Майкл Ридпат: The Partnership Track

‘We’ve got an hour,’ said Cynthia. ‘Let’s use it. Bill might have a point; between us we may be able to figure out who killed Harald. We should at least try.’ She lifted the flip chart and brought it over towards the table, uncapping one of the thick felt pens. Blue. A constructive colour. She stood there, tall, tidy in her pink shirt and slacks, the corporate uniform of the middle manager at a weekend offsite, her thick blond hair blow-dried to perfection, the pen poised, ready to turn half-ideas into scribbled words.

‘What are you going to do with that?’ I said.

‘Brainstorm,’ said Cynthia. ‘We brainstorm all the time. So, first question. What’s our first question?’

Cynthia looked around at us. Part of me admired her matter-of-fact ability to do something constructive. But I wasn’t going to be part of it.

‘We know where he was killed,’ said Charlie. So how about: “Who could have been at the scene of the crime?”‘

‘All right,’ said Cynthia. And she scrawled the question on the flip chart. ‘Thoughts?’

‘Me,’ said Trent with a half-smile. ‘I went for a run around the lake this morning. Put me down.’

Cynthia raised her eyebrows.

‘Go on,’ said Trent.

‘OK.’ She wrote down Trent’s name.

‘Harald,’ added Trent. ‘Obviously.’

Cynthia wrote it down.

‘And Peter. I saw Peter running.’ Trent shot me a smirk.

I wanted to protest my innocence, or suggest that someone else might have been lurking by the side of the lake, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to encourage them in a game I might lose.

‘Could anyone else have been there?’ Cynthia asked. ‘A hotel employee? A stranger?’

‘No,’ said Trent. ‘I asked the cops and they were certain there were no signs of anyone else apart from me, Peter, Harald and the guy who found him, who worked for the lodge.’

I remembered what Jason had just told me about the lack of unexplained tracks in the snow, but decided not to share it with the others. Trent was right.

There followed a long and unstructured conversation between Trent and Cynthia about footprints, vehicle tracks, why no one had heard a gunshot, the timings, the employee who had discovered the body and what the police had and hadn’t said. Charlie threw in a few comments, but I kept quiet, as did Manuela. Cynthia was doing a pretty good job of asking the right questions, but I had to admit that there was only one answer emerging.

‘All right,’ said Cynthia. ‘That suggests Trent or Peter.’

Both she and Trent looked at me for a reaction. I didn’t give them one. I was going to watch this game, but not play it.

‘OK,’ Cynthia said. ‘Now, what else?’

‘Motive,’ said Trent.

Cynthia flipped the chart to a new page, and wrote the word down, underlining it. I could see exactly what Trent was doing. ‘All right, so who had the motive?’

‘Peter,’ said Charlie. ‘He was favourite to make partner, until Bill mentioned Harald’s name.’

‘That’s true,’ said Trent, looking at me, one corner of his wide lips raised slightly. I was beginning to see why Trent was so effective at doing deals. He was demonstrating his total confidence that he had got me where he wanted me, and it was hard not to believe him.

I had to fight this. Time to take the field.

‘All of us want to be partners,’ I said. ‘Really badly. You, for example, Trent.’

‘Sure I do,’ said Trent. ‘But I know I don’t have much of a chance. I’m just here to make up the numbers.’

Trent’s chances were better than that, but he had a point, and we all knew it.

‘I don’t believe any of us would actually kill for a partnership,’ I said.

Trent shrugged. ‘Harald is dead.’

‘We don’t know why he was killed.’

‘Put Peter’s name down, Cynthia. He has the strongest motive of all of us. No question.’

Cynthia shrugged. Avoiding my eye she wrote my name on the flip chart.

‘There might be other motives,’ I said.

‘Such as?’

My mind raced, searching for possibilities. I thought of Manuela and her affair with Harald. Wasn’t it about time that she mentioned it? It was definitely relevant. Maybe she had some motive — maybe Harald had rejected her? Or threatened to expose her? Maybe she had killed him?

I glanced at Manuela, sitting, arms folded, watching what was going on, showing no inclination to talk. She had said she would tell the police about Harald when the time was right. Surely the time was right now. Except these people weren’t the police, just her colleagues. Her rivals.

Was she playing some game? Some game that I couldn’t yet fathom?

But I couldn’t bring myself to reveal her affair, at least not yet. I felt as if I had established a tentative bond of trust with her, and I needed all the trust I could get.

So what other motive might there be? Think!

‘Project Assegai,’ I said.

Cynthia stared at me. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Write it down,’ I said.

Cynthia shrugged and wrote it down under Motive . She, at least, wanted to play fair.

‘Something went wrong with Project Assegai,’ I said. ‘What was it, Charlie?’

‘Nothing. I told you. I mean, there was some screw-up with the numbers, but we sorted it out and the client was happy in the end. It can have nothing to do with Harald’s death.’

‘But Harald was involved with the deal?’

‘Yeah,’ said Charlie. ‘He reworked the numbers. Modified the assumptions. You know how Harald is. Sorry, was. Always questioning the assumptions.’

‘That’s not how it was,’ said Cynthia, frowning. ‘And you know it, Charlie.’

‘OK, so I screwed up,’ Charlie said. ‘But that has nothing to do with Harald’s death.’

‘You know what happened with Project Assegai, Cynthia,’ I said. ‘Tell us.’

‘We don’t have time for this,’ said Charlie.

I checked my watch. ‘We have fifteen minutes.’

Cynthia hesitated, but she overcame her reluctance. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Peter might have something here.’ She flipped over the sheet and wrote the words Project Assegai . ‘Needs its own page. No one in the firm knows what really happened apart from me, Charlie, Harald and the partner, Steve Rosenheit. And it was one humongous screw-up.’

‘What went wrong?’ I asked her.

‘It was a deal in Mauritania, an offshore field operated by Archimedes Resources. They needed another forty-two million to drill two more exploratory wells, and our client Tomskoil was going to put up half the money.’

Tomskoil was a Russian oil company led by an oligarch whom I didn’t trust an inch. But Steve Rosenheit claimed he understood him, and he was one of Labouchere’s most profitable clients. I had managed to keep away from him. I knew very little about Archimedes.

‘Steve and Charlie did the deal, but a couple months later, Tomskoil was concerned about the numbers for the Dynamic Simulation Model. A British geologist working for Archimedes had been killed down there — it looked like it was a kidnapping that had gone wrong. Nothing to do with the deal. Harald and I flew down to Nouakchott with Steve and Charlie to check out what was happening. It turned out that the numbers were bad and Charlie hadn’t spotted it.’

‘How could I have spotted it?’ protested Charlie. ‘I was using the client’s assumptions. How was I to know they were just making up the figures?’

‘Harald knew,’ said Cynthia. ‘And he told Steve. Steve told us to... er... to rework the figures. Harald refused.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

Cynthia glanced at Charlie. ‘He was uncomfortable ,’ she said. ‘He thought the Archimedes geologist’s death might be related in some way.’