Conviction

by Denise Mina

  But it didn’t work. He said gently, ‘Look, you’re too invested in this. You hardly knew him. What’s really going on?’

  ‘Forget it.’ I started the engine.

  ‘What even is Skibo Castle?’

  ‘It’s a luxury holiday resort in a castle that belonged to Andrew Carnegie. Adam and I worked there. Albert’s the manager there, he knew Leon.’ I pulled the car out into the road. ‘Albert knows everyone, he works in the luxury sector. It’s his job to know all the latest gossip about wealthy people. He has an encyclopedic knowledge about them, knows more than the gossip mags ever will. He’ll know what people are saying about it.’

  ‘Why not just phone him and ask about it?’

  ‘He’s old-fashioned and very well mannered. He’s too discreet to risk talking on the phone.’

  ‘You’re going to ask for reassurance that Leon wouldn’t kill his kids?’

  ‘I’m going to ask about Leon’s finances and Gretchen Teigler. He’ll know. I know he will.’

  Fin tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Anna. What are we really doing? Are we just running? I’m up for that by the way, if that’s what this is.’

  ‘I want to clear Leon’s name.’

  ‘And this has to happen now? Today? After what happened this morning? Come on,’ he sneered. ‘Just be honest with me.’

  ‘Look,’ I pulled up at the side of the road, ‘I didn’t ask you to come with me. Why don’t you get out and get a hotel or something? Just go home.’

  Fin sat still, looking out of the window placidly. Then, as if he had just remembered, he took out his tobacco pouch and rolled two cigarettes. He offered me one. I took it.

  We lit up. I stopped smoking years ago and remembered now how completely disgusting and utterly compelling it was, how my blood pressure rose when I inhaled and how it made my mood ricochet around.

  He gestured to the road ahead. ‘Drive.’

  ‘I think you should get out.’

  ‘I can get out any time. I’ll get out later. Drive.’

  So I drove and smoked and loved it and wished I wasn’t smoking.

  ‘Really, I don’t get why you’re still here, Fin. You could have left at the restaurant or got a hotel in Fort William.’

  I waited for him to say some sappy shit about being worried about me. I didn’t expect him to say what he did.

  He exhaled and smacked his lips. ‘OK. I couldn’t get a hotel because I haven’t got tuppence. I can’t even use my cards any more. So either you drive me home or take me with you.’

  ‘I can give you money to get home.’

  ‘D’you want me to go home?’

  I didn’t know. I didn’t really want to be alone but he wasn’t much fun to fight with and that was all I had going on at the moment.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’ve been in hiding for a while, but now people are looking at me again. They’re aware of me and I don’t want to seem broken. You know? I need to be doing something, d’you know what I mean?’

  ‘No.’ I was irritated and he was excited. It wasn’t a good combination.

  ‘What I’m saying–I think you know what I’m saying–let’s go on an adventure, investigate, follow up that thing about who took the picture. I’m thinking we could make a podcast about it. Put it out on Facebook and Twitter.’

  ‘No!’ I found that idea really alarming. I was kind of shouting and driving too fast, trying to frighten him, I think, but he was having none of it.

  ‘Ah, come on, it’ll be fun. The case is interesting.’

  ‘No!’ The road was narrow and I was driving very fast, faster and faster, panicky driving.

  ‘Slow down!’ He pointed up ahead to a sign warning of sharp turns in the road.

  I did slow down. ‘I mean, why? There’s nothing left to say.’

  ‘You’ve got enough to say about it. Has anyone asked who took the photo yet? I mean, what if we’re good at this? We can live-stream and tweet links, it’ll be fun.’

  ‘Look, Fin, you don’t listen to podcasts. It can go very far wrong. You accuse the wrong person and they sue you, you can make a mistake in reasoning and get piled on and trolled for it. People will persecute you for having a linguistic tic–’

  ‘A tic? Like what?’

