‘He knew about you.’
‘He’d have guessed that Frank would have K&R insurance. That’s all. If he knew me, he’d have called me by name.’
‘He knew about my neighbour in Edwardes Square.’
‘Gossip,’ said Boxer. ‘Unless you were keeping it a secret.’
‘No, I talked to my friends about it. Everybody knew why I moved house.’
‘And Frank knew, too, so it was something known in Mumbai and London.’
‘What about Jason Bigley, the man I’d invited to lunch on Sunday to meet Alyshia?’ said Isabel. ‘He knew the content of my call with Chico.’
‘He’s listening in on your calls. He knows your mobile number from Alyshia’s contact list. He has a tracking system so he knows where you are. People have been listening in on mobile phone calls since they were invented.’
‘And the guilt trip?’
‘Don’t get involved in speculation,’ said Boxer. ‘It sucks up too much energy and it’s unproductive. We wait until we pick up Alyshia’s mobile. What I want from you now is more background detail on Frank’s Mumbai world, as best you know it. I have to write a situation report this morning before Mercy arrives at eleven. I’ll type while we talk.’
Boxer went upstairs, came back down with the laptop, set it up.
‘You know I haven’t been to Mumbai in years,’ she said.
‘Tell me what you remember of it,’ said Boxer. ‘For a start: who did you marry? A film star? Or did that happen later?’
‘It was 1984 and I married a businessman,’ said Isabel. ‘He was in import/export. Mainly between India and Dubai.’
‘There’s always been a long-standing relationship between Mumbai and Dubai.’
‘There’s a big Indian Muslim community over there: people running hotels and small businesses, and lower down the scale, a lot of construction workers. There’s always been plenty of movement between the two places,’ said Isabel.
‘And Dubai has always been open-armed to people with money and not too concerned about how they got it,’ said Boxer.
‘I was naïve in those days, but so were my parents,’ said Isabel. ‘That’s not entirely fair. I was crazily in love and my parents were utterly charmed by Chico. He had a powerful network even then, right at the beginning of his career. Important people, politicians that my father recognised, would speak up for him.’
‘Import/export covers a multitude of sins in that part of the world.’
‘I can’t say all the people he knew were the sort you’d introduce to your parents,’ said Isabel. ‘There were some rough types. I think there still are. I suppose it’s always useful to have access to people who can do the dirty work, like persuading people to move from a site where you’re planning to build, for instance. In the phone call the kidnapper was listening into, Chico was bellyaching about some slum dwellers who were protesting in downtown Mumbai about being moved out.’
‘And when did Bollywood call?’
‘He won’t tell you this, because he always wants to be thought of as a big star, but he’d had bit parts in movies since he was in his early twenties,’ said Isabel. ‘Always been obsessed with film. But he didn’t get his big break until much later, a few years after we were married.’
‘It’s well known that Bollywood and the Mumbai mafia are close.’
‘Is it? My English friends don’t know that,’ said Isabel.
‘I don’t know whether English people of our generation have fully connected with Bollywood yet,’ said Boxer. ‘Do you know how he became a film star? In those days, I doubt you were spotted; more likely “sponsored”, in the Frank Sinatra “I Did It Their Way” style.’
‘Chico’s version of the story was that he did brilliantly in a screen test with the director Mani Ratnam.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘He made a very famous gangster movie called Nayagan, based on the life of a big mafia boss,’ said Isabel. ‘But I’m not convinced by Chico’s version. It could be one of his fantasies. Sometimes he gets his own filmography muddled up with Anil Kapoor’s.’
‘Still, he got a part in a movie.’
‘A big part. It was an underworld movie in which he played a likeable goonda, or mobster. That was at the end of 1985. He was twenty-eight years old and he changed his name to Anadi Kapoor.’
‘Why the name change?’
‘Frank is Christian, Catholic, like most people from Goa. Bollywoood was a Hindu/Muslim industry with Hindu/Muslim audiences, so he thought a Hindu name would help him. He was very friendly with Anil Kapoor at the time. They’re about the same age. Of course, Anil is very famous now, but he wasn’t so big then. So Chico took the Kapoor name and attached Anadi to it, which means “Eternal”. He was never short of self-esteem.’
‘Did you like it that Frank was famous?’
‘Bollywood was appealing to mass audiences. I liked the dancing but I found it a bit naïve for my taste. It was difficult to get excited about something I didn’t admire,’ said Isabel. ‘And you’re right, the reason so many movies were made about the Bombay underworld was that there were a lot of them involved in the business. That and cricket, which I’ve always found tedious, were the main topics of conversation. So I didn’t fit in very well.’
‘So you didn’t know much about what was going on with Frank’s business?’
‘It always helped that he was neither Hindu nor Muslim and that he was a movie star. It meant he could play both sides of the fence and had friends in both camps. He also had a bit more freedom of movement just at the time when the Indian government was liberating the economy. Chico could set up companies, buy and sell them, had all the top government connections to pick up all the best infrastructure projects, and so on. He was the right man, in the right place, at the right time and with the right network.’
‘Was that when things started changing between you and Chico?’
