“This lady’s not his wife Judith, is she? Does your colleague know whose name’s on the lease?” I asked.
She phoned Steven Jacobs on her mobile and had a brief conversation with him.
“The lease’s in the name of someone named Paula Jeffries.”
“You have the apartment number?”
I was back on duty again, an hour after going off duty.
*
I drove to Septimus House for the second time today. The same security guard was on duty, recognised me as police and, at my request, phoned flat thirty-eight, on the eighth floor. I took the lift and knocked on the door.
The woman who answered looked exhausted and bleary-eyed, like she’d spent some time crying recently. She was quite short, maybe five-two, and had dull mousy hair. I guessed she was close to fifty, though she probably wouldn’t thank me for this. She was wearing a fawn cardigan over a white blouse and black trousers which, even to my unsophisticated eye, looked well tailored and very expensive. She looked like she was a reasonably attractive woman, despite red eyes and tear-stained cheeks. I showed ID and she stepped aside to let me in.
The flat itself was spacious and the main lounge was well laid out and well lit, with expensive-looking furniture and a mahogany-coloured leather three-piece suite as the dominant feature. The windows faced west and, from the eighth floor, afforded a good aerial view of the streetlights of Soho. Some of my earliest times on the beat a decade ago, as a rookie copper, had been spent walking the streets of Soho and the West End, with my training officer Gavin Dennison, and discovering the facts of life about what went on behind the bright lights: the drugs, the prostitution, the corruption and the violence, little of which ever appeared in the glossy tourist information guides.
I identified myself and commiserated with Jeffries on her loss. She sat down demurely on the settee as I spoke, legs together and hands resting on her knees. She looked shaken up, so I decided to make this visit a quick one.
I started by saying I was investigating the untimely death of Charles Garlinge. She nodded. How long had she known him?
“First off, can I ask how you found out about us? Charles and I have been very discreet.” Her voice sounded distant, like it was coming from somewhere else. “Hardly anyone knows about us or this place.”
“I’m with Special Branch; it wasn’t difficult,” I stated confidently.
I was exaggerating somewhat. But for the information Taylor’s colleague had uncovered from his range of sources, we might not have found out about Garlinge’s cosy little love nest for some while.
She sighed and looked out the window for several seconds.
“I have to know.” She sniffed, looking like she was about to cry again. “The fact police are here means Charles was killed, doesn’t it?”
“Not so I’ve heard. As far as we know, there’re no suspicious circumstances, but they’ll be conducting a post-mortem soon to discover the actual cause of death.” This was the truth as I knew it.
She nodded. This seemed to satisfy her for the moment. She sighed deeply, as though composing herself for an ordeal.
“I’ve known him almost five years, I think,” she said, answering my question at last. “I used to work with him at Bartolome, here in London. I went with him on a business trip to the Middle East once, we ended up having an affair,” – she looked at me and shrugged, as if to say you know what I mean – “and we’ve been together since then, though obviously not openly.”
“So I’m guessing neither of your families know about this.”
“I was already divorced, and Charles was going to leave his wife after he became an MP,” she said, evading the question. “He didn’t want to do it before he was accepted to be a candidate at an election. Didn’t want a messy separation getting in his way, with possibly unfavourable publicity in the papers, so we agreed to wait. We were going to set up home together, which is why we took this place on. Charles even paid the deposit; he was serious about us. This was going to be our new home.”
She looked directly at me with melancholy eyes for several seconds.
“Not likely to happen now, is it?” She sighed resignedly.
“This place’s in your name, isn’t it?”
She nodded her agreement.
“Can I ask how much deposit you put down?”
She thought for a moment.
“Somewhere in the region of £50,000, I do believe.” She sighed.
Nick Graves had said Garlinge had pocketed a cheque for well into five figures for his part in the Bozetti arrangement. He’d invested his money wisely.
“What do you know about his business dealings over the past year or so?” I explained Special Branch had recently begun investigating certain business dealings Charles Garlinge had been involved with, one relating to an Italian company. “Do you know anything about his work with Bartolome?”
“Well, he’s been an MP for the last year or so, hasn’t really had much contact with the firm, other than going to the AGM as a shareholder not too long back. The only other business thing he’s done this year is go to Italy, earlier in the year, maybe six, seven months ago.”
“Oh, really? Why’d he go to Italy?” I was interested in this.
“To talk to a company about some contract he’d been involved with before he left Bartolome. There was a problem, apparently, and he said as he knew the people there, the company’d asked him if he’d help out. They even paid for the trip. I can’t remember the name of the firm he went to see, though, and I don’t know what it was about either. He never told me things like that, and I didn’t ask.”
This made me take notice. “Could the company have been called Bozetti, the one I alluded to just now?”
“If they’re in Milan, then yes, probably. That’s where he flew to.”
“Did he go on his own or were there others with him?”
“He went with a few other people, but I don’t know any names, I’m afraid.”
“Do you know if he was supposed to be meeting anybody last night?” I was thinking about what his wife had said she’d heard around midnight.
