‘Yes, but it did no good. None of it did. Sebastian and Willie got him in the end, and his poor old mum.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
‘The money?’ I asked.
‘Gone,’ said Justin, with a huge sigh. ‘Moved on from the Cayman bank, blind transfer; we don’t know where it is now, and we never will.’
‘When did this happen?’
He told me the date. I made a quick mental calculation. ‘The day after he was abducted,’ I said. ‘They must have forced him to transfer it again, then killed him.’
‘Poor little bastard.’ I’d cried all mine, but the Home Secretary was on the verge of tears. ‘It was meant to be legal,’ he said, ‘I promise. As soon as we’d secured some additional funds through bank borrowing, the casino would have been built. As soon as the ground was broken, Energi investment would have quadrupled in value.’
‘So why did both Lidia and Rowland vanish from the face of the earth?’
‘We had to, as soon as the money went missing. I’d just been offered the post of Home Secretary: I couldn’t be seen to be involved in any scandal.’
‘But an investigation will be bound to lead to Ludmila.’
‘But not to Lidia. Energi will be. . no, Energi is just another victim of theft. You say fraud, but still I don’t believe it. The money was honestly, if unconventionally raised, and stolen by the people who killed Frank and his mother.’
I knew that I’d like to go along with that explanation, but I wasn’t ready to tell him. ‘And you two? What happens to you?’ I asked, not particularly kindly.
‘We move house, or I buy it from the family trust before it implodes. I’d hoped to hang on to my job, but when those Luxembourg records become public, I’ll be stuffed. My signature’s there.’
‘Funny you should say that,’ Mark intervened. He told him about the robbery. ‘Would I find MI5’s fingerprints all over that, by any chance?’ he added.
Justin blinked, several times. ‘If they knew of this operation. .’ he murmured. (Mark and I could have told him they did, and how. That explained a lot about the hard line the security-service woman had taken with us: not just a minister to protect, but maybe a government if the scandal was messy enough.) ‘But I didn’t authorise it, I promise you.’
I thought about that for a while. ‘If I accept all of that,’ I said slowly, ‘it means we’re the only people who know of your involvement. Caballero can identify Ludmila as Lidia Bromberg, but he’s more concerned with political rehabilitation right now. Anyway, he’d never make the connection.’
‘I suppose it does,’ Justin agreed. ‘So. .’
I beat him to the question. ‘So what do we want? Only one thing. There’s a woman in the security service who made some very nasty threats against me, and Mr Kravitz, here, my associate. She called herself Moira; blonde, early thirties, rat faced. I want her told to forget that she’s ever heard of us.’
‘That won’t be a problem,’ the Home Secretary promised.
‘In that case,’ I told him, ‘good luck with your career, and God help the country.’
Forty-three
If I said that the meeting hadn’t gone the way I’d imagined, that wouldn’t be quite accurate. No, the truth is, when we went in there I didn’t have the faintest idea how it was going to play out. But I hadn’t expected my carefully constructed theory to be turned completely on its head, and for Frank to be revealed as the brains behind the whole business.
I might have had a strong suspicion that Justin and Rowland were one and the same, given what I knew about Ludmila, but the part about the seal had taken me totally by surprise. No wonder Frank had hung on to that rucksack as if his family jewels were in it. No wonder it had landed in Caballero’s back seat with such a thud. No wonder I’d noticed a difference when I’d picked it up in my garage.
The rest of the scheme, though, that had been brilliant. What a pity, I thought, that he hadn’t hired his muscle from Mark, who would have made sure that the guys were completely trustworthy. I told him as much as we left.
‘With that sort of cash in the pot,’ he replied, ‘you can never be one hundred per cent sure.’
‘What do you think, Mark?’ I asked. ‘Did it all happen as Justin said?’
‘He believes that it did. His wife confirms that for me; she’s way short of bright enough to do that sort of thinking for herself. Is it the truth? Maybe, but there’s another possibility I can’t ignore, and it’s much the likelier, that as far as Frank was concerned, this was a fraud all along, only he told his hired hands too much and they turned on him.’
‘I can’t bring myself to accept that.’
‘Think of the story he spun you.’
‘Maybe he was an undercover agent.’
He held up a crutch. ‘And maybe next week I’ll sign for Chelsea.’
I laughed. ‘As a Barcelona fan, I hope you do.’
Tom had been waiting in the car for an hour by the time we returned, but he had a supply of crisps and fizzy water, and the two police officers had been keeping an eye on him, as I’d asked them. He was fine and I didn’t feel too guilty.
I did feel troubled, though, as Mark dropped us off at the Tower Bridge Hotel. I could understand why he thought Frank might have been on the con from the start, considering the story he’d told me. And that was where Justin’s version really rang true, when I thought about it.
All of the core information I’d gathered about the whole d’Amuseo affair had come from Frank himself. Mark had done some digging, but the key details had been offered by my cousin.
The problem was I had believed it before, and I still did then; and suppose he had embellished it a little, with the undercover stuff and his lies about Caballero being involved with Energi, and about the breakin. I convinced myself that he’d done it to keep the Mayfields’ involvement secret and maybe also in the hope that I’d hang in there and help him, after Loman and Venable, his badly chosen security team, had turned on him.
What I did know for certain was what had happened to us after we were reunited in Sevilla, and what had happened ultimately to him and Auntie Ade.
So why had Ludo filmed my house? Since I had come to believe the rest of her tale I decided to accept her explanation, that Frank was thinking of hiding in St Martí. I wished I could ask him, but still I concluded loyally that he had indeed concocted a brilliant scheme to help his best pal out of a jam, and it had gone fatally wrong on him.
For the next couple of days, I focused on Tom alone. I took him to a cricket Test match at Lords. . he knows all the players, and loved it; I slept through much of it. . and for a cruise on the Thames. . he’s been nagging me ever since to buy a boat. . before we headed back to Spain, back to our usual, humdrum, sun-splashed existence, filling in time before we were due to leave for California.
For his age, Tom’s a great reader. In no time, he’d devoured all six books I’d brought him from Dad’s. For my age, I’m not. I found the first of mine to be a struggle, which eventually I gave up and turned to the second, plucked in a hurry, and completely at random, from the shelf. It was called Reverse Circle, by a guy named Michael Jacks. I sat down to read it one night, on the front terrace, when Tom had gone to bed.
I had reached page thirty when I began to feel a tingle. By page one hundred I was aware that I was sitting stiff and upright in my chair, reading as fast as I could, and that I couldn’t stop. It was almost three in the morning when I put the book down. The square below was deserted, the mosquito population was well fed, my eyes were standing out like organ stops, and I was wide awake.
With certain subtle differences, I had just read the story of the Hotel Casino d’Amuseo scam, page by page. Ex-con comes up with a brilliant wheeze, recruits team in Italy, finds some Mafia interests to come up with front-end money, and the fund-raising gets under way. Then it all goes pear shaped, the Mafia figure out what’s happening, ex-con’s wife is kidnapped, and he’s chased halfway across Europe before. .