‘Why did they worry you so much?’
He frowned, as though he couldn’t believe anyone could be so obtuse, then whispered: ‘Money-laundering.’
‘What?’ Trish felt her jaw slacken as she stared at him.
‘It had to be. And it explained everything. All the oddities and strange remarks and weird threats.’
‘You mean you think GlobWasMan isn’t just cleaning up chemical waste but dirty money, too,’ she said, needing to be sure of what he was telling her.
‘Exactly. And dirty money means organised crime. Drugs. People-smuggling. The kind of men who kill anyone who might get in the way of their profits. I got out as soon as I could. And I reported them to the Fraud Squad. I had to; otherwise I risked a prison sentence, too, and what would have happened to my family then?’ He shivered.
‘What is it, Carl? What happened?’
‘When I told Ken Shankley, the chairman, that I had to resign because of my wife, he looked at me without saying anything. That’s when I knew he knew I knew.’ Bianchini swallowed hard, as though he had something huge and painful in his throat that had to be choked down. ‘Then he went, “You know what’ll happen to her if you talk, don’t you?”’
Trish couldn’t bear to leave him in this much agony.
‘Carl,’ she said. ‘Look at me.’
After a while he did, and she said with great deliberation:
‘You’re letting your nightmares overcome your judgement. The sums you found in the accounts must have been too small to be of any interest to a money-laundering gang of violent organised criminals. Their profits are vast, far too big to be hidden in a business the size of GlobWasMan.’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘Yes, I do. For instance, how much was the payment to Fleming and Stuart?’
‘Only five grand. But that’s how money-laundering works: dozens, hundreds, thousands of small transactions that all look innnocent.’
Five thousand pounds, she thought. John Fortwell was killed for the price of a second-hand car.
‘I must go.’ She stood up.
He grabbed her wrist with both hands, clutching at her. Even if there’d been nothing else, that gesture would have shown her how near the edge he was, how eaten up with irrational anxiety.
‘You won’t use my name, will you? Nowhere? Never?’
‘I never will, Carl.’
She left him and walked quickly towards the southeastern corner of the square. Watching the traffic move at a sluggish crawl around the lower edge of the square as she waited for the lights to change, she thought of Angie Fortwell’s hatred that first day in court.
Being able to tell her the truth about what Maryan Fleming and Barry Stuart had done, and why, and for whom, might assuage some of it.
Her phone rang.
‘Trish Maguire.’
‘Trish, it’s me.’ Antony’s voice was reassuringly vigorous. ‘I need you. Now. I know you can’t have any work to do because Steve’s phoned to say you’re adjourned. And you can’t be itching to help David again because he must be in school. Please.’
‘Oh, all right. I’m in Trafalgar Square. I could be with you in about ten minutes.’
He might even be useful, she thought, so long as he didn’t rant at her for taking such an unorthodox line with her work.
Visitors were milling about in the hospital foyer, waiting for the end of the post-lunch quiet period up in the wards. Trish had forgotten about it. But she wasn’t going to waste any more time.
Hurrying figures in white coats passed by with stethoscopes flying. Bored children ran about, screeching, while their parents looked on in tired resignation and elderly visitors with outrage. Trish made for the lifts.
The brushed steel doors opened and a crowd of nurses rushed out. Trish took their place, barely noticing the other five or six people who followed her, and pressed the button for the tenth floor.
The first thing she saw as she emerged was Jay’s familiar figure slumped on one of the orange plastic chairs outside the entrance to the two main orthopaedic wards.
Today he was wearing torn jeans and a round-necked grey T-shirt that did nothing to make his screwed-up blob of a face and aggressively ugly haircut look less threatening. She’d taken two steps back before she realised what she was doing and stopped herself.
He looked so vulnerable. And so unhappy.
There was a messy bunch of evergreen branches and three wilting roses in a neatly folded cornet of newspaper on the chair beside Jay. The mixture of the bedraggled flowers and the tidiness of their holder reminded her of everything she liked about him and everything George and David admired. Her sneaking wish to get him out of their lives seemed cruel.
