The Legacy (21 page)

Chapter 41

Richards watched them go. Things weren't exactly going to plan. He'd assumed that the girl's fall from the top of Hay Tor would have killed her. Concerned that someone might have seen him follow the girl up the mountain, he'd made a swift departure from the scene of the accident and hadn't gone round to check the body at the foot of the face. The only reason he now knew that she hadn't been killed was because, once he'd returned to London, he'd monitored the local internet news to see how the ‘accident' was being reported. Eventually, he'd spotted a short article explaining how a falling walker had been miraculously saved by some climbers on Hay Tor. The article was thin on detail but it did explain that she had been taken to Exeter Hospital and that although she was still unconscious she was expected to make a full recovery. Richards was clearly irritated that the girl hadn't died but he was also relieved that the article had given no suggestion that it had been anything other than an unfortunate accident. Once she regained consciousness, however, Richards realised that she might well be able describe what happened to the police. He saw no reason why they wouldn't believe her story and he suspected that she would be able to describe him reasonably accurately having seen his face before she fell. They might well be able to use her description to find and arrest him, but he knew he'd left no evidence at the scene and she would therefore need to testify in person for him to be convicted. Because of this, he realised that he had little option but to kill her. He'd considered trying to get at her in the hospital but, following a quick visit the previous evening, he realised that it would be difficult. The presence of her friends and the security of the Intensive Care Unit, as well as the CCTV cameras that were positioned at key points near the entrances, would make trying anything at the hospital an extremely risky proposition. He'd therefore decided that the best thing to do was to wait until she was discharged. She might go home to London but he suspected that she would go back to her friends' house and stay on Dartmoor for a week or so to recover. The way he saw it, if she'd felt safe in London, she would have stayed there in the first place rather than travel down to Devon.

He wasn't yet sure how he'd get to the girl once she was back at the house but his experience told him to be patient. He'd decided to watch the house and its occupants in order to try and identify any patterns that he could exploit. He realised that things would change if and when the girl returned but he'd long ago learned that time spent in reconnaissance was seldom wasted. ‘Things would change,' he'd said to himself. ‘But the post will still arrive at the same time and the dustbins will still be emptied according to a schedule. Walkers will still go through the village and village life will go on.' All he needed to do was to spot a weakness in the pattern of life that he could exploit. ‘I'll give it a few days,' he said to himself. ‘If I can't see a way, then I may have to do something more obvious.' He didn't doubt that he could kill the girl whenever he wanted but, at this stage at least, the aim was still to make it look like an accident of some sort.

Richards' only other concern was the recent arrival of the big man in the Range Rover. He'd seen him out running earlier that morning with one of the girls and he suspected that he was an ex-soldier. Lean and fit, there was a hardness about him that Richards knew well. It came from years spent in austere environments fighting for survival and it gave people a confidence in their own physical abilities that was apparent in the way they moved. Richards had taken photographs of the man and e-mailed them to one of his contacts to see whether they could identify him. ‘The large scar on his face should help,' he'd told his contact. ‘My instincts tell me that he's an old soldier but he might not be British Army. If you draw a blank with your Ministry of Defence friends, try ex-French Foreign Legion and ex-US Special Forces.'

Chapter 42

H
ighworth's morning was proving more productive than he had dared hope. The short update that his team had put together on Bubble.com's recent performance was reassuring. It listed some of the larger institutional investors who were now beginning to sell their shares and suggested that this would encourage others to do likewise, causing the price to drop as predicted. Satisfied, Highworth closed the file and leaned back in his chair, smiling as he remembered last night. He wasn't sure why but Caroline had been even more passionate and adventurous than usual. He must remember to get her some flowers or something. It wasn't her birthday or even an anniversary but she was so good at taking his mind off things that he felt he needed to thank her. He was also sure that such a display of affection would end in another night of passion and he reckoned he had the stamina for at least one more of those before the weekend. The phone on his desk rang quietly. ‘Yes,' he said, putting it on speaker.

