36
Viewed from Port Hercule, Monaco resembled an amphitheatre, with the apartment blocks banked up on the hills in place of the seats. As always when he brought Queen for a Day into Monaco, Captain Grant Williams felt she was the star of the show. All morning, tourists had been lingering and taking photographs beyond the gangplank security gate. On the gate, the sign said ‘Private Vessel, No Boarding’ in English and French. Samarin had paid ten million for a twenty-year lease on the berth. The Queen was at the very limit of what was allowed in the port. Three metres longer, and she would have been required to moor at a buoy a quarter-mile out with the crass cruise ships, and be reliant on the tender for coming and going.
It was the afternoon of Tuesday 16 December and the day was overcast. The tops of the hills were lost in tumbling clouds. Sometimes, depending on his mood, these clouds reminded Captain Williams of steam rising off a dunghill in some grubby farmyard. He ought to have been in St Barth’s by now, getting some rays. He stood on the aft-deck, and watched a young woman swabbing the decks of the next vessel along, a ninety-metre-long motor cruiser called WTF. You didn’t have to be an old-school sailor to disapprove of that name. The sound of dance music, turned low, was coming from the wheelhouse. Before long, Williams believed, the music would be turned up. A party seemed to be brewing up on WTF, and a little van had just pulled up at its gate. ‘Service Froid Monégasque’: a delivery of ice. Two young guys came out of the wheelhouse to receive it. The Veuve Clicquot was already aboard.
In spite of the cold, the deckhand, who was quite gorgeous, wore hotpants. As the ice came aboard, she was engaged in bending low to fix a new chamois to the mop head. Women always bent from the waist rather than bending their knees. Captain Williams didn’t understand why but he was glad they did, and he wondered whether this one was laying on a show for his benefit. That was quite possible, since she had glanced sidelong at him as she resumed her swabbing. She wasn’t very vigorous about it, but then she wouldn’t be used to manual labour: probably some trustafarian on a gap year. She was now hitching up her hotpants, as if they weren’t short enough, and, yes, another glance. At this rate he wouldn’t need to crash the party; he’d be invited. He could do with a few drinks after the morning he’d had.
Any other port in the world, and Williams himself would have been displaying his own, somewhat more scarred knees, shorts and flip-flops being his usual work attire. But in Monaco he always had to be smart-casual. That was specified in his contract. The specification came from the agency, he believed, rather than from Samarin himself, who was pretty laid-back on matters of dress whilst always being beautifully turned out himself.
There’d been a meeting of the big three that morning: Samarin, Rostov and Porter. Rostov had pulled up dockside in a black Mercedes with one of his security guys; then Porter, overall head of security, had turned up in what Williams believed to be one of the half-dozen Aston Martins he kept in various parts of the world. Samarin, who’d pitched up the night before, had received them in the library. All crew except Williams himself had been ordered on shore for the next two days with accommodation allowances. They’d all cleared off to Nice, where the allowances went that much further.
Williams knew to keep out of the way of the meeting, but he’d heard shouting from the library. That was mainly Rostov. There also came the occasional, soft mutterings of Samarin, and interjections from Porter in his staccato, incredibly upper-class accent. Porter had been in the Queen’s Guards, or something. From the few snatches Williams could make out, the question was who would be going up to ‘the hotel’. That would have meant either the Hotel Metropole Monte Carlo, or possibly the Hermitage. Or maybe the Hotel des Etrangers west of Nice, where Rostov in particular hung out a good deal of the time.
The meeting had ended at midday. Towards the end of it, Williams had distinctly heard Porter say, ‘These are the ramifications. I give you them quite squarely.’ That sounded pretty heavy, but everything Porter said sounded heavy. Samarin had stayed in the library after the conflab. Rostov and his security man had departed in the Merc, and Porter had gone to the aft-deck, where he’d sat on the stretched canvas cushion of the long bench under the aft awning and made a number of phone calls. Williams, who was always curious about Porter, had gone aft himself.
