In the Company of Ghosts (13 page)

‘I think you need to demonstrate the tact and diplomacy for which you are legendary,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘Given that Mister William T. McCarley has extended us the courtesy of inviting us to dine at an institution where heads of state and oligarchs take breakfast. Besides, if Mister McCarley’s innocent, he won’t know that Simon Werks is dead, and it would be unfair of us to give him the advantage of that news.’

‘Innocent.’ Doyle chewed at the word like an unwelcome fishbone. ‘The W. should stand for wanker, anyone who insists on using their middle initial in their name.’ He pulled out a City of London warrant card as he walked up the steps towards the Plato Club. ‘This is our cover… fraud squad. McMoneybags has been told we’re investigating the ControlWerks take-over for possible insider trading. We’ll see if he lets slips that he knows that Saucy Simon is laid out on a morgue slab, rather than sunning himself with a bunch of church hippies out in California.’

Doyle and Mrs Witchley walked through the open doors of the club. There was a cloakroom and reception alcove in a short corridor inside, and a pair of liveried doormen, black jackets with tails and a discrete Plato Club logo on their ties in gold. The taller of the two men smiled at them. ‘Mister McCarley’s guests?’

Doyle nodded and the man indicated the cloakroom, while his colleague checked their arrival off on his PDA. ‘Welcome to the Plato Club. And would Mrs Witchley care to leave her umbrella in the cloakroom?’

‘Mrs Witchley would not, young man. Something to lean on at my age proves inestimable – and as you can clearly see, I am far too young to sport a walking stick.’

Doyle rolled his eyes.
What is it about women? Vanity at the old biddy’s age.
His grandmother had been the same right up until her last day in the nursing home. Selecting silk blouses she couldn’t afford and having someone come in to do her hair every fortnight well into her nineties.

‘Very good. Sir, madam, the morning room is this way.’

The doorman led them through a large hall, an expanse of Italian stone with a sweeping white staircase curving up and splitting into two bridges of marble with dark wrought iron for banisters, the climbing treads rising up through two storeys. Off to the side, the morning room was a tall room filled with light from sash windows, perhaps thirty tables surrounded by easy chairs and occupied by club members drinking tea and coffee and nibbling at sandwiches and croissants. Many of the faces were vaguely familiar to Doyle from television, although he wouldn’t have been able to name half of them if pressed – a rum crew of politicians and industrialists and media celebrities. William T. McCarley was dining alone. There was a reading table by his side, a selection of tablet devices fanned out, each with a different newspaper on the screen. Members of staff appeared and pulled out chairs for Doyle and Mrs Witchley, announced by name by the doorman, and after inquiring after the guests’ preferences for food and drink, the two of them were left alone with the fund manager. Matching his short ginger hair, McCarley was wearing a brown three-piece suit bordering on orange; a tweedy pattern that made him look like Rupert the Bear gone to work on Wall Street. Elegant but showy, it wasn’t the sober anonymous blue stealth suit favoured by most bankers. His solid ruddy features gave the impression of a man who was used to doing things his own way.
I know how that goes.

‘So, Britain’s interested in my fund’s activities? I thought you guys were all about the free market again these days?’ Doyle had been expecting the American accent from his file, although it lacked Curtis Werks’ patrician edge. McCarley could have been a prizefighter from New Jersey.

‘Free?’ said Doyle. ‘And how often does Greenrock get out of bed in the morning for free?’

‘We like to earn our money. That’s an American thing. A little like an
American
fund taking over an
American
company.’

‘An American firm which has a London Stock Exchange listing as well as a U.S one,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘Besides, I was under the impression that markets and money were global these days.’

‘I know what you guys have been hearing. The old David and Goliath narrative, with Greenrock playing the part of the evil giant. For all of their supposed shyness with the press, the Werks boys do a good PR job on the rags-to-riches story, don’t they? Werks is the twins’ mother’s name, not their father’s. Their father was a Connolly. Their old man took the Werks name so the family wouldn’t object quite so much to a penniless Mick marrying into a German packaging fortune. It’s real easy to start a software business when the first eighty million comes from granny.’

‘And you, I presume, are a self-made man?’ asked Agatha.

‘Damn straight. My father was a teamster. Drove haulage for the same company in Nevada for thirty-eight years until the day it went bust. The next morning he stole his truck from the bailiff’s lot and drove it off a bridge and into a canyon outside Winchester. I ever figure there’s not a place in the world for what I do, I’ll do the same damn thing. There’s no safety net fortune in my line to catch my activities. What I’ve done with Greenrock has been funded solely by the Bank of Hard Work.’

A tray appeared with coffee, tea and sandwiches cut into neat little triangles. Doyle tucked into it while Mrs Witchley fastidiously ignored the fare. ‘And what do you do, Mister McCarley?’

‘My fund’s not the barbarians at the gate, lady. Greenrock Capital is like a forester in the woods. Sometimes we find a little spare soil and we plant an acorn and we water it, and something good grows up from nothing. That’s venture capital. Other times we find a big old oak that’s been there for centuries, but most of its dead wood, diseased. To keep it alive you’ve got to cut out the dead bark to preserve the healthy. That’s a private equity buy-out.’

‘And which of those two analogies does ControlWerks fall under?’

‘Well, I’d have to say that particular one would be a big juicy apple tree, with a pair of hayseeds tending it and letting half the fruit rot on the tree, rather than picking ’em and selling ’em like they should be. I own a piece of that land and that tree. Purchased fair and square on the open market. And those two hayseeds, much as I prod and poke them, don’t seem minded to pull out their baskets and get on with the harvest.’

‘And how far are you willing to prod?’

