“You know, you really do disgust me, you odious little man. Men have died this week because of your incompetence, and you are still protecting your own worthless hide.
Gillian Davis flew out of the UK under her own name on a charter flight this morning. She is in the air as we speak, heading to the sun.”
“Well, I’ll have her picked up as soon as she arrives. We have operatives in most cities and we can rely on the local authorities everywhere else. She can’t escape.” Barry sounded more confident now, but the director laughed.
“Does your stupidity know no bounds? Let me see, this woman has outsmarted you every step of the way and made you and the firm look incompetent. The only reason I knew she was flying out this morning was that she bought a book on her credit card at Newcastle Airport.”
Barry looked puzzled. “But she must know any transactions would be flagged.”
“Of course she did! The title of the book was ‘Getting Away to Cuba, a traveller’s guide’. She is mocking us; she knows very well that the one country in the civilised world that will not cooperate with us at all is Cuba. Once she lands there, we lose her forever. We will never know where she is. She could stay and enjoy endless Mojitos in Hemingway’s favourite bar, or she could fly to any communist enclave in the world. At least we can sell off her company and bang another few million into the treasury’s coffers. Contact Lena at SOCA and get her to make an application to the Assets Agency under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.”
Barry hardly dared speak. His heart was racing and he could feel an anxiety attack coming on as he answered.
“She doesn’t own any assets in the UK any more, apart from a few hundred pounds in her current account. The remaining assets of the business were sold to the employees for one pound under a legal covenant last week. Later the same day the employees transferred their assets in the company to another greeting card company for an undisclosed amount.
SOCA says that the deal is watertight without clear evidence that criminal funds purchased, or were invested in, the company, and we have no such evidence. It seems that she paid around three million for the business when she acquired it and took around three million when she left. SOCA say that the courts would accept the argument that the illegal assets , if any, were paid into the company and paid out by the company in equal amounts, and so no money laundering has taken place and no illegal assets remain in the company. In short, their lawyers say that we have no case, even if we could prove Gillian Davis had accrued her three million investment money illegally. None of that is relevant anyway; we simply have no idea where her money is now.”
The director flung back the stressless office recliner he used as a desk chair, which was clearly not working to reduce his stress, and leaned over Barry Mitchinson, hatred burning in his eyes.
“I’d say Cuba has a good chance of being the new home of Davis’s fortune, wouldn’t you? Idiot!”
Sorry, sir,” Barry responded meekly. This seemed to send the Director into an uncontrollable rage.
“Sorry? You spineless piece of garbage! Are you just going to sit around for the rest of your life and let people defecate on you from a great height? You were a Director here, for heaven’s sake. You had a Thames view, and when they told you the special operations division was going you meekly sat back and let the DG demote you. Have you no pride?
Do you know that the powers that be had a bet on how low you could be demoted before pride kicked in and you raised a fuss? But you never did, and so they all lost their bets. I won because I said you’d stay even if I sent you to work in the cafeteria. They had a good laugh at that. You are a joke. Now, get out of my office. I need to call your wife and tell her I need a good blow job tonight. She’ll come running, as she always does - as she always has. Then, whilst she is mopping up, she’ll make some joke about you not being able to get it up. Poor Eloise; she deserves a good shagging and I’ll make damn sure she gets one.”
***
Something in Barry Mitchinson snapped; the stress, the drugs and the drink combined to produce a white heat of rage such as he had never before experienced. He toyed with the idea of telling the Director that he knew all about his wife and her many conquests, and how he used his wife to extract useful information from the Director in their post coital banter.
Barry wanted to tell him that for years he had been banging the Director’s own secretary, the delicious Maureen, often over the Director’s own desk and in his precious thousand pound ‘stressless’ chair.
He wanted to humiliate the man by telling him that between them he and Maureen had amassed almost a million pounds from foreign governments, who believed it was the Director they had in their pockets when they had never even spoken to him. But he did none of these things; he reacted as he had never done before. He reacted physically.
The first blow was a head butt that spread the Director’s nose over his face, blood trickling down the crevices made by his jowls. The second blow was a firm punch to the solar plexus, which doubled the Director over towards Barry’s third blow, an uppercut that sent the older man back into his chair, unconscious.
***
Mitchinson was still shaking when Maureen came into the room.
“My word, Barry, I heard what he said, but this! This will get you sent down.”
Barry was suddenly back in control. He looked at Maureen, and with the hand that seconds before had inflicted a terrible violence on his boss, he gently stroked her cheek.
“It’s still early, and there aren’t many people around. We need to act quickly. Bring me your keyboard and mouse.”
Maureen looked confused, but she did as her lover asked and returned with a standard keyboard and mouse.
Barry plugged both appliances into the Director’s laptop and opened Microsoft Word. Typing carefully on Maureen’s keyboard, he wrote a note on the Directors machine.
To Security Service Director General; Dame Monica Stewart - Smith.
Dear Monica,
I realise this will come as a shock but I cannot go on, I have made mistakes, too many to mention, but they have taken their toll. I was never there for my children and my wife is well aware of my continuing infidelity. I have betrayed my college friend Barry Mitchinson by conducting a long term affair with his wife and my former girlfriend Eloise, and on this issue I simply cannot find it in me to be ashamed.