“I saw him Friday but didn’t see Charles yesterday, but, so far as I know, he was at the ExCeL centre at some bloody boring arms trade fair, then he was going home to spend today with his wife. He never mentioned meeting anyone to me.”
I was going to ask her if she could think of any reason why anyone would want to kill Charles Garlinge, but decided not to. There was no proof yet he’d been killed, and I didn’t want to upset her unjustly.
“Today’s his silver wedding anniversary, you know,” she said very softly.
I said I hadn’t known this.
She was silent for a moment, looking on the verge of tears.
“It’s all going to come out about Charles and me now, isn’t it?” she said resignedly, staring at me as though I’d just said she had an inoperable brain tumour.
“Not through me it won’t, but you should know the press’ll be looking into all the circumstances relating to Charles dying. Who knows what they’ll find.”
I again expressed condolences for her loss, left the flat and drove back to Battersea, feeling like I’d unjustly intruded into personal grief with no tangible benefits to show for it.
N I N E
Monday
Nothing suspicious concerning Charles Garlinge’s death had been discovered by Herts CID. They’d conducted a wide area canvass and had spoken to several known trolls who’d sent insulting, threatening or hostile messages to MPs, or had made threats on Facebook or Twitter, but all were alibied up to their pathetic necks. Nick Graves had also been questioned by police, given the fact of Armswatch having been in contact with Garlinge. He’d been able to establish where he’d been Saturday evening, outside the ExCeL centre as one of the organisers of a stationary demonstration against the proceedings and the participants inside. This had been verified by the ExCeL centre’s CCTV.
News of Garlinge’s death had come through t
oo late to be included in the Sunday press, so all today’s broadsheet newspapers carried obituaries and articles about what was being eloquently described as an unfortunate tragedy, a few expressing sympathies for his wife as he’d died on the day of their silver wedding anniversary. The obituaries were mostly factual, listing his army record and his work for Bartolome. His recent election as a Conservative MP was mentioned, though, as the Guardian commented, for a constituency to lose two sitting MPs through untimely demises in so short a time suggested the seat was cursed.
I was reading Garlinge’s obituary in the Times when my phone sounded.
Richard Clements leapt straight in. “You called yesterday.” “Yeah, I wanna talk to you. When are you available?”
“Available now. Wanna meet in the café?”
*
At nine twenty I was sat facing Clements in the café we used when we didn’t meet in the Clarence in Whitehall. The café was located in Little Turnstile, the narrow passageway connecting High Holborn to the north-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and close by the offices of New Focus. I liked this place because it had a real old-time café ambiance and wasn’t as formatted and identikit as most modern coffee shops. There was a spirit, an atmosphere here which I liked. Truth be told, it was only one step up from being a greasy spoon, but the smell from food being cooked as you approached was a glorious nasal assault, and you could order a sandwich or baguette and see it being made as per the customer’s request, not served wrapped in cellophane after being made the night before.
Clements, however, liked it here not only for its proximity, less than one hundred yards from his desk, but because one of the women behind the counter, some mid-thirties blonde with overly dyed hair, too much make-up and a large chest, was seriously hot for him.
I’d smelled eggs and bacon cooking as I’d entered and immediately felt hungry again but decided against eating anything. The blonde brought our teas across and looked at Clements with an expression hovering between hero worship and pure lust, like he was some teenage heartthrob. From the lascivious look in her eyes, if he clicked his fingers, she’d probably nail him on the spot. There was so much sexual tension here I could almost breathe it in.
“Bloody hell, it’s hard to think straight looking at a body like hers,” he said, sipping his tea as she returned behind the counter. He looked forlorn. “You know what Jack’d do if I strayed off the reservation?”
I nodded. I was in no doubt.
“Anyway, you wanted to talk yesterday.”
“Yeah, I did.” I leaned forward. “You remember, at the wedding, you told me you’d heard about Bartolome Systems being implicated in bribery and a Tory MP being involved?”
“Yeah, I do.” As he spoke, he was still ogling the blonde behind the counter, who was smiling at him. He winked at her and she turned away, looking like she was blushing. “Sorry, Rob.” He turned round to face me.
“Did you ever find out which MP it was?” I was hoping I finally had his full attention.
“You kidding me?” He laughed. “Piece of cake, mate. The late Mr Charles Garlinge. Worked for Bartolome up to last year, involved in selling arms to the Middle East.”
“How’d you find this out?”
“Spoke to the head guy at Armswatch Saturday afternoon, just before he went to the ExCeL centre. Someone called Graves. He showed me photocopies of accounts they’d been sent alluding to bribes being paid and received. He showed me some figures and explained what they meant, which was just as well as I couldn’t make head or fucking tail of any of them.” He laughed and shook his head. “Anyway, he said these accounts clearly show Bartolome maintains a slush fund for illicit purposes. He also showed me minutes of meetings Garlinge’d attended, and his name was mentioned in a couple of places when negotiating strategy was being discussed. That I could at least understand.” He grinned. “We spent some while going through what I was shown and, I’m not kidding, Rob, you’d have to be naïve to the point of wilful ignorance not to realise the board was sanctioning bribery. If the Serious Fraud Office ever gets to see what I saw, there’ll be fucking sparks flying all over Whitehall.”
