“I see,” says Harry, taking a long gulp of lager.
“It then gets a bit murkier,” says Mary, leaning in, so that her hair falls down near to his own face. In another life he would have stroked it. “It’s then that he became some sort of middle man between American arms manufacturers and the Saudi government. This is where he made his real money, possibly billions, although a lot of this is hearsay and circumstantial evidence. He certainly crops up in enough photographs alongside Congressmen with strong links to the military-industrial complex.”
“Brilliant,” says Harry, smacking the edge of the table. He’s beginning to feel a bit tipsy. “He’s a concierge... just like Max and me.”
“Slightly bigger league,” chuckles Mary. “Anyway, he left America after 9/11, for whatever reason, and settled here in London.”
“What about the diplomatic immunity... why does he have that?”
“No idea, or why his daughter has it either. Possibly to facilitate arms deals... he’s certainly never held any official ambassadorial role. And there’s another strong possibility – in fact, I’d wager, a probability.”
“Which is?”
“He’s some sort of spook or political fixer... a behind-the-scenes, sort of dark-arts type. Not someone you should be messing with in any event.”
Harry is silent, unlike the party of office workers which is getting ever more noisy and raucous. “I see,” he says at length.
“But...” says Mary, looking at him intently.
“Yes?”
“If you should want to go looking for his daughter then I know where the family home is. It’s in Oxfordshire. A big stately home they bought when they moved here in 2002 and where the daughter spends her down time.”
* * *
“You’re nuts,” says Rachel as Max explains the plan of action. “You’ll get arrested. Why don’t you just go round there and ring on the front doorbell?”
“Because we won’t get anywhere near the front door,” says Max. He’s stuffing a raincoat into a rucksack.
“E-mail him then; it’s much easier than breaking and entering.”
“My e-mails just ping back.”
“I still think you’re crazy. It’s Harry’s idea I take it?”
“It’s Harry’s idea,” says Max taking the raincoat out of the rucksack and this time folding it into a tight ball. “But I wholeheartedly agree with him.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“What a truly classic English pub,” says Max, pushing another forkful of steak into his mouth. As he chews, his eyes seem to film over. It’s true, thinks Harry, taking in the horse brasses, hunting scenes, snoozing Labrador by the crackling fire. The landlord’s, it seems, and it’s called Basil, which makes Max laugh.
“Bas-il,” he repeats.
The landlord of the Golden Lion in Luddeston – the nearest pub to Luddeston Hall – is the type Harry likes; late middle-aged, fat, polite and efficient but not nosey. He worked in a pub in Norfolk one summer holiday after he left school, and the landlord, Terry, was just like this one. “I haven’t seen my cock in over thirty years,” was one of Terry’s favourite sayings. He kept a water pistol behind the bar and used to squirt drinkers who were slow to leave at closing time.
They had taken a train to Oxford and then a taxi for the forty-minute drive to Luddeston. There’s only one other customer here today, a bearded man of about their age, with lank long hair and a look of private amusement on his face as he sits at the bar nursing a pint of bitter. Part of the fixtures and fittings, thinks Harry, who has known the type over the years. Perhaps he’s a farm worker contemplating an eternity of ploughing straight furrows, of harrowing and harvesting and driving up and down fields as he listens to Steve Wright in the Afternoon on the tractor radio.
Max is having steak and chips and salad and Harry is eating lasagne and chips, with sticky toffee pudding – they have decided that they needed to get as much fuel inside them as possible, given the uncertainties of the coming afternoon.
A pinched and harassed-looking middle-aged woman – the landlord’s wife presumably – bustles out of the kitchens to serve them: two hikers, with boots, chunky sweaters and rucksacks under the table.
“Off for a walk then?” she asks, chirpy but, like her husband, not really interested in their answer.
“Yup,” says Max, looking greedily at his plate of food as it’s placed in front of him.
“Would you like mustard or ketchup with that?” says the woman, firing on automatic. Fine dining thinks Harry. But then what he really wants to ask the woman comes blurting out of his mouth.
“Who owns the big house? Luddeston Hall is it? Anyone famous?” He can feel Max tense beside him.
“Oh, an Arab. Bin something,” says the woman. “Not that we ever see him. They don’t drink, see… Muslims.” Max laughs rather too loudly.
“Good one,” he says. “Not very good for business those Muslims.”
“No, and we need all the business we can get nowadays. Mustard, did you say?” They hadn’t said.
The pub returns to its previous pleasant torpor, the gentle crackling of the log fire joined by the energetic clinking of their knives and forks as they demolish the food. Microwaved, bland, but then hunger is the best chef, as Harry had read somewhere.
“Bin shopping.” It’s the bearded man at the bar.
“Sorry,” says Max.
“Bin shopping,” repeats this joker. That’s his name. Bin… shopping.” He chuckles to himself. “He’s there now, Bin Shopping… the A-rab.”
“Oh, yes?” says Max, feigning indifference through a mouthful of chips.
“Know how I know?” continues Beardie. “His helicopter comes in right over my back garden. Bloody racket, it is.”
“Can’t be good when you have the washing out,” says Harry.
