by Andy Maslen
“I’m fine,” he said, before the lead medic could say anything. “Just wanted to try some relaxation.”
Now it was obvious their patient wasn’t dying on them, irritation mixed with relief clouded the faces ranged about the bed.
“You can take your heart rate down to fifty at will?” a nurse said.
“Lower if I want to. I’m sorry if I caused a problem.”
“Just, maybe, leave it where it wants to be, OK?” said the younger of the two doctors, a short, thickset woman with owlish glasses suspended on a thin brown leather string. “You had a nasty accident. Do you remember anything about it?”
“Lady Maitland,” Gabriel said. “She died. She had internal bleeding and her neck was broken.”
Chapter 10
The older doctor was balding, though he still couldn’t be more than 35. He consulted a chart, then spoke.
“No. She didn’t die,” he said. He was young-looking but had dark circles under his brown eyes and a couple of days’ growth of stubble. “She’s in bad shape, but she’s still with us. She has a dislocated shoulder: that may have given you the idea her neck was broken. And she bit her tongue clean through. She also has a handful of broken ribs, a broken leg, a ruptured spleen and a mild concussion, but she’s going to be OK.”
Gabriel muttered a small prayer of thanks. He didn’t believe in God. Or not the traditional old bearded guy in a toga, at any rate. But he did believe in trying to live in harmony with the universe, and not killing his employer’s wife through negligent driving warranted some form of gratitude.
“How long will she be in here? How long will I be in here?”
The female doctor answered, as if they were taking it turns to do the talking.
“Someone’s looking out for you, Gabriel. Apart from some superficial cuts and bruises, and mild burns on the back of your head, there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“OK, then I have to see Lady Maitland and then I have to go. Somebody has to tell Sir Toby.”
“You can see her when she comes round: she’s sleeping at the moment but she’s on a four-hour wake-up call. So that would be in,” the tired-looking doctor checked his watch, a cheap digital number with a grubby plastic strap, “an hour. Why don’t you sit tight till then? You need to rest, too.”
“And don’t worry about next of kin,” said the woman doctor. “The police have already informed her husband. He’s on his way here now. They want to talk to you, by the way. The police. I’ll send them in if you’re feeling up to talking to them?”
“Sure, sure, whatever,” Gabriel said. He had nothing to worry about. Deer were just a fact of life on the roads round here.
The medics and their attending nurses exchanged glances that Gabriel, for once, couldn’t read, then left. He leaned back against the pillows and waited. Almost as soon as the door had hissed shut on its damped closer, it opened again, the change in air pressure sucking the curtain across the open window into the room.
His visitor, police Gabriel supposed, was male, about forty, and wearing an expression that was supposed to look concerned but carried a hint of artificiality about it. Something to do with the even set of his mouth and the bland smoothness of his brow. His bulky shoulders strained the jacket of his suit. The tobacco-brown shirt matched the man’s tie – both had a sheen that might have been silk but probably wasn’t. He reeked of aftershave. He came and stood by the bed, holding out his warrant card.
“Mr Wolfe. I’m Detective Inspector Joe Abbott. I’m glad you’re feeling up to a chat.”
“Is it usual for CID to get involved in traffic accidents? We hit a deer. Your colleagues from Traffic must have told you that.”
Gabriel found he was clutching his neck. His question had come out too aggressive, he could tell. The detective’s expression hardened and even the pretence of concern slipped away.
“It’s usual for CID to do whatever we like. Sir,” he said. “‘Local Billionaire’s Wife Killed in Car Crash on Empty Road’ is the sort of headline that would have my superiors hauling me over the coals if I didn’t investigate. So forgive me for doing my job but I have a few questions for you. If that’s OK with you?” he added with a sneer.
“Sorry, yes, of course. Just a bit shaken up. Ask whatever you like.”
