Blood, Salt, Water Read Online Free PDF

Lucia. Roxanna continued to educate her children alongside ambassadors’ kids at an exclusive central London Spanish-speaking school. Sensing money, the Met investigation grew.
    The incomeless couple were seen in the company of a Colombian attaché and his wife. Checking back, Maria and Juan Pinzón Arias had paid for the table of ten at the charity auction, Robin and Roxanna had been their guests, but the wealthy couple bid on none of the items themselves.
    The Arias children were at the same Spanish school as Roxanna’s. The four kids weren’t known to be friends, they were in different years, but Maria and Roxanna became very close very suddenly. Roxanna travelled often with Maria Arias, usually on overnight stays to Barcelona, a known distribution point for cocaine. Smuggling was suspected. On their third trip the Met investigators compared the airline’s weight of Roxanna’s luggage on the way out (twenty-three kilos) and on the way back (thirty-three kilos). The differential was suspiciously precise.
    Maria Arias was using a diplomatic bag which could be neither searched nor weighed. The investigation grew again, serious now because of the diplomatic implications.
    Like Roxanna, Juan Pinzón Arias also had money that could not be explained. He bought cars with cash. He bought three flats in central London in his mother’s name, all in the same block of foreign investment flats. The Met were moving in, swift and hungry for a proceeds-of-crime bonanza. They’d get to keep a percentage of whatever they found. Every police force needed that sort of money. It looked like fifty or sixty million net, estimated from the iceberg tip they could see above the waterline.
    Then, abruptly, in the middle of a school term, Robin and Roxanna packed up and moved to Glasgow. With no capital, Roxanna Fuentecilla bought a viable insurance business for a peppercorn sum. The nominal amount suggested an off-the-books payment. She arrived with seven million pounds of investment money, transferred from a string of Cayman Island companies. It would take months of document recovery and tracing to prove legally, but the original account was in Maria Arias’s name.
    Police Scotland took over the surveillance and began to covet the Fuentecilla slice of the case.
    Met investigators speculated that the insurance company was engaged in fraudulent claims but Morrow couldn’t see Fuentecilla going from suspected cocaine smuggling in London to insurance fraud in an unfamiliar city. That was a career-criminal move and she certainly wasn’t that. The Met had a theory that Arias and his wife were trying to distance Roxanna, something had gone wrong. That explanation seemed wrong to Morrow as well, but no one wanted her input.
    Paul Tailor, the brand new chief constable of the brand new Scotland-wide police service was an ex-Met man. He had taken a personal interest in the case. All developments were to be reported directly to his second in command, Deputy Chief Constable Hughes. DCC Hughes channelled the chief’s voice as surely as a soundboard and he had made it very clear to everyone involved that, whatever happened, he did not want them to cock up in front of his old comrades. Her chief inspector had taken this to heart: no one would be using their initiative on this but they might well take the blame. They understood the implication: Police Scotland were the chief constable’s stagehands but not his audience. Among themselves officers began to refer to the investigation as P.I.N.A.D. ‘Are you on that PINAD case?’ ‘Pass that onto the PINAD team’. The acronym stood for ‘Prove I’m Not A Dick’.
    A month after Walker and Fuentecilla moved to Glasgow, Morrow’s instincts were proved right: the Arias couple weren’t trying to distance themselves. Juan Pinzón Arias, short, lumpish, and his wife Maria, tiny and as elegant as a dragonfly, flew into Glasgow International on a private charter plane and spent a night at an exclusive Loch