The Vengeance Man (15 page)

A London suburb

Ironically it was a woman who caused me grief. My own sister.

Imagine my surprise about two weeks later that I got a distraught phone call from Barbara. I was relaxing after a hard day, with a glass of wine and the television. I wasn't really in the mood for what she told me.

Between the tearful gulps the story came out. Apparently the great Jersey copper scheme had come unstuck with the result that Barbara and Wet Eric had lost all their savings. It was all a bit complicated and she wasn't exactly a  model of clarity, snivelling away on the phone,  but the gist of the story on the phone was that the copper firm had never bought the promised copper bars and had then gone bankrupt, - taking all the subscriptions. So no copper: and no money.  I calmed her down and promised to call round there and then.

Round at Malden it was like the aftermath of a pithead disaster.  A red-eyed Barbara and a white-faced, shocked Eric told me the details over a whisky and water. As he pointed out glumly, it might be the last bottle of whisky they would be buying for a long time. I got the hint. So I made my drink last.

They had bought a large number of shares in a firm that traded from Jersey; the deal was that the firm bought bars at cheapest market prices and hung on to them until the price of copper rose. Then it sold off the bars. That was the theory, anyway.   The shares were quite simply ownership of copper bars. These, according to the company's prospectus, were stored in a warehouse somewhere near Tilbury.  Originally Barbara and Eric had put all their building society money into the company, but about two months ago, the directors had offered extra shares to existing shareholders to make a quick buy of a lot more copper before the world price was supposed to rocket. It was a certainty, they indicated.

Taking a gamble, Wet Eric had ploughed all their savings and even taken a second mortgage against the security of their house in order to raise money. He had planned on a short term killing and, provided that copper rose in price, he couldn't fail to make money.

Copper had gone up, alright.  It had, in the word of the Financial Times commodity page, 'bumped along the bottom for an unusual length of time' and then gone
sky-high
. That was the moment when the shady Jersey directors were caught out. Some investors tried to take their profits and asked to sell their copper. Whoops! It turned out that the Jersey boys didn’t actually own any copper, or even copper shares. They just had a lot of shareholders’ money and  an empty warehouse. Desperate, and under pressure, Eric had  tried to cut his losses, by selling his shares. He would still have lost some money, but could have survived.

To Eric's horror, he couldn't unload even his holdings. He didn’t have any.. The company had stopped trading. Even the money he’d paid for extra bars had merely been used to keep the company going for a last couple of months. It had now ceased trading and was in liquidation. The Jersey
wide boys
had gone bankrupt and skedaddled, taking with them any cash they hadn’t already moved offshore.

Eric had decided not to be wet for once and had even been up to the City and talked to one of the names on the company letterhead. Some kind of fat cat director called Varley. He'd been an MP at one time and had left at the last election. Allegations of sleaze abounded, but nothing had been proved. That's the trouble with really smart crooks. There’s more money to be made out of politics and directors’ fees than any armed robbery. And white collar crime is so much safer for your health.  Eric said that when he asked Varley what had gone on, he'd just shrugged, muttered something about the Companies Acts, and then virtually had Eric thrown out of the office. Then, to add insult to injury, Eric had shortly afterwards seen Varley drive away in a  new Bentley.

To
say that
the evening was gloomy would be an understatement. It was a catastrophe. Barbara
sniveled
occasionally, and Wet Eric kept saying, "What are we going to do?" like some kind of dismal chanted counterpoint.  I offered what money I could from my gratuity, but much of that had already gone on buying the flat and I couldn't begin to meet the kind of pressures that would soon engulf their family. They would have to sell their house and start all over again, probably in a rented place. Fortunately they were both sensible people and their desperation was tempered by common sense. No-one, thank God, was contemplating anything drastic.

Finally I had to go. Barbara showed me to the door. Her eyes were red-rimmed from weeping and the blue shadows that had half-circled them on my last visit were more marked. I looked down at her and then put my arms round her and gave her a kiss. "Cheer up, Sis." The tears glistened in her eyes. "It'll all work out - you'll see."

"Will it? I hope so." She sniffed and tried to smile bravely but only succeeded in a weak half-sob.

"C'mon, love, things will look different in the morning. Don't cry. I'll help all I can."

She buried her head in my lapel. "I know. I just wish someone could make that bloody man pay for all the misery  he's caused us.”

"Who? Eric?"  I was puzzled - the idea of the blazered, desperately anxious and fussy Eric being 'that bloody man' was laughable.

"No, silly." She half-laughed. "Not Eric. It's not his fault. Well, not really. No, Varley. The one that Eric went to see in the City; the one with the Bentley and the office. Him."

