by Paul Hoffman
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying.’
‘Good!’ he replied, and started to giggle. ‘Because I wouldn’t want our marriage to be . . . y’ know . . . brought down to the level of washing and cleaning.’ He smiled at her. ‘Give me a kiss.’
‘No.’
‘If I promise to do more round the house will you give me a kiss?’
She laughed, then stopped and looked at him. ‘This isn’t about that.’ She put her hand around the back of his neck and lightly drove the heel of her other hand into his forehead. ‘Think!’
A look of bewildered effort crossed his face. ‘I’ve been to a party and had too much to drink. You’re taking advantage of my weakened ability to change the subject.’ She laughed again but said nothing. He looked at her desperately. ‘Give me a clue.’
She turned and walked off down the dark and deserted street. He hurried to catch up with her.
‘I want you to see how much you need from me,’ she said. ‘This isn’t about housework. That isn’t the point.’
‘I’ll do more.’
‘Fine, but that still isn’t the point. What I want you to get from this conversation is for you to understand – no, to feel – how dependent you are.’
‘I’ll do a lot more.’
She stopped again, kissed him then walked on. He called after her.
‘Are you wearing those knickers Elizabeth gave you for your birthday?’
‘Be quiet!’ she hissed, although it was early in the morning, they were in the legal centre of the City and there were no lights on in any of the imposing buildings that surrounded them.
‘Look,’ she said, as he caught up and she turned off Newgate Street into Warwick Lane, ‘I want a great deal more out of this conversation than a bit of badly done ironing.’
‘Tell me and it’s yours,’ he replied.
She stopped again and looked at him. ‘All right, but don’t pretend tomorrow that you were drunk and didn’t take it in, because you haven’t had that much to drink and, in any case, I’m going to get my way on this.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, do get on with it.’
‘All right. I want you to recognise just how dependent on me you really are. It’s not that I want you to be any less dependent because I want you to need me. I just don’t want you not to know it any more. I want you to see how needy . . . how greedy you are for all the things I give you, the support and stroking and . . . all the . . .’ She tried to grasp for the right word. ‘Stroking. I stroke you like a cat – a great big, spoilt, over-fed pedigree cat.’
He gasped. ‘Come on, you’re exaggerating.’
‘No, I’m not, and that’s the problem. Because that’s what you get, but it’s not what you give.’
‘You’re saying that I’m not nice to you?’ He spoke with a tone of entirely sincere incredulity.
She sighed with exasperation. ‘Forget nice. I want you to see how needy and greedy you are so that you’ll stop patronising me because I’m needy and greedy about wanting the same thing back from you. If I am a whiny, pathetic, needy little girl from time to time, I want you to say to yourself, “I’m just as bad, only I get my greedy little needs seen to so wonderfully well, I don’t even know it’s happening.” ’ She laughed and pinched his chin. ‘I want you to stop thinking you’re a bit of a loner . . . cool, manly . . . whatever hopelessly, completely and totally incorrect view of yourself you’ve got and come down here with me. And whenever I want stroking, petting, patting, feeding, watering and smothering in oil, I want you to jump to it.’ She looked him in the eyes, cool and amused. ‘OK?’
He seemed to be thinking about what she had said as if it caused him physical discomfort. As if to steady himself he put one hand on a parked lorry filled with spare metal barriers for crowd control. He grimaced.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said.
‘I’ve got a stone in my shoe.’
She turned round and walked off towards a side street about thirty yards away, shouting over her shoulder as she went. ‘I’ve got the key to Mark’s, garage. You might as well wait here.’
She was just about to turn into the side street when he called out to her. She glanced back to see him holding his shoe in his left hand.
‘I . . .’
At this point the lorry on which the man was leaning disintegrated at a thousand metres per second. The two hundred pounds of plastic explosive hidden inside disconnected his body joint by ligament, scoured it of stomach, lungs, heart and face, and atomised his blood so that, for a moment, in the aftermath, a fine mist of it hung in the air like a small cloud.
