by James Hazel
Jessica Ellinder frowned. It was enough to suggest to Priest that McEwen had lied about the location of the card. Probably to make it sound more significant than it was. Besides him, he sensed Georgie shifting her weight on the chair.
‘Detective Inspector McEwen said that you weren’t very helpful,’ she remarked. She was difficult to read but not so difficult that Priest didn’t recognise that he was being appraised very carefully.
‘I answered his questions.’
‘Economically, I gather.’
Priest clicked his tongue. ‘I prefer succinctly.’
‘In their trade, they call it evasive.’
‘You would make a very good detective, Miss Ellinder.’
No ring on those willowy fingers meant she was Miss Ellinder and, indeed, she made no effort to correct him.
‘She probably would,’ Ellinder agreed. ‘My daughter is my most trusted aide. The eyes and ears of an old, failing man. I am confident that the Group will be left in safe hands.’
‘You’re retiring, Mr Ellinder?’
‘A retirement of sorts, Mr Priest. But one driven by necessity of circumstances rather than choice. If my physicians are correct – and they are rarely wrong – I have six months to live, twelve at best.’
Georgie let out a small gasp of air. Priest looked long and hard at Kenneth Ellinder. He didn’t look ill but that didn’t mean much. His watery eyes were resolute though. He was probably speaking the truth.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Ellinder,’ Priest offered.
‘Don’t be. I have grown weary of life and my affairs are generally in order. Until yesterday, I would have died a relatively contented man. But things change. Priorities change. People change. Perhaps, given my life so far, I am unsurprised that God has seen it expedient to deal me one final hand.’
‘I cannot begin to imagine what a loss Miles is.’
Ellinder dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand. ‘Not at all. For a start, Miles is not my son. He is my stepson. My wife’s child from a previous relationship; the price I paid for her love. He is – was – a failure in almost every venture he was involved in. I could hand him the most stable of companies and he could wreck it in weeks. He was a walking disaster.’
‘Miles and I were not close, Mr Priest,’ Jessica Ellinder said.
Priest nodded. Not close. Got it.
‘In the last six months,’ Ellinder said, with a heavy sigh, ‘I had not seen Miles once. Jessica neither. He disappeared without trace. We assumed he was dead.’
It seemed an odd assumption.
‘You’ve no idea where he went?’ Priest asked.
‘My half-brother was involved in something unsavoury, Mr Priest,’ said Jessica. ‘We don’t know what. But it was dangerous. And it got him killed.’
‘Miles was never able to concentrate on anything for long,’ explained Ellinder. ‘He would spend weeks on end living like a hermit, festering inside his house. Squirrelled away from the world. He was almost certainly on something, and the irony of being the head of a pharmaceuticals company and having a drug addict for a son is not lost on me, but there was something else too. A more fundamental change set in a few years ago.’
Priest thought back to the grinning lunatic hunched over him and ramming the barrel of a drill in his ear. Pinprick pupils, dead eyes. Addict’s eyes. It made sense.
‘How long had he been an addict?’ Priest asked.
‘Since he was eighteen,’ Ellinder said, rubbing his head with his hand. ‘He didn’t have the constitution to deal with the privileges he was handed, you see. Some of us are just made like that. Money is corrosive and that corrosion can eat away at a younger mind much more destructively than an older one. I tried to wean him off the drugs. I spent a small fortune on therapy, practically built a rehab centre for him. He wasn’t interested. Just cash and women, booze and pills. That was Miles.’
‘That must have been very hard for you both to deal with.’
‘Naturally. But all families have a black sheep, don’t they, Mr Priest?’
Priest nodded. The old man was setting the ground rules. Letting him know that he knew about William, perhaps? Establishing a point to negotiate from by making it personal. Well, it’s hardly a social call, is it?
‘You said Miles changed fundamentally a few years ago?’ Priest prompted.
