‘I fell asleep,’ Ellie admitted. She’d finished her bath and lain down on the bed, waiting for Doug to get out of the library. The next thing she knew it was six-thirty and the hotel phone was ringing with an alarm call she hadn’t ordered.
‘Did you sleep well?’ Exhaustion slurred his words, but the sarcasm came through sharp and clear.
‘Listen, I’m so sorry. I swear I’ll make it up to you. We knew it was going to be like this in the beginning.’
‘That’s why I told you not to do it.’
‘I promise it’ll settle down.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘It’s six in the morning.’
‘Seven in Luxembourg. I’ll call you tonight.’
‘When are you coming back?’
‘I don’t know.’
His voice became more distant. ‘It’s like you’ve stepped through a door and I don’t exist any more. You’re in your world, and I’m nowhere.’
‘I’ll make it up to you,’ she repeated.
‘I’m going back to Oxford. You know where to find me if you want me. Whenever you’re back in England.’
‘I love you.’ But he’d hung up.
Ellie’s textbook defined due diligence as the careful examination of a company’s records to ascertain all the material facts regarding its financial position. Pry before you buy, the lecturer on her course had called it. In fact, Ellie thought, it was more like trawling your hand through a haystack and seeing how many needles pricked you.
Talhouett Holdings SA occupied one of the big glass blocks overlooking the gorge, just up the street from the hotel. The views might have been stunning, but Ellie didn’t see them. The moment she arrived, a guard led her like a prisoner to a windowless room at the back of the building, the data room. The Monsalvat team — five men and an empty chair — huddled around a plastic table at one end of the room piled with files and cups of coffee. The rival bidder’s bankers had the other end. In between, and all around, stood racks of steel shelving, overloaded with boxes, folders, discs and papers. The entrails of the company for capitalism’s priests to pick over, and read the signs as best they could. They took up so much space that there was no room for aisles between the shelves: instead, the company had invested in library-grade rolling stacks, digitally controlled shelves on wheels, which rolled and rumbled apart like magic doors to open a path to the shelf you needed.
It was like being stuck in a mundane corner of hell. After an hour, Ellie wanted to run screaming from the room — except the door was locked, monitored by a security guard who picked his teeth. By lunchtime, when a sullen girl brought sandwiches and soft drinks, she would have paid back her entire salary to be out of there. Her colleagues all came from the local Monsalvat office: they ignored her, and talked amongst themselves in the Luxembourgeois dialect. She got more attention from their rivals. One in particular, a thin man with a greying ponytail and a tie that drooped well below his collar, seemed to be staring at her every time she looked up. He chewed gum incessantly. That afternoon, as Ellie was coming back from the toilet, she met him going the other way. She tried to brush past with a smile, but he angled himself across the corridor to block her path.
‘Lechowski,’ he introduced himself. He took a pack of gum from his pocket and offered her a stick. ‘I must apologise if I stare at you, but you are the only beautiful thing in that room to look at.’
Ellie had heard similar propositions in every walk of her life, from the streets of South Wales to the hallowed quads in Oxford. She knew she wasn’t extraordinary to look at, but she had some unwanted aura that gave men the impression they had a claim on her. It’s because you look kind, her mother had said, tart as ever. Whatever it was, she still hadn’t got used to it.
‘There’s a lot to get through,’ she demurred. She tried to edge forward, but Lechowski stood firm. He wore a cologne that he’d probably bought in Duty Free. It made a sickening confection with the minty air blasting out of his mouth.
‘You are staying at the Sofitel?’
Her heart sank. Blanchard had said the other bidders were staying there too. Perhaps you can get to know them.
Reluctantly, she nodded.
‘Maybe I see you in the bar this evening. Luxembourg is a graveyard at night, but I know some places to have fun.’
He wouldn’t let her pass without some concession. She offered a false, desperate smile.
‘That would be nice.’
Like the City itself, the Monsalvat building had grown and spread over centuries. You could pick out individual items and date them — a twelfth-century stone still bearing the marks of the chisel that cut it; an eighteenth-century brick baked in the kilns at Southwark; a twenty-first century steel beam designed by computers — but the whole, the way it knit together and functioned, was indivisible, the sum of its history.
In one of its oldest, darkest corners, a filthy figure lay huddled on the floor. His hands were chained together and so were his feet, and those chains were themselves chained together to keep him in an awkward, doubled-over position strung up like a puppet. He couldn’t move one limb without moving them all — and to do so was agony. Both his arms were broken. His legs were a mess of scars and dried blood; the only places you could see skin were where they’d swabbed it clean to attach the electrodes.
But he wasn’t defeated. They’d thrown everything they could at him and he hadn’t broken. He’d held firm to his training, his cause. He hadn’t given them what they wanted.
The door swung open. The thick-set man with the broken nose and the tattoo creeping out from his collar stood in the opening, framed by a wall of sodium-orange light. The face from his nightmares.
‘Let’s try this one more time.’
The knife glimmered in his hand as he advanced into the room.
‘Tell me about Mirabeau.’
Ellie left at six thirty, the last of the Monsalvat team to go. She’d packed up her files fifteen minutes earlier, but sat and waited until Lechowski had disappeared into the stacks before she slipped out. Dusk had already fallen; an autumn chill nipped her cheeks, biting life back into her. She couldn’t face the hotel, so she strolled across the Pont Adolphe to the old town. Far below and out of sight, police tape flapped in the evening breeze.
Ellie hadn’t heard anything from Christine Lafarge, so she assumed their shopping trip was off. She didn’t mind. She wandered through the streets, looking at the bright windows and the passers-by. Many of the shops were familiar, the same chain stores and fast-food franchises you’d find in any major city. But somehow, filled with people speaking other languages, they felt foreign.
The lights and crowds faded away as she moved east, into the oldest part of the town. Here the cobbled streets were narrower and the walls taller, with high-set windows far above the street, as if they still distrusted the world outside. Remnants of the old fortifications began to appear: the stub of a rampart hacked off like a limb; a gateway without gates arching across the road.
The night was getting cold and Ellie had no coat. She decided to go back. She’d reached the bottom of the hill, a small enclave in the ravine where gabled houses peered over a still river. She wasn’t sure if she could get up on the other side; she turned to retrace her steps. And that was when she saw him.
A dim figure stood on the bridge at the bottom of the hill. He wore a white plastic rain cape with the hood pulled up, though there was no rain about. She didn’t know how long he’d been there.
You’re in the middle of a big city in the heart of Europe, she told herself. Of course there’ll be other people about. Except he was the only one, and the bright lights on the plateau above seemed far away, like passing aeroplanes.