Nobody Gets Hurt

by R J Bailey

  He invested the word with the sort of disdain with which one might have said ‘child molester’.

  ‘The Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn was the first railway on Swiss territory. It connected Zürich with Baden in 1847. Do you know why it was so successful?’

  I shook my head, biding my time. He would get to the point eventually.

  ‘A Spanisch-Brötli, or Spanish Bun, is a pastry traditionally made in Baden but prized in Zürich. The wealthy lake-dwellers liked these pastries so much that servants would be sent out very early in the morning to fetch them from Baden, twenty-five kilometres away, by foot. Every day. The train builders boasted that, if the tracks were laid, buns could be delivered to Zürich in just forty minutes. Investors flocked. It was probably the first and only rail investment in the world driven by a love of pastry.’

  He laughed at that, his shoulders shaking at a story he must have told a hundred times.

  ‘Why did you move from Geneva?’ I asked. It was where he had been based when he trained me in the finer points of personal protection. Or bodyguarding if you prefer.

  He looked serious now. ‘Geneva? I was fossilising there.’

  He didn’t look like a fossil, but he did look like a mummy. His great dome of a bald head was dense with wrinkles. His mouth looked like he’d borrowed it from Boris Karloff. It was a good job old men don’t use lipstick. It would fill those lines like water flowing into a delta, spreading across his face. His ears were like large handles on either side of his head, but as transparent as parchment. How old was Colonel d’Arcy? He could be a careworn sixty or a well-preserved ninety. What was his nationality? I had no idea and the wayward accent was slight and gave no real clue to his origins. Armenian, some said. Others insisted he was descended from French nobility. All I knew for certain was that he was still somewhere near the top of his game. Which is why I needed him.

  ‘You look thin,’ he said as he sat down. I breathed a small sigh of relief that his history lesson was over. ‘Is it the cigarettes?’

  ‘I’m not smoking,’ I said. Not much, anyway.

  ‘You need to look after yourself.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Really?’ He gave a little sigh of disappointment as he looked at the notes on his desk. ‘So, you lost your SIA accreditation.’

  My Security Industry Association status was actually suspended, rather than revoked, for two years. It was a serious hindrance to getting a job in the UK. Apparently I’d brought disgrace on the close-protection business. ‘For the moment.’

  ‘You kidnapped this man and tortured him?’

  ‘Torture is an emotive word.’

  ‘What would you rather say?’

  ‘I thought Ben had set me up by getting me a job with a family that others wanted to discredit. Business rivals.’

  ‘And had he?’

  ‘He admitted that he had.’ After a bit of light persuasion. More threat than any actual torture.

  ‘There was something else?’

  ‘I thought he might have some knowledge of the whereabouts of my daughter Jess, who was—’

  ‘Taken by your ex-husband, her father, and his young girlfriend.’

  I nodded in appreciation of the depth of his knowledge. My ex-husband Matt had pitched back into our life at a very inopportune moment, just as I was involved in an elaborate scheme to discredit the Sharifs, my employers. And while Jess was being a turbo-charged adolescent. In the midst of that, he was demanding full access to our daughter, even though he had walked out of her life years before. Given his background as a drug-taking and drug-dealing hedonist, I wasn’t too keen on that arrangement. So he simply took her, persuaded her to come with him from my friend Nina’s house. Yes, I should have stopped him. In my defence, I’d like to say I was busy fighting for my life at the time.

  ‘A year ago now?’

  Stab, stab, stab. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You took your time coming to me. This Ben, the man you abducted, he actually knew nothing of the Jess business. Is that right?’

  It was. I had threatened – well, terrified – a man who was innocent. At least, innocent of anything involving my daughter. I was blinded by hate and panic. Still, no lasting damage was done to him. Not physically at least. ‘You are well informed.’

  ‘I like to keep a distant eye on my protégés. I worry about you, Sam. I worry about all of you. But you, especially. After the wars you fought in, the death of your husband Paul, the loss of your daughter . . .’

