Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

They were in Cornwall for his father’s birthday, his sixty-fifth. Patrick Webster was not a man for grand celebrations, but the family would be there, and one or two close friends. Webster’s sister, a family lawyer, was flying down from her practice in Edinburgh. Tomorrow night they would all have dinner and Webster was to give a speech, something he hadn’t given a moment’s thought in the crush of everyday obligations, and now as he moved through the water, twisting his head up to the air every fourth stroke, he felt shame at the thought that he was devoting more time to a man like Darius Qazai than he was to his own father.

What different men they were. Patrick Webster was a clinical psychiatrist who had devoted his career to the care of profoundly ill people: to the schizophrenic, the irretrievably depressed, the bipolar, to those poor souls whose minds had betrayed them.

As a boy he had found his father’s job mysterious and, if he was frank, a little frightening—not because he felt at risk but because the idea of a mind failing seemed nightmarish, both terrifying and curiously real. His father, though, he had found anything but. He was a quiet man, well-read, a student of history, engaged in the world, a socialist by instinct but never a member of any party, indefatigably kind. He was always trying to help people: when Webster was eight one of the fathers in the street had left his wife and small daughter, disappearing entirely with all the family’s money, and the Websters had put them up for four months while they reconstructed their lives. A couple of years after that, a homeless man whom Patrick had befriended came one summer to dig over and replant the garden, turning up every day in time for breakfast and after three weeks leaving with the job, which was of course unnecessary, undone. If he had been born in the eighteenth century, people would have called him a philanthropist, and there was something classical too about his more caustic, satirical side, which railed against entitlement and injustice. He was funny about these things, but deeply angered by them, too, and if he dwelled on them for too long could sink into a forceful gloom.

After ten minutes Webster had reached Frenchman’s Creek, where the trees swelling out over the water were in such health that he couldn’t see the bank on either side. He rested for a moment by a buoy at the entrance and saw bass sliding past a foot below the surface of the water. Before Lock’s death, he wouldn’t have taken this case so seriously. Now everything seemed trivial, and corrosive: Qazai’s vanity, Senechal’s steely mania, his own determination to find his client guilty of something at all costs.

He set off again, up the creek now, swimming through the clustered leaves and twigs that the night’s rain and wind had dislodged from the trees. At eye level water boatmen skittered around by the bank and bass broke the surface to snap at them.

Too much was wrong. The state of Shiraz Holdings, in particular, was beginning to intrigue him. A broker friend of his had asked around and found that it was widely assumed that Qazai’s private fund was in trouble. Word was that in 2009, when Dubai looked as if would be cut loose with all its debts by Abu Dhabi, Qazai had decided that there was no way that the richer, more sober of the Emirates would let its brash younger brother default, and had bet heavily that the market was wrong. No one was sure how much he had lost, but it was known that he had placed not only a large amount of Shiraz’s money but a larger sum he had borrowed from various banks, all of which he had of course had to pay back. There were some who were surprised to see Shiraz still functioning at all.

Then there was Mehr, whose death made little sense. It was no robbery, that was certain, and none of the other motives fitted unless Qazai was somehow involved. Webster had two theories, neither of which he particularly liked: that Mehr really had been smuggling treasures out of the country, perhaps on Qazai’s instructions, and had been caught; or that he had been involved in a far deeper, darker game, perhaps for an intelligence agency somewhere—a game that for now he could only guess at.

No: even without Parviz’s brief disappearance it was too much.

THAT AFTERNOON THE WEBSTERSrented a bass boat and took it out to the mouth of the estuary to fish for mackerel. The drizzle had cleared, scraps of blue showed through the white clouds and a breeze blew into their faces as they made for the headland, the faded pinks and oranges of their lifejackets vivid in the middle of the lead gray sea. The two-stroke outboard, flat out and managing three or four knots, strained away at a constant pitch behind them.

Half a mile short of open water Webster killed the engine and letting the boat dip up and down on the gentle swell unwound a mackerel line over the side, taking care not to let the shining sharp hooks catch his fingers. He passed the end to Nancy and started playing out another line while Daniel waited patiently. They both loved to fish. On land they weren’t still for a minute, but out here they would happily sit for an hour jigging the lines and waiting for that moment when something unexpectedly powerful tried to tug them out of their hands.

“Move it up and down,” Webster said to Daniel, taking his son’s hands in his own. “Like this. You want the fish to think the bait’s alive.” Daniel gave the line a great jerk. “That’s it. Gently. Do it again and again. That’s it.”

Elsa smiled at him, her dark hair falling in her face in the wind.

“You’re such a countryman.” She pointed at a grand stone house sitting in isolation on the headland to the north. “How about that one?”

“Too severe. And you’d get bored.”

“I’d do something. Paint. Sculpt. Learn the violin.”

“You’d still get bored. Although I’m sure you’d find plenty of patients down here.”

“What would you do?”

“Fish.”

She laughed. “These two have a better record.”

“That’s true.”

Nancy turned to him. “Daddy, is this one?”

“Did you feel a tug? Let’s see.” He moved over to her side of the boat, which tipped a little with his weight, and pulled her line out of the water, looping the wet nylon in his left hand. There was nothing there. “False alarm. Do you want me to have a go?” Nancy shook her head and made to take the line back from him. He let it out again, passed it to her and moved back to sit by Elsa.

“What are you going to say then?” she said. “Tomorrow night.”

“I don’t know. I’m getting there. He’s an easy man to say nice things about.”

Elsa looked up at him and leaned against his shoulder. He put his arm around her. The breeze was beginning to gust a little and there was a trace of chill in it.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

“I know. They’re not a tough crowd. I’ve just never had the opportunity before. I want to make the most of it.”

They all sat for a minute in silence, Nancy diligently tweaking her line, Daniel simply staring at his.

“You seem better for your swim,” said Elsa.

“Much. This place never fails.” He looked around him at the murmuring gray of the water, lighter and white-capped beyond the line between the two headlands; at the ragged tawny rocks on the shore and the secret sandy beaches that lay among them; at the hundreds of boats moored at Helford a mile or two behind. It was a complete world, the estuary. Maybe they could live here.

Nancy gave a little shriek and lifted the line above her head in her hands. “Daddy! Daddy! I think this is one!”

Webster moved forward and sat between her and Daniel, helping her reel it in. This time he could feel weight on the other end, and as he pulled he looked carefully into the water for the first silvery sign of a fish. There were a dozen or more hooks, and on the last were three plump mackerel, each about a foot long, whose shining backs squirmed in the light and dripped water as they struggled into the boat.