The Truth (31 page)

Number 15 was a three-storey stuccoed Victorian cottage, with a black front door and matching railings, in a modest but discreetly expensive terrace not far from Harrods. The doorbell nestled in a circular brass cavity, which had been kept well polished. Krystyna answered the door. She met his eyes briefly, then led him along a narrow hall. Mabbut heard his daughter before he saw her, her whimpering sobs echoing from the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, head bowed; a heart-breakingly fragile figure. She looked up as Mabbut entered, trying and failing to smile.

‘Dad.’

He sat down at the table and took her hand.

‘What is it, love? Whatever is it?’

Rex appeared behind him in a polo shirt and baggy jeans. He looked almost naked without a tie or a jacket. He smiled briskly at Mabbut and moved towards the kettle.

‘Cup of tea?’

Mabbut nodded. Rex put his hand lightly on Krystyna’s shoulder.

‘Another one, darling?’

Krystyna was seated on the other side of the table from her daughter. She was looking at Mabbut with ill-disguised scorn.

‘Could someone tell me what’s going on?’ he asked, looking from face to face.

Jay took a deep breath, then shook her head and looked imploringly at Krystyna. But it was Rex who spoke.

‘The boy’s gone.’

‘The boy? You mean Shiraj?’

Rex was at the sink, filling the kettle. He turned and nodded.

‘Gone? Gone where?’ Mabbut’s voice rose. ‘Don’t tell me. It’s the Border Agency. They’ve shafted him, haven’t they? It’s my fault. My stupid fault. I was supposed to drum up support for him. Oh, Jay, love, I’m sorry—’

Rex cleared his throat.

‘It’s not the Border Agency. We don’t know what’s happened to him. He left a message to say he was sorry, but he had to leave and that he’d explain one day, but not to try to find him.’

Jay gave a low moan. Krystyna reached across the table and took her hand.

‘Is he in some sort of trouble?’

‘Jay’s mother always had suspicions about him,’ said Rex, ‘so I made a few enquiries and one of my contacts, a perfectly trustworthy source, I promise you, warned me that there was a criminal ring operating within London in the Iranian community, obtaining money under false pretences. One of those on file matched Shiraj Farja’s description.’

‘No!’

Rex nodded.

‘They believe his real name is Anek Mertha and he is an Iranian Kurd.’

‘Are they sure?’

‘Almost certain.’ Rex coughed and cast a quick glance at Jay before going on. ‘There’s a warrant out for his arrest.’

Mabbut shook his head in bewilderment.

‘Do they know his background? What he’s been through?’

Jay spoke at last. ‘He lied to me, Dad, and he lied to you.’

She hung her head. The tears came again and this time there was no stopping them. He put his arm around her shoulder.

Krystyna’s eyes were hard and cold.

‘Jay says you gave him four thousand pounds.’

‘Mum . . .’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes, it’s true.’

‘You should be able to get it back. When he’s apprehended,’ said Rex. But Krystyna was still staring at her husband.

‘Four thousand pounds! To someone like that?’

Mabbut returned her contemptuous gaze.

‘And I would have given him more if I could.’

‘Oh, well, of course, now you’re a best-selling author, what’s four thousand pounds? A drop in the ocean!’

‘I gave him the money because I believed him. Just as our daughter believed him. And until I hear a lot more about this, I still believe him!’

Krystyna gave a desperate toss of her head.

‘Keith, why do you always believe anything except the truth?’

Rex took two cups off their hooks above the kettle.

‘Look, why don’t we all adjourn for breakfast. Tea’s ready, and I’ll put on some toast.’

Mabbut thanked him but declined. He gave his daughter a kiss on the top of her forehead. She took his hand for a moment, and then looked up, as if remembering something.

‘How’s the book, Dad?’

‘Nearly there.’

‘That’s good. At least that’s one thing I didn’t mess up for you.’

Krystyna moved protectively towards her.

‘Jay’s going to stay here with us for a while. She doesn’t want to be in the house.’

Mabbut nodded. ‘Of course.’

Rex led Mabbut to the front door.

‘There’s no point in my staying,’ said Mabbut on his way out, ‘not with Krystyna the way she is. She’s in shock. She’ll calm down. Perhaps you could give me a call then?’

