By this time, the computer arrives at the Pembroke & Hawkes’ homepage. She clicks once, into the mail and clicks again for the box marked “P. Kensington.” Enter password, click on “go,” open inbox.
Another pinch of scone, more latte. Savor each bite, finish scone and latte at exactly the same time.
This routine gave her a satisfaction she was quite unable to explain. As it progressed, she would open each e-mail, scan it briefly, forward it to Percy if it was personal or prepare an acknowledgment if it were business.
It was a life without surprises or major cataclysms—the life she’d engineered when she left Kent for London twelve years ago.
Percy was her ideal employer and, she felt, the ideal role model: a ship with well tended rudder and full sails, cruising calm waters under a perpetual sun.
So the job was hardly a job at all. It had become more like a pleasant succession of habits, void of unseemly peaks and valleys, with a thoroughly satisfying check every fortnight.
Perfect she thought, and this she thought every morning at 8:06.
The e-mail bore an odd sender line: “The grievous angel.”
She frowned and clicked it open. The message was two lines with no signature.
“A lesson for those who bespoil the earth. The Washington project stops here or more will follow. 46 Kentish Lane.”
The earth tilted slightly. What lesson? What ‘Washington project’? “Bespoil the earth?’”
The only clear part of it was the address—Percy’s address. He always left home she knew at 7:50. Always arrived at 8:15. He’d be in his car now, just about three blocks away.
She dialed his cell. It rang an unprecedented five times. His voice mail came on. She had never heard it before. She had recorded the greeting because he was so clueless with electronic gadgets and now the sound of her own voice filled her with dread.
She rang off and dialed his home phone. The staff didn’t come in until 9, so he would answer his own phone as he always did.
It rang endlessly, 10, 11, 15 times. She slammed down the handset and rose from her chair to…do what? She began to pace, clenching her fists in frustration. If he were en route, he’d answer. If he were home, he’d answer. He had, therefore, to be neither, and that was simply unthinkable. This was Percival Arthur Kensington, after all: Percy the responsible, the steadfast, the wholly predictable. A man who kept appointments at the appointed time, kept schedules and remained on course.
She called Derek Robbens, head of corporate security.
“Come to Mr. Kensington’s office, now!” she sputtered. Before Robbens could even say his name, “I fear something dreadful has happened.”
Within a minute, Robbens was reading the e-mail over her shoulder; within two, he was talking with Scotland Yard. Within ten, agents were in cars, bound for 46 Kentish Lane.
Within 20 minutes, Ragnar Torgesen was in a cab with his bags, headed for what he had said was a sudden trip home.
No one at the hotel took any note that the cab turned right out of the Regent’s Drive, the opposite direction from Heathrow.
Sixteen
As Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard, John Calvert always took the lead when a call involved a prominent address. A tall, handsome, gracefully-graying 48, Calvert possessed the sort of cultivated diction and well-bred manner of an Eton grad, which he surely was, coupled with the ability to shift, in mid sentence, to the gutter slang and malevolent stare of an east-end loan shark, which he surely was not. The gentility was real. The hard edge was a flawless and well-tended disguise that he was alarmed to find, in recent years, easier and easier to maintain.
As his car turned up the drive at 46 Kentish Lane, he spotted the body instantly; a bulky worsted-wool, navy-pinstriped heap lying at the curve of the drive.
Calvert knew from 15 feet away that the guy was dead—no breathing, two-foot bloom of blood ringing the head like a lopsided demonic halo.
Calvert gave a quick hand signal that everyone on his team read instantly: fan out and search. The agents drew pistols and melted away into the shrubbery and the improbably unlocked house.
Calvert drew on exam gloves and gently pulled back the collar of the man’s blazer. A red hole about the size of a dime revealed itself, just at the base of the neck. Directly under that, Calvert knew, would be a nearly severed carotid artery and a much larger exit wound, the source of the cooling puddle beneath them.
“Bullet?” Calvert barked.
“Divot in the stonework over here,” Atkins called out.
