Out of control (20 page)

I sat back and reflected over the new information and how I could best use it. Slowly things were fitting into place.

I’d no sooner put the phone down when it rang again. This time it was Pierre phoning from Bucharest.

“Bob, I’m in my hotel preparing to leave. I thought I’d call you now to check whether there was anything else you wanted me to do over here before I come home.”

“What have you found out?”

“I went to see Irina’s parents. They were very nice people but at first they weren’t too keen to talk. I think they were frightened. When they were over in Scotland Ross told them what their daughter had been involved in. They had no idea before that. From the news they had had from her everything seemed to be fine and Ross’s information was a horrendous shock. They were frightened and didn’t want to get involved. I think they just wanted to pretend it wasn’t true and mourn their daughter normally.

“Fortunately their son was there. He’s just a couple of years younger than Irina and he is very upset and angry about what happened to his sister. He didn’t know the name of the company that had got the work permit for her but he managed to persuade his parents to tell us. He offered to help me to find out who was behind it. That was very useful because all company information was in Romanian. The guys behind the company are two brothers. Their name is Dumitru. Toma and Andrei Dumitru.”

“Brilliant. That ties up with what we’ve found out.”

“What do you mean?”

So I brought him up to date on what had happened – how we had found Ana and brought her up to Lochbervie and how she had pinched Macek’s iPhone. She had given us the names.

“Stefan, Irina’s brother, will help us if there is anything we want done in Romania.”

“Thank him very much and tell him we think that the problem needs to be solved from over here but we’ll certainly contact him if we need help. But make sure he doesn’t do any more. We don’t want him to do something stupid and put them on their guard. Can you get some official paperwork about the company and the names of the directors? We’ll need that when we go to the police.”

“Sure. No problem. I’ve got that. If that’s all, I’ll be back in Geneva tomorrow. I’ll call you then.”

We had gleaned a lot of extra information and I was keen to share it with Pierre so I suggested to him that he didn’t bother calling the next day but simply flew on up to Edinburgh on Monday. I wanted his help to get my thinking straightened out. He agreed, said he’d rent a car and come through to Letham sometime in the afternoon.

The vague plan I had in my head was starting to come into focus. I wasn’t sure it would work but it was worth a try. There were various levels of potential success but I considered that even at the lowest level it was worth trying.

Although Maggie wasn’t fully aware of the whole story she had a rough idea of what was going on as I had told her I was helping Helen to stave off the unwanted advances of Bernard Dugain. I needed to go back down to see her and Pierre was coming over on Monday. I promised to be back up again the next weekend.

Sophie had promised to stick with Ana until all this was over so I suggest to Mike that he and Sophie stayed up as well as protection for Ana ‘just in case’ and, while he was at it, there were a few jobs around the hotel that Maggie needed done and I hadn’t had the time. I assured him I’d be back up at the weekend and I’d have Pierre with me.

I left on Monday morning feeling sure that I had everything under control.

Back home in the early afternoon. I rang the garage to see if my car had been repaired. It had and I was free to collect it whenever I wished. I said I’d be round the next morning.

That was when I got the expected call from Helen.

“Bob, Dugain has just called me. Just as you thought.”

“And…?”

“He spun a story about why he had become interested in Bioscope. He claimed that he personally had only heard of us when one of his team had mentioned that we had been working on the same project as they were. Claimed he’d never heard of us before that. But when he did hear of us he became interested and thought that we could be a worthwhile investment for his Group.

“He confirmed that he was in the process of acquiring Albion’s shares which would give him forty per cent of the shares and as it was his group’s policy to always have a majority, would Richard and I be prepared to sell? He wanted to buy six per cent from each of us so that he would have fifty two percent, leaving us with four each. His argument was that he would give us a decent price so that we could partly cash in on what we had achieved so far and that, with his help, we could grow the company much faster and our four per cent would increase much more quickly. As you suggested, I said I’d think about it.”

*

Pierre rolled up in the late afternoon so we had the whole evening for me to update him on all we knew. Not having any provisions in the house we went round to Fernie Castle and had a leisurely dinner.

Over dinner I did most of the talking. I explained everything that has happened except I made absolutely no mention of my visit and conversation with Antoine. Pierre is an excellent listener and, as I had discovered very early on, has a keen analytical brain.

He asked for the occasional clarification but more or less let me explain what I thought we were up against.

When I had finished he summed it up to have it clear in his mind.

“We have this man Dugain, the boss of LyonPharma, who you are almost certain planned the operation on Liam and effectively stole a patent away from Bioscope which could be worth millions of dollars….”

“Correct”

“….and who is now trying to purchase a majority in the company which you think is either to ensure they don’t make a fuss or, perhaps, to get hold of research data to help him get approval to put it on the market. He put his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands, a pensive look on his face. Then he continued.

“Fine. And also we have this ring being run from Bucharest. They get girls jobs in France and then we know what happens next. Some of these girls’ first point of call for a job is LyonPharma. Macek, who works for their company in Edinburgh, seems to be part of the set up. “This girl Irina, who has been murdered, was the person who fed Liam’s indiscretion back to Lyon and you think Macek is responsible for her death. Either he did it himself or he got someone else to do it. Is that right?”

“Yes. Remember we have the note from his iPhone.”

“If that’s the case I would be wondering if there is any connection between the two. Could it be possible that this Dugain is fully aware of the girl trafficking?”

I smiled across the table at him. I remembered Antoine making the same observation but I couldn’t tell him that. I had wanted to hear his thought processes before I told him the last piece of information that I had intentionally held back.

“Have another sip of our wine,” I said, “and listen to this. Bernard Dugain is French. But he has been naturalised. He took out French nationality only six years ago.”

