The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  Prisca never flinched from debate. She did not dismiss what I said, replying calmly, ‘Well, it is one rational explanation of what happened.’

  ‘And do you think that I’ve made up the whole story, the attacks on Julian by the Mafia, as a cover story for what I’ve done?’

  She was a better judge than anyone. I knew her well and had confided in her, as far as I confided in anyone, for years. She had met Julian, yet I had never hinted to her at any stage before the murder that Julian was at risk. If she didn’t believe me, no one would.

  ‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘I don’t think it is a fabrication, either conscious or unconscious. I believe you.’ She looked down at her hands, swivelling her watch on her wrist so that the face came into view; she had a heavy programme which demanded strict time keeping. ‘Frankly, Nicholas, I don’t think you have the imagination to create such a story which, even if it isn’t verifiable, is intricate and complete. You have never been attentive to human relations. I am sure you are as capable of lying as the next person, especially to save your life, or rather your liberty. But your story doesn’t even promote that end. Reason suggests that it must be true.’

  ‘Well, the lawyers don’t think so. They clearly think I’m mad.’

  ‘The next thing is to confirm any part of your story we can. I’m sending private detectives to Moscow. Not that firm you used, you’ll be glad to know. Someone a little less high-powered who’s glad to have the job. She’s going to find out about the Bank.’

  ‘I hope she doesn’t get herself into the sort of trouble that I did when I was there.’

  ‘I’ve warned her to be very careful. I think she realises it’s a dangerous place out there.’

  ‘Then we must sort out this question of the knife.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You say he took the knife out of his pocket. Minna swears it was the one Julian was given in Moscow.’

  ‘How can Minna tell one knife from another?’ I asked. ‘I can’t. I don’t know where he got the knife from.’

  Later, lying on my back in my cell, I decided that Prisca was the only person who believed in Julian’s connexion with the Mafia because she had never liked her. I had seen the instinctive recoil of the two women that night with my father. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she made me tell her all I could about her and speculated endlessly about character and motive. Nothing I said was admissible evidence in court, because it was hearsay; but Prisca claimed it was vital background information, and I liked to do it. I missed Julian endlessly and to talk eased that unimaginable pain. When she was alive, I had thought that the impossibility of ever knowing her completely or having her entirely was the worst torture

  I had endured. However, it was nothing to knowing that I would never know her or have her again. I saw her all the time: her bony wrists and cold dry hands, her hair falling forward as she bent over me, the transparent skin of her abdomen, the vividness of her smile breaking in her impassive face.

  Prisca would not permit me to dwell on these memories. She did not want to hear of Julian’s beauty. She wanted her story, then Anatoli’s, then Igor’s.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ she asked. ‘He had to have a reason.’

  ‘I don’t know why; I can only guess,’ I said wearily. ‘I only met him that evening. And that was the terrifying thing: it happened without reason, like a thunderbolt. I had no idea when I led him across to meet her of what he intended to do.’

  ‘Think about what he said. People tell you what they want you to believe, what they want to believe themselves. It may not be the truth, but it is a version of it, so you can use it to construct your interpretation, a glimpse of what happened.’

  ‘Talking to you, Prisca, is like looking in a pair of mirrors, reflecting ad infinitum. All I know is the simple truth: the act. He stabbed her.’ I stroked my cheek, unshaven, rasping. ‘I thought they were embracing.’ And I had realised that my rival was not Anatoli at all, but Igor.

  ‘We have to construct a scenario, a motivation. What did he say?’

  ‘I’ve told you. He said that Julian was an active participant in the Bank’s activities and after her bust-up with Anatoli she was trying to take over the London end. To achieve this she had done a deal with the Uzbek.’

  ‘And did that mean cutting out, not only Anatoli, but Igor too?’ ‘Igor said, implied, that he had offered her a similar deal, but she had rejected it in favour of alliance with the Uzbek.’

  ‘And the killing in Moscow. According to you she was in agony, not knowing who had won the battle, Igor or the Uzbek.’