  ‘One presenter used to say “hnnn” after every second word–“angryhnnn”, “going forwardhnnn”, “in other wordshnnn”. He didn’t have a sound engineer to edit it out or tell him. The guy had to leave social media because every time he posted anything a thousand people would reply “hnnn”. It’s brutal. Podcasting is like comedy or football, everyone thinks they know how to do it but they don’t. They don’t have a fucking clue. And you need a network to attract an audience.’

  He held up his phone. ‘We have got an audience. They’re waiting for me to say something.’

  ‘Stupid.’ A bigger audience was the last thing I wanted. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He was unfazed by me. I think he might have dealt with a lot of aggression from Estelle. She’s quite fiery too.

  ‘It’s just a terrible idea, Fin. You have to make them in the studio for sound quality.’

  ‘Rubbish. Nothing is done in studios any more. If I put this little mic into the headphone jack I can get very good-quality sound. Look.’ He took a small black suede drawstring bag out of his pocket and reached into it, taking out a little mic no bigger than my thumb. ‘We used this to record song ideas on the road. The sound quality is so good one guy released an album he recorded with it.’

  ‘Absolutely not. If you do that I’ll dump you by the side of the road.’

  ‘Dumped twice in one day.’ He brushed a speck of ash from his tweed sleeve.

  ‘God, you’re so fucking preening.’

  ‘And that aggravates you?’

  ‘It does. The button done up to the top, the perfectly buffed shoes. It looks as if you’ve got nothing to do all day but admire yourself. You’re honestly not that good looking.’

  ‘Personal fashion isn’t a celebration, it’s a defence. It’s the armour of everyday life.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got too much fucking armour on.’ I wasn’t being very nice at this point. I was alarmed by the podcast conversation and how blithely Fin had suggested drawing even more attention to us. It wouldn’t take a genius to trace me to Fin and Fin to Estelle and then find out she had gone to visit her family in Porto with my girls.

  He sighed and then out of the blue he said, ‘Have you ever heard of Bill Cunningham?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He said that, about fashion being armour. I was thinking about him because he lived above Carnegie Hall.’

  ‘The Carnegie Hall?’

  ‘Yeah. In a bedsit. Lived there for decades. They let out rooms above the hall as studio apartments to artists, back when no one wanted to live in New York. He was a fashion photographer, invented street-fashion photography. He was amazing but never really cashed in on it. He said, “They can’t tell you what to do if you don’t take their money.” I like that. I think about him a lot.’

  ‘Did Estelle like that?’

  He laughed and looked out of the window. Then he laughed some more. ‘Poor Estelle. She really didn’t know what she was getting into.’

  I could have said the same about Hamish but I wasn’t as kind as Fin.

  We drove and smoked and had another argument about something irrelevant to this story. We were enjoying ourselves. We stopped at a petrol station in Inverness to buy drinks because our mouths were foul from smoking. I made him eat half a chocolate bar and watched while he swallowed it. I told him if he fainted again I’d stop the car and roll him into a ditch and drive away. He said that seemed quite strict but entirely fair.

  Back on the road we hit the bright suspension bridge across the Moray Firth.

  ‘This is so far,’ Fin muttered. ‘I mean, what could a hotel manager possibly know about that’s worth going all the way up here for?’

  I picked up my pho
ne and put on the final episode of the podcast. The Gretchen episode.

  22

  Episode 6: What’s the Deal with Gretchen?

  In this episode I want to talk about Gretchen Teigler and Leon Parker.

  These murders were committed by someone on board. Leon had the means, the skills and had orchestrated the situation. He could have done it. To me, that’s an obvious observation, but he wasn’t investigated. The question is–why? And the answer is almost certainly–Gretchen.

  Every generation thinks the world will end with them. Whether it’s the Black Death, Judgement Day or nuclear war to wipe them out, humans have a hard time imagining a world going on after their death. Maybe because, if the world does just rumble on, nothing we do really matters anyway. We’re not that important. But some people are. Gretchen Teigler might be. Her money, her history, her connections are so extensive that when she dies the world might just give up and fold in on itself because Gretchen is a direct consequence of many of the major events of the twentieth century.

