Inhuman Remains (33 page)
Authors: Quintin Jardine
Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Scotland
For the purposes of that business, we were supposed to be researchers for an American television company that was planning a feature on the fastest-rising political couple in the land. Mark had made the appointment, using one of his cover names.
His wheelchair was in the luggage space of the estate car, but he left it there, and used elbow crutches instead. There were two uniformed police officers, one male, one female, on guard duty at the Mayfields’ door. ‘Mr Crossley and Miss Gregg,’ Mark announced as we approached them, ‘to see the Home Secretary.’
Our names were checked on a list, then the young lady officer . . . once again, it was with great sadness that I calculated that I was old enough to be her mother, if I’d got myself knocked up at around seventeen . . . announced us through a video-phone, and the door was opened.
We were met in the narrow hallway not by the new cabinet member but by a pallid woman in a mannish suit, middle aged, wedding ring but no other jewellery, bad hair day, with an intense expression and the hollow cheeks of a heavy smoker. ‘Martina Smith, Press Office,’ she announced, as Mark put all his weight on his left crutch to shake her hand. ‘We spoke on the telephone. You understand the ground rules?’
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘We recite the list of questions I gave you, one by one, and they recite the answers you’ve drafted for them. That’s how it works, isn’t it?’
I had the impression that she didn’t know whether to scowl or smile: she compromised by doing neither. ‘There will be some scope for supplementaries,’ she said stiffly, ‘as long as they’re appropriate and relevant. I’ll be the judge of that; I’ll be sitting in, as usual.’
She swung a door open and stepped into a drawing room, beckoning us to follow, like courtiers. Mark led the way, and I followed.
I was much better dressed than I had been in the Hotel Arts, and much better groomed, and so it took Justin Mayfield a few seconds to recognise me. When he did, the politician’s smile was wiped from his face like chalk from a blackboard. He glared at the press officer, and I knew that somewhere down the line she was going to pay, big-time, for not checking out our
bona fides
. ‘Thank you, Mrs Smith,’ he murmured, in a tone that would have etched steel, ‘we won’t be needing you for this one.’
bona fides
. ‘Thank you, Mrs Smith,’ he murmured, in a tone that would have etched steel, ‘we won’t be needing you for this one.’
‘But, Home Secretary,’ she protested, ‘it’s standard practice.’
‘This won’t be a standard interview. Leave us.’
As Martina Smith obeyed, he turned back towards me. ‘Primavera,’ he blustered, ‘what the hell is all this about? If you wanted to see me, all you had to do was ring my office.’
‘It isn’t really you I’ve come to see, Justin,’ I told him. ‘As soon as I saw Lidia on telly the other night, I knew we had to renew our acquaintance.’ I smiled at Mrs Mayfield.
‘My wife’s name is Ludo.’ If he’d been in the dark about the whole operation, I’d have known it then, by the way he said those words. But his tone was wrong, his simple denial. There was no bewilderment there. He knew exactly what I was talking about.
‘Sure,’ I said, nodding, ‘short for Ludmila. But in Sevilla, and on the website of a fraudulent hotel and casino project, she calls herself Lidia Bromberg. When she and an associate tried to kidnap me two weeks ago, that was the name she was going under. She had a black hair job then, but the cut was the same as she has now. I’m pretty sure I could tell you who her hairdresser is. My sister goes to him every time she’s in London.’
‘Woman’s mad,’ Mrs Mayfield snapped, and turned her back on me, as if she didn’t want me looking at her any longer.
I couldn’t help myself. I forgot my promise to Mark, that I’d be cool, and I kicked her, hard, on the right buttock. She screamed, arching her back as her hand flew to her rump; I was glad that the door had looked exceptionally thick, so that the sound wouldn’t carry to the outside. Mind you, she wasn’t the only one who was hurting. I’d thought that my broken toe had healed, but it hadn’t, not completely. A spear of burning pain tore into my foot.
‘Hey!’ Justin protested. ‘I’m getting the police in.’ He headed for the door but I stepped in front of him.
