Webster gulped his Scotch. He stood, peeled off Hammer’s cardigan, laid it on the back of the chair and made to leave.
“The first time I saw him I knew he was wrong,” he said. “I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
“I’m letting you do the seeing.”
Webster shook his head. “While you watch the fees? I understand.”
He gave perfunctory thanks for the drink and left, taking his damp jacket from the stand.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, after a cool morning at home, Webster took Nancy to school and Daniel to nursery and made his furtive way to the Caledonian Road to see Dean Oliver, stopping in Queen’s Park to arrange for flowers to be sent to Elsa. They were a poor substitute for honesty but he couldn’t afford that, not yet. Throughout his time at Ikertu he had told her almost everything almost all the time, only leaving out the details that he thought would appall or bore her. This, though, would frighten her, and he persuaded himself, disingenuously, that he preferred to lie to her than see her scared. On his way he left a message for Constance, telling him that things had become more serious and asking him to call.
Webster had never been to Oliver’s office before; their two or three meetings had always been on neutral ground, where an illusion of distance might be maintained. He was not someone to be seen with, if it could be helped, and perhaps he understood this, because Oliver spent his days in a single room on a light industrial estate in an anonymous part of north London, four hundred yards from the prison—which may or may not have occupied his mind as he walked to work each morning.
Uniquely among that strange band of people who did occasional jobs for him, Webster knew nothing about Dean Oliver: where he lived, who he lived with, what he held dear; how he came to do the difficult and esoteric work that made him useful. Still less about his trade secrets, which was probably just as well. After every meeting Webster came away with the feeling that he had said rather too much, which left him at the same time unsettled and reassured.
Even Oliver’s face gave little away. It was tanned all year round to a suspicious evenness, and otherwise smooth and so featureless that it was hard to retain a strong impression of him without the original present. His cheeks were tight and always clean-shaven, his lips a little too full. That was all that was notable; all, in fact, that one could see. The rest of his face was covered by a swipe of thin brown hair across his forehead and a pair of metal-framed glasses whose tinted brown lenses were just dark enough to obscure his eyes. Sitting with him, it was impossible to know whether he was making some piercing survey of you or simply staring vacantly past your ear.
It was his voice that bore all the distinction: it was rich, in a quiet way, full of sympathy and invitation and gentle variations that irresistibly drew you in. A good thing, then, and no surprise, that he did all his work on the phone.
Oliver asked Webster whether he’d like coffee—“I wouldn’t, it’s not good”—and excused himself while he finished an e-mail. There were five phones in his office: two landlines and three mobiles, neatly laid out on a sixties wooden desk beside a laptop. Webster watched him type and found himself asking the same, unaired questions that always occurred to him when they met. Something about Oliver forbade inquiry: an aura of privateness, of a persona deliberately constructed to give nothing away. But Webster feared the answers more than the reaction. It was difficult to believe that this very particular man who performed such a very particular purpose had ever been a child, or cried to his mother, or worn shorts, or gone on holiday.
What was only too evident, though, was that Dean loved his work. From this anonymous bolt-hole he carried out silent raids on any organization foolish enough to think that it could keep its information secure. Banks, hospitals, councils, ministries, universities, the companies that sell us phones, power and credit: his job was to get inside them, take what he needed, and retreat without leaving a trace. He needed little more than cunning, and to every target he was someone else. To the local branch of Barclays, he was from the fraud department in London; to the person in the cell phone company call center who sent out copies of bills, he was the owner of that phone and that account; to the local tax office he was a colleague in another office looking to clarify an inconsistency. His work was a sequence of tiny masquerades. But despite his apparent hollowness, Oliver’s great talent was not acting but eliciting; he didn’t inhabit a role so much as simply create a space that others felt obliged to fill.
And they did. In his first meeting with Webster he had volunteered—unusually, it turned out, because he rarely offered information—that he had never been “compromised,” in his word: never had a single call that had gone awry, never had a single mark suspect that they were being duped. Webster could believe it. For all his flatness there was something about Oliver that made you want to tell him things. Perhaps it was some hidden trickery; perhaps it was as simple as needing to banish a silence. Whatever it was, it hadn’t changed, and Webster found himself once again giving too much away.
He had meant to leave the details vague: his purpose for looking, what he was expecting to find. But in the end he told Oliver everything except the identity of his client: the looted sculpture, the death of Mehr, the utter conviction he now had that the two were linked and that the only way to find the connection was to go to the heart of it all, where the money was.
When Webster had finished his brief, Oliver nodded several times to show that they were now in harmony, part of a secret team.
“And what do you need, Ben?” His voice was warm, gently coaxing.
Webster took a last look at Oliver before committing. His calculation was this: Qazai was blackmailing him, and in order to make him stop he had to blackmail him back. That was the argument, and it was logical enough. But logic wasn’t what had brought him here.
