A Murder of Magpies (14 page)

I couldn't see where to go with this. The only person I could think to speak to was his landlady, Gloria Ramsay, Ian's Jesus Saves lady. Then Ian hung up and said, “No, she hasn't seen him since we all left.” So much for that.

Although, wait a minute. I turned to Oliver. “If that's the case, surely it casts doubt on the information she gave you? If she hadn't seen Davies for the past two years, it's hardly surprising if she didn't see Kit, either.”

Nick interrupted. “But wait a minute. The police investigated, too. They must have known he didn't live there.”

“I don't know. Maybe they did, and didn't tell you.” I made a mental note to ask Jake to check. If my mother could ask him to run errands, why not me? Then I thought about his voice-mail message again. Did I want to ask him a favor? Did I want him to know I'd been talking to people on my own?

Did I know what I wanted?

*   *   *

I called my mother as I left the LSD. She wouldn't be able help me with the last question, even were I to lose my mind and ask her, but I thought we needed to pool our notes. She agreed, and when I got to her house at ten, she was sitting in the kitchen surrounded by papers, with a cup of coffee in her hand, as I'd seen her so often before when she was in the middle of preparing a case. This time it was my case, and Jake was sitting next to her: more papers, more coffee.

Helena's kitchen is the best room in her house. It has a red-tiled floor, bright yellow walls, a wooden table covered with a Provencal cloth. It should have been gaudy enough to need sunglasses, but it isn't—somehow it's just cheery. It always feels like the sun is shining there, even when it hadn't for days, or now, when it had been dark for five hours in the long English winter evenings. I dropped into a seat, poured some coffee for myself and nodded to both of them, pretending that I hadn't had Jake's message.

Jake had looked up only briefly anyway. He was shuffling through a pile of documents my mother had just given him. “Can you précis this for me, Nell? What have we got?”

“The manuscript makes for very interesting reading.” She slanted a look at me. “Much better than I'd expected. The legal implications are fascinating.”

My mother can say stuff like that with a straight face. “And for those of us who aren't interested in corporate law?”

She was serene. “You should be. Everyone should be. For one thing, Robert Marks is even thicker than I thought. This one should have sent alarm bells ringing at Selden's by page ten.”

Jake looked alert. I looked confused.

“Come on, Nell,” he coaxed, “let us have it.”

I squinted at him. He was treating my mother like his new best friend, and leaving suggestive messages for her daughter. It was only with difficulty I dragged my attention back to what Helena was saying.

“There is the money laundering that Kit picked up, mostly involving shadow companies in Eastern Europe, and a few in the Far East, which are invoicing for nonexistent goods. That he's got, and it's all very straightforward. But he missed the money laundering at home, although he's a good enough journalist that he collected all the evidence. He just didn't recognize it for what it was.”

I thought Jake was going to lunge across the table and shake the information out of her. I intervened. I'd had enough violence for a while. “What is it? Where? I didn't see anything.”

“No, dear. That's because you're one of those who aren't interested in corporate law.” I could see she was getting to it, so I made a shushing gesture to Jake.

She turned to him herself. “Have you spoken to NCIS?”

This was irritating. Now it was making sense to him, and I still had no idea what was going on.

“NCIS?” I asked neutrally, to the space between them.

“The National Criminal Investigation Services,” he translated for me. “It's a joint investigatory body—police and Revenue and Customs—to probe anything that might involve money laundering. It gets reports from banks and lawyers on questionable transactions, which it then follows up.”

I understood the bank part, but lawyers? Who turns in their own clients? If you were honest and thought a client was crooked, then you didn't act for them. If you were crooked yourself, then you weren't going to turn the client in. Either way, it didn't make any sense.

My mother picked up my unspoken question. “Solicitors are legally culpable if their clients are laundering money.”

“Of course they are, if they help them.…” I began.