He was looking vacantly at the far wall and kicking one clean trainer against the chair leg in a disturbing, rhythmical way that made her think of news footage of damaged children in third-world orphanages.
‘Jay?’ she said at last, leaning down a little towards him so that he would hear her quiet voice. ‘Are you on your way to see your mother?’
He looked up and smiled like a newly woken baby sensing a feed, as though there’d been no estrangement, no attempted arson. He stopped kicking and sat straight. He wasn’t nearly as tall as David, but as he stretched she remembered he was fourteen: no longer a child; barely even a boy. Others of his age were already fathers. Could the damage he’d suffered for so long be mended or was it already too late? At what age should you lose the get-out-of-jail-free card?
‘Hi, Trish. Yeah. But I can’t go in till the cops’ve finished with her. What are you doing?’
‘I’m visiting a friend. How’s your mother?’
‘Still too bad to come home. Her skull’s broken, as well as her ribs.’
‘I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I didn’t see you on Friday as I’d expected,’ she said, determined to get to the bottom of the cinema episode. ‘The day you and David went to see Henry V’.
He looked up at her from under his lids as the old sullen expression settled over his features, blotting out the intelligence.
‘Why?’
‘Jay, what happened then? I know David couldn’t have made up that story about you setting fire to your socks, whatever the cinema manager said when George rang him up to check.’
He said nothing.
‘D’you think David’s got a good enough imagination to think up something like that?’
Jay met her eyes. A faint smile brought back hints of awareness to his expression.
‘I don’t either,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t going to admit it though, was I? Stupid, innit? When they come looking for me I took my bag and hid in the toilets, then I went back and saw the rest of the film.’ He swung his legs again, whacking the heel of his trainer against the chair leg. The noise or the vibration must have appealed to him because he did it again, and again. His face returned to vacancy.
She would have a lot to say to him if David wanted him back, but until she knew that, there was no point even trying. She left him and went to find Antony.
He was sitting in his chair beside the bed, wearing an ordinary neck collar now instead of the cage and fully dressed in dark corduroy trousers, a checked shirt and a heavy cashmere cardigan that was knitted in a complicated cable pattern. She’d never seen him in such informal clothes, but they were as much of an improvement as the neck collar. His blond hair seemed thinner than usual and his face was netted with new lines, but he no longer looked like a victim.
‘Hey! Congratulations, Antony.’ She bent to kiss his cheek. ‘Does it still hurt?’
‘Not too bad, but they’re getting a bit mean with painkillers these days. The physio’s helping, though. I’m due out tomorrow. Liz is coming to pick me up at ten-thirty, after the consultant’s ward round.’
‘Fantastic news.’
‘So tell me what you’ve been up to.’
She filled him in on everything that had been happening and most of her suspic
ions about the case, distracted at one moment by the bustling departure of two uniformed police officers.
‘They’ve been interviewing the assault victim,’ Antony said. ‘They’re the third lot today.’
‘Why so many?’
‘They want her to ID their suspect from photographs because she’s too ill to go to the nick. First time, she wasn’t making much sense; second time, she started yelling and swearing at them. This last round has been quieter.’ He grinned. ‘I was reduced to offering my services, via the prettiest of the nurses, during the shouting. But the answer came back that she didn’t need no interfering brief telling her what to do.’
‘She had no idea what she was turning down, had she? The great Antony Shelley, offering pro-bono help to a woman who—’ She broke off.
‘There’s no polite way to describe her, according to what I’ve heard. Never mind her now. Tell me what you’ve been up to.’
Trish went back to work, glad to hear his qualified approval of her unorthodox search for the people who’d paid Maryan Fleming’s boyfriend to sabotage the tanks. Minutes later, a hoarse screaming voice ripped through the air behind her:
‘Get out of my sight, you filthy little stinking waste-of-space.’