“What was he before?”

“Guess.”

He smiled slowly. “Romanian?”

“Bull’s eye.”

“So you do think he is aware of it?”

“I think he’s an integral part of it. I think he’s the boss.”

Coffee and malt were ordered.

“And what is your plan then? I presume you have one judging from the look in your eye. How are you going to bring them all to book?”

So I described to Pierre all I knew about the man. I tried to give him a picture of the type of person he was. I couldn’t tell him that some of my information had come from Antoine but by the time I was finished he had a pretty good idea of what I was talking about.

“A thoroughly nasty piece of work,” was his comment.

“Yes, and we’re going to use a bit of psychology to try and trap him,” and I described what I was going to try to do.

We collected my car the next morning and smiled our way round the golf course in the afternoon, imagining my planned scenario.

I’d received a brief text from Helen telling me that Dugain had in fact visited. ‘Will explain when I see you’.

We drove through to Stirling on Wednesday morning to see her.

I took Pierre round by the loch to show him where the accident had taken place – or the attempt on my life I should say. We stopped and I showed him the tyre marks, the gouges my wheels had made in the verge and the tree which was still lying at the side of the road. The marks on the branch made by the rope were still visible. Looking back up the road he shook his head and let fly a string of French which sounded to me as if it was pretty strong cursing.

Actually seeing the evidence seemed to have brought home to him even more what had happened.

Helen was expecting us and I introduced Pierre as my brother and also told her that he was someone who had funds to invest and it could be that he might be able to help if things got really difficult. Pierre and I had discussed and agreed this before.

She took us into the meeting room at the end of a short corridor. It had windows down one side looking out onto parkland and trees behind. It was simply furnished with a large table where there was room to sit four or five people on either side. A quick examination and I concluded that it would suit my purpose.

There was a false ceiling with eight spot lights set in and a screen at the far end for showing images from a projector which could be connected to a lap top. I started to envisage the scene.

We sat at one end of the table and I asked Helen how the contact with Dugain had been.

“He turned up yesterday afternoon. I couldn’t do much else but receive him and listen to what he had to say. Thank goodness you warned me. It wasn’t difficult to give the impression that I was surprised by his visit.”

“Was he on his own?”

“No. He had two people with him – his M.D. from Edinburgh, whose name I can’t remember and a man called Macek. I remember his name because I didn’t much like the look of him.

“Anyway we did the tour of the premises. He asked us if we had other interesting projects. I told him that we did but that they were confidential. That was when I very nearly put my foot in it by saying something about information getting stolen but I managed to stop myself.”

I could imagine how difficult it must have been not to give away what she knew, bearing in mind how devastated she had been at the time.

“Fine,” I said.” Well done. And how did you leave it?”

“I told him I would have to talk to my accountants and that I would get back to him within a couple of weeks. Was that what you wanted me to do? He seemed to be satisfied by that.”

“Right, let’s get ourselves a cup of coffee and we’ll tell you a bit more of what we know. I want to know your reaction because I think there is something we can do about this.”

They had a coffee machine at the other end of the corridor and once we had served ourselves we went back to the meeting room, I closed the door and we sat down.

“Helen, as you know, we have definite knowledge that Dugain plotted to arrange for some people to try to get information from Liam about your research. He effectively stole your property rights.

“Now it wasn’t the boy, Rémy , the person we first thought, that was used but his girlfriend, a girl called Irina who is Romanian. She was forced to do it by the man that came yesterday with Dugain.

“Macek has connections with two brothers in Bucharest who have a company which they use to ‘help’ girls to come to the west – mainly through France as far as we know – where they then force them into either prostitution or pushing drugs.”

Helen’s eyes widened in disbelief. I could see her shudder at the thought of it.

“This girl Irina was one of them and she was brought through from her small home town in Romania and given a job with LyonPharma for a short while, then she was transferred to Edinburgh to their company there. This is the girl who passed the information back to Lyon, either directly or via Macek.”

She gulped back her coffee and excused herself to go and get another one.

“How do you know all this?”

“I really wanted to find out the truth for Liam’s sake and I managed to get in touch with Brian Dawson of LyonPharma whom I think you know.”

“Sure, I know Brian. He’s a good guy.”

“I agree, but what you probably don’t know is that he was fired recently.”

That surprised her.

“It was on the orders of Dugain and he’s not very pleased. He was able to tell me a few things.

“What makes things much more serious is that the girl Irina was murdered a couple of weeks back. Her body was discovered in the Forth, out near Bannockburn, and the police have told us that it was definitely murder.”

“Good God.”

She thought about this for a moment. This was the girl, after all, who had deprived her of her patent, willingly or otherwise, but I could see her starting to realise that, even if she had perhaps cost her millions, what we were talking about here was something far more important than money.

“That’s absolutely horrible.”

“We agree, and we want to try to do something about it.”

“But why are you telling me? Why is it anything to do with me, and what’s it got to do with the problem of the shares in my company?” 

Pierre answered that for me.

“It doesn’t really have anything to do with you, Helen, unless you want it to. You see we are pretty sure that Dugain is the boss of all the trafficking operation as well as being the CEO of LyonPharma. We know that he is not French. We have found out that he was originally Romanian. We believe that Macek murdered Irina, probably on the orders of Dugain. After all he is his boss and we doubt if Macek would do anything without his approval.”

He paused while she tried to sort this out in her mind.

“And these are the guys that were here in my office? Bloody hell!”

“There’s more. There’s another Romanian girl who has been brought over from Lyon to replace Irina. Fortunately we have managed to persuade her to abscond and we have her safely hidden. She has also been able to help us to piece it together.”