Within a few minutes a policeman walked slowly to the spot where the lorry had once been parked, stunned by the impossibility of what he was seeing – an apocalypse of broken glass and masonry. For the moment there was only silence. He stood for a few seconds unable to think and then raised the radio attached to his lapel to contact his home station. It was then that he saw the woman lying on the ground, her body arched slightly over a shattered pillar of stone. He ran over to her. She had been cut in two by the metal tailgate of the lorry as it had exploded. Her skirt, not much damaged, was bundled around her waist and the policeman could see she was wearing a pair of immaculate white knickers on which were printed a small red heart and around it the words “‘I love you”.’
An hour later, still unable to sleep because of the pain in his back, George Winnicott switched on the radio and heard the first reports of an explosion near the Old Bailey. He thought how odd it was to be sitting in his kitchen when only ten days before he would have been woken within minutes of the bomb going off. The report said that one woman had been killed and that a man, her husband, was missing. He decided to go for a walk to take his mind off the pain in his back. By the time he returned Alice had left with the kids to visit her mother for the day. He found a Post-it on the kitchen door: ‘Urgent. Ring Jim Vaughan as soon as possible.’ Winnicott looked in his diary, picked up the phone and dialled. It was answered after the first ring. ‘Jim, it’s George here . . .’
‘Maria’s vanished,’ interrupted a desperate voice. ‘It’s been three weeks.’
‘Maria’s disappeared before, Jim. She’s twenty-five.’
‘Not for this long. Five days, that was the longest. I’m worried, George. Monica’s beside herself.’ There was a pause.
‘How can I help?’ said Winnicott finally.
‘Talk to Hobbs. If you ask him, he’ll help – put someone on it and keep them there.’
‘I’m not in the force any more, Jim, you are. Hobbs is more likely . . .’
‘He won’t. We’ve never got on and I’m not senior enough to ask a favour. He’ll listen to you. He owes you after the Waldorf business. Please.’
Winnicott tried reassurance once more. ‘Why couldn’t she have gone off somewhere with friends to celebrate the New Year? Lots of people have strayed.’
‘I’m sure something’s happened. Please, George.’
Winnicott said nothing, weighing up whether he could refuse. He was pretty sure this was just another of his goddaughter’s disappearing acts. But the last time they had met the change in her had been astonishing. Why would she have gone back to her old ways? On the other hand, she was an odd girl. ‘Of course, I’ll do what I can, but it’ll take a few days for everyone to get up to speed after the new year so be patient. Give me the details.’ He took a pencil from the back of his diary.
‘There’s not much – you know how secretive she is. She came to see us the week before she disappeared – said she’d never been happier. George . . .’ his voice expressed only bafflement, ‘she looked wonderful. We were both so happy . . . never seen her looking so well . . . a different girl.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Winnicott sadly. ‘I met her about six weeks ago. She was on her way to work. I’d never seen Maria looking so contented.’
‘So why should she run away?’ asked the voice, plaintive and afraid. ‘This psychiatrist she’d been seeing, she
said he was wonderful. Really helped her. She had a boyfriend and he’d got her to see things differently. He really cared about her. So why would she run away?’
‘Have you spoken to him – the boyfriend?’
‘She wouldn’t tell us his name. You know Maria. We were so delighted we didn’t want to press her. She was a new girl, George, almost like another person. Hobbs could find him. If you speak to him, he might know something. I’m worried, George, really worried.’
About six weeks before the phone call about Marie Vaughan, Michael McCarthy, deputy head of investigation at the Fraud Secretariat, had arrived for work. He made his way straight to the chief executive’s office suite and booked in with Sally Brett’s personal assistant, then sat down and waited. His grey business suit could not hide the stocky mass of his body. The short frame and wide shoulders looked no more than a couple of generations from the working of a plough or the selling of horses, an effect heightened by the slightly red flush of someone who had been out in the sun and open air recently. It was a peasant face, square with a large nose, open, friendly and at ease. When he spoke, however, it was in the rhythm and tone of the Home Counties.