“Thank you. Of course you’re shaken up. The car’s a write-off. As is the deer.” The policeman permitted himself a brief smile. “So, why don’t you tell me what happened? From the beginning. Starting with how fast you were going. The Ferrari looks like it’s been through a crusher and the deer’s more like bolognese sauce.”
Gabriel let his breath out in a controlled exhalation, then answered, looking the policeman in the eye.
“I was doing sixty, maybe a little over. The deer came over the hedge to our left. There was nothing I could do to avoid it.”
“Sixty? Goodness me. Amazing how you can obey the law and still get into so much trouble, eh? Go on.”
Gabriel retold the story. Throughout, the detective nodded, mm-hmmed and wrote steadily in his notebook. Gabriel’s heart rate held steady at sixty throughout, the EEG machine acting almost like a lie detector, ready to signal to the policeman if Gabriel’s stress level increased.
“One last question, if you don’t mind, Sir. Your job at Rokeby Manor. How’s that going?”
This surprised Gabriel. The cop had done his digging all right. Did he know about MI5’s involvement? No way. They looked down their noses at local CID the way CID dismissed uniformed officers as grunts suitable for crowd control and mooching around shopping centres reassuring old ladies.
“It’s going fine. I haven’t been working for Sir Toby long. I’m his—”
“You’re his communications man, aren’t you?” the detective interrupted. “Must be fun putting words into the mouth of Sir Toby Maitland?”
“Is that what he told you? Well, I don’t ‘put words’ into his mouth. I take his ideas and give them shape, that’s all. I was supposed to be working on something for a local hustings today but Vix needed driving. She’s a hard woman to ignore,” he added, hoping for a shared moment of male sympathy, or solidarity. He didn’t get one. “Is there anything else Detective Inspector? I need to be going. I have to get home. I need to clean up and talk to Sir Toby.”
“No need. He’s already here. I’ll show him in.”
The Inspector left, and before the door had closed, Maitland walked in. His face was neutral. No sign of anger, or sadness or shock. His cheeks were pink and shiny, as if he’d shaved before coming out to the hospital. He looked at Gabriel with mouth pulled to one side, frowning. As if concerned.
“How are you doing, old chap? That was a nasty prang. Poor old Vix is going to be after me for a new car, I’m afraid.”
Was that it? No rage. No accusations. Just a clubroom quip about the little woman’s wheels?
“Er, I’m fine Toby. I’m so sorry about your wife. It was a deer, it jumped the hedge. We hit it fast but I couldn’t have avoided it. She’s all right they told me. Vix, I mean. She’s going to be OK.”
“Gabriel, Gabriel. She’s the least of my worries. No doubt she was distracting you. What was it, skirt pulled up a bit too high? Flash of leg while you should have been concentrating?”
“No! Nothing like that. We were just talking. Like I said, the deer—”
“Relax! I’m joking.”
Maitland laughed, even though his wife, his beautiful wife, lay semi-conscious somewhere down the corridor, stitched up, bandaged and no doubt hooked up to a more impressive array of machinery than Gabriel was. “Vix is a hard woman to kill. She’ll bounce back. It’s you I’m worried about. You’re going to help me win the election. So listen to me. Stop worrying about Vix. And Detective Inspector Abbott. I lent his Chief Superintendent some money to buy a house in Portugal last year: I don’t think we’ll be having much trouble from that quarter.”
He leaned down and put his mouth close to Gabriel’s right ear.
“Let me tel
l you something, Gabriel. Women like Vix aren’t hard to pick up. She makes me look good and I enjoy her company from time to time. But she can be a monumental pain in the arse too. You, on the other hand, were extremely difficult to find. So why don’t you put this little … episode … behind you. Get fixed up, take a day off, work from home for a week if you need to. And let’s focus on the big picture.”
He straightened, and walked out of the room, leaving the expensive smell of a woody aftershave in his wake.
