‘That much we know,’ I told the Mayfields. ‘That much we can prove. The rest is what we believe. You seem to take after your father, Ludmila, rather than Ondrej, because you seem to have sat on your hands for five years and watched the decline accelerate. By last year the business was, in effect, insolvent, so you decided on one last gamble, one grand scheme that really was worthy of your grandfather in its scope and its imagination. You did some research and you found some worthless land in the south of Spain. You invented the persona of Lidia Bromberg and, as her, set up Hotel Casino d’Amuseo SA, a company based in Luxembourg. Then, through the Banovsky Corporation, you instructed the chief officer of Energi to invest its last twenty million euros, telling the banks that at last you had a diversification strategy.
‘You commissioned designs for the project, and then, as dark-haired little Lidia Bromberg, you approached the owner of the land, Emil Caballero, an essentially greedy man, with good political connections, and you showed him a vision. He went for it and, as a bonus, offered you a mountainside that his wife’s grandmother owns as an add-on ski resort.
‘With all your preparations made, you recruited Frank McGowan, your husband’s old friend, to sell the grand design to would-be investors. You didn’t do it directly, though. You found another convicted fraudster, Hermann Gresch, and he brought Frank into the operation, so that you and Frank could never be seen to have come face to face.’
‘Nonsense,’ Ludmila growled.
‘I don’t think so. The last meeting, in Lithuania, was between Frank, Gresch and a Canadian named Sebastian Loman, whom you had hired as security for the operation. Once it was all set up, they were given new identities. Frank became Roy Urquhart and Hermann became George Macela, those people being listed as executives on the website, with another man, Alastair Rowland, as the supposed chairman.
‘Frank did incredibly well as a salesman,’ I went on, in full flow. ‘He used the list of wealthy contacts he’d ripped off from the Cinq Pistes ski resort and built up an international network. In more or less a year, he had raised another fifty-seven million in funding for the project. Everything was going well. But there was one bloody great bluebottle in the ointment. Frank wasn’t on your team. When he was in jail he had been recruited by Interpol, through the security service,’ I looked at Justin, ‘for which you are now responsible, Home Secretary. A couple of months ago, he reported to his controller in London that the time had come to pull the plug on the operation and round everybody up before the money disappeared. Macela was in the process of killing himself through a drug addiction, and an investigation would surely uncover Rowland’s identity. But Frank was betrayed: there was a mole within Interpol, and word got back to you, Ludmila. Whatever you paid the person who tipped you off, it was worth it. If the scheme had collapsed, the money would have been returned to the investors. Your role in it all might never have been exposed, but Energi would have got its twenty million back, and that wasn’t what you wanted. The company would have crashed anyway, to the tune of over fifty million euros, and the French bankers would have pursued your family trust for the loss, since your unfortunate dad, Pavol, had guaranteed it way back. It’ll still go down, and they’ll do that anyway, but it won’t matter to you, Ludo, for you’ve got another fortune salted away.’ I looked at Justin, who sat there impassively. ‘Who owns this house, by the way?’ I asked him.
‘I suspect you know already,’ he replied. ‘The family trust does.’
‘See?’ I challenged his wife. ‘You had no choice but to step in and see the fraud through to the end. Until then your personal involvement had been kept to a minimum, but you had to surface again. You had to become Lidia, and take over Roy Urquhart’s role in the scheme. You ordered Loman and his pal, Willie Venable, to take Frank out. Unfortunately he got the better of them and went into hiding. You were in huge trouble then. You had to smoke him out, but how? I reckon that your original plan was to kidnap my son and me, and use us as hostages. That’s why you went to St Martí in April, and filmed my house; you were casing the place.’ Again, the woman shook her head.
‘But my son saw you doing it,’ I continued, undeterred, ‘and you backed off. Instead you bided your time, until an even better target offered herself up . . . Frank’s mother. You kept tabs on her, until one day she wasn’t at the agency. You called and her idiot assistant told you where she was. Willie Venable abducted her from my house, you and the poor sap Emil tried to take me for a ride, and when Frank got me out of it, you had Loman track us. He was good, too good for Frank in the end. Now he and his mum are in a cardboard box in Girona . . .’ to my surprise, I heard my voice crack ‘. . . and your old man’s the Home bloody Secretary!’ I glared at Justin. ‘No wonder you weren’t too keen to help us in Barcelona.’
Occasionally, very occasionally, there are silences that you think you can touch, as if a glass bubble has encased you, one that no noise can penetrate. One of those had formed in that drawing room. The Mayfields sat, stunned. I sat, exhausted. Mark sat, recovered but waiting.
And then Justin shattered that almost palpable bubble of silence into a million shards. ‘Primavera, Primavera,’ he sighed, ‘that was brilliant, it was sad, and it was deeply moving, but it was also very, very wrong. I love my wife dearly, but you identified the flaw in your own argument. Ludo is indeed as intellectually limited as her late father was. She isn’t capable of coming up with a scheme like that.’
‘Then who did? You?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that sort of imagination either. But Frank did; your cousin, my pal. The whole project was his idea, from start to finish.’