‘No, you ain’t,’ I said, putting my hands on his chest to stop him. ‘If your wife was to bend over and drop her pants, we’d see a healing knife wound on her arse, just where I booted her. That was a gift from Frank, when he rescued me from her and from Emil Caballero. He thought they were only going to teach me a lesson, but I suspect Lidia might have planned more than that.’
Mayfield sighed. ‘Look, Primavera, I know Frank’s dead. You must be upset, so I’ll make allowances. Now stop this nonsense.’
‘Haven’t you seen her naked in the last couple of weeks?’
‘Of course I have and, yes, she has a wound there, but she got it in London when she slipped in the street and landed on a broken bottle.’
‘And I was there when it happened, was I, and knew exactly where to kick her? No, Justin, that won’t work for a second. Let’s all sit down,’ I glanced at Mark, on his supports, ‘especially my friend, and we’ll talk you through it.’
The new Home Secretary gave in. ‘Okay.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s do that.’ His wife’s expression would have frozen others solid, but I guessed he’d seen it often enough before. ‘Come on, Ludo,’ he told her. ‘Do as I say.’
She did, grudgingly. I looked at my companion, an invitation.
‘I’ve spent the last couple of weeks,’ he began, ‘doing a lot of research on you, Mrs Mayfield. Your maiden name, or birth name if you prefer, is Ludmila Banovsky, a member of an old Slovakian family, one that in the past was rich and powerful. Your grandfather, Ondrej Banovsky, was an industrialist, a steel magnate, and a friend of President Benes, in pre-war Czechoslovakia. This worked in his favour, for in 1937 he was advised that bad times were coming, and that he should protect his assets. He was an astute man; he did this by setting up a secret trust, in Switzerland, moving his family and as much of his money out of the country as he could, before the Germans arrived. He might have moved it all back after the war, but the country was unstable, and Communism was on the rise, so he stayed where he was and ran his enterprises from a distance. But they were in poor shape. The Nazis had allowed him to carry on, for they needed the steel that he produced, so the mills had survived, but as the tide turned against them in 1944, raw materials became scarce, and they had gone into decline. So, as a form of long-term protection, your grandfather decided to establish a business base in Western Europe, by taking over a French mining company called Energi, with solid profitability and considerable untapped reserves of coal.’ He paused and looked at Ludmila. ‘All correct so far?’ She scowled at him.
‘By the time the Soviets were gone in their turn,’ he continued, ‘so were your operations in what became Slovakia, all failed, all closed. And so was Ondrej, long gone. He died in 1965, and your father, Pavol, became head of the family, and chief beneficiary of the trust. When democracy was re-established, he reopened an office of the Banovsky Corporation in Bratislava, but that was no more than a patriotic gesture, for by that time the only asset it controlled was Energi. Unfortunately for your family, it wasn’t the cash cow it had once been. It needed good, strong management, but Pavol wasn’t a patch on his father. Ondrej would have ensured that the company had continued reserves or that it diversified in time, but his son sat back and watched the seams being worked out, and old equipment being patched up rather than modern machinery installed. When he died in 2000, and you inherited, Energi was doomed. Worse than that, its borrowings were underwritten by the family trust, in Switzerland.’ Mark stopped again; this time, it seemed, to recover his strength, and maintain his momentum. It was a long time coming; I decided to take over.
‘That much we know,’ I told the Mayfields. ‘That much we can prove. The rest is what we believe. You seem to take after your father, Ludmila, rather than Ondrej, because you seem to have sat on your hands for five years and watched the decline accelerate. By last year the business was, in effect, insolvent, so you decided on one last gamble, one grand scheme that really was worthy of your grandfather in its scope and its imagination. You did some research and you found some worthless land in the south of Spain. You invented the persona of Lidia Bromberg and, as her, set up Hotel Casino d’Amuseo SA, a company based in Luxembourg. Then, through the Banovsky Corporation, you instructed the chief officer of Energi to invest its last twenty million euros, telling the banks that at last you had a diversification strategy.
‘You commissioned designs for the project, and then, as dark-haired little Lidia Bromberg, you approached the owner of the land, Emil Caballero, an essentially greedy man, with good political connections, and you showed him a vision. He went for it and, as a bonus, offered you a mountainside that his wife’s grandmother owns as an add-on ski resort.
