The Ludi Victor
by
James Leigh
Published by Wexyork Books on Smashwords
This book is also available in print at my website
Copyright © 2010 James Leigh
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Winner of the Crime Writers Association's John Creasey Memorial Award
'Mature, sophisticated, civilised' - New York Time Book Review
'A coruscating English thriller-...-spun with a confidence that concusses disbelief' - Guardian
'Carried off with a panache that keeps you agog' - Oxford Times
'Clever and original . . . executed with flair and style' - Hampstead & Highgate Express
The Ludi Victor
CHAPTER 1
From the journal of Denfert Rochereau, Ludi Victor IV
I lay face-down in the leaf mould of Navarre feeling more angry than frightened, which was perhaps as well. Under the circumstances, anger was the more useful emotion, for it stimulates rather than diminishes the capacity for decisive action.
Still, I had momentarily to struggle to control my trembling limbs. Why the hell, I asked myself silently, was Alexander the Great trying to kill me with a bow and arrow? It wasn't allowed. Regulations are very clear on the subject. No blades, no firearms. Was the Greek being dishonourable or merely stupid? Who told him the tines of an arrow needn't count as blades?
A metre in front of me, the dead doe lay on her side among long grass, the arrow that transfixed her reflecting an afternoon sun that dappled down through branches dressed in new, acid-green foliage. Her eyes stared candidly back at me, large, dark eyes not yet glazed in death. She was fat, and the moment before she died her belly had heaved. She had been pregnant and near her term. Probably her young had put up a tiny, instinctive struggle to be born before their life support system failed. But she was still now.
I had time for such reflections because I am used to the kind of situation I describe. I have been in it before. It no longer has power to startle me with strangeness. I even had time to look up and register the snow-capped mountains beyond the trees.
Everything was still. I listened but heard nothing above the rustle of leaves in a light breeze and a distant tinkling of bells that reminded me of the Jura. A matt of secondary growth hid me on three sides, so Alexander the Great must have shot at a venture, hitting the doe by pure chance. Behind me, a gully shelved steeply down a hillside.
I thought carefully. As yet, I knew nothing of my opponent. What would he do next? I tried to put myself in his place and guess. He could not know the results of his marksmanship, so he would have to investigate. I, however, was not yet armed. Arrogantly, I had decided to see my enemy's choice of weapon before making my own,
I looked around again. The gully rose once more after a few dozen metres and passed through a stand of half-grown oaks. I got to my knees, checking that I was still completely hidden, and reached out. The arrow was harder to remove than I thought. I had to push it through the doe's body. I squeezed her carcass after piercing the diaphragm with my knife until the blood welled out. I let a small pool of it form on the open ground. Then I shuffled on my knees towards the thicket in front of me, letting fall as many drops as I could on the way. I stuffed the carcass behind a fallen branch and retreated the way I had come, avoiding the blood. Then I crawled down the gully as fast as I dared. I did not stop until I was inside the stand of oaks. There I found a comfortable bole and rested. There was still no sound.
1 breathed more easily. The peaks of the Sierra de Andía glittered in the sunshine. The sloping meadows were bright with early flowers. I should have felt privileged. For this was Navarre, the cradle of guerrilla warfare, where partisans had given Napoleon more trouble than all the armies of Europe put together. Instead, I felt anger.
I had brought the Greek's arrow with me. I inspected it now. It was a simple length of ash, split at one end to take crosspieces of stiff plastic that acted as flights. The tines were of thin sheet metal set into the other end. I guessed that Alexander the Great had at least manufactured the thing after arriving in the zone rather than bringing it with him, but the contrivance was still very irregular. I decided to make a long-range weapon for myself in order to equalize the odds. I, though, would not breach regulations.
I worked quickly, using a spare pair of bootlaces from my pocket supplies and a soft piece of leather from what had until then been my left glove. I cut holes in the leather with my knife and tied the laces so that my slingshot had a slightly concave pocket. It was an honourable weapon with a pedigree stretching back to the armies of Imperial Rome and beyond.
There was a bed of pebbles running along the gully. I had selected some smooth, round ones when 1 heard the cracking of branches. My guess had been correct. Alexander the Great had decided to investigate the results of his shot.
I kept carefully hidden as I watched him step into the clearing where I had lain with the dead doe. His bow was ready, another arrow fitted to the knock. He was a big man with lank, long hair and a badly trimmed moustache. He looked sloppy, out of condition and dull. He also looked very strong. He wore an olive-drab combat jacket like my own and thick-soled plastic boots laced up to his calves. He was a careless mover and seemed unconcerned about noise. I was encouraged by the fact. Perhaps his size made him over-confident. It certainly made him a bigger target.
He quartered the clearing, stooping when he saw the pool of blood I had left. He followed the trail cautiously towards the undergrowth, his back towards me, and I smiled resignedly. This might be easier than I had expected.
As he leaned forward to part the bushes, I stepped quietly from cover, fitted a stone and whirled the slingshot round my head. A breeze sprang up providentially, masking the wickering sound with the murmur of its passage.
The shot was a fine one. Unfortunately, the Greek straightened up again while my stone was still in the air. Instead of hitting him on the skull, it struck his bull-like neck with a loud smack. He roared with pain and crashed off through the thicket.
I moved after him immediately, unwilling to forego my advantage. I thought my cunning and woodcraft were probably far superior to his. On the other hand, he still had an advantage in armoury. Whirling my slingshot took up vital seconds, and I could not always rely on a breeze to mask its sound. Besides, I had been impressed with his speed and athleticism. Granted I had given him good reason to display them, I still made a note to avoid close-quarters combat if I could.
