Staying Alive Read online

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘No, it’s just the lost look in your eyes when you’re not focusing on work. Tell me about it.’

  ‘It’s about Jase Phillips.’

  ‘Yes, bad business, Jake, but murder in prison happens.’

  ‘But not to someone like Jase Phillips.’

  Sir Nicolas had been the judge at the trial and had resigned from the bench after the court martial verdict that freed the two young soldiers was overturned. He subsequently went back into private practice and this was when he employed me as what he called his private police force.

  ‘I know what you think, Jake. You think Mabry ordered the killing to prevent us getting the verdict overturned.’

  Now why would I think that? How could I have been so cynical? My covert cynicism was nearly made overt.

  Mabry was now in the cabinet as Home Secretary and was a senior member of The Family. He was the half-brother of Michael Carmichael, the major that Jase had been convicted of murdering. Only a handful of people knew about that relationship. Of course there was no confirmation, just straws in the wind when I’d been involved in Barrow Jones’s Special Section of MI5.

  I thought about the court martial that had acquitted Jase Phillips and his co-accused Mike Munro, and the overcoming of ‘double jeopardy’ because the ‘acquittal was tainted’. Sir Nicolas told me that had been the work of Antony Bray, Major Carmichael’s cousin. Bray was the personal private secretary to the then Home Secretary, James Bradshaw, and a rising star in The Family. I wasn’t available to testify at the subsequent court case as I’d been shipped off to Bolivia. Jase had been found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years and Mike had been released.

  My view, as the investigating officer, was that Jase was justified in killing Carmichael given the reality of the battle situation. Anyway, Bray was now dead, assassinated from a smartly aimed bullet and Mike had been wrongly blamed. I shot the right honourable bastard Bray, but Mike had set it up for me and died immediately after the shooting; his choice, suicide by police officers from SCO19 Specialist Firearms Command. Six bullets from four police officers hit him, he fired only three and none directed at the police, and the enquiry found that justifiable. Me, cynical? Come on! I think I had justification for my cynicism.

  ‘Yes, sir. If Jase had been released or just retried, the whole Carmichael case would have been front page news again and our illustrious Home Secretary’s links with him may have been revealed and other information about The Family could have been made public.’

  My view was that the only way to break the power of The Family, with its hold on senior government and industrial positions and its Mafia-like criminal infrastructure, was press exposure, but insignificant accusations were useless. It needed something like a major court case.

  ‘You do like to live dangerously, Jake. Why don’t you go and talk to Mabry? He knows you.’

  ‘I doubt that I could get past the bureaucracy now. Anyway, I doubt he would talk to me.’

  ‘Oh, I think we might just be able to fix that.’

  I seemed to know so many people who could fix things or who knew people who could fix things. I suppose it was all about this thing called networking but in the case of legal people, politicians and the wealthy old families, it was just an old boys’ network, the rich and powerful scratching the backs of the rich and powerful. Me, I was neither rich nor powerful but, luckily, I knew a few people that were.

  2

  It was six in the morning and I was lying in bed trying to build up enough energy to get up and go for a run. Jase Phillips was again on my mind. My phone went; it was Vera. Did the bloody woman never sleep? Perhaps witches don’t need sleep.

  ‘Jake, Sir Nicolas spoke to Mr Randolph Mabry last night and he’ll see you in Portcullis House at ten. Just ask the receptionist and he’ll direct you to the allocated office.’

  It was short, to the point and complete. What else could I possibly need? I supposed I’d better wear a smart suit; though, I didn’t think I really needed to impress anybody. I’d had my blue Crombie cleaned so that was easy.

  I went for a run then dressed appropriately for a meeting with the Home Secretary and even arrived early, so I watched the Thames from Victoria Embankment. I could see the restaurant ship Hispaniola moored alongside and decided I would really have to bring Sam here one evening and as for the necessary qualification to call her Sam, I’d have to work on it. The Thames had stunning views from the Victoria Embankment. I thought perhaps we could have lunch on The Symphony with its all-glass super-structure to enable views of some of London’s landmarks as it tootled along the river. Apparently, one of these waterborne restaurants had live jazz music. I wondered if Sam liked jazz.

