Quintin Jardine - Inhuman Remains

‘In that case, let’s go.’ I turned to my son, in the back seat. ‘We won’t be long, love,’ I told him. Don’t worry, I had no intention of taking him in there to confront Mrs Mayfield. But when I’d known I had to go back to London, I’d realised I couldn’t leave him in St Martí, not so soon after bundling him off to Monaco, so I’d decided to take him with me and make it a holiday for him. (We left Charlie with the guy in El Celler Petit; he has dogs and said that one more wouldn’t make that much difference to him.) We’d done the Tower that morning, and Madame Tussaud’s in the afternoon. He was quite happy to sit in the car and play with his Game Boy, while Mum did a bit of business.

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.’

‘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.