A Murder of Magpies (23 page)

“You first.”

Jake slumped back in his chair. “There's not much to tell in that sense. Most of the day was spent setting up an incident room, putting in motion all the routine of a murder investigation. It's depressing and you don't want the details. We had a press conference. Appeals for witnesses. That kind of thing. There was a bulletin on the news, and it will be in tomorrow's papers.” I wrapped my arms around myself, cold suddenly. “It's the best way of getting information. By morning there will be a hundred reported sightings.” He stared ahead cheerlessly at the thought of what tomorrow would bring.

“It makes it real. I hate it.” I took a deep breath. “Particularly as what I was doing this morning was so unreal. These people are talking about Monopoly money. None of it means anything. I know it's important, but I can't feel it. I can't feel any of it matters.”

“Tell me anyway.”

I reported the meeting with Conway and his merry men. I didn't see any reason not to. Jake didn't look surprised. His NCIS buddies must have reported back, at least for as much as they'd been allowed to sit in on. “The thing I don't understand is that the property deals have never been mentioned. I know that for a huge corporation it's not a fortune, but it's still millions of pounds. Someone, somewhere is making a lot of money off their backs.

“The other thing is that the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that they didn't know Kit had vanished. Conway was really angry.” I shivered. In retrospect I found him frightening in a way I hadn't at the time. “He could have been that angry because I'd suggested something true that he thought was hidden, but it didn't have that smell. He was…” I paused to consider. “He was insulted, I'd say. Enraged that anyone would think that of him. It was vanity, but not the kind of vanity where a man thinks he can do anything because he's powerful enough.” I trailed away. “I don't know. This is all guesswork.”

Jake was listening carefully. “Guesswork is usually all we have. You've spent nearly three hours with the man now. If there were inconsistencies, you didn't see them, and that's important. I'd like to know what NCIS has turned up, but while they tell us they're giving us everything, they never are.” He thought for a minute about that, and then, moving on, said, “I forgot to tell you yesterday, I checked where the fingerprints were found here.” He waved around the kitchen.

“Useful?” I was so tired I was practically telegraphing.

“Not very. As you'd guessed, everything was in the ‘public' part of the flat—bathroom, kitchen, sitting room. In the office there were smudges, meaning gloves, but that's all, apart from you and your cleaning lady.”

I nodded wearily. “So now all you have to do is find a burglar who knows about fingerprints, and how to avoid making them.”

Jake was almost as tired. “Yeah. Cuts the possibilities right down.” We were both slumped at the table, barely awake. “Have you spoken to your mother?”

“She's coming in the morning.”

“Great.” He stood up. “Am I staying until then?”

I looked at him appraisingly. Even in fuchsia, he was very nice-looking. Not devastatingly handsome, not the kind of man you'd turn and look at on the street. But attractive. Sure of himself, and sure of what he wanted. And I wanted it, too. I smiled as I stood up. “Now you've showered you are.”

*   *   *

Helena was merciful. She didn't arrive until nine thirty, and when she came she was bearing fresh croissants. You can forgive a lot for that. I made coffee and we sat down at the table. It looked like one of those meetings you see in films about Wall Street: coffee, papers, stacks of files. The only thing missing was the fluorescent light making everyone look slightly green.

Jake was, as I suspected was his habit, in charge. He looked at my mother. “Why don't you go through what you've got first.”

My mother had her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She looked like a very severe elf. “There's not much, or not much that's useful. It's really a long list of negatives. Lambert-Lorraine seems to be clean. At least, as clean as any company of that size can be.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that money is being ping-ponged through a host of companies in Panama, the Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands. But it's all normal creative accountancy, well within the law. They take advantage of every possible loophole, but never stray near, much less over the line. I've gone through a list of their company officers, and none of them has any history of involvement with any financial impropriety. I'm not saying there isn't any. Without an inside contact, and without wanting them to know I'm looking, that's not possible to say. What is possible to say is that it looks unlikely in that environment.”