  I didn’t exactly fight. I’d been a battlefield medic. My second husband, Paul, an undercover cop with the British Nuclear Police, had been gunned down on the streets of London, but there remained some confusion as to who exactly was responsible. Islamic terrorists or avenging Albanians? It probably didn’t matter a whole lot to Paul who did it, but it was another scab for me to scratch at.

  ‘So you have been running around Europe, looking for Jess?’

  ‘I have.’ The trouble was, the ‘sightings’ of Jess and her father Matt came thick and fast, thanks to the power (and sheer perversity and mischievousness) of the internet. Like some deranged maze rat, I had crisscrossed the continent, to the frustration of both the British police and Europol, who thought I was just creating confusion in their ranks and their ever-so-logical approach to the investigation. Ibiza, Amsterdam, Cyprus, Berlin . . . dead ends all of them. A good proportion of the sightings were either hoaxes or just wishful thinking on someone’s part.

  ‘And now you would like me to help?’

  I kept my voice low and steady, not always a given when talking about Jess. I wanted, needed, this man to take me seriously. Not dismiss me as a grieving mother prone to ranting and flights of fancy. ‘It’s very simple, Colonel. You have a network of eyes and ears, better than any police department’s. If you put Jess on a watch-for list . . . well, I’d be surprised if a man with Matt’s history and predilections didn’t pop onto your radar sooner or later.’

  The Colonel stroked his chin. He didn’t look convinced by my thesis. ‘Possibly. Yet he appears to have gone to ground rather effectively.’

  I ignored that, because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Nobody can hide forever in this day and age. ‘And where there is Matt, there’s Jess.’

  His sparse eyebrows went up. ‘Again, possibly.’ He made a pyramid with his hands. ‘You have to face up to one thing . . .’

  ‘She’s alive,’ I said firmly. ‘Matt’s a twat. But he’s not a murdering twat.’

  The Colonel allowed himself a little smile at my language.

  ‘I can pay,’ I said.

  I don’t know if he had pre-checked my bank accounts, which were severely depleted by my travels, or if there was a telltale note in my voice, but he shook his head. ‘How, exactly? I fear you have used a lot of funds on your wild-goose chases.’

  I was getting tired of him being a know-all. Although that was his skill set. It was, after all, why I had come to Zürich. This was a man who traded in information. ‘I can work.’

  ‘Without an SIA accreditation? Anyone worth their salt would run a background check to discover why you lost your badge. Bringing the industry into disrepute is one thing. But the police were involved, I believe. What were the charges again?’

  I was sure he knew perfectly well. ‘It came down to one charge in the end. Kidnap with intent to cause grievous bodily harm,’ I admitted. ‘But the sentence was suspended . . .’

  ‘Nevertheless, it doesn’t look good, Sam.’

  ‘No,’ I had to agree. That Ben Harris, the man I kidnapped, was head of my agency – my ultimate employer – probably wasn’t going to help, either. And the fact that I hadn’t been thinking straight – blinded by grief and anger – was no defence. On top of that I didn’t regret my actions. No remorse at all. If I thought it would bring Jess back, I’d go into the kidnap and torture business full time.

  ‘And putting Jess on a watch-for list isn’t cheap. You’d have to keep it live for weeks. Perhaps months.’ Or years, I sensed
he had wanted to add.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘For six months, say, twenty thousand euros.’

  Twenty thousand? I felt like that German airship after it burst into flames and plummeted to the ground. The Hindenburg, that was it.

  He caught my expression. ‘I don’t run a charity.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I looked down at the bag at my feet, full of USBs containing pictures of Jess and Matt and grainy images of Laura, the treacherous bitch who had masqueraded as my au pair so she could help him snatch Jess from me. I had intended to hand them over to the Colonel for the watch-for list. Instead, they would be coming home with me. I reached down for the bag, preparing to leave.

  ‘There might be one thing you could do for me. To pay your way.’

  I let my fingers brush the holdall’s handle and straightened up again. ‘Oh, yes?’ He knew I wouldn’t think that ‘one thing’ was sexual. Colonel d’Arcy was not that sort of man. ‘A PP kind of thing?’

