‘Interpol,’ said Runion, ‘are about as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane.’
‘The Yard?’
‘Overrun by politically-correct, pen-pushing philistines who probably think that Art is something you put your ’and on when you swear your daily allegiance to the bloody Queen!’
Runion had presumably raised his voice further than intended and he checked to see that their friend hadn’t heard. If he had, the man in the corner wasn’t showing it and remained hidden behind a wall of outstretched newspaper. Or almost hidden: his crossed legs could still be seen, the uppermost of which shamelessly flaunted, for all to see, an uninspiring, blue and grey checked sock, and an even more tone-lowering brown suede shoe. The people they allowed into the Garrick these days…
‘So those fellows you mentioned earlier,’ said Bridges, ‘Norton or whatever his name was, and the Russian…?’
‘Aleksei Denisovsky. Ukrainian I believe.’
‘Right. So are you saying that there’s a link? With―’
‘Oh there’s a link all right,’ Runion said, looking around at the newspaper and lowering his voice further. ‘The word on the street is that Aleksei has been using his Russian connections on the black market for quite some time. And Norton Rattatroop…’ He proceeded to speak in an almost inaudible murmur. ‘Norton Rattatroop most certainly has been. Interpol have been camped out in front of his gallery, pretty much on a permanent basis. They’ve never been able to pin anything on him though, the fools. He’s hardly going to bring his stolen art in there, is he. What’s he going to do, have a Stolen Artworks Retrospective? Anyway, I probably shouldn’t be talking about him in the present tense.’
‘You think he’s been…?’
‘That or he’s decamped to Armenia for the rustic lifestyle. I know which one my money would be on. Oh and the other thing…’ Runion checked the room again quickly. ‘He’s a friend of a member here, Sir Martin Nevers, the judge, so if that’s true, this Norton fellow has friends in the right places. Had.’
‘Mm. Not enough of them, by the sounds of it.’
‘The thorny thing is, Nevers is reputed to have his own line of… connectivity, if I can use that word, to the Soviets. Don’t ask me how I know that.’
‘Sounds like a le Carré novel.’
‘Infinitely messier. Infinitely. Anyhow, Nevers was the person lunching at the Traveller’s today. Thought it might be wise to steer a wide berth on this occasion. You just never know. Right now, any connection’s a dangerous connection as far as I’m concerned.’
Bridges nodded, mulling over the phrase “dangerous connection”.
There was a sudden rustling in the corner as the man in the grey suit folded his newspaper and put it down on the table in front of him, checked his watch, stood up with a degree of grunting effort and trudged out of the room.
‘Any idea who that was?’ Runion asked.
Bridges shook his head. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve seen him somewhere. Can’t quite place him…’
Runion and Bridges shared a miserable moment in their own thoughts.
‘So what are we going to do?’ Bridges asked eventually.
Runion stared at Bridges for a moment. He appeared to have only half heard the question. ‘It’s tricky,’ was all he said.
It was tricky all right. This situation wouldn’t do at all. Bridges hated things being left up in the air. Particularly where his health was concerned.
‘Who’s this chap of yours anyway, can he help us?’ Bridges asked.
‘Which chap?’
‘Your chap. The one who tracked down Mr Smith and who’s been putting out feelers. Surely he can do something. Or advise us what to do.’
‘Ah yes, my chap. Except it’s not a he. My chap happens to be a woman.’
‘A woman?’
Runion nodded. ‘A private investigator, and a bloody good one. Easy on the eye too, it has to be said, but that’s not why I use her. She is, very simply, the best man for the job.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘No really.’
‘Does she have a name?’
‘Her name is Emerald Strand. A Danish-Ukrainian… or Ukrainian-Dane, whichever you prefer. Perfect, really, as it turns out, for our current…um… situation. I’d wager she knows a lot of these characters personally. Rather her than me, I might add.’
‘How did you find her?’
