Chameleon - A City of London Thriller (25 page)

I am, at
heart, something of a coward in these matters and I cannot take the
shame and opprobrium that awaits me and so this will be my last
missive. Please ensure that my wife receives all of the benefits to
which she is entitled. She has been faithful, true and blameless in
all of this.

I hope that
this final selfish action can, in some way protect the agency and
the country from embarrassment.

Ian.

Barry did not
bother to print the note, rather he saved it to the ‘documents’
folder and left it displaying on the screen. He unplugged the
keyboard and mouse and handed them back to Maureen. She took them
back to her desk and re-attached them to her own
machine.

With both
office doors secured, as they had been during their passionate
lovemaking in the past, Barry spoke as he wiped the blood from the
desk with a screen wipe.

“
This is how
it happened. You heard a loud noise and so you tapped on the door
to see if the Director needed assistance, only to discover he was
beyond help. You then noticed the message on his screen. And this
is the most important part, you will say that it is not possible
that anyone passed you, either in or out, between his closing the
door and his suicide. Do you understand?”

Maureen nodded
blankly. Barry held her shoulders gently. Looking into her
tear-filled eyes, he continued.

“
Responding
to his earlier call to me to join him for coffee, I arrived to find
you sobbing uncontrollably on the sofa. OK?”

“
Yes. But
what are you going to do?”

“
You’ll see.
When it’s done I’ll leave and return in a few minutes. Are you with
me on this?” Maureen nodded again. “Now is the time for us to move
on and spend some of that money we‘ve salted away, to spend more
time together.”

Realising the
nature of the proposal, Maureen buried her face in his shoulders.
Barry held her at arm’s length and said, nodding in the direction
of their dead boss, “Save your tears for him. He will need someone
to mourn his sorry life.”

***

As with all
other buildings in the UK, smoking was not allowed inside Thames
House, and so smokers were expected to congregate outside in a
designated area. The trouble with that arrangement, of course, was
that it smelled awful and cigarette debris overflowed the bin and
contaminated the whole area. It was a foul place, and it was meant
to be that way. Perry Jameson was cleverer than the bosses, though;
or so he thought.

Perry worked
on ground minus 1, the floor which enjoyed the benefit of a patio
overlooking the Thames. At the rear of the building floor G -1 was
a floor lower than street level at the front of the building. The
night had been long, and Perry would be off duty soon and back to
his warm bed in Camden, hopefully with a warm body beside him. His
current girlfriend was a nurse, and she worked nights,
too.

He sat
glancing out at the patio beyond his window. He wanted a smoke,
badly, and that was his secret place. When Perry had first moved to
this office, he was warned, somewhat pointedly, that the outside
patio had been designated as an ‘inside area’ for the purposes of
the smoking ban. The duty officer was familiar with such
bureaucratic doublespeak. The powers that be had even alarmed the
door to prevent random access to the patio, which was used for
cocktail parties in the summer. The alarm could only be disarmed by
the entry of a six figure code into the keypad by the
door.

As duty
building security officer (level two), Perry was not entitled to
the security code required to exit the fire door without setting
off the alarm. That was a privilege restricted to the Section
Security Manager (the SSM) and the Chief of Building Security
(CoBS). Fortunately, the SSM had a memory like a sieve, and so
wrote the keypad code on a piece of paper taped to the pencil
drawer in his desk. Perry had memorised it long ago.

As soon as her
shift ended, Suzy, the overnight relief administrator, packed her
bag and said goodbye. Perry would be alone for an hour, waiting for
the SSM to turn in and take Perry’s report, which would be brief
and uneventful as usual, and so he keyed in 3-6-3-2-8-9 and
disabled the exit door alarm.

Perry was
drawing in a deep lungful of the calming smoke when he heard a
noise. He looked up to see an old style computer monitor heading
straight towards him. Darting back inside, he watched the monitor
explode into a million pieces on the concrete patio. Still
theoretically in charge of the building, he stepped outside to see
which idiot had thrown the monitor out of the window. As he looked
up he could see clearly that the fifth widow up was shattered. That
would be one of the Directorate offices, he thought. But his
thoughts were interrupted by the figure of a man flying through the
air in his direction, arms and legs flailing, with his face fixed
in a rictus of fear. Diving to his left, the young security guard
only just managed to avoid the falling body, but he did not escape
the awful squelching sound of the body hitting concrete. He looked
on in horror as the body twitched for a few seconds, before finally
lying still.

Following
procedure, Perry called an internal number, not the police, as it
was obviously way too late for an ambulance. The Chief of Building
Security was at his desk and Perry explained the situation. The
Chief hurried down the stairs from his office, his mind already
turning to how they could keep this quiet and how they could
restrict the Metropolitan Police to a minimum
involvement.

***

The Director
had started to come around when the old and unused computer monitor
crashed through the toughened glass window at the third attempt,
the first two attempts merely cracking the large pane without
penetrating it.

Barry lifted
the man roughly to his feet. The Director caught sight of Maureen
sitting on the sofa, a frightened expression on her
face.

“
For God’s
sake, Maureen! Call Security! He’s lost his mind!”

Barry turned
the Director to face the window and the older man realised what his
fate entailed.

“
Sorry, sir,”
Barry intoned ironically, “Maureen doesn’t take orders from you any
more, if indeed she ever did.”

Barry laughed
as he hauled the weakened director towards the opening. “Strange
how things turn out, isn’t it, Gordo? You’re going to be flying out
head first over the same windowsill where I shagged your PA last
week.”

Mustering all
of his remaining strength, the Director pushed himself away from
the broken glass, but two severe punches to the kidneys subdued him
and he folded again, only to fully recover his wits as he fell from
the window and caught sight of the concrete patio, five floors
below, racing towards him.

