The Dying Light (12 page)
He looked up and shook his head. ‘You just said all that in near-perfect American idiom. You know, you could pass for an American. Look, I wish I was the man you describe but I’m not.’ His eyes flicked to the door. She turned to see a slim black man looking in their direction. Swift gave a tiny shake of his head and the man vanished.
‘A friend?’ she asked.
‘An associate,’ he said. ‘It can wait.’
‘Maybe Eyam’s other friends can help me. Was there anyone special in his life?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘What about his interest in the bell ringers? Did he do any kind of work? Diana Kidd says not, so what the hell did he do out here for two years?
‘Why are you asking all this?’
‘No more diversions - just tell me about his friends,’ she said and then she realised that along the way she had struck a nerve because Tony Swift’s expression had become several degrees more resistant. ‘I met some people at the wake today - Chris Mooney, Evan Thomas and Alice Scudamore. Know any others?’
He began to reel off the names. She looked in her bag for some paper, ignored the envelopes containing the will and the letter, and withdrew the list for the Eyam dinner. On the back she wrote the names of Danny Church, picture framer and sometime journalist; Michelle Grey, a divorcee who lived with the town’s best restaurateur; Andy Sessions and Rick Jeffreys, partners in a web design business; Penny Whitehead, a former probation officer now a local councillor and Paul Sutton, a retired publisher who with Diana Kidd was involved in the Assembly Rooms. He told her that Chris Mooney was a portrait photographer and Alice Scudamore a writer.
The contrast between the list for Eyam’s dinner and the people he mixed with in High Castle couldn’t have been starker. On one side of the piece of paper Mermagen had handed to her during the wake were some of the most powerful people in the land, all of whom knew Eyam well enough for them to travel to his funeral and attend a dinner in his memory; on the other side were his new friends, people you’d find in any provincial town in England making their lives in decent, humdrum obscurity.
Finally Swift wiped his mouth with a napkin and gazed at her with his tongue searching some particle of food lodged in his upper gum.
‘What is it? What do you want me to ask you?’ she said.
‘Anything. It’s not often that I am out with such a beautiful woman.’
‘These people: I know it sounds snobbish but they all seem a bit, well, underpowered for Eyam.’
‘They’re good people,’ he said firmly. ‘And nearly every one of them is suffering because they were friends with Eyam.’
Then he told her with a series of coughs and murmurs that since Eyam’s disappearance, all of them had fallen foul of the law or of the tax authorities. It had taken a couple of months for them to put it together, but as he understood things from his friend, Danny Church, their troubles intensified just after the New Year. All were under some kind of investigation or had been charged under new laws, which they didn’t know existed.
‘What are they doing about it?’ she asked.
‘What can they do? Most of them have broken the law. Penny Whitehead made the mistake of repeatedly writing to some company about global warming and has been charged under the harassment laws. Chris Mooney had his accounts seized. So did Danny Church. Both look as though they will be done for tax avoidance. Alice was an easy target because she’s an ID card refusenik. Her property has been repeatedly seized in lieu of fines for not having a card. They always go for her computer so she can’t write her books and they do a fair amount of poking about among her personal papers. I heard Rick and Andy have had some trouble with their business, and their premises have been searched.’
‘Sounds like someone is looking for something,’ she said.
‘Could be,’ he said. ‘But don’t you go asking about that. Proceed with caution, Miss Lockhart. Some of the larger circle of friends belong to Civic Watch, and be careful how you use that,’ he said, pointing to her smart phone on the table. ‘They can listen to any call or read any message or email you send.’
‘I know. What the hell is Civic Watch?’
‘A quasi-secret network of volunteers - mainly public officials and council employees - who each have a code number. They monitor the communities they live in for signs of anything untoward. They call it “community tension”. It’s all very informal; a way of passing information up to people who may find it significant. It gives the state another pair of eyes - actually hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes. I am a member of CW, though not a very active one it has to be said.’
