East of the City (34 page)

‘Because?’

‘Because Barin Mehmet is a crook. Because it was a bad risk from day one.’

‘Justine couldn’t have thought so.’

In his voice and in his eyes there seemed to be a question. Whatever Allen had told him, Piers clearly had his own doubts about Justine. And maybe also about the way the Ottoman case had been settled. With nothing to lose now, I took the plunge.

‘Justine was a bit cosier with Sebastian Ward than she should have been. And I think it's possible Sebastian was in with Mehmet.’ For the time being, I left Angela out of it.

Piers absorbed my speculation thoughtfully. I was expecting him to ask me to explain, but he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘Justine told you she was going to sign it, and you waved it through?'

I suppose I could have told him about my parents dying, how I wasn’t exactly on top of things at the time. The truth was, that wasn't any kind of excuse.

'I made a mistake.'

He said nothing, but his eyes opened a little wider. Another lift came, Piers reached over and held the doors.

I said, ‘My old man owed Sebastian some money. I didn’t know about it. The Ottoman lawyers made it look like it was me who was a bit too close to Sebastian. Like Sebastian had a hold on me. That’s not true.’

Piers got into the lift. His head dropped to one side. ‘Sebastian Ward and Justine Mortlake?’ he said.

The lift doors started closing.

‘Ask her,’ I said.

In his office, Allen was standing by the wall-window looking down at the Room. He had a drink in his hand, he gestured with it towards the bar-fridge, telling me to help myself. It wasn’t quite the reaction I’d expected. After the day I’d had, I could have drunk the fridge dry, but I held off. I had Lee’s file on Angela tucked under my arm.

Allen didn’t seem quite with it at first. He mentioned some recent US court case that was going to hit the insurance industry hard. He said the Lloyd’s Chairman was setting up a working party to look into it. I said I'd just seen the Chairman, out by the lifts with Piers. I asked, ‘What were they here for, the merger?'

‘No,’ he said. ‘Something else.’

That was a lie. Which could only mean one thing: Allen didn’t trust me anymore.

We were silent a few moments, both of us wondering who was going to mention it first, the Ottoman settlement. Peering down into the Room, Allen finally said, ‘How long was this going on, Ian? Sebastian punting with your father.’

‘The first I heard of it was in court today.’

He gave me a doubtful look.

I said, ‘I would have explained that in court, only Clive came back after lunch with the settlement. So I didn’t get the chance.’

‘You’ve got your chance now.’ He swung round and put down his glass. ‘You’re not in the witness stand. This is a private conversation. And it’s cost us a very big payout to make it a private conversation. In the name of Christ, what was going on between you and Sebastian?’

‘We didn’t have to settle.'

He slammed his fist down on the table, the pens jumped. ‘We’ve settled. Seven million pounds. And I’d like a fucking answer.’

‘I told you.’ I held his gaze. ‘I didn’t know anything about it till today.’

‘That’s not an answer?'

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ He turned in a circle on the spot. ’Do you realize the damage this has done? How we look? In particular, how we look to Crossland. One week we’re a prime managing agency, running good syndicates, and the next we’ve got a rotten apple in the barrel. We look bad. Extremely bad. Shocking.'

‘I'm the rotten apple?'

‘If the cap fits...’ 

‘Allen, just give me some time. I’ll prove this thing between Sebastian and Dad had nothing to do with Ottoman.’

'Sure. Take all the time you need. What you do in your own time’s your own business. Because as of right now, you are suspended.’

A sharp kick in the balls. Suspended. Temporarily removed from the box. Until that moment I must have kept some ridiculous hope alive that I might still get the promotion. But that one word killed the hope stone dead. Frazer Burnett-Adams was going to inherit Angela’s seat, and I was going to be sitting at home watching daytime TV.

I said, ‘You can’t do that.’

‘It’s done.’ He went to his desk and sat down. ‘Until the merger goes through, I don’t want to see you back here.’ He nodded to the file under my arm. ‘Is that for me?’

‘No,’ I said, clutching it tight to my side, like a drowning man clinging to the wreckage.

There was a knock at the door. Without waiting to be called, Clive came in. His eyes slid from Allen to me. He told me I was wanted downstairs.

‘Not now,’ I said.

‘It’s Fielding,' he said. 'And he isn’t playing games.’

