Breath of Corruption

by Caro Fraser

  Lola held out her glass. ‘This really is the weediest G and T in the world. Slosh in a little more Bombay Sapphire and I might just let her stay with me.’ She caught his look of astonishment. ‘Really.’

  He poured her some more gin. ‘Lola, I can’t ask you to do that. It’s bad enough for me without anyone else getting involved—’

  ‘Oh, stop. I’d like to do something useful and interesting for a change.’ She smiled at Irina. ‘Do you think she’s understood anything we’ve been talking about?’

  ‘A bit, I suppose.’ He paused. ‘Lola, are you absolutely serious? Would you have her for a day or two?’

  ‘Why not? If it’ll help.’

  Leo turned to Irina and spoke slowly to her. ‘Listen, Irina – I want to help you to get back to Ukraine, but first, I need to do some things. Get your passport back, for one. This lady’ – he indicated Lola – ‘says you can stay with her for a couple of days. OK?’

  Irina hesitated. She hadn’t a clue what they’d been talking about earlier, except that Viktor’s name had come up regularly. She didn’t understand how this woman came into things, either. But she had no choice. She had to trust someone. And the woman looked nice. Probably her house was nice, too. All she really wanted was to get away from London, to get back to Ukraine. This man Leo had said he would get her passport back. She didn’t know how he was going to do that, but something in his eyes made her believe he would. She nodded at Lola and murmured, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Leo asked Lola again. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. Much more fun than going to Hugo’s party.’ She knocked back the remains of her drink and gestured towards Irina’s bag. ‘Does she have any things, or is that it?’

  ‘That’s all she came with.’

  ‘By the way,’ asked Lola, as she stood up, ‘how are you going to speak to this man Kroitor if you don’t know where he is?’

  Leo was stunned by his own lack of foresight. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  This much Irina had understood. She dived into her bag again and brought out Marko’s mobile phone. She handed it to Leo. ‘Is Marko’s. He leave on table, and I take. Viktor’s number is on it.’

  Leo looked at Irina in admiration. ‘Brilliant.’

  ‘Now, Leo, darling,’ said Lola, putting on her jacket, ‘would you be a dear and ring for a cab?’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Leo spent much of the next morning weighing up the situation, going over and over the various options, uncertain what to do for the best. By lunchtime he had made up his mind. He took Marko’s mobile phone from his briefcase – where it had buzzed forlornly and rather irritatingly on several occasions – and scrolled through the address book till he came to Viktor’s name.

  Viktor was at his Paddington flat, the one he used as a base for his London operations. He was feeling irate, to put it mildly. Last night he had lost one of his girls, along with his wallet with all his cash and credit cards, and had spent the hours since then threatening to kill that fat, useless shit Marko – who appeared to be the one responsible – in the slowest, most disgustingly excruciating way conceivable if ever he got his hands on him. So he was mildly nonplussed, when his phone rang, to see that it was apparently Marko who was calling. He stared for a moment, then answered.

  ‘Marko! Where the—’ But the voice which interrupted him was not Marko’s.

  ‘Viktor Kroitor? I wonder if you remember me.’ Viktor struggled for some seconds to place the cool, familiar tones. ‘You called at my house not long ago. Leo Davies.’

  Davies! What the fuck was he doing with Marko’s phone? He paused, collecting his thoughts as he tried to work out the implications of this bizarre development, then said, ‘I remember.’

  ‘You’re no doubt a little puzzled as to why I’m calling you.’

  Viktor’s cooling anger was replaced by bemused suspicion. ‘Tell me, Mr Davies, where did you get the phone?’

  ‘Well, it’s a long story. I don’t propose to go into it right now. The reason I’m calling you, Viktor, is to arrange a meeting. You don’t mind if I call you Viktor, do you? Makes things more informal.’

  Viktor laughed. This guy was mad, but he had some fucking nerve. ‘Call me what you like. What do you mean – a meeting?’

  ‘Between you and me. There are a few things we need to discuss. Irina Karpacheva, for one.’

  Viktor was beginning to make some sense of this, but was struggling to work out how on earth Marko and the girl had got involved with Davies. ‘What about her?’

  ‘She’s useful to you – and to me. I’d like to reach some kind of deal – what we lawyers call a settlement. I suggest some nice, neutral place – say in an hour’s time? Do you know the Temple at all?’