‘A network of spies and informers. I’ve never read anything about this. Why would you want to sign up?’
‘There’s discreet pressure. It’s easier to join and forget the thing exists than have to explain your reasons for not doing so.’
This depressing fact was the last useful information she got out of Tony Swift. She pleaded exhaustion, paid the bill and left him flushed after darting a strictly consoling kiss to a plump and unloved cheek.
At the hotel, Karl was on the desk. When she asked for her room key he said, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Lockhart, the hotel management must now insist you comply with the identity regulations.’
‘I repeat: you have seen my passport and credit card. What else does the
hotel
need?’
hotel
need?’
‘We need for you to complete this form.’ He slid the papers over the desk with a camp backwards movement of his fingers. She glanced down the list of some forty items contained in the ID Supplement Form which included mandatory fields on credit card details, phone numbers, email address, movements over the last month, including any visits to countries of special interest (Russia, Pakistan, Iran, etc.) and destinations during the period of stay in Britain (dates, addresses and telephone numbers all required). At the base of the form was a panel where the respondent was invited to lift the clear plastic strip, moisten their right index finger with a generous amount of their own saliva and place it firmly on the spongy material in the panel, thus allowing their DNA and fingerprint to be recorded without ‘any further inconvenience’.
‘Can’t we just forget it? I’m leaving tomorrow.’
‘It’s an offence not to complete it,’ Karl said. He handed her a pen with her key. ‘Just leave it here when you’ve finished.’
She sat down in the lobby with the form. Her answers showed an uncharacteristic lack of precision and in one or two questions she simply gave false information and made up her telephone numbers and credit card details. When she came to
Biometric Window
she lifted the flap but failed to complete the procedure.
Biometric Window
she lifted the flap but failed to complete the procedure.
By this time her concentration had wandered to the dinner in the Jubilee Rooms, now visible through a glass door from which a curtain had just been drawn. Her eyes met the heavy gaze of a man in his mid-fifties at the centre of the table, who wore a simple grey suit and a dark-blue and white striped shirt open at the neck. The other men were in dinner jackets. Behind him stood a tall blonde man whom she had seen with Glenny at the wake. Mermagen was leaning into the composition, his expression eager and confidential. On his left, Glenny expounded, and in the foreground two heads nodded in silhouette.
Eden White in chiaroscuro. The few photographs she had seen of him during Calvert-Mayne’s defence of Raussig Systems Inc. showed an unexceptional-looking man of average height, understated in dress with slightly hooded eyes, a smile lurching to the right.
Old Sam Calvert once leaned over her desk to look at the photograph on her computer then placed his hand on the screen to cover the right side of his face. ‘That’s the man we’re dealing with,’ he growled. ‘He’s not the pathetic jerk-off he looks.’ The corporate raptor came into focus: all the power in his face was concentrated in his left eye. The smile on the right side of his mouth became a neat incision on the left. When Sam removed his hand, a mild-looking insurance executive reappeared. ‘He’s a remorseless, two-faced, vindictive bastard.’
In the flesh, White was even less impressive than his photograph, though it was evident from the body language and glances of those around him that he held all the power in the room. He was very still; his eyes moved slowly around the group then settled on her again. She couldn’t tell whether he was appraising her or simply lost in thought, but then he seemed to nod in recognition, perhaps to himself, before his attention moved to Mermagen, who was clinking a glass for silence. A few seconds later the door was closed and the curtain drawn again, but she could still hear the rumble of Oliver Mermagen making the most of his audience.
She got up and placed the identity form on the empty reception desk with a scribbled note saying she would check out in the morning. Instead of going to her room, of which she was heartily sick, she crossed the stone flags of the lobby to the bar and ordered a drink, which she didn’t particularly want, and stared at a huge log smouldering in the grate. She was there about twenty minutes when she heard Mermagen’s voice in the hall, which caused her to sink into the button-back leather armchair. His face loomed in the door.
