NO KISS FOR THE DEVIL (Gavin & Palmer 5) (10 page)

‘What about DI
Pell?’ she reminded him, suddenly remembering the detective. ‘It would be
better if you called him rather than the other way round.’

Palmer gave a
dry smile. ‘Let’s do this first. While I’m still free.’

*********

Pantile
House in the flesh – or at least, it’s equivalent in concrete and glass -
looked even less attractive than the photo images had suggested. Squatting in a
hinterland of narrow streets a stone’s throw from Euston  Station, it appeared
faded and sad in the evening light, a stark contrast to the newer buildings
springing up in the area. The tarmac around the outside of the building was
liberally spread with litter and pitted with holes from years of low
maintenance and heavy vehicle wear, and the louvred shutters at ground level,
indicating a basement, were peeling and drab, in need of a good paint job.

Malcolm Swan
turned out to be a lofty young man in a dark suit, striped shirt and heavy
black brogues. He was waiting for them outside the entrance, clipboard and
mobile in hand. The car park was nearly empty, and an air of silence hung over
the building. There were a few lights left on, and the whine of a heavy-duty
vacuum cleaner drifted out of an open window.

‘I gather you
want to take a quick recce inside,’ he offered eagerly as they shook hands.
When his eyes fell on Palmer, he almost stood to attention. ‘Mark suggested I,
um… get you in, then leave you to it.’ He seemed unconcerned by this strange
request so late in the day, and turned to survey the building. ‘Fourth floor,
Mark said. That right?’

Palmer nodded.
‘That’s the one.’

‘Okey-dokey. In
that case, I’ll do my clipboard bit with the super and get you upstairs. Then
I’ll go take a phone call or two. If anyone asks, you’re out-of-towners
checking out some possibilities.’ He smiled to take any possible offence out of
the comment, adding, ‘Londoners do office hours.’ He turned towards the
entrance. ‘Follow me.’

They entered a
glass-walled reception foyer furnished with a reception desk, a clutch of
chairs and a few pot plants in large tubs. A faint smell of stale polish hung
in the atmosphere, and the strip lighting highlighted the need for a coat of
paint and a layer of carpet tiles to rid the place of its utilitarian
appearance.

Along one wall
was a black wooden board listing the tenants in plastic lettering. The names
gave no useful indication of their function, consisting mostly of acronyms
followed by the universally bland UK or EUROPE. None of them meant anything to
Riley or Palmer.

‘Small
businesses, mostly,’ said Swan perceptively, eyeing the board. ‘Some holding
companies, manufacturing and distribution admin offices, that sort of thing.
Four is empty right across the floor. Now, where is that man?’ He cast around
just as the lift door opened and a tall, thin individual stepped out carrying a
tool box. He was wearing dark blue overalls over a blue shirt and black tie.
‘Ah, Mr Goricz. There you are.’

He made vague
introductions all round and confirmed that the visitors wanted to see the
fourth floor. Goricz nodded affably enough, but made no attempt to shake hands.

‘It’s not
clean, you know?’ he told them, his Central European accent overlaid with
traces of east London. ‘Nobody has been in there for weeks – including me.’ He
seemed impatient to have the viewing over and done with, and moved crabwise
towards the lift without waiting to see if they wanted to inspect any of the
ground floor.

‘No problem, ‘
Swan assured him. ‘They’re here to judge the space, not the dust mites.’

On the way up,
Swan ran through the services and facilities on offer, playing his part to the
hilt without sounding over-zealous. Goricz, meanwhile, stared blankly at the
light board as if signalling that helping to do a selling job on the building’s
facilities wasn’t part of his job description.

The lift
stopped and they all exited, at which point Swan, who was bringing up the rear,
excused himself and held up his mobile, which was buzzing. ‘Sorry – better take
this. You folks go ahead and browse around. I’ll see you down in the foyer.’ He
looked at the supervisor, who was unlocking the doors to the fourth floor
suite. ‘Mr Goricz, do you want to come down with me? I’m sure we can leave Mr
and Ms, umm… to take a peek in private.’