My mother smiled bitterly. “No, it's more than that. The burden of proof was shifted. Now the criteria is not if the solicitor knew, but if the solicitor
should
have known. In other words, if you're an innocent, a naïve, or just plain bad at your job, and you've been hoodwinked by a clever and unscrupulous client, it's too bad for you. You go to jail, too.”

“So if you've acted for someone who has been handling dirty money—even if you didn't know where it came from—” I looked inquiringly at my mother for help.

She nodded crisply. “If you were my client, and came to me simply to buy a house, but used tainted funds, if I did the conveyancing for you on the house, then it's off to jail for me. Which means that solicitors report their clients to NCIS. Who then investigate. If there's nothing there, the client never knows. If the solicitor fails to report a dubious client, his bank probably will, and if NCIS finds evidence of money laundering, then…”

I was triumphant. “Then you end up with Kenneth Wright.”

My mother and Jake both looked at me as if I were a toddler they had been indulging, who had suddenly started reciting Hamlet's soliloquies.

Jake spoke first. “Kenneth Wright? Who is he?”

I was proud of myself. “He does the UK property deals for Vernet.”

Helena was peeved. Solicitor Land was her territory. “Where did you hear about him?”

I told them about my conversation with Selden's.

My mother looked thoughtful. “Cooper's. That does surprise me. They're extremely respectable. There's never been a hint of a problem for them. You say he's not with them now, and working on his own?”

I wasn't going to put too much faith in Selden's. “So Littlewood said. I don't know more than that.”

Jake was getting impatient. “What are we saying here?”

“We're saying NCIS should be looking at Wright. Cooper's are very big, very prestigious. It's unusual that someone should leave them to set up in a small way on his own. Put that together with the fact that Vernet's property deals in this country were unnecessarily complex.…”

She seemed to feel she had said enough, but Jake made a rolling motion with his hand, keep going.

“It's straightforward. Kit writes that before the Regent Street shop was bought, three deals failed. It's the oldest and easiest way to launder money: make an offer on a property, put the dirty money in a solicitor's escrow account, abort the deal, and then the money comes back, fresh and clean from a reputable solicitor's bank account. And,” she sat up at the thought, “
and
if it was coming from Cooper's, no one would ever think to look further—not even NCIS—you just can't get more respectable than that. Kit didn't realize what was going on, so he didn't follow it up, but Vernet was opening boutiques in ridiculous places, then discovering that the market wasn't there, and closing them again. It doesn't take a genius to know that you can't sell £4,000 dresses in places like Bradford. But if there were three or four aborted deals for every piece of property purchased, then Vernet were washing tens of millions of pounds in Britain alone every year. Multiply by all the countries they were operating in. The stuff Kit found on the false invoices was nothing—probably just a little sideline. The real money was coming from the property.”

I thought I'd better add in the rest. “Did you speak to Diego Alemán?”

Jake looked at me blandly, and made a noncommittal noise. It would have been nice if information were a two-way street, but then, I didn't expect him to tell me how to edit books.

“Did he tell you he'd worked for Intinvest?”

Jake stopped looking bland.

“I met him at a party on Sunday—totally by chance, he's the student of a friend of mine who teaches at Birkbeck.” I didn't expect him to believe me, but I also didn't care. “He was working for Intinvest in Paris, and plans to go back to them this summer.” I paused, then added, as though I was merely thinking aloud. “He said he was in IT. I have no idea what that means in his case, but I assume that that's how money gets transferred?”

Jake sat staring at the table, working the implications through.

I kept quiet and watched him. After a minute he nodded sharply once to himself, and went down the hall to make some calls privately.

I was still of two minds about nagging Jake to get the police to look at Kit's file again. Bringing the harassment to their notice again seemed like a bad idea, doing nothing seemed like a bad idea. Which was worse? I had no idea, and decided to hang fire for the moment. Instead I told Helena about the LSD, more to keep her amused than anything else. The Jesus Saves lady made her laugh, which I had known it would, and we sat catching up on more mundane matters until Jake came back. He was pulling on his coat.

He looked at me. “I'll drive you home.”

