The Concierge

by Gerard Gilbert

  “You don’t owe him a thing,” says the colonel.

  Just the last seven years of his life, thinks Aafia.

  “Why did your father send those British men to Rome?” he asks.

  “Oh, them. They just sort of fell into our hands. We needed independent witnesses and one of them had good journalistic contacts in London, so he seemed perfect.”

  “It’s all so… so…” the colonel is waving his hand around as if the right word could be magicked from air around his head. “So Mossad.”

  We could do with a bit Mossad, thinks Aafia, who admires her counterparts in Israeli intelligence, and a lot less of these soft-skinned, well-connected pen-pushers sitting around in their air-conditioned offices. But this particular pen-pusher is still talking, and she doesn’t like what she’s hearing.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to withdraw your diplomatic passport… indeed any sort of passport. It is better that you remain in the kingdom for the time being…”

  “But my father…” interjects Aafia.

  “Yes, and how is your father?”

  Bastard, thinks Aafia. You know very well how he is. Six months maximum, the Harley Street consultant had said.

  “You must persuade him to come back,” the colonel is saying. “And why not make him proud by marrying? Perhaps he can come back for the wedding.”

  “Did you have anyone in mind for my husband?” says Aafia, looking at the colonel full on. After all, Aafia would bring a significant dowry. He squirms in his seat, and shuffles with the papers on his ridiculously large desk.

  “That Omar is very good at what he does”, she says, turning the screw. “Quite good-looking if it wasn’t for that scar. Any word on him?”

  “Not yet,” says the colonel.

  “He’s good… very good,” says Aafia admiringly.

  “You liked him?”

  “Not my type.” The colonel looks relieved.

  “We need your passport… by sundown”, he says. “Why you just couldn’t stick at what you’re good at – pretending to be a liberal, westernised Arab, attracting dissidents and then handing them over to us. Now that’s a proper job for a woman.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Abdul is washing up his breakfast things in the cramped kitchen of his student house-share in the Portswood area of Southampton. He’s being extra diligent because, although it’s the Easter holidays, one of his housemates, Sam, a white hipster with a beard that makes him look like a Muslim brother, has come back early to start his revision, and Abdul has been putting up his friend Hassan since they got back from Stockbridge at the weekend.

  Hassan has kept to Abdul’s room, emerging only for meals and their five-times-a-day prayers, which they conduct in the main living room. Sam, who seems to revise in front of the television, on which he watches boxed sets of The Walking Dead while eating endless bowls of cereal, reluctantly shifts himself at the appointed times.

  Hassan’s real name, Abdul knows, is Jamal O’Rourke, and he’s done time in prison, which is where he first received the Dawah. Jamal’s father is Ghanain, long vanished, and his mother is English – more Irish really – from Willesden. Abdul met him at a mosque in Southampton, where Hassan had been sent to help see the light. They weren’t interested, but Abdul and Hassan became friends of a sort, meeting afterwards in cafes in the city centre to discuss the war in Syria, their hatred of the West, their dreams of a true Islamic society and what could be done to help create the caliphate.

  Abdul had managed to convert himself online without ever leaving his bedroom. He became more and more obsessed with jihadi websites, and what they had to say about the state of the world. His law degree studies started to seem ever more irrelevant, and he was even getting a name for himself for disrupting lectures with his arguments in favour of sharia. The girls on the course all hated him, except for one shy Muslim girl, who was always looking at him. “My life in the West is just study, eat, sleep, study, eat, sleep,” he wrote on the blog he started. “It’s so generic.”

  His one wish now was to travel to Syria and he’s saving up for the price of a return ticket to Turkey. He knows there’s a bride waiting for him – they been conversing on an encrypted messaging app. Her name was Julie, a blonde blue-eyed American who had become an IS fighter. Abdul could keep slaves for sex, if he wanted, Julie told him – because she’s often away from home fighting and she doesn’t want him to feel lonely.