Where I do feel ashamed is in my illegal dealings with foreign agencies who have asked for, and have been granted favours and access they were not entitled to receive.
I have betrayed you, my wife, MI5 and my country.
Having removed the people who knew about my indiscretions, I believed I was safe, though I do regret that Doug and Tim had to die to keep my secret safe. Unfortunately one more person knows all about my secret arrangements, and she has avoided my attempts at assassination and has flown to Cuba. I have no doubt she will reveal all as soon as she lands.
I am, at heart, something of a coward in these matters and I cannot take the shame and opprobrium that awaits me and so this will be my last missive. Please ensure that my wife receives all of the benefits to which she is entitled. She has been faithful, true and blameless in all of this.
I hope that this final selfish action can, in some way protect the agency and the country from embarrassment.
Ian.
Barry did not bother to print the note, rather he saved it to the ‘documents’ folder and left it displaying on the screen. He unplugged the keyboard and mouse and handed them back to Maureen. She took them back to her desk and re-attached them to her own machine.
With both office doors secured, as they had been during their passionate lovemaking in the past, Barry spoke as he wiped the blood from the desk with a screen wipe.
“This is how it happened. You heard a loud noise and so you tapped on the door to see if the Director needed assistance, only to discover he was beyond help. You then noticed the message on his screen. And this is the most important part, you will say t
hat it is not possible that anyone passed you, either in or out, between his closing the door and his suicide. Do you understand?”
Maureen nodded blankly. Barry held her shoulders gently. Looking into her tear-filled eyes, he continued.
“Responding to his earlier call to me to join him for coffee, I arrived to find you sobbing uncontrollably on the sofa. OK?”
“Yes. But what are you going to do?”
“You’ll see. When it’s done I’ll leave and return in a few minutes. Are you with me on this?” Maureen nodded again. “Now is the time for us to move on and spend some of that money we‘ve salted away, to spend more time together.”
Realising the nature of the proposal, Maureen buried her face in his shoulders. Barry held her at arm’s length and said, nodding in the direction of their dead boss, “Save your tears for him. He will need someone to mourn his sorry life.”
***
As with all other buildings in the UK, smoking was not allowed inside Thames House, and so smokers were expected to congregate outside in a designated area. The trouble with that arrangement, of course, was that it smelled awful and cigarette debris overflowed the bin and contaminated the whole area. It was a foul place, and it was meant to be that way. Perry Jameson was cleverer than the bosses, though; or so he thought.
Perry worked on ground minus 1, the floor which enjoyed the benefit of a patio overlooking the Thames. At the rear of the building floor G -1 was a floor lower than street level at the front of the building. The night had been long, and Perry would be off duty soon and back to his warm bed in Camden, hopefully with a warm body beside him. His current girlfriend was a nurse, and she worked nights, too.
He sat glancing out at the patio beyond his window. He wanted a smoke, badly, and that was his secret place. When Perry had first moved to this office, he was warned, somewhat pointedly, that the outside patio had been designated as an ‘inside area’ for the purposes of the smoking ban. The duty officer was familiar with such bureaucratic doublespeak. The powers that be had even alarmed the door to prevent random access to the patio, which was used for cocktail parties in the summer. The alarm could only be disarmed by the entry of a six figure code into the keypad by the door.
As duty building security officer (level two), Perry was not entitled to the security code required to exit the fire door without setting off the alarm. That was a privilege restricted to the Section Security Manager (the SSM) and the Chief of Building Security (CoBS). Fortunately, the SSM had a memory like a sieve, and so wrote the keypad code on a piece of paper taped to the pencil drawer in his desk. Perry had memorised it long ago.
As soon as her shift ended, Suzy, the overnight relief administrator, packed her bag and said goodbye. Perry would be alone for an hour, waiting for the SSM to turn in and take Perry’s report, which would be brief and uneventful as usual, and so he keyed in 3-6-3-2-8-9 and disabled the exit door alarm.
Perry was drawing in a deep lungful of the calming smoke when he heard a noise. He looked up to see an old style computer monitor heading straight towards him. Darting back inside, he watched the monitor explode into a million pieces on the concrete patio. Still theoretically in charge of the building, he stepped outside to see which idiot had thrown the monitor out of the window. As he looked up he could see clearly that the fifth window up was shattered. That would be one of the Directorate offices, he thought. But his thoughts were interrupted by the figure of a man flying through the air in his direction, arms and legs flailing, with his face fixed in a rictus of fear. Diving to his left, the young security guard only just managed to avoid the falling body, but he did not escape the awful squelching sound of the body hitting concrete. He looked on in horror as the body twitched for a few seconds, before finally lying still.
Following procedure, Perry called an internal number, not the police, as it was obviously way too late for an ambulance. The Chief of Building Security was at his desk and Perry explained the situation. The Chief hurried down the stairs from his office, his mind already turning to how they could keep this quiet and how they could restrict the Metropolitan Police to a minimum involvement.