McCarley raised his hands. ‘Only what’s legal. Of course, that’s not always so easy to work out, what with you people fattening up the compliance books every year, but I have plenty of advisors to take care of that.’

‘And if you buy out ControlWerks, what happens to the two brothers?’

‘Well, in that regard, they’re not much different from my father or me. They like driving down their own road and they probably don’t enjoy backseat driving anymore than I do. They’re going to get booted out of the cab one way or another, sooner or later. Kinder and cleaner all around to make it sooner.’

‘Well ye-ha, Willie, we’re having us a ho-down, and they’re all invited. And when they’ve arrived for the bleeding square-dance, we’ll crosscheck their stock purchases just to make sure the cousins haven’t been kissing each too much.’

‘There’s no damn inside dealing with ControlWerks. I don’t care what the Werks brothers have been alleging.’

‘Alas, these days the British government doesn’t take much on trust when it comes to financiers,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘A few too many bailouts along the journey. It would be very helpful if you could give us a list of the others involved in the consortium.’

McCarley waved his hand in disgust. ‘You can have it – much good may it do you. But you bear in mind it’s beyond commercially sensitive. If I find the names on it leaked to scupper our bid just because some pork-barrel Brit politician is worried about jobs in their constituency, my lawyers will nail their ass to the wall. Be coming after you for billions, you hear?’

Doyle affected a posh English accent. ‘Old chap, keeping secrets is our bread and butter.’

‘Make sure it is.’

With their interview terminated, one of the serving staff appeared to lead them out, the footman who had escorted them to the table moving in the opposite direction with a fashionably dressed woman to replace them at McCarley’s table. She looked too old to be the fund manager’s secretary, probably too old to be his wife too, if Doyle was any judge of character. ‘You know,’ said Doyle. ‘I’ve just seen McMoneybags pay for lunch, so why does it feel like he’s eaten mine?’

‘I know that woman’s face from somewhere,’ said Mrs Witchley, glancing back at the table. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue.’

‘Unless you’re secretly the Duke of Westminster’s sister and you’ve been dining here on the sly, love, I don’t see how…’

‘Christine Lormand,’ said Mrs Witchley, snapping her fingers. ‘The second to last head of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. She retired over ten years ago.’

‘The French spooks at the DGSE? She’s not here working as the club’s cake waitress, then?’

‘You know, the sedative that was used to tranquillise Simon Werks was derived from a substance still used by the French army.’

‘That’s a bit tenuous, love. I mean, I get that everyone loathes the Frogs, but still… give the cheese-munchers a break. The doc’s report said the drug’s used by the Australians too, but until we see Skippy the Kangaroo on an assassin’s leash hopping around with a vial of tranquillizer tied around its neck, I’m not going to put them in the frame for the murder either.’

‘I might have been a little unfair to you and your theories, Mister Doyle. Perhaps there is a commercial motive here after all. Did you get the impression that Mister McCarley wasn’t being entirely honest with us back there?’

‘Do bears lay brown ones in the woods? Of course he wasn’t telling the whole truth to us. But is it because his mates really are playing the market on the side knowing ControlWerks shares are going to rocket as soon as the takeover begins, or does the old sod know that Saucy Simon is dead and suspect we’ve rumbled Werks’ suicide is a fake?’

‘He should have had a lawyer sitting in,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘If he thought we were really with the fraud squad, he would have had representation. Shittysticks, what sort of American meets the fraud squad without his lawyers present?’

‘The totally innocent kind or the completely guilty kind. Which leaves us straight back at square one.’

‘I thought perhaps you might just smack him in the stomach, plant a spray of methoxyflurane in his jacket pocket and arrest him in front of his peers.’

‘You haven’t got a very good impression of how I do things,’ said Doyle, stepping out through the club’s entrance and into the morning sunshine. ‘When my scumbags do time, I really do want them to have done the crime. If I’d been into taking the easy route, I’d still be in special branch pulling antiterrorism cases.’

‘Oh, I trust
my
phone. I wrote its security software myself – well, with a smattering of help from Charles Babbage. Yes, I thought so…’ She turned the mobile’s screen around to show Doyle the photograph of Christine Lormand on a corporate web page. ‘Meet the executive chairwoman of PegasusEnForce.’

‘No, I mean, oh
shit
!’ Doyle pointed to the empty parking space where his car should have been. He sprinted over to where the space was, a great big vacancy of automobile between a Mercedes four-wheel drive and the bright yellow Lamborghini. There was a traffic warden with dreadlocks inspecting the time left on the Mercedes’ meter, his PDA out to note how long was left before he had to check again. Doyle stamped in front of him. ‘You! Did you tow the Nova? There’s at least a bloody hour left on that meter.’

‘That old-fashioned smoker was yours?’ said the traffic warden. ‘Driven off a couple of minutes ago, man. Three young kids – thought they couldn’t afford nothing better than a rust bucket to tool around in.’

Mrs Witchley was kneeling in the vacant parking space, and picked up the Nova’s broken aerial lying on the tarmac. ‘The old aerial trick. Snapped away and used to dive your door lock. I did warn you about the security on last century models.’ She indicated the cars on either side. ‘Biometric identification, you see? They would take at least half an hour to hotwire.’

Doyle kicked the pavement’s oak tree in fury. ‘Little hoodie scumbags, I’m going to kill them. My Chevy Nova. What’s the wife going to say?’

Standing in the street, Mrs Witchley had the phone to her ear. ‘Hello, I would like to report the theft of a car, registration details are—’ She halted as the thud of an explosion echoed through the streets, a distant chorus of car alarms set off, muffled screams and panic marked by a column of black smoke spearing up above the houses and shops a few roads away. Doyle had watched Bomb Disposal trigger a suspect package in a car in Westminster five years ago. The resulting havoc had sounded a lot like that.