“What about Cooper's? Can anything be coming from there?”

She looked wistful for a moment. “I wish I could say yes. It would give me enormous pleasure to think such monuments of rectitude had a secret life. But if they do, it's covered up better than Queen Victoria's underwear. Not a glimpse of anything showing. The one I'm really interested in, and the only one that I think is worth following up, is Kenneth Wright. Sam and I spoke to him briefly on Thursday, and there's definitely something to be uncovered there.”

Jake turned to me. “Anything on him from your end?”

“No. Selden's have gone to ground. They're horrified to be caught up in something as undignified as this, and the only word we've had from them is a prissy little e-mail more or less saying they don't know anything, and if we could keep our problems to ourselves, they'd be grateful.”

Helena snorted. Now she looked like an elf who had just discovered that Santa wasn't going to give her a Christmas bonus. “I always said they were about as useful as a wet Kleenex. Honestly—”

I broke in. I'd heard Helena's Selden's rant before. “I know, I know. What I don't know is if they think there's something to cover up, or just don't want to be mixed up in anything as icky as crime.”

“I would have said the latter if they hadn't been the ones to bring up Wright's name. Can we focus on him for a minute?”

Jake and I looked at each other like schoolchildren brought to order. Another second and we'd be passing notes. “Absolutely, Helena,” he said, chastened. “Go on.”

I was intrigued by the “Helena.” She'd been Nell the day after they'd met. Had he reverted to Helena because he was sleeping with me? Did that mean if we became a couple he'd move on to “Mrs. Clair”?

Helena wasn't wasting her time on such fripperies. I dragged my attention back to what she was saying. “He's a tricky customer. Something is going on, because no one at Cooper's will talk. I have a lot of friends there, and I shouldn't have any problems getting information about an ex-employee. But I am, and that's puzzling. This is not normal discretion. At a guess I would say an order has come down from the partners that no one is to talk.”

“But don't you know any of the partners well enough to ask off the record?” I was amazed. Helena knows everybody.

“Of course I do.” She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “But they're not talking, either. I let it be understood he'd approached us for a job, and that should have loosened tongues, but it hasn't. Several of them are old friends, and if he had been sacked, they would have told me, and they would have told me why. I'm not getting either of those responses.”

“Which means?” Jake encouraged.

“Which means that whatever it was he did or didn't do, he's either got the goods on someone there, or he involved the firm in something illegal. The former is unlikely. I've known most of the senior partners forever, and I doubt they have done anything worse than anyone else, which means there are no goods to be had. So it's the latter. If he was laundering money, say…” She paused, thinking it through. “If he had been laundering money for Vernet, or an employee of Vernet, and Cooper's got wind of it, then they'd sack him, but they would keep the lid on it, because it would have been Cooper's escrow accounts that had been used.”

“But wouldn't they have reported it to NCIS?” said Jake. “It would look bad for them if anyone else reported it, and they hadn't. They don't strike me as the type to take a risk like that.”

“That's what's odd. You're not getting any reports of this back from NCIS?” Jake shook his head. “Would you? I know there are interdepartmental problems, and you don't always hear everything.”

Jake looked uncomfortable, but said, “I think once the missing persons report was elevated to a murder inquiry NCIS would have sent me everything.”

“You ‘think'?” Helena looked at her papers, allowing Jake to be embarrassed on his own. I got up to make more coffee.

But Jake wasn't embarrassed, he was angry. “
I think.
That's all I can say. It's all I know.”

“Fine.” Helena wasn't going to waste time on office politics. “Let's work on the assumption that Cooper's did report to NCIS, and for whatever reason NCIS hasn't sent the report on. Can you get it? Although we should consider whether actually having the report will do us any good. Will it be any more useful to thinking about Wright than just making the assumption that it happened? It's Wright we're interested in, after all.” She thought for a moment. “The other possibility is that Cooper's became suspicious, but there was no evidence. Wright was only a salaried partner, and so they could just let him go, and clamp down on the reason. They were worried enough to get rid of him, but without even enough to go to NCIS with.” She considered it again. “Maybe.” She wasn't happy.

