“I have a slide deck,” she told the committee. “I just need to connect my laptop.”
She fiddled with her computer for a few seconds, and Rose ran over to connect a cable to the projector’s side.
A picture of Spencer House came up on the screen, shot from farther away than Christopher’s attorneys had shot theirs.
Gen’s picture showed the flagpole, where the Union Jack flew along with the banner of the earldom, showing that the earl was in residence when the picture was taken.
Looking at the British flag, Gen wondered how she could have missed what Arthur’s back tattoo was for so very long. The distinctive blue triangles and red crossed stripes etched into his skin should have been a, well, a red flag.
Just to emphasize that she was right about everything and Christopher’s interpretation of everything was wrong, she leaned over the desk and told Ruckus, “Lay down.”
The terrier dropped to the floor and laid his head on his white paws.
“Good boy.” Gen straightened and looked at the committee.
Beside her, Arthur was watching. To anyone else, he probably looked just as relaxed as before, but the slightest tremor of one of his knees told Gen that Arthur was so tense he might scale the walls.
All right, here we go. Gen needed to say what needed to be said without saying anything at all.
Truly, she needed to be the most British she had ever been.
Gen sucked in a deep breath and said, “Listen to me carefully. Listen to what I’m not saying because I can’t say it. Are you listening?”
The committee members glanced at each other uneasily but leaned in.
“Okay,” Gen said. “I want you to forget the interpretations of the pictures that Mr. Christopher Finch-Hatten’s lawyers have told you. We need to look at the real data, some pictures, and then you need to draw your own conclusions about what you see. I can’t tell you what to think. Got that?” She looked around at the committee members who looked even more wary. “I can’t tell you what to think.”
Baroness Honeycutt sat back and looked sharply at Arthur, her brown eyes frankly evaluating him.
Arthur had his arms still crossed over his broad chest and was watching Gen from the corners of his silvery eyes.
Gen asked him, “How long has your family supported England?”
“Over a thousand years,” he said.
“Has there ever been a traitor in your family?”
He shrugged. “A small branch picked the wrong side in the War of the Roses, but eventually the Lancastrians were folded into the kingdom. Not traitors so much as they chose the wrong English monarch amongst English monarchs.”
“And everyone else?”
Arthur looked directly at her, his silver-blue eyes uncomfortably solemn. “Loyal,” he said. “Loyal to a fault. Loyal until their untimely deaths in the War and every war that Britain has ever fought.”
“And we’re at war now,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I think that’s quite clear.”
“And your family has always been loyal?”
“Every single Finch-Hatten and Spencer has been and is utterly loyal to the Crown and Britain.”
“And that includes you,” she clarified.
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Arthur.” Gen used his name instead of his title to emphasize the man, not the position.
She looked back at the committee. “No matter what else has been said, Arthur Finch-Hatten, Lord Severn, would never, ever betray Britain. Britain is in his DNA. He has been absolutely loyal. He is absolutely loyal. He is loyal to the ideals and values and legacy of Britain, of tolerance, of fairness, and of equality.”
Over on the side, Lord Butterfield and Lady Hart exchanged a glance, looked at Lord Coatham who sat between them, and then back at each other. Lord Coatham was staring at his fingers as he twiddled them, but Lord Butterfield and Lady Hart were having a whole conversation about him and about that night at Spencer House with only a few touches of their eyes.
Yes, Arthur had stood up for what was right over that dinner at Spencer House. Arthur had defended Britain and all its citizens.
Excellent.
She sipped her water and checked on Ruckus. He was snoring.
“So we’ve established Arthur Finch-Hatten’s loyalty to Britain. Now let’s look at the photos, shall we?”
She tapped her computer space bar. The next few photos were the incriminating ones, the ones showing Arthur talking and laughing with dictators, terrorists, and oligarchs.
She had, of course, cropped the pictures so that the word TREASON! was gone.
Each tap and flip of the pictures was crisp and deliberate. She didn’t race through them, but she didn’t agonize over them, either.
“Look at these pictures,” Gen said. “Take in what you’re seeing. Just what you’re seeing. Not what anyone has told you. Just what is in those pictures. You see Lord Severn talking with some of the world’s most powerful leaders, many of whom oppose Britain’s policies, ideals, and aims.”
Some members of the committee fidgeted. This part was uncomfortable.
Baroness Honeycutt was staring straight at Arthur from her center of the head table, watching him. She might have already figured it out.
Lady Bazalgette, beside the Baroness, scanned the pictures, the room, the committee, and Arthur, noting each with sharp skill. She might have figured it out, too.
Gen told them, “Don’t listen to what the newspapers say, how they interpret all this. Think about what you know about Arthur, the man ultimately loyal to the Crown and to Britain. He was pictured with all those people, world leaders and terrorists, because he has access to them.”
She paused, watching the committee members.
“Very few people have access to world leaders, to wealthy oligarchs, and to the noble classes of Europe and the world like Arthur does, because of how he grew up. He grew up at an outrageously expensive boarding school in Switzerland, where most of the people turned out to have the work ethic of a Quaalude-stoned sloth, among the next generation of these people. He grew up walking into their homes, sleeping in their guest rooms, and eating at their tables. He was almost invisible, just another rich, idle son of an English aristocrat, someone who was automatically included in those circles of power.”