I shadowed him for several hours, not taking many risks, while the sun passed its height and the Greek got used to the idea that a slingshot was my only weapon. Once, catching him in the open, I cannoned a stone off the trunk of a tree he was running towards. Later, I messed up a shot taken at speed. My stone flew far wide, and I had to dive fast into cover. I had given him time to use his bow, and a shaft explored the branches softly very close to my head.
The afternoon wore on. The sun would soon disappear behind a high peak, although there was still an hour or two of daylight left. I decided that the time had come to deploy the major stratagem which I had contrived for the Greek's death. I needed only a few minutes to set it up, and 1 had already noted the perfect place for its execution - a tall patch of timber on a ridge which dropped steeply behind into a fair-sized stream. A few metres down, the stream was dammed by a tree-trunk that had fallen across the flow.
I made my way to the place along a track which I hoped would guide my lamb gently towards his slaughter. I arrived at a gap where the path entered the trees and found the branch I wanted. It was horizontal, whippy, and I could just manage it. I untied the thin nylon rope I kept round my waist for climbing purposes and lashed one end to the end of the branch. Then I took a turn round a neighbouring trunk with my rope and hauled the branch back as far as I could. I secured the whole thing with a slip-knot and adjusted it until I was sure that a small tug would release the branch. Now all I had to do was entice my lamb.
1 found him without difficulty. His movements were as discreet as those of a randy bear. I closed in on him. When I was sure he had seen me, I retreated the way I had come, leading him carefully - and warning myself against over-confidence. With his bulk and weapons, he was still formidable. He would hardly have progressed as far as Navarre were it not so. It was hard to lead him anyway without inviting a shot. Twice he skimmed arrows uncomfortably close to me. Twice I retaliated for appearances' sake, for I had determined that he should fall to my stratagem. My second attempt, however, was an unintentionally good one. The stone hit him on the shoulder and appeared to enrage him, which was an advantage.
I had one major risk left to take. The last few metres of track leading to the ridge of timber lay across open ground. It was essential that the Greek should follow my path precisely, but I did not want an arrow in my back. So I manoeuvred quietly until I knew he would expect me to appear next some sixty degrees of angle further away, then sprinted for the gap in the trees. I was immensely lucky. His arrow hit me just as I arrived. It struck the thick, serge-sheathed canteen I wore at my belt and glanced off.
I dived into cover and fumbled for the slip-knot on my rope. There was no scope now for further manoeuvre. The Greek and I were committed. He was fast, angry, and not entirely a fool. He, too, could see the kind of cover into which I had gone and would understand that neither of us now had a chance to use weapons. The outcome of combat would seem to depend on simple strength and size, and he could scarcely be deceived as to which of us held the advantage in those respects. He had no choice but to follow me.
He was even faster than I thought. His arrival at the gap almost took me by surprise. I released the slip-knot, however, at exactly the right moment. The branch I had tied whipped forward and smashed into him precisely where I had intended that it should - full in the throat. I know something of medicine, and I think he must have died instantly from paralysis induced by the blow. But he stumbled on, arms flailing, until he fell forward in the stream beyond with a huge splash. The current took him, and he fetched up at the dam caused by the fallen tree-trunk. He bobbed there, face down. I blew out my cheeks with satisfaction and relief and stood up. I climbed down to the water's edge and crawled across the tree-trunk to where he lay, a big piece of sodden flotsam. Green, icy water filled my boots. I knew it was impossible that he should be alive, and I could not have hoped for a better outcome.
I reached forward and pulled back the collar of his combat jacket. The key was on its chain round his neck. I pocketed it and threw the chain downstream. To get at his armband, I had to turn him over. I did so with difficulty, and he floated on his back, stream-water slopping untidily from his mouth. His eyes were shiny as the flanks of a gudgeon as he stared past me. I removed the strip of yellow material and turned him over again.
Depression hit me as I made my way back to the bank. It always does at such times. Thank God it rarely lasts, though I sometimes wonder whether others feel the same. There is so much I would like to know about the others now. Alexander the Great was dead. He had used what I still thought of as an illegal weapon. He had been clumsy and unexpectedly stupid for his rank. Yet he had also been brave and fought hard. Now he was dead.
Back on the bank, I took off my boots and squeezed some of the water from my socks. I was shivering, for the breeze had become a sharp wind cutting through the damp flannel of my shirt. But as I dismantled the simple components of my slingshot, my spirits lifted again. Alexander the Great was dead, but I was alive, able to feel the discomfort of my clothes and see the flushed sun poised enormously over high hills of snow. The air was full of birdsong and I could almost hear emerald grass grow under my feet. I was exalted with a feeling few men are ever privileged to know.
I returned to the ridge, untied my nylon rope from its branch and wound it round my waist again. I dismantled the Greek's makeshift bow and carried the stave some distance away before abandoning it. I think it right to be punctilious in such matters. I also stripped all the arrows I could find, burying the heads and flights deep inside an old badger sett. Finally I quartered the whole zone several times, taxing my memory. I found three more arrows and dismantled those as well.
I made my way to my car, changed and drove off in the direction of the French border. At a town some miles short of it, I found a post office open for its evening session. I parked in a narrow, smelly side street between bars, returned on foot and made my telephone call, consulting the scrap of paper in my pocket. While I waited for the connection, I wondered idly what arrangements Alexander the Great had made in the event that I, not he, had ended up bobbing face downwards in a mountain stream. The cop who took my call sounded bored or half asleep.
'Soy forastero,' I mumbled earnestly. 'Si ... de vacación. He visto un hombre muerto en las montañas ... Creo que se haya ahogado.'