What could I say:
Look, I haven't made up my mind, and it's raining and nearly midnight, so thanks, but I'd rather walk?

We drove the mile and a half in silence. When we got to my house Jake pulled over and cut the engine. I stared out the window.

“Whatever you want,” he said.

I kept staring. This was absurd. I wasn't an adolescent, and I wasn't making a lifetime commitment. The man didn't want to marry me, he wanted to fuck me. And, despite the fact that nice men find it more comfortable to think that nice women don't jump into bed with men they've just met and don't have long-term plans for, nice women sometimes do. They definitely sometimes do.

Jake put his hand on the back of my neck and waited silently, gently rubbing behind my ear.

The car was very small suddenly, and airless.

I opened the door. “Let's go,” I said.

 

8

Jake was up and gone by the time I woke up. Well, actually, he was up and gone by the time I stopped pretending to be asleep. I really didn't want to talk to him. I had no idea where this could go. If it had been awful, or even just dull, then it was easy—thanks a lot, it was great, but I don't think so. But it hadn't. And from what Jake had said last night, he was one of those nice men who didn't think women should be slept with and then dropped. He wasn't looking for a just a couple of fun weeks, which would also have been easy. Casual, very enjoyable sex was one thing, but could I see myself having a relationship with a policeman? I didn't think so. But how could I say that? I had no idea, so I pretended to be asleep. Which was fine for the moment, but unless I developed narcolepsy it wouldn't work for long.

I lay with my eyes firmly closed, lying still until I heard the door bang and his car start. The second it did I leaped out of bed and roared through shower, dressing, and coffee, setting the land-speed record in the process on the way to the office. The last refuge of the intelligentsia: when real life gets too difficult, go find something to read.

I was halfway there before I realized what day it was. I was supposed to be in Paris for Vernet's show that afternoon. The whole trip was ludicrous. Kit and I had planned it for fun. Now he was missing and there was no point anymore. Miranda had set up this meeting with Loïc, and I had my train tickets, but neither of those things justified five hours in a train. I stood, undecided. Then I realized that if I went, at least I'd be out of meaningful conversation distance with Jake for a bit longer. Decision made, I raced up to my office, grabbed the tickets, left a note for Miranda, and thundered back down the stairs. Hurtling through the reception area I saw the student from the LSD—the thin, not-very-clean one who had taken me to Nick's office. He was talking to Bernadette, and I had practically mown him down before I stopped.

“Hi. Are you looking for me?” I looked at my watch as I spoke. I could get to St. Pancras in half an hour—twenty minutes if I was lucky. I should make it.

He took a hurried step back, as though my momentum had unbalanced him. “No. That is—” He turned to Bernie. “Thanks very much. It's OK. I was mistaken.” And he bolted.

Bernie and I stared at the door, then at each other. “Was it something I said? Or something you said?”

Bernie shrugged. “He was asking if you were in all day. He said he didn't have an appointment. I was just telling him we don't keep track of the staff.” She snorted at the idea of even trying. “Then you came back and—”

“Did he leave a name?” Maybe he knew something about Davies.

Bernie shook her head.

“Well, if he comes back, nab him and get a contact number. Frisk him if you have to. I really want to talk to him.”

She looked slightly sick at the idea, but I knew she'd do what she could. I didn't have time to deal with it now, anyway, and headed back out the door.

I made it with five minutes to spare, which meant that the staff at the station were giving everyone those
don't you realize how privileged you are to travel on my nice shiny train, and here you are putting me to all this trouble
looks. I ignored them. If you paid attention to all the put-upon people in England, you'd never have time to be put-upon yourself, which would take all the fun out of things.

The compartment was jammed, but once we had left the station I prowled down the corridor and found that, as usual, they'd put everyone in two carriages to minimize the work for the staff. The rest of the train was empty. I moved, ignoring the huffs of annoyance and giving my best Helena Junior stare. Then I settled down to read the morning's crop of e-mails and submissions.