Blackstone's Pursuits (23 page)

We were still talking in the kitchen when Allan came in a couple of hours later, just after nine, but by that time the kids were in bed, our kit was in the spare room, and a meal had been prepared.
‘Coq au Vin’
Ellen called it, muttering something about ‘shaggin’ in a Transit’, but it looked like chicken in red wine sauce to me.

I try to make excuses for my brother-in-law, especially to my Dad, but I always wind up admitting that he’s a selfish, boring get. Allan is not the sort of guy you’d invite out to the pub. He was surprised to see us, of course, but not the sort of surprise that gives way to a big smile, like Ellen’s did. He barely hid his irritation at our disruption of his routine.

We ate outside in their small courtyard. Ellie asked Prim about Africa, and to be polite, I asked Allan about his job. He gave me a lecture on the state of the oil industry; I told him that I always judged the state of the oil industry by the number of rigs tied up idle in the Firth of Forth. Finally, as soon as half-decent manners allowed, my brother-in-law offered the ‘early start’ excuse and went upstairs.

Later, as Prim and I undressed in the tiny guest room, we thought we heard the sound of my sister’s raised voice. ‘See if I ever get like him, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Make sure you shoot me before you leave, will you.’

In which an unhappy sister lends us her car and plots her own escape.

We decided that French Grand Prix should be postponed until another night.

Neither of us said anything, but we knew that it just wouldn’t have been right in that unhappy house, under that roof. Instead, we lay together in the big iron-framed bed which almost filled the room, Prim in her nightshirt, me in my boxers, making our plans for the last stage of our journey, and trying not to dwell on the danger which might be lying in wait for us.

Next morning, when I wandered downstairs at seven o’clock for a glass of water, Allan was gone.

Over breakfast, with Jonathan packed off to school and Colin sent into the courtyard with a bun and a football, Ellen tried to keep her brave face on it, and I tried to go along with it. But it was no use.

‘What is it, Ellie?’ I asked her. ‘D’you feel homesick, or what?’

She shook her head. ‘No, wee brither. I feel bored. I feel uncared for. I feel abandoned. Try to imagine what it’s like living here. The place is lovely, sure, but so what. It’s in the middle of nowhere, the natives are unfriendly. Bloody Hell, the place even has a wall round it. It’s a place to visit, not to live, and yet I’m stuck here full-time with nothing to do but eat pastries and go quietly out of my mind. Look at the size of me, Oz. I’m like a bloody bus.

‘How would you fancy this for a life? How would you, Prim?’ Prim rolled her big eyes, and shook her head, solemnly.

‘But Ellie,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t you have thought all this out before you bought the place?’

She glared at me. ‘I didn’t buy it, brother. Allan did. He took the job, the company came up with this and he said okay. You don’t think he consulted me about any of it, do you!’

I watched her as she savaged her third croissant. ‘You know what, Ellie?’ I said. ‘I reckon that’s mostly shite. You were brought up in Anstruther, for heaven’s sake. That’s hardly a bloody metropolis. Yet you could handle that, and, if everything else was okay, you could handle this.

‘But we both know that right now, if you were living in the middle of the Champ d’Elysée, you’d still be bored out of your tree, and we both know why.’

But she wasn’t ready for such fundamental truth. She shook her head and stood up, to fetch more coffee from the big range cooker. ‘Enough about me,’ she said, sitting back down at the table.

‘Are you going to tell me, finally, what it is that’s brought you two out here? And don’t say you just came on holiday. You’re a creature of habit, Oz. You take your holidays in July, like the rest of Scotland.’

Normally, Ellie’s the third person in the world, alongside my Dad and Jan, that I’d have trusted with our problem. But all of a sudden I wasn’t sure. She had problems of her own.

‘Are you working up to telling me something bad about Dad?’ she probed.

I shook my head. ‘No, not at all. It’s nothing like that. Look if I told you you’d think I’m mad.’

She looked me dead in the eye. ‘Oz, remember when we were kids? Who did you come to when you were in bother? And who sorted it out for you? As for being mad, what’s new?

‘So come on boy. Out with it.’

