Blind Spot Page 13

  Besides, the fewer conflicting facts people held in their heads, the smoother they slept. Vos set the tea on a Thorndike-branded coaster in front of Andy, took in his pleasant, benign expression, and bet he slept like a baby.

  ‘Ta,’ Andy said.

  Vos knew that Andy met regularly with the heads of several divisions at Thorndike. He had a limited set of issues to cover with each. If meetings ran long, it was only because some of the executives were soft enough to let him ramble. Andy spent so much time in the lands of irrelevant discourse, Vos suspected he must own property there. Early in their relationship, Vos had squashed all of Andy’s attempts to speculate, reminisce, or roll out favourite anecdotes. Now their meetings were short and business-like. It took only that one cup of tea to despatch the items on their agenda, and Vos was preparing to stand when Andy said, ‘One last question, Gerrit.’

  Vos glanced at his Breitling. ‘Yeah?’

  Andy reclined and crossed his legs. ‘I’ve been thinking about South Africa.’

  Vos looked up. ‘Thorndike Platinum? Why?’

  He decided he’d give Andy enough time to say something interesting. Either that, or cut him short and say goodbye. Although Vos himself made regular trips to the Transvaal, ensuring local security kept a tight lid on operations there, Andy Turner’s company didn’t have a great deal to do with the platinum side of the business. It was mildly intriguing that Andy had brought up South Africa at all. Worth five more minutes to find out why anyway.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that union dispute a few years ago,’ Andy continued.

  Suddenly Vos’s skin prickled. ‘Oh?’

  ‘What was behind the scandal?’

  Vos stared into Andy’s peaceful, innocent face. Anyone else and he’d be fearing a trap right about now. ‘There was no scandal,’ he said flatly.

  Andy shrugged as if, scandal or no scandal, it was all the same to him. ‘Some union leaders – coincidentally, ones that opposed Thorndike – went missing.’

  What the fuck? Vos thought. His mind whirred. Had Jamie mentioned Rootenberg to Andy? If he had, it wouldn’t have taken much effort for Andy to follow the link back. Where is this going?

  ‘Political leaders in South Africa do that from time to time,’ he observed dryly.

  Andy chuckled. ‘That’s exactly what I said,’ he agreed.

  Vos twitched. ‘What you said to whom?’ he demanded.

  Even as he asked, Vos was constructing scenarios. Maybe it hadn’t been Jamie. Maybe Andy was describing an old conversation he’d had with Rhodri Jones. That would suggest that Jones had known more about what had happened than he’d let on. It would also mean, for fuck’s sake, that he’d felt free to share such delicate information with his old mate Andy Turner. If that were true, it rewrote several events in Vos’s own past. It cast new light on all his dealings with Thorndike’s former Chief Executive Officer, and also with Andy himself.

  But hang on … when Vos thought about it, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. If this interpretation were true, it suggested that the powers that be had not only known what he had done, but approved of it. Maybe they promoted him not only for sorting out the miners’ dispute, but for showing the balls to do it in a decisive way.

  And yet … if both Rhodri Jones and Andy Turner had understood the truth about what transpired back then, then who else might know?

  ‘Sara Jones,’ Andy concluded.

  ‘What?’ Vos said.

  ‘It’s what I said to Sara. We saw each other last week, and she brought it up. She mentioned there’d been some scandal in South Africa, right after the resolution to the strike, and a few union bosses went missing. I said that sounded fairly normal.’

  Vos felt his brow knitting. Sara Jones – he had hoped she was on board. After all, her brother had been Thorndike’s CEO. He rubbed his forehead. OK, he thought, Andy doesn’t know anything. Maybe he’d heard whatever was in the public domain – certainly, the basic facts had hit the news in South Africa at the time – but he wouldn’t have been privy to anything especially incriminating. Or, if he had – and Vos wasn’t stupid enough to think that Andy didn’t have his own sources – he was being especially coy. No – that wasn’t likely. Feigning coyness wasn’t a move in Andy’s playbook. Vos looked at him sipping his Lady Grey. It was safe enough to assume that this PR whiz was genuinely ignorant of the full facts.

