‘Have you been drinking?’ asked Banks, her eyes widening in horror.
‘No, but I plan to after the debrief,’ said Bryant, plonking himself down. ‘Where are we up to?’
‘Miss Banks is tearing us off a strip for not producing a casual landmine,’ said Raymond.
‘I don’t need a landline,’ said Bryant, ‘I’ve got my mobile. Not that it worked today, just when I needed it most.’
‘Whose fault is that?’ asked May.
‘Henry the Eighth’s,’ Bryant replied obtusely.
‘Can we please keep this meeting on track?’ asked the exasperated Banks. ‘I’m not here to judge, just to point out the flaws in your systemization techniques and try to rectify them. Mr Bryant, it seems to me that most of the problems here arise from your continued refusal to share information.’
‘Then let me share some information with you right now,’ said Bryant. ‘First of all, let’s trace back your causal through-line, as I just heard you call it.’
‘So you did understand.’
Bryant smiled slyly. ‘“When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” Indulge me for a minute or two, please.’ He gathered his wits and presented himself to the room. This was the part he liked best. ‘John, shall I do the honours?’
May held out his hand. ‘Please, be my guest.’
‘This started with a company that took bribes for matching up the buyers and sellers of industrial waste. And before you say anything, they’re registered in Threadneedle Street, which makes it a City of London case. The directors of Defluotech needed to bury some illegal profit, and Krishna Jhadav, wine buff and bon viveur, decided to invest in something that had a fantastic resale value. As the directors didn’t entirely trust each other, they left the arrangements to Jhadav and his corporate lawyer, one Thomas Wallace, a small-time operator with a failing business, someone operating below the radar of the Serious Fraud Office.
‘What they hadn’t bargained for was that Mr Wallace couldn’t handle the burden of knowledge, and decided he’d had enough of life. Revenge is a dish best prepared earlier, a lesson that Vanessa Wallace failed to heed. In a moment of spontaneous anger and grief, she threw away something she hoped was of value to Mr Jhadav and his partners; she chucked a flash drive that had been left in her husband’s care into his grave.
‘Her son was devastated by the loss. Martin Wallace barely spoke to his mother. For an emo or an indie or whatever he’s supposed to be, he wasn’t very good at expressing emotion. All he knew was that, in addition to being responsible for his father’s death, Jhadav and Emes were now desecrating his memory by trying to disinter him.’
‘Wait, how did he know it was them?’ asked Land.
‘He was friends with Romain Curtis,’ Bryant replied.
‘We’ll get to that,’ said May, who knew that his partner liked to take things in order.
‘Martin Wallace mistakenly shot Emes dead,’ Bryant continued, ‘but it had the positive effect of making Jhadav fearful for his life. Martin left a crossbow at the chapel to make sure that Emes was blamed. He did a lot of crazy things. It was he who watched Shirone Estanza’s flat, not his mother. If only the pair of them had been able to talk to one another, all this might have been avoided. Instead, the boy avenged his father, but he also lost his reason. He’ll be tried under the Youth Justice System for the murders of Stephen Emes and Krishna Jhadav, and for the attempted murder of Sennen Renfield.
‘Now we come to the saddest part of this story, the death of Romain Curtis. There was one anomaly that struck both John and myself early on in the case. Curtis had changed his shirt between the time he went out to the Scala nightclub and the time he was found in Britannia Street two and three-quarter hours later. Why? Shirone Estanza, who accompanied him, couldn’t recall how he was dressed, but his mother was sure he left the flat in some kind of black T-shirt. However, he was found in a pale blue Superdry shirt, a brand he hated.
‘We know that Curtis was a fashion student and wanted to study at St Martins. We know he liked to design his own clothes. On Sunday night, when he went back into St George’s Gardens to take another look at what he had seen, it seems likely that he did so to take a photograph. Not because he wanted to identify the vandals caught digging up a grave, but because it looked cool. The kid loved horror films! His photo showed two men and an upended open coffin. What Romain Curtis did next only makes sense in the light of his age and the way he was treated. He printed the picture he’d taken on to a T-shirt. Although neither Emes nor Jhadav considered the boy to be a threat – he was, after all, only a minor, and a stoned one at that – they decided to be on the safe side and keep an eye on him. It couldn’t have been difficult; Curtis was well known in the neighbourhood where Shirone Estanza’s brothers hung out and kept a watchful eye on everyone.
