Capital Punishment

by Robert Wilson

  ‘All right,’ said Mercy, trying to keep Nelson’s racism on the leash. ‘Jack Auber couldn’t have been running his illegals business without someone’s permission, could he, Nelson?’

  ‘No, but I doubt that was anything to do with it. If it was his home crew, he wouldn’t have taken young Vic with him, would he? He’d have drawn on someone more experienced,’ said Nelson. ‘No, they approached him because of his cab. It was a deal on the side with an outside gang.’

  ‘Who runs his home crew?’ asked Mercy.

  ‘Joe Shearing.’

  ‘And what will Joe Shearing do about it?’

  ‘If Jack went freelance, Joe probably won’t see it as his responsibility,’ said Nelson. ‘On the other hand, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of Ruby, and Joe might give her a hearing. If he does, she’ll persuade him otherwise.’

  ‘And you’ll hear about it if she does?’

  ‘The pubs’ll be ringing with it.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Alyshia,’ said the voice. ‘Believe me, it was absolutely necessary. I think we have your father’s undivided attention now. Are you there, Alyshia?’

  Alyshia was catatonic. No sleeping mask. She was staring up at the ceiling, having come out from under the bed after an hour or so. Her brain functioned in bursts. Life crashed in on her in savage cuts of intensity, like streaks of brutal news footage, and then she’d blank out, unable to process extreme emotions – hope and despair, relief and fear, faith and dread.

  ‘Sit up on the edge of the bed,’ said the voice.

  She sat up, swivelled her legs over the bed, rested her hands on the edge of the mattress. Robotic.

  ‘Drink some water.’

  She drank water from a glass on the bedside table.

  ‘Place your hands in your lap and breathe evenly and deeply.’

  She did as she was told. She could find no trace of resistance or disobedience in herself. She was content to be in this narrow world with the sound of the voice’s commands, which she found she enjoyed obeying as precisely as possible.

  ‘We have just one more very important part of your life to discuss,’ said the voice. ‘We’ve talked about the relationship with your mother and how that has developed since you’ve been back in London. We’ve looked at your early adult life: leaving the comparative innocence of university before taking the more complex ride through the Saïd Business School. We’ve seen how the guilt at what happened there has erupted during this more confused period you’re living through at the moment. What we’re going to do now is look at the relationship with your father, what happened in Mumbai and why you left, never to return. Is that understood, Alyshia?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Say it out loud.’

  ‘Yes, I’m ready to talk about that.’

  ‘Do you know how your father managed to extract you from that difficult little situation at the Saïd Business School?’

  ‘Not at the time. I found out later,’ said Alyshia. ‘The only way I could cope with what had happened was to deny it. My father told me not to talk to my mother about Abiola Adeshina. He developed an alternative story for me to tell her: the break-up with Julian and how that meant I had to leave for Mumbai as soon as possible.’

  ‘And your mother bought that?’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult for me to be convincing.’

  ‘Was that when you started despising her?’

  ‘Probably, yes,’ said Alyshia. ‘Because that was the moment I stopped being the person I had been and started being someone else.’

  ‘Who was that “someone else”?’

  ‘That’s a difficult question,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure. A lot of it was probably done subconsciously. For a start, I needed a platform of total confidence. You can’t do business feeling vulnerable. That meant lopping off the unsatisfactory elements of my life. I thought I’d been successful. Now I see that all I’d done was push things down, for them to bubble up somewhere else.’

  ‘So how did you try to control those unsatisfactory elements?’ asked the voice.

  ‘I realised I had to maintain a balance. If I let my emotional life get out of control, it would make me feel exposed again and I wouldn’t be able to perform. That meant staying away from all relationships. Not an easy thing to do when you look like I do and have a wealthy father. That combination seems to be particularly intoxicating in modern India.’

  ‘So you got a lot of interest,’ said the voice. ‘But you must be an expert at freezing men out.’

  ‘I am and I was until I ran into Deepak Mistry.’

  ‘Right. We know about him,’ said the voice. ‘Tell me about Deepak Mistry.’

  ‘He comes from Bihar, India’s poorest state. He has no family to speak of. And nobody knew how he could have come from that background to run a successful software company in Bangalore.’

  ‘So the Mysterious Mister Mistry,’ said the voice. ‘Did that attract you?’

  ‘It was intriguing, the kind of gossip that might make people exaggerate, but not especially attractive. I wasn’t receptive on that score.’

  ‘So you didn’t even bother to find out?’

  ‘I asked my father when we were having dinner alone one evening,’ said Alyshia. ‘He said it didn’t interest him how Deepak had got there, just that he had.’

  ‘So how had he done it?’

  ‘He put himself through school, working nights at a call centre. He was already writing software programmes for the call centre by the time he left and set up on his own.’

  ‘There’s still a lot of gaps,’ said the voice. ‘How did he learn to speak English? In the village school in Bihar?’

  ‘My father couldn’t care less. All he saw was a capable young guy who reminded him of himself,’ said Alyshia. ‘And I suppose he took him under his wing because of that.’

  ‘Had you met him by the time you were asking your father these questions?’

