In the Company of Ghosts (8 page)

‘Until Simon Werks’ absence is noted or the news is leaked – either by someone at his company, or ourselves in a more controlled manner, I suspect,’ said Agatha. ‘If our hand is forced early, we’ll go with suicide on the death certificate, thank you. Wouldn’t do to tip off his killers that we’re onto their trail. Hopefully we’ll discover who slipped the noose around his neck before that comes to pass.’

‘You know, if Gary Doyle keeps on asking this kind of favour from me in the name of queen and country, I’m going to ask to be put on retainer with you people.’

‘I wouldn’t bother,’ said Thorson. ‘Our kind of money won’t change your life.’

Agatha looked at Simon Werks.
But his had
.
And like most money, not for the better.

CHAPTER FIVE – THE MIRROR MAN

‘Who are the bullet catchers?’ asked Agatha. Their car had drawn up outside the imposing walls of a country estate. There was a gaggle of tall young men and a woman outside the wrought iron gates, the greens of Hunter boots and Barbour jackets to indicate that they were only estate staff. Layers of tweed to cover the bulges where their concealed guns were carefully strapped away. An hour away from the motorway exit, this was the kind of isolation that money could buy when you were rich enough. Every view, every secluded Surrey field and furrow on the way in belonging to Werks.

‘They’re with MI5,’ said Doyle, his fingers tapping the wheel of the steering wheel as he waited. ‘The Home Office didn’t want to take any chances with the last of the dynamic duo. As long as Curtis Werks stays in the country, he’s going to have more bodies on him than the Italian PM in a swinger’s club for his birthday.’

Serenely professional, the agent who came to the car’s window walked away with Doyle’s passport, discreetly checking the chip inside the booklet against his admittance list with an RFID reader he pulled out from the back of a quad bike. While he was doing that, a woman strolled over and casually examined the underside of their car with a mirror on the end of a long steel rod, one of her colleagues running a wand-sized scanner in his hand across the chassis of the car as if he were airport security. Agatha suspected that Doyle was disappointed the agents weren’t showing more interest in his hoodlum Chevy Nova’s supersport’s package. What was the point of tooling around in a boy’s toy if it wasn’t admired?
They’re all young enough to have never driven anything other than hybrid cars.
The first man returned and delivered the passport back through the open window, passing no comment as the large gates opened automatically on rollers.

‘We’re on the list. We’re coming in,’ growled Doyle. He nudged the car over a cattle grid, jouncing briefly, before all four tires bit into the gravel of a wide drive and they crunched their way down a private lane bounded on both sides by thick woodland, vegetation sitting damp and green under the dull sunless sky. Agatha passed no comment as small red targeting dots winked on and off the car as they wound their way towards the mansion. Even the marksmen of the Special Air Service grew bored when they were out camping.

Agatha tapped the car’s dashboard. ‘The real problem with classic cars like your Chevy, apart from the additional pollution, is it lacks the basic modern security features needed to deter car thieves and other ne’er do wells.’

Doyle pulled at the edge of his jacket with his left hand, revealing a pistol in its shoulder holster. ‘It’s got the best security feature of all, love. If anyone steals the Nova, I’m going to fucking kill them.’

‘Well, there always is that. You do realise the officers on the gate might as well pack up and go home,’ said Agatha. ‘There’s not going to be an assassination attempt on Curtis Werks’ life.’

‘Who told you that one, love, Julius Caesar?’

‘Common sense, Mister Doyle. I have been checking the twins’ itinerary. They spent enough time together that there were ample opportunities to kill both of them and make it look like an accident. Two for the price of one. A car crash. A plane crash. Food poisoning. A kidnapping attempt gone awry.’

‘Maybe the plan was to kill the twins separately, leave some time between each murder?’

‘Difficult to arrange. Harder yet to make two murders arranged separately appear as serendipity. The surviving twin is forewarned, now. Even without the service officers here, Curtis Werks has ample private security on hand to protect him.’

‘If the motivation was business, Saucy Simon’s murder might have been a shot across the bows for his brother. A warning. Withdraw from a key market, sell out to us or else. We can get you anywhere you go. We can even make it look like an accident.’

‘That’s quite an imagination you have.’