  ‘There’s two, in fact, but one has been delayed.’ He frowned at his screen. ‘Client has a morbid fear of flying. So has decided to cross the Atlantic by boat.’

  ‘How long does that take?’

  ‘A week, perhaps more, but they aren’t even under way yet. We’ll come back to that. What I have immediately isn’t quite personal protection though. So your suspension won’t be an issue.’ A slight grimace crossed his face as he reached for a file to his left and flipped it open. This was something outside his normal remit, I was sure. He glanced up, studied my face for a second, and cast his eyes down again. ‘You’d be perfect, I think. And you can use your initial fee to defray some of the watch list costs.’

  I had a sudden feeling a blow job might have been the easier option. ‘What is it?’

  He extracted a photograph from the file and pushed it across to me. It was a picture of the sort of unfeasibly large boat that men use to signify to the world the size of their bank accounts, the smallness of their penises or the number of people they have ground into the dust on their way to that yacht.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, not really meaning it. I reminded myself not to turn sour-tongued on him. It was very easy for the bitterness I felt inside at the hand life had dealt me to leak out.

  ‘Forty million euros worth of nice.’

  ‘Really.’

  He smiled at how unimpressed I was.

  ‘Is this what the client is crossing the Atlantic in?’

  ‘No, no. This is a completely different kind of job altogether. Tell me this, Sam. How well do you know Monaco?’

  It isn’t unusual not to be told all the finer details of a job you’ve been hired for. I’ve been ordered to turn up at Heathrow where I would be briefed on the plane, or waited in lay-bys at dawn for a pick-up to take me off to some secret location where a celebrity wedding or a party was taking place. If they pay you well enough, they can be as secretive as they like.

  So, as instructed, I pitched up at Nice airport and took a taxi to Villefranche-sur-Mer. There I checked into the Hotel Welcome – room 28, a corner deluxe – unpacked, opened the bulky package in my name that was lying on my bed and waited to be contacted.

  It wasn’t a hardship. I had a lot of reading to do (these days briefing documents have gone back to being presented on paper, rather than vulnerable emailed PDFs) and a cute balcony to do it on, overlooking the glistening waters of the beautiful bay.

  I spent the next day watching a slab-sided cruise ship send tenders full of slightly dazed passengers to catch trains to Nice or Monaco or to wander the front exclaiming at the extortionate prices in the seafood restaurants. Low cloud rolled in over the Cap opposite, blotting out the sun and bringing a rain squall with it, sending the day-trippers into those restaurants they had recently been complaining about. A half-hour later the sun peeked out again, the Italianate villas over the bay, their cypresses standing like exclamation marks, glowed ochre and saffron, the sea twinkled and sparkled, the streets of Villefranche began to steam themselves dry and I went back to my spot on the balcony and my stack of files.

  I liked working, even if that only meant background reading. It was morphine to me. It allowed me to put the constant pain of Jess’s absence into a compartment. It was still there, I was fully aware of it, but I could function. Without activity, the agony could be excruciating, from the first stirring in the morning when the brain zipped up to speed and delivered its cold truth – she’s still gone – to the final slip into (sometimes drink- and Zopiclone-induced) oblivion.

  When I’d had my fill of the minutiae of Monaco’s Historic Grand Prix and the construction of superyachts, and once the last of the tenders had chugged the passengers back out to the Bollocks of the Seas or whatever the ship was called, I went down and sat in the little chapel that Jean Cocteau decorated for the local fishermen. It was empty, the interior cool. I had read in the hotel brochure that during the making of Exile On Main Street, Anita Pallenberg had taken refuge here to escape the madness of the Rolling Stones. That had been one of Paul’s favourite albums.

  I slipped into a pew and, embarrassed before a god I didn’t actually believe in, I had the temerity to pray for the safe return of my daughter, just as wives had sat a century ago and prayed for the safe return of their fishermen husbands, in the time before day-trippers became the local harvest.

