Stone’s mood was low as he walked into the busy foyer of Claridge’s twenty minutes after leaving the hospital. In the sitting room of his suite, he poured a large whisky. For a moment he felt an urge to throw it across the room, but he paced the heavily carpeted space and took a long sip. This thing he was faced with was real and threatening. He felt cold, and he shivered.
His phone buzzed; he was in no mood to answer, and it rang for almost a minute before he picked it up.
‘I want to meet with you.’
Stone sat more upright; he knew that voice immediately.
‘Josh, good to hear from you. You got something to tell me? You’re ready to close the deal on Marine House I hope,’ Stone said almost with a snigger.
‘Can you be at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, next Friday, 10.00 in the morning? Can you be there?’
‘Of course I can. Will you be on your own, or will your mother come with you?’ Stone asked.
‘Just me, but can you be there?’
‘Yes, I’ll look forward to it.’
It was enough to end the call. Stone heard it click off as if Josh needed to keep it short and quiet. Stone stared at his whisky glass and then wrote down the details from Josh.
What had the son of the Jackson family, Josh, got to say to him that he would really want to listen to? Stone had dismissed him as a top-level layabout, a playboy and probably with not much to do. And meeting in the Reform Club – a toffs’ place in an expensive part of the West End of London – was not Stone’s scene. Just like the meeting room in Mayfair, to Stone they were sterile places, never changing, where he could never feel comfortable.
Stone rested on the sofa for a few more minutes and stared at the ceiling. He then paced the room, and the growing nagging pain on his hip subsided for a while. His mood slowly lightened. Next Thursday there was a deal to be done on Marine House; he would put his prejudice of the meeting place aside.
Half an hour later, he poured his second glass of whisky; he was still shivering – he put on a bathrobe and started to pace the room. He pulled the bathrobe more tightly around himself. And his dark mood deepened as he again added up what money he could find. He was still £500,000 short, and he was never going to tell the Jackson family there was a deep hole in his purse.
Feeling an urgency, Stone opened his laptop and keyed into his Panama dollars. The money had been buried away for six years, forgotten, nobody touching them, and would the bank in Panama soon snatch the dollars as their own? He wanted to grab them in his hand, to feel them, to know they were real. They would close half the gap in the money for Marine House, and if he had to, he would carry them in his pocket back to London himself.
Today his body was aching; he was still dazed as the news of the doctor’s words were sinking in. Whisky glass in his hand, he wandered around the sitting room of the suite. Any time he had left would not be kind to him and a journey to a small island in the Caribbean Sea would test his diminishing stamina to the end.
Suddenly feeling alone, helpless, he began to believe that the pain in his back would not let him work much longer. And maybe his time was short even to go outside just to walk a few steps. His energy was being sucked out by the certainty of this prognosis, but there was fight stirring in Harry Stone. Whatever was attacking him, he was going to get hold of his deposit of dollars in Panama. There was urgent work to do before meeting with Josh. He poured another whisky and took more painkillers as prescribed by the consultant.