‘There we are,’ said Mrs Witchley, pointing to a car pulling away from the curb, leaving an empty space along the Mayfair street. It was under an oak tree, the white splatter of bird shit on the roofs of the nearby Porsche four-wheel drives nearly enough to put Doyle off from pulling in, as were the litter of acorns fallen on top of the cars. He resigned himself to some tissue wiping of his beloved Chevy Nova later on. He manoeuvred in manually, parked up, then swung the door out into the pavement. The parking meter was book-by-phone, and at Mayfair prices, Doyle also had to resign himself to taking out a second mortgage to pay for the time the two of them would spend interviewing the head of Greenrock Capital.
‘Real men don’t use autopark,’ said Mrs Witchley, in a tone warm enough he could almost believe she wasn’t being sarcastic.
‘You get a chance to read up on William T. McMoneybags last night?’ retorted Doyle.
Mrs Witchley shut her door and turned to look at the sweep of white stone, iron railings and faux temple columns fronting the building they had parked alongside. ‘I believe I was somewhat side-tracked by the history of the institution we’re meeting him in.’ The entrance to the Plato Club was six steps up to an open set of double doors at the front of the wide three story Georgian façade – a black silhouette of the Greek philosopher’s head enamelled on a discrete brass plate, not even the club’s name, just the words subscription library under the head’s contours.
‘Yeah, he’s sending us a message by meeting us here. The Big I Am. Davos for the people that get invited to Davos. This place is so far beyond exclusive, that they’re having a laugh. British Prime Ministers get turned down for membership at the Plato Club.’
‘Only the ones who are no longer in power,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘It wasn’t so much the exclusive nature of the membership that had me entranced – all of London’s gentlemen’s clubs play that game. No, it is the genius of portraying the club’s headquarters as a subscription library.’
‘That’s not genius, love, it’s fake snobbery. We’re so clever we read books; on actual paper, hand-bound in the leather of rare endangered goats. You won’t find JK Rowling’s latest pot-boiler on our shelves, but you will have to pay the equivalent of a garage full of new Mercedes every year to join.’
‘You can’t put a price on good company, Mister Doyle. But that’s not the genius of this place. The club’s characterized as a library. In the last London riots, six million pounds worth of electronic goods were taken and nearly as much in designer trainers and clothes. Bobbins, even pound stores were cleared out and set on fire. But not one single bookshop or library was looted. Not one. Nobody steals books. Nobody puts a brick through a library. You are either too educated to do it, or not nearly educated enough. The only protesters a library ever sees are mobs of local pensioners when they hear it might close. This—’ she indicated the building, ‘—is the world’s most exclusive stealth building. Rendered invisible by the use of two simple words. Yes, I would call that genius.’
Doyle watched in growing impatience as Mrs Witchley bent down by the side of his Nova, opened her handbag and started scooping up handfuls of acorns from the gutter into her handbag. I know I’m going to regret asking, but…’
‘My pig has rather a fond tooth for the common acorn, Mister Doyle. He can’t get enough of them.’
‘Well, that’s all right then. You really are two cards short of the complete Pokemon set, love.’
‘I don’t suppose it will help if I told you that Churchill visited me last night after I finished taking a rather splendid supper with young Spads. Call it a coincidence, but he mentioned acorns, too. Churchill that is, not Spads.’
‘See the future too, then, can they, without even reading tea-leaves? That’s versatile.’
‘I don’t think time moves for the passed in the same way as it does for us. I did question one of them, once. All I was told was that being afraid of what happens after you are dead does you about as much as good as being afraid of not being around before you were born.’ She stopped filling her bag, lifted up a single acorn, removed her little set of steel teeth, and used the hole punch-like device to pierce a cavity in the oak nut. Agatha held up the acorn to the light, the morning sunlight filtering through the little triangle she had punched through it. You’d think she was a jeweller who’d found a diamond in the street. She chuckled to herself as she wedged the acorn in the groove of Doyle’s engine bonnet and dropped the little device back in her handbag. ‘What was it Winnie said to me, again? Who knows what English oak shall grow from little acorns.’
