Connections (40 page)

“The servants are here,” she said, adding brightly, “Did Chris turn up?”

“Yes,” said Hugh.

“I thought you looked rather cheerful – earlier,” she said.

“Fleur,” he told her gravely, “I think you need someone with you.”

“It's all right,” she said. “I'll be all right.”

“It's an awful business,” he said. “Have you got any idea what it was all about – that madman coming in, shooting Dickie?”

“Yes,” she told him. “That's the trouble. I have.”

The phone rang. It was a friend of Dickie and Sophia who had heard the news in Tokyo. There was a second call, from Germany. Then a third. It was Dominic.

“Fleur,” he said urgently, “do you want to get out? I think you should. Sam Hope's here. He had a man outside the house all evening, videoing the people coming and going and sending the pictures down to him by computer. Now he's come back to London fast. Listen – a man just came into the house, didn't he? We've just seen him on Sam's guy's video. Sam says he's the man who tried to get him to kill us. Called himself Robinson.”

“What?” exclaimed Fleur. “Just came in?”

“About half an hour ago. We've just watched it. He's a tall, nondescript bloke, fairly bald. Looked downcast. A young thin bloke in a tuxedo and dicky-bow met him on the steps and wafted him in.”

“That's Henry Jones, my father's right-hand man,” Fleur said. “I can't believe it.” She was staring round the room, at the flowers, the furniture, at Hugh, lying in his chair with a glass of brandy, studying her curiously.

“Well it's true. He offered Sam a quarter of a million to kill us. Flattering, isn't it? Is he still in the house?”

“In the study.”

“Where are the older bloke and the young man?”

“One's in the study with Henry Jones. Hugh's here with me.”

“Where's Tallinn? Did they catch him?

“Not as far as I know.”

He groaned. “Well, there you have it. Tallinn's on the loose. He may be on the roof for all we know. I wouldn't put it past him. And in the study is Henry Jones who hires assassins. Don't try to tell me you're safe because you're not. Don't give me an argument, Fleur. You have to get out. Will you please do that?”

“Where are you?”

“We'll be outside Victoria Station in the van in half an hour. But don't wait – leave now. Make out you're going to the garage for cigarettes or off for a kebab or whatever they do in those places.”

“Right,” Fleur said, her heart thudding. She put the phone down.

Hugh's voice cut into the panic. “Need any help?”

“I have to get out of here,” she said.

He looked at her shrewdly. “Perhaps that's best. That Russian may still be at large. Look – let's go together. If anyone asks, we're going out for a quick nightcap, just getting out of the house to relax after what happened, otherwise we'd never sleep.”

“Can we go straight away? I'm terrified of staying here.”

“I'll get my coat,” he said. “Go upstairs and grab what you have to.”

Fleur ran upstairs, got her thick coat and filled her handbag with small essentials. Her hands shook as she did so. She ran down the stairs reciting to herself, “Out for a nightcap – relax after what happened this evening.” But there was no one in the hall. The phone was ringing as they quietly let themselves out, passed the policeman on the steps and went into the snowy street. It was freezing and there was little traffic.

“Where to?” asked Hugh.

“Victoria. I'm being picked up there.”

“There may not be too many cabs on a night like this – I'll walk you down,” he said. As they went along he asked, “Are you sure the people who're collecting you are reliable? I don't know what it's all about but it looks dicey. So you need to be very sure of your friends. If you're at all uncertain, don't meet them. Come back to the flat with me and we'll work something out.”

She thought about it, but, still half expecting pursuit, decided Hugh was too close to the Jethros. “No – I trust them,” she said.

“Is one of them Ben Campbell?” he asked.

“No – Ben would sell me for what he could get,” she said.

“You found out.”

“I've found out a lot,” she replied. “I still think that man is going to come out of the dark. I really don't know what's going to happen next.”

“That Russian was the plutonium smuggler, wasn't he?” said Hugh.

