Out of control (14 page)

They both looked astonished.

“You must be kidding.”

“I’m being perfectly serious.”

I told them the true story I’d heard of a Development Director who had decided to expand into Europe and picked Italy as his target country. So his company bought a small company in Milan. It had seemed totally illogical because other countries had more potential. He justified it to his board with all sorts of figures and graphs but it turned out that the real reason was simply that he had a girlfriend who lived in Milan that his wife didn’t know about.”

“You’re joking.”

“I can assure you I’m not.”

They both looked a little subdued at the thought.

“It’s for reasons like that that a lot of acquisitions don’t work. So we’ll not worry too much about the motive. Let’s assume that it’s to get a hold of the data you have to help him with the approval for the drug based on the patent. Or maybe he just wants to rub your nose in the dirt. Have you ever met him? I’ve seen a couple of videos of him and, with what Brian Dawson told me, that wouldn’t surprise me. That guy has got a giant-sized ego and people like that can act strangely and totally irrationally - irrationally as we see it but, to them it’s rational. It helps to confirm the illusion of power.”

“But even if he did have forty percent that doesn’t give him access to internal company information. He’d only be a shareholder.”

“If that’s what he wants I’ll guarantee you that within a month he’ll approach either you two or Antoine to buy up enough to give him a majority then he’ll be able to do what he wants.”

Helen went as white as a sheet.

“But…..”

“Don’t worry about that yet. Let’s just concentrate on presenting a good story to Albion.”

*

We discussed how to fine tune the presentation to give us the best chance of Albion Venture Capital not selling and agreed to meet in Edinburgh the following Wednesday, half an hour before the meeting. I drove into town to meet Mike and we set off north in the two cars. Mike followed a hundred yards behind me but we had no incidents. We arrived in the early afternoon. Pierre and Sophie were not due until early evening.

Only Heather and Liam had so far met Maggie although the others knew of her. So I was naturally interested in their reactions. Mike took to her instantly and, just as importantly, so did Oscar.

I unloaded the car while Maggie showed Mike to his room. We celebrated our safe arrival with a quick beer and I proposed to take Mike for a bit of fishing for an hour or two. I’m not much of a fisherman but I knew he was.

We hiked the two miles across the heather to the loch which was kept seeded by the locals in the village. Mike set to work flicking flies at the surface of the water and I lay down in the heather, my back to a rock and just enjoyed the calm stillness of the surroundings.

Mike gave up after an hour. Nothing was biting. He packed up the rod and we sat companionably for a while. Mike produced a hip flask of Balvenie which didn’t do us any harm. We rested quietly and admired the wildness of the mountains around us. In the distance a small herd of deer came over the skyline out of a corrie, their antlers silhouetted against the blue sky.

“Isn’t that a wonderful sight,” said Mike, and then “Come on. Time to get back.”

He got to his feet and offered me his hand to pull me up. I refused and obstinately levered myself up to the vertical on my own. He grabbed his gear and we headed back to the hotel.

“So what are you planning to do now?” he asked. “This car business - what’s your theory?”

“I don’t think there’s a lot of doubt. Someone clearly wanted either to get rid of us or, at least, warn us off. As I told you the only person it could possibly be is Macek.

“We know that Irina was brought over to work for LyonPharma in Edinburgh and Macek effectively managed her. She was behind the operation on Liam and she was somehow involved in drugs. It looks to me like Macek was running Irina for two different bosses - Dugain for the patent bit and the Romanians for the drugs.”

I thought back to my impression of him when I’d seen him in Edinburgh.

“I wonder what nationality he is. He didn’t look British and he had a slight accent. Do you think there’s any way you could find out?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he replied.

I returned to my theory.

“If I’m right he must have known Liam’s name and made a connection when he heard mine. Then he’d be wondering why I was sniffing around the Edinburgh offices and decided to warn us off. It would have been easy to note my car number and trace me to Letham. Then they could have planned the ambush. I quite often take that road.”