He sat back in his chair. “You read about Rolls-Royce earlier this year? The High Court came down like a ton of bricks on the firm after it was found guilty of bribery and all kinds of corrupt practices to win business. The judges particularly focused on the phrase the controlling minds of the company. In layman’s terms, they were saying those who run the business had to have known it was going on because of the sums involved; something of this scale couldn’t have been just the actions of a rogue manager or junior official, and bribery and corruption had to have been institutionalised. It’s the same situation here. Senior management at Bartolome has to be complicit. The kinds of figures Graves showed me couldn’t possibly be paid out without senior management knowing about it. This includes Garlinge.”
I remembered the case, as a DI I knew in the fraud squad had been involved in the investigation. Rolls-Royce had been accused of being embroiled in truly vast endemic bribery and corruption and had been fined somewhere in the region of £700 million, though I couldn’t remember if any prosecutions of senior company officials had taken place or were still pending. Rolls-Royce was one of the most iconic names in UK business, but this hadn’t stopped the High Court holding the company to account on grounds of financial dishonesty on an epic scale. It seemed to me what Rolls-Royce had been found guilty of was the same thing Bartolome Systems was implicated in.
“Our next edition comes out a week Thursday and, after what I’ve seen, I’m going to be spending this week putting together a piece about bribery and corruption in the arms trade for the edition two weeks after. Our main starting point’s gonna be Bartolome Systems, and asking if the Government’s aware of how Bartolome gets its business.”
Nick Graves had told me on Friday last that Garlinge had been given a certain amount of time to respond to the allegations Armswatch had made and, if he didn’t, they were going to go public with what they knew. But Garlinge was now dead, so the question had become whether Graves still intended to publish and be damned. What would be the response if he did?
“Will this include naming Garlinge?” I asked.
“Editorial policy’s not down to me, so the editor’ll decide whether it does. But I don’t see why the fact he’s now dead should mean we gloss over the fact he’d had his nose in the trough. If it’s clearly demonstrable he’s a crook, the bastard’s name should be mentioned.”
“You heard anything else?” I asked cautiously.
He shifted in his seat, shot a quick look at the blonde and then leaned forward across the table.
“You remember me once telling you about someone I spoke to when you were looking into Paul Sampson?” he said in a low voice.
I did. It was through this person, one of Clements’ well-placed sources, I’d learnt Paul Sampson’s untimely demise hadn’t been a suicide. I nodded.
“A few days after I spoke to you at your wedding, I got in touch with this guy through my connection at the Guardian, and I spoke to him last week. He wouldn’t say too much, though one thing he did say was he’s not surprised about bribery allegations concerning Bartolome. But that’s not the only interesting thing he said. Seems they’ve been implicated in other orders which’ve gone astray, not going where they were intended to. Weapons they’ve sold have been diverted via companies he thinks are arming terrorists.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He told me about a process called oversupply. What happens is, I mean, take someone like Bartolome.” He paused to sip his tea, as well as to quickly glance at the blonde waitress, who was whispering to another waitress whilst looking in our direction. “They get an order for X number of, I don’t know, handguns, for example. The order goes through the system in the usual way, the firm produces the number required, X, they go through the usual channels, obtain the proper export licenses, everything’s properly signed off and everything�
�s transparent, yada yada. But, somewhere along the line, the paperwork gets changed to read Z number instead of X, and the difference between the two, which could be as small as half a dozen guns, is what ends up with the unofficial recipients. So, the company’s documentation is accurate, but not all the guns they’ve produced arrive at the right destination. You follow?”
I nodded.
He looked serious. “The most significant thing he said, though, was he thinks there has to be an intelligence connection for export licences to be obtained. Someone inside MI5 would be giving the requisite minister the okay to sign off on the export licence, and also the End User Certificate.”
“MI5?” I was confused.
“That’s what I heard. It makes sense, doesn’t it? No minister’ll sign off on the sale of arms unless the security service gives them the green light.”
“Did he give you any specific examples?”
“No. This guy wouldn’t be drawn. He said I should get other sources looking into this. He just said he’ll give me a hint and I’ve gotta do the rest. So I’ve put out feelers with a couple of journos I know who’ve got contacts in intelligence to see what they can find. I’m waiting to hear back from them.”
I remembered the picture of Harry Ferguson sitting at top management’s table at Bartolome’s AGM, taken a few years back. If there was an intelligence involvement, could this be why he was at the table: as an MI5 emissary?
“It’d make sense, wouldn’t it?” Clements asked. “I mean, how else do groups like Red Heaven and Muearada get their weapons? I know there’s a black market for arms, but the arms still have to be made and sold by someone, don’t they? Firms like Bartolome might sell arms legitimately, but then whoever they sell them to sells them on to someone who has a terrorist connection. I heard this from my source on the Observer, who’s got friends in the intelligence community, and this’s one of the things we’ll be researching for the article I just mentioned.”
The Real World- the Point of Death Page 16
