Lost Causes (3 page)

A knock came to his door but before he could say anything it was opened by a short woman in her mid thirties, hair tied back in a severe bun, and dark-framed glasses on her nose. She was Rachel Collins, one of the company’s legal team who specialised in intellectual property. She had the office next door. She smiled and said, ‘I thought I heard you come in. Have you checked your email yet?’

‘No.’ 

‘There’s a special meeting at ten this morning with the top brass. You and I have been instructed to attend.’

‘Sounds exciting,’ said Steven in a voice that suggested
otherwise
. ‘Maybe they’ve discovered a cure for cancer downstairs.’

‘I think we would have heard about
that
,’ said Rachel with a smile. ‘The conga in the corridors would have been a small clue.’

‘How long have you worked for Ultramed, Rachel?’

‘Eleven years. Why d’you ask?’

‘I’m still trying to get a feel for things. Any big discoveries in your time with the company?’

Rachel screwed up her face, seeking an alternative to ‘no’. ‘Can’t honestly say there have been any
big
discoveries,’ she replied, stretching the word ‘big’. ‘Lots of little things, stuff for indigestion, athlete’s foot treatments, hay fever pills, bread-
and-butter
stuff, not much better than the remedies they’re replacing, if truth be told, but with a shiny new box and an ad campaign aimed at GPs they bring in a bit. No really big earner.’

‘I guess big earners don’t come along all that often.’

‘And that’s why drugs are so expensive,’ said Rachel. ‘Lots and lots of research that went nowhere has to be paid for. Anyway, see you at the meeting.’ She turned to leave but stopped and turned back as she reached the door. ‘How are you liking it here?’ she asked, her tone suggesting that she really didn’t know the answer.

‘Fine,’ said Steven. ‘Absolutely fine.’

‘Good.’

Steven returned to gazing out of the window, wishing it had been true. He was a very long way from being ‘absolutely fine’. He had known it would be difficult; he had done his best to prepare himself for the feelings he knew were bound to come. The one he had at the moment, that of being trapped, had been odds-on favourite to make an appearance from the outset but he was determined not to give in to it despite the urge he felt right now to run downstairs, go out through the door and keep on going till he dropped.

The first antidote was to think of positives. He thought of Tally and the life they were having and would have together. He thought of Jenny, his little girl who now had a father in an ordinary respectable job rather than one that could result in her becoming an orphan. The second counter-measure was to think of negatives, those that had made him resign from Sci-Med in the first place. The creeping suspicion, built up over the years, that he didn’t work for the good guys after all; that there were no good guys, only various shades of in-between. Our
democratic
government was a warren of ulterior motives, alternative agendas, horse trading and compromise, connived at by a bunch of greedy self-serving twerps whose egos knew no bounds and whose only duty was to themselves.

He was now away from all of them and their devious
machinations
but he did miss the intellectual challenge of the job, that of figuring out what the hooks and crooks were up to and then going to war with them. Someone in the SAS had once told him that you don’t know you’re alive until you’re very nearly not, and they were right. Everyone who had experienced danger over a long period of time knew about ‘the feeling’, that heightened sense of awareness which perhaps only drugs could simulate. When it stopped you were relieved, but if it didn’t come back at some point you’d start to miss it, and miss it badly. Formula One drivers, rock climbers, downhill skiers, all knew about ‘the feeling’. Retiral might seem like a good idea at the time but after a year or so, God, you missed it. You just had to go back.

Steven’s game plan was to think of his time with the
military
and with Sci-Med as a drug addiction from which he was now withdrawing. It wouldn’t be easy but it could be done. He would struggle to keep his twitchiness and bad temper under control while he fought his demons, and in the end he would come through and emerge as a better person: a loving, contented husband to Tally if she’d have him as such and a caring
considerate
father to Jenny, even if she chose to remain in the north.
Enough navel gazing
. He turned on his computer and checked his mail for details of the meeting.

‘I have Chief Superintendent Malloy on the line for you, Sir John,’ said the voice of Jean Roberts, his secretary, from the speaker on John Macmillan’s desk.

‘Put him through.’

‘John? I don’t think I’m going to make lunch today. Something’s just come up.’

‘A pity, Charlie. I was looking forward to seeing you again. It’s been ages.’

‘It has,’ agreed Malloy, ‘but the French authorities have been in touch. I don’t know if you heard anything about a gas explosion in Paris?’

