The Double Bind of Mr. Rigby

by Brian Martin

  The police had been called, an ambulance and a doctor. As we spoke, the doctor came from the washroom and spoke to Naish. Naish turned to us and said to Roxanne, ‘Would you mind, Mrs Gimenez, identifying Mr Gimenez? I know it will be shocking, but we should do it.’

  Roxanne was pale with anxiety and trembling slightly. She blanched even more at his suggestion. I said, ‘Look, if it helps, I’ll identify him. I’m a good friend.’ I found that sickening to say in the case of Raoul but in the circumstances it was necessary. I also showed Naish my press card. Naish thought it a good idea and commented that Roxanne should see Raoul’s corpse later, and turning to me he added sotto voce, ‘When things have been tidied up a bit.’

  Raoul lay on a stretcher in the middle of the floor of the washroom. A paramedic uncovered him and I took a close look. Most of the washroom was a complete mess; there was so much blood. The medics had cleaned around Raoul’s neck and what surprised me was the neatness of the incision that had opened up the jugular vein. It was almost surgical and I wondered then how Raoul would have managed such a precise piece of surgery. It was at that moment that I started thinking that Raoul would not have been able to do that himself; perhaps someone else had done it. Maybe he had been murdered. Uri and the Agency were the obvious perpetrators. Raoul’s death could have been stage-managed and made to look like suicide. Uri’s outfit were specialists in deception. Of course I said nothing to Naish; I kept my thoughts to myself. If it were an assassination, I thought how ironic. Raoul had overseen Mark’s throat being cut; now he lay there having suffered the same fate. There was a terrible, fatal contrast between a murder in Tallinn and this bloodied corpse in the Ritz, London.

  32

  That night I stayed with Roxanne. She was withdrawn and distant. I could not penetrate her thoughts. In bed for a short time she allowed me to hold her in my arms but then gently pushed me away, turned on her side and whispered that she needed to think. I lay there wondering about Raoul’s fate.

  It was impossible that he should have committed suicide. Raoul was not that sort of man. The act did not fit his personality. Anyway, Uri had been definitive about what should happen to him. I considered his corpse. The jugular slit was surgical, small but effective. I could not see Raoul administering with clinical objectivity the scalpel cut himself. I remembered that there were marks, almost weals, at each side of his mouth as if he had been gagged with a cord, a nylon cord or a jute sash-window cord. It had been done for him, the deft incision that enabled his life to flood away. The set-up of his suicide had been contrived; but the investigators would soon see, as I had done, that it was murder. Why the Agency wanted to present a charade of suicide, I was at a loss to know; perhaps they wanted to provide the police with an easy story. Anyway, I was convinced that the Agency had acted swiftly. The opportunity had presented itself, information provided by me, and the deed had been efficiently executed. Myrex’s chief actor had departed the stage.

  Throughout the night I woke from time to time. I sensed that Roxanne drifted in and out of sleep; she was deeply disturbed. I knew that she could not think that Raoul had taken his own life. She suppressed talking about it. In the early hours of the morning I saw a new life opening for me. Roxanne and I would live together. The towering figure of Raoul was no longer there to inhibit us. The prospect actually excited me.

  The reality turned out to be somewhat different. When Roxanne got up early that next morning she was still distant, preoccupied with her own thoughts. I ordered breakfast to be sent up to Raoul’s suite. She immediately said that she would return straight away to Spain. She needed to be on her own; she needed to sort things out.

  ‘What will become of Myrex?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Presumably it will be up to the board. There are people who will help work that problem out.’

  She commented contemptuously, ‘Myrex is nothing without Raoul. Nothing.’ I was surprised by the degree of dislike, even contempt, in her remark.

  ‘Of course, it might not even survive. Scandal and suspicion might ruin confidence in Myrex. Clients and partners might want to distance themselves from it. I’ve seen it happen before.’

  I reflected silently that much would depend on the Agency and Willy’s outfit. They could both ensure Myrex’s demise. They could arrange adverse publicity and spread damaging rumour. It was their trade. I envisaged directors in the marketplace looking for a job.

  Roxanne left that afternoon. I looked forward to her return. We said goodbye. There was no passion in her embrace and those last kisses. She had changed. It was as though her blood ran cold. She was indifferent to me. Our parting was something to be endured.

