The Concierge

by Gerard Gilbert

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Nadia Pizzuto has hardly slept. By the time she did get to bed, just after two, restless dreams were interspaced with periods of anxious wakefulness, and by the time her alarm goes off at six o’clock, she isn’t sure whether she has been lying there fretting or dreaming about lying there fretting.

  Is there something more she can do? Of course a red alert, the highest level of warning of an imminent terrorist attack, has been issued to all the relevant agencies. The Vatican, which has its own army and police force, but which falls under the jurisdiction of the Italian state in matters such as this, has been informed.

  Police checkpoints have been set up on all major routes into the city centre, with patrols at all city centre Metro stations and on trains. These patrols have been issued with gas masks, and with most of what little stocks of the sarin antidote that could be found at such short notice. The government has made a secret emergency application to Washington for further stocks, but Pizzuto doesn’t know if and when these might arrive, and some wag in the office had suggested they approach the Mafia instead.

  The investigation into the hotel has led to a ’Ndrangheta family in Reggio with a history of people-smuggling and sex trafficking, but already established wiretaps revealed nothing further. Forensics are still looking at the suicide vest found in the wardrobe.

  Police all over Italy are on the lookout for a specific blue Audi A6, with number-plate recognition cameras primed to pick it up, while CCTV at the motorway toll booths tracked the car to eighty kilometres to the north of Rome yesterday afternoon, seemingly headed in their direction.

  Swiss police finally stormed the chalet in Verbier to find two dead policemen and two dead British nationals – the chalet owner and an unidentified female. They have also picked up a small quantity of drugs, a load of spent ammunition but no guns, and a Mercedes people carrier that could be traced to Rome, to a luxury private rental company that deals mainly with super-rich Russians and Arabs. The owner has already been paid a visit, but refuses to divulge the names of any of his clients.

  The two British fugitives are Maximilian Draycott and Harry Kimber, Kimber having already been detained on his arrival back in London on a flight from Geneva yesterday afternoon. Draycott’s whereabouts are unknown, although he is thought to be a passenger in the Audi A6, along with a Saudi national, Aafia, who possesses a diplomatic passport.

  Pizzuto has slept in the guest bedroom to allow her husband a decent night’s sleep, and now slips into a dressing gown and pads downstairs. Her nine-year-old is already awake and she can hear him talking to himself in his bedroom, absorbed in some imaginary game. How much she’d like to join him and give him lots of cuddles, but she feels that there won’t be much family time in the coming days and weeks.

  Making a cup of coffee, she scrolls through the emails and phone message that have arrived while she’s been sleeping, and two catch her immediate attention. The Saudi national, Aafia, caught a flight from Genoa to Frankfurt yesterday evening at eight o’clock. She was met at Frankfurt by a diplomatic mission that whisked her off into the night.

  The second message again related to the Saudi national. Early yesterday afternoon she made a phone-call to a gymnasium in Civitavecchia, a gym belonging to a known member of the ’Ndrangheta.

  “Strange,” Pizzuto says to herself, taking a sip off coffee. “Very strange.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  “Why were you carrying a gun?” asks the new man, who has identified himself as DS Philip Johns of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorism Unit. He has joined the two detectives from yesterday, who both seem to defer to him.

  The night in the police cell had been cold until he asked for an extra blanket and, to his surprise, was given one. The plastic mattress was hard, but he was tired, and he had slept surprisingly soundly until woken up for breakfast. Two slices of toast with margarine and a bowl of cornflakes.

  “As I’ve already said,” replies Harry. “The guy who claimed he was from the Saudi secret services handed me his gun after he untied me in that hell-hole in Rome.”

  “Saudi secret services… it’s all a bit far-fetched don’t you think?” asks DS Johns, a man of about Harry’s age, trim-looking and with close-cropped hair disguising his premature balding. “Isn’t the truth of the matter that, for perhaps good reason, you felt you’d been ripped off by the Saudi woman - Aafia, did you say her name was? – and simply went after her to kidnap her and get your diamond back?”