‘You want to feed the birds, Gypsy Jen, you can wipe off my Nova afterwards. The little tweety bastards are going to whitewash it under the leaves here as it. You’ve missed a few acorns on the top of that Lamborghini Aventador behind us. You want me to help bag them for you, or shall we go and see if William T. McMoneybags is bloody bumping off company founders so his fund can clean up?’
‘I think you need to demonstrate the tact and diplomacy for which you are legendary,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘Given that Mister William T. McCarley has extended us the courtesy of inviting us to dine at an institution where heads of state and oligarchs take breakfast. Besides, if Mister McCarley’s innocent, he won’t know that Simon Werks is dead, and it would be unfair of us to give him the advantage of that news.’
‘Innocent.’ Doyle chewed at the word like an unwelcome fishbone. ‘The W. should stand for wanker, anyone who insists on using their middle initial in their name.’ He pulled out a City of London warrant card as he walked up the steps towards the Plato Club. ‘This is our cover… fraud squad. McMoneybags has been told we’re investigating the ControlWerks takeover for possible insider trading. We’ll see if he lets slips that he knows that Saucy Simon is laid out on a morgue slab, rather than sunning himself with a bunch of church hippies out in California.’
Doyle and Mrs Witchley walked through the open doors of the club. There was a cloakroom and reception alcove in a short corridor inside, and a pair of liveried doormen, black jackets with tails and a discrete Plato Club logo on their ties in gold. The taller of the two men smiled at them. ‘Mister McCarley’s guests?’
Doyle nodded and the man indicated the cloakroom, while his colleague checked their arrival off on his PDA. ‘Welcome to the Plato Club. And would Mrs Witchley care to leave her umbrella in the cloakroom?’
‘Mrs Witchley would not, young man. Something to lean on at my age proves inestimable – and as you can clearly see, I am far too young to sport a walking stick.’
Doyle rolled his eyes. What is it about women? Vanity at the old biddy’s age. His grandmother had been the same right up until her last day in the nursing home. Selecting silk blouses she couldn’t afford and having someone come in to do her hair every fortnight well into her nineties.
‘Very good. Sir, madam, the morning room is this way.’
The doorman led them through a large hall, an expanse of Italian stone with a sweeping white staircase curving up and splitting into two bridges of marble with dark wrought iron for banisters, the climbing treads rising up through two storeys. Off to the side, the morning room was a tall room filled with light from sash windows, perhaps thirty tables surrounded by easy chairs and occupied by club members drinking tea and coffee and nibbling at sandwiches and croissants. Many of the faces were vaguely familiar to Doyle from television, although he wouldn’t have been able to name half of them if pressed – a rum crew of politicians and industrialists and media celebrities. William T. McCarley was dining alone. There was a reading table by his side, a selection of tablet devices fanned out, each with a different newspaper on the screen. Members of staff appeared and pulled out chairs for Doyle and Mrs Witchley, announced by name by the doorman, and after inquiring after the guests’ preferences for food and drink, the two of them were left alone with the fund manager. Matching his short ginger hair, McCarley was wearing a brown three-piece suit bordering on orange; a tweedy pattern that made him look like Rupert the Bea
r gone to work on Wall Street. Elegant but showy, it wasn’t the sober anonymous blue stealth suit favoured by most bankers. His solid ruddy features gave the impression of a man who was used to doing things his own way. I know how that goes.
‘So, Britain’s interested in my fund’s activities? I thought you guys were all about the free market again these days?’ Doyle had been expecting the American accent from his file, although it lacked Curtis Werks’ patrician edge. McCarley could have been a prizefighter from New Jersey.
‘Free?’ said Doyle. ‘And how often does Greenrock get out of bed in the morning for free?’
‘We like to earn our money. That’s an American thing. A little like an American fund taking over an American company.’
‘An American firm which has a London Stock Exchange listing as well as a U.S one,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘Besides, I was under the impression that markets and money were global these days.’
