“What about your ex-members? Russell’s dead.”
“Same difference. It’s the Russell family we’re concerned about.”
“All well and good. Under normal circumstances, I’d leave it at that, but something’s come up. We’ve got pictures of his car parked just outside.”
“Does this have something to do with his murder?”
“More than that, actually.” Graves cocked his head and leaned in, whispering confidentially. “Look, Mr. Tweeden, you may keep late hours, but I don’t. If I’m coming here at half-past one, it’s because something serious is up. A question of national security. If you’d like, you can phone the director general.” Graves held out his phone.
“I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“Who’d you serve with?” asked Graves.
“Grenadiers.”
“Parachute Regiment, myself,” volunteered Graves.
“Wankers.”
“Look who’s talking. Got to be a fairy to wear those bearskin caps.”
The men shared a laugh. Tweeden motioned Graves closer. “Look, Colonel. This billet’s a sweet bit of work. Remuneration’s competitive. Members are a nice lot. Russell’s father, the duke, saw my boy into Eton. The only things they ask of you are loyalty and discretion. When a member passes through these doors, he doesn’t want the world following him.”
Graves said that he understood. “This is between you and me. You have my word that it won’t come back to bite you in the arse.”
“All right, then,” said Tweeden. “Guess a little chin wag won’t hurt. But between us and us alone. Lord Russell was here. He arrived at midnight. I greeted him. He wanted a private room. He had a guest coming and he wanted to use the back entry…” A footstep sounded in the doorway behind them. Tweeden shot from his chair. Graves glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of a longish, bony face familiar to every Briton from the age of two up. One of a dozen or so men entitled to use the title HRH, His Royal Highness. The man’s eyes looked Graves up and down, none the happier because of it. A second later he was gone.
The effect on Tweeden was immediate. “You’ll have to leave now, Colonel,” the club manager said icily. “I can’t help you any further.”
Graves rose. “Who was it?” he whispered. “Who did Russell meet with? Give me a name.”
“Foreigner,” said Tweeden. “Name you see on the football pages.” Then, in a louder voice, for public consumption, “It was a pleasure, sir. My assistant will see you to the door.”
“Come on,” said Graves, taking hold of Tweeden’s elbow. “One name. You can do that much.”
Tweeden yanked his sleeve free. “Good evening, Colonel.”
Graves dropped into the front seat of his Rover and slammed the door. “Damn it all,” he muttered under his breath. He’d been a second away from getting the name, and then who of all people should show up? If he weren’t a rationalist, Graves would think that the gods had something against him. He considered running home and packing a bag to join Kate. Her plane was set to leave at five. He might just have time to get an hour or two of sleep.
He felt his phone vibrate and saw that he had received an incoming message from the AVS, Automobile Visual Surveillance. He crossed his fingers. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, Lord…”
He downloaded the message from his in-box into the car’s command center. It was nothing James Bond-like, just a scratched-up color monitor like any other police car had these days. One after another, pictures taken from surveillance cameras in a four-block perimeter of Sloane Square appeared on the screen. He scrolled through them until he caught sight of Russell’s Aston Martin DB12 parked in the same spot he now occupied.
Graves scrolled through the next few photos more slowly. A time stamp on the bottom corner indicated a lapse of two minutes between each picture. It would be sheer luck if he found anything. A Lamborghini passed by, then a BMW, a Mercedes, and an unmissable Rolls-Royce Phantom. He wondered if anyone in London drove a car costing less than a hundred thousand quid anymore.
The source of the pictures switched to the camera at the rear of the club. Graves sat up, remembering that Tweeden had vouchsafed that Russell’s guest had entered via the back door. He scrolled through thirty or forty images before stopping abruptly.
It was the Rolls-Royce again: a black Phantom, the flagship of the brand. It had pulled up opposite the club’s back entrance. Its passenger door was open, but no figure was visible. Tinted windows prevented him from seeing inside the vehicle.
Graves magnified the photo. The license was a vanity plate bearing the number ARSNL 1. Every soccer fan in London knew whom the car belonged to. He recalled the stack of sports magazines about the Arsenal Football Club he’d discovered in Robert Russell’s flat. One more mystery explained.
He called in the plates to AVS, requesting all pertinent registration information. A name, phone number, and address were waiting when he arrived at Thames House nine minutes later. Not an HRH, exactly, but hardly a commoner either, at least not in the general sense of the word. Men and women whose personal fortunes exceeded a billion pounds constituted their own aristocracy, whether they were English or not.
Justice waits for no man, thought Graves as he picked up the phone and dialed the home number listed on the automobile’s registration. He wondered how a billionaire felt about being roused at two in the morning. An angry voice picked up on the seventh ring.
“Da?” demanded the man nicknamed the Great White.
Graves had his answer. He didn’t like it much at all. They weren’t very different from us, after all.
49
Ghosts in the gathering light, the figures floated across the docks, gathering nets, hauling tackle, and coiling ropes as they fitted their craft for sea. It was not yet 5 a.m. and the port of Civitavecchia was wide awake. The docks never sleep, thought Jonathan as he trudged along the quai. He was tired and hungry and his pants were wet from sleeping on the grass in a field outside of town. To the north, intermittently visible through the patchy morning fog, lay moored the massive oceangoing ferries waiting to board at first light and deliver their passengers to ports in Corsica, France, and Spain. To the south, an armada of fishing boats bobbed inside the jetty, readying for another day’s labor.
Jonathan bought a bag of warm roasted chestnuts and found a place to sit, anonymous among the passing seamen. The port looked neither familiar nor strange. Eight years had passed since he’d visited. It had been February, not July, the streets cold and empty, the town melancholy. Hardly a place begging to be visited.
Yet Emma had insisted they come.