‘It's Sir James Briggs,' said his PA. ‘Shall I put him through?'

Highworth sat upright. ‘Yes,' he replied, his good humour evaporating.

‘I'm glad I've caught you Charles,' said Briggs, sounding far too cheerful. ‘I'm going to give you the details of the bank account I want you to transfer the money into. The transfer is to be completed by six this evening. Once I've confirmed that the money is safely in the account, I'll destroy the files I have on you. I'll also fix Knowles. Clear?'

‘Yes,' replied Highworth. ‘How are you going to ensure that Knowles doesn't find someone else to tell his story to?'

‘You don't need to worry about that,' replied Briggs. ‘You have my word that within the next few days he will cease to be a problem. I know one or two things about him that he will not want to become public. That's all you need to know. 1800 hours, remember. Any later and I start the formal inquiry into your activities. And just so you know, if it were to go ahead tomorrow it would kick off with a discrete little leak to the FT. Nothing substantive just the usual “unofficial police sources have confirmed that they are about to launch an investigation into the dealings of etc etc etc.” You know the sort of thing. I'll rant and rave about leaks but the story will be out there.' Briggs gave Highworth the details of the account and told him to read them back.

Once he was content that Highworth had them, Briggs hung up and stepped out of the phone box, whistling as he walked towards the underground station. If it all went according to plan, he would be a great deal richer before he went to bed that evening. He was looking forward to going to Belize. He had already booked two weeks holiday and this would give him plenty of time to get the ball rolling in terms of buying a house and transferring what few assets he had, including his beloved dog, Princess. He'd thought of taking the money and just staying out there but, on balance, he'd decided that he needed to come back and carry on as normal until his retirement early next year. ‘No point drawing attention to myself just yet,' he'd thought to himself. ‘It's not in Highworth's interests to do anything stupid and nobody else knows about our little deal.'

The only thing he needed to do now was to keep Knowles quiet. He'd told Highworth that he already had this in hand but, although he'd given it a great deal of thought, he hadn't yet come up with a pragmatic way of doing it. Knowles would expect to see an investigation beginning as soon as Briggs had had the chance to go through the file. Briggs had decided that he would tell Knowles that the investigation had started but that it would take them several months of painstaking and very discrete research to construct a case that would stack up in court. This was believable and would buy Briggs enough time to come up with a more permanent way of getting Knowles to back off. He'd already tasked one of his more talented detectives to dig through Knowles' life and see whether there was anything that could be used against him. He suspected that the financial side would be well above board but he had heard a rumour or two that Knowles had had a couple of mistresses over the years and that he was also partial to the odd call girl. He'd told the detective that he suspected Knowles was being blackmailed but also that he was clearly concerned about the repercussions of talking to the police. He was therefore being uncooperative and wouldn't confirm whether or not someone was putting pressure on him. The detective had accepted the story. He'd done similar investigations in the past and there was no reason for him to doubt the well respected intentions of his boss, particularly as he knew that Briggs and Knowles went back a long way.

When he had briefed the detective, Briggs had mentioned the rumoured mistresses. He'd told the detective to take a close look at Briggs' personal life as well as his professional one. ‘He's hiding something,' Briggs had said to the detective, ‘but I don't yet know what. I think he's being blackmailed into doing something that will upset the markets. This makes it our concern, particularly as he won't cooperate.'

‘Why don't you just arrest him?' the detective had asked.

‘For what?' Briggs had asked. ‘All we have at the moment is suspicion and a few stray rumours about his personal life. We have nothing on his business dealings that we can charge him with. If we pull him in now for questioning, his blackmailers will suspect that something's wrong and will most likely disappear off the radar. I want to find out what it is that they have on Knowles before we do anything and then I want to turn the tables on them. If we simply scare them off, they'll try again with someone else. I want to catch them. But this must remain between us for the moment. I don't want anyone else involved just yet.' As he said this, he put his hand on the detective's shoulder and gave him his most sincere look. ‘I trust you more than anyone else on the team to keep this quiet. But don't worry, I'll make sure you get the credit when we catch the bad guys.'

