Deadly Business

Sixteen

Once we reached the Edinburgh Park office complex, the headquarters of Torrent PLC was pretty easy to spot. It wasn’t the four-storey building itself, although it was classier than most of its neighbours in that it was faced in stone; no, it was the towering pole in front of it, with a bloody great ‘T’ on top, visible from a mile away.

We parked in the visitors’ area and my driver and I went inside, into a square atrium, with glass walls looking down on it from the floors above. The reception desk was set in the middle; I announced myself to the young man who was stationed there.

He nodded. ‘Miss Morgan is expecting you. If you’d sign yourselves in, please …’

I signed for both of us. The lad tore slips from each form and fitted them into plastic cases, then handed them to us. ‘We like you to wear these all the time you’re in the building. Health and Safety, you understand.’ I didn’t, but I nodded anyway. He handed me a key card. ‘You’ll find the lifts behind the desk. Take the one on the left, it goes all the way up. Put the card in the slot you’ll find there, then press the button.’

I wondered why they both didn’t go all the way up, but found out pretty soon. Natalie Morgan’s office suite was on the roof of the building, out of sight of the car park, built around the glass ceiling of the atrium. Another young man met us as the lift opened. ‘Mrs Blackstone.’ He frowned. ‘Miss Morgan is only expecting one visitor.’

I smiled, sweetly. ‘And my driver is expecting to wait in an anteroom. It’s what drivers do, isn’t it?’

‘Of course.’ He chuckled. ‘If you’ll follow me, please.’

We did, along a corridor with a door at the end, facing us, and a low sofa outside. ‘If you’ll just take a wee seat there, sir,’ our escort said, as he opened the heavy wooden door for me. It seemed to be the only upright surface that wasn’t made of glass. (I must explain that it’s a Scottish peculiarity, that in my home nation you are never simply offered a seat. It’s always ‘a wee seat’. It doesn’t matter how small you are, or how large, or on the dimensions of the furniture in question; it’s always ‘a wee seat’.)

Natalie didn’t stand as I entered. She leaned back in her very big seat and smiled at me, a look of triumph as naked as she had been last time I’d looked at her. And yet there was something else there too, a question that she couldn’t quite pin down.

‘Come to hand over the keys to the kingdom?’ she asked.

I didn’t wait to be offered a chair, I sat down facing her. ‘I thought we should meet,’ I replied. ‘Imagine my surprise when I found that we had already.’

‘Indeed. Maybe you think I should apologise for my small deception in Diego’s office. If so, tough; apology is not my style.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t give a toss,’ I said. ‘I would like a drink, though. It’s going on lunchtime.’ I glanced at a wine fridge in the corner. ‘White wine, slightly dry, that would be nice.’

Natalie gazed down her nose at me. ‘If you wish. I might even join you.’

She rose, walked across to the cooler and took out a bottle; Fransola, by Torres, I saw from the damp label. It had been opened but it was kept fresh by a pressure cap. She poured two glasses, and handed me one. The bitch had legs to die for, and clearly she was committed to figure-hugging clothes.

She eased herself back into her swivelling seat. ‘You must be pretty close to setting a record,’ she murmured, ‘for the shortest period of office of a company chair.’

‘I’ll be there until my successor is appointed,’ I pointed out. ‘That can’t happen overnight. You still have minority shareholders to buy out.’

‘I take it the Gantry board will recommend against acceptance.’

‘We’ve still to reach a consensus on that. I’m against, of course, and so is Audrey Kent, but my colleagues are still considering their position. Have you had any other acceptances yet?’

‘It’s a little early for that.’ She frowned, very briefly, but it was her first sign of anything short of total confidence.

‘You’re still working on it, aren’t you?’ I said.

‘Working? On what?’

‘On how I knew before I walked in here that Kim Coates was actually you, given that you seem to be very camera-shy. Your face doesn’t appear in any of Torrent’s corporate brochures, and when I trawled the internet I couldn’t find a single photograph.’ I reached into my bag, took out a print of Liam’s image and tossed it across to her. ‘That’s how.’

She picked up the image, and as she realised what it was, her eyes widened then she frowned again, full force, for real. ‘What the hell is this?’ she hissed.

‘What does it bloody look like? What I don’t understand, Natalie, is … why the hell didn’t the idiot bother to close the curtains? Do you like it in the daylight, is that it? Can you fake it either way?’

‘You cow! I could go to the police with this.’

‘What makes you think I haven’t?’ I shot back. ‘You and Culshaw, with the aid of his ageing and gullible uncle, have conspired to cheat the majority shareholders of the Gantry Group into accepting an offer for the business that undervalues it ridiculously. And he’s gone further; the people he’s cheated are my son’s sister and brother, by committing their controlling interest to you at that price.’

