‘Who is he?’
‘The cook is telling me that he is a big Muslim gangster. An old friend of Mister Frank.’
Clayton squeezed some lemon over the buttery potato curry to cut its oiliness and scooped some up with his bread, stuffed it messily into his mouth and took some time to clean himself up.
‘Was Sharmila involved with the meeting with Anwar Masood?’
‘No, no, sir, Mrs Sharmila was out of the house. Just Mister Frank and Anwar Masood on their tods.’
Clayton smiled at Gagan’s cheering English.
‘Did you hear any of their conversation?’
‘Oh, yes, sir, Mister Roger. Mister Frank telling me to make snacks but no pork. So I do the beef croquette, fish tart . . .’
‘That’s great, Gagan, but just tell me what you heard them say.’
‘Mister Frank telling Anwar Masood to go to Pakistan to talk to their friend in Karachi.’
‘Their friend?’
‘That’s what he said. Their friend in Karachi,’ said Gagan. ‘They not naming their friend, they know him already.’
‘Are you sure there was no name? He must have a lot of friends in Karachi.’
‘Now, I’m thinking,’ said Gagan, and he did just that. ‘It was a long night, many different parts and me coming and going.’
‘Take your time.’
‘Yes, at one point I think they saying Mister Iqbal. Yes, Mister Iqbal is the friend.’
‘That’s good,’ said Clayton. ‘What did Anwar Masood have to talk to Mister Iqbal about?’
‘Something about Miss Alyshia. I don’t understand it very well. They were not talking very straightly and I was in and out. I’m thinking that she is not being very happy after leaving Mumbai.’
‘It’s important that you tell me what you heard, even if you don’t understand it.’
‘They having very long conversation and I’m making my beef patties. So one minute they talking about Miss Alyshia. The next minute I come back with the beef patties and they talking about Deepak Mistry.’
‘Who is Deepak Mistry?’
‘He is very close to Mister Frank,’ said Gagan. ‘I put the beef patties on the table and Mister Frank says, “Make some fish tarts for Mister Masood”. So I have to go back to the kitchen straight.’
‘What did you hear when you came back with the fish tarts?’ said Clayton, who realised that the evening was structured culinarily in Gagan’s mind.
‘Anwar Masood already standing to leave and Mister Frank saying, “You must try one of Gagan’s fish tarts. They not making them as good as this, even in Goa.” And Anwar Masood is trying one and heaping praise on my head. And Mister Frank telling me to leave the plates and go. And I’m closing the door and Mister Frank says, “You have to find Deepak”. And I’m staying to listen because I’m liking Mister Deepak and sorry that he is lost.’
‘And what did you hear?’
‘Anwar Masood telling him that he’s not finding Mister Deepak. Mister Deepak not here in Mumbai and not there in Bangalore.’
‘How long was Anwar Masood at the house?’
‘He leaving soon after. He maybe there for two hours.’
They finished the pav bhajis and walked back up the beach towards the lights of the food stalls. Clayton bought himself a vivid, red ice gola in the hope that it would cleanse his palate without giving him diarrhoea.
As he travelled back into town, he called the consular researcher, who was still in the office.
‘Tell me everything I need to know about a gangster called Anwar Masood, a Pakistani friend of Frank D’Cruz in Karachi called Mister Iqbal, who I assume is Lieutenant General Abdel Iqbal, and an employee of Konkan Hills Securities called Deepak Mistry and, if you can, whether Mistry is still in the country.’
12
11.30 A.M., MONDAY 12TH MARCH 2012
Isabel Marks’ house, Kensington, London W8
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Could Mercy tell anything about us?’
‘I told you, she knows me very well.’
‘So what did she intuit?’
‘That we’ve been intimate and that we’ve been to bed together.’
‘I like her,’ said Isabel, a little stunned. ‘She must be good at her job, too.’
‘I’m glad you like her because she’ll be the one to take over from me if it gets out that you and I are having . . .’ said Boxer, trailing off to nothing.
