Blackstone's Pursuits (24 page)

‘Of course,’ said the banker. He was a tall thin bloke, grey-haired, with a complexion that was so sallow it was virtually cream-coloured.

‘I am Jean Berner. How can I help you?’ I had the strangest feeling that he knew the answer already.

‘We wish to make a cash withdrawal,’ said Prim, ‘from numbered account AF 426469. I believe that these represent the key.’ She took out her half of the fiver from her purse. I unbuttoned my shirt pocket and produced the other half.

Berner took the two pieces of banknote from her and checked each number. ‘That is correct,’ he said. ‘But you are not the young lady who opened the account.’

‘No,’ said Prim. ‘That was my sister. But the arrangement was that possession of the note gives the bearers authority to operate it.’

He nodded. ‘Of course. How much would you wish to withdraw?’

‘Nine hundred thousand pounds, sterling,’ I said.

Berner stepped over to the desk, produced a key, unlocked a central drawer and took out a sheaf of computer printouts. It looked completely out of place in that room as he leafed through it. ‘But that will leave a balance of only forty-eight thousand,’ he said. ‘Our minimum deposit level is fifty thousand in sterling.’ I looked at him, astonished. Even allowing for interest on the lump sum, Wee Willie must have salted away at least another thirty K that no-one knew about.

‘In that case, close the account, please,’ said Prim. ‘We’ll withdraw it all.’

If I was a banker and someone came in and told me that I’d lost a private account worth nearly a million squigglies, I’d be pissed off up to my neckline. Jean Berner’s smug half-smile never wavered. I found myself wondering whether he regarded sterling as second-class money, and was glad to be shot of it.

‘You will wait here, please.’ He oiled his way back through the door, still carrying the printouts and Prim’s fiver.

As the door closed behind him, Prim gave a wee jump of joy. I thought she was going to shout out loud, and somehow, with a video camera in the room, I didn’t want that to happen. So I caught her in mid-jump and pulled her to me in a hug. She looked at me surprised, and gave me her most delicious grin. ‘We’re ...’

I kissed her, to stop her mouth. ‘We’re on Candid Camera in here, so careful what you say and do.’

Still she smiled. ‘Wow,’ she whispered. ‘You really are paranoid. He’s gone to get our money, Oz. Relax.’

‘When we step out of Ray Archer’s office with our ten per cent, partner, then I’ll relax,’ I whispered back. ‘Until then, this is just too easy, and he’s just too pleased with himself.’

We stood there, hugging and kissing, and throwing in the odd bump and grind for the cameras.

Berner returned in a shade under five minutes, carrying a canvas satchel and an A4 form. And the bugger was still smiling. He put the bag on the desk and opened it wide for us to see inside. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Nine hundred and forty-eight thousand pounds sterling. Now if you will each sign this withdrawal form...’

‘Count it, please,’ I said, really niggled by that smile. He looked at me, as if he was disappointed in me.

‘But M’sieur, this is a reputable Swiss bank.’

‘Oui, M’sewer,’ I said. ‘And I am a suspicious Scots bastard! Indulge us.’

With the sigh he would give to an awkward child, Berner unpacked all the money from the bag and piled it on the desk. There were nine large bundles and one smaller one. ‘This money is in Bank of England fifty pound notes,’ he said, picking up one of the larger bundles. ‘Each one of these contains one hundred thousand pounds. He riffled through the bundle, holding it up for us to see. I worked out how thick two thousand fifty pound notes should be and nodded. He riffled through each of the others in turn, showing us that there was no newsprint laced in there. Not that I thought for a moment there would be. I just wanted to do something, anything to rile the guy. No chance. He was still smiling when he finished his riffling. He began to pack the satchel once more. Our wee duffel bag looked pretty silly beside it. When he was finished, he clicked its catch shut and snapped a small padlock into place. As we signed the form he produced a key, and held it out to Prim, together with the two halves of her fiver.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘I hope that one day your organisation will do business with Berners again.’ We looked at him, puzzled. My old friend the hamster started running around in my stomach.

‘Now for your surprise,’ said Berner. ‘You do not have to go to Lausanne to meet your colleague. He is here.’ He reached under the rosewood desk and pressed a button. We heard a bell ring.

