by Sam Nash
“Blue Chip shares, mostly, with a few sound investments made on the estates behalf in certain energy conglomerates, nothing too risky, you understand.” He flicked through a shares folder, drawing my attention to certificates in which he seemed especially proud.
“Mr Boare, I have no wish to be rude, but I am in a bit of a hurry. Is there any way you could summarise so that we could go through in more detail another day?”
“Certainly. What would you like to know?” He sat fully upright, fingers interlinked and resting on the desk.
“Roughly how much does the earldom amount to overall?” I know it sounded cold hearted and calculated, but that is, after all, the purpose of a bank.
“Approximately, eight hundred and fifty million pounds, plus a couple of unsold pockets of land.” His expression did not flicker once. These were the sums that he was used to dealing with. I, however, am not. I spluttered on the tea I was sipping. He continued. “Do you know what you would like to do with this sum? We would need some prior warning to liquidate shares and such, should you wish to move the money elsewhere…”
“No..um…at least for now, I should like you to continue as before, please.” He seemed pleased with this response. I meant to compliment him on his prudent management, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. I was so completely overwhelmed.
“I should very much like to see what she left for me in the bank box, if that is possible.” I put my cup down on its saucer and rose from my chair.
“Of course, Dr Lawrence, but first, what would you like us to do with your Grandmother’s legacy?”
“Her legacy? I assumed that the bank box was her legacy. My father inherited the Judge’s house and all their belongings when Phebe died. I still have one of their paintings and some photographs.” I sat back down.
His smile transformed into a more paternal frown. His hooded eyes exuded patience and understanding. “You inherited Judge Lawrence’s accrued wealth through your father, but Phebe had her own money. She was a shrewd investor… gifted, my father used to call her, and now I can see why. Her estate was put into trust for you, and managed according to her exacting instructions. It matured this very day. You only need to sign this document, and everything is yours for the taking.”
It was fortunate that I was sitting. I felt giddy at the prospect of yet more wealth. A mixture of shock and panic infilled me, but more than those, I needed to know more.
“How much?” I whispered.
“It’s more difficult to put a precise value on her assets. There are a number of properties, a particularly lovely estate on the Italian lakes, another in Scotland, and one or two others elsewhere. Her shares portfolio is doing tremendously well… the savings account currently stands at nine point six billion pounds, give or take the odd million.” He took out a fountain pen from his inside jacket pocket, unscrewed the lid and pushed it onto the end of the barrel before offering it to me. “If you’ll sign just here…”
My mouth hung open. I was on automatic pilot, signing my name in the directed places on the document. I didn’t even read the terms, I was so numbed. My mind could not comprehend such a vast sum.
“There are a few other items that require your attention, but I suspect that you have had enough for one day. Mr Bunyan has offered to assist you with some of the more legal aspects. I’m sure he will be in touch.”
I nodded. “The bank box?”
“Yes, absolutely. If you’d like to come this way, Dr Lawrence…”
He led the way down the corridor to a lift. As we passed each office door, staff and one or two clients peered out through the glass at me. I did not like this sudden celebrity status, and so hurried into the elevator, waiting for Mr Boare to choose the floor.
I don’t mind admitting that as the lift plummeted down the shaft to the steel lined basement, my autonomic system took charge of my body, while I dealt with the dizzying facts. How is such enormous wealth to be managed? How would it alter my life and those of my family? How did Anthony Knight know to send my grandmother’s solicitor to me if he had no former knowledge of my inheritance?
Mr Boare ushered me through a steel gateway, past security guards and officers, and then unbuttoned his jacket to gain access to the tiny pocket in his waistcoat. From it, he produced a key, not unlike the one I also brandished. With it, he stepped inside the vault and unlocked a small hinged door in the wall of boxes at shoulder height. I could just see his back as he slid out the steel case from inside, before carrying it towards me.
“This is it, sir. If you would like to follow me into a private viewing room.”