‘I read something in the papers.’

‘Turns out it wasn’t gas; it was a bomb and it looks like at least some of the victims may have been British. Fragments of British passports were found in the clean-up.’

‘Ah,’ said Macmillan. ‘So someone else’s mess has just become yours. Any idea what’s behind it?’

‘Not right now, but the
gendarmerie
has ascertained that the flat was let to an Englishman named Charles French on a
short-term
agreement. Apparently it wasn’t the first time, according to the letting agency. He’d used the place on a number of occasions when he was in Paris on business.’

‘What kind of business would that be?’

‘The agency had no reason to know that and didn’t ask, but we matched the name up with a missing person report. If it’s the same chap, he’s Charles French, CEO of Deltasoft Computing, a Cambridge graduate and pillar of the
community
, by all accounts.’

‘Did the passport fragments yield anything?’

‘We’ve managed to identify one holder so far. There was enough of the name left for us to match it up with a Lady Antonia Freeman who has been absent from her holiday home in the south of France near Saint-Raphaël where she likes to spend the winter months. Her housekeeper reported her missing; apparently she’d no idea her ladyship had gone up to Paris.’

‘Strange. What was that name again?’

‘Antonia Freeman.’

‘Rings a vague bell …’

‘Let me know if anything comes to you,’ said Malloy. ‘I think our best bet is to match up what we’ve got with passport control and missing person reports.

Anyway, sorry about lunch. How are you fixed for next week?’

‘That should be fine,’ said Macmillan. ‘I look forward to hearing more.’

Macmillan pressed the intercom button. ‘Jean, I’ve
rescheduled
my lunch with DCS Malloy for the same day and time next week.’

‘I’ll put it in the diary, Sir John. All right if I go to lunch?’

‘Of course.’

‘Don’t forget you have a recruitment meeting at two thirty.’

‘Ah, yes. Thanks, Jean.’

Macmillan got up and walked over to the window to look out at the rain while he thought about the meeting Jean had reminded him of. He’d been avoiding considering a
replacement
for Steven Dunbar until it was absolutely certain that he wouldn’t be returning, but sadly it seemed that that moment had come. Steven had twice turned down his overtures and still appeared adamant about not coming back. Macmillan knew why, of course, and understood Steven’s frustration at watching the guilty walk free so often – he hated it himself – but surely, through his anger, he must be able to see why no charges could have been brought at the end of his last investigation. It was just not in the national interest. He’d felt sure that Steven would come round eventually, as he’d always done in the past, but apparently not this time. He was now working as some kind of security consultant, living in Leicester. God, what a waste.

Sci-Med was Macmillan’s baby. He’d seen the need for a different sort of investigator in a high-tech world. True, the police had special squads, such as those that dealt with fraud and crime in the art world, but when it came to science and medicine they lacked expertise. It had taken him several years to persuade the government of the day to agree with him that such a unit was necessary, and that it should be independent, but in the end he had succeeded. It had now been operational for fifteen years.

There was no doubt it had been a success, as several
governments
had been forced to admit, although perhaps they would have liked Sci-Med to have been a little less independent on occasions where success had also brought embarrassment when the great and the good had been exposed as being rather less then either. As this embarrassment had not been confined to any one party, history had worked in Sci-Med’s favour, ensuring that any attempt by the rulers of the day to clip the unit’s wings would be vigorously opposed by Her Majesty’s Opposition, whoever happened to be in power. Macmillan had often pointed out that it was the opposition who kept Sci-Med in business, not the government.

Steven had been Macmillan’s top investigator, a doctor and a soldier with a proven record of being good at both, and he wouldn’t be easy to replace. Sir John had asked two of his other investigators, Scott Jamieson and Adam Dewar, to come in and help him assess possible candidates but he would be doing it with a heavy heart. Another course of action open to him would, of course, be … retirement. After all, he had the knighthood and had passed the sixty milestone where most senior career civil servants went off to grow roses and write their memoirs, but he couldn’t quite bear the thought of giving up the reins of Sci-Med just yet. It meant so much to him … if not his wife, it had to be said. She would be delighted to see him walk away from it all to spend more time with her. Given half a chance, she’d have him on some round-the-world cruise, dancing bloody rumbas with her blue-rinsed pals and listening to their bloody boring banker husbands telling him how they saw the crash coming all along. Jesus, he wasn’t dead yet.

