The Natural Law

by Steve Attridge

  He smiled and nodded in agreement. I wanted to hear his voice.

  “Going far?” I asked.

  “Dubai,” he said.

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Business is pleasure. When it’s going well.”

  Then he walked away. Mid-West American. Money. He was also lying. He had a carrier bag with what looked like a brand new pair of fleece lined gloves inside. Dubai had current temperatures of up to thirty one degrees centigrade. I don’t think so, America.

  *

  Prague appeals to my imagination. Ancient, iconoclastic, cultured, embittered, like an old scholar warrior nursing his grudges. It has irony too, leaving the Russian tanks in its streets to both rot and remember. A city has many realities, like a hydra, and in Prague they are often in silent dispute. Ice Age hunters, warring Germanic, Celtic and Slavic tribes that carved an unruly history in the cradle of Bohemia and which, thousands of years later, now peer from the shadows at a current burgeoning tourism and a boilingly corrupt City Hall. It makes me feel barbaric, civilized and litigious. You can walk off the streets and hear a string quartet to break the heart of Vlad the Impaler.

  I booked into the Marriott hotel. I suppered on a bag of peanuts, two glasses of heavy Rioja and a Famous Grouse, then strolled out and past the building several doors along. This was it. I stopped and looked at the nameplates, then photographed them with my mobile. I walked on to the Old Town Square, looked up at the astronomical clock, and spent five minutes watching a fire eater in the streets. She was a young woman of about twenty eight with Nordic pigtails and wide dark eyes, muffled inside a thick jumpsuit against the cold, but with a cloak of black and gold to add a touch of Wicca and theatre. She held one flaming sword aloft and the other she twirled with her left hand. Then she looked up at the blackening sky and lowered the sword into her mouth. She kept it there, and then slowly removed it – extinguished and smoking, to gentle applause.

  I flipped two Korunas into a copper pot and she smiled.

  “Speak English?” I asked.

  “A little,” she said.

  “You do this because you like risk?” I asked.

  “Everything important is a risk, so I do this to remind me. You like to try?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I liked the whiff of danger about it. She said that the trick is to remember that fire and hot air travel up, so keep the sword angled properly and tilt your head, flatten the tongue and above all, don’t inhale, otherwise you set fire to your lungs. Then exhale to douse the flame. When you are frightened your throat constricts, so take a few deep breaths beforehand and try to relax. I learnt a long time ago that fear is about choice. There is a moment when you decide to do something, not because you’ve conquered your fear, but because you choose to ignore it and take that unknown leap anyway. She gave me a flaming sword. I could smell petrol. I took a few breaths, raised the sword, faced skyward, and opened my mouth. I could feel the heat on my face but kept lowering the sword into my mouth, the flames rippling up the dulled blade. When it reached the back of my throat I exhaled as quickly as I could. The flames spluttered out but I breathed in and got a mouthful of fumes and petrol. I spat on the ground but held the sword aloft. A few passers-by applauded and the young woman shouted “Bravo!”

  An hour later I sat in my hotel room and charged two new mobile phones I’d brought with me, then did an internet search on my laptop of all the businesses listed on the nameplate that I had photographed. All were readily available except one. Caneo Inc. No trace anywhere. Caneo is an anagram of Ocean. This was it. After a restless night of dreams full of fire and Anna and then seeing Lizzie waving at me from the other shore of a wide turbulent river, I woke up sweating and hyperventilating. I didn’t need a shrink to work out some of the ramifications of that little night of vipers. I left the hotel and went to the building where I knew Ocean Investment to be. I rang the Caneo strip and waited. Nothing. I waited until someone, a middle aged man in a suit, arrived to go to one of the other offices.

  “Dobry den. Mluvite Ingles?” I asked.

  “A little English,” he said.

  “Great. Can you tell me where I can find Tourist Information?”

