To Die For

by Janet Neel

  ‘She didn’t go to those places,’ Richard said, and she understood they were at cross-purposes. ‘So.’ He pulled himself to his feet and went down the racks of clothes, counting. ‘Twenty-five, say. That’s twenty thousand fucking quid. An’ that’s not all. Shoes. What do they cost?’

  ‘She buys – bought – Magli. About £150 a pair.’ She was watching him anxiously, but he squatted down without ceremony and conducted a rough count in the bottom of the cupboards, occasionally hauling out a pair, impatiently. ‘About fifty. That’s another, what, £7000-odd. Fuck. And we couldn’t even pay the milk bill.’

  Judith cleared her throat nervously. ‘Richard, I think you should leave this to me and Selina’s mother. If she doesn’t want … well, all of it, then I’ll arrange for what’s left to go to a Nearly New.’

  He cast a final baleful, puzzled look at the cupboards as he stood aside to let her pass – his upbringing had at least included a sound training in formal manners, she reflected.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea? I could make it.’ Judith, in serious need of sustenance, decided she would have to ask, and thankfully found tea and biscuits.

  Something was worrying Richard still, she thought, watching him prowl around the small kitchen.

  ‘The police found some letters,’ he said, abruptly, looking out of the window. ‘To Selina. Before we were married.’

  The ground was very uneasy here, she could feel the tension in his body from several feet away.

  ‘Some from blokes, of course.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ she said, promptly, and then wondered. If she had been a person who kept letters, what would she have had to show as correspondence with the opposite sex? Two notes from a boy half a head smaller than her, with spots, at the nearby boys’ school. And several letters and notes from Ben, with whom she had had an entirely unsatisfactory affair eight years ago now. And to call it an affair was doing it a favour; his letters had been the best part of the whole thing.

  ‘Richard. Do you want to keep them, or …?’ Or what, she thought, panicking.

  ‘Police took them. There was only a few. Wonder why she kept them?’

  At least the conversation had become rational again. ‘Don’t you keep letters?’ she asked.

  ‘Not on purpose. I find the odd thing down the back of a drawer, whatever.’

  ‘I used to, then I threw them away. Or all I could find. Perhaps Selina just didn’t find these.’

  ‘Yeh.’

  This, she saw, had hit the right note and he was looking more cheerful. She glanced at her watch. ‘What time did you say Selina’s mother was coming?’

  ‘Oh Christ. Now, or pretty soon. Can I go out and leave you to it? We spent most of yesterday together and it didn’t do either of us much good. Yeh? Thanks, Judith …’

  Michael Owens sat in his big office behind a substantial mahogany desk, space all round him, feeling trapped and slightly sick. His secretary put her head round the door.

  ‘I’ve just talked to Margaret – that’s Mr Judd’s secretary. She says he’s in a meeting, then he’s getting a plane, but he will get back to you today. He’s been ever so busy, she says.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’ They looked at each other; Susie preferred to do her job and keep her head down, but she was not a stupid or unsympathetic young woman. ‘I know that’s what she said yesterday, and the day before, but maybe he is very busy. Her boss.’

  ‘Maybe. Thanks, Susie.’

  ‘More coffee?’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  He waited, looking out over the City, the great high towers thrusting up from the Wren churches and the nineteenth-century banking palaces that still persisted. He had fallen in love, conclusively, the first time he had seen the place, as a graduate trainee accountant, and for over fifteen years it had returned his love, and he had been happy. Until this bloody awful last year when he seemed to have lost his touch. The bank had failed, publicly and conclusively, four months ago, to get a flotation under way. It had been his client, his responsibility, his baby, with substantial success fees for the bank and himself, and all his team riding on it. And the client turned out to be an incompetent manager and perhaps worse than that. The flotation had had to be pulled at the last minute, with all the underwriting in place and fees incurred all over the City to the underwriters, the lawyers and the sodding useless reporting accountants who had not been doubtful or cautious enough. Well, it was a banker’s job to see the wider picture. He hadn’t been on top of it enough and had left the details to a not very experienced young assistant director, who had not known enough about where to look. He’d been bloody well too busy himself, running half the department and harassed by everything. He stilled, resolutely, the familiar interior monologue; there was no point in it, what’s done was done, he’d had bad luck, happened to everyone at some time, and he’d made enough money for the bank that he could weather it. Just. But the débâcle had put him out of the running for head of corporate finance, and an impressive tough, just younger than him, had been brought in from Warburgs to run the department. And Simon had made it arrogantly clear that everyone, but particularly those who had been involved in the mistakes of that year, had to earn their ticket, no matter how senior they were, or what their past contributions.

