A woman, her neck collared, was in the centre of the picture, her hands manacled to an eyebolt in the ceiling. Her head was turned away and another woman, dressed only in a leather G-string, was whipping her with a riding crop. In the background an overweight middle-aged male was strapped into a large wooden chair, his feet hoisted on stirrups, a blindfold around his face, and a blurred figure seemed to be attaching metal clamps to his genitals.
Teschmaker looked back at the manacled woman. Was that Jane? He winced in sympathy.
‘Natty rope work and some rather unusual appliances but it doesn’t ring any bells.’
‘Bullshit!’ Sinclair snapped. ‘You’re involved with that bunch of psychos and you’ve been following my wife. I don’t understand what the hell you thought you’d gain by sending me the photos. Did you think I would pay you off or something?’
‘You can think whatever you like, Sinclair.’ Teschmaker allowed a little of the anger to leak out. ‘But whatever your fantasies are, they don’t concern me. And next time get your facts right before you send your bully boys around to pick on the wrong man.’
‘Crap, Teschmaker, you’re talking crap.’ Sinclair got to his feet. ‘I want to know what the fuck your little game is.’
‘My game is about minding my own business and not having the shit beaten out of me by your thugs. If you weren’t who you are I’d have you hauled in for assault —’
‘You haven’t a hope in hell of that happening,’ Sinclair snorted.
‘I’m sure you’re right. But when I last checked there were still some sections of the media that you didn’t control. I’m certain they would find my story amusing. Especially if I let them know about your obsession with whips and chains.’
Teschmaker smiled through his cracked lips and got to his feet. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll let myself out the way I came.’
Clamping his mind shut against the protests of his aching limbs he strode purposefully around the desk and opened the door through to the toilets.
‘Oh, one last thing.’ He turned back to the room but kept the door open behind him. ‘I wasn’t following your wife. I was following the man who was following her. I was hoping you would tell me a bit about him but I’m obviously wasting my time.’
He stepped through the door and quickly locked it. Teschmaker knew he had little chance of making it out of the building but decided to give Sinclair’s security boys a run for their money. He walked down three flights but on each floor the fire doors were locked. He could open them in the same way he had done on the top floor, but he could smell smoke and where there was smoke . . .
His judgment was spot on. Six floors down the fire door was jammed open by a metal ashtray. A couple of empty Pepsi cans and a hamburger wrapper littered the stairwell. He walked nonchalantly through the door and past a series of open-plan offices to the elevator. Nobody afforded him a second glance.
The elevator arrived half full of people. Apart from a few glances at his battered face, he could have been just another office worker on his way out for lunch. Three times on the way down the lift stopped for people to get on or off but there was no sign of a security presence. They will be waiting in the foyer, he thought. But they weren’t. As the remaining people moved out of the lift he felt a gentle tug on his arm. A young boy dressed in some kind of official company uniform looked up at him enquiringly.
‘Mr Teschmaker?’
‘Yes?’
‘Mr Sinclair phoned down and said he had forgotten a couple of things he wanted to discuss —’
‘So?’ Teschmaker said curtly and strode towards the doors.
The boy, tenacious as a puppy, kept pace with him. ‘He was wondering if you had time to come back up?’
‘Tell Mr Sinclair,’ Teschmaker said gently, ‘to fuck off.’
He nodded at the doorman, who swung the door wide for him. The boy, suddenly nonplussed, remained inside.
CHAPTER TEN
It was evening when the doorbell rang. He had spent the afternoon tidying the mess in his study, vacuuming the floor, polishing his desk and neatly arranging his pens and pencils. The front door, however, was another matter. Teschmaker had toyed with fixing it himself but in the end decided it was a job for an expert.
Not until next week, the local handyman’s wife told him. Max was doing Mrs Thorstien’s bathroom taps, old man Sutton’s cracked bedroom window and some renovations for the smart young things who had taken over the old rectory at St Matthew’s. ‘God knows where they get the money,’ she had moaned. ‘Not like in our day.’