‘Indeed. Before he was loud, eccentric – an embarrassment. Then he withdrew from us all. He retreated into himself. He cut ties with us, even his mother, and while given his general contempt for the family, that may not seem strange in itself, he also cut himself off financially. I was supporting him, of course. My daughter believes I was feeding his habit. No doubt she is right. But what else could I do? When he cut himself off, I tried to reconnect but I found nothing but brick walls and barricades.’
‘There’s just the four of you?’
‘I have a sister, too,’ Jessica replied. ‘Scarlett. She works abroad and has almost nothing to do with Miles.’
‘Why would Miles cut ties with you?’ Priest asked.
Ellinder did not immediately reply; but then, ‘I believe Miles was scared of something and it certainly wasn’t death. It was something far worse. He had got himself involved with something extremely dangerous. Something that went far beyond his sordid world of drugs and prostitution.’
‘You’ve no idea what?’
‘That it was criminal, I have no doubt, but we are talking about a millionaire drug addict, Mr Priest. People engage in criminal behaviour for only a limited number of reasons. Money is the most common motive. Miles didn’t need money, which must rule out a great number of high-risk crimes – drug trafficking, pimping, organ trafficking, fraud – since they all have money as a primary motivation. His motivation must have been far more complicated.’
‘Something more personal. Enjoyment, perhaps?’
Ellinder breathed deeply and ran his hand through his silver hair. He looked at his daughter.
‘As much as it troubles us, Mr Priest,’ she said, ‘that is possible. We still don’t know what and we’re tired of speculating. Whatever it was, it killed him.’
‘In a quite spectacular fashion,’ Priest ventured.
Jessica fixed Priest with an icy stare. ‘Quite.’
‘I’ve had the details recounted to me,’ said Ellinder, looking down at the table with a vacant stare. ‘I understand that my stepson’s death was slow and undignified. Miles was a rogue, but no one deserved to die in the manner he did.’
‘There’s a limit to your intolerance of Miles, then?’ asked Priest. He wondered if his question might have come across as impertinent but Ellinder brushed it off.
‘He was my family. Like it or not.’
Priest nodded. William was family. Like it or not. ‘Anyway,’ Ellinder continued, ‘my personal feelings on the matter are not important. For the sake of my family’s business, I need a swift resolution to this fiasco. And my wife, Lucia. For her sake, too.’
‘You have months to live. Your stepson was found impaled in one of your warehouses yesterday, in what appeared to be an assassination. The media are treating his death as a big story. When they find out the circumstances of his death – and eventually they will – it’ll be the biggest story of the year. Your share price has already crashed; your companies are collapsing. But you’re here, talking to us.’
‘You have a way with words, Mr Priest,’ the old man replied. ‘And you are quite right. However, this meeting is of the utmost importance to us.’
By the look on her face, this was apparently not a view Jessica shared.
‘You may be disappointed –’ Priest began.
Ellinder raised his hand, closed his eyes. He seemed to be concentrating very hard on something. ‘The officer in charge of Miles’s murder case – McEwen – do you know of him?’
‘Yes. We worked together briefly when I was in the Force a long time ago.’
‘Then you know he is intellectually impotent, incompetent a
nd backward-thinking. A bumbling buffoon whose only achievement so far is managing not to pass wind at each press conference.’
Kenneth Ellinder went up a few notches in Priest’s estimation.
‘This is a big case for anyone to handle,’ said Priest carefully.
‘Very diplomatic, but we both know the man is a moron. I have tried to arrange for McEwen to be removed from the case but without success . . . I have limits, as you observe. Like all public servants, the police are under-resourced and heavily unionised. The entire future of my family and business legacy sits on the edge of a knife, and do you know where DI McEwen is now?’
Priest shook his head.
‘Applying for a warrant to search your offices. What a total waste of time! It will tell him nothing. No, Mr Priest. I will not rely on a man like McEwen to save us. I need someone far more capable. Someone with a brain, balls, guile. Someone like you, Mr Priest.’
‘Me?’ Priest was taken aback, but something in those watery eyes suggested Ellinder was deadly serious. ‘Why?’
