He wished he’d never seen that bloody journal, he thought as he walked on, wondering what the hell to do with it. Under normal circumstances, he would have shown it to Jessica, asked for her advice. But now he was just going to have to wait until she was ready to talk to him.
His phone buzzed: another chasing email from Harriet Baldwin at Van der Bijl & Zimmermann. He checked the time. He’d never had that shower, he realised, but at least he was wearing a suit. And for once he felt grateful to have some urgent corporate work pressed upon him. Something which, for a few hours at least, might take his mind off the unnavigable mess in which he found himself.
51
Spike spent a long afternoon working on the legal opinion for Van der Bijl & Zimmermann. Harriet Baldwin, he had quickly surmised, was an idiot. Those of her amendments which were not entirely asinine demonstrated such a lack of market knowledge that he wondered, not for the first time, if she had ever handled this kind of matter before. He forced himself to be more charitable. Maybe she was just a trainee solicitor, thrown in at the deep end by a neglectful partner. Then again, noting Ms Baldwin’s fondness for the imperative mood, perhaps even a trainee solicitor thought herself above a lawyer with a funny name sending her emails from a tinpot firm in Gibraltar. Either way, the challenge of dealing with each of her objections in a manner which did not disclose his contempt for her legal abilities stretched his diplomatic skills to their limits.
So it was past 7 p.m. when Spike finally finished the email and hit send. Peter and Ana were long gone, so he switched on Radio Gibraltar and settled down at his desk with a glass of one of Peter’s better Riojas. And sitting there by the light of his old anglepoise lamp, listening to Bruce Springsteen coaxing Mary to go down to the river, just for a moment he felt relaxed. But then the song ended, and he remembered Sir Anthony and Drew and Jessica and Marcela’s diary and all the things he wanted to forget, so he killed the music and reached for the Brusati file, a conveyance he’d been working on for another of Peter’s Italians of dubious means.
Last month, Spike had fixed Signor Brusati up with Juan Felipe, and apparently the Italian had opted for the first apartment the estate agent had shown him. Evidently time – or the sustainability of his country’s latest coalition government – were pressing hard on the man’s finances, and the sooner he could avail himself of Gibraltar’s tax breaks the better.
Logging onto the private client account to check if Brusati’s deposit had arrived, Spike saw the screen and blinked. The balance was nearly four million euros higher than it ought to have been. Either Brusati had settled on a very different property than they’d discussed, or he’d wired through the asking price rather than the deposit. For a brief, dizzying moment, Spike considered absconding to Buenos Aires with the company debit card, but contented himself with ordering a detailed statement of the account instead.
His neck was aching; as he flexed his shoulders, he caught sight of his reflection in the blackness of the French windows. Christ: he was starting to look old. It might have been him farming out work to the sticks from an office in Canary Wharf, he thought with a sudden surge of bitterness. The scholarship he’d won at Bar School in London had caught the attention of a number of Magic Circle firms, all hoping to persuade him to cross-qualify. But then the call had come in from his father, followed by a surreal meeting with the specialist. ‘Connective tissue is the cement of the body,’ the doctor had explained. ‘It joins the lens to the eyeball, the valves to the chambers of the heart.’ Spike remembered Rufus sitting in the corner of the examination room, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, looking strangely – infuriatingly – amused. ‘Your father’s connective tissue is deteriorating,’ the specialist had concluded. So Spike had moved home, and here he still was, some twenty years later.
As he swivelled around to replace the Brusati file in the bookcase behind him, his elbow caught the bottle of Rioja on his desk. ‘Manascada!’ he spat, and ran outside to retrieve the hand towel from the office’s tiny lavatory, a once yellow thing which, to his knowledge, had never been washed.
Mopping up the spillage on his knees, Spike was relieved to see that it was only the Esteban Reyes file that had taken the brunt. He set about peeling apart the saturated pages, laying them out to dry one by one on the conference table they so rarely used. As he turned back to his desk, he saw a sheet he’d missed busily welding itself into the carpet. Only when he’d picked it up and placed it on that day’s Chronicle to dry did he see that it was an index of the contents of the file.
