Laurence O’Bryan - The Manhattan Puzzle

‘That’s what worries me,’ said Henry, quietly.

Finch was already moving on to something else.

It wasn’t Sean on the phone. It was one of his colleagues from work, George Donovan.

George was a senior security manager at BXH who took an interest in Sean’s project there. He was a close-mouthed Iraqi war veteran, a borderline posttraumatic stress victim, Sean said, who’d rejoined his British army regiment when he’d heard they were heading to Afghanistan for a campaign.

She’d met him only twice. There was something weird about his stare. It felt as if he was wondering whether to kill you or not. He reminded her of Mark, her ex, who had died in Israel. He’d had a similar distant stare at times, as if he’d seen too much.

Sean had told her that George had been a hero. But why BXH needed that kind of security officer, he’d never explained.

‘Good morning, Mrs Ryan.’

‘Good morning, George.’

George cleared his throat. Isabel wondered was he at work, sitting in that neon-lit open-plan office on the twenty-ninth floor of BXH, the banking corporation worth the GDP of a fast-developing nation state, where he and Sean and ten thousand other Londoners worked like coal miners on twelve-hour shifts. Sean had been working late at the bank for months now, integrating the facial recognition software the Institute had developed with the bank’s IT systems.

And if he was at the office already, did that mean that any minute now he was going to rush into one of those breakfast meetings Sean was always telling her about?

‘Can I speak to Sean, please?’ George’s tone was stiff, proprietorial, as if Sean belonged to BXH, not to Isabel. Not really.

It was a tone Isabel hated. She had to tighten her hand around the phone to stop herself reacting.

‘He’s not here.’ There was no point in lying. ‘He hasn’t come back yet. I thought he was with you lot last night.’

‘I wouldn’t know, Mrs Ryan. Sean has a meeting here at eight thirty. I’m sorry to disturb you. I thought I might catch him before he left your house.’ He paused for a millisecond, to reload.

‘Aren’t you and Sean going away later today?’ There was the tiniest note of surprise in his tone. And something else too. Did he know something Isabel didn’t?

She chewed her lip. She hadn’t done that in years. The pressure in her forehead was intense suddenly, as if a blood vessel had become trapped.

‘We’re going tonight.’ She tried to make it sound as if they had plenty of time.

They had plenty of time.

George hummed. It sounded almost as if he was laughing.

Isabel wanted to explode. The pressure inside her was rising, like a wave.

‘What time did you last see him?’ she said, in as calm a tone as she could muster.

A dog barked in one of the other back gardens. Isabel felt the bones in her fingers pressing into the plastic of the phone.

‘Maybe six yesterday evening. He was expected in here this morning.’ There was a note of anger in his voice. Was he implying Sean was late?

A prickly warmth spread over Isabel’s face. She hated anyone criticising Sean.

‘I thought he had a day off today?’

A tiny snort came down the line.

‘What time had you been planning to leave for Paris, Mrs Ryan?’

It sounded as if George thought the trip was bound to be cancelled. The hairs on the back of Isabel’s neck rose like quills.

‘The train’s at a minute past six. Our taxi’s coming an hour before that.’

The journey from Fulham to St Pancras International station should take no more than forty minutes, even late in the afternoon, but Sean had wanted them to be early, to enjoy every second of what they’d earned, he’d said.

By five fifteen that afternoon at the latest, according to Sean’s plan, they’d be in St Pancras. And after that it’d be first class all the way. It was going to be a weekend to remember. A well-deserved payback for all the evenings she’d spent alone while he was working.

‘Should I tell Sean something when I see him?’ she said.

‘Can you tell him I’m looking for him? Thanks.’ The line went dead.

Isabel tapped Sean’s number into the handset and got that stupid voicemail message again. She cut the line.

She stood by the window, massaging her temples. An unsettling memory had come back to her.

Sean had said something the weekend before about a feeling he’d had that George was spying on him. Sean had reported some regulatory issue to the bank’s technology security committee and ever since he’d constantly been asking him questions, Sean had said.

Isabel had told him he was getting paranoid.

But there was something about George’s tone on that call that had almost been like a warning. Sean had also told her that Paul Vaughann had been taking an interest in his project recently. He’d complained that Vaughann brought out the worst in people.

Paul Vaughann III was the President and Chief Executive of the twenty-ninth-floor UK operation of BXH. Insiders called him The Shark, because of some mythical incident when he’d bitten a fellow trader’s arm to get his attention. And he loved the nickname so much, Sean said, that he’d had a shark’s jaws mounted behind the desk in his office.

Vaughann was also known for biting people’s heads off if they criticised the bank in his presence, whether they were the bank’s employees or not.

A low-flying jet on its way to Heathrow passed over the house noisily. Isabel looked up at the leaden sky.

Not far away, the traffic would be bumper to bumper on the King’s Road, cars full of slowly stewing people, buses full of workers anxious to get in on time, trucks spewing diesel fumes.

Isabel closed her eyes. ‘Come home, Sean.’

Pastor Stevson, the American pastor and tele-evangelist who had sponsored the most important archaeological dig in Jerusalem in fifty years, was coming up in the mahogany-panelled elevator of the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

He’d been sweating. His white hair and beard were sticking to his pink-mottled skin. His wife hated him looking this way, but there was nothing he could do.

He’d been out late and would have stayed out later if she hadn’t called and told him she was up and praying for his safe return, and that she’d tell everyone back in Dallas if he stayed out all night.

As he strode down the blue-carpeted corridor he rehearsed his lines. His wife, whose money had sponsored his first TV station, was not someone he wanted to fight with.

But he had to put her in her place.

The first thing he noticed when he entered the suite was that someone had pulled the floor-to-ceiling blue and gold curtains back, allowing the twinkling lights of Manhattan into the room. Had she been praying at the window, as she’d told him she’d done before when she’d been suspicious about his whereabouts?

‘Where the hell were you?’ were the first words out of his wife’s mouth.

‘I was walking the streets and praying. Why are you questioning me?’

‘You’ve been gone since dinner.’ She spat the words out.

‘That was no reason to call me, woman.’ Pastor Stevson pointed at his wife. His finger was shaking in righteous anger.

His wife stared at him, as if he’d just pissed on the floor.

‘You expect me to believe that?’ she drawled.

Pastor Stevson pulled a thin prayer book out of the inside pocket of his jacket. His cream suit was crumpled, but she had no way of proving what he’d been doing. Unless that whore had had a camera. He smiled for a second. Where would she have put it?

A memory of the redhead straddling him, her breasts bouncing, came to him. He wiped a hand across his brow. He had to put such thoughts away.