Inhuman Remains

Forty-two

‘You realise we have to be careful here,’ said Mark, as he reversed his car into one of the parking spaces that had been cleared in front of the Mayfield house. ‘We may know what we know, and you may suspect what you suspect, but this man is now the Home Secretary, not the middle-ranking ministerial wanker you met in Barcelona.’

‘Yes, and that’s good. But remember, the higher you climb. . and all the rest of that metaphoric stuff.’ I looked at him and saw his anxiety. ‘I’ll behave myself appropriately,’ I promised him, ‘but what about you? You were threatened along with me, and so was your business. If you want to stay in the car with Tom and let me do this, I’ll be perfectly happy about it.’

He grinned, and I saw that his concern had been about me alone. ‘You know what?’ He chuckled. ‘After you left I started thinking about Moira and what she’d said, and I realised that I don’t give a toss about her and her crew. I’m comfortably off, I’m well insured against incapacity, and I don’t have any dependants they can threaten. Anyway, what are they going to do? Sabotage my wheelchair? ’

‘In that case, let’s go.’ I turned to my son, in the back seat. ‘We won’t be long, love,’ I told him. Don’t worry, I had no intention of taking him in there to confront Mrs Mayfield. But when I’d known I had to go back to London, I’d realised I couldn’t leave him in St Martí, not so soon after bundling him off to Monaco, so I’d decided to take him with me and make it a holiday for him. (We left Charlie with the guy in El Celler Petit; he has dogs and said that one more wouldn’t make that much difference to him.) We’d done the Tower that morning, and Madame Tussaud’s in the afternoon. He was quite happy to sit in the car and play with his Game Boy, while Mum did a bit of business.

For the purposes of that business, we were supposed to be researchers for an American television company that was planning a feature on the fastest-rising political couple in the land. Mark had made the appointment, using one of his cover names.

His wheelchair was in the luggage space of the estate car, but he left it there, and used elbow crutches instead. There were two uniformed police officers, one male, one female, on guard duty at the Mayfields’ door. ‘Mr Crossley and Miss Gregg,’ Mark announced as we approached them, ‘to see the Home Secretary.’

Our names were checked on a list, then the young lady officer. . once again, it was with great sadness that I calculated that I was old enough to be her mother, if I’d got myself knocked up at around seventeen. . announced us through a video-phone, and the door was opened.

We were met in the narrow hallway not by the new cabinet member but by a pallid woman in a mannish suit, middle aged, wedding ring but no other jewellery, bad hair day, with an intense expression and the hollow cheeks of a heavy smoker. ‘Martina Smith, Press Office,’ she announced, as Mark put all his weight on his left crutch to shake her hand. ‘We spoke on the telephone. You understand the ground rules?’

‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘We recite the list of questions I gave you, one by one, and they recite the answers you’ve drafted for them. That’s how it works, isn’t it?’

I had the impression that she didn’t know whether to scowl or smile: she compromised by doing neither. ‘There will be some scope for supplementaries,’ she said stiffly, ‘as long as they’re appropriate and relevant. I’ll be the judge of that; I’ll be sitting in, as usual.’

She swung a door open and stepped into a drawing room, beckoning us to follow, like courtiers. Mark led the way, and I followed.

I was much better dressed than I had been in the Hotel Arts, and much better groomed, and so it took Justin Mayfield a few seconds to recognise me. When he did, the politician’s smile was wiped from his face like chalk from a blackboard. He glared at the press officer, and I knew that somewhere down the line she was going to pay, big-time, for not checking out our bona fides. ‘Thank you, Mrs Smith,’ he murmured, in a tone that would have etched steel, ‘we won’t be needing you for this one.’

‘But, Home Secretary,’ she protested, ‘it’s standard practice.’

‘This won’t be a standard interview. Leave us.’

As Martina Smith obeyed, he turned back towards me. ‘Primavera,’ he blustered, ‘what the hell is all this about? If you wanted to see me, all you had to do was ring my office.’

‘It isn’t really you I’ve come to see, Justin,’ I told him. ‘As soon as I saw Lidia on telly the other night, I knew we had to renew our acquaintance.’ I smiled at Mrs Mayfield.

‘My wife’s name is Ludo.’ If he’d been in the dark about the whole operation, I’d have known it then, by the way he said those words. But his tone was wrong, his simple denial. There was no bewilderment there. He knew exactly what I was talking about.