‘Memorandum to the Governor and Commander in Chief, Gibraltar (p. 17)’, he read. ‘Technical Report on Sabotage Material (p. 18)’. He worked his finger down the list of statements: ‘Statement of Chief Witness . . . “LAUREL” (p. 35)’; ‘Statement of Accused . . . ESTEBAN ALEJANDRO REYES (p. 38)’. Then he inhaled sharply. ‘Statement of witness . . . MARCELA ELENA PERALTA (p. 41)’; ‘Statement of witness . . . JOHN FERNANDO CAPURRO (p. 43)’.
‘John Capurro?’ he said aloud. What had John Capurro to do with the events of the Dockyard bomb? Heart quickening, Spike stood up and started leafing through the sodden pages on the conference table. Both Marcela’s and John Capurro’s witness statements had been completely redacted from the file.
Spike sat down at his desk, swivelling in his chair as he rubbed his neck. If John Capurro had given a statement, then he must have known something about what had gone on that night at the Dockyard. An eyewitness perhaps, or another informant. But Marcela had never mentioned John in her diary. Just Tito, Anthony, Esteban and . . . Spike closed his eyes and tipped back his head. ‘Jack’ and John Capurro were the same person. Of course they were.
He leant forward in his chair. John Capurro and Marcela Peralta. Both had been involved in the conspiracy against Esteban Reyes. And both were dead. As was Eloise Capurro, John’s wife and confidante. And the one man who interlinked them all? ‘Laurel’. Tony. Sir Anthony Stanford.
Spike folded the index page into his briefcase, turned off the lights and locked the front door. There was no choice now: he had to turn the diary over to the police. But as he set off for New Mole House, he couldn’t help but wonder what these revelations would do to Sir Anthony’s case. Whether or not the prosecution could use Marcela’s diary as admissible evidence was a moot point, but the RGP would now have everything they needed to charge Sir Anthony.
Drew would have destroyed the diary, that much he knew. Spike had always suspected that Drew was not the type of lawyer to be overly troubled by the niceties of the Law – not when they threatened his own comfort, or career. And one night, not long after Drew’s mother had finally surrendered to cancer, he had confirmed Spike’s intuition. They’d sat out in the garden at Dragon Trees until the early hours, drinking a bottle of tequila down to the worm, and Drew had told him about the night that he’d learnt he hadn’t got tenancy. Sir Anthony had managed to swing Drew a pupillage at a small criminal set in Lincoln’s Inn, but not even his influence could secure the permanent gig for his son – not when he was ‘up against a Hardwicke Scholar with a Double First and a cracking pair of breasts’, as Drew had so delicately put it. Drew’s response had suggested that his pupil master’s judgment had been sound – because he’d gone off on a bender and somehow ended up in Cornwall. And in the early hours of that frosty, nasty night, Drew had driven his car into a wall on the outskirts of Penzance. He was drunk, and he was a lawyer, albeit one without a job, so instead of calling the police, he’d doused the car in petrol and torched it, then reported it stolen the next day. So Spike knew he wouldn’t hesitate to bend the Law, especially if it was his father who was in trouble.
But though Drew was Spike’s oldest friend, Jessica was going be his wife, and sometime in the next week or so, the mother of his child. So he pushed open the doors to New Mole House and asked the desk sergeant if DI Isola was available, hoping that he could persuade the detective to keep his mouth shut about where he’d obtained such compelling new evidence against Sir Ant
hony Stanford.
Because the one thing he was sure of was that if Drew ever found out that Spike had betrayed his father, he would never forgive him.
52
Two days went by, and Spike lost count of the number of voicemails he’d left for Jessica, begging forgiveness, swearing to do better. But nothing worked, and it was becoming harder and harder to explain away her absence. Meanwhile, the house had regained its former level of disorder with a speed that both would have alarmed Jessica and vindicated her complaints that she was the only adult in residence at Chicardo’s Passage.
At work, Spike did his best to keep out of Peter’s way and to avoid tormenting himself by constantly checking the online papers. So far, the press didn’t seem to have picked up on Sir Anthony’s arrest. Spike was just starting to believe there was a possibility it might stay that way when his phone rang.
‘It’s Drew. Can we meet?’