  ‘We’d met before: a couple of years ago at a dinner in London. But in Mumbai we had no reason to meet. He was trying to maintain a level of production while implementing structural changes in the plant. He worked and slept. He had nothing to do with sales and marketing.’

  ‘Did you think it odd, at that point, that your father didn’t reintroduce you?’

  ‘I hadn’t met anyone on the board. My father said I wouldn’t until I’d proved myself. His regime was strictly meritocratic, unlike a lot of other Indian industrial dynasties.’

  ‘What was your first impression?’

  ‘Serious. Preoccupied by his job. No time for life.’

  ‘So he made no physical impact?’

  ‘Not an immediate one,’ said Alyshia. ‘Only later. He was like one of those movie actors who don’t look particularly remarkable and you wonder how the hell they got into the business, until you find that they have that elusive quality: watchability. Whenever they’re on screen, your eyes follow their every move.’

  ‘Charismatic?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t that,’ said Alyshia. ‘Not like my father. He didn’t command a room. In fact, Deepak had the reverse of that. Stuff didn’t shine out of him; rather, his intensity drew light to him. He had presence, but it was dark.’

  ‘Not an obviously attractive quality,’ said the voice. ‘On the human scale of things, unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘It was around that time you discovered some dark matter in yourself?’ said the voice. ‘What was your social life like at the time?’

  ‘Cricketers, Bollywood actors, industrialists and state administrators’ sons.’

  ‘Any friends?’

  ‘Friendship is not on offer in that world,’ she said. ‘Contact is everything, but only to create a network. Real intimacy is not just rare but dangerous. Other things are so important that to reveal yourself would be a mistake. Intimacy makes you vulnerable. The mask has always got to be firmly in place.’

  ‘Was this how Deepak made his first big impression?’

>   ‘The impressions he made were never big, but they were cumulative,’ said Alyshia. ‘He isn’t a looker. He’s not a great wit. He’s not obviously brilliant, or worldly. But each time I was left with something indelible. I never felt myself being emotionally drawn in, which meant I never took fright and ran away. I watched him whenever he was in the frame.’

  ‘So where did you first meet up with him in Mumbai?’

  ‘On Juhu Beach. I was staying at my father’s house nearby and I went to watch the sunset. It was a weekend. I found myself looking at someone standing in the water, trousers rolled up, a shoe in each hand. I don’t know why I thought this, but I was sure that he was a man in a state of profound thought, as if he was contemplating his future, making a big decision or a change of course. Maybe the sea and the setting sun is the necessary cliché to bring that out in people. After the sun had gone down – and he didn’t turn away until the whole red circle of light had disappeared into the black horizon – he walked back up the beach towards the food stalls. He saw me looking at him and blinked as if in partial recognition. As he came level with me I realised he wasn’t going to stop, so I said, “You’re Deepak Mistry, aren’t you?”’

  At that point Alyshia withdrew into herself and was back on Juhu Beach, mentally sitting on the sand after a sunset in the half dark, lit only by the food stalls.

  ‘I think I know you,’ said Mistry, uncertain, nearly embarrassed.

  ‘I’m Frank D’Cruz’s daughter. We work in the same place.’

  Relief flooded his face.

  ‘You know, I’m really happy you said that. I thought you might be an actress from the TV, or the movies, that I was so accustomed to seeing that I’d begun to think of you as an acquaintance.’

  ‘You watch that much TV?’

  ‘It’s my sleeping pill,’ he said. ‘I turn it on low and the murmur makes me think I am with family. Then the colours float in front of my eyes and in ten minutes I’m gone. It’s still on in the morning when I get up.’

  ‘I’m surprised to see you here.’

  ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I hardly ever come here. I haven’t taken a day off in a year. But I finished something today and I thought I needed somewhere different and, you know how it is, take stock. Are you . . . doing the same?’

  ‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘I was just getting away from the crowd.’

  He looked up at the food stalls, the thousands of people milling around, the tumult of their voices. He laughed.

  ‘It’s not easy to be alone in this country,’ he said. ‘But not so difficult to be lonely.’

  ‘That was it,’ said Alyshia, coming back into the room. ‘The sum total of our first meeting. He said goodbye and was gone. As you can see, it made an impression. I remember it word for word. What struck me was this feeling of respect he left me with. I had respected his need to be alone, he respected mine. I can’t think of another man I’ve met who would have done that, who wouldn’t have tried to make something of that situation. It wasn’t even a tactic.’

  ‘So you were already thinking something was possible at that stage?’ asked the voice.

  ‘No, it didn’t feel like that. It felt much more like the beginning of a friendship,’ said Alyshia, feeling tired and dull now. ‘After a blind date, people will say there was none of that “elusive spark”. Well, there was no spark. No clenching of the stomach. No passion. There was something, but not what I’d expected, given what happened later.’

  16

  4.00 P.M., MONDAY 12TH MARCH 2012

  Isabel Marks’ house, Aubrey Walk, London W8

  ‘If you told me there was a chance that Alyshia was being held by Muslim extremists, I would have to pass that on to my boss, Martin Fox, who would then have to decide whether or not the police should be informed,’ said Boxer, trying to pressurise D’Cruz, who was still in a state of shock, to reveal the direction of his investigations, if nothing else. ‘Given the number of killings so far, I think there’s a high chance that the police would alert the Counter Terrorism Command.’

