“Were you special forces?” she asked him.
“More like special delivery. I was a postman.”
She smiled. “Why Spain?”
“My son and his mother live out here. I was fed up with only seeing him twice a year, so I decided to move out permanently. Personal protection was the easiest job for me. It was either that or working in a bar. And you?”
“Computers and research,” was all she said.
He turned to face her with a quizzical look.
“For the CIA,” she clarified, having made the decision that she liked and trusted him.
“Good. That means you know what’s going on. I was hoping you’d fill me in. I’ve been here about four hours, and I’m not sure what I’m meant to do in the villa. Am I just to protect Mr Yelland when he goes out?”
She was standing with her arms crossed, one hand holding an elbow and the other the cigarette. She looked at him sideways from under her black wig. “I’m partly here to find out, but let me say that he’s not being threatened by amateurs. Are you armed?”
“Yes. I have a special licence.”
“Good.” She looked at him, wondering where his gun was concealed. “Have you looked over the villa?”
“Yes, it has thirty rooms but no panic room, which is a bit odd. There’s a small room with a metal door and a large safe in it, but it isn’t what I’d call secure.”
“That sounds like Charles. He’s more likely to protect his money and business than his family. And for your information, he has a problem with the truth – he seems to be allergic to it.”
“What’s the threat? Kidnap? Or is his life under threat?”
“A business partner was poisoned, and the person who rang Charles to warn him about the threat to his life has been shot at.”
“I think I prefer escorting rich widows shopping in El Corte Inglés.”
“What did Charles say to you?”
“I only met him for five minutes while you were upstairs. He just said I was to wander around the villa and gardens … and go in the car with him if he leaves the place.”
“Unbelievable. I must get back to him. Hopefully, he has finished the call to his brother-in-law.”
It was Sunday morning, and Brendan Dowell was sitting looking out of a cottage window a few miles outside London at the last act of the harvest: the loading onto trailers of the bales of straw for the short trip to the two barns. Although his work colleagues thought he was in Paris, having returned late from Colmar, he would in fact never go back to the embassy again. The cottage was a safe house, but not one belonging to the British secret services.
Six weeks before, he had stayed over a weekend at the Auberge du Pont Neuf in Colmar, where he had befriended the staff and reconnoitred the place. In particular, he had noted the locations of the cameras inside and near the auberge and where the CCTV recording device was hidden in the cupboard at the back of reception. He had chosen the hotel carefully because it was old-fashioned and had three points of access, if you included the kitchen. He had subsequently recommended it to Johnny Musselwhite, with Brendan being Johnny’s liaison while in France for his meeting with Yves Dubuisson, the French Minister of Energy. On Wednesday, 31st August, under instructions from Brendan in Paris, two of his colleagues had unplugged the recorder before getting the final instruction to kill Johnny Musselwhite.
Everything had been planned, right down to the selection of the innocent Walter to accompany Johnny during his overnight stay. It was well known in FCO circles that Johnny would spend the evening in his room on coke, as he always did when he was away from home and his family. While shooting him would have been easier, it was important to send the right message, and only poisoning would do this. It was also critical that Johnny’s laptop and phone were taken as there would be information on them that Brendan’s real employers needed desperately. This was where the plan had started to go wrong.
The key information hadn’t been on either of them.
However, his phone had revealed a WhatsApp message from Charles Yelland earlier in the evening on which Johnny had been killed asking him if he’d had time to check and agree to the structure outlined on the memory card. His killers hadn’t been tasked with finding a memory card, nor had they noticed one. Brendan, as had previously been planned, was in Paris so he would be perceived to be unconnected with events in the Alsace.
On hearing about the card, he knew he had to return to the Alsace. He had immediately set off in his car from his flat in the southern suburbs of Paris. He hadn’t wanted to go through airport security. His trip was easily disguised as a final tidying up of the logistics surrounding Johnny Musselwhite’s belongings. His first port of call on arrival had been a catch-up with the prosecutor. He had sat listening to a litany of barely disguised excuses and downright lies. More than anyone, he had known that the CCTV tapes hadn’t mysteriously been lost after having been handed over to the police – they never existed in the first place. Brendan had relied on all of his acting skills and considerable restraint. He needed to know whether the police had found the business card and asked in a roundabout way, trying not to emphasise his interest. Finally, he had settled on requesting a list of Johnny’s belongings that had been taken from his room. This was, he had been told, not a problem.