‘But much to Jhadav’s horror, he found that Curtis was wearing a shirt with his face on it, as if he was daring him to do something about it. Curtis wasn’t, of course, he just thought it looked neat. It’s likely he didn’t even realize his photo had caught two men dressed in black on either side of the corpse when he took it, because he didn’t mention it to me or to the officious Community Support Officer. I imagine that later on Monday afternoon when he uploaded the shot, he saw them revealed and thought the composition would make a good design. He didn’t have his own computer at home; he used his mother’s. We searched the computer he shared at school. Our oversight was to fail to search her hard drive. I think we’ll find the shot there.
‘Jhadav knew he’d had his picture taken, but hadn’t been able to go after Curtis – he and Emes had an unearthed body to contend with, and they still hadn’t found what they were looking for. Instead he asked around the next day, following Curtis, taking Emes along with him, trying to figure a way of finding out what the boy had seen. They probably saw him talk to friends – Martin Wallace, for one. And there they all were that night, arranged in a classic death-metal scene, Jhadav and Emes and a corpse and a coffin, displayed on the boy’s chest for all the world to see, with a band logo underneath that read “The Bodysnatchers”. Did Martin Wallace recognize his father in the picture? We’ll have to ask him about that.
‘One of them – probably Emes, who had access to medical supplies – spiked Curtis’s drink at the bar so that they could get him into a stairwell and take his shirt. But they lost him in the crowd. Shirone Estanza’s brothers heard what was going on – they missed very little – and warned by them, Shirone ran out to find him.
‘When I met Shirone Estanza, I realized something else. She’s very short. She has a penchant for wearing absurdly high heels. She wore them to the graveyard, and she was wearing them to the club that night. She couldn’t run around the backstreets trying to find Romain, so she got hold of the keys to her brother’s van. She didn’t know where to look and she hadn’t passed her test, but she had a good idea which route he would take, the one he always took, through the backstreets.
‘She wasn’t to know that he’d been drugged; she just thought he was drunk. And there he was, falling into the road right in front of her. She couldn’t find the brake in time and hit him, and to make matters worse, in her panic she managed to reverse into him. Terrified and tearful, the poor girl fled the scene. She had no idea she’d killed him.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘In all of this, she and Romain were the real victims. Moments after she’d gone, Jhadav turned up and was able to remove the offending shirt.
‘Jhadav thought he’d cleared everything up, but like so many guilty parties, he couldn’t leave well enough alone. When I interviewed him he clumsily tried to tell me that Wallace had a fear of being buried alive.
‘Shirone Estanza wasn’t stalked by Mrs Wallace but by her son. Because he cared for her; because she was at risk. And there’s one last matter to clear up.’ Bryant dug a piece of pink toilet paper from his coat pocket and held it in his fist. Banks gave a grimace of puzzlement.
‘What did the laundered money from Defluo
tech Management Systems buy? I assumed Jhadav had invested it in a bottle of rare vintage wine, but then I thought it seemed a lot of effort to go to for something that was still valued at under a million pounds. These were big boys. What if Jhadav’s company had made a lot more money than that? Here’s what was inside the bottle: the North Star diamond, not especially large but astoundingly well cut. It vanished from the Congo in 1997 and turned up here in a secret sale last year. It would have lost its provenance but maintained its black-market value. Jhadav consigned its security to Thomas Wallace, who was an Old Harrovian. If there’s one thing Old Harrovians know about it’s wine, and Wallace knew the location of London’s most secure vault.
‘Wines of an exceptional vintage appeared in the years when a comet was seen in the sky, like the legendary Château d’Yquem of 1811. So you see, there really was a connection between the stars, the wine, and – the diamond.’
