Cooper watched him. He said, ‘How do you think they could tell?’
‘The excess fire of the CZ. It would become apparent when it’s put next to the genuine article.’
‘Really?’
A silence fell. Almond put out his cigarette in a way intended to signify: this meeting’s over.
‘I’ll be off in a tick,’ said Cooper. ‘But we might as well finish this wine.’
Interesting that he said ‘we’, given that he’d downed two-thirds of the bottle on his own.
Cooper said, ‘Would you mind just telling me, old man, how the whole thing came about? Because I couldn’t really ask the girl, and I do want to get it all straight.’
Cooper reached for the bottle. Almond lit another cigarette. ‘I can tell you some of it,’ he said, ‘then I’m going to have to head off, I’m afraid.’
Cooper nodded, grateful.
‘She came to me with her fiancé,’ said Almond.
‘And what was he like?’
‘I’ll show you a picture of him in a minute. They looked at some stones for a ring, mainly whites, but she was always after a yellow. Her mother had liked yellow diamonds, or something. She’d seen a picture of her mother wearing them. The mother meant a lot to the girl because she died giving birth to her.’
Cooper frowned.
Almond said, ‘She fell in love with the yellow I showed her. Everything about the stone: the brilliant cut. All facets warming up the yellow. We agreed it would look perfect in a vintage setting.’
‘Where did you get it from?’
‘Never you mind.’
The original stone was from South Africa, illegally traded.
‘I acquired it as rough,’ Almond continued, ‘got it cleaved and polished up in Antwerp.’
‘Sounds big.’
‘It yielded two principals and … a parcel of smaller material. She chose it, he paid.’
‘How did he pay?’
‘That’s confidential,’ said Almond, and Cooper looked at him sadly. Almond relented somewhat. ‘Half in cash,’ he said, whereas in fact the guy had paid the total sum in cash: two instalments of ten grand, for which he’d earned himself a ten per cent discount. It occurred to Almond that he would have to erase the CCTV footage of Cooper’s arrival. ‘Two weeks later, the boyfriend came back. He said the engagement’s fallen through, and would I like to buy back the stone? I said no. I sent him to the Arcade, and he sold it there. She then saw it there, so then I had her knocking on my door. She said the stone was hers. I said, “He gifted it to you?” She said, “What is ‘gifted’? He gave me it.” She asked if I could get a paste copy made, and did I know anybody who could do the switch.’
‘You said no to him and yes to her,’ said Cooper.
‘A woman’s wiles,’ said Almond.
‘Why didn’t she just buy it back?’
‘As she saw it, the stone was hers already. And she’s a bit of a nut.’
It was Almond’s turn to ask a question. ‘What were your wages?’
Cooper produced a stone from the inside pocket of his jacket. He’d actually been carrying it there, for God’s sake. He passed it to Almond. A two-carat e-colour flawless. Might fetch forty, but a man like Cooper would probably not be offered more than early thirties. Even so, he’d done well. Rather better than Almond himself.
‘Can you give it the once-over for me?’ Cooper asked.
Almond laid his cigarette in the ashtray; he angled his lantern, put a loupe in his eye and held up the stone against a sheet of white paper.
‘A little sleepy,’ he said, handing it back, ‘but it ought to fetch thirty grand with no trouble.’
‘I was wondering whether you might want to make an offer.’
Almond shook his head. ‘Not my kind of goods.’
It was exactly his kind of goods, but he couldn’t have any more dealings with Cooper or anybody in the nexus of the yellow stone. He said, ‘She gave you the cert as well, I assume?’ Cooper nodded, looking sadly at the stone. ‘Then try Hatton Garden. But give it a few months if you can hang on.’
‘When the dust has settled, you mean?’
‘It could be a while,’ said Almond.
He stood up, and eyed Cooper. All the merchandise was in the safe except for a one-carat white on the side. He wouldn’t insult the guy by moving it. He walked through to his storeroom, returned with a carrying sling and a back number of the Evening Standard.
‘If you must carry the stone about, put it in that, and wear it under your shirt.’
‘Right you are,’ said Cooper. ‘I suppose you think I’m crackers to have it on me.’
