14

At about the same time on the same evening, when Fleur was with Greg at his flat in Fulham, Richard Jameson eventually caught up with Paul Valerian in a Polish restaurant in Knightsbridge. Jameson had been looking for him all day. He had come to deliver Willoughby Blake’s final offer.

Valerian had been in the restaurant since noon, lunching, drinking, playing chess with cronies, but by six o’clock he was alone, a brandy glass and a newspaper before him, the chess board pushed aside. He looked up when Jameson approached. His eyes were rheumy and bloodshot.

‘You again,’ he said thickly.

Jameson drew up a chair. He was carrying a black briefcase which he laid on the table. ‘I have here’, he said, ‘fifteen thousand pounds.’ He opened the case, and showed Valerian the bundles of banknotes.

‘That’s a lot of money to be carrying around,’ Valerian replied.

‘It is. You can take it from me now, this instant, and you can be in Paris by tomorrow morning. This way, whatever happens, you have for certain fifteen thousand pounds. It is in fifty-pound notes. All you have to do is take it.’ He closed the lid of the case and pushed it across the table towards Valerian.

Valerian stared at him through his bloodshot eyes. He must have been drinking all day, Jameson thought.

‘I told you. I’m not interested.’

‘So you said, but this is an even larger sum than what we talked about when last we met. To prove they are in earnest I have brought the money to you. It’s their final offer.’

Valerian pushed the case back across the table towards Jameson. ‘What do they think they are doing, offering me money? Whose money is it?’

‘It is my principal’s money. He’s so serious about wanting you to go home to Paris that he is willing to pay you this very large sum to persuade you to leave. If you stay, he believes that the young woman may not succeed. He is prepared to pay this money to you because he thinks that it is in her best interests you should go.’

‘Why should I? Why doesn’t he go? Who says it’s in her best interests that I go? I am her friend. He is not. She needs me. It’s me who is in charge of this, not him, not you. It’s me who began it and it’s me who’ll end it. I’m doing the paying, not them, and when it’s over, I’ll pay them for what they do for her, as I arranged with the lawyer. Now go back to your boss and tell him that, once and for all.’

He tried to rise. Jameson put his hand on his sleeve.

‘Be sensible. Do what they ask, do it if it’s only for the young woman’s sake.’ He paused and then said slowly, ‘She’s your friend. Do it for her sake, and for yours. They mean it. They want you to go.’

Valerian shook off Jameson’s hand, staring blearily at him. ‘Take your hands off me. I’ve had enough of the lot of you.’

He stumbled to his feet. ‘Tomorrow I find other lawyers. There’s plenty of other lawyers who’ll take us on. We don’t need you.’ He bent and shook a finger under Jameson’s nose. ‘Go home and you tell them that tomorrow I take Fleur to other lawyers. Tell Stevens and Blake I don’t want to see them again. Tell them they’re finished.’

He turned and wove his way unsteadily past the empty tables and out into the street. Jameson followed. On the escalator of the Knightsbridge underground, Jameson stood a few steps above. He was quite close when they joined the crowd on the platform. Valerian shouldered his way aggressively to the front until he was standing on the edge of the platform.

*   *   *

A little later the Piccadilly line stopped running. There had been an accident at Knightsbridge. A man had fallen in front of a train. At the time the station had been packed with commuters and shoppers on their way home, a mass of people several rows deep who were crushed together on the platform. From behind more had poured down the escalator, struggling and pushing to get on to the platform. Afterwards all that anyone could remember was that the man, a large man, very stout, had been seen suddenly to lurch forward and fall. Some said he was drunk. He certainly smelt of drink. He must have lost his balance, they said, pushed forward by the pressure of the crowd behind him. Others said he could have deliberately thrown himself in front of the train.

No one took any notice of the tall sandy-haired man with the black briefcase who had been among the crowd near the front of the platform and who after the accident had pushed his way back to the exit, as had so many when they realised that for some time no more west-bound trains would be running from Knightsbridge. Later the dead man was identified from papers on him as Paul Valerian, born in Warsaw, with a French passport and an address in Paris. No one knew where he was staying in London.