Deadly Business

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Clearly so,’ I conceded. ‘It’s worked, even if that owes a lot to poor old Phil being suckered by his nephew.’

  ‘He was one of Susie’s bigger mistakes,’ she said. ‘I knew from Duncan that the old man has never got over his wife’s death. He goes home every night, gets drunk and talks to her across the dinner table, as if she was still there. Do you ever do that with Oz?’ she asked, suddenly. ‘Did Susie?’ She laughed. ‘Did the two of you ever get the ouija board out and try to summon up his shade?’

  There’s something hypnotic about Natalie Morgan. As I’d listened to her, I’d been drawn into what she was saying, seeing the sense and logic of it. With that last vindictive taunt she blew it all. But I bided my time.

  ‘Still,’ I countered, ‘it was a long shot, was it not?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she insisted. ‘The way it was set up, once Phil had taken the Gantry Group in he couldn’t get it out. The damage was done. Then Duncan had a message from Susie, via Phil. She said that she didn’t have long to go, that she didn’t know why he’d left her … that was the first time we knew that you hadn’t shopped him … and that she wanted him back. So I told him to go to her. I saw the way to complete control and now I have it.’

  ‘The marriage was your idea?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. It was really handy being so close to Nevada, where you can do the deed in a couple of hours if you really want to. Viva Las Vegas, eh? As it turned out, Duncan made it work just in time. To be honest, I didn’t think Susie would be silly enough to defy the medical advice and fly all that way.’

  ‘No. You’d have thought the loving husband would have put his foot down and forbidden her.’

  She shot me the archest of looks. ‘Oh, please,’ she chuckled. Then she winked at me. ‘You weren’t anticipated, I admit. I was astonished when you popped out of the woodwork on Monday as the new chair. You of all people, the woman whose husband the little slapper stole.’

  I laughed, so heartily that she was taken aback. ‘Yes, she was good at that, wasn’t she?’ I rose from my chair, and headed for the door. ‘I think it’s time my driver joined us,’ I told her, over my shoulder.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she called after me.

  I ignored her and opened the door; my driver stepped through it and into the room. As he did, he took off the grey German officer cap he’d been wearing, and the big Vuarnet sunglasses that had covered half his face. ‘I don’t think you’ve met my brother-in-law,’ I said, ‘but you may know him by sight. He’s not as reticent as you are when it comes to cameras. Did you get that, Miles?’ I asked.

  ‘Every word of it,’ he replied. ‘Good quality.’

  ‘I’ll call security,’ Natalie threatened.

  Miles hook his head. ‘Don’t do that. There’s a guy downstairs in the lobby by now; he won’t let them anywhere near here … unless you have half a dozen or so, in which case he’ll only delay them for a while.’

  I resumed my seat, picked up my wine glass, and took my first sip. ‘Ouch,’ I murmured. ‘It’s a shame to treat a fine wine like that. You should use nitrogen storage; prevents oxidisation.’

  Natalie stared at me; she’d run out of words, temporarily.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, you really are very bright, aren’t you? Sixty watt at least.’ I picked up my mobile from the desk. ‘Yes, this is my phone,’ I said, ‘and it really is switched off.’ Then I produced another from my bag. ‘This is my boyfriend’s, and it isn’t.’

  Miles produced a third from his jacket. ‘This is my nephew Tom’s phone.’ And a fourth. ‘This is mine; your entire conversation is recorded on it.’

  She sat there, pale but fierce. ‘And what are you going to do with it?’ she challenged.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he laughed. ‘I’m going to see the friendly local police force, honey, and I’m going to play it to them.’

  ‘And what exactly will they do?’ she snorted. ‘Tell me what law I’ve broken.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s this one. It’s rare, I’m sure, so rare they’ve probably never had a case before, but it sure as hell has to be illegal somewhere.’

  He grinned as he eased himself into a chair, beside mine. ‘When Primavera told me yesterday morning what had gone down with Susie, and what she guessed was going to happen, she asked me to confirm that she and Duncan had actually been married, legally and above board. So I had an employee call the Clark Country marriage registration office and run a check. The person there did a computer search for the name Duncan Culshaw, and sure enough, there it was, he and Susie Gantry, Mr and Mrs.’

