‘Gav,’ he said, as they got into the van. ‘Porter, bodyguard, personal shopper, dogsbody.’
‘Right,’ Silva said, trying to be friendly as she shifted across and sat in the middle seat.
‘The journey will take about three hours,’ Gavin said as he nudged the van out into the traffic. ‘But Mr Fairchild thought it would be better to transit via Brindisi rather than Naples. Especially afterwards.’
Afterwards was when Karen Hope would be lying in the basement of an Italian hospital with a hole in her head. The world’s media would be camped outside. There’d be an international outcry, messages of sympathy from world leaders, meaningless virtue-signalling hashtags on social media. The mobilisation of a kill team to hunt down the assassin.
Fairchild had told her not to worry about the aftermath. There’d be uproar at first, but the information about the Hope family’s involvement with terrorism would trickle out. Within a month Karen Hope’s name would be mud.
Gavin was talking again.
‘The place we’re going is up in the mountains. The Monti Picentini. Be cooler there.’
‘Thank fuck,’ Itchy said. ‘Hope it’s not too basic.’
‘The opposite. It’s a luxury retreat. You’ll be very comfortable and it has the bonus of being in the middle of nowhere. We can prepare without being disturbed.’
Soon they were heading away from the airport and the coast along an arrow-straight road across the flat countryside. Silva hadn’t been to Italy before, but so far she wasn’t impressed. Gavin turned his head.
‘It gets better,’ he said. ‘Once we cross to the west coast and begin heading up. The mountains where we’re staying are something else, and you should see Positano. Picture postcard is an understatement.’
Silva couldn’t help but think of the card her mother had left for her. She tensed. If only the message could have been a simple wish you were here… see you soon… love, Mum.
‘Picture postcard,’ she said. ‘Great.’
It was two weeks since their visit to Suffolk and they were back in Thames House in the little office under the stairs. Holm had written a long report for Huxtable detailing the trip to Ipswich and claiming it as a resounding success. He told her they’d liaised with Suffolk Constabulary and set up channels of communication to ensure any re-emergence of extreme animal rights groups in the area would be effectively monitored.
There hadn’t been any more tweets from TCXGP1505 and it seemed as if the reference to the dead SeaPak operations manager was all the help the mysterious informant was going to provide. Still, it was enough. Holm pulled a sheaf of printouts towards him. Paul Henderson’s bank details. The new manager was clearing ten thousand dollars into the account each month. Only this wasn’t his normal account, not the one his salary was paid into, not the one he paid his bills from. This account was registered in the Channel Islands.
It had taken Holm a while to get the information but that was because he hadn’t wanted Huxtable to know what he’d been up to. Eventually the account details had pinged into his inbox, but while the financial details were interesting there was little else to help them.
‘The money’s coming from a numbered account in Singapore,’ Holm said. ‘So we’re buggered.’
‘Oh,’ Javed said.
‘Yes, oh.’ Holm jerked his arm and cleverly floated the piece of paper across the room and into a waste bin. He sighed. A numbered account had no name attached to it, or rather the name was known only to high-ranking bank officials. The information would only be revealed in a criminal investigation, and in Singapore that was unlikely to happen without some sort of international pressure. ‘It’s a dead end unless we can get the shipping manifests, and that isn’t going to happen without spilling the beans to the Spider.’
‘But if you have an ordinary job like Paul Henderson you don’t set up an offshore account and you don’t receive a secret gift of ten thousand dollars a month for doing nothing.’
‘Of course you don’t. The trouble is, unless we can get some sort of intelligence on Henderson or the manifests we’re not going to get any further.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘You go and fetch some coffees while I think on it, right?’
Javed muttered his disapproval, but he got up and left the room. By the time he’d returned with two coffees and a plate of blueberry muffins, Holm had worked out a solution.
‘Nazi memorabilia,’ he said.
‘You what?’ Javed crunched his face. ‘Have you lost the plot?’
‘A twist in the plot, more like.’ Holm reached for a muffin. ‘It’s like this: during our investigations we’ve come across Henderson. We’ve discovered he’s importing Nazi artefacts and they’re like gold dust to fascist groups. Bits of the Führer’s bunker. Tatty old SS uniforms. Propaganda material from the thirties. The right-wing nutters worship this sort of stuff, make shrines of it. Henderson is creaming off a cool ten K a month simply by getting the stuff through customs. Once it’s here he auctions it to the highest bidder. To combat the trade we’re going to need the shipping manifests for SeaPak. We’ll need to obtain them surreptitiously so as not to alert Henderson but I reckon we can do that through the Border Force by telling them we need the manifests for every vessel for the past three months.’
‘Fascists? I thought we were investigating animal rights groups? Do you think the sudden change of strategy will wash with Huxtable?’
‘Remember the attack in Hamburg a few weeks ago? A right-wing terror group targeting immigrants? Perhaps I can weave that into the story. Anyway, as long as we’re bumbling along on our stupid little investigation, Huxtable doesn’t care.’ Holm took a bite of his muffin and then tapped