‘I know what you guys have been hearing. The old David and Goliath narrative, with Greenrock playing the part of the evil giant. For all of their supposed shyness with the press, the Werks boys do a good PR job on the rags-to-riches story, don’t they? Werks is the twins’ mother’s name, not their father’s. Their father was a Connolly. Their old man took the Werks name so the family wouldn’t object quite so much to a penniless Mick marrying into a German packaging fortune. It’s real easy to start a software business when the first eighty million comes from granny.’
‘And you, I presume, are a self-made man?’ asked Agatha.
‘Damn straight. My father was a teamster. Drove haulage for the same company in Nevada for thirty-eight years until the day it went bust. The next morning he stole his truck from the bailiff’s lot and drove it off a bridge and into a canyon outside Winchester. I ever figure there’s not a place in the world for what I do, I’ll do the same damn thing. There’s no safety net fortune in my line to catch my activities. What I’ve done with Greenrock has been funded solely by the Bank of Hard Work.’
A tray appeared with coffee, tea and sandwiches cut into neat little triangles. Doyle tucked into it while Mrs Witchley fastidiously ignored the fare. ‘And what do you do, Mister McCarley?’
‘My fund’s not the barbarians at the gate, lady. Greenrock Capital is like a forester in the woods. Sometimes we find a little spare soil and we plant an acorn and we water it, and something good grows up from nothing. That’s venture capital. Other times we find a big old oak that’s been there for centuries, but most of its dead wood, diseased. To keep it alive you’ve got to cut out the dead bark to preserve the healthy. That’s a private equity buy-out.’
‘And which of those two analogies does ControlWerks fall under?’
‘Well, I’d have to say that particular one would be a big juicy apple tree, with a pair of hayseeds tending it and letting half the fruit rot on the tree, rather than picking ’em and selling ’em like they should be. I own a piece of that land and that tree. Purchased fair and square on the open market. And those two hayseeds, much as I prod and poke them, don’t seem minded to pull out their baskets and get on with the harvest.’
‘And how far are you willing to prod?’
McCarley raised his hands. ‘Only what’s legal. Of course, that’s not always so easy to work out, what with you people fattening up the compliance books every year, but I have plenty of advisors to take care of that.’
‘And if you buy out ControlWerks, what happens to the two brothers?’
‘Well, in that regard, they’re not much different from my father or me. They like driving down their own road and they probably don’t enjoy backseat driving anymore than I do. They’re going to get booted out of the cab one way or another, sooner or later. Kinder and cleaner all around to make it sooner.’
‘Caught between a rock and a hard place,’ said Agatha. ‘Hence your fund’s title, perhaps?’
‘Nah. I wanted to call it Kryptonite Capital, but I wasn’t allowed to trademark the name.’
‘We’re going to need a list of all the funds in your consortium of buyers,’ said Doyle.
‘They’re private-minded, sir, they don’t much like governments getting in their face.’
‘Well ye-ha, Willie, we’re having us a ho-down, and they’re all invited. And when they’ve arrived for the bleeding square-dance, we’ll crosscheck their stock purchases just to make sure the cousins haven’t been kissing each too much.’
‘There’s no damn inside dealing with ControlWerks. I don’t care what the Werks brothers have been alleging.’
‘Alas, these days the British government doesn’t take much on trust when it comes to financiers,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘A few too many bailouts along the journey. It would be very helpful if you could give us a list of the others involved in the consortium.’
McCarley waved his hand in disgust. ‘You can have it – much good may it do you. But you bear in mind it’s beyond commercially sensitive. If I find the names on it leaked to scupper our bid just because some pork-barrel Brit politician is worried about jobs in their constituency, my lawyers will nail their ass to the wall. Be coming after you for billions, you hear?’
Doyle affected a posh English accent. ‘Old chap, keeping secrets is our bread and butter.’
‘Make sure it is.’