  The next day went much the same. Breakfast on my balcony, lunch at Palmiers, dinner in the cave-like L’Aparté, which was built into the Rue Obscura, one of the town’s covered streets. I didn’t smoke at any location and had one glass of Bandol with dinner. I hadn’t yet spotted who was watching me, but I was damn sure someone was. And I didn’t want them to see my bad habits.

  It was at breakfast on the third day, in the square behind the hotel, that he showed himself. I was impressed that I hadn’t clocked him before. He was a little shorter than me, but wider, and probably a little younger, too. His fair hair was cut short, his smile was playful and the pastel colour of his jacket suggested he was American, as indeed he turned out to be. As my hot chocolate arrived, he sat himself down opposite me, took off his sunglasses and ordered a coffee. His eyes had the sparkle of sobriety and clean living. ‘So, Alison,’ he said affably, as if he believed the name on my phoney documents was actually my real one. ‘I’m the Keegan you’ve been reading about. Ready to go to work?’

  THREE

  Monaco – present day

  By now a dozen people had gone below deck, for between five and twenty minutes each. Several of them subsequently engaged in conversation with VJ in a fashion that managed to be both animated and subdued, as the pair tried not to draw attention to themselves. This was meant to be a social gathering, after all, and not business.

  Elsewhere, the party had peaked as the excitement of being on Kubera had subsided and it became clear that some of the bandied-about names (Nikolai von Bismarck, George Spencer-Churchill, Suki Waterhouse, Lennon Gallagher) weren’t going to show and that DJ Henry wasn’t the same as DJ Henri. It settled into a calmer rhythm as the rate of slugging back the champagne, vodka martini and gin gimlets slowed. A small number of the most restless guests – those with event-ADD, a well-recognised syndrome along the Riviera at that time of year – had left to grab their shoes and move on to the next boat or bar. It was as if they had a permanent hunger they could never sate, no matter how big the martini glasses or glittering the guest list, they were convinced the grass over the hill was even more gold-plated. It could be exhausting, living the High Life. It was tiring enough just looking on.

  That still left upwards of eighty people on board, not counting crew and security. As guests drifted by, heading for the foredeck, they left behind snatches of conversation, like glacial erratics dotting the landscape.

  ‘. . . the trouble with the Monegasque boys is their only ambition is to become a croupier at the casino . . .’

  ‘I saw him at Jimmyz. Wasted. White powder all round his . . .’

  ‘The brakes on the E-t
ype were always shit.’

  ‘. . . just too expensive to divorce . . .’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about Cannes.’

  ‘Let me introduce you to my dealer . . . he’s just off Dover Street.’

  ‘Oh, that kind of dealer . . . I thought you meant . . .’

  ‘I’d fuck him. And then I’d let you fuck him . . .’

  ‘I’ve set up a new company. I’m a Lifestyle Curator, if you know anyone who needs one . . .’

  I wondered if I needed a Lifestyle Curator, whatever that was. I suspected not. I beckoned Jean-Claude over. I needed to breathe some different air for a while. ‘You mind if I go down and take a look at Eve?’

  ‘Not at all. I’ll mind the shop.’ I handed him the phone. ‘You seen Keegan?’

  Keegan was the American from Villefranche, the gangmaster who had placed us on Kubera as part of the security detail.

  ‘No,’ Jean-Claude said. ‘But he’ll be here somewhere.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Keegan had a key part to play in the next stage of the operation.

  ‘We have done this sort of thing before,’ he said.

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. I’ll just give her the once over. I won’t be long.’

  Eve had come aboard in Barcelona, taking up residence in what was normally the sports deck. A couple of RIBs and wetbikes had been offloaded to make room for her. Since I last saw her, lights had been rigged to show off her body to full effect, which had been polished, preened and buffed to within an inch of its life. She sat there mute and imperious, millions of dollars resting on surprisingly skinny tyres.

  Balraj was standing to the rear of the vehicle, arms folded across his imposing chest. He beamed when he saw it was me. ‘Come to see what all the fuss is about, Miss?’ He always called me that. Made me feel about thirteen.