‘Sure,’ I said, nodding, ‘short for Ludmila. But in Sevilla, and on the website of a fraudulent hotel and casino project, she calls herself Lidia Bromberg. When she and an associate tried to kidnap me two weeks ago, that was the name she was going under. She had a black hair job then, but the cut was the same as she has now. I’m pretty sure I could tell you who her hairdresser is. My sister goes to him every time she’s in London.’

‘Woman’s mad,’ Mrs Mayfield snapped, and turned her back on me, as if she didn’t want me looking at her any longer.

I couldn’t help myself. I forgot my promise to Mark, that I’d be cool, and I kicked her, hard, on the right buttock. She screamed, arching her back as her hand flew to her rump; I was glad that the door had looked exceptionally thick, so that the sound wouldn’t carry to the outside. Mind you, she wasn’t the only one who was hurting. I’d thought that my broken toe had healed, but it hadn’t, not completely. A spear of burning pain tore into my foot.

‘Hey!’ Justin protested. ‘I’m getting the police in.’ He headed for the door but I stepped in front of him.

‘No, you ain’t,’ I said, putting my hands on his chest to stop him. ‘If your wife was to bend over and drop her pants, we’d see a healing knife wound on her arse, just where I booted her. That was a gift from Frank, when he rescued me from her and from Emil Caballero. He thought they were only going to teach me a lesson, but I suspect Lidia might have planned more than that.’

Mayfield sighed. ‘Look, Primavera, I know Frank’s dead. You must be upset, so I’ll make allowances. Now stop this nonsense.’

‘Haven’t you seen her naked in the last couple of weeks?’

‘Of course I have and, yes, she has a wound there, but she got it in London when she slipped in the street and landed on a broken bottle.’

‘And I was there when it happened, was I, and knew exactly where to kick her? No, Justin, that won’t work for a second. Let’s all sit down,’ I glanced at Mark, on his supports, ‘especially my friend, and we’ll talk you through it.’

The new Home Secretary gave in. ‘Okay.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s do that.’ His wife’s expression would have frozen others solid, but I guessed he’d seen it often enough before. ‘Come on, Ludo,’ he told her. ‘Do as I say.’

She did, grudgingly. I looked at my companion, an invitation.

‘I’ve spent the last couple of weeks,’ he began, ‘doing a lot of research on you, Mrs Mayfield. Your maiden name, or birth name if you prefer, is Ludmila Banovsky, a member of an old Slovakian family, one that in the past was rich and powerful. Your grandfather, Ondrej Banovsky, was an industrialist, a steel magnate, and a friend of President Benes, in pre-war Czechoslovakia. This worked in his favour, for in 1937 he was advised that bad times were coming, and that he should protect his assets. He was an astute man; he did this by setting up a secret trust, in Switzerland, moving his family and as much of his money out of the country as he could, before the Germans arrived. He might have moved it all back after the war, but the country was unstable, and Communism was on the rise, so he stayed where he was and ran his enterprises from a distance. But they were in poor shape. The Nazis had allowed him to carry on, for they needed the steel that he produced, so the mills had survived, but as the tide turned against them in 1944, raw materials became scarce, and they had gone into decline. So, as a form of long-term protection, your grandfather decided to establish a business base in Western Europe, by taking over a French mining company called Energi, with solid profitability and considerable untapped reserves of coal.’ He paused and looked at Ludmila. ‘All correct so far?’ She scowled at him.

‘By the time the Soviets were gone in their turn,’ he continued, ‘so were your operations in what became Slovakia, all failed, all closed. And so was Ondrej, long gone. He died in 1965, and your father, Pavol, became head of the family, and chief beneficiary of the trust. When democracy was re-established, he reopened an office of the Banovsky Corporation in Bratislava, but that was no more than a patriotic gesture, for by that time the only asset it controlled was Energi. Unfortunately for your family, it wasn’t the cash cow it had once been. It needed good, strong management, but Pavol wasn’t a patch on his father. Ondrej would have ensured that the company had continued reserves or that it diversified in time, but his son sat back and watched the seams being worked out, and old equipment being patched up rather than modern machinery installed. When he died in 2000, and you inherited, Energi was doomed. Worse than that, its borrowings were underwritten by the family trust, in Switzerland.’ Mark stopped again; this time, it seemed, to recover his strength, and maintain his momentum. It was a long time coming; I decided to take over.

