“What else did you and Poletti talk about?”
“He asked if I supported Red Heaven in what it was trying to achieve. I said I disagreed with the innocent being killed to achieve an undefinable objective. Don’t think he was pleased with that, but he didn’t say anything about it.”
“Anything else?”
“Just political stuff, mainly. Did I support the idea of government, who do I vote for, what’s my view of the Prime Minister, what other matters does the Focus write about, just general stuff like that. He knows a lot more about politics than Simon Addley does.”
“The restaurant you met him in, was it Delucca’s?”
“Yeah, it was.” He looked surprised. “How’d you know that?”
“I’m a detective,” I said. “Also, the restaurant owner knows both men, so it made sense that’s where Poletti’d be likely to meet someone.”
He was quiet for a few more moments. I then decided to take Clements into my confidence as it was possible I would be asking for his help with something I was considering.
“There could also be a connection between them and Nigel Hemsley,” I stated calmly.
“Hemsley?” His voice went up an octave and he almost choked on his lemon tea. “How would that twat be involved?”
“My question exactly. I was recently informed by a security source Hemsley was an associate of Michael Mendoccini. But, a couple of hours back, I talked to Hemsley and he denied knowing him, and I think I believe him. Interestingly enough, he even denied knowing you.” I enjoyed saying that to Clements. I kept a straight face as I spoke but his face changed colour.
“What? The bastard.” Clements looked offended. “Why would he do that? It was him came to me to spill his guts last week.”
“Why indeed? That’s what I want to know. Something isn’t making sense here.” I paused. “Very soon, I may ask you to meet up with him, somewhere public. I’ll be nearby and, when you two start talking, I’ll make myself known. You okay with that?”
Clements nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he replied wickedly.
We both got up to leave. He smiled to the woman behind the counter. She returned it.
“You sure you don’t want a double date?”
Richard Clements agreeing it was Michael Mendoccini with Paulo Poletti when he’d spoken to him confirmed what I’d been told earlier. Returning to the office I was struck by sadness almost bordering on melancholy as I began thinking back to when my memories of Mendoccini weren’t tarnished by any thoughts of involvement with terrorism.
I remembered a party we’d both attended during my last year at grammar school. We’d got quite drunk and were both trying to impress a very attractive woman who was probably about seven or eight years older than we were but way more mature than us two combined. She was very pleasant about our talking to her; she knew, despite being big lads, we were just boys pretending to be men and she had more than enough experience of dealing with guys like us to give us both the brush-off without damaging our fragile teenage egos. I realised I had more chance of natural childbirth than I did with this lady, so I withdrew.
Michael, however, convinced he was in with a chance and ignoring my suggestion she was probably with someone anyway, slid up to her and began whispering something in her ear whilst she was pouring a drink. She turned quickly, threw the contents of her glass in his face and swore at him, attracting the attention of the big guy standing the other side of the table. He stood well over six feet and was built like the side wall of our garage. He moved towards us, making menacing overtones about wiping the floor with this prat. But, as luck would have it, I recognised the man; he was the first team captain of my school’s old boys rugby club, the Old Robertians. He recognised me and I muttered something jokingly to him about my friend being a lunatic on a day pass from the asylum and that I was about to take him back as his day release was now over. The guy accepted my grovelling, told me to get him away pretty damn quick, so I did and we left, laughing all the way back home. But it had been a lucky escape for Mendoccini.
By this time he’d dropped out of school before sitting his final exams, but we’d remained in touch and hung around together. I was beginning to consider life after school more seriously and had already been accepted at King’s on condition of achieving the right grades in my A-levels. Michael, however, was now working for his father.
Now I thought about it, even then he and his father were making the occasional trip to Italy, supposedly to buy and sell produce for the family business. I wondered if this was when he began to espouse the credo of whatever it was he now believed in and was fighting for, as I couldn’t remember him ever making any contentious political comments when we were still friends. Had his father been instrumental in Michael becoming the terrorist suspect the security services now considered him to be? I thought of the man standing behind the counter of their shop, serving customers with a smile on his face and a kindly word for everyone whilst yelling instructions in Italian to his assistants. Was he involved in terrorist activity even then? These thoughts did not make me feel any better.
Michael had had unformed and unsubstantiated opinions about everything, like the rest of us, but, whilst I took an interest in political events, his comments came with the implication he wasn’t particularly interested in the world around him, preferring to focus on his hedonistic pursuit of women and having a good time.
Josh Bryant had been asked by Nigel Hemsley to check out something in the accounts at Karris and Millers and had been murdered soon afterwards. I didn’t believe it was an unhappy coincidence either.
Hemsley had spilled his concerns about financial irregularities to Richard Clements, yet had denied knowing Clements when I’d asked him. Hemsley was also supposedly in league with Michael Mendoccini, according to Gavin Dennison, yet he’d denied knowing him and did not recognise the picture shown, and from the look in his eyes I believed him. Hemsley was concerned his bank was involved in laundering money and Mendoccini was supposedly involved in this for Red Heaven. Was this where the connection between them could be found, if indeed one existed? Maybe this would produce a lead I could follow as we had none at present.
