Her Fugitive Heart Read online

  “Alfie would have had a laugh over what happened last night,” he said.

  “You planned it all along,” I said.

  “Of course I did. Nothing left to chance. Good result, Ravi,” he said.

  “How the hell do you measure that?”

  “The weekend was a roaring success! The guests all had a marvelous time. They all said they were going into business with me. Even Interzone.”

  “After Laird Collins threw a complete wobbly and nearly shot me in the head,” I said.

  “Chin up, old son. That was well in hand. I told Ariel to keep an eye on him and have a sedative ready. You were safe as houses.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I said. “Wait, Ariel was in on it with you?”

  “I’ve had a dialogue with her in the last few months,” Roger said in that tone he used when he was enjoying being evasive.

  “To turn on her boss? Are they planning a mutiny at Interzone?”

  “There have been rumblings,” Roger said. “I was open to fanning those flames.”

  “Except we all could still end up getting burnt,” I said. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the games within games you’re playing.”

  “Ravi, Laird Collins pointed a gun at my head back in 1989 and he was stone-cold-bloody-sober at the time. I did not conduct myself with half the calm and dignity you did, I’m ashamed to say. I had to throw away the trousers I wore that day. He would have pulled the trigger, too, if Cheryl hadn’t talked him out of it.”

  “Was I bait that you laid out for Collins?” I said. “Just so you could have history repeat itself last night with me, for a different outcome?”

  “Nerves of steel, Ravi,” Roger said. “That’s what you got.”

  “To be honest, I think I was too bemused to be terrified. It was so absurd it didn’t occur to me to shit my pants.”

  “Collins would have pulled the trigger and killed me that day in 1989,” Roger said. “And he didn’t have to. I just happened to have a piece of evidence he was assigned to get back, and I would have gotten a payout big enough to be life-changing if I’d kept it. Cheryl saved my life by giving it to him. That was when I vowed I would get back at the fucker, no matter how long it takes. Not because he won that day, not because he humiliated me, but because he was perfectly fine with murdering me without a second thought, all for the sake of power.”

  “Power that you fancy getting a piece of,” I said.

  “I don’t kill people,” Roger said. “That’s the difference between him and me.”

  “You gambled with my life,” I said, still so calm that I surprised myself. “If he’d killed me last night, you would have just had Wittingsley and Ken and Clive cover it up and carried on your business plan.”

  “Come on, Ravi, didn’t you at least feel a bit of gratification at seeing that bastard taken down several pegs? After all his pompous self-righteousness and belief in the Rapture and the Apocalypse, a bit of magic mushrooms and he pisses his pants in abject terror. I waited more than twenty years to see that. Well worth it, and it’s on video!”

  I had watched earlier as Ariel and Jarrod helped a rather wobbly Collins into his car for the trip to the airport. He was ashen, diminished, as if he’d been through the wringer with the gods, which you could say he literally had been the night before. I didn’t feel good about seeing one of the most dangerous men in the world humiliated.

  “What’s this business proposition you’ve been pitching anyway, that you need to drug your investors to have blackmail material on them for?”

  “Better you don’t know, my son,” Roger said, smiling.

  “Because it might be incriminating?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked you lot to put in the extra work if this wasn’t important. You’ll know when it comes to fruition and we’re covered in clover.”

  “David must know if he’s the one having to write the contracts. Just how dodgy is this business deal that’s made him so nervous?”

  “David has a touch of moral and ethical scruples like you,” Roger said. “You’re a mensch. I’m not.”

  “At the rate you’re going, we ought to get danger money,” I said.

  “I haven’t forgotten you lot,” Roger said. “When you go into the office on Monday, Cheryl will be giving you all a nice little bonus for this weekend. I asked her to put in an extra for you and Julia, something for the wedding, eh?”