Finding out who Shokhor phoned was one thing: he was a crook, without question, and in any case no one in Dubai or Cyprus cared much about privacy laws. But this was London, and the targets were UK citizens, and one of them was only recently dead. What was worse, it was conspicuous. Ten years before, few journalists or investigators had stopped to think about what they were doing; there had been safety in numbers and so little interest in the activity that the crimes had barely seemed crimes. Then there had been Dean Olivers everywhere, stealing secrets from celebrities, checking spouses’ finances, tracing fleeing debtors; but now, as the world finally objected to having its privacy ravaged, his kind was dying out, and it was difficult to see how even Oliver himself, such a subtle, devious operator, could avoid his fate. Hammer, early on, had outlawed any contact with him or his kind.
Looking at him now, Webster felt a certain sadness—part of the man’s spell, possibly—that one day soon such people might simply not exist, and that men like Qazai could relax a little more. Because occasionally, and certainly now, what Oliver did, however unsavory, felt not merely necessary, but right.
“I need you to look at Qazai. His calls. His credit cards. Don’t worry about the banks—they’ll be too complicated. But I want to know what he’s spending, where and when. So credit cards. Any hotels he’s stayed at, I want to see the bills. Any calls made from the room. Flights. He has a jet. He keeps it at Farnborough. I want to know exactly where it’s been for the last two years.”
Oliver made some notes, and Webster went on.
“Have a look at Mehr, too. His company. His private accounts—any you can find. Money in and out. And his telephone calls. Everything you can think of. You have free rein.”
“How long ago did he die?”
“Two months.”
Oliver wrote it all down, and Webster had a sudden vision of his notebook in a barrister’s hand being introduced as evidence. He would have a word about destroying it at the end of the case.
“And his lawyer.” He went on. “What the hell. His name’s Yves Senechal. It’s a French cell phone. J
ust his calls.” He paused. “How are you in France?”
“I have a good man in France.”
Webster wondered whether he really had good men stationed across the world or whether they were all, in fact, just Dean himself, seducing unwitting bank clerks wherever they happened to pick up their phone. He wouldn’t have been surprised.
“I think that’s it.”
“It’s a lot. I have quite a lot of other work at the moment, Ben.”
“I’ll pay you a hundred percent bonus if you find something useful.”
“How long have I got?”
“Two weeks.”
“Are you serious?”
Webster ignored him, and Oliver, adjusting his glasses, went through his notes, ticking each item as he went. When he was done he looked up.
“Have you done his bins?”
“He’s too savvy for bins. He’s a shredder.”
“It’s worth doing. He may not realize what’s important.”
“Maybe. But the house is a nightmare. Right on Mount Street. Hundreds of eyes.”
“I know all the binmen in W1. They’ll do it for me.”
Webster shrugged. It seemed silly to refuse, like refusing a brandy at the end of a rich dinner. “All right,” he said. “Go ahead. Report to me. No one else at Ikertu. And only call me on my cell.”
Oliver smiled. “You gone rogue, Ben?”
13.
THREE DAYS AFTER HIS MEETING WITH OLIVER, Webster received an e-mail from Ava Qazai.
Dear Mr. Webster,
I fear that I ended our conversation by the lake too abruptly. If you think it worth continuing, I’d like to apologize in person. Can I buy you a drink one evening soon?
With warm regards,
Ava Qazai
• • •
HE WROTE BACK SUGGESTING they meet the following night at the bar of the Connaught, opposite her father’s house, and she, as he had hoped, agreed the time but changed the venue—to the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge, which was far enough away to be discreet. Clearly she preferred her father not to know.
That day and the next he speculated on her motives. He thought back to her fury at her father during lunch in Como and to their talk by the lake. What might she know? She knew Iran, she knew her father. She seemed exercised by what had happened to Parviz. Perhaps she knew something about that, or about Mehr, or about Shiraz’s troubles. He hadn’t heard anything from Qazai since Como; perhaps he had sent her to gauge his mood. It could be anything, Webster realized, and tried to concentrate on the other work that was making a feeble claim on his attention.
The next evening, a Wednesday, he finished at Ikertu, took the tube to Marble Arch and walked across the park. A strong wind was gusting from the west, churning dust into the air, and when the sun moved behind the clouds any summer warmth dropped suddenly to a chill. Webster buttoned his jacket, rubbed some grit from his eye and struck out for the hotel.
The bar—low leather seats, mirrored walls—was busy with expensive shoppers and the odd tourist, but a pair of stools were free. Webster took one, waited for a group of American businessmen in high spirits to be served and ordered a whisky. The businessmen were toasting a success with champagne, and Webster tried to pick out the subtle signs that told you at a glance they weren’t English: the monogrammed shirts, the pleated trousers, the boxy jackets, the straightforward enthusiasm. To his left a young woman, dark, with thick eyebrows, Lebanese perhaps, listened patiently to the level monologue of an older, barrel-chested man wearing sunglasses and a bright yellow shirt under his blazer. Webster wondered at the possible connection between them and when Ava arrived he was so lost to his daydreams that she had to touch him on the arm before he noticed her.