  Now was the time to bring in a really good high-paying innovative deal, or it would have been. But the one – the big one, the one that was going triumphantly to redeem all past errors – was going sour. It was a good idea, a deal whereby a problem division in one big retailer, not previously a client of the bank, would merge with a similar one in different ownership, and he had devised a very clever financing structure to facilitate the merger. And the retailer to whom he had taken the idea had been more than enthusiastic; for the last four weeks his people had been working flat out, and the phone had gone a dozen times a day, either to him or to the bank team he had put in place. But the buzz was gone, and he hadn’t managed to speak to the managing director, or the finance director, since last week. And the finance director’s staff weren’t returning phone calls from his juniors either. You could tell yourself that they were just regrouping, and would be back on all the phones tomorrow, but his years in the City told him otherwise. They’d decided not to do it, or, worse, much worse, decided to do it with someone else, leaving him with nothing to say and four weeks’ intensive work by a three-man team unpaid for.

  He got up and reached for his address book, the bank’s client list and the Financial Times. What you did at these points was to go through everything, any contacts you had – and he had plenty – to find a couple of ideas that might work. And you started with the clients, because you knew them best and they wouldn’t usually drop you in it, take your idea and run. He found however that he couldn’t start, and he couldn’t face assembling his team, telling them the bad news, and starting them working on ideas. The best of them wouldn’t even do that for him, they would be poached by other busy directors, that was how you progressed and made money in corporate finance, by getting yourself to where the action was. He was supposed to be one of the chaps who found the action, and today he couldn’t do any of it.

  ‘Susie? I’m going to the gym. Just for an hour.’ His back ached with tension, and he knew he needed exercise to ease it up, so he would go, little though he felt like it. And then have lunch with Judith, he needed a break. Then he remembered she was off site, with Richard, and set off wearily for the gym, commandeering his bastard boss’s driver to take him.

  Brian Rubin and his financial controller were sitting side by side at a table. A PC blinked at them from one end, then, ignored, swallowed the contents of the screen, substituting a series of starbursts.

  ‘It’s a bit better this week.’ Diana, in her forties, thin as a whippet, putting a son through boarding-school, had been with him for years and knew exactly what variables mattered. ‘Take’s up, by, what, £5000. And we paid the VAT last week.’

  ‘So,
who do we pay, outside the necessaries?’

  ‘No one. It’s only £5000, Brian, we hang on to it in case next week isn’t so good.’

  ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’ Brian Rubin said sadly; he was a natural optimist and also liked people he dealt with to be happy. ‘Well, maybe we’ll do even better next week.’

  Diana eyed him. ‘It’s tight, Brian. What’s happening with this deal? We can’t go on long like this.’

  ‘No, no, I know.’ He hesitated, but Diana had every right to ask, and there wasn’t anything else she didn’t know. ‘The bugger is that Selina’s husband has to wait till the lawyers have got everything together and got probate before he can sell the shares to me. Could take weeks.’ He considered her. ‘You think we can hold out for six or eight weeks, Diana?’

  ‘If the take stays up, yes. The bank sees the management accounts every week, they know the music by now. I don’t think they’ll increase the overdraft but they’ll hang on if it isn’t getting any worse and they can see a way out. Just. If no one sues. But we have not to spend a penny anywhere we don’t have to. We can forget the redecoration schedule.’

