Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tyler whistled quietly through his teeth, taking in the sight of the house before them. Since first clapping eyes on it, he’d muttered two bloody hells and a Jesus, and was teetering on the brink of a fuck me.
‘Aye, no’ bad, is it?’ Logan said, following the line of the driveway towards the glass-fronted behemoth rising from the ground up ahead.
The gate had been opened again. Uniform had clocked off stakeout duty an hour ago, so Logan had no idea what they were headed into. Only the Tesla from yesterday was parked at the side of the house, though, which made him hopeful Victor’s brothers hadn’t yet returned.
‘No’ bad?’ Tyler took in the glass and metal mound with its grass roof again. ‘It looks like Bilbo Baggins won the lottery.’
Logan shot him a sideways look. ‘Who the hell’s Bilbo Baggins?’
‘The wee gnome fella, boss. Or whatever he is. From The Hobbit,’ Tyler explained. ‘You know, the book?’
‘You read a book?’
‘I can read, believe it or not.’ Tyler settled back in his seat. He sniffed. ‘OK, technically, I saw the film, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it? At the end of the day, it’s all just dwarves and whatever. Wizards.’
‘The fuck are you talking about, son?’
‘I don’t know!’ Tyler admitted. ‘I’m just saying, it’s a nice house.’
‘Aye, well, might be a dangerous one, too. Stay alert.’
Tyler pulled down the sun visor and checked his hair. ‘Don’t worry, boss. I’ll keep my wits about me.’
Logan pulled into an empty parking space. ‘Aye, well,’ he said, pulling on the handbrake. ‘You’ll maybe want to have a go at finding them first.’
They got out of the car. Tiny spots of rain floated about in the air, threatening the possibility of a much heavier downpour later.
‘Relax, boss. I’ve got this,’ Tyler assured him. He adjusted the cuffs of his shirt. ‘I’ll make her sing. She’ll be eating out of my hand in no time.’
Logan snorted. ‘God, no. No, you’re not talking to her. I’ll be doing that.’
Tyler hung back for a moment, then hurried after Jack as he headed for the front door. ‘Wait, what? What am I here for then?’
Logan reached the door, rang the doorbell, then shoved his hands into his coat pockets.
‘You, son, are here for one reason, and one reason only.’
The door opened. A plastic arrow with a suction cup on the end came flying out from inside, whistled past Logan, then hit Tyler square in the groin, immediately doubling him over.
Logan glowered at the boy in the doorway, who was currently reloading his toy bow. The look he gave him made very clear that opening fire on the DCI would be a move he would come to regret.
Taking the hint, little Jack turned and ran off, leaving the door wide open. Logan gave the wheezing Tyler a pat on the shoulder.
‘You’re here to keep the kids occupied.’
Dave watched in silence as three storage boxes were placed, one after another, on his desk. They were heavy, too, given the grunts Sinead made as she shifted each one off the trolley.
‘What’s all this, then?’ he asked, once Sinead had slumped into a chair across from him. ‘This CID’s stuff on the family and their all mates, is it?’
Sinead shook her head, getting her breath back. ‘Just him.’
Dave lifted the lid of the closest box. A mugshot photograph of Victor Belov peered up at him from inside.
‘What, this is all Victor?’ Dave looked across at Sinead, who nodded. ‘What was he, Al Capone? Why’s there all this?’
Sinead shrugged. ‘Not sure. CID was happy to hand it over, though. I don’t think they’re exactly going to miss the late Mr Belov. Whoever did him in has probably saved them a lot of paperwork.’
‘Pity they’ve landed it all on our desk instead.’
He rummaged around and pulled out the sheet below the mugshot. It was the transcript of an interview from a couple of years ago. From the looks of it, they’d brought Victor in on a minor speeding offence, which wouldn’t normally merit an interview at all, let alone with CID.
‘They’ve been after him a wee while, then,’ Dave said.
‘After him, aye. Not very good at catching him, though,’ Sinead said. She took the only thing left on the trolley—a thin paper folder—and passed it across. ‘That’s his full criminal record.’
Dave opened the folder and found a single page inside. He scanned the front, then turned it over in case there was something he was missing on the back.
‘Driving without insurance?’ Dave compared the printout to all the boxes sitting on his desk. ‘Driving without insurance. That’s it?’