‘Come on,’ I shouted, outraged by his attempt to smear the dead. ‘He didn’t have access to those Energi funds.’
‘No, but I told him about the company’s problems, and what it would mean for us when it collapsed, losing the house and maybe even my career going down the toilet.’
‘But you dropped Frank as a friend, after he was jailed.’
‘Who told you that? No, let me guess. He did.’
‘In the Hotel Arts,’ I countered, ‘he had to threaten you to get in to see you.’
‘Gretchen Roberts, you mean?’
I nodded.
‘There’s no such person; that was for your benefit.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I didn’t exactly flaunt our friendship, but Frank was always my best mate. He was the only person I’d ever have told about Ludo’s problems. A couple of weeks after I did, he came back to me and set out the whole scheme. The only difference from your account was that he said it would be legal. He did it all. Ludo didn’t set up the company in Luxembourg, he did . . . as its records will prove.’ I looked at Mark quickly, then back at Justin. ‘Ludo didn’t hire any security people; Frank did that. But that was much later in the day: I’m not sure when. The first we knew of them was when he sent them to a meeting Ludo had in Seville, with Caballero. As for Macela, he didn’t recruit Frank; Frank recruited him. Hermann Gresch is a name I’ve never heard until now. We knew nothing about the man’s background, only that Frank vouched for him. As for a meeting in Luxembourg with the man you called Loman, that’s news to me also. I can’t think why that would have happened.’
‘When the project got under way,’ I said, ‘Frank took a false identity and still you thought it would be legal?’
‘He’d been in prison. How would that have looked to investors?’
‘So what was Macela’s role?’ I demanded.
‘To be on the ground, showing the project to investors who chose to visit Seville, but he turned out to be useless, because of his addiction.’
‘Frank told me that Macela controlled the money as it came in.’
‘Nonsense. Frank controlled everything. I was amazed by him, by the level at which he operated, but it was all of his creation.’
‘No,’ I protested. ‘No. I’m not having it.’ I jabbed a finger in his wife’s direction. ‘You’re trying to save her skin.’
‘No
, and I’ll prove it. You still don’t know who Alastair Rowland is, do you?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
He smiled again. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I signed the funds-transfer order that the Luxembourg lawyers received, and I used the company seal to do it.’ He rose, walked over to a sideboard, and took something from it, then returned and handed it to me. It was blue, metal, hinged and heavy, a stamping device, and its base held a carved round symbol. I’d never seen one before, but I knew what it was.
‘That was why Frank came to the hotel. When we were together on the club floor, before you came up to join us, he gave it to me, to keep it safe, and so that I could move the money into an account he’d set up. Our meeting was prearranged, before his mother went missing. If only he’d accepted my offer of help and not gone storming off, he’d still be alive, and so might she.’
Begged questions were being thrown at me as fast as I could process them. ‘But if you still thought it was kosher, didn’t the funds transfer seem odd?’
‘Not at all. The plan always was to move the money out of Luxembourg before construction started, into a better tax environment. So I signed the transfer, to a bank in the Cayman Islands.’
‘Hold on. Let’s go back. When Frank had to disappear, didn’t that alert you that all wasn’t well?’
‘It concerned me, I’ll grant you, but he told us that he believed that his real identity had been blown and that he had to fade away, into the background. With him out of the picture, and Macela pretty much helpless, there was no choice but that Ludo should become Bromberg again.’
‘And that she should film my house?’ I sneered. Yes, I actually did sneer; I felt my lip curl.
‘Frank asked me to do that,’ Ludmila murmured, ‘on one of my trips to Spain. He said he was considering hiding out with you but wanted to see how secure your place looked.’
‘Where was he hiding at that time?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Why? Where were you?’
‘Most of the time I was in London. Calls to the land-line number in Seville were diverted to my mobile. Like when you called me. If I had to see someone I always gave myself a couple of days to get there.’
‘And you and Caballero kidnapping me? I imagined that, did I?’
‘Frank told me to do it. He said his security people had gone bad on him, that his mother had been kidnapped, and that you were in danger. He said we had to do something to get you out of the way, but to make it look convincing to those men so that they’d lay off you. So I recruited Caballero to help me: I told him that you were a conwoman trying to fleece us, and the clown believed me.’
‘But, Ludmila, you still can’t sit down comfortably,’ I pointed out. ‘Remember what happened to you.’
‘I did not expect that,’ she admitted. ‘But Frank called me afterwards, full of remorse, and said that the whole thing had had to be as realistic as possible.’
‘That’s why he and I spent a little longer on our own in Barcelona than he’d expected,’ Justin added. ‘I didn’t like that either. Frank and I were having it out, while you were waiting downstairs.’
‘Jesus,’ I whispered, apologising mentally to Him and to Gerard. The more I thought about it, the more I was coming, if not to believe them, then at least to see their account as a possibility. But there were still holes in it. ‘Who gave you the gun?’ I asked Ludmila.
‘Frank did. It was loaded with blanks, wasn’t it?’ She looked at me nervously, and this time I did accept that her ignorance was genuine, since Caballero had said more or less the same thing.
