Could Ian have killed her to prevent her from telling Marcus about Duncan?
Chris had to admit that the answer was probably not. It wouldn’t make sense. Certainly, the police would cause trouble if they asked questions. But Eric was right; as long as all the witnesses on the boat stuck together, they would all be safe. The police couldn’t prove anything. With a shiver, Chris realized that Ian could even try to cut a deal if he agreed to tell the police what really happened in return for immunity from prosecution. That would be bloody typical. Either way, Ian would survive.
No. As much as he liked to think the contrary, Ian was probably not responsible for Lenka’s death.
Chris wished he could talk to Megan about all this. She would be able to add some objectivity. He wondered how she was getting on at Cambridge. Would she even have a telephone? He desperately wanted to call her.
What about Duncan? Megan had suggested that he should find out a bit more about Duncan and Lenka’s recent relationship. But before confronting him, there was someone else he wanted to talk to first.
He looked up the number for United Arab International Bank, dialled it, and asked to speak to Phillippa Gemmel.
‘Securities Trading,’ came the voice, bright and breezy.
‘Pippa? It’s Chris Szczypiorski.’
‘Chris. How are you?’ She wasn’t rude, but she didn’t sound exactly pleased to hear from him.
‘Look, Pippa, do you think we could meet for a few minutes after work? It won’t take long. There’s something I want to discuss with you.’
‘If Duncan wants to talk to me, he can speak to me himself,’ Pippa said.
‘It’s true, I do want to talk to you about Duncan. But he doesn’t know I’m calling you. Please. It won’t take long.’
Pippa was silent for a moment. ‘OK. But I’m leaving at five thirty. Can you meet me downstairs in the lobby?’
‘Fine. I’ll see you there at half past five.’
He hung up. Next, he pulled out the card of the English-speaking Czech policeman who had interviewed him after the murder. Poručík Petr Karásek. Presumably, poručík was his rank. He dialled, and eventually got through to him. Chris asked whether he had made any progress.
‘We have had some success,’ the policeman replied. His English was careful and clear. ‘We found a woman who said she saw a man with a moustache running out of the street where Miss Němečková was killed. We showed her photographs and she identified a criminal we know here who uses a knife. He is Czech, but he works for the Ukrainian mafia. We arrested him. But there are problems. She was not sure of the identificationwhen we put him in a line, and he has a — what do you say? Ah, yes. Alibi, I think?’
‘Yes, alibi,’ said Chris.
‘It may be false. We are still working on that line of inquiry.’
‘So you think the murderer is a local criminal?’ Chris asked.
‘From the way he used the knife, we think he was a professional. Unfortunately, we do have some professional killers in Prague. It is likely it is one of them. Do you have any idea of a motive?’
Chris knew that Karásek was thinking about Carpathian’s investments. ‘No,’ he answered.
‘You are sure Miss Němečková had no business deals in the Czech Republic?’
‘We own two million euros of a CEZ bond and a lot of bonds issued by your government.’ CEZ was the national electricity company, hardly likely to be the centre of an organized crime conspiracy. ‘Besides that, we were planning to open an office in Prague, but I can’t see why that would upset anyone. Have you spoken to Jan Pavlík?’
‘Yes, we have, but with no luck.’ There was a pause. ‘Have you any other ideas for us, Mr Szczypiorski?’
Marcus and Alex was a can of worms that Chris didn’t want to open at that moment.
‘No. Nothing’
Karásek didn’t sound surprised. ‘OK. Thank you for keeping in contact. Goodbye.’
Chris put down the phone. Nowhere. They were getting nowhere. Chris wasn’t convinced by the identification. The more he thought about it, the more he suspected that the key to Lenka’s murder lay in London, or possibly New York, rather than the Ukrainian mafia in Prague.
He stared down at the papers in front of him. There was his portfolio, mocking him. If Amalgamated Veterans did want to withdraw their money, what would he liquidate?
It would be next to impossible to sell the Eureka Telecom position to Bloomfield Weiss now that he had pissed off Ian so comprehensively. He checked the prices with other brokers. They were all floating around the Bloomfield Weiss level, apart from Leipziger Gurney Kroheim who were making the bonds ninety-one to ninety-two. But he knew he’d never be able to offload the whole ten million with them. The truth was Bloomfield Weiss were the market in these bonds, and Bloomfield Weiss didn’t want to buy them.
So what else could he sell?
There were four other relatively small positions in junk bonds that Lenka had bought, plus a couple of better quality issuers like CEZ. All of them were good companies with good prospects. He considered his own large government bond position. This had moved against him following the wobble from Russia, but he was sure it would come back. Now was the wrong time to sell. It would be against all his principles to get rid of his good positions and be left with his bad one.
Then there was the problem of valuation. The fund was revalued once a month, and the February reval was the following day. Technically, he might be able to get away with a price of eighty-eight for the twenty-five million euro position. But he knew that the real price, the price at which he could actually sell the bonds, was more like seventy. That was a seven and a half million loss. Chris winced. The investors would not like that one bit.
But he would have to use that price. He knew what could happen if you didn’t disclose your losses immediately, and he didn’t want to find himself in a similar position again. Besides, allowing Rudy to sell out of the fund at a higher price would be unfair on the other investors who remained in. If Rudy was determined to sell, he would just have to take his loss and lump it. And Chris would have to pray that the fund survived the consequences.
Chris leaned back in his chair and exhaled. This was getting all too familiar. A big position spinning out of control, taking everything else down with it. He could tell himself that it wasn’t his fault of course, just like it hadn’t been his fault last time. But he should face reality. He couldn’t handle this kind of thing. Somehow, it always went wrong, and he could never figure out why.
Perhaps trading really was like chess. People assumed that the secret to chess was the ability to plan precisely several moves ahead, just as they assumed that good traders were those who could calculate precisely what was going to happen next in the markets. But both chess and trading were much more imprecise than that. Good chess players developed a feel for a position. They would plan many moves ahead to achieve a position that they felt was strong: an unassailable knight, a bishop attacking the opponent’s centre, a crushing pawn attack on the queen’s side. For them, chess was as much an art as a science.