I put in, “What can you find out—” I thought about Helena's usual methods, and changed the question—“What have you already found out about him?”

She looked at me approvingly. “He does well for himself: big office, expensive location. But there's no corresponding client list. Apart from Vernet's property portfolio, Wright has only a handful of clients he brought with him from Cooper's, and that is all I can find. It might be an idea to get a full list.” She turned to Jake. “Can you do that? I've done a fair amount of digging, and I'm fairly sure my list is complete, but it would be nice to know for certain.” Jake made a note. “If those are his only clients, he's not generating enough income to support his office, much less his family.” She turned over a couple of pages: “Big flat in Kensington, house in Gloucestershire, no mortgage on either; son at Winchester, daughter at Bedales.
Very
expensive wife. He's sleeping with his secretary. Also expensive.” I peeked at Jake, who was staring openmouthed at Helena. Good. He'd finally discovered she was a Martian, too. “He'd need half a million after taxes to stay even modestly afloat, and he's doing better than that. There's no family money.” Jake made another note. “You don't have to check. There isn't.”

Jake said mildly, “I'm sure there isn't if you say so. Anything else?”

“I talked to his secretary yesterday. Tiffanie Harris. Tiffanie with an ‘ie.'” She sniffed.

I blinked at her priorities. “And she probably dots the ‘i' with a smiley. But this isn't the time. What did she say?” I prompted.

“Nothing. I offered her a job, said I'd heard about her from Cooper's, and she turned it down.”

“So she likes working for Wright. It's unimaginable to us, but there you go. She is sleeping with the man. It's not surprising that she doesn't want to move.”

“Yes it is.” Helena was dogged. “I offered her double what she's earning now, in a company where she'd have a chance to climb the ladder, instead of a dead-end job in a one-man office.”

“But she's having an affair with Wright. I can quite see—” Jake tried to mediate.

Helena flattened him. “I didn't tell her there was a no-shagging policy. She could have had double the money and still gone on sleeping him.” She shuddered delicately.

Jake backed down, dubious, but he was on rocky ground on the shagging front. I tried not to smirk. He saw it, though, and pushed me into the firing line. “What have you got?” He smiled meanly.

I would have made a devastatingly crushing remark, if only I could have thought of one. In addition, I had nothing that I hadn't already passed on already. So I shared with them the McManuses' question about Mr. Rudiger. To my amazement both Jake and Helena agreed.

“You think that? But he's been so kind.”

Now they teamed up, wondering how to try to convey information to someone as mentally deficient as me. My mother, naturally, volunteered. “Sam, really. He's a very pleasant man, and because he's famous in his field we think we know everything there is to know about him. But what do we know in fact? Do we even know that he
is
Pavel Rudiger?”

I don't like being taken for an idiot. “Well, he has been calling himself that for the past fifteen odd years. I think it's unlikely he would have taken on an alias all that time ago, just in case one day his downstairs neighbor decided to commission a book on a company with which he was illegally involved, don't you?”

Jake intervened, before Helena and I had a mother-daughter moment. “I don't think that's what Helena meant, Sam. His name
is
Rudiger, because as you say he's been using it for a long time. Do we know his first name is Pavel? I imagine you do—you all must see each other's post when it arrives?” I nodded. “But even with that information, do we know he is the Pavel Rudiger who was an architect?” I started to protest, but he went on. “And even then if that is confirmed, and we are sure he is the Pavel Rudiger who was an architect, that still doesn't tell us anything useful. That man was last heard of forty-two years ago, when he retired for reasons no one knows. Who can say what happened then, or even what has happened between now and then? What's his source of income? He's worth looking into.”