Teschmaker commiserated with her and asked her to let Max know he needed a new front door. After that he had driven back to the Russian Quarter and arranged for Shlyapnikov to get him a list of personnel at the Romanian Embassy and, if possible, what cars they drove. Aleksandr Yefremovich loved playing the spy and was only too happy to assist as long as Teschmaker sampled Zoya Nikolayevna’s stroganoff. Teschmaker had driven home a couple of hours later to find his door repaired rather than replaced and a note from Max tucked under it. Your friend paid for it. Since when have I had friends, Teschmaker had wondered. Now it seemed he had visitors too.
‘I take it you have no objection to red?’ Oliver Sinclair looked a little out of place, awkward, as though he had no idea how to behave in the suburbs. He was still wearing his Hawaiian shirt but had thrown on a navy jacket with gold buttons. He looked like an off-duty commodore from a yacht club. ‘By way of an apology.’
Teschmaker glanced over Sinclair’s shoulder. A white Porsche Carrera Cabriolet sat in the driveway. No Rolls Royce and no chauffeur. Sinclair was slumming it. He took the proffered bottle of wine, something French, something expensive.
‘I’m not sure if I have two glasses but we can look.’ He led the way through to the kitchen.
‘Edwards said your house was empty.’
‘Termites,’ Teschmaker responded gravely. ‘Ate the lot.’
He located two glasses and retrieved a corkscrew from a drawer. ‘We’ll go upstairs.’
‘Your wife cleaned you out?’ Sinclair asked, pausing on the stairs and surveying the empty rooms below.
‘No. Everything was chosen by her and when she left I decided I had never really cared for her taste in anything. Haven’t got around to replacing it.’
‘Clean slate, huh?’
‘Something like that.’
Teschmaker swung the study door open. ‘Here. It’s all a bit cramped but at least there’s a chair.’
He ushered Sinclair in, carefully cleared a space on the desk, put the glasses down and proceeded to open the bottle. Oliver Sinclair pulled the remaining chair over beside the window and opened it a small way.
‘Mind if I smoke?’
Teschmaker, much to his own surprise, found that he was shaking his head. ‘No. Sorry there’s no ashtray but the window will do. Here.’ He passed him a glass of wine. ‘So,’ he said, sipping at his glass, ‘do you make a habit of having people beaten up?’
‘Not usually.’ Sinclair produced a large cigar and started to unwrap it. ‘And I don’t often have to apologise for anything. But I was pretty steamed up about what my wife is going through —’
‘She left you?’ Teschmaker interjected.
‘Six months ago. Trial separation, she called it. I was sent a bunch of those photographs.’ He placed the unwrapped cigar carefully on the window ledge, pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it over. ‘Of course I reacted.’
The photographs were of much better quality than the one Teschmaker had seen earlier in the day. Though still with the slight graininess that suggested they had been pulled from a video still, they were well lit and sharply focused. Jane wasn’t hard to spot; she would have been hard to miss. In every one of the photographs she was centre frame. Naked or with a studded collar, tied in some, strapped in others, being whipped in two of the photographs and expertly tied in another. In the final of the series she was strapped into the chair Teschmaker had s
een in the earlier photo. Spreadeagled with clamped wrists and ankles, she was having clothes pegs attached in a circle around her nipples.
There was something odd about the photographs. Maybe it was just the way they had been shot but in none of them was there any sense of a background. In each one the victim was lit in such a way that the background and indeed the other participants appeared to merge into absolute blackness. Maybe they had been Photo-shopped. ‘And you thought I was involved with this?’
Sinclair tugged at the ends of his moustache then took a small silver cutter from his top pocket and clipped the end of his cigar. ‘I’ve been floundering around. Jane wouldn’t say a word. Just packed up. I told her I was going to take custody of our daughter but she pointed out that to do so I would have to produce the photos in court. Well, I backed off.’ He paused and lit the cigar. ‘The thing is, I’m so damn used to getting my own way that I didn’t know how to handle this. I hired Edwards and his sidekick to keep an eye on Jane and they reported that you had been following her. I assumed it was because you were involved.’ He peered through the smoke at Teschmaker. ‘And you tell me you’re not.’