‘Yes,’ Porter was saying into his phone. ‘No. That has not been established. No. The matter is under discussion. Be so good as to call me back as soon as you know.’
He terminated the call without bothering to say goodbye or anything like that. He examined the phone for a minute, then he pitched it over the railing of the stern and into the choppy, dark-blue water. Williams found it quite difficult to believe what he’d just seen. Porter noticed that he was being looked at; he went a deeper red.
‘Can I be of any assistance to you?’ he said.
‘Do you want a coffee, or anything, Major Porter?’
‘No. I do not.’
Probably just as well. Last summer, Williams had heard Porter ask Jones the cook to go ashore and get him an ice cream. ‘What flavour?’ Jones had asked.
‘Raspberry ripple.’
‘What if they don’t have raspberry ripple, Major Porter?’
‘I will tolerate any close approximation thereto.’
Well, that was big of him.
‘Tell me,’ Porter now asked Williams, ‘how many of you does it take to sail this boat?’
Williams did not like the word ‘boat’. He replied, ‘Any fewer than eight would be a stretch.’
‘But would you be kind enough to answer the question?’
‘It would be possible with eight.’
‘How much notice would you need to sail?’
‘It would depend on where we were going.’
Porter turned his head quickly aside, as though in distaste.
Williams had then said, admittedly with a touch of sarcasm, ‘Any more questions, Major Porter?’
‘No. Since you don’t seem disposed to answer my questions.’
He’d then waved Williams away, and Williams had had no choice but to leave, unless he wanted to be sacked, because he was sure that Porter had the power to sack him, even though he was merely the owner’s chief heavy.
37
The Hotel des Etrangers was about ten miles west of Nice. It took the form of a white mansion on a headland. Reynolds sat in a white-and-gold lounge that gave a panorama of the sea. It was called the Observation Lounge. The sky was dark grey, the sea dark blue. The colours complimented the appearance of an old-fashioned blue-and-brown steamship that appeared to have moored so as to be perfectly framed by the wide windows of the lounge. It flew a red flag from the stern, with a Union Jack in the corner, like a stamp on a letter. Reynolds was glad to see that Union Jack, even if it didn’t occupy the whole of the flag. If the worst came to the worst, he could swim out to that ship with Russian bullets landing in the sea all around him.
Reynolds knew he was out of his depth, chiefly financially. He had felt slightly ill from the speed at which Samarin’s private jet had taken off – you were more aware of the speed of a small plane – and the rocket-like angle at which it had ascended. There had been ten cream-coloured leather armchairs in the jet. Two of these faced each other with a low table in between. Reynolds had sat at one of these. The Russian called Nicky, whom he’d last seen at the wheel of the four-by-four on the way between the London Library and the Orangery, sat in the other. Nicky would point at the various canapés that a member of the crew kept bringing from the back of the plane, repeatedly saying, ‘Pliss’. Reynolds had eaten food to a total, he decided, of twenty pounds: not a lot of food, but some of it involving caviar. He had drunk a glass of champagne which he costed at six pounds. These were the figures that would be going in the hospitality register.
Driving was Nicky’s speciality, not hospitality, and he had seemed more relaxed when ferrying Reynolds from Nice airport in a black Mercedes. He had said, ‘This very good road!’ and looked at Reynold
s for a response. Reynolds had said, ‘You mean it’s empty?’
‘Empty! Always!’
At the hotel, Nicky had deposited Reynolds in his current location, and told him, ‘Wait pliss. One hour maximum.’ That had been nearly an hour ago.
The Observation Lounge featured a well-proportioned Christmas tree, with a perfect helter-skelter of white lights. They raised the dreamy question of whether the lights were ascending or descending the tree. Reynolds was hypnotised by it. There had been no mention of a booked room. When Reynolds asked whether he was to stay at the hotel, Nicky had said, ‘Of course, of course,’ but Reynolds had not quite believed him.
