by Mark Raven
Resisting the temptation to fall asleep, I watched the receptionist make some perplexed calls. After a while she stood and sashayed over to me.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘He’s out of the country, in a meeting, on the golf course, with his accountants, or all of the above.’
She looked at me strangely.
‘Mr Carmody will see you now, sir. I will take you up. It is only one floor. Are you able to use the stairs?’
I had another octogenarian moment.
‘If I take them one at a time,’ I replied.
We took the lift to the Mezzanine floor. It was scattered with beanbags in green, red, orange faded by the sunlight from the high windows. Games consoles lay discarded on the floor, screens blinked on the walls—no, 24 hour news up here—there was a pool table, air-hockey, a pinball machine, an old Space Invaders unit and so on. All of it decidedly retro.
It was deserted. I thought of the PiTech whizzkids at Sunny Prajapati’s memorial service.
‘Playtime over?’ I asked the receptionist.
She looked at me dryly.
‘It’s never over,’ she said.
I liked her. She had a good line in put-downs. She needed it, I suppose, with her looks.
‘Most of them are out enjoying the sunshine,’ she added. ‘Or at lunch.’
She left her words hanging in the air and strode through them like perfume.
The cafeteria was at the back of the building, facing north, so it was not as hot here despite the floor-to-ceiling windows. They looked out over the parkland and a ruined folly on the hill. Inside the seating area was as big as a football pitch: white tables, white chairs, minimalist art on the white walls, it only needed Swedish meatballs and it could have been IKEA.
‘There’s Mr Carmody over there,’ the receptionist said.
Vincent Carmody sat alone by the window with a tray of food in front of him. The receptionist waved informally at her CEO. The place was full of contradictions. He waved back and gestured for me to join him.
‘Can I get you some food or refreshments?’ she asked. ‘It’s all free.’
‘One of the perks of the job?’
‘Mr Carmody doesn’t believe in charging people to come to work.’
It sounded pat, like she had learnt it at her induction, but the sentiment seemed genuine enough.
‘I’ll just go and grab a coffee, I said. ‘Just to be polite.’
‘I’ll bring it across. What type?’
‘Instant,’ I said. ‘Nescafe, water, milk, two sugars that sort of thing.’
‘How exotic,’ she said. ‘I’ll do my best.’
I limped over to Carmody. He was taking a call on a Bluetooth device tucked behind his ear. He held it there like a Bee Gee trying to reach a Scouse falsetto. If he was surprised by my appearance, he didn’t show it. He shook my hand without getting up, and continued speaking. In Russian. He gestured for me to sit down before turning in his seat to look out of the window.
Carmody was wearing a pink open-necked shirt that accented a deep tan from his throat to the top of his shaven head. I guessed he was early to mid forties and attended a gym regularly—on the days he wasn’t doing triathlons. Any fat on his stomach was compacted behind ridges of muscle that pressed against his pink shirt like wet sand.
The coffee arrived. The receptionist stalked away. I sipped with the side of my mouth that still worked. I didn’t know what the coffee was, but it wasn’t Nescafe. The call ended abruptly without valedictions. Vincent Carmody focused on me.
‘That all you’re having? Get yourself some food. It’s all free.’
‘So I’ve been told. You don’t believe in charging people to come to work.’
He smiled without the light in his eyes changing. ‘Or my visitors, Mr Becket.’
I resolved to be polite for the time being.
‘Thanks for seeing me.’
‘Always pleased to meet a local hero.’
‘So, you know what happened to me?’
‘And Mr Janovitz. He works for us from time to time. How is he, by the way?’
‘I think they call it a ‘minimally conscious state’,’ I said.
‘Not a full coma then?’ he looked me hard in the eyes and saw what he was looking for. ‘You did what you could.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Yes, well, if it’s any consolation I have beaten myself up on this sort of thing before, too. The better option is the coma, any day.’