“Yes,” she said. “Everybody knows everything, these days, don't they?”

“No. Everybody knows something. Nobody knows everything. I recognised him from his picture in
Die Welt.
Very dangerous guy. Attractive, though,” Hugh mused. It started to snow again. “Not my type, really. You wouldn't ask him, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket or are you pleased to see me?'”

“It is, I'm not and I'm going to kill you,” Fleur said in a Russian accent. They started laughing. “Oh God,” said Fleur, “I'm on the run, it's snowing and my father's in a hospital, probably dying. What's so funny about that?”

They had reached Victoria Station, where a few people loitered. There were some buses and a short rank of taxis, but the place seemed to Fleur frighteningly cold and deserted.

“I'll wait with you,” he said, and they stood by the bus stops, far away from the stationary police van.

“This is very nice of you, Hugh,” Fleur told him.

“Dickie was rattled on that trip to St Lucia,” he told her. “As soon as we arrived he and Jones got a flight back. Men like that are always having crises, of course – but I smelt trouble even then. What's it all about?”

“Keep quiet about it, but I think he's been laundering money for August Tallinn, the Russian.”

“Ah,” said Hugh. “That makes sense,” he added. “He's not the only one doing that sort of thing. We – the art dealers – are the people who get the money when it makes its next move.
By the time we're getting paid, by cheque or banker's draft, the money's usually half clean. But before that it's been taken out of suitcases and bounced into the system. If your father dies it'll be bad luck. He won't have done anything the other big banks in the City don't do.”

There was a tooting noise and across the street was the van, with Dominic leaning out of the window. Fleur gave Hugh a kiss and ran to it.

She and Dominic sat on sacks in the back. Joe was driving with Sam Hope beside him. Fleur told them what had taken place that night in Eaton Square.

“Don't worry,” said Sam. “We'll go down to Dover and you can take the ferry to France. No one's going to be looking for you yet. With luck, all this will be resolved in a week or two. But if you stick around now someone may get hysterical and decide to stop you from talking. Or you'll get arrested on the grounds that they need someone to blame. Stay clear for a bit, let the tale come leaking out, embarrassing everybody, let them work out the heroes and villains, then you can come back. You haven't done anything wrong, after all.”

There was a silence until Fleur, who realised she had got a lot older in the past few months, said, “Does that make any difference?”

So there we are, ladies and gentlemen of the Enquiry, and William.

I hoped, as I told the others, that after a flurry it would all settle down. And it seemed to. And I thought it was over. But as I've said before, this was the story that would not die. Now, eight months later, here I am on the move again, and this time it may be for keeps.

Here we were with a Bank of England Enquiry, the neatest, discreetest solution to the problem that wouldn't go away. Foreign investors are disquieted about the stability of our banking and political institutions; there are money markets all over the world who wouldn't mind the City of London disgraced and found unreliable, and all that lucrative business coming their own way. But we need it ourselves, don't we? It represents such a large proportion of national earnings.

You'll note that by February the small people – Fleur, Dominic, Joe, and I won't exclude myself from the group – had been forced to flee because of the big guys: bankers, senior civil servants and their masters, and a big-time, wealthy drug dealer and his former allies in the Kremlin.

Getting mixed up in all this meant Dominic and Joe had to disappear without telling their boss, knowing he would probably sack them and that this might precipitate them back on to the streets, or into petty crime with all its repercussions. Joe had been forced to part with Melanie, too. Fleur had failed to get to the end of her computer course and missed the first crucial discussious at the film company and the meeting at the firm which
was supposed to help her sort out her creditors. And I wasn't happy myself about having to disappear at short notice because of the actions and fuck-ups of others. I was still hesitating about starting the countdown towards vaporising Hope Vansittart, but I knew if the auguries were bad over the period following Jethro's shooting, I'd have to. It was a classic example of that game of barons and peasants which is British life. Barons fight. Peasants starve.

