by Seb Kirby
Back then he’d blamed them. All those well-meaning, self-serving types who’d made a living out of his distress. Now, looking back, he knew that much of the blame rested with him.
It had taken nine years as a merchant seaman to understand that. He’d travelled the world, seen the misery out there in Africa, in the Far East and South America and discovered that this world is founded on despair and suffering, the exploitation of one man by another - of many women by many men - and understood that in comparison his suffering was not so great. It was the norm. It was those who lived with happiness and in peace and who knew only love that were the exception. They were the ones who failed to understand that the happiness, peace and love they took for granted was only made possible by the suffering of the many out of their sight. Just as he’d taken those things for granted and expected them as a right before that night when his father failed to make it home from work.
And, yes, he’d done his share of hurting others. In fist fights in dockside bars. With women in the loneliest of lonely nights. It had made him feel better – but not for long enough. After fighting his way through it all, he realized that nothing he could do to others would ever take away the anger and the hatred he was now destined to feel. Yes, he’d somehow found the strength to hide these things from view. At least that’s what he was trying so hard to believe was true.
When he returned to London, the time spent in the merchant navy had given him a past he could talk about. It was enough to get him this security job. And here he was, patrolling one of the most prestigious buildings on Canary Wharf.
He stopped. He could hear movement in one of the offices ahead. He’d have to check it out.
He used the master key to open the plate glass front door of OAM Securities and stepped inside.
He shouted out. “Someone working late?”
A scuffling noise came back. Coming from the CEO’s office. Tyrone Montague’s door.
Someone hastening to stop what they were doing, perhaps?
Brogan moved closer and waited. “I know you’re there.”
These situations were always difficult. There was no question of allowing him or anyone else in security to be armed. All he had was the two-way radio that connected him to the command center and, if matters necessitated it, the heavy torch that was slung from his belt.
Brogan moved through the trading area, its workstations empty now, and into the CEO’s office. It was more a suite than an office. The area outside the inner sanctum had three desks that would have been manned by assistants during daytime. The area was also empty now. Nothing suspicious.
In the inner office, Brogan found few signs of disturbance. The drawers of the CEO’s desk had not been opened. There were no papers lying scattered around. On the far side of the office there was a second exit, a door left ajar. Whoever had been here had left that way and would be heading back out to the corridor on the other side of the floor.
Brogan prepared to head off in pursuit but then he noticed something.
The table-top computer had been in use just moments before and had not yet gone back to sleep.
Brogan stared at the screen.
His heart stopped.
He rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing this.
There on the screen was the image of a beautiful woman. Dark hair, bright, brown eyes that the years of deprivation had not dulled.
He was looking at an image of his sister. Della Brogan. The first time he’d seen her in all these long years.
He forgot about the intruder. Whoever it was, whatever they had been here to find, mattered little to him now.
Sitting in the CEO’s chair, in Ty Montague’s seat of power, he stared at the picture of Della, taking in every detail of her appearance.
She looked happy. Her smile and the sparkle in those brown eyes told him that. And she was no longer poor. The jewelry at her neck was proof enough. Yet there was an absence in that face. A something missing in her look that meant all was not as it seemed.
Brogan clicked the mouse. The image disappeared.
He tried all he could to bring Della back but nothing worked. He’d seen her and now she was gone. But it didn’t matter. He knew she was alive. He knew she’d survived. That was worth more than anything to him.
The radio beeped. The automatic check on his position.
Brogan returned to awareness of the situation.
Should he log this as an incident? There would be an internal investigation. The police would be informed. But there had been no external breach of security. He would have been alerted to that. The intruder was almost certain to be someone already in the building.
Brogan wasn’t quite sure why, but it was something about having seen the image of his sister that meant he didn’t respond and, instead, took his time to turn off the computer.
Something in Della’s look had told him this was the thing to do.
He spent the next two hours on his rounds, combing though the building, floor by floor. He found over twenty night-time sleepers who’d decided not to bother going home. Any one of them could have broken into Ty Montague’s office. He noted the names of those he knew. But keeping record was not uppermost in his mind.
He was thinking of Della and how he was now certain he could find her.
CHAPTER 31
What Evan Hamilton didn’t need to tell any of team at The Herald was they were under pressure to come up with results. Since the breakthrough story that had led them to be nominated for the Insight Award, their investigation had produced some good copy but not a single front page headline, no new killer story. Doubters were already circling, making the newspaper’s management restless, to say the least.
Hamilton steeled himself for the 8 AM meeting. He knew he would have to crank up the pressure on the team.
He arrived at the meeting room his customary five minutes early to find Geoff Tunny sitting there alone. “No one else here?”
“Early yet. Give them time.”