  He gave me directions and I thanked him. He closed the door and I waited a few minutes, then keyed in the same code I’d watched him use. Caneo Inc. was on the fifth floor. I took the lift and got out. There were two companies on each floor. This had Caneo and an Insurance company, Baranek. Their office hadn’t opened yet. I tried the door of Caneo but it was locked and there was a code punch by the door. I looked around – no CCTV, which was lucky.

  I sat on the stairs and thought. I took out Andy’s little notebook and flipped through it again. The dates at the back were, I assumed, dates of arms shipments. The last date had no slashes between the numbers to indicate days and month. I tried it on the code pad. Wrong. I rang Mary and asked her for Andy’s birth date and her own, and those of her children. I tried them all, praying that the pad didn’t have a disabling trip switch which shut it down after a certain number of errors. I tried Mary’s first, then Andy’s and there was a click and the door opened.

  Inside was not what I expected. It was dusty, unused, a smell of deadness and abandonment. A reception area with a bare wooden floor and scraps of newspaper like vagrant place mats. Mice or rats had been colonising the place. There were two offices left and right with only desks in. One had a pile of folders. I looked through them. Bizarrely they were mostly full of carpet samples – I assumed from the previous tenant.

  Behind the reception area was a larger office. Desk, chair, filing cabinet. I looked in the desk. Some weapons catalogues. In another drawer old flight tickets and travel itineraries: Mr Andrew Thomas King, at least a dozen flights from Prague to Istanbul, then a return flight from Kabul to Prague via Istanbul. There were other documents – invoices from car hire companies in Istanbul. A picture began to emerge. I speculated that this was where Andy would come to arrange money transfers, and then he would go to Istanbul, where perhaps the weapons would be collected, then taken either overland or by private charter, which was more likely, to Kabul. Then he would fly back. I had thought that Andy was little more than a mule, albeit a crucial one, but he started to go up in my estimation as I read through some emails that had been printed off, with headings such as ‘Avoiding Surveillance’; ‘Code names for suppliers’; ‘Details for changing overland routes.’

  The filing cabinet was locked. I found a screwdriver in the desk drawer and prised it open. A few Xerox files of weapons and consignments, a bundle of receipts from restaurants and taxis. At the back a list of contacts. This made it worth the journey. Hugh Dillsburgh, two other MPs, some MOD Personnel, Special Branch, all with code names. Dillsburgh, hilariously, was MOUSE. Then the one I was looking for. GLADIATOR. No name but a phone number. I used one of my new mobiles and rang the number.

  “Yes?”

  I stopped the call, dropped the phone and stamped it dead. The voice was Symon Crace’s. I sat down and looped my mind back. I’d been so stupid, so gullible. Symon’s fortuitous and sudden reappearance in my life just as I took this investigation; his apparently nomadic, homeless existence; his innocuous ability to gain my trust; questions about the investigation; the endless texting and philosophical conundrums. I took the hair I had found under Anna’s nail from the little plastic wallet that I carried in my pocket. There was a tiny galley kitchen and I held the hair under the tap. The blood had stained it red but it lightened a little – this could easily have been a blonde hair. Symon’s. What had I told him? Too much, of course. Far too much. He’d been playing me all along while killing off anyone I came close to. I could speculate on why he killed Andy King, if King was street bragging about the arms deals, but all the others? Had there been some big falling out? What was he still hiding? Presumably a trail that would lead to him as a main player in an International illegal arms trade. I was spitting angry. I’d let him live in my flat
. He’d murdered Anna. My own daughter had fallen for his wayward, lying charm. Cass, Cass. I feared the worst and phoned her.

  “It’s Dad. Where are you?”

  “At home. Are you OK?”

  “Yes. Listen, if Symon contacts you...”

  “He’s here. He just popped in to collect a few things.”

  My heart squeezed into a ball. God, I prayed she didn’t have the phone in conference mode.

  “Cass. This is very important. Please don’t ask any questions. Act normally. Thirty seconds after this call I will ring again. Pretend it’s a friend, or Mum, and it’s an emergency, and you have to leave immediately. You have to do this.”

  “Dad, you’re scaring me.”

  “Don’t be scared. If you just do what I say you’ll be fine. I love you.”