He unwrapped the flawless pink diamond and raised it high so that everyone could see. Unfortunately the toilet paper was torn and it fell out from between his fingers, bouncing along the warped floorboards and dropping straight down between them.
‘Don’t anybody move,’ said Raymond Land.
48
STARS, WINE AND DIAMONDS
On Thursday afternoon, Janice Longbright found the final item she needed to add to the report: a Facebook photograph posted by a girl in the Scala nightclub showing Romain Curtis, Shirone Estanza and some of her friends standing at the edge of the dance floor. In it, Curtis’s shirt was clearly visible. It showed what appeared to be a scene from a horror film: two clearly identifiable men and an opened coffin.
Longbright studied the picture for a while, her chin resting lightly on her knuckles, then emailed it to Louisa Curtis. It was Romain Curtis’s final photograph. She hated the pictures of victims more than anything, those cheerful shots of people who had no inkling that they were about to lose so much. She still had a picture of her mother in just such a pose. And Sennen Renfield had come close to joining that tragic group. Longbright sniffed and closed down her computer screen.
Next door, Colin Bimsley closed his locker and went over to the window where Amanda Roseberry was standing.
‘I know you’re going to think this is forward of me, and probably inappropriate, seeing as we’re in the workplace and everything,’ he said, ‘but now that the case is wrapping up I wondered if you’d like to maybe have a drink with me.’
When she turned around, he realized she was on her mobile. Placing her hand over it, she looked at him enquiringly. ‘Sorry, what?’ she said. ‘I’m on the phone to my boyfriend. He’s stranded in Zurich and asking me for a decent hotel. I can only think of the Baur au Lac. Have you any ideas?’
‘Oh.’ Colin looked down at his shoes. ‘I’ve never been to Europe. Except Marbella, with some mates, on a stag weekend. I was sick in a pedalo.’
‘Sorry.’ Roseberry turned back and listened to her phone. ‘Well, try them first, darling, and if not head for the Hyatt.’ She rang off and returned her attention to Bimsley. ‘You’re terribly sweet, Colin,’ she said, looking into his eyes. ‘But—’
‘It’s OK, you don’t have to say it.’ He gave an apologetic smile. ‘I’m not on your level. I should have known better. Good job there’s still a class system, eh? It protects you from blokes like me.’
‘There’s someone here who likes you very much, you know,’ Roseberry whispered, discreetly pointing across the room. ‘She just pretends she doesn’t.’
Colin looked over and saw Meera staring at her computer screen with intense concentration, chewing the end of a Pepperami stick.
Bimsley wasn’t sure. ‘You really think so?’ he asked. ‘She looks kind of angry.’
‘You just have to be patient.’ Roseberry squeezed his arm. ‘Go on, go over there. Say something nice and make her unscrunch her face.’
At the end of the hall, Longbright took Renfield to the cluttered evidence room, one of the few places in the building where she was sure they could not be overheard.
‘I need to tell you this, Jack,’ she said, taking his arm. ‘Years ago there was an unsolved case, a man preying on young girls in the streets behind Leicester Square. There was incredible pressure on us to close the file. We realized that John’s daughter Elizabeth bore a strong resemblance to the last victim, and she volunteered to re-enact the attack. The operation went very badly wrong. We all swore that such a situation would never arise again. So what did I do? I put your own daughter in the firing line. It’s always going to stand between us, and it’s something I can’t ever put right. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re right,’ said Renfield. ‘I know you did it to get closer to her, but it was a serious error of judgement.’
‘I don’t expect either of you to forgive me. And I understand if you want to let things go between us.’
‘It’s not my decision, it’s hers. Sennen’s back with her mother. I talked to her this morning.’
‘How was she?’
‘Still pretty upset, although not as much as I thought she’d be. My ex-wife now thinks you’re the Antichrist, of course. But it’s safe to say that you’ve had a profound effect on my daughter.’
‘Why?’
Renfield screwed up one eye, stuck his finger in his ear and wiggled it. The gesture was more endearing than it sounds. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘she’s decided she wants to join the police force.’