I told a very confused story, making no attempt to hide my bad accent or grammar. Eventually, the cop ordered me round to the station from where I could take him to the 'accident' I described. He gave careful me directions. I agreed and hung up. I went back to my car and drove on towards the border.
I got to Bordeaux in time for a late dinner at a café near my apartment block. I was alone in it by the time I had finished my bad couscous. Waiting for the barman to coax coffee from an ancient Gaggia machine, I borrowed some jetons and made my call from the other end of the bar where I would not be heard. The owner of the voice I spoke to is unknown to me, of course, but his thick and fleshy accent of the Midi is as familiar to me as my own.
'This is Denfert Rochereau,' I announced quietly. 'I have returned from Spain.'
'Good evening, Colonel. You were successful, then?'
'Alexander the Great was unfortunately drowned. It was an accident.'
I congratulate you most heartily. These facts must be verified, of course.'
'Naturally. The local police have already been informed. There was nothing compromising in the Greek's rented Seat which he abandoned nearby. You will be in touch?'
'In the usual way and in good time. You have your key and insignia?'
'Of course.'
'Then send them to me and prepare for your final step. It will be good to have a Frenchman break the stranglehold of the Germans.'
1 agreed, hung up, and took my coffee and marc to a table by the window. I looked through it into the unattractive street beyond. 1 wondered how Gustavus Adolphus and Oliver Cromwell had fared in the Ardèche. The man from the Midi had presumably not been informed.
A group of boys in denim and leather were revving up their motorbikes outside, deliberately annoying the residents of the quartier and attracting the attention of a cop who was strolling towards them, loosening his white-painted truncheon in its holster. They awaited his arrival with scant interest.
I sympathized with them, but my sympathy was more than tinged with contempt. They were trapped, boring children of boring parents, leading boring lives in a boring quartier of a boring town.
I had a sudden recollection of a pair of hawks I had seen raping the thermals high above the sierras of Navarre, I smiled in the empty bar. I wondered how these children would react if they knew how I had spent my day.
CHAPTER 2
The pressure of the headrest on the back of my neck was a soothing massage as McVeigh's maroon Rolls accelerated. It was a pleasing sensation. It was only early afternoon, but I was already tired. So would you be if you had been up half the night tearing the scales from a man's eyes, then up again at six o'clock to shoot his vermin.
We were cruising south-east on a stretch of dual carriageway to join the M4 near Swindon. It was a fine, brusque day. I watched a motionless kestrel stand on its tail and flutter briefly to maintain station over a patch of grass verge between carriageways, hoping for a fat vole flushed by the wind of our passage. I thought sententiously of how the forward march of progress always creates new scope for old savageries.
McVeigh was concentrating on his driving, so I dozed. The top of the Rolls was down, but the heater was on. I was sumptuously warm, feeling enough slipstream to ruffle one side of my hair.
1 had just finished a short, boring engagement for a short, boring man called Huddiesford. He was a tiny tycoon who earned his daily caviar making rustic garden fencing for a million suburban homes. He had started out with nothing but a simple idea, some borrowed capital and a load of Dr Beeching's cast-off railway sleepers. We were passing his place now, a series of low workshops with a prefabricated office building on two floors. I could see the company slogan on a big billboard in front of it. 'Fidelity is the fence.' The word 'the' was heavily underlined and painted in red longhand.
Mine is not an easy job to define, even though London Provincial Five Tax District knows me simply as a consultant. Huddiesford's brief had been pretty typical. He knew in his bones he was being ripped off by one of his suppliers. He wanted me to confirm the hunch and show him how it was being done.
Finding answers had been easy. Huddiesford had mobile display centres for his products up and down the country. The suspect supplier sold him booths fitted with tape-and-slide shows intended to impress potential customers. The design was unique, patented and overpriced. It turned out that Huddiesford's own marketing manager, a cherubic West Countryman called Bennett, had poached the idea from a naive freelance designer in the Midlands and set up the supplying company through front men to make and sell the booths to Fidelity Fencing at an inflated price.
Huddiesford hadn't been willing to accept my findings, and that was normal, too. We had punished a lot of single malt whisky while I worked hard to convince him. I knew what the trouble was. He had come up the hard way himself and probably had bigger and better skeletons in his own closet. On the other hand, he had invested a lot of time and profit turning himself into a bucolic country squire with rolling acres and a nineteenth-century mansion that looked as though it had started out as a workhouse and been convened to Catholicism halfway through the building. He had not liked being reminded of the kind of business he was really in, or the kind of man he really was. At first he had not relished the idea of wrestling in mud to sort Bennett out. But I had the feeling he would get used to it. The upshot of our long meeting was that I had started the day with a pain in my head and Huddiesford's Cogswell & Harrison 12-bore in my hands. He was a bad landowner. According to his gamekeeper, he regularly shot the hell out of every bird on his land, with the predictable result that vermin found itself with nothing in nature's larder at the end of the season and took to terrorizing local farms instead.
Earlier in the week, I had been drinking in The Malt Shovel with one of Huddiesford's tenant farmers. He told me how a fox had got into his house via a small trap in the door.
'Thik bugger did even kill the bleedin' cat,' he said. 'There were blood all up the bleeding walls.'
So the gamekeeper had suggested a vermin shoot with as many guns as could be mustered before the breeding season got too far ahead, and I had spent the morning motionless inside a bare, black, freezing wood. All I had got for my pains were frozen feet, one jay, and a vixen dropped with a load of number 4 shot in her head.
Eventually we had gone back to Huddiesford's mansion for lunch. McVeigh had been waiting for me in a small withdrawing room where glycerine-preserved flowers drooped funereally in urns and Mrs Huddiesford kept a bottle of gin hidden in case of sudden emergencies. McVeigh and I had sipped Manzanilla while he explained Sir Bryan Proctor's need for my services. Hadn't explained, rather, except to say that the job would be worth a very large fee, which was explanation enough.