  That was the Roger Cheryl had warned us about in private. He would put you in harm’s way, push you in the deep end and leave you to struggle your way out, throw you under the bus for his agenda, then make it up to you with a speech with his silver tongue and extra money. He genuinely didn’t see why you would be upset about any of it. In his eyes, the money should be compensation enough. Money was the great equalizer. He might not actually be capable of guilt or remorse at all. That was the mindset of a chancer. I could imagine now why Cheryl regretted falling in love with him and eventually fell out of love, but perhaps after it was too late.

  “Ready to go?” Julia asked.

  “One last thing,” I said.

  FOURTEEN

  Julia and I caught up with Wittingsley as he limped back towards the mansion, nursing his ankle.

  “Ow! Bugger!” He winced and cursed at the pain.

  “You orchestrated the drugging of the guests, didn’t you?” I said.

  “It would appear you have me bang to rights, sir,” he said.

  “You’re the only one who could have had the guests so precisely doped up and avoided having the staff or us drugged. You made sure the staff had a simple sedative in their food and drink so they’d sleep through the pandemonium. Especially our Marcie.”

  “No witnesses outside those of us in the know,” Julia said. “So Roger could have total deniability.”

  “Mr. Golden paid me handsomely to get it done properly, sir, but I couldn’t have done it myself since I had to organize the staff for the whole weekend. A senior butler’s job is to delegate.”

  “When you were briefing Madame Felicity’s girls, you didn’t just give them the lay of the land. You instructed them to douse the guests’ drinks and food. That’s how only the guests started tripping their brains out once they were with the girls. They were all targeted.”

  “It’s actually from an old American playbook,” Wittingsley said. “When the CIA were testing LSD on unsuspecting civilians in the early sixties, they used brothels they happened to control. They got the ladies there to slip the mickey into their clients’ drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors in the bedrooms. The hapless gentlemen didn’t know what was happening to them, and they were never going to report it to the police. The spies had perfect cover and deniability.”

  Bloody spies and their games again. Games Roger was happy to play.

  “And all those women have gone back home to London and their lives, scattered to the wind,” Julia said. “For them, it’s probably another night on the job, catering to the kinks of their clients, and for a higher rate than usual.”

  “Quite,” Wittingsley said. “Thank you for the help, miss. My ankle’s been a bit weak since I shattered it back in Iraq. I should get on with closing the mansion down, dismissing the staff, and packing up.”

  “You mean doing a runner,” Julia said.

  “Quite right, miss.”

  “I really ought to turn you in,” I said. “After the mess you caused.”

  “None of the guests are likely to press charges, sir. This is how some people do business. Your Mr. Golden paid me twenty thousand pounds for my services this weekend, including making sure the guests had a suitable dosage of mushrooms. If I were to be interviewed, I might have to tell the police about that.”

  “Ravi, he was doing what Roger wanted,” Julia said.

  “If I may ask, sir,” Wittingsley said, “how did you deduce that I was the one behind the drugging?”

  “When I ran into you in the hall,” I said, “you said you were having a bad trip like everyon
e else, but I realized you were faking it to throw the scent off. Everyone who was tripping was seeing the same things, sort of a shared hallucination, don’t ask me why or how. You weren’t seeing or reacting to what they were seeing. You were just acting like you were tripping on acid and experiencing slowed time, instead of seeing odd visions. The guests were all off their tits.”

  “Ah,” Wittingsley said. “I should have consulted with Mr. Oldham for more details on how to fake tripping.”

  “So what’s next for you?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m out of a job once this mansion is sold. Off to the wild blue yonder with me.”

  “I expect someone will always need a butler-bodyguard,” I said.

  “Some of those people are not necessarily the type of employer one is proud to serve,” he said. “But there are a few interesting offers on the horizon.”

  “You mean you’re in the job as much for the crack of it as paying the bills,” I said.

  “I imagine you’re the same, sir.”

  “I’m stuck in this job because I’m sort of trapped in it,” I said. “I can’t really escape.”

