“Have you organised any protection yet?” she continued.
“What?”
“Bodyguards. Have you arranged any yet?” She sounded like his mum asking if he had ordered his grandmother flowers for her birthday.
“No, not yet.”
“You are taking this seriously, Charles, aren’t you?”
“I think I’ll go to Spain,” he suddenly blurted out, not having given it any serious consideration.
“Are you safer there?”
“Probably. I won’t tell anybody except Tony and Jo … and you.”
“May I come too?” Mike equally made an on-the-spot decision. She hoped she could kill two birds with one stone: specifically, to watch Charles at close range and visit Randy’s flat in Málaga.
“If you want. Can you be at Northolt airfield at 10.00am tomorrow? I’ll ring the crew.”
“Yes, I’ll be there.”
She finished the call and it dawned on her that, despite all her protestations to Leonard, she was back doing fieldwork.
Patrick Redwood was the senior British police officer in Colmar looking into Johnny’s murder and Walter’s attempted murder. He had spent a few hours with Prosecutor Bettancourt and the brigade criminelle in a sequestered office in the main police building. His head was full of the investigation, and this had been stretched further by the language issues. Needing fresh air, he was now sitting on a bench in a tree-lined avenue, eating a baguette. The weather was warm, and the sun was filtering through the leaves. Something, however, had been bothering him all morning.
He was about to call Commander Ben Cox, his ultimate boss, who had attended the COBRA meeting with the PM. Patrick waited to make the call until after he’d chewed and swallowed. Unfortunately, the sliced cured ham in the sandwich was a bit stringy, and he regretted his choice. He breathed in. For a few seconds, he savoured his life and the fact that he was being paid to sit on a bench in the Alsace while his colleagues were trying to nail some Albanian drug dealers in the arse end of East London.
Commander Ben Cox, who had worked with Patrick for a long time, was waiting for a progress update. Ben’s office was about ten stories up in an office block in Central London, with views across the urban fabric that never quite reached the countryside. He, too, was a little frustrated. This wasn’t any annoyance with Patrick and his colleagues but rather as a result of not being in control or, at least, having to devolve the investigation to another jurisdiction. He knew how a murder (in fact, a murder and an attempted murder) would be dealt with in London, but this was different. He liked the idea that the French had very quickly appointed a special team to take this over once they had realised that it was a high-profile international character. Next, a special prosecutor had been appointed to drive things forwards; this matched or bettered the British system. Then it seemed to fall apart.
“Patrick, where are you?”
“I’m sitting on a bench in a quiet street – called Rue Camille Schlumberger – having a sandwich,” he replied, subtly communicating the level of conversation they might safely have.
“The boss is asking questions.” The commander was equally subtly communicating that the PM was personally very interested.
“Well, I would suggest that things are going swimmingly on the surface.”
“And below the water?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I would sure like to swim back to the shore. I’m beginning to think things aren’t quite what they seem.”
“I’m intrigued.”
“It’s all going too well.” He paused. “You and I know how these things usually progress … and we aren’t adding a British minister dying on foreign soil into the mix.”
“So, what’s bothering you, Patrick?”
“Let’s start with the prosecutor, Madame Bettancourt. She’s superficially charming and efficient, but her priority seems to be on PR. She says all the right things in TV interviews, but then applies no pressure on what I’ll loosely call her ‘team’ … and they’re all muppets. They’ve ‘lost’ the hotel’s CCTV footage covering the period when the poisoners were in the hotel, which is the only real way that we’re going to identify the killers. If you wanted to screw up the investigation, I cannot think of a better way to do it.” As if to give some sort of physical demonstration, he screwed up the paper bag in which his lunch had been and put it in his jacket pocket.
“Had anyone looked at the footage before it got conveniently lost?”
“Yes, apparently, and whichever officer watched it can give a description of two men whom he describes as ‘typically Slavic’. But it gets worse. They’re now saying that the special lab in Lyons may have misidentified the poison. It may not be some special Russian concoction but something more run-of-the-mill.”
“It sounds as though, right at the beginning, they jumped to the conclusion that the Russians were to blame and have tried to shoehorn any evidence into their theory … or they’ve been nobbled.”
“I agree. Blaming a foreign power is terribly convenient. They clearly don’t want it to turn out to be a French plot. I’ve spoken to the hotel night manager, and he can’t remember two Russian-looking men and, by the way, is certain that they weren’t staying at the hotel.”
“What about the shooting of Walter Flushing?”
“This is what’s making me really suspicious. The night manager told me that he saw a plastic business card next to the cocaine on the bedside cabinet when he went into Johnny Musselwhite’s room with Walter Flushing. He told the local police about it because he says it wasn’t there when he went back into the room with the doctor a bit later. I asked the prosecutor and the brigade criminelle chief, and they deny any knowledge and say they’ve never found a business card in Johnny’s or Walter’s rooms or on their bodies.”
“That’s bizarre. I presume the night manager didn’t see the name on the card?”
“No, no such luck, but you see that it must have been Walter who took it or hid it, as he was the only person in the room until the manager and doctor turned up.”
“Why take it? Of all things, why take that?”
“And where is it now? The French say they didn’t find it in Walter’s room or on his body … and they found nothing on his phone to frighten the horses.”
“Are you thinking that this is why Walter was shot? To get this card?”
“Well, if not, why come back at great risk to shoot a very junior assistant? It can’t be because he saw and could identify Johnny’s killers, since Walter would have already told the manager, doctor or police when they interviewed him several times. Whoever is behind this failed to get what they wanted when they killed Johnny. They presumably thought it was on his laptop, on his phone or in his wallet. I don’t think the poisoners were looking for a business card. I think they were told to bring back his laptop, phone and wallet.”
“So how did whoever is behind this know that the card existed and Walter might have it?”
“I don’t know, but this is why I’m suspicious and not entirely buying this Russian-hit-squad scenario. I specifically asked the manager if he had told anyone about the card apart from the police and me. He said no one.”