Bryant had been previously employed on the Observer but had left three years back to work as a freelance reporter as he’d been disheartened by the paper’s increasingly frequent refusal to sanction what he called in-depth investigations into substantive issues, which he’d believed were being sacrificed for greater downmarket celebrity coverage, and he’d not wanted to be associated with the quality press relinquishing its hold on serious reporting. Despite this, the paper still occasionally used articles he submitted or was commissioned to write, which proved there were no hard feelings when he’d left.
I learned this from Vicky Holder, the paper’s assistant commissioning editor and one of Bryant’s few friends on the staff, both having joined the paper around the same time. I’d phoned the Observer after discovering from our file on him that Josh Bryant had been a staff reporter on the paper for almost twenty years before leaving.
I was sitting in the foyer of the Observer building, near to the Euston Road. I’d phoned and asked if I could speak to anyone who knew or had worked with Josh Bryant, and had been put in touch with Vicky Holder. She was probably early fifties and facially reminded me of Theresa May, though I suspected, being an Observer hack, she’d not thank me for this observation. She was casually attired, wearing dark trousers and a white blouse with a Moroccan-looking silk scarf around her neck. She was sipping from a glass of water, which she seemed to be holding tightly, as though it were trying to escape.
“Do you have any idea what Josh Bryant might have been investigating before he was killed?” I asked after the formalities had been dispensed with.
“No, I don’t, but it was probably something financial, knowing Josh. That was his area of expertise. He had a real thing about how the banks had created the Credit Crunch with their reckless financial profligacy and were getting away with tanking the weste
rn economies, as well as all the hardship they’d caused, and he’d written a couple of quite acerbic pieces about it. In fact, one was so acerbic it didn’t get published. The editor said we couldn’t possibly run with it as it stood, and wanted changes made. Josh refused to make any changes, said everything written was true, and he cited this as one of the reasons he was glad he’d gone freelance. If memory serves, it was published more or less verbatim in New Focus,” she said. “I think that magazine actually offered him a staff job but he wanted to continue being freelance.”
I made a note to check out what he’d written. “But would you know anything specific he was looking into? I think whatever it was had something to do with his being murdered.”
“I don’t really know. He was freelance, so I didn’t see him as often as I used to.”
“Anyone here likely to know?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe the City editor? I can ask if you want.”
I thanked her for that. She went to the reception desk and made a call. I saw her nodding and heard her talking softly. She hung up after ninety seconds.
“Seems Josh’d been in here not too long before he died. He said he was looking into allegations of a City merchant bank being involved in money laundering and was sounding out various people here about what they knew concerning the bank in question. That’s what the City editor just told me.”
“Do you know which bank?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
I knew who it was anyway.
“Do you think I could talk to your City editor?” I smiled at her. “I have a few financial questions I’d like to ask him.”
“I’ll see if she wants to speak to you,” Vicky said pointedly. Oops.
A few minutes later I was sitting in the small, cramped but cosy office of Helen Cranston. She’d agreed to my request and hadn’t held my thinking she was male against me. She was late thirties and had fair hair, cut short. On her desk was a picture of her and a man around the same age alongside two small children, all riding bicycles around a park. Cute.
I explained my interest in Josh Bryant, naming no names. She nodded as I spoke.
“Josh asked me if I’d heard anything about a particular City financial institution, a bank, engaging in shady dealings,” she began. “He didn’t name any specific bank and I couldn’t get it out of him which one he was looking into. I mean, being a reporter in and about the City and financial matters for as long as he’s been, and knowing as many people there as he does, or did, you’ll always pick up rumours and stories swishing around. You know the kind of thing: X isn’t doing very well, Z’s about to resign, stuff like that, but most have no basis in fact. They’re just hearsay.”
“He say why he was asking the question?”
“No,” – she shook her head – “he didn’t.”
She paused for a moment to check something on her laptop screen. I looked around the room whilst she did. There were two framed certificates on the wall behind her, but I couldn’t make out what they were for or from whom.
“The problem Josh would’ve faced,” she continued, “is that most financial institutions are private limited companies, which means looking into them is difficult because private companies don’t have to make their accounts public. Only the shareholders get to see the picture, and even then it’s probably not the full picture. They
have to deposit fully audited yearly accounts at Companies House, of course, but they’d be skeletal in outline.”
“Which means anyone investigating financial irregularities wouldn’t have much to go on?” I was curious.
“Just from the accounts, very little,” she agreed. “Accounts seldom show you anything except figures. They say nothing about the context those figures derive from. That’s the important factor.”
“In which case, you’d need to know someone on the inside, wouldn’t you? Someone who could fill in the gaps or who could point you in the right direction if you wanted to know something specific.”
