Читать книгу The Fund - Jeff Edwards - Страница 16

With all the files read thoroughly and pages of notes written, Sloane and the two agents were considering their next move.

‘Should we make a call on Dr Rani Smith? She wouldn’t talk to Sloane, but maybe if we put some official government pressure on her she’ll open up,’ said Sam Tait.

‘I doubt if Dr Smith would bow to pressure from anyone. She’s much too sure of her position. At her age, no one can tell her what to do,’ explained Sloane. ‘However, that doesn’t include her children. Perhaps they can shed some light on matters.’

‘Would they know much?’ asked Bree.

‘You never know what sort of information has been revealed to them over the years.’

Sam nodded. ‘I’ll get a list of names and addresses and then we’ll do a little background checking before we interview them.’

‘Actually, while you’re doing that, I suggest you do some background checking on a Colleen Hicks. She and Dr Smith were both mentioned in Green’s will,’ suggested Sloane.

‘Colleen! Hang on! There was a Colleen mentioned somewhere here!’ said Bree as she searched through her notes. ‘The mention of Colleen and Dr Rani Smith in the same sentence brought it back to me. Here it is! Immediately after you tried to interview Dr Smith she made two phone calls. The second one was to someone at The Fund, but the first person she contacted was an unlisted number in New York. That number belongs to a Colleen Cross, but the records show that she has been married several times and one of them was a John Hicks. She’s Colleen Hicks!’

‘What were her other names?’ asked Sloane.

‘So far she has been a Colleen Cross, a Hicks, Jones, plus Adams and Dunkley.’

‘What was her maiden name?’

‘Dunkley.’

‘Colleen Dunkley, eh!’ said Sloane as he too dived into his files. ‘Interesting! I just knew these old hospital records would come in handy. During the war Jade Green was admitted to hospital with abdominal stab wounds. Her doctor was Dr Rani Smith and the person who signed her admission papers was a certain Colleen Dunkley. I checked out the incident in police archives and Colleen Dunkley was with Green at the time of the assault. Green was heavily pregnant and lost the child as a result.’

‘Who stabbed her?’ asked Bree.

‘Dunkley / Hicks / Cross claimed she didn’t know.’

‘Is any of this significant?’ asked Sam.

‘You never know,’ replied Sloane. ‘It may be a dead end or it could be the clue to open up the whole mystery. The more information you have, the clearer the picture becomes. The answer may not relate to your line of questioning, but it’ll let you know if someone’s lying or sending you in the wrong direction.’

‘So, background checks on Smith’s children as well as this Colleen person?’ asked Bree.

‘Check Colleen Dunkley out for children as well and do backgrounds on them. It looks as though she may have been one of Jade Green’s “girls”. If so, she should have a great deal of interesting information.’

‘If she’ll talk to us,’ said Sam.

‘Ask the right questions. That’s the clue,’ smiled Sloane.

‘How did you find out about the assault?’ asked Bree.

‘I was looking for Green’s criminal record and do you know what?’

‘What?’ asked Bree.

‘Up until she was arrested and sent to prison, she never had one.’

‘What? You mean she operated the most high profile bordello in the city for decades and was never arrested! Not once?’ asked Bree in amazement.

‘Not once. Now what does that tell you?’

‘That she had some high-placed friends.’

‘Very high-placed friends,’ agreed Sloane. ‘Friends who could offer a level of protection that was almost unprecedented. The only mention of Jade Green in the police files was as a stabbing victim.’

‘An upset client?’

‘Apparently not. It happened in a park.’

‘A mugging?’

‘Muggings are a modern phenomenon. Robberies took place back then, but robberies with violence, especially to women, were almost unheard of.’

‘So you think she may have known her attacker?’ asked Bree.

‘On the law of averages I’d say she would have and I believe her friend Colleen Dunkley knew him as well.’

‘Why wouldn’t she tell the police?’ asked Sam.

Bree grinned. ‘I’ll take much pleasure in watching the former Colleen Dunkley’s face when we put that exact question to her.’

The directors of The Fund met for a final board meeting before going their separate ways. There was an air of excited expectation in the room as Brian and Toby prepared to call and pick up Fred Marks on their way to the Jersey ferry while Suzie and Lana were preparing to take their younger colleagues, Justine and Eliza, under their protective wings to indoctrinate them in the matter of secret women’s business as conducted in the city of Paris.

Unfortunately, they had to delay their departure for a couple of days as Lana had been unable to secure accommodation in their selected hotel due to the influx of visitors to Paris for the spring showings of the world’s leading couturiers.

When Brian found that out he groaned inwardly. Letting women loose in Paris at that time of year could prove absolutely disastrous to a company’s credit card. He was just glad that he would not be present to witness the raw passion and utter concentration exhibited by a pride of shopping lionesses.

Chuck Towner was present at the meeting, handing out watches, satellite phones and laptop computers to each of the directors including Ali and Nori Akuba while he answered their questions and made sure that each one of them understood their new toy’s many secrets.

Eliza Strang reported to the board that she and her father had conducted interviews and were now assembling a team to man the central computer that had been installed in a secure office upstairs and to which each laptop was now connected.

Skills criteria for each of their new staff included an extremely high proficiency in the IT field, with a special emphasis on the art of hacking.

Teddy and Eliza had quickly realised that the future of The Fund may rely on the dark arts that this group could bring to bear on problems and they had convinced the others on the board to pay these people a salary that was commensurate with their talents. The Strangs felt sure that the original heavy outlay of funds would pay for itself many times over.

As soon as Chuck had ensured that all their devices were activated, everyone said their goodbyes and Brian and Toby climbed into Brian’s new Jaguar and drove off.

The bullet holes and shrapnel damage in Brian’s beloved old Land Rover had finally been the death knell for his old and faithful friend.

Faced with the necessity of replacing the car, Brian had looked at updating to a new model, but after test driving several he felt that the new models were just too luxurious and polished to risk fording rivers and scraping past rocky outcrops. He finally decided that on the days he wanted to go off-road he would simply hire a car for the day and selected a town car for his day-to-day needs.

Now the pair settled into the thickly padded leather seats for their whisper quiet trip south.

‘This will be the first time Suzie and I have been apart since the night we met,’ said Toby with a long face as he selected a suitable music CD for the journey.

Brian felt much the same way himself. He and Lana hadn’t been married all that much longer than Suzie and Toby and their times apart had been few and far between as well. Nevertheless, he tried to cheer his partner up. ‘It’s for the best. You don’t want to be around the women when the shopping urge is upon them, especially when you have four of them operating in a pack. One woman, a man might be able to handle, but a pack would tear him apart if he accidentally placed himself between them and a designer outfit.’

‘I’ll miss her.’

‘Of course you will and she’ll miss you too, but that won’t stop her from indulging in maximum retail therapy.’

‘So, what do we do to get over the blues?’

‘We concentrate on the job in hand.’

‘Which is?’

‘Well, Fred will be doing the accountancy work. While he does that we’ll be concentrating on the mechanics of the whole thing to see if there’s anything that could be of interest to us. Remember, information will be our stock in trade and banks hold more than information than most businesses.’

‘And we record everything?’

‘Everything that we can get our hands on.’

‘That’ll be a hell of a lot of information to go through.’

‘Our new computer experts will look after most of that. Chuck tells me that they’ll have filters that will spit out anything that looks important for further analysis.’

‘I’m glad they’re looking after that end. I’d be useless at something like that.’

‘So would I. That’s the beauty of having plenty of cash to work with. We’ll be able to hire the best and can expect to get the best results,’ replied Brian.