Beardie doesn’t smile. “Oh, no, too high up for that,” he says. “Noisy mind. He arrives on a Friday and leaves on a Sunday… not every Friday or Sunday mind… but when he’s here, those are his days.” The man seems satisfied to have got that off his chest and returns to staring into his pint.
“They don’t mix with the village then?” says Harry, who knows the sort of things that annoy villagers. Not mixing is the cardinal sin.
“Not in the slightest.” It’s the landlord who takes the bait. He puts down the glass he seems to have been drying since Max and Harry turned up half an hour ago and now joins in the conversation. “He did buy the cricket club a new pavilion, mind.”
“Wow,” says Max. “That’s not too bad then. Always good to keep the cricket club on side. How long has he lived here?”
“Let me see. I took over this place in 2001 – it was after the millennium because the previous owners had a big party for the village on Millennium Eve.”
“It was 2003,” chips in Beardie. “I remember the fuss. The Cobhams – that’s the family that was there before – had been there for 500 years or something, and they sold up to an Arab. It was in all the papers. His daughter came in here once – remember that, Stu?”
“Don’t I just,” says the landlord with a chuckle. “She came in and ordered a coke… all on her own… the whole place went hush, you could hear a pin drop. Pretty little thing. That was about ten years ago.”
“Did you ask to see her ID?” asks Max.
“No I did not. Between you and me I never ask anyone for ID unless they arrive in a pram with a dummy in their mouth. We need all the business we can get, and that’s no lie.”
“She took a load of photos with her phone,” says Beardie. “We’d never even known you could take photos with your phone back then. Not embarrassed at all, just photos of the bar, the walls, the tables and the rest.”
“I asked her what she wanted them for,” says the landlord, taking up the story. “Know what she said?”
Harry and Max shake their heads, electrified by even this faint contact with the woman who had stolen the diamond from them.
“She said she
was doing a school project on English pubs because back in her country they don’t have pubs. Then her minder came in – a big brute – and she left. A pretty little thing. Quite cheeky I think.”
“She was fucking gorgeous, hope she don’t wear no veil,” says Beardie, proffering his empty glass to the landlord, who takes it and pumps in a refill. “She’s living it up in London now, so I’ve heard.” He watches his glass of bitter being placed in front of him and with that he lowers his mouth on the glass’s rim, and sucks in the froth.
“There’s a path that goes along the side of the estate… we won’t get any trouble from any security guards, will we?” asks Max. His plate, which he pushed away from him, is wiped clean.
“Er, no, it’s a public right of way,” says the landlord. “It’s mostly fenced off with a high wooden fence… isn’t that right Robert?” Beardie, whose name it seems is Robert, shrugs. “Where you headed anyway?”
“Landport,” says Max. “I reckon a good two hours from here. What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t know,” says the landlord, “I don’t walk anywhere if I can help it.”
“Me neither”, says Robert.
* * *
Max sits beneath a tree and unfolds the Ordnance Survey map they have brought with them. He creases it until he has the relevant section that includes Luddeston Hall and its grounds. The footpath comes off the village street just along from the pub.
He had tried to talk Harry out of this escapade; it seemed undignified. He had tried all the clichés – there are other fish in the sea, don’t cry over spilt milk, learn from your mistakes, and (his favourite one) it’s only business, but he can see that Harry is obsessed with this damned diamond.
Harry feels cheated and he wants to have his revenge. Max, who has never borne a grudge in his life, can’t understand this, but he quietly admires it. Perhaps he was too lenient with people – Tash always said he let people walk all over him. The truth was he didn’t like arguments and confrontations, it just wasn’t his style. Simon once said that his generosity was a mask for weakness, and that had struck home.
But people liked Max, and the fact that he wasn’t guarded or stingy or inquisitive. His handshake was respected as the handshake of a gentleman. The Saudis – many of them Bedouin after all, Harry had discovered during his manic online research since the theft of the diamond – liked that in him. And if that trust is abused?
“We have to put this behind us,” he says, one last stab at halting this desperate course of action. “We can build up again – you know, in this life, it’s possible to make and lose several fortunes.”
Harry peels off his rucksack and lets it lie on the mossy bank, next to where Max is sitting.
“You can do that perhaps. Nothing has come easy to me,” he says. “To own a house and part of a thriving business was more than I could have dreamed of. And now look – I’ve got a room in a cheap hotel and you’re sleeping on your best mate’s spare bed and not a bean to our names. What have the last ten years been about?”
Max nods, and looks at his friend. He wants to reassure him, but part of him also thinks it’s time they took up arms, it’s time they became men. He had liked to believe that Harry’s dad had been a brave soldier killed in action. He always felt his own generation had been cheated of the opportunity of going to war. He has never had to test his mettle.
Some guys at the bank had taken up boxing. At the end of a day’s trading they’d take the DLR from Canary Wharf to these old East End gyms, where they’d learn to spar with broken-nosed pros. And they’d have real fights. Max went to one once and watched a trader he knew called Josh punch the shit out of some guy from derivatives.
The ref had to step in, but not after Josh had pummelled this poor bloke so his face was no longer recognisable. Everyone from the trading floor had been cheering like crazy, and all these old Cockney types were grinning. War must be like that, thought Max, class distinctions dissolved in the heat of battle.
