‘Ha ha.’
‘So, Mr Glatz; Chris.’
‘Well, Mr Nott-’
‘Call me Ken, please.’
‘Right. Ken. Well, I’ll come straight to the point. Oh; well, first, I’d better say, this is all off the record, right?’
‘I’m not a journalist, Mr Glatz, but yes, all right.’
‘Right. Good. Now then. You’ll remember you witnessed a road traffic accident a few months back.’
‘Mm-hmm. Guy in a blue Beemer Compact, talking on his mobile, came out-’
‘That’s the one, that’s the one.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘See,’ he said, ‘Mark – the gentleman involved, Mr Southorne – is a, an occasional business partner of mine.’
‘I see.’
‘You haven’t heard of him?’
‘No, should I have?’
Glatz teeter-tottered one hand. ‘He’s fairly well known in the City. One of these flamboyant types, you know?’
Well, no, I thought, but I could imagine. He hadn’t looked very fucking flamboyant standing holding his mobile in the rain looking down at a still stunned biker lying in the gutter, but maybe that had just been shock.
‘Thing is, you see,’ Glatz said, looking pained. ‘He’s sitting on ten points. On his licence.’
I nodded. ‘The poor soul.’
‘Twelve, and he’s banned. Sure you know how it is.’
‘Of course.’
‘And, well, the thing is, Mark really needs his car. He loves his car; loves his cars. But he does a lot of driving, which he enjoys, and-’
I’d held up one hand. ‘Hold on, Chris. That was a bog-standard two-year-old Compact he was driving. If he loves cars so much-’
‘Yeah, that was just a courtesy car. His M5 was being serviced. ’
‘Ah-hah,’ I said. Ah-hah, indeed. Served me right, I thought. There I’d gone, making assumptions about the man just because he’d been driving the sort of car people bought because they wanted to say they’d got a BMW rather than because of what it actually did. In fact he had an M5. That was different. I’d test driven an M5 about a year ago; a sleek brute with four hundred horse-power. A brilliant motor, but wasted in London.
‘Look, ah, Ken,’ Glatz said, smiling awkwardly at me. ‘Frankly, I think this has been mishandled. I think that the whole way this has been approached was pretty fucking stupid.’ Another stilted smile. ‘Excuse my vernacular.’
‘Well, obviously I am shocked, but all right.’
He smiled. ‘I’m going to level with you, Ken. Thing is, you see, we’d like you to retract your witness statement, especially the bit about Mark using the mobile at the time of the accident. ’
‘Oh?’ I said. I sipped my coffee. Actually I hated this new coffee culture; people wandering around with these pint-sized cartons full of a mild, warm, watery drug it takes about twenty words and five questions just to fucking order, turning some streets in London into nothing but a procession of Starbuck’s, Aromas, Coffee Republics, Costas and… but enough. Mr Glatz was making his point. ‘We’ll get a good brief, we’ll suggest that the biker guy was going too fast, and with a bit of luck and a following wind, like they say, we’ll get Mark off. But we do need you to retract that statement, you see, Ken, because that’s the really damning bit. Without that there we might be able to swing it; with it the prosecution can walk all over us.’
I nodded. ‘Right,’ I said. A very strange, disturbing but oddly relieving idea had occurred to me. It seemed grotesquely unlikely, but then when had that ever proved a problem for reality when it was determined to serve up a squid in your custard? ‘This occasional business relationship you have with this guy Mark…’
‘Yes, Ken?’
‘In terms of above-boardness, whereabouts would we be talking here?’
Chris Glatz chuckled. ‘You’re catching on here, Ken. Frankly, pretty well below the waterline.’
‘Right, and when you say,’ I started slowly, ‘that this has been mishandled, what exactly are you referring too?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well. When – and I hasten to add here, Ken, that I was not personally involved at this point,’ he said, holding up one hand. ‘When it was decided that my colleagues might be able to help Mark with this problem, a – how’s best to put this? – a rather extreme plan was formulated to, well, to attempt to impress upon you the fact we were serious in our commitment to aid our friend and colleague.’
We’d been strolling round the big circular path in front of the museum. Now I stepped round and stopped in front of him and said, ‘Is this about my trip to the East End in a certain taxi, to fucking Haggersley Street?’ I almost shouted the last bit.
My new pal Chris looked around and patted the air with one hand. ‘Now, I can see why you might be upset about that, Ken, but-’
‘You fuckers were trying to drug me and kidnap me because of a fucking traffic violation?’ Again, I had trouble keeping my voice modulated for maximum mellifluousness.
Glatz did the air-patting thing again. He sighed and put a hand to one side of his face, then nodded forward and we set off again, walking slowly round the big circle. ‘Ken, I’m not going to lie to you,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘That was an overreaction. But,’ he said, holding up one hand, before I could respond to this, ‘the need was felt to impress on you that we are serious people, and that we have the necessary resources, and the will, to follow through with any – what’s the best way to put this? – incentivisation framework we might wish to implement.’
‘You can back up threats because you’re crims.’
Chris actually laughed quite loudly at this. ‘Well, basically, yes, if we’re being frank with each other.’
‘I see. And the threatening phone call? And the tyres on my Land Rover? And the headlights?’
He nodded. ‘All a bit messy, a bit unrequired, frankly, Ken. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m approaching you as one reasonable man to another.’
I gave a small laugh. ‘You obviously don’t listen to my show.’
He smiled, sipped some more coffee. ‘Ken, we’d like to compensate you for the damage and distress you’ve suffered.’
‘I see. You mean bribe me.’
‘Frankly, yes.’
‘How much?’
‘Two grand. And we’ll settle the bill with the garage.’
‘And what if I say no?’
He looked round at me. ‘Frankly?’
‘Frankly.’
‘Then I go back to Mark and say that we’ve done our best; gone out on a limb for him, even, and it hasn’t worked. We’ve tried money and that hasn’t worked either, and unless he wants to raise the offer to something you’d accept-’
‘I’m not poor, or greedy enough, Chris. And I am easily proud enough not to.’ I smiled.
‘Fair enough,’ he said, dumping his coffee in a bin. I’d have followed his example except I’d remained just worried enough to be keeping the still-just-about-scaldingly-hot coffee to use as a weapon if things suddenly turned nasty again. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I’d tell Mark that maybe he should just take his punishment like a man and take more care driving in future, and get a chauffeur for however long his ban lasts. And unless he does something very stupid, which I shall try to persuade him not to do, that’ll be the end of the matter.’
‘Really?’ I looked into the man’s eyes. I formed the distinct impression that actually Mr Glatz wouldn’t be at all averse to his business associate having to swallow his pride and accept his punishment.
He shrugged. ‘You have to have a sense of proportion about these things, Ken,’ he said reasonably, ‘otherwise people end up getting hurt. Which is messy. And messy, generally, is not good for business.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘If I say I’m not going to retract my witness statement, that’ll be that.’
‘It should be.’
‘I know it should be, but will it?’
‘Ken,’ Glatz sighed heavily. ‘I am not here to threaten you. I am here to make you an offer, which I’ve done. You seem to be rejecting it. That’s the end of the matter as far as I’m concerned and as far as my colleagues are concerned, in so far as you’re concerned… if you see what I mean.’