Chapter
33

Stratfield
Turgis Village, Nr Basingstoke, Hampshire. Wednesday, 11
am.

It was a week
since the Hokobus had met their fate and Pete Lowden still thought
about them every hour of every day. In an effort to shake off his
despondency, Dee had despatched him to follow up on Simon’s
research into Gillian Davis’ origins.

Thus it was
that on a rare foray to this unfamiliar part of the country Geordie
unexpectedly came across a fellow North Easterner. He shouldn’t
have been surprised. After all, his heart felt rendition of the
local folk song, ‘Wherever you go you’re bound to find a Geordie’
at the Black Horse on Friday nights had become a regular
performance. Now, sitting in front of a real fire in a comfortable
lounge, he was helping an attractive middle aged woman recall her
childhood by sharing stories about how Newcastle had changed over
the years since she had left.

Geordie’s
magic with middle aged women had worked again, and he had been
warmly welcomed in by Angela Hult, widow of local poacher Les
Vaughan. Simon had suggested that Geordie should start here, as it
was rumoured that Les Vaughan had abused Gil Davis before taking
his own life. Simon suspected that there was some truth in the
rumour, given that his wife so despised her husband that she would
not even attend his funeral.

After the
reminiscences and some strong builder’s tea, the two new friends
spoke quietly and intimately about her past.

Angela Hult
was born on Tyneside and had entertained dreams of being a vet, but
her schoolwork was not of a standard that enabled her to enrol at
university. So, at the age of seventeen she started work as a
veterinary assistant in Northumberland, where she worked with
horses. It seemed that she had found her calling in life, because
soon she was working in Bishop Auckland with a famous racehorse
trainer, who marvelled at her ability to get sick and injured
horses back to their best so quickly. Initially the horse racing
vets dismissed her talent, suggesting that her early successes were
flukes, but as she performed her miracles more consistently her
reputation grew.

At nineteen
she found herself living in stable lads’ accommodation near Newbury
and on a drunken night out she met the handsome, but disturbed, Les
Vaughan. Despite all the warnings, she married the man because she
was smitten and he treated her so well. Sadly it didn’t last. He
was lazy, relying entirely on her income, he was unfaithful often
on their marital bed when she was working, and he was
brutal.

At twenty one
she had seen enough, and was planning to move back to the North
East when Les beat her very badly before taking her money and going
out on a drunken binge. A local man named Nick Davis, known to help
battered wives, called around when he heard about her injuries.
When she refused to face the disparaging looks of the doctors and
nurses at Newbury General Hospital yet again, he tended her wounds.
Nick was gentle and understanding; he was a little older but quite
attractive. Angela fell a little bit in love with the brother of
the local squire, and uncle to Gillian Davis.

When she had
been administered to, and comforted by, Uncle Nick, he left to seek
out Les Vaughan. He apparently found him because Angela had a call
the next morning from a casualty nurse asking her to visit Les in
hospital. She didn’t go. His mother went instead.

Geordie was
intrigued at this glimpse into country life. This was the closest
he had come to an everyday tale of country folk since his mother
made him listen to the Archers’ omnibus edition on Sunday mornings
as she roasted the beef when he was a child.

“
Angela,
there was a rumour of a bit of a scandal about the time Gillian was
born; it seems that Mr Davis wasn’t her real dad. Did you know
that?”

“
Oh yes,
Pete, this is a village. Everyone knows everything, there are no
secrets here. It was before my time but it was village folklore
long before Nick spilled the beans during one of our long talks.
There were a lot of those. They were intended to let Les know I was
protected, and it worked.

Nick told me
that he had his eye on the new estate manager at Tallgarth House;
she was a ‘pretty little thing’, he would always say, but I think
he was head over heels in love with her without ever telling her.
Her name was Andrea Jane Bailey and she was one of the first women
to graduate in Estate Management at Reading University. Nick
explained to me that they spent all of their spare time together,
but he just couldn’t find the words to tell her how he felt, and
then Denton Miles turned up for an internship. Suddenly Andrea was
spending every waking hour with Miles, and some non waking hours,
too, I suppose.”

Angela
giggled. It was the sound of a young woman’s giggle. It was light
and it was infectious. Geordie smiled.

“
Anyway, he
left, she was pregnant with Gillian and then she fell ill. She died
very quickly after the birth, if I recall the story
correctly.”

“
Did you know
Gillian as a child?”

“
Of course.
Like most girls she loved horses, and she trailed around with me,
for days sometimes, but that was before she discovered shooting. We
were right proud of her when she started winning medals.” Geordie
laughed at Angela’s accent which suddenly morphed into a mix of
Geordie dialect and West Country brogue. Angela giggled
again.

“
I’ll be
saying this is my one and that’s your one next, won’t I? I’ve been
here too long,” she joked.

“
What
happened to Denton Miles, do you know?”

Angela gazed
into the fire and paused before answering.

“
The story
goes that he returned to the States to run his family farm in
Virginia.”

“
Would
Gillian have known who her real father was?”

“
Absolutely,
yes. Nick told her as soon as she was old enough to understand. She
would talk to me about taking one of the horses and trekking to
Virginia; she was six or seven at the time and didn’t understand
where the USA was.”

“
Angela,
don’t answer this if you don’t want to, I won’t be offended.” He
paused as she turned to look at him; sadness cloaked her wet
eyes.

“
Pete, its
all in the past now. I had one rotten husband who I loved madly and
then a wonderful husband who loved me madly, if only the two
burning passions of my life had coincided in one man. Both are dead
now; one shot, and one the victim of an unexpected heart attack.
It’s just me now. Maybe it’s best that way.”