‘With all your preparations made, you recruited Frank McGowan, your husband’s old friend, to sell the grand design to would-be investors. You didn’t do it directly, though. You found another convicted fraudster, Hermann Gresch, and he brought Frank into the operation, so that you and Frank could never be seen to have come face to face.’
‘Nonsense,’ Ludmila growled.
‘I don’t think so. The last meeting, in Lithuania, was between Frank, Gresch and a Canadian named Sebastian Loman, whom you had hired as security for the operation. Once it was all set up, they were given new identities. Frank became Roy Urquhart and Hermann became George Macela, those people being listed as executives on the website, with another man, Alastair Rowland, as the supposed chairman.
‘Frank did incredibly well as a salesman,’ I went on, in full flow. ‘He used the list of wealthy contacts he’d ripped off from the Cinq Pistes ski resort and built up an international network. In more or less a year, he had raised another fifty-seven million in funding for the project. Everything was going well. But there was one bloody great bluebottle in the ointment. Frank wasn’t on your team. When he was in jail he had been recruited by Interpol, through the security service,’ I looked at Justin, ‘for which you are now responsible, Home Secretary. A couple of months ago, he reported to his controller in London that the time had come to pull the plug on the operation and round everybody up before the money disappeared. Macela was in the process of killing himself through a drug addiction, and an investigation would surely uncover Rowland’s identity. But Frank was betrayed: there was a mole within Interpol, and word got back to you, Ludmila. Whatever you paid the person who tipped you off, it was worth it. If the scheme had collapsed, the money would have been returned to the investors. Your role in it all might never have been exposed, but Energi would have got its twenty million back, and that wasn’t what you wanted. The company would have crashed anyway, to the tune of over fifty million euros, and the French bankers would have pursued your family trust for the loss, since your unfortunate dad, Pavol, had guaranteed it way back. It’ll still go down, and they’ll do that anyway, but it won’t matter to you, Ludo, for you’ve got another fortune salted away.’ I looked at Justin, who sat there impassively. ‘Who owns this house, by the way?’ I asked him.
‘I suspect you know already,’ he replied. ‘The family trust does.’
‘See?’ I challenged his wife. ‘You had no choice but to step in and see the fraud through to the end. Until then your personal involvement had been kept to a minimum, but you had to surface again. You had to become Lidia, and take over Roy Urquhart’s role in the scheme. You ordered Loman and his pal, Willie Venable, to take Frank out. Unfortunately he got the better of them and went into hiding. You were in huge trouble then. You had to smoke him out, but how? I reckon that your original plan was to kidnap my son and me, and use us as hostages. That’s why you went to St Martí in April, and filmed my house; you were casing the place.’ Again, the woman shook her head.
‘But my son saw you doing it,’ I continued, undeterred, ‘and you backed off. Instead you bided your time, until an even better target offered herself up . . . Frank’s mother. You kept tabs on her, until one day she wasn’t at the agency. You called and her idiot assistant told you where she was. Willie Venable abducted her from my house, you and the poor sap Emil tried to take me for a ride, and when Frank got me out of it, you had Loman track us. He was good, too good for Frank in the end. Now he and his mum are in a cardboard box in Girona . . .’ to my surprise, I heard my voice crack ‘. . . and your old man’s the Home bloody Secretary!’ I glared at Justin. ‘No wonder you weren’t too keen to help us in Barcelona.’
Occasionally, very occasionally, there are silences that you think you can touch, as if a glass bubble has encased you, one that no noise can penetrate. One of those had formed in that drawing room. The Mayfields sat, stunned. I sat, exhausted. Mark sat, recovered but waiting.
And then Justin shattered that almost palpable bubble of silence into a million shards. ‘Primavera, Primavera,’ he sighed, ‘that was brilliant, it was sad, and it was deeply moving, but it was also very, very wrong. I love my wife dearly, but you identified the flaw in your own argument. Ludo is indeed as intellectually limited as her late father was. She isn’t capable of coming up with a scheme like that.’
‘Then who did? You?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that sort of imagination either. But Frank did; your cousin, my pal. The whole project was his idea, from start to finish.’
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