“Seems a bit small scale, can’t we do something a little grander a little more…” He struggled to find the word he was looking for to describe his vision.
“Dramatic?”
Helena smiled in appreciation, “A dramatic tableau to scare her?”
Charles smiled and shook his head, “No, not scare, impress. Felicity loves to be impressed. Every one of her boyfriends has impressed her in some way and so ended up in her bed. It’s her one failing.”
Helena looked down at Felicity staring out of the window smoking, “Ready?” she said to Charles. He nodded. Helena flicked a hand upward to shoulder level and then down to waist level.
The effect was instantaneous Charles’s face filled all of the vertical surfaces in the room. The mirrors, windows and doors had transformed from a hard clinical white to show his tanned skin tones, silver hair and bright blue eyes. Felicity stood still cigarette still in her hand, staring. She swivelled on the toes of her gym shoes taking in the transformation of the room, smiling.
A door opened on the far side and a young middle ranking executive walked in to begin his workout. He wandered over to the benches on the opposite side of the room not noticing anything out of the ordinary. Looking up and seeing Felicity he nodded and said, “Good morning” Felicity, still smiling, looked at the young man and said, “Get out”
He looked at her confused not moving. She repeated what she had said, this time shouting, “Get out, NOW!” The smile was still on her face as he grabbed his bag and ran out of the room.
“Hello Felicity. If Mohammed wouldn’t come to the mountain…we do need to talk and you need to listen.”
The reply made him smile too. “Impressive, very impressive. Your spook knows her shit doesn’t she. Can we tone it back to just the mirrors if this conversation is going to be longer than thirty seconds? Too much Charles is giving me a migraine.”
Charles looked at Helena with a certain smugness and raised his eyebrows at her.
”Can you?” he said to Helena. The multiple images faded leaving white walls, white doors and clear windows. The floor to ceiling mirrors remained containing Charles smiling face. The smile faded as he looked out at her and began.
“You, my dear have a problem. William Bacchus is continuing to be trouble. Ernest is here in limbo accompanied and assisted by a very able guide called Juanita. He is going to become a real thorn in your side if you let him. Williams’s friend Annabel is talented and the cripple is a borderline genius on a computer. Who’d have guessed?” He said the final phrase with an overtly camp inflection.
“We will be keeping a close eye on them, but contrary to rumours, omnipresence is not available in limbo. So we can only be in one place at a time.”
Felicities face lost the pleased, excited smile and became pinched and irritated.
“Please, please tell me that this tableau and your little speech weren’t the reasons you wanted to talk to me. Omnipresence isn’t necessary to realise that Bacchus has a bag stuffed with documents and is as we speak, trying to join the dots to prove we killed Jonas and Ernest. If he’s lucky he’ll also uncover our family business and ruin us with that as well.”
Felicity began pacing the room, her anger real and increasing with every step. She grabbed the packet of cigarettes poking out of her handbag and shook out a cigarette spilling the remainder of the pack on the floor without noticing. Lighting it with a gold lighter, she inhaled, taking long drags using the smoke to try and calm herself. It wasn’t working.
“No one can tell me why Sanderson gave everything to one of Freddie’s acolytes. I still have to prove myself to that misogynistic psychopath Pablo, Jemima is proving to be very disappointing and Thrasher is an imbecile. Now you. A man I have looked up to since my teens and who has taught me everything I know about this business we are in.” The venom in Felicity exploded out as she screamed at the image in the mirror.
“Has returned from the dead to tell me we might have a problem? Have you become senile you doddering idiot?”
Felicity picked up a one kilo weight from the weight tree next to her and hurled it at the mirror smashing it into thousands of pieces. She sat down putting a foot on the chair opposite and lit another cigarette and stared at the ceiling; breathing hard.
The fracture face of Charles disappeared from the mirrors and was replaced by a youthful, attractive face with an odd expression, malevolence. The face looked out at Felicity and its expression changed to irritation and boredom and then back to pure malice.
