Stealing People (9 page)
07.45, 16 January 2014
Wilton Place, Belgravia, London SW1
E
ight-year-old Sophie Railton-Bass was standing at the window of the lower sitting room of her mother’s house in Wilton Place looking down into the street, waiting. She was wearing the uniform of Francis Holland Junior School. A navy-blue pullover, white shirt, blue and grey checked skirt, navy-blue tights and sensible black shoes. The only thing she was holding was a rag doll frog called Zach. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail, apart from one long wisp that hung from her forehead and which she sucked in the corner of her mouth. A black Jaguar
XJR SWB
pulled in to the kerb below. The driver, a man in his sixties in grey trousers and a purple pullover, got out, looked up at the window and opened his arms as if the love was radiating forth. He smiled. Sophie waved at him.
‘Pat’s here, Mum. I’m off now.’
‘Have you got your coat?’
She shrugged into the thick grey coat with dark collar and buttoned it up.
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t I get a kiss?’
‘If you insist on a kiss I’ll resist till you miss so desist or I’ll hiss.’
‘Why do you talk such rubbish?’ said Emma Railton-Bass.
‘It’s not rubbish. It rhymes.’
‘Come here.’
Sophie walked a tightrope to her mother and held her face up, eyes closed, lips pursed. Her mother took hold of her little face in both hands and kissed her on the cheek and forehead.
‘Now don’t go distracting Pat,’ said Emma, opening the door, guiding her daughter down the stairs. ‘I want you there in one piece.’
‘Which piece?’ Sophie said, turning at the front door and holding up her hand and foot. ‘This one … or that?’
‘All of you.’
‘Love you, Mum,’ she said, waving Zach at her, and disappeared down the final flight of stairs and out of the door.
She trotted towards the Jaguar. Pat Gould opened the passenger door and gave her an exaggerated Elizabethan bow.
‘Where to, ma’am?’
‘I think I’d like to go to Versailles today,’ said Sophie.
‘Traffic’s abominable … coaches and horses all the way out of the Channel Tunnel, ma’am.’
Sophie sighed.
‘In that case you’d better just whisk me away to Sloane Square, and don’t spare the nags.’
Gould pulled out, took his normal route to Sloane Square. The streets were all empty of people at this time of day.
‘The crowds are terrible this morning, ma’am,’ he said. ‘They’ve all come out to see you.’
He cut down Lyall Street and was surprised by a couple of workmen in white hard hats, yellow goggles and dayglo jackets standing by a red and white barrier in front of a pile of rubble, pointing at him and urgently waving him off to his left. It was so quick he didn’t have time to think. He just turned the wheel, coasted up the ramp of the pavement, under an arch and into a mews.
A huge white plastic scaffolding sheet broke away from the building on his right and descended over the car so that he had to jam on the brakes. In seconds the driver’s door was opened and a rag was closed over his face. His eyes widened, which was all the reaction he could muster to the sting in his neck from a needle. He slumped across the gearstick. Exactly the same thing happened on Sophie’s side, except as the rag closed over her mouth and nose, she felt herself being torn from the car. She clung on to Zach. The scaffolding sheet billowed as her vision collapsed into absolute darkness.
Boxer was standing in front of the almost empty One Hyde Park, whose penthouse apartments with views over trees and greenery to Speakers’ Corner and Marble Arch changed hands at £140 million. He called Amy, asked if Siobhan was stable.
‘She’s still sleeping.’
‘What about you?’
‘What about
me
? I’m all right.’
‘You had a bit of a shock last night.’
‘The rape … was terrible,’ said Amy, ‘but the way she took it was almost worse. It was as if she … as if she thought she deserved it or that it was to be expected.’
‘She’s used to extreme reactions to her gender,’ said Boxer. ‘And she’s no shrinking violet, but maybe all that charisma attracts the wrong kind of people.’
‘People like me, you mean?’
‘No, Amy, in fact I think you’ve been a positive influence,’ said Boxer. ‘What I meant was: she craves the attention even if it comes with violence. She doesn’t want anybody to be indifferent to her.’
‘I find her kind of fascinating,’ said Amy, distracted, unintentionally verbalising a thought.
‘She told me, by the way.’