  ‘What’s that – some kind of church?’

  ‘No, it’s an area of London, between Fleet Street and Embankment. Have you got a pen? Right – get a cab, and ask to be dropped at the bottom of Middle Temple Lane, and walk up fifty yards or so. I’ll meet you. Or you could get one of your chaps to drive you – not Marko, obviously.’

  Viktor, still mildly angry, had to laugh. There was a ludicrous kind of charm about this guy. ‘Why should I have a meeting with you? Just say what you’ve got to say now. Don’t waste my time.’

  ‘I like to do things face to face. It’s the best way of communicating, don’t you think? Also, much as I’d love to chat, I think the battery on Marko’s phone is running low. I hope you’ll turn up. Given what Irina has told me, I think you should. You might even get your wallet back, in return for Irina’s passport. Make sure you bring it. Oh, and before you ask, I have no intention of involving the police, or Sir Dudley, or anyone else. This is between you and me. As you said at our last meeting – strictly personal.’

  Leo clicked the phone off and put it down. Would Kroitor turn up in an hour’s time? As matters stood, Leo didn’t see that he had a choice.

  Viktor sat there, perplexed and furious. He couldn’t believe it. This guy, whose family he’d threatened with harm, was calling the shots and telling him to turn up to meetings? He got up and went to the window, staring down at the street, trying to put things together. By using Marko’s phone, and by saying he wanted to talk about Irina, Davies had pretty much laid it on the line. He had all he needed to go to the police. Given that Marko knew just about everything, Viktor wouldn’t even have time to get to the airport before he was picked up. And that would be the end. Shit! Viktor paced the room, re-rehearsing the horrible things he would do to Marko if he ever met him again. But why would Marko do this? He stood to gain absolutely nothing by betraying Viktor. Quite the reverse. Then again, Davies had said he wasn’t going to involve the police. He’d said he wanted to meet to do a deal. Did he want money, or what? These barrister people were supposed to be incorruptible and utterly honest – or so Sir Dudley said. Sir Dudley – he was the fool who’d started all this. It was his panic over that one stupid invoice which had led to Viktor visiting Davies and threatening his family. Clearly Leo Davies was not, at this moment, intimidated by those threats. Given the cards in his hand, Viktor could see why.

  After a few more minutes spent musing and fuming, Viktor went to the next room and instructed one of his men to drive him to this place called the Temple.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A little before one, and after much cursing and arguing over the A to Z, Viktor’s driver dropped Viktor off on the Embankment, at the foot of Middle Temple Lane.

  ‘Be back here in half an hour,’ said Viktor, thinking that it was time to get a new car with satnav. He turned and began to walk up Middle Temple Lane. He was mildly impressed by but not much interested in the stately elegance of his surroundings, being more preoccupied with what he would say and do when he met Leo Davies.

  Leo, loitering by the corner of Crown Office Row, saw Viktor coming. There was no mistaking that dreadful coat. He watched as Viktor approached, waiting for the moment of recognition. There was
something mundane about this encounter, here in the open, surrounded by lawyers and office workers on their lunch hour, compared to the night that Viktor had forced his way into his house. Leo sincerely hoped he could achieve enough today to make sure he never saw Viktor Kroitor in his life again.

  ‘Let’s take a walk,’ said Leo.

  They made an incongruous pair as they strolled along Crown Office Row – the dapper, silver-haired lawyer in his elegant pinstripe suit walking next to the big, bulky six-foot-four Eastern European with his hands thrust into the pockets of his leather coat. A couple of acquaintances nodded to Leo as they passed, giving his companion a curious glance. A client, they supposed.

  ‘You said this would be neutral,’ remarked Viktor. ‘You seem to know a lot of people.’

  ‘Do you feel unsafe?’ asked Leo, as they approached the wrought-iron gates of Inner Temple Garden.

  Viktor didn’t deign to answer this. He walked with Leo through the gates and into the ornate, spacious gardens. They found a bench and sat down.

  Viktor lit a cigarette, and blew a casual plume of smoke into the bright September air. ‘How is Sir Dudley’s case going?’ he asked.

  Surprised by the insouciance of this enquiry, Leo replied, ‘It’s proceeding. I imagine we’ll win. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested in that aspect of Sir Dudley’s business.’