  It was Hassan who came up with the promise of money. They had a secret mission, he said, when he turned up at the house suddenly last week, and if they succeeded, then Islamic State would pay for their flights to Turkey and transport over the Syrian border. He then showed Abdul the guns, and how to use them, although he wouldn’t say where he got them.

  He had a car, an old red Ford Fiesta, and they were to travel to a place called Stockbridge, and to hold an English family hostage while they filmed them. The family’s son was a British soldier who had been captured in Iraq, and IS wanted to extract information from him. By holding his parents at gunpoint they hoped to persuade him to talk. Hassan said he had a special number where to send the video.

  Part of the reason Hassan won’t come out of his room is that he’s ashamed, thinks Abdul. They fucked it up by running away when they did. But it was becoming overwhelming – more and more people turning up – what were they supposed to do? Shoot all of them? He didn’t think they even had enough bullets. The police turning up had been the last straw.

  He stacks a plate on the drying rack and, lost in thought, nearly jumps out of his skin when the front doorbell rings. Hassan’s face appears around the bedroom doorway. “Who’s that, bruv?” he asks.

  “Might be someone for Sam,” says Abdul. “I’m not expecting anyone.”

  The doorbell rings again, and Hassan vanishes back into the bedroom.

  Abdul opens the door on its latch and looks out. There’s a tall, well-built Arab man standing there. His eyes are not unfriendly, but not anything else either. And he has a scar all the way down his face.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  Harry walks into WH Smith at Liverpool Street Station and takes the newspaper from the revolving plastic cube. The banner headline is like something out of the glory days in Fleet Street, with its thick black font screaming: How Saudis foiled Vatican sarin attack: exclusive interview with one of the two Britons held by ISIS in Rome. Underneath is a picture of Harry, looking haggard, hollow-eyed and unshaven.

  All the other serious newspapers had followed with the story, not that Harry needed to buy a paper to ‘read all about it’. Mary’s exclusive had broken on Newsnight the previous evening, with Mary in the studio, looking very new to television, but growing in authority during the course of her inquisition.

  She revealed nothing about the circumstances behind the interview – ‘protecting her sources’ and all that – and was so obviously invested now in her exclusive that she didn’t betray the scepticism she had shown in the hotel yesterday morning. An international affairs correspondent pontificated on the impact that this would have on the kingdom’s hitherto deteriorating relationship with the West.

  Harry had woken at six this morning and had immediately switched on the television in his hotel bedroom. Julian’s photograph of Harry wearing those weird clothes from the Martigny boutique was all over the rolling news, until he was sick of the sight of himself.

  There were also news teams outside the office, because there was the front door, with a female Sky News reporter saying something about Forward-Max Capital being a hedge fund and how owner Harry Kimber – the owner now was he? – acted as ‘concierge’ (that word again) for rich foreigners. Kimber’s partner, Max Draycott, had been released without charge by Italian police and was expected back in Britain today.

  Then Harry almost choked over his breakfast tray, laughing, as the bewildered-looking new owners of his house in Hammersmith met the world’s press. Harry had been booked into the hotel under the name of ‘Thomas Jones’,
he soon discovered, and grown used to being addressed as Mr Jones when he rang for room service. They shouldn’t trace him here.

  The lawyer, Fairbrother, had told Harry that there would be lots of big-money offers to talk to other media outlets, but that the sixteen-page document he had signed at the hotel was a non-disclosure agreement that restricted Harry from speaking to anybody about recent events, it seems. Not that Harry had any intention of speaking to anybody, since he was now two and a half million pounds to the good and he was only too glad to put the whole scary adventure behind him. As for Max, well, Max’s manic deal making had got them into this situation in the first place, Harry reasoned to himself. And the Saudi had said that Max was ‘on board’, so he needn’t worry about Max selling his side of the story to the media.

  Only Fairbrother, the office manager Fi, and Harry’s bank had the number of the brand new iPhone that the lawyer had given him – its caller ID blocked. Fi was to phone him at once as soon as Max got in touch, while Harry had updated his records with the bank.