‘Which I take it you now believe?’
‘I did some further checking up. You weren’t even in the country when these photographs were taken.’
‘I told you, not my scene. Neither is blackmail.’
Sinclair laughed. ‘That’s the silly thing. I was certain that the next thing would be a demand. You know the kind of thing: your money or we publish.’
‘And it didn’t happen?’
‘Not yet.’
‘So why did they send them?’
‘I was rather hoping I could interest you in finding out.’
‘Really?’ Teschmaker was surprised. ‘It seems to me that your two head-kickers would be better equipped for a job like that.’
Sinclair shot a wry glance at Teschmaker’s black eye. ‘They are good at some things.’ He took a sip of his wine and turned on the trademark grin. ‘But not only did the idiots not bother to run a proper check on you but even Jane has constantly managed to give them the slip.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Sinclair, but if you have done your checking properly you will know I’m not a private detective.’
‘You’re an insurance investigator.’
‘Was. I am now an ex-insurance investigator.’
‘Same thing though.’
Teschmaker shook his head. It wasn’t true. The style and type of work was rarely the same. ‘I don’t have the temperament for that kind of work.’
‘I can pay enough that your temperament isn’t too inconvenienced.’ Sinclair took another pull on his cigar. ‘How did you get into the business in the first place?’
‘Insurance?’
‘The fraud side.’
It was funny, Teschmaker thought later, that Sinclair’s cigar hadn’t prompted the memory. It was, after all, due to cigars that he had managed to join the elite band of investigators.
The case was the first loss in the courts that the company had suffered in years. The embarrassing thing was that it wasn’t even over a large amount of money: $10,000 — peanuts really. The client, a Britisher, had purchased a case of extremely rare cigars at an auction in New York and immediately insured them against everything from theft to fire. He returned to London where, in under a month and having paid only a single premium, he smoked all twenty-four cigars. The company would have had no problem with that had the man not then filed a claim stating that the cigars had been destroyed in a series of small fires. Naturally enough General Insurance International refused to pay the claim, pointing out that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion. To their astonishment the man sued the company.
‘So GII took the man’s premium?’ the judge asked GII’s manager of public relations.
‘Yes.’
‘And in return issued this policy avowing they would pay in the event of fire?’
‘Yes, but it was not intended —’
‘What happens when you put a match to a cigar?’
‘It burns.’
‘And does any clause of this policy specifically exclude a fire of this nature?’
‘No, your Honour, but common sense —’
‘This court, I am afraid, is interested only in the law.’
The man won the case and the press had a field day. It became fair game for everyone from stand-up comedians to newspaper cartoonists — a public relations disaster. General Insurance International knew full well that to appeal would only prolong the expense and the agony and so decided to cop it on the chin and pay the man his $10,000. It was at that point that Teschmaker knocked on the CEO’s door, introduced himself and offered an elegant solution.
Teschmaker waited until the man, a frequent visitor to the United States, returned on business and had him arrested on twenty-four counts of arson. Using the man’s own insurance claim and transcripts from the proceedings of the earlier trial as evidence against him, the man was convicted on all counts of intentionally burning the rare cigars and attempting to defraud General Insurance International. He was instructed to repay the $10,000, sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and a fine of $50,000. But the real winner in the case was Teschmaker. With the CEO’s blessing he was initiated into the ranks of the fraud division and within a year was making a name for himself as a tenacious and creative agent.
‘You said you were following someone who was following Jane,’ Sinclair said when he had stopped laughing. ‘I take it you don’t mean you were following my men?’
‘No. I didn’t even see them.’
‘Care to tell me who you were following then?’
‘So you can send Mr Edwards and his friend around?’
