by John Dysart
“I’ve heard from Sophie. She’s coming back a few days early. I’m picking her up this evening so we’ll come over to ride shotgun. And I’ll leave Macek to Mac and Doug. How’s that?”
“Fine. See you both this evening.”
I’d no sooner finished with Mike when the phone went.
It was Maggie. I might have guessed. Heather had called her as soon as I was off the phone and told her the news.
I soon realised that I was glad she called. I had so far told her little of what I was up to - partly because I didn’t want to worry her and partly for the very selfish reason that I didn’t want our evening phone calls, nor the little time we had together, to be burdened by my concerns. She had enough to worry about running her hotel.
She was all concern. “Had I hurt myself?” “No, not even a bruise.” “And Liam?” “He’ll heal. Don’t worry.”
“But I’m afraid the car will be off the road for about a week.”
“Shall I come down this weekend then? I’ve no guests booked in and I could easily close for a couple of days?”
I put her off that idea very quickly. If Macek had tracked me to Letham and arranged for me to be followed and run off the road I didn’t want her to be exposed to any danger. I wanted to keep her away from the place as much as possible.
“No. It’s OK. I’ve got a replacement which should make it up to Lochbervie.”
Then I remembered that Pierre had called and told me he was coming over as well. Why didn’t we all go up to Lochbervie? It should be perfectly safe. Heather would be more than happy to have Liam for a few days recuperation.
“I’ll come up on Friday evening, as promised. Are you sure you’ve got no bookings for the weekend?”
“None. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”
“I’ve just had an idea. Why don’t I bring Mike and Sophie and Pierre? He’s coming over and so is Sophie. You haven’t met either of them yet and I’m sure they’d love to meet you and see Lochbervie.”
“And I thought we would be able to just cuddle up all weekend and play scrabble….or whatever.” I could detect her grin coming down the line.
Then she said “Of course, great idea.”
She whispered soft words of love and goodnight and rang off.
Good, I thought. We can have a safe summit meeting up there.
Macek wouldn’t have the number of my replacement car so he couldn’t follow me. Then I suddenly remembered that I had parked it just outside the front door as usual. To be on the safe side I went out and moved it fifty yards up the street in front of someone else’s house.
Chapter 13
The next morning I communicated the new arrangements to everyone. Pierre was coming over on the same plane as Sophie and would hire a car and drive straight up to the hotel. Mike and I would go up from Stirling in two cars after my meeting with Helen. We decided that, although two cars meant twice as much petrol, it would be better if Mike followed me on the journey through to Stirling to watch my back. Heather had no problem in taking Liam. She’d send Oliver through to pick him up from the hospital when they discharged him.
I left Mike to his own devices while I had my meeting with Helen and Richard. He was quite happy and said he would take the opportunity to visit the castle which, I was astonished to hear, he had never visited. Helen and Richard had prepared well. All the science was there. They explained clearly what they were trying to do and had done a good job in making clear the market potential. They assured me that they were virtually certain that there was no one else working along the same lines. That was what the investors would want to hear.
It wasn’t a brand new discovery. They had developed a technique for more rapid identification of different types of cancer - a technique which would save enormous amounts of time and money to the medical profession and obtain just as good, if not more reliable, results.
The science baffled me and I pointed out to them the importance of making their story as simple as possible so that non-scientists would understand it, at the same time stressing the strong commercial possibilities.
The cash requirements were not enormous and the projected returns were good even under a conservative scenario. My view was that it was good enough to persuade Albion to hang onto their shares. We decided to add a few hypotheses about what it would mean to the value of the company over the next few years and, as that is what a venture capital company wants to hear, the likely types of buyers who would be interested.
The key thing was that they could reasonably expect to sell their shares three years down the road for somewhere between two and three times the price that LyonPharma had offered.
I congratulated them, suggested a few changes to accentuate the financial aspects and we finished over coffee.
This gave me a chance to tell Helen what I had heard from Brian – not all, but what was useful for her to know.
“Do you think Dugain could have heard about this stuff,” I asked them.
“I doubt it very much,” she replied. “Diagnostics is not their area and I can’t think why they would suddenly want to get involved in that.”
“Helen, one thing you have to realise is that there are an awful lot of acquisitions or investments that take place which don’t seem to have any strategic sense. We’re talking about people here and you can never tell what their real motivations are. Maybe a Director is on a bonus of forty per cent of his salary if he achieves the objective he’s been given of making one acquisition a year. He’ll push anything through to line his pockets. It’s not his money he’s investing. It’s the shareholders’.”
They both looked astonished.
“You must be kidding.”
“I’m being perfectly serious.”
I told them the true story I’d heard of a Development Director who had decided to expand into Europe and picked Italy as his target country. So his company bought a small company in Milan. It had seemed totally illogical because other countries had more potential. He justified it to his board with all sorts of figures and graphs but it turned out that the real reason was simply that he had a girlfriend who lived in Milan that his wife didn’t know about.”
