This Thing of Darkness (37 page)

66

It’s the French navy which finds us.

The first we know of it is the beat of a helicopter overhead, followed by the sound of a boat outside. The seas are still high, but subsiding. Honnold untents our entrance flap.

Blue light invades the orange.

A boat bumps up against the raft. French voices, speaking English.

Strong hands and friendly faces.

The grey bulk of a destroyer, the
Edlinger
, looms above us to windward. This smaller boat, a rubber speedboat thing, will take us from here to there.

The light is astonishing. Clear skies. The ocean turbulent, yes, but blue. Puffs of white foam almost dazzling in the sunshine.

As for the sea itself – it’s completely empty. No
Isobel Baker
. No orange box. Just us. The grey destroyer. And this troop of handsome, helpful, smiling French
matelots
.

67

We’re taken to Brest.

Not where any of us wanted to go, but that’s one of the inconveniences of travel. Snow at Heathrow? You’ll be set down in Birmingham. Lose your ship off Ireland? Find yourself in France.

En route
, the ship’s doctor bandages my hand and flirts with me, but nicely. Nicely enough that he goes straight into my top ten Sexiest French Sailors list which, given the quality of raw material around, takes some doing.

Honnold, who was treated before me, sticks around to chat.

I ask him if his ship was insured. He says yes. I say sorry for sinking it. He says,
de nada
, the Scottish version anyway. ‘At least I dinnae have to eat another one o’ yer meals.’

I tell him about the orange box with the computer junk inside. He grins. Says he’ll tell someone.

I say would he mind not mentioning my part in all that. Just that I’d rather not get too involved with the police.

He looks sharply at me, but says fine. I think he wonders just how uninvolved I’m likely to be after all this.

After my hand has been seen to, I’m given a cabin with one of only a handful of women on board, Alizée, an aircraft handler. Alizée, who’s quite glam, lets me use her make-up, and I choose Noir-Rouge for my lips. Dark eyeliner. Mascara. Eyeshadow.

I still don’t look as glam as Alizée, but it’s nice playing.

She gives me a cap with the name of the ship on it.

As we enter port, I go into the women’s shower room and take my bandage off. Put it on my other hand, the right one.

In Brest, we’re handed over to the Police Nationale, but no one quite knows what to do with us. With Connor, Buys and Wee Philly it’s fairly clear. There are allegations of piracy, hostage taking and illegal firearms, and those men are taken straight into custody. With Pearson, Ryan and Honnold, things are less clear. All three men are visibly hurt, but it’s not clear that they’ve committed any offence, nor is anyone alleging that they have. I assume that Watkins and colleagues will be screaming their interest in talking to these people – but a foreign police force’s interest in talking to someone is not sufficient reason for holding them against their will. In any event, hospital seems a higher priority than custody, and all three men need medical care, so that’s where they go.

I go with them, so my hand can be looked at. We sit in a blue police van with two gendarmes.

When we get to hospital – the Hôpital d’Instruction des Armées – I go off in search of the Ladies, but once I’m out of sight of our chaperones, I simply walk away. Out onto the street, down the Avenue Georges Clemenceau to the railway station, where I buy a ticket and get on the first train to Paris.

Don’t go all the way, of course. Slim as the risk is, I don’t want to be welcomed at Montparnasse by a bevy of policemen, so I get off at Rennes, then hitchhike down to Nantes. Travel most of the way with a lorry driver who tells me all about chicken farming and Gascony.

At Nantes, I think I’ve covered my tracks enough, so I buy a rail ticket that will zoom me from here to Bordeaux, from Bordeaux to San Sebastian, and from there, via Madrid, to Lisbon, and Faro.

Meet up with my sister again. We spend a few days together. Beach days, pool days. A happy time. My skin is of the tan-resistant Welsh variety, but my sister does good things with fake tan and I work hard on supplementing that with the real thing.

I get a haircut. Shave my legs. My sister does my nails, including my toes, which I don’t normally do, but which do look nice, bright red toenails in strappy leather sandals.

We eat fried fish and salad and my sister tells me about a Portuguese guy who she’s sort of dating, ‘only not really. Don’t tell Dad.’ She doesn’t tell me what happened to Cai, but I don’t ask. I turn myself under the sun’s hot lamp and read a lot.