Thanks to Gabriel’s army training, and his still-excellent fitness, he was back home later that day. The doctors gave him sheaves of forms to sign then allowed him to discharge himself. There were always other people needing beds: this was the NHS, after all. He poured himself a drink, against the express orders of the tired male doctor, and lay on the sofa. Seamus was nowhere to be found. They must have found Jules’s number on his phone under ICE – in case of emergency – and she’d collected the dog at some point. For now, he just wanted to sleep, but Maitland’s words were circling round in his head like a murmuration of starlings, swarming, intersecting, shifting into new shapes as he tried to fix on them and what they meant.
Chapter 11
At some point Gabriel fell asleep. He awoke at ten the next morning, still on the sofa. Britta was standing over him, a look of concern on her face.
“You look a mess,” Britta said, placing her cool fingers on his still-tender cheek. “What happened?”
“We hit a deer. Simple as that. Happens all the time down here. Just not at a hundred in a Ferrari.”
“Is everything OK? With Maitland, I mean?”
“It’s weird. He was more concerned about me than his wife. Like he was relieved I was still alive. Why would that would be?”
Britta sat on the sofa while Gabriel struggled to sit upright.
“Ok, Gabriel, don’t be mad. Your military record. It was, what’s the English word, exemplary? It still is, but my MI5 colleagues … they made some … amendments. To prepare the ground for when Maitland checked out your history.”
“What amendments?” Gabriel was alert now, jaw pushed out, eyes narrowed.
“Not your army actions. Just some reservations based on your political views.”
“I don’t have any political views. Leave me alone to do my job and live my life: that’s my political view.”
“You do now. You have marked right-wing sympathies. Officers’ mess talk late at night, ill-advised rants against socialist politicians, immigration, that sort of thing. Suggesting a strong-willed leader with total power would be good for the country.”
“What the hell, Britta? And where am I supposed to have picked all this up?”
“Your father and his friends. Original members of the plot to stage a coup and remove Harold Wilson back in the seventies.”
“I thought all that Spycatcher rubbish was proved to be just the ravings of a disgruntled former spook.”
“Oh, no, Gabriel. That was the real deal. The real … McCoy? Is that right?”
“Jesus, Britta. This is all a bit much to take in. My Dad was a good man. He loved this country. Loved democracy.”
“I’m sorry, Gabriel. But don’t worry. Once this business is finished, we’ll put everything back to how it was.”
She stroked his hand, running her fingertip along a three-inch-long gash that had crusted over with an archipelago of dark, glistening scabs.
“Maitland wants me to fly to the States with him on Monday. He’s doing some sort of mergers and acquisitions thing with a guy called Ash.”
“Good. Just stay with him and let him lead you. Let him draw it out of you – your viewpoint, I mean.”
They had breakfast and then Britta left, planting a kiss on each cheek and one on the lips, “to keep you going” she said.
He spent the rest of the day packing, walking Seamus with Julia and Scout, easing off his stiff muscles, and thinking. He was supposed to protect this country from men like Maitland, while its faithful servants were fiddling around with people’s army records. “Nothing is black and white in this world, Gabriel,” his father had liked to say over breakfast. But he hadn’t believed that, and nor – now – did Gabriel. There was white and there was black. Good. And evil. And Maitland, and men like him, were evil. They had to be stopped.
The weekend passed. Gabriel made arrangements with Jules to take care of Seamus, and read the dossier on Maitland. His background was anything but noble. His father had been a printer in the East End of London, his mother a secretary for a firm of solicitors. He’d gone to a local comprehensive school and scraped a clutch of A-levels, one of a handful of boys from his year to manage it. The man had made his first million aged just twenty-two as an estate agent in Mayfair. Then he had moved onto property investment, building up a portfolio in London and the wealthier parts of the South East. Sensing the far bigger opportunities in the newly liberated Eastern Europe, he’d spent a few years in Bulgaria, parts of former Yugoslavia, and further east, Kazakhstan and Belarus: buying, selling, trading, dealing.
