Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street

‘If it wasn’t our father in there, why did we pay the Pinkertons a small fortune to guard him?’ asked George, changing tack.

‘The Pinkertons were there to keep out unwanted visitors, who might discover the truth,’ Blackstone said. ‘Besides, it all contributed to the illusion — the place wouldn’t be worth guarding if Big Bill wasn’t there, but it was being guarded, so he must be there.’

‘Let me see if I understand this,’ George said. ‘You’re saying that our father died seven years ago, and that we’ve been keeping his death secret since then. Is that right?’

‘Half-right,’ Blackstone said. ‘You had to keep his death a secret, because the business was your father, and your father was the business, and if it had become common knowledge that he was dead, the shares would have collapsed. That’s when you came up with the idea of him becoming a hermit, and, I must say, you played that out to perfection.’

‘ How can you say that Father was cowardly to take the precautions he did?’ Harold demands angrily. ‘And that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it — calling him a coward? ’

George’s expression softens. ‘I never used that word, little brother,’ he says, in a much gentler voice. ‘What he did was weak, rather than cowardly. ’

‘You get the point?’ Blackstone asked Meade. ‘As long as they were discussing him in those terms, the main question we would be asking ourselves was which one of them was painting a more realistic picture of their father. And whatever side of the fence we eventually came down on, our automatic assumption would be that their father was still alive.’

‘Very clever,’ Meade said, with mock admiration.

‘You said I was half-right about your preposterous theories,’ George said.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘So in what way was I half-wrong ?’

Blackstone walked over to the window, and looked out. Virginia and Elizabeth were walking in the garden. Virginia had her hand firmly on Elizabeth’s arm, and was talking earnestly to her. Elizabeth, for her part, looked as if she might collapse at any moment.

Blackstone ran his hand across his forehead. The room was hot and sticky with guilt and denial, and what he really needed at that moment, he decided, was a breath of fresh air.

‘So in what way was I half-wrong ?’ George repeated, from behind him.

Blackstone turned around.

‘You were wrong to assume that I believe your father simply died,’ he told George.

‘But I thought you just said that he-’

‘He didn’t simply die at all. You murdered him.’

The four men walked slowly through the gardens which overlooked the ocean. They were not entirely alone. Posted at a discreet distance were several uniformed policemen. But the officers weren’t really necessary, Blackstone thought — because George wouldn’t try anything without Harold’s say-so, and Harold was too smart for that.

‘Do we have to go through this charade?’ George asked.

‘No, it’s entirely your choice,’ Blackstone told him. ‘If you’d prefer it, we can have the conversation in Coney Island police headquarters.’

‘Oh, get it with it, then,’ George said.

‘I intend to,’ Blackstone said, coming to a sudden halt. ‘It was roughly on this spot that I had my talk with Fanshawe, no more than an hour before he died. He’d come up to the room that you’d assigned us, to ask if we wanted anything to drink. Did you know that?’ He paused. ‘But of course you knew it — because one of you had sent him up there to be noticed .’

‘Perhaps, rather than that, one of us sent him up there to see if you were thirsty,’ Harold said.

But he didn’t say it as if he expected to be believed, because — unlike his brother — he already knew the game was lost.

‘You sent him so he could be noticed,’ Blackstone said firmly, ‘and so he could deliver the script which you had written for him — a script which you hoped would establish that you stood to gain nothing by your father’s death.’

‘ So Big Bill’s still running the business ?’ Blackstone asks, looking out over the ocean.

‘ Not really,’ Fanshawe replies. ‘Mr George and Mr Harold make most of the decisions since he signed the company over to- ’

‘ Since he signed the company over to them?’

‘ For God’s sake, don’t tell anybody I told you, or I’ll lose my job. ’

‘It must have been while Fanshawe and I were talking that you realized he had made a big mistake earlier that morning,’ Blackstone said to Harold.

‘Really? And what mistake might that have been?’

‘Fanshawe hadn’t taken a breakfast tray down to the bunker — which meant he already knew, before he even got there, what he would find. If you could spot that mistake, the chances were that I would too, and Fanshawe suddenly stopped being a valuable asset and became a very dangerous liability. He had to die, so George — I assume it was George — lured him into the woods, half strangled him, and then hung him from the tree.’

‘So now it’s not our father you’re accusing us of killing, it’s our butler,’ George said.

‘I’m accusing you of killing both of them,’ Blackstone replied. ‘And those two murders are just a start.’ He lit up a cigarette. ‘I think we’ll go down to the bunker, next.’

‘I. . I don’t want to go down to the bunker,’ George gasped, in a half-strangled tone.

‘For God’s sake, George, be a man for once!’ Harold said.

There was very little room for four men to stand in the small guard room, but though George and Harold seemed uncomfortable about rubbing shoulders with the others, Blackstone himself appeared to be perfectly at ease.

‘I can’t tell you exactly what happened that night, but I think I can give you a rough outline,’ Blackstone said.

The guards have been told to expect two visitors — the first visitors, apart from his ladies, that Mr Holt has ever had — but when they arrive, it is a shock, because they look like such rough types that it is hard to imagine Holt ever wishing to associate with them. But Fanshawe is there, and Fanshawe says these are the people Holt wants to see, so it must be all right.

‘ Take them through into the boss’s suite,’ the butler says.

And that is strange, too, because neither of the guards has been inside the suite before.

They open the door, and step to one side to let the visitors enter first.

‘ You lead the way,’ Fanshawe tells them.

The guards enter the suite. The boss is sitting behind his desk.

Up until this moment, they have only ever caught the occasional glance of him, when one of the Persons Permitted to Enter visited. Now, for the first time, they get a proper look at the man, and it occurs to both of them that he seems very unprepossessing for someone with so much power.

‘ Stand in front of my desk,’ the boss says.

‘ Us?’ one of the guards asks.

‘ You,’ the boss replies.

The guards do as they’ve been ordered, and two seconds later they are gasping for breath as sharp knives slash across their throats.

The guards crumple to the ground.

‘ You ready?’ one of the visitors asks the man behind the desk.

‘ I’m ready. ’

‘ Then let’s get the hell out of here. ’

They meet Fanshawe on the way out. He is carrying several suits — which clearly belong to a big man — over one arm. He enters the suite, steps around the dying guards, and walks into the bedroom. He opens the wardrobe and hangs up the suits, then removes a second set of suits — made for a much smaller man — which had been hanging there. By the time he returns to the study, the guards are already dead.