‘What is it that we’re having?’ asked Isabel, teasing.
‘A different relationship to the one that we should be having,’ said Boxer. ‘We have to talk, Isabel, about the job that I ought to be doing.’
‘Which is?’
‘Preparing you for your next conversation with Jordan,’ said Boxer. ‘You have to start forming a relationship with him.’
‘Maybe that will be easier once we find out what he’s been talking about to Alyshia.’
‘No, I don’t think so. We have to have our own strategy, not based on Jordan’s narrative. We have to start trying to control him, rather than letting him manipulate us.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘We have to manoeuvre him into giving us what he doesn’t want to give; namely, a demand. He knows as well as we do that the moment he makes a demand, he transfers some of his power to us. From that moment, we start to know something about him. While we have no idea of what he wants from the kidnap, we are in a state of maximum uncertainty and, therefore, helplessness.’
‘But we think we do know what he wants,’ said Isabel. ‘To punish us. I mean, Chico.’
‘So far, all he’s declared is that he’s not in it for any material gain. I think you have to demonstrate your understanding of that by approaching him on the “higher level” that he wants to be seen. You’re no longer grubbing around in the filth of money and possessions. He disdains that.’
‘So what is a kidnapper’s higher plain?’ asked Isabel sarcastically.
‘He enjoys the psychology of the situation he has created. He is in control and cannot be bought by the man who can buy everything. So we have to work towards finding a way of admiring him. It mustn’t be crass. He’s too intelligent for that. It has to be subtle and sincere. He will despise flattery, so that’s out. The one great advantage you have is that you’re a woman and you work. And you probably work with men, intelligent men, but men who need their egos stroked.’
‘Not my colleagues,’ said Isabel. ‘They’re all women in publishing. But the writers . . .’
‘Tell me about the writers.’
‘Intelligent but unworldly. Egotistical but insecure. Communicative but detached. Well-known but solitary. Talented but in their own eyes worthless.’
‘Worthless?’
‘That probably only applies to the more self-aware ones,’ said Isabel. ‘They recognise that they have talent but somehow think that “making up stuff”, as some of them call it, is a worthless profession. Given their intelligence, they think they should be doctors or entrepreneurs or, perhaps, kidnap consultants. I have to tell them that people need stories more than ever, to make sense of this new and uncertain world, and remind them that without their “stuff”, there’d be no publishing industry, a smaller TV industry, fewer films . . .’
‘So their sense of worthlessness springs from their insecurity,’ said Boxer. ‘They sound like very interesting potential criminals. You’ve had the perfect training.’
‘So what do I talk to him about?’ said Isabel. ‘With writers you’ve always got their books.’
‘And with Jordan it’s obvious, too,’ said Boxer. ‘You’ve got a common interest: Alyshia. Talk to him about her. Get him to share in your concern over her mental state. See if you can make him care.’
‘But how do I elicit a demand out of that kind of conversation?’
‘You don’t. You cannot be seen to have ulterior motives. Don’t think of yourself as a saleswoman trying to close a deal. Never reveal your goal. Think of him as a
difficult person you’ve met at a party who’s revealed to you that he’s having trouble with his daughter. I know, that sounds familiar. But that’s how to do it. You want to identify with each other, but you should have no interest in trying to get something from him. You have to show genuine human interest.’
‘That might be difficult.’
‘Don’t make me say it, Isabel. Even Mercy was dismayed.’
‘Shut up about the bloody committee.’
‘All right,’ said Boxer. ‘This is important, too: you have to imagine Jordan with a human face.’
Isabel blinked, unable to bring the necessary image to mind. All she found herself doing was suppressing a vast, nearly uncontrollable rage against this man who had kidnapped her child.
‘It’s absolutely crucial that you do not dehumanise him,’ said Boxer. ‘When you’re talking to him, I want you to think of someone. Not necessarily someone you know. It could be an actor or a politician, but someone who, despite their difficult nature, you think you probably admire because, deep down, they’re a good man.’