  He gazed at her. When it comes to hypnotic looks, Natalie was an amateur compared to him; she couldn’t break away.

  ‘Trouble was,’ he continued softly, ‘the name was coughed out twice. Same man, same blood group, same nationality, same passport number, married in Las Vegas four years three months and five days ago to Miss Natalie Morgan, of Edinburgh, Scotland. Legally recorded, and never annulled in the great state of Nevada, nor, I will bet you, anywhere else. You didn’t have time, did you? Susie was so ill that you took the chance and let Duncan go ahead and tie the double knot.’

  She shrunk, visibly, into the big chair. When she looked at me, she wasn’t super-confident, arrogant Natalie any more, she was just a scared lady.

  ‘I have all the paperwork, copies of every document,’ Miles told her. ‘There’s a warrant out in Vegas for Culshaw even now. I’ve got no doubt the Edinburgh police will issue one for you as soon as we’ve seen them, for conspiracy, by encouraging your lawful husband to commit bigamy. After that, they’ll see how many other laws you’ve broken.’

  ‘And as for your takeover bid,’ I added, ‘that is royally fucked, if you’ll excuse my Catalan. Since Duncan and Susie’s marriage was never legal, he can never have been Janet and wee Jonathan’s stepfather, so he can’t have committed their shares in your support. We’ve already been to see Susie’s executor. He’ll have called the cops himself by now, Natalie, and set them on your husband. You’re next, just one phone call away.’

  She picked up her wine and drained it. I pushed the rest of mine across the desk, and she did that in too. She looked out of the window for a while, then back at me. ‘What’s the way out?’ she asked.

  ‘What makes you think there is one, lady?’ Miles drawled.

  ‘There’s always a way out,’ she replied, ‘if you look for it.’

  ‘Why should we want to?’ I asked.

  ‘But you do,’ she countered, ‘otherwise you’d have made that one phone call by now. What do you want?’

  I looked at Miles; he nodded. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Here it is. You make the phone call; not to the police but to Diego Fabricant, instructing him to agree to the winding up of Babylon Links PLC and to return the Gantry Group’s cash. Next, you announce this afternoon that you’ve dropped your takeover bid. All this happens before we leave this building. Agreed?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Relatively cheap at the price, I suppose.’

  ‘Ah,’ I continued, ‘but I’m not done yet. Tomorrow morning you’ll receive a counter-offer for Torrent PLC from an American venture capital fund. Its owner is a significant shareholder in Gantry, who’ll be very happy by then, since he’ll have made a tidy gain on his investment yesterday. You were out to pick up our company for about one-third of its real value. This offer will be generous by comparison. It’ll offer you fifty per cent of yours.’

  ‘What?’ she gasped. ‘Do you expect me to accept that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Miles said. ‘Absolutely. I’ve looked at your accounts. I pulled them from Companies House before we drove through here. They’re wide open; Torrent PLC is significantly overvalued, and its assets are a lot less than people think they are. It doesn’t even own this building; that belongs to the same offshore company that owns your house, and you own that, so you’re out of sympathy. Fifty per cent is okay, so when my friend Buddy’s offer is on the table, if you don’t accept it, we walk away, you go
to jail, your client base evaporates, you go bust and the liquidator comes after you for your private wealth. You’re not as smart as you thought you were, Miss Morgan, but you ain’t stupid either. You’ll still be left with a few million. I think it’s crazy to let you go, but it’s what’s Primavera wants; I’d have turned you in without a second thought. Deal or no deal? You have five seconds.’

  ‘Deal,’ she sighed. She looked shell-shocked.

  So, why had I asked Miles to let her off lightly? Let’s just say I’m a kind person at heart. Within limits. ‘One final condition,’ I told her. ‘When we leave here, you do not get in touch with Duncan. I know where he is, or at least where he’s going, and the pleasure of breaking the great news to him has to be all mine.’