Trying to be kind, Almond said, ‘You’d be amazed what walks up and down Bond Street.’
Cooper was removing his shirt, exposing a not very pretty sight. Almond handed him the newspaper. It was open at the right page: the report of the murder.
‘That’s the boyfriend,’ said Almond, ‘the fiancé.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Cooper. ‘Are you saying she killed him?’
‘I’m not saying that, no. On balance I’d say probably not. But it’s become very messy, and you ought not to come here again.’
Almond put out his cigarette, this time with finality.
17
At midday on Thursday 11 December, Reynolds watched the rain from the high window of the Down Street office. He was about to go to Mount Street, for his meetings with financial investigator Eaves, and ex-copper Barney Barnes. He had no idea where Victoria Clifford might be.
Open on his desk was the Mayfair Gazette. A picture of himself occupied half a page. There might have been some consolation in the fact that the Mayfair Gazette had a small readership, whether in print or online, but that had been removed by the appearance on the streets about an hour ago of the Evening Standard, which had run a variation of the story, albeit over just a quarter of a page. Reynolds thought of all those hundreds of thousands of copies being thrown out of vans on rainy street corners for distribution free to the populace, and then all the clicks on all the laptops, tablets and smartphones. Clifford had telephoned from somewhere. ‘The picture looks much better smaller,’ she’d said.
It had been raining for more than twenty-four hours, and there seemed no reason for it to stop. It was ‘set in’, as people said in York, but probably not in Mayfair. Yesterday had been a quiet day, but with one big jolt. He had taken the Tube from Green Park to St James’s Park, in order to visit the Yard, where he intended to browse various databases and paper files at the Information Bureau. In St James’s Park Tube station, he’d been queuing at the ticket office, in order to get a printout of the journeys made on his Oyster card. It was his habit to tick off the ones made on Met business, and claim for those. He was about to be served when he saw a pair of ghostly feet: a small, neat man in white shoes stepping into the station from the south side. Xavier Hussein had obviously come from the Yard. He looked, Reynolds suddenly thought, like a golfer. His facial expression – a moderate frown – suggested he’d found no new leads on the killing of John-Paul Holden, but with Zav Hussein you never knew. If he ever decided to maximise that enigmatic quality, he would be more than just a semi-flier. In a minute he’d see Reynolds. The ticket clerk’s hand was outstretched to receive Reynolds’ Oyster card, but Reynolds withdrew the card, turned about and left the station by the north entrance. He stood on Broadway, breathing heavily in the swirling grey rain. He wouldn’t bother going back to itemise his journeys. He’d just claim for the cost of the whole bloody card, like every other detective on the force.
In the Yard, he bought a coffee for a contact in Serious and Organised Crime Intelligence Support, and so learnt a little more about the career of Barney Barnes.
Barnes had joined the Met in the early seventies. He had failed his sergeant’s exams first time around, then joined the Flying Squad as DS at a time of corruption scandals. Barnes had never been prosecuted, but he’d been close to some of the blokes who were done, which was probably w
hy he’d remained stuck at DS for fifteen years.
Whilst at the yard, Reynolds had also wandered into Foreign Office Liaison to ask whether they had any Russian speakers on the premises. They did not, but he was referred to a guy who did Technical Support for covert policing who’d just been in the Liaison office and was now probably in the canteen – and so it proved.
He turned out not to be Met. He was a service provider, some sort of electronics expert. He was called Gregory and he was half Russian and half English. Since he was not actually MPS staff, Reynolds ought not to have shown him an item that should have been securely bagged and tagged in an evidence room, but he seemed a perfectly nice bloke, so Reynolds showed him the written-on pages of the floppy book, asking, ‘Is anything there in Russian?’
‘None of it is Russian,’ Gregory said, after a quick inspection.
‘No, but I mean transliterated Russian, if that’s the word.’
Gregory looked again. He pointed to ‘SERG E I’. ‘Sergei,’ he said. ‘A Russian first name.’
‘But why the gaps?’
Gregory shrugged. ‘Could be an abbreviation of Sergeant, and then the initials E. I.?’
Reynolds said, ‘Good idea,’ but he’d already thought of that, and there was no one at all on the MPS Directory with the initials ‘E. I.’