I recalled his army record and the suggestion from Janovitz that Carmody had been in the SAS.
‘The country is going to the dogs,’ he added. ‘Nowhere is safe these days. Not even Chichester. These random attacks...’
‘It wasn’t random.’
He sighed like he had also seen that sort of thing before. The paranoia of victims.
‘Believe me if it wasn’t random,’ he said, ‘they would have chosen another place for it. Town centre like that, too many variables.’
‘They wanted it to appear random. That’s their MO.’
Again, that stare.
‘Interesting,’ he said, but left it at that. He didn’t say which part he found interesting: the facts of the case or my many delusions. I let him muse on it, and went on.
‘I also wanted to thank you for paying my client. I know you didn’t have to...’
‘We most definitely had to. Sunny made a commitment—perhaps he shouldn’t have from the company account—and we had to honour it. My finance team never brought the matter to me.’
‘Understandable.’
‘Yes, understandable. But I pay them to think as well as save me money. However, it is all sorted now, I trust?’
‘Yes, and for you? Now the boat has been delivered...’
His face went blank. I knew it was a trick intelligence trainers teach you. Either that, or he really hadn’t a clue what I was talking about.
‘The boat,’ I said. ‘Did it arrive okay?’
Now his look suggested that my bang on the head was worse than he thought. ‘Haven’t the foggiest. I assume someone’s sorting it out.’
I could see that, in his head at least, he had moved onto the next meeting. I pushed my chair back and stood to go.
‘Well, I'm sorry I interrupted your call. Good news from MoEx, anyway.’
He looked up. ‘You speak Russian?’
‘Enough to get by. I did a stint with Interpol when I was with the Met.’
‘When?’
‘2006-8.’
He smiled, ‘Interesting times.’
He waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. There was no point. For some reason, I had a feeling he knew all about me, anyway. There was no point heading up a defence contractor if you couldn’t find out about people.
‘I will walk you to the door,’ he said.
The cafeteria was almost empty now. Out in the mezzanine, there were a few people lounging on the beanbags playing computer games, or recharging their creativity in other ways. They paid their boss absolutely no attention.
‘So PiTech was floated on the Moscow Stock Exchange?’ I asked.
‘No, no, no. That’s our subsidiary. Just called ‘Pi’, but as in the symbol. That’s how we came to the attention of Vassiliov in the first place.’
‘I thought the failed take-over and Sunny’s death would have been a drag on your value?’
‘We are not floated in this country. But our subsidiary’s value went up because we resisted Vassiliov. They think a higher bidder will come in.’
‘That was the plan all along?’
‘Heavens, no! I was against the merger from day one. It was our Indian investors and Sunny of course.’
‘Sunny?’ I asked. ‘He was for the merger?’
He didn’t answer until we were in the lift.
‘Sunny wanted to cash in. His old man had died and there was no need to carry on. He could have the sort of life he always wanted. Good luck to him.’
‘Sailing.’
‘Among other things.’
‘And you were split on the matter?’
‘Split is the wrong word. We disagreed, yes. But we had not fallen out over it. It was business. What you need to understand about Sunny is that he had not one iota of business sense in that great brain of his. Fundamentally he didn’t know his arse from his elbow.’
‘Nicely put,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you didn’t say that at his memorial service.’
The lift doors opened. Several faces stared in. Carmody pressed the button to close the doors. He kept his finger there.
‘What’s going on here, Mr Becket?’ His voice had gone hard and deadly serious. It was perhaps the way he used to speak to his NCOs when they got out of line. It only served to provoke me further.
‘I think there’s a link between Sunny’s disappearance and the murder of Sir Simeon Marchant, the man who sold him the boat.’
He looked away.
‘If you had any concerns you should have raised them with the police. Or at Sunny’s inquest.’
‘I missed it,’ I said acidly. ‘I was in hospital.’
‘I’m sure there’s still time,’ he said. ‘If you had any evidence of wrongdoing.’
