Capital Punishment

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Of course we’ve heard of him,’ said Deacon. ‘He’s always in the news. He’s that kind of businessman. And we opened a file on him once we were told about his interest in investing in the UK and one of my agents is researching him. So far his reports have been quite bland and they haven’t been circulated because nobody has requested any information about Mr D’Cruz until today.’

  ‘And what about MI5?’ asked Radcliffe. ‘Have you opened a file on Mr D’Cruz?’

  ‘Because he’s been meeting ministers and the PM, yes, we have,’ said Hunter. ‘We’ve also had him under light surveillance, but so far he hasn’t done anything that would classify him as a security risk.’

  ‘Have we got any more information on last night’s shooting?’ asked Radcliffe.

  ‘Just the ballistics report,’ said her assistant. ‘The bullet they removed from the back seat of Mr D’Cruz’s car didn’t match any they had on their files.’

  ‘Any further developments in the kidnapping?’ asked Radcliffe.

  ‘We’re awaiting an update from DCS Makepeace of SCD7. He’s in a meeting with the Director of Operations for the kidnap.’

  ‘Barbara Richmond called me last night and she wants to be absolutely certain that we’re not missing something,’ said Natasha Radcliffe. ‘This combination of an important Asian investor’s daughter being kidnapped and an attempted assassination doesn’t make sense to her. And when things don’t make sense, it’s usually because there’s something missing, something we don’t know about that’s preventing us from making the link. I don’t want that “unknown” to become a major security issue. So what I’d like you to do is to start filling those open files on Mr D’Cruz with valuable intelligence that will put the Minister for Security and Counter Terrorism’s mind at ease.’

  ‘I’m not going to have it, Charles,’ said Isabel. ‘So just forget it.’

  ‘As I said before, it doesn’t mean you’ll be sidelined. It doesn’t mean it won’t be your responsibility. It just means you won’t be taking the brunt of contact with Alyshia’s kidnapper.’

  ‘I’m not going to trust anyone with her life,’ she said, walking away from him, showing the back of her hand over her shoulder. ‘So stop talking about it.’

  ‘OK. Will you give me the names of people who you would consider in the event of your being incapacitated?’ said Boxer. ‘We have to think ahead all the time. If you crack . . .’

  ‘I’m not going to crack.’

  ‘It’s not just the pressure of the phone calls. It’s all this “downtime” as well. The waiting. The way things play on your mind. Nobody with your level of involvement could expect to last longer than a week.’

  ‘What is this about?’ asked Isabel, a little venom creeping in now, showing her steel. ‘Is this about something else?’

  ‘There is nothing else. This is how life is until it’s over.’

  ‘I mean, is this about what happened last night . . . between us?’ she said. ‘You want some distance now?’

  ‘No. It’s not about what happened last night. But you’re right,’ said Boxer. ‘We already have a highly emotional situation, into which we’ve introduced . . .’

  ‘What? What has been introduced? Is there a word for it in the manual? Like getting friends to do your negotiating for you is called a Crisis Management Committee. What’s having sex with your kidnap consultant called? A Crisis Manager Encounter?’

  ‘My boss would call it a Crisis Management Disaster,’ said Boxer. ‘I’d never work again.’

  ‘And you? What would you call it?’

  ‘Look,’ said Boxer, holding up his hands. ‘Look at us. This is what I’m talking about. We’ve introduced a whole new level of emotional involvement. There’s not just the enormous external pressure from the kidnap situation but also a powerful internal one, because of what’s happening between us.’

  ‘And what is happening between us?’

  They were staring intently into each other’s eyes when Boxer’s phone went off.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  ‘You know what’s happening,’ he said. ‘There’s no mistaking it.’

  The phone continued to ring.

  ‘Answer it,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the profiler,’ said Boxer, looking at the screen.

  ‘Tell him to call back on the fixed line,’ she said, still riled. ‘I want to listen to this on the speaker phone.’

  Boxer gave the profiler, Ray Moss, the number. They sat back in silence, waiting.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just—’

  The phone rang.