  On the other hand, there was Sara Jones …

  Now, Sara too, might just be responding to old news. But even if she were, why would she bring it up? The only answer was, because she suspected something. There was no other reason to fish for more information.

  ‘Good tea,’ Andy said. It was only then that Vos realised he’d continued to stare at Andy, while also keeping him waiting. He grunted – fuck him. Andy could wait a few seconds longer.

  ‘Pour yourself some more,’ he said.

  Sara Jones’s interest suggested three questions. One: did she know anything more than she could have read online? Two: if she did know more, how much more? And finally, three: where had she got that extra information?

  If she knew more, then the third question had an obvious answer – she must have heard things from Rhodri Jones. In the past, Sara would have had no reason to be troubled by her brother’s indiscreet confidences. Some enemies had been killed in South Africa, and Rhodri suspected some of his own security people. So what? Sara would have had no reason to act on that. But now, something had changed – her boyfriend was working for Thorndike Aerospace. More than that, he was working for Gerrit Vos.

  And that suggested that Sara Jones understood, or at least suspected, something about his own involvement in the event.

  ‘It’s odd that Sara brought it up,’ Vos said finally, as casually as he could. ‘Did she explain why?’

  Andy made a shrugging frown. ‘She’s been thinking about Rhoddo, I suspect,’ he speculated. ‘She’s still creeped out by the way he died. She misses him.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s probably it,’ Vos agreed. He decided to make sure Andy was in no doubt about the party line. ‘As far as I know, all of Thorndike’s business in South Africa was conducted with complete integrity,’ he said with emphasis. ‘That’s the way Rhodri Jones operated.’

  Running the risk of sounding like a corporate promotional video, Vos added, ‘And it’s still the way Thorndike Aerospace presents itself to its partners, both internal and external.’

  Andy chortled. ‘On land, sea, air and on line.’ He stood, and added, ‘Thanks for your time, Gerrit. Rest assured, everything you've said is what I think too.’

  Of course it is, Vos thought with a mental sigh. One of your talents is not knowing any uncomfortable facts.

  Sara Jones on the other hand, might well know a few too many.

  The clinic where Sara worked occupied the basement of a deconsecrated church not far from London Fields. Her office was in its the dimmest corner. Sara had spent the first part of the morning seeing clients in the fluorescent-lit gloom. She had just spent half an hour with a recently divorced and surprisingly inarticulate man who had arrived with his far-too-articulate advocate. Trying to pull information from the client was exhausting, and handling the advocate’s endless stream of inconsequential quibbles even more so. In the end, Sara had determined that the client needed practical help rather than counselling. She had sent him and his advocate down the hall to talk to her colleague Ellen about housing. It would have been wonderful if that had been the end of this particular case – but Sara also knew that clients’ problems were never cut-and-dried, and practical issues tended to overlap with emotional ones. She realised she must reserve a time this week for herself and Ellen to discuss a care plan for this homeless divorcee.

  Usually, Sara was able to shunt her personal problems into the background during sessions with patients, but today she could not ignore the queasiness that still lay coiled inside her. Even as she dealt with the client and his advocate, Sara had reflected on how Eldon Carson once referred
to the burden of psychic knowledge as ‘an awful thing’. That burden felt particularly heavy today.

  Maybe I’m just tired, Sara told herself.

  Sara’s vision of Tim Wilson bludgeoning Philip Berger to death had recurred not only on Saturday night, but last night as well. Damn it, she thought – if only she’d been able to warn Berger away from Wilson on Saturday, that bloody future could not possibly happen. But she had failed in that attempt, and knew she could do nothing until Philip Berger rang her.

  Or failed to ring, she thought.

  What will I do then?

  Not for the first time this morning, that question led Sara to relive a conversation she’d had with Eldon Carson almost three years before, during that terrible summer in Aberystwyth.