In the building’s corner office, Raymond Land sat hiding behind his computer screen as Orion Banks paced before his desk. ‘Extraordinary,’ she said for the third time. ‘I don’t know how they did it. No methodology, no planning, nothing but organizational chaos. And out of it comes lightning in a bottle. Literally. I’ve been to every seminar, every presentation, but they never explained anything like this.’
‘It’s just the way they are,’ Land ventured. ‘The way they’ve always been, right from the start. They attract the unusual. You wouldn’t believe some of the people who’ve helped them.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘A professor who finds missing people by analysing newspaper cuttings. A forensic expert who thinks he’s a werewolf. A biochemist who impersonates his dead wife. A gang of counter-culture hippy types called the Southwark Supernaturals. Witches, conspiracy theorists, lefties, fascists, criminals on the run. Sane, intelligent people who believe they’re reincarnated Vikings or characters from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. We’ve had things going on here I could never put in official reports. You know they always say there’s a fine line between genius and madness? Well, here the line gets rubbed out.’
Banks was incredulous. ‘And they’ve used these methods for years and got away with it?’
‘Barely. It feels like we’ve done nothing but fight closure for the last couple of decades. The government has taken everything else away, but they’d be wrong to shut this unit down. Bryant will tell you that England has a long history of hiring such people. He says that during the war Winston Churchill employed the horror writer Dennis Wheatley to work out what the Germans were up to. Churchill also got Royal Academy artists to camouflage battleships. And, indirectly, he founded this unit. The people who were hired then would never have passed modern-day psychometric tests. But the culture of taking on innovative outsiders survived. In the 1950s, the development of the microchip came from people who could barely take the top off a boiled egg without help.’
‘So you must still have a few friends in high places.’
‘A very few,’ Land conceded, ‘but those friends are even older than Bryant. Sometimes it feels like I’m working in a Victorian magic shop when everything around me is Starbucks. It’s a different world now, your world, all financial forecasts and PowerPoint presentations and target-driven results. This place can’t last much longer. We need some new allies.’
Banks picked a speck of fluff from her pink and black tunic. ‘Yesterday I was ready to write you off myself,’ she said. ‘But two things interest me. The first is this.’ She reached i
nto her case and pulled out a spreadsheet. ‘You get results. I conducted some research of my own. You’ve closed eighty-four per cent of the major cases you’ve been involved with. You have the right idea, you’ve just been going about it the wrong way, fighting with everyone.’
‘You said two things.’
She tucked a curl of hair back behind her ear. ‘The second is – less tangible. These days detection has given way to prevention. It’s about crunching the numbers. At least, it is over in Head Office. But here – I look back at the last ten days and what do I find? Stars, wine, diamonds, bodysnatchers. You’re not normal, any of you. People don’t like what’s not normal, and try to crush it. As you say, you badly need an ally. Perhaps that person is me.’
Land looked like someone had jumped out of a bush to surprise him. ‘Really?’
‘It’s not an entirely altruistic thought, Raymond. I have a small department and limited resources. I need to make a name for myself, but the big budgets are awarded to the fraud boys. Some parts of the City of London have weak stats that drag us all down, but with the right handling your unit might be able to make a difference and push the figures up for me.’
‘So we’d be a team,’ said Land.
‘No, I’d still be your boss.’
‘Oh.’
‘May I speak confidentially?’
‘Of course.’
‘When we found out that you were under our jurisdiction, we downscaled you. Actually, we wrote you off. I think it was a mistake. I might be able to guarantee that you get the things you need to tackle bigger cases.’
‘Tell me what I have to do,’ said Land.
49
WATERLOO BRIDGE
On Friday morning the sun put in a surprise appearance, catching everyone unawares. Sweaters were slung over shoulders, coats were draped across arms, umbrellas were sheathed, scarves vanished and even a few pale knobbly knees protruded from pairs of shorts. On the South Bank, strollers, cyclists and a couple of mimes (the Duke of Wellington and a man dressed as a talking dog in a kennel) crept cautiously out into the light. Joggers appeared among the commuters crossing Waterloo Bridge. It felt almost pleasant to be outside.
Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart Page 32