by Janet Neel
‘That’s understood, Mr Graebner. So your associate delivers the cash – when?’
Matthew found he had got down the stairs and out of the building before he breathed in. His chest felt stiff and his shoulders ached. Peter Graebner looked just the same, small, greying and rabbinical, trotting along the pavement, absently throwing out suggestions about a landlord/tenant case in which they were both involved.
‘I’ll come back alive, will I, after handing over the money?’ Matthew asked, breathlessly.
‘Good gracious, yes, my boy. And they’ll be willing to deal with you alone next time, if need be.’
‘I can’t wait.’
‘No, he’s still unconscious. I’m going to come back – will you get a couple of sandwiches? Anything I need to know?’ Michael Owens had waited while Richard Marsh-Hayden had been taken away to have his stomach pumped and put into an intensive care bed, wired to about twenty different pieces of equipment. No one had been prepared to give an opinion. The houseman had called out two senior consultants whose views were not available. There were nurses doing little bits of rewiring round the unconscious Richard every five minutes, and it was clear he might as well not be there, and would indeed be in the way when the family arrived.
‘Brian Rubin called?’ he said, surprised. ‘You didn’t tell him where I was? Oh, you did. To get rid of him. No, don’t worry, Susie, he’d have known soon enough. I’ll ring him. Or better yet, I’ll go by his office – it’s on the way. Sort of.’
He only got in by ringing the bell for two minutes solidly and identifying himself. He had not expected that resilient tough to be looking so distressed. He was unshaven, the shadow very dark on the olive skin, and the thick curly hair had not been brushed. The office was full of dirty coffee cups, and both telephones were ringing at once, continuously and unanswered.
‘Diana’s having a long weekend,’ he reported gloomily. ‘Not that anything would help today, but at least I could have sent her out to buy more coffee. Shut the door – the phones will drive you mad otherwise. Your girl told me the bad news – it means the deal’s buggered, doesn’t it? Someone warned me – chap who did it can’t benefit.’
‘He isn’t under arrest,’ Michael said, stiffly. ‘Or wasn’t when I left. There’s a policeman with him. I feel terrible – poured him into bed last night, with no goodwill at all, I just wanted to get back to collect Judith. And then he tries to kill himself.’
‘If he’d brought it off then presumably he’d never have been charged? And the estate would get Selina’s shares and could sell them.’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘Sorry, sorry. Forgot you’d known him since you were kids. Fuck it, though. I had a couple of weeks’ grace from the bank to see if I could bring this deal off, but they’re losing interest. In every sense. And anyway, what with the fire, I’d need a bit more cash.’ He ran both hands through his disordered hair which parted unbecomingly. ‘Just at this moment I don’t see a way through. I need coffee.’ He got up, peered hopefully into two of the mugs which littered his desk and took them with him, opening the office door on the ringing telephones. ‘Gotcha.’ He pounced on a half-open drawer in the desk and extracted a small jar of coffee, unplugged the electric kettle and carried it and the mugs back with him. He poured hot water into both mugs, rinsed them round in a desultory way and poured the results on to a wilting pot plant, then put in fresh coffee and water. ‘Sorry about this. What are you going to do? I mean, I’m still in the market for this deal for about a week, I suppose.’
‘You’ve got a charge on Richard’s shares – no, he told me, he had to. Couldn’t you go ahead and take the risk on Selina’s fifteen per cent?’
‘I would, if it were my decision. But it isn’t – I have to have the bank’s and the broker’s support, or I don’t have the cash. And they find it too difficult, because it’s not a bog standard deal.’
‘It is too difficult,’ Michael said, soberly. ‘You’d need to be ICI or near offer to get them to do that kind of funding. It’s a bugger for me too, I’d love to be able to sell.’
‘Particularly after the fire.’
‘As you say. Judith and Tony Gallagher hope to be able to open again next week. I’ve seen the schedule.’
‘She’s nuts, sorry, excuse me. I keep forgetting you two are engaged. And Tony Gallagher is one of the reasons the place wasn’t making any money.’
‘What?’
‘He’s been ripping you off. Has to have been him. Don’t look like that, mate, I told Selina.’