“Just because you were poking your nose around to find out if Liam had been set up?”

“No. Not just that. What would scare him more is that I might be following through on the murder of Irina.”

“Because you think he bumped off the girl?”

“That’s what I’m definitely starting to think.”

“Let’s run it through again. Macek wangles it so that Irina comes over to work for him in Edinburgh and he uses her to push drugs around. Maybe the Romanians got her the job at LyonPharma in France in the first place.

“Dugain knows about Bioscope’s work and realises its potential so he calls Macek and asks him if he’s got anyone who can do a bit of spying for him. Macek proposes Irina and Dugain supplies Liam’s name. They succeed and he passes the information back to Lyon and gets a feather in his cap.

“Then for some reason – maybe because she’d been picked up by the police – he thinks Irina has become a danger and so he bumps her off. “Then you turn up in Leith because you want to satisfy yourself about what really happened to Liam and he thinks there might be more to it and, to play safe, he tries to get rid of you. As luck would have it Liam’s in the car with you so, had he succeeded, he’d have been in the clear. Nobody could have linked him with either the patent business or anything to do with drugs.”

I nodded. “Can you think of another explanation? And to round it off he brings a new girl over to carry on where Irina left off.”

We were now approaching the hotel.

“Let’s not talk about this in front of the girls. I don’t want them worried. If we get a chance during the weekend to fill in Pierre and see what he thinks we will. And you can see if you can imagine another plausible scenario. Meanwhile, as far as Lindores is concerned, it was just an accident, OK?”

He nodded agreement and we went in and through to the bar for a refreshing beer.

Maggie came through shortly.

“Any luck with the fishing?”

Mike spread out his empty hands and shrugged. “Sorry. They must all have been asleep.”

The sound of a car meant that Pierre and Sophie had arrived. Mike was off his stool like a shot and disappeared out the front door. I grinned at Maggie. “Young love,” I said with a smile. “Come on, let’s go and welcome them.”

When we got outside Mike and Sophie were already stuck together like glue with Oscar prancing around them like a mad thing, leaving poor Pierre to unload the suitcases, which he dumped on the doorstep. I made the introductions.

From the approving look, the Gallic embrace and the wink to me I knew that he approved of Maggie. Somehow that seemed important to me. Mike and Sophie eventually untangled themselves and came over.

Introductions were made by Mike, and Sophie presented Maggie with a ‘gift from France’. Maggie immediately took her off inside, detailing me to bring the luggage.

Pierre produced a package which looked suspiciously like three bottles. He handed it to me, saying, “For tomorrow evening.”

Our first evening together went as well as I could have imagined. Everyone got on famously. Pierre had to recount some of his history for the benefit of Maggie. Sophie was ecstatic about the journey up, the hotel and the superb ‘sauvage’ countryside and Mike produced a few of his old army stories. Otherwise he just sat and devoured Sophie with his eyes. I simply enjoyed the atmosphere but didn’t say too much. The back of my brain was still playing around with my theory of the events that had led up to the ‘accident’.

After dinner Mike and Sophie retired early and Maggie, Pierre and I lingered over coffee.

I encourage Pierre to have an early night as we had planned some exercise for him the next day and Maggie and I cleared up, closed everything down and hit the sack.

*

We lay quietly together, her head resting on my chest, both of us quietly satisfied with our gentle exertions of the preceding twenty minutes.

Her hand stroked my chest as she nestled against me. My eyes circled the room comfortably as I thought to myself how lucky I was.

Then she murmured “What’s bothering you, Bob?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem to have something on your mind.”

I stroked her back. “Oh, nothing.”

She lifted her head and looked at me. “It’s not us is it?”

“No, no,” I reassured her. “’Us’ is fine. Don’t worry.”

“Well, what is it? It’s something, I can tell. Can’t you share it with me?” I didn’t respond immediately. She raised herself up on her elbow and moved away from me, giving me a full view of her beautifully shaped breasts, the light creating fascinating shadows as she moved a little. “Come on. Out with it.”

