James Craig - Never Apologise, Never Explain

‘No? What should I be worrying about?’

‘We need to have a meeting in the morning. In the meantime, you should start thinking about the practicalities.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, remember the good news here — the very good news — which is that there is no suggestion that you were party to any of this.’

‘I wasn’t.’ Simpson picked up the wine glass and this time drank about half of its contents.

‘No,’ the lawyer said hastily, ‘of course not. But you know what it’s like in these situations.’

Simpson drained the remaining wine in the glass, and resisted the urge to smash it against the wall. ‘No, I don’t actually,’ she bristled, all her desire to be rational, to be reasonable, slipping away.

‘Well,’ Lucas summoned up extra reserves of empathy and patience, ‘as his wife, you will find that there will always be gossip and speculation. But you are not under investigation and there is not, as things stand, any… direct threat to your job. In the first instance, however, you need to consider various aspects of your relationship with your husband and in particular the distribution of your respective assets.’

After a day of feeling numb, Simpson suddenly recoiled as if she had been slapped in the face. ‘Are you saying that I should divorce him?’

‘Not at all,’ Lucas said calmly. ‘It is not my place to give any such advice. And, remember, technically, I am Joshua’s lawyer, not yours. You should, of course, get your own representation. However, for the moment at least, there is a great commonality of interest here.’

‘For the moment?’

Lucas gritted his teeth. He was getting increasingly irritated by Simpson’s verbal tic of echoing what he said. But, once again, he ploughed on. ‘Let us assume, for the moment, that the authorities will want to try and recover as much of Joshua’s assets as possible. You will need to prove to them that anything you keep is not something that was gained as a result of his schemes.’

‘Christ!’ Simpson muttered as she grabbed the wine bottle and refilled her glass.

‘Stop here!’ Lucas told the cab driver. Before clambering out, he returned to his call: ‘Remember, Carole, that you are a very successful professional in your own right. What’s more, you have dedicated your entire career to public service. It should not be difficult to demonstrate that you have built up a reasonable portfolio of legitimately acquired assets over several decades. Draw up a list this evening, and we can discuss it in my office in the morning.’

‘Fine,’ Simpson sighed.

‘Shall we say eleven?’

‘I will see you there.’

‘Good,’ the lawyer replied. ‘Until tomorrow then.’

With a click, the line went dead. Simpson tossed the phone back on the table. For the next few minutes she sat in silence, going over their conversation in her head. Then she pulled some paper and a pen from her bag, and began jotting down numbers.

Carlyle dropped his biography of the football manager Brian Clough on the coffee-table and glanced over at Helen, who was sitting on the other end of the sofa. A dispiriting sense of deja vu overwhelmed him. His wife was still engrossed in her celebrities-in-the-jungle television show that seemed to have been running for months already. Carlyle was even more amazed to note that former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Luke Osgood was still hanging in there with a chance of winning. Osgood had made it down to the last three of the competition, along with a stripper (or, rather, ‘burlesque performer’) called Tizzy McDee and a nondescript-looking soap actor called Kevin. Carlyle tried to avert his eyes from the screen, particularly when Osgood appeared, but the sight of the pneumatic Tizzy, wearing a bikini that would have been too small even for young Alice, was predictably hypnotic.

Mercifully, a commercial break arrived. Helen pulled the remote out from under a cushion and muted the sound. ‘Osgood’s done well to get this far,’ she said, ‘but he’s not going to win.’

‘So it’s between the soap star and the stripper?’ Carlyle remarked, curious despite himself.

‘Yes,’ his wife replied, with all the seriousness appropriate to a discussion about a general election, ‘but the actor is more likely to win. Once Osgood is out, he can combine the gay vote with the housewives’ vote. There aren’t enough teenage boys who can be bothered enough to ring in to vote for Tizzy over the line.’

‘They’ve all got their hands full already, I expect,’ Carlyle joked.

Helen shot him a sour look. ‘Moving away from events in the jungle,’ she said, ‘I have some more news.’

‘Oh, yes?’ he said warily, expecting anything from a demand for money to an announcement that his mother-in-law would be paying them a visit.

‘About Agatha Mills,’ Helen said, rolling back on the sofa and pulling her knees up to her chest.

‘What about her?’

‘Well… Agatha and Sandra Groves did know each other.’

Carlyle yawned. ‘You told me that already.’

Helen rose above the rebuke. ‘They were both involved in a Daughters of Dismas campaign against the arms trade. Their particular interest was in British military aid to Chile. Apparently it was being used to finance mercenaries in Iraq.’

Carlyle let this new information sink in. ‘Does this come from the woman that you spoke to before?’

‘Yes.’ Helen glanced at the television screen to make sure that the adverts were still running and that she wasn’t missing any of her jungle fun. ‘I spoke to Clara again this morning, and she put me on to a couple of other people she knows. They say that the two of them were quite active about it.’

‘Was there anyone else involved?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Dunno,’ Helen shrugged.

‘Well, you’d better get your friend to check,’ he chided her. ‘These two have ended up dead, which means any of their chums could now be at risk. They need to get in touch with me straight away.’

‘I will pass the message on,’ Helen said coolly. She picked up some papers that were lying on the floor. ‘They were targeting a company called LAHC.’

‘Which stands for?’

Helen quickly scanned the text. ‘I don’t know. It was reportedly using men and equipment, paid for by British money, as so-called private security guards. Some of those guards are accused of human rights violations.’

‘ I get accused of human rights violations,’ Carlyle snorted, ‘on a fairly regular basis.’

‘Not including murder,’ Helen said bluntly. ‘This isn’t a laughing matter.’

‘I was just-’ Before he could finish his sentence, she dropped the sheaf of papers into his lap, restoring the television’s sound just as her programme resumed.

If anything, the stripper’s bikini seemed to have shrunk during the commercial break. Her nipples, meanwhile, seemed to have grown massively. Through great force of will, Carlyle managed to tear his eyes away from the screen and scan the documents that Helen had handed him. Much of the material was in Spanish, but one thing he could read was a Daughters of Dismas press release entitled Time To Act Against Iraq Mercenaries. Keeping one eye on the stripper’s tits, Carlyle scanned the text. Mercenary recruitment agencies are sending former soldiers to Iraq… human rights abuses… unauthorised use of Army weaponry… assault… murder. He read on: American private security companies who recruit guards at the request of the US government to send into armed conflict zones, to protect strategic installations and military convoys, tend to subcontract to South American firms like LAHC Consulting. The owner of LAHC is Gomez Gori, a retired admiral of the Chilean navy who played a leading role in overthrowing the democratically elected Chilean government in 1973.