Murder in Retribution by Anne Cleeland Page B

a full confession. “It does not surprise me, Michael; when you are not present, Marta is not always very respectful to me.”
    There was a pause while he struggled to control his reaction—he was most unhappy, was our Acton. “Kathleen, you should have told me; no one is allowed to disrespect you.”
    “Yes, I should have told you,” she agreed.
    “It is a reflection on me, after all.”
    Good one, she thought—he is trying to couch it in terms that may inspire me to change my non-assertive ways; good luck to him. “I see that now,” she said humbly. “I’m that sorry, Michael; I should have thrown Marta out headlong—or at least put her in the stocks.”
    He ducked his head, and finally had to smile. “I am expecting too much, am I?”
    “A little.” She smiled in return. “I am still findin’ my way in all this; give me another week to become accustomed to demandin’ off with their heads.”
    He pulled her to him and rested his chin on her head. “No one has license to make you feel inferior. I will ring her up now, and fire her.”
    This was much appreciated; it was a fine thing to have such a champion, but she felt she had to warn him, “Your mother said she was goin’ to wait for you to come to your senses.”
    Scrolling for Marta’s number, he absently replied, “My mother will relent; in the end, she has no choice.”
    Deciding that she’d rather not ask him to elaborate on this ambiguous remark, Doyle listened in as Marta was given the well-deserved sack.

CHAPTER 8
    D OYLE WAS WORKING AT HOME ON S UNDAY AFTERNOON whilst Acton sat on the sofa, reading the contraband manual from his conference and entering notes on his laptop. He seemed very interested in the new procedures the Home Secretary was instituting to counteract smuggling and black market trade, and Doyle had a very good idea as to why this was, although he didn’t know she knew. She had a shrewd suspicion that he was running a smuggling rig with illegal weapons, which presented a fine dilemma for her; she was a policewoman, after all, with a healthy respect for the rule of law—it was a dangerous thing to be a rule unto oneself, there was no telling where it would end. Hopefully, not in some prison somewhere; she couldn’t imagine Acton would do well in prison.
    She was seated at the table, researching the Sinn-split information on file and cross-referencing the Russian mafia information. Her main object was to find a nexus having to do with racecourse crimes—such as doping, money laundering, or illegal gambling—because such a nexus could provide some insight as to what had touched off the turf war. Williams had suggested that something might have changed; some unsavory activity had suddenly become more lucrative so that the factions were willing to go to war over it, and this seemed as good a theory as any, if only she could find some hint. Thus far, however, she had found no indication that the long shots were winning when they shouldn’t, or that more money was passing hands than was usual.
    Another angle was to research the victims’ biographical information so as to cross-check the Watch List with suspected racecourse activities. Strangely, the most recent Russian victim—Barayev-of–the-maggoty-face—did not fit the usual profile. He was by all appearances an ordinary businessman from Moscow—or as ordinary as one could be in such an environment ; the high achievers tended to have unsavory connections due to the nature of the beast. That he was a high achiever seemed evident; the man’s clothes and shoes were of the highest quality, and his fingernails had been manicured. His biography showed that he was on the board for several banks and import-export companies, and the majority of his time was spent as the CFO in a venture capital firm—or what passed for one in the questionable climate of the Russian oligarchies. Interpol had no record of him, and as far as she could see, he had not raised any eyebrows