For purposes of ‘fitting in’, Reynolds had ordered a white wine, which he had offered to pay for, and it had been with mixed feelings that he had received the news that it was taken care of. Looking at the wine list, he couldn’t find the price of wines by the glass. A Carlsberg was fourteen Euros. So that was twelve pounds for a cheap beer, so to speak. The cheapest bottle of wine appeared to cost fifty-five Euros. He would put down ten Euros for the glass. Pretty soon, he would start refusing things, however much the ‘offence or damage to working relationships’.
The waiter who’d brought the wine returned and asked, ‘Will you be dining with us tonight, sir?’ Reynolds believed he would be; otherwise why was he at the hotel? So a waiter gave him a preview of the menu. Reading it, Reynolds felt that what he was really seeing was a copy of the Bribery Act 2010, with its specification of ‘conduct leading to improper performance’. But was a police officer guilty of bribery if he didn’t know what he was being bribed about? Probably. Croft, when Reynolds had finally got him on the phone, had drawled, ‘Stay on the right side of bribery.’ He’d seemed a remarkably ordinary and laid-back person for someone so elusive. Then again he was Undercroft. When he’d tried to go over the whole case, Croft had said, ‘Yes, yes, Victoria’s put me pretty well in the picture, I think.’ It appeared that she’d spoken to Croft immediately before Reynolds.
Reynolds no longer trusted Clifford. She’d been up to something in the country, trying to keep him out of Quinn’s room. She was playing some sort of double game. On Monday night, he had counted up the pages of the two floppy books. Quinn’s from the farmhouse had 110 pages. The one from Argrove that Clifford had given him had 108. One leaf – two sides of possible writing – had been neatly sliced out. Reynolds had been alerted by a stray sliver of paper in the binding.
When, the next morning, Clifford had pitched up – rather late – at Down Street, Reynolds had asked her, ‘Did you cut a page out of Quinn’s floppy book?’
‘Why on earth would I do that?’
‘Well, a page is missing.’
‘The obvious conclusion’, she’d said, fluffing up her hair (she’d arrived in a kind of crocheted cap), ‘is that Quinn cut it out.’ Reynolds had watched her sit down and click open her emails. She began to read them: ‘Trevor Kennedy says you’re to try to avoid using the minibar at the hotel. Honestly, that man.’
As she’d begun typing something very fast, and presumably rude, in reply, Reynolds said, ‘I expect you could spend several thousand pounds in the minibar at the Hotel des Etrangers.’
‘Well don’t. Likelihood of rain on the Riviera. You’ll take the Aquascutum, and the blue suit of course. If I were you, I’d also buy a new white shirt.’
She’d then begun printing something out on the old printer. Clifford eyed Reynolds as the thing juddered away. She said, ‘I’ve half a mind to buy a top-of-the-range printer right now. See how Trevor Kennedy likes that. Does he think there’s a cheaper OCU in London?’ She’d handed Reynolds the printed result. ‘Contact details for the Chief of Police in Nice. The hotel comes under him. The Euros are coming at three.’
‘In a security van, would that be?’
‘On a bike. From Baxter in the Finance Group. He had to go through Foreign Office liaison if you can believe that.’
‘Are you going to give me a pen that turns into a small-calibre pistol?’
‘What?’
‘And a grooming kit that assembles as a nuclear bomb?’
‘Oh. Like Q, you mean? Are you implying that you’re James Bond?’
He had told her something about the meeting with Samarin, and the sudden appearance of Barney Barnes. She said, ‘Barnes is a nut, with too much time on his hands,’ but by then she was into a phone call to the Royal College of Surgeons. She was trying to get a second opinion on Quinn’s condition, with the ultimate aim of getting the original anaesthetist replaced.
Reynolds had left the office before Clifford. As he walked towards Piccadilly, he had looked back and seen her at the high, illuminated window, watching him depart with, as it had seemed to him, great anxiety.
