To Tell the Truth (8 page)

Rosie grimaced ruefully at the waiter who took her drinks order. He made a bored face. He’d heard it all before. She sipped her red wine and looked at the moon on the water. She took her mobile out of her bag and fiddled around with it, going through the directory of names and stopping at TJ’s. She resisted the urge to ring it, to see if the number was still dead. And anyway, she’d moved on, hadn’t she? A sudden wave of loneliness swept over her, taking her by surprise. She shook herself immediately out of it. No time for that crap. She sat herself up straight and got her head into work mode. Where was this little bastard?

On cue, Taha arrived from behind her and sat down.

‘Hello, Rosie.’ He smiled at her with his big brown eyes. ‘I am very happy to see you again. You are very nice lady.’

Rosie looked at him. Surely to Christ he wasn’t going
to offer himself for rent. She gave him a blank look and waved the waiter over. Taha ordered a coke, and asked if he could have a sandwich.

‘Of course.’ Rosie handed him the menu.

‘Is it okay to have a steak sandwich?’ He looked genuinely concerned.

Rosie noticed he was a little fidgety.

‘Sure. Of course.’ She turned to the waiter. ‘With French fries.’ She smiled at Taha. ‘What the hell. Let’s push the boat out.’

‘Thank you,’ Taha said. ‘I am very hungry.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Always hungry, because I am always running around and working. Last night I worked on the boat. Very late. So I not get time to eat much. Or sleep.’

He pulled his chair a little closer to the table so when he leaned forward he was nearer Rosie. The dark smudges under his eyes were more pronounced than yesterday. ‘That is what I want to talk to you about.’

Rosie watched him, wondering if he was on something. He was a lot more jumpy than he’d been yesterday. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know the gory details of his work, but she’d better listen anyway.

‘The boat?’ she said. ‘You worked on the boat? What boat?’

‘Yes,’ Taha said. ‘It belong to the Russian. The big boss Mr Daletsky. Mr Viktor Daletsky. He is very rich man. He own everything. Everywhere.’

Rosie looked at him. No bells rang. ‘Daletsky?’

‘You know him?’ Taha said.

‘No, I don’t. What were you doing on his boat?’ Rosie
hoped he would spare her the graphic details of bottoms being breached.

Taha took a swig of coke. His steak sandwich arrived and he scooped up a handful of chips as soon as the waiter put the plate on the table. He chewed fast and gulped the food down.

‘I work in the kitchens for a little while. They have some kind of big party last night. Lot of people. Then I am there in case anyone asks for me.’ He sighed. ‘You know, like … the clients. If my boss tells me someone wants me for a while, then I will go to one of the rooms on the boat. The cabins.’

Rosie kept looking at him curiously, wondering why he was telling her all this.

‘Who is your boss? Is he Russian too?’

‘Yes. He is Russian, but also he has a boss and he is the Albanian called Leka. He is a big boss. Very big man. Everybody afraid of Leka. My boss is scared of him. He runs all the business for them.’

Rosie was feeling a bit lost. What had the Russian millionaire and the Albanians got to do with this rent boy – apart from the obvious, that he was just part of their prostitution racket that in turn was part of their empire. She took a deep breath and leaned towards Taha.

‘Taha,’ she said. ‘Why are you telling me about the boat and the Russian? What has this got to do with what you told me earlier? About the little girl and the British man?’

Taha looked at her surprised.

‘He was there,’ he said. ‘The man. The British man in the picture card I gave you. He was on the boat too. With
Mr Daletsky. I saw them drinking champagne, and another man was there too. I think he also English. They were laughing together. I was working in the kitchen and I saw from the doorway the man I was with. But he didn’t see me.’ He leaned towards Rosie and spoke softly. ‘I saw a picture in the English newspaper of the man on the card I give you. He is a big politician.’

Rosie hoped her eyes hadn’t popped. Carter-Smith and a Russian millionaire! It was a headline in itself. Most of the Russian tycoons were gangsters who had plundered and murdered their way through the country after the fall of the Soviet Union, then legitimised themselves in business in the new Russia. But scratch a Russian oligarch and you found the same corruption and ruthlessness the world over.