‘You told Selina?’
‘Yeh, and that was a mistake. She came to me, said she wasn’t happy with the deal and her position, yatter, yatter, yatter, so I told her she was lucky to be getting it at a good price, because she couldn’t control her staff, and her chef was into a scam. I thought she’d take the point, sell out and take a greeter’s job with me. She was good at that. But no, what does she do? Talks to Judith, and those two decide they can turn the whole thing round and get on to the market. Only I’ve got nine other restaurants and years’ more experience than they have and I only managed to get on to the market last year.’ He peered at his guest. ‘I was offering a fair price too, and not chiselling on it.’
‘Yes,’ Michael said, slowly. ‘Yes. Sorry, I can’t get this straight. You were the mystery businessman who told Selina about the scam. And Selina told Judith?’
‘Must have, mustn’t she?’
‘And Judith now thinks she can turn Tony Gallagher and get the restaurant open again in a week. After the fire, which was his fault.’
‘Sorry, come again?’
‘It may have been an accident, but he was responsible for making sure the grease filter was cleaned. And he was too busy robbing the till.’
‘Probably not the till,’ Brian Rubin demurred. ‘Food sales at the back, or a supplier fiddle.’
‘Why on earth did Selina think she could cope with the likes of Tony Gallagher, if he turned against them?’ He stared at Brian Rubin, who looked back at him, got up and poured some more coffee.
‘Well, I’d assumed – I mean, I could be wrong – that she had something going with him.’
‘What? She was in it too!’
‘I thought it was simpler than that. Good-looking bloke. Don’t look like that, Michael, I could be wrong, I mean I never saw them at it, but well, Selina was the sort of girl who likes a bit of rough.’
‘Tony Gallagher!’
‘Wouldn’t be true of Judith of course,’ Brian Rubin pointed out, hastily. ‘He’s got a lot of respect for her. I bet you he only started on the fiddle when she was building the new place.’ He looked anxiously at his guest. ‘I mean, she’ll be making Tony sweat for it. She knows what she’s doing, believe me, and I’d rather she didn’t. I want her to sell out.’ He paused to consider this statement, and Michael, still dazed, found the flaw in the argument.
‘But Tony wanted to sell.’
‘Now that is true. And he didn’t just want to sell, he needed to. Made that clear to me. He was in money trouble – no, he didn’t say what but he was scared. Well, maybe he solved it some other way.’
‘Like stealing from us.’
‘Well, well, it’s maybe not that hopeless.’ Brian Rubin was sitting up, the mind working, displaying the qualities that had enabled him to claw together his first restaurants from scratch. ‘I’ve got Richard’s shares, if he doesn’t repay the loan in another six months, and he’s not going to do that, is he? Selina’s shares we can’t do anything about, but if you could buy Tony’s off him and we could somehow persuade Judith she isn’t going to manage to get the Caff open again before she runs out of cash, then we’re home.’ He looked hopefully at his guest, then considered him more closely. ‘You OK?’
‘I’ve got a headache. Now I know why everyone tells you not to get involved with private companies, or do business with friends. I’ll tell Judith. I can’t wait to be out of this.’
‘You remembered it
’s Tosca again tonight? I asked Tris to get two tickets for us.’
John McLeish looked at his desk diary in dismay. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s the Bramshill reunion dinner.’
‘Oh.’ Francesca knew that this was not only a prior engagement but completely inescapable. ‘Oh, pity. In which case I’ll tell Tris he can have the tickets back – they’re booked out. I was not, of course, going on afterwards.’ She was sounding virtuous and injured and McLeish reflected, as he had often done before, on the marks left by the relentless competition between siblings.
‘I should hope not,’ he said, briskly. ‘It’s a weekday and you’re pregnant, remember?’
‘Very difficult to forget. How are you getting on?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘You arrested someone?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘I see. Do you have to stay and get absolutely pissed with the lads? No? See you around eleven then.’
He put the phone down and looked up; Bruce Davidson was in the doorway, all but dancing with excitement.
‘What?’
‘There’s more letters. Being fingerprinted as we speak, but it looks like more of the same. Only up to date.’