  ‘I suppose that was it. I thought that she was desperate with fear that Anatoli had been killed. She must have known it was likely to have been a shoot-out between Igor and his old godfather, the Uzbek, and she was anxious about the success of her plan.’

  ‘But all was not necessarily lost for her, even with the Uzbek dead. She would presumably have hoped that Igor would renew his offer. You had no sense that she expected danger from Igor’s direction? She seemed to think she had him well wrapped up.’

  ‘I don’t believe any of it. I don’t know what to believe.’

  I was grateful for Prisca’s faith, as all attempts to verify my story failed and Julian’s past evaporated as if she had never lived. Only her death confirmed her existence. As far as the police were concerned, their case was clear-cut; they had an accused, a witness, an arrest. For them, the simple story and the obvious suspect were the best. They had no need of the complication of the Mafia. I had not wanted to tell them and now they did not want to hear. My lawyers came every week with stories of failure.

  The first problem was not so much the absence of Igor as the presence of Minna. Igor could not be found; Minna claimed that she had never seen him. When she had arrived on that evening she had found the lift doors open on the ground floor and Victor had explained that the lifts were out of order. She had clambered up to the fourth floor where she had found the doors of both apartments ajar, but nobody in sight. She had briefly peered into my mother’s flat, calling my name, but not for long enough, she insisted, for anyone to escape without being seen.

  I could see, after what had happened in Moscow, that she would take pleasure in her role in the police enquiry. I had, effectively, murdered her Lady in a Pelisse and now she would have revenge by seeing me convicted for another murder, a rather less important crime in her eyes than my original one of contesting the authenticity of the Litvak painting. I had to acknowledge that she was not necessarily lying, in denying that she had seen Igor. It was difficult for me to judge how much time elapsed between his departure and her arrival. She could be telling the truth; but I was not convinced of it. Her pleasure in shutting her eyes, at not seeing, would be too great and too convenient. My conviction for murder would not invalidate my charges against the painting, but it might make it easier for her to resist them for a while. A paper presented by someone who soon after was imprisoned on a charge of murder might be regarded as the work of someone not entirely sane. I wondered if she would be able to suppress my contribution to the conference from the publication of the proceedings. I would not be around to fight my corner.

  I explained all this to George Goodson, who said admiringly, as if impressed by my imagination, ‘So the one big witness against you is malicious.’

  ‘I don’t think she can be trusted to be fair in my case. For the reasons I’ve given. What about Igor?’

  ‘No news, I’m afraid.’

  Prisca in her work on finding corroboration had seized on Anatoli, for she had got out of me what I had deliberately withheld from the police, that he had been in England at the time of the murder, under arrest by Tom Naish.

  ‘Why didn’t you mention him at once?’ she reproached me.

  ‘Because he had nothing to do with what happened. He was in prison himself.’

  ‘Don’t you see you haven’t a single person willing to stand up and vouch for what you say. At least he’s here. He can an
swer questions. He can give us Igor’s name, Barnaby’s. He can explain things.’

  ‘I didn’t realise that Igor would never be found.’

  A week later, Prisca was gloomier.

  ‘It’s extraordinary how all these people disappear like mist.’

  ‘That means that Anatoli’s gone. What’s happened to him?’

  ‘He’s back in Moscow, presumably, because he’s not in this country. Oh, there’s no doubt he exists, but we’re not even going to be able to prove that. Anatoli got himself an excellent lawyer who had him out of your friend Tom Naish’s clutches within a couple of days.’

  ‘That was me, or rather Jamie.’

  'What was?’

  ‘The excellent lawyer. I rang as soon as we came back from Heathrow.’

  ‘From what I can gather, the arrest was part of a plan to roll up some of the Bank’s networks in London. Julian was co-operating and the charge of attempted murder was going to be used to pressurise Anatoli into talking. I’m not sure whether it was just a local operation, or a much bigger one involving other police forces abroad. Probably the latter, I suspect, because Tom Naish is beside himself with rage at having lost him. Without Julian, he had nothing to go on. And he was probably humiliated in front of his colleagues by allowing the sting to fail here in London.’