Afterwards, McVeigh and I joined Huddiesford for a morose lunch of watercress soup, King o' Fife pie, treacle tart and Stilton in a dining room decorated with panelling looted from a monastery in some bygone age. Huddiesford's only contribution to the small talk had been to remind me that I was I invited to a football match. He was a director of one of the top London clubs involved. McVeigh and I left soon after, me I with a fat and comforting cheque in my pocket.
I had been dozing but came awake as McVeigh sailed into the M4 with ruthless panache, neatly intercepting the paths of two other cars. The small sports job behind sounded twin battle horns and tried to ram us. The Rover in front gritted its teeth as McVeigh left both of them effortlessly behind. McVeigh slipped a Vivaldi cassette into the stereo player and lit a cigar.
I knew quite a lot about him although I had only met him a few times. He was a handsome man in his fifties, beautifully suited in some light-grey material with a regimental tie. I wasn't sure what the regiment was, but I was sure it was a good one. His air was sleekly brushed, with just a certain touch of grey at the temples. He probably tied his tie in the high gloss of his Lobb shoes. He was impeccably unsurprising.
His boss, Sir Bryan Proctor, I knew a lot better. In fact, I had known him before he acquired his 'Sir' and a Queen's Award for services to overseas earnings. He was one of the last self-made myths of British commerce like the Grades and Branson. He had taken control of an insignificant insurance company after the War and turned it into an international corporation, specializing at first in the fast-growing car insurance market where his hard-nosed selling and cut-throat premiums had raised eyebrows in City boardrooms. He had sailed close to the wind but used good judgment and avoided the reefs that wrecked lesser competitors. After that, there had been no stopping him. He had expanded his life insurance division and got in early on the mutual fund and pension fund boom, making all important investment decisions himself.
Now Global Alliance was one of the Big Five in the business and Sir Bryan himself a household name. He had all the flamboyance the British love in his type plus a canny talent for public relations. He kept a string of racehorses and backed several wildlife conservation agencies. Since his horses often won, and since various species the British love to get sentimental about were usually on the endangered list, that meant there weren't many days when you failed to come across his name on either the news or the sports pages of the popular press.
McVeigh was a different proposition altogether. He had a reputation as a brilliant and abrasive loner with a lethal actuarial brain. He was feared and disliked both inside and outside the Global empire. Sir Bryan had picked him early in both their careers and set him on his right hand as first lieutenant and general hatchet man. Why they were still in harness, though, was a popular and well-aired mystery, since they were known to dislike each other. At all events, it looked as though the mystery might soon be resolved, since rumour also had it that Sir Bryan was preparing to hand over. He was only in his sixties but was said to be ill and tiring. The question was, who would take his place? If McVeigh were being groomed, he would be taking a giant step from unpopular henchman to one of the top jobs in British business. If he were not, the odds were that he would be out on his ear into obscurity. Even inside the Global empire he had many admirers but no friends.
I inspected him covertly. He certainly didn't look as if he had many worries. His suave, mordant style was pretty much in evidence. If anything, he had more assurance and assertiveness than I expected. There was something in him that suggested he was playing a winning streak in a game the rest of us were not even aware of.
He registered my inspection and guessed wrongly at the thought behind it.
'I wonder,' he murmured, 'how much you earn.'
'Enough,' I said. 'I'm not greedy.'
McVeigh laughed softly. 'Sir Bryan rates you highly. I gather you've worked for him several times before.'
'I met him years ago in a grubby first-floor gaming room over a Soho restaurant,' I said, 'but I can't remember for the life of me how the hell either of us came to be there. We were playing poker for high stakes. I took a thousand or so off him.'
McVeigh laughed again. 'That would impress him,' he agreed. 'But the old boy's esteem goes further. He rates you very high professionally. We were talking about you before I came down. I was wondering why you had never gone into business on your own account. Real business, I mean.'
I didn't like the condescending reference to 'the old boy.' Nor did I like the suggestion that my job was unreal.
'What you call real business bores me,' I said. 'Most of the real businesses I come across are just games played by people who only take them seriously to avoid getting bored themselves.'
McVeigh shrugged, still smiling. He had needled me and knew it. He had intended to. He overtook another line of cars and resumed station in his original lane as though he owned it.
'Looked at in that light,' he observed, 'it is reasonable to ask whether anything in life isn't fundamentally a game. Don't you find your prejudice hampers you in your work?'
'Quite the reverse. Most of my clients over-complicate their business instincts. They get so close to their complexities that they can't unravel even simple problems close up. Coming from outside, I have an advantage.'
'You mean you see things more objectively?' McVeigh asked lazily. It was not a serious question and he didn't expect a serious answer. Open countryside was coming to an end. The fields stopped unfolding like fans as we swept by, and I could see a huge plane coming into land at Heathrow. It looked stationary in the sky.
'I have been studying the files on your last job,' McVeigh remarked after a few minutes. 'Do you remember it? It concerned a man called Ezra Harrison.'
I remembered, and I wondered why McVeigh had taken the trouble to do his homework. I had a good track record with Sir Bryan.
'I remember,' I said.
The Harrison saga had not been the prettiest one 1 was ever engaged in. The man had been on the board of a company Sir Bryan wanted to take over, only Harrison had not liked the idea of being taken over. He had been spoiling for the kind of fight that culminates in a very golden handshake.
My job had been to dig up dirt on him so that he could be got rid of easily and without comeback. I had succeeded better than expected. Obviously Harrison had dipped his fingers in the till in various ways. More surprisingly, he had turned out to be some kind of patron saint to the paedophile information exchange. The whole takeover had been dirty like that. Rumour even had it that one of Harrison's fellow directors had been stabbed in the chest by mistake.
