It was late afternoon, and Walter was still in his hotel room, after having eaten a quiche with salad from the room service menu. The empty plate and tray were on the carpet near the bed. He was playing some music while reading the obituaries and comments about Johnny Musselwhite in the British and French press, having reached dead ends on his search for the reasons Johnny had been killed. Earlier, he had taken his mind back to his short time in North Africa when he was undertaking his research project. Walter had come across the two planned Mediterranean pipelines. He had written in his report about the political tensions in Algiers over the ways to maximise the financial return from the gas, and about the potential and sometimes conflicting routes to market.
He remembered reading about the involvement of a company called Petronello in the pipeline called PEGASUS; in fact, the ‘PE’ part of the name represented Petronello. There were several other interested parties, including the French government and the Corsican regional government: the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse. Corsica was to be a key part in the long chain from Algeria to somewhere near Marseilles.
The GALSI pipeline, or Gasdotto Algeria Sardegna Italia, was the other possible pipeline; it had been mooted since 2005 and would import 283 billion cubic feet of natural gas from Algeria to Italy each year. Being roughly 930 miles long, the pipeline would follow a route that would start from the gas fields in Algeria and cross via Sardinia to Tuscany, close to Piombino.
Neither of these seemed connected to the British Minister for Energy. What was Johnny’s connection to Charles Yelland at Petronello (the name on the business card), apart from the fact that they were both British. Had Johnny simply been given a business card at some trade show or industry dinner?
Walter plugged the business card into his laptop; he didn’t save the contents but merely read them. There were photographs, some technical specifications and the recording of a phone conversation. What he saw and heard shocked him. He slumped back in his chair and tried to think logically what to do. He got up and paced around the room like a tiger in a compound.
An hour later, Walter was at his wits’ end. He phoned Brendan, who was reassuring.
Walter was waiting eagerly for some notification from the prosecutor’s office to give him the time that the policemen from London would arrive later that day. Madame Bettancourt had made it clear that she wanted to lay down certain ground rules with the British police before they spoke to Walter. He had three boxes to tick: two interviews with, firstly, the British and, secondly, the French police; afterwards, he would be free to fly back to Paris; and then, a couple of days later, he’d fly on to Exeter airport and a family reunion.
He was walking to the en suite bathroom when there was a knock on the door.
Excellent, he thought to himself. He walked across and opened it. “Oh … Hello, Brendan. I thought …”
There was the quietest of noises, which came from the raised gun. Walter never heard it. Instead, he fell backwards onto the corner of his bed, bounced off awkwardly and ended up sprawled on the carpet with his right arm appearing to reach for the napkin on the tray of finished food.
Brendan entered the room. He searched the top of the desk and Walter’s open briefcase. He picked up his laptop and the memory card, putting them into his shoulder bag, then he walked past the prone figure to the door. With a quick final look, he left the room and disappeared down the corridor.
A few minutes later, Walter’s mobile phone rang. It vibrated in his inside pocket, but who knows if it was enough to stimulate his un-beating heart back to life?
On the other end of the call was Mike Kingdom, who had decided to ring the number Charles Yelland had given her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Madame Bettancourt had cut short the visit to her daughter to deliver the large, fluffy rabbit to her newborn granddaughter, Noémie. A phone call had rather taken the edge of what should have been a happy occasion.
It was early evening, and Madame Bettancourt was now standing in the corridor of the auberge, wearing a stylish, black coat that only went so far in protecting her against the wind. With her were a selection of French and British police, who had been expecting to interview Walter Flushing not to watch his body being carried out on a gurney to an awaiting ambulance on its way to the hospital.
Both the French and British police were trying to contact Brendan Dowell from the British Embassy, who had been at the auberge earlier that afternoon, making the arrangements to transport Johnny Musselwhite’s belongings and car back to Paris. It might be that he had spoken to Walter and may have been the last person to see him alive. Brendan was probably travelling back to Paris and incommunicado.
Madame Bettancourt had made it quite clear to the police that, in her opinion, Walter did not have diplomatic immunity and so his phone, laptop and anything else could be examined.
Discussions were centring on why a country like Russia would use a sophisticated poison and a hit squad to kill an important British minister, then return a day later to shoot his junior assistant. What did the assistant know or have in his possession? The other unlikely theory was that Walter had killed the minister and had to be killed to cover up the tracks.
The prosecutor had quite liked Walter – he seemed like an ‘innocent abroad’ as Mark Twain might have said. She saw him as a hapless pawn in a much larger and darker conspiracy. Madame Bettancourt could not decide whether she thought he had seen something and needed elimination or had something from the minister that the killers had expected to find in his room. The gunman had taken Walter’s laptop but not his phone; hopefully, this would reveal something.