  ‘Bloody right,’ Brian agreed, heartily. He gazed fixedly at the piles of bills, thinking hard, then he sighed, and Diana, who knew him very well, waited, apprehensive. He reached over to his jacket and slowly extracted a bill from his wallet. He gave her a sidelong, little-boy look. ‘There’s one here.’

  ‘Your Visa?’ She took it from him and scrutinised it. ‘We won’t get this past the auditors. We don’t buy uniforms at Harvey Nicks, at £800 a throw. Janice has been going it a bit, hasn’t she?’

  ‘No. Yes. I’ll pay it back, but I’m skint – personally as well. And I need to use it.’

  ‘You’d do better to cut it up. Or, at least, cut up Janice’s card. Doesn’t she understand what’s happening here?’ She gazed at her boss, indignant on his behalf. He was a good ten years her junior and she felt responsible for him and totally identified with all his interests.

  ‘Look, Di, leave it, will you? She’s been having a bad time and this deal was going to solve a lot of things.’

  ‘Brian, you may not be able to wait for this deal to happen if she goes on spending money like this.’

  He got up and stared out of the window. ‘Thing is, Di, it wasn’t Janice. Those things.’ He waited, then turned to see her open-mouthed and struck silent. ‘It’s not what you think. See, Selina – Mrs Marsh-Hayden – was always being a bit dodgy about the sale, kept complaining that any money she got would be taken by her husband to pay his debts. Well, I thought she was probably right – not a lot in it for her. So we went shopping, so she’d have a few goodies of her own, to sweeten the deal.’ His voice trailed away as she stared at him. ‘Well, I can’t tell Janice any of that, can I? Not now. Not when she’s pissed off with me anyhow, wants to know whether Joshua’s going to be able to go to Stonefield, yatter, yatter, yatter.’

  ‘Are you mad, Brian?’ Diana said, getting her breath back. ‘Was Selina blackmailing you?’

  ‘Nah, not really. Just giving me a hard time, and getting a bit for herself off the deal.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, Di, I can’t tell Janice she can’t use the card. She knows what the credit limit is and she’s going to pay the school deposit off it, whatever I say. So we have to pay some off, yes? I’m sorry, it looks stupid now.’ He gazed at her hopefully. ‘I’ll buy you lunch. Downstairs, where it’s free.’

  ‘John.’

  ‘Sir.’

  John McLeish had been summoned to see his Commander, and came carrying the notes on a case he had managed to complete that morning and reduce to a tidy package such as even the CPS could not, he hoped, make a haggis of. He stopped at the door; there was a heavy senior man, whom he did not know, sitting at the table.

  ‘This is Superintendent Hall from Special Branch. Detective Chief Superintendent McLeish. You can tell him everything.’

  John McLeish nodded politely to the Special Branch man and listened while he unfolded his story. ‘Sorry,’ he said after three minutes. ‘Let me get this straight. Your royal charge was having a walk-out with Mrs Marsh-Hayden, whose body turned up in a freezer in West End Central’s patch. When? No, not the body, the walk-out. Six months ago? Was it still going on?’

  ‘We don’t think so. And we ought to know. But we don’t want the whole of the Met tramping over the back history so we’re asking for “C” division’s co-operation. Sorry it took us a while to make the connection.’

  ‘I know the restaurant. I ate there last week with my wife and two of my brothers-in-law.’

  ‘No personal connection though?’ the Commander asked, sharply.

  ‘One of the partners knows my wife slightly,’ he volunteered, hopefully.

  ‘If we kept you away from anyone Francesca knows slightly you’d be on your ownio in a tower,’ his boss said, heartily, and McLeish understood wearily that he had just added another burden to his case load. He acknowledged the obligation and escorted the Special Branch man to the lift, returning to face the Commander.

  ‘Sorry, John. How is Francesca?’

  ‘Pregnant.’ He had known the man for fifteen years, there was no need to keep key facts from him.

  ‘Well done, John, we knew you had it in you.’

  He managed to raise a polite smile for the traditional Metropolitan Police benison before heading for his own office to call for everything anyone had on the Marsh-Haydens and the Café de la Paix.