‘Yes, she kept telling me how interested people are in her,’ said Amy. ‘Lucien Freud wanted her to sit for him, you know that?’
‘I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing,’ said Boxer. ‘Siobhan told me you’d kissed last night. That must have been … confusing?’
‘She told you
that
?’
‘I told you she likes the attention. I didn’t have to prise it out of her. Be careful what you tell her and what you show her.’
‘
Christ
,’ said Amy, mortified. ‘Did she blurt anything else out?’
‘Was there anything else to blurt?’
Amy had a flashback to the intensity of last night’s sexual anticipation and decided that was too much information for her father even with their new relationship.
‘We were having a drink in the gallery bar after seeing the show and she just snogged me … I couldn’t do anything about it.’
‘I’m here if you need to talk,’ said Boxer. ‘Your mother’s worried about you. And you should call her because, and don’t get annoyed with me for not telling you this, Marcus was kidnapped last night and—’
‘Holy shit, Dad. What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ said Amy. ‘How can you be so cool about something like that? Mum’ll be in a total state.’
‘She is, and I didn’t tell you for very obvious reasons, but now that I know you’re OK, I think it would be a good idea for you to call her,’ said Boxer. ‘I’ve just been talking to Glider, see if he was involved.’
‘Was he?’
‘Doubtful,’ said Boxer. ‘Anyway, call your mother. She could use some support. I’m going to see Tanya Birch now.’
‘Isn’t it a bit early?’
‘Mark Rowlands cleared the way. She’s got a meeting up north this afternoon and she’s leaving early, so we agreed an 8.15 meeting,’ said Boxer. ‘Call me when you’ve spoken to your mother, and remember, nobody in her office knows about Marcus.’
He hung up, rang on Tanya’s doorbell in the arched porch of a five-storey Edwardian mansion block on Hans Crescent, not far from Harrods. He went up to her second-floor flat. Tanya was a petite blonde with skinny legs under a very short black miniskirt, a tight black cashmere V-neck sweater and a fine gold chain around her neck from which hung a small gold cross. Her hair was shoulder length and close to platinum in both price and colour. Her hands were surprisingly large, almost manly, and sported complicated rings with brown diamonds, semi-precious stones and twisted gold and silverwork that looked like plant life. She led him into her living room, where she indicated the white leather sofa that had featured in Siobhan’s little tale of sexual
flagrante.
‘So what’s happened to Con?’ she asked, sitting in a white Arne Jacobsen egg chair with her legs joined tightly at the knees.
‘He’s disappeared. We’re trying to find him. You’re the obvious starting point.’
‘He didn’t even call me,’ she said, icily.
‘Perhaps he was here strictly on business.’
‘He’s always here
strictly
on business. That’s never stopped him calling me before. Makes me wonder how many times he has been here and not called. Mind you, that little … Siobhan,’ she said, biting back something nastier, ‘always seems to take delight in calling me whenever she’s along for the ride just to let me know he’s not getting in touch. Bitch or … whatever you’d call that sort of thing.’
‘You don’t get on with Siobhan?’
‘That’s probably the understatement of the decade,’ said Tanya. ‘She’s a trollop or whatever you call someone of her sex who throws themselves at anything that moves. I suppose slut would cover it. There’s even been a
disgrazzia
here in my own home.’
‘She mentioned that.’
‘Did she?’ said Tanya.
‘Any particular reason why Siobhan would take against you?’
‘Jealousy,’ said Tanya, with no doubt. ‘It was like that from the outset. I tried to be … nice. I offered to take her shopping and she didn’t show up. I had her here to stay and she behaved appallingly. I went out of my way to be accommodating and she was just plain nasty in return. So … she’s banned now. We barely speak, although she did call a few days ago to make sure Con wasn’t with me but, as usual, I just thought she was taking the opp to rub my nose in it. I only really took it seriously when Mark Rowlands called.’
‘When did you last have contact with Conrad?’
‘On the sixth of January. We’d spent Christmas and New Year together …’
‘Where?’
‘Con had rented a house in the Cotswolds.’
‘Was Siobhan there?’
‘Only over Christmas.’
‘Were any of Con’s friends or business contacts with you at any stage?’