A hot glimmer of something sparked deep in my mind. "Ah: the unacceptable face of capitalism, you mean?  How do you mean, 'make him pay?' "

She looked at me, her head on one side. "Well, someone like you. Teach him a lesson."

"Someone like
me
?"

"Oh come on big brother - it's not as if I don't know what you get up to."

I pulled away from her. "Oh yes..... what’s that then?"

She was coy. "I know what you
used
to do. It was in all the papers last year. And let's face it, you're hardly the world's leading expert on insurance, are you?"

"What of it?" I said roughly. "I do work for a Lloyds firm. You know I do."

Barbara laughed. "Yeah, sure. But your brand of insurance is a bit different from Eric's, isn't it?"

I was worried and wondered how much she knew.  "What are you saying, then? That I'm running some kind of protection racket?"

She took a deep breath. “Come on, little brother…  this is
me
. I know you.  You’ve always  wanted to be the hard man. Even when you were a little boy. Always playing on your own. Always quiet and watching.  Never cry, hide your feelings, never show you’re frightened. Hit back hard if you’re cornered. That’s you."  She brushed something imaginary from my lapel, avoiding my eyes. "You haven't changed. Ever: that's why you joined the Army: that’s why you joined the Corps.  That's why you went for SAS selection.” She clutched my lapel.

She stared up at me and suddenly said, “Have you ever
killed
anyone?”

She must have spotted my startled blink. “Thought so. Well, as they say, your silence speaks volumes. Just the same as when you were little. You always were a cold hearted, punchy little devil. You don’t fool me with this insurance stuff.”

I bit back hard. This was a dangerous conversation. Very dangerous.   "Well, you're wrong; I do work in insurance. And I can prove it. Call the number on my card if you don’t believe me. I just use my knowledge of the Middle East to help Lloyds with bodyguard contracts, OK? All that stuff's behind me, since I left the Army.  Right?"

"OK. If you say so."

"Well, I do say so."  I was too rough and Barbara’s face began to crumple again. "I'm sorry,
Sis. I didn't mean to be so sharp. I know this has all been hard for you, what with the baby, the money….”"

"I know," she sniffed.  "It's just that I wish something could be done about people like that Varley man. I just thought..."

"Can't you go to the Police?"

“No, Eric says that the man’s not actually done anything illegal. Bastard….”

"Just immoral?"

"I suppose so."

There was a long pause. Eric's voice floated through from the living room. "Come on, Barbara. It's getting cold."   She looked up at me, and called back to him,

"Coming, love." Then in a softer voice, she added, "Don’t you know anyone who could help? Even if we could only get some of the money back…. The eyes pleaded.

"Barbara," Eric called again

She turned back to me. "Please try. Think of little Theo.  You must know someone who could help… Could
you
do something about him? Please?" she pleaded. “Can you ask him to give at least some of it back?”

“I'll see. No promises, though."

"Thanks, love."  She kissed me gently on the cheek. From upstairs came the spluttering, mewling wails that babies make preparatory to full scale crying and Barbara smiled, half apologetically. "There’s Theo. See you soon, love. Take care."

I made my way slowly back to my flat, my mind in a turmoil.  I thought about how little I really bothered about money, yet how vital it was.   As long as I'd got the stuff in the bank and could get what I needed out of the hole in the wall. I hardly ever thought about it.   I didn't even know my bank manager's name. Yet money ruled all those lives, really: mine too.
Bankers were Public Enemy Number One at the time.
I thought about how all that stuff in the papers about how bankers could devastate whole families by manipulating commodities and people.  Money's never exactly been my scene.

Anyway, it's dog eat dog out there in commerce, isn't it?  They're the really hard hearted ruthless bastards.... The Building Societies, the Banks and the lawyers: 'we only repossessed your house because we were obeying company policy, you see…  “The computer says…”   “Head Office's orders are orders and we have no discretion.....”   Orders are orders. Now where had I heard
that
before?  Not that it really hurt me....  Except when it's hurting one of your own family. Suddenly  Yusif's words floated back to me, "Who else will act for us, if a man will not act as a man to support  his own kin...?" 

Surely I owed my sister something? Christ, if she couldn't get justice from the law, then who could provide justice?   Barbara was
kin
, wasn't she?   Blood's thicker than water.

And finally, as I lay in bed, some gentle piece by Rameau fading away in the darkness,  I thought about fraud and crime and justice and the law and the police. As sleep eluded me, I thought about my nightmare policeman, Detective Sergeant Harry Plummer of the Metropolitan Police.  Maybe he was right; maybe whoever had done Spicer wasn't normal.....  that meant
I
wasn't normal.....  Hepworth had said I wasn't... psychotic personality….