The chairs in the Observation Lounge were covered in white canvas, and the staff wore white. The place suggested a luxurious asylum for rich lunatics. The idea seemed to be to put everyone into a languorous dream. A waiter would periodically trundle a heavy, wooden trolley laden with cocktails to some new table, and he might have been a nurse with the evening medicine. Gentle jazz played. Beyond the side windows, the empty swimming pool, set into an outcrop of white rocks, was illuminated in such a way as to make the water turquoise. Wind from the dark sea ruffled the water. A worried-looking man in black paced next to it, talking into a mobile.
It was winter outside, but the women in the Lounge wore skimpy clothes – almost as much in the way of jewellery as clothes. Reynolds was reminded of slaves of ancient Rome, in togas and chains. The men had not made such an effort. Some wore suits, like Reynolds himself, others chinos and polo shirts with cashmere sweaters over their shoulders. They had perhaps been playing golf, or tennis on the orange cinder courts that were surrounded by trees, as though the tennis courts themselves were a natural feature.
Then Reynolds saw three men approaching him: all wore suits.
38
It was possible to have an expensive dinner in the Observation Lounge. But it was possible to have even more expensive dinners elsewhere in the Hotel des Etrangers, and Reynolds now sat in a smaller room, with medieval-looking tapestries on the wall, and still the sea beyond the window, although now it was difficult to tell sea and sky apart.
The three men were Samarin, his partner, Viktor Rostov, and Russell Page. Rostov had a big, red face and wild – yet not enough – hair of a suspect, russet colour. He wore a crumpled black linen suit and a shirt that might as well have been untucked but in fact was not. He also had on Chelsea boots that would have suited a thinner man. Russell Page’s suit jacket and spectacles were so old-fashioned as to be ultra-modern: very wide lapels on the jacket, tortoiseshell for the glasses. He was the youngest of the four men: perhaps forty; quite fat and smooth-skinned. He looked like a sort of junior grandee, Reynolds thought. He and Rostov had their phones on the table. Page had introduced himself by handing Reynolds a card that Reynolds couldn’t read, the writing being tiny for reasons of style. He explained, ‘We supply public relations and marketing services to many of Mr Samarin’s and Mr Rostov’s companies.’
At this, Rostov, whose English wasn’t as good as Samarin’s, grunted, ‘Not really marketing. Publicity, yes.’
But Russell Page was not fazed: ‘We are in a range of deployments across the communications spectrum.’
They were all looking at the menus. Reynolds would go for the cheapest option. Melon and Parma ham: thirty Euros. Then sea-bass fillet, tomato confit, fresh basil: forty Euros. Russell Page was reading the menu very intently, flicking the pages back and forth, cross-referring. Rostov was reading the wine list. He called a waiter over, asking Reynolds, ‘You like white wine, my friend? You do, I think.’ He indicated something on the wine list to the waiter. ‘This,’ he said, ‘two.’ He turned to Reynolds, saying, ‘Thank you that you agree to meet.’
Then his phone went, and he began speaking Russian into it. The wine came, and he tasted it while talking into the phone. Russell Page said, ‘Since we’re on the
Montrachet, I’m going for the scallops.’
Samarin gave a half smile to Reynolds. ‘The flight was painless, I hope?’
Reynolds nodded. ‘My first time in a private plane.’
Samarin nodded. ‘It is an indulgence – more or less unforgiveable.’
Without looking up from the menu, Russell Page said, ‘As one of Britain’s top ten philanthropists I think you are allowed a few indulgences.’
Samarin didn’t seem so sure of that.
Reynolds said, ‘Could I ask? Will I be staying at the hotel tonight?’
Page said, ‘Were you not sent a personal storyboard? You will be staying at Mr Samarin’s chateau.’
Reynolds said, ‘Are we all staying there?’
‘I’m not, worst luck, and I think Andrei’s heading back to his boat in Monaco. Not sure about Viktor. Andrei’s very tied up tomorrow, but we’re hoping to get you over to the boat for a follow-up meeting.’
The Yellow Diamond Page 20