‘To Selina? How many?’
‘Four from gentlemen friends. Quite a lot of others from women friends, or her mother, as well. Found at the Café de la Paix, in a folder in a safe.’
McLeish looked at him, scandalised. ‘Was it not searched?’
‘Yes, and I’ve talked to the bloke who did it. It wasn’t there, when he looked, it was put in later and Miss Delves says so too. That for me? Thanks, lass.’ He snatched up the phone, blue eyes bright with excitement. ‘Mr Marsh-Hayden’s, were they? Good, good, good, just keep going.’ He put the phone down, beaming with pleasure. ‘Richard Marsh-Hayden’s prints all over them. My bet is – and Miss Delves thinks so as well – he found them yesterday somewhere in the Café de la Paix office and sat reading them all day, getting more and more pissed. Mrs Cameron had a day off and Miss Delves was busy downstairs after the first hour or so. And in any case she said no one wanted to be in there with him – with Richard – they just left him there hoping he’d go home.’
‘So he hunted around,’ McLeish said slowly, ‘because he thought there were some more letters – some more men. And then he found them. Why didn’t he take them home with him?’
‘Why not make himself really bloody miserable?’ Davidson agreed. ‘Wait a minute, though. He didn’t go home by himself, did he? Owens, Gallagher and Rubin took him, and he mebbe didn’t want to risk carrying the folder, dropping it in the car whatever, so he popped it in the safe.
‘Yes,’ McLeish said, seeing it. ‘Yes. That’s what happened. And he went home, took a lot of paracetamol and passed out.’ He looked across at Davidson. ‘When are we going to be able to ask him about all this?’
‘Well, now, there’s the problem.’ Davidson had calmed down a bit, but the excitement of the chase was still on him. ‘They were running more tests but his liver function is very poor.’
‘Very poor?’
‘That’s what they said. You’ve to talk to the consultant at lunch-time when he finishes his rounds, or a meeting, or whatever.’
‘Where did he get all this paracetamol?’
‘Packet by the bed, remember. The story is that Rubin and Gallagher and Michael Owens took him back – took all three of them to get him into the car and put him to bed. Owens says he got him to drink some water, not enough but some, and had left a glass and a jug beside him. He didn’t see the paracetamol, and didn’t give Marsh-Hayden any drugs at all. They had a discussion and agreed he’d only sick them up, and he was better left propped up in bed. They took all the alcohol they could see and put it in Michael Owens’ car. Didn’t find it all, though; there was a half-bottle of whisky with the paracetamol by the bed. I’ve only talked to Owens, but I’m seeing the other two later.’
‘How was he? Owens, I mean?’
‘Terrible. Feels awful, he says, about leaving, but he was fed up and desperate to get back to his fiancée, Miss Delves, and make her go home. Well, you can see that, she’s having a bad time.’
‘So Richard Marsh-Hayden read the letters, got pissed, went home, drank a bit more and took everything he could see,’ McLeish said, thoughtfully. ‘Well, no point speculating. We need to look at the letters, and I’d like to talk to Mr Marsh-Hayden.’
Davidson eyed him. ‘You think we’ve got a conclusion here?’
‘That he killed his wife, then attempted suicide? Not unlikely, is it? I’d just rather ask him.’
‘Any tickets? Anywhere?’
The man in the Coliseum box office indicated that his only hope lay in someone being so lost to all sense of propriety as to return a ticket an hour before the performance. Matt only just managed not to swear aloud; he had been too busy during the day even to remember to ring up Francesca, in too much of a hurry to get to the Café de la Paix with his hastily drafted loan agreement and charge over the shares to stop on his way. Altogether it had been a difficult day, starting with meeting two people who still made his blood run cold when he thought about them, and continuing through a painful redraft of his original thoughts. And it had got no easier; when he got to the Café de la Paix he had had to beat on the door for five minutes, making gestures eloquent of his wish to be admitted. Men on ladders, manhandling lengths of aluminium ducts, either ignored him or made gestures back indicating that the restaurant was closed, as if anyone could think otherwise. Performance restaurant, perhaps, he wondered, trying to recover his temper, eat your lunch while workmen erect the roof above your head. At the point where he was considering a frontal assault on the door, Tony Gallagher, dodging tubes and ladders, had let him in and he and Judith had signed the agreement against a background of crashing noise which penetrated to the first-floor office from the massed labour force on the site. He had attempted to console and met the usual fate of the well-meaning underinformed; cash, Judith had told him, was pouring out to the expensive groups of fitters and joiners working at time and a half and to the thirty regular kitchen staff and waiters who must not be allowed to drift away to work for other restaurants. The regular suppliers were all expecting their bills to be paid on their normal schedule, but there was no cash at all coming in.
