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Authors: J Jackson Bentley

Tags: #thriller, #london, #blackmail, #bodyguard, #josh, #blackberry, #hammond

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BOOK: 48 Hours - A City of London Thriller
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I have a photo of each of the diamonds and their
certificates. Halima can email them to you. As for the man, he
appeared very much like you see in these pictures. I would say he
was almost six feet tall, a little overweight, he wore a badly
fitting toupee and he was wearing a Breitling Navitimer Mecanique
wristwatch. I have been selling Breitling watches for thirty years
and the Mecanique, a French version, is very rare now, and very
valuable.”

It was typical of a jeweller to be able to describe a watch
with precision and yet only be able to give a vague description of
the wearer.


Thank you, Mr Nour. My understanding is that Breitling
watches are individually numbered. Is that correct?”


Yes, each one is registered to protect the brand against
replicas and fakes. But obviously I did not see the
number.”

I thought that was too much to hope for, but nonetheless Bob
had slipped up. He was fallible after all, and I took heart from
that.


Thank you, Mr Nour,” Boniface said, shaking his hand. “A
technician will be here within the hour. I can assure you that we
will try our level best to find your gems and also the man who
misled you.”

Chapter 18

City of London Police Station, Wood St, London. Friday,
5pm.

I was exhausted. It had been a long day.

The police had eventually managed to freeze the money in the
Sharia Islamic Bank of Arabia but there was some doubt as to
whether I would ever get it back. Mr Nour had sold the diamonds in
good faith to a man who had two hundred and fifty thousand pounds
delivered to Nour’s account. The Egyptian had even made sure that
‘Josh Hammond’s’ money was in his account before he let the
diamonds go. Finally Nour had copies of a scanned passport and
driving licence that probably would have fooled me. Either he lost
a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of diamonds, or I lost the
cash, and if I was being honest I had traded the money for my life,
which was now hopefully safe from Bob, who was potentially a double
murderer.

Boniface and I were covering the emails Bob had sent to Nour
and the fax number on the business card. Neither led anywhere. The
email had been sent from [email protected] which we had
known was a dead end since yesterday morning. The fax number was a
YAC number, a free service that allows email users to have faxes
converted to email and forwarded on. The number led straight back
to the email address.

I was still in Boniface’s office reading through my statement
concerning the morning’s grim find when Dee came in with a
Detective Sergeant from the financial crimes team. Boniface
gestured to them to sit down, but they both seemed excited. They
handed a sheet of paper to me and to Boniface and asked us to read
it to ourselves. It read;

Breitling Research: Dee Conrad & DS Peter
Fellowes.

The Navtimer watch was introduced in 1952 and went out of
production around 2003. The Old Navtimer edition was produced in
the period 1993 to 2002. The Mecanique was a special French limited
edition of just 1000 pieces. Breitling HQ is in Grenchen
Switzerland.

DS Fellowes has been in touch with Breitling HQ in Grenchen,
Switzerland and they confirmed that the majority of owners do
register with them to guard against theft and forgeries. They said,
“When you are paying thousands of pounds for a watch you want to
know it is genuine.”

Each Old Navtimer Mecanique is marked with the model reference
number, A11022 and a unique Breitling registration number. Of the
1000 Mecanique watches 143 are unaccounted for or have never been
registered. Most are registered in France, where they were
predominantly marketed but 78 are registered to people currently
living in the UK, 66 of the UK based owners are French nationals
and 4 are known Breitling Dealers. That leaves 8 in British private
ownership. Unfortunately Breitling cannot give us names or
addresses without an international warrant, which is unlikely to be
granted as we are on a fishing expedition here.

However, there is a ray of hope. Breitling watches are
serviced and maintained at Tonbridge Wells and Dee Conrad has been
in contact with the manager there. He has maintenance records of 12
watches bearing the reference A11022. He was not keen to share that
information but after a bit of sweet talking he agreed to email Dee
a list of the names and the towns to which the serviced watches
were returned. He said we will need a warrant if we want any more
than that. Here is the spreadsheet he sent.

NAME TOWN

D. Allinson Edinburgh

S. Bentley Oxford

F. Cozee London

A. Hickstead Leeds

L. Houlier London

D. Julliard St Helier

H. Laurent Manchester

T. Morrissey Wigan

K. Pascal Glasgow

N. Van Doren Rotterdam

G. Weissman London

A. Wasir Birmingham

 

I decided to be the first to make an observation.


If my reasoning is correct, we have potentially eight watches
registered to individuals who are not French and are not dealers.
The spreadsheet you’ve procured has eight people who appear to be
non-French. Even if I’m wrong on a couple of the names, it means
that our man is almost certainly on that list.”


That would be right if one hundred and forty three of the
watches were not registered. The unregistered watches could all be
in London,” DS Fellowes countered.


Or none of them could be in the UK at all. It is at least a
lead,” I said optimistically.

Dee chirped up. “Am I the only one seeing this? The fifth name
down, L Houlier of London, whose initials are LH.”

The room fell silent.

Chapter 19

Pendolino Train, First Class Carriage, Kings Cross.
5pm.

Bob sat in the seat and relaxed. The East Coast line was
experimenting with the Pendolino that had proved such a success on
the West Coast route. He was a regular rail traveller across Europe
and found the Pendolino less comfortable than the Eurostar or the
old GNER 225s.

He closed his eyes and pondered as the odours of dinner
cooking in the dining car permeated the carriage. This line was one
of the last to preserve the dignity of passengers by offering a
Silver Service dinner in a dedicated dining car.