It wasn't all bad. I went to where I went to, met up with old friends who will remain anonymous and caught some sun. I kept an eye on CNN and an ear on the World Service, spoke to people in Britain and chatted to the young folk who were making the best of it in the South of France, where an unusually early spring was beginning. They were quite happy, especially Dominic and Fleur who gave up pretending they only fell on each other's bones from time to time because they were too hard up to rent a video. Melanie's mum even let her come away on a weekend break to France to see Joe – the down side being, the rest of the family came too. And back home Veronica took the problem at HVPS as a cue to stay home and redecorate her house. So our panic-stricken flight had its good side. Maybe, all in all we had had a better time than those at home who'd created the necessity for it.

As you'll know, William, ten days after the shooting one of the party ratted, and gave the police an account of what really occurred on that night in Eaton Square. I don't know who it was or why. It can't have been the servants because all the housekeeper saw was Tallinn coming through the window and demanding that the alarm be turned off. After that she and the others hid in the kitchen. Could it have been the Keiths, ready to back Jethro as long as he was of advantage to them, then keen to dissociate themselves from a possible scandal and disgrace? Was it Haussman, taking some kind of revenge, or trying to overturn Strauss and pick up his business? Or Maria Haussman, mindlessly going to the cop shop with an English-speaking friend and demanding justice, just to get her necklace back? It might even have been Sophia, dreadfully upset about her husband and
ready to disobey Peter Strauss's orders in order to see Tallinn brought to justice.

Whoever blabbed, for whatever reason, the police couldn't just ignore the information. And a lot of sweat must have appeared on brows in high places and there must have been more of those tedious letters from the Germans implying a lack of brains and energy when it came to the hunt for the Russian. Because the informant had, knowingly or not, told them that the troublesome August Tallinn was still in the country, so what, for want of other evidence had been defined as a disturbed robbery and shooting, with a strong chance the perpetrator would never be caught, suddenly had to turn into a man-hunt for Tallinn.

Earlier, Peter Strauss, helped by Henry Jones, had done a good job of burying as many bodies as possible in the time available. Jethro had survived the operation but it was genuinely hard for the doctors to say at that time exactly how bad he was, harder still to predict whether he'd improve or deteriorate in future. I hear he's in Athens, wheelchair-bound, his mind a blur, being tended devotedly by his wife who is, in turn, being loyally supported by her own family. Unfit to appear before your committee, it hardly needs saying.

The night of the shooting must have been a bad one for Peter Strauss. His was the counting-house area of the bank. He was the senior man. He knew what came in and went out and had a duty to know the rest, though the investments were Dickie's responsibility. But on that night, he must have realised he didn't know what was going on. And on that night, having been through a scene where he had known he himself might have been killed, and not knowing whether Jethro would live or die, he had to confront the only man who could tell him what Jethro had done and take him through the labyrinths Jethro had created – Henry Jones.

Jones must have suspected, as time went on, that a moment such as this would come, and now it had. The mystery is why, when he heard Jethro was in hospital undergoing an operation which might prove fatal, he didn't do a bunk. He must have thought that,
with Strauss, he could get through it, save the bank and save his own reputation and that of the boss he adored. Strauss must certainly have told him that, though Strauss was probably more concerned for himself and the bank than he was for Jones.

The figure of ten per cent of all money going through the banking system being money earned through drugs may be a conservative one. The US system demands of banks that they declare deposits of over ten thousand dollars but that doesn't work. The British have an honour system, which doesn't work either.

The Drugs Traffic Offences Act of 1986 only asks a British bank to turn in a suspiciously wealthy customer if they “knew or had strong reason to suspect” the funds came from illicit sources. It's not hard to mount a legal defence against a law so loosely worded. A normal person might think neither Strauss nor Jethro could reasonably claim they had no suspicions about Tallinn, when he kept on turning up with enormous quantities of cash. But the law's a funny thing, William, and an expensive legal team might be able to get away with just that defence.