by Jill Downie
“Or in hospital, having his gall bladder removed. Do we know who these rowdy Scrabble players are?”
“I’ve got a list.” PC Brouard pulled his notebook from his pocket. “The regulars are the wife of the president of Crédit Genève, the wives of two local bank managers, and — get this — the ex-wife and the ex-girlfriend of Dr. Watt. Dorothy Watt and Crystal Plummer. The cook says some of their stories about Dr. Watt and his, er, little ways in the sack get the biggest laughs of the evening.”
“Combined in mutual hatred. Hell hath no fury like two women scorned,” observed Liz. “Is that everyone?”
“Not quite. The other regular is Anthony Bonamy — he’s an interior decorator. All girls together, as you might say. The cook says he’s the one that gets them going when they’re really sauced. There’s even been the odd striptease.”
“Very odd striptease, I’d say,” a highly diverted PC Le Marchant remarked. “Mrs. Evans could add that to her naughty book.”
“Well, well,” said Liz. Life in Fort George sounded a lot less buttoned-down than outward appearances might suggest. “Thanks, fellers, that’ll do. I don’t think we need worry Mrs. Amsterdam’s Scrabblers.”
As soon as the two constables left the office, Liz picked up the phone and checked. Yes, Dorothy Watt and Crystal Plummer were listed. At the back of her mind something she could not grasp slithered in and out, like a name you cannot quite remember. It was something Melissa Machin had said, something that stuck and would not compute, or tuck neatly away in an orderly fashion.
Whatever in the heck it was she had no idea, but remember it she must. Because it just didn’t add up.
“You want to talk to me about —?” Dorothy Watt sounded weary. Her words were slurred, as though she had just woken up.
“Dr. Watt. Specifically, Mrs. Watt, your time in America. And I want to keep this confidential.”
She was, of course, taking a risk. If it got back to Nichol Watt, there would be hell to pay, both from him and from Moretti, let alone Hanley. It would make the brouhaha over Denny look like a tinkle in an egg cup. But she was banking on Dorothy Watt’s apparent taste for scapegoating her ex.
“Our time in America? Is this about the MRI machines?”
Well, well, well, as the first banana liked to say.
“I’d rather not say over the phone, Mrs. Watt. When would it be convenient to speak to you?”
“I’ll be here all day. I had rather a late night at Mona Amsterdam’s. I imagine you know about her upsetting experience.”
“Yes. I should be there in an hour.”
Liz replaced the receiver, thinking that perhaps she ought to contact Moretti before she did this.
Perhaps she should, but she wasn’t going to. Without a doubt he would say no, wait until I get back. After all, he had asked her to check into Nichol Watt’s time in America, which was exactly what she was about to do.
Chapter Ten
Day Five
Peter Walker lived in Kensington, just off Kensington High Street. He owned a flat in one of the tall, narrow houses that line a quiet road not far from Holland Park, and he had been there for many years, not choosing to move after either retirement, or the death of his wife. Ed Moretti had only met her once or twice, but his memory was of a warm, good-looking woman who matched her husband in intelligence and wit. Even in the rather louche surroundings of the jazz club she gave off an impression of old money, and the ease of manner such a background brings with it.
But the arbitrary nature of life being what it is, the silver spoon she was born with did not protect her from the drunk driver who knocked her down only a few yards from her doorstep. Moretti had flown back to England for the funeral, and in so doing had strengthened what had become a distant and occasional contact with his old friend.
After they took the Tube from Heathrow into town, Walker showed Moretti the room he would be using and said, “I’m going to make some phone calls. If I can get hold of this person I have in mind, we’ll probably be in business. Just pray she’s in town?”
“She?”
“Yes. She. Make yourself at home, pour yourself a drink if you feel like it. With any luck I’ll be taking the lady out to a late lunch.”
The phone call was made behind the closed doors of his office, and then he bustled off after a brief, “Wish me luck, Ed.”
“Luck, so they say, Peter, is a lady. Sometimes.”