“We are very similar you and I. You have problems, I have problems. You are surrounded by half-wits, as am I. You have an additional problem. Me. I need something doing. You are going to do it. That is what Charles was intimating in his incompetent way. I understand from him; that you respond to rewards. So I will reward success. You will arrange for the Home Secretary to be ruined and for that you can have anything, anything at all. Your enforcer is going to be very busy isn’t he?”
Felicity stared at the youthful face and said,
“Yes, he is.” Turning to Ernest she said,
“And now I need to know who it is who does our enforcing?” Helena was incredulous.
“You didn’t tell her? How can she run the business and keep it all together if all she has is a voice? Charles, tell her.”
Charles gave an embarrassed shrug as he looked at his granddaughter and then he told her.
Chapter 25
Freddie Aldhelm sat staring at his computer screen. His ear buds were firmly implanted and Handel’s Messiah was resonating through his body. He was so engrossed in the music he failed to hear his daughter bring him a cup of tea and leave it next to him on top of the two-drawer filing cabinet adjacent to his desk. He was jerked back to reality by the jar of the door closing. He tapped on the play icon on iTunes and turned Handel off. Back to the moment he thought and considered the blank screen that should have at least half of a sermon on. Today, he thought, his message should in some fashion involve ignorance is bliss. He smiled and then began a thirty-minute burst of typing that completed his sermon for Sunday.
Why, he wondered, was his niece Felicity still so concerned with William Bacchus’s inheritance? He acknowledged that Ernest Sanderson and before him his scientist brother had been thorns in the families side, but that was over. Ernest’s massive heart attack had been fortuitous for the family. Inappropriate, he thought, for a man of god to be suggesting that any death was a good thing, but this one had been fortuitous. Felicity was a very tough and resourceful woman, but she was served by a poor team. The solicitor she used, Thrasher, was a good example. More concerned with his own self-importance than providing good advice. She needed someone she could trust, someone to rely on to help push the company and all of its endeavours forward. Could he help? Perhaps ease her in the right direction? Felicity needs to see that the deaths of Jonas and Ernest Sanderson are ancient history and not something she need concern herself with.
Freddie sat staring at his computer, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair as he wrestled with how best to help his niece. Why, he wondered hadn’t he thought of this before? Picking up his mobile phone, he scrolled through the contacts and hit the auto-dial button.
“ Are you busy tomorrow? Excellent, I was thinking lunch if you fancy it.”
Putting down the telephone, he called from the office to his daughter, Sarah.
“We have company for lunch tomorrow, Jemima. Also I need you to become best friends with your cousin”
Sarah said as she entered the room, “I already get on well with Jemima, we went to lunch a couple of weeks ago.”
Freddie smiled and said,
“Good. I think she’d appreciate some support from a good friend.”
Chapter 26
Thrasher stared at his computer screen. William Bacchus. Why was William Bacchus chosen to become a very rich man? Why?
Rotating his head while rubbing his temples in a vain attempt to forestall the migraine that was increasing,
he decided that it was worth reviewing everything one last time before he went home. He wrote, ‘Did Ernest Sanderson know William or anyone connected to him?’ Drawing an arrow away from the sentence he wrote, ‘Angela Bacchus - tentative possible meeting, barristers chambers.’ Another arrow went to the right of the page, ‘DNA to prove paternity - how?’ Then in frustration, realising this was going nowhere, he drew a final arrow to the bottom left of the page, ‘Who cares?’ A weeks work, hundreds of pages of reports, interviews and supporting documentation, amounted to nothing.
Looking up at the office ceiling he made a strangled ‘Urgghh’ noise and said to the empty room,
“Felicity I haven’t a clue why Sanderson chose this vicar.” The office door opened and his PA, Siobhan, poked her head around the door,
“You okay Gerry? Sounded like you were in pain.”