While we went along the corridor and down in the lift, Clive filled me in on what he knew: Fielding, it seemed, had been very busy. Since I saw him leave the courtroom with Max after the announcement of the settlement, the bastard had got another search warrant for my flat, gone back there and found what he’d told Clive was evidence linking me directly to Sebastian Ward’s murder.

‘Evidence at my place? You’re kidding.’

Standing in the lift now, Clive raised his hands. He told me not to shoot the messenger.

‘Well what kind of evidence? A box of matches? What?'

‘A piece of jewellery, apparently. A Ward family heirloom.’

‘Fielding must have planted it.’

Clive wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me he'd taken the liberty of calling a lawyer for me. 'He'll meet us down at the station.'

‘I’m going to be questioned officially?’

Nodding. Clive warned me not to say anything to Fielding until the lawyer arrived.

My head was spinning. I’d just been suspended, Frazer was going to get the top job, and now Fielding was about to interrogate me over evidence he’d planted in my flat. I slumped back against the lift wall, tilted my head back and closed my eyes. 

Clive said, ‘By the by. I went for a drink with one of the Ottoman solicitors. Who do you think fed them that information about your old man?’

‘Fielding.’

‘You knew that?’

‘Clive, I told you what he’s like. He's bent. And he wants to fry me.’

Clive considered me a moment. He asked why I didn't just show Fielding the photo, Justine and Sebastian.

I reminded him of what he'd once said, of his advice to me, that it was just a photo of two adults doing what adults sometimes do. He reached out and held his thumb on the lift button. The doors stayed closed.

‘I gave you an option, Ian. What should I have done? Let you go into the courtroom unarmed?'

I pressed my fingers to my temples. I shook my head. None of this was Clive's fault.

He asked me what I'd been talking about with Allen back there in the office.

‘Allen doesn’t want the merger with Crossland derailed over this,' I said. 'He needs a scapegoat. And as of now, that's me. I'm suspended.’

Clive took his thumb off the button, the lift doors opened. Stepping past me he muttered, ‘Buy yourself a lottery ticket. Your luck has to turn sometime.’

It was only when I got out of the lift that I realized we weren’t on Clive’s floor. We were down by the Room, the floor where the Mortlake boxes sat, you could see them through the big glass door. Fielding was in there, sitting on my desk and talking to Frazer.

I grabbed Clive’s arm. ‘What’s this?’ I pointed through the glass door.

Clive didn't see the problem, he thought it was no big deal. Then Fielding looked over and saw us. He must have been waiting for this moment since he’d sent Clive upstairs to fetch me. And now he lifted his hand and crooked a finger, beckoning me in there. But there was no way I was going into the Room to be questioned. 

I said to Clive, ‘I’ll wait out here.’

Clive reminded me to keep my mouth shut till we joined up with the lawyer down at the station.  Then he went into the Room to bring Fielding out.

I took a turn around the landing, tapping Lee’s file on Angela against my leg, and wondering what I was going to do with it. I was pretty sure I’d done the right thing not showing Allen. After all, that was what I’d done before, with the Justine-and-Sebastian photo, showed it thoughtlessly. A couple of brokers came out of a lift and went into the Room.

Kerry Anne Lammar, I thought then. Jesus. I was going to have to call her. Now that I’d been suspended, my chance of promotion completely blown, I’d have to tell her that I’d changed my mind about the penthouse. And all the while she’d know that I hadn’t really changed my mind, that the truth was I just couldn’t afford the place. She was really going to love that. Unless another buyer for the penthouse showed up, clause seven on the contract kicked in. As from Saturday, my hundred-grand deposit would be disappearing at the rate of five thousand pounds a week.

Stuffed. From every direction possible.

I looked up. In the Room, Clive was shaking his head as he spoke to Fielding. Clive looked angry, there was obviously some disagreement between them. Gesturing towards me, Clive chopped one hand down on his other palm. At a few boxes, the underwriters and brokers had begun to notice, there was a general rubber-necking going on. Fielding was the centre of the show, he just sat there grinning.

Finally Clive seemed to give up, he came back out to rejoin me.

‘He wants you in there,’ Clive said, looking everywhere but at me. ‘I tried, Ian.’

‘Wants me in there for what?’

‘You’ll just have to go along with it.’