  ‘And for how long do you think the terrorist community in the UK would remain ignorant of that?’

  ‘All right, Frank. Let’s analyse this theoretically,’ said Boxer. ‘That way you don’t have to admit to the knowledge. If she is being held by terrorists, what is their motivation?’

  ‘Well, it could still be financial. I know you dispute this. That this doesn’t conform to your kidnap model. But there’s a big difference in negotiating techniques if you’re aiming for two hundred thousand or want to achieve, say, fifty million, which was the figure mentioned to Isabel in the first phone call.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of that annoying corporate expression, “thinking outside the box”, but that’s what I want you to do for me,’ said Boxer. ‘You’re firmly in the box of financial gain. We have to look at all the possibilities. The kidnapper’s behaviour, with all his teasing and psychoanalysis, makes me think his ultimate intention is to punish you. Why would a terrorist organisation want to do that?’

  ‘Because not only am I not being helpful to them, I am being obstructive,’ said D’Cruz.

  ‘Does that mean you know these people personally?’

  Silence from D’Cruz. The stress chiselling lines into his forehead by the moment. He knew he had to reveal something now; the escalation of brutality in the kidnap demanded it.

  ‘Look, Charles,’ he said, both confessional and conspiratorial, ‘before I was a businessman I was an actor, and before that, yes, I had a dodgy early career in the 1970s and 80s to pull myself out of poverty. I was, what you would call, a gangster. As far as I was concerned, that was just a name. I was taking advantage of a stupid situation, which is what all smugglers do. The government controlled the importation of gold into India. As you probably know, Indians are obsessed with gold jewellery – it’s part of our culture. By smuggling it in fishing boats from Dubai, I made a good living and a lot of friends in high places, who wanted to buy my product. In order to operate, I had to have the backing of a gang and so . . . I became a gangster. If I’d tried to do that work naked, I’d have been killed.’

  ‘And the members of your old gang have connections to terrorism?’

  ‘Even you, as an outsider, must know that terrorism has connections in all worlds: business, political, criminal, religious, scientific,’ said D’Cruz. ‘I am in a unique position in that I have been a criminal, I am in business, I am politically connected, I am outside the religious argument, with friends in all camps, and I’m even in the scientific world, since I’ve been asked to advise on Indo/Russian nuclear reactor projects. I am what you would call “plugged in”.’

  ‘So in what way have you been unhelpful and obstructive?’

  ‘I move an enormous amount of money and goods around the world. I have all the necessary resources to launder large amounts of cash and distribute, let’s call it equipment, globally. I could do that for the people I used to be connected to in the underworld, but I don’t. I refuse to do it.

  ‘I am politically well-connected enough to be given valuable intelligence on matters of state. These nuclear reactors, for instance, are vital if India is to keep up the level of growth to raise millions out of poverty. There are people who would like to know how to ruin this project and send India back to the dark ages. I tell them nothing.

  ‘I also do not react to their religious pressures because I am a Catholic, and a lapsed Catholic at that. So, you see, there are all sorts of ways I would be expected to be helpful but I am not. But recently I have been treading a fine line because I have accepted favours, primarily to ensure that my steelworks did not fail. These are people who expect favours to be returned. When they are not, I could be considered not just unhelpful but obstructive as well.’

  ‘And taking Alyshia is the only way they can apply pressure and show their disapproval?’ said Boxer.

  ‘This is the least obtrusive and the most personal,’ said D’Cruz. ‘If it’s who I think it is, I
’m expecting it to get much worse. They are smacking me into line and they are from a culture where a smack draws blood.’

  ‘It sounds as if you’re ninety-nine per cent certain who these people are?’

  ‘I am awaiting confirmation, but that is part of the game. They are bringing me to the edge of my seat,’ said D’Cruz. ‘They have always been good at this. This charade of Alyshia’s psychoanalysis and goading me with her dress and diamonds is no surprise to me. They have a deep understanding of what makes people tick. The only thing that puzzles me is that they have still not asked me to do anything specific for them. They are applying pressure, but I don’t know what for. What this “demonstration of sincerity” is, I have no idea, but I have to try to find out.’

  It was six o’clock. D’Cruz had left, which was for the best under the circumstances. Boxer knew that Amy would be at his mother’s flat in Hampstead by now. She was still refusing to take his calls or respond to texts. After Alyshia’s farewell speech and mock execution, he had a powerful need to reconnect with her. He wondered what Amy’s speech would have been like had she been in Alyshia’s place. He went upstairs and made the call, looking down into the empty square.

  ‘Hello, Esme.’

  ‘Charles.’

  ‘Is Amy there?’

  ‘Yes, she is.’

  ‘Can I speak to her?’

  ‘Hold on.’

  He hung on for a minute.

  ‘She doesn’t want to talk to you,’ said Esme.

  ‘I know that but I want to talk to her.’

  More silence.

  ‘She still won’t take the phone.’