“I’m sorry. I was miles away.” He stood and shook her hand, and she smiled at him with her black eyes. The truth was that he was more startled by her appearance than by her arrival: she wore a plain, short black dress, black high heels and a wrap of some silvery-gray fabric that managed to be shiny and discreet at once. Her hair was up, but artfully loose, and a single diamond hung around her neck on a white gold chain. She might have been going to meet a president or accept an award, and Webster’s first thought was that next to her he was a crumpled mess.
On his own, sitting at the bar, he had been an outsider, a wary observer of a different world; now, ordering a vodka martini for this beautiful woman, he was a part of it—incongruous, perhaps, but complicit.
“Are you going out?” he said.
Ava, straight-backed, sitting with a poise that seemed in an old-fashioned way to have been taught, swiveled toward him a few degrees and crossed her legs.
“I am out,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “What do you mean?”
“You look . . .” He hesitated, not knowing what to say that wouldn’t sound like a compliment. “I rarely have meetings with anyone so well dressed.”
She laughed. “You’re worried that I’ve dressed up for you? Mr. Webster, I just like to dress up. It’s not personal.”
The barman finished shaking her drink, strained it into a frosted glass and carefully squeezed a spray of oil from a strip of lemon rind onto its surface. Webster smiled, feeling foolish, and raised his glass to her.
“To dressing up.”
“To meetings,” she said, took a sip, put the glass back on the counter and ran her finger back and forth across the base of its stem. “You left very abruptly last week.”
That word again. “After what you told me I thought I should make myself scarce.” She frowned, not knowing what he meant. “About the likes of me never normally staying there.”
“You don’t seem the sensitive type.”
He returned her smile. “I’m not. I had to get back. In the event I could have taken my time.”
She looked faintly puzzled by the remark but let it go. Either she didn’t know what had happened to him in Milan or she had chosen not to refer to it, and by the look of her, making no effort to appear nonchalant, he’d have been prepared to swear that she had no idea. He didn’t think it wise to explain.
For a while they talked about Qazai, about Timur and Parviz, about Dubai, which she believed was no place to raise children. About Iran, which was quiet after months of unrest. He asked her about her childhood, and she sidestepped his questions with deft jokes and subtle shifts of subject that seemed to mask a mild prickliness. Webster wondered where she’d got her sense of humor from, and for that matter her real charm. If he was solving the mystery of the Qazai family—and thank heaven he was not—he would have looked forward to the interview with her mother.
He was enjoying himself, he realized, warily and not a little guiltily. For the last six months he had rarely felt lighthearted, and feeling it now was unexpected, and the more refreshing for it. This, of course, was not why he was here. He had now finished his second drink, Ava’s martini would soon be done, and after one more he would forget to ask half the questions that needed to be asked.
“That lunch in Como,” he said, turning toward her a little. “What was all that about? With your father.”
A lock of hair had fallen in front of her eye and she moved it out of the way, not smiling now. “Is this the part where you grill me?”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
She looked at him for a moment, then took her glass and emptied the last half-inch. “Are you going to get me another?”
Webster nodded and turning to get the barman’s attention signaled that he wanted the same again. When he looked back she was watching him with her head slightly tilted to one side, not for the first time weighing him up.
“I think,” she said at last, looking away, “that when your grandson has just been kidnapped it would be good not to pretend that everything is normal.”
Webster didn’t say anything.
Ava shook her hea
d and flicked the lock of hair aside again. “Sometimes I wonder what goes on in his head.” She took an olive. “Tell me something. What do you think of him? You must have a sense of him by now. Who do you think he is?”
That was an excellent question, and it took Webster a moment’s thought to find something meaningful that was less than completely frank. “He strikes me as the sort of man who’s built his own world so carefully that other people are an inconvenience. He expects them to come into line.”
“That’s it,” she said, animated now, apparently surprised by Webster’s acuity. “That’s it. And what happens when your world starts to collapse? You prop it up. You can’t change it, because you can’t imagine another.”
Their drinks arrived. Webster took a sip of his, waiting for her to continue, wondering what she meant by “collapse.”
“Come on,” she said, getting down from her stool. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Somewhere no one can hear us.” And before he could object she was walking out of the bar, throwing the end of her wrap over her shoulder as she went. Webster fished his wallet out of his back pocket, put down some notes on the counter and left at a brisk walk. Out of the bar he turned right, expecting her to be heading for the hotel’s main entrance, but there was no sign of her in the lobby or on the stairs that ran down to Knightsbridge. To his left was the restaurant and a private room with grand, tall French doors, one of which was open. He looked inside. The room was laid for a dinner, and beyond the long table running down its center more French doors gave out onto a wide terrace above the park. Ava was there, leaning against the balustrade, struggling to get a cigarette lit, her back hunched against the wind.
“Can I help?” Webster said as he approached.
“This fucking lighter is useless,” she said without looking up. He moved around in front of her, took the lighter and cupping it closely in his spare hand struck the flint wheel as she leaned in. It was a cheap, plastic lighter, he noted with mild surprise. “Thank you,” she said. “Do you want one?”
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