‘Oh really,’ she blustered. ‘Don’t be so fanciful.’

‘Don’t give me that!’ I shouted at her. ‘I bloody know, okay! And what makes me even angrier is that I also know I’ll never be able to prove it! I’m angry because I’ve spent some time as a guest of Her Majesty, and I would so enjoy sending you to do the same. So think on that, madam chairin-waiting, as you’re running the merged company with not much more than the percentage you have already. My guys and I haven’t reached a recommendation to minority shareholders, because that’s pretty much us now. My partner has an investment, Phil Culshaw and Gerry Meek have private holdings, Buddy Beaujean, my Texan support, he has a sizeable chunk. When you add them to my son’s twenty-six per cent … and he has said, Natalie, without my coercion that he’d rather stick hot needles in my eyes than sell to you … we will have a block that’s big enough to be a fucking spear in your side, never mind a thorn.’

‘And I don’t care,’ she yelled back, ‘because I’ve got it. Susie Gantry’s business, bloody Oz Blackstone’s business is under my control; my only regret is that they’re not here to see it! I’d have loved that even more. I don’t care about the company; all I want to do is wipe it off the face of the earth. I hated Oz for what he did to me, when I was with Ewan Capperauld! But for him, nobody would ever have known about it, but he spilled the beans and caused the chaos that followed. Then when I tried to get even with my first takeover bid, he got in the way of that too.’

She had so lost it that I thought for a second she was going to spit at me. ‘As for Susie,’ she hissed, ‘little miss perfect? Businesswoman of the Year three times? Sure, thanks to her sucking every dick in Glasgow to get the votes! Well, let them fucking rot, the pair of them, because finally I’ve had a day of my own against them!’

She was out of her seat, leaning across the desk, glaring at me, eyes like organ stops.

‘Sit down, Natalie,’ I told her quietly. ‘You’ve made your points; some of them might even be the truth. Now just tell me, how long have you been using Duncan to hatch these plots of yours? Because they weren’t his alone, that’s for sure. He’s not the sharpest tack in the box. The exposé book about Oz for example; I’ll bet that was your idea all along.’

‘Okay, I’ll give you that one,’ she conceded. ‘You want to know? Is your mobile switched off?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to fall for that one the way he did.’ I took it out of my bag, showed it to her, then laid it on her desk. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘then I’ll tell you, for it isn’t going to do you any good. Duncan and I have been a couple for a few years, but we kept it quiet.’

‘How did you get together?’ I asked.

‘He did some writing for me. I fancied him, and it went on from there. He is a bit of a stud, I must tell you; his sword is mightier than his pen, and no mistake. We didn’t make a noise about it, though, because I didn’t want old Phil to know. The last time I tried to take over the Gantry Group, when Oz got in the way, Phil helped him stop me.’

‘Are you telling me you were using the guy as a weapon all along?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I didn’t have that in mind at the start. But when Phil introduced him to Susie, and he told me that she’d made a flat-out play for him, I thought, “why the hell not?” so I told him what I wanted him to do. At first, all I’d thought about was getting some revenge in general. Yes, the book was my idea; I know that Oz was no lily-white, and don’t you try to deny it, Primavera, so do you. But it was meant to embarrass Susie, that was all. Using it to extort cash from you, that was all Duncan’s stupid idea. I don’t know why, but Duncan hates your kid; that’s where it came from, why he did it.’

She paused for a couple of seconds. ‘Yes, I know, it was stupid; I went ballistic when he told me, I almost chucked him out, I was so mad. He backed off from Susie, thinking you’d be bound to tell her, then, just a couple of weeks later, Phil told him that she was ill, very seriously ill, maybe even terminally, and that he’d be pretty much running Gantry for a while.’

‘Was that when you came up with the Babylon Links scheme?’

Natalie smiled, her self-confidence and self-satisfaction restored. She nodded. ‘I’d owned the land for years. My Uncle James bought it for a song from a friend who needed some cash. He was a secretive sod, was old James; in particular he wasn’t a big fan of inheritance tax, and did everything he could to avoid it. He salted away all sorts of assets in offshore companies, mainly Monsoon, using a nominee shareholder, usually Diego Fabricant. They all came to me when he died. Some I disposed of, but the Monsoon Holdings land was pretty much useless, so I was stuck with it.’

She sipped some wine and gazed at me, across her desk. ‘There are some big advantages in looking like me,’ she said. ‘Probably the biggest is that people focus on one’s body without even considering one’s mind. But in business that can work against you, especially when you find yourself running a major company in your twenties as I did. That’s why you didn’t find my image on any of my corporate literature: I don’t want it to affect perceptions of Torrent PLC. You must know this, Primavera; you’ve probably experienced it yourself. Little Susie, on the other hand, not being quite so gifted in the looks department, found it much more easy to be taken seriously as a businesswoman. You with me?’