The detective had smiled. Briggs had a reputation for sharing the credit amongst his team and for rewarding those who delivered the goods. The detective trusted him implicitly to keep his word and was flattered that Briggs had selected him for the job. ‘I won't let you down, Sir,' he'd said to Briggs.

Briggs stopped before going down the steps into the underground. Thinking through his conversation with Highworth, he realised that it might be useful to have a little more detail about Knowles' personal life in case Highworth started to doubt the story that Briggs had given him. He reached for his phone and dialled the detective's number.

‘It's Briggs,' he said when the detective answered. ‘How's it going?'

‘OK,' replied the detective. ‘You were right about the mistress. He's seen a woman a couple of times whilst his wife has been away visiting friends. She's about twenty years younger than him, probably in her mid thirties, and extremely attractive. Well dressed, tanned and very up market. Way out of my league I suspect!'

Briggs laughed. ‘It's not his daughter is it?' he asked, knowing that Knowles had two daughters, one of whom lived in London.

‘Not unless he's taken to kissing his daughter passionately on the lips when he meets her and patting her bottom. They've had lunch together on both occasions and then gone back to a flat in Clapham. He's normally left after a few hours and gone back to work. I'll do some more digging whilst you're away but he's very careful. When they've met, they've eaten at very discrete little restaurants where he would be unlikely to meet anyone from the City. I'll produce a written report for you for when you get back from your holiday in Belize.'

‘Thank you,' said Briggs. He congratulated the detective on what he'd managed to uncover so far. It was good work. He'd only been on the case a few days and already he was starting to make progress. Briggs didn't doubt that there'd be more. He'd made the blackmail story up to convince the detective that Knowles was worth looking into but the rumours about a mistress and the call girls were true. He'd heard them a few times over the years but he also knew that Knowles had become a very powerful man over the last decade or so and, in his experience, the more powerful people became, the more they started to believe that rules and social conventions didn't apply to them. This was something of a hobby horse of his. He'd written a few articles about it for the odd academic journal and he'd recently started to lecture on it. At least once a week, a newspaper would carry a story about a politician, senior policeman, army general, bishop or CEO of a multinational whose fall from grace could be attributed to forgetting that the law also applied to them, not just the ‘little people' who worked for them.

‘It's more than greed,' he'd recently suggested at a seminar he'd been invited to speak at. ‘They believe that because they are so successful, they can have what they want. Their behaviour has few checks and balances within their own organisations. The people around them are usually junior to them and, if they are aware of what's going on, they don't comment because they are fearful of their own careers. This is one of the reasons that executive boards have non executive directors. In an ideal world, the non execs are there to question board decisions, prevent “group think” and ensure that chief executives and other board members do the right thing for the company and not for themselves. I say in an ideal world because the reality is that most non execs don't really do this. They enjoy the kudos and financial rewards of being on the board and they tend not to rock the boat too much for fear of being replaced. Moreover, whilst I wouldn't say there's a conspiracy here, the people at the top of the commercial and public worlds often know each other. They went to the same universities, they have the same friends, their kids go to the same schools and they attend the same parties. If you want to establish a second career as a non executive director, it's not a good idea to get a reputation as a difficult person who makes life hard for the chief executive, at least not if you want him to recommend you to one of his buddies at the head of another company or public body.'

The irony of his position wasn't lost on Briggs. He was about to make a great deal of money by doing something entirely illegal. ‘But the difference', he rationalised, ‘is that I know what I'm doing is wrong. I'm doing it simply because I want the money, not because I believe it's my right'. He put his phone back in his pocket and started down the steps into the underground. Within minutes, he was on the Circle Line and heading for his office.