  I counted to thirty and rang back.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice thin.

  “It’s going to be fine. Leave now and don’t tell Symon where you’re going...”

  Suddenly Symon’s voice. “It’s too late for that. Why couldn’t you just play along? Why be so bloody complicated? This could have been easy.”

  “If you hurt her I’ll kill you. I won’t stop until I do. Just leave her,” I said.

  “Paul, this is not some crap movie. Don’t threaten me. You don’t have the substance for it. Cass will be safe with me. I’ll be in touch. I know what I’m doing.”

  Then he was gone. I knew the knot in my stomach would only tighten until I was back in England and could find Cass. My Cass. Then I heard the main door to the offices open. I got down below the desk. I could see a man’s legs checking the other two small offices. Expensive brown brogues. America. If he came in here there was nowhere to hide. It seemed better to at least take the initiative and give myself the advantage of surprise. I stood and ran at him while he had his back turned. I barged into him and he fell heavily, but I kept my balance and ran out. No point in taking the lift, so I ran down the stairs. I got down three floors before I heard him coming after me. I opened the front door and slammed it behind me and ran.

  When I reached the Old Town Square I knew I was almost done. My lungs had clearly shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. I was about as fit as a middle aged man who takes no exercise and drinks too much was entitled to be. There was my young sword swallowing friend. I ran up to her and put my arms around her, pulling her cloak around my back, and kissed her full on the lips. She tasted of petrol and mint. It was a long and lingering kiss. I saw from the corner of my eye the man I knocked over run into the square, stop and look around, then make a wrong decision and run diagonally across and away. I pulled away, breathless.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” I said.

  She looked amused and curious. I walked away. I had to get to Cass.

  Chapter XVIII

  ‘Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’

  Exodus 25

  I counted clouds. I counted the windows in the plane. I counted the number of passengers. I closed my eyes and tried to count the flickering dots. I tried to recite some of the Old Testament just to remind me of how we need to shed this ludicrous, archaic religion. Indeed all religions. Even animals get punished in the Old Testament vision of things: “If the ox shall push a manservant or a maidservant; he shall give unto their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.” Even that failed to distract. I twitched and sighed and fretted my way through the flight. Symon could gain nothing from murdering Cass. His kills were functional – to either stop someone from talking to me or from passing on what I may have said to them. If Anna’s death was merely a warning, this made it far more chilling, but would he kill Cass too? Had something been unleashed in him that couldn’t be reined in? And beneath all this was a nag of uncertainty about everything. I tried meditating but thought that if the Buddha was on an EasyJet Boeing 737, seething with revenge fantasies, a slight hangover and wondering what the hell his murdering former best friend was going to do to his daughter, then the smile might twist a little, and the paunch become dyspeptic. I felt physically sick and when the man next to me tucked into an evil smelling bacon sandwich I almost gagged over his cheap suit. He looked shocked when I turned to him and said, “Do you mind troughing that greasy slop a bit more quietly? You sound like an unplugged drain.”

  I drove like a demon from Gatwick. At best I was hoping that he would have relented and left Cass in the flat, though I knew that unlikely. I tried her number and his, but it went straight to voicemail. At the flat there was no message. Nothing. Everything about this investigation had been twisted and circuitous. I telephoned Mary King and told her I knew who her husband’s killer was, a man called Symon Crace, and that I would doubtless be seeing him soon. I had long decided not to tell her where she could find her husband’s killer in case she had some dangerous revenge fantasy that would end in her being the victim, but she didn’t ask. It was enough to know who it was. To have a name to curse, as she had first said to me. She told me to be careful. Then my landline rang. Symon, telling me to come to an address in North London, an industrial estate by the River Lea. I said I’d be there in an hour, trying to keep the panic and murderous fury out of my voice. I had to keep a lid on my mind, which was now a williwaw of scorpions, if I was to be of use to Cass. I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone as much as I hated Symon at that moment. I should have known. Someone said that behind every fortune is a crime, and Symon had been at great pains to tell me how wealthy he was.