‘That’s all they ever managed to pin on him.’
‘What about the brothers?’ Dave asked. ‘They been done for anything?’
Sinead groaned, got to her feet, and gripped the handle of the trolley. ‘Not sure,’ she said. ‘But there’s half a dozen more boxes through there, so I guess we’ll find out.’
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Belov, the lad’ll be fine. DC Neish is good with kids. He’s got two of his own. Twins.’
Eleanor blinked. Her largely immobile forehead struggled to frown, and she looked off in the direction of the hallway, like she had no idea what the DCI was on about.
‘Oh. Jack. Yes,’ she said, after a moment. ‘He’ll be fine, yes. He’s… resilient. I haven’t told him about Victor yet. I’m not sure he’ll care.’
‘Wasn’t Victor…?’
‘No. God, no. He’d have insisted on naming him after himself if he was. No, Jack’s dad passed away before he was born.’
A mental notepad tucked away in one of the more suspicious regions of Logan’s brain flipped open.
‘Oh? I’m very sorry to hear that. Do you mind if I ask…?’
‘Suicide,’ Eleanor said, cutting him off. Her face visibly hardened before Logan’s eyes. ‘Left a note, took himself out to a bothy in the middle of nowhere, and hanged himself.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Eleanor shrugged in a way that suggested she didn’t care. The way she sucked in her bottom lip and nodded said otherwise.
‘He was bipolar. They were trying to get his medication right. Needless to say, they didn’t. He started using other stuff. Uppers. Downers. Everything. Went from weed to heroin in about a month and a half. Must be some sort of record.’
Logan assured her that it wasn’t. She almost looked disappointed.
‘I was away for the weekend when he did it. Maternity shopping in Glasgow with my mum. It’s all documented in police records. You can look it up.’
The white leather couch creaked as she crossed her legs and stretched an arm out across the back of the cushions.
‘Can’t have you thinking I’m some sort of Black Widow, after all.’ A smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. Her red lipstick shone in the glow of the ceiling-mounted spotlights. ‘Losing one child’s father is unlucky. Losing two is a pattern. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’
Logan drew a breath in through his nose, and shook his head. ‘No. Not really. I was just feeling sorry for you, I suppose.’
‘Please. God. Don’t. I’ve had enough pity over the years to last me a lifetime. You can keep it. I don’t want it.’
She turned her head and looked away again. Her fingers drummed on the couch cushion. From out in the hallway, there came a slap-slap-slap of something hitting the floor. A ball, maybe. Whatever it was, it was getting louder as it drew closer.
‘I’m sorry Victor’s dead. I am,’ Eleanor said, still gazing off in the direction of the sound. ‘But he wasn’t a great man, and he certainly wasn’t a good one. Our relationship was complicated from the start.’
‘How so?’ Logan asked.
‘Because I was basically still a child. Because I was still grieving Jason. We’d been together since first year in school. We were high school sweethearts, I suppose, if you want to get sentimental about it.’
Even though her face was still side-on to Logan, he saw something shifting in her expression. It softened in a way he hadn’t seen before. Her eyes sparkled, like the memory of her childhood boyfriend had awakened something in her.
Out in the hallway, the slap-slap-slap drew level with the living room. Logan watched, stony-faced, as Tyler came bouncing past on a space hopper, little Jack clapping excitedly beside him.
A look passed between the two detectives. It was a look that said, ‘Sorry, boss. This isn’t what it looks like.’
They both knew that it very much was what it looked like, though. Logan gave a tiny, incremental shake of his head, then turned back to Eleanor as Tyler went bouncing off up the hallway.
‘And he’s a detective, is he?’ Eleanor asked, once the coast was clear again.
‘I find it hard to believe myself sometimes,’ Logan told her. ‘But he actually knows his stuff.’
‘Hm?’ Eleanor turned to look at him. ‘Oh, no. I wasn’t doubting him. The opposite, really. I’m so used to you lot treating us like shit, it’s nice to see something different.’
Logan sat forward on the couch. This took some doing, as it had almost swallowed him when he’d first sat down. He leaned his elbows on his knees and pressed the fingers of both hands together.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Eleanor,’ he said. ‘You’ve had interactions with the police before, then?’
Eleanor laughed. It was just one quick, flat ha that came from her throat, not her chest.
