Philian Gregory

by Simon J. Stephens

  Now, he could go back to being Bob Dexter full time. In a way, he’d miss the role of secret vigilante. It had been worth it though. Philips could be ticked off the list and their brief relationship had yielded him enough names to keep his interest for quite a while.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  And so, like Nathan Carrington and Philian Gregory before him, Bob Dexter found his life changed by The Circle and the feelings it stirred within him. Unlike the others, Dexter was able to continue with his day to day life whilst he pursued the remnants of that pernicious organisation. An organisation that he’d seen the worst of in Philips and his sexual preferences, and an organisation that he knew to be active and dangerous to this day. There were the remnants of the past, like Philips, who were owed payback, but there were also the unseen forces that continued to influence events in ways that hurt people. People like Carrington and Gregory and of course, Amanda Courtney.

  Still, he was under no illusions that the more involved he became, the harder it would be for him stay off the radar and operate without suffering for his mission. Philips had been expensive but relatively straightforward. Leopards never truly changed their spots and it was only a matter of time before Philips’ arrogance and neediness let the barriers fall and expose his true nature. As Anthony Parker, Dexter had played up to Philips and created a persona that the television presenter began to consider as both a kindred spirit and a friend. There had been a price to pay of course, and not just a financial one. Dexter struggled with the ethics of procuring the men, the women, the girls and the boys that Philips enjoyed in equal measure, but it was, he believed, a price worth paying. The adults were willing participants; that is, they were mature enough to understand the trade they were making and it was their lifestyle choice. Drug addiction excepted. The children were a different matter. They could only ever be considered as sacrificial lambs.

  As he’d lain awake in the adjoining hotel rooms, or sat pensively waiting for the dawn in filthy backstreet hovels, racked with confusion about what Philips was up to, there had been a few times when he’d wanted to call the whole project off. But this was about breaking a cycle. Those who suffered now would prevent many others suffering in the future. It was this trade-off that helped him to keep focus. And Philips’ arrest was some sort of vindication.

  The twins had been the only ones to know what Dexter was up to. In some ways, this was an insurance policy should anything go wrong and yet, without their help it was unlikely that he would have succeeded. They were the ones who set up the false websites and who took on the personas of numerous fictitious Millennial Productions employees as they answered Philips’ e-mails. They were the ones who had moved the necessary funds around in ways that could never be traced. And they were the ones who had found and engaged the unemployed actors who were happy to earn big bucks for a few hours’ work posing as television executives. As far as he could tell, the twins had done everything he’d asked of them and more and, in the process, had put up enough of a smokescreen to protect them all.

  The twins had also taken the reins of Dexter’s business whenever he was absent and had proven to be the safe pair of hands that he always knew them to be. There would come a day when he would gift the business to them. He hoped that that day was some way far in the distance but that hadn’t stopped him from securing the legal paperwork for that handover prior to his first foray into revenge. His own life was valuable to him. He certainly wasn’t choosing to lay it down for others, however, he fully understood that he was walking a very tricky path.

  Amanda had been the decider for him. Philian was somebody with whom he felt a great amount of sympathy and who had lost so much and so unfairly, but he hadn’t given his life. Amanda was as innocent as the children who The Circle had corrupted and it was her suffering that made the decision for Bob Dexter. He was under no illusions that those who had killed her would never be brought to justice. That much he could accept. What he was able to do was to act against the forces that had ordered the killers to act. Those with bloody hands were never as guilty as those who ordered the bloodshed.

  And that had been Philips’ greatest gift to Dexter. The arrest and neutralisation of one member of The Circle was satisfying, but the names that that member had inadvertently supplied Dexter with were priceless. They always used initials. Philips had been ‘P’, Geoff Samson was ‘S’ and now he also had detailed information regarding several other members, respectively known as ‘D’, ‘J’ and ‘R2’. The latter implied another ‘R’, and the rumour of their being some who were threes and fours sent a shiver down Dexter’s spine as he began to understand that this was an organisation that had more members than he cared to think about. The Circle was, in truth, no longer active. The pressure put on it by Carrington’s actions had forced them to disband and separate, but that didn’t mean that it was no longer an influential organisation. The individual members were out and about doing their own thing. Some had chosen to take the hint and avoid the excesses of the past. Others pursued their own particular flavour of perversion in solitary and discrete ways. Either way, justice demanded that none be exempted.

  Geoff Samson was one of the non-active elements. Numerous discrete web searches and comprehensive monitoring identified him as having settled down to married life and put aside his past indiscretions. And yet, he had been the one to alert others to the possibility of Gregory being found. Clearly, you never truly left The Circle, even if you no longer sought its pleasures. Deeming him to be a low risk, Dexter chose to defer any action against Samson, deciding instead to continue with the property deal that they were working on and keep that particular enemy close. If the scope of this organisation was as wide-reaching as it seemed, then his only hope was to build relationships that fed him names leading to names, leading to more names that might, just possibly, direct him towards the names that mattered. The new names he had, certainly didn’t seem to be the type of people who were at the centre of things.