Somewhere along the line he’d made some serious contacts with men who were profiting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the trolley-dash for state-owned assets, Maitland had been at the centre of it all, liquidating his property portfolio and buying himself sizeable chunks of a range of utilities and infrastructures, from airports to power companies.
Back in the UK, he’d began to climb the social ladder, just as he’d climbed the financial one. He started by making political donations, a few tens of thousands at first, and then much larger sums, in the six-figure range. Dinners with cabinet ministers and, eventually, the Prime Minister, had followed, as had receptions, minor ministerial posts as an appointee of the Prime Minister and, at last, the summons to Buckingham Palace. As he’d knelt before the Queen, Maitland appeared to be smirking. The photo in his dossier had been taken from a vantage point set well apart from the official photographer, who could be seen at the edge of the image.
There were more photographs: Maitland in black tie, at receptions in East European capitals, smiling for the camera next to groomed and polished ultra-nationalist politicians, Russian ‘businessmen’ and their cronies.
What caught Gabriel’s eye was a set of financial records: printouts of spreadsheets, profit-and-loss accounts and balance sheets, stapled together. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble decoding Maitland’s web of interconnected holding companies, offshore funds, Bermuda-registered businesses and family trusts. They were nested like Russian dolls, but with the largest doll somehow back inside the smallest. Gabriel had read about the techniques for tracking illegal money-flows while preparing for a client meeting a couple of years back. “Forensic accounting” they called it, practiced by Oxbridge-educated financial whizz kids who’d spent their university years solving quantum mechanical equations instead of boozing or chasing the opposite sex.
As he read the top line of figures on the summary sheet Gabriel let out a long, quiet whistle. Maitland was not a very rich man at all. He was an obscenely rich man. In fact, “rich” didn’t even begin to cover it. He was worth tens of billions of pounds. But somehow he’d kept it hidden and so had avoided appearing on the fawning “rich list” articles alongside the dukes, bankers and Saudi princes living in £20 million houses in Mayfair, Chelsea and Kensington.
On a separate stapled document headed “CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES: FINANCE” was a column of numbers connected by dotted lines to a number of short but disturbing phrases. The list ran down the page, the amounts decreasing but not the depravity of the activities to which they related. There was no corner of human wickedness from which Maitland hadn’t found a way to profit. Gabriel flipped to the second page of the summary and what he saw there made him clench his jaw so that the muscles in his cheeks cramped.
There was a single line of figures on the next sheet.
£11m ……………… PALM, Mozambique
With an effort of will he relaxed his jaw and stretched his
mouth open in a yawn, or a silent yell of rage. His employer had been doing business with Abel N’Tolo. Gabriel wished it had been Maitland in that Chief’s hut instead of the warlord. At least N’Tolo had been on some kind of nationalist crusade, even if he was a sadistic madman with a taste for the brutal executions of his prisoners.
A memory swam to the surface of Gabriel’s mind. Smudge, darting back for a briefcase full of plans. Smudge getting hit by a Kalashnikov round. And a pretty nine-year-old girl, her hair braided into corn-rows, who’d never see her Daddy again.
Gabriel’s job had just become personal. It had nothing to do with MI5 or the security of democracy. He was going to stop Maitland as payback for Mickey Smith.
The next day, Gabriel arrived at Rokeby Manor as a distant church bell was striking five. Maitland was waiting for him, dressed for business as always, in a grey suit with a kingfisher-blue tie. Franz was sitting behind the wheel of a silver Bentley Azure R, as powerful as the GT but with added room in the back, suitable for conducting business.
“Gabriel! Right on time,” Maitland said. “Somehow, with your background, I thought you’d be early.”
“It’s an early enough start Toby, without making it any earlier. My army days are behind me.”
Gabriel tried to soften the crispness of his words with a smile, but the page of figures and dotted lines was too fresh in his memory.
“Of course. I’m sorry. Blame the hour. Now, give me your keys and I’ll have Franz deliver your Maserati back to your house while we’re away.”