‘Meaning?’ I said. When he didn’t answer, I reached out and touched his shoulder. ‘Clive?’

He breathed out a long breath. ‘He’s going to arrest you, Ian,’ he said. ‘In the Room.’

My gut turned over.

‘He can’t.’

‘He can, Ian. And he is.’

Through the glass door, I saw that Fielding was looking straight back out at me, seeing how I took the news from Clive.

People do not get arrested in the Lloyd’s Room. Not underwriters. Not brokers. Not even the girls who do the photocopying. Nobody. But there was Fielding, waiting for me to go in so he could put a hand on my shoulder and nick me in front of the whole damn market. I’d be finished. Arrested and walked out of the Room by a cop, suspicion of murder — how was anyone going to be able to trust me after that?

And Fielding must have known. This whole business could have been done quietly. Christ, if he’d picked up the phone and told me to get myself down to the station, I wouldn’t have liked it, but I’d have gone. But that wasn’t how Fielding wanted it. What he wanted was maximum damage. I was Bob Collier’s son, and now Fielding had me at his mercy and he was going to bring me down. If I walked in there, if he arrested me, my career at Lloyds was over.

Clive said, ‘Let’s get it done,’ and he stepped up to the glass door. But I stayed right where I I was.

Fielding had his feet up on my chair. He held something up for me to see, swinging it gently, so that its metallic sheen caught the light. Handcuffs.

‘Oh fuck,’ Clive said. ‘That man is so far out of order.’

‘There’s no way he does that to me, Clive. No way.’

‘Keep your hat on. I’ll go in and talk to him again. We’ll sort it out.’

Eyes still on Fielding, I edged slowly across to the stairs.

When Clive realized what I was about to do, his angry look disappeared. He screwed up his face. ‘Don’t, Ian. Don’t even think about it.’

But I had thought about it. And what I’d thought was that playing things straight had lost me the penthouse, probably my deposit, and got me suspended. Playing things straight had let Fielding walk into the life I’d built since leaving the dogs, and tear it to bits. And finally here Fielding was, perched on the 486 box, swinging a pair of handcuffs, and waiting to nick me for murder.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said, and Clive called me a bloody idiot. Then I took one last look into the Room. Fielding had stopped swinging the cuffs, I think it had just gotten through to him that maybe he’d misjudged the situation. Misjudged me.

Clive said, ‘You can’t hide from this, Ian.’

‘I don’t intend to.’

‘Then stay put.’ He gestured to the Room. ‘I’ll talk to him.’

I watched as Fielding got to his feet. Then I turned to the stairs, clutched the folder under my arm, and ran.

M
en in suits. An anthill has ants, the City has men in suits. By the time I shot out of the Lloyd’s Building and through Leadenhall Market I was just one more of them, a guy with worries trying to make his way home. I’d heard Fielding shouting down the stairs after me, but I wasn’t even sure if he’d given chase, and once I’d got through Leadenhall I stopped looking back to see.

What now? Where now? The one place I couldn’t go was home, Fielding knew I wasn’t that stupid, but he’d have to make sure it was covered anyway.

‘Taxi!’ I shouted, and stuck out my hand.

A miracle, it pulled up right next to me, empty. I scrambled in. The driver asked, ‘Where to?’ and without thinking I found myself giving him directions to Tubs’s place. As we pulled out into the traffic I slumped back in the seat and suddenly felt quite cold. The sweat made my shirt stick to my back like wet plaster.

Swivelling, I looked back through the window. People walked up and down, no-one paying any attention to my taxi going by, and there was still no sign of Fielding. I faced the front again, calming down, my heart gradually eased up thumping against my ribs. And somewhere around then I had an uncomfortable thought. Pulse rate dropping, the zing of adrenalin dying away, I saw the whole performance as Clive must have seen it. Me not a hero standing up for my rights, but me an idiot, crossing a dangerous legal line.

I held tight to the folder on my lap. I prayed to God that Tubs was home.

‘Then what, you done a runner?’

‘More or less,’ I said.

Sprawled across the floor, heads and arms under the sink, Tubs laughed. He’d met me at the door with a monkey wrench in his hand, and now we were back in the kitchen. The relief at finding him home had already passed. I was getting annoyed he wasn’t taking my problem more seriously. He rolled and grunted. Under the sink, the waterpipes clanged.