  “What do the Italian police say?” answers Harry, eager to change the subject. “Do they say I’m imagining that place in Rome?”

  DS Johns doesn’t reply. Instead he tries a different tack.

  “Why didn’t you phone the police in Verbier until you were in Martigny, nearly half an hour away on the train? Why not simply find help as soon as possible once you’d escaped the immediate vicinity of the chalet?”

  “I did phone the police from Verbier.”

  “Let me correct you… your call to the police was actually traced to Martigny, nearly thirty minutes away. You claimed to be in Verbier, but Harry, I’m afraid we’ve caught you out in a lie.”

  “Verbier… Martigny… it was all the same to me. I was in shock,” says Harry. “Until the other day I’d never had anyone point a gun at me, but in the last two days it’s happened twice, the second time I was actually shot at…”

  “So you say…”

  “Because that’s what happened,” says Harry. “When I got to the cable car in Verbier that takes you down to the train station I was in full flight mode. It was only when I got on the train to Martigny that I felt safe. And then I tried phoning the police, but couldn’t get a signal. You can ask a Monsieur Remy if you can track him down, because he tried to help me. Also, when I was picked up by the VW camper van we passed a police car shooting past, and I assumed – or hoped – that they were headed to the chalet…”

  “They were headed to their deaths,” says Johns, reading through some notes. “Both men in their twenties, married with children.”

  Harry waits. Does this require an answer?

  “I’m sorry about that,” he says at length. “But what has that got to do with me?”

  “But back to the VW camper van,” says Johns. “The witnesses say that you were in good spirits. You don’t sound like you were in shock at all.”

  “The witnesses were stoned,” says Harry. “And drunk. But the point is that I was relieved to have escaped. If that’s the same as being in good spirits, then I was in good spirits.”

  “I see,” says Johns, and there’s something about the way he makes that sound, as if Harry had incriminated himself, that bothers Harry.

  “Have you heard of self-preservation?” he says against his better judgement that you shouldn’t embark on a philosophical conversation with a policeman while under caution.

  “I’ve heard of cowardice”, says Johns, obviously glad of the opening.

  “If cowardice is not wanting to die, then, yes, I was a coward.”

  “Cowardice is leaving your friend to die.”

  “Okay, I want a lawyer now,” he says, then noticing the recording device, adds, “I’ve answered all your questions now, you’re just asking the same ones all over again.”

  “What did you do with your gun?”

  “I already told you,” says Harry. “I left it on the table by the back door so that the others could use it.”

  “Did you tell the others that that’s what you were doing?”

  “No, because I hadn’t decided to make a run for it at that stage,” says Harry. “It was only when I saw Omar sitting in the car that I decided to leg it.”

  “Without warning the others,” says Johns unpleasantly. “I think I’m beginning to build a picture now. But one question that I do keep coming back to is why you waited until you reached Martigny to phone the police?”

  “I’ve already answered that. I want a lawyer.”

  “In shock, you say. Or ju
st plain scared?”

  “No comment,” says Harry.

  “And then to fly back to London when your best friend, as far as you know, is being held captive by a terrorist in Switzerland. Sounds a bit callous to me.”

  “No comment.”

  “Was Max your best friend?”

  “No comment.”

  “You weren’t sleeping with his wife then?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “His wife.”

  And there’s an insinuating leer on Johns’ lips as he stares back at Harry.

  “Is that why you ran back to England, leaving… how shall we put this… your love rival in mortal danger from a murdering terrorist? Were you hoping that Max would in fact be killed, leaving the way clear for you and Rachel? Call me old-fashioned, but that doesn’t sound like the actions of a best friend to me.”

  “That’s not the way it is,” says Harry, properly flustered for the first time in this interview. “It was over between me and Rachel.”

  “Really?” says Johns, leaning in towards Harry. “That’s not the way she sees it. Have you told her it’s over?”