  6

  ‘So that’s all I know so far, Bruce. And this is all we have. Photograph of deceased when in life, and a post-mortem picture. She was strangled, and deposited in a deep freeze in the basement of her own restaurant shortly after death according to Forensic.’

  ‘They had to defrost the body before they could cut.’

  Detective Inspector Bruce Davidson, a stocky, black-haired Scot, who had known John McLeish for many years, gazed at the small pile of exhibits. ‘It’s no’ a suicide, then?’

  ‘I’d guess not, but we’ll need to look at that carefully.’ McLeish, lips compressed with tension, was sitting on the edge of his desk going through messages, handing some back to his secretary with instructions, and packing the others into a briefcase.

  Davidson laid the photographs side by side and considered the contrast between the assured blonde smiling teasingly into the camera, eyes wide, and the congested distorted lifeless mask, the eyes closed in death. ‘Poor lass. A pretty one.’

  ‘That’s right. Said to have been the mistress of one of Special Branch’s charges – no, not him, thank the Lord, one of the cousins. Not current, they don’t think, but just the same …’

  ‘Keep that off the file, will we?’

  McLeish paused in his labours and looked across at him. ‘Yes. It’s bad practice, but if there’s going to be anything in the papers it’d better not have come from here.’

  ‘So why have we got the case then, John? For the lads’ ears, I mean.’

  ‘Can we leave it vague? Blame it on the AC.’

  ‘Nae bother.’

  ‘And could we solve it by tonight, do you think, Bruce? I’m supposed to be in Glasgow tomorrow.’

  ‘I’d mebbe better get started then.’ Bruce Davidson gathered up the slender file and made to go, but John McLeish motioned to him to close the office door.

  ‘Your godson is going to have a little sister.’

  ‘Away! Well done, John.’ He caught his superior a eye and managed not to go on. ‘I’m glad it’s to be a girl,’ he said, heartily. ‘Francesca decided, did she?’

  ‘She thinks it’s twin boys. I’m just trying to take a positive view.’

  ‘That’ll slow her up a bittie.’

  ‘I’d not put money on it. See you in a few minutes.’

  The room was enormous and air-conditioned, high in one of the new blocks at Bishopsgate, overlooking Liverpool Street Station. Twenty people could have met comfortably in it, but even with four thinly spaced at the top of th
e large oval table Brian Rubin was sweating.

  ‘So I hope all that is clear,’ he said, in peroration, leaning forward winningly. ‘We would hope to be able to complete the sale next week, after a formal vote. And Richard here would give an undertaking to transfer the remaining fifteen per cent when he gets probate.’

  The broker was not listening to him, but was reading the marked passage in Café de la Paix Ltd’s Articles of Association. ‘I’m not altogether comfortable, Brian. And it’s not an easy proposition to explain to investors. Who, as you must know by now, can only cope with the Janet and John stuff.’

  ‘But this isn’t complicated,’ Richard Marsh-Hayden said, irritably, and Brian Rubin, although in agreement with the sentiment, regretted that he was seated just too far away to kick him.

  The lanky broker at the top of the table said uncensoriously that anything was too complicated for the simple souls of the investing institutions. If you couldn’t chop it up and serve it out in bite-size bits they just went and did something easier. And you had soured your market.

  ‘So what am I supposed to do?’ Brian Rubin asked, rhetorically.

  ‘Keep on trading in your admirable restaurants. Keep the money coming in until … well … until all the Café de la Paix shareholders are free to sell.’

  The problem was that the cash coming in fell short of that required to keep suppliers in a state of barely simmering discontent, and to give the bank the interest on their loans. As these people ought to know, Brian Rubin reflected, angrily.

  ‘I’m sorry to rush you, but I am due in a meeting. Can we get you a car? No?’

  Brian and Richard found themselves outside on the pavement five minutes later in a state of mutual frustration.

  ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do,’ Richard asked, bitterly, of the surrounding air. ‘Wait for the bank to call in my loans?’ He pulled irritably at his collar, sweating in the warm sun.

  ‘They’ll carry you, won’t they?’