‘I’m not sure Con has any friends as such. We socialise with my circle. As for business contacts, he keeps that separate, although somebody did turn up on New Year’s Day. An American with one of those really unlikely names that only Americans have – Walden Garfinkle.’
‘Did he stay?’
‘He joined us for lunch but didn’t say much. He was very polite and revealed nothing. He was very hairy. I mean a really dark five o’clock shadow. Hands like a chimp’s, eyebrows and ears sprouting all over. He even had hair on the outside rims of his ears,’ she said, shuddering. ‘He was in a dark blue suit, white shirt, a red bow tie and looked very Ivy League. Oh, and he had huge and utterly perfect white teeth that looked as if they’d torn many a steak and possibly human beings apart.’
‘Did Conrad offer any explanation?’
‘That he was a business associate,’ said Tanya. ‘After he’d gone, my friends all thought he was
CIA
and Con didn’t bother to persuade them otherwise.’
‘And that’s the only person you’ve ever met?’ said Boxer. ‘Did Conrad talk to you about his work?’
‘Never.’
‘Did you ever overhear conversations, phone calls?’
‘Bits and pieces when he was talking in English, nothing that would give me or you any idea of the sort of thing he was up to,’ said Tanya. ‘There were definitely times of great intensity: the Arab Spring at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011. Libya and Syria still get talked about even today. And then that guy, the whistleblower …’
‘Edward Snowden.’
‘Yes, him. When he came out into the open in June last year, the phone calls were endless. A lot of Hong Kong Chinese, Russians and Spanish as I remember it.’
‘Was Con good at languages?’
‘Yes, which was why I didn’t pick up that much. He is fluent in Arabic, Russian, Spanish and French and can get by in Mandarin but not Cantonese. He has a whole bunch of other lingos that he knows enough of to eat, drink and be merry in, as he put it.’
‘Did you talk about the Arab Spring or Snowden? Did he reveal any sympathies to you?’
‘He was pro the Arab Spring and anti Snowden. Or rather, that’s my generalised reading of his feelings. He thought these oppressive Arab regimes had it coming to them. As for Snowden, he seemed to find his actions brave but foolhardy. He was astonished at the outraged reaction of the world. He thought everybody must have been delusional if they believed that governments hadn’t been accessing private data since the internet began.’
‘Did you know that Con was a private contractor to the US military?’
‘Those words have never been said to me in that order, but I’ve gathered as much.’
‘How would you describe his behaviour before and after the visit from Walden Garfinkle?’
She sat back in the chair, crossed her legs, toyed with her gold chain.
‘You know, Con wasn’t the sort of man you could read very easily,’ she said. ‘He was attentive without ever being intimate, which was fine by me. I’m sixty-two years old and I’ve had my fair share of intimacy and not much of it did me any good. So Con was refreshing in that respect. I always felt there was a whole other world going on that none of us knew about, but Con did, and he was working some of the levers. So to answer your question, there was no
apparent
difference, certainly not at the lunch when Walden was still there. But after he left, Con went into the library room at the house and sat there on his own staring out of the window for probably an hour. I went in there and called his name and he didn’t even turn, let alone answer. Later on we had supper with the guests who were staying and he was back to his usual self. When everybody had gone to bed, he went back into the library with a glass of Springbank, his favourite whisky. I heard him talking on the phone but I didn’t see him until morning. No explanation, but that was Con. After that, he was fine.’
‘What happened on the sixth of January?’
‘We came back to London. I dropped him at Heathrow where he was meeting Siobhan to fly back to Dubai. He called me a few days later. He made no mention of coming back to London. He asked after me, my son and two daughters, the grandchildren. Yes, he always liked a sense of family. That was strange, but then again, given that he only had Siobhan and she’s sterile, I suppose he hasn’t got anything like that to look forward to.’
‘Can you think of anything that would make him want to walk out of his current life?’
‘If I was Con, the only thing that would make
me
want to walk out of my life would be Siobhan.’
‘Just out of interest, how old is Siobhan?’
‘You’d never get a straight answer out of her,’ said Tanya, shaking her head. ‘She’s a myth-maker, a fantasist, a fabricant. She’s twenty-three, born on the twenty-fourth of November 1990. I saw her passport when I went to get her a visa.’