Rex gave a backward glance then stepped out too, pulling the door almost shut behind him.

‘Keith, I’m to blame as much as anybody. I should have spoken up much earlier. I’ve seen a couple of very similar situations. Plausible young chaps with poise and charm. Perfectly decent people taken in. I had doubts about the boy the first time I met him, but as soon as I voiced them Jay took it personally, and because of my situation with her mother, she and the young man didn’t come round much any more. She compounded the problem by telling
everyone it was Krystyna’s fault. All those stories about us splitting up, that sort of thing.’

Mabbut looked up the street. Two elderly ladies with bulging green shopping bags were getting into a taxi, giggling like schoolgirls. A group of young men with wayward blond hair were walking three abreast, fighting each other for possession of the pavement. An immaculate Jaguar XJ turned out of a side road. This was not Mabbut’s London and he wanted to get away.

Rex held out his hand.

‘Ring me any time. If you need to.’

They shook. Mabbut paused and looked at Rex.

‘I still don’t believe he was a bad man.’

Rex sighed.

‘That’s the skill of these people, I’m afraid.’

Back home, Mabbut made himself a cup of coffee, then called Wendy Lu. Her machine said that she was out of the office until Monday but left no other number. Mabbut thought briefly of ways to poison Ron Latham, or even of running away and leaving his clothes and a note on a beach somewhere. Then, fortified by a second, even stronger cup, he returned to the distasteful task he now had no option but to complete. By late afternoon what had to be done was done. He read through the rewritten pages without satisfaction. There could be no doubt now that the subject of his book was an all too ordinary mortal; a man who at one time in his life had reportedly stolen not just another man’s wife, but his life’s work as well. No matter how much he used the word alleged’, or the well-worn phrase ‘some say’, the damage was clear. Innuendo would do the rest.

So now, his side of the contract was complete. Mabbut sat back, numbly, staring into the middle distance. The whole process confirmed that, despite all his grand pretences, nothing had changed. He remained a hack. A pen for hire. The Melville effect had made fools of them all. His delusions of transforming himself into some latter-day Hamish, helping the helpless, spreading the truth, slaying cynicism in its lair, had turned out to be no more than that: delusions. And who was he to presume to slay cynicism anyway? A
little more cynicism on his part and his only and dearest daughter might not have ended up sobbing over a kitchen table in Knights-bridge. Stanley, with his unerring sense of occasion, leant against the doorpost and purred with pleasure.

At six Silla called. She apologised for not being around during the week. She was glad to hear he’d revised the book. Things had gone well in Madrid, and now she was back she’d promised Ron that she would come over, collect the new version from Mabbut and deliver it to him personally. She was just glad to hear that it had all worked out.

NINE

W
hen Silla rang again to say that she would not be with him for another hour as Hector Fischer was unavailable – it was Sunday night and Hector was evidently a devout churchgoer – Mabbut’s misery was merely prolonged.

He poured a whisky, vaguely aware that this was the sort of thing he was doing far too regularly these days, checked for the umpteenth time that the envelope was ready on the hall table and was about to distract himself with the evening news when the door buzzer sounded. He looked at his watch. It couldn’t be Silla already. He half hoped it might be Jay, but she’d have her own keys. The buzzer sounded again, impatiently.

‘All right. I can hear you!’

He opened the front door. A stocky figure stood at the top of the steps holding a package.

‘Keith Mabbut? Sign here, please.’

He reached for a terminal and marker and held them out to Mabbut.

Mabbut signed completely illegibly, then grabbed the package, slamming the door far harder than he meant to. Inside the Jiffy bag was another white envelope. He tore it open. The now familiar handwriting, the Foreign Office notepaper. The lack of an identifying date or place. He had difficulty holding it steady.

Keith
,

I’ve just heard from Wendy of the problems you are having. All I can say is that I’m not surprised. This is why I don’t do books. This is why I don’t give interviews or go on chat shows. They all have an agenda which is very different from my own. As you know, I had my doubts about Urgent Books from the
start, but I’ll come to that later. First of all, the allegations. I owe you an apology for not giving you Ursula or Victor Trickett’s name on the list of people you should talk to. They both are, or were, part of my life. Ursula is not the only daughter I have either, and I would have told you that had we not both agreed that this was not going to be that kind of book. Bettina wanted Ursula to be brought up entirely independent of me and I have always respected that
.