I grinned to myself.  Hepworth.   What an arsehole...  I could show him a few bloody
psychopaths
…
real
ones. He should go on the piss with the lads in B Squadron one day. Then he’d see some real psychos….  Well, if the law cou
l
dn't look after my sister, maybe I should...... Now,
Jamal
, he knew about an eye for an eye...  he looked after
his
sister...  a bit late...and poor bloody Nusret, who'd said that we made our own law.... burnt alive by
the Ayatollah’s
goons.....   Christ! What a way to die..... I'd fix bloody Varley.....

An image of Spicer's blood-slimed torso crept into my dreams and to the faint music on the stereo I slept....

Prelude

Fixing Spicer for the world at large was about as far as I had intended to go as an avenging angel. But suddenly I was back in the private vengeance business.

Spicer was meant to be a one-off,  but this busine
s
s with Barbara was family.  Curiously enough, the bad dreams I had been having on and of ever since my return from Iran stopped as soon as I had taken the decision to do something about Varley. I wondered what Hepworth, the creepy little psychiatrist at the London clinic would have made of
that
.  Even my stars were looking up; according to the Sundays,
  'I was due for a memorable month, that could see the fruition of a long cherished dream....'

In my position as Operations Chief for a Lloyds-based company, it was easy enough to mug up on Varley.  The database had lots on
him
. Like Spicer, it made u
n
pleasant reading. He was an ex-public-school boy and had worked in the City at first. Then there had been some odd mail order business that had folded and a first wife. Rumours that he’s peddled cocaine as a young man.   He'd stood for Parliament, done two terms as a Tory MP and then left. The sleaze allegations were financial.  He had a string of directorships in a string of businesses.

Now he lived in a farmhouse down in Kent with his second wife, two kids and some horses. He still contributed  to the  Tory Party and some other more fashionable charities, owned shadowy holding companies in the Isle of Man  and Jersey that seemed to control a series of remarkably unsuccessful businesses, while he kept getting unaccountably richer, and worked out of a floor of discreet but expensive Victorian offices in the City of London.

It all seemed an odd set-up, and the more I delved, the more he stank. To my surprise I discovered that it had  been one of his holding companies that had gone spectacularly bust the preceding year, leaving thousands of trippers without their paid-for holidays. The Press had had a field day, I remembered; but they hadn't uncovered Varley.  The tour firm had lost its ABTA bond, but I didn't have to be an accountant to work out how much cash had flowed from “Sunburst Tours Ltd.” into a holding company before the former had crashed. The holding company was a Jersey Company. I had a pretty clear idea who the beneficiary owner of that hidden Jersey company might be. 

By now my interest was thoroughly whetted. I got every shred on Varley I could, and I didn't like what I kept finding.

After a couple of weeks delving, I felt that I had enough background to go and have a look at him in person. Normally  this would  have been a background inquiry, delegated  to one of the support boys: but I dare not take the risk, so I had to do it myself.  I called round at the City offices of Varley's holding company and made a point of 'accidentally' bumping into him. My good old theatrical moustache and horn rimmed glasses gave me enough cover to risk a brief encounter.

We met in the corridor and I read him as we dropped down in the lift together. With th
e studied indifference of Brits
we avoided each other's eyes; yet while he watched the numbers unwind, and I hummed to dis
t
ract him, I examined him discreetly but in great detail.

He was a large, slightly beefy figure with thinning fair hair and a reddish face. He looked older than his fifty odd years, and in an expensive tweed suit he looked more like a prosperous  country farmer than a bent financier. But he certainly looked like a sleazy ex-MP on the make, which is precisely what he was.   As we got out I rather shyly  asked him if he had any idea where Mr Cunningham worked. His brusque ''No, I don’t. Never heard of him….," as  he pushed past me told me a lot about his attitudes to his fellow men.  I'm glad I hadn't ever voted for him. It would have been a terrible waste.  He was undoubtedly a pompous, arrogant, overbearing public school bastard of  the worst kind, and taking the wind out of him was going to be a positive pleasure. And  a public duty, too.

Having got the measure of the prey, I now wanted to see its lair. From the map it lay well off the main A20 near Pluckley
down in rural Kent
, so I made a telephone appointment to inspect the electricity meter. I telephoned a friend of mine at the local electricity company and said that we needed to use an official Electricity Company cover for a special operation  for  a few days. He readily agreed, without knowing the target.

