A Murder of Magpies (20 page)

“Let's talk when you're through.”

“I'll call. Changing the subject, what should I do if I see that guy from the LSD? When I got back to the office yesterday he'd vanished.”

This was not high on Jake's list just at the moment. “Have you seen him today?”

“No, but on the other hand, it is only six thirty in the morning.”

“Stalkers aren't usually worried about the time,” he said dryly.

“A
stalker
? Is that what you think he is?” I wasn't quite sure how I felt about that.

“I don't know what he is, but if he's not following you, I'm not sure what I can do about it. I'm not sure what I can do about it even if he is following you. There's no manpower to get someone to follow you to see who is following you, if you see what I mean. Even if there were, it's not my department. Are you frightened?”

“No more than I have been for the last week. I think I might be too stupid to be afraid.”

Jake ignored that. Sensible. “Keep an eye out for him when you leave Cooper's, and let me know.”

“I will. Just one thing I don't understand.”

“If you've got it narrowed down to one, you're way ahead of me.”

Jake was sounding bleak, and I didn't waste time laughing politely. “It's about the police investigation at the LSD. They decided that there were no grounds for a prosecution in part because Davies' landlady said that she had never seen Kit, and Davies had claimed he was hanging around outside the flat.”

“So?”

“Well, according to the landlady this week, Davies had moved two years before the harassment charge was made. She wouldn't have seen Kit even if Kit was in fact harassing him, for the simple reason that Davies wasn't living there.”

“Are you trying to make a case for the prosecution?”

“Of course not. Don't go official on me. It's odd, and it doesn't fit, and that makes me wonder.”

“If we investigated everything that was odd and didn't fit, you'd never see me at all. Look, don't worry about Davies. Just call me when you leave Cooper's.”

Maybe he was right, and I was fixating. Maybe I just wanted it to mean something because that would give us something to go on. The way it was, we had nothing at all. “Yes, I will, but don't forget I'm going straight to Galway.”

“When will you be home?” He paused. “I would rather have told you this face-to-face but…” He hesitated again.

“What?” I demanded. “Just tell me. You being mysterious is much worse than whatever it is.”

“I don't think so.” He paused, thinking about his words. “A floater was pulled out of the Thames late last night. We think it might be Kit.”

I made an involuntary small noise, the kind you do when someone knocks you flying from behind. I pushed away what he was saying, and tried to grasp at whatever hope there was. “You
think
?”

“It's the right age, sex, height, weight, hair color. From the location the body was found, the river police estimate it went into the river at Chelsea Embankment. Kit was last seen at the Chelsea Arts Club.”

“What does his sister say? Has she identified him?”

“There's nothing for her to identify.”

I understood. “If she doesn't want to—if she—that is, I will, if you want.” I didn't want to, but Kit's sister must be in her seventies. A formal identification of a body that had been in the river for a week might be too much for her.

Jake's voice was harsh. “No. Not that we don't want her to do it. That there's nothing for her to see. The body was caught in the propeller of a boat.” He repeated it, as if I might have failed to understand. “There's nothing to identify.”

I was frozen. Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

Jake was worried. I am rarely silent. “Sam. Are you there?”

I pulled my coat tighter around me, as if that would keep the demons at bay. “Yes. Yes, I'm here. What happens now?”

“We're getting a DNA sample from his sister sent up from Devon. It will take three or four days before we know whether we have a match. In any case, we have a murder investigation, whoever this turns out to be.”

“Murder? He didn't drown?”

“No. A preliminary look says he was knocked out, then strangled. It'll be a while before we get the full picture.”

I waited for him to go on. I was numb.

“If the identification is confirmed, I'll need to talk to you in more detail about Kit's private life: friends, lovers, whatever names you know.”

I stiffened. Turn Kit's private life into newspaper fodder? I calmed myself. Jake was now doing what I'd been furious he'd failed to do when Kit first vanished. “I'll tell you what I can, but I don't know a lot. For such a public man he was very private.”