I nodded; I couldn’t disagree with her.

‘What I’m saying is that I really am very bright. I think even you will concede that Babylon Links was a masterstroke. When I heard of Susie’s illness, I knew that Gantry had to be vulnerable. But it was still too big for me to swallow without conceding a substantial slice of the ownership of Torrent. In other words, I couldn’t do the deal for cash alone, there would have had to be shares involved, diluting my one hundred per cent ownership. So I wondered, “With Susie gone for a while at least, can I find a way to destabilise Gantry’s share price?” and that’s when the golf development was born, a joint venture, my land, their cash, and great wedges of it, without anyone ever knowing that I was involved because the true ownership of Monsoon is untraceable. Brilliant, yes?’

‘Clearly so,’ I conceded. ‘It’s worked, even if that owes a lot to poor old Phil being suckered by his nephew.’

‘He was one of Susie’s bigger mistakes,’ she said. ‘I knew from Duncan that the old man has never got over his wife’s death. He goes home every night, gets drunk and talks to her across the dinner table, as if she was still there. Do you ever do that with Oz?’ she asked, suddenly. ‘Did Susie?’ She laughed. ‘Did the two of you ever get the ouija board out and try to summon up his shade?’

There’s something hypnotic about Natalie Morgan. As I’d listened to her, I’d been drawn into what she was saying, seeing the sense and logic of it. With that last vindictive taunt she blew it all. But I bided my time.

‘Still,’ I countered, ‘it was a long shot, was it not?’

‘Not at all,’ she insisted. ‘The way it was set up, once Phil had taken the Gantry Group in he couldn’t get it out. The damage was done. Then Duncan had a message from Susie, via Phil. She said that she didn’t have long to go, that she didn’t know why he’d left her … that was the first time we knew that you hadn’t shopped him … and that she wanted him back. So I told him to go to her. I saw the way to complete control and now I have it.’

‘The marriage was your idea?’ I asked.

‘Of course. It was really handy being so close to Nevada, where you can do the deed in a couple of hours if you really want to. Viva Las Vegas, eh? As it turned out, Duncan made it work just in time. To be honest, I didn’t think Susie would be silly enough to defy the medical advice and fly all that way.’

‘No. You’d have thought the loving husband would have put his foot down and forbidden her.’

She shot me the archest of looks. ‘Oh, please,’ she chuckled. Then she winked at me. ‘You weren’t anticipated, I admit. I was astonished when you popped out of the woodwork on Monday as the new chair. You of all people, the woman whose husband the little slapper stole.’

I laughed, so heartily that she was taken aback. ‘Yes, she was good at that, wasn’t she?’ I rose from my chair, and headed for the door. ‘I think it’s time my driver joined us,’ I told her, over my shoulder.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she called after me.

I ignored her and opened the door; my driver stepped through it and into the room. As he did, he took off the grey German officer cap he’d been wearing, and the big Vuarnet sunglasses that had covered half his face. ‘I don’t think you’ve met my brother-in-law,’ I said, ‘but you may know him by sight. He’s not as reticent as you are when it comes to cameras. Did you get that, Miles?’ I asked.

‘Every word of it,’ he replied. ‘Good quality.’

‘I’ll call security,’ Natalie threatened.

Miles hook his head. ‘Don’t do that. There’s a guy downstairs in the lobby by now; he won’t let them anywhere near here … unless you have half a dozen or so, in which case he’ll only delay them for a while.’

I resumed my seat, picked up my wine glass, and took my first sip. ‘Ouch,’ I murmured. ‘It’s a shame to treat a fine wine like that. You should use nitrogen storage; prevents oxidisation.’

Natalie stared at me; she’d run out of words, temporarily.

I nodded. ‘Yes, you really are very bright, aren’t you? Sixty watt at least.’ I picked up my mobile from the desk. ‘Yes, this is my phone,’ I said, ‘and it really is switched off.’ Then I produced another from my bag. ‘This is my boyfriend’s, and it isn’t.’

Miles produced a third from his jacket. ‘This is my nephew Tom’s phone.’ And a fourth. ‘This is mine; your entire conversation is recorded on it.’

She sat there, pale but fierce. ‘And what are you going to do with it?’ she challenged.

‘Are you kidding?’ he laughed. ‘I’m going to see the friendly local police force, honey, and I’m going to play it to them.’

‘And what exactly will they do?’ she snorted. ‘Tell me what law I’ve broken.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s this one. It’s rare, I’m sure, so rare they’ve probably never had a case before, but it sure as hell has to be illegal somewhere.’