  With one glance at Harry’s balance they had swiftly transferred him to someone introducing himself as Harry’s personal wealth manager, who was keen to set up a meeting as soon as was convenient.

  He steps out of the hotel foyer and on to the street. The pseudonym seems to have worked for there are no journalists waiting to greet him. His first destination is the pawnbrokers on New Bond Street, where he is loaned £3,000 for the watch, which he tells the man behind the counter that he will redeem the following week. He then goes down to Piccadilly in search of Nicola and her dog, who are duly slumped against the wall near Green Park underground station.

  The dog sees him first, as Harry looms over them. He drops the £3,000, tied in a bundle with an elastic band, into Nicola’s begging cap. The woman’s fierce blue gaze meets Harry’s.

  “There’s three grand there,” he says. “Look after it. And yourself.”

  Nicola slips the wad inside her coat.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” she asks brusquely.

  “I don’t know,” says Harry. “Where are you from originally?”

  “Why?” she replies defensively. “Bolton. I’m from Bolton.”

  “Well, that would get you at least six months’ rent up in Bolton,” he says breezily. “Nice for you and the dog.”

  “Great,” she says sarcastically. “And then what?”

  “And then it’s up to you, I guess,” he replies.

  She nods.

  “Thanks, anyway, Gervaise.”

  “Gervaise?”

  “It’s what I call you.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Rachel is sitting by the open window of the six-star hotel on the island of Phang Nga Bay in Thailand. Freshly showered, and wrapped in a white towelling dressing gown, she is staring out across turquoise water at the limestone pinnacles that give the bay its picturesque quality – as the website put it.

  They had spent the first night of Max’s freedom in his apartment in Geneva, where they collected a suitcase of fresh clothes, after which they had paid a visit to Dieter. The gemologist had blanked Rachel as he provided Max with the certificates of ownership for the diamond – he so obviously fancies her husband, she thought.

  The Italian police had provided Max with details of the Swiss safety deposit centre in whose vault the diamond was being held. The manager, having already received visits from the Swiss and British police, was waiting to greet Max and take him to the box in question. Max handed the gem to Dieter, who duly signed for it and took it back to his office.

  Having paid sureties to return to Switzerland for further questioning in a week’s time, Max and Rachel had then flown first class with Etihad to Bangkok by way of Abu Dhabi, arriving at this hotel yesterday afternoon, after an internal flight to Phuket and a rather tiresome ferry ride to Phang Nga. It would be a second honeymoon, said Max.

  The seed investor had redeemed his money in Forward-Max Capital, citing the incapacitation of its partners, triggering its closure and forcing other investors to redeem their moneys. There was nothing to do now until the lawyers had sorted out the paperwork.

  “What are we going to do about Harry?” asks Rachel, padding back to the bed, where Max lies sprawled, one leg sticking out from under the duvet. “The bastard left you to die.”

  “Simon never believed that cock-and-bull about his dad dying in the Falklands,” he says.

  “But you did,” says Rachel, sitting down on the side of the bed, and wrapping a towel around her freshly washed hair.

  “I guess I wanted to. What about you?” asks Max.

  “It didn’t worry me one way or the other. Who cares if his father was some big hero or not? What else did Aafia say about him?”

  “There wasn’t much time to tell me anything,” says Max. “Harry had just buggered off and we were waiting in Simon’s kitchen for Omar to kill us all. She just said what I told you already, that he was the product of a one-night stand, that he never knew who his father was and didn’t care, and that he had admitted to Aafia that he had been abused as a boy by his mother’s boyfriend, a businessman, who then paid for him to go to our school.”

  “And do we believe that?” says Rachel.

  “I don’t know. Do you think he’s a serial fantasist?”

  “I know he’s a liar... and a coward.” Max ignores her pointed comment. It looks like it’s going to be Nicky all over again, thinks Rachel. Something else not to be spoken about. Ever.

  Max is thinking about what Dieter had told him many times, about the dangers of cutting diamonds. You never know what you might find inside – what tiny cracks, fissures and other weaknesses. They are hidden from the eye, and might shatter into tiny worthless pieces at any moment.