  It had been a day in mid-August. Sara had known Carson for less than a fortnight, but he had already convinced her of the reality of his powers – and also the vast potential of her own. At that time, Sara had a clear goal. She planned to master the arcane skills that Carson had to teach her, and then use them to understand – finally – the awful mystery of her past. Such was the extent of her ambition, and the line she drew on the use of her fledgling psychic abilities. On that day, they sat in Sara’s living room in the small coastal village of Penweddig. Sara had drawn the blinds against prying eyes and the late-summer light. They discussed a burden that Sara had still believed to be Eldon Carson’s alone.

  ‘Let’s assume you’re right,’ Sara had said, ‘and every one of your victims would have committed the crimes you expected them to commit.’

  His grin had been both compassionate and taunting. ‘You can safely assume that,’ he had drawled.

  ‘Well, I’m a medical doctor,’ Sara said, ‘and despite my research into fringe subjects, I’m a fairly skeptical one. I believe the human brain is no more than a physical entity. The chemical processes that occur within it create what we call the mind.’ She sat forward in the love seat, and leaned towards Carson. ‘I strongly suspect there’s nothing else – no disembodied spirits or sentient forces inhabiting us.’

  Carson shrugged. ‘I have no problem with that,’ he said. ‘We both know that psychic powers are as real as this coffee table. There needn’t be any mystical mumbo-jumbo involved at all. We may not know exactly how these abilities work, but since they do, we can assume they’re natural.’

  ‘I’m not referring to psychic powers,’ Sara had countered. ‘I’m talking about the freedom to make choices.’

  For a moment, Carson’s habitual air of cocky certainty had faltered. He hadn’t understood what she was getting at. ‘Go on,’ he’d urged.

  Sara chewed her lip, wondering how best to relay complex ideas to this bright-but-undereducated young man. For a moment, she felt as though she were back in the lecture rooms of UCL, delivering a first-year introductory course. ‘An individual,’ she began, ‘may believe she’s made a particular decision out of her own free will. But neuroscience has shown decisions appear in our conscious minds fully formed. In other words, they’re made deep in the unconscious – often seconds before we’ve become aware of them.’

  Carson blinked. ‘So?’

  ‘So, looking back on some action, people might assume they had the potential to change what they chose to do at the time. We might say to ourselves, “why didn’t I just do X instead of Y?”’ She spread her hands. ‘But how could we have? The decision to act had already been taken by the time we became aware of it.’

  He frowned skeptically. ‘You’re saying there’s no such thing as free will?’

  ‘I can’t be quite that definite … but I am saying that it’s hard to imagine how true free will could exist, considering what we know about how the mind works.’

  Carson offered a small shrug. ‘OK Miss Sara,’ he conceded, ‘I reckon you’ve made some kind of point. What I’m not so sure of is what it’s got to do with you and me.’

  ‘It hasn’t got anything to do with me,’ Sara said. ‘Only you. If your victims had no other choice but to do what they did – or, what they would have done, if left to their own devices – then you’re punishing them for something they cannot control.’ She shrugged. ‘That hardly seems fair.’

  Carson pondered this, and then nodded as though he now understood. ‘I get it,’ he said, ‘you’re saying that, if people don’t have any real free will, then it’s not actually their fault if they go and kill someone. They had no choice. And I’m a monster for trying to stop them.’

  ‘I never called you a monster,’ Sara reminded him.

  He laughed. ‘You’re one of the few.’ Quickly, his mirth evaporated, and he added, ‘Still, there are problems with what you’re saying. First, let’s take the word “fair.” I define it as treating people equally – and I do. If you’re going to commit an atrocity, then I’ll kill you before you can do it, without any concern over who you are. That’s fair, isn’t it? But, frankly, I’m more concerned with justice than fairness. Justice is about doing what’s morally right – such as stopping someone from murdering another human being. That’s why your argument is a red herring. I don’t care if any of those folks could’ve made a different decision. The fact is, they were going to commit atrocities, and I had the power to stop them. Free will or no, what I do is administer justice.’

  Sara was shaken from her reverie by her mobile’s saxophone ringtone. She looked for the caller ID, but the number had been blocked. Hoping it was not a telemarketing robot, she answered.