‘Won’t the suppliers wait?’ he had asked when these facts had been explained.
‘Well, they have to,’ Judith Delves had said, irritably. ‘But they won’t go on supplying except for cash. So when we need to get supplies in to open we have to find more cash. Which we haven’t got.’
All in all, it was a bad time for the chef to have got himself in a position where he, too, needed cash, Matt reflected, but Judith Delves had shown no hesitation at all in arranging a banker’s draft from her private funds for him to hand over to Tony’s appalling associates. He considered her as he stood, disappointed, in the foyer. She was indeed determined; the odds against her were considerable. Even though she now owned, or controlled, twenty per cent of the share-holding, recent events could only make the others keener to sell and get shot of the whole mess. Well, she had his client tied hand and foot, and he must be one of the key – if not the key – elements in getting the restaurant open and trading again. And if Brian Rubin was forced out of business, then none of the other shareholders had anywhere to go if they really wanted out. That had been the point of recruiting the late Mrs Marsh-Hayden to her side of course; there was a good chance that Brian Rubin would not be able to hang on and the other shareholders would just have had to row along with them. The two women might have been in some practical difficulty without his client, but now Tony Gallagher was committed; Judith Delves controlled his shares.
He sat down, heavily, on a seat just inside the door, barely seeing the early arrivals leaving coats and greeting each other in that braying English way which still fell oddly on his ear even five years out of New Zealand. Judith Delves was taking a huge financial risk, but her ability t
o carry on the business was much strengthened. Would Selina Marsh-Hayden have been showing a similar resolution? No, emphatically, on what he had known of her, she was at best an uncertain ally, sexually volatile and without any of Judith’s capacity for sheer grinding hard work. But Selina was dead, and the man investigating that death, Francesca’s husband, even if he knew Tony had been in trouble, certainly could not know how it had been resolved. He cast one reluctant backward glance at the man behind the counter, who shook his head sympathetically, and rose to go; Peter Graebner would clear his head for him. He marched down the steps, unseeingly, and cannoned into a woman.
‘Matthew. Do you mind?’
‘Francesca. Sorry. What are you doing here?’
She was looking up at him, frowning. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No. I wanted to hear your brother but I couldn’t get a ticket.’
‘Ah-ha.’
‘Wonderwoman! You haven’t!’
‘I have. I’ve been trying to find you. Tristram told me you wanted one. It’s John’s ticket. He’s at some Old Policemen’s outing. It’s a box seat with whoever else has comp tickets. Agents. People’s Central European aunties.’
‘Is that really OK?’
‘Yes, you cuckoo.’
He hugged her to him, suddenly enormously pleased with life. She felt warm and smelled of lily of the valley as she always had.
‘I had lunch with your brother on Sunday, see,’ he said, following her through the gathering fashionable crowd, full of faces he half recognised.
‘He said. We’ll go round afterwards, but I’m not going on to supper. Too pregnant.’
He understood the reminder perfectly and smiled at her reassuringly, he hoped, as they arrived at the door to the box, occupied by two heavy duty Central European ladies and an immaculate American in his thirties. The man looked at him thoughtfully before dismissing him from consideration, leaving Matthew to wonder, again, how gays could know, so unerringly, who was straight. Francesca took a front seat, bowing politely to the rest of the box, and he wedged himself awkwardly into one of the rear seats, noting that a box seat was not quite the privilege it might appear from his normal position in the gallery. He peered down over Francesca’s shoulder to the auditorium which was boiling with people.