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‘Almost since the beginning,’ she met his look of enquiry. ‘If anyone knows where all the bones are buried, it’s Bruno d’Andrea.’
Chris smiled quietly to himself. He was always amused by the metaphors people used to make their colleagues – and their jobs – sound somehow more darkly glamorous than they really were.
Just after ten-twenty that night, Elliott North swiped his card through the electronic security lock to Monitoring Services. He strode swiftly past the rows and rows of computer stations, now in near total darkness, towards the only source of light on the floor – the desk lamp shining in Bruno d’Andrea’s office.
Dark-haired, moustachioed, his steel-framed spectacles flashing in the shadows, North had received d’Andrea’s message on his pager less than half an hour earlier: ‘Guardian has the story’. Only four words, but all that was needed for him to excuse himself from the dinner he was co-hosting for a visiting Italian client with another Lombard director at Le Palais du Jardin. Climbing in a Lombard Jag, he’d ordered the driver back to the office with all haste.
Now, before he’d even reached d’Andrea’s office he demanded, ‘What have they got?’
‘Everything.’ D’Andrea looked up from behind his desk as North appeared in the doorway.
‘Shit!’
He regarded North impassively, his heavy-lidded eyes seeming even larger in the darkness.
‘How’s it looking?’ demanded North.
D’Andrea didn’t bother answering. Instead he pushed an early edition of the next day’s front page across the desk.
North scanned the main headline: City high-flier in kinky sex death. ‘Christ Almighty!’ he sat down opposite d’Andrea, rapidly digesting the contents of the article. The body of Merlin de Vere, a £400,000-a-year analyst with merchant bank J. P. Morgan had been found at his Dorset cottage, it reported, after what appeared to be a kinky, auto-erotic experiment which had gone wrong. Dressed in a black, rubber wetsuit covering both body and head, and legs bound together with a pair of his girlfriend’s stockings, de Vere had been discovered with his head in a dustbin of two-week-old, rotting rubbish. He’d died of asphyxiation. Police had found substantial quantities of sado-masochistic pornography both at his Dorset cottage and downloaded on the computer in his London flat.
The article went on to report how de Vere’s body had been discovered by his girlfriend, a City caterer, when she arrived at his cottage to spend the weekend with him. Currently being treated for shock, his girlfriend had said nothing except that she was simply unable to believe her boyfriend capable of the state in which she’d found him.
There was a paragraph on how de Vere was described by colleagues. ‘A loner,’ said one, ‘never a man to follow the herd. Constantly challenging convention, which is a very useful quality for an analyst to have.’ ‘Something of a recluse,’ said another, ‘rarely joined his colleagues for a drink at the end of the day, and couldn’t wait to escape town at the end of the week.’ The outlines of a portrait began to emerge – de Vere as the compulsive oddball, the social misfit – perhaps, the implication seemed to be, the manner of his death wasn’t so surprising after all?
The article ended with a line-up of high-flying achievers who’d died in similarly sordid circumstances, including the late Conservative MP Stephen Milligan, who had been found under his kitchen table, asphyxiated, in his mouth a segment of orange containing amyl nitrite.
The article was better, a whole lot better, than what North had feared. But it was still early days. Scanning it over once again, he glanced up at d’Andrea who was watching him. ‘No mention of the police. What are they up to?’
‘The usual. It appears forensics have been in but didn’t find anything,’ d’Andrea spoke in his customary monotone. ‘The coroner’s report will be available in due course. It will confirm death by asphyxiation.’
‘As long as that’s all it confirms.’
North met his gaze. Ever since he’d arrived in London there had been tension between the two men. He put it down to hierarchy. Before he’d got there, d’Andrea had been the undisputed Prince of Darkness at Lombard. Despite his deliberately modest-sounding title, ‘Head of Monitoring Services’, in reality, d’Andrea was Mr Intelligence, the eyes and ears and, on occasion, invisible hands of the whole operation. Then along had come North, fresh from America, with his own ideas about how to deal with sensitive issues. D’Andrea resented the imposition, but there wasn’t much he could do about it; he knew Elliott North had long been Jacob Strauss’s confidant, and Jacob Strauss was not, in any circumstances, to be irked.
North ignored d’Andrea’s expression of distaste. ‘Nice touch, wasn’t it,’ he bragged, ‘downloading stuff on to his home PC?’
D’Andrea said nothing.
‘We also made sure we had his fingerprints all over a stash of S&M material in the cottage.’
Then, looking d’Andrea in the eye, ‘What had he dug up on Jay?’
‘Nothing on his computer at work. At home we found a few files which we downloaded then deleted.’
Reaching down to a drawer, he retrieved an envelope containing computer disks which he handed over to North.
‘He’d got a fair way down the road on previous business stuff,’ d’Andrea continued.
‘Personal life?’
‘Hadn’t looked.’
‘Good,’ North slumped back in the chair with relief, ‘looks like I’ve put out the fire … on this occasion.’
Across the dark shadow of his office, d’Andrea met North’s challenging expression, his mouth forming a bitter smile. ‘I can’t emphasise strongly enough our extreme reluctance for agency staff to involve themselves in this kind of activity,’ he said evenly.
‘And I can’t emphasise strongly enough the importance of my client to Lombard,’ countered North.