Calvert looked at the position of the body. The carotid wound would have dropped him in his tracks, Calvert knew. Door unlocked there, garage door ajar…
“Atkins,” Calvert shouted. “Check the gravel next to that brass thing, the hitching post, there. Go a couple of feet into the grass behind it, too, if you please.”
Calvert lifted the vent in the expensive Saville Row suit coat and worked a kidskin wallet from the left rear pocket of his trousers. Worst fears realized, Calvert thought. Percival Arthur Kensington, 72. Never to see 73.
“I.D.,” Calvert sang out. One of the agents watching the cars peeled off and brought over plastic evidence bags. The wallet went into one and was labeled.
“Got it, sir!” Atkins shouted. “Badly deformed but I think the labs can work with it.”
“Bag it,” Calvert replied.
“We’ll need someone for a positive I.D.,” the agent with the bags observed.
“I can do that,” Calvert sighed, peeling off his gloves.
“You knew him, sir?” Atkins asked, completing the label on the bullet.
“He used to be my father-in-law,” Calvert said quietly. “I’ll need to call Elizabeth…and the kids.”
Calvert drew out his cell and turned to face his troops.
“All communications on this will be by cell or land line until further notice. We’ve caught a break, what with on the foliage and fences, but some of our press brethren, like ants to a picnic, will show up eventually. I’d like to buy as much time as possible. This was a good old fellow, Mr. Percy Kensington, Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Pembroke & Hawkes, Inc. Many people will mourn his passing and I prefer that all of them hear about it from each other, rather than the telly. Clear enough, chaps?”
“Clear, sir,” the five said in chorus.
“Communicate that to the people out on search, please. Atkins, if you would be so kind as to organize a canvas?”
“Straight-away, sir,” Atkins replied. “My condolences, Mr. Calvert.”
Calvert nodded and caught Atkins’ eye.
“He was a good egg, this one,” Calvert murmured. “Let’s find whoever did this, shall we?”
“Absolutely, sir,” Atkins nodded. “Absolutely.”
Seventeen
Katja’s tiny flat in Soho had been sitting empty for almost eleven months, so Joe opened all the windows and turned on the two large ceiling fans.
He had asked the cabbie to stop at a fast-food fish and chips shop on the way. He sat in the bedroom windowsill, with its lovely view of a blank airshaft, and devoured the breaded cod and fried potato wedges like a starved wolf. He was always ravenous after a job and the double portions did little to fill his tank.
He popped his suitcase and dug out the two long, silver tubes of hair dye and his straight razor. He ran the shower as hot as he could stand and climbed in with his razor and clarifying shampoo.
Torgesen’s color swirled down the drain, flecked with the nubs of scruffy beard. The moustache stayed, along with longish sideburns carved out of the wreckage of the facial hair.
He worked in the red color paste and sat on the ledge at the back of the stall. He ran the water completely cold to conserve the hot and leaned back, eyes closed, feeling the fatigue drain out his pores like poison.
In about 40 minutes, it was done. He slid the gum inserts in along his molars and above his incisors and carefully shaped them with the tips of his pinkies.
His contact in
L.A. had made him a full set of British I.D. complete with a valid Harrod’s credit card. Joe smiled as he remembered it. No way, of course, his guy could have known but the only way the Nigel Tufnall pictured on the I.D. would ever get a Harrod’s card would be to mug somebody.
Joe had always had a quick facility with dialects and he’d first done cockney when he was 13 and saw a B.B.C. comedy show. He was convincing enough, he knew, to fool natives and he now looked the part, too.
He flipped open the new phone and dialed Katja’s cell from memory.
“I’m here,” he replied to her greeting. “You should see me, now.
“No, I shouldn’t,” she chuckled dryly. “My face is, sadly, no longer comfortably anonymous in the British Isles.”
“I know,” Joe sighed. “I’m taking the new I.D. out for a spin.”
“Be careful,” she warned. “Don’t mistake the locals for credulous yahoos. Most of them could steal your underwear while pinching your cheek.”
“Semper paratis,” Joe smiled. “Just a pint or two w’me mates, then.”
“Ciao,” she replied.”
“Ciao.”