I grinned at her. “How in the blazes do you expect me to concentrate on telling you anything while you look like that?”

She looked down, gathered the sheet around her nakedness and moved away from me.

“OK, then. Tell me what’s on your mind or you’ll never see that again,” she grinned.

“That’s blackmail.”

“Absolutely.”

I sighed. How much should I tell her of the whole business? I didn’t want her worrying. Nor did I want her to try to stop us trying to investigate things. So I explained to her all that had happened except my worry about Antoine and the real truth behind my encounter with the waters of Lindores loch. I kept that one as an accident – a momentary lapse of concentration while driving.

She was very upset when she heard what had happened to Liam and disgusted by the viciousness of some sectors of the business community. It wasn’t her world and I think I was glad of that. Maybe my professional career had polluted me and made me cynical and I hadn’t noticed it. Being with her life seemed so much more straightforward.

She smiled at me, leaned forwards and kissed me. “Thanks for telling me,” she said tenderly.

She sat back up and the smile slowly transformed itself into a wicked grin. She stretched her arms above her head and the sheet fell away.

Pierre and I sat comfortably in the lounge with a well-earned whisky. We had spent the day on a seven mile hike across the moors and were exhausted. But it had been worth it. The weather had been just right for our hike - small patches of cloud chasing each other across the sky, allowing the sun to appear and disappear and giving us a random slide show of shadow and colour on the flanks of the hills –greens, browns, purple and grey, with a backdrop of distant mountains. We had returned aching but satisfied and were now enjoying our reward.

Mike and Sophie were at the other side of the room engrossed in a game of scrabble which seemed to be causing no end of hilarity. They were playing in two languages. Sophie was playing in French and Mike in English and there seemed to be a great deal of argument over the rules. Apparently they had decided that a player who made a word which was spelt identically and had the same meaning in both languages received double their score.

Sophie had read somewhere that there are at least three and a half thousand words common to both languages. So far Mike had managed ‘table’ and ‘crayon’.

Maggie was rustling up another culinary delight.

I took the opportunity to update Pierre on what had happened while he was away. He was very concerned by the car incident and listened carefully to my theory about who had been behind it and why.

I asked him if he knew whether Antoine had ever met Dugain.

“I don’t think so. I know he’s still got a chunk of shares in the company but he’s no longer very close to things. He kept in touch when the old owner was still alive but now he just sees it as an investment. He’s actually quite pleased because their shares have risen by fourteen percent since the announcement of the new patent.”

“In spite of the fact that we suspect that they stole the information from Bisoscope,” I added gruffly.

“I know, but Antoine doesn’t know anything about that.”

I let his comment pass.

“Did you manage to find out whether Irina Vasilescu was ever employed by them?”

“Yes, she was, for about six months.”

“Well that confirms what Brian Dawson told us.”

*

Mike, Sophie and Oscar went off the next morning back to Forfar and I left with Pierre for Fife. I bade a reluctant farewell to Maggie, having fixed the date with her for our cruise in three weeks time.

As I had the meeting with Albion Venture Capital on Wednesday, on Monday I treated Pierre to a round on The Old Course at St Andrews. I was able to tell him a little of the history of the game as we fought an offshore wind which helped to keep my slice more or less in the fairway on the first nine but resulted in me playing most of the back nine going down the rough.

My only noticeable feat was when I managed to play ping-pong with the seventeenth green, going from the road across the green and into the bunker and back again to finish with a nine. At least it was one less than the famous occasion when a Japanese competitor in the British Open had ended up with a ten.

Pierre left on Tuesday. We had agreed there was not much more he could do in France except for one thing he suggested that might be useful.

“This girl, Irina,” he said over supper. “If she’s been the victim of a group of criminal elements in Romania, don’t you think we should tell the police?”

“I thought about it but until I’ve more information I didn’t see much sense in telling them here in Stirling. And I’ve got no contact with the police in France which is where they seem to be bringing them. That’s much nearer the source and would be better.”