‘Now you’re just punishing me for not having a committee.’
‘The other person you can talk about is Frank,’ said Boxer. ‘And there you might find yourself on common ground. You have no illusions about Frank. You don’t love him any more and you know why you don’t love him. You thought that Jordan knew him too, and he didn’t like him either. You see eye to eye on the reason for that.’
Isabel stared into the table, nodding.
‘Something else for you to think about, for you to focus on,’ said Boxer. ‘Something to give you strength. Although you still think of Alyshia as your child, you have to remember that she’s a grown woman. She has experience of dealing with people, she is intelligent and confident, and that has been proven to her in her life. She can look after herself. She has resources.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Isabel, beating the table softly with her fist, as if drumming these things into herself. ‘I do think of her as my little girl. I even find myself telling her off like one. That’s why she gets annoyed with me.’
‘That’s how I think about Amy. Well, some of the time. Recently, that’s become almost impossible, I have to admit. But you never lose that protective instinct; it’s engraved into you at the moment of their birth.’
The doorbell rang.
‘That’ll be Chico,’ said Isabel, getting up.
Still not enough time to prepare her, thought Boxer. Too many distractions. The situation kept slipping away from him.
He stood to shake hands with D’Cruz as he entered the room.
They listened to the early morning phone call with Jordan. D’Cruz shook his head, perplexed, asked where Alyshia’s mobile was now.
‘Pavis will send it round here, just as soon as they’ve carried out the forensics and made a recording of what’s on the device,’ said Boxer. ‘Have you had any further thoughts, Frank, about who this could be? You might be dismissive of the disgruntled employee possibility but we should be considering every angle.’
D’Cruz said nothing.
‘A profiler has listened to that call,’ said Isabel. ‘He didn’t think Jordan was a kidnapper. He didn’t want to say it but he thought he was a killer. Now why would Jordan want to do that? You must know something, Chico. You must have crossed someone badly for them to be doing this.’
‘I’ve done a lot of terrible things in my time as a businessman,’ said D’Cruz. ‘I’ve fired people, that’s for sure. I’ve taken over businesses aggressively, without approval of the families who own them. I’ve made ruthless decisions, I can’t deny it. But this is the first time someone has kidnapped my daughter in retaliation.’
‘And what happened in Mumbai?’ asked Isabel. ‘Why did Alyshia not go back after Christmas?’
‘Why do you assume I know that?’ said D’Cruz. ‘I’m not like you, Isabel. Alyshia and I have a different relationship. When she arrived in Mumbai, she spent only the first weekend with Sharmila and me before moving into the apartment we’d arranged for her. From that day on, she had her own private life. I gave her responsibilities in the company. She had to learn about the steel business from scratch.’
‘How did she do that?’ asked Boxer.
‘She worked in all the different departments. I sent her to Australia to meet our raw material suppliers. She worked in shipping, to see how those materials arrived in the docks. She had experience of all the different production lines – pipe, girder, roll – and then she went into marketing and sales.’
‘Did any one person show her the ropes?’ Boxer asked.
‘That’s not how I do things. I believe in people learning with their own eyes, from their own experience, not having everything filtered through the mind and opinions of one other person. So she met people from all the different departments, from the managing director to the crane operators, to the men on the foundry floor and back up to the sales director. But there was no one person telling her how to think about the business. She saw everything for herself and made up her own mind.’
‘What was she doing by the time she left?’
‘She was manager of the sales teams for the home market and Pakistan.’
‘So she wasn’t on the board?’ said Boxer. ‘There was no one who could have been envious of her position? She was where she was through merit?’
‘She was where she was because she was my daughter, but she held on to her job through merit. Nobody was dissatisfied with her performance.’
‘When the daughter of the owner comes into a business, there must be employees who interpret that in a certain way,’ said Boxer. ‘Did anybody leave because Alyshia had come on board and they could see the writing on the wall?’