  She was born at the crossroads between two great fortunes and, aged just twenty-three, inherited more money than the GDP of half the world’s states. Unlike most rich kids, Gretchen hasn’t spent and enjoyed her money. In fact, in the years since she inherited she has tripled her fortune through aggressive deals and questionable investments, using methods most people would baulk at.

  She is an extraordinary woman. She is fantastically rich and never, ever speaks to the press. She never has. She refused to even appear in her school yearbook. When she graduated from high school she submitted a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt looking particularly toothsome instead. That was prescient for a seventeen-year-old in late-1980s California. But she had good reason to be wary of public attention. Rich kids were being kidnapped all over the world and the Teiglers were loathed. She had three generations of reasons to be wary.

  It began like this: in around 1900, a small German man left his home town of Weil in Freiburg and walked to Paris. There, he set up shop and began selling face cream. A lot of people sold face cream, the market was crowded, but Otto Teigler had discovered, long before it was well known, what is now called the Veblen principle. If Otto made his face cream shockingly expensive then people would buy it as a status symbol. What the cream did or didn’t do wasn’t really important. They weren’t really buying cream. They were buying exclusivity. Women who could afford the cream wanted to boast about having it. Men bought it as ostentatious gifts for wives and lovers. Celebrities wanted to be associated with the cream and were happy for their names to be used in endorsements.

  Otto understood the forces at play well enough to keep the formula secret. He built and advertised a laboratory where chemists were paid high salaries to develop new products. His face cream outsold all others and Otto Teigler made a fortune which he used it to promote his one true passion: fascism.

  German Nazism recruited from the working classes but Teigler’s fascism was a Veblen product: he made it exclusive. At first he established a league of prominent, well-to-do right-wingers. They hosted elaborate fundraising dinners, balls, concerts. These rich, glamorous people then attracted an army of less wealthy but socially aspiring supporters. They, in turn, brought in even less wealthy supporters until the league had an army of impoverished angry blackshirts.

  1930s France was awash with immigrants. From the south came half a million Spanish refugees fleeing the Civil War. From the north and the east came Jews, driven from their homes by Nazis and pogroms. Otto Teigler provided the French government with vast funds to repatriate the Jews to Germany. He started a newspaper designed to incite violence against Jews and the Spanish. Following the Nazi’s invasion, Teigler became a prominent supporter of the appeasing Vichy government. Then the war began and we all know how that went.

  But the aftermath of the war was telling.

  Soldiers begin fighting for a cause and finish fighting for their comrades. This was no different. After the war Teigler’s main concern was for his fascist league brothers.

  In the chaos and recrimination of peace, when any woman who accepted a drink from a German soldier was punishment-raped or had her head shaved in public, Teigler and his comrades protected each other. France needed investment and Teigler Inc. built factories. It employed fellow league members to run a workforce made up of the blackshirt army and over the following two decades Teigler Inc. blossomed into a worldwide brand.

  Otto and his wife, Therese, had one child, a daughter named Françoise. She had grown up in the belly of the regime. Now eighteen, Françoise attended smart parties and movie premieres, was pictured waving from airplane steps at glamorous locations. Everything she did was a Teigler Inc. endorsement because the tagline always read ‘sole heir to the Teigler fortune’. Then, abruptly, in 1961, Françoise dropped out of view. No one in the Teigler camp ever mentioned her again.

  This is what happened to her: while attending a house party in Monte Carlo Françoise turned down an invitation to a night at the casino. There were twenty or so people in the group and everyone was keen to go except for Françoise and one other guest. She was bored of the casino and the other guest, a young man her own age, didn’t approve of gambling. They were left alone for the evening. He was unlike any man she had ever met. He was intriguing, had a lot of unfamiliar ideas about politics and the history of Europe. He was from a wealthy Chicago family, his name was Freddy Klaerche and he was a rabbi.

  Less than a week later, Françoise and Freddy ran away to California together. They were married for twenty-seven years.