‘It wasn’t just that I didn’t fit in. I hated that world. It was a nouveau world, where the men competed over money and power, and the women were judged by their looks, clothes, lifestyle and, to use Chico’s horrible word, fuckability. There was something particularly ugly about it in Mumbai, or Bombay, as it was then. While we danced on glass floors with everybody else looking up, in screaming envy, there were millions living in, literally, shit. There were days when I just couldn’t face going out. The comparative scenario was too vile. Chico knew I was all wrong for it. He developed an escort agency for himself and his friends. By the mid-nineties, he and I were finished. I was spending more than half the year in London, in the house in Edwardes Square, which he’d bought for me in 1992. By 1997, I’d got a job and my life in India was over.’
‘What about his new wife?’
‘Sharmila? She came from a poor background but she’s very beautiful. She was some gangster’s moll and Chico brought her in to run his escort agency and then . . . she replaced me.’
‘No hard feelings?’
‘None. Chico has always looked after me. We never fought over Alyshia. He wanted her educated here, but to know Mumbai. So she was here with me most of the time and went to India for holidays. Alyshia would have been the only reason for us to fall out, but we never let it happen.’
‘Sleep OK?’ asked the voice, concerned.
‘Yes,’ said Alyshia, groggy from the drug they’d given her, confused at where she was and the level of care in the voice around her.
‘Ready for a brand new day?’
‘No,’ she said flatly, as the reality flooded in.
‘Even if I told you that this would be your last day on earth . . . would you be ready for it?’
The fear seized her but she managed a what-the-hell shrug against the bed.
‘I’m stuck here,’ she said. ‘What’s there to look forward to?’
‘Yes,’ said the voice, conspiratorially, ‘what’s life without freedom?’
‘Exactly,’ said Alyshia, sounding bored.
‘It’s just life, but
you’d be surprised how attached you get to it.’
‘Can I take my sleeping mask off?’ she asked, and realised, as she’d said it, how subservient she’d become.
‘Good girl,’ said the voice. ‘I knew you’d pick things up quickly.’
She reached her hand up to her face.
‘But no, you can’t, not for the moment. Keep your hand down.’
‘There’s nothing to see in this room.’
‘It shouldn’t bother you then,’ said the voice. ‘Relax into it. Concentrate. Try to reach those moments buried deep in your unconscious mind, which reveal so much.’
‘What are you?’
‘A mad psychologist? You’d better hope not. Just an amateur one. I’ll try not to make too many mistakes and put you into irretrievable trauma.’
‘I thought you might be my confessor,’ said Alyshia. ‘All this talk about dredging my subconscious mind and my last day on earth.’
‘Well, you are Catholic, I suppose, technically. Ever go to Mass?’
‘I was christened.’
‘That’s something, but you’ve never confessed your sins?’
‘One moment you don’t have any and the next . . .’
‘They’ve got away from you,’ said the voice. ‘How little those closest to you know who you really are. They see what they want to see when you’re a child and then, as time goes by, and you spend more and more time out of their sight, they lose track of you.’
‘You’re not going to tell my mother about Abiola?’
‘I’m sure every beautiful woman has a horror like that somewhere in her life.’
‘I’m atoning for my sins.’
‘How? By being friendly with black guys?’
‘I saw a black kid stabbed in the Strand . . . was it last night?’
‘And you called the police,’ said the voice. ‘I’m not sure I’d call that atonement.’
‘How do you know about that call?’ asked Alyshia, pouncing. ‘The only person who knew about it was Jim. Is Jim in on this?’
‘You’d be surprised at the people who were prepared to help us. For some, it was just a question of money. We are in London, after all. Others were looking for no reward at all. In that particular case, we were just listening in on your calls,’ said the voice. ‘But yes, you were being a good citizen, and one with a little subconscious motivation, too.’
‘Do I know you?’ asked Alyshia, wondering now if she’d come across this person in her free life.
‘Yes,’ said the voice, ‘you know me. I’m your conscience. It’s just that we haven’t formally met for the last twenty years.’
‘What do you put in that situation report?’ asked Isabel.
‘Everything to do with the situation as I find it,’ said Boxer. ‘A report on the initial call you received. The mental and physical state of the participants – that’s you, Frank and Alyshia. The relationships between the participants and their relationships to others. The biographies as they stand at the time of writing. The idea is to bring the Director of Operations up to speed on the kidnap. Think of it this way: I’m here to help give you an objective point of view. They’re there, at a further remove, to give me an objective point of view. It helps us to get things right.’
‘Do you tell them everything?’
‘I won’t tell them what happened last night.’
‘Has that happened to you before?’
‘Never.’
She nodded, happy with that.
‘I’m not sure why it happened,’ she said. ‘I’ve never done anything like that in my life.’
‘Under normal circumstances it couldn’t have happened because there would have been other people around,’ said Boxer. ‘It happened because I wanted it to happen. My professional self should have held me back.’
‘I needed you,’ she said.