  She put her flexible fingertips into her eye sockets and gently massaged her eyelids. ‘There’s something about this case,’ she said. ‘We just can’t get any purchase on anything. No Anatoli…’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been willing to get involved anyway.’

  ‘Not just that. Tom Naish is refusing to give us any help. He claims that publicity will ruin his work and warn off another big Mafia group whom he hopes to catch. National security.’

  ‘I’m not sure that anything Tom Naish said would do me much good.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but he knows that what you say isn’t a complete fantasy, yet he won’t stand up and say so. We have no one, no one at all, not one witness.’

  ‘There is Colin Trevor,’ I said on another occasion to Ms Martens. ‘He wasn’t exactly helpful to me, but we might try to get some information out of him. I went to him when I wanted to find out about Anatoli. I wasn’t looking for Igor, at the time. I didn’t know he existed. But Trevor might have turned up something about him.’

  This venture failed too.

  ‘I’ve heard from George Goodson about his approach to Colin Trevor,’ I told Prisca. ‘Do you remember? He was the private detective.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Completely fruitless. First he denied any knowledge of me. Then he cited client confidentiality and refused to comment. When a great deal of pressure had been brought to bear on him, he agreed that he had seen me once. He said that he had rejected the case. Finally, he admitted that he had destroyed the file and that he would never agree to get involved in the case or to give evidence, “for fear of the safety of his family”. He wouldn’t say more than that.’

  41

  Although this Kafkaesque situation did not last long, it dominates my memory of the time I spent on remand. After a while, my sense of living rather than observing my own existence returned. The first sign was the irritability I began to feel towards my cell companion. I was confined with an almost mute young black man, which was, by chance or forethought on the part of the authorities, a sensible pairing. Neither of us enraged the other with conversation. However, the disadvantage of this silent companion was that he was hyperactive. His fretful movements from the bunk above mine broke into my self-absorption and I began to wake up to my position.

  The first breakthrough came when George Goodson turned up for the weekly meeting instead of Ms Martens, whom he used to pass on bad news. He was standing behind his chair, smiling, as I entered the interview room. He wore a superb suit, Savile Row, and a bow tie, flat and narrow, so that he looked like a distinguished East Coast academic. He gestured welcomingly to the seat on my side of the table.

  ‘You’ll be glad to know,’ he said, ‘that this elusive Russian bank really exists.’

  I felt a spasm of rage, which had as much to do with my crumpled clothing and stubbled cheeks as his patronising manner or his implicit surprise that anything I had said was true. I don’t think any of these feelings were visible, or audible, when I replied, ‘That’s very good news. How did you, er, discover it?’

  ‘It was Christina Martens’s idea, clever girl. She contacted the commercial department of the Russian Embassy here in London and at our Embassy in Moscow. A tortoise race, she called it, to see which would come back to us sooner, if at all.’ He sat down and took out his slender pad. It was an affectation of his never to carry a briefcase. ‘The Brits beat the Russians. Fax in yesterday replying to our letter of a month ago. It was set up in 1992, one of the hundreds of banks established after the downfall of Communism. It was an important one right from the start; has dealings with a number of big European banks, involved in privatisation joint ventures. Rapidly became one of the biggest going and is now among the top ten local banks with a capitalisation supposedly running into billions of dollars. I say “supposedly” advisedly: apparently the figures are not always reliable or verifiable. But these are more or less good guys. Only bit of dirty business known: some tough tactics in the Ukraine to do with aluminium transports. Nothing too serious, given the competition. Otherwise, as pure as the driven.’

  He paused and I said, ‘Well, thanks. For the effort, I mean.’ All this was no more than I had told him already, so I could see no cause for enthusiasm.