‘That much we know,’ I told the Mayfields. ‘That much we can prove. The rest is what we believe. You seem to take after your father, Ludmila, rather than Ondrej, because you seem to have sat on your hands for five years and watched the decline accelerate. By last year the business was, in effect, insolvent, so you decided on one last gamble, one grand scheme that really was worthy of your grandfather in its scope and its imagination. You did some research and you found some worthless land in the south of Spain. You invented the persona of Lidia Bromberg and, as her, set up Hotel Casino d’Amuseo SA, a company based in Luxembourg. Then, through the Banovsky Corporation, you instructed the chief officer of Energi to invest its last twenty million euros, telling the banks that at last you had a diversification strategy.

‘You commissioned designs for the project, and then, as dark-haired little Lidia Bromberg, you approached the owner of the land, Emil Caballero, an essentially greedy man, with good political connections, and you showed him a vision. He went for it and, as a bonus, offered you a mountainside that his wife’s grandmother owns as an add-on ski resort.

‘With all your preparations made, you recruited Frank McGowan, your husband’s old friend, to sell the grand design to would-be investors. You didn’t do it directly, though. You found another convicted fraudster, Hermann Gresch, and he brought Frank into the operation, so that you and Frank could never be seen to have come face to face.’

‘Nonsense,’ Ludmila growled.

‘I don’t think so. The last meeting, in Lithuania, was between Frank, Gresch and a Canadian named Sebastian Loman, whom you had hired as security for the operation. Once it was all set up, they were given new identities. Frank became Roy Urquhart and Hermann became George Macela, those people being listed as executives on the website, with another man, Alastair Rowland, as the supposed chairman.

‘Frank did incredibly well as a salesman,’ I went on, in full flow. ‘He used the list of wealthy contacts he’d ripped off from the Cinq Pistes ski resort and built up an international network. In more or less a year, he had raised another fifty-seven million in funding for the project. Everything was going well. But there was one bloody great bluebottle in the ointment. Frank wasn’t on your team. When he was in jail he had been recruited by Interpol, through the security service,’ I looked at Justin, ‘for which you are now responsible, Home Secretary. A couple of months ago, he reported to his controller in London that the time had come to pull the plug on the operation and round everybody up before the money disappeared. Macela was in the process of killing himself through a drug addiction, and an investigation would surely uncover Rowland’s identity. But Frank was betrayed: there was a mole within Interpol, and word got back to you, Ludmila. Whatever you paid the person who tipped you off, it was worth it. If the scheme had collapsed, the money would have been returned to the investors. Your role in it all might never have been exposed, but Energi would have got its twenty million back, and that wasn’t what you wanted. The company would have crashed anyway, to the tune of over fifty million euros, and the French bankers would have pursued your family trust for the loss, since your unfortunate dad, Pavol, had guaranteed it way back. It’ll still go down, and they’ll do that anyway, but it won’t matter to you, Ludo, for you’ve got another fortune salted away.’ I looked at Justin, who sat there impassively. ‘Who owns this house, by the way?’ I asked him.

‘I suspect you know already,’ he replied. ‘The family trust does.’

‘See?’ I challenged his wife. ‘You had no choice but to step in and see the fraud through to the end. Until then your personal involvement had been kept to a minimum, but you had to surface again. You had to become Lidia, and take over Roy Urquhart’s role in the scheme. You ordered Loman and his pal, Willie Venable, to take Frank out. Unfortunately he got the better of them and went into hiding. You were in huge trouble then. You had to smoke him out, but how? I reckon that your original plan was to kidnap my son and me, and use us as hostages. That’s why you went to St Martí in April, and filmed my house; you were casing the place.’ Again, the woman shook her head.

‘But my son saw you doing it,’ I continued, undeterred, ‘and you backed off. Instead you bided your time, until an even better target offered herself up. . Frank’s mother. You kept tabs on her, until one day she wasn’t at the agency. You called and her idiot assistant told you where she was. Willie Venable abducted her from my house, you and the poor sap Emil tried to take me for a ride, and when Frank got me out of it, you had Loman track us. He was good, too good for Frank in the end. Now he and his mum are in a cardboard box in Girona. .’ to my surprise, I heard my voice crack ‘. . and your old man’s the Home bloody Secretary!’ I glared at Justin. ‘No wonder you weren’t too keen to help us in Barcelona.’