I don’t think about work. Nothing I can do about it now anyway.

And after four days, I’m done. Book a flight back. Email the office telling them that my holiday is over.

Holiday over, and time to see what sweet fruits my colleagues gathered in my absence.

68

‘You look well.’ Jackson’s comment on the post-Portugal me.

‘Am well, sir. In the pink. Fine fettle and mint condition.’

‘I’m pleased to hear that,’ says Jackson gravely.

I nod. Want to ask about Zorro, except I don’t want to ask, I want Jackson to tell me.

He says, ‘Did you go online while you were on holiday?’

‘Sometimes, but not really. Not work stuff.’

‘So you don’t know what happened?’

‘What did happen?’

A long pause. Jackson’s eyes heavy on me.

Then: ‘The
Isobel Baker
left Milford Haven.’

‘Yes?’

‘She was a fishing boat. She went fishing.’

‘Scampi,’ I say. ‘That’s made out of little baby lobsters. Did you know that?’

‘No. No, I didn’t know that.’

Another pause.

My fault this one. I shouldn’t have got Jackson thinking about scampi.

I wait until Jackson gets back on track and when he does, he says, ‘After a few days out at sea, four men joined the ship, bringing with them a Remote Operated Vehicle, of exactly the sort you said we should be expecting.’

‘Yes.’

‘The men proceeded to locate the Atlantic Cables line. They cut it. Lifted it. And they were about to install this little item before splicing everything together again.’

From a drawer, he pulls Wee Philly’s little black box. The one I kicked the crap out of him to acquire. The one I put out to sea in a bright orange waterproof container.

Jackson’s face examines mine.

My face hears itself say, ‘This case started with a man hanging in an inaccessible room, with nothing stolen, nothing missing. Except the room
had
been accessed, the man
had
been murdered and something
was
missing – namely, the company’s data.

‘Now why would anyone steal data? I mean yes, if you were planning a $300 million cable of your own, it might be interesting to see your competitor’s route map, but we knew no one was planning such a line. Perhaps you might want to
destroy
a particular cable and maybe there are ways of gaining a commercial advantage if you did that. But not for long. Those things are easily repaired. And in any event, if you did something to wreck an expensive piece of infrastructure, you’d have a massive international police inquiry coming after you right away. So that doesn’t seem especially clever.’

Jackson falls into my rhythm. He murmurs, ‘So as you’ve been saying all along, sabotage must have seemed like a better route. But
subtle
sabotage. A sabotage that would never be noticed.’

‘The thing is,’ I say, ‘there’s so much money swooshing down those lines – or rather, so much financial trading activity depending on the data which those lines transmit – you only need to interfere a teeny-tiny bit to give yourself an advantage. One millisecond is worth a hundred million quid, remember.’

I stop. Remember that this is meant to be about Jackson giving me information, not the other way round. So I shut up.

‘Yes.’ Jackson turns the little black box, retaining its secrets for another few moments yet. ‘Work is still ongoing, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘This here is just the case. The innards are at some lab in Cheltenham.’

‘Good.’

‘Rhiannon’s in London, working with our friends and colleagues in the Serious Fraud Office.’

Friends and colleagues: idiots in suits might be more accurate, but a wrinkling of Jackson’s mouth is as close as he’ll get to acknowledging that.

‘I’m sure she’ll be enjoying that,’ I say.

Jackson nods. ‘Computer work. Complicated stuff.’

I nod. Maybe say something. I’m not sure.

Then Jackson divulges, ‘At the moment, as far as we can tell right now, this box had one simple job. It was there to put a tiny pause on the line. Three milliseconds. No more than that. The Atlantic Cables line would still have been the fastest one out there, just a tiny bit less fast than their boffins would have had been expecting.’

I say, ‘A tiny pause on the line, but not on
all
of the line, maybe. Maybe it wouldn’t have interrupted
all
of the data.’

‘No. Quite right. There was one bit of the line that wasn’t going to get paused.’

‘The bit of the line being rented by Idris Gawr. Galton Evans’s “investment fund”.’

‘Correct. Absolutely correct.’

Since Jackson has now shut up and doesn’t look like he wants to continue, I tell the story for him.