‘If they did, they didn’t give Alyshia’s appointment as their reason for leaving,’ said D’Cruz. ‘She had a long way to go before she could have made it to any directorial post. I deliberately started her off in the steel business because that was not her natural interest. She was always going to have to work hard to get anywhere. She was much more interested in the manufacturing sector, especially cars, but I wanted to see her prove herself in heavy industry first and to understand where all the components of the car industry came from.’
‘What was the name of that young man you particularly liked?’ said Isabel. ‘You brought him over here once. We all had dinner together before Alyshia left the Saïd Business School. Deepak . . . I can’t remember his family name. What happened to Deepak?’
‘Deepak Mistry left the company,’ said D’Cruz. ‘It was very sad. I had high hopes for him, but he said he didn’t want to work in a corporation anymore. He wanted to be an entrepreneur again. He left to set up on his own, although I don’t know where he is now. I’m told he is not in Mumbai and he hasn’t been seen in Bangalore, where I first came across him.’
‘Any resentment on his part?’
‘I made him a wealthy man. He could have done anything he liked in Konkan Hills, but he decided it wasn’t for him. He was responsible for transforming the steelworks I’d bought into the business that it is today. I’d always thought that he would end up running it. Nothing I could say would persuade him to change his mind.’
‘Would it be worth checking him out?’
‘I could have his details sent to Pavis but I think they would be wasting their time. Deepak kidnapping Alyshia? It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘So why did Alyshia leave Mumbai?’ asked Isabel. ‘The kidnapper seems to think he knows why. You were so close to her, Chico. You must know something.’
‘It was nothing to do with her work. There was no friction with anybody that I knew of. It must have been something to do with her private life. I assumed she’d had an affair and it had gone wrong,’ said D’Cruz. ‘I mean, you share everything with her and she didn’t tell you anything, either.’
The doorbell rang. A bike messenger from Pavis with Alyshia’s mobile.
George Papadopoulos went into Bovi
ngdon Recruitment on Tottenham Court Road and asked at reception for Alyshia D’Cruz.
‘She hasn’t come in today.’
‘That’s weird,’ said Papadopulos. ‘We arranged to meet here at eleven-thirty. I bumped into her on Friday evening. Can I speak to one of her colleagues?’
The receptionist made some calls and sent Papadopoulos up to the first floor to meet one of the other managers. He handed over a fake business card and explained that he’d met Alyshia with a group of people on Friday night.
‘The leaving party.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We got talking about business. She was with another girl. I can’t remember her name.’
‘Toola. Toola Briggs.’
‘That’s the one,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘Maybe I could speak to her if Alyshia’s not in?’
‘It was her leaving party. She’s not with us anymore.’
He left, fobbing off other people to talk to, asked them to get Alyshia to call him when she came in. He went for a coffee on Goodge Street and accessed Toola Briggs’ tax details, home address and mobile number.
‘Hi Toola, this is George,’ he said.
‘George?’
‘A friend of Alyshia’s. We met on Friday night at your leaving party.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Yeah, right. You were all a bit bladdered. Alyshia told me to meet her in the office at Tottenham Court Road this morning but she hasn’t come in today and she’s not answering her mobile. When did you last see her?’
‘We were all running away from Doggy down Bedford Street to the Strand to get the tube at Charing Cross. Alyshia, as far as I know, went off down Maiden Lane with Jim.’
‘I don’t remember Jim.’
‘Jim Paxton. Tall, balding, a bit older than the rest of us. I’ve got his number if you want it.’
Papadopoulos took the number down, hung up, went back into the computer and got an address for Jim Paxton in Shoreditch. He called Bovingdon Recruitment, asked for him, and was told that he’d left the company. Papadopoulos decided that if Jim Paxton was the last to see Alyshia, he’d prefer a face-to-face conversation. He took the tube to Old Street and half an hour later was standing outside a block of flats on Purcell Street. No answer from Jim Paxton’s bell. He rang the one next to it, got an answer from a girl.