A moment’s hesitation: ‘Now?’
‘It’ll only take a minute. I’m in the Alameda.’
Spike hung up and headed for the exit. On Main Street, he had to flatten himself against a wall to give passage to a baton-twirling Band Major. The Ceremony of the Keys wasn’t even on until next week – he couldn’t wait for the damn thing to be over.
It was only as he neared the Alameda Gardens that he felt his palms start to sweat. He must have been mad to have trusted DI Isola. The man wasn’t known for his integrity – even when dealing with people he didn’t actively dislike.
But it was reassuring somehow to find Drew standing beneath the bust of General Eliott, hero of the Great Siege. As ever, Drew had dressed with care, but as Spike sat down on the bench beside him, he could see the shadows beneath his eyes were now so dark they looked like bruise marks. He felt a sudden stir of guilt as he realised for the first time how much his friend was starting to resemble his father.
‘The injunction failed.’ Drew was studying some unidentified spot in the distance. ‘It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow.’ He slid a pack of Marlboro Reds across the bench to Spike; for old times’ sake, Spike accepted. ‘They’ve charged Dad with three counts of murder.’
‘Three?’
Drew took a deep pull on his cigarette, then curled his lips into a facsimile of a smile. ‘It came as something of a shock. The CCTV evidence was undeniably damaging, so we knew they’d probably charge Dad with Eloise Capurro’s murder. But the other counts blindsided us.’ Above Drew’s head, Spike saw wisps of cloud rising over the peak of the Rock, like a volcano waking from sleep. ‘The charge relating to the death of Marcela Peralta was particularly unexpected.’
‘The police are treating it as murder?’ It was just as Spike had feared. He dropped his cigarette and crushed it out with his foot. The nicotine was making him nauseous.
‘According to the Coroner, she was dead before she hit the water. Broken neck.’
Spike closed his eyes, trying not to think about how Marcela might have sustained that sort of injury. But Drew was still talking: ‘The RGP found traces of her blood at Dragon Trees. They’re working on the assumption that she was killed there, then the body was dumped at sea.’ Drew pinched out his fag end between thumb and forefinger and flicked it away.
‘They can’t seriously think your father was responsible?’ Spike said. ‘At his age?’
For the first time, Drew looked encouraged. ‘Perhaps not. But there’s also the third charge. The police found a phial of morphine at the house. And last week, the Attorney General ordered John Capurro’s body to be exhumed.’
Spike had trouble keeping the incredulity from his voice. ‘But John Capurro’s death was never in dispute. He had pancreatic cancer.’
‘And as we all know, “There’s no recovering from that.”’ Drew’s impression of Eloise Capurro’s flat Essex accent was poor in both execution and taste. His lip curled again, and for a terrible moment Spike thought he was going to laugh. ‘It seems that John’s death was premature. The post-mortem concluded that he died of a morphine overdose.’
Spike took a careful moment to formulate his next question. ‘How did the police make the connection with John Capurro?’
Drew rubbed his neat cleft chin and shook his head in resignation. ‘They must have some evidence they haven’t shared with us yet. And whatever it is, I think Dad knows more than he’s prepared to admit.’ Drew turned and looked Spike in the eye. ‘I wondered if he’d said anything to you. That morning in the garden before they arrested him.’
‘No,’ Spike replied, letting his eyes slip away from Drew’s penetrating gaze to the ornamental tree draped over the wall ahead, forcing himself to focus on the clusters of purple seeds hanging from its branches. As Drew shook another white tip from his pack of Marlboros, the name of the plant hovered at the fringes of Spike’s mind, then slipped away.
‘All Dad cares about is the impact on my career,’ Drew went on. ‘Ironic, really.’ Another sour curve of the lips: ‘I withdrew my candidacy this morning to concentrate on his defence. I’d assumed the party might have the good grace to try and talk me out of it. But the Secretary General couldn’t snatch the letter out of my hand fast enough.’
Spike reached over and touched his old friend’s shoulder. ‘If there’s anything I can do, Drew. Anything at all.’
As they walked back towards the gates of the Alameda, Spike looked back at the wrinkled, finger-like pods hanging over the wall and suddenly remembered what the shrub was called. Judas tree.