‘Basically, Galton Evans’s crowd would get to see its data those three milliseconds ahead of everyone else. The big investment banks. The big hedge funds. Everyone. Mostly, betting on the financial markets is just betting. Speculation. But if you know that the biggest players in the market are seeing old information, and if you know what the real information is, you have an unbeatable advantage. You can rip off the big boys at their own game. You literally can’t lose.’

Jackson nods. ‘And it’s even better than that. The big boys never know someone’s stealing from them. I mean, yes, they might notice the occasional trade going wrong, but those guys just play the odds anyway. A few bad trades wouldn’t give them a moment’s pause.’

‘Like
The Sting
, sir. Have you seen that film?’

Jackson nods, but I don’t really know what his nod means. In the movie, Paul Newman and Robert Redford set up a complicated con that involved getting access to horse-race results before they were made public. Galton Evans was trying to pull the same scam, except that he was targeting the world’s primary financial axis – and adding a few noughts to his potential for gain.

‘Have we made arrests?’

Jackson nods. ‘Galton Evans. Conspiracy to murder. Application for bail denied. As for the four men who boarded the
Isobel Baker
, we’ve brought charges against two of them. Jack Longland, a computer specialist, the guy who was going to install and test this thing. And a nasty piece of work called Connor Houlding, who seemed to be in charge of things. Also, one of the crew members. Jonah Buys. Boarded the ship as a regular fisherman, but was part of Houlding’s gang.’

‘Evidence?’ I ask.

‘We’ve got plenty and we’re getting more. This little black box links directly to Idris Gawr, so we can demonstrate that Idris Gawr was set up specifically for the purpose of this fraud. And since there were two murders aimed at enabling that fraud, we have a very strong case to put before a jury. We’ll probably offer to go soft on Jack Longland if he tells us everything, and the lad’s basically shitting himself so I think he’ll go with it. Any case, one way or another, we’ll get the verdict we want.’

‘And the Stonemonkey?’ I say.

‘Yes. The Stonemonkey.’

It seems like one of us ought to speak but I’ve done my share so I stay shtum. Wait for the spirit to move Jackson.

When he is so moved, he says, ‘Fiona, when I told you to take a look at the Plas Du burglary, I thought, just possibly, you might find a thief. If you had done, I’d have been impressed. Cold case. No new evidence. Nothing much to go on. And instead – all this. And it’s like you knew the whole damn thing all from the start.’

‘Not from the start, sir. No.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, look. It’s just logic. When those artworks vanished then reappeared, that was odd. When Galton Evans lied to us, that was odder. Those things led me to investigate further. When I found out that the members of a particular insurance committee had all been targeted, I realised there had to be some kind of insurance scam at the heart of this. A threat levelled against the insurance industry itself.

‘Now that could have been that. Perhaps this was just the way the Stonemonkey chose to profit from his skills. Except that the story
wasn’t
over. Derek Moon’s death looked rock-climbery, but any old climber could have arranged that murder as neatly. Only then we got the Livesey killing. A murder carried out by an elite-level athlete. The kind of climber who pulled that insurance stunt.

‘And again, it’s just logic. Yes, you could in theory have two equally able climbers, one of whom carries out an insurance scam and the other one of whom enjoys a bit of murder. But the odds are overwhelmingly in favour of the perpetrator being a single individual. And that’s curious for two reasons. One, because if you’ve just made ten million quid from a successful insurance fraud, it’s going to take a lot of money – like a
lot
– to get you involved in murder. And two, because any fraud that involves high-speed telecoms cables and the financial markets doesn’t sound like an operation which any climber will know much about.

‘So I needed to find an individual who knew about the Stonemonkey’s special attributes, and who had the cash and other resources to put in place the kind of telecoms scam we’ve just uncovered. In theory, that person could have been any member of that insurance committee. Except, not really. For one thing, that committee was mostly full of ordinary corporate executives, people like Nellie Bentley. Well-paid, but a long way short of the resources you’d need to set this scam up. The only person with the cash to do it properly was Galton Evans. And then, for another thing, the silly bugger was stupid enough to call his investment company after one of the climbs on the cliff where Derek Moon was found dead.’