  “That’s what you like to tell yourself, sir,” Wittingsley said. “In my experience, if a man really wants out, he will find a way. Neither of us truly wants it.”

  I left Wittingsley to his own devices and walked back to the car. The sky was getting dark by the time we got back to London. So was my mood. “I can’t believe the guests were all smiles when they left,” I said. “Doesn’t that strike you as incongruous after the night’s events? Did they even remember any of it?”

  “It’s not something they’re likely to forget,” Julia said. “The Tories were well chuffed. They had a great time losing control like that. Yes, they cried and moaned and hallucinated God knows what, but Mistress Tania had them well under control. Since they were tied up and blindfolded, they couldn’t do themselves any harm. She’s talked people through head trips before. Took good care of them.”

  “Thank Christ for that,” I said.

  “You might hate to admit it,” Julia said, “but Roger might have judged all the guests perfectly. I think he knew how they would react to the drugs.”

  “If he did, that means he knew who was going to have a bad trip,” I said. “It means he knew that Laird Collins would not enjoy losing control and going completely round the bend . . .”

  “Ravi? What’s wrong?”

  “It means that was why Roger wanted me there.” I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. “So that I would talk to Collins about the gods and that would completely fuck with Collins’s worldview. I was the bait and the weapon, Roger’s revenge against Collins.”

  “Are you upset that Roger used you for the very reason he’s always kept you around?” Julia asked.

  “I’m offended that Roger used me and the gods to mash Collins’s head into paste,” I said, seething. “That’s not how you use gods. You should never use gods to get revenge at all. It’s hubris. The gods will make you pay for that. And if Roger’s pissed off the gods, that puts me in the middle. Again.”

  Julia went quiet as it sank in. I didn’t know if she believed the gods were there. She tended to act as if they were. She especially took comfort in the notion that Louise was there.

  “Bloody hell, so the butler did it, after all,” Benjamin said. “The oldest but least used cliché ever.”

  Mark laughed.

  “I’m sure old Roger knew about the whole irony of it all,” he said. “It’s just like him to fuck with convention like that.”

  “When he called Willingsley a ‘combat butler,’ I thought he was joking,” I said. “Now I know what a combat butler does. He could have told us instead of having me chasing down who spiked the food.”

  “And made us accessories and conspirators?” Mark said. “Imagine how much shit we’d be in if this even ended up in court. No, you provided Roger with his deniability.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. That actually hadn’t occurred to me in this instance. “So Roger keeping us in the dark was, in his own way, keeping our arses covered as well.”

  “It’s not from the kindness of his heart, I can tell you,” Mark said. “He wants to keep Golden Sentinels as his primary business, as a backup. I heard him talking to Cheryl about that.”

  “This doesn’t leave us clean,” I said. “We’re still implicated in whatever he gets up to, by association alone. He’s taking a fucking big gamble here.”

  “Roger’s gotta be Roger,” Mark said. “Always gotta chance it.”

  “And he might land us in the shit in the process,” I said.

  Louise was riding in the car with us, beaming from the backseat between Mark and Benjamin as we headed back to London.

  Both Louise and Julia looked happy.

  Louise settled into the backseat and sipped on her cocktail.

  THE PEAR-SHAPED ANTITERROR CAPER

  ONE

  “Deep shit” had been my prevailing mood for more than a month, ever since this case. I had not been in the best of moods. It’s hard to maintain a sunny disposition when you were nearly beheaded in a terror video. The gods hadn’t been much help. They thought it was a great laugh, especially the bit where I was rescued and the clusterfuck that followed.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Julia has suggested I talk about the case that had put me in a dark mood. I don’t really want to talk about it, but I might as well do it now to get it over with, and out of my system. I’ve tried to write about this several times, but mostly it was just writing “fuck” a lot. It was that unpleasant. I promised Julia I would pull my finger out and get on with it.