‘Come on love,’ I said picking up the heavy bag and taking Prim by the hand. ‘Let’s quit this town,’

Without an ‘au revoir’ to Berner we headed out of the room towards the exit. But the small door off the hall was open, and the hall wasn’t empty any more. It was full: full of Rawdon Brooks.

In which Hansel and Gretel are right up against it in the forest.

He stood there, wrists limp no longer; instead he was tall, surprisingly wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted, and very trim in a beautifully cut jacket. There was no trace at all of the effete character we had met in the Lyceum rehearsal room. This Rawdon Brooks looked very dangerous, and I had no doubt at all that he was.

‘So you made it at last, little people,’ he said in a fruity, friendly voice, loud enough for Berner to hear through the open door. ‘Come on and I’ll tell you about the change of plan.’ He was dressed immaculately, grey slacks accompanying his jacket. Again I flashed back to our first meeting, and realised what a consummate actor the man was.
‘Which is the real him?’
I asked myself, until I saw the answer in his eyes.

His hands were clasped together in front of him, with an overcoat draped over them. He flicked the coat to one side, letting us see the silenced gun. After that we weren’t about to argue. Her jerked his head towards the door. Prim, white-faced, walked past him and opened it, and we stepped out into the street.

All that stuff about being safe in a crowd, God, what rubbish that is. Brooks stepped close behind us and dug the gun into my back. ‘Right,’ he said in a voice that, suddenly, wasn’t at all friendly. ‘Walk in front of me, Oz. Primavera, take his arm. Now young man, remember this. You do just one thing wrong, and she gets it first, then you. Now do as I say. Walk!’

I could tell he wasn’t in a negotiating mood. I walked, with Prim holding my arm, keeping the leisurely pace of a tourist, making certain that I didn’t do
anything
wrong. He walked in silence until we reached the end of Rue Berner. ‘Turn left,’ said Rawdon. We did as we were told. All of a sudden, the pavement was even more crowded, but narrower. Brooks moved up alongside me. ‘Right, Miss Phillips,’ he said. ‘Now it’s the other way around. You do anything wrong and Oz gets it first, then you.

‘Now we’re going down this road until the next traffic lights, then we cross.’

As we walked, I realised that something strange had happened. The hamster wasn’t running around in my stomach any more. Instead it felt as if it was encased in a block of ice. I had passed way beyond plain scared; now I knew what truly terrified felt like. I think I may have spoken to him to stop myself from passing out. ‘Tell us, Rawdon,’ I said. ‘What tale did you spin Berner?’

He laughed, but it was as cold as his voice. There was triumph in it, triumph over me, triumph over Prim. He had my girl and me in his power and suddenly I hated him for it. Truly, I’d never hated anyone in my life before. The ice began to melt. Something I had been told years before by a soldier pal came back to me. ‘Anger overcomes fear.’ It doesn’t, but it helps. I concentrated on my hatred as hard as I could.

‘That was so easy,’ he said, maddeningly self-confident. ‘One is an actor after all. It’s one’s job to make people believe. I told him that I was a policeman on an Interpol operation with two Special Branch colleagues. We were off to pay off an informer who’d helped us round up some terrorists. I told him that the money was in the account that poor little Kane used dear Dawn to set up.

‘I said that I’d travelled down first, and that you two would come down later with the banknote, pick up the cash and then rendezvous with me in a hotel in Lausanne. Only your car had broken down on the way, and I wasn’t sure when you’d arrive, so I’d cancelled the hotel in Lausanne and come to meet you at the bank.

‘I arranged with Berner to give you a little surprise. He’d allow me to wait in his anteroom until you two arrived, then when you’d done our business, he’d press his bell and I’d appear out of nowhere. It worked a treat, didn’t it! One of my better productions, I’d say. It certainly gave my audience a start.’

Suddenly it all came back to me, what Dawn had said about him, and the College of Cardinals. ‘Willie Kane cried it all out on your shoulder, didn’t he. At the theatre club. He told you what he’d done for Dawn, about the bank account, about the money he’d stolen, about the key. Gay men are such good listeners after all, aren’t you!’

We had reached the traffic lights, and the crossing indicator was flashing. ‘Go on,’ he said digging me in the ribs with the gun. ‘Right,’ he said, once we were on the other side of the street, ‘that’s where we’re going, to that park down there. So we can decide what to do with you.’ He added that as an afterthought, but we both knew that he’d made up his mind.