Jackson: ‘So basically, you reckon that Galton Evans had the idea for this telecoms scam. Needed to steal a route map so accurate that he could find the cable, even far out at sea. To do that, and do it secretly, he needed to be able to kill someone in a way that didn’t even look like murder. And as he’s wondering how to do that, it occurs to him that the Stonemonkey would be the ideal person. Someone able to achieve the impossible.’

‘It’s neat, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Galton Evans thought so too and got in touch. He had the Stonemonkey’s Hotmail address. Knew how to make contact. Presumably said “I’ve got cash and I need your help with something massively illegal. Please give me a call.” Said enough to persuade the Stonemonkey to take it seriously.’

Jackson nods. ‘Yes. We’re getting the computer people to see if they can trace anything.’

‘But you’re still calling him the Stonemonkey.’

‘Yes. We’ve not found him yet. We’re still looking. The Guardia are looking. Everyone’s looking. We’ve got a load more data now.’ Jackson pushes a thick file over the desk at me. ‘But nothing concrete, not yet.’

I take the file. Sit with it on my lap.

I’m still half in holiday mode, so I’m wearing stuff more summery, more playful than I’d usually wear to the office. A sleeveless dress in sky blue and sandals that show off my red toes.

Jackson nods at my hand. It’s much better now, but I still have a dressing on it.

‘You hurt your hand,’ he says, exhibiting the observational prowess of a seasoned officer.

‘Yes, sir. I splidged myself in a car door.’

‘Did you now?’

‘Sir? That stuff in Rhayader. You and DI Watkins. I want to say that I really appreciate the way you handled that. I couldn’t have managed it if we’d gone down official routes. So thank you. You really helped.’

‘You’re more than welcome.’

He watches my face carefully, but I am OK. I really feel OK.

‘That abduction,’ he says carefully. ‘Tell me about it. I mean, I don’t need you to tell me what happened. I want to understand their logic. Why do it? Why abduct a police officer?’

‘It’s because we were on to them. They assumed the Livesey murder would be treated as suicide, which indeed it was. Then DI Findlay decided to share everything we had with the coroner.’ I make my I-didn’t-like-that-at-the-time face, but continue, ‘And that meant the Idris Gawr mob needed to know how far our suspicions ran. I mean, if it was just the Livesey murder, they didn’t have much to worry about. But when they saw South Wales was involved, they realised we must have connected the Livesey killing to the Moon one, and then they were seriously worried. Had we understood their whole plan? Had we identified the
Isobel Baker
? Did we have the ship under surveillance?

‘If they’d been able to access our systems, they’d probably have poked around and left it at that. But DI Watkins did an extremely effective job at blocking access, which meant they needed an actual human target. That target just so happened to be me.

‘As it happens, we were both lucky and unlucky in their choice of target. Unlucky, because I was about the only officer who had very strong suspicions of what these people were up to. If I’d said all I suspected, I assume they’d have taken some extremely strong measures to protect themselves. Fortunately, I managed to keep my mouth shut for long enough.’

‘That was the lucky part?’ Jackson’s face is grave. Fatherly.

‘No.’ I give him a twisted smile. ‘I meant that not everyone would have been able to escape. I was lucky that I could.’

‘Yes.’

Jackson studies me. I think I’ve lost the little bit of weight I gained during my junk-foodathon with Lev. I’m back to my normal not-very-sturdy me.

Jackson is, I guess, wondering, not for the first time, how the skinny bare-armed girl in front of him manages to get herself out of the situations she finds herself in. But if so, he doesn’t ask.

‘But then you got away, and that gave them a problem. According to your answers, our inquiry basically had nothing. No surveillance. No interest in the
Isobel Baker
. No interest in shipping. But then you escaped. And we’d have been asking ourselves what that whole interrogation had been for. So their abduction effort might have ended up making us ask questions which hadn’t previously occurred to us.’

‘Exactly.’

‘They must have discussed what to do. I mean, they must have thought about abandoning the entire plan.’

‘Yes.’

‘But they didn’t.’

‘No.’

Partly, of course, Evans and his gang would have made a considerable investment by then, one that would have been hard to walk away from. And then as well, my answers under interrogation implied that we knew and understood almost nothing. Perhaps they figured that they had nothing to fear, even if my abduction did put our inquiry on red alert.