  Before things went off the rails, we went to Sunday dinner as usual with my parents. Anji and Vivek brought baby Daya so Mum and Dad could coo over her and not talk about Julia’s and my wedding ceremony. The gods milled around us at the dinner table. Louise was in a Holly Golightly dress, her hair in a Hepburn bun.

  I wondered if the gods had their own ongoing soap opera when I wasn’t looking, aside from reenacting the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita, of course. Perhaps that was why they liked to show up and watch my life. Now they had a new god in their midst, Louise, who wasn’t even from the same culture. Now that I thought about it, it sounded more like a sitcom.

  In case you were wondering why I never talked about what my sister and her husband do for a living, it’s because she specifically asked me not to. On pain of death. Mind you, Vivek would have been utterly chuffed if I’d mentioned what he did, since he thinks everything I do is glamorous and grand. I haven’t told them or my parents about the hairier situations I get into as an investigator, and that is how I plan to keep it. They would be horrified and my parents might drop dead from the shock. Rest assured, Anji and Vivek work in perfectly normal, totally legal middle-class white-collar professions that never require the services of the likes of me, and that is how we all like it.

  My parents were getting on well, or normally, anyway. Mum was helping out at the local food bank giving out provisions to the people who needed it. Mrs. Dhewan, who owned the food bank and was Mum’s friend, was also the local gangster who ran her own little kingdom in my parents’ part of town.

  The dominating topic, of course, was my impending wedding to Julia. Her parents had insisted on being in charge of the wedding, much to my relief. More specifically, Julia’s mother was planning it all, and my mother had been spending a lot of time with her. The result: two Bridezilla mums. They’d been arguing for weeks now about everything from the flower arrangements, to the color schemes, the style of the hats, the gift lists, the seating arrangements. My parents were actually quite delighted that I was going to have an English wedding. Julia and I were going to be married in a church. There was going to be a reception with speeches and dancing, only much plainer and more anodyne than you would expect from a Hindu wedding. The church was booked, the hotel was booked for the reception afterwards. The gift list had to be planned. This was virtually a ful
l-time job. Which our mothers took charge of. Which became the next big source of stress for everyone.

  Two words: Bridezilla mums.

  This had to be an absolutely perfect wedding, of course, but our mothers’ ideas of what constituted that were not 100 percent in synch. Julia’s mother was very Church of England. Mum kept trying to introduce elements of Hindu custom into it. I suspected one of the relatives back in India had put the idea in her head in one of their phone conversations. Some of the other relatives were actually thrilled to be attending an English wedding, a fun reason to fly over from India for the first time since my sister’s wedding more than a year ago.

  “Did you go over to see that woman?” my father asked.

  “Of course I did, Dad. It would have been disrespectful not to,” I said.

  Dad was referring to Mrs. Dhewan. Julia and I had stopped by to say hello on our way to dinner with my parents.

  “Wonderful, Ravi!” she said. “And what a lovely girl Julia is! The two of you work very well together!”

  We had helped her out with some bits of bother with her businesses a few months ago, tracked down some dodgy suppliers of Bollywood DVDs who owed her some merchandise after they did a runner and left her video rental business in the lurch. Since that was what kept that local Asian community up to date on the latest movies, it would not do. So we got Olivia to do a search and hacked the supplier’s website, shutting it down with a DDoS attack that paralyzed their business until they agreed to supply Mrs. Dhewan again. Not everything with her needed to be a gang war, fortunately.

  “If you need any help with the catering or supplies for your wedding, you’ll let Auntie know, won’t you?” Mrs. Dhewan said and beamed.

  Of course, we invited her to the wedding. My father harrumphed when I told him.

  “That’s all the boxes ticked,” I told Julia as we drove home. “Now we can just try to get through this without our mums driving everyone mad.”

  I knew it wasn’t exactly going to be easy, but we’d done our part. Any stress that arose after this wouldn’t be our fault. It was just as well, really, considering what was to come.