In Paris, what had begun as a relatively low-priority matter (i.e., helping a British minister to meet his French counterpart in Alsace) had escalated to the top of the British ambassador’s pile. This proved the golden rule in the FCO: you could forget what was top of the pile on first reading in the morning, as it would be overtaken by the day’s events. He had just finished speaking to London where Dennis was about to update the PM.
“What? You’re joking?” Victor was standing in Number Ten, looking like a slightly overfed penguin. He was about to leave for a formal dinner at the Guild Hall, celebrating the centenary of some chartered body of which he had never heard. Was it chemical engineers or estate management? Who had agreed to this? And why wasn’t the Cabinet Office Minister or, his boss, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster attending this dinner? Weren’t they in charge of chartered bodies? He was beginning to feel that his relaxed style was coming back to bite him.
“Unfortunately, not. This Walter Flushing has been shot – in his hotel room. He’s in a critical condition in intensive care,” Dennis said.
“Why?” The PM was playing with his bow tie, an action that invariably leaves it looking worse than when one first tied it.
“Nobody has a clue. Interpol and our police never got to interview him about the Minister of Energy’s death. They’re with the French authorities now.”
“Was it to stop him speaking to them? If so, why?” Victor looked pained. “I thought Johnny was the victim of some sophisticated poisoning by the Russians?”
“MI6 are convinced it’s the Russians – no one else would use that poison – but we don’t have any proof yet. As to why they’d return to shoot a junior FCO man, we have absolutely no idea at the moment. He was really only a glorified lackey.”
“Perhaps he saw them in the act of murdering Johnny?”
Someone indicated that Victor should be leaving for the dinner.
“Keep me updated,” he requested, “I’m getting a funny feeling about this.” With that, he turned and headed for the door.
Mike Kingdom was slouched in her tatty armchair with her feet on an upturned wooden wine box, which served as a coffee table. She was frustrated that Walter Flushing hadn’t answered his phone, but she was glad that she had tried. When she had joined the CIA in the Seattle office, a director had told her to forget the clever and complicated theories until you have dismissed the patently obvious. She had decided to concentrate on Walter. Most things in her line of work were variants of the terminally mundane – but Walter intrigued her. Having run a quick check on him, she had established that he was on a short-term contract with the FCO and was currently based at the British Embassy in Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris. Why would he phone Charles to tell him that his life was under threat? It was obviously not in an official capacity.
She wanted to establish how and when Walter’s life had intersected with Charles’s; she didn’t trust that she had been told everything by Charles. Once bitten, as they say, apply the ointment. Mike had checked Walter’s social media accounts and came up with nothing earth-shattering. Mostly, she had found photographs of gig racing on the River Tamar and the sea around Cornwall. She had stared at various shots of a tall youth in surfer shorts and with a thatch of curly hair. The spy in her thought there was something missing: the mistake. Where was the mistake? Where was the out-of-focus drunken selfie or the boring photograph of a greasy breakfast? His accounts looked like a constructed backstory – or, perhaps, she was gradually becoming more cynical and more suspicious. This was a risk in her business.
She jumped up and sat at her computer; there was something about the way her upturned fingers slid across the keyboard that was reminiscent of a virtuoso piano player. It was the sound of her nails clicking along the plastic keys. She didn’t do this for effect, which was for the best, as there was nobody watching (if you discount the three polystyrene sisters). An idea jumped up out of nowhere. She remembered that she still had full access to Charles Yelland’s computers and company intranet from her previous job for him, so she decided to pay a virtual visit. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t changed his password from his daughter’s name – “Angelica1” (the 1 was his idea of internet security).
She tapped in “Walter Flushing”, and only one match appeared.
It was a link to Walter’s report The Current Political Tensions in the Maghreb, which he had written in Algeria. Now, why would Charles read that? she mused. Petronello is an oil exploration and production company that’s not involved in gas or Algeria. Perhaps his world has changed? She was beginning to join up dots that were, in all probability, just specks of dirt on life’s mucky screen.
If you’ve ever wondered what people in the secret-squirrel community have in common, then there’s only one answer: inquisitiveness and, probably, a distrust of coincidence. Now she had access to the Petronello computer system, she couldn’t stop herself from searching for, well, whatever came into her head. She started with “Algeria” and came up with a mix of items about a visit Charles had made to Algiers late in 2021 as part of some UK trade delegation. She noted this coincided with Walter’s time there producing his report. She tapped in “Johnny” and “Musselwhite”, but she only got very generic newspaper articles and irrelevant references. Then, on a completely random impulse, she tapped in “Randy” and regretted quickly as she ended up with several hundred hits, most of which were in his recycle bin with the remainder in his spam folder. Some of the images appeared to be upside down, but then again, perhaps not. This made her move on, and after a few seconds thinking about Randy, her focus transferred to the forest canopy outside her big window.