  Viktor narrowed his eyes and smiled. ‘You think you know everything that’s going on, don’t you?’

  ‘Hardly. But I know enough.’

  Viktor smoked for a few seconds. ‘So, this deal you wanted to talk about—’ He paused, giving Leo an appraising glance. ‘You don’t look like a man who cuts deals, I have to tell you.’

  ‘I do it every day for a living,’ replied Leo. ‘It’s all a question of negotiating the obstacles, finding a way to the result you want. I imagine you know all about that, in your line of work, though you probably use a little less finesse than I do.’

  ‘Finesse? What is that? Tell me – I like to know new words.’

  ‘Subtlety. Sophistication.’

  Viktor laughed and nodded. ‘OK.’ He took a final drag of his cigarette and ground it beneath his shoe. ‘Now, tell me your deal.’

  ‘I’ve brought you here to extract from you a promise – a promise that you will stay away from my son and his mother, never to threaten them, or me, in your life again. Forget they exist.’

  ‘And if I promise to do this – you give me the girl Irina and that son of a bitch Marko? Is this your deal?’

  ‘The deal is that if you don’t agree, then I solemnly promise you I will bust Sir Dudley wide open – and if I do that, you and your operation are unlikely to survive very long, knowing Sir Dudley.’

  Leo had no idea how Viktor was going to respond to this. He seemed neither angry nor surprised. He just sat there in silence for a few moments. Then he nodded and said, ‘Sir Dudley gives me a lot of problems. He gives me grief – is that what you say?’

  ‘That’s what we say.’

  Viktor met Leo’s disconcertingly clear gaze. Despite his undemonstrative manner and conservative appearance, there was a ruthless and uncompromising quality about Leo which intrigued Viktor. It commanded his respect. ‘I don’t get this. I don’t get this at all. If you are so sure, if you know so much, why don’t you just go to the police?’

  ‘Because to be honest, Viktor, you frighten me. I don’t for one minute believe that if I were to go to the police, and they were to pick you up, that it would end there. You’d find a way to carry out your threats, or get someone to carry out your threats for you. I would have an enemy for life, and I can do without that. Frankly, I don’t care about your sordid operations, or your criminal activities. I just want to be kept out of them, and to keep my family out of them. Not the attitude of a responsible citizen, perhaps, but I care more about their safety than what you do for a living. I don’t like you, but I’d rather stay on your side. Do you follow me?’

  ‘I follow.’ Viktor chuckled. ‘You are an interesting man. But you know what? If you were ever to carry out your threat to bust Sir Dudley, and the police found their way to me—’ Viktor shrugged.

  ‘You’ve arrived very neatly at the point. Our interests are perfectly balanced. As is the way with all good settlements, it depends upon both parties respecting their sides of the bargain. You stay away from my family, and I do nothing about Sir Dudley.’

  ‘But for this deal to work, I need to know where Irina and Marko are. I want them.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about Marko, except that he’s clearly none too bright. He helped Irina to get out of the hotel, and then she dumped him. The reason she found her way to me is because my name and address were in your wallet, which she took, along with Marko’s phone. As for Irina herself – well, she’s another of my bargaining tools, but not in the way you seem to think. She’s somewhere you can’t find her for the moment, but once I have your word and her passport, she’ll be straight on a plane back to Ukraine.’ Viktor made an angry sound of impatience, and Leo dipped his hand into his pocket. ‘Come on, what’s one prostitute more or less to you, Viktor? I’d have thought your wallet and credit cards were worth more.’ He took out Viktor’s wallet and held it up.

  Viktor hesitated, then put out his hand. ‘Her passport,’ Leo reminded him.

  Viktor sighed grimly. ‘OK – let the girl go.’ He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out Irina’s passport. He handed it to Leo, who gave him his wallet in return. ‘You’re right, Marko was always a dumb prick,’ said Viktor, frowning thoughtfully at the wallet. Then he turned to Leo and said, ‘You know what I think? I came here thinking you were the problem. Now I think the problem – the real problem – is Sir Dudley.’ He shook his head. ‘He’s not a reliable trading partner. He started this, with his stupid invoice. Then he tried to tell me it was my fault, but it was his people. I know that. You’ – he jabbed a finger at Leo – ‘you never wanted to get mixed up in this. I understand that.’ Viktor put the wallet away, pulled out another cigarette and lit it. ‘Anyway,’ he went on conversationally, ‘I’ve been thinking. There are better ways of moving money than using Sir Dudley. Ways that are less clumsy. Internet gambling – it’s legal in Britain now. That’s a way.’