Working with a private investigator like Tunny went against everything Hamilton valued in journalism. But in these days of press competition, with journalists so accountable if matters weren’t wholly above board, it was the only way to get results. Not that Tunny was allowed to be called a PI when he worked for the paper. SC, story consultant, sounded much more acceptable to anyone looking in from outside.
Useful, then, that the others hadn’t yet arrived. There were matters they needed to discuss.
“Tell me, Geoff, where do you think we are in exposing Montague?”
Tunny lowered his eyes. “You want the detail or the methodology?”
“Because there is no detail yet?”
“It will come so long as we don’t try to rush it.”
Hamilton gritted his teeth. “So, let’s have the methodology.”
“You sure you want to know about this?”
“There’s no one here but us two.”
“OK. We have a bug in Montague’s office. In his computer.”
“Monitoring his keystrokes?”
“Better than that. It relays all his activity on the desk top. Copies every document. And it also records everything he says.”
“You can listen directly?”
“And see what he’s looking at, where he’s linking to.”
“How did you manage to set it up?”
“You’re sure you really want to know?”
Hamilton nodded.
Tunny smiled. “OK. That’s the pleasing part. The reason why you pay me to do what I do. There’s a young guy from China, Alan Qui, works in Canada One, not for OAM but for another investment company. He’s not making it, not delivering the goods, and sooner rather than later he’s going to be sent home. The only way he’ll be able to face his family when he gets back to China is to show them he’s made good money and no longer needs to work in London. So, he’s taking on jobs. One of those jobs was to stay overnight in the Tower and place the bug for us.”
Hamilton was begi
nning to wish he hadn’t asked. “What happens if he talks?”
“He won’t.”
“What if Montague discovers the bug?”
“Relax. He won’t. He’s too busy being Tyrone Montague, king pin and financial whiz kid, to ever notice. And for insurance, once we’ve gathered the information we need, part of the deal is that Qui goes back and removes the bug. If we’re lucky, we’ll be back out of there before they even notice.”
“This shouldn’t come down to luck.”
“You know well enough how this game works by now, Evan. You have to take risks. Acceptable risks. It’s what we do.”
Hamilton shook his head. “And what did it cost?”
“Five thou to put the bug in and another five thou to take it out. Cheap at the price.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“You want to catch Montague, don’t you? Expose him for the bag of slime that he is?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’m afraid, Evan my friend, that you have to feel comfortable getting down and dirty like the rest of us.”
There was noise outside in the corridor. The rest of the team arriving.
Hamilton wondered how he’d ever let himself get mixed up with a low-life like Tunny. But the time for remorse was long gone. They were in this together now.
He stepped back to take his seat at the head of the table. “Keep this to yourself, Tunny. Just between us. Safer that way, I’m sure you agree.”
Tunny whispered back. “You know you can depend on me, Evan.”
CHAPTER 32
Stella DaSilva combed her hair and tied it in a pony-tail.
Her next client liked them young and she knew how to dress to appeal to this without surrendering the high-class sheen that was so essential when you had to cut it in the top London nightspots.
But she shouldn’t think of him like that. He was more than a client. He was the one who’d saved her.
She looked in the mirror and smiled to show her perfect whitened, straightened teeth. “Not bad. Not bad for someone who began with nothing. Nothing at all.”
Her thoughts went back to the children’s homes where she’d spent seven loveless years wondering why the world had been so hard on her and the brother with whom she’d lost contact. It was a cruel thing to do, she knew that well. But to separate them, place them in homes at opposite ends of the country and leave no means for them to stay in touch was routine in those days. That didn’t excuse what had been done or make it any easier. She’d lost contact with her brother and now, even if she could find him or if he was to find her, she wouldn’t want him to know how she now lived. As an escort girl. Or by any other account and no matter how she dressed it up to the outside world, as a high class whore.
And all because their father had been killed crossing the road that misty night. All because their mother, Caitlin, couldn’t cope with the loss of Jimmie and had fallen apart, taken to drink and then found another man who’d begun knocking her and her brother about. When the neighbors reported it, Caitlin had been forced to choose between the children and her new man and she’d chosen to stay with him.
It was for their own good that they were removed and placed in public protection, Stella knew that. Nothing but violence and abuse would have resulted if they’d stayed with their mother and her new man. And while the care she’d received in the half dozen homes she’d been confined in during those years was without fault in its own terms, she’d been left in a loveless world with no one, no mother, no brother, to care about and be cared for.
When she reached eighteen she had to leave. That’s the way it worked. She was an adult. She had to stand on her own two feet.
It was like stepping into a swamp on a moonless night, with no direction, no preparation for what was to come.
But she’d made it.
She’d come to London with the few possessions she’d been allowed to keep and faced the terror of cold nights on damp and icy streets.
She had something on her side. She was beautiful in a way that attracted men of a certain kind. She was tall, thin with small breasts, raven black hair and brown, bright eyes that the years in the homes had not dimmed.