  I poured the last of the tainted Fransola into one of the glasses and we left her there, to dwell at length upon the speed with which the world can be turned upside down by a single reckless act driven by over-confidence.

  ‘What she said, about Susie,’ Miles murmured as we walked towards the lift. ‘About how she got those business awards. That wasn’t true, was it?’

  ‘Nah!’ I replied. ‘Maybe one or two in her time, but not all of them.’

  Seventeen

  Liam was waiting in the lobby downstairs. He looked at me as I stepped out of the lift and I nodded.

  ‘All of it?’ he asked.

  ‘The works; she’s a pragmatist. She had this irrational hatred of Oz and Susie,’ I told him. ‘Hopefully she’s worked it out of her system now.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ he agreed. ‘To be honest, I didn’t think she’d agree to sell out, even though the Buddy guy’s offer was fair. To be even more honest, I don’t understand why he made it. He’s a US investor, this is Britain.’

  Liam hadn’t been there when Miles had spoken with his pal; he and Tom had still been on the Hampden Park Stadium tour. (Tom wasn’t impressed, he confessed afterwards, having done the Camp Nou equivalent in Barcelona.) ‘There’s more to it,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it later.’

  We’d done a lot of planning, Miles and I, in a very short time. The first part of our scheme for dealing with Natalie and Duncan had gone as well as I’d dared hope. The second part lay ahead, and it was going to be made a hell of a lot easier by the luxury of having my brother-in-law’s plane at our disposal.

  He’s been married to my sister for about fifteen years now. We’ve been close, he and I, for all that time, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him as up for anything as he was that day. He’s a guy who’s made it big in his career; because of that, inevitably he’d become used to doing everything at arms’ length. The search of the Las Vegas marriage records, for example: he’d told somebody to do it, and it had gotten done. Being involved in the aftermath, hands-on, had turned him into a kid at a lock-in in a sweetshop.

  He, Liam and I joined Tom in the car, where he’d just eliminated the last Zombie Gunship on his iPad, and headed for Edinburgh Airport. On the way, I called the office and told Wylie to put the short-notice board meeting that we’d arranged on hold. I turned in the hire car, then we took a short taxi ride to the general aviation terminal, where the plane and its crew were waiting. It occurred to me as I got on board that the last time I’d been on a private aircraft the journey hadn’t ended where it was supposed to, but I pushed that thought to the back of my mind and trusted in the singularity of lightning strikes.

  Miles’s pride and joy was the newest Beechcraft passenger jet, the aviation equivalent of a Roller. It isn’t very big, but it can do Los Angeles to Scotland in one jump with a couple of thousand miles left in the tank, so the journey we were about to take was a short hop in its terms. I slept for most of it. The last couple of days had taken more out of me than I’d realised, and I’d nodded off before we reached cruise height.

  When Liam roused me, we were a hundred miles short of Nice, our destination airport, and it was six forty-five, Central European Time. Immediately, I thought of Susie, who’d been on the same flight path, and who would never waken again.

  We were hoping that Duncan had caught the Easyjet Edinburgh–Nice flight; that would have landed mid-afternoon, according to the timetable, and he’d have arrived in Monaco ahead of us. A guess, but well-founded; he had no other option.

  I thought we might have been held in immigration for a while, but Miles has been there so often for the Cannes Film Festival that they treated him like a local, and we were waved through. The car that I’d booked was waiting for us on the rank. I could have called Audrey and asked Conrad to come for us, but I didn’t want to let even them in on the surprise that was coming. It was going to be too good to spoil for anyone … most of all Duncan.

  It’s no distance at all from Nice to Monaco, autoroute all the way until you descend into the principality … but not all the way into it in our case, for the family home that Susie and Oz had shared looked down on to the famous harbour and the Formula One Grand Prix street circuit. It was just short of eight o’clock when our chauffeur pulled up at the gate.

  As always, it was closed. Normally visitors announced themselves into a video camera, but there was a keypad beneath for those who knew the entry code, as Tom and I did. I let him punch it in, and the gate slid aside.