  ‘How would that work?’ asked Leo. He was fascinated by the complexities of Viktor’s character – evidently regarding himself as something of a sophisticate, a man of the world, yet at the same time exhibiting an almost puerile candour in relation to his criminal dealings.

  ‘OK,’ explained Viktor, with some modest pride in his scheme, ‘you open a gambling account, put money in under a false name, then you make a few small bets. After a while you withdraw the money.’ He shrugged. ‘Or maybe you just open an account and store funds for a few months, then transfer the money to a clean account, pretend it’s winnings.’

  Leo reflected that it was going to turn out to be something of an embarrassment for the government to find that its gambling reforms were facilitating criminal activity and money laundering. Still, the best laid schemes would always provide opportunities to enterprising individuals, and without doubt Viktor Kroitor was one of those.

  ‘I don’t know why I tell you this,’ remarked Viktor as an afterthought.

  Leo didn’t either, but he replied, ‘Because we have an understanding. And perhaps because, fundamentally, our professional ethics aren’t so very disparate.’

  ‘Disparate – what is that?’

  ‘It means different, far apart. Take prostitution, for instance – that’s one of your rackets. The work I do as a barrister isn’t so far removed from prostitution.’

  Viktor frowned. ‘How is that?’

  ‘Oh—’ Leo gave a sigh, glancing around at the lawyers strolling through the gardens. ‘The degradation of applying one’s intellect to say what one doesn’t necessarily believe, much of the time. Doing for money the most unacceptable things for the most unacceptable people.’

  Viktor smiled and sho
ok his head. ‘You’re a funny guy.’ He stood up, dusting cigarette ash carefully from his leather coat.

  ‘So,’ said Leo, ‘have we a deal? Do you give me your promise?’

  Viktor shrugged. ‘OK, you have your deal. Like I said – Sir Dudley is my problem, not yours.’

  They walked back in silence to the gates of the garden, and Viktor, glancing round, observed, ‘You work in a nice place. A beautiful place.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Leo. ‘It is.’

  Without another word Viktor walked back down Middle Temple Lane towards the Embankment, and the last Leo saw of him he was standing by the busy roadside, cigarette in hand, scanning the road for his driver and his car.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Leo went back into the gardens, past the neatly clipped lawns and well-tended beds of glorious late-summer flowers. He sat down again on a bench, letting the warmth of the September sun creep into his skin and bones, drinking in the elusive fragrance of the roses. As he looked round the gardens, he wondered idly what kind of day it had been all those centuries ago, when Richard Plantagenet and the Earls of Suffolk and Warwick, having become embroiled in argument in Inner Temple Hall, had come out to these same gardens and plucked the red and white roses which had become symbols of their factions before the commencement of the Wars of the Roses. Had it been a mellow day such as this one, or in the bright heat of early summer? His knowledge of history was insufficiently particular. He wondered, too, if the gardens had looked so very different then. Somewhat, he supposed – much larger, with the Thames waters lapping at their lower reaches in the days before a river wall was built, or the Embankment conceived of, but still a calm, fragrant retreat from the noisome hubbub of the busy streets.

  Leo closed his eyes and let his thoughts wander over the events which had troubled 5 Caper Court over the last few days. It was a burdensome business, being head of chambers, but he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to relinquish it yet. The sounds of the city, like those of a constant tide, rose around him. He opened his eyes and looked around. The greatest and deepest of London’s many qualities, he had long since decided, was the sense of rolling history with which it was imbued. Buildings rose and crumbled, people lived and died, institutions grew and dwindled, yet the city carried on relentlessly, the changes and erosions of the passing ages only serving to mark more deeply the pattern of its story. It made sense that Pudding Lane, that tiny vennel of history, was no more now than a lifeless alley flanked by the vast concrete walls of office buildings. Its meagre length, the repository of great events, had endured, but the city made no concessions; it was too busy with its own teeming, ever-shifting progress. This place where he now sat, the buildings round him, were part of that history, and he was as well, in his insignificant way. At any rate, he was as long as he lived and worked here, as long as his name was still listed among those of the other tenants on the hand-painted board outside 5 Caper Court.