‘Why did you feel it necessary to put Sunny under surveillance? For his safety perhaps?’
Carmody laughed, giving me a look that said ‘nice try.’ Somehow I had played my hand wrong. He knew I was only testing the waters. He could see I had nothing. He took his finger off the lift button. It dinged.
‘PiTech did not put its own boss under surveillance, Mr Becket. Other people might have, of course. You see dear old Sunny liked to play the field.’
The lift doors opened. The lobby was empty and the receptionists were making a sustained effort not to look our way. Vincent Carmody lowered his voice.
‘That’s another thing I didn’t mention at his memorial service.’
And the lift doors closed on him.
Back at the car, I asked Meg if I could stay at her place in London that night. She asked what was going on. I said I needed time to recuperate.
‘You're not getting any funny ideas, are you Thomas?’
‘Not the sort you are thinking about.’
I assumed silence was agreement. Without exchanging another word, we drove up past Gatwick to the M25. We missed the rush hour and drove down the M4 past Heathrow into west London just as the traffic was beginning to build. At the flat, Meg called the hospital to say she was back earlier than expected and please could she have some of her leave back. Then she went out to buy some provisions. I offered to help but she told me to rest. I presumed she wanted to be on her own to ring Hammonde. I was pleased. It was not a conversation I particularly wanted to overhear.
She had been with him for over a year now. Although they had not moved in together, I assumed it was only a matter of time. After all, she had been with him in the States while he presented to a conference of other psychoanalysts. You couldn’t get any more committed than that.
It must have seriously pissed off Hammonde that Meg had come running to my bedside. That thought alone made it almost worthwhile getting beaten within an inch of my life.
After Meg left, I left it several minutes, put the door on the latch and nipped downstairs. The car was parked in a square outside the flat. It was in a secure enough area between the Edgware Road and Kensington. Several rundown hotels traded off the address, but it also meant the place was well covered by CCTV. Meg’s flat was in a modern block, probably late Sixties with floor-to-ceiling windows. I could see right into her kitchen and living room, as I knew from the one occasion, to my shame, I had followed her and Hammonde there, my mind full of evil thoughts. I looked around a bit. All other cars had residents’ permits. No black Range Rovers in sight.
I sat in the Spider’s passenger seat. My case notes were in the glove compartment next to my tobacco. I rolled a cigarette—the first in five days, I calculated—and read through the notes again. Then I added with an unsteady hand:
Meeting with V Carmody:
Suggestion that wife had SP under surveillance. How to check?
Knew what ‘MO’ meant in relation to the mugging.
Modus Operandi of the ‘muggers’ is to use public spaces.
‘Town centre like that, too many variables’ said VC.
Question then: how to minimise the variables?
Involve local youth. (Weak point: can testify against you.)
Felt VC was interviewing me. Losing touch?
I stopped before it became a diary entry. Too much introspection these days, Becket, I thought. Too much by half.
The next day I woke in Meg’s spare bed. Even her box-room looked better cared for than my flat. There was a pile of art books we had bought together. British art mainly: Turner, Constable, Bacon, Freud, Stanley Spencer. Coffee table books, glossies made for display, tucked away in a corner of the spare room. Typical no-nonsense Meg.
Lying there, I remembered why I didn’t like staying with Meg; it reminded me of what I had lost. Although we had shared a much larger house back then, there was always a sense of order about it; something that would magically evaporate, even when she went away for as little as a few days. What this said about me, I did not know. I pondered this as I lay in bed staring at the white ceiling, my head throbbing, and my stitches itching.
The bandage had slipped from my head in the night but luckily the dressing had held firm. I was relieved there was no blood on the freshly laundered sheets. It was early, so I dressed as quietly as I could and tried to leave without waking my hostess.
But I was out of luck. Meg caught me at the flat door and ordered me back inside for breakfast.