  A teacher, a retired librarian and an accountant had been given up to him by Philips. The teacher was the natural first choice to investigate. His name was Roger Daniels, the ‘D’ that Philips had slipped into the conversation as being one of those rare beasts who could corrupt a young boy and leave that desecrated creature thanking his abuser for what he had endured. At the height of The Circle’s activity, he had only just moved into teaching. He was now looking forward to retirement and working out his final years in a girl’s school. That, in itself was reassuring. Either his tastes had changed or, as seemed more likely, he had chosen to place himself in a position where the temptation to slip would be less. The twins were in on this one from the start and it was they who suggested the most effective form of approach.

  Dexter’s success in business owed a lot to a piece of advice he’d been given early on and which he tried to strictly adhere to. It was to delegate as much work as possible. Nothing too radical in itself but it had proven to be a huge boon to him over the years. When you were able to delegate things that you believed only you could handle and they ended successfully, it meant that not only were you employing the right people but also that you were helping them grow as an asset to the business. For that reason, he had no hesitation in leaving the twins to their own devices as they gathered the necessary data on Daniels.

  Having handed that one over, and fully aware of his own limited resources and the need for him to keep his property business as his primary focus, Dexter left a message for Dave and waited for the return call. Meanwhile, he began to look into the strange case of the retired librarian whose discoverable wealth seemed so at odds with that low-salaried profession.

  Steve Reynolds, or ‘R2’ as Philips had described him, lived in an apartment that overlooked the Thames and which was in the sort of price bracket usually reserved for the super-rich. He was in his seventies now, enjoying a youthful burst of life that belied those years. According to Philips, it was Reynolds who had been charged with keeping
any necessary records of The Circle’s activities. The content of those records remained a mystery to all, although Philips knew a little more about them than some.

  “They thought that he was one of the nerdier members.”, he’d told Parker as they settled back drunkenly and waited for their visitors to arrive, “But I think he was a bit smarter than the others. We’d get it on together quite often. We shared some lovely pieces of flesh, I can tell you, and you’d never guess from his physique that he spent his days pootling about along dusty bookshelves. And man, he was hung like a donkey.”

  “There were routine bits of administration that we needed looking after,”, he’d continued, “as I’m sure you can appreciate. The sort of stuff that monitored membership but kept everything secret. He had a gift for that. But he also had a bit of a weakness that the others hadn’t spotted. We need to think about this as we progress in our own exploits. You see, he reckoned himself as something of a writer. When a session was finished, the evidence was salted away. Any video recordings that were made were kept well hidden, but you couldn’t hide the memories. Reynolds showed me some of his stuff. It was average writing but the content was enough to get you hard in a few minutes. I thought nothing of it really. I assumed the others knew and I know a lot of them had him make copies for them. But, if he did that, how much did he write down that revealed too much?”

  “Anyway,”, he’d concluded as they heard a knock on the door, “good luck to him. It was the videos that caused the biggest problem. If he’s still going, I doubt he’s even kept much. We all destroyed what we could when Carrington appeared on the scene.”

  That had been the first time that Philips had talked about The Circle as an entity and it was the most precious indiscretion that he’d shared with Dexter. The hint that he, as Parker, had been one of the other ‘P’s’ and the high-grade cocaine that had addled his mind had been enough to bring him out of his shell. And, the following morning, the effects of a drug that Dexter had administered to him during his sleep, meant that he remembered very little about the night and nothing about that particular revelation.

  If, as he suspected, Reynolds’ wealth was in some way attributable to the records that he kept so meticulously, then cracking him could be the action that opened up numerous other avenues for investigation. If he was receiving hush-money or threatening to use the data he held, then that meant that he was sitting on a vast amount of that data. The challenge was in finding a way to approach him and then to access what he had.

  As he was thinking about the various options available to him, the call came back from Dave.

  “Mr D.”, the voice was as familiar and guarded as ever.

  “Dave, thanks for calling back. This line secure.”

  “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  “Good. I’ve got something I wouldn’t mind your help with. Before I say anything more, I need to tell you that it is related to our last discussion. We can end the call now if that’s a problem.”

  “No. Let me hear some of it.”, Dave sounded cautious as he replied, “I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  Dexter told him nothing about his wider plans or the progress that he’d made to date, only hinting that the information he’d received had come via a source in the police, who had mentioned in passing some information given by Paul Philips at interview.

  “Yeah, I read about that.”, Dave offered, “Hope they throw the book at him.”

  “So, the thing is.”, Dexter concluded, “I was wondering whether we could do our own bit of private investigation into Elliott Jones. Nothing too intrusive, but just a cursory glance.”

  “I don’t get your interest in this.”, Dave replied.