The supervisor
hesitated, then threw open the door and peered inside. He stepped aside and
gestured for Riley and Palmer to go in. As Palmer brushed by him, he was sure
he sensed a wave of tension coming off Goricz, and wondered why.

He and Riley
waited for the lift to go down again before moving through the empty offices.
The floor was covered in drab, brown carpet tiles, with an occasional clutch of
telephone wires showing where workstations had once stood. Other than a few
empty notice boards on the walls, it was clear that whoever the previous
tenants had been, they had left little of value for any incomers to use save
for a single desk. This was in the main office, which ran from the front to the
rear of the building and overlooked the rear car park.

Palmer walked
over and flicked open the desk drawers. They were empty save for a large file
drawer on one side, which held a reading lamp with a green shade, the flex
coiled neatly around the stem. A plain telephone and plastic in-tray stood on
the top of the desk, both covered in dust. Palmer ducked down and checked the
surface against the light from the window, then straightened up and looked
around the rest of the floor.

Riley watched
him moving about. This was Palmer’s speciality. He knew more about examining
buildings and rooms than she did, and she was happy to let him get on with it.

When he came
back and stood next to her at the rear window, he wore a puzzled expression.

‘What’s up,
hound-dog?’ she asked him. ‘You’ve got your worried face on.’

He shook his
head and said loudly. ‘Looks pretty good. Not sure about the street access,
though.’ With that, he walked back to the door, crooking a finger for Riley to
follow. She caught on quickly: now was not the time or place to talk about why
they were really here.

When they were
out in the stairwell, he turned and said quietly, ‘For a place that’s been
empty for ages, the desk is completely dust-free, but the phone isn’t. There’s
a reading lamp in one of the drawers, and the inside felt warm, although it
could have been my imagination. But the nearest wall socket switch is in the
‘on’ position and there’s no dust on that, either. The others are all off and
haven’t been touched for a long time.’ He opened his hand. He was holding a
toffee wrapper with a small dab of brown, sticky substance at one end. ‘This
was on the floor near the door. The toffee’s still moist.’

‘A supervisor
with a sweet tooth?’

But even as
Riley said it, she recalled the man’s words just before they had entered the
lift: ‘Nobody has been in there for weeks – including me.’

*********

By
nine the following morning, refreshed by a few hours sleep, Riley had completed
researching what she could find of Helen Bellamy’s life. There was almost
nothing of a personal nature.

A schools
reunion site yielded some names from a meeting a year ago, but nothing recent.
Helen’s professional record, which was spread across a wide range of business
topics, showed a varied and regular pattern of work, although strangely,
nothing for the last six weeks. But that, she decided, could be because Helen
may have been working for publications without a web presence, and therefore
with no electronic link to the Internet. She had worked for a number of small
but solid magazines and newspapers, and was clearly building up to a more
prestigious future when she had met her untimely death.

She had
belonged to one or two journalism or writing-related support groups, but they
were also woefully thin on detail. Riley’s conclusion was that Helen Bellamy
had been a very private person, and had left almost nothing of a footprint,
unless it was with people who had known her well. People like Frank Palmer, who
appeared to have known precious little.

For a change of
pace and atmosphere, she turned her focus on the background, work and minutiae
of ‘Kim’ Al-Bashir, retailer, multi-millionaire, investor and speculator.

Originally
named Muammar, after his grandfather, Al-Bashir had decided shortly after
arriving in England to call himself Kim – a fact which had earned him the
early, taunting tag of ‘Johnny English’ both from the press and his enemies.
Al-Bashir seemed to have developed the knack of courting the former when it
suited him, and evidently had no shortage of the latter. Rumour suggested that
these enemies stretched from his birthplace in Egypt to the corridors of
Whitehall in London, many of them the trampled human casualties from numerous
business dealings and his ruthless desire to rise to the top.

