‘But my son saw you doing it,’ I continued, undeterred, ‘and you backed off. Instead you bided your time, until an even better target offered herself up. . Frank’s mother. You kept tabs on her, until one day she wasn’t at the agency. You called and her idiot assistant told you where she was. Willie Venable abducted her from my house, you and the poor sap Emil tried to take me for a ride, and when Frank got me out of it, you had Loman track us. He was good, too good for Frank in the end. Now he and his mum are in a cardboard box in Girona. .’ to my surprise, I heard my voice crack ‘. . and your old man’s the Home bloody Secretary!’ I glared at Justin. ‘No wonder you weren’t too keen to help us in Barcelona.’
Occasionally, very occasionally, there are silences that you think you can touch, as if a glass bubble has encased you, one that no noise can penetrate. One of those had formed in that drawing room. The Mayfields sat, stunned. I sat, exhausted. Mark sat, recovered but waiting.
And then Justin shattered that almost palpable bubble of silence into a million shards. ‘Primavera, Primavera,’ he sighed, ‘that was brilliant, it was sad, and it was deeply moving, but it was also very, very wrong. I love my wife dearly, but you identified the flaw in your own argument. Ludo is indeed as intellectually limited as her late father was. She isn’t capable of coming up with a scheme like that.’
‘Then who did? You?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that sort of imagination either. But Frank did; your cousin, my pal. The whole project was his idea, from start to finish.’
‘Come on,’ I shouted, outraged by his attempt to smear the dead. ‘He didn’t have access to those Energi funds.’
‘No, but I told him about the company’s problems, and what it would mean for us when it collapsed, losing the house and maybe even my career going down the toilet.’
‘But you dropped Frank as a friend, after he was jailed.’
‘Who told you that? No, let me guess. He did.’
‘In the Hotel Arts,’ I countered, ‘he had to threaten you to get in to see you.’
‘Gretchen Roberts, you mean?’
I nodded.
‘There’s no such person; that was for your benefit.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I didn’t exactly flaunt our friendship, but Frank was always my best mate. He was the only person I’d ever have told about Ludo’s problems. A couple of weeks after I did, he came back to me and set out the whole scheme. The only difference from your account was that he said it would be legal. He did it all. Ludo didn’t set up the company in Luxembourg, he did. . as its records will prove.’ I looked at Mark quickly, then back at Justin. ‘Ludo didn’t hire any security people; Frank did that. But that was much later in the day: I’m not sure when. The first we knew of them was when he sent them to a meeting Ludo had in Seville, with Caballero. As for Macela, he didn’t recruit Frank; Frank recruited him. Hermann Gresch is a name I’ve never heard until now. We knew nothing about the man’s background, only that Frank vouched for him. As for a meeting in Luxembourg with the man you called Loman, that’s news to me also. I can’t think why that would have happened.’
‘When the project got under way,’ I said, ‘Frank took a false identity and still you thought it would be legal?’
‘He’d been in prison. How would that have looked to investors?’
‘So what was Macela’s role?’ I demanded.
‘To be on the ground, showing the project to investors who chose to visit Seville, but he turned out to be useless, because of his addiction.’
‘Frank told me that Macela controlled the money as it came in.’
‘Nonsense. Frank controlled everything. I was amazed by him, by the level at which he operated, but it was all of his creation.’
‘No,’ I protested. ‘No. I’m not having it.’ I jabbed a finger in his wife’s direction. ‘You’re trying to save her skin.’
‘No, and I’ll prove it. You still don’t know who Alastair Rowland is, do you?’
‘No,’ I admitted.
He smiled again. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I signed the funds-transfer order that the Luxembourg lawyers received, and I used the company seal to do it.’ He rose, walked over to a sideboard, and took something from it, then returned and handed it to me. It was blue, metal, hinged and heavy, a stamping device, and its base held a carved round symbol. I’d never seen one before, but I knew what it was.
‘That was why Frank came to the hotel. When we were together on the club floor, before you came up to join us, he gave it to me, to keep it safe, and so that I could move the money into an account he’d set up. Our meeting was prearranged, before his mother went missing. If only he’d accepted my offer of help and not gone storming off, he’d still be alive, and so might she.’
Begged questions were being thrown at me as fast as I could process them. ‘But if you still thought it was kosher, didn’t the funds transfer seem odd?’
‘Not at all. The plan always was to move the money out of Luxembourg before construction started, into a better tax environment. So I signed the transfer, to a bank in the Cayman Islands.’
‘Hold on. Let’s go back. When Frank had to disappear, didn’t that alert you that all wasn’t well?’
‘It concerned me, I’ll grant you, but he told us that he believed that his real identity had been blown and that he had to fade away, into the background. With him out of the picture, and Macela pretty much helpless, there was no choice but that Ludo should become Bromberg again.’
‘And that she should film my house?’ I sneered. Yes, I actually did sneer; I felt my lip curl.
‘Frank asked me to do that,’ Ludmila murmured, ‘on one of my trips to Spain. He said he was considering hiding out with you but wanted to see how secure your place looked.’
‘Where was he hiding at that time?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Why? Where were you?’
‘Most of the time I was in London. Calls to the land-line number in Seville were diverted to my mobile. Like when you called me. If I had to see someone I always gave myself a couple of days to get there.’
‘And you and Caballero kidnapping me? I imagined that, did I?’
‘Frank told me to do it. He said his security people had gone bad on him, that his mother had been kidnapped, and that you were in danger. He said we had to do something to get you out of the way, but to make it look convincing to those men so that they’d lay off you. So I recruited Caballero to help me: I told him that you were a conwoman trying to fleece us, and the clown believed me.’
‘But, Ludmila, you still can’t sit down comfortably,’ I pointed out. ‘Remember what happened to you.’
‘I did not expect that,’ she admitted. ‘But Frank called me afterwards, full of remorse, and said that the whole thing had had to be as realistic as possible.’
‘That’s why he and I spent a little longer on our own in Barcelona than he’d expected,’ Justin added. ‘I didn’t like that either. Frank and I were having it out, while you were waiting downstairs.’
‘Jesus,’ I whispered, apologising mentally to Him and to Gerard. The more I thought about it, the more I was coming, if not to believe them, then at least to see their account as a possibility. But there were still holes in it. ‘Who gave you the gun?’ I asked Ludmila.
‘Frank did. It was loaded with blanks, wasn’t it?’ She looked at me nervously, and this time I did accept that her ignorance was genuine, since Caballero had said more or less the same thing.
‘No,’ I told her. ‘It shot a very convincing hole in the upholstery of your friend’s car.’ I winced. ‘That little bugger should have kept the damn thing, instead of chucking it in the flames when he burned Caballero’s toys in that barn.’
‘He set his bikes on fire?’