She had eaten two tapas and swigged one glass of white wine, but her appetite was gone.
“Charles,” she continued, “you remember what happened last time? You do trust me, right? Tell me the f—” – she restrained herself – “truth, the whole truth and the commercially sensitive, personally embarrassing truth.” She stood up and took the wine bottle out of the ice bucket and poured herself another glass. She looked up at Charles and poured him one too. Initially, he made no comment and didn’t press the button on the underside of the table that he used to summon Paco.
“I’m guessing that the memory card had commercially sensitive information on it. Everyone knows Johnny was a cokehead. That wasn’t any problem. The fact that he was using it to cut coke before he was murdered is … unfortunate,” he said.
“Unfortunate? Do you ever think ahead? I don’t give a shit that he was cutting coke with it. What bothers me is that Walter helpfully took it, and this meant that the killers had to come back” –she paused – “because they weren’t after Johnny or the unfortunate Walter. You understand that the killers were after this memory stick and, in case I need to spell it out, the contents?”
She took another gulp of wine and spelt it out very firmly: “What was on that memory stick?”
Charles matched her and more, taking two big mouthfuls of wine. “I don’t know. Really, I don’t know, but it probably had details about the pipeline. Sensitive details. Does it matter? Johnny and this Walter are dead.”
Mike stopped any movement. “Who told you that Walter Flushing is dead?”
“Inspector Maslen.”
“Inspector Maslen is probably one of the killers. He obviously doesn’t know that Walter is in intensive care. It might be better if we keep it that way.”
She changed tack: “How much were you paying Johnny Musselwhite?”
Charles stopped. “I thought I was paying him enough to be a bit more careful.”
She finished the glass.
At Northolt, near London, it was early afternoon and starting to rain. The rented white Gulfstream 700 with orange and green stripes was taxiing to the private terminal while a black Range Rover pulled up on the tarmac at the front of the building. The steps were lowered, and an American flight attendant peered out at an England in gentle autumn sunlight.
A few minutes later, Maria Yelland and her daughter, Angelica, were on their way through the necessary but perfunctory formalities at passport control before they were whisked off to their estate twenty-seven minutes away in Buckinghamshire. England looked green but somehow more mellow than the lush, tropical greens of Cuernavaca in Mexico where they had been staying at one of Maria’s family haciendas.
After a journey along fast roads, the Range Rover slowed down in preparation for turning into the estate between the stone gatehouse and some large pillars. The gates opened, and the Range Rover vibrated across the first of several cattlegrids before heading up the long drive shaded by an avenue of lime trees. Beyond the deer fencing on one side, they could see the familiar sight of Charles’s Highland cattle herd, which barely paid any attention to their arrival. These same cows hadn’t even raised their huge horns earlier that day when a white van had stopped opposite the entrance gate and discharged two highway engineers in hi-vis jackets, one of whom proceeded to push a measuring wheel along the edge of the road. The other man appeared to look for, and find, a small manhole, which he sprayed with blue aerosol paint. His task of identifying it for future maintenance was over in a matter of minutes.
The first man, now fifty yards away from the gatehouse, tied a mini-surveillance camera surreptitiously to the black metal deer fencing and walked nonchalantly back to his van. They need not have worried as there was nobody in the gatehouse and no one was watching the entrance on the estate’s own CCTV camera at that moment. However, there was someone watching now. Brendan Dowell was sitting fifteen miles away, checking the newly installed camera and confirming to his installation team in their van that all was OK. He wouldn’t have to wait long until the camera was automatically triggered by Maria and Angelica returning early from their Mexican trip.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lunch in Spain had come to an abrupt halt when Charles had to take an urgent call from Tony (his brother-in-law and finance director of Petronello) about test results from a drilling rig off Mozambique. Mike was in desperate need of a cigarette and was pleased to have an excuse to clear her head and digest what she had just heard. She didn’t know where she could smoke, and so she made her way out into the sunshine and around the side of the west wing of the villa. She found herself outside the kitchen, from which she could hear the sounds of staff chopping and preparing food against a background buzz from the extractor fans. She leant against the end wall and lit up. The first deep drag into her lungs and the stunning view across the back lawns lifted her spirits.
“That’ll kill you,” came a voice from behind her.
She spun around.
“You should try vaping,” the voice continued.
A chunky man with his arms covered in tattoos was leaning on a yellow metal bin as if it were the bar in his local pub. He was puffing on an e-cigarette whose smell was not that distinct from the rotting vegetables and salad waste in the bin. He stood up to his full height, revealing a neck and forearms that were seriously testing the fabric of his white tee shirt.
“I’m Wazz,” he said, using the trainer on his right foot to tap out a rhythm on the brake release at the bottom of the mobile bin.
“Does that mean piss or wank? I can never remember.”
“It means snake in Polish, and you must be Mike?” he said, not missing a beat. He spoke with the merest trace of a central European accent, as filtered through a broken nose.
“Only to my friends.”
Wazz, or Waldemar Wasielewski, stared back at her, and his face gradually relaxed into a smile. He stepped to the side but did not approach Mike or offer a handshake. “Paco said you would be here soon.”
“Charles told me that he had organised protection. I didn’t realise he meant protecting the bins.”
Wazz continued to evaluate her. “Do you have a problem?” he said, but the smile never left his eyes.
“Lots, but I was hoping they’d cancel each other out.”
“How did you break your nose?” he asked as he walked towards her.
They ended up next to each other, both facing the terraced back lawns.
“Someone didn’t like me looking through a back gate. You?”
“Boxing as a teenager.”
The ice was beginning to thaw between them.
“You sound British,” she said.
“I am British. My parents are Polish. You sound American.”
“I am American, but I’ve lived in the UK for a while. My parents are Czech.”
Three small parrots flew across and landed in a tall, thin Washingtonia palm to continue their squabbling. A brown leaf frond spiralled to the ground. Wazz watched it fall onto the manicured lawn, contemplating it in silence.