'Were you ever aware of the real purpose for which Sir Bryan engaged you?' McVeigh enquired.
'There was a gang of middle managers under Harrison just waiting to see the outcome of battle before putting the boot in themselves,' I said. 'I imagine Sir Bryan wanted to squash Harrison in order to cow them into submission.'
'With your noted acuity, you are right in assuming that an effect upon the gang of middle managers, as you call them, was the real object of the exercise,' McVeigh observed tartly. 'However, you are wrong in supposing that Sir Bryan's intention was to cow them into submission. A cowed and beaten man is of no use to anybody. Those young men were an important reason for taking Harrison's company over in the first place. I'm afraid the history of the affair is an object lesson in what happens to able and ambitious young men subjected to weak and self-indulgent management. They become méchant.'
'Like gun dogs that don't get enough exercise,' I suggested mischievously.
'Exactly. Sir Bryan wanted those young men, but they needed a lesson, and both the nature and method of the lesson were important. I am glad to say the results of your enquiry had the intended effect. The young men found in Sir Bryan a leader whom they could respect. Most of them are still among his most loyal and capable staff.'
'Would I be correct in supposing that you wish to point up the moral of the story?' I sighed.
'In the main, it speaks for itself,' McVeigh answered primly. 'The particular point I bring to your attention is that it is a fallacy to suppose you or anybody else can remain ultimately uninvolved in any business matter in which they are engaged. In your case, the real object of your enquiry was not made clear to you because of your known prejudice.'
'You mean I was manipulated?'
'If you insist.'
'In my own best interests, of course.'
'In those of the company.'
'Thanks for the warning.'
McVeigh was heading north from Hammersmith towards the extension of the M40 that arrows into the heart of London. The dying sun was a sliver of fevered brilliance far away to our left. The tower blocks around Shepherd's Bush were lost against the grey sky, only their lit windows forming patterns of geometric brilliance in soft yellow squares. We wheeled to the north of Paddington. Our side of the road was empty. The other was crammed with cars crawling back to their little grey lives in the west. They got snarled up at every traffic light, and their owners glared as we ghosted by as though we were breaking some unwritten law of commuterdom.
I dozed again until we passed King's Cross on our way to the tangle of roads that suddenly become streets as they enter the City. I sniffed the air and caught for the first time in weeks the odour of decaying brilliance and dazed apprehension that emanates from all boardrooms and wine bars of the Golden Mile these days. Byzantium, I thought, must have smelt something like it shortly before the Fourth Crusade. We passed under Holborn Viaduct with its heraldic beasts around a shield and its motto Domine Dirige Nos. He'd be lucky, I thought. There wasn't a board of directors in London that would give him a say in company policy. I was getting more and more curious about why McVeigh himself had travelled all the way to Huddiesford's mansion to collect me. It was a bit like Sir Bryan Proctor slipping out to buy paperclips.
'Can't you give me some idea what this engagement is about?' I asked.
McVeigh thought carefully. 'The matter is so important that Sir Bryan insists on briefing you personally.
'So important that he sent you all that way to find me?'
'Quite.' McVeigh. I realized, was deaf to anything remotely resembling sarcasm. He eased the Rolls through the heavier traffic around the Tower of London.
'I, however, will be in day-to-day charge of the investigation he wants you to conduct.' He glanced sideways. 'The business has been weighing on him, and he is not well. I want to take as much pressure off him as possible. That information, by the way, is confidential. 'You will find him a changed man,' he added.
CHAPTER 3
Global House lay deep in the City, not too far from the great crumbling docks and warehouses, not too near the P&O building than which it was a shade smaller, though older in style. Chronologically it had been built midway between Titanic and Concorde, and its worst enemies would have said it had the drawbacks of both, being both uneconomic and doomed. But if such rumours ever got back to Sir Bryan Proctor, I doubted whether he cared. He had acquired the place at a time when it dominated the skyline and the Global empire had yet to savage its competitors into second place or nowhere. He was a great sniffer of the winds of economic change and had long since diversified abroad. The real power these days lay with Global Alliance International SA in a more modest building just outside Brussels anyway, although Sir Bryan himself still operated out of London. As he had once told me with his sly and ageless grin, the financial world is sentimental. It still expects London to know something about insurance that the rest don't.
An evening mist was collecting along the Thames. I could smell its rank richness as the Rolls negotiated the tight concrete bends into the underground car park of Global House. McVeigh got out without switching off. A uniformed attendant who looked like a film extra parked the car in the bay assigned to McVeigh while we crossed to the directors' lift.
We soared upwards in discreetly lit beige silence to the top floor. The well-bred doors sidled efficiently out of our way, and we padded into the deep-piled luxury of Freda Harman's outer office. She was Sir Bryan's personal secretary and looked like a passionless Theda Bara. I winked at her. She smiled uncertainly back. Protocol was the essence of her job. She knew my face but could not place me for a moment in the corporate pecking order.
McVeigh raised an elegantly enquiring eyebrow. Miss Harman nodded in reply. He went through the heavy oak doors into the Chief Executive's sanctum. Left to myself, I inspected the Chagalls and Kokoshkas on the walls. It had been the boss's own idea to fill the building with art treasures back in the heady sixties when there had been too much investment money chasing too few stocks. Just being in Miss Harman's office told you that you were either in a national art gallery or the headquarters of an insurance conglomerate. Nobody else could have afforded the premiums.
A buzzer sounded on Miss Harman's desk. She attended to it, cooed briefly into a desk console and smiled at me invitingly. I followed McVeigh into the sanctum. I had seen it many times before, but I still prepared myself to be jolted.