With their interview terminated, one of the serving staff appeared to lead them out, the footman who had escorted them to the table moving in the opposite direction with a fashionably dressed woman to replace them at McCarley’s table. She looked too old to be the fund manager’s secretary, probably too old to be his wife too, if Doyle was any judge of character. ‘You know,’ said Doyle. ‘I’ve just seen McMoneybags pay for lunch, so why does it feel like he’s eaten mine?’
‘I know that woman’s face from somewhere,’ said Mrs Witchley, glancing back at the table. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue.’
‘Unless you’re secretly the Duke of Westminster’s sister and you’ve been dining here on the sly, love, I don’t see how…’
‘Christine Lormand,’ said Mrs Witchley, snapping her fingers. ‘The second to last head of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. She retired over ten years ago.’
‘The French spooks at the DGSE? She’s not here working as the club’s cake waitress, then?’
‘You know, the sedative that was used to tranquillise Simon Werks was derived from a substance still used by the French army.’
‘That’s a bit tenuous, love. I mean, I get that everyone loathes the Frogs, but still… give the cheese-munchers a break. The doc’s report said the drug’s used by the Australians too, but until we see Skippy the Kangaroo on an assassin’s leash hopping around with a vial of tranquillizer tied around its neck, I’m not going to put them in the frame for the murder either.’
‘I might have been a little unfair to you and your theories, Mister Doyle. Perhaps there is a commercial motive here after all. Did you get the impression that Mister McCarley wasn’t being entirely honest with us back there?’
‘Do bears lay brown ones in the woods? Of course he wasn’t telling the whole truth to us. But is it because his mates really are playing the market on the side knowing ControlWerks shares are going to rocket as soon as the takeover begins, or does the old sod know that Saucy Simon is dead and suspect we’ve rumbled Werks’ suicide is a fake?’
‘He should have had a lawyer sitting in,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘If he thought we were really with the fraud squad, he would have had representation. Shittysticks, what sort of American meets the fraud squad without his lawyers present?’
‘The totally innocent kind or the completely guilty kind. Which leaves us straight back at square one.’
‘I thought perhaps you might just smack him in the stomach, plant a spray of methoxyflurane in his jacket pocket and arrest him in front of his peers.’
‘You haven’t got a very good impression of how I do things,’ said Doyle, stepping out through the club’s entrance and into the morning sunshine. �
��When my scumbags do time, I really do want them to have done the crime. If I’d been into taking the easy route, I’d still be in special branch pulling antiterrorism cases.’
‘How very old fashioned of you,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘And I mean that as a complement.’
‘Elvis been telling you to make friends and influence people?’
‘Not recently, Mister Doyle.’ Mrs Witchley had her phone out, pecking intently at the small buttons of its keyboard.
‘Oi, what happened to sending all our comms by carrier pigeon?’
‘Oh, I trust my phone. I wrote its security software myself – well, with a smattering of help from Charles Babbage. Yes, I thought so…’ She turned the mobile’s screen around to show Doyle the photograph of Christine Lormand on a corporate web page. ‘Meet the executive chairwoman of PegasusEnForce.’
‘The company that’s meant to be protecting Curtis Werks and his family!’
‘Indeed. A small world. So, how safe is Caesar when the Praetorian Guard are seen meeting with Brutus?’
‘Oh shit!’
‘A little indelicate, but essentially accurate.’
‘No, I mean, oh shit!’ Doyle pointed to the empty parking space where his car should have been. He sprinted over to where the space was, a great big vacancy of automobile between a Mercedes four-wheel drive and the bright yellow Lamborghini. There was a traffic warden with dreadlocks inspecting the time left on the Mercedes’ meter, his PDA out to note how long was left before he had to check again. Doyle stamped in front of him. ‘You! Did you tow the Nova? There’s at least a bloody hour left on that meter.’
‘That old-fashioned smoker was yours?’ said the traffic warden. ‘Driven off a couple of minutes ago, man. Three young kids – thought they couldn’t afford nothing better than a rust bucket to tool around in.’
In the Company of Ghosts Page 10