  ‘Hi Ray. I’m putting you on speaker phone now. Present in the room is Alyshia’s mother, Isabel Marks, and me. You’ve listened to the recording. Tell us what you think.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s a kidnapper.’

  ‘Hold on a sec, Ray.’

  ‘I know,’ said Moss, ‘but it feels to me like he’s playing a role.’

  ‘Whether he’s playing a part or not, he’s still kidnapped my daughter,’ said Isabel. ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘The first thing that struck me was the way you found out that your daughter had been kidnapped,’ said Moss.

  ‘You mean the kidnapper waiting for Isabel to contact him,’ said Boxer.

  ‘That’s significant,’ said Moss. ‘If I remember correctly, you said your ex-husband had been calling Alyshia on Saturday and she hadn’t answered his calls. Do we know when she was taken yet? If not, when did you last speak to her, Mrs Marks?’

  ‘Friday afternoon.’

  ‘So it seems likely that it was Friday night,’ said Moss. ‘It’s pretty rare for a serious gang to wait twenty-four hours for the mother to make contact so that they can reveal that they’ve taken her daughter.’

  ‘He did have proof of capture ready,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Which in itself is odd,’ said Moss. ‘Why prepare yourself and then wait to be contacted? A lot of gangs make initial contact without proof of capture. They’ve got their prize and they want you to know it as soon as possible. More often than not, it’s the kidnap consultant who ensures that the first proof of capture is asked for, and rarely the gang that offers it up.’

  ‘What else?’ said Boxer.

  ‘The detail of his threat if you dared to involve police or press was much more calculated that the norm,’ said Moss. ‘And I understand you felt that he knew the extent of your ex-husband’s ruthlessness, which I do think indicates that he knows him and that there’s something personal about this, too.’

  ‘Yeees,’ said Boxer, in a way that warned Moss off what he was building up to.

  ‘The second call was quite different in tone. More teasing, offhand, arrogant and casually violent. This time he’s not going to give you any proof of life. I would have expected a gang eager to make money to have issued a demand during this call. If she was taken on Friday night, then we are now talking fifty-four hours later. That there’s still no demand, but rather the reverse – a statement of disinterest in financial gain – is very unusual. That he also seems to want to demonstrate to you his superior knowledge about every aspect of your life, including your daughter—’

  ‘What do you mean, superior knowledge about my daughter?’ asked Isabel, hackles rising.

  ‘The kidnapper said: “Her interest lies elsewhere”, implying that he knows about someone your daughter is involved with that you don’t. And he also seems to know “what happened in Mumbai”. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘These are fairly normal tactics designed to alarm and undermine, but they’re usually accompanied by a demand for money.’

  ‘So if he’s not a kidnapper, what is he?’ asked Isabel.

  Moss breathed in, held it.

  ‘I think we should listen to what’s on the mobile as soon as it’s been retrieved,’ said Boxer.

  ‘You think he’s a killer, don’t you?’ said Isabel.

  ‘I haven’t said that because it’s not clear to me what
he is,’ said Moss. ‘All I know is that he’s not behaving like a regular kidnapper.’

  ‘But you think he bears a grudge against my ex-husband and in not making a demand, in fact dismissing my ex-husband’s extensive ability to pay, it’s implicit that his intention is . . . to punish him.’

  ‘Whatever his intentions are,’ said Moss, ‘they don’t seem to be immediate. He seems to want to spin this out. He’s expecting you to retrieve the mobile. He’s talked about “what happened in Mumbai”, which indicates to me that there are more revelations to come. He’s enjoying this role.’

  ‘You say this “role” as if he’s acting as a kidnapper when, in fact, he’s told us he is a kidnapper and that we are in a kidnap process,’ said Isabel, desperate to arrange the facts as positively as possible in her mind. ‘Is it conceivable that we are hearing someone acting on behalf of someone else?’

  Boxer could hear the pity coming down the line.

  ‘All Ray is saying,’ said Boxer, ‘is that Jordan has set up a situation with all the appearances of a kidnap, but that there are a number of oddities, which make his intentions unclear.’

  ‘I’d like to listen to what he sends you on your daughter’s mobile,’ said Moss. ‘Forensics will want to look at it first. Then we’ll talk again.’

