‘But their new premises doesn’t use entrance slips any more – it operates on a swipe-card system.’
‘You’re right. I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Bryant. ‘A swipe card wouldn’t have led us to Kasavian.’
‘Exactly – so maybe somebody was trying to implicate him.’
Bryant groaned. ‘This is dreadful. Not only do I lose my only suspect, I gain Dracula as a client.’
‘I thought it would be right up your street – his wife thinking she’s being hunted down by a satanic cult.’
‘Well, it is actually. Except that Kasavian should turn out to be the culprit, not the client. He looks like the sort of man who’d try to drive his wife mad, doesn’t he? He’s a cold-blooded bureaucrat. He can make children cry just by staring at them.’
‘But he’d gain nothing by coming to us. His career is about to come under the microscope, and the last thing he’d want is to draw attention to his marital problems. He’s giving us the power to wreck his career, Arthur. That’s not the action of a man who wants his own complicity uncovered. It’s the act of someone who’s desperate and has been forced to turn to his enemies for help.’
‘Fair enough, but it’s Occam’s razor, if you ask me. When a man looks like Christopher Lee with irritable bowel syndrome, it’s hard to suddenly imagine him buying flowers and patting puppies. Never mind, I shall set aside my personal antipathy while we figure out what’s behind it all. Just don’t ask me to be friends with him afterwards.’
The detectives descended into the muggy tunnels of Victoria tube station.
7
THE ENGLISH DISEASE
LIKE MOST OF the venerable institutions in London, the Guildhall was more impressive than beautiful. It had been the corporate home of the City of London for eight hundred years, and tonight was illuminated to welcome six European heads of state, from Finland, the Czech Republic, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy.
The chevrons and monograms of previous reigning monarchs and Lord Mayors shone down on the Great Hall’s assembled guests, who were seated beneath monuments to Nelson, Wellington, Chatham, Pitt and Churchill. It was in this room that Dick Whittington had entertained Henry V, paying the delicate compliment of burning His Majesty’s bonds on a fire of sandalwood. Gog and Magog, the short-legged, flame-helmeted giants who founded London before the time of Christ, glowered over the oblivious diners, who were finishing their desserts and moving on to coffee.
Sabira Kasavian was growing more upset by the minute. Sandwiched between a moth-eaten City alderman and a twitchy, crow-faced woman named Emma Hereward, she tried to spot her husband. Oskar was seated on the top table between the Deputy Prime Minister and the Chief of the Metropolitan Police. The intense conversation did not allow him time to look up and offer her a complicit smile. She had been relegated to an unimportant table because regulations prevented her from being within earshot of private ministerial conversations.
After almost four years of marriage she should have become used to such snubs, but each one still came as a shock. Her security clearance for visiting her husband at his place of work was one of the department’s lower grades, because other wives had longer-serving spouses. She was not permitted to call him between certain hours, nor ask Oskar any questions about his work. There were rooms in the house she was forbidden from entering because they contained sensitive documents; she was not allowed access to any of his electronic devices. In times of a security crisis her friends, family members and correspondents were vetted, and sometimes, during those periods when the city was on the highest level of security alert, a guard was posted outside their flat.
She had thought she was freeing herself from her lunatic ex-boyfriend and her own impossible family, from the endless financial worries and the painful peculiarities of Albanian life, but instead she had stepped into a secretive gilded prison.
So she drank. Downing the dregs of her red wine, she snatched the brandy bottle away from the alderman, filling her water glass from it. She looked around at the other guests: the florid businessmen and their badly dressed wives; the desiccated accountants and corporate lawyers; the frumpy horse set; the charmless couples who couldn’t wait to get back to their dogs and their mock-Tudor Thames Valley houses; the so-called cream of the nouveaux riches. They all treated her as if she was a fool and a foreigner, as if those states were synonymous. None of them had bothered to get to know her. If they had, they would have found out that she was well read and intelligent, and spoke flawless, if accented, English. The other wives could speak only their own language plus a smattering of restaurant French.