So, just as I had with Jan and my Dad, I told her. I left out not a scrap of detail, from the size of Willie Kane’s organ, to the size of his wife’s betrayal. When I had finished, my sister was smiling. ‘It’s just like when you were Jonathan’s age.

‘You know, Prim, this bugger never got into ordinary bother like other kids. He did it in the grand style. I remember one summer: the man next door grew garden peas, on stalks, and they were right up against the boundary fence. This yin here, he reached through the fence, and he stripped all the peas out of nearly all the pods, but left them hanging there. When the man’s wife went out to pick her peas, all she found was empty pods, hangin’ there looking pathetic, like blown green condoms. There was hell to pay. He’d maybe have got away with it too, only he kept the evidence in a basin in his room!’

All of a sudden she was serious. ‘Are you sure you’re right about this man Ross?’

‘As sure as we can be.’

‘And you can’t go to the police?’

I shook my head. ‘He is the police. We’d wind up in the nick ourselves, and my client’s business would be bust. There is the other angle too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If we can avoid Ross, and get the money back to Archer, we collect ten per cent commission. That’s ninety thousand, Ellie.’

‘I’m a teacher. I had worked that out!’ She shot me her old familiar glower. Everything was all right again.

‘So you reckon that Ross’ll have come after you.’

‘Sure. He isn’t just after ten per cent. He’s after the lot.’

‘So what’s your next step? Geneva?’

I nodded.

‘Right. If he’s there he’ll be looking out for Jan’s car. So you two take mine. Just you drive right up to the door of the bank and march straight in. Once you’ve got the money, don’t come back here. Head north. I’ll take Jan’s car back. It’s time the kids saw their Grandad again.’

‘What will Allan say about that?’

She looked at me, and it was as if I was back in the school playground. ‘Not a bloody word, unless he wants his legs slapped!’

In which we cross the border and reach our objective.

Ellen’s car was a farty wee Peugeot diesel, so short of horsepower that when the air conditioning clicked on, you felt a ‘clunk’, and the beast slowed by about five miles an hour. But it
had
air conditioning, and on the baking Autoroute as we headed for the Swiss border, that was real consolation for the loss of Jan’s nippy wee Fiesta.

It isn’t very far from the east side of Lyon to Switzerland, barely as much as an hour, even in Ellen’s clunker. It was still morning when we crossed the border. I’d never been in Switzerland before, but I had seen Swiss drivers in action on the Autoroutes, and so I was extra careful.

We pulled into the first parking area we could find, to study the street map of Geneva that we had bought back in France. The place looked a bit smaller than Edinburgh. I was pleased, because it meant that Berners Bank should be relatively easy to find, but concerned, because I figured that the smaller the place, the easier we’d be to find.

Dawn had told us that the bank was more or less in the city centre, in a street which bore its name. We found the index on the back of our map, and sure enough, there it was, Rue Berner, grid reference H6.

If Lyon is only a stone’s throw from Switzerland, Geneva is only a spit from the border. We had hardly started down the road before the countryside was giving way to built-up areas. As we descended, in the distance we could see, beyond the city, the blue water of Lake Geneva, and beyond that the towering massif of Mont Blanc.

The first thing that struck me about Geneva was the flags. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many flagpoles in my life, or as many colours flying upon them. It’s a real international city, just as much as London or Paris, and in some ways even more so. After all, the Red Cross is based there, and the World Health Organisation, and even, I read once, the World Council of Churches.
Appropriate,
I thought, feeling the stirring of my Calvinist roots.

Prim navigated us smoothly along the broad green avenues, taking left, then right, then right again. We missed Rue Berner first time around, but a laborious loop brought us into it at last. It was a big, wide street, with two-way traffic, and very definitely no parking. We drove down it as slowly as we could, shrinking into our seats as we looked around for any sign of Ricky Ross, but seeing none.

Berners was about four hundred yards down the street, its name picked out in beaten copper on a sign above a dark, narrow doorway. ‘There it is,’ said Prim, her voice hushed but excited. ‘Do you see him?’ she asked.

‘No sign of him, as far as I can see.’

‘What’ll we do with the car?’

