‘Fuck me,’ Payne whispered, ‘it’s like a room full of Amy Winehouses. I’m sure you don’t have to be Jewish to work here, for that would be illegal, wouldn’t it, but I’m even surer it helps.’
The woman seated at the desk nearest to the entrance looked up at them. They judged that she was probably the oldest of the five. ‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Mrs Radnor, please,’ the DCS replied, showing her his warrant card. ‘Police. I’m Chief Superintendent McIlhenney, from the Met, and this is Chief Inspector Payne, from Strathclyde.’
‘Aunt Jocelyn’s busy, I’m afraid. She’s making a new product video, and can’t be disturbed.’
McIlhenney smiled. ‘I think you’ll find that she can. But we’d all prefer it if you did it, rather than us.’
For a moment or two, the niece looked as if she might put up an argument, but there was something in the big cop’s kind eyes that told her she would lose. And so, instead, she sighed and stood. ‘If you’ll follow me.’ They did. ‘Can you tell me what this is about?’ she asked as they reached the private room on the right.
‘Family matter,’ Payne told her.
‘But I’m. .’ she began, swallowing the rest of her protest when he shook his head. ‘Wait here, please.’ She rapped on the door and stepped inside.
They waited. For a minute, then a second, and then a third. McIlhenney’s fist was clenched ready to knock, when it reopened and Jocelyn Radnor, glamorous, late fifties and unmistakably Golda’s mother, stepped out. She did not look best pleased, even under the heavy theatrical make-up that she wore.
‘Gentlemen,’ she exclaimed, ‘I haven’t a clue what this is about, but it had better be worth it. I’ve been trying to get that bloody promo right for an hour now, and I had finally cracked it when Bathsheba came in and ruined it.’
‘We’re sorry about that,’ McIlhenney said, lying, ‘but it is important, and better dealt with in your office.’
‘If you say so,’ she sighed. ‘Come on.’ She led them into the other room; they found themselves looking down the Elephant and Castle, back towards the tabernacle. The furniture had seen better days, but it was quality. She offered them each a well-worn leather chair and sat in her own. ‘What’s it all about, then? “A family matter,” my niece said.’
‘We want to talk to you about your son-in-law,’ Payne replied.
She tilted her head and looked at him. ‘You’re one too?’ She chuckled. ‘Scotland Yard is finally living up to its name. What about my son-in-law?’ she asked, serious in the next instant. ‘Why are you asking about Byron?’
‘We’ll get to that. Can you tell us, how did he come to work for you?’
‘We needed a buyer, simple as that. Jesse, my late husband, always handled that side of the business, from the time when he founded it. That was the way it worked; he bought, I sold. Eventually, there came a time when he decided to plan for what he called “our retirement”. What he really meant was his own death, for he was twenty years older than me and had heart trouble, more serious than I knew. So he recruited Byron.’
‘How?’
She frowned at the DCI. ‘I don’t know; he recruited him, that’s all. I can’t remember.’
‘Think back, please. Did he place an ad in the newspapers, or specialist magazines? Did he use headhunters?’
Her eyebrows rose, cracking the make-up on her forehead along the lines of the wrinkles that lay underneath. ‘That was it. I asked where he found him and he said he had used specialists.’
‘Do you know anything about his career before he joined you?’
‘Jesse said he had worked for other mail order firms, in his time, and for a bank, but he never specified any of them.’
‘Doesn’t he have a personnel file, Mrs Radnor?’ McIlhenney asked.
‘Please, officer,’ she sighed, with a show of exasperation. ‘This is a family business. We don’t need such things. I know he was born somewhere on the south coast, although I can’t remember where, I know that he never had a father and that his mother is dead, I know that he’s nowhere near as good a buyer as my husband was, I know that he’s a very good husband to my daughter, and I know that he spent some time in Israel, a lot of time.’
‘How do you know that last bit?’
‘The accent would have told me, if he hadn’t. He didn’t get all of that in Sussex. I asked him about it, not long after he joined us; he said that after his mother died he went to work in a kibbutz.’
‘Do they have mail order in kibbutzes?’ Payne murmured.
‘Of course not, but after that he stayed in Tel Aviv for another few years, or so he said.’
‘You didn’t believe him?’
‘Let’s say he was never very specific.’ She paused. ‘Look, to be absolutely frank, my guess has always been that when Jesse took him on he was doing a favour for a friend from the old days.’
‘The old days where?’ the DCI asked.
‘My late husband was a soldier in his earlier life, a major in the Israeli army. He fought in the Six Day War, back in sixty-seven. He didn’t come to Britain until nineteen seventy-two.’
‘But he kept his links with Israel? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes, through work with Jewish charities. He had a couple of friends at the embassy as well.’
‘So, Mrs Radnor,’ McIlhenney murmured, ‘if we told you that the man you’ve known all these years as Byron Millbank was known before that as Beram Cohen, am I right in thinking you wouldn’t be all that surprised?’
‘Not a little bit.’ She gazed at the DCS. ‘So what’s he done, that you’re here asking about him?’
‘He’s died, I’m afraid.’
Jocelyn’s hands flew to her mouth, but she regained her composure after a few seconds. ‘Oh my. That I did not expect. Golda, my daughter, does she know?’
‘Yes, we’ve just left her. You’ll probably want to go to her when we’re finished here.’
‘Of course. When did this happen? Where? And how?’
‘Last week, in Edinburgh, of natural causes.’ He carried on, explaining how it had happened and what his companions had done with his body.
She listened to his story without a single interruption. ‘What was he doing with these men?’ she asked, when he was finished.
‘Planning a murder,’ he replied. ‘You’ve probably heard of the shooting of a senior police officer in Glasgow on Saturday evening. Your son-in-law organised the whole thing. The two guys who buried him were his comrades, soldiers like he was in Israel, working these days for money, not for flags.’
‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, ‘I read of it. His buddies, they’re dead too, yes?’
‘Killed at the scene.’
‘So Byron was a soldier. That’s what you’re saying?’ McIlhenney nodded. ‘Israeli army, I guess.’
‘That and more. Latterly he was Mossad, the Israeli secret service.’
‘So was my husband,’ she told them, ‘in the old days, and for a while after he came to Britain. It all fits. So why did they send him over here?’
‘From what I’m told, he’d become an embarrassment, so he was relocated. He kept in touch with his old community though. The concert hall killing wasn’t the only job he did, not by a long way. I guess it all helped pay for your daughter’s lifestyle.’
‘I have wondered about that,’ she admitted. ‘And Golda, does she know any of this?’
‘Only that her husband had another identity.’
‘Am I allowed to tell her the rest?’
‘If you want to, but do you? Isn’t being widowed enough for her to be going on with?’
‘True,’ she agreed. ‘So why did you tell me?’
‘Because you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’d fall for a phoney cover story when we say we need to take Byron’s computer and all the other records he kept in this office.’