Michael Ridpath - See No Evil

‘Can’t you just ask Cornelius van Zyl?’

‘We have. Or at least Todd has. And other members of his family. But none of them seems to know anything. And if they do, they aren’t saying.’

‘I think my dad has tried to erase that whole period from his memory,’ Todd said. ‘I’m sure he feels guilty about all the fights they had. But I can’t do that. I need to know what happened to her.’

‘So you have no idea what the information referred to in this letter is?’ Calder asked.

‘No,’ said Kim. ‘But Martha did mention a man she had discussed it with. He’s a banker. A banker who works for Bloomfield Weiss.’

‘I see,’ said Calder. ‘You want me to talk to this person?’

‘Todd’s tried,’ said Kim. ‘But he won’t agree to meet him and he doesn’t even return his phone calls.’

‘Can’t your father pull strings?’

‘Dad’s not quite comfortable—’

‘He could but he won’t,’ Kim interrupted. ‘But I told Todd I was sure you could help us. This banker works in London. You probably know him, and if you don’t, you would know someone who does. Also, I know I can trust you to be careful with whatever you find out.’ Kim smiled at Calder in encouragement.

‘We read about what you did to uncover the scandal with that hedge fund,’ Todd said. ‘This is just a case of asking a couple of questions and getting some answers.’

‘Who’s the banker?’ Calder asked.

‘Benton Davis,’ said Kim.

Calder closed his eyes. When he opened them, Kim was watching his face with concern.

‘You do know him?’ she said. ‘I can tell you know him!’

Calder nodded. ‘I do. And I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

Kim frowned. She glanced at Todd, who gave the tiniest of shrugs. Calder had the feeling that she had assured her husband of his assistance and he had disappointed her. ‘May I ask why?’ she said. ‘It would just be a question of calling him up and going to London to see him.’

Calder took a deep breath. ‘Benton Davis is the head of Bloomfield Weiss’s London office. He was in charge when I resigned from there a couple of years ago. Jennifer Tan, a woman who worked for me, had brought a sexual harassment case against the firm. They made her life hell, and so she quit. She died soon after, falling from a sixth-floor window. At first it looked like suicide: I held Benton responsible, amongst others. That’s why I left the firm. It turned out she had actually been murdered, but I still blame Benton for the way she was treated, and he knows that. There’s no love lost between us; I think the chances of him talking to me are nil. Besides which, I’ve left all that behind me, and I don’t want to go back to it.’

‘The poor woman!’ Kim said indignantly. ‘That’s a terrible story. What a bastard.’

‘What about just giving him a call and asking him to see us?’ Todd said.

Calder shook his head. ‘Even if I did, he wouldn’t take any notice. Can’t you tell all this to the police?’

‘This was an unexplained death in South Africa in the 1980s,’ Kim said. ‘There were hundreds of those. Thousands.’

‘Anything you can do would be really appreciated,’ Todd said. ‘I was very fond of my mother — that’s a dumb thing to say, everyone’s fond of their mother — but I was away at school in England when she died. I hadn’t seen her for four months. I wasn’t there. I know it’s stupid, but I kind of blame myself for that. And I have no idea why she died. It was obvious at the time that the authorities were covering something up, but what? And why? Perhaps the South African security police killed her. Or somebody else. My family has been desperate to bury it all in the past, but that’s not right. We have to know the truth. I have to know the truth.’

Calder looked at the couple. Their disappointment was plain. They had come a long way to see him. And he sympathized with Todd. His own mother had died at about the same stage in his life. That was a road accident, a head-on collision with a farm worker who had had too much to drink, but Calder too had in some way felt responsible. She had been rushing to pick him up from school after he had missed the bus. His life had never been the same since. And if his own mother had been murdered he wouldn’t have rested until he had found out why. He was tempted to offer to help.

But Benton Davis? The man at the very heart of all the scheming manipulation he so much detested at Bloomfield Weiss. No. No, he couldn’t do it. There was no point in even trying.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

The food came, and after a couple of awkward minutes the conversation picked up. Todd was an affable, pleasant guy, seemingly unspoilt by all the advantages with which he had been born. Calder found himself warming to him. And Kim, well Kim was as lively as she always had been, and she had that smile, that you-are-the-most-important-person-in-the-world smile, which she flashed at him every few minutes and which sparked a familiar flicker of excitement every time, just as it had all those years ago. To Calder’s disappointment Kim had always been someone else’s girlfriend. At university that someone else had invariably turned out to be a good-looking, charming bastard. But from what Calder could see that wasn’t the case with Todd. And he was pleased. Kim deserved to have someone who treated her well.

Lunch finished, they stepped outside into the small pub car park. The creek had swollen with the tide; its waters now reached halfway up the hard. The clouds were still low and grey: no chance of any more flying that day.

Calder was still feeling bad about his refusal to help. ‘I tell you what, Todd. The weather’s supposed to get even worse tomorrow and stay bad until the weekend. But if you’re around next week and it’s cleared up, I can take you up in the Yak. Show you a bit of Norfolk from the air.’

Todd grinned. ‘I’d love to do that,’ he said. He glanced at Kim, who looked doubtful. ‘We’re staying with my father in London for the next few days, flying back to the States next Wednesday. So, next Tuesday, maybe?’

‘Great,’ Calder said. ‘Let’s talk early Tuesday morning and see what the weather’s doing.’

‘Your guests from Bloomfield Weiss have arrived, Mr van Zyl.’

Cornelius looked up from his desk as Nimrod stood at the entrance to his rather grand study. Despite his dashing name, Nimrod was a small, wiry Xhosa with a lined face, watchful eyes and flashes of gold in his teeth, whose suits were always just a little too big for him. He had proved his loyalty over thirty years as driver, fixer and right-hand man, and he was the one relic of Cornelius’s South African past that Cornelius was happy to keep around.

‘Show them in.’

Cornelius grabbed a pad encased in a leather wallet and placed it at the centre of the long walnut table. Edwin was already sitting there, waiting, peering through his thick lenses at a sheet of paper bearing closely printed figures. Cornelius was in shirtsleeves, but his balding son’s flabby body was squeezed into a three-piece suit, as always. Edwin was Cornelius’s eldest child, a product of the first and least successful of his three marriages. The boy was diligent, and he worked hard, but he lacked the charisma or vision of his younger half-brother, Todd. Boy? He was in his mid-forties. But no matter how earnestly Edwin acted, and he did act very earnest, Cornelius could never take him seriously.

Cornelius himself was over seventy, but he stood tall and straight and precious little of the muscle he had carried when he had played centre three-quarter for the Western Province rugby team fifty years before had turned to fat. His square jaw, firm cheekbones and shock of white hair gave the impression of a block of granite, all the stronger for its age. In his youth, he had earned the nickname of ‘the Dart’ for his ability to pierce a defensive line of three-quarters, but it could equally well have been used to describe his mind, which if anything had sharpened over the years. He was good at what he did. And what he did was buy newspapers and make money out of them.