“Wait,” I said, “Ludo was married?”
“Darling,” Caz sighed, sipped her martini, fished out an olive and popped it into her mouth, “the man – when his papa finally pops his proverbials – will be worth millions. Of course he’s married. All the best millionaires and heirs are these days. Though his wife deciding to pop over to Heidelberg was nearly the end of the marriage.”
“What happened?” I asked, accepting a top-up.
“Well, imagine her surprise, on arriving, to find dear old Ludovico in bed with a hooker.”
“Oh shit,” I gasped, the cocktail suspended halfway to my mouth.
“Worse,” she said, “the fly half was hiding in the wardrobe. I mean, who even knew the Germans played rugby?”
“Wait,” I put my glass down, “you went out with Ludo for how long? Six weeks? And in that time, you turned him gay?” I couldn’t help myself – the accumulated stress of the past twenty-four hours came out in hysterical laughing.
Caz shot daggers at me. “Bisexual darling. Like all aristos. And he needed little prompting from me.”
“So why do you think Prissy wants to see me?”
“Sweetest, if I had the remotest inkling of how her bitter little mind worked, I’d be able to answer that question. But sadly, I have not, and so I can’t. But meet you – and I – she desires, so we’d better finish these sharpish and get ourselves to The Savoy.”
TEN
A light drizzle, borne on a gust of chilly autumnal wind followed us into The Savoy as, behind us, the revolving door continued its turn, each rotation slowing it marginally.
Caz paused in the lobby; glancing around at the huge fireplace, a warming fire blazing away in the grate; at the richly upholstered sofas dotted around; the portraits placed as though someone had just casually flung some family memorabilia on the walls; and sighed contentedly.
“Never underestimate the restorative power of a five-star hotel, Mr Bird,” she said, locking eyes with a passing octogenarian, his brilliantined hair glistening in the soft light as his thick cashmere coat floated along behind him.
“Hello!” I had to snap my fingers in front of her eyes before the naked flirtation was ended and her gaze reluctantly returned to me. “We’re not here for you go sugar-daddy hunting,” I reminded her.
“God,” Caz groaned, “why did you have to remind me?” She shook herself, straightened her back, acquiring a tall hauteur that she rarely wore these days, threw back her head and stalked – with me scuttling beside her – across the lobby, down a small flight of stairs and – turning to the left – entered an opulent cloakroom where her serviceable but slightly worn Givenchy raincoat was soon placed on a hanger next to my Debenhams overcoat (the latter receiving noticeably less care than the former at the hands of the cloakroom attendant). The coats safely stashed, a small compact having been used to check hair and make-up were in place, we exited and headed straight into the foyer.
“So,” I said, trying to catch up on Caz’s family tree, “I thought you had two brothers.”
“I do,” she said, “Gamble and Tarquin.”
“And they called you Caroline,” I said, wondering whether they’d run out of pretension by the time they got to her.
“Well Gamble’s real name is Robert. Everyone else calls him Bobby or Bobbers, but when we were children, he loved nothing more than a round of Baccarat or Roulette, so his nickname sort of stuck.”
“When I was a kid we had Monopoly and Cluedo,” I observed, as we entered the palm court.
The space was light and airy; a huge glass dome filling the room with what little light was available this late in the day, and wall sconces, table lamps and peripherally dotted chandeliers filling the gap so that the space seemed almost to sparkle lightly.
The centre of the room was filled with a large ornate gazebo, a gatekeeper by a small lectern positioned in the entrance. Within the gazebo, small round tables – each one covered in pristine white linen and set with sparkling silverware and bone china crockery – hosted small parties, and, in the corner, a grand piano issued notes which managed to resemble a jazz standard whilst – as if by magic – managing to strip the melody of anything that could be either spirited, distasteful or recognisably jazz.
Caz walked straight up to the uniformed woman and announced that we were joining Baroness Holloway for tea.
The gatekeeper made a show of inspecting the book before her.