‘And I you,’ said Boxer. ‘What it means, we’ll find out later. This is an intense situation and you may find you feel very different afterwards.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What I’m saying is that you’re vulnerable because of Alyshia and I don’t have that excuse,’ said Boxer. ‘I just fell for you the moment I saw you and that has never happened to me before.’
‘I saw that,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t been the first time, but it was the first time I wanted it.’
‘From now on we concentrate on the important thing,’ said Boxer. ‘Let’s sort that out and look to ourselves afterwards.’
‘I don’t know whether I’m strong enough for that.’
‘I don’t know whether I am either,’ said Boxer. ‘It’s just an expression of intent.’
‘That’s what makes parents so desperate,’ said Alyshia. ‘They can’t control the people you meet, your friends and the ones you fall in love with. They cannot control fate.’
‘They can equip you.’
‘My mother’s father was a diplomat, her mother from an army family. They walked the battlements of their moral standards, as my mother used to say, but couldn’t stop her from marrying a womanising foreigner.’
‘Even though they knew she’d regret it.’
‘She couldn’t be helped; she couldn’t help herself.’
‘Is that what happened to you and Julian?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, playing for time, feeling him prodding around again after the lull.
‘Come on, kid, you must know whether you fell for him or not.’
‘I thought I was in love with him at the time.’
‘That sounds retrospective,’ said the voice.
‘I don’t know what it was between Julian and me. It was intense, but I’m not sure it was love.’
‘So, what did he have that you liked?’
‘He knew what he wanted. That was attractive. I thought he knew who he was.’
‘That was probably why your mother went after Frank.’
‘There was no question of that. My father went after her.’
‘And why was that?’
‘A whole bunch of reasons, but one of them was probably that she gave him respectability.’
‘Why do you despise your mother and worship your father?’
‘Because my mother loves me without knowing who I am.’
‘And your father?’
‘He recognises me,’ said Alyshia. ‘And I recognise him.’
‘What was the first thing that attracted you to Julian?’
‘Why do you come back to him all the time?’
‘It’ll lead you to talk about other things.’
‘Julian was unaffected by me; at least, that’s how it looked.’
‘Physically?’
‘Everything-ly,’ she said. ‘I had to work hard to get noticed by him. He didn’t go to goo in my hands.’
‘I still don’t see why you fancied him,’ said the voice. ‘He knew what he wanted and he didn’t take any notice of you: doesn’t sound like a great recommendation. You got anything more positive than that?’
‘It wasn’t his looks,’ she said. ‘He had terrible teeth, said it was from doing too much speed.’
‘I said positive, Alyshia.’
‘He was intelligent; he saw things differently.’
‘Like a few thousand others at Oxford,’ said the voice. ‘Come on, Alyshia.’
What was it? The question reverberated around her mind. What had possessed her at that time? And it was a possession.
‘Did you know his real name?’
‘What do you mean his real name?’
‘The Daily Telegraph dug that one up around his court case. His real name is John Black. Did he talk about his parents, what they did, where they lived?’
‘His father ran a hedge business for airlines and aviation gasoline. Mother was a lawyer. They lived on the Old Brompton Road. We drove past there once.’
‘Bet you didn’t go in.’
‘He didn’t get on with his parents.’
‘By the time Julian was sent down,
he was thirty-one. His father had been dead seven years from liver cancer. His mother still lives on benefits in Nottingham. Her age at the time of sentencing was given as forty-six. She’s part of those statistics that stick in the craw of Little England – the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe.
‘And by the way, something else you might not know: Julian owed Abiola thirty grand. He’d run up some gambling debts to pay for his drug habit. Part of the deal was that he could get Abiola an intro to you.’
Alyshia felt herself buried in a hole, deep in the foundations of a building that had fallen around her.
‘And before you ask, it’s all in the public domain,’ said the voice.
She stared out into the expanding dark. Her eyelashes brushed the velvet sleeping mask as she blinked it all in.
‘Think about that,’ said the voice. ‘What was it about Julian that drew you to him?’
10
7.30 A.M., MONDAY 12TH MARCH 2012
Home Office, Marsham Street, London SW1
There was one more person in the room than the Home Secretary was expecting. He looked hard and lean with dark hair, high cheekbones, a small scar under his left eye and a permanent frown, which gave him the look of a man who was always curious about what you were going to say next.
‘This is Simon Deacon, from MI6,’ said Joyce Hunter, of MI5. ‘I thought it would save time if he sat in on this meeting. He runs the Asia desk at Vauxhall Cross.’
Natasha Radcliffe, the Home Secretary, was annoyed to find that the small favour she’d done for the Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills had now become a ball in her court. She’d heard from Mervin Stanley early that morning that someone had tried to shoot Frank D’Cruz in Knightsbridge yesterday evening. That news had done the rounds and triggered a call to her from Barbara Richmond, the Minister for Security and Counter Terrorism, who was doubly nervous in the run-up to the Olympic Games. After that call, she’d decided that the safest course of action was to convene a meeting with MI5 to discuss any possible security issues around this kidnap and shooting. At least the press hadn’t got wind of any of it.
‘Have you heard of Frank D’Cruz?’ she asked.
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