Eighteen
“Anthony Pembroke, please,” Jack said into his cell. “Jack Bartinelli.”
Jack deftly cut a wedge out of the stack of pancakes Dale’s wife had sent up, bright and early at 7 a.m.
He had been awake for an hour, getting caught up on the daily scoop at Synsys and talking to his stockbroker. I was still pulling cobwebs out of my mouth and eyes and grappling with a cup of really gorgeous coffee that I was about to ruin with too much creamer.
“Stop shouting,” I grunted.
“Whassa matter? Screaming Eagle doesn’t agree with ya?” he grinned.
“Well, it gives me a headache just like my own house red,” I sighed. “Just a far more upscale headache.”
“Yes,” Jack said into the phone. “Omigod. When did…”
He listened for about 30 seconds, an intent scowl settled on his brow.
“I see,” he replied. “Well, if you would, please, convey my sincerest sympathy to Mr. Kensington’s family and tell Mr. Pembroke I can be reached at the same cell number he called last night. Yes. Thank you. Good day.”
He closed the phone and settled back in the chair.
We were sitting in a small breakfast nook tucked into a large bay window that faced west toward lightening skies over the Kettle River mountain range. A fine mist shimmered over the valleys among the round, rolling peaks, painted a soft orange in the swelling light. Old-growth pines framed the endless hills. A family of deer was clearly visible, cautiously grazing the shrubs on a low rise just behind the motel. The morning air through the open window was cool and moist and almost shockingly clean.
It was the dictionary definition of pastoral, spoiled only by the expression on Jack’s face.
I arched a brow and nipped at the coffee.
“Somebody shot Percy Kensington this morning,” Jack murmured. “8 a.m., broad daylight, right outside his back door. I met the guy not even three weeks ago; just a good-natured old geezer who liked his beer, rugby, low-stakes poker, and working on the Pembroke & Hawkes Board, which he’d done since God was in diapers. Also, just about the only guy on the Pembroke & Hawkes Board who thought P.P.V. was a good idea.”
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Well, I was talking to Anthony 3’s assistant, so he didn’t know a lot. But apparently there was some sort of e-mail that came in about the time of the shooting. I’ll want to find out what that was. And, guess I can’t really lean on P.P.V., right at the moment. No point in shaking the tree if nobody notices.”
He was quiet for a moment. I knew what he was thinking and decided not to wait him out.
“No,” I said quietly.
“No…what?” Jack frowned.
“No to what you’re thinking right now. You’re wondering if Kensington’s murder is tied into this. No. How? Why? He was, you said, a ‘good-natured old geezer’, who didn’t even work for P.P.V. With absolutely no information, I think it smells like one of those bizarre, obscure, European eco-terrorist loons, pissed off at Pembroke & Hawkes for clear-cutting the Balkans or contaminating the water table or just for providing the paper those filthy old Euros are printed on. Some such arcane shit that Europeans argue about in cafes. If somebody wants to derail this, you shoot Anthony 3…or you.”
“Now there’s a happy thought,” Jack chuckled. “Of course, even that wouldn’t really stop the project. My company is run by my brother. If I get killed, he’d probably just…make more money. Point is, Anthony or I suddenly get gone, the company’s structure just coughs up a successor.”
“Like I said, no,” I smiled.
“You’d have to shoot a whole bunch of folks to upend some operation like Pembroke & Hawkes, or even P.P.V., since they’re a wholly-owned subsidiary,” Jack mused. “You’re right. Still…”
“Scotland Yard is on it, I’m sure,” I replied, “and they’re pretty damned good at what they do. If Kensington does have something to do with this business, you’ll know before long.”
“Yeah,” Jack nodded. “Right. Eyes on the ball. What’s next?”
“Today we do my best thing,” I grinned.
“Which is?”
“We bother people.”
Nineteen
For the millionth time, give or take a hundred, Rod Hooks looked around himself and wondered how the hell he ever wound up there.