I did as I was instructed, allowing Mr Boare to set the box down on a protective velvet cloth covering the antique table. Other than a couple of matching chairs, there was nothing else in the room. No windows, nor pictures, nothing in which a camera or recording device could be attached.
“When you have completed your business, Dr Lawrence, please press this button by the door, and I will return immediately.”
This was it. The moment I had been waiting for since receiving the earldom documents and key. There was a tense minute, while I thanked him and waited for Mr Boare to leave the room. There was a further moment while I braced myself for the contents. In a wild fantasy, I imagined that Phebe had altered the location of the sealed tin. That she had returned to its hiding place and relocated the journal to this very bank box.
My hands shook as I inserted my key and listened for the tumblers to slot into place. Lifting the small casket lid, I discovered two, small, fabric covered items. I reached in for the smallest of them, unwrapping a cotton handkerchief embroidered with the initials P.L. It hadn’t occurred to me until then how Grandma Phebe and I shared initials as well as abilities.
As I unwound the pretty lace, the gold sheen of a brooch came into view. Although it appeared to be quite modern, its lines curiously shaped to the Greek letter lambda, encircled by an adjoining ring, I know that it had to be at least fifty years old, probably much older. A small black gemstone glistened from its position, orbiting the letter. I laid it down gently on the table and hastened to the second item.
In a similar wrapping of a gentleman’s handkerchief, monogrammed with the letters CL, for my grandfather, Judge Charles Lawrence, I found his pocket watch. Its hands frozen to the time when the winding spring had run down to dormancy. A beautiful piece though it may be, I could not stop myself from feeling disappointed. I looked inside the box once more. There were no clues, no scraps of paper, nothing to spur my quest in finding the journal.
I flipped the watch over in my hand. Above the company name, Wendle and Sons, engraved on the watch back, it said: For my darling, Charles. With love, Phebe. Pushing my nail between the joins in the gold casing, I prised the watch open, exposing the mechanism, searching for more. The inner surface of the case was bare.
Grandma Phebe certainly wasn’t going to make this easy for me. I scooped up both items, and their wrappings, and tucked them into my trouser pockets. With the box locked, I returned the key to my fob, and pressed the button as instructed. Mr Boare was waiting just outside the room the whole time, making me jump with his prompt return.
“I hope everything is to your satisfaction, sir.” He said, collecting the box and repeating his security process in reverse. I looked at his expectant face. Curiosity burned through the veneer of indifference. His puzzle was longer in its gestation than mine. He had his entire staff itching for a solution to this generational burden. I had none to give. Suspicion and caution were my new watch words since my encounter at Whitehall.
Travelling up in the lift to the ground floor of the magnificent building with the banker, I thanked him for all that he had done in carrying out my grandmother’s wishes, and reassured him that I had no intention of moving the assets to another establishment. My platitudes gushed from me without conscious effort, while my mind grappled with the absence of useable intel.
Mr Boare volunteered to update the
solicitor on our meeting, suggesting that he leaves any further legalities for a few days to ‘let it all sink in.’ I readily agreed, since I needed time to find Phebe’s journal, and to eradicate the Anthony Knight threat. I wasn’t about to inform him of my current difficulties. He walked with me to the threshold and shook my hand.
“It has been a much anticipated pleasure to meet you, Dr Lawrence, and I look forward to the long and productive business relationship between our families to continue for many years to come.”
My skin flushed hot. This was more attention than I am used to. “Thank you, Mr Boare. We will meet again soon, of that I am sure.” I managed to pull myself out of my agitated state of mind, to afford him a genuine smile of appreciation. He and his bank, had managed all my family’s affairs for centuries, keeping confidences hidden from Her Majesty’s Secret Service. They deserve every penny they make from my grandmother’s substantial fortune.
My eyes adjusted to the brightness of the street, focusing my sightlines on the traffic heading east. The door closed behind me, and I stepped out onto the pavement. I strained my sight into the distance, reminding myself to be on the lookout for the little red Ford. A double decker bus stopped before me, halting the traffic, giving me an opportunity to dash between the slowed vehicles to the opposite side of the road.