Gregory looked again; this time he pointed to the word ‘Sfinsk’. ‘Means “Sphinx” in Russian,’ he said.
Again Reynolds thanked him, but the mystery of the word was only increased if the word itself meant mystery. (Or as good as.)
There was nothing on any Met database about Andrei Samarin or Anna Samarina, so Reynolds had repeatedly googled them both, finding more about her than him. She would come up alongside photos of parties, fashion shows, art fairs, auctions, but the text was often in Russian. Her father’s name came up in bland lists of oligarchs. He was low-key, and he gave a lot of money to the arts in London, Russia and France. He had once written a very obscure book about the planning of modern industrial towns in Russia, and almost everything to do with that was in Russian. Samarin might have qualified as the ‘shadow oligarch’ or the ‘intellectual oligarch’ but those roles were already taken.
Most of the coverage for Samarin was about his boat, Queen for A Day, which appeared to be his biggest extravagance if you discounted the Mayfair mansion, the chateau near Nice and the bolthole in St Barth’s. The Queen was raved about on superyacht websites. She was one of the dozen biggest sailing superyachts in the world.
There was marginally more about his business partner, a man called Viktor Rostov. He had just bought a big house in Surrey. His name also brought up a story from a local newspaper in Northumberland about the shooting of a ‘muchloved’ dog on a country estate. The dog had been shot by a gamekeeper called Michael Fleet. It had evidently been harassing sheep and ‘out-of-pen pheasants’. Mr Fleet had been found not guilty of criminal damage in respect of the dog, which he had shot three times with a double-barrelled shotgun. That had been in 2013. The article concluded by mentioning that ‘the owner of the estate, Major Graham Porter, is a security consultant to some of Britain’s wealthiest businessmen, including the Russian oligarch, Mr Viktor Rostov. Major Porter was out of the country at the time of the drama.’
Reynolds googled Porter. Only scraps, and no doubt Porter liked it that way. He’d evidently done a bit of motor racing. Nothing on his army record. Putting in ‘Samarin’ and ‘Rostov’ together brought up a silent YouTube clip of a giant earth-mover attacking a mountain of snow-covered coal under what appeared to be a night sky. There were no comments.
18
The gothic brickwork of Mount Street was a scrubbed, pale pink that appeared livid against the darkening sky. The shop fronts had sprouted dark-green foliage – a Dickensian-Christmas look.
Reynolds had walked there in the Aquascutum, carrying the disapproved-of umbrella, and wearing the M&S suit, Clifford having insisted he keep the new suit in reserve for the drinks with Plyushkin’s Gardeners. At the north end of Down Street, a man had fallen in step behind him, talking Russian loudly into a mobile phone. He wore a bad suit, and was angry: he was probably only talking business, but it seemed to Reynolds that all the turmoil of the Revolution, Stalingrad, and the Gulags was in his voice. Reynolds stopped outside the Curzon Cinema to let him go by, but the man stopped there too, shouting under the same canopy. It was there that Reynolds saw the first man in a black four-by-four looking directly at him. If the man was English there was nothing English about him. The shouting man now moved away, his work of agitating Reynolds having been taken up by this new person.
Reynolds walked on, heading into the heart of Mayfair. Cars moved slowly behind him in the pretty, rainswept, Hansel-and-Gretel streets. Reynolds was regretting his appearance in the Evening Standard.
The cars parked outside the Mount Street Deli were all, without exception, black Range Rovers. Some had people – men – in them, behind the smoked windows and swishing wipers. There was also one expensive-looking red bike, locked to a lamp post. That would be Eaves’s. Reynolds saw Eaves, sitting on a high stool at the shelf-like table against the window. His fluorescent cycling jacket was folded neatly on the stool next to him, and he was talking into his phone. The Deli was chalet-like inside, mock-rustic with wooden walls, cosy on this day of rain. Bespoke Christmas Hampers were advertised. A blackboard announced hot sandwiches involving things like Brie and rocket for six pounds. Smoothies were four pounds. Eaves had ordered a smoothie. Eaves was a smoothie. He had a lot of curly black hair with a few raindrops sparkling in it; his black roll-neck jumper was possibly cashmere. Reynolds wondered whether Quinn would have approved of that jumper, and of Eaves in general. All he knew was that Quinn had called Eaves, and asked him for information. Eaves was saying, ‘It’s good on the hilly stuff, yeah, but there’s an issue with the front mech.’ He was talking about his bike.