Daletsky. Whoever he was, he was worth looking at. The very fact that Carter-Smith was rubbing shoulders with a guy like him on a yacht on the Costa del Sol was a story in itself. She would run a check on Daletsky on the web when she got back, and then talk to McGuire.

‘Can you tell me any more about Viktor Daletsky?’ she said.

Taha shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Just that he has a big company that exports things. But all the people who work for him are bad people. Leka. He is the worst. Drugs. And also they sell people. Girls from Russia and other places. Lithuania and Ukraine. They kidnap them and sell them. That’s all I know. And this man, this British man in the picture I give to you, was with them on the boat.’

Rosie looked at him but said nothing. He was brighter
than she’d thought: smart enough to know that a politician on a boat with a bunch of Russian and Albanian gangsters was worth something. She waited for him to ask.

He ate the sandwich and they sat in silence. Then he spoke.

‘I want to go away from here, Rosie. Can you help me? I need to go.’

‘Why do you want to go away?’ Rosie said.

‘I think now it is dangerous. I think I should not give you the card with the picture of the man. Now I am frightened because he knows Leka and Daletsky. I didn’t know he knew them so much.’ He swallowed and looked at his feet.

‘But they don’t know you had the pass. The man could have dropped it anywhere. He might not even talk to anyone about it. If anybody asks you, just say you have no idea. He won’t know where he lost it.’

‘I cannot do that,’ Taha said. ‘I know how they are. They won’t just ask me. They will just start to beat me and beat me until I tell them the truth. I have to go away before they ask me, because they won’t believe me, and if they keep beating me I will tell them. Then they will kill me.’ He looked away. His eyes filled with tears.

Jesus. He was just a kid, and Rosie could sense his fear was genuine. It was a different world these days, with the Russian and Albanian gangsters moving in on all the rackets from drugs to people-smuggling. A boy like this was nothing to them, just someone who could be supplied to a client until they had no further use for him. By the
time he was all used up, he’d probably be a hopeless junkie and they would toss him into the gutter. But that would be the least of his worries. For talking to her, and for giving her the security pass of someone who must be one of their top clients, he was already a dead man walking.

‘Do you think you can give me some money, Rosie? I want to go somewhere tonight. Just get in a train and keep going. Maybe Barcelona. Maybe France.’

Rosie looked at him.

‘Why do you have to go immediately? I know you’re scared, but why now? And you have no passport, Taha. You are illegal.’

Taha rubbed his face. His hands were trembling. He took a deep breath.

‘Because …’ His voice was almost a whisper. He looked over his shoulder. ‘Because when Leka came onto the boat last night, I had to take drinks through to him and Mr Daletsky in the office. I heard them saying that the girl was in Tangiers. I think they mean the missing girl. They said Besmir had taken her there. I know him. He’s Albanian and he works for Leka. I think it was Besmir who stole the girl. I think they kidnap her to sell her.’

Rosie looked into his eyes.

‘But if you know this man Besmir, you would have known it was him who took the girl, would you not? You would have recognised him.’

Taha shook his head. ‘When the girl was taken, I just saw the man from the back for few seconds. It was nothing to me then. I didn’t see the man’s face. And I have only
met Besmir once. But now, last night on the boat when they said Besmir’s name and the girl in Tangiers, I am thinking that it was him I saw. He was big man like Besmir. But I didn’t see his face so I am not sure.’

‘But it could have been anybody they were talking about on the boat, Taha.’

He nodded. ‘I know. But I think I am right. I think I hear too much. And now, because I talk to you and give you the card, I am worry. I need to go away. When I am far away from here I can hide. I won’t go through any borders. I know how to hide from police. Can you help me? Please Rosie. I have no friends here. Only the boys like me who work for them. You are the only one I can ask for help.’

CHAPTER 10

It was getting dark by the time Rosie typed the final paragraph of her story. To clear her head, she threw open her bedroom doors and went out into the evening air. The chatter and clinking of glasses on the terrace bar below drifted up as hotel guests gathered for an aperitif before dinner.

She went back in and read the story one more time before sending it to McGuire’s private email, then she sat back and waited for his call.

The last two days had been non-stop work with she and Matt digging around to find out where Carter-Smith was staying. Rosie had also spent hours trawling through internet cuttings on the Russian billionaire Daletsky.