“Into battle!” shouts Max.
Harry looks up from the map, and smiles for the first time in a long time.
“Into battle!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Ordnance Survey map shows the footpath starting at the end of a lane that had a line of houses to its right, with their back to the estate – one of them presumably belonging to bearded Robert. Delineated in a broken green line, the footpath hugs the edge of Luddeston Hall for about 100 metres before veering off at ten o’clock and away from the estate.
On the train to Oxford that morning Max had outlined his plan of attack – his belief being that the stretch where the footpath abutted the estate would be heavily fenced and possibly guarded and that their best bet was to walk on for about a mile, to where he had noticed a copse that led back to the far end of the estate. This would provide cover as well as potentially being less fortified.
“You’ve got military blood in you, what do you think?” he had asked as they left the last dregs of London behind them.
“Sounds like a good plan,” Harry had said, over-enthusiastically, thankful that Max had even considered this course of action, which seemed full of risk and more futile with each passing minute.
And yet he couldn’t bring himself to do nothing, to let the bitch – or whoever was behind the robbery – get away with it. The anger drives him forwards now. He needs to rid himself of the feeling of hopelessness that threatens to envelope him as they trudge down the lane, and onwards on to a muddy track that is flanked on one side by a well-maintained two-metre high wooden lap fence topped with a double strand of taut, well-maintained barbed wire.
They expect there to be guard dogs of some kind, and Max has brought along various cuts of meat, some which have been wrapped in cling film. These are the ones that have been soaked in Rohypnol that he says Simon gave to him. He doesn’t want to think what Simon uses it for.
“How much does Simon know?” Harry asks.
“Oh everything,” says Max. “He’s a good bloke Simon… solid. You know he once saved my life?”
“How so?” Harry realises how much he hates Simon. How much he fears him. They are nearing the end of the high fence, which takes a sharp right as the footpath starts veering off to the left.
“We were in some dodgy pub in Fulham… God this was years ago… and outside a couple of hard-nuts started giving us some lip. Pissed both of us… and the rest. Anyway, one of them pulled a knife on me, but Simon hit him from behind with a bottle of wine he’d nicked on his way out. Right on the head… the bloke dropped like a stone.”
“Was he all right?”
“I’ve often wondered.”
The memory dissolves as Max takes in the thick, tall unpassable evergreen hedge that forms the boundary once the slatted wooden fence runs out, stretching off at a sharp angle to the footpath. It reminds him of the yew hedge at his parents’ place, hundreds of years old and shaped like a cloud, except this is that faster-growing variety that his parents despise for some reason. Leylandii. How does he remember that?
The copse on the ridge of the low hill sweeps round to almost touch the far end of the hedge, just as the map says it should. They’ll find a way through, or over. Dusk is when they will attack – just two hours from now. Attack. Max is enjoying the martial aspect of this operation – in fact he hasn’t felt this alive for a long time. He feels like a spy, like Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. At the same time he knows this is completely crazy, and they’ll end up in police custody by the end of the day. At least someone will have to sit up and take notice then. Perhaps the Saudi himself, whoever he is.
This particular Saudi he has finished with – no worries there. Plenty more super-rich fish in the sea. But even if they manage to get into the house undetected what do they expect to find? A handy map leading the way to the daughter’s bedroom, and there, sitting on top of a chest of drawers alongside pony club cups, what? Their diamond?
Harry is desperate though; Max can see that. He doesn’t real
ise that fortunes can be made over and over again once you know how. But this is the last shot Max is going to give at getting back this diamond. After that they’d have to take it on the chin and get back to making money. If you deal in shares for long enough – even boring European mid-cap equities – you soon learn that you win some and you lose some. There’s absolutely no point in obsessing; you just end up chasing your losses.
Learn your lesson and move on. Fuck, the crash of 2008 had taught him that if nothing else. Almost wiped out one minute, then making the sort of percentages that ought to be outlawed – it was so criminal. On Barclays alone he had tripled his bet in six months. They don’t advertise those returns on their website.
“We’re early,” he shouts to Harry, who is making a ferocious pace and is now a good twenty metres ahead of him. “Let’s get to the copse and wait up, take the lie of the land.”
At the point where the footpath comes closest to the copse, just as it starts to veer away, there is a gate with a sign attached Private property – no public right of way. Below is another sign: Danger – keep out. Shooting in season.
“What season?” asks Max.
“Pheasants probably,” answers Harry, who used to be paid twenty pounds a day to beat for a farmers’ shoot in Norfolk. Twenty pounds and all the beer and whisky you could drink. He remembers being fifteen years old, sitting on a straw bale with the blow heater blasting out in the barn, exhausted gundogs panting out great gusts of condensation, while Harry was sick-drunk on lager and scotch.
None of his schoolmates had holiday jobs as far as he could tell. It was skiing at Christmas and Easter, and their parents’ place in Umbria or the Dordogne for the summer. He was invited along a couple of times but had to refuse. He couldn’t afford it, and that was soon understood about Harry. He was hard up. No one seemed to mind. His dad was a hero.
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