Like most of the men of his family, Sir Bryan's father had been a career soldier. Sir Bryan himself had spent his childhood in India, although he had returned to England long before the old man got himself and Sir Bryan's mother killed in the troubles following independence. The father had blown the remnants of the Proctor fortune on cards and good living. The son had returned to study accountancy and law, determined to rebuild the family fortunes any way he could. Their dislike had been mutual, though I had never known whether Sir Bryan's business ambition had been a cause or effect of it. The young man had despised his father's raffishness as much as the old man had despised his son's taste and talent for trade. But consciously or unconsciously, there was a lot of filial piety in the penthouse suite Sir Bryan had built. It was an immense conservatory of tinted glass occupying almost half the roof area of Global House. On one side were panoramic views of the Tower of London, HMS Belfast moored upstream and the West End. On the other side, a tangle of cranes, warehouses and scummy quays stretched beyond St Katharine's Dock and Shad Thames into the Pool of London. Between them, the grey river bore a scabrous cargo of split packing cases and debris against a backdrop of the old Courage brewery. The inside of the conservatory was alive with creepers, palms and concealed lighting. Exotic birds screeched from mid-air perches and crapped into shallow pools filled with brightly-coloured fish. It was a cantle of the old Raj assembled from memory by Pinewood set designers. The temperature was a constant and fetid 75°.
Sir Bryan Proctor sat at a desk not more than thirty feet long beneath a green-shaded overhead lamp and a slowly revolving fan. As usual, I looked for, but could not see, a turbaned flunkey with a tray of gin and tonic water at his elbow. Sir Bryan was fitting the cap back on a pen that might have been made in Benares. He looked up impassively as the door hissed shut behind me. He stood up, walked across and poked me in the solar plexus without registering any expression.
'You're looking fit and well, boy.' His voice had always been curiously soft and hoarse. 'You're going to need to be. Champagne and orange juice, isn't it?'
He turned on his heel without waiting for an answer and walked to the drinks cabinet, a priceless piece of oak blackened by age. It was just as well, because I was too surprised by the change in him to give an answer, or even be flattered by the fact that one of the best-known men in England remembered what I drank.
When I had last seen him, he had been very big, deftly groomed and solid. A man who rolled slightly on the balls of his feet like a high-class sailor. Now he had shrunk. His shoulders were rounded and the grey at his temples had spread over his head and chin. He needed a shave. But when I analysed what I had seen, I realized he had an infection of some kind like facial dandruff. It must have been painful and made shaving difficult. But he was still a big man, well over six feet, with a gambler's deadpan lack of expression and a computer-like facility for weighing up people and odds with little, if any, emotional involvement.
He glanced with irritated impatience at McVeigh who stood deferentially beside the cabinet like a court emissary from some smaller but more dapper republic. McVeigh had glanced meaningfully at the decanter in Sir Bryan's hand. Even the hand had white flakes of skin peeling from its back.
'Shut up, Ted, will you?' Sir Bryan grumbled. 'It's my first today.'
He stoppered the decanter, handed a delicate Lalique crystal glass to McVeigh and brought my drink across personally. He stopped in front of me with a half-hostile, half-calculating grin,
'As you are no doubt aware, I have been instructed by my physicians to take things quietly. The degree of their concern is, of course, in proportion to the liberality of the hand that feeds them.'
'I had heard something of the sort,' I admitted.
His expression did not change, but the temperature around him dropped sharply.
'Had you now? From whom did you hear it?'
'In the West Country. Come off it, Sir Bryan. When a man like you gets ill, you can hardly keep it quiet. It's my job to hear things.'
There was a pause before he nodded and grinned again.
'Have you been told anything about the matter we are to discuss?'
The engagingly hoarse tone was very noticeable. My drink was cold and good. By golly, it might even do me good.
'Just that it's important,' I said. 'And that you wish to brief me personally.'
'Very well. Sit down. You too, Ted. I will give a resumé of the facts, preferably without interruption. Afterwards, I should like your reaction. I will then leave you to discuss how you might be able to help us with Ted here.'
1 sat obediently in a leather chair so big it ought to have been supplied with a compass and emergency rations. Grinning sardonically, McVeigh perched himself on a corner of Sir Bryan's desk. There was something in the grin I did not like. Something that looked like malevolent anticipation.
Sir Bryan walked to the desk and took up a Meissen jar. He filled one hand with grey fish food pellets and went round distributing them among the fish pools. The fish almost collided in their rush to get at them. He paused before recapping the jar.
'Briefly, the Global Alliance group of companies is being swindled on a massive scale. Has been for the past four years. Not just in England, but throughout the continent. I should add that murder is a component element in the situation.'
I took a big pull at my drink. This looked a much more interesting job than James Huddiesford's domestic comedy of tape-and-slide booths.
Sir Bryan put a small heap of unused pellets down beside the jar and sat at his desk. He examined the backs of his hands, rubbing one softly against the other, before taking a first delicate pull at his whisky. McVeigh removed himself from the corner of the desk and sat in another armchair.
'An insurance fraud is not like theft. With theft, you know your property's gone. The difficulty is to discover who has now got it. An insurance fraud is different. You generally know who enjoys the benefit. It's a simple question of cui bonum. The problem is evidence. Assuming, that is, you know fraud has been committed in the first place.'
He got up and prowled the room, rustling the ice in his glass to make his whisky last.
'In this case, we do not really claim to know how the swindle works or who is perpetrating it. If it were not for Jake, we probably wouldn't know anything at all - except that Global is losing money and men are dying.'