  ‘Thanks Ray,’ said Boxer, taking it off speaker, putting the phone to his ear.

  ‘She shouldn’t be managing this on her own,’ said Moss.

  ‘We’re trying.’

  ‘He’s going to kill her . . . in the end. I’ve got no doubt about it in my mind,’ said Moss. ‘This teasing is just part of the torture. I’d get the Met onto it straight away, whatever that fucker, Jordan, says.’

  Simon Deacon’s phone call had given his agent, Roger Clayton, the sort of full day’s work he wasn’t used to and especially not in this terrible mid-March humidity, which had taken over after the hot dry winds from Gujarat had departed. The phone call had precipitated three meetings, which were all in different parts of a city that, for some mad reason, had taken Los Angeles as its template for modern living. The city sprawl was colossal. The only way to get to all these places was by car, along with ten million other road users in Mumbai. He estimated his travel time alone at around nine hours for the day.

  Rajiv Tandon was a Deputy Central Intelligence Officer for the Indian Intelligence Bureau, known as the IB. They’d arranged to meet in one of the most dreaded places in Mumbai for Clayton: the High Street Phoenix Shopping Mall in Lower Parel, a development which had ironically incorporated the old textile mill’s chimneys and was only a few miles south of his office in the Bandra Kurla Complex. Tandon liked to shop and, because Clayton had nothing to offer Tandon to make him look better to his superiors, and Simon Deacon had told him that he didn’t want D’Cruz’s daughter’s kidnap openly known in the IB, Clayton knew what he had to do: produce the credit card at the right moment. Clayton didn’t like this; not because it felt like corruption or bribery, but because he had to pay with his own card and reclaim on expenses, which used to take six weeks but, since HM government’s austerity measures, now took close to ten. At least Tandon wasn’t excessively greedy, and three hundred and fifty quid’s worth of Ralph Lauren did the trick.

  They sat in Costa Coffee. He was grateful for that. Tandon was fond of McDonald’s and Clayton already had a bandoleer of Big Macs padded around his waist. Tandon maintained his gold-framed Persol sunglasses, whose mirrored lenses reflected Costa’s bean logo and Clayton’s resolute calm, masking subcutaneous irritation. A distant roar from the TV, replaying Indian Premier League 20/20 games in the build-up to the new championship, competed with the milk steamer for noise supremacy.

  ‘So we’re here to talk about Goldfinger,’ said Tandon, using the highly creative codename they’d developed for Frank D’Cruz. ‘And you don’t just want recent material but historical, too.’

  ‘We need to know if there’s anything ugly in his past that might have an impact on a situation that’s developed in London,’ said Clayton.

  ‘I told you this wasn’t going to be easy for me,’ said Tandon. ‘You’re talking about the pre-computer era. Nothing before 1992 has gone into digital format yet. I’m still trying to find out where his paper file is being stored, but I have been able to speak to some people.’

  ‘About Goldfinger’s interest?’

  ‘Yes, and I’ve been lucky because his name has come up quite naturally in our offices.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  Tandon tilted his head so that the TV screen appeared in duplicate in his sunglasses.

  ‘The Indian Premier League?’ asked Clayton, amused by Tandon’s practiced cool. ‘So what’s going on in the IPL? I thought it was a huge success story.’

  ‘It’s going off,’ said Tandon, wrinkling his nose. ‘The word in the office is that D’Cruz has gone to London because of it.’

  ‘How’s he involved?’ asked Clayton, letting Tandon do his bit, even though this sounded off brief.

  ‘He’s a major investor and he, along with other investors, were responsible for the installation of the president and the board,’ said Tandon. ‘The IPL is the most lucrative version of cricket ever played. Hundreds of millions of people watch these games. We’re obsessed with it. It is a source of pride for our new nation. If it is proved that the corruption has reached to the deepest depths, then I promise you, the howling of Indian rage will be heard all over the world.’

  ‘What are we talking about?’ asked Clayton, who couldn’t think of any enterprise in this madly burgeoning country that wasn’t corrupt and so needed comparisons. ‘How bad on the Gangrene Scale?’