Occasionally, very occasionally, there are silences that you think you can touch, as if a glass bubble has encased you, one that no noise can penetrate. One of those had formed in that drawing room. The Mayfields sat, stunned. I sat, exhausted. Mark sat, recovered but waiting.

And then Justin shattered that almost palpable bubble of silence into a million shards. ‘Primavera, Primavera,’ he sighed, ‘that was brilliant, it was sad, and it was deeply moving, but it was also very, very wrong. I love my wife dearly, but you identified the flaw in your own argument. Ludo is indeed as intellectually limited as her late father was. She isn’t capable of coming up with a scheme like that.’

‘Then who did? You?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that sort of imagination either. But Frank did; your cousin, my pal. The whole project was his idea, from start to finish.’

‘Come on,’ I shouted, outraged by his attempt to smear the dead. ‘He didn’t have access to those Energi funds.’

‘No, but I told him about the company’s problems, and what it would mean for us when it collapsed, losing the house and maybe even my career going down the toilet.’

‘But you dropped Frank as a friend, after he was jailed.’

‘Who told you that? No, let me guess. He did.’

‘In the Hotel Arts,’ I countered, ‘he had to threaten you to get in to see you.’

‘Gretchen Roberts, you mean?’

I nodded.

‘There’s no such person; that was for your benefit.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I didn’t exactly flaunt our friendship, but Frank was always my best mate. He was the only person I’d ever have told about Ludo’s problems. A couple of weeks after I did, he came back to me and set out the whole scheme. The only difference from your account was that he said it would be legal. He did it all. Ludo didn’t set up the company in Luxembourg, he did. . as its records will prove.’ I looked at Mark quickly, then back at Justin. ‘Ludo didn’t hire any security people; Frank did that. But that was much later in the day: I’m not sure when. The first we knew of them was when he sent them to a meeting Ludo had in Seville, with Caballero. As for Macela, he didn’t recruit Frank; Frank recruited him. Hermann Gresch is a name I’ve never heard until now. We knew nothing about the man’s background, only that Frank vouched for him. As for a meeting in Luxembourg with the man you called Loman, that’s news to me also. I can’t think why that would have happened.’

‘When the project got under way,’ I said, ‘Frank took a false identity and still you thought it would be legal?’

‘He’d been in prison. How would that have looked to investors?’

‘So what was Macela’s role?’ I demanded.

‘To be on the ground, showing the project to investors who chose to visit Seville, but he turned out to be useless, because of his addiction.’

‘Frank told me that Macela controlled the money as it came in.’

‘Nonsense. Frank controlled everything. I was amazed by him, by the level at which he operated, but it was all of his creation.’

‘No,’ I protested. ‘No. I’m not having it.’ I jabbed a finger in his wife’s direction. ‘You’re trying to save her skin.’

‘No, and I’ll prove it. You still don’t know who Alastair Rowland is, do you?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

He smiled again. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I signed the funds-transfer order that the Luxembourg lawyers received, and I used the company seal to do it.’ He rose, walked over to a sideboard, and took something from it, then returned and handed it to me. It was blue, metal, hinged and heavy, a stamping device, and its base held a carved round symbol. I’d never seen one before, but I knew what it was.

‘That was why Frank came to the hotel. When we were together on the club floor, before you came up to join us, he gave it to me, to keep it safe, and so that I could move the money into an account he’d set up. Our meeting was prearranged, before his mother went missing. If only he’d accepted my offer of help and not gone storming off, he’d still be alive, and so might she.’

Begged questions were being thrown at me as fast as I could process them. ‘But if you still thought it was kosher, didn’t the funds transfer seem odd?’

‘Not at all. The plan always was to move the money out of Luxembourg before construction started, into a better tax environment. So I signed the transfer, to a bank in the Cayman Islands.’

‘Hold on. Let’s go back. When Frank had to disappear, didn’t that alert you that all wasn’t well?’

‘It concerned me, I’ll grant you, but he told us that he believed that his real identity had been blown and that he had to fade away, into the background. With him out of the picture, and Macela pretty much helpless, there was no choice but that Ludo should become Bromberg again.’

‘And that she should film my house?’ I sneered. Yes, I actually did sneer; I felt my lip curl.

‘Frank asked me to do that,’ Ludmila murmured, ‘on one of my trips to Spain. He said he was considering hiding out with you but wanted to see how secure your place looked.’