Trickett, on the other hand, is a very nasty piece of work and I would not wish his view of events to go unchallenged. His late wife Bettina was a brilliant woman, a chemist and a physicist with a sharp, highly original mind. I met her through a college friend and although I won’t deny there was a physical attraction, I was chiefly interested in the work she was doing. Bettina was from Yugoslavia and she’d come over as a young researcher to Imperial College in ’76. She badly wanted to stay and work in London and to help that process she’d married a colleague by the name of Victor Trickett. He was also a surgical researcher, but he was a plodder; Bettina was the brains. In 1978 she made a breakthrough that later led to the development of bileaflet heart valves – that’s a ring to which two semicircular discs are fitted that open and close to control blood flow. Without her knowledge, Trickett approached a big pharmaceutical company and offered to sell them the technology for a substantial sum of money, portraying himself as the one who’d made the breakthrough. Bettina was – understandably – furious. She was in the course of developing the next stage of anginal valve technology, but now, thanks to Trickett, all her work and her future ideas had been mortgaged off to a company called Bell Laboratories. I had been drifting around the City at the time, as you know, but while most of my friends were looking to invest in bricks and mortar I was more interested in intellectual property. People doing the sort of things I liked to do, thinking outside the box. Independent-minded, difficult bastards. Bettina was one of those. With her co-operation I raised enough money to buy back the rights to the work she – and to a very limited extent Trickett – had pioneered. Because he had cheated her in the first place we had to work behind his back and eventually leave the country to avoid the long legal battle that he would undoubtedly have fought. He is not a nice man, Keith. He sent people over to Prague to search the apartment. He made sure Bettina would never be able to work in the UK again. To cap it all, he used work she had done with him to produce heart–lung tubing for which he received a knighthood. For a few years he pursued Bettina through the
European courts but he got nowhere. He produced nothing more and his career faded into oblivion. I was surprised to hear he was even alive. Bettina worked on in advanced surgical research until she died of breast cancer in 1998. By that time we’d long since gone our separate ways, entirely amicably
.

This, of course, is my side of the story, and it’s entirely up to you whether you believe it or not. But this you should believe, for it’s true. When I heard what they were trying to do to your book I commissioned some research of my own, on your publisher, and the following can easily be checked out – maybe you’ve even done so? Urgent Books is a subsidiary of Wide Hatt Publishing, wholly owned by the Karlhatt Corporation, headquarters in St Louis, Missouri, and the Cayman Islands. This grand-sounding, if somewhat shadowy, organisation is 80 per cent owned by one Karl Hattiker and his family. Along with a few evangelical radio and TV stations, they also own a cereals combine called Hemisphere Grain Group, one of the big wheat cartels that fix prices around the world. Their domination of the market is now being threatened by Russia and China so HGG are looking to expand elsewhere. One of their biggest, most controversial investments has been to put billions of dollars into the soya fuel market in Brazil. To date they are directly responsible for the clearance of two to three per cent of the Amazon rainforest, and the construction of irrigation dams on the Parcachua river that have already destroyed the cultivable land of thirty local tribes. And Brazil is just the current target. They have eyes around the world, constantly on the lookout for the line of least resistance – the corruptible local politicians, the ambitious state governor, the regime that needs to buy tanks and aircraft. Until last year their operations went almost unnoticed. Then, acting on inside information, my team moved in last August and within a couple of months we had enough evidence to convict the company of fraud, corruption and intimidation. As far as HGG goes I’m Public Enemy Number One. Do you remember those guys out in Bhubaneswar? The ones who came to the hotel? They were HGG heavies, looking for me or my colleagues. And they’re becoming increasingly desperate. My guys in Parcachua have had their families threatened. Kids approached at school, for God’s sake. Now wouldn’t it just suit them if a best-selling book were to come out, showing that the man who has been giving them grief is nothing but a wife-snatching con-man?