Gen glared at the committee. “That kind of access is very valuable to certain sectors of the British government, especially in someone who is, ultimately, utterly loyal to Britain.”
At that, most of the committee members got it. They looked sharply at the screen glowing with a picture of Arthur meeting with a foreign dictator and then peered at Arthur himself.
Gen pressed onward. “Lord Severn has secrets,” she said, “secrets from everyone, things that he cannot tell anyone, things that I can’t tell you, either. However, you should be able to piece things together. There’s one more piece of the puzzle, however, one more thing that you should ask yourself. A few minutes ago, I told you that Spencer House couldn’t support itself and that Arthur had two sources of unaccounted-for income. One was from his mother’s legacy that had been well invested. The other one, I’ll tell about now.”
Baroness Honeycutt and Lady Bazalgette were already sitting back in their chairs.
Other committee members looked less impressed.
Gen clicked her computer.
Banking statements for the Spencer House accounts rolled up the movie screen.
She told the committee, “All right, stay with me here. This is what we call ‘forensic accounting,’ which I’ve had to employ because my client won’t tell me his secrets because he’s too damn loyal even if it is to save his fortune, which is billions of pounds,” and maybe his life.
Gen walked the committee members through several layers of what was, essentially, money laundering.
Arthur had set up nested shell companies and linked investment accounts to disguise the fact that his extravagant lifestyle was funded by several anonymous entities tha
t were actually fronts for the British government.
Arthur had been receiving a monthly salary commensurate with that of a middle-ranking government employee since he had graduated from Oxford.
His expense account paid for nearly all of his travel on the earldom’s private plane except for a trip to California a few months before and some trips to Africa over the years. It also paid for some of the upkeep on his London flat, an impressive array of computer equipment at that location, and some security options for the same flat. Even his bi-monthly plane trips between London and Gloucestershire had been expensed.
On the screen, Gen projected a map of England with dots over London and Gloucestershire, and then two buildings grew from those dots.
The first was the Secret Intelligence Service building in Vauxhall that looked like a teal, art deco Mayan temple.
The other was The Doughnut, an enormous steel torus of a building in Benhall, Gloucestershire that housed the Government Communications Headquarters and all their many computers that spied on every corner of the internet and the dark web.
By the end of it, Arthur was staring straight ahead, his eyes unmoving and fixed, staring at the middle of the wood veneer surrounding the head table. He didn’t look at any of the committee members.
Gen asked him, “Did I miss anything?”
Arthur said, “No,” but he didn’t look at her.
“All right,” Gen said to the committee, “so that’s my closing argument. Lord Severn never was a depraved and debauched drunk, he hasn’t been frittering away the earldom’s finances, and he’s not a traitor. Arthur Finch-Hatten is an upstanding British gentleman with a carefully crafted cover identity, a diligent conservator of a British legacy, and a patriot. I only have one other question to ask.”
The committee members rumbled a bit, muttering to each other.
Gen turned to the claimant’s table. “Mr. Christopher Finch-Hatten, just where did you get what must be classified photographs of my client, and why did you publish classified documents to the public, which blew the cover of a—” Damn it, think fast. “—a person employed by the British government in a clandestine capacity?”
Treason, Again
AT the other table, Christopher Finch-Hatten raised his open hands and sputtered. “My private investigator—”
“Bullhockey.” Gen strode over to the table and leaned right in front of him, bracing her hands on the wood. She stared him right in his dishwater gray eyes. “That Saab-driving dumbshit couldn’t investigate his way out of his own ass.”
Some committee members gasped. Some chuckled.
It was a good thing they weren’t in a real court just then. She would probably get cited by the Bar Council for language unbecoming or disrespect to the Crown or whatever.
But sometimes you have to call a dumbshit, a dumbshit.
She said, “That so-called private investigator tried to bribe me to drop Arthur’s case. He said that you told him to. That’s tampering. It’s interfering. It’s illegal.” She was pretty sure it was illegal in Britain, too.
Christopher said, “I did no such thing.”
Gen glared at Christopher’s lawyer. “It’s unethical as shit, too. You’re gonna need to talk to the Bar Council, aren’t ya?”
Orval scowled. “I didn’t have anything to do with his private investigators and advised against using them.”
“Yeah. Right.” It was exactly the sort of thing that Orval would recommend, the scuzzball. Gen turned back to Christopher. “You’re in a lot of trouble, Christopher. You blew the cover of someone working for the government in covert operations. You had him followed to Paris when he was on official business and took pictures of him and published them, which has endangered him and his sources. You committed treason.”
Christopher’s eyes were so wide that his eyeballs looked to be in danger of popping out of his head, but his posture suffered. He cringed in his chair, curling his spine. “I did not do that! I would never do that! I had nothing to do with those pictures! I do not know where they came from and did not give them to the newspapers!”