  “Let me speak to Cass,” I said.

  Moments later. “Dad. Please come soon.”

  “Hang on. I love you.”

  Just as I was leaving the phone rang again.

  “Dr Rook. Audrey Pritchard. You are meant to be at a sub-committee meeting for Creating a Safe Learning Environment. Where are you?”

  “You’ve just rung my home number so it’s pretty bloody obvious where I am.”

  “I am making a formal complaint about you for unprofessional behaviour, dereliction of duties and illegally keeping a creature on university premises.”

  “And I’m making a complaint about you simply for being you. In fact I am going to call a meeting in order to challenge for your position.”

  I then wrote an email to Lizzie, telling her everything that had happened, about Rook Investigations, how sorry I was for being me, how I would always love her, and as much as I knew about Symon, and Mary King’s contact details. I put it on a delay timer so that unless I was able to delete it within twelve hours it would send automatically. It was a small and cruel insurance, but desperation creates its own road. And she deserved some truth. I took out the hair in the little plastic envelope. My mind started to snag on details, uncertainties. Then I left.

  *

  The industrial park was mostly abandoned workshops and storage units. I parked outside unit 32. There were no other cars – Symon must have parked off-road somewhere. It was dark because most of the security lights had long since dimmed or been vandalised. The unit door was closed. I knocked. It opened straight away.

  “Get inside,” said Symon. He held a silver automatic revolver and a small torch in the other hand. I entered; he took a quick look around outside and closed the door behind us. He led me along a small corridor and opened a door into a windowless box room. Cass stood and rushed to my arms. I held her, breathed the pine and rosemary of her hair, smelled her fear, and whispered that everything was going to be fine. Her eyes filled. She shook in my arms. I turned to face Symon and wanted to kill him.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Tell me what you think you know,” he said.

  “You retiring from a successful business was a lie. In fact everything about the way you represented yourself is a lie. You’re a gun running psychopath on a murder spree. What makes me spitting angry, though, is that you’ve frightened my daughter and you killed someone close to me who wasn’t connected with your grubby little death trade.”


  “Someone close to you?” said Cass, suddenly anxious about Lizzie.

  “Anna.”

  Cass looked at Symon. “You’re a monster.”

  Symon sat and took a deep breath.

  “Now you’ve had your cathartic moment, let me tell you both what really happened. No, I wasn’t a businessman. I worked in Security for ten years, and then made a killing, no pun, in Iraq when the British and American governments were more than happy to throw money at people like me. It was a gravy train. The winners in that war were mercenaries and oil barons. We called ourselves security contractors but we were private armies. Two of us to every six soldiers. You’ve no idea how much money we were making. My company got a 100 mill contract protecting oil fields so that the US and UK barons could rob from them, plus regular five mill sweeteners creamed off reconstruction money. Legal lines blurred as aid money was arguably as much ours as anyone’s. It was a truly privatised war. Plus mercenaries could kill anyone – rivals, imagined rivals, protesters, activists – anyone, and because of the great global terror scam our arses were always covered. I became the weapons man – supplying state of the art firepower to other companies. I was making over two hundred grand a week.”

  “Very noble. And then you did the same in Afghanistan?”

  “Yes. Some protection of bases, but the US and UK governments also paid me to arm ‘kill teams’ – special forces that work at night, going into villages to assassinate Afghan fighters who oppose the occupation, and to terrorize civilians who might harbour them.”

  “These aren’t regular soldiers?”

  “Not many soldiers at all. A few ex-commandos, but mostly mercenaries who combine greed for money with a hunger to kill. Dillsburgh was the main man in the government who channelled the funds, and he continued this in Opposition. Callous, ruthless bastard.”

  “Not a liberal humanitarian like you then?” I said.

  Symon smiled.

  “He was just the sort Blair and Bush liked to do their dirty work while they could pretend they knew nothing about it. You won’t believe me but I grew sick of it. I didn’t care about the politics. I expect them to be corrupt. But the body counts were becoming huge. I wanted out.”