“You’re joking.”
“I can assure you I’m not.”
They both looked a little subdued at the thought.
“It’s for reasons like that that a lot of acquisitions don’t work. So we’ll not worry too much about the motive. Let’s assume that it’s to get a hold of the data you have to help him with the approval for the drug based on the patent. Or maybe he just wants to rub your nose in the dirt. Have you ever met him? I’ve seen a couple of videos of him and, with what Brian Dawson told me, that wouldn’t surprise me. That guy has got a giant-sized ego and people like that can act strangely and totally irrationally - irrationally as we see it but, to them it’s rational. It helps to confirm the illusion of power.”
“But even if he did have forty percent that doesn’t give him access to internal company information. He’d only be a shareholder.”
“If that’s what he wants I’ll guarantee you that within a month he’ll approach either you two or Antoine to buy up enough to give him a majority then he’ll be able to do what he wants.”
Helen went as white as a sheet.
“But…..”
“Don’t worry about that yet. Let’s just concentrate on presenting a good story to Albion.”
*
We discussed how to fine tune the presentation to give us the best chance of Albion Venture Capital not selling and agreed to meet in Edinburgh the following Wednesday, half an hour before the meeting. I drove into town to meet Mike and we set off north in the two cars. Mike followed a hundred yards behind me but we had no incidents. We arrived in the early afternoon. Pierre and Sophie were not due until early evening.
Only Heather and Liam had so far met Maggie although the others knew of her. So I was naturally interested in their reactions. Mike took to
her instantly and, just as importantly, so did Oscar.
I unloaded the car while Maggie showed Mike to his room. We celebrated our safe arrival with a quick beer and I proposed to take Mike for a bit of fishing for an hour or two. I’m not much of a fisherman but I knew he was.
We hiked the two miles across the heather to the loch which was kept seeded by the locals in the village. Mike set to work flicking flies at the surface of the water and I lay down in the heather, my back to a rock and just enjoyed the calm stillness of the surroundings.
Mike gave up after an hour. Nothing was biting. He packed up the rod and we sat companionably for a while. Mike produced a hip flask of Balvenie which didn’t do us any harm. We rested quietly and admired the wildness of the mountains around us. In the distance a small herd of deer came over the skyline out of a corrie, their antlers silhouetted against the blue sky.
“Isn’t that a wonderful sight,” said Mike, and then “Come on. Time to get back.”
He got to his feet and offered me his hand to pull me up. I refused and obstinately levered myself up to the vertical on my own. He grabbed his gear and we headed back to the hotel.
“So what are you planning to do now?” he asked. “This car business - what’s your theory?”
“I don’t think there’s a lot of doubt. Someone clearly wanted either to get rid of us or, at least, warn us off. As I told you the only person it could possibly be is Macek.
“We know that Irina was brought over to work for LyonPharma in Edinburgh and Macek effectively managed her. She was behind the operation on Liam and she was somehow involved in drugs. It looks to me like Macek was running Irina for two different bosses - Dugain for the patent bit and the Romanians for the drugs.”
I thought back to my impression of him when I’d seen him in Edinburgh.
“I wonder what nationality he is. He didn’t look British and he had a slight accent. Do you think there’s any way you could find out?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he replied.
I returned to my theory.
“If I’m right he must have known Liam’s name and made a connection when he heard mine. Then he’d be wondering why I was sniffing around the Edinburgh offices and decided to warn us off. It would have been easy to note my car number and trace me to Letham. Then they could have planned the ambush. I quite often take that road.”
“Just because you were poking your nose around to find out if Liam had been set up?”
“No. Not just that. What would scare him more is that I might be following through on the murder of Irina.”
“Because you think he bumped off the girl?”
“That’s what I’m definitely starting to think.”
“Let’s run it through again. Macek wangles it so that Irina comes over to work for him in Edinburgh and he uses her to push drugs around. Maybe the Romanians got her the job at LyonPharma in France in the first place.
“Dugain knows about Bioscope’s work and realises its potential so he calls Macek and asks him if he’s got anyone who can do a bit of spying for him. Macek proposes Irina and Dugain supplies Liam’s name. They succeed and he passes the information back to Lyon and gets a feather in his cap.
“Then for some reason – maybe because she’d been picked up by the police – he thinks Irina has become a danger and so he bumps her off. “Then you turn up in Leith because you want to satisfy yourself about what really happened to Liam and he thinks there might be more to it and, to play safe, he tries to get rid of you. As luck would have it Liam’s in the car with you so, had he succeeded, he’d have been in the clear. Nobody could have linked him with either the patent business or anything to do with drugs.”
I nodded. “Can you think of another explanation? And to round it off he brings a new girl over to carry on where Irina left off.”
We were now approaching the hotel.