Bob idly wondered whether the slimy Abasi Nour was in jail
yet. He doubted that the Egyptian would ever get his hands on the
two hundred and fifty grand that had been used to secure the
diamonds. Sir Max had once let slip that Nour had provided him with
some investment gems, no questions asked, along with a legitimate
diamond studded tiara for his daughter’s ‘coming out’. Bob
remembered being amazed that Debutante Balls for the privileged
classes still took place in the twenty first century.

The diamonds were now secure in a safety deposit box in
London, and all signs of Bob, his alter ego, had been
eliminated.

Bob was content that neither the CCTV nor the photos in the
passport or on the driving license could be used to trace him. He
had barely recognised himself with the glasses, wig and moustache.
He imagined that the best description the police would get from
Abasi Nour was that his ‘Josh Hammond’ was a tall middle aged man
from East London.

Of course, Bob couldn’t have done all of this on his own. Faik
Al Khufi, his faithful young friend, an Iraqi asylum seeker, had
proved to be a talented photo editor. His photoshopping skills had
produced a masterful passport photo page and a convincing photo
card driving license.

Bob would use his influence to keep Faik in the UK, at least
until he had outlived his usefulness. He began to drift off as the
train left the station. He was looking forward to a weekend with
the family, and soon Richard Wolsey Keene would receive his forty
eight hour ultimatum. Bob had little doubt the spineless banker
would pay the one million pounds he was demanding, especially when
he discovered that Sir Max had paid such a heavy price for being
stubborn.

Chapter 20

Brompton Place, Knightsbridge, London. Friday,
6:15pm.

As we turned off Brompton Road into Brompton Square I
marvelled at the beautiful buildings facing me. They were town
houses, but town houses that were so large it was hard to imagine
that they could exist in London, where property was so
expensive.

DS Fellowes and Dee had driven into the City to speak to
Andrew’s boss before he departed for the weekend. Inspector
Boniface, his driver and I were looking for the house where Mr L
Houlier lived.

The car pulled up outside a magnificent porticoed house with
four floors. The house was immaculate. The grey granite stone walls
had been cleaned and renovated some time in the recent past. The
stone steps were worn. They were rounded at the edges and the
entrance to the house itself had a depression in the stone where
generations of tradesmen, deliverymen and visitors had stood,
waiting to be attended to. Inspector Boniface left the police
constable in the car and walked up to the door. I tagged along. The
Inspector was just about to press a white pearlescent button
surrounded by a ring of intricately cast brass-work when the door
opened.

A young man of Latin appearance stood inside looking at us. He
smiled.


I saw you coming up the steps on the CCTV,” he said,
answering our unasked question, pointing at a carved Lion’s head
which looked as though it might have been an original fixture but
which, on closer inspection, contained a tiny lens in the lion’s
open jaws.


Mr L Houlier?” Inspector Boniface asked.


I’m one of them,” the young man replied. “My father is also
L. Houlier. He is Leon and I am Luc. Which one of us do you want to
see?”


Actually we would like to speak to whoever owns an Old
Navitimer Mecanique watch.”


Ah, my Grandpa’s old Pilot Watch, the Breitling,
yes?”


Indeed. May we come in and have a chat about the watch?”
Boniface showed the young man his warrant card and introduced me as
a colleague.


So, you too are French, Monsieur Boniface?”


Not for three generations, Luc.” The Inspector fell silent as
we stepped into the cathedral-like space that served as the
entrance hall. It was a glorious pastiche of gold and Italian
marble. Every metal surface was gilded to an identical patina and
had the look of ancient, much buffed gold. But it was a clever
deception because the air conditioning grilles looked exactly the
same. The marble flooring did look original, as it was the same
kind of old brown marble flecked with grey that one associates with
London Museums. In places it had cracked and had been expertly
repaired. The wooden staircase, the tall skirting boards and carved
picture rails were a rich dark hardwood and in the middle of the
edifice was an astounding chandelier, which was suspended from two
floors up by a long gold coloured rod and chain.

Luc could see our astonishment, and filled the silence with an
explanation.


Yes, it is very grand. I sometimes forget how impressive it
appears to visitors. When you live here all of the time you become
complacent and take the grandeur for granted.”

Luc explained that the house had been created from two houses
that backed onto one another. It had a front door on both streets.
The houses had been bought and refurbished by Dmitri Lubenov, the
Russian oil and gas billionaire better known to the English for his
patronage of a Premiership soccer team, unfortunately not my team,
West Ham.


We live here because my father is the London representative
of Muscovia Natural Resources. Also because when Dmitri took up
residence he found that his Rolls Royce would not fit in the
garage, despite the architect specifically designing it for the
car. That architect was found floating in the Thames a month
later.” Luc winked and smiled at his own joke. “Our place in Paris
is a simple apartment and so this is a big step up for
us.”

Luc led us into a reception room that was ornate but modern.
There was a flat screen TV that must have measured all of seventy
two inches, and it was surrounded by speakers and a computer
console. Luc invited us to sit down. We took a seat on Chesterfield
sofa, the leather of which was so highly polished that it was
difficult to sit on without sliding off onto the floor.

Inspector Boniface spoke. “You said the watch was your
Grandfather’s. Is he still around?”


Non, he passed away ten years ago, when I was still quite
small, but he left his watch and memorabilia to me. My father was
not overjoyed, as I suspect my Grandpa knew very well. They had a
strained relationship.”


When you say memorabilia……..” Inspector Boniface
began.

Luc stood and beckoned us to a display case in the corner of
the room. One shelf was filled with medals, framed pictures of a
young pilot and in the middle an Old Navitimer Mecanique watch; the
much discussed Breitling.


My Grandpa was a pilot in France. He was a test pilot for the
Super Entendard before a career flying for Air France. He was an
adventurous man and he saw my father as being too boring. He had
hopes of me continuing the Houlier’s buccaneering adventures.” Luc
smiled with affection but his eyes betrayed his sadness and
loss.

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