‘Good question. It was my wife Lucia’s idea in the first place. There are three reasons. First, and most important, you are already involved. If you had any inclination that your involvement would be peripheral, think again. McEwen will see to that. Maybe you’ve met Miles, maybe you haven’t. That’s your business. But there’s a reason why he had your card on him when he died. You need to find that out, Mr Priest, and you will do. I only ask that, whilst you do so, you also find out what the hell happened to my son.’
Priest felt sick. Rather like he imagined Atlas felt as he stared at the sky, wondering which way to approach picking it up.
‘Second,’ Ellinder went on, ‘you have a reputation for ruthlessness. And for being clever. You are resourceful and multi-skilled. You have a respected team to aid you. You are used to investigation – it’s what you do. You go into companies and tear them apart from the inside. Find the bit that’s rotting and extract it. That is what fraud investigation is all about. This is just another manifestation of that technique, except that it may not be fraud that you are exposing.’
‘And the third?’
‘I knew your father, Mr Priest. We were friends. You may not have known that; there are certain clubs in London where alliances are not shouted about. There’s nothing sinister about that; it’s the way it is. Way it was, anyway. And if Felix were alive, then I would have him find my son’s killer in a second. But he is not. And that makes you the next best thing.’
Priest sat back in his chair. The Ellinders hadn’t been on any family party guest list that he could recall but that didn’t mean the old man was trying to deceive him. Priest’s parents had been away on business for months at a time when he was a young man. It was perfectly plausible that they had known the Ellinders.
‘Their death was a tragedy, Mr Priest,’ said Kenneth Ellinder softly. ‘But I know they would have been proud of what you achieved after they were gone.’
Priest wondered if they would have been proud of his divorce, or the time he’d spent working in a bar just to regain control of his life. Still, he had never murdered anyone, which meant he was doing marginally better than William.
‘We realise this is a lot to take in, Mr Priest,’ said Jessica. She didn’t look at him. There was an eerie formality to the way she conducted herself, but where anybody else might have made such rigidity appear uncomfortable, she somehow retained a quiet dignity. ‘But my father is keen to enlist your help.’
‘You’ll have complete access to everything you’ll need, Mr Priest,’ Kenneth Ellinder assured him. ‘My business will be opened out to you. Jessica will assist you, of course. She is a very accomplished businesswoman in her own right.’
‘Indeed,’ replied Priest. She’s also someone who I’m struggling to stop staring at, although I’m not sure why.
‘We’ll pay you, of course.’
Of that, Priest had no doubt, although he rather wished the old man hadn’t mentioned money. He’d known it was coming but sitting in his office looking into the desperate eyes of a dying man offering to pay him to find out why his son had been impaled on a shaft in a warehouse made him feel . . . unclean.
Priest considered his response. ‘I’m not sure I can help,’ he said eventually.
Ellinder put up his hand, presumably a gesture designed to deter Priest from being hasty. ‘I’m sure it is something you need to consider.’
‘I’m not sure I can help,’ Priest repeated. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What’s your hourly rate?’
Priest hesitated. ‘Five hundred.’
‘We’ll double it. Triple it if you tell me what happened to my son.’
Georgie exhaled sharply.
‘It isn’t a financial issue, I assure you.’
‘Then what?’ Jessica cut in sharply, and Priest found himself stumbling for a convincing reply.
What’s the real issue, here? I can hardly tell them I’m committed to the race but not sure which horse to back. Priest was kneading his unshaven chin and the motion must have prompted something in Kenneth Ellinder because he got up suddenly and offered his hand.
‘I appreciate this is a lot to take in, even for a man of your capabilities, Mr Priest. I trust we have achieved enough to at least procure your agreement to think about it. Felix, I am sure, would also have reserved his decision.’
Priest got up and shook Ellinder’s hand. ‘Of course. I’ll think about it.’
The old man managed a smile before withdrawing his hand. ‘Please call me in the morning with your answer.’
As the door closed behind them, Priest realised that not once had Jessica Ellinder looked him in the eye.