The rain had stopped and the sky was brightening. He’d lost his appetite for lunch but he’d walk over to the club anyway if only to smell the wet grass in the park. Apart from that,
something
Charlie had said was niggling away at him. He’d mentioned that the dead woman was Lady Antonia Freeman. Macmillan felt that the name should mean something to him, but for the moment he couldn’t think why.

The meeting with Scott Jamieson and Adam Dewar was a relaxed affair, during which they narrowed down the list of potential candidates for Steven Dunbar’s replacement to three: two were medics, one a science graduate, all in their mid thirties. It was Macmillan’s practice never to recruit people who hadn’t yet proved themselves in other jobs, so new graduates were not considered. Both medics had served in Afghanistan with
distinction
. One was an A&E specialist, the other an orthopaedic surgeon. Both had been called into action through their
association
with the Territorial Army. Once derided as weekend soldiering, membership of the TA now meant almost certain active service overseas. The science graduate, with a first in biological sciences from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, had seen service in Iraq with the Military Police, where he had shown himself to be a more than competent investigator in uncovering a medical supplies scam.

‘Are you sure Steven won’t be coming back?’ Scott Jamieson asked.

‘I think his mind is made up.’

Dewar seemed almost embarrassed about saying what was on his mind. ‘You know, I’m not at all clear … why he left.’

‘Come to that, me neither,’ added Jamieson.

‘And I’m afraid I can’t tell you,’ said Macmillan. ‘Don’t take that personally. I would trust the pair of you with my life, but there are some things that the fewer people know about them the better, and Steven’s last assignment was most decidedly one of them.’

‘But as no court case was forthcoming at the end of it, we might guess that that was the reason?’ said Jamieson.

‘Let’s move on.’

‘Yes, boss.’ Jamieson smiled.

‘Check your diaries: let me know any dates that aren’t
suitable
and then I’ll ask Jean to send out invitations for interview. No hurry: sometime in the next few days.’

‘Still hoping?’ said Dewar.

As Macmillan was clearing his desk at the end of the day, he suddenly remembered why the name Antonia Freeman should mean something to him. Her husband had been Sir Martin Freeman, an eminent surgeon in his day. It was a long time ago, back in the early nineties, but he had died in the middle of an operation. He’d been operating on a woman who’d had a bad facial deformity from birth, attempting to give her a new face using a revolutionary new technique, when he’d collapsed and died in theatre.

There had been some other scandal surrounding the whole affair whose details he couldn’t remember, but what he did remember was thinking at the time that that was exactly the kind of situation that cried out for an organisation like
Sci-Med
. In the morning, he would ask Jean to see what she could come up with about the case. It might just be a trip down memory lane, but his widow had just got herself blown to bits in Paris. The niggle had gone; he felt a whole lot better.

A tall, elegant man sipped gin and tonic and thumbed through the wine list while he waited for the others to arrive. He’d chosen the restaurant because it had a small private dining room, ideal for the five of them. Officially they were the competitions committee of Redwood Park golf club, and he was the
secretary
, James Black. Unofficially, they weren’t, and he wasn’t.

Toby Langton was first to arrive, a slightly stooped man with an unruly crop of light brown hair, and clothing that suggested an academic, which he was. When he spoke it was in a languid drawl but with an underlying confidence that tended to present opinion as fact. Constance Carradine was next, a woman in her mid thirties, ‘power-dressed’ as expected of a prominent figure in the City of London. She wore a well-cut navy blue suit over a white blouse, and a pale blue chiffon scarf at her throat. Her dark hair was cropped short and she wore fashionable
small-framed
spectacles that only served to amplify an already piercing stare. Finally, Rupert Coutts and Elliot Soames came in together, having met in the car park. Both wore dark Savile Row
business
suits, individualised, in their minds at least, by the ties they wore: regimental for Soames, an ex-Guards officer who now headed an asset management group; university for Coutts, a top-level career civil servant.

‘Good to see you all,’ said Black after they’d ordered drinks. When they arrived, the waiter, dressed in black but wearing a white apron and looking as if he’d stepped out of a nineteenth-century French painting, asked if they would like to see menus.

‘Give us thirty minutes,’ replied Black, and the man left.

‘I haven’t seen anything in the papers,’ said Coutts.

‘Nor I,’ said Langton.

‘There was a small piece in the
Independent
,’ said Constance Carradine. ‘Suspected gas explosion in Paris suburb kills five.’