There are a surprising number of people who will do things for the SAS or for the secret world, and never say a word to question it.  Everyone likes to be associated with the magic world of secrets.  Glory by association, I suppose.  Very glamorous. Makes people feel important. People are gullible.  I had often used them in the past and held an array of spurious work-names and IDs.   And I didn't tell Mike that I had left the Army and was no longer serving with the Counter Revolutionary Wing team at Hereford: it seemed un
n
ecessary to go into that kind of detail.

With this protection against embarrassing phone calls to check my authority, I called at the house about a week later. It was, by any standards a desirable residence. From the gate a long drive swept up to a mock-Georgian front door, and the Victorian pile had been expensively worked on.

His wife let me in. I insisted on showing her my Electricity ID card,
and invited her to phone in and check my
bona fides
. Thank God, she didn't, but then they never do, do they?  She didn't really ask to see it. She was a thin, harrassed-looking soul, with wisps of straggly blonde hair framing a permanently worried face. Like her husband, she looked older than her thirty-nine years. I wondered if she knew about Varley's affair with his secretary, as I did.

While I was taken to the meter in the utility room, I cased the house as quickly and expertly as I could. There were a number of alarms evident; all the windows had security locks and a display panel in the utility room was quite clearly the nerve centre of a standard domestic alarm system. A glimpse of the dining room and living room, ('I only want to check the downstairs wiring, madam,') revealed some good pictures on the walls and attractive silver on the sideboard, but nothing both portable and really valuable. Or, more important, anything that would get to Varley and make him suffer.

On an impulse, I asked her if the alarm system wiring was independent of the mains. There had to be a safe in a house like this.  She looked flustered; not
unnaturally
, she wasn't sure, but a quick inspection revealed that the system went to an independently charged battery if the power was cut.   Her puzzled fumblings also revealed that only one of the pictures was wired to the alarm. When I asked why, she became nervous and cagey. I grinned and said that it didn't matter.  "I see a lot of safes and alarms in my job, madam. I quite understand."

She smiled, still embarrassed, but more relaxed. "It's just that my husband doesn't like people knowing ... you know, about the alarm system."

On a total guess I said, "Quite right too. All I need to know is, is the picture alarm linked to the safe with a separate circuit, or does that use mains electricity, too?"

She looked startled and glanced instinctively at the picture. "No, I think it's all the same system."

I tried to make her relax. "Good, good. Well, I won't need to see any of that. Can I check the fuse box, now, please?  And then we've finished."  And off we went to the fuse box in the utility room. My eye had already noted the bowl of cat food  and the small open top window.

She invited me to have a cup of coffee before I left. She was clearly lonely out there in the country and needed to chat. I had seen no evidence of a daily cleaning woman; I expect that the nice Mrs Varley was starved for human company.  Every rule in the book said that I should decline her invitation and not stay a moment longer; theoretically I had already exposed myself too much already. The counter argument was that time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted, and I really needed a first hand report on Varley.  Curiosity won, and, secretly praying that my horn-rimmed glasses and scrubby stick-on moustache would last the course, I joined her at the kitchen table.

She was a decent, kind enough woman. Her mannerism of pushing back the strands of hair at the side of her face with the back of her hand reminded me of bakers or harrassed mothers, and her permanently apologetic manner - "I'm sorry  it's only instant" as she handed me coffee - was clearly based on an unhappy and doubtless bullied background somewhere down the line. It didn't take any great skill to bring the conversation round to her husband and the house, and she fleshed out my picture of Varley very well. She missed her two kids away at some expensive school and proudly showed me a picture of them in coloured blazers on the cliffs at Eastborne.

She was a nice woman, and deserved better from life than she  had got, even with the fancy house and all. I could sense a desolation of the spirit,
and when she talked of her kids she stared out of the window as if hoping to see them playing on the lawn. But they weren't.

Just as I was leaving, though, she gave me a nugget of information, while I was fending off some too-detailed questions about the promotion prospects of local Electric
i
ty Board employees. She revealed that she was off to Wales the following Thursday to see her parents. I realised that would give me good access to the house, because she'd already told me that Varl
e
y rarely got home before eight o'clock. We parted cheerfully, although not before she'd confirmed that there were no security TV cameras, "should the workmen come round madam..."   I crunched across the gravel to the hired car, mentally deciding not to take any risks but relieved that I now had a date to  strike. Moreover, at least I knew how I was going to give Barbara a very practical revenge.

I was going to rob Varley of enough to pay Barbara back. It was probably in the safe.

And if it wasn't, then Varley could pay up. Personally.

I was sure I could find some way of convincing him.