  ‘More good things to come. The names of the directors are…’ He balanced a pair of reading glasses on the end of his nose and peered through them with a camel-like tilt of the head in order to read out: ‘R.Y. Muzafarov; A.F. Vozkresensky; I.A. Romanov. So there we are.’

  I.A. Romanov. At last a name. But what good did it do me?

  ‘This gives us something to work on,’ George Goodson said, in reply to my unspoken question. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  More background was filled in by Prisca. I had described the street, the house, to which I had followed Julian during my stalking period. With a supreme effort of memory I had recalled the number, 15. She had gone to knock on the door and bring back more confirmation of my version of Julian’s story.

  Francesca had opened the door, a tall, emaciated woman with a large bust displayed in a Wonderbra and T-shirt. She had been unaware of Julian’s death and had led Prisca inside, calling to Barnaby, repeating the horrifying news, talking incessantly. Barnaby had risen from a welter of newspapers to shake her hand. He was, according to Prisca, a vain man struggling to retain his youth and figure against the forces of time and alcohol. He had broad, florid face and pigeon-shaped torso, tapering down to a neat pair of feet, shod in embroidered slippers. He had acknowledged his organisation’s relations with the Bank and was willing to sketch some of the deals they had been involved in together, but he could contribute nothing about Igor’s whereabouts now or then. Neither he nor Francesca could recall his presence at their dinner table. Anatoli they claimed to know well; they had met him at least half a dozen times, though not in the last year.

  ‘No, longer,’ Francesca interjected. ‘At least a year and a half. Almost two years, I’d say.’

  They remembered him as charming, amusing. ‘Very attractive,’ was Francesca’s comment; ‘Very astute,’ Barnaby’s. They had seen him with Julian at Glyndebourne, at a weekend in the country near Bath. He spoke good English, had a great sense of humour. The Uzbek, too, Barnaby had once met in London, a long time ago. But Igor, no. Barnaby was clear that there was another director, though he had not taken part in their negotiations. Francesca denied ever encountering him.

  I heard Prisca’s account of her meeting in much the same spirit as I had listened to George Goodson. It might reassure my lawyers that I was sane, and that I had not fabricated the whole legend, but it did nothing to prove my innocence.

  This qualify, innocence, was som
ething that had to be taken on trust, and not many people were willing to. Pessimistically, I had expected this. The very fact of being present at a murder, mixed up in a police enquiry, remanded in custody, was enough to taint me, even before conviction. Prison screened me from most of the embarrassment, and I was only faced with the suspicion of my family.

  Emily behaved well. She refused all interviews and protected the children from reporters. Her only appearance in the press was a picture of her broad, floral-skirted backside scuttling indoors, scooping the children ahead of her. She made no contact with me. I was glad of this and withdrew all the delaying tactics to the financial settlement, so that the divorce could proceed unhindered. All the children were at boarding school now, even Cordelia, and Em was free to live her fulfilling life on my money.

  My father did not visit me, nor did he, later, attend the trial. He wrote that his health was playing up and my step-mother had forbidden him to leave Scotland. When telephoned by a reporter for an article entitled Professor Charged with Lover’s Killing, he made the single statement that he was sure I was innocent. Thus far my close family ‘stood by’ me.

  In contrast, Jamie and Sybil visited me whenever Prisca could not; they both sat through every day of my trial. Prisca supported me in everything.

  Apart from them, the only person who came was Victor. He contacted the prison authorities to ask if he could see me. I agreed and one afternoon he and I sat awkwardly together in the Visits Room. Victor’s distaste for the place was written in the distressed creases of his face. I took his presence as a sign of solidarity and felt a warm gratitude towards him.

  ‘How’s… Mary?’ I asked. ‘And Rose.’ I couldn’t remember if Rose was the daughter or the granddaughter, but I could hear those names repeated like returning waves in the tide of Julian’s conversation.

  I had somehow managed to say the right thing, a legacy of Julian’s charm. He looked more at ease, leaning forward confidentially.