  I wandered along, past The Battle of Britain Monument. It was exactly opposite the Ministry of Defence and close to Big Ben and Westminster Pier. For some reason I thought that was appropriate. I’d never seen it before. It showed aircrew running to their aircraft, some resting in full flying kit on the grass and fitters and mechanics working on the aircraft. Time was running away from me and I had to hurry to get to Portcullis House. I arrived at three minutes to the hour. It was odd that. I had this horror of being late but I’d been taught to never be too early.

  The whole thing went as Vera had said. A pretty young man met me in the entrance area. I wondered where they found them. ‘Contacts, Jake, contacts.’ I could hear Sir Nicolas’s dulcet tones in my ear.

  ‘Captain Robertson?’

  My guide had the public school accent, I might have known. His vowel sounds indicated north of the border and he also had the soft effeminate lisping of an extrovert gay and elements of his expensive clothing reinforced it: the soft, loose cut of his expensive suit, the broad tie with more and brighter colours than usual in the regimented civil service bureaucracy and the floppy handkerchief in his breast pocket.

  ‘Um, no, Robinson.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry; it’s the Home Secretary’s handwriting.’ As he said ‘Oh’ he placed his index and middle fingers of his right hand on his right cheek just below his cheekbone. Dislike washed through me. You see; I have this quirk of accepting responsibility. I dislike people who blame others when they can check to get things right and if they can’t check they should still accept that they’re the one in the wrong. But that was never going to happen in civil service or political circles; they had to be right all the time, even when they knew they were wrong. Oh, cynical me!

  ‘Would you like to walk this way?’

  I was very tempted to say, ‘No, daahling, I like the way I walk,’ but I restrained myself. It was odd how some people irritated me. Howard was a homosexual and Gabriel was an extrovert gay but they didn’t irritate me; they were my friends.

  We went to the lift, up two or three floors and along a balcony passageway that had pictures of members of Parliament hanging on the inner wall to a bunch of offices. I looked over the balcony rail at the side and down onto a restaurant area with lots of people in small groups talking. Such was the way of real power in Government. The office we went into was huge with a long table and the Home Secretary was at one end with a pile of papers in front of him. A drab-looking woman was sitting near him: one of the minions that toil through mountains of paper, scrutinise millions of words, ensure everything is correct, the bedrock of the civil service, but are largely ignored by the hierarchy. Still, they’d safer pensions and greater job security than toiling productive workers who provided that security.

  Mabry was like he always was, with fair, receding hair, long at the sides with twin bald patches on top and a crew cut clump in the middle. He had tanned skin, an aquiline nose and piercing blue eyes. He oozed power and authority and his sharp tongue had made many an MP in the House hate him, but with me he’d always been pleasant.

  ‘Come in, Jake, please come in and sit down here. Charles, please ensure we’re not disturbed.’ Charles pouted; I’d no idea why. Mabry turned to the woman and said, ‘Please give me fifteen mi
nutes, Jacky.’ She obediently, silently and neatly gathered up her papers with no indication of emotion and we waited for them to leave. ‘Now, Jake, what can I do for you? Sir Nicolas implied it was important.’

  ‘It’s about the killing of Jason Phillips.’

  ‘Yes, bad business and you want to talk to me.’ There was a thoughtful air in the way he said it. ‘I can understand why you think I ordered it.’ So he’d reached a conclusion as to why I was here or perhaps Sir Nicolas had told him. ‘It was a relief when it happened as it got me out of a hole, but I didn’t order his killing or even suggest it.’

  ‘I didn’t ask, sir.’

  ‘No, I know you didn’t but it must be in your thoughts, Jake.’ He looked at me with those intelligent, analytical eyes that gave nothing away. ‘We’ve known each other a fair time; perhaps you could call me Randolph.’