“That’s probably right. I don’t know who it was, but Josh said he’d been contacted by someone inside the bank he was looking into who’d agreed to speak to him. He didn’t say who it was or where it happened. He just said someone was helping him with what he was looking into. He was quite excited, said it’d help make progress.”
I wondered if this was who Bryant had been meeting in the pub at Canary Wharf when he’d been killed. “Did he say when he’d met this person?”
“No, but from the way he made it sound, it was recent, not long before he came in here for the last time.”
I sat forward. Bryant had a contact inside Karris and Millers. I would need to find out who it was as this person was probably the last one to see Bryant alive. I wondered if the police investigating his murder were aware of this. Richard Clements had said Hemsley had been connected up to Josh Bryant by a friend. Which friend? Someone inside the bank whom he’d trusted and confided in?
“Do you know how this came about? Seems odd, Bryant looking into a financial institution and someone there offering to help. Did he say how contact was made? Did this person just contact him out of the blue or did Josh contact whoever it is?”
“Don’t know.” She shook her head firmly. “But don’t
forget he’d been a financial reporter for several years and he had an impressive range of contacts in the City, given how left-wing he was. The City’s like any other place; forget all the talk about equal opportunities, it’s an incestuous boys’ club where the boys talk to each other and spread gossip. Josh wasn’t one of the boys in that sense. He wasn’t the kind of person you’d take to your club if you wanted to talk to him. Simply not clubbable, old chap.” She mimicked an upper-class accent perfectly. “Josh loathed the City with a passion, but he was able to develop contacts and gather information from them. I’m not one of the boys,” she said with feeling, “and I work here, so it’s harder for a woman.”
“I don’t suppose you’d know if he was making much progress in his investigations?”
“You’re right, I don’t. Josh was always tight-lipped when he was researching or investigating something, never said anything unless he absolutely had to.”
“Did he have a partner or assistant?”
“No. He always preferred working alone. He consulted people for their opinions, of course, but pretty much retained his own counsel.”
“Did he keep a diary or a logbook or anything like that here?”
“Don’t think so. He wasn’t on the staff any longer, so he didn’t have a desk.”
“Do you have an address for him?”
She nodded. She dialled personnel and asked for the last known address of Josh Bryant. She scribbled it on a Post-it note and passed it to me.
“Josh was very dedicated to his work, and it cost him his marriage. His ex-wife got fed up being second to his investigations.” She looked solemn as she spoke. “He was rarely at home, used to spend hours away. He was tenacious in pursuit of a story. He saw a lead; he followed it all the way to the end of the line. He was scrupulously honest, and very
fair; never published anything based on gossip or hearsay. He firmly adhered to CP Scott’s dictum that comment is free but facts are sacred. That’s why he was a good reporter.”
The address Helen Cranston had given me was for a first-floor flat in De Laune Street, by Kennington tube station. I parked on double yellow lines and saw a stern-faced female traffic warden making tracks towards me. She was just about to speak when I showed her my ID. She frowned and turned away.
The area looked as though it were waiting for the process of gentrification to arrive. I suspected the houses mostly accommodated a transient population and there was little sense or feel of community in the area. There was a general aura of seediness, with many of the houses looking as though a coat of paint was a necessity. There were several full-to-overflowing wheelie bins on the pavement awaiting collection.
I found the address. There were four buzzers by the front door
but none with names, so I rang the bell for the ground-floor flat. The door opened almost immediately and I found myself eyeball to eyeball with a surly-looking thirty-something black guy with deeply sunken cheeks and chest-length dreadlocks, who stared at me through bright red bloodshot eyes, as though he were looking at someone who’d just landed on Earth and didn’t believe they were real. I suspected he was just coming back to life from wherever chemical stimulation had recently taken him.
“Yeah, what you want? You got business here?” He sounded hostile. He looked me up and down as he spoke. He didn’t like what he saw.
“I think so.” I showed him my ID. “Police. I need to see the flat upstairs, Josh Bryant’s.”
I went to walk past him. He blocked the way.
“Bryant’s dead, man, what you wanna go up to his crib for?”
“Police business. Step aside.” I put my ID away.
“You got a warrant? You can’t just come in here without one.” He looked smug and certain in his assertion.
“Don’t need one; you’re going to invite me in and open the flat upstairs for me, aren’t you? Because, if you don’t, the drugs squad’ll be here before one more of your brain cells dies, and then I’ll arrest you for obstructing police in the investigation of a murder. How tolerable do you want the next few hours of your life to be?” I smiled without warmth at him. I’d taken an instant dislike to this guy.
He stared back at me with disdain, then stepped aside. “First floor, turn left top of the stairs, door on the right.” He looked like he was sulking.
The door to the flat was unlocked, which made me wonder if anyone else had been here before me to carry out a search. I was sure nobody would have been. Bryant had been murdered in the street and it wasn’t known whether he’d been robbed or whether the motive had anything to do with a current investigation, thus police wouldn’t have initially thought to search the home of the deceased.
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