Detective Sergeant Stephen Eaves was about thirty, and he was a flier. Reynolds was old enough to think of him as Fraud Squad, but Eaves would never use that term himself. He was number two in a Financial Investigation team under the Economic and Specialist Crime Command. As Reynolds sat on a high stool alongside him, Eaves put his hand over his phone, and said, ‘All right fella?’ The person at the other end was looking something up. Reynolds said he’d order, and Eaves asked for a double espresso. He wouldn’t eat; hadn’t got time … So none of this was very promising. Eaves, like most of the fliers, was hard to pin down. He’d always be in a meeting when you called, and when you met him he’d still be in a meeting, albeit by phone. There was a newspaper on the high table near him: the Wall Street Journal. Reynolds wondered whether it belonged to Eaves or the Deli: could easily have been either.
A man stood in the rain over the road. He was conspicuous by virtue of not being in a black four-by-four. He wore jeans and a black blouson jacket. He was big, athletic; his hair was a blond brush-cut. He could have been a basketball player.
Eaves was holding up his phone as Reynolds brought the coffee over. It showed the footage of the giant mechanical digger that Reynolds had already seen; but Eaves knew more about it. ‘Here’s one of Samarin’s mines from a few years ago,’ he said. ‘Open-cast. Somewhere near the Ob River, just this side of the Urals. Not exactly a holiday resort.’
‘It was Samarin that Quinn wanted to talk to you about?’
‘That’s what he told me. Can’t remember the date, but I was tied up over the next few days. Then he got shot.’
Reynolds asked, ‘Any idea why he wanted to know about Samarin?’
‘Not a clue.’
Eaves did not seem to have been very curious on the point. Reynolds also hoped he would not be curious about why he in turn wanted to know about Samarin. He was betting heavily on Eaves’s lack of curiosity, which he believed stemmed from his egotism. Eaves would not believe that anything anybody else was doing could possibly be important.
‘Tell me what you know about Samarin,’ said Reynolds, s
itting down, and he was gratified by the way that Eaves did not look askance at the absence of a notebook. Reynolds had gone right off his notebook.
‘It’s Samarin and Rostov,’ Eaves began. ‘They’re business partners. Sort of like … Jagger–Richards.’
‘Best mates?’
Eaves shook his head. ‘Don’t really get on. Very different characters but they’re stuck with each other. Samarin’s reticent, tasteful; got the reputation of an intellectual. Rostov’s a heavy – ex-KGB and looks the part.’
Reynolds looked over the road. Brush Cut was now sitting under the canopy outside Scott’s restaurant. He was the only man under the canopy. He sat amid the decorative torches that burned there, and he didn’t look as if he belonged. His eyes met Reynolds’ and so they were into a staring match as Eaves continued: ‘It’s the classic double act. Samarin was the ideas man, Rostov brought protection, which you needed in Russia in the early nineties because it was, you know, the Klondyke.’
Eaves’s phone rang. He was good enough to suppress it.
‘It’s called krysha,’ he said.
‘What is?’ said Reynolds, who’d lost the staring match, looking away first from Brush Cut.
‘The protection. It means ceiling. There’s no formal contract, just an understanding. Others had legal battles over this sort of arrangement. Samarin and Rostov seem to have avoided coming to blows about it, and they’ve spent the past twenty years cashing in their chips and putting all the grubby stuff a long way behind them, including the coal. What you’ve got now is two respectable citizens. Samarin’s based mainly here, in Mayfair, just around the corner, in what is considered the finest private house in SW1.’
‘Who considers it that?’
‘A lot of people who’ve never been inside it. Rostov’s just bought a big place in Surrey. They’ve both got places in the south of France and the West Indies or wherever. Samarin’s got a big boat. They probably did well in hedge funds in about 2000. They’re in property now – lot of developments along the river here, and some projects in Russia to keep Putin happy. Samarin’s a philanthropist …’
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