I stood on tiptoe, waving at the glare from the windscreen of a small red car about a hundred feet away. That was when I felt the constricting grip of massive hands around my left arm. My immediate response was to try and shake myself free, thinking that I was in the process of being mugged. He stood a good six inches taller than me, and without the driver’s uniform, it took a while to recognise him. Fletch would not release me, despite my wriggling.
“And I thought we had a beautiful thing going on between us.” A woman’s voice, loud, syrupy and American. She slipped her hand beneath my right elbow, peering up at me. “I hadn’t pegged you as a love em and leave em sort of guy, Phil.” Tawnie said, before allowing Fletch’s raw force to propel me down the street. I twisted my face over my shoulder, appealing to any passer-by for assistance, but none came.
They frog marched me around the corner into a side street and bundled me into an Audi saloon. A far cry from the flashy Bentley. Strapped into the backseat, next to the fragrant Tawnie, I watched impotently, as Fletch hopped into the driver’s seat and hit the accelerator. We wove through side-streets and back alleys as though he knew more than the average London cabbie. If I were not his prisoner, I would have been impressed.
“How did you track me down?” I asked of Tawnie. I thought it most unlikely that anyone from the bank would have betrayed my whereabouts after keeping my legacy a secret for so many years.
“That was easy. You’d be surprised how little it takes to retain a few critical British Intelligence Officers. We knew of your destination the moment you dialled… what do you call him? Wildman, is it? Fabulous name.” She flashed me a row of her perfect teeth, bleached beyond nature in compensation for her nicotine habit.
I hadn’t made the connection. That was a foolish mistake. The blue van watching my house would have spotted Wildman, when he came to help me with the documents and also when I asked him to retrieve the spare key from the tree house and collect my mail. He would have become central to the surveillance data from then on. I had not banked on British Intelligence being so easily bought.
If the Americans can locate me with ease, why then has Anthony Knight and his operatives not yet made a move? His activities are suspicious by their absence, but then, he does have a potential war on his hands now that the talks have failed. I wonder whether he has named me in the distribution of the Gulf vaccine schedule. He must be mustering the troops by now, and almost certainly begun the delivery of the chemical cocktail of twenty-eight defunct virus strains and adjuncts into their veins.
A tiny part inside of me died. That little seed of hope that is kept alive, in belief that the conscience of men will win out. Another of my tormented visions will come to pass, and I will live the rest of my life knowing that I was unable to alter its course. Decades of misery and loss for those affected families, and I will always wonder how my choices contributed to their pain.
I kept a mental record of familiar sights and signage, and as we passed a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, my pulse quickened until it drilled in my throat. I looked at Tawnie, expecting a calm, beatific presence about her, and was surprised to see that she appeared more nervous than myself. She picked at her manicured nails and straightened her blouse several times within a few minutes.
We cruised past signs leading to Islington Museum and jumped the lights at the next junction. Tawnie picked imaginary fluff from her cotton slacks, then poked around in her voluminous bag for a compact mirror and lipstick. Whoever I was going to meet, had her in a flat spin. More narrow lanes and back alley manoeuvres, until we slowed onto a long straight thoroughfare called Wharf Road.
My mind extrapolated this data. Wharf means canals. Canals means industry. Industry means old warehouses. Warehouses are where gangsters and mafioso dispose of people in films. I squeezed my hands against my legs to hide the trembling.
The Audi turned into a gateway and the metal struts immediately receded from view allowing us entry. I assume it had a remote trigger of sorts. The fencing either side was a minimum of ten feet tall, with sharp twisted barbs crowning each post. In the opposite direction, at the far end of the yard, chain link fencing and razor wire. No place to run, no place to hide.
Fletch secured the handbrake and pocketed the car keys before hopping out and opening the back door. I gave a cursory thought to the notion of refusing to cooperate, but guessing from the way his jacket strained over his biceps, I supposed that his primary skills were not confined to driving. Choosing to avoid a physical confrontation, I released the seatbelt and stepped out of the car of my own volition.