‘Funnily enough it was through Aleksei, but well before any of this began to go pear-shaped. I used her a couple of years ago to track down a Russian who, um, let’s say owed me either a painting of mine that he happened to have in his possession, or a hundred thousand pounds, I didn’t mind which. After I got Emerald onto him, I ended up with both. The painting and the hundred grand. Don’t ask me how she did it. But I never saw the Russian again.’
‘You don’t think she―’
‘You never ask questions in this business, Lawrence.’
‘No. Right.’
‘If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that.’
‘Great, so let’s get her in. For a three-way. I mean, obviously, a meeting.’
Runion was shaking his head, and as far as Bridges could tell, it wasn’t over his choice of words.
‘What?’ Bridges said. ‘I have a right to be involved Richard, after all―’
‘Oh I have no problem with you being involved. None at all.’
‘Well what, then.’
‘There’s a little snag.’
‘What?’
‘Emerald seems to have disappeared herself.’
It was just one thing after the other. Another squirrel down. Bridges could almost feel the crosshairs on him as they sat there in the sitting room of the Garrick club. He stared at Runion for a good ten seconds, blinking. Processing. But there was no answer. Or rather, no answer that was good.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Runion replied. ‘Fuck.’
49.
It was bang on 3pm and Jon was standing in the crowded circular booking hall of Piccadilly Circus tube station – the proposed rendezvous. He was nervous, there were people everywhere, why had he suggested meeting in Piccadilly Circus? What had he been thinking?
He cast his mind back over the last twenty-four hours…
The previous day, after the shooting incident and while fleeing West Kensington in the taxi, it had dawned on him that he had to find a way of meeting up with Alastair – who had become indispensable, his life preserver – but he knew he couldn’t return to Alastair’s flat. He also didn’t know Alastair’s phone number or even, for that matter, his surname. Just his address.
Why didn’t he go to the police? It would have been the obvious thing to do, but he was running purely on instinct by this stage, and every electrical connection between every neurone in his brain and every twitching muscle in his body was saying no. There was logic too, behind this decision: if he’d gone to the police they’d have taken a statement, wasted time, and done very little. And his backstory was looking increasingly deranged or at best, hard to explain – the house fire, the week at Alastair’s under the radar… Not to mention the fact that going to the police would have immediately announced his movements to all and sundry (and especially the sundry) making him even more of a target than he already was. Rightly or wrongly, he’d made his decision and he had, anyway, perhaps already passed the point of no return.
He still had some cash left, so decided his best option would be to send a registered-post, next-day-delivery letter and pray that Alastair would actually read it. And pray that no-one else intercepted it (in which case, in all likelihood, that would be that – game over, as they say).
He’d jumped out of the cab on King’s Road, Chelsea – they’d been stuck in traffic directly in front of the World’s End Post Office. It happened to be just up the road from Romy’s and was certainly closer to the place of his attempted murder than he would have liked, but he was anxious to get his note off to Alastair.
His note was a wail, followed by a grovel and a plea. It was light on tact and heavy on imploring. He wasn’t asking for ‘lawyers, guns and money’ exactly (he was a lawyer himself and guns weren’t his area of expertise), but he was asking for money: cash, and as much as Alastair could spare. It was a big ask but he would forever be in his debt. He swore he’d repay him many times over. He then went on to suggest they meet in Piccadilly Circus tube station at 3pm the next day, Thursday 24th.
(Thinking about that suggestion now, of course, it was ludicrous. Piccadilly Circus? Famous for being the place where you’d see everyone you knew if you stayed long enough? And it was hardly all that convenient for Alastair either, who spent most of his time, as far as Jon knew, in West London.)
After dispatching his letter of desperation, and low on cash, he continued on foot towards the West End to see if he could find accommodation for the night. First stop was his old haunt, the Covent Garden Travelodge.
When he arrived though, the staff (as usual) had all changed since the last time he was there and no-one knew him. They couldn’t accept his booking without payment up front and he only had about fifty pounds left. And everywhere else, it was the same story: the first night’s payment was required up front.