Jake was his pet name for the giant IBM mainframe computer housed in the basement of Global House beneath its car park. It was the apple of his eye. I lit a cigarette from the silver presentation box on the low table beside me.
'What size swindle are we talking about?' I asked. 'How many murders?'
Sir Bryan rubbed one hand softly across his face, palm uppermost. 'We are talking about losses in the region of one and a half million pounds annually in this country. Total losses in the Group as a whole are in the region of fifty million pounds. Eleven murders have been committed to our certain knowledge. The actual number is probably higher.'
I did not question the statement. Apart from the public record, Sir Bryan had access to secret and semi-official sources at the kind of level and scale that would have made a citizens' rights activist blench.
'A swindle that size is big enough to be called taxation,' I said flippantly, more to ease the oppressive silence than anything else. The immense penthouse was soundproofed, but you could still hear quiet descend when the commuter trains pulled out of Cannon Street and London Bridge. McVeigh grinned back at my probably idiotic grin.
'Insurance is the science of the predictable imposed on facts of the unpredictable,' he explained. 'Using statistics and experience, we formulate actuarial tables which enable us to quantify risk with a remarkable degree of reliability. Naturally, we continually assess performance in the light of expectations. Our first unexpected losses on the scale Sir Bryan has mentioned occurred three years ago. We were perturbed, and carried out an immediate investigation but learned nothing. We wrote the matter off as an aberration of no particular significance. What Voltaire might have called a lusus naturae.'
Sir Bryan had listened in silence, his head bowed, 'Cut the pedagoguery, Ted,' he said quietly. 'I said I'd like to make this exposition in my own way.'
'Certainly, Sir Bryan,' McVeigh murmured with undisguised irony. 'I do apologize.'
I began to get slightly angry. I realized instinctively that McVeigh was enjoying Sir Bryan's worry. I had worked often enough for the old man and did not consider myself his greatest fan. He could be ruthless and coldly arrogant. Still, there was a lot in him to admire. He had built Global up from scratch with his own sweat and brains. It was his life. Thinking about that, I realized why I was also suddenly afraid for him. He was the type who had no opinion of himself as mere man, good, bad or indifferent. He defined himself completely by what he created. It made him vulnerable. Or perhaps I just felt that way because his creation seemed to be under attack and because he looked ill. Sir Bryan returned to his desk. He seemed to have forgotten the interruption.
'Losses of the same order occurred during the following year, ' he went on, 'and again last year. The matter was taken up at the International Board level, and it was established that similar losses were being experienced in seven other major European countries where Global companies operate. A top-secret committee was set up to conduct an enquiry using all available resources. To date, neither it nor the Army of Ferrets has yielded anything of significance.'
The Army of Ferrets was another code name, this time for the corps of investigators who examined every dubious claim on Global's policies.
'Unexplained coincidence isn't evidence of fraud, surely?' I said as intelligently as I could.
'I haven't finished yet.' This time, I got the quiet brush-off.
'During that second year, we set up an exhaustive computer programme based on all holders of life policies who had died over the preceding two years throughout Europe. We were looking for correspondences of the kind that might tell us something about what was happening. Jake fed us back a detailed and homogeneous list of them. A list so comprehensive,' he placed his glass abruptly on the desk, spilling a few drops, 'that there is no possibility of coincidence.'
McVeigh picked up my tankard and carried it to the bar. I did not object. Sir Bryan's story was having an effect on me. Besides, I have a theory that champagne is the best antidote to too much whisky the night before.
'What correspondences?' I asked, not bothering any more about whether he welcomed interruptions.
Sir Bryan scooped up the remaining fish food pellets on his desk and opened the Meissen jar. He slipped one pellet inside.
'The type of policy in question was always straight-risk, the sum assured exactly fifty thousand pounds - or its equivalent in the currencies of the other countries affected. In every case the policyholder was a young man, sometimes married but usually not, who had held the policy for less than a year at the time of his death.'
I accepted my re-filled tankard, 'Let me get this straight,' I said carefully. 'You are telling me every single one of the policyholders in your programme actually died?'
'You catch on remarkably well,' Sir Bryan snapped with a touch of his old fire.
'How many?'
'Between thirty and thirty-five policyholders per year in each country, allowing a margin for computer error.'
'Margin for error?' My implied question hung in the air.
Sir Bryan shrugged. 'No doubt one or two cases crept into the programme that shouldn't have been there. Perhaps one or two that should have been were in fact omitted. The possibility simply highlights the overall consistency of the pattern.'
'What happened to the victims?'
He rubbed the back of his hand across his face again. I might have been wrong, but it seemed to me he was already more tired than when he started.
'As I said, eleven young men are known to have been murdered. But all died violently, apparently from accidents. Drownings, falls from rock faces, that sort of thing. In every case, death took place in a remote country district, usually in summer.' He looked up at me expectantly.
I obliged. 'Young men have a habit of taking up dangerous pastimes,' I said. 'Particularly in summer.
He nodded. 'True. Except that, as you would expect, the majority of them lived in towns, although none died in one. More, an unusually high proportion of them were of the city-dweller type who wouldn't know the difference between a cow-pat and a pussy willow.'
'You've been doing your homework,' I commented.
Sir Bryan jumped up quickly, making me flinch. 'We've researched these kids till research comes out of our ears.' There was a sudden, passionate irritation in him. 'Sometimes I think I know more about them than their own mothers. I've had synopses made of all important matters just so that you don't spend the next month reading paperwork.'
'Fine,' I said soothingly. 'What does your third bit of fish food stand for?
He had the Meissen container ready in his hand. He smiled fractionally, a shade self-consciously, and slipped his pellet in the jar.
