Xujiabang Copper and Gold now owned a forty-one per cent stake in Kernon Whitmire.
It wasn’t even hard to find. It was in the second page of Google results. Before he sent the email to Flory, Fourpetal had only bothered to look at the first page. For the first time in his life, Fourpetal wished he actually read The Economist instead of just telling people he did.
So that was why nobody had come to the room. Flory must have decided that he had more to gain by warning his friends in China that some opportunist was proposing to wreck their bond deal with Lacebark than he did by making a tawdry deal with that opportunist. In fact, he must have thought Fourpetal was a total imbecile for choosing Kernon Whitmire instead of some other corporate rival who had no connection with Xujiabang. Fourpetal was still trying to think through the implications of all this when he dozed off in his clothes.
The next day, on the train back from Heathrow, he called Lacebark’s headquarters in North Carolina and asked to speak to Jim Pankhead.
‘Oh — I’m afraid Mr Pankhead sadly passed away last week,’ said the girl on the switchboard.
‘How?’
‘They told us he had a very bad allergic reaction to a painkiller he was taking.’
At that moment Fourpetal felt a gauze of fear drape itself across the back of his neck, but he immediately dismissed the feeling as preposterous. ‘I see. Thank you.’
The new-build block of flats in Bermondsey where Fourpetal lived had walls and floors that were about as dense as filo pastry, and at least twice a week he would be kept awake by his downstairs neighbour having parties. But she was young and fetching and single, so every time she stopped him to apologise about the previous night in the effusive and passionate tones of someone who has absolutely no intention of curtailing whatever it is they are apologising for, he just waved it off. That day, wheeling his suitcase into the entry hall downstairs, he saw her coming out of the lift.
‘Hi, Mark! Will you tell your friend we’re so, so sorry about last night?’ she said. ‘I really hope we weren’t too loud.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Fourpetal.
‘We had a few people over and it got a bit out of hand for a Tuesday.’
‘But what do you mean, “my friend”?’
‘You had a friend staying, right? We could hear someone walking around up there. We knew you were away for a few days so at first we almost thought it might have been a burglar but then they were still there this morning.’
Fourpetal picked up his suitcase and ran.
Outside, the sky was a triple-distilled blue with a few squiggles of cloud like someone testing a ballpoint pen. He only got as far as the building site at the end of the road before his lungs started spitting hot bacon grease, and as he stumbled panting to a halt he tried to put together what must have happened. Donald Flory had told someone at Xujiabang. Someone at Xujiabang had told someone at Lacebark. And someone at Lacebark had started an investigation. Fourpetal had been careful not to give Flory his name or even his nationality — Flory knew only his hotel booking. But if Flory had passed the hotel booking to Lacebark, then of course they could identify Fourpetal, because it was a Lacebark secretary who had booked the room. After that, they would have read through all of his emails, even the ones he’d tried to delete, and they would have found the email that started all this.
They’d murdered Pankhead, and now they were going to murder him too.
Behind him, he heard the crunch of a tyre flattening a discarded soft-drink can. He turned to see a white builder’s van pulling up beside him, and as in a dream he knew at once there was something uncanny here but he couldn’t identify exactly what; a minute ago he’d seen this van, or another like it, parked across the road from his flat, but it wasn’t just that. The side door of the van slid open, and inside were two men dressed all in black, one holding what looked like a plastic toy gun — some sort of Taser? Fourpetal dropped his suitcase and broke into a sprint, but as he rounded the corner on to Crimscott Street the van accelerated too, ready to trap him effortlessly.
Then the van’s tyres squealed, there was a second, louder crunch, and a black man with a satchel strapped across his back was twirling through the air in front of the van like something disgorged intact from empty space.
4.39 p.m.
‘I met that guy!’ says Raf. ‘Morris.’
They’ve now given up treating Fourpetal as a prisoner, although Isaac did tell Hiromi to use her ‘ninja skills’ again if he tried to steal anything else; Raf had worried that might offend her until she replied with a sardonic karate chop.
‘So you got away?’ says Isaac.
‘Well, I don’t know if the accident with the bike was enough to make the Lacebark men turn tail,’ says Fourpetal, ‘or whether it just cost them the initiative, but I kept running, and I didn’t look behind me for a long time, and when I finally did, I couldn’t see the van. I couldn’t go back to my flat, of course, and I couldn’t go back for my suitcase either, but I had my passport in my pocket, so I went to a bank and took out two and a half grand. That’s the most they’d let me have in cash; I haven’t used any of my accounts since. Then I checked into a fleapit under a false name. I’ve been hiding out for nearly a fortnight.’
‘Why don’t you leave London?’ says Isaac.
‘I can’t just fly the coop. Lacebark will eventually catch me. I have to buy myself out of all this for good. When all I had was that email, and no real proof of anything, no details, no documents, no photographs, the best I could really expect to get from Kernon Whitmire was a new job and a bundle of shares, yes? That was a plausible exchange if I could get them to trust me. But now that Lacebark are after me, that’s not enough. I need to find a company that will give me a new name and maybe a new face, otherwise I’ll be as dead as Pankhead by the autumn. I don’t have the resources to disappear on my own. And no one is going to go to those lengths to protect me just for an email they can’t even verify. I need a lot more to bargain with. I need something huge.’
‘So what’s “something huge”?’ says Raf.
‘I’m not sure yet. I’ve been looking into it for three weeks and I haven’t made spectacular progress. Which is to be expected. May I remind you both that I work in PR? All I’ve found out so far is that, as I told you, a lot of Burmese men have been disappearing in south London. We know from the email that this chap Bezant, who runs Lacebark corporate security, he was out in Lacebark’s fragrant Sulaco, and now he’s in London.’
‘I thought Sulaco was the spaceship from Aliens,’ says Isaac.
‘We also know from the email that he must be handling something “ten times more important than the Xujiabang deal”, if this other chap Harenberg is to be believed, contra Pankhead. That’s got to be why the Burmese men are vanishing. It’s got to be Bezant doing something for Lacebark. So that’s why I’m staying in London. If I can find out what Lacebark are up to here, and I can get real proof, then I can take it to one of Lacebark’s competitors — not Kernon Whitmire, this time — and perhaps I can save my own skin.’
‘Why don’t you just go to the police?’
‘And tell them what? That I’m being stalked by a Fortune 500 company? That I once saw a scary van? Furthermore, I could ask you two the same question. Why don’t you tell the police about your friend Theo?’
‘Theo wouldn’t want the police anywhere near him.’
‘Neither would either of us, to be honest,’ says Isaac.