“I am. This vicar thing is driving me mad.” Siobhan walked over behind him massaging his shoulders while reading the words on the screen. Moving her hands from his shoulders to his temples, she continued to rub and said,
“So you can’t discover why he received this enormous bequest? Why do you need to?”
Gerald answered with one word,
“ Felicity.” he reached forward and changed the screen to the email screen.
“Read that. Received on the day we had the reading of the will.”
From: Felicity Cortez
To: Gerald Thrasher
Subject: How to keep your job
I am prepared to give you one final chance to prove that you are not the moron that current evidence indicates that you are. Find out who Bacchus is, how he is connected to Sanderson and what danger his connection could pose for my family and company. Succeed and you keep your job and receive a token of my appreciation. Fail and I will fire you and ruin you.
Siobhan looked at the email in surprise.
”Would she?”
“With great pleasure. She hates me. When I first began doing bits of legal work for Charles he brought her to the office and instructed me to take her to lunch, as he was too busy. We had a pleasant lunch, but when we got back to the office Charles had left telling her to make her own way back. She was furious, cursing and screaming about her grandfather’s lack of respect for her. To mollify her I offered to drive her to her flat. When we got there she insisted I come and have a drink as recompense. As soon as we walked into the flat she jumped on me.”
Siobhan interrupted, “You screwed her? The ice queen?”
Gerald had the decency to look embarrassed.
“It was okay and I left feeling full of myself. The following day she came to the office without her grandfather, burst into an important client meeting, threw the clients out; and went berserk. Why hadn’t I called her? Did I just screw and run? Was that all she meant to me? I told her that it had been great fun, but I was married and happy that way.”
Gerald shook his head with a rueful smile on his lips at the memory.
“She was colder than I thought possible. She said if I ever even looked in her direction she would make it known I had raped her. Then she would get some of the more muscular Piccadilly boys to rape me. Did I understand? I thought she was mad and said so. I told her to get out of my office. Bad mistake. Three days later my London flat was broken into, trashed while I watched and then I was raped. Three or four times. When they had finished all they said was ‘Be careful who you cross next time.’”
Siobhan sat open mouthed, unsure if he was telling a story that would have a, ‘just joking’ tag or whether it was true. The expression on his face left her in no doubt.
“What did you do? What did the police say?”
“The police said nothing, I didn’t report it. The following morning I limped into the office and carried on as usual. Later that day she came in again with her grandfather. This time she gave me a very hard look and then ignored me. Felicity is not someone you mess with.”
Gerald sat looking at the screen of his laptop. Reading between the lines, he knew that William Bacchus was a dead man walking. If he could prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Bacchus was no threat to the family, just lucky, he might survive. Might. If not, Bacchus had days left before the kill order went out. Did it matter? It wouldn’t be the first time or, he was sure, the last time that he would be involved in one of Felicities‘accidents.’ The harshness of the word killing and it’s connotations had started the use of euphemisms by Charles. His attempts, Gerald remembered, had been more comical than effective. He was a man who believed in calling a spade a shovel. If you were killing someone, you were killing them. But, wiser council had prevailed and the phrase ‘erasures’ was coined.
“Siobhan can you call the Ladrones brothers, I have a little something that I need doing. Tell them to go to Sherborne in Dorset again and call me for an address. They need to do a little photography and send me the results. Usual rates plus ten per cent. Speed and absolute discretion is vital, no one must realise that anyone has been into the address, ok? The key is not if he is related, but what he has been told and what he has to do with that information. The connection itself is irrelevant”
Felicity didn’t need to know anything yet. She only liked good news, or bad news that she could use to her advantage. This came under neither of those headings.
***
Jemima lay on her back staring up at the bedroom ceiling with a look of wonder on her face. Ben had left twenty minutes before to get to the bookshop in time to open up and since then she had just lain there. They had spent the night together, wrapped around each other, talking, kissing, caressing and making love. This was the first time she had spent the night with a man. The first time she had woken up with anyone who she was sad to see walk out of the door and excited at the prospect of seeing again. They had agreed she would come in later for coffee and they could decide what to do that evening.
