‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to intrude—’
‘You are intruding. This is still extremely painful for me. It’s all public knowledge. I’ve had my whole life eviscerated in the tabloid press. Did you read what they wrote?’
‘Some of it.’
‘They are beasts. They have no humanity.’
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then slowly opened them.
‘My husband had an affair with my son’s Russian tutor. Can you imagine that? This woman came into our house. She sat at our table and she ate our food. She taught our son! I call her a woman, but she was only a girl, twenty years younger than my husband. He took her to Grand Cayman. I did not know this, but I suspected it. Men are like schoolboys. Their whole life, they are schoolboys. He lied to me, but I knew he was lying and I was determined to discover the truth.’
She paused and I saw a shroud of puzzlement cross her face and for a brief moment she had forgotten who I was.
‘Why are you asking about him?’ she demanded. ‘What has it got to do with you?’
‘I’m not here about your husband,’ I assured her. ‘I need to contact the agency that you used . . . the one that employed Mr Hawthorne. It’s difficult to explain, but I’d be very grateful if you could give me their address.’
‘What do you need them for?’
‘I’m looking for someone. I’m hoping they may be able to help.’
‘Someone you know?’
‘Someone I want to know.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Marcus always liked your books,’ she said. ‘So did Harry, my youngest son. I don’t see the two of them very much. Marcus went to Montenegro with his father, and Harry . . .’ She tried to summon up a memory of where Harry had gone. It didn’t come. She reached forward and pressed a remote control resting on the table.
‘I think you are making a mistake,’ she said. ‘The company that I used was extremely efficient. They tracked my husband down. They managed to hack into his telephone, although I thought it was meant to be impossible.’ I had an idea who might have done that for them. It had to be Kevin Chakraborty. But I said nothing. ‘They gave me a printout of every single message he had sent his mistress. They even provided me with filmed footage of the two of them in bed together, first in a hotel in London, later in Grand Cayman. When we divorced, they tracked down all his assets, including properties I didn’t even know we had. There was nothing he could hide from them. They delivered him to me, signed and sealed, tied with a red ribbon.
‘But this is what I want you to know. They enjoyed what they did. I asked them for the truth, but they didn’t need to rub my face in it. They spared me no details of my husband’s infidelity—’
‘Are you talking about Hawthorne?’ I interrupted.
‘Not Hawthorne. No. I liked him. He’s a good man, a kind man – not at all like the people he was working for. I sometimes got the feeling that I wasn’t so much their client as their victim. They belong to a different world to you and me and if you employ them, you will understand what I’m saying. My advice to you would be to stay well away. They will cost you a great deal. How many of these books have you sold? You will have to be very wealthy indeed to afford them, but it is not just your money that they will take from you. They’re like vampires. They’ll suck you dry.’
A door opened at the back of the room and the personal assistant appeared.
‘My guest is leaving,’ Lady Barraclough announced. Then, just as I thought she wasn’t going to give me the information I needed . . . ‘The company is called Fenchurch International. Maria will give you their contact details and their address.’
I got to my feet. ‘Thank you, Lady Barraclough.’
She shuddered. ‘Don’t call me that! I lost the title along with everything else.’ She took one last look at me. ‘Thank you for the book. I would ask you not to return here. I really want nothing more to do with you. Now, I’ll wish you a good day.’
Maria showed me out of the house. When I got to the end of the street, I turned round and looked back. She was still there, watching me, making sure I wasn’t going to come back.
4
I’m not sure what I was expecting from Fenchurch International, but I walked past the drab three-storey building twice before I noticed it was there and even then I wasn’t sure I was right: it didn’t have any signage and one of the numbers had fallen off. The area was prestigious enough – this was, after all, the financial district of the City of London – but the office had all the charm of a civic building put up on the cheap back in the seventies. The architecture was strikingly utilitarian, all concrete and glass, with four rows of identical windows and a nasty revolving door. This led into a cramped reception area with a single woman working on her nails, a headset connecting her to an old-fashioned console on a faux-marble desk.
‘Hello. Can I help you?’ She brightened up when she saw me. I got the impression that despite her job description, this was a receptionist who didn’t have that many guests to receive.
‘I’m here to see Mr Morton.’
‘And you are?’
‘Anthony Green.’ It was probably stupid of me to use my wife’s name. I’d be found out eventually. But it had occurred to me that if I had gone in as myself, they would almost certainly have known my connection with Hawthorne and might have refused to see me.
‘Fourth floor. Room five. You can use the lift.’
The lift was as out of date as the rest of the building, with solid aluminium doors and chunky buttons that sprang back when they were pushed. It moved slowly. The fourth-floor corridor was equally disappointing: not shabby or cheap – despite everything, the rent on this place must have been astronomical – but almost deliberately unimpressive. It must have been years since I had last walked on parquet flooring. A woman with spectacles and her hair tied in a bun hurried past me, nervous and unsmiling, clutching a bundle of papers. I walked past Rooms 1 to 4 and knocked at the one at the end of the corridor.
‘Come!’
Why do some people use that construction? Why do they drop the ‘in’? The voice had come from the other side of the door and I opened it to find myself in a small, square room with a window looking out over railway lines branching out from Fenchurch Street Station, which was about five minutes’ walk away. A man was sitting behind the sort of desk a child or a cartoonist might draw. He had been typing on a laptop computer, but he closed the lid as I came in and looked up affably.
‘Mr Green?’
‘Mr Morton?’
‘Alastair Morton. Please . . .’ He gestured me towards the two identical armchairs that faced each other across an ugly glass coffee table with a couple of files on top.
I examined him as we sat down. He was not an attractive man; somewhere in his forties, out of shape, with a sprouting of hair on his chin that was too scrappy to be a beard, but which nonetheless must have been grown by design. His eyes were tired and his skin was not good. He was wearing a dark jacket and jeans with an open-neck shirt – the same uniform as those Californian tech entrepreneurs who are worth billions and are brilliant enough to have invented some new algorithm or sent tourists into space, but who work on their appearance to suggest the opposite. He had difficulty breathing. Even the short journey from the desk to the chair had tired him. I wondered if he was ill.
Certainly, it was hard to believe that this was the man who employed Hawthorne, his adoptive brother, Roland, and quite possibly John Dudley too. Nothing about him fitted what Lady Barraclough had told me – her sense of being victimised and humiliated. Perhaps she’d met someone else.
‘So you’re looking for a missing person,’ he began. His voice was throaty. He licked his lips at the end of the sentence.