‘You really are a good detective, Oz,’ he said. He was rubbing his power into us now, the bastard. ‘That’s just what happened.’

‘But how did you get into Prim’s flat? When I phoned, it was a woman who answered.’

He laughed softly. ‘Did you really think so?’ I thought back. A high voice. An arch tone. But in hindsight, no, not feminine: effeminate.

‘Poor little Willie. When Dawn told him it couldn’t go on he was distraught. He had stolen the money by that time. Even if he had given it back, his career would have been over. If he’d gone back to that wife of his, she’d have torn out his fingernails as a punishment.’ He paused.

‘She was there, you know, on the night. Just as I parked my car she came out, looking furious, having given the errant husband one last piece of her mind.

‘The little chap asked me to come and see him, you know. He hadn’t a clue what he wanted any more. So I persuaded him that he needed something new, something different. I told him to get undressed, lie down, and close his eyes, and that I’d make everything all right.’ He laughed, an awful cold sound. ‘And didn’t I just.’

Geneva, they say, is famous for its parks, and the one towards which we were heading was probably its biggest, with a wide grassy area leading up to thick woodland. It was the middle of the afternoon, and for all its size it was uncomfortably empty. The forest seemed to go on for ever, and it looked very dark indeed. I suspected that on the other side there was nothing but the lake, since, above the tree-line, I could see the spume of the great Geneva fountain. All in all, it didn’t look like the sort of place where you’d want to go with a man with a gun. But we had no choice: Brooks shoved us roughly through the gates.

‘But you didn’t find the fiver, Rawdon, did you?’ I said, as we stumbled towards the woods.

‘No indeed. Hard as I looked. And I never would, but for the strangest piece of luck. The very next night, dear PC McArthur came to the club. He was actually smiling! Unusual for him. I asked him what the joke was, and he said that his inspector was in terrible trouble because he had allowed a witness to take a piece of evidence away from a murder scene. A five pound note he said. A young couple, he said.

‘And then, the morning after, you come barging into the Lyceum, all bright-eyed and full of investigative zeal. I had the whole picture then.’

We were more than halfway across the grass, nearing the woods. ‘That policeman who questioned you before us,’ said Prim. ‘He never existed, did he?’

Brooks laughed. ‘Of course not. Just a little something to set you off a-worrying about little sister.

‘Once I knew you had the note, I knew that eventually, you’d wind up here. With the company in recess, it was just a matter of coming down here and waiting. Although I did think you’d have got here sooner.’

‘So what happens now?’ asked Primavera, direct as always. It was a question I’d been avoiding.

‘Ferry crossings are really insecure things, you know,’ said Brooks. ‘You can take an unlicensed gun abroad in a car without worrying about being searched. You can even take really high quality heroin through, and a hypodermic.’

‘A bit of a junkie,’
Dawn had said. ‘So that’s it.’ I think I may have snarled at him. ‘We’re going to have an overdose.’ A picture flashed, unbidden into my mind: that poor dead lassie from years back, in that close, with me, in uniform, on guard at its mouth. I could see her, as clear as day.

‘Precisely. You’ll just be another couple of dead addicts. And when they find you, sooner or later, there’ll be nothing to identify you. I think there are foxes in there too.’

We had reached the woods. ‘Right, Hansel and Gretel, hold hands and go on ahead. But don’t forget the gun.’

He drove us on through the trees, like animals. It grew darker and darker in there, with no sign of the other side. The traffic noise was distant, too. No, this was no copse, this was an urban forest.

At last we saw an area up ahead, where the trees seemed to thin, and where more light was allowed in from above. ‘Enough,’ said Brooks. ‘This’ll do. Now: Oz, dear boy, drop the bag. Then, both of you, turn around.’

We did as we were told. The big bastard just stood there, smiling at us, almost laughing. It was the way he was enjoying it, that was what was working on me. He was going to kill Prim, and he was looking forward to it.

He threw his raincoat on the ground and reached into the side pocket of his blazer with his left hand, pulling out a thin metal box. He flicked up the lid with his thumb and held it out for us to see. There it was, right enough, a hypo, primed and ready. ‘I cooked it up in advance,’ he said. ‘There’s enough in there to see you both off, believe me. It’s a relic of a rogue consignment I confiscated from a member of the company in Edinburgh last year. The fool was going to take it. It’s quite pure, uncut.’