Trish couldn’t help looking round, although there was nothing to see.
‘It’s only the drunk,’ Antony said. ‘At it again. I thought the cops had gone.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Trish said.
Her heels slipped on the polished vinyl floor as she hurried to the far end of the ward. There, in the last bay, she saw Jay, clinging to the bars at the bottom of his mother’s bed. His chin was quivering with the intensity of his silence and his back was stretched even tighter than Carl Bianchini’s had been. Through his thin T-shirt, his spine looked like a piece of high-tensile steel wire. There was aggression in every aspect of his figure. But it was his mother who was pouring out the invective.
‘Can I help?’ Trish asked, cutting through the diatribe with a quietness that made the other woman strain to hear her.
‘Fuck off, you interfering middle-class cunt.’
‘You OK, Jay?’ Trish said, turning towards him without responding to the insult.
‘She wants me to go and buy her some cans of White Star and I said I won’t and that’s why she’s like this.’
Trish saw the improvised bouquet on the floor, spilling out of its carefully folded newspaper holder.
‘Fucking little waste-of-space, coming here bringing me weeds and sticks. Get out of my sight and don’t come back. I never want to see you again. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t never of needed to drink.’
Longing to put an arm around his shoulders, Trish couldn’t think how to help. Shelby’s optimism for the family’s chances seemed wildly unrealistic.
‘Go on. The pair of you. Fuck off.’ The woman’s voice was a scream now. Nurses were converging on them from all over the ward, and the patient in the next bed was cringing against her pillow as though she expected a physical battering at any moment.
‘Come on, Jay,’ Trish said, still not getting within touching distance.
His hands were white around the bedstead, as though the clenching had driven all the blood back up into his wrists, which was hardly possible. He drew in a huge breath and Trish waited for some gross outburst. In the end he just let it out in a shuddering sigh, unclamped his hands, and whirled away. She caught up with him near the nurses’ station.
‘Withdrawal makes everyone aggressive,’ she said, trying to make it less hard for him. ‘Your mother didn’t mean any of that.’
He stopped and kicked the laminated panel beneath the desk. Then he looked at Trish. There was no contempt now, or rage; just weariness.
‘Yeah, she did. It’s what she thinks; what she always says. She’s scared of Darren and she likes Kimberley. But she hates me.’ He looked away again. ‘Fucking bitch.’
‘Don’t, Jay. It won’t help. Look, I don’t want to be tiresome, but shouldn’t you be in school now?’
The look he gave her could have scorched paper.
Chapter 18
Don Bates, the managing director of CWWM, arrived in his solicitors’ meeting room straight off an overnight plane. Even so, his vigour was undimmed. Only the slightest clenching in the corners of his eyes and a barely distinguishable yellow tinge to his skin told Trish he was even tired.
One of Fred Hoffman’s trainees was standing by a tray, pouring coffee and handing milk and sugar. There were biscuits too. Fred took one and chewed noisily, but the others ignored them.
‘So, Ms Maguire. Fred tells me you’ve got some news,’ said Bates, just as the trainee took herself out of the room.
Fred retreated to the far end of the long table, where he settled into an armchair and watched the other two.
‘The adjournment of the case has given me some time to step back, think, and do a little research,’ Trish said, seeing the light catch in his eyes as he looked from Bates to her and back again. ‘I’ve discovered who sabotaged the tanks, and who—’
‘Hold it.’ Bates’s bark made even Fred look quite scared. ‘Didn’t I tell you not to go there?’
Trish smiled with a slow confident widening of her lips. She was tough enough to stand up to Bates, but she didn’t want to challenge him so obviously he’d have to rev himself up into a real rage.
‘“Don’t waste time” was what you said. Having an unexpected slug of uncommitted hours because of the adjournment, I knew I wouldn’t be. Look, I think you’ve been the victim – worldwide – of a systematic campaign by a small waste company called GlobWasMan.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘They’re about to list on AIM, and—’
‘We all know that.’