“She’s a bitch most of the time. I’m going to twist the rather attractive arm of this particular lady.” Peter Walker grinned and closed the front door behind him.
Interesting. Either Peter knew where a few bodies were buried, or he had been at some point closely acquainted with this particular lady. Moretti went into the kitchen, poured himself a beer, made a sandwich, and took them through into the sitting room that overlooked a small square of trees and shrubs. The rain had stopped, and a tentative sun touched the iron railings around the area with a soft, oily gleam. He drank some beer, took out his mobile, and phoned Falla.
“Falla, Moretti. I’m in London now. Any developments?”
“Some.”
“Fill me in.”
“The Stepford wife isn’t.”
“Isn’t?”
Moretti listened attentively to Falla’s account of her interview with Melissa Machin.
“My, I had her pegged wrong! She plays Mrs. Offshore Banker’s Wife to the manner born. What she told you confirms a few things, even if we don’t know what those few things are. At least we seem to be on the right track. Anything else? A Scrabble club — good God! How is our chantoozie? — I suppose Mrs. Evans is better than nothing — oh, did you get that phone out to La Veile? Good. Anything yet on Nichol Watt? No? Get in touch if anything else comes up, okay?”
“Okay. Good luck, Guv.”
“Thanks, Falla. I’ll need it.” He sat on one of the leather chairs in Peter Walker’s sitting room, opened his briefcase, and took out his notes.
Two hours later, Peter Walker returned looking, Moretti thought, almost boyish. The word radiant came to mind.
“Peter, you look like you just won the lottery.”
“I have, my boy, I have. Let me just grab a beer for you and for me.”
There in his sitting room, beneath a splendid series of Gillrays, Peter Walker told Ed Moretti a love story.
“Bear with me, Ed. This goes back to my early days at the Yard. I was an ambitious young sod, pushy, prepared to cut a few throats if it meant a quicker path to the top. Prepared to do anything if it got me ahead of the pack. I was working on a fraud case involving two of the biggest names in the London underworld at that time. We wanted them for dozens of other more heinous offences, but our best bet was to get them this way, rather than for murder or torture or any of their other hideous crimes. One of the officers on the case was a woman, working undercover in one of the bastards’ bars, chosen not only because she was smart as a whip, but a looker.”
Walker paused, shaking his head, the thatch of white hair falling over his face. “God, what a beautiful girl she was. I fell for her, so heavily you could have heard the crash clear across London and the Home Counties. And, by some miracle, she fell for me. Christ, I died a thousand deaths every night she was in that bloody bar. So, to cut a long story short, we caught the two bad lads on fraud charges, the lovely lady and I got promotions and —” he paused.
“And —?”
“I married Anita. Her father was in the cabinet at the time, the PM’s right-hand man.”
“You broke the lovely lady’s heart. Possibly your own?”
“Ambition doth make cold-hearted codfish of, well, some of us. Including the lovely lady.”
Moretti raised his eyebrows. “She married the son of a cabinet minister?”
“Wrong. She didn’t marry at all. It would have interfered with her goals, she told me. She informed me she’d never have married me, in any case. Mind you, it wasn’t as easy as that. There was a lot of screaming, and we went a f
ew rounds. Never get on the wrong side of an expert in various forms of self-defence. I still bear the marks.”
Moretti looked at his old friend. How little he knew about this man, who had changed the direction of his life.
“Let me jump to conclusions. This is the lady you had lunch with?”
Walker laughed. “A brilliant deduction, Detective Inspector. Yes. You see, my career may have gone well, either because of my own ability or my wife’s connections, or a combination of the two. But this woman went right to the top, the very top, and not of the Met, but another, even more prestigious organization, some would say. And she did it on her own, no husband, and no sleeping around with the right people. That much is true, because you can be sure I’d know otherwise. I’m sure she had affairs, relationships, but there was no sexual stairway to the stars. That kind of trajectory cannot be swept under the organizational rug.”
“This is Janice Melville, first woman to head MI5.”
“This is. She just retired.”
