Greenbriar was in the business of international real estate holding and development. They acquired land and built large subdivisions, apartment complexes, and resort hotels. The list of properties was long. I clicked through to the About page and found a list of top level managers as well as the board of directors. The CEO and Chairman of the board was named Morgan Jutting. Balding, maybe in his sixties, with a face like one of the thuggish, late Roman emperors—Titus, maybe, or Vespasian—he stared imperiously at the camera as if he was willing it to explode. I could easily imagine him carved in marble and scowling down from a tall plinth. Something about his name resonated. It pinged around in my brain, sinking down and then ricocheting back up attached to a memory: Julian Wolhardt, halfway across the planet and eight days in the past, explaining to me why someone might have gone to the trouble of stealing his notes. An English billionaire had offered a reward, Wolhardt had told me. The billionaire’s name, maybe not so coincidentally, was Morgan Jutting.
So, Bathmore had been a personal assistant working for Jutting’s company. It seemed clear, judging by his unpaid bills, that he was probably no longer employed as a PA at Greenbriar. Instead, he taught music lessons and flew across the world to break into houses. Jutting, according to Wolhardt, was also a devotee of the Enigma Variations mystery. I googled Jutting and found a lot of articles about his projects. Apparently, he had started out as a small time developer in the nineteen-eighties and had built his company up into a massively successful enterprise. I scrolled through the results. There were a lot of fawning interviews and puff pieces in business magazines and conservative newspapers. Worryingly, though, some key words and phrases kept popping up in descriptions of Jutting. The most common were ‘famously reclusive’ and ‘eccentric’. There were variations but they all pointed to him as a kind of present day Howard Hughes figure—averse to contact with outsiders, rarely leaving his house, running his business by issuing orders from behind closed doors. I started scrolling through photos of Jutting. He liked gray suits and solid colored ties. He wasn’t one to have his picture taken at parties or playing golf. Almost all the photos showed him ducking from a chauffeured car into his house or the glass and steel monolith in central London where Greenbriar headquarters was located. He was usually surrounded by a couple of bodyguards. There was also a young blond woman in most of the shots, following close behind Jutting. She wore chic suits, carried a large shoulder bag, and was nearly always on her phone. She had the alert face and harried body language of a personal assistant. As I scrolled back further the woman disappeared from the photos, replaced by a young man. I clicked to open one of the images, zoomed in. I don’t know why I was surprised to see Bathmore’s face emerge from the pixilated image. I looked at a few more. It was definitely him. So Bathmore had been Jutting’s PA but wasn’t anymore. Jutting was an Enigma fanatic who had offered a massive reward for a solution to the mystery. Bathmore stole Wolhardt’s notes. Somehow, Bathmore knew that I was on the case and had searched my house too. Things were getting interesting, threads were getting tangled, exposing relationships.
I didn’t like the fact that Bathmore knew who I was. Did Jutting know about me too? Was Bathmore still working for him but in an undercover role? I didn’t think so. The evidence of Bathmore’s money troubles and his low rent office didn’t point to any lucrative position serving Jutting. Also, if a guy like Jutting knew about a possible solution to the enigma and wanted it stolen he would have hired a professional. Breaking into Bathmore’s place had been worth the risk but now I needed to try to figure out what the information meant and how it tied together. My to do list had grown suddenly longer but that suited me fine. It meant I had some leads and some idea of how to pursue them. My first step would be getting in touch with Valerie again. I needed a contact in London and I was doing a favor for her family friend so the way I saw it, she still owed me.
The cat wandered into the kitchen and meowed at me, standing expectantly by the refrigerator. I gave him a little bowl of cream and he settled down to lap it up. He had me wrapped around what? His paw? His tail? Cats don’t have fingers. Anyway, he knew I was a sucker and was not going to be shy about exploiting it.
****
Six PM that same evening found me riding an elevator paneled in figured Hawaiian koa up to the rooftop bar of a hotel in central London. There were a couple of young finance types in the elevator with me wearing slick suits and smelling like cigars. Their voices were loud and deep. I tuned out their conversation, thinking about pieces of the puzzle I was trying to solve for Julian Wolhardt. We reached the tenth floor, the doors opened, and I followed them out into one of those environments that is designed to overwhelm. It