“There” was a shamelessly opulent office overlooking Kensington Gardens in the heart of London. His office, replete with brocade drapes, antique sideboard of solid mahogany, a 19th century handmade cherry desk you could play tennis on, Persian rugs, flat screen TV, mini-bar, private toilet (“loo,” his colleagues called it), and a Dell workstation with DSL, CD burner, and a 3600 D.P.I. laser printer.
All this, however, was not what had Rod Hooks pondering his situation. Now, he considered all this as what he stood to lose if the guy sitting across the desk didn’t get the right answers.
Anthony Pembroke—“Tony 3,” to his staff, to distinguish him from the Anthony Pembroke one flight up—always seemed to be less than half engaged in any conversation he conducted. He carried the perpetually bemused air of a man on his way to meet someone far more interesting and fun than you. He was unfailingly polite, profane in that clumsy way English preppies affect when they’re trying to be one of the boys, and nearly devoid of any clearly-defined personality.
His management style was one Hooks had seen before: search exhaustively, interview endlessly, hire with ceremony and loud proclamations about “hiring the best and letting them work,” and then land on them like a genteel ton of hammers when something goes wrong.
Having one’s only real ally on the board of the parent company gunned down in his own driveway, Hooks thought glumly, was the very definition of “something gone wrong.”
“I’m rather puzzled,” Pembroke continued, “as to how absolutely no one, Roderick, had any inkling of opposition to the Colville site. The permit process went smoothy, locals were positively cordial, the state has been helpful to a fault, and yet…”
“I don’t know that we can place a lot of stock in the content of that e-mail, Tony,” Hooks replied. “As irrationally quiet as we’ve kept the site, and as little buzz as there’s been, I can’t see how someone could know enough to become so incensed to do something this drastic. I mean…the project is far more visible and public here than it is in Washington or Idaho.”
“Well, obviously it played some role in Percy’s death,” Tony snapped, “and that is intolerable to me. Apart from the fact that I’ve known him my entire life and consider him a member of my own family, he was our—your—only ally on the board. Oh, I know the whole thing is a bit ass-backwards but we had to publicize it here and hope that public opinion would galvanize the old pack of shits.”
“It’s worked—barely—but the brutal truth is that the board was being held back by the
ir regard for Percy. I can milk that for a while by saying it’s what Percy would have wanted but, let’s face it, the lot of them are older than dirt and death is much of a spectator sport with them. In two-three weeks, Percy’s blood will draw every shark in the water.”
“What I don’t understand is the motivation,” Hooks sighed. “It can’t be the European enviro-Nazis. Why would they care about Washington? And in Washington…lord knows there’s no shortage of conservation freaks. But they take their shots with video cameras, not rifles.”
“I need to remind you that this is why I hired you—to know things like this. You’re from Washington. You’ve worked in Oregon and Idaho. You told me, in our first conversation, that you had your ear to the rail in that part of the world. Now, something unimaginably drastic has evolved and you had no clue.”
Pembroke ran his fingers through his hair and rose from the chair.
“My contacts in the Northwest don’t include people who monitor the paranoid delusions of solitary gun freaks,” Hooks replied. “I’m a paper salesman, not a fuckin’ detective.”
“So hire one,” Pembroke shrugged.
“What?” Hooks blurted, startled.
“Hire a detective,” Pembroke said, warming to the idea. “D’Onofrio uses that Seattle chap…can’t think of his name but Arthur could, I’m certain. I’ll authorize the money. It makes practical sense because we need to know if there’ll be more ghastly business like this, but…I owe it to Percy, as well.”
“If we go that route, the lid will come off the project,” Hooks warned.
“Which would be a relief, frankly,” Pembroke sighed. “I can’t understand the thinking on that. Our one chance to make P.P.V. a viable entity is this project. We should have been selling for a month, now.”
“So do it, Tony!” Hooks sputtered. “For god’s sake, you’re the president of the company. If we fail, you’re in the soup.”
“I may be the president,” Pembroke mumbled, “but we all have our marching orders, don’t we?”
He stood and straightened his lapels and the tie.
“And you have yours Roderick,” Pembroke said quietly. “Call D’Onofrio and retain this detective. Pay whatever it takes. I want this stopped.”
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