  There was nobody in sight as the four of us walked up to the front door. It’s on the landward side of the property, and it doesn’t have a keypad, and not even a doorbell, since by the time visitors get that far, the household knows they’re coming. There’s a door knocker, though, an ornamental thing that’s never used. Tom gave it three loud raps, and then we waited. Liam and Miles were standing to one side, so they wouldn’t be seen through the spyhole, should it be Duncan who came to see who was making the noise.

  But it wasn’t. Nobody answered, not until Tom had knocked again, harder the second time around. When it did open, Audrey stood behind it, chubby, friendly, bright-eyed little Audrey … only she looked none of those things. She seemed to have shrunk, her cheeks were gaunt and there was fear in her eyes. They told me as clearly as words that something dreadful had happened.

  ‘Primavera,’ she exclaimed, then stopped as she saw the two guys. ‘Who are …’ she began.

  ‘Miles and Liam,’ I replied. ‘We bring tidings of great joy … but … what the hell’s up? And where is that bastard Culshaw?’

  ‘The kitchen,’ she whispered, as if she had to force the words out.

  ‘This way,’ I said, heading for it. The three guys made to follow me, but Audrey grabbed Tom.

  ‘No, not you, son. You stay here with me.’

  ‘Audrey!’ he protested. He could have freed himself from her grasp, easily, but I shook my head.

  ‘No, Tom. If Audrey says you stay with her, you stay.’

  The kitchen door was ajar when we reached it. At first I thought the floor had been relaid. Susie had never liked the Roman-style white tiles, trimmed with brown, and had been threatening for years to do something about them, but red, Susie, no, not red, much too garish.

  At first I thought … then I stepped through the door, felt the stickiness beneath my feet, moved past the island work surface in the middle of the room and saw, behind it, Duncan Culshaw, lying on his back, mouth wide open, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, his face a waxy off-white, looking as dead as anyone I’d ever seen. He was wearing nothing but a pair of Speedo budgie-smugglers. It wouldn’t take a detailed autopsy to determine what had killed him. There was a great gaping wound on the inside of his right thigh, and both of his legs were covered in his blood.

  Conrad stood beyond him; he was holding wee Jonathan in his arms. The kid’s face was pressed hard against his chest, and his body heaved with silent sobs.

  ‘Gimme him,’ I demanded, walking around the other side of the work unit, to avoid the great crimson pool. Conrad handed him over, without a word.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked him. ‘Did he threaten the children? Or did he just push you too far?’

  ‘Let’s just say
I’d had enough of him,’ he replied.

  ‘It wasn’t Conrad,’ wee Jonathan mumbled into my belly. ‘It was me, Auntie Primavera, it was me.’ The sobs began again, with full sound effects.

  Why did I have no trouble believing him? You might wonder that, but the answer’s quite simple. If Conrad Kent had decided to kill Duncan, he’d have done it in a very quiet place with no witnesses, no mess and no fuss.

  ‘How?’ I didn’t say the word, I mouthed it.

  ‘Duncan got back three hours ago,’ Conrad began. ‘He told Audrey and me, in front of the two kids, that we were fired, then he went for a swim. He had a few beers by the poolside, then he came into the kitchen. Audrey was here; she’d started to make dinner for the children. Duncan said something to her along the lines of, “Are you trying out for a job as a chef?” Little Jonathan was standing beside her. He started to protest, but Culshaw said to him, “Shut up, you, and learn some fucking respect. I’m your daddy now!” The little chap picked up the knife that Audrey had been using to cut the veg, and lashed out at him. He didn’t think about it, he just did it. He’d have grabbed anything, a carrot, a courgette, a handful of spaghetti, whatever was nearest. It happened to be the knife, and it happened to be as sharp as a razor, as all good chef’s knives are. I was in the children’s day room with Janet when the screaming started. And there was a lot of it, from Audrey, from little Jonathan, and most of all from Culshaw. As soon as I got here, I knew he didn’t have a prayer. You can see that for yourself, Primavera.’