Al-Bashir’s
biggest problem seemed to be his belief that, having bought a large amount of
London property during the ‘eighties, including a chain of household department
stores with a flagship address and branches all over the country, he should
have been riding high in the nation’s consciousness and hearts, loved and
respected by all.

Sadly for him,
this had not happened. As if in compensation, he had surrounded himself with a
small army of security men, and the stories of how he dealt with perceived
enemies were numerous. He had been investigated many times, some of his men had
been charged with assault or intimidation, but nothing had stuck, confirming
the belief among many in the press that, in spite of his claims to the
contrary, he had friends in high places.

Yet when it
came down to basics, all Riley managed to find was that Al-Bashir - rich,
powerful and seemingly paranoid - was no worse than many other rich, powerful
businessmen. He had more money than most and, if rumour in the city was true,
backers with unlimited resources to help fund his various business ventures.
But in that he was hardly unique.

One of those
ventures, verified in the on-line city pages of the nationals, concerned
Al-Bashir’s desire to become a leading player in the telecoms market. He had
bid for a share of an imminent release of licences across Central and Eastern
Europe, effectively seeking to supply, equip and run the entire cellular
network across a vast land base. According to the Financial Times, Al-Bashir
already had a share in the huge new Batnev satellite system which, once hooked
up, would control a substantial amount of mobile phone and wireless
connections. It was rumoured that the low cost of the new system would allow
him to mop up subscribers across an even wider area, including parts of the
Middle East and even sections of the hugely profitable European subscriber
base, where subscribers were no longer troubled by brand loyalty.

Riley turned to
the folder Varley had given her. She had deliberately left this to one side
until she had formed opinions based on her own research. Much of it merely
confirmed what she had already discovered, probably culled from the same public
domain sources. Al-Bashir, it said, was after some very big fish indeed, and
could, if successful, change the face of a large part of the communications
world across Eastern Europe.

A note on a
single sheet of paper in the file caught Riley’s eye. Folded in on itself, it
was snagged between two other documents. There was no indication where the
information had come from or where it was supposed to fit. Although typed, it
read almost like an afterthought.

Apart from the
established providers (already bidding), there could be other obstacles in
Al-Bashir’s way. These amount to a number of previously unidentified wealthy
individuals or equal-interest groups with a strong desire to keep control of
the market in local hands while taking advantage of the enormous potential
offered. Although largely resident abroad, these émigrés (oligarchs?) still
command substantial resources and considerable influence in the region from
local (state) up to national level, in some cases capable of outstripping bids
from the more impoverished national treasuries. Singly or as a group, they
should not be discounted.

Oligarchs.
Riley sat back. That word again. Coincidence? It must be. She forged on, her
thoughts drifting to whether Al-Bashir had considered how unpopular his bid was
going to make him if he succeeded. Commercial enemies were one thing and to be
expected. But consumer resentment of one man’s grandiose schemes was something
else entirely, and very unpredictable. If he had thought it through, he was
evidently unconcerned by it.

Reading further,
she found other disturbing questions coming to the surface. They concerned
Asiyah, Al-Bashir’s young and beautiful - but rarely seen - wife. A gifted
musician and artist from a traditional Alexandrian family, she had walked into
his store one day, and by the time she was ready to leave, Al-Bashir had
proposed.

Some of the
press speculation and reports included mention of Asiyah’s alleged taste for
the high life, free of the restrictions of her family and homeland. But why
not? She was the wife of a wealthy man who clearly liked to indulge her. There
were reports that he was protective of her, some suggesting to a degree beyond
the merely reasonable. One of Al-Bashir’s security men had been dismissed for
allegedly looking at Asiyah too openly, while another had been sacked,
subsequently accusing Al-Bashir of having him beaten up for disagreeing with
Asiyah over a question of her personal safety.

Yet again,
nothing startling, given the kind of life these people led. Mildly eccentric
behaviour came with the territory. But press reports fed eagerly on the
mundane, turning it as if by magic into something else, coloured and
re-packaged for public consumption.