  Now that was a real surprise. Most people called him Home Secretary or Sir or introduced him as the Right Honourable Randolph Mabry. Why was he drawing me into his circle? How many people outside of the bounds of power and privilege would call him by his Christian name? Yes, it would definitely be a Christian name as he came from that social group that believes it has a duty to attend a church every Sunday even if they show no evidence of believing what is preached there. My cynicism was growing with every passing month that I had contact with the politically powerful.

  ‘You’re right, Randolph.’ I was mildly uncomfortable calling him Randolph. It wasn’t that he was the Home Secretary; it was more that I didn’t want to be on first-name terms with a senior member of The Family, the most powerful criminal group in Europe. ‘It seems logical that you’d order his killing. If you didn’t, have you any ideas who did?’

  ‘You’re assuming it wasn’t just a prison killing.’

  ‘It seems that this is the first killing in Peasmarsh.’

  ‘I see you’ve been doing some homework. Murder in prison is fairly rare. Prisoners are one and a half times more likely to die from suicide, three times more likely to die from an accident and forty-two times more likely to die from natural causes.’

  I wondered why politicians go into the ‘it’s not as bad as you think’, assuming the listener thinks the worst and then put in some statistics or a disclaimer. I was impressed he knew the statistics though, but as I didn’t he could have been making them up.

  ‘No, I believe you’re right; his killing was ordered. By whom or why I’ve no idea; but it was of great benefit to me. If you and your friends had managed a retrial all sorts of things we wouldn’t want aired may have come out.’

  There you go: both statistics and a disclaimer. It wasn’t me, Officer, honest, and the ‘we wouldn’t want’ spread the targets for giving the order.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Such as the things you “wouldn’t want to come out”.’ The you, I hoped, planted it back in his domain.

  ‘Come on, Jake, you can’t expect me to tell you that.’

  ‘But it may be one of those things that could give me the clue to finding his murderer.’

  ‘True, very true.’ He nodded and thought and then reached a decision. ‘Well, you know my cousin Antony Bray had the original evidence tampered with and you also know he was behind the overthrow of the dismissal of the first case and the conviction of Phillips in the second case. You also know he couldn’t have ordered Phillips’s killing because you shot him.

  ‘You seem quite convinced I killed Antony Bray.’ Bugger, he’d done the politicians’ trick of diverting me.

  ‘Look at the evidence, Jake. It points to Munro but you know and I know that he was in no state to accurately fire that rifle. You were in the vicinity and you were in league with him and you wanted Antony dead. I understand that.’

  Now, how did he know I was there? Kitty Halloway the senior investigating officer had ‘lost’ all the information that connected me to the crime.

  ‘As I said, I owe you too much for rescuing my sister and, and um, Sister Theresa.’ It’s extraordinary that he still perpetrates the lie about ‘his sister’ when he knows I know she is his daughter and Sister Theresa is her mother.

  ‘What was it that Jase might have known that would cause somebody to have him killed?’

  ‘There are a number of people who would want Michael’s name unsullied but enough to take the risk of murder? Not sure about that.’ He was using avoidance. Sounding helpful and saying nothing. Another politicians’ trick.

  ‘What about somebody wanting to get at you?’

  ‘Could be, but I’m in the dark, Jake.’ He was thinking. ‘Jake, old bean,’ he began again - he occasionally did this old-world, upper-class charm stuff - ‘I’ve some spare cash lying around.’ What an understatement; he was a multimillionaire, probably a multibillionaire. ‘About fifty grand. If you find out who killed Phillips that fifty K is yours.’

  ‘You’re on, Randolph.’ It wasn’t the money, although it would come in handy. Running a flat in London wasn’t cheap and the death duties on Frances’s legacy, my ex-boss in MI5 and girlfriend who left me all she owned, hit my nest egg. It was just that it had to be The Family that had Jase killed. Mabry was the head of the political and non-financial criminal wings of The Family and had no reason to lie to me, but he was actually giving me nothing. So he knew something that he didn’t want to tell me. That told me it was ordered and not just a prison killing. If I could get enough straws in the wind I’d be able to build a straw stack but would it help me find the answers I wanted or would a gust of wind blow it away.

  ‘Would anybody else in The Family have Jase killed?’