“Good God.” Moretti hesitated, then asked, “And you’re still talking?”
“We are now, thanks to you. I’ve been looking for an excuse, a reason to contact her, something more than just ‘let’s get together for old times’ sake,’ and you gave me one.”
“So I’m your cupid?”
“Don’t need one, Ed. I was hit by that arrow a long time ago. What you are is my cover story.”
“And there I was, thinking this was all for my sake.”
Above Peter Walker’s head, the lilac-jacketed gentleman in Gillray’s Delicious Weather treated himself to a pinch of snuff as he sat on a bench surrounded by flowers, shaded by leafy trees, a picture of contentment and bliss.
“How soon can I talk to her, or is she putting me in touch with someone?”
“Not sure about that yet. So let’s go take in some jazz, only we won’t be playing.”
“What’s good?”
“A little bar in Battersea High Street called CaffConc. Has an extraordinary young guitarist who plays Gypsy jazz.”
Moretti groaned. “God, Peter, how your tastes have changed. Not jazz manouche, please. My Django Reinhardt period ended over a decade ago.”
Walker leaned forward and tapped Moretti on the knee, hard. “The lady in question is an aficionado. Or is it aficionada? Anyway, that’s where we’re meeting her. So rediscover your boyish enthusiasm, Ed. Fast.”
They took the Tube to Battersea High Street. As always on his return trips to London, Moretti was struck by the changes since his university days. In one of the most ethnically and culturally complex cities in the world the word cosmopolitan seemed inadequate to describe the range of race, creed, and colour that filled the streets and the shops. Certainly it had not been a white little, tight little town when he was there, but the diversity now was mind-blowing. Whole neighbourhoods were given over to being Beirut or Bangladesh or Bahrein in miniature, and there was probably a transplanted Guernsey somewhere. And it seemed to him that, since the arrival of suicide bombers in the heart of the city, the ease with which passersby brushed shoulders with each other had changed into a wary watchfulness, as the citizenry looked out for dynamite-lined jackets or loaded backpacks.
In spite of Dwight’s dark face in the Fénions, Moretti realized he spent most of his life in a now uncharacteristically almost-white society, and CaffConc confirmed that impression. Early though it was in the evening, it was already busy, and the crowd spanned a wide age group, as mixed racially as the wardrobe its clientele wore. The club itself was self-consciously Left Bank in style, its décor and furnishings a cross between Art Nouveau boudoir and Empire salon chic, with a touch of the bordello thrown in. It was not an ornamental conjunction Moretti was fond of, and he felt despondency settle on his shoulders like sodden gabardine. Somewhere across the dimly lit room he could hear, not the sound of a guitar, but the sound of a piano. A middle-aged man with a fez on his head was playing standards in a standard kind of way.
“There she is.”
In a room with a preponderance of good-looking women, Janice Melville held her own. In a career in which avoiding attention was a good idea, her looks must have made that difficult. She was very blond, very white-skinned, with the blackest eyes in such an expanse of paleness that Moretti had ever seen. There had been an actress in the seventies in a television series to which his mother was addicted with similar colouring, he remembered, with the same long, slanting eyes.
Janice Melville saw them and waved without any discernible change of expression. As they came over to the table near the bar, Moretti got the feeling of distance, detachment, as if she had an invisible force field around her, separating her from the rest of the room. A glass of red wine stood on the table in front of her.
“Hi, Peter. You must be Ed Moretti.”
“You must be Janice Melville. An honour to meet you, ma’am.”
One thin, dark eyebrow went up. “Retired. No more ma’ams, please. Jan.”
Janice Melville had worn the years well, especially taking into account the nature of those years. She had to be in her mid to late fifties, but looked a decade younger. She wore black, presumably because she liked black, because she was whip thin, her small breasts beneath the clinging jersey fabric heightened by the narrowness of her ribcage. Her only piece of jewellery was what looked like a very pricey gold watch, with diamonds on the bezel.
“Do sit down, and let’s talk. I won’t want to talk once they start playing. Are you eating? The chicken curry’s good.”