‘No. So I can understand what the hell is going on.’
‘Sorry, but I still don’t know.’ Teschmaker refilled the glasses. ‘He’s a Romanian and he’s involved in something. I think he was following your wife because she was there.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t think he has a clue who she is.’ He realised he was asking for rather a large suspension of disbelief. But fortunately his mind was working better than his body. ‘His extracurricular activities have been causing a bit of a problem for the embassy and I’ve been employed to file a report.’ Not bad, he thought, almost plausible. ‘Obviously they couldn’t use one of their own people as he would recognise them,’ he added for good measure.
If Oliver Sinclair was sceptical he didn’t show it. ‘I can pay.’
‘I never doubted that.’ Teschmaker wanted to laugh but his ribs were aching again. He gritted his teeth. ‘Maybe we can come to an arrangement, but I would need your full cooperation.’
‘You have it.’ Sinclair moved his hand slightly and allowed the build-up of ash to drop from the tip of the cigar. ‘Tell me what you need to know.’
Teschmaker knew he was about to make the wrong decision and for all the wrong reasons. Though he couldn’t put his finger on it, every professional instinct was telling him not to trust Sinclair. Not to have anything to do with his messy affairs. Was it something he had said that sounded odd? Or was it simply his overwhelming self-confidence? It irked Teschmaker, worried him, and yet he couldn’t stop himself.
‘Everything about Jane. I want to know everything about her.’
‘This is everything you need.’ From behind the bar Aleksandr Shlyapnikov handed over the manila folder. ‘The embassy staff is pretty stable.’
‘Stable?’ Teschmaker asked. ‘In what way?’
Shlyapnikov laughed. ‘I think it’s an economic thing. They can’t afford to rotate their staff in the way most embassies do. These people have all been here since Ceau¸sescu was overthrown.’
‘Banished for life.’
‘Somehow I don’t think they would consider it like that. The life here is much better than in Bucharest.’
That was understandable, Teschmaker thought as he flipped open the folder. He ran his eyes down the li
st of names. Whoever had done the job for Aleksandr Yefremovich had been pretty thorough. Listed alongside was the make and numberplate of the car they were officially listed as using. Only five names out of the thirty or so had a car beside them. Times were obviously tough in Romania. There was no mention of a Ford.
‘There is a list of their pool cars on the back.’ Shlyapnikov leaned over and flipped the page. ‘Six of them, but from what I understand only two are in running order. One of them isn’t even registered.’
‘There’s no Ford, Aleksandr Yefremovich.’ Teschmaker glanced down the list again.
‘Sorry,’ Shlyapnikov grunted and ambled off to the freezer for a bottle of vodka. ‘You didn’t ask about any Ford,’ he said when he returned. ‘You must be more precise, Martin.’
For a while they sat and drank; single icy shots accompanied by slices of dill-flavoured gherkin and spicy sausage. Later, as he cautiously navigated the steps down to the street, Teschmaker turned and called out: ‘A Ford. Precisely a black Ford.’ Behind him he heard Aleksandr Yefremovich laugh.
Despite the amount of vodka he had consumed Teschmaker was up at dawn, prepared to devote the day to getting a better idea of Jane’s routine. Now familiar with the cars she drove, he could afford to take more care and so he parked further along the road but still in sight of her house. There was no sign of life. He spent the time reviewing the information he had garnered from her husband. Was he still her husband? Oliver Sinclair had described it as a temporary separation. Was he fooling himself? According to Sinclair, Jane had been the one to suggest they spend some time apart. He claimed he had shown her the photographs and demanded an explanation. None had been offered. Simply said she couldn’t talk about it and that it would be better to part for a while, like she was punishing herself, he had said. And the photographs? No matter how Teschmaker put together what he knew about Jane, the images simply didn’t fit. Five photographs. None of the other people in the shots were identifiable but neither were they the same people. Five photographs and the only common denominator, apart from the activities, was Jane.
Delicate Indecencies Page 15