“Don’t bother checking,” Caz advised her. “I know she’s here, I can smell the sulphur.”
The woman blushed, muttered something completely noncommittal and ushered us across the room to a table in the corner where a small dark woman – her hair in a chignon so high it resembled a beehive – sat perusing a small hardback book, a pot of tea before her.
“Your ladyship,” the waitress said, managing to include a discrete cough in the sentence.
The beehive came up, a pair of surprisingly bright plastic reading glasses were slipped from the end of a long aquiline nose, dropped into a handbag sitting open at the petite woman’s feet and a hand waved to silence and dismiss the flunky.
“You’re late,” Caz’s sister-in-law said to her as another waiter arrived, pulled a chair back and ushered a tight-lipped Caroline into it.
I seated myself. The watery blue eyes were turned on me. “And you’re not waiting to be asked,” she said in a voice which – if it had finished with a whinny and the tossing of a mane – couldn’t have been more horsey.
“I was busy elsewhere and he was never taught that one should wait for a Baroness to ask you to sit,” Caz said stonily. “What do you want?”
The watery eyes tore themselves away from inspecting me as though I were some sort of exotic flower and turned themselves to the waiter who had finished seating Caz, and stood, now, waiting silently.
“More tea, Benjamin,” the Baroness said, “and perhaps some coffee for the lady. Strong coffee. She looks like she needs it. And bring some more pastries.”
I blushed, as Benjamin murmured, “Certainly my Lady,” bowed and bustled off to fetch as requested.
“Really, Caroline,” the tone changed to one of concern, but one heavily influenced by the late and (in many quarters) unlamented Margaret Thatcher – equal parts sadness, concern and unspoken judgement, “it’s so lovely to see you. But did you have to consume the crate of gin before lunch?”
Caz glowered. “What I do, Priscilla, where I do it and who I do it with is none of your concern.” She looked around her, spotted a waiter, raised a finger to summon him over, and said, “Two large gin martinis, please. Stirred. With olives. And as dry as you can make ‘em without delivering neat gin.”
The waiter nodded, made to move away, and Caz stopped him with a hand on his arm before turning to me as Benjamin arrived with the earlier order. “D’you want a drink?” she asked me and, glancing at the purse-lipped woman on the other side of the table, I considered declining, before realising that to do so would be to abandon my best friend, and requested, as there was already coffee on the table, a large Calvados.
Caz glared at Benjamin as he placed a coffee cup and saucer before her. “Unless you want a scene of epic proportions, Benjamin, I would consider – very seriously – your next move.”
Benjamin, the coffee pot poised to begin pouring, froze, a panic sweat breaking out on his forehead, his gaze immediately going to the coiffured gorgon on the other side of the table.
“I’d love some coffee,” I said brightly, sliding the cup and saucer across the table in front of me.
The pursed mouth broke, favoured me with a tiny smile – displaying, before the pink painted lips closed firmly, a set of teeth so small they might have belonged to a Yorkshire terrier – and Benjamin filled my cup. Priscilla accepted a refill of her tea and raised the cup to her mouth, waiting until she had sipped, swallowed and put the cup back almost silently into her saucer before speaking again.
“Caroline, I really don’t understand why we always hav
e to be so uncomfortable with each other,” she said, as the two martinis and the Calvados hit the linen.
Caz favoured the waiter with an apologetic smile, murmured her thanks, raised one of the glasses to her lips and swallowed most of the contents in one before putting the glass down and responding to the other woman.
“Because,” she said, “when we were at school, you persuaded an entire year of girls to ignore me. For an entire year. You had me blackballed from every club, group or gang I tried to join, and you put out the rumour that I was illegitimate.
“To add insult to injury, you then managed to hook my idiot brother, deflower him, bully him into marrying you and then had the audacity to behave to me as though we had never even met.”
The woman opposite sipped her tea, put the teacup, once again, silently, into the saucer and said, “We all do stupid things when we’re children. And, my dear, I would never have suggested – openly or via rumour – that you were illegitimate. Although I may have suggested that your mother wasn’t much better than she should be.”