‘Said the woman who thinks that she’s the bleeding ghost whisperer. We’ll see. We need to find out if our Curtis received a tip-off Saucy Simon was for the chop, either before or after the hit.’

‘You’re not a believer in the afterlife, then, Mister Doyle?’

‘No I’m bloody not. Here’s the thing, Gypsy Jen. You and all the other nut-jobs who claim to be channelling Elvis and Martin Luther King, why’s it only ever the celebs? There are billions of people who’ve croaked. Why’s it always James Dean on your private party line to the next world, eh? Why’s it never Jane Smith the bog cleaner who shuffled off this mortal coil in total obscurity back in 1826, Jane Smith who nobody’s ever heard of?’

‘I’ll tell you my theory on that,’ said Agatha. ‘Ghosts are mostly memory. The pattern of a soul imprinted on the consciousness of the world. In the old days, people would know of the Napoleons and Queen Victorias, and such personages were the spectres most frequently conjured up during séances. The weight of memory, to use your own example, does not favour Jane Smith, honoured only by her own family and friends. Today, with broadcast media, the burden of the local universe favours James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Those are the figures lodged in humanity’s group consciousness.’

Doyle shook his head. ‘Shit.’

‘But that’s only my conjecture. Maybe heaven does exist and God’s an Elvis fan.’

‘Okay, we’ll here’s another one for you, then. Why you? Why Agatha Witchley? What makes you so special? How come when my poor old bladder wakes me up for my midnight promenade to the bathroom, I don’t find Heath Ledger having a ghostly shave and dropping me a few tips on who murdered Simon Werks? Why
you
and not
me
?’

‘There is a reason for that,’ said Agatha. ‘But I am afraid I can’t tell you. It’s simply not allowed.’

‘Shit, of course, that would be too easy. We’re not talking Bruce Willis in
The Sixth Sense
here are we? I see dead people. You’re dead, I’m dead. This is the afterlife and all that bollocks.’

‘I’m very much alive and on this mortal coil, Mister Doyle. So are you. Sadly for Simon Werks, that’s a joy that someone has stolen from him.’

‘It’s all in the mind, love. Your subconscious makes the connections and joins the dots together, but if you want to believe that it’s Dean Martin appearing and singing the answers to you, well, fuck it if I can’t take a joke. Right now, I’ll take all the help I can get.’

‘Then we have an understanding, Mister Doyle. Just like the one that existed between Margaret and myself.’

‘Yeah, well she’s well out of it.’ Doyle turned his Chevy into a crescent drive, pulling up in front of a three storey-high Georgian pile, acres of white stone on the mansion’s frontage, a sweep of stairs leading up to a marble column-lined entrance that wouldn’t have looked out of place if Cinderella had been hopping down the treads on a single slipper. Doyle parked next to three identical government Range Rovers, the green of their chassis so dark they might as well have been black. Agatha got out. Behind her was a manicured lawn on a slope leading down to a river, elaborate topiary with Greek statues on either side.

‘Why do I feel like I’m on the set of
Pride and Prejudice
?’ said Doyle.

‘I believe the current owner of this house is good for considerably more than four or five thousand a year, Mister Doyle.’

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a copper in possession of a good murder case will be in want of Saucy Simon’s twin spilling his rotten guts out to me,’ said Doyle.

‘Curtis Werks has just lost his brother, and twins are often very close,’ chided Agatha.

‘I’ll be the soul of tact and sensitivity… you might even think I’ve passed a sociology degree.’

The imposing front doors were opened before Agatha had a chance to reach for the bell pull, not by a liveried butler, but by a tall shaven-headed man in a blue suit conservative enough for him to have run as a politician. Tight, tailored and trim. He wrinkled a nose that only a rugby player could love and touched his earphone as he motioned them inside. There was a low indecipherable buzz from a voice at the other end. ‘They’re in. Two for two. Car is stationary. Confirm no driver.’ The guard indicated a guest book on a stone-topped table. The book seemed an antiquated ritual in an age of biometric security. Agatha rummaged in her handbag for a pen and signed them both in.

Doyle tutted in disapproval at her plump little Mont Blanc pen as she placed it back into her handbag. ‘More money than sense. What’s wrong with a forty pence Biro?’

‘You can’t put a price on quality, Mister Doyle.’