It became clear that accommodation would be impossible to secure and that he’d need a plan B. He thought of Heathrow (airport) and then he thought of St. Pancras (station) but as he was at least looking semi-respectable in Alastair’s suit (which almost fitted him and was only slightly soiled from his frantic dash through the remains of his burnt-out house), he opted for more comfort and headed for a bar he knew in an expensive hotel near Hyde Park Corner, frequented by rich Russians and high class prostitutes. There were, however, only so many advances from bejewelled, befurred, blonde thirty-year olds with Eastern European accents he could take in one evening – the prostitutes he couldn’t afford (not that he was particularly keen to return to Macau, so to speak) and the Ukrainian gold-diggers were a little too much of a loaded question for him. As attractive as it might have been, the thought of a warm bed for the night if he played his cards right, the baggage these women came with had contents he was far better off without.
He didn’t want music or alcohol or people around him indulging in either, so that left the twenty-four hour cafes. Bar Italia in Soho fitted the bill for a while with its coffees and hot chocolates until the noise and the late-night/early-morning crowds became too much and he decided to make his way to St. Pancras after all. It was a chilly night – down to six degrees by 6am – and he was sorely tempted to get on a train: a one-way journey on a heated train to anywhere seemed like just the ticket except he had a rendezvous, he hoped, to stick to. So in architecturally-inspired, thermally-challenged St. Pancras station he remained, wondering how in the hell homeless people got by. When they did. And it wasn’t even winter yet.
In this way, Wednesday blurred into Thursday, the sun reluctantly appeared and slowly rose and the day warmed to a civilised seventeen degrees. It was just about the longest twenty-four hours he’d ever spent.
And now, surrounded by the throngs of tourists and commuters in Piccadilly Circus tube station, he could only dream of a quiet room, a comfortable bed…
Other thoughts continued to bounce around in his head, though. Thoughts that clamoured for attention. Persistent, like the pleading of a young child.
There was no longer any doubt someone was trying to kill him. He no longer had to wonder if he was going crazy. He no longer had to look at the odds or Probability, or the illusion of ‘coincidence’. So who was behind all of this? And why? To what end? And most importantly of all, what had any of it to do with him?
Now that he was no longer doubting the connectivity of it all, it drew Emerald back into the frame yet again. She had to be a part of all this. How, though, was the unanswerable question. Nothing she’d brought to him, or said, had made any sense.
A loud, passing group of unchaperoned Italian teenagers startled him for a moment and he felt more exposed than ever. Whoever was trying to kill him was pulling out all stops now. So it would seem. If he was supposed to have died in the fire, he most certainly should have been farewelling the world with a bullet in his back. He looked around at the swirling sea of humanity, faces from every corner of the globe, every nook and cranny: there were Spaniards and Norwegians, Americans and Koreans, Australians and Russians and Indians, and he wondered if any of them was following him. Because that was what must have happened the day before, wasn’t it? He had to have been followed. Unless – and this had crossed his mind earlier – someone knew he was returning to West Kensington, knew the timing of his return.
And the only person who knew that was Romy, who he’d just come from seeing.
He kept pushing the thought out of his head, and it kept springing back: it was almost impossible to imagine, but could Romy have been connected with any of this? He had, after all, received her phone call the night of the fire – the phone call, what’s more, with its discomposingly abrupt conclusion, nothing more than sinister perhaps, but nothing less than strange.