He grinned as he eased himself into a chair, beside mine. ‘When Primavera told me yesterday morning what had gone down with Susie, and what she guessed was going to happen, she asked me to confirm that she and Duncan had actually been married, legally and above board. So I had an employee call the Clark Country marriage registration office and run a check. The person there did a computer search for the name Duncan Culshaw, and sure enough, there it was, he and Susie Gantry, Mr and Mrs.’

He gazed at her. When it comes to hypnotic looks, Natalie was an amateur compared to him; she couldn’t break away.

‘Trouble was,’ he continued softly, ‘the name was coughed out twice. Same man, same blood group, same nationality, same passport number, married in Las Vegas four years three months and five days ago to Miss Natalie Morgan, of Edinburgh, Scotland. Legally recorded, and never annulled in the great state of Nevada, nor, I will bet you, anywhere else. You didn’t have time, did you? Susie was so ill that you took the chance and let Duncan go ahead and tie the double knot.’

She shrunk, visibly, into the big chair. When she looked at me, she wasn’t super-confident, arrogant Natalie any more, she was just a scared lady.

‘I have all the paperwork, copies of every document,’ Miles told her. ‘There’s a warrant out in Vegas for Culshaw even now. I’ve got no doubt the Edinburgh police will issue one for you as soon as we’ve seen them, for conspiracy, by encouraging your lawful husband to commit bigamy. After that, they’ll see how many other laws you’ve broken.’

‘And as for your takeover bid,’ I added, ‘that is royally fucked, if you’ll excuse my Catalan. Since Duncan and Susie’s marriage was never legal, he can never have been Janet and wee Jonathan’s stepfather, so he can’t have committed their shares in your support. We’ve already been to see Susie’s executor. He’ll have called the cops himself by now, Natalie, and set them on your husband. You’re next, just one phone call away.’

She picked up her wine and drained it. I pushed the rest of mine across the desk, and she did that in too. She looked out of the window for a while, then back at me. ‘What’s the way out?’ she asked.

‘What makes you think there is one, lady?’ Miles drawled.

‘There’s always a way out,’ she replied, ‘if you look for it.’

‘Why should we want to?’ I asked.

‘But you do,’ she countered, ‘otherwise you’d have made that one phone call by now. What do you want?’

I looked at Miles; he nodded. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Here it is. You make the phone call; not to the police but to Diego Fabricant, instructing him to agree to the winding up of Babylon Links PLC and to return the Gantry Group’s cash. Next, you announce this afternoon that you’ve dropped your takeover bid. All this happens before we leave this building. Agreed?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. Relatively cheap at the price, I suppose.’

‘Ah,’ I continued, ‘but I’m not done yet. Tomorrow morning you’ll receive a counter-offer for Torrent PLC from an American venture capital fund. Its owner is a significant shareholder in Gantry, who’ll be very happy by then, since he’ll have made a tidy gain on his investment yesterday. You were out to pick up our company for about one-third of its real value. This offer will be generous by comparison. It’ll offer you fifty per cent of yours.’

‘What?’ she gasped. ‘Do you expect me to accept that?’

‘Yes,’ Miles said. ‘Absolutely. I’ve looked at your accounts. I pulled them from Companies House before we drove through here. They’re wide open; Torrent PLC is significantly overvalued, and its assets are a lot less than people think they are. It doesn’t even own this building; that belongs to the same offshore company that owns your house, and you own that, so you’re out of sympathy. Fifty per cent is okay, so when my friend Buddy’s offer is on the table, if you don’t accept it, we walk away, you go to jail, your client base evaporates, you go bust and the liquidator comes after you for your private wealth. You’re not as smart as you thought you were, Miss Morgan, but you ain’t stupid either. You’ll still be left with a few million. I think it’s crazy to let you go, but it’s what’s Primavera wants; I’d have turned you in without a second thought. Deal or no deal? You have five seconds.’

‘Deal,’ she sighed. She looked shell-shocked.

So, why had I asked Miles to let her off lightly? Let’s just say I’m a kind person at heart. Within limits. ‘One final condition,’ I told her. ‘When we leave here, you do not get in touch with Duncan. I know where he is, or at least where he’s going, and the pleasure of breaking the great news to him has to be all mine.’

I poured the last of the tainted Fransola into one of the glasses and we left her there, to dwell at length upon the speed with which the world can be turned upside down by a single reckless act driven by over-confidence.

‘What she said, about Susie,’ Miles murmured as we walked towards the lift. ‘About how she got those business awards. That wasn’t true, was it?’

‘Nah!’ I replied. ‘Maybe one or two in her time, but not all of them.’