  * * *

  Mary walks back from the newsagent with a bottle of skimmed milk and the morning newspaper. Every single paper is leading with the story, headlines ranging from Britons slain in Alps massacre and Brits dead in Isis Swiss attack to Terror on the ski slopes and Murder in the chalet: Britons dead in Swiss terror attack. All variations on the same theme.

  Her own ‘first-person’ piece is on page three, following the news stories of the event. The headline reads: My friend the British terror suspect. Are a stolen diamond and a mysterious Saudi beauty keys to the Swiss chalet massacre?

  Mary stops walking to read the piece, half-cringing because she knows it was a rush job. Charlotte has tightened up the prose and punctuation, and added a couple of paragraphs to give some background information, while the picture desk have found a photograph of Harry looking very smart and rather smug, a publicity shot for Max and Harry’s company. She had no idea that Harry’s hedge fund was called Forward-Max Capital LLP. How vain of Max to name it after himself.

  Next to her article is a short piece entitled The Rise of the Concierges to the Super-rich, a quick summary of the different ways in which enterprising Britons are making a good living from providing their services to the global nouveau-riche pouring into London.

  She’s just finishing folding the paper when her phone rings. It’s BBC radio wondering whether she could come along to Broadcasting House to discuss her feature. She feels she ought to but instead tells a lie – a half-lie – that she’s not in London. Actually she and Ben had set aside today to take a look around Sidcup and see if there was anywhere they could bear to buy a flat. God, how depressing.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  The first part of the journey is easy enough, round slip roads and on to dual carriageways, Omar in view from the rear-facing CCTV camera, following in his little Fiat Panda. The truck takes a long time to get up to speed, but, once it does, it trundles along quite nicely. Just about everybody in every car that passes stares out at the truck, and one driver even gives Max the thumbs-up signal. A fan of the riot police, presumably.

  The boy keeps looking at the water-cannon controls, lightly touching the buttons and talking to himself. He seems to be taking his task extremely seriously.

  The whole thing just seems increasingly bizarre to Max, and he can’t help wondering if there is more to the exercise that merely giving the Catholic faithful a good dousing. But what else, unless it is something other than water that will be gushing out of the cannon on the truck roof?

  As they approach the denser suburbs around Rome, Omar pulls out ahead of them and puts on his flashing emergency lights. Max eases up and pulls to a stop on the hard shoulder. Omar walks round to Max’s door and pulls it open.

  “I’m turning off at the next junction,” he says, “but you carry on following the instructions on the satnav. Okay?”

  “Okay,” says Max.

  “Don’t forget. If you want to see your family again, do exactly as I have told you.”

  “Okay,” says Max.

  Omar slams the door closed and returns to his car. Off they go again, but at the next junction, Omar turns off. The satnav tells Max to continue for the next one-point-two kilometres and then to exit right on to the A90.

  As he swings down on to a roundabout, Max notices two motorcycle policemen standing next to their bikes surveying the traffic through sunglasses. The cops’ gaze follows the truck as it approaches the junction to the roundabout and Max feels certain they are going to call him to a halt. Instead they turn their attention to a car that is following the truck, ordering it to stop. Max can see them on the CCTV, leaning in through the car’s windows.

  As they exit the roundabout Max finds that they are driving along proper city boulevards now, with cafes and shops and apartment blocks, and people on the pavement – all of them, more or less, stopping to stare as the truck rumbles past. The boy is still touching the water-cannon buttons like they were good luck charms, talking to himself.

  Glancing at the CCTV, Max realises that he has been tailgated by the same black Range Rover for about a hundred metres now. Other cars are overtaking but this one – in fact two, there’s another one directly behind it – are stubbornly sticking to the truck’s slipstream. He’ll soon have a better idea as to whether they’re following or not, because in fifty metres he has to take a left down a more minor road.