First though she needed to talk to Uncle Alex and contact the coroners office to arrange a copy of the death certificate for Jonas Sanderson. Picking up her iPhone, she dialled the number and then set her phone’s record app to record. As Alexander Cortez’s assistant answered his private line she tapped the record icon and began recording both sides of the conversation
“Alexander Cortez’s office how can I help you?”
“Hi Debbie, it’s Jemima is Uncle Alex in?”
“Hi Jemima, yes he’s just back from the house and is in for a while as his lunch meeting was rescheduled. Give me a moment and I’ll transfer you.”
The sound of canned hold music filled the void as Jemima waited for her Uncle to come on the line. She knew she had better access to her Uncle since she had taken the time to cultivate Debbie. A couple of lunches, a trip to the theatre and a brief, torrid affair had guaranteed her access to everything. Remaining friends with her lovers had been a policy that had ensured she was as well connected as Felicity, but with people who wanted to help rather than helped out of fear.
“Hi Jemima, I’ll put you through. Nice to hear from you. Bye.”
“Jemima, how are you? Long time no speak.” Jemima groaned. She could see him now sat at his large desk in an oversized leather swivel chair, flicking through a news website, or his outstanding emails, not registering what was being said on the other end of the line. Debbie said that on all but personal calls she had to listen on the extension in the office taking notes or recording the calls just to be sure he knew what had been said to him.
“Hi Uncle Alex, well thank you. You?” Not waiting for him to answer she ploughed straight on.
“Just a quickie, I’m tying up some loose ends for Felicity on this endless problem with Sanderson. She can’t recollect if there was an autopsy on Jonas Sanderson. There wasn’t on his brother, she made sure of that. Was Jonas dealt with in the same way?”
She heard the clicking of his tongue on his teeth as he thought back to the night in nineteen seventy-three before answering.
“I’m ninety nine per cent sure there wasn’t. It was my laun
ch party, you know. Launched into the maelstrom of Conservative politics for the good of the Cortez clan. The whole Cortez clan together. Father had decided that tonight Jonas Sanderson would stop being a problem. I’m sure he wouldn’t have allowed any interference by the authorities. Why would they have been interested? He had a heart attack” Laughing he continued, “A cocaine induced heart attack, but a heart attack nonetheless. The finest Cortez marching powder. I know Felicity arranged for a very rapid cremation of the brother and I’m sure father had Jonas turned to ash within a few hours.”
“Thanks Uncle Alex. Jemima said, struggling to hide the shock from her voice. Cortez marching powder? Cortez cocaine?
“No incriminating reports to deal with. Wonderful. You said the whole Cortez clan, was dad with you that night?”
A chuckle and then a sneering response,
“No, just the players. The ones who father respected.” Jemima heard the sound of a door being opened in the background and the muted voice of her uncle’s PA, Debbie. Her uncle hung up, leaving her sitting listening to nothing. Moments later her iPhone rang. She saw the number of her uncles House of Commons office and assumed that technology had interrupted them.
“Jemima?” Debbie asked, “Sorry about Alex hanging up on you, but another urgent call came through that he couldn’t avoid. I just wanted to explain. Your sister is such a bitch isn’t she? Anyway next time you’re around give me a call and maybe we can have dinner, okay? Bye then.”
Jemima realised that she hadn’t said a word in the entire twenty-second call. Why did Felicity want to speak to Alex? Would he mention their call a moment ago?
***
What, Felicity wondered, was Jemima doing in Sherborne? No results had been forthcoming in two weeks. Now she was seeing the cripple, an enthusiastic romp with an attractive woman should have had him falling over himself with gratitude. Hard on Jemima having to screw the cripple, but a generous bauble should help. Nothing to report, she’d been told. Not a peep out of him. It wasn’t good enough. Nowhere near good enough.
Bacchus and Sanderson (Deceased) Page 19
