Vogel didn’t get to quite finish the caution. Moving with considerable speed for a burly man, Jack Kivel had arrived at his side.
‘Back off, DI Vogel,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand what you are dealing with here. Just back off.’
Vogel was momentarily distracted. And before he could attach the cuffs, Fairbrother wrenched himself free.
Vogel turned to look at Kivel, and found he was staring down the barrel of a Glock handgun fitted with a silencer. A gun that had probably already killed once that day. Vogel no longer had much doubt about that.
‘Jack, don’t make things any worse for yourself,’ he said lamely, looking hopefully back across the terminal. He could see that Saslow had arrested Freddie Fairbrother, who, predictably, appeared to have made little fuss. There was still no sign of any further police presence. Where the hell was that backup?
Meanwhile Fairbrother Senior had grabbed the stunned-looking airport official and was holding a pocket knife to her throat.
Vogel could barely believe what was going on. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion. It was surreal.
‘C’mon, Jack,’ said Fairbrother suddenly. ‘You’ll have to come with me. There’s no choice now. You’ve been seen with me. You can’t bluff your way out of this one, and neither can I. We can still get away. The bank might be history, but we needn’t be.’
The Glock wavered in Jack Kivel’s hand. ‘But we did all this for the bank,’ said Kivel. ‘That and your damned family name!’
‘Well that’s over now, but we can still escape to somewhere no one will be able to get at us and live a new life. In luxury. It’s all been arranged. You know that.’
Vogel was surprised at how calm Sir John Fairbrother seemed to have remained. This was some piece of work. How could he be that way, under these circumstances? There was, of course, only one possible conclusion. The conclusion which Kivel had finally reached on the drive from London.
Sir John Fairbrother had gone quite mad. Raving mad. Stark staring bonkers. Off his rocker.
Kivel was talking. ‘I have a wife, boss — children, grandchildren...’
‘C’mon Jack, I’ll get them to you whenever you want,’ said Fairbrother as he dragged the terrified airport official closer to the departure gate. ‘We can do this.’
Kivel turned a little to watch. His broad shoulders had slumped. Vogel wondered if he dared grab the gun.
‘I always go where you go, don’t I, boss?’ he said. ‘And do what you say. Always.’
‘Yes, well, you owe me, don’t you, Jack. You’d have been locked up years ago if it wasn’t for me.’
‘At least I would have been my own man.’
‘Oh c’mon, Jack, don’t I always look after you? I will now. I promise you.’
‘And you think they’re just going to let us fly out of here, do you?’ Jack asked. ‘To live this new life with your fancy Arab friend?’
‘You’ve got the gun, Jack,’ said Fairbrother. ‘And God knows, you know how to use it.’
‘Yes, like I did earlier today. Something I already regret with all my heart.’
‘C’mon, Jack,’ said Fairbrother yet again. ‘She was a loose cannon. I did love my daughter, you know, but she had to go. She was about to bring us down.’
‘We are down, boss, down as low as you can get.’
Vogel heard a noise behind him. They’d arrived at last. Numerous black-clad armed police officers were storming the terminal.
Kivel saw it too. If Fairbrother had noticed, he gave no indication. He seemed locked in his own crazy world.
‘It’s finished, boss,’ said Kivel quietly. ‘This time we’ve gone too far.’
Kivel turned towards Vogel. ‘Tell Martha, I’m sorry, will you,’ he said.
And with that he turned the handgun around, pointed it at his own face, and shot himself through the mouth. The back of his head exploded, and he crashed instantly to the ground.
Vogel was momentarily transfixed. Sir John Fairbrother immediately let go of the airport official and lurched toward the fallen Kivel. Vogel grabbed him, this time managing to attach and fasten the handcuffs in one swift motion. But Sir John did not resist. Instead he stood quite still looking down at Jack Kivel.
Then, and Vogel could hardly believe his own eyes, this man who had behaved with such wanton mindless cruelty, who had committed such terrible evil, and shown a total disregard of the lives of other human beings to the extent that he had arranged the murder of his own daughter, began to weep.
Twenty-Eight
The next day, or technically later that same day, Vogel interviewed Freddie Fairbrother at Bristol’s Lockleaze police station.
There remained a lot of unanswered questions, and Freddie was now probably the only person able or likely to provide answers to any of them.
Vogel had promised Freddie, before the formal interview began, that he almost certainly would face no charges if he told the truth and revealed all that he knew about his father’s extraordinary plan of deception. Freddie had, after all, been out of the country until less than forty-eight hours previously, and his direct involvement was slight. Vogel told Freddie that he was confident he would be free to leave the UK within a few days and return to Australia, which was now all he wanted to do.
In return, Freddie — to use a phrase which had been a favourite of Vogel’s first sergeant — had begun singing like a bird.
‘My father knew that Fairbrother International was close to collapse, and that because of his irregular business practices he would probably end up in jail, possibly, at his age, for the rest of his life,’ Freddie began. ‘He had attracted the attention of fraud investigators more than once over the years, but nothing had ever been proven. If he failed to keep Fairbrother’s afloat, and he knew that he was about to fail, there would be an investigation on a whole new level. He feared that not only was he going to lose the bank, but his reputation, and that of the family, would be ruined for ever. Which to him was of massive importance, overshadowing even the probability of a jail sentence.’
‘And so, in your own words, Mr Fairbrother, will you please tell me the details of this plan your father concocted which was supposed to save the bank and keep his reputation intact?’ asked Vogel.
‘Well, I don’t know it all...’
‘Just everything you do know, Mr Fairbrother.’
‘Well, as you would be aware, Mr Vogel, the bank is a family affair, a family business, and it has survived many centuries of trading. One of the reasons for this is that continuity has always been maintained, largely by a unique system of trust funds, and other investments, which can only be released back into the bank following the death of the incumbent chairman, which is an appointment for life, you understand. Like being a monarch.’
Freddie managed a small smile. ‘A despot monarch, usually, and certainly in my father’s case,’ he continued. ‘The chairman traditionally retires from active participation at a certain age, if he lives that long, and appoints a chief executive to actually run the company, but he remains chairman until his death. These moneys are then realised when the next chair, always another Fairbrother, takes office, ensuring a fresh influx of funds with every generation, and more or less copper bottoming the future of the bank even if the previous chair has left it with problems. My father, I suppose, wanted to have his cake and eat it, as they say.
‘By faking his own death he could maintain his reputation, and at the same time ensure the future of the bank. That’s what he thought anyway. He also thought he could carry on running things from behind the scenes. The bank, in particular, had always been his toy after all. Crazy really. Now you come to think of it.’