‘Come on. Don’t say you haven’t looked us up,’ she said.
‘You lot have been after Victor forever, trying to pin all sorts on him. You’ve got him pegged as some big drugs dealer.
Him and his brothers.’ She gestured a manicured hand at the opulence around them.
‘You think that’s what paid for all this, don’t you? ’
Logan kept his gaze locked on her. ‘It’s a very nice house,’ was all he said.
‘Yeah. It’s my house. Not Victor’s. And definitely not those two chuckleheads you met last night.’
She looked him up and down, twirling a finger in her hair, the other hand still tapping out a rhythm on the back of the couch.
‘You’re wondering how I could afford something like this, aren’t you? Me, just a daft wee lassie with two kids and no qualifications.’
‘I assure you, I wasn’t. But, now you mention it…’
‘Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency,’ Eleanor said. ‘Jason’s doing, mostly. He read about it somewhere when we were in first year. About mining it. On the computer?’
From the way she looked at him, Logan concluded that there had been some sort of question in there.
‘Aye, I’ve heard about it,’ he said, which was technically true. It also quite neatly summed up the entirety of his knowledge on the matter.
‘We started in twenty-ten. His stepdad was really into tech stuff, so he had a few spare laptops at his house. Jason set them up, kept them running. I thought it was a bit of a waste of time, but he was dead into it. It made him happy.’
That slightly wistful look played across her face again. She laughed, and though it was short and sweet, it came from somewhere deeper down this time.
‘He was such a geek. He’d bring over the laptops to show me how things were going. I didn’t really understand it, but I didn’t care. I just liked him being around. My mum and dad really liked him, too. And I think they were happy that we were messing about with computers, and not with each other.’
She let herself wallow in the memory for a few moments. Out in the hallway, the thwacking of the space hopper had been replaced by the whirring of a radio-controlled car racing across the floor.
‘Do you know how easy it was to mine Bitcoin in twenty-ten? Before anyone had really heard about it?’
Logan was forced to concede that he did not.
‘Piece of piss before it started to really slow down. Other people jumping in. GPU mining kicking off. It all ground to a halt, and we sort of forgot about it. It was pretty much worthless anyway. Back then. Not now, though.’
She brushed her hair aside and tilted her head like she wanted to get a good look at him. Like she wanted to be looking right at him for the next part.
‘You know what a Bitcoin’s worth right now?’
Again, Logan drew a blank.
‘About a hundred thousand dollars. Each. Give or take.’
‘That’s a lot of money.’
Eleanor sat forward, matching his position, arms resting on her knees. ‘It is. And do you know how many Bitcoins Jason and I mined in that first year and a half?’
Logan shook his head. ‘Not a clue.’
‘One-thousand, three-hundred, and forty-seven.’
Logan felt an eye twitch. His brain started trying to run the numbers, but almost immediately gave up again.
‘But that’s…’
‘A hundred and thirty million dollars,’ Eleanor said.
Logan couldn’t contain himself. ‘Fuck me!’
Eleanor smiled. ‘All legal, all above board. I’ve got eleven accountants and six lawyers who make damn well sure of it.’
Her expression darkened, the curve of her mouth edging downward.
‘I suppose I do have Victor and his brothers to thank for it, in a way.’
‘How’s that?’ Logan pressed.
‘They use crypto in their business. It was through listening to Mikhail that I got to thinking about it all again. I asked him about it, and he offered to help me track down the wallets Jason and I had set up. I said no, obviously, because I don’t trust him.
Any of them. But I hired someone to help me dig and, well, here we are. ’
‘Well, I’m very happy for you,’ Logan said. ‘Although, I’m sure a hundred and thirty million dollars doesn’t make up for your loss.’
Her smile returned. Tight. Polite. Fake.
‘It takes the edge off it,’ she said. ‘And, to be honest, I learned early on not to get too bogged down in emotion. I know where that gets you. I’m mostly just sad that he never knew. Jason. He never knew what he’d done for me. For us.’
‘I meant the loss of Victor,’ Logan told her.
‘Oh. Him. Yes.’ Eleanor waved a hand, almost like she was ushering the thought of him out of the room. ‘Like I say, that’s more complicated.’
She clasped her hands and tapped her thumbs together. The red-painted nails clicked in the silence.
‘But then, I’m guessing that’s what brings you here…’