  ‘An 8.4,’ said Tandon, accurate to decimal points. ‘If you’re a billionaire in this country, you are one of a handful of people in a teeming mass of humanity. You feel elevated. But to give yourself that extra feeling of power, you like to know what everybody else does not. It’s not about money. It’s about complete control. To sit back, watching the hysterical millions cheering on their teams, whilst knowing with total certainty . . . the result.’

  ‘Ah, yes, match-fixing.’

  ‘We’re not certain yet, but the hysteria is building.’

  ‘Did these discussions about the IPL lead any of your senior officers to reminisce about the good old days with Goldfinger? Because much as we’d like his investment, we still have to be careful where it’s come from.’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but something else did come to my attention as I was about to leave the office, but I don’t know whether it’s relevant to you or not,’ said Tandon. ‘I came across a police report dated seventh of January twenty-twelve. There was a break-in at one of Goldfinger’s car plants.’

  ‘What did they take?’

  ‘That’s the interesting thing,’ said Tandon. ‘They don’t appear to have taken anything. The only evidence was a large hole in the perimeter fence and broken locks to two of the storage warehouses, but nothing appears to have been stolen.’

  ‘And what was in these storage warehouses?’

  ‘Some prototype electric cars.’

  ‘Industrial espionage?’

  ‘Who can say?’ said Tandon, holding out his empty hands.

  They were in the Half Moon pub on Mile End Road. Dan brought the pints of lager to the table.

  ‘What about the crisps?’ said Skin, Dan’s arse barely touching the seat.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Dan. ‘They do the full English if you want it.’

  He went back to the bar, bought two packets: salt and vinegar, cheese and onion.

  ‘Nice place, this,’ said Skin.

  ‘It used to be a theatre,’ said Dan, looking around.

  ‘Anywhere that serves a pint at nine-thirty in the morning has my vote,’ said Skin. ‘Pity about the fucking students.’

  ‘How’s the shoulder?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Skin. ‘You did a good job.’

  ‘Don’t drink too much with the painkillers and make sure you take the antibi
otics right to the end of the packet,’ said Dan. ‘That shoulder gets infected and you’ll have the cops at your hospital bedside and they won’t be bringing flowers.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Skin. ‘So what’s the news?’

  ‘Why do you think I’ve got news?’

  ‘What are we doing here if you haven’t?’

  ‘Socialising?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. You’re a bit poncey for me, Dan. You know, read too many books. My Dad told me: never trust a brainy bastard, they’ll fuck you in the arse.’

  ‘Did he tell you that all male nurses are gay, too?’

  ‘He did. Are they?’ asked Skin, pulling his pint away from Dan’s. ‘I know you fancy me.’

  ‘Bugger off,’ said Dan.

  ‘Oh no, I remember now. The girlfriend who put you inside never came to see you,’ said Skin. ‘Maybe they turned you in Wandsworth. It happens.’

  ‘The only thing that happened to me in Wandsworth is I did weights and put on two stone.’

  ‘That says something to me,’ said Skin, tapping his head.

  ‘You’re not my type, anyway.’

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Don’t get all hurt now.’

  They laughed, supped a couple of inches off their pints, tore open the crisps.

  ‘As it happens, I have got news,’ said Dan. ‘About the girl.’

  ‘What about her?’ said Skin, looking round the pub but listening hard.

  ‘I got her name from Pike, said I needed it in case there was a health problem.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Alyshia D’Cruz is her name. I Googled her and she’s the daughter of an Indian billionaire who used to be an actor in the movies.’

  ‘I hate that shit.’

  ‘Bollywood?’

  ‘Everyone breaking into song and dance routines,’ said Skin, moving his head from side to side on his neck. ‘And no tits.’

  ‘A succinct deconstruction of the genre,’ said Dan.

  ‘You see, that’s my problem with you, Nurse, I only understood three of those words,’ said Skin.

  ‘As long as they were the important three,’ said Dan. ‘Now listen, Skin, no fucking about. Her Dad used to be an actor and now he’s a billionaire. And that’s a dollar billionaire, not rupees.’