At that moment, I didn’t have a clue, but just then the answer presented itself, a big blue ‘P’ sign above a doorway a hundred yards ahead. I swung the car in, took a ticket from an automatic machine and found myself steering sharply down and round a spiralling ramp which opened out eventually into a long neon-lit garage. We found a space, parked and just sat there, our hearts pounding, breathing heavily.

‘This is it,’ I said, trying to sound confident, but, I’m sure, sounding scared instead. ‘Ten minutes and it’ll be done.’

Prim nodded. ‘Or we will,’ she said, brightly. I didn’t need to be reminded of that.

‘There’s still time to back out,’ I said, quickly, to myself as much as to her. But I knew there wasn’t. Sometimes, a man has to do ... and all that. To steel myself, I thought ahead, of what it would be like when the thing was over, and Archer had the money back, and Prim and I could get down to some serious living together.

‘Okay,’ I said, at last, my loins as girded up as they were going to get. ‘Let’s go and get Archer’s cash.’

Prim drew me to her, and kissed me. I could feel her hands trembling very slightly. ‘I love you, Oz Blackstone,’ she said, for the first time. ‘Nothing can stop you and me.’

‘I love you too, Primavera,’ I said, grinning like an idiot, ‘and you know what? I think you’re right.’

She reached into her handbag, fiddled with her purse, and pulled out half of a five pound note. ‘You’ll need this.’ I read the serial number aloud, ‘AF 426469. Remember, that’s the number of the account too.’

Apart from the map, we’d picked up a few other things in France. On the basis that even the most basic disguise might help, we’d bought floppy sun-hats, blue for me, white for Prim, and Vuarnet sun-glasses, a good brand that were going to cost Ray Archer plenty on my expense account. Finally, realising just in time that nine hundred thousand sterling might be just a shade bulky, we’d found a good size duffel bag. It was still stuffed with waste-paper packing, and we decided to leave it that way, looking full, so that out on the street we’d look even more like a couple of plonker tourists.

There was a lift up from the garage, to a narrow glazed door which opened directly out on to Rue Berner. We peered through the glass. Outside, the pavements on either side of the street were thronged, with business people rather than tourists. This was a commercial centre, with nothing to attract sightseers. We pulled on our sun-hats, then our shades.

‘We should have taken the ones with the false noses and moustaches,’ said Prim, giggling, very slightly nervously, but looking, I thought proudly to myself, absolutely sensational in tee-shirt and shorts. We looked at each other for reassurance and, taking a deep breath, stepped outside.

In which we do the business and Berner rings the bell.

The air was a lot cooler than it had been in Pérrouges, even in the morning. As the business people bustled by us, some of them in fairly heavy clothing, we realised all of a sudden how out of place we looked.

‘Come on,’ I said, picking up the pace until I was almost at a trot. Those last few yards to Berners were the most nervous of my life. Every step I took, I was tensed for a shout, or a heavy hand on my shoulder.

But nothing happened. Unimpeded, we reached the narrow entrance to the bank and almost fell inside. We took off our redundant sunglasses and hats and stuffed them into the duffel bag.

When I think of a bank, I think of a line of tellers behind counters, usually in a high-domed airy hall, where every whisper about the sad state of my account carries to the inquisitive ears of everyone else in the room.

I’d heard the term ‘private bank’ before. I even know of one in Edinburgh. But until I set foot in Berners I had no idea what the term really meant. There was a short hallway off the street, with an unmarked door, closed, to the right and a second door at the end, opening and welcoming. We stepped inside. For a second I had the strangest feeling, that somehow I was back in my Dad’s front room. The furniture was similar, of the same vintage, and arranged in much the same way, around a fireplace, with an embroidered screen in front, not unlike my Mum’s. The only major difference was a big rosewood desk, set before the curtained window.

We stared at each other. The room was empty. We looked around for a bell, something to ring, and call ‘Shop!’

We didn’t see a camera, but it must have been there, because when the door in the far wall opened and the man stepped in, he was smiling a greeting before he’d even seen us. He stretched out a hand and said, ‘Good Day’; or rather, he said, ‘Bonjour’.

‘Oh shit,’
I thought, but Prim shook his hand, returned his smile, and said simply,
‘En Anglais, s’il vous plait.’