53
The next day, as Drew had predicted, the scandal hit the press. The legal profession on the Rock – like every other – was not immune to the baser attributes of humanity, and Spike could easily imagine the scores of ‘close friends’ and colleagues sniggering into their cappuccinos as they read of Drew Stanford-Trench’s withdrawal from the political fray after his father’s spectacular fall from grace. Peter Galliano was never one to deny himself a little Schadenfreude, and Spike felt a mild sensation of disgust as he watched his partner flip through the Gibraltar Chronicle, emitting little tuts and gasps as he lapped it all up. Finally replete, he closed the paper and heaved his feet up onto Spike’s desk with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Rejoice not when thine enemy stumbleth, and all that, but I mean, really, Spike! The old goat must have lost his marbles. A knighthood? That magnificent villa? And then he goes and kills three people.’ A rope of smoke unfurled from each nostril. ‘It must be dementia. I’d put money on it. Make sure you ship me off to “Dignitas” before that ever happens.’
Spike suppressed the temptation to suggest they put the idea in writing there and then, and just said, ‘They’ll have a job pinning three murders on a man his age.’
‘Then they must have some pretty compelling evidence in reserve.’
Spike looked away. So far Isola had kept his word. The article made no mention of Marcela’s diary.
‘Well’ – Peter reached for his gold-topped cane – ‘I must get on.’
But Spike hadn’t finished. As Peter turned towards the door, Spike held out the statement from the firm’s client account. ‘This BACS payment, Peter,’ he called over. ‘I assumed it was related to the Brusati conveyance. But it isn’t, is it?’
Peter dismissed the question with an airy wave of the hand. ‘Oh, the donation. Don’t you remember? From Siri Baxter’s people.’
‘Siri Baxter donated 3.5 million euros to the Liberal Party?’
Peter scratched one eyebrow. ‘Like I said, she was very taken with your friend’s political prospects.’ He picked up the Chronicle and tucked it under his arm with a smirk. ‘I expect she’ll be wanting her money back now.’
Peter closed the door, and Spike looked back at the statement, wondering if he should just stuff it back into the filing cabinet and forget all about it. Probably, he thought. But then he heard Peter’s phone laugh resonate from the next door office and realised that his mind was already made up.
So he walked into the hallway, finding Ana at her desk, sipping some foul-smelling
herbal concoction from a mug marked ‘I’d Rather Be Reading Ulysses.’ He reached into her pen pot for a biro and circled the transaction code that was troubling him. ‘I’d like some more detail on this deposit.’
Ana cocked her head. ‘What sort of detail?’
‘The provenance of the money.’ Spike didn’t lift his eyes from the sheet of paper, but he could sense Ana narrowing hers as she tried to work out what he was up to, and if she wanted any part of it. ‘Housekeeping,’ he improvised.
‘Housekeeping,’ she repeated. There was a long pause, then she leant forward and plucked a stray hair from his shoulder. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
54
It was the waiting Spike hated the most. He always had. As a child, his impatience had infuriated his mother – she’d never understood how deeply he loathed that sense of powerlessness, as though he were some passive creature that could only stand by until others acted. And here he was once again. Waiting for Jessica to decide if she was prepared to forgive him. Waiting for Isola to divulge to Drew where he’d acquired the new evidence that had strengthened the police’s belief that Sir Anthony might be capable of murder.
Three days had now passed since Jessica had left. At first, the work had helped, but now Spike found that his in-box was clear. Even the invoices Peter had been nagging him to get off his desk for months had been drafted and sent. Charlie was otherwise engaged with Rufus, so that afternoon, Spike found himself sitting on a bus to Catalan Bay, staring out at a lone fishing boat tacking in towards the harbour’s golden sickle of sand.
The bus reached his stop, and Spike got off, pausing on the step to savour the gentle salty breeze on his face. Then the driver pulled away, and Spike made out the Rock’s disused water catchments on the other side of the road, the steep flattened bank sheering down into empty underground reservoirs – no doubt about to be snapped up by some hi-tech company for its new R&D centre.
A Thousand Cuts Page 18