Caz drained what was left in the glass, held it above her head and yelled, “Another martini,” so loudly that the distant sounds of a neutered Ain’t nobody’s business if I do were disrupted by a series of bum notes, and a woman three tables away gasped (though whether at the raised voice, the demand for grain alcohol, or the flat keys, it was hard to tell).
Caz addressed the woman opposite her in a voice so quiet now that it was almost a whisper. “You married into my family, Priscilla, and I can do nothing about that. But if you mention her one more time, I will personally come around to your side of the table and rip that ridiculous periwig from your scalp strand by strand. Now: I will ask this only three times, so for the second time: What. Do. You. Want?”
The two women stared at each other in undisguised loathing, each of them completely ignoring me while I reached across, picked up my calvados, sniffed, sipped and finally said, “If you’d like to book a room and a selection of duelling implements, I’m sure that The Savoy can arrange it. Just call me when you’re done,” I finished, addressing the last line to Caz and watching as each of the women snapped back to the present.
“Bobbers has done something brainless,” Priscilla finally said, a look of supreme discomfort – at, perhaps, the fact that she was having to discuss this with Bobbers’ sister – crossing her face.
“Stupider than marrying you?” Caz shot back.
“Caroline,” Prissy responded, the Thatcher tone creeping back in, “I know you’re not a fan of mine.”
“In the way that, say, a mongoose isn’t a fan of a cobra. Or penicillin of syphilis,” she sighed. “Who’s he been shagging now?”
“Caroline,” Prissy fixed my friend with another angry glare, “your brother’s made some, shall we say, marital errors in the past, but they are all – as I say – very far, and very firmly in the past.”
Caroline laughed, lifted her martini and sipped from it. “Mistakes? They were cries for help from a drowning man.” This last addressed to me.
“Now,” she put the glass back down, “for the third time—”
“He’s ruined the entire family,” Priscilla, Baroness Holloway said in the same tone that, I imagine, she might have said, say, he’s served the Burgundy with the foie gras, “while I was having my hair done.”
I eyed the cut and blow-dry opposite me and decided that, yes, the rich truly were a different race.
Caz jerked upright. “Explain.”
“Bobbers wanted to look big, so he did a deal. Something to do with some oil rights that the Fifth Earl had acquired in Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan or some bloody Stan. Thing is, he thought he was doing a genuine decent deal.”
“Except?”
“It was sanctions busting.”
“Sanctions busting?” Caz asked, in the way she might, for example, intone the phrase, Primark sale rack.
“It’s illegal to trade with some people, or countries,” I offered, “regardless of how much money you might make from them.”
“Yes, Daniel,” Caz turned eyes that were blazing angrily on me, “I am familiar with the phrase, and that to willingly and knowingly enter into trade with those people or countries would be sanctions busting.”
“Which,” Prissy finished, “leads to prison sentences, financial implications and reputational disaster.”
“Just what did you have done at the hairdresser?” Caz demanded.
“I was in Monaco.”
“You had one job, Prissy. Stop Bobbers from doing anything stupid. So what, exactly, has happened?”
“He’s been shaked.”
“Shaken?”
“Shaked.”
“Shook?”
“Are we doing verb declensions all afternoon?” I asked.
“Define shaked?” Caz demanded.
“Some idiot who dresses up as a member of Saudi royalty,” Prissy explained. “Not, obviously, the one who went to prison for it, some other con man in a keffiyeh has recorded Bobby’s misdemeanour,” she said, reducing Bobbers’ contravening of international sanctions to the status of a parking ticket. “Has recorded him, and is threatening to send the recordings to the police and to the papers. But, for a fee, he’s willing to forget any of it ever happened.”
“Which is a good thing,” Caz said, downing her second martini as the third one arrived, and growling, “keep ‘em coming, sweetheart,” to the bemused waiter.
“So how much does Sheikh Shakedown want to wipe the tapes and develop amnesia?”
