But when Frank said it, somehow I knew that I would, however strange the yarn he was about to spin me. We were sitting on the terrace off my room, under an awning, with a bottle of Pinot Grigio by our side, standing in a bucket of rapidly melting ice. I had showered and changed into one of the tops and the cool skirt I had bought. I took a sip from my glass and challenged him: ‘Try me.’
‘Okay.’ He took a sip from his, then drained it, refilled it, and looked me in the eye. ‘I’m a secret agent.’
I gasped, then laughed. ‘You’re a what?’
His face took on an expression that might have fitted the barely three year old I had taken to the toilet in St Andrews. ‘See?’ he grumbled.
I mollified him: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh. Go on, but warn me properly next time you’re going to say something like that.’
‘Then be warned: I’m going to say it again. I’m a secret agent. I work for Interpol, but my parent organisation, if you care to put it that way, is the security service.’
‘Whose security service?’
‘Ours. Her Majesty’s. Britain’s.’
‘MI5?’
‘That’s not our official title, but we answer to it these days.’
‘Frank, you’ve got a criminal record.’
He winked at me. ‘Chas and Dave have hundreds but they’re respectable.’
‘Cut the bad old gags and get on with it.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He tugged his forelock. ‘They approached me when I was inside. I found out later that my mum was the indirect cause. At first I thought it must have been Arnold Thomas, the guy I worked for in Westminster, who put them on to me. He’s on the Commons’ defence intelligence committee. But it wasn’t. Mum was punting a book around by a retired senior spook; she’d mentioned my predicament to him, and he had a word with the people in Millbank. I’d been in for three years, then one day at Ford prison. . I was in open conditions for most of my sentence. . I had a visitor, a smart-suited lady, about my age; not a glamour girl, very business-like. We had a roundabout discussion, and she asked me about my plans, post-nick. I said I didn’t have any. She said that her company. . that was how she put it. . had an interest in people like me, guys with financial acumen who’d screwed up big-time and were looking for a way back. I said I’d be interested in hearing more, and she went away.’
‘And you did hear more.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, but not until they’d made me sit a series of tests; IQ, isometric, physical. I was interviewed by a psychologist too. When all that was done, the woman came back, all business, and told me who she represented. She also promised that if I breathed a word, I’d do my full stretch and never work again when I got out, or get anywhere near the money I’d stashed in Switzerland. She told me they were involved, with colleagues in other countries, in the detection, infiltration and subversion of major international fraud. This would involve the use of what she described as sleeper agents, with no official status, ready to be drawn into scams as they developed, to gather intelligence from the inside on them and on the people involved and, when the time came, to pull them down. She admitted that it would be risky, and that I’d be largely on my own. I told her that I’d been largely on my own all my life.’
‘That’s not fair. You mum loves you.’
‘I know, and I love her; but I had a solitary upbringing, Prim. I was a loner as a kid, and I stayed that way. Other than Mum, you and Dawn are my closest family, and I’ve spent no more than few weeks with you in my entire life.’
‘You must have friends, surely.’
He gnawed awkwardly at his bottom lip. ‘Nobody close. Girlfriends, sure. . I’m straight. . but I’ve never had any boy buddies, not even at university.’
‘What about Justin Mayfield?’
He frowned. ‘Yes, there was him, I suppose, but like all the rest of my little circle, he cut me loose when I got banged up. That was the way it was.’
‘So you took the Queen’s shilling?’
‘Yes. The deal was that I was transferred from Ford to another place. I was still a prisoner, in that I couldn’t leave, but I wasn’t in jail. I was in a training college, learning all the stuff that spooks need to know: intelligence gathering, surveillance, counter-surveillance, communications, and combat, armed and unarmed. I was there for over a year, save for a few weekend visits home to Mum, who thought I was still in Ford but preferred not to go there anyway. When I was ready, they paroled me. I did an induction course at Millbank, then I was transferred to Interpol headquarters in Lyon to be integrated into the international operation. After three months there, they sent me back to the British bureau, where they told me to go out and get myself a job, establish myself in the real world, and wait for an assignment.’
‘You were on their payroll, though?’
‘Yes. I was on what I suppose you’d call a retainer. And part of the deal was that I’d get to access the funds I’d stashed away from my private enterprise at the bank, without hindrance.’
‘So the application to Cinq Pistes, that was for real?’
‘Oh, yes, entirely.’
‘And Madame Gilpin, she was for real too?’
‘Susannah? You’ve spoken to her? Yes, she’s the genuine article, in more than one way, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Did you really want her to come with you, or did you just say that to get back into her underwear in Paris?’
‘I wanted her to leave her husband, still do. Not to come here, though: I’d have set her up somewhere, Madrid, maybe, or London, until the d’Amuseo business had run its course.’
‘The d’Amuseo business. What’s it really about?’
‘You’ve been digging. What do you think?’
I told him that I thought it was an elaborate fraud, that the intention was to raise finance for the project and then, when there was enough in the kitty, to bugger off into the wide blue yonder with the funds, never to be seen again.
‘Spot on,’ said Frank. ‘I reckon I could get you a job as an analyst with my outfit. Fancy it?’
‘Not in a million years. How did you get involved?’
‘Through Hermann Gresch. He was in the same boat as me; his criminal record was a hell of a lot longer and more distinguished than mine but, like mine, it was for real. He was recruited in a German prison, in the same way that I was, but instead of creating a new, respectable front for him, they let him carry on as a fraudster, making sure he was never caught.’
‘What about the people he conned?’
‘He focused on government agencies; they were always reimbursed on the quiet and Hermann never got to keep all the money. Interpol hung him out there as a human lure.’
‘Did they know who they were after?’
‘No, but they did know what. This type of hustle has been pulled before, in St Lucia in the Caribbean and in the Far East, in Thailand. In the second one, an American politician was done for four million dollars, and some very loud noises were made. The minor people involved in each case were caught and put away, but there were others who weren’t and none of the money was ever recovered. The Interpol operation had several targets but the people who had pulled off those two were very high on the list. And then it fell into our hands.’
‘How?’
‘Hermann Gresch was approached in Lithuania, by a woman calling herself Lidia Bromberg. She told him she was putting together a team for an operation, built around a hotel casino complex in Spain. She said that the seed capital, twenty million euros, was already in place, and she needed salespeople to raise more.’
‘Did she say where the seed capital had come from?’
‘No, but I’ll get to that. She told Gresch that she had vacancies for two people, who would be presented as board members and whose brief would be to sell the project to investors.’
‘Did she say what was in it for Gresch and his eventual associate?’
‘Ten per cent each of the money they raised. The target was. .’
‘One hundred million euros: I know. So potentially you and Gresch stood to pocket eight million each.’