'At this point,' he said quietly, 'you might say the plot thickens. Every policyholder had specified a beneficiary in his application who was not a member of his family. A young male like himself. A beneficiary who, so far as our researches can determine, he had never met before in his life.'
McVeigh chuckled sardonically. Again, I had the feeling he was enjoying the situation. Even Sir Bryan noticed.
'What the hell's so funny about it?' he snapped.
McVeigh was unconcerned. 'I see no point in getting overwrought,' he drawled. 'It will hardly help.' He smiled at me. 'There's an interesting sidelight to that last fact. We vetted all the beneficiaries very thoroughly. Remarkably, every one had an unimpeachable alibi. They were all provably somewhere else when the accidents occurred. Not only that, I checked for general socio-demographic similarities. Common backgrounds, friends, activities, that sort of thing. There was nothing. Like the policyholders themselves, they were an unrelatedly mixed bag.'
He drained his glass and laid it carefully on the thick umber tiled floor. 'Most interestingly, a few of the policyholders themselves were, inevitably, relatively wealthy, and in those cases, the policyholder had had the policy explicitly written under trust so that benefits from it could not be lumped with the rest of his estate for tax purposes.'
'Fascinating,' I remarked. 'Only why would someone bequeath a fixed sum with no tax strings to someone he had never met before in his life?'
Sir Bryan was definitely tiring. His face had turned pale and blotchy. If he noticed McVeigh's second interruption, he didn't react.
'Answer that,' he said morosely, 'and I expect you'll have earned your fee.'
He slipped a final fish food pellet into the Meissen jar and locked it away in his desk.
'There's another important correspondence which should have helped us but hasn't.' He looked at me with a kind of despairing anger. 'I've checked carefully, and no other insurance company is affected by this syndrome. It is unique to Global. From that, I infer not only a fraudulent and murderous conspiracy but one whose conspirators, whoever they may be, are waging personal war against me. Or against Global in particular. Again, I want to know why.'
His intensity made me uneasy. 'That's a sweeping assumption, isn't it?' I asked. 'Do you know anybody, any group of people, with a particular reason for wanting to see you ruined?'
Sir Bryan shook his head. 'There's no other explanation,' he insisted. There were more blotches now among the facial dandruff. As I had thought, there was a condition there, perhaps psychosomatic in origin. He controlled himself. 'No other explanation,' he repeated.
He got up slowly. It was an old man's motion. Usually his movements were lithe, for he had kept himself in shape through squash when I had known him before. Now he placed the flat of his hands on his knees to lever himself upright.
'I have built this place up for more than forty years,' he said with quiet intensity. 'It is my life. Someone is trying to destroy it. I don't know why, but I want you to find out, boy. I don't care what it costs. Nobody is going to do this to me.'
I could feel his insistence like a trap closing around me. I got up and walked to the big window. Early evening clouds had cleared to show a bronze sun westering melodramatically over the forward turrets of HMS Belfast. McVeigh came forward to take my tankard again and renew it at the bar. I made no objection. If this was happy hour at Global, I was all for it.
I turned. 'Your story makes no sense,' I said at last. 'I am sorry, Sir Bryan. It's too bizarre. Let's start at the beginning. There is no point in examining these correspondences you claim unless you assume the relevant case histories are alike in all significant respects - and that has to include how they the policyholders died. So, if eleven of them were murdered, the rest must have been. With around thirty-five murders a year spread over eight countries and four years, I make that getting on for a thousand.' I accepted my refilled tankard from McVeigh and took a long pull. 'That's not fraud, Sir Bryan. That's war. An organization capable of inflicting mayhem on that scale would make the Mafia look like a village rotary club. There's got to be something wrong with Jake's circuitry.'
It was my longest speech since making my presentation to Huddiesford, and it reminded me of my hangover. I went back to my armchair and took another long pull at my drink.
Sir Bryan looked up from an inspection of his hands. McVeigh had not refilled his glass, and I noticed there was not a lot left in it.
'I don't accept that.' He put his hands firmly in his pockets. 'There is nothing wrong with Jake, and the software has been checked again and again. A small but efficient organization would be capable of killing that number over that period of time.'
'Without its existence even being suspected?' I was irritated. The chief executive of Global might be ailing, but he was not normally stupid. Sir Bryan had never been the type to dodge inconvenient truths.
'I'm not just thinking about the killers, assuming they exist. What about the beneficiaries? You say they have been thoroughly investigated?'
'They certainly have.' McVeigh was grinning all over his face again. 'Thoroughly. As I said, we have failed to establish any convincing connection between them and the men from whom they benefited - or among the beneficiaries themselves.'
I sighed. My head was beginning to hurt anyway. 'You said it yourself, Sir Bryan, with an insurance fraud, it's a question of who benefits. The beneficiaries would also have to be involved, and there's a thousand of them as well.' I got up and began to prowl. 'Besides, where is the point? There's no motive.'
'Global SA companies have lost in the region of fifty million pounds since this business started,' Sir Bryan snapped testily. 'What the hell do you mean there's no motive?'
There was no real anger behind the words, and I began to feel a certain guilt. I saw now why he wanted me to investigate. He valued my judgment but hated the obvious conclusions he must have reached for himself. He had been hoping I would immediately turn up some simple explanation that would get him off the hook. And here I was, sealing off all exits and redoubling his worries.
'A lot of money,' McVeigh agreed humorously, 'but spread around in a strange manner, don't you think, Sir Bryan? Straight-risk policies for fifty thousand pounds are small beer these days, the kind we sell for bank loan protection. These were fit young men, presumably well able to look after themselves. Why would an organization that wanted to murder for gain pick on such men anyway when we have doddering old invalids on our books insured for ten times that amount?'