“I'm sorry. Sorry to tell you like this, too.” Jake turned his head to speak to someone. A muffled voice replied, and there was laughter. He came back on the line. “We don't need to do this yet, not until we get a positive ID. Just think about it. Make a list. I have to go. We'll talk tonight. Do you want to call when you arrive at Gatwick? If I can get away, I'll come and collect you.”

I pulled myself together. I was out of my depth, but even so, I didn't expect him to take time out from a murder investigation to chauffeur me about. “No need. Why don't you come back to the flat when—if—you can? I'll cook something that will keep if you don't get there.”

“It's my job. It's always going to be like this, you know.”

“I'll worry about how I feel about that later. Right now, I'd much rather you find out what happened to Kit than that you take me out to dinner.”

I disconnected from him, and disconnected my emotions. I slid down off the stool. Time to face the suits.

*   *   *

I arrived at Cooper's bang on seven o'clock. There had apparently been a pre-meeting meeting, because everyone at the table had a well-worn look. Jesus. Didn't these people ever sleep? I swiftly compared a prestige City firm's meeting room to Timmins & Ross's grubby version. No chipped melamine table here, no catering-sized coffee machine with burned-smelling coffee belching uncomfortably on a rickety side table. Cooper's didn't go for Selden's attempt at Victorian grandeur, either, settling instead for high-powered ultramodern. Good for them. Black Eames chairs were drawn up to a vast, smoked-glass and chrome table. Glass? My mind, glad of the distraction, skittered away to wonder who cleaned off the smears and marks that glass collects every time you walk past it. Then I looked again at the smooth, sleek creatures sitting there, and decided they didn't make smears. They were a special kind of gleaming super race. Tradition was nodded to with a beautiful Rosenthal coffee set, laid out beside two chrome-plated thermos jugs. Elegance and functionality. They'd got it down pat.

As well as Derek Gascoigne there was a woman introduced as Dara Janes, his assistant, and Michael Eliot, also from Cooper's. You could spot them by their expensive suits, their all-around polish. They were easily separated from two men from NCIS, who were not introduced, and a man who only said he was an observer from Revenue and Customs. They had Marks and Spencer linen suits that hadn't been ironed this side of the millennium, with polyester ties yanked down into tiny crumpled knots to reveal unbuttoned collar buttons. And at the head of the table, looking as elegant as if he had just stepped out of an advertisement in a men's magazine, was Patrick Conway.

He and Gascoigne stood up when I was shown in. Eliot hadn't planned to, but when he saw the way Conway greeted me, he leaped to his feet as though it were natural to him. The NCIS and Revenue men looked up from their files and one acknowledged my entrance by tugging his tie further down his neck.

Conway took my proffered hand in both of his, and made a great fuss of setting out a chair next to his at the end of the table. The NCIS men looked sourly at me, and I couldn't really blame them. If I were them, I would have looked sourly at me, too. I was feeling rather oppressed by Conway's charm. It was too thick, and too overwhelming. Yet he was a clever man, and must know that it—and the small matter of the use of a private jet—would make me wonder what I had that he wanted.

Conway turned to the table. “Well, let's sum up what we've got. You,” he spoke to NCIS, “will hold off taking any further action until we have conducted our own inquiries. If we don't have anything concrete within the next two weeks, then we will turn everything over to you. If what we have we can act upon, we will let you know in advance what it is, and what we plan to do. You can then deal with whatever falls outside our remit.”

The NCIS men conferred briefly, and not too happily.

“Agreed?” prodded Conway, sharply.

“We'd still like to put our own people in,” said the man I'd decided was in charge. It was very obviously an argument that had been going on for some time.

“I've said it over and over”—Conway's accent was thickening, which I assumed meant he wasn't nearly as upset as he wanted to appear—“you can put in your own men in this country, which will immediately become apparent to the entire company, whatever you think. You will then lose us whatever leverage we have, and probably the big fish, while you net the small fry. If that's what you want.…” He threw up his hands, in a highly dramatic picture of a man pushed beyond his patience. I didn't think he was at all. He talked of big fish, but he was the angler, and he was playing his catch very cleverly. I particularly liked the way he'd slipped in the phrase “in this country.” He knew perfectly well that the bulk of his corporation was out of reach of UK law, and he was dangling in front of NCIS the possibility that everything would be snatched from them if they were too precipitate. But he did it elegantly, so they could all pretend that it was not happening.