“Oh, bull-sheet. When you threatened me at the Hope Ball a few weeks ago, you said that you had pictures that would destroy Arthur. I thought you meant drugs or prostitutes or something stupid like that, but you meant these pictures that were taken over the last several years. Now, Christopher, where did you get those classified pictures?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Arthur was watching her, his face completely impassive, his silvery eyes clear and focused, utterly inscrutable and very British.
“I have more than one private investigator working on the case.” Christopher stared down at the table and his hands. He started flicking his fingers, something he had never done the several times Gen had seen him. He crunched over so far that his forehead nearly touched his hands. “I have lots of private investigators. Dozens of private investigators.”
Dozens?
Gen smelled the bullshit of exaggeration.
Christopher cringed farther down into his chair. “I had dozens of people following him every minute. I have thousands of pictures of him. No one had to give me those pictures.”
His posture and his exaggerations were his giveaway, Gen realized. Christopher was outright lying.
She knew how to handle this. Arthur had taught her well.
Gen asked Christopher, “What would you say, if I said that someone saw a person give the pictures directly to you?”
“I don’t know how they would have seen that,” Christopher said, still staring at his hands. “The pictures were on a flash drive, and it was in private. They couldn’t have known that the flash drive held pictures.”
Gen held onto the table so she wouldn’t stumble backward. “When was this?”
“You tell me. You said someone saw me.”
She squinted at him, making herself look like a mean-lady hardass lawyer instead of the stupid-newbie pupil barrister that she was. “This is your one chance to come clean, Christopher. You blew the cover of a loyal British government employee. After you’ve been arrested for treason, the MI5 will be asking the questions.”
MI5 is Britain’s federal police force, much like the FBI in Gen’s head.
She continued, “You are under oath. Are you going to add perjury to the charge of treason?” Gen wasn’t sure the House of Lords committee meeting counted as a court quite enough to make a perjury charge stick, but she was shooting every gun she had. If Christopher’s timid-ass lawyer didn’t object, she was going to pound him harder. “Now, lest you are also charged with treason and perjury, who gave you the classified pictures that you published?”
“A man came to see me,” Christopher said. Sweat drips dotted his pasty forehead. “He made an appointment at my practice and gave me a USB drive with the pictures on it. Then he left.”
Score! “What did he look like?”
“He was a late-middle-age, thin, white man. About six-foot, lean body mass, thinning white hair.”
“Name?” she demanded.
“Milford Bentley.”
“Bentley?” Gen’s knees failed, but her grip on the table kept her steady. “Are you sure?”
He hung his head lower. “When I win this lawsuit, when I gain control of the estate, I’m going to buy a Bentley. I thought it was a sign.”
Gen looked over at Arthur.
At the defense’s table, Rose and Lee looked a little confused.
Arthur’s expression hadn’t changed in the slightest. His solid stare belied the fact that he might have been betrayed by the government he had given his life to.
But it didn’t mean anything. Anyone could have used the name Bentley. It didn’t necessarily mean that Arthur had been betrayed.
It might be the most unlikely of coincidences.
A highly unlikely coincidence.
Gen proceeded, “Had you ever met Milford Bentley before?”
“No,” Christopher said.
“Have you met
with him since then?”
“No. I never saw him again.”
“Or communicated with him in any way?”
Christopher didn’t answer.
“You’re still under oath,” she reminded him.
“He emailed or texted more information, such as where Arthur was going to be so that I could tell the investigator to follow him, like to that strip club in Paris.”
Only MI6 would have known that. “You knew ahead of time where Arthur Finch-Hatten had meetings with sources?”
“Yes,” Christopher said.
“And then you sent someone there to photograph him so you could expose him and the sources.”
“I didn’t know he was working for the British government! I thought that he was a drunken degenerate wasting the wealth of the earldom and committing treason! I wanted to save it from him!” Sweat dripped down Christopher’s temple and soaked into his brown hair.
Gen bent her elbows to get closer to where Christopher crouched behind the table so she could stare right into his pale, weak eyes. “Now that you know Arthur Finch-Hatten is not a ‘drunken degenerate’ nor ‘wasting the wealth of the earldom’ nor ‘a traitor,’ now that you know his cautious investing and government expense account have been supporting an insolvent estate, now that the basis for your case is disproven and you obviously don’t have the money to support the estate, will you withdraw your lawsuit?”
Gen glared at him, her teeth bared in a snarl, the very stereotype of a pit bull lawyer.
She loved every second of it.
Christopher stammered, “I—I don’t know. Orval?”
Orval Ainsley frowned, scowling at her.
If Orval had taken Christopher’s case on a no-win, no-fee basis, he stood to lose a hell of a lot of money in billable hours if Christopher withdrew the case. Christopher was still on the hook for the private investigators and anything else stupid like that, but Horace Lindsey had noted that he thought Christopher’s lawyer had gambled on no-win, no-fee. Part of Horace’s delaying strategy had been to increase the pain for both the client and the lawyer until one of them blinked.
But would Orval counsel his client to quit a case when it meant he wouldn’t get paid?
Hard Liquor: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #2 Page 31
