With that, Straker had two thoughts at once.
What about Charlotte Grant?
Now that his investigation involved more names, could he test her connection with any of them? He suddenly thought of her phone, and the names he had seen on it in Monte-Carlo.
Turning it on, Straker looked into her directory. Spookily enough, Jeremy Barnett and Michael Lyons were there.
Both of them.
In the absence of any firmer leads, he wanted to examine everything her phone contained — including the call, text, and email logs. Maybe that data could now help him join up some of these dots. But there was a lot of it.
Extracting it all would clearly take some time.
Calling Backhouse’s secretary, he arranged for Charlotte’s phone to be couriered down to Cavendish Square in London. Then, ringing Karen in his office, he explained what was coming and what he needed the Quartech technicians to do when it arrived.
‘Okay, Matt. I was about to ring you anyway. I’ve got some stuff for you on Trifecta. Do you want me to email it through?’
Five minutes later Straker was standing over the printer in Backhouse’s office. ‘Okay, Andy,’ he said, as he lifted the sheets off the machine. ‘What can you tell me about this list of Trifecta directors?’ and read them out.
Backhouse replied: ‘A former president of the FIA, a former chief executive of the BRDC and a former World Champion.’
‘Not a group you’d expect to play fast and loose with the rules, then?’ suggested Straker.
‘Wouldn’t have thought so, would you?’
‘How do they square with Lyons’s clandestine jamming, then?’
Backhouse shook his head.
‘So Lyons must have been doing this as a sideline — a bit of moonlighting — mustn’t he?’
Backhouse shrugged in part-support of the logic.
There was a moment of silence between them. Straker leafed through some of the other pages. ‘There’s a list of Trifecta investors here — and, hang on, that’s interesting: There’s been some recent corporate activity. Back in March, someone acquired fifty-one per cent of the company. Someone called Avel Obrenovich?’
Backhouse’s face changed in an instant. ‘I don’t believe it?’
‘What?’
‘That’s extraordinary.’
‘Why?’
‘He only happens to be Massarella’s principal sponsor.’
TWENTY-ONE
Straker buzzed with this new intelligence, his mind swirling. What did it mean? Frustratingly, he was called away from his meditations before he could plan his next step.
Minutes after twelve noon, having had a pretty clear overnight run, the convoy of Ptarmigan lorries arrived back at the Shenington factory from Monte-Carlo. Backhouse led Straker down to the loading bay to see them arrive. Pulling in through the large hangar-like doors, their air brakes were applied and the engines cut. With only hours before the lorries would be away again, this time for Belgium, the team went to work immediately, unloading and processing all their kit and equipment. Most of the attention — including Backhouse’s and Straker’s — was paid to the lorry carrying the wreckage of Helli Cunzer’s car. Fork-lift trucks, hand-pushed trolleys, and about twenty men converged round the tailgate as the segments, fragments and remains of the car were extracted and placed on the painted concrete floor of the bay.
‘We’ll be laying all the bits out on the floor in here,’ Backhouse explained, ‘and we’ll subject every remnant to scrutiny and testing to try and determine the cause of the crash.’
Straker soon went back to his temporary office.
He was called by Backhouse ten minutes later. ‘I’ve got Remy’s helmet,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come and see us research the jamming device?’
They met up again as Backhouse was carrying the helmet into the electronics lab. He placed it on one of the work benches. Backhouse peered in through the visor and then ran his finger into the folds in the foam lining where the device had been put back.
His expression changed dramatically as he moved his fingers round the inside of the lining. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘What?’ asked Straker.
‘It’s not there.’
‘It’s not there?’
‘No.’
Carefully turning the helmet over, Backhouse unpopped some of the fastenings, pulled the foam inner out of the casing and laid it on the white workbench. Gently easing the foam panels apart, he opened up the groove where the jammer had been. ‘It’s definitely not here,’ he repeated and looked up into the other’s face. ‘It’s gone.’
Straker looked deeply concerned. ‘I want the area around it on the lorry dismantled and checked. Immediately.’
Straker called Quartano an hour later from his temporary office.
‘What do you mean it’s gone?’ asked the tycoon. ‘You sure it hasn’t just fallen out? Somewhere in the truck, or fallen out into its carrying case?’
‘No, sir. I’m afraid not. We’ve stripped the compartment down completely.’
‘Someone’s taken it out for safe keeping?’
‘No, sir. We’ve asked everyone if they’ve been near the helmet — not why, of course — and we’ve even made contact with absent members of staff who are away on a break for a few days.’
‘Matt,’ said Quartano with unexpected gravity. ‘Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?’
‘As much as I can be.’
‘Christ, you know what this means, of course,’ said Quartano solemnly.
‘It’s been removed — to cover the saboteur’s tracks. But worse, it means that even if Charlotte put it there, she clearly wasn’t the person who took it out. Someone else did. And it must’ve been one of the team. It means we’ve got a serious problem. Our saboteurs do still have a collaborator … right here … on the inside.’
PART TWO
EAU ROUGE
TWENTY-TWO
Straker returned home to Fulham early that evening, craving the comfort of familiar surroundings. But opening the door of his — their — empty flat, the hollowness hit him hard. Worse, among the backlog of post strewn across the mat, he saw an envelope franked with the name of his wife’s solicitors. A pulse hissed through his ears. The grim reality of what that letter meant was all too obvious.
Dropping his bags inside the door, Straker placed the letter on the hall table, unable to bring himself to open it.
After running a bath, and pouring a hefty tumbler of whisky, he finally summoned himself.
Having read it, he sighed. And breathed deeply. He and Jo were, mercifully, not at war. They would clearly reach an agreement and looked like they would settle as fast as the process allowed. He had a flat. She had a flat. There were no children. But it was the fact of it that finally got to him. Six years, altogether, many of which had been happy and close.
Straker found himself swallowing hard.
His rendition and enhanced interrogation by the Americans, and resultant struggles to reconcile those ethics with everything he had believed in for twenty years, really did for them — well him, at any rate.
He hoped, now, that he was over the worst of his turbulent reaction to those experiences. The flashbacks had been becoming much less frequent. His recovery had been happening gradually, but — tragically — not fast enough to reassure his wife that his psyche was on the mend.
Straker spent his one day of leave moping around the flat. His curtains remained closed for the entire time. He sat slumped in a chair. His only distractions were a bottle of whisky and the track which best captured his mood — Miles Davis’s ‘Blue in Green’ — which he played semi-hypnotically in a continuous loop on his B&O CD player. He didn’t remember eating. He never felt hungry. Waking from another fitful sleep in the middle of the following night, he set out on a punishing run through the deserted streets of west London, trying to purge himself.