  And then he surprises her.

  “Actually I may need help”, says Max. “I can’t help thinking about her. Kylie I mean.”

  “The girl in the chalet… Simon’s girlfriend?”

  “Girlfriend? Hardly,” replies Max. Rachel doesn’t think she’s ever heard him speak so solemnly. “But, yes, her. I can’t get her out of my mind. Omar shooting her… and Simon lying dead. But mainly Kylie.”

  “We ought to meet her parents”, says Rachel. “There’ll be an inquest, I suppose”

  “I suppose”, says Max absently.

  Rachel joins Max on the bed, lies down beside him and snuggles into his chest. She closes her eyes and remembers last night – the intensity of their lovemaking. She knows. She knows. She knew as soon as he came inside her, Rachel straddling on top in order to get every single last millimetre of him deep inside of her. It was if she wanted to get him right up against the neck of her womb, deeper and deeper so that there should be no mistake. Don’t ask her how she knows, but she knows.

  * * *

  His train leaves in twenty minutes, just in time for his last mission. He slips the cheque for £100,000 into an envelope, addresses it to Mary at the newspaper’s office, which he has found printed on the letters page of that day’s edition, and marks it ‘strictly personal’. He then slips in a note:

  Dear Mary, do with this what you will – but I hope that you and Ben will accept it as it is intended, as an early wedding present. Put it towards your new home. Best wishes, Harry.

  He settles into the first class carriage, diagonally opposite from some sort of businessman in a suit, tapping away on a laptop. The man keeps sneaking glances at Harry, and Harry notices the newspaper with Mary’s story by his side. Eventually the man plucks up courage, picks up the paper and asks in a pompous voice, “Is this you?”

  “No, sorry, some mistake,” says Harry, and turns to the BBC news website. He had read in the morning paper an item in home news about two young men being shot dead in Southampton, and hadn’t thought anything about it. Now the ‘breaking news’ banner on the bottom of the BBC home page is saying: Murdered Southampton men connected to Rome terror plot, say police.

  Two men who were shot dead yesterday morning i
n Southampton have been identified as the same men who held a family hostage in Hampshire on Easter Saturday. Police say that the two men in their early twenties have both been positively identified by the family of Max Draycott, the British hedge-fund manager allegedly coerced into carrying out an attempted chemical attack on St Peter’s Square in Rome on Easter morning.’

  Fuck, thinks Harry. Omar.

  He takes his wallet out of the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, and fingers his way through a selection of cards, finally finding the one he is looking for. Harry taps in the number.

  “DC Andrews,” a voice answers almost at once.

  “Oh hello,” says Harry. “My name’s Harry Kimber. You visited my house in London a couple of weeks ago and left your card.”

  “Kimber… oh yes,” says the voice, followed by a silence. “The same Harry Kimber that’s been in the news recently, I believe.”

  “You believe correctly,” says Harry.

  “How can I help you then, Mr Kimber?”

  “It’s the case you came to visit me about. I’d like to be a witness for the prosecution.”

  AFTERWORD

  My final draft of The Concierge was sent out to agents and publishers in March 2016, since when a number of horrifying events have occurred which echo those in this book. Most significantly in this context, the attack in Nice, France, in which eighty-six Bastille Day revellers on the Promenade des Anglais were murdered when a Tunisian man deliberately drove a truck into the crowd, along with similar atrocities using trucks and cars in Stockholm, a Berlin Christmas market, and on Westminster Bridge in London.

  “Life imitates art,” Oscar Wilde quipped, and while it didn't take great powers of prophecy to predict terrorist attacks on population centres in Europe – or indeed on the Catholic church – I was horrified to switch on my phone on the days in question and read, for example, of the killing of Father Jacques Hamel in his church in Normandy, or of President Assad's use of sarin against his own people in Syria. Sarin and a desire to confront Christianity are integral elements of the story in The Concierge – imagined beforehand and not simply ripped from the headlines to be exploited in a thriller.