Quintin Jardine - Inhuman Remains

‘So what was Macela’s role?’ I demanded.

‘To be on the ground, showing the project to investors who chose to visit Seville, but he turned out to be useless, because of his addiction.’

‘Frank told me that Macela controlled the money as it came in.’

‘Nonsense. Frank controlled everything. I was amazed by him, by the level at which he operated, but it was all of his creation.’

‘No,’ I protested. ‘No. I’m not having it.’ I jabbed a finger in his wife’s direction. ‘You’re trying to save her skin.’

‘No, and I’ll prove it. You still don’t know who Alastair Rowland is, do you?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

He smiled again. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I signed the funds-transfer order that the Luxembourg lawyers received, and I used the company seal to do it.’ He rose, walked over to a sideboard, and took something from it, then returned and handed it to me. It was blue, metal, hinged and heavy, a stamping device, and its base held a carved round symbol. I’d never seen one before, but I knew what it was.

‘That was why Frank came to the hotel. When we were together on the club floor, before you came up to join us, he gave it to me, to keep it safe, and so that I could move the money into an account he’d set up. Our meeting was prearranged, before his mother went missing. If only he’d accepted my offer of help and not gone storming off, he’d still be alive, and so might she.’

Begged questions were being thrown at me as fast as I could process them. ‘But if you still thought it was kosher, didn’t the funds transfer seem odd?’

‘Not at all. The plan always was to move the money out of Luxembourg before construction started, into a better tax environment. So I signed the transfer, to a bank in the Cayman Islands.’

‘Hold on. Let’s go back. When Frank had to disappear, didn’t that alert you that all wasn’t well?’

‘It concerned me, I’ll grant you, but he told us that he believed that his real identity had been blown and that he had to fade away, into the background. With him out of the picture, and Macela pretty much helpless, there was no choice but that Ludo should become Bromberg again.’

‘And that she should film my house?’ I sneered. Yes, I actually did sneer; I felt my lip curl.

‘Frank asked me to do that,’ Ludmila murmured, ‘on one of my trips to Spain. He said he was considering hiding out with you but wanted to see how secure your place looked.’

‘Where was he hiding at that time?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Why? Where were you?’

‘Most of the time I was in London. Calls to the land-line number in Seville were diverted to my mobile. Like when you called me. If I had to see someone I always gave myself a couple of days to get there.’

‘And you and Caballero kidnapping me? I imagined that, did I?’

‘Frank told me to do it. He said his security people had gone bad on him, that his mother had been kidnapped, and that you were in danger. He said we had to do something to get you out of the way, but to make it look convincing to those men so that they’d lay off you. So I recruited Caballero to help me: I told him that you were a conwoman trying to fleece us, and the clown believed me.’

‘But, Ludmila, you still can’t sit down comfortably,’ I pointed out. ‘Remember what happened to you.’

‘I did not expect that,’ she admitted. ‘But Frank called me afterwards, full of remorse, and said that the whole thing had had to be as realistic as possible.’

‘That’s why he and I spent a little longer on our own in Barcelona than he’d expected,’ Justin added. ‘I didn’t like that either. Frank and I were having it out, while you were waiting downstairs.’

‘Jesus,’ I whispered, apologising mentally to Him and to Gerard. The more I thought about it, the more I was coming, if not to believe them, then at least to see their account as a possibility. But there were still holes in it. ‘Who gave you the gun?’ I asked Ludmila.

‘Frank did. It was loaded with blanks, wasn’t it?’ She looked at me nervously, and this time I did accept that her ignorance was genuine, since Caballero had said more or less the same thing.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘It shot a very convincing hole in the upholstery of your friend’s car.’ I winced. ‘That little bugger should have kept the damn thing, instead of chucking it in the flames when he burned Caballero’s toys in that barn.’

‘He set his bikes on fire?’

‘Yes, but it did no good. None of it did. Sebastian and Willie got him in the end, and his poor old mum.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘The money?’ I asked.

‘Gone,’ said Justin, with a huge sigh. ‘Moved on from the Cayman bank, blind transfer; we don’t know where it is now, and we never will.’

‘When did this happen?’

He told me the date. I made a quick mental calculation. ‘The day after he was abducted,’ I said. ‘They must have forced him to transfer it again, then killed him.’

‘Poor little bastard.’ I’d cried all mine, but the Home Secretary was on the verge of tears. ‘It was meant to be legal,’ he said, ‘I promise. As soon as we’d secured some additional funds through bank borrowing, the casino would have been built. As soon as the ground was broken, Energi investment would have quadrupled in value.’

‘So why did both Lidia and Rowland vanish from the face of the earth?’

‘We had to, as soon as the money went missing. I’d just been offered the post of Home Secretary: I couldn’t be seen to be involved in any scandal.’

‘But an investigation will be bound to lead to Ludmila.’

‘But not to Lidia. Energi will be. . no, Energi is just another victim of theft. You say fraud, but still I don’t believe it. The money was honestly, if unconventionally raised, and stolen by the people who killed Frank and his mother.’

I knew that I’d like to go along with that explanation, but I wasn’t ready to tell him. ‘And you two? What happens to you?’ I asked, not particularly kindly.

‘We move house, or I buy it from the family trust before it implodes. I’d hoped to hang on to my job, but when those Luxembourg records become public, I’ll be stuffed. My signature’s there.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ Mark intervened. He told him about the robbery. ‘Would I find MI5’s fingerprints all over that, by any chance?’ he added.

Justin blinked, several times. ‘If they knew of this operation. .’ he murmured. (Mark and I could have told him they did, and how. That explained a lot about the hard line the security-service woman had taken with us: not just a minister to protect, but maybe a government if the scandal was messy enough.) ‘But I didn’t authorise it, I promise you.’

I thought about that for a while. ‘If I accept all of that,’ I said slowly, ‘it means we’re the only people who know of your involvement. Caballero can identify Ludmila as Lidia Bromberg, but he’s more concerned with political rehabilitation right now. Anyway, he’d never make the connection.’

‘I suppose it does,’ Justin agreed. ‘So. .’

I beat him to the question. ‘So what do we want? Only one thing. There’s a woman in the security service who made some very nasty threats against me, and Mr Kravitz, here, my associate. She called herself Moira; blonde, early thirties, rat faced. I want her told to forget that she’s ever heard of us.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ the Home Secretary promised.

‘In that case,’ I told him, ‘good luck with your career, and God help the country.’

If I said that the meeting hadn’t gone the way I’d imagined, that wouldn’t be quite accurate. No, the truth is, when we went in there I didn’t have the faintest idea how it was going to play out. But I hadn’t expected my carefully constructed theory to be turned completely on its head, and for Frank to be revealed as the brains behind the whole business.