The first of her many men had been the one to find her, to save her and lead her to the direction her life was now on.
The man she was going to meet again tonight.
There was security in knowing that he’d remained as true to her in his own way as she’d remained true to him over the years since she’d arrived in London. Though he had a wife and another life quite different to anything she knew; though she had others to fill the time between their meetings, and yes, to pay the bills and keep her in the high life to which she was now accustomed.
She dabbed her lips with a tissue, removing some of the bright red lipstick she’d been applying as she looked in the mirror. He didn’t like her to look too obvious.
She moved back and looked herself over. Yes, she could still cut it amongst the models and would-be starlets that appeared on the scene and shone for a few brief months before the terrors of this life took hold of them. Pornography or violence or perversion. Stella had seen it all, had steered a pathway through all that. There was no way she would let anything now stand in the way of her success in surviving.
Time to go.
She smoothed the tight, tight silver lame dress over her hips. Not too short. But short enough to excite.
Time to meet the man who’d saved her.
He didn’t like to be kept waiting.
CHAPTER 33
He didn’t like journalists and he didn’t care who knew it. They were a menace, snooping about, collecting information that might compromise his investigation and for what? All for a few headlines that would be forgotten next day once another story came along. Meanwhile, for policemen like him, the task of bringing prosecutions that would succeed in court went on. As he would tell anyone who would listen, he didn’t give a damn about the faint-hearted liberals crying about freedom of the press. What mattered was putting the wrongdoers away.
He’d been investigating drugs misuse in the City for over three years now, ever since Superintendent Henderson had received information that a new drugs gang was finding a ready market for cocaine, methamphetamine and other illegal highs amongst the asset traders and bankers of Canary Wharf. He’d been making progress, establishing useful contacts that sooner or later would deliver the evidence he needed, he was sure of that. And then along came the journos, on his case, and he didn’t mean that in any figurative sense, either.
He knew that Evan Hamilton at The Herald had set up a team to investigate City corruption. Stories about rogue bankers were a currency high in demand. He respected the man, admired, even, his determination to root out corruption in high places. But that was no help now it was clear that many of those accused of financial wrongdoing were also of interest to the drugs investigation. Fingering any of them for financial fraud would create such a climate of suspicion that the gathering of information on drugs misuse would be all but impossible.
Yet it was difficult to intervene. That was the problem when working undercover. With so much police time already invested in trying to penetrate the protective layers around the trade in drugs, it would be disastrous if his identity was now revealed. That meant he had to stand by while Hamilton and his men were running all over his back yard.
Above any of this, Hamilton’s men could even be a direct threat to him. No one, least of all the press, needed to know the details of his undercover identity. If they did, he could end up in the dock himself.
He sat back in his office chair and gave a smile.
It wasn’t all hard going.
There were satisfactions in living a life as someone else. Going undercover in a new identity as a drugs dealer himself gave a man like him new freedoms. Led to many experiences he would never have had if he’d remained an ordinary copper.
Like meeting Stella and taking her as a lover.
The alarm he’d
set on his phone rang. Time for his meeting with Superintendent Henderson. Time to let him know that Hamilton and his journos were intruding too far on the case.
He looked at the name tag on the uniform he wore for formal meetings like this.
John Delaney.
Strange how after spending so much time undercover his given name was starting to look unnatural to him. Stranger still that his undercover name, Terry Morgan, had started to feel so much more like the real him.
CHAPTER 34
Marshall Brogan knew he should have worked harder to establish the identity of the intruder. It would have given him a stronger bargaining counter in his meeting with Tyrone Montague. But perhaps he already knew enough.
It wasn’t easy to get through to the man. His assistants did their jobs well in protecting their CEO’s time and space. Though they wouldn’t quite say as much, every barrier they placed in his way asked the same question - why would a lowly security guard be asking for a confidential meeting with the head of OAM? Surely, if there were matters of importance that needed consideration, they would best come from the Head of Security. Yet Brogan had persisted and when the matter reached Montague himself, his curiosity raised no doubt, he agreed to the meeting.
Sitting in the padded leather Chesterfield facing Ty Montague, it was difficult for Brogan to remain calm. The aura of privilege surrounding the man could be all but touched, all but tasted. Montague was, in this moment, an embodiment of every injustice Brogan had been forced to contend with down the years. The children’s home managers, the prison governors, the ships’ captains, and all the mean-spirited authoritarians that had dogged his life - now all rolled into one. It was bound to reignite the rage that he’d fought to control over so many years. An anger made all the stronger by the way Montague was keeping him waiting, pretending to be involved in the paperwork before him, a well-practiced artifice to let him know who was in control. Brogan knew that despite it all, he must not let the way he felt at this moment intervene. He wanted something from the man.