11
25th March, 1946
A remote farm in middle England
Bertie Ruck was eating eggs. Two of them. Poached. That was about all he could find the morning after his first interview with Dr Schneider. He had arrived at the farmhouse the previous week and spent the first couple of days reviewing notes, documents, photographs, reports. Anything that might help him deconstruct the subject.
The German had been here for months, hidden away from the world. For his own protection more than anything else. The farm buildings had been adapted for his containment. Bars on the windows, heavy bolts and locks on the doors. It hadn’t taken much to turn the farm into a prison. There was an assignment of six soldiers but their job was not a difficult one. Schneider had shown little interest in escapology. What was the point of being a German fugitive in England after the war was lost? They had worried about him taking his own life initially – just as Himmler had – but Schneider had not shown much interest in that pursuit either.
Ruck’s sleep had been sporadic. It was cold still, the winter was refusing to retreat. The bed was lumpy and damp but the farmhouse kitchen had at least lived up to his expectations. Stone floor, hot stove, pots and pans hung from every shelf. Everything was bathed in sunlight.
Lance Corporal Fitzgerald was leaning up against the open door puffing on a roll-up cigarette. His body was so extraordinarily long and lanky that he never seemed to fit anywhere properly. He was permanently bent out of shape. So far Ruck had managed to ignore him, although Fitzgerald’s squeaky voice was starting to grate.
‘Well, c’mon then,’ Fitzgerald said gleefully, looking at Ruck as if expecting him to perform a magic trick. ‘What was it like?’
Ruck sighed heavily. Only a week more of this nonsense and then back to London and away from Nazis and simpletons.
‘As you know, Lance Corporal, I’m not permitted to disclose anything of my conversations with Dr Schneider . . .’
‘Schneider?’ Fitzgerald sounded genuinely baffled. ‘Nah. I meant Eva!’
Ruck finished his mouthful before looking up. ‘Who?’
‘Eva! Eva Miller. The totty with the botty!’
Fitzgerald grinned stupidly. His teeth were as long and bent as his body. Every part of him annoyed Ruck incessantly. He ought
not to let the cocky bastard speak to him like that; he ought to command respect, keep discipline. But Ruck was tired of that system, and what did it matter out here, in an operation that officially didn’t even exist?
‘You mean the scribe?’ Ruck sighed.
‘Yeah. That’s the one. Now, ain’t she a fine-looking woman! Dunno how you can cope with her around. She’s staying here, you know. Across the way. Own quarters, near me. Arrived yesterday. Driven in a private car.’
‘Quite.’
‘Nice, isn’t it? Havin’ a bird around, I mean. Something to think about when it’s cold at night. Bet it’s warm between those big titties of hers.’ Fitzgerald stopped at the sound of the polite cough behind him. He jumped away from the door as if he had been burnt.
To Eva’s credit, she showed neither embarrassment nor annoyance as she strode past him. Fitzgerald tried to say something but the only noise he made was a strange wheeze of surprise. Ruck carried on eating his eggs. Eventually, Fitzgerald mumbled something, and loped off.
Ruck glanced up at Eva. She had the most extraordinarily beautiful face. White, translucent skin, deep red lipstick. Brown hair immaculately curled. But something else. He had seen it yesterday, but only from afar. An air of something he could not quite place. He saw it even in the way she stood, a little uncertainly, across the table from him. She was elegant, graceful. Every crease in the blouse beneath her blue coat was pristine. Every pleat in her skirt perfectly aligned. She looked like a doll freshly removed from its packaging.
‘Colonel Ruck.’ She nodded at him, politely.
‘You’re American.’
‘Partly. How can you tell?’
Ruck looked up again, made sure he was right. ‘Way you dress.’
Eva looked down at herself. ‘Boston,’ she conceded. ‘Although my mother was from Cheltenham.’
She produced a cigarette from her purse. ‘Do you have a match, Colonel Ruck?’
He fumbled around in his inside coat pocket, produced a box of matches and struck one for her. She cupped her hand around the flame as she lit up. The smoke glistened in the dawn sun.
‘You’re not much of a conversationalist,’ she observed.