“Two million pounds.”
Caz downed the third martini, reached into her bag, pulled out a bottle of gin, filled the empty glass to the brim, downed that, all without glancing in my direction, and looked Prissy full in the face.
“How much is Bobbers worth?” she asked.
“Between what he got from your grandfather, and what he’s likely to inherit, far more than that,” Prissy answered, “but none of it is lying around cash.”
Caz frowned deeply. “What does Bobbers say about this?”
“Your brother,” Prissy answered, her face setting angrily, “knows nothing of our conversation. He’s not – as you know – a strong man at the best of times.”
Caz snorted humourlessly. “So what does he think you’re doing here?” she asked.
“I’m looking for a painting for the chapel,” Prissy responded, as I might, for example, say, I’d like a nice print for the guest bedroom.
“There’s a sale of late Renaissance religious work at Frankleby’s – all anaemic saints and gym-toned Christs writhing in ecstasy. He thinks I’m rifling through the school of Veronese. And I want it kept that way,” she commanded, eyes blazing. “This situation has left him knocked for six. I don’t want him upset or disturbed any further.”
“I should imagine he’ll be somewhat disturbed if he goes to prison for the rest of his life,” Caz murmured.
Prissy rolled her eyes. “Which is why we need to figure out a way to make this situation go away,” she said, pouring another cup of Darjeeling.
“So let me get this straight,” I said, “you want us to go see this man. What’s his name, by the way?”
“Balthazar Lowe,” she answered, splashing a drop of milk into the cup and stirring it briskly. “Vile little man, calls himself an intelligence broker, lives in a huge house near Regent’s Park.”
“Okay, you want us to see Lowe, and – what? Pay him off?”
She sipped from the cup and before Prissy could speak, Caz had butted in. “If paying him off was the plan, Daniel, I suspect neither you nor I would have been invited to tea this evening.”
“As I say,” Prissy said, carefully replacing the bone china teacup in the saucer, “we simply don’t have enough cash at hand to pay him off even if we wanted to. Which we don’t.” Her eyes blazed. “This family,” she announced, channelling her inner Thatcher again, “does not negotiate with blackmailers.”
“Just with oligarchs and sanctioned terro
rists,” Caz responded, staring absent-mindedly into an empty martini glass.
“It was business,” Prissy hissed. “And I should imagine that someone with,” she paused, searching for the right words, “your moral compass would be highly unlikely to cast the first stone.”
Caz didn’t even flinch. Her eyes rose from their contemplation of the glassware and blazed, briefly, with fury. “And yet, here you sit, opposite someone with my moral compass. So,” she sat up straight, and stared solidly across the table at Prissy, “what do you want me to do?”
“Go to this man – this Balthazar Lowe – and figure out how to close this down.”
Caz frowned. “How? In what way?”
Prissy looked at her, smirked, looked at me pointedly, and said, “Caroline, we have the internet even up north. We know what you and your,” at this she jerked her head at me, “friend have been up to.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Caz firmed up against the gorgon.
“We’ve seen how you two have been making names for yourselves for sorting out problems that other people have trouble sorting out.”
“You’ve made us sound like the A-Team,” I protested, receiving, for my stab at ice-breaking humour, a warning stare from Caz.
“So if you’re not going to pay him off,” Caz pressed, “what do you want us to do? Threaten him? Murder him? Break into his house and tie him up until he hands back the tapes?”
Prissy shrugged, “What you do, Caroline, is up to you but you can be certain of one point – if you do nothing,” she said, leaning forward slightly, “Bobbers goes to prison, what’s left of the family cash goes to lawyers’ fees, and your dear old daddy goes to his grave knowing that the family name is disgraced.”
ELEVEN
Caz was halfway towards Waterloo Bridge, marching in front of an aggressively-honking Nissan as she sailed across the road before I caught up with her.
“Calm down,” I entreated as she stomped aggressively up the Aldwych. “What’s up?”
Death Of A Devil Page 6
