Chapter 10
The Elephant in the Props Cupboard
Anselm cooked groundnut stew in a kitchen that smelled of diamonds.
The flat was in Antwerp, above a diamond cutter's workshop, on a street where every second door had a brass plate and a camera. Nobody here ever asked questions. It was the first dinner the five of them had shared in three weeks. The windows were steamed, a gas fire hissed, and in the middle of the table, propped against a jar of pickled onions, was Ravi's laptop.
Pelagia: fourteen names, fourteen accounts, attached. Roberto's wife says you are an angel. I told her you are not. — W.J.
"They've all been paid," said Ravi. "All fourteen. And three thousand others. He said they cried in the union hall."
"I'm glad."
"Don't say it like you're reading the weather!"
"I'm very glad," said David gravely.
He had eaten about a third of what a man his height needed, ever since Istanbul. He was thinner and quieter, and oddly gentle with everyone, like a man who has set something heavy down and is afraid to look at it.
"Mr. Morgan," said Nell, not lifting her eyes from her stew, "there's a grey Peugeot in the street. Since Thursday. A man with a newspaper. I think he's reading it upside down."
"It followed my car on Saturday," said Anselm. "Six streets, very correctly, with a gap. He is not a policeman. A policeman would be quicker."
"So someone found us," said Ravi thinly. "How? We've never been in Antwerp."
"I have something to show you," he added, "that I was going to leave until after pudding."
On the screen was a close-up of a small steel box screwed inside a door frame.
"The beacon from Maes's container," said Ravi. "Military grade. It has a serial number engraved inside, which a good firm wouldn't do. Numbers lead to registers, and registers lead to buyers." He clicked. A logo came up: a stylised square.
HALYARD RISK LTD.
"Maes bought it from Halyard in March. So I checked the others. The alarm panels in the Marseille customs warehouse. The door sensors in the Zurich bank. The palace cameras in Lisbon, the ones I thought were lazy. Every man we've robbed uses the same security firm. Strake doesn't work for the Portuguese minister, David. He works for all of them."
Nobody spoke.
"So he wears each man's coat," said Camille slowly. "He holds the keys."
"He's not an investigator," said Ravi. "He's a landlord."
"And someone must have told him, in the last four years, that the men he guards have something in common," said David. His voice was level. He had put down his spoon.
Camille gave him a long, tender look. In French, so only he understood: You know. He didn't answer.
Anselm rose with the weight of a man carrying a tray. "I would like to say a thing about stew. I cooked it for an ambassador in Vienna who ate with a gun under his napkin. I have never cooked it for people who were not a family. So eat, Mr. Morgan. Whatever it is, you will think about it better with groundnuts."
"Thank you, Anselm."
"It is only soup."
"It is not," said David, and ate it.
At midnight Camille found him on the gravel roof, sitting against the chimney, his tea cold. She put a blanket round his shoulders and sat beside him.
"He went to a house in Geneva," she said. "Emrys. In the winter of ninety-nine. It was the only time in his life he went abroad for money. A polite old banker with a house on the lake invited him to entertain his friends. He did the shells. He made a ring appear in a loaf. When he came home to Cardiff he shut himself in the theatre for three days."
"He told me he had flu."
"He told everyone that. Twenty years later, in the hospital, he told me what he saw. A look passed between two men at the table, over the soup. He knew he had been brought there to be looked at, by people who didn't want to be looked at. It was the first time he had been used as a mirror." She breathed out smoke in the cold. "And three months later, the papers said a man in Liverpool had killed himself in prison, and a pension fund was gone. He thought: I helped them."
David was very still.
"A year after, a woman brought a boy of seventeen to his stage door. A boy with no shoes. He thought God had a sense of humour. David, it was his idea to take you in. Not because you were talented. Because he thought it was the only way he could pay. And he gave you his name, and never told you, because he was ashamed. I think that's why he left you the envelopes. He didn't know who sent them. But he had been waiting twenty years for someone to send something."
The church clock struck the half hour. David had always known it, he found, the way you know a house has a cellar.
"I've been in a story I didn't know I was cast in," he said. "And the person who cast me was kind. I hate that."
"I know," said Camille. She put her head on his shoulder.
At a quarter to three, in the dark kitchen, he stood barefoot with a cheap prepaid phone and dialled a number he had never written down.
It rang five times.
"Hello?" A woman's voice, thick with sleep, soft, with the lilt of a Welsh valley. "Who is that? Is it the hospital? Is it Mrs. Pugh?"
He didn't speak.
"I can hear you breathing." A creak of springs. "Is that...
"Danny?" said Rhiannon Lewis quietly.
He took the phone from his ear and pressed a button. The screen went dark. In the dark kitchen, he stood with his hand over his mouth and his shoulders shaking, without a sound, for a long time.
The envelope came on Tuesday, which was wrong. They always came on Thursday.
"It's a different day," said Ravi, hovering. "I'm not saying anything. I'm saying it's a different day."
David broke the wax and read.
"Dr. Milan Kostka. Prague. Sixty. A hundred and seventeen pharmacies. He has sold counterfeit insulin for eleven years in sixteen countries. Eight hundred and forty-one deaths confirmed, thirty thousand more at risk. His records are in a vault under his own headquarters. He leaves for Cyprus on Saturday."
"That's four days," said Nell. "It takes us three weeks."
"It's the worst idea I've ever heard," said Ravi.
"I think so too." David laid the page down. At the foot, as always: For those counted last. "But eight hundred and forty-one people is a number I can't look at for four weeks. We'll go in carefully. I'll walk the building first. If it feels wrong, we leave."
"You said you'd know with the others. And in Istanbul?"
"I was wrong in Istanbul," said David. "I'll be careful."
By the radiator, Nell laid a card on the table, kept her hand on it, and did not turn it over.