Rugby man gave them the most trifling tilt of his head, then left, muttering into his earpiece and not bothering to check his charges were walking behind him. Follow the bullet-catcher, they did. Werks’ country pile loomed around them, as imposing inside as out. Their footsteps resounded loud across a large hall that could have been leased by the Natural History Museum to host a Diplodocus display, open doorways giving onto rooms with tall sash windows, period green plasterwork, polished floors and antique furniture. Shadows moved in doorways as they passed, and Agatha realized they weren’t nearly as alone as the echoing emptiness of the grand spaces suggested. Another man joined them as they progressed down the house’s main corridor along the ground floor, the newcomer sporting a grey three-piece suit, his hair running to silver around his cropped temples, a whippet to Rugby man’s bulldog. He boorishly didn’t bother to introduce himself, either.

‘I’ll need you not to take more than half an hour with Curtis Werks. We have other visitors due to arrive, and your presence cannot possibly overlap.’

Doyle grunted. ‘And I’ll need you to take your spook nose, stick it in this pile’s antique shitter, and hold it here until I’ve taken as long as I need to get the answers I want. This is a murder investigation.
My
murder investigation.’

‘The next round of visitors—’

‘If I find ninjas hiding in one of the urns, you can all draw straws to see who’s going to take a bullet for Werks. Until then, you can do what all good guard dogs do…stay quiet and watch for burglars. If you’re needed to bark, I’ll whistle.’

The agent appeared as though he was about to remonstrate with Doyle, but Agatha tapped his lapel with her office passport as they reached the entrance to what looked like the library. ‘My apologies, gentlemen. A cultural misunderstanding. We do things a little differently in our country.’

Agatha just made it through the threshold as Doyle started to close the door on the two spooks’ faces. She glanced around. The library contained shelf upon shelf of leather tomes, bookcases fitted into the wall, brown walls mounted with large electric candles and a collection of porcelain in glass cabinets arrayed in front of a sweep of tall windows. Under the high white ceiling everything inside appeared smaller than it should do by rights, a rich noblewoman’s Wendy House. Gazing sadly on the view outside, herbaceous rose borders and his granite-edged pool with ornate waterspouts spraying in its centre was Curtis Werks, a magazine-sized tablet computer resting in his lap as he leaned back in an armchair. His skin appeared more tanned than his brother’s, a healthy ruddy shine to it.
Or perhaps that just comes from being alive? I wonder what you’re thinking, Mister Werks? Not just anguish, but worry too. Real worry, If I’m any judge.
Other than that he was a mirror of the dead twin Agatha had seen in the mortuary. The mirror man was wearing the smart-casual uniform of venture capitalists around the world – dirt-yellow chinos and a dark black roll-neck shirt. There was nobody else in the room. No secretaries or bodyguards – either his own or the state’s hastily assigned bullet-catchers. A set of piercing blue eyes swivelled around on the two newcomers as the library door shut. Agatha was struck by the sudden impression that such eyes should have belonged to a ghost, so clear she could almost stare through them and out of the window Werks stood framed against as he stood up.
But this is the twin who lived.

‘You’re the specialist team from the British government?’ Werks asked in a soft-spoken Pennsylvania baritone. ‘Please, do sit down.’

Doyle nodded brusquely. ‘Gary Doyle. Agatha Witchley. We’ll stay standing. You might want to sit.’

‘All the better to intimidate me, is it? Well then,’ said Werks, ‘Perhaps you can start by telling me what evidence you have that my brother was actually murdered rather than dying in an unfortunate accident?’

‘You don’t seem too upset over his death?’ observed Doyle, sidestepping his question.

‘I don’t need British civil servants to tell me the manner I should grieve,’ snapped Werks, running a hand through his dark mop of hair. ‘Of course I loved Simon. We were as close as any pair of twins in the world. But our work was important to us, it was everything we built together. I don’t know what will be worse… the news reaching the market that Simon died accidentally as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation, or the news hitting Wall Street that he was murdered in a professional execution. And now you people tell me I’m a target for assassination too. Do you have any idea how that is going to play out? Now, you can have the courtesy to tell me why the hell do you think Simon’s death is murder?’

‘I know this is a novel experience for you, but in this deal, I ask the questions,’ said Doyle. ‘You answer them.’