“Let’s not talk about this in front of the girls. I don’t want them worried. If we get a chance during the weekend to fill in Pierre and see what he thinks we will. And you can see if you can imagine another plausible scenario. Meanwhile, as far as Lindores is concerned, it was just an accident, OK?”
He nodded agreement and we went in and through to the bar for a refreshing beer.
Maggie came through shortly.
“Any luck with the fishing?”
Mike spread out his empty hands and shrugged. “Sorry. They must all have been asleep.”
The sound of a car meant that Pierre and Sophie had arrived. Mike was off his stool like a shot and disappeared out the front door. I grinned at Maggie. “Young love,” I said with a smile. “Come on, let’s go and welcome them.”
When we got outside Mike and Sophie were already stuck together like glue with Oscar prancing around them like a mad thing, leaving poor Pierre to unload the suitcases, which he dumped on the doorstep. I made the introductions.
From the approving look, the Gallic embrace and the wink to me I knew that he approved of Maggie. Somehow that seemed important to me. Mike and Sophie eventually untangled themselves and came over.
Introductions were made by Mike, and Sophie presented Maggie with a ‘gift from France’. Maggie immediately took her off inside, detailing me to bring the luggage.
Pierre produced a package which looked suspiciously like three bottles. He handed it to me, saying, “For tomorrow evening.”
Our first evening together went as well as I could have imagined. Everyone got on famously. Pierre had to recount some of his history for the benefit of Maggie. Sophie was ecstatic about the journey up, the hotel and the superb ‘sauvage’ countryside and Mike produced a few of his old army stories. Otherwise he just sat and devoured Sophie with his eyes. I simply enjoyed the atmosphere but didn’t say too much. The back of my brain was still playing around with my theory of the events that had led up to the ‘accident’.
After dinner Mike and Sophie retired early and Maggie, Pierre and I lingered over coffee.
I encourage Pierre to have an early night as we had planned some exercise for him the next day and Maggie and I cleared up, closed everything down and hit the sack.
*
We lay quietly together, her head resting on my chest, both of us quietly satisfied with our gentle exertions of the preceding twenty minutes.
Her hand stroked my chest as she nestled against me. My eyes circled the room comfortably as I thought to myself how lucky I was.
Then she murmured “What’s bothering you, Bob?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem to have something on your mind.”
I stroked her back. “Oh, nothing.”
She lifted her head and looked at me. “It’s not us is it?”
“No, no,” I reassured her. “’Us’ is fine. Don’t worry.”
“Well, what is it? It’s something, I can tell. Can’t you share it with me?” I didn’t respond immediately. She raised herself up on her elbow and moved away from me, giving me a full view of her beautifully shaped breasts, the light creating fascinating shadows as she moved a little. “Come on. Out with it.”
I grinned at her. “How in the blazes do you expect me to concentrate on telling you anything while you look like that?”
She looked down, gathered the sheet around her nakedness and moved away from me.
“OK, then. Tell me what’s on your mind or you’ll never see that again,” she grinned.
“That’s blackmail.”
“Absolutely.”
I sighed. How much should I tell her of the whole business? I didn’t want her worrying. Nor did I want her to try to stop us trying to investigate things. So I explained to her all that had happened except my worry about Antoine and the real truth behind my encounter with the waters of Lindores loch. I kept that one as an accident – a momentary lapse of concentration while driving.
She was very upset when she heard what had happened to Liam and disgusted by the viciousness of some sect
ors of the business community. It wasn’t her world and I think I was glad of that. Maybe my professional career had polluted me and made me cynical and I hadn’t noticed it. Being with her life seemed so much more straightforward.
She smiled at me, leaned forwards and kissed me. “Thanks for telling me,” she said tenderly.
She sat back up and the smile slowly transformed itself into a wicked grin. She stretched her arms above her head and the sheet fell away.
Chapter 14
Pierre and I sat comfortably in the lounge with a well-earned whisky. We had spent the day on a seven mile hike across the moors and were exhausted. But it had been worth it. The weather had been just right for our hike - small patches of cloud chasing each other across the sky, allowing the sun to appear and disappear and giving us a random slide show of shadow and colour on the flanks of the hills –greens, browns, purple and grey, with a backdrop of distant mountains. We had returned aching but satisfied and were now enjoying our reward.
Mike and Sophie were at the other side of the room engrossed in a game of scrabble which seemed to be causing no end of hilarity. They were playing in two languages. Sophie was playing in French and Mike in English and there seemed to be a great deal of argument over the rules. Apparently they had decided that a player who made a word which was spelt identically and had the same meaning in both languages received double their score.
Sophie had read somewhere that there are at least three and a half thousand words common to both languages. So far Mike had managed ‘table’ and ‘crayon’.
Maggie was rustling up another culinary delight.
I took the opportunity to update Pierre on what had happened while he was away. He was very concerned by the car incident and listened carefully to my theory about who had been behind it and why.