  33

  There was no return. It was the end of the affair. Raoul’s death had affected her in a way that I could not have anticipated. When I rang her later that evening she did not come to the phone. One of the well-spoken secretaries, or whoever they were, told me that she was not receiving calls and was keeping to her room. She was grieving. I thought it natural. She would take a day or two to come to terms with her loss and change of circumstances. Then we would reunite joyously.

  I was wrong. I realised I did not know her at all. Our relationship had been entirely physical. There was no depth, no loyalty, no meeting of souls. She enjoyed me as she might have enjoyed a series of short holidays. She remained incommunicado. After about a week I realised that she was not going to speak to me. The last time I rang the Spanish residence I was told that she had returned to her mother in the south of France. I had stayed there once at the neat house in Beaulieu-sur-Mer close to Nice. I imagined her there looking out on to the glittering sunlit sea wrapped in her memories of Raoul. I reckoned that there was little space in her thoughts for me.

  During that time of anxiety and disappointment, I spoke to both Uri and Willy. My suspicions were justified. Uri rang me at the Journal and we met for lunch in a local delicatessen.

  ‘You sent us at the right time, old man,’ he said. ‘Our boys made it an easy job. Great work, Pel. Myrex is on the skids.’ Raoul’s name was not mentioned once. Everything was understood. ‘Keep looking and writing. You can be useful for us.’ He thought I should have some payment. There were special funds, but I found it all distasteful. My conscience did not sit easily with me. I had been the agent of a man’s death. I was not comfortable with it even though Raoul Gimenez was a ruthless murderer.

  Willy’s conversation was different. I remembered that he said he would be in touch, that the Service might want me to do something for it. I met him one evening in our club after Uri had spoken to me. What Willy did was to make an offer and my life shifted into a different gear.

  ‘I want you to meet the director, Pelham. What you’ve done with Myrex has really impressed people at the top. They want you engaged with us.’

  My immediate assumption was that they knew of my involvement and my connection with Uri, and I was right.

  Willy continued, ‘Your work with Uri Rovde was invaluable. We want you with us. We have lots of people who work for us. You keep up your present job, again invaluable to us, as a journalist, an investigative journalist, but you are with us at the same time. Of course you are bound to secrecy. That goes without saying. But you can do things for us. You’ve access to information that we don’t have. We want you with us.’ He added, ‘On a formal basis.’

  That week altered the direction of my life completely. Roxanne wrote herself out of it, and I joined forces with the Service. They wanted my pledge and they got it. I met the director, considered his proposals, thought long and hard about what I owed to the memory of Mark and committed myself.

  It took some nerve. In one of many interviews that I had to submit to, Willy’s old question cropped up. I might be called upon to kill someone; was I prepared to do so? In a way, I felt I had already. After a moment’s pause and after the dreadful murderous scene at Paldiski had flashed across my mind, I answered yes. I felt myself the same as being a soldier prepared for battle.


  Myrex foundered. The forces that it had come up against, the weapons of two immensely powerful states were so crushingly effective that Myrex could not retaliate. It had lost its leadership. In that war between organised crime and the state, in the end the state has more staying power. The Security Services operate without conscience; they owe no obligations to an individual who has played his part. They must hurry on, prosecute the next business, cut the next deal. Myrex did not compete; it went out of business. Arne was gone, assassinated. He had vanished into my past along with Roxanne. She never tried to get in touch with me again.

  Out of the ashes of Myrex my new career began. On the day that the newspaper business pages were full of the news of Myrex’s collapse, I was sitting in the garden of the Lord High Admiral in Pimlico having left the Journal’s offices in the early evening. I had ordered a glass of Kronenbourg and was trying to relax, lamenting the fact that there was no Mark to meet. My mobile rang and it was Willy. ‘We need you to do something, Pelham. Call into the office tomorrow some time. You’ll be expected.’

  There was the order. I was under contract now. I could not refuse.

  About the Author

  Brian Martin was appointed MBE for Services to English Literature in 2002. His literary criticism has appeared in the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times and Literary Review. He lives in Oxford, where he spent most of his career as a teacher. His first novel, North, was published by Macmillan New Writing, in 2006. His second novel, Latimer, was published in 2013. The Double Bind of Mr Rigby is his third, and he continues to write.

  Copyright

  Arcadia Books Ltd

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  This Ebook edition published by Arcadia Books in 2014

  Copyright © Brian Martin 2014

  Brian Martin has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  ISBN 978-1-910050-43-9

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