For the first six months after he had become deputy chief, the PA had been pleasant to him, but he had made the mistake of referring to her as Sally Brett’s secretary. She took her revenge by always waiting ten minutes before telling Brett he had arrived to keep his appointment. The result was that McCarthy, a punctual man, had now developed a reputation with his superior as a slovenly timekeeper. Brett frequently dropped hints about lateness, and though he realised she was trying to communicate something to him, he had no reason to connect it with his own prompt arrival. On this occasion, however, he was shown in almost immediately. He entered Brett’s office feeling slightly uneasy. He knew that his own lack of involvement in the series of cock-ups that had resulted in the collapse of the Bris case after such a long trial would be overlooked if it was considered convenient to deliver someone’s balls to the president of the Department of Trade and Industry by way of conciliation. There had, in fact, been no director of investigations since the previous year when McCarthy’s last boss had been bribed by a generous early settlement of his pension to take the rap for the collapse of the second Northern Accident trial. McCarthy had refused the offer to replace him on the grounds that the decision, several years earlier, to place all the most complex fraud investigations under one agency meant that a significant proportion would inevitably fail to result in a conviction because they were so complex. Any such failure, he reasoned, was bound to be laid at the feet of the FS because the press took into account neither the special difficulty of these cases nor the possibility that the accused might have been innocent.
‘Ah, McCarthy,’ said a miserable-looking Brett, standing by the window looking down into the street fifty feet below. ‘It’s good to see the buses are running on time.’ McCarthy grunted in a way that he hoped signified his agreement that standards of public transport weren’t all they might be, generally speaking. Brett turned round and sat down looking glum. She was in her sixties and had an odd way of speaking, rather like a pre-war colonial governor, which is what her beloved father had been. Unusually tall, with grey hair and a face thin to the point of gauntness, she had a dress sense that had been arrested in the early 1950s, a time when she had, according to unsubstantiated office rumour, been left at the altar by the only man she had ever loved. As a consequence, she had been nicknamed Colonel Havisham after her clipped manner of speaking and the mad, jilted bride in Great Expectations. There was nothing unbalanced about Sally Brett, however, as those who made the mistake of underestimating her usually discovered. Many were the exiles who had tried to get one over on her only to find themselves gulaged to whatever job passed for Siberia in that particular organisation. She sighed irritably.
‘Have you seen this morning’s Times?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Read it.’ She passed over a copy folded so that only the editorial was visible. The headline ran: A Cosy Arrangement Fails Again.
Serious fraud is unique in at least three respects. The rewards for wrongdoing can be huge, far in excess of traditional kinds of theft. The late Robert Maxwell misappropriated several hundred million pounds, while the Brinks-Mat gold bullion robbery, the largest ever traditional theft, netted less than thirty million. There are often, at least in the more technical frauds, no obvious victims and no obvious signs that an unlawful deed has been committed. Finally the complexity of all but the most unsophisticated frauds means that it can be very hard to prove whether or not there has been any wrongdoing at all – at least of a kind that can be clearly established in a court of law.
The disintegration of yet another major fraud trial means that serious questions must be asked about the Fraud Secretariat and its ability to deliver the goods. The FS clearly needs to be given a good shake-up through clearer direction from the top. Why, for instance, was it necessary to indict Louis Bris on so many counts, or to call so many witnesses who merely echoed each other? However, given the failure of its high-profile director Sally Brett to appoint a successor to the long-departed but not-much-lamented John Rank, there is real doubt whether she has the will to take the initiative with regard to getting the financial professions to put their houses in order and restore public confidence in their ability to deal with the cheats within their ranks.
Self-regulation is a traditional British means of avoiding unnecessary state interference while also saving the public purse. It also satisfies a widespread desire by professional bodies not to wash their dirty linen in public lest confidence be lost, although this is not a facility extended to less middle-class miscreants such as bank robbers or burglars, It is hard to feel much confidence in the smug view implicit in the continued existence of such arrangements.