‘With the intention, I suspect,’ she went on with a doggedness she hoped would eventually get through to him, ‘of raising enough money to mount a takeover of CWWM.’
She paused to allow him to make another protest if he wanted, but he seemed speechless with disbelief. Fred leaned across the table to reach for more biscuits, almost flattening himself like a snooker player. No wonder his suits always looked so crumpled.
‘Obviously the amount they’d need would be much less if they could reduce your share price,’ Trish said. ‘And the easiest way to do that would be to make your operations look dangerously careless.’
‘Where did you get this … this fantasy? I don’t mean to be rude, Ms Maguire, but really! Those clowns at GlobWasMan are a bunch of overgrown schoolboys, who have no interest in me or my company.’
She thought about the Pathfinder prospectus and the manifesto printed at the beginning of it, which she’d now reread several times. If she couldn’t persuade Don Bates any other way, she’d take him through it line by line, pointing out all the claims to unprecedented safety measures and being way ahead of any of their competitors in the preservation of the environment.
‘How do you know what they want?’
‘I know all about them. Listen,’ Bates said, jabbing a finger at her. ‘They got their first taste of money in the dotcom boom. There were four of them then and they sold themselves to a bunch of naive investors, who believed anyone young enough and slick enough could make a killing out of the Internet. Then they bailed out just in time to keep their own profits and laugh at the losers as the company disappeared like an ice cube in a heatwave.’
‘Shows a certain amount of acumen when you think of everyone who lost their shirts at the time,’ Trish said and saw the ghost of agreement in Fred’s expression. She wondered who the fourth dotcommer was, and why he – or she – had not joined GlobWasMan.
‘Pathetic lemmings,’ Bates said as though he could never make a misjudgement like that.
‘You seem to know a lot about them,’ she added with a disarming smile. ‘Were you one of their original backers?’
‘God no! I stick to what I understand. It’s the only secure basis for investment. One of them applied for a job with u
s after they sold out. I heard all about it at his interview.’
‘I thought you said they made a killing,’ Fred said from the far end of the table. ‘Why was he applying for jobs?’
‘They hadn’t made nearly as much as they pretended, and they knew they’d have to go on working. A couple of them set up as freelance techies, but there wasn’t a lot of call for that around the time of the crash. Most companies were fighting shy of the Internet just then. But we needed someone to design our new systems. When we advertised Ken applied.’
‘Ken Shankley?’ Trish said.
‘That’s right. He didn’t do a bad job and while he was with us he saw how profitable the business could be. When we turned down the idea of taking over GlobWasMan, because its sites were in such a poor state and too small really for us to bother with, he thought he’d have a crack at it himself, raising the money from the few other people who’d bailed out of the Internet boom in time.’
‘Did he ask you for help?’
‘Nope. Cocky little sod that he was, he thought he could do it all himself. I warned him though.’ Bates laughed. ‘“Watch the hubris,” I said. “Take a bit more advice this time and you may build up a useful little business that will last.” Did he listen? Did he hell!’
Ah, Trish thought. So here’s the personal element. Ken Shankley wasn’t just grabbing a commercial opportunity when he decided to wreck your share price; he saw a chance to humble you too. Irresistible, I should think.
‘To give the boy his due, after a year or two he eventually saw the point of my warning,’ Bates said. ‘He got in some experts, chemists, lawyers and so on, and he’s built up a reasonable company now. But it’s still tiny. And your ideas of world domination are completely bonkers. He’s going to sell out and move on to the next growth area as soon as he can.’
‘I’m not so sure. And there are—’
‘Listen to me, Ms Maguire. And listen well. I know what I’m talking about here, and it’s a world that’s entirely new to you, however good you may be in court. Ken and his friends are planning to do exactly what they did with Goforthebrains.com. They’ve spent tens of thousands on their glossy Pathfinder in order to snare another bunch of overhopeful investors. I’ve seen it, and it sticks out a mile. Watch. And learn.’
A Poisoned Mind Page 27