‘Where was he hiding at that time?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Why? Where were you?’

‘Most of the time I was in London. Calls to the land-line number in Seville were diverted to my mobile. Like when you called me. If I had to see someone I always gave myself a couple of days to get there.’

‘And you and Caballero kidnapping me? I imagined that, did I?’

‘Frank told me to do it. He said his security people had gone bad on him, that his mother had been kidnapped, and that you were in danger. He said we had to do something to get you out of the way, but to make it look convincing to those men so that they’d lay off you. So I recruited Caballero to help me: I told him that you were a conwoman trying to fleece us, and the clown believed me.’

‘But, Ludmila, you still can’t sit down comfortably,’ I pointed out. ‘Remember what happened to you.’

‘I did not expect that,’ she admitted. ‘But Frank called me afterwards, full of remorse, and said that the whole thing had had to be as realistic as possible.’

‘That’s why he and I spent a little longer on our own in Barcelona than he’d expected,’ Justin added. ‘I didn’t like that either. Frank and I were having it out, while you were waiting downstairs.’

‘Jesus,’ I whispered, apologising mentally to Him and to Gerard. The more I thought about it, the more I was coming, if not to believe them, then at least to see their account as a possibility. But there were still holes in it. ‘Who gave you the gun?’ I asked Ludmila.

‘Frank did. It was loaded with blanks, wasn’t it?’ She looked at me nervously, and this time I did accept that her ignorance was genuine, since Caballero had said more or less the same thing.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘It shot a very convincing hole in the upholstery of your friend’s car.’ I winced. ‘That little bugger should have kept the damn thing, instead of chucking it in the flames when he burned Caballero’s toys in that barn.’

‘He set his bikes on fire?’

‘Yes, but it did no good. None of it did. Sebastian and Willie got him in the end, and his poor old mum.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘The money?’ I asked.

‘Gone,’ said Justin, with a huge sigh. ‘Moved on from the Cayman bank, blind transfer; we don’t know where it is now, and we never will.’

‘When did this happen?’

He told me the date. I made a quick mental calculation. ‘The day after he was abducted,’ I said. ‘They must have forced him to transfer it again, then killed him.’

‘Poor little bastard.’ I’d cried all mine, but the Home Secretary was on the verge of tears. ‘It was meant to be legal,’ he said, ‘I promise. As soon as we’d secured some additional funds through bank borrowing, the casino would have been built. As soon as the ground was broken, Energi investment would have quadrupled in value.’

‘So why did both Lidia and Rowland vanish from the face of the earth?’

‘We had to, as soon as the money went missing. I’d just been offered the post of Home Secretary: I couldn’t be seen to be involved in any scandal.’

‘But an investigation will be bound to lead to Ludmila.’

‘But not to Lidia. Energi will be. . no, Energi is just another victim of theft. You say fraud, but still I don’t believe it. The money was honestly, if unconventionally raised, and stolen by the people who killed Frank and his mother.’

I knew that I’d like to go along with that explanation, but I wasn’t ready to tell him. ‘And you two? What happens to you?’ I asked, not particularly kindly.

‘We move house, or I buy it from the family trust before it implodes. I’d hoped to hang on to my job, but when those Luxembourg records become public, I’ll be stuffed. My signature’s there.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ Mark intervened. He told him about the robbery. ‘Would I find MI5’s fingerprints all over that, by any chance?’ he added.

Justin blinked, several times. ‘If they knew of this operation. .’ he murmured. (Mark and I could have told him they did, and how. That explained a lot about the hard line the security-service woman had taken with us: not just a minister to protect, but maybe a government if the scandal was messy enough.) ‘But I didn’t authorise it, I promise you.’

I thought about that for a while. ‘If I accept all of that,’ I said slowly, ‘it means we’re the only people who know of your involvement. Caballero can identify Ludmila as Lidia Bromberg, but he’s more concerned with political rehabilitation right now. Anyway, he’d never make the connection.’

‘I suppose it does,’ Justin agreed. ‘So. .’

I beat him to the question. ‘So what do we want? Only one thing. There’s a woman in the security service who made some very nasty threats against me, and Mr Kravitz, here, my associate. She called herself Moira; blonde, early thirties, rat faced. I want her told to forget that she’s ever heard of us.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ the Home Secretary promised.

‘In that case,’ I told him, ‘good luck with your career, and God help the country.’