‘I don’t spend a lot of my time in here,’ I countered the lady’s remark whilst picking up the business card she had put in front of me when she had entered, unannounced and without an appointment. ‘So what can I do for you... Eve Rambart?’
‘I would like you to find my husband. I will pay you a million pounds.’
‘You will, a million pounds?’ Was she for real? Seeing that my usual timeframe for finding a missing person is about four days, it sounded a good deal – a ridiculously good deal. Ten years in the N14 branch of the SAS, and another ten in the Met’s Organised Crime Squad when I got too old for N14 had built me a good range of contacts in both; and as most of the information on people that a private eye needs is on one or other of those organisations’ databases, I could usually find whatever I needed pretty quickly. So, for a million quid this sounded a very good deal.
‘Yes, I would like you to find him and then kill him.’
Now that didn’t sound so good a deal. Okay, yes, I had killed people in the line of duty, and since I left the services and had gone private a couple more – usually a gangland hit for a mobster who didn’t want it traced back to him. I do a good job, the body is never found – no body means no trail and no evidence. That’s the sort of care I take. You can pay a lot less for a couple of Glaswegian knobheads on scooters with two rented pistols, but there’s no guarantee of a clean kill and there’s always a mess for the police to clear up that’s full of clues. Rented guns are okay, but once one falls into the hands of the police and forensics analyse it against their data on bullets recovered from various killings and woundings the walls can come tumbling down pretty quickly if the renter gets pulled in and sees a plea deal as a better option than life inside and starts to talk about his clients. My current rate for a hit is one hundred grand, and the only people who know I carry out that service are very few and far between indeed. Was this lady for real? Was somebody playing a game, a joke? Her name wasn’t ringing any bells in my head. If it was a gangland hit she was proposing then she was probably representing somebody else; and with so many Eastern European gangsters setting up bases in the UK recently it was quite possible and after all I thought I’d detected an accent to her voice. She was smiling at me – expecting what, to be thrown out or an immediate acceptance of the job?
‘I’m not a hit man, Mrs Rambart. I’m a private detective.’ I used the honorific Mrs as you couldn’t not notice the wedding ring with a diamond big enough to plays bowls with on her left-hand finger.
‘I know exactly what you are, Mr Nevis. If I wasn’t confident that this sort of work was within your...’ she searched for the right word, ‘…portfolio, I wouldn’t be here. You come highly recommended.’
‘I do? Who by?’
‘Jameson Reynolds.’
That was a surprise. Jameson Reynolds was indeed a client of mine, and a very good one at that: an ex-gangster who had taken his ill-gotten gains and used them to progress into being a city financier and hedge fund director, operating in stocks and shares and international money movement. It’s quite common for a lot of the big boys in crime to try and legitimise their businesses in the field of commerce; few succeed, but Reynolds has. I handle his security and do monthly bug sweeps of his trading floor and offices in the city. He is paranoid that his competitors are spying on him, trying to find out his money trades on Forex or what stocks he’s buying and then piggyback on them. At least that’s what he tells me, but personally I think he’s terrified of one of his old adversaries from his criminal days taking him out with a hidden bomb – otherwise why would he insist we sweep for bugs and explosives? The team I hire to do the sweeps have never found a bug in six years, but now and again I take one into his office and tell him we found it. Well on a retainer of five grand a month, wouldn’t you?
So anyway, I digress… Jameson Reynolds knows this lady, does he? I wonder in what capacity he knows her? She read my thoughts.
‘No, we are not having an affair, Mr Nevis. Jameson is my financial investment advisor.’ Her smile turned into a small laugh. ‘I like the older man, Mr Nevis, but Jameson isn’t my type. And nor are you,’ she added as an afterthought.
I smiled back. ‘I never mix my social life with my business life,’ I countered, not sure whether to take umbrage that at forty-two she looked on me as an ‘older man’.
She rose and slung the Gucci over her shoulder. ‘I will expect to hear from you in forty-eight hours if you will take the job, no contact if you won’t.’ She turned to leave and stopped at my office door, pointing to the rather discoloured lettering that had once been pristine and bright. ‘Is that really your name, Ben
