Quintin Jardine - Inhuman Remains

‘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.’

‘Come on,’ I shouted, outraged by his attempt to smear the dead. ‘He didn’t have access to those Energi funds.’

‘No, but I told him about the company’s problems, and what it would mean for us when it collapsed, losing the house and maybe even my career going down the toilet.’

‘But you dropped Frank as a friend, after he was jailed.’

‘Who told you that? No, let me guess. He did.’

‘In the Hotel Arts,’ I countered, ‘he had to threaten you to get in to see you.’

‘Gretchen Roberts, you mean?’

I nodded.

‘There’s no such person; that was for your benefit.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I didn’t exactly flaunt our friendship, but Frank was always my best mate. He was the only person I’d ever have told about Ludo’s problems. A couple of weeks after I did, he came back to me and set out the whole scheme. The only difference from your account was that he said it would be legal. He did it all. Ludo didn’t set up the company in Luxembourg, he did. . as its records will prove.’ I looked at Mark quickly, then back at Justin. ‘Ludo didn’t hire any security people; Frank did that. But that was much later in the day: I’m not sure when. The first we knew of them was when he sent them to a meeting Ludo had in Seville, with Caballero. As for Macela, he didn’t recruit Frank; Frank recruited him. Hermann Gresch is a name I’ve never heard until now. We knew nothing about the man’s background, only that Frank vouched for him. As for a meeting in Luxembourg with the man you called Loman, that’s news to me also. I can’t think why that would have happened.’

‘When the project got under way,’ I said, ‘Frank took a false identity and still you thought it would be legal?’

‘He’d been in prison. How would that have looked to investors?’