‘A hostile takeover?’
‘It will be a monumental battle. Both the French and German governments own stakes. If the French sell to us, the Germans will refuse; if the Germans sell, the French won’t. In fact, probably neither of them will do business with us, because they will suspect us of being a Trojan horse for the other. Between them, they own 40 per cent of the company. That makes it difficult for us. All the cards must fall our way. But Michel is determined.
‘We need you for this, Ellie. Your mother’s condition could last for months and you cannot put your life on hold all this time. It goes on.’
He pressed the letter-opener into the desk, pushing a dent in the leather blotter. ‘It would be difficult, I think, to keep working for Monsalvat if your mother remains in Newport.’
A week later she got a reply. The message was so well hidden she almost missed it: slipped into the folds of a free newspaper handed to her on the street as she walked towards the Barbican. The distributor thrust it into her chest; then, when she took it, held on a moment longer, so she was forced to look up. The yellow cap was pulled low over his face, but she recognised Harry’s worried features below it. The next moment, he spun away to press another newspaper on an unwilling commuter. She looked out for him again the next day, but he wasn’t there.
Two nights later, she got off the bus on the Fulham Road and walked back to the corner, checking to make sure no one was following. Old Church Street, the message had said, though there was no church Ellie could see: only an antiques shop and a plain brick wall disappearing around the corner. But there was a churchyard, an orphaned parcel of land long since forgotten. Ellie had seen it from the top deck of the bus, behind the wall she was now approaching.
Paint peeled from a green door in the walclass="underline" it looked as though it must have rotted shut years ago, but when Ellie pushed, it opened with barely a squeak. Ahead of her, a dozen rows of gravestones stood half-sunk into the soil, like some Neolithic monument.
‘I’m sorry we couldn’t find somewhere more convivial.’
In other circumstances, a lone figure loitering in the shadows of an abandoned graveyard would have made her jump. Today, she was too tired. Harry stood against the wall where the bus passengers couldn’t see him, watching through the arms of a moss-covered cross. He beckoned her over.
‘Are you trying to scare me?’
He shook his head. ‘You have no idea how difficult it’s been. Blanchard has you covered every second you’re out of the office. Seems to know where you’re going even before you step out the door.’
‘That’s not hard. I go to the office, I go home. That’s about it.’
Ellie thought back, trying to picture any unexpected coincidences, recurring faces. As ever, Harry sounded like a polite, soft-spoken lunatic. Except now, she thought, I have to believe him.
If he was right, she didn’t have much time. ‘Tell me about my father. Did he work for Monsalvat?’
Harry scratched a hunk of moss off the cross, exposing the white stone underneath. His finger came away black.
‘He didn’t get the job. In Brussels, I told you that I belong to an organisation. Call it a brotherhood, though we’ve nothing against women. We’ve been fighting a war against Monsalvat, on and off for almost nine hundred years.’
It was an extraordinary statement, but all Ellie could think to say was, ‘The bank’s only existed since the sixteenth century.’ Only.
‘As a bank. As an entity, it goes much further back. Saint-Lazare de Morgon, who founded the bank, was a descendant of a Norman warlord called Lazar de Mortain. Even by medieval standards, he was a particularly vile piece of work.’
‘Why did my father apply for a job there?’
‘He was reconnoitring. You remember I told you he died trying to break into the vaults?’
‘It’s not the sort of thing you forget.’
‘Nine hundred years ago, Lazar de Mortain stole something that belonged to our brotherhood. So far as we know it’s still there, locked deep in the vault.’
Ellie remembered the vault shuddering as the train roared past. She imagined the bright headlamp reaching round the corner. A figure caught in its beam, no time to react. The screech of steel, burning metal, an impact. Sometimes, when she was working late and the office was quiet, she could feel the floor shiver, echoing the faint rumble far below.
‘Monsalvat, for all its lip-service to the modern world, is effectively a feudal household. Michel Saint-Lazare’s the king, and Blanchard his loyal seneschal. He’s also Saint-Lazare’s nephew, did you know that?’
Ellie shook her head.
‘Saint-Lazare can’t have children. We met up with him once, left him paralysed from the waist down.’ Absentmindedly, Harry played with the button on his overcoat.
Something Blanchard had said popped into her mind, that night after the opera. You don’t need any protection with me. She tried to imagine these old men — so much money, so much power — yet denied the most basic, creative power of all.
‘What about Talhouett? What have they got to do with you?’
‘With us, nothing. They’re just what they seem, a mid-ranking European industrial concern. But, by an accident of history, they own something that belongs to us.’
Ellie remembered his question in the park in Brussels, and Blanchard interrogating her after the due diligence. ‘Mirabeau.’
‘You don’t need to know what it is. But somehow Saint-Lazare found out about it. When we heard he was prowling around Talhouett, we sent someone in to find out what he knew.’
Ellie saw a shadow move on one of the gravestones. Perhaps she wasn’t too tired to be frightened after all. But it was only a squirrel.
‘It went wrong. One man died, another got captured. He’s dead too.’
‘Captured by …?’
‘Blanchard? Saint-Lazare?’ Harry shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. Blanchard’s got a henchman who probably did the dirty work, a nasty chap called Destrier.’
‘I’ve met him.’
A bus rumbled by on the Fulham Road. The lights of its upper deck seemed to hover in the night, men and women floating past with no conception of what was happening in the darkness below.
‘Why did Blanchard recruit me?’ Ellie asked.
‘We don’t know. We didn’t think he knew you existed, or we’d have protected you better. We never meant for you to get mixed up in this. But now that you have … Damn.’
He’d twisted the button on his coat so hard the threads had snapped. He looked at it ruefully.
‘That was new last Christmas.’
Ellie didn’t care about his coat. She didn’t care about a nine hundred year-old knight, or a brotherhood who wanted to bring down the bank.
‘What do you want me to do?’
Never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer, they’d taught on her negotiating course. But you always knew. Even speaking to Mrs Thomas in the thicket in Switzerland, she’d known what was coming. It was as if, in the intake of breath, you could hear the words that would re-emerge.
‘We want you to break into the vault.’
‘What’s in it?’
He dropped the button into his pocket. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
‘You want me to risk my life for it, but you won’t tell me what it is?’
‘I can’t.’ Harry shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘When you’ve got it — when you’re safe — I’ll show you everything.’
‘But my dad knew what it was.’
‘Your father had devoted his life to it.’
She tried a different tack, pretending she hadn’t already decided. ‘You said you didn’t want me mixed up with this.’