  ‘Sara,’ the voice said with unwarranted cheer. ‘It’s Gerrit Vos calling.’

  Sara’s stomach lurched. A robot would have been preferable. ‘Mr Vos,’ she said neutrally.

  ‘I never thanked you for dinner,’ he said. ‘It was delicious.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t take credit – Jamie was the cook,’ she replied, trying to add some warmth to her tone. ‘The most I did was load the dishwasher … and, come to think of it, Jamie did that, too.’

  ‘You want to keep him,’ Vos said with a chuckle. ‘Nicole’s lucky if I rinse out my coffee mug.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Vos?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d like to chat with you,’ he said. ‘I’m in town today. I was hoping you’d be free.’

  ‘As it happens, I’m at work,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ he demurred. ‘Stupid of me. But it’s almost lunch time. You do take time off for lunch, don’t you?’

  Sara considered telling him today was entirely out of the question. In truth, she had no clients booked that afternoon, but she did have other things to do. However, she also felt morbidly curious about what Vos could want from her. ‘When are you free?’ she asked.

  ‘Two o’clock,’ Vos suggested. ‘How about Highgate?’

  Sara made a quick mental map. Over to the Holloway Road and straight up. ‘That’s quite convenient from here,’ she acknowledged. ‘What restaurant do you have in mind?’

  ‘No restaurant,’ he said. ‘The cemetery.’

  Sara started. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Highgate Cemetery,’ Vos repeated. ‘I’ve been meaning to pay my respects to your brother for ages. Nothing would please me more than to do it with you.’

  THIRTEEN

  Highgate’s East Cemetery had been accepting residents since 1860, when the body of the sixteen-year-old daughter of a local baker became its first internment. One of its more recent burials had been Rhodri Jones, Chief Executive Officer of Thorndike Aerospace. Rhodri’s grave was located just off a main path, some distance from Karl Marx’s, but quite close to a 1980s television celebrity. His memorial was a simple rectangle of grey granite, carved with a Welsh dragon just above the words Er coffadwriaeth am Rhodri Huw Jones, and his dates. That inscription read “in remembrance of” – a neutral epitaph chosen by Sara at a time of conflicting varieties of grief, when more personal sentiments would have seemed hypocritical. Despite such diffidence, Sara still visited this tranquil place regularly. The cemetery trust required the family of the interred to keep bo
th grave and memorial presentable. On the way up, Sara had stopped at a small garden centre and purchased a pot of daffodils. She had just placed it on Rhoddo’s plot when a deep voice rang from behind her.

  ‘Twenty thousand quid?’ it said.

  She rose, turning. Gerrit Vos stood before her in a dark blue summer blazer, light blue open-necked shirt and tan cotton chinos. He carried a Panama hat. Vos’s eyes were masked by Ray-Bans. ‘To be buried here,’ he elaborated. ‘Something like twenty thousand?’

  ‘Slightly less,’ Sara replied.

  ‘Still … a fair whack.’

  ‘It’s worth it, if it’s what you want,’ she said. ‘It’s what Rhodri wanted.’

  Vos tilted back his head and examined the sky; twin suns reflected in his grey lenses. ‘Andy said he suggested scattering his ashes over Wales from a helicopter.’

  Sara smiled. ‘That was never going to happen.’

  Vos nodded. ‘This is more tasteful.’

  On the way up to Highgate, Sara had wondered whether this man was trying to bond with her through her late brother. She quickly dismissed that benign interpretation: although Vos had not said what their meeting would entail, Sara had received a few distinct impressions, which had radiated through the phone lines and pierced Vos’s casual bonhomie. Thinking back on the conversation, Sara realised Vos had been feeling suspicion and fear. She knew there was only one reason he would be afraid of her – the suspicions she’d revealed to Andy about the events in South Africa. And the only way Vos would have known anything about them was if Andy had actually said something. Sara believed with all her heart that Andy would never betray her intentionally. He may have been in Thorndike’s pocket, but he was not Vos’s snitch. Still, Andy did like to talk.