The NCIS men and their colleagues nodded sourly. They had known that this was where they would end up, but they had wanted their protest on the record. Conway stood again. “Thank you for coming, gentlemen. I appreciate it, and we'll be keeping you up-to-date.”

They were astonished: They had expected to stay. Conway was shepherding them toward the door with a double dose of charm. They didn't like it, but hadn't any option. Interesting. I was supposed to see them, but not know what they had discussed. They were supposed to see me, but not know what Conway was going to talk to me about. I wondered if he knew about me and Jake, whom I assumed was sending any information he thought important back to his colleagues at NCIS. Were we all being played by Conway?

He sat down again, looking pleased with himself. “Well,” he said, “that's the bureaucracy out of the way. Now let's roll up our sleeves and see what we've got.” Conway's tailor would faint at the idea of him rolling up his sleeves: £3,000 suits are not to be fooled with. He turned to me. “We have Diego Alemán coming in shortly, but in the first instance can you run through your conversation with him? It would be helpful to know what triggered his visit.”

I didn't see why not. He'd had the bulk of it already from Gascoigne. “It's not that straightforward. We didn't actually discuss the book, or his brother, or anything to do with Vernet. The name never even cropped up.”

Michael Eliot blurted, “Then what did you talk about?” and looked horrified when Gascoigne and Conway turned to him.

“John Wilkes, mostly.”

The others looked blank, while Conway burst out laughing. “Wilkes the MP?”

I nodded. The others continued to look blank.

“Ms. Clair,” he said, “it's a joy working with you.” The others now looked blank and annoyed. “For those who have never heard of him, John Wilkes was an eighteenth-century MP who was accused of libel. He was even found guilty, was he not?”

“Yes. I looked him up afterward. I can't say I knew a lot about him before. He was charged with seditious libel, stripped of his parliamentary privilege, outlawed, imprisoned, then his ‘outlawry' was reversed—I have absolutely no idea what that means—and he was, eventually, reelected to parliament.”

Conway considered. “A libel, found guilty, the result overturned. Is there anything there?”

“If there is, I'm not smart enough to work it out. If Diego Alemán was trying to tell me more than the fact that the book I am hoping to publish is defamatory of his brother in countries where you can libel the dead, then it went over my head. But the conversation, apart from eighteenth-century history, only brought up the fact that he'd worked in the IT department of Intinvest in Paris, and planned to go back there this summer. And that you must have known as soon as he came to see you.” I turned toward Gascoigne. “What exactly did he say to you?”

Gascoigne looked toward Conway, as if for permission. I saw no signal, but Gascoigne must have, because he sat back, put the tips of his fingers together and, staring at them, began. “He rang up to make an appointment. Normally I wouldn't see someone I don't know out of the blue, but his name made him interesting. Even if there hadn't been rumors swirling about this book, I would have made time for Rodrigo Alemán's brother. When he arrived, he asked me if I knew you.” He shot me a puzzled look, and then returned to contemplating his fingers. “I asked in connection with what, and he said that he had met you at the weekend, that you were suspicious of him, thought that he was involved somehow.”

“Involved,” I repeated. “Involved in what? Did he say?”

Gascoigne thought. “He said, as near as I can remember, ‘She thinks I'm involved with Intinvest.'”

“That's an interesting way of putting it. He
told
me he was involved with them, that is, that he worked for them. I never brought up the subject, because until then it wouldn't have occurred to me. ‘Involved' implies more. We know from the work Kit Lovell has done that Intinvest may be laundering money. It sounds like Diego Alemán thinks so, too. And that either he isn't part of the money laundering, or he would like us to think he isn't.”