While it is notoriously difficult to assess the total amount of money lost through fraud, reliable estimates put it conservatively at £3 billion a year. This is twice the sum misappropriated through conventional theft, burglary and robbery. If the Upperworld is not to replace the Underworld as the prime source of public concern about the level of criminality in society, then it is high time the financial sector realised that it can no longer be a judge in its own court. The Fraud Secretariat for its part needs to realise that the days of hands-off regulation are numbered. It is being weighed in the balance and we must hope that it will not be found wanting.
McCarthy put the paper back on her desk. Brett looked at him balefully. ‘I also had a phone call from Lafferty. He wants to see me over at the DTI tomorrow morning. I’ll have to give him something solid. Louis Bris stole from a great many influential people and a lot of Tory MPs are getting their noses tweaked. Lafferty is under pressure to deliver somebody and I’ve got to make sure it isn’t us.’
‘What have you got in mind?’
‘We ought to be seen to be acting in a way that is both substantial and effective. We need to fill the Director’s vacancy. I had dinner with Sir John Hapgood on Tuesday. He was after a job.’
‘With us?’ said McCarthy, astonished.
‘Not quite. No doubt Sir John would be willing to take over from me, but I’ve no intention of going anywhere. No, it was for someone else.’
‘Ah . . . who?’
‘George Winnicott.’
‘Winnicott?’ said McCarthy, mystified.
‘Yes,’ said Brett. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘We’re talking about the Head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad?’
‘That’s correct.’
Neither said anything for a moment and it was McCarthy who spoke first. ‘He’s obviously intelligent . . . Principles of Policing was an interesting piece of work, very well argued. Not at all what you’d expect.’
‘From a policeman, you mean?’
‘Yes . . . I suppose that’s what I do mean. There’s no doubt he squeezed the IRA dry in London. Until recently, anyway.’
Brett looked offended. ‘You can’t reas
onably expect one man to solve the problems of Northern Ireland. The point is that the Anti-Terrorist Squad was an absolute bloody shower when he arrived. Since then there’s been a near universal recognition that the IRA have had a difficult time of it because of him. You said so yourself. His decision to seal off the entire City of London to stop them from bombing the financial centre of the country to oblivion was absolutely brilliant . . . decisive, direct.’
‘I don’t remember many people taking that view at the time,’ he said, with restrained relish because Brett had bitterly complained about the plan to put roadblocks at all points of entry into the financial district. She ignored the reminder. ‘Anyway,’ continued McCarthy, ‘why would he want to come here? He can’t be much more than forty and he’s already head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad, so why would he leave? It sounds fishy to me.’
‘It’s simple. Winnicott’s got a bad back, an injury from years ago apparently. He’s failed his police medical and he’s got to take a desk job. He needs a job that isn’t physically demanding but which keeps him mobile.’ Brett coughed. It was not a clearing of the throat, it was a black cap to signal the death of their conversation. ‘He’ll have fresh eyes . . . see things differently. He’s got a reputation for getting results. Sounds like just the man.’
George Winnicott sat in one of his chiropractor’s treatment rooms eyeing a model of the spinal column complete with an assortment of typical back problems defined by different coloured plastic: spondylitis, compression fractures, prolapsed discs. He felt as if he were suffering from every one of them.
‘How are you?’ asked the chiropractor, as he walked through the doorway with the briskness of a man who could charge twenty-five pounds for every ten-minute consultation he could fit into an hour.
‘Not too bad,’ Winnicott lied pointlessly. ‘A bit stiff.’
The chiropractor gestured towards a padded couch that rested on a plinth hinged so that it pointed vertically. ‘On you go.’
Winnicott walked over to the couch, which was slightly taller than him, and rested against it, face down, with his arms above his head. The chiropractor pushed a pedal with his foot and the couch slowly settled to the horizontal, taking Winnicott with it. The chiropractor prodded the fifth lumbar vertebra.