Free To Tell the Truth by Anna Smith Page B

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 onlymet 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 ofwealth. 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