And then something clicked in his head. It must have been thinking of Emerald and that will, because he was reminded of his own will. He hadn’t looked at it in years, and a while back he’d made a mental note to change it (which he still hadn’t done), because just prior to his marriage to Romy, he’d altered his will so that everything went to her. Everything, which currently meant the Wiltshire cottage, his half-share of the Chelsea house, the million pounds…
Surely not. Not Romy. She wouldn’t… surely wouldn’t… be capable of such a thing. Nor could she be so stupid that she could possibly think she could get away with it. No. It simply wasn’t conceivable…
Suddenly, a man in a dark brown suede coat came charging in from nowhere and bumped into him, hard, and thrust something into his chest. For an instant Jon assumed it was a knife. By the time he realised it was a piece of paper – which reflexively his hands had grabbed, the man was weaving away through the churning crowds and rapidly disappearing from sight. Jon only had a second or two, but it was enough for him to see that the man resembled Alastair, with his indignant ginger hair. He looked cross, too.
Recovering from the fright it gave him, and realising there was no point in chasing him (the man obviously didn’t want to be followed), he unfolded the piece of paper. It was a large, sprawling handwritten note, signed “Fond Regards, Alastair”. There was no addressee and he wondered if Alastair even knew his name. It began:
Wretchedly harebrained place to meet !! see you in 3 HOURS at BRASSERIE ZEDEL 20 SHERWOOD ST W1 just around the corner couldn’t get a booking at this late stage being a thursday night but assured a walk-in table at 6PM will be no problem hope you havent had lunch they do a wonderful andouillette de troyes grillee if youre a tripe man as I am and the profiteroles are absolutely OBLIGATORY in the meantime lie low for God’s sake go to HATCHARDS bookshop on piccadilly and read a book these FUCKING CRETINS we are dealing with DONT READ you know that dont you
so youll be safe there
DO NOT FOLLOW ME do not try to find me i will be trying my luck in a building FULL OF PUBLIC SERVANTS (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) in westminster (the department it houses shall remain nameless) it is the most incomprehensible layout of any building in the country even the AUTOMATONS who work there can’t FIND THEIR OWN WAY AROUND IT without gps so you couldnt find me there anyway just go to hatchards and take deep breaths in the poetry section…
The rest of it was a rant – or rather a continuation of a rant, a rage against the nameless government department in question – and as far as he could tell, contained nothing more of relevance other than a command to destroy the note.
Jon knew Brasserie Zédel well – it was a cavernous, opulent, art-deco French restaurant in the basement of the old Regent Palace Hotel building near Piccadilly Circus. It was vast – with seating for well over two hundred – and he wondered how it was any better a place to meet tha
n where he was standing, given how crowded it was likely to be.
Did the “fucking cretins” not eat as well as not read?
50.
It was a source of irritation.
When it came to catching public transport, Bridges hated catching the Tube and almost always caught a bus when he had a choice. Taxis were a wonderful extravagance, particularly after selling a painting or making his way to a flashy lunch – or, as is often the case, both – but it somehow felt rather wasteful and very much against the spirit and camaraderie of the Blitz (not that he was around then) and everything that was good about being a Londoner. But when it came to travelling like a true (if not necessarily true-blue) Londoner, only when special circumstances warranted it would he revert to the subterranean option, which in his view was only really suited to spelunkers, submariners and Morlocks. And also (funnily enough) tourists from the Mediterranean end of the Continent (who you’d think would be out of their element without the sun, but perhaps had less need for topping up their quota of sunshine).
He was on the deep and dreaded Piccadilly line, surrounded by noisy Spaniards as far as he could tell, who began invading his personal space from the moment he boarded the train at Covent Garden. Normally, after a lunch at the club, he would have caught a bus – the good old number 19, as loyal as a Jack Russell – all the way from Shaftesbury Avenue in Covent Garden to Sloane Square, but as Runion lived near him and was himself catching the bus home, the bus option was out.
Bridges liked Runion, and he certainly enjoyed their lunches at the club, but enough was enough and that day’s lunch had certainly been enough. He needed some air after their conversation, so when Runion had invited him to join him on a bus home, he’d been forced to quickly invent a need to attend to some local business first. As soon as they’d parted ways on Garrick Street, he’d been forced to follow at a safe distance – feeling a little like a spy – and take a sharply angled dive into the depths when he reached Covent Garden tube station.
Dark Oceans Page 24