  “Nor do I, mate!”, Dexter laughed as he tried to explain, “Other than the simple fact that I want to see justice done. I know we talked about the other stuff and you advised me to steer well clear. That’s fine. But, well, this one seems to be something that we can at least look at. Call it my duty as a concerned citizen if you will.”

  Dave agreed to make some enquiries. Something else was happening here with Dexter and he felt somewhat duty-bound to protect him if necessary; he was a good man and a good client. It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked to act as a hidden support to the stretched official members of the criminal justice system, but it was the first time that somebody like Dexter had made such a request. He ended the call and left Dexter to his musings.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Discounting the excessively greedy and the overly avaricious, who are the exceptions to the rule, money seems to have an uncanny knack of gravitating towards certain people. They are the ones who can best handle it and who understand that great wealth, per se, is nothing compared to how you choose to use it. Bob Dexter was just such a person. He worked hard to develop his natural gifts and was never complacent about the responsibility that his wealth bought with it. It was a responsibility both to use that wealth wisely and to nurture it with the care that the best parents bestowed on their children.

  The properties that Geoff Samson had tipped him off about proved to be another source of serious capital gain for Dexter. What had begun as a speculative investment for an ulterior motive, had now developed into a well-timed punt on a London property market that was currently enjoying one of its regular growth spurts. With his recent distractions, the deal had all but been forgotten about by Dexter but a call from Samson was a timely reminder to him. The deadline for completing the deal was imminent and his initial deposit only held good for a few more days. The finance wasn’t difficult to secure. A call to LMBA and a brief meeting with Sheridan Harper secured a favourable loan deal and the promise of an immediate transfer of funds.

  “How did you get on with finding a new project manager?”, Samson asked as they met to sign off the final paperwork.

  “Oh, I’m still following up a few leads on that.”, Dexter replied, laying down the fountain pen that had sealed so much of his fortune and leaning back in his chair, “For the short-term, I’ll do the planning permissions and basic proposals myself. It’ll be nice to have some hands-on time for a change. You know anyone suitable?”

  “I can send you across some names,”, Samson offered, “but the best of the best will be booked up for months just now. Still, as you say, there really isn’t any urgency. You could shift these properties tomorrow and still turn a huge profit.”

  “Talking of which.”, Dexter spoke softly, “I’ve been thinking about your involvement in this. It’s a good deal. And I owe you.”

  “Not at all. You struck lucky, but it works well for me. The seller’s happy, you’re happy and I’ve earned a healthy commission. Sometimes it just goes like that.”

  “But still,”, Dexter said, “you could have approached others. I appreciate what you did and want to offer you a little extra bonus, if that’s okay?”

  “Really, you don’t need to.”, Samson’s refusal was very half-hearted.

  “The thing is, I have a place in the Caribbean. Nothing too fancy but all mod-cons and a team of staff who look after the place and her guests very well. I’d like to offer you a break there. Private jet out for you and any guests you’d like to take. And everything you need laid on. Would you do me the honour of accepting such a gift? Strictly off the books, of course, although you’re welcome to declare it if you wish.”

  Samson spent very little time considering the offer. It was one of those perks of the job that came from dealing with wealthy clients and he’d never refused one before.

  “Give me a date and I’ll send you all the details. Trust me, you’ll love it there.”, Dexter shook hands with Samson and prepared to leave, “Don’t leave it too late though. I may well be needing your services again soon.”

  He received the e-mail less than a week later. Samson and his wife were keen to make the most of the offer and wondered if they could make the trip in a fortnight’s time. Dexter confirmed that tha
t was fine and charged the Summers twins with sorting out the necessary details. It was sooner than he had expected, but he would still be able to exploit the situation if he acted promptly enough.

  The idea had come to him when Samson first sent him a gentle reminder about the deadline on the deal. He’d promised to keep that particular enemy close with no immediate plans to act, however, that didn’t mean that he’d forgotten Samson’s connection to The Circle. If he was connected as part of its past, then he would exist in their records. As a reformed member, he would also be one of the twitchy ones who had heard all about the fall from grace that Paul Philips had suffered and who feared the same. Added to which, The Circle had been inactive for several decades now. Even the closest of fellow members would struggle to recognise each other after so many years of aging. At least, that was his hope.

  Making contact with Reynolds proved less challenging than he’d thought it would be. You just had to touch the right buttons and, for all his overt respectability, it was clear that for Reynolds those buttons were all about money. There was an element of gambling involved in Dexter’s approach but it was a calculated gamble, playing the pretty certain odds that within The Circle there had to have been an ‘O’. The introductory note that was couriered to Reynolds at his home and which accompanied a bearer bond of considerable value was simple and to the point:

  ‘R2,

  Have received number of requests in light of P situation. Trust that sum proposed for each is suitable for file deletion. Discretion assured. If interested, S will be outside lobby. Tuesday, midday. O.’

  If it worked, he’d know soon enough. If not, he had enough discrete surveillance equipment focused on Reynolds that he’d be able to respond in an alternative manner. As it was, he arrived on time.