I watched her, as I had the night before preparing dinner. It was like a work of art. I enjoyed it for its own beauty and the sense of stability it gave me. But I knew it was an illusion; knew that it would not and could not last. I knew that the night before when she said I needed to face up to myself. Why did I get so angry? Why did I lose control? It is only people who are very close to you who think they have the right to say such things, although knowing Meg she probably said it to her more recalcitrant patients. She was stronger than me. I accepted defeat and said I needed to sleep. When I had heard her bedroom door close, I had nipped downstairs for another cigarette, rehearsing all the things I should have said, resolving to leave as early as I could in the morning.
Now, watching her butter some toast, I asked, ‘What do you know about Rohypnol, Meg?’
The question wasn’t as strange as it seems. Time was when I’d quiz my wife on all sorts of drugs and their criminal usage. Meg took it in her stride.
‘It’s a brand name for a particular genus of benzodiazepines—opiates to you. Why do you ask?’
‘Would it be picked up if I had been given it?’
‘When?’ She put the plate in front of me. ‘Have you been date-raped, Thomas?’
‘I keep thinking back to the mugging. How I couldn’t fight back, how I couldn’t even think...’
‘Someone slipped you a Mickey Finn, is that what you mean? This man Janovitz. Why on earth would he do that?’
‘I don’t know. I just wondered if it would be picked up at the hospital. They seemed to know exactly how much alcohol I had consumed.’
‘Well, they would have run a common toxicology screen. That would have picked up alcohol, THC—that’s your cannabis—amphetamines as well, and the major opiates. If they were looking for the presence of Rohypnol in your bloods then they would have found it.’
‘And if they weren’t looking?’
‘They probably wouldn’t.’
Chapter Fifteen
It was a beautiful morning. The continuing dry weather and warm September sun made London seem a more exotic city than it really was. On the Edgware Road, men in brown suits sat outside cafes smoking from hookahs on brass stands. I put the Spider’s lid down and drove north. I was going home via the Alconbury Estate. As far as I understood my own motivati
on, it was probably the reason I had asked to stay at Meg’s. I had to check something out in person, when I knew a phone call would not be enough. But the blood test was a bonus. Meg said she’d take the sample into the lab when she went on shift that afternoon. Sometimes things just fall into place, I thought.
Before I left the flat, Meg had changed the dressing on my forehead. She fingered through my hair like a mother looking for nits: Your scalp is absolutely full of cuts, Thomas. I had forgotten what it was to have such intimacy in my life. The ownership of another human being, where they touch your body as if it were their own. But I didn’t dare to reach out and touch her, as she stood so close to me in her kitchen. I breathed in her scent and contented myself with that.
I shook the cobweb of thoughts from my head and pulled into the Alconbury Estate. I parked outside the Community Office in Coolidge, soon to be Obama, Court. It was still too early and the place was closed: metal shutters and warnings of Smart Water inside. I decided to wait until someone turned up, hopefully it would be Reuben Symonds.
The newsagent next door was doing a brisk trade in lottery tickets and tabloids. Construction workers in hardhats came out with pre-packed sandwiches. Everyone had a glance at the Spider and the idiot with the bandaged head sitting in it, hood down like he was on Brighton front, smoking a roll-up.
The first comment I got was from an old man pushing a shopping trolley crammed full of black bin bags. He advised me not to hang around too long in the area if I valued my possessions. I thanked him for his concern. The sun was up behind the flats now and it was hot on my forehead. I thought about putting up the sunroof but that would have defeated the object of me sitting there in full view of Presidents Kennedy, Coolidge, Carter and Lincoln. The estate was waking up: the canyon calls of large apartment blocks, the resounding clank and echo of bins being emptied, a paperboy free-wheeling past staring at me open-mouthed. I stared back: newspaper deliveries in this part of London, things must be looking up.
A few minutes later the boy came back, without his bag. Instead he had another youth on the back of his BMX, standing up, his hands in his friend’s shoulders. They circled me like a baby shark.