A few hours later that afternoon, he had been sitting alone outside a café with a cup of coffee as he read the short inventory. He had really been interested in only one thing on it, and that wasn’t mentioned. Did he trust the French police? He had ordered a piece of patisserie and another coffee. A noisy refuse lorry had reversed up towards him, and the large waste container nearby had been emptied into it. The lorry had driven off in a puff of black smoke that had added nothing to the subtle taste of the pear in his slice of tarte tatin. He had regained his train of thought. The card was either still in his room or had been collected up in Johnny’s belongings and was in storage at the hotel, being of no further interest to the police. As a representative of the British Embassy, it would not be difficult for him to gain access to these. In fact, the French authorities had wanted to know the plans for the transportation of the body, together with the removal of his Mercedes and remaining belongings. If it wasn’t in one of these places, the remaining possibility was that Walter Flushing had taken it.
He had rung Stewart to tell him what he was planning to do. Afterwards, he had informed the brigade criminelle that he was going to the auberge to deal with these administrative and logistical matters. He had begun to feel the pressure from his real masters: people who did not take failure as an option. His task was to find this business card. He had swallowed the last mouthful of tart, put some change on the table and set off.
He had crossed the bridge and had walked alongside the black metal railings separating him from the canal. At the auberge, he had pushed open the old oak door and accustomed himself to the dim light and the smell of polish. He was a consummate actor, and in situations like this, he adopted his ‘person in authority’ aura and had spoken to the young lady behind the reception desk. Before she had responded, the manager had come out from a door behind her. The expression behind his eyes had said, “Please take everything away and let the hotel return to normal.”
Brendan’s first port of call had been Johnny’s Mercedes. The manager had given him the keys that had been returned by the police. There are so many places where something the size of a plastic credit card could have been hidden or dropped in innocence. It had taken him twenty minutes to check everywhere that wasn’t covered by a glued- or bolted-on surface. He hadn’t been optimistic at the start. Johnny had not been alert to the possibility that he might be killed and may not have realised the full potential contained on the card, and therefore may not have thought that it was necessary to hide it.
Next, he had checked the things in the locked store cupboard. Almost everything had been packed into Johnny’s suitcase or briefcase. It didn’t take long to sift through the pieces, being ever wary of hidden places in the linings.
Finally, he had gone into Johnny’s room, which was still officially out of bounds and under the control of the authorities; it had been emptied but not cleaned. Brendan had closed the door behind him and had quietly begun to look everywhere. He had looked on the top of every wardrobe, at the back and bottom of every drawer, in the toilet cistern, and at so many other places. In passing, he had noticed the wastepaper bin was empty. Its contents couldn’t have been thrown out, collected and on the way to the incinerator? No, Johnny had only been there one evening and overnight. He had probably generated no waste.
Brendan had sat on the bed for a couple of minutes to calm himself in preparation for going next door to Walter’s room and the likely result. The gun had been in his coat pocket. It wasn’t the probability that he would have to shoot Walter that had been prominent in his thoughts. Rather, it was that this represented a pivotal moment with no going back. For seven years, he had been a sleeper for the DEGD, the Moroccan Directorate General of Foreign International Studies and Documentation; this was the very active and respected Moroccan intelligence agency that was best known for its infiltration of the EU at the highest level – particularly, it was alleged, on behalf of Qatar. Brendan had spent this time within the British FCO, firstly in Belgium and more recently in Paris.
His phone rang. It was an agitated Walter, asking him about the card.
There was now no debate. Brendan waited a few minutes and then, with a cold heart, he had gone and tapped on Walter’s door. He would have preferred to have found the card earlier in his searches, but this had always been a very long shot. It had always looked likely that Walter had found it and may even have been a willing partner. On opening the door, Walter was shocked to see Brendan, whom he presumed to be in Paris. Brendan had fired at Walter, who had slumped onto the bed and fallen onto the floor. The room had smelt of recently eaten food. He had reached outside to put the do-not-disturb sign on the door handle.
Having put Walter’s laptop and the all-important memory card into his bag, he had taken a minute to check the bedroom and en suite bathroom for anything relevant, but he’d found nothing.
Once back at reception, he had thanked the girl at the desk, said that he would be back in the morning and walked straight out to his car. Forty-five minutes later, he had been driving into Basel airport. Two hours later than that, he had flown to London on a false passport. He had arrived at the safe house by midnight that Saturday night.
The next morning, Brendan had been staring at the harvest when he was snapped out of his reverie by an alarm. He walked over to his laptop to see live images of the entrance to the Yelland estate. His colleagues, who were based in the safe house, had been monitoring Charles’s phone traffic and were aware that Maria and Angelica would probably be arriving home about now.