He was a piece of work. There were articles on him in one of the broadsheet newspapers in the last couple of years, and a couple in the tabloids. But none was specific enough to pin anything on him. That was the trouble with these Russians once they had amassed this level of
wealth. Their fortunes gave them a tag of respectability, and Daletsky wasn’t the only Russian with a dodgy background who now had legitimate dealings with established companies across the world. But Rosie’s Special Branch pal in Glasgow had talked to his mates in London and given her the lowdown on just who he was.

There was enough dubiousness about Viktor Daletsky to cause a stir if it was revealed that he was entertaining the Home Secretary and one of his ex-public schoolboy pals, the millionaire businessmen Oliver Woolard of Woolard Institutions. That kind of stuff never looked good on paper.

McGuire’s political connections had established that Carter-Smith had been staying at Woolard’s villa on his annual jaunt, so now the pieces were beginning to fit together. There was no proof that Carter-Smith and Woolard had been on the yacht, other than the word of a rent boy, but he decided to wing it and see if Carter-Smith burst. He’d never thought there was any substance to Carter-Smith, and believed that if put under serious pressure, his bottle would crash. McGuire loved a bit of bluff. His attitude was that Carter-Smith would already be bricking it because he knew he’d lost his House of Commons pass. The longer the pass was missing, the more it became like a ticking time bomb, waiting to end up in the wrong hands.

So Rosie and Matt had found themselves staking out Woolard’s villa since early morning, without any real plan. It brought a whole new meaning to the phrase flying by the seat of your pants.

‘Here he comes,’ Matt said. ‘Come on you big smug fucker.’

Matt was already firing off several pictures, as they came out of the villa towards the chauffeur-driven Daimler.

‘Who’s that with him, Rosie? That Woolard? He’s got that public schoolboy face. Why is it these guys, no matter how old they are, always have that youthful, fucking pampered tosser expression on their faces?’

‘Something to do with self-belief,’ Rosie said, shrinking down into her seat out of view. ‘They don’t teach self-belief in the kind of schools we went to, Matt. The first thing public school kids learn is that they are being prepared and groomed to go out and run the world. It’s their destiny. They expect.’

‘Well, fuck them.’ Matt, put the camera down on Rosie’s lap, and started the engine as Carter-Smith and Woolard got into the back of the Daimler. ‘They’ll not be expecting this.’

They waited until the car had gone down to the bottom of the steep hill and turned onto the street before they went after it.

‘Let’s see where they go. Nothing to lose.’

The Daimler whispered its way out of the
pueblo
and onto the main drag towards Marbella. They kept a discreet distance as the car continued beyond Marbella and turned into the harbour at the town of Estepona.

‘Maybe they’re going to Daletsky’s yacht. Now, that
would
be the equivalent of a decent pools win.’

‘Well, it looks like they’re going to
someone
’s yacht.’

Matt pulled the car over when they got into the harbour. The Daimler headed for the biggest yacht in the harbour, moored at the far end.

‘Don’t get any closer. Just do what you can from here, then we go away and discreetly find out who owns that big bastard.’

Matt did as Rosie said, firing off a few shots of Carter-Smith and Woolard getting out of their car and walking up the gangplank behind what looked like a bodyguard.

‘I like the look of this, Matt.’ She slapped his thigh. ‘I like the look of this very much. Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.’

In a little tapas restaurant from where they could keep their eye on yacht, they ordered lunch and sat in the shade watching how the other half lived.

‘I was made for this kind of life, Rosie,’ Matt said, wolfing down tapas as though he was in the office canteen.

‘Yeah, I can see that, Matt. The Spaniards spend generations honing the subtle flavours of their delightful tapas and you’re horsing it into your mouth as though it was a fried egg roll with brown sauce.’ She stabbed at a little dish of potatoes before they disappeared.

‘Hmmm,’ Matt mumbled with his mouth full. ‘But you know what I mean, Rosie. This life. This pavement café lifestyle. Yachts in the background, sunshine and long lunches. I could settle into this quite well. And you know what? I’d always make sure I was kind to the hired help. That’s important if you’ve got class.’ He drank his coke and stifled a belch.