  The Range Rovers do indeed follow suit, down a one-way street lined with parked cars. Max pulls up behind a dustcart that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in a hurry. He honks his horn and then turns his attention to the two cars behind him. Several tough-looking men in jeans and bomber jackets, all of them wearing balaclavas, are emerging from the cars.

  The truck doors swing open and masked faces appear, as do handguns. The boy starts shouting, but he’s pulled out of the cab, a gloved hand clasped over his mouth. Max doesn’t understand what’s being shouted at him in Italian, but he can guess that he’s been asked to get out of the lorry. A gloved hand reaches in and pulls the keys from the ignition.

  As one of the men start pulling Max from the cab, he yells and shakes the hand that is handcuffed to the steering wheel. The man shouts something in Italian to his comrade, who shouts something back and heads off to the lead Range Rover. Swearing under his breath, the man puts the muzzle of the pistol right up against the handcuff.

  “Asptetta!” shouts the comrade, passing up a large pair of bolt cutters.

  “Thank God,” says Max, as the cutters slice though the handcuff chain, leaving it dangling from the steering wheel.

  Max now feels himself being lifted out of the cab. Two men half carry him to the rear Range Rover, as the man with the bolt cutters now jumps into the truck’s driver’s seat. The dustcart starts to move forward, followed by the water-cannon truck, as Max’s head is pressed down, just like he’s seen in the movies when a suspect is put into a police car, as he’s manoeuvred onto the back seat of the Range Rover. The boy, he presumes, is in the lead car.

  And now they are off, the whole operation having lasted less than a minute. As the dustcart and the truck take a left, the Range Rovers carry straight on, Max’s minders obviously in no mood to make conversation.

  “Police?” he asks, although something about the men suggests that they are nothing of the sort. The two men in the back with Max continue to look straight ahead through the eye-slits of their balaclavas, while the driver picks up speed, the front passenger on the lookout for other vehicles.

  The two cars pull up near a large building that looks like a railway station, and the boy emerges from the last Range Rover. And then they are off again, the boy just standing on the pavement, a dazed look on his face. Max never did get to find out his name.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  In Fulham, Hugo Fairbrother has just had a rather vexing conversation with his sixteen-year-o
ld son, Fergus. The morning had started out pleasantly enough, with the exchange of chocolate Easter eggs, and Radio Three in the background as Fairbrother sank his teeth into a slice of wholemeal bread, butter and marmalade made by his second wife, Lulu. And then the subject had turned to Fergus’s choice of A-level subjects, which seemed unlikely to fit the boy for any worthwhile profession.

  “English, psychology and art,” he repeated. “Art?”

  “Yes, art, Papa… you know, painting and drawing and things,” drawled Fergus, slurping his tea. A shock of hair sat up vertically from his head. Had he forgotten to comb it, or was this the latest style? You really couldn’t tell these days, like those youths he sometimes ended up representing who wander about with their jeans halfway down their legs.

  “Painting and drawing? My word, that’s very old school of you,” said Fairbrother. “I thought they didn’t teach those things any more. It’s all video and conceptual and requiring absolutely zero amount of talent as far as I can see.”

  “Maybe I could try my hand at advertising…”

  Saved by the bell, or rather his mobile phone, as Fairbrother takes a call from Stephen Cheswright, his fellow partner at Fairbrother, Cheswright and Burgess, criminal lawyers to the seriously rich. The Saudis had been in touch – there’s a client that needs rescuing from the police down in Sussex.

  “Crawley… do you know it?” asks Cheswright.

  “Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure,” replies Fairbrother.

  “Well, there’s no pleasure to be had in Crawley as far as I know. When can you get down there?”

  * * *

  The custody sergeant has seen all sorts in his time, but this is a new one. For a start he is vast, by which he means fat or overfed, with a belly the size of a beached whale. The face is a ruddy ball, topped off by unruly ringlets of blond hair. He looks like Billy Bunter after the midnight feast to end all midnight feasts.