He brought out his phone and texted Vuk Divjak with an offer of €7,500 for his information, then copied the text, along with Vuk’s bank details, which he had from a previous job, to Imogen. Vuk was a rogue, but in all the dealings Samson had had with him, he’d never lied. If he said he had information, it was worth having. Macy would kick up, but it was Hisami’s money and, besides, Samson was in no mood to spend carefully or, for that matter, to oblige bloody Macy Harp.
Then he brought up the photographs he’d taken in the Pit and was unsurprised to see that all traces of the words on the whiteboard exactly fitted the five words found in Hisami’s calendar. PIT was part of PITCH; EAR was what was left of PEARL; ORA of AURORA; R N of BERLIN; and S FRO of SAFFRON. He asked Ivan to fetch the laptop from his bags, now stowed in the restaurant’s cloakroom, ready for him to leave. He entered all five words in the search engine and found a link to something called Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. Of course! They were all colours – pitch black; pearl grey; aurora red; Berlin blue and saffron yellow. He found the online version of the nomenclature. The first attempt at classifying colour had subsequently been refined by an Englishman, Patrick Syme, in 1814; the nomenclature was used by Charles Darwin in his scientific observations. Each colour was defined through references to nature, which Samson thought ingenious and also charming. Pearl grey was found on the backs of black-headed and kittiwake gulls and in a mineral called porcelain jasper; pitch black can be seen on the guillemot and in yenite mica; Berlin blue on the wing feathers of a jay; and saffron yellow in the tail coverts of the golden pheasant.
This was Harland all over. But the origin of the code was no great puzzle. Anyone wanting to know the relationship between them would simply put the words in a search engine and locate Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. Odd that Toombs and Reiner hadn’t mentioned that. Maybe they were testing him, although there seemed no earthly point. The question, of course, was what did the five colours stand for? Having seen the board, Samson was sure that each represented a project and that progress on those five projects was logged in the room where Naji and Zoe Freemantle worked, the operations centre of the whole enterprise.
The phone rang. It was Vuk.
‘English pussy, I take deal – €8,000.’
‘I said €7,500,’ said Samson. ‘It’s on the way to your account.’
‘Vuk needs eight. Big expenses.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Money first. Talk later. This clear for you?’
Samson leaned into the phone. ‘Vuk, unless you tell me now, you won’t get any fucking money. There’s time for me to stop the transfer.’
‘Okay, I tell you English pussy first thing I know and this only. Name of man who kill Mr Bobby Harland is Nikolai Horobets. He is Ukrajinski.’
The name of the Ukrainian hadn’t been released to the media and there was no way Vuk could have read it anywhere. ‘Okay, so we’re on,’ said Samson. ‘What else can you tell me?’
‘Rajavic, Drasko and Dutch cunt Rossi, they work for Ukrajinski from Vojvodina. Ukrajinski drug lord.’
‘So, all three worked for one man. What is the drug lord’s name?’
‘Oret, but he is now not important. Oret is dead. He killed yesterday with wife.’
‘So, the link between them all and the man most likely to have hired them was murdered yesterday?’ Samson grabbed an order pad from one of his waiters and wrote down the name Oret.
‘Yes, I just say that.’
‘How?’
‘Shot in car by home.’
‘So who paid Oret?’
‘Man who is lion killer.’
Samson inhaled. ‘Vuk, what do you mean by “lion killer”?’ Then he understood. ‘Is he a big-game hunter?’
‘Yes, of course, very big game-hunter. Ruski. Maybe living in Kipar.’
‘Kipar? Ah yes, Cyprus. So, this individual you’ve heard about could be a Russian national based in Cyprus. Is he the person who arranged for the supply of the nerve agent?’
‘I do not know this. His name Anatoly Stepurin. Maybe he is GRU or maybe FSB.’
Samson made a note. ‘What makes you think this?’
‘His name in newspaper.’
‘Hold on a moment, Vuk. I’m just going to look this character up.’ He entered the name into the search engine and without too much trouble found Stepurin exposed in the French press as someone with a background in military intelligence and now an organiser of illegal big-game hunting. A French investigative journalism unit named Rochet had managed to trace his phone to dark facilities in and around Moscow that were particularly associated with ‘foreign actions’, which invariably meant assassinations.
‘This man is practically famous,’ said Samson. ‘Can you tie him to Oret?’
‘I have zero more information. But this is good for English pussy, no?’
‘Yes, it looks very good – thank you, Vuk.’
‘I go now to drink and fuck my girl. Cheerio, English pussy.’
Samson hung up and at that moment saw Ivan look round, hand Samson’s bags to a waiter to bring them over and then make urgent flapping motions with his hand below the desk. Samson got up and, without looking back, entered the kitchen, walked past the half-dozen cooks, who took no notice of him, and moved to the side door. At the far end of the narrow passage between the two buildings he saw the blue and yellow of a