***
The Director had started to come around when the old and unused computer monitor crashed through the toughened glass window at the third attempt, the first two attempts merely cracking the large pane without penetrating it.
Barry lifted the man roughly to his feet. The Director caught sight of Maureen sitting on the sofa, a frightened expression on her face.
“For God’s sake, Maureen! Call Security! He’s lost his mind!”
Barry turned the Director to face the window and the older man realised what his fate entailed.
“Sorry, sir,” Barry intoned ironically, “Maureen doesn’t take orders from you any more, if indeed she ever did.”
Barry laughed as he hauled the weakened director towards the opening. “Strange how things turn out, isn’t it, Gordo? You’re going to be flying out head first over the same windowsill where I shagged your PA last week.”
Mustering all of his remaining strength, the Director pushed himself away from the broken glass, but two severe punches to the kidneys subdued him and he folded again, only to fully recover his wits as he fell from the window and caught sight of the concrete patio, five floors below, racing towards him.
Chapter 33
Stratfield Turgis Village, Nr Basingstoke, Hampshire. Wednesday, 11 am.
It was a week since the Hokobus had met their fate and Pete Lowden still thought about them every hour of every day. In an effort to shake off his despondency, Dee had despatched him to follow up on Simon’s research into Gillian Davis’ origins.
Thus it was that on a rare foray to this unfamiliar part of the country Geordie unexpectedly came across a fellow North Easterner. He shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, his heart felt rendition of the local folk song, ‘Wherever you go you’re bound to find a Geordie’ at the Black Horse on Friday nights had become a regular performance. Now, sitting in front of a real fire in a comfortable lounge, he was helping an attractive middle aged woman recall her childhood by sharing stories about how Newcastle had changed over the years since she had left.
Geordie’s magic with middle aged women had worked again, and he had been warmly welcomed in by Angela Hult, widow of local poacher Les Vaughan. Simon had suggested that Geordie should start here, as it was rumoured that Les Vaughan had abused Gil Davis before taking his own life. Simon suspected that there was some truth in the rumour, given that his wife so despised her husband that she would not even attend his funeral.
After the reminiscences and some strong builder’s tea, the two new friends spoke quietly and intimately about her past.
Angela Hult was born on Tyneside and had entertained dreams of being a vet, but her schoolwork was not of a standard that enabled her to enrol at university. So, at the age of seventeen she started work as a veterinary assistant in Northumberland, where she worked with horses. It seemed that she had found her calling in life, because soon she was working in Bishop Auckland with a famous racehorse trainer, who marvelled at her ability to get sick and injured horses back to their best so quickly. Initially the horse racing vets dismissed her talent, suggesting that her early successes were flukes, but as she performed her miracles more consistently her reputation grew.
At nineteen she found herself living in stable lads’ accommodation near Newbury and on a drunken night out she met the handsome, but disturbed, Les Vaughan. Despite all the warnings, she married the man because she was smitten and he treated her so well. Sadly it didn’t last. He was lazy, relying entirely on her income, he was unfaithful often on their marital bed when she was working, and he was brutal.
At twenty one she had seen enough, and was planning to move back to the North East when Les beat her very badly before taking her money and going out on a drunken binge. A local man named Nick Davis, known to help battered wives, called around when he heard about her injuries. When she refused to face
the disparaging looks of the doctors and nurses at Newbury General Hospital yet again, he tended her wounds. Nick was gentle and understanding; he was a little older but quite attractive. Angela fell a little bit in love with the brother of the local squire, and uncle to Gillian Davis.
When she had been administered to, and comforted by, Uncle Nick, he left to seek out Les Vaughan. He apparently found him because Angela had a call the next morning from a casualty nurse asking her to visit Les in hospital. She didn’t go. His mother went instead.
Geordie was intrigued at this glimpse into country life. This was the closest he had come to an everyday tale of country folk since his mother made him listen to the Archers’ omnibus edition on Sunday mornings as she roasted the beef when he was a child.
“Angela, there was a rumour of a bit of a scandal about the time Gillian was born; it seems that Mr Davis wasn’t her real dad. Did you know that?”
“Oh yes, Pete, this is a village. Everyone knows everything, there are no secrets here. It was before my time but it was village folklore long before Nick spilled the beans during one of our long talks. There were a lot of those. They were intended to let Les know I was protected, and it worked.
Nick told me that he had his eye on the new estate manager at Tallgarth House; she was a ‘pretty little thing’, he would always say, but I think he was head over heels in love with her without ever telling her. Her name was Andrea Jane Bailey and she was one of the first women to graduate in Estate Management at Reading University. Nick explained to me that they spent all of their spare time together, but he just couldn’t find the words to tell her how he felt, and then Denton Miles turned up for an internship. Suddenly Andrea was spending every waking hour with Miles, and some non waking hours, too, I suppose.”
Angela giggled. It was the sound of a young woman’s giggle. It was light and it was infectious. Geordie smiled.
“Anyway, he left, she was pregnant with Gillian and then she fell ill. She died very quickly after the birth, if I recall the story correctly.”
“Did you know Gillian as a child?”
Chameleon - A City of London Thriller Page 17