  The Klaerche family were just as conflict-ridden as the Teiglers. These Chicago industrialists were a vast, fractured clan who sued and countersued each other over trivialities. Françoise and Freddy stayed out of it. They lived modestly, happily and had only one child. They named her Gretchen.

  Growing up in San Diego, Gretchen had no contact with her grandparents. Her parents died within a year of each other, father of a degenerative muscular condition, mother of a stroke, leaving her alone in the world aged just twenty-two. She has always been intensely private, which is what makes her first and only foray into public life so strange.

  Her grandmother, Therese Teigler, was widowed and elderly when her estranged daughter died. Seventy-nine-year-old Therese Teigler could not attend the funeral because her young boyfriend was jealous and didn’t like her going out of the house.

  Therese met Anton von Beuler at a charity fete. Twenty-six and very handsome, he was working as a waiter for the catering company. At the end of the fete Anton helped seventy-nine-year-old Therese from her wheelchair into her car, climbed in next to her and they went home. Six months later he was still in the house and boasted that his bank account was hundreds of thousands of Francs heavier.

  This is a problem most of us do not have: the super-rich are surrounded by flies. They attract predators. It is both a hazard of being very rich and what motivates others to get very rich. The dying super-rich attract more flies than most, or maybe they don’t have the energy to bat them off. Some are blind to the complexity of those relationships, but some aren’t. Some like it. For some people these power differentials are a reason to get rich. Therese seemed to enjoy it. She didn’t leave the house any more because Anton didn’t want her to.

  Her staff called the police but they couldn’t remove von Beuler because Therese said she wanted him there. Her lawyers tried to have him evicted but she had signed a letter consenting to him doing whatever he wanted in the house. Then von Beuler began removing artworks from the house and keeping them in his own storage unit. He said they were redecorating.

  A rumour began that she had changed her will, disinheriting Gretchen and making von Beuler her sole heir.

  Gretchen was twenty-three at this point. She had never met her grandmother but, hearing of Therese’s intentions, she flew to Paris on her own initiative. She waited until von Beuler was out and had the butler let her in to visit her grandmother.

  Gretchen quietly drank her
tea and talked to her grandmother about the weather and holidays and health while, all over the house, a private security firm planted cameras and microphones.

  Two weeks later Gretchen returned, retrieved all of the equipment and released the footage, unedited, to the media. That was a strange choice. There were blow jobs between members of staff, drinking, pilfering. She could at least have cut the footage of Therese being washed by a nurse or using the commode, but she didn’t. Those intimate episodes were not what caught the press’s attention though.

  The film showed bankers and accountants coming and talking to a confused Therese about her accounts, her tax liability and her offshore investments. Therese was dodging tax on a massive scale and had been for decades. The Teiglers had finally done something to offend the French.

  Things moved quickly then: Therese’s new will was nullified by a judge and von Beuler was charged with abus de faiblesse–conning a frail person. He was made to give everything back, the money, the shares, the art. Ironically, the most valuable pieces in the Teigler art collection were by two Spanish asylum seekers and an Italian Jew: Picasso, Dalí and Modigliani.

  Everyone who worked for Therese was sacked and replaced. She was dead within four months and, in accordance with the reverted will, Gretchen inherited everything. She was fabulously wealthy, on paper at least.

  When she moved into the Teigler mansion in Neuilly-sur-Seine she discovered that von Beuler was not the first handsome adventurer with his hand in the pot. There was very little left and they were running everything through the books. Offshore accounts were frozen and back taxes were billed. Gretchen was suddenly not very wealthy at all.

  She set about rebuilding the fortune with the help of her legal advisers. The firm she chose had taken over an Italian football club in administration. Now Gretchen decided to invest in football. Her career in football finance has been controversial to say the least. One Italian club dissolved into insolvency six months after she withdrew her investment and the pension fund was found to be all but empty. This happened several times, twice in Greece, once in a minor league Spanish club. Football finance is a strange grey area. Although heavily regulated, the large sums generated sometimes mean that unscrupulous investors are attracted to it, using shell companies and accounting tricks.