‘Ah, there you are, Kate: I’ve brought Mr White to meet you.’
White was in the doorway. Kate rose and nodded to him. ‘Hello, she said. ‘Did you enjoy the dinner? David would have been touched, I know.’
Mermagen was looking agitated. Clearly something more was required of her.
‘I would offer you a drink but—’ she started.
‘Yes, I think we have a few minutes. Mr White was interested to know that you were on the other side of the Raussig deal.’
‘A minor legal role,’ she said.
‘You do yourself a disservice,’ said White quietly. ‘My information is that you devised the strategy - the use of the public relations and lobbying firms, the approaches to government.’
‘To match the endeavours of your company, yes, we did, but I am on the legal side. I am a simple lawyer.’
‘I know that it isn’t true,’ he said without smiling and moved to place his hands on the back of the chair in front of her. ‘Yes, I believe we do have time to converse with Miss Lockhart . . . Would you tell them, Oliver.’ Mermagen nodded and vanished.
‘I don’t want to delay you,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bed soon: it’s been a long day.’
White sat down in the chair opposite. ‘You should have been at our event for David: a most interesting evening. We had one or two informal presentations.’
‘David would have loved that,’ she said with such underlined sarcasm that it was surprising White didn’t seem to notice.
‘A deep dive on the purpose of modern government.’
Mermagen appeared between them looking anxious and pulled a chair over. ‘As you know, Kate, Mr White has been putting most of his energies into government through his consultation business and Ortelius, his think tank.’
Kate nodded. ‘But you still have a heck of an empire to run.’
‘I’ve got good people: they look after the day-to-day business, leaving me free for my . . .’
‘Strategic interests,’ said Mermagen.
‘Right,’ said Kate.
‘Oliver tells me you are looking for a new position.’
‘I still work for Calverts. I’m going to their London office after a break.’
‘You should consider coming over to us. We are doing a lot of work on the governmental side, repurposing technologies developed in our corporate arm and applying them to social intelligence programmes. Ortelius has been concerned to deliver solutions that help business and government simultaneously under our long-running Government of Insight project.’
‘That sounds like a Powerpoint presentation,’ she said. ‘What the hell does it mean?’
‘It means that government know what individuals want before they know themselves.’
She snorted a laugh. Mermagen looked nervously at White. ‘You see! I’d be no use to you,’ she said. ‘I can’t even understand what you’re saying. How can the government know what I want before I know myself?’
‘Your behavioural patterns: what people of the same generation, social class, income bracket, beliefs and expenditure want will, ninety-nine point nine per cent of the time, tell us what you want.’
‘I doubt it,’ she said.
‘It is a fact. Government is now learning to read the public in the way corporations like mine have been doing for a long time, and that can only lead to good outcomes, better understanding between the governed and those who govern.’ He continued with a ten-minute speech full of gristly little abstractions and jargon that was delivered with an accent that oscillated between a functional American management drone and a South African sports commentator. What the hell had Eyam seen in him?
White had good recall, yes, and a certain chilly mental organisation, but Sweet Jesus the man was such a bore and, despite his hard, rather plain face, he seemed vain too. It was her father who had pointed out to her that people obsessed with Napoleon Bonaparte were often psychologically flawed. In Napoleon’s self-aggrandising, unprincipled, blood-letting ambition they recognised their own amorality, though it was disguised as something altogether more noble. She remembered now that during the Raussig defence they discovered almost nothing on his personal life: a wife and family long dispensed with, few friends, no culture, and no interest apart from this obsession with Napoleon. There were no skiing or yachting or hunting pictures in the White album. Just White on a dais and White arriving at Bohemian Grove in California for his annual misanthropic jamboree with the boys or at the Sun Valley Conference with media and banking moguls. White became American and connected to the most powerful men in American business very quickly indeed, but you didn’t get the impression that his company was sought after. The research department could not work out whether there was a vast secret to White’s life or if he was simply a dismal modern success story.
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