She had a light voice, higher up the vocal scale than Moretti would have expected. On the phone she would sound two decades younger.
Moretti and Walker ordered the curry and two beers and, as soon as the waiter moved away, Moretti said, “Peter’s told you why I’m here, but I’ve had some more information since then from my sergeant.”
“Go ahead.”
She listened in silence, sipping her red wine, waiting to respond until after the beers arrived.
“So. Sounds more like some sort of coup d’état to me, as opposed to terrorism, in which case I couldn’t have helped you. Those doors are closed, even to me, now I am an outsider.”
“Coup d’état? Would whites be involved in something like that in, say, Africa?”
“If there was something in it for them, and they were the money men.”
“A change of government for mercenary, rather than idealistic reasons.”
“Exactly. One is not talking about orange revolutions here, although even orange revolutions have been known to benefit the power brokers and their corporations. Naïve to think otherwise.”
“Money. A familiar theme in Guernsey. But in this case the coup d’état would have to be about something produced by the country, and the cash would be the by-product.”
“Except that the cash is what it’s all about for the white guys in this case. And power, of course, but money is power.”
The curry was good, as she had said, West Indian as opposed to East Indian.
There was a pause in the conversation, and then Peter Walker spoke. “Diamonds?”
“Very possibly.” Moretti noticed Janice Melville did not meet Peter’s eyes when she replied, as she had with him. “A messy, dangerous business, but I’ve no need to tell you that. If it’s diamonds. The problem with diamonds is that they’re easily obtained — no need for huge capital investment in many cases — but it’s very difficult to secure the source. Might not, therefore, be diamonds, or diamonds may be only part of whatever this is.”
“Diamonds are not a power broker’s best friend.”
“Diamonds are a fairweather friend and an unreliable lover.”
This time Janice Melville looked straight into Peter Walker’s eyes, and Moretti watched him flinch.
This was getting off the rails. The coup d’état theory was useful, but he hadn’t come here for theories he’d probably have arrived at himself eventually, and a good chicken curry wasn’t enough reason to subje
ct himself to Gypsy jazz just to endure the banter and barbs of two star-crossed ex-lovers. It was beginning to look as if he’d been conned into this for the sake of Peter’s love life, rather than anything more useful. Moretti put down his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair, allowing his impatience to show.
“Coup d’état somewhere in Africa, with wicked white men raping the dark continent yet again. Even this plodding copper might have eventually grasped that much.” Moretti started to get up. “Can you help me with contacts, names, Ms. Melville? You can, but will you? Otherwise let me leave you two to your own devices, whatever those may be, and get out of here before the entertainment.”
“Too late. The entertainment is about to begin.” Janice Melville was laughing. “Hang about, plodding copper. Let me hear the music, and then I’ll give you what you want. Then you can leave us two to our own devices.”
She was, apparently, amused by his outburst, but from the look in those black eyes when she said “devices,” giving Peter what he wanted was not part of her plan. At least, not without much further negotiation. Janice Melville turned her chair around and gave her full attention to the stage, now vacated by the piano player after a smattering of applause.
The man who came on stage did not look like a Gypsy. Long, lean, fair-skinned, and fair-haired, he looked to be in his twenties. He wore wraparound dark glasses, a black shirt and black jeans, and the guitar he carried was the petite bouche style of instrument favoured by jazz manouche guitarists. He was followed by another guitar player and a bass player, both of whom looked more likely to have sprung from one of the birthplaces of Gypsy jazz. Their set-up was blessedly brief, and they opened with a melody Moretti didn’t recognize, the bass underlining the melody, the rhythm guitarist providing the familiar repetitive boom-chick manouche beat.
The blond was good, a gifted player, his style in this number closer to traditional Gypsy music than the jazz-influenced Parisian sound. When the unfamiliar piece was over, the group moved directly into one of the jazz manouche standards, “Les Yeux Noirs.” Black eyes. For a split second, the lead player looked toward their table, then back to his guitar.