‘No,’ I told her. ‘It shot a very convincing hole in the upholstery of your friend’s car.’ I winced. ‘That little bugger should have kept the damn thing, instead of chucking it in the flames when he burned Caballero’s toys in that barn.’
‘He set his bikes on fire?’
‘Yes, but it did no good. None of it did. Sebastian and Willie got him in the end, and his poor old mum.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
‘The money?’ I asked.
‘Gone,’ said Justin, with a huge sigh. ‘Moved on from the Cayman bank, blind transfer; we don’t know where it is now, and we never will.’
‘When did this happen?’
He told me the date. I made a quick mental calculation. ‘The day after he was abducted,’ I said. ‘They must have forced him to transfer it again, then killed him.’
‘Poor little bastard.’ I’d cried all mine, but the Home Secretary was on the verge of tears. ‘It was meant to be legal,’ he said, ‘I promise. As soon as we’d secured some additional funds through bank borrowing, the casino would have been built. As soon as the ground was broken, Energi investment would have quadrupled in value.’
‘So why did both Lidia and Rowland vanish from the face of the earth?’
‘We had to, as soon as the money went missing. I’d just been offered the post of Home Secretary: I couldn’t be seen to be involved in any scandal.’
‘But an investigation will be bound to lead to Ludmila.’
‘But not to Lidia. Energi will be . . . no, Energi is just another victim of theft. You say fraud, but still I don’t believe it. The money was honestly, if unconventionally raised, and stolen by the people who killed Frank and his mother.’
I knew that I’d like to go along with that explanation, but I wasn’t ready to tell him. ‘And you two? What happens to you?’ I asked, not particularly kindly.
‘We move house, or I buy it from the family trust before it implodes. I’d hoped to hang on to my job, but when those Luxembourg records become public, I’ll be stuffed. My signature’s there.’
‘Funny you should say that,’ Mark intervened. He told him about the robbery. ‘Would I find MI5’s fingerprints all over that, by any chance?’ he added.
Justin blinked, several times. ‘If they knew of this operation . . .’ he murmured. (Mark and I could have told him they did, and how. That explained a lot about the hard line the security-service woman had taken with us: not just a minister to protect, but maybe a government if the scandal was messy enough.) ‘But I didn’t authorise it, I promise you.’
I thought about that for a while. ‘If I accept all of that,’ I said slowly, ‘it means we’re the only people who know of your involvement. Caballero can identify Ludmila as Lidia Bromberg, but he’s more concerned with political rehabilitation right now. Anyway, he’d never make the connection.’
‘I suppose it does,’ Justin agreed. ‘So . . .’
I beat him to the question. ‘So what do we want? Only one thing. There’s a woman in the security service who made some very nasty threats against me, and Mr Kravitz, here, my associate. She called herself Moira; blonde, early thirties, rat faced. I want her told to forget that she’s ever heard of us.’
‘That won’t be a problem,’ the Home Secretary promised.
‘In that case,’ I told him, ‘good luck with your career, and God help the country.’
Forty-three
If I said that the meeting hadn’t gone the way I’d imagined, that wouldn’t be quite accurate. No, the truth is, when we went in there I didn’t have the faintest idea how it was going to play out. But I hadn’t expected my carefully constructed theory to be turned completely on its head, and for Frank to be revealed as the brains behind the whole business.
I might have had a strong suspicion that Justin and Rowland were one and the same, given what I knew about Ludmila, but the part about the seal had taken me totally by surprise. No wonder Frank had hung on to that rucksack as if his family jewels were in it. No wonder it had landed in Caballero’s back seat with such a thud. No wonder I’d noticed a difference when I’d picked it up in my garage.
The rest of the scheme, though, that had been brilliant. What a pity, I thought, that he hadn’t hired his muscle from Mark, who would have made sure that the guys were completely trustworthy. I told him as much as we left.
‘With that sort of cash in the pot,
’ he replied, ‘you can never be one hundred per cent sure.’
‘What do you think, Mark?’ I asked. ‘Did it all happen as Justin said?’
‘He believes that it did. His wife confirms that for me; she’s way short of bright enough to do that sort of thinking for herself. Is it the truth? Maybe, but there’s another possibility I can’t ignore, and it’s much the likelier, that as far as Frank was concerned, this was a fraud all along, only he told his hired hands too much and they turned on him.’
‘I can’t bring myself to accept that.’
‘Think of the story he spun you.’
‘Maybe he was an undercover agent.’
He held up a crutch. ‘And maybe next week I’ll sign for Chelsea.’
I laughed. ‘As a Barcelona fan, I hope you do.’
Tom had been waiting in the car for an hour by the time we returned, but he had a supply of crisps and fizzy water, and the two police officers had been keeping an eye on him, as I’d asked them. He was fine and I didn’t feel too guilty.
I did feel troubled, though, as Mark dropped us off at the Tower Bridge Hotel. I could understand why he thought Frank might have been on the con from the start, considering the story he’d told me. And that was where Justin’s version really rang true, when I thought about it.
All of the core information I’d gathered about the whole d’Amuseo affair had come from Frank himself. Mark had done some digging, but the key details had been offered by my cousin.
Inhuman Remains Page 25