  ‘If I knew that, Jake, I’d point you at him, but I’d insist you didn’t kill him.’

  Very interesting. This meant that if I found out and I, by some mischance, killed the killer, my new friend Randolph had clean hands. I liked Jase and I knew, given time, I could nail his killer. I’d lost people I liked in Iraq and in some of my little adventures with the MI5 Special Section, but that wasn’t what was nagging at me. Why would Mabry be worried to the extent of fifty grand to find out who killed Jase Phillips? And why would he have wanted me to look into the killing when as Home Secretary he had the whole damn police force to find out, not to mention his own goons and goonesses. Conclusion: he wanted this entirely private. Not just private but carried out by someone he trusted.

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice.

  I agreed with the Right Hon. Randolph Mabry, Home Secretary and one of the top criminals in the country, that I would find out, for the princely sum of fifty grand, who killed Jason Phillips, but more than that I would find out who ordered the killing and why.

  I nipped back to the chambers and spent the day going over the court transcripts and my notes. Nothing! That night in bed I went back over the information as I remembered it; perhaps there was some clue along the way. I just lay there painting pictures of what happened on the light, rose-coloured ceiling (I like ceilings that aren’t white. Funny that! They’re kind of relaxing. I had them painted a very pale shade of the colour of the carpets.) and went back step-by-step: my investigation, the court martial and bits along the way. Nothing new came to mind.

  Carmichael’s reputation was restored with Jase going to prison. It seemed a hell of a lot of trouble just to restore the reputation of your cousin but I suppose that’s what The Family was like, close-knit and supportive. The murder of Jase could be due to the legal team of Sir Nicolas Ross, solicitor Keith Todd and defence barrister Roland Parsley, with me sitting on their coat-tails, deciding to challenge the second trial. Even before we got underway Jase was murdered in prison, stopping our challenge in its tracks. Who else but The Family would want to stop the challenge by killing Jase? Who else but Mabry, Carmichael’s half-brother, would order the kill? Perhaps Rupert Carmichael, Earl of Charnforth, his father and head of The Family, now that was likely. I’d been thinking about this for months. I’d reached the conclusion that I must do something or go rig
ht round the bend. There must have been more to this than the reputation of an army major, even if he was destined to be a big wheel in the army and The Family, and that was something I was going to find out. I was becoming evangelical about this and not only that; the Home Secretary was going to pay me for it.

  3

  The next morning found me in Sir Nicolas’s palatial office with coffee served by Faith, another of Vera’s acolytes. Funny how all those in Vera’s coven had inappropriate names for junior witches: Grace, Faith and I shouldn’t be surprised if there was one in the stationery cupboard called Hope or Charity. Jake, stop fantasising. Faith had a very different approach to serving coffee from Grace. Faith was into military precision. It was as if an army drill sergeant was snapping out orders to her: lift spoon, two, three, load with sugar, two, three, dunk sugar, two, three, stir, stir, stir and not one flicker of a smile. She even did everything with a straight back.

  Sir Nicolas asked me how the meeting went.

  ‘The Home Secretary – he thinks I should call him Randolph – told me he didn’t order the killing of Jase. In fact, he wanted to know who did order the killing and he offered me fifty thousand pounds to find out.’

  ‘Why are you telling me? And why now?’

  ‘Well, you did ask and I work for you and I’d like to find out who killed Jase. It seems it would be a good contract for the practice, although it’s likely to lead to a prosecution rather than a defence.’

  ‘Do you think this practice would earn much from this contract?’

  ‘Well no; by the time the cost of my employment has been deducted and I’ve hired, say Howard and Nicky for any bits I can’t do, and you’ve had to replace my services for however long, you’d probably break even.’

  ‘At last you’re beginning to see what is required in business, Jake. But I’m intrigued. If Mabry didn’t order it I wonder who did and why. Somebody is playing a long game here or it’s a cock up. The questions are, is it somebody within The Family or is it somebody planning to use it sometime to attack The Family? If it’s within The Family, was it done to rehabilitate Carmichael or was it to, at some time, disgrace and replace Mabry?’