‘Actually six, but it’ll take them a while to figure out who they all are,’ said Black. ‘After all, none of them were supposed to be there and wouldn’t have told anyone where they were going. As to what they were doing there … that will remain anyone’s guess.’

‘Please God,’ murmured Soames.

‘French was meticulous about security. We’re safe.’

‘It’s all a bit of a shame really,’ said Constance Carradine. ‘I mean, they were the ones who set the whole thing up all those years ago.’

‘And they did a good job in their day,’ said Black. ‘But their day was over. They had their chance before the New Labour nightmare began and they blew it. One prying journalist got nosy and they had to shut the whole thing down before the party twigged what was going on. They had no option but to lie low until the dust had settled, and by that time scandal had destroyed the party and an election was lost. So were the
subsequent
two. They wanted to go down that same old route again. Can you believe it? They turned our plan down. We’ve spent ten years putting it together and getting everything in place and they turned it down. They had to go.’

‘So here we are,’ said Langton. ‘The new executive of the Schiller Group, the guardians of all we hold precious.’

‘I take it we all saw the
Telegraph
this morning, and the Carlisle story?’ said Coutts.

‘What an arse,’ said Soames.

‘He is a worry,’ said Black. ‘It was never very clear how much he actually knew at the time. He was such a posturing idiot that no one told him anything if they could avoid it.’

‘But he was such a pretty boy,’ said Constance. ‘Shame he had the intellect of a cabbage. Now he’s starting to look like one.’

‘Well, he served his purpose as the charming front man of his day. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if French and co. had taken him all the way to the top.’

‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘There’s a story going around that he’s been trying to
telephone
people high up in the party,’ said Black. ‘No one’s talking to him, of course. He’s about as popular as bubonic plague, but he seems to think he has something to bargain with …
something
to stop the leader pulling the rug out from under him. We’re by no means past the post in this election. We don’t need strange stories doing the rounds, even if they come from a
discredited
clown like Carlisle. We could be back in the wilderness.’

‘He’s a loose cannon,’ said Langton. The others turned to face him. ‘If he did know more than we think he did, he might well see this as the time to use it.’

‘Blackmail, you mean?’

‘It was more a revelation to the press I was thinking of. If the leader shows him the door, what’s he got to lose?’

‘Maybe we should … help matters along?’ suggested Coutts.

There was a long silence in the room until Constance Carradine said, ‘I think that might be a very good idea. There will be lots of very angry constituents out there; no telling what they might do. It would also give me the chance to test out the new chain of command.’

‘Very well,’ said Black. ‘It’s agreed, unless anyone has
objections
?’ Thinking there were none, he was about to continue when Langton spoke again.

‘I really don’t think it a good idea to go down the angry constituents route,’ he drawled. ‘It would only amplify the nature of the crime in the eyes of the public –
he made them so angry they felt they had to take matters into their own hands
, et cetera – that would do the party no good at all.’

‘Good point,’ said Black.

‘What would you suggest?’ asked Constance, irked at having her idea shot down.

‘Something that would elicit public sympathy for Carlisle would be preferable.’

‘Like?’

‘I’ll leave that in your capable hands, Connie,’ said Langton with a smile.

Black decided to move things along. ‘Connie’s already mentioned putting the new regime to the test,’ he said. ‘How about the rest of you? Have you used the information from the disks? Elliot, what’s happening with our finances?’

‘Absolutely no problems there,’ replied Soames. ‘I used the contact number and gave the password. I told them I had taken over as trustee of the Wellington Foundation from Lady Antonia Freeman. It was accepted without question. I requested
statements
and they arrived the following day. Things are looking good, very good indeed.’

‘Excellent. Always nice to have money in the bank.’

The others reported similar success in touching base with people designated as operational contacts.

‘We have to hand it to Charles French,’ said Black. ‘He did an outstanding job in setting up the network. But the old guard has gone. We are now the only people who know just how many members we have, how many people there are out there who share our views and care enough to change things, organised as cells within cells within cells … people all prepared to do their bit for their country.’

There was a knock on the door and the waiter entered.

‘So we’re all agreed about the changes to the fourteenth hole and the ladies’ tee on the fifteenth?’ said Black. 

‘Absolutely.’

‘Would you like some menus now, Mr Black?’ asked the waiter.

‘You know, I think we would.’