The place was deserted. No one manned the reception area, and as we passed through unchallenged, I noticed that the security monitors behind the main desk showed nothing but static snow. The surveillance feed was switched off. There would be no record of me ever having been here. I swallowed hard, and hoped to Christ that David was safe, encircling the block around Fleet Street.
This building was massive. Fletch herded me down a corridor, past a few central offices and out onto the factory floor. A cavernous space, filled with gigantic metal hoppers, coated with the powdered dust of custard yellow. The heat was oppressive, instantly drying to the eyes and nostrils. We all blinked, adjusting to the desert conditions in this furnace driven environment. The sickly sweet smell of ground cocoa and icing sugar, dissolved into my muccal membranes, making me gag. Fletch removed his coat and threw it over a steel banister railing.
“He’s not here yet?” Tawnie muttered to Fletch.
He pulled a condescending face, then tempered it in due deference to her position of authority. “No ma’am. As you see. His car would have been in the yard, had he arrived first.”
There was nowhere to sit, and standing felt awkward between the huge vats of stored powder. Every footstep and spoken word echoed from the vented apex roof. Lights flashed above the hopper chutes, as though packing and production had been interrupted and the workers dismissed without notice or time to fully power down.
Perspiration beaded my forehead. I removed my jacket and hung it over my forearm. Every movement I made, monitored by my abductors. “Would one of you care to tell me why I have been forced here against my will?” They ignored me, gazing around the raised gantries running parallel with the floor. “If you want me to cooperate, one of you had better start talking.”
Tawnie broke first. “We tried talking, amongst other things, on the train. You just pretended to cooperate.”
“Perhaps you were not persuasive enough. Let’s talk some more and maybe you will convince me to join your group.” I took a step closer to her. She recoiled for a moment, and then relaxed.
“If on
ly I could believe you, Phil. You have no idea how sad I was when you left me in Paris.” The tilt of the head, the flick of her auburn hair over her shoulder, encouraged an involuntary smile. In all honesty, I had enjoyed my time with her, but I did not crave a repeat performance.
“You are aware of the concept of free will, I take it? The use of my trustworthy name and title depends entirely on my agreement with your ethics.” I said, interested in rehashing the debate to stall for time. I had to figure a way out of this literal powder keg.
“Your ethics seem flexible enough to me. You had no ethical problem in using me to satisfy your own whims on the train.”
“You think an old man like me could have the wherewithal to seduce an attractive heiress such as yourself? Please, Ms Chambers, be reasonable.” I used our little cat and mouse game to wander about, glancing this way and that to survey the corners of the room. At the far end of the raised gantries, was another door and a large window into what I assumed was a control room. A fire escape was also just visible between two large storage vats, halfway down the warehouse.
“The time for reasoning is over.” She huffed. “Thanks to you, my father has cut his business trip short and flown here directly. He is far from pleased with this outcome. If you intend to retain any free will at all, you will take him up on his offer.” I could tell there was more she wanted to say, but she was interrupted by a rubbery squeak and peculiar suction noise, as the sealed door opened behind us.
He was shorter than I expected him to be. Balding, with a growing collection of age spots showing between the fine strands of his comb-over. Tawnie teetered over to him on ridiculous heels, and pecked his cheek. “Father.” She observed their ritual formalities, and then stood a few paces from his side.
It’s curious how anticipation and build up can induce such powerful feelings. For the entire, agonising trip from Fleet Street to this god forsaken factory, I took my cues from Tawnie’s reactions. Her exaggerated state of anxiety, and hints that her father was a forceful man, not to be trifled with. As soon as this little upstart crossed the floor, in his puffed up blouson with a bilious complexion, my nerves melted into the ether. I could no more be afraid of Tawnie’s father than of the vicar at St Joseph’s Church in Brighton. He too, had a waddling gait, giving him an air of comedy.