GRAVE MATTER

FIFTEEN

We emerge out of the drive and swing right, taking the back road. The Mercedes floats over the dips.

"Did you see Daler Kuzyaev's face? I thought he was going to have a heart attack."

"He's frightened."

"No s**t, Sherlock? World War III?"

Blanche begins listing the security measures, the cameras, motion sensors and alarms. Barklay could have come straight out of the SAS.

"Blanche, let me explain," I said after she had been talking non-stop for about ten minutes.

"I wish you would," she said sharply.

"Daler Kuzyaev is a financier who made his fortune in Moscow. He has been receiving death threats since lifting the lid on a $230 million tax fraud by corrupt Russian government officials last year."

Heading back towards North London, I can't get a single question in my head:

Who is next?

"I need to go back and see Amber Chase," I say, "and I need to have another look around Robbie Chase's apartment again. I've missed something.

I know I have."

Blanche doesn't say a word, but I know she's thinking the same thing.

Amber Chase opens her front door, wearing a knee-length dark blue dress with a black leather belt and shoes that show off her lovely legs. Her hair shone, and make-up colours her lips and eyelids.

The general impression of thin elegance remained strong, but the last few years were starting to take their toll. The drooping lines of eyebrows and eyelids, the small scar on the left cheek, were new territory.

"What's wrong?" she asks immediately.

"It might be nothing," I say, trying to reassure her.

She picks up some posts and newspapers from the floor and straightens them before tucking everything under her arm.

"Sorry," she says, "I haven't been in long. Would you like to come in?"

"As long as we are not intruding?" Blanche says.

"No, not at all," she replies, "I have just spent the morning with an asset recovery specialist. Very exhausting."

"How did it go?" I ask.

She looked at me with an air of resignation. "They still have not found a single bank account in Robbie's name. Robbie was meticulous in all his business dealings. So we might never know where all the money went."

She's nervous, making her want to talk. I let her carry on, knowing she'll soon stop.

"Did he lose it?" I suggest when she pauses for breath.

"I doubt it," she says. "Robbie was very clever, but no evidence was discovered of a bank account in his name during the divorce and up to his death. Neither the receivers nor my other investigators ever found an account."

She glances at Blanche and back to me, growing more anxious.

"The last time I spoke to Robbie, he offered her £30million to go away."

"And you didn't accept it?"

"Of course not," she says, offended. "We once lived in stately homes in England and Florida, complete with staff including a butler. But I have ended up with nothing more than an empty paper bag following the divorce."

"When did he offer you the £30 million?"

"About five weeks before he died," she responds, "I turned him down knowing he had more assets hidden."

"But where?" I ask, "and how?"

"Not only was Robbie the legal and beneficial owner of assets of just under £1billion, but he was also the legal owner of the trusts and foundations offshore. He used many professionals, including 30 law firms, dozens of banks and about eight asset management companies, to hide his assets during divorce proceedings. I am certain that the cash stretched across Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and the British Virgin Islands. Robbie was no different to any other wealthy person that uses offshore structures to conceal their wealth. I think it's immoral that this is allowed to happen."

She raised her eyes and gave me the sort of inspection as if she'd never seen me before. I guessed that it would be a more radical assessment. I was the man who had accompanied her to Russia to keep her safe.

I was becoming accustomed by now to seeing this new view of me supplant older and easier with relationships, and although I might often regret it, there seemed no way of going back.

"Everyone says…" she began doubtfully. "I mean…over the past few days, I keep hearing…." She cleared her throat. "They say you're good…very good…at this sort of thing. But I don't know whether even you can sort this out."

"Rest assured, Mrs Chase, if I can't solve your husband's murder, then I'll say so."

"Robbie was involved with many people, with his business dealings?"

She nods.

"Did you ever meet Alexi Zelenyy?"

"Yes. Why?"

"He's dead."

The newspapers and post slides from under her arm.

She swears and bends, trying to gather them together. Her hands are shaking.

"How?" she whispers.

"He died from a lethal 2mg-oral dose of sodium fluoroacetate."

I'm on the floor with her, gathering the papers, bundling them together. Something has changed in Amber, a hollowness echoes in her heartbeat. She's in a dark place, listening to a repeated rhythm in her head.

"Who is killing all these people?"

I watched the shaking of her hands and listened to the tremors in her voice and reflected that I'd seen a whole procession of people since I'd drifted into the trade of sorting out trouble and disaster.

"We were hoping you might know."

She shakes her head, sticky-eye and wavering as if suddenly unable to recognise her surroundings or to remember she could be next.

"Come on, let's have a drink," Blanche said, "where do you keep the alcohol?"

"In the lounge," she turns to me, "we'll go and sit in the kitchen."

"Whisky or gin?" Blanche asks.

"Gin…tonic…anything."

"Justin?"

"Tonic water for me."

She finally stands up, and I follow her into the kitchen, where we sit on bar-stools around a pine breakfast bar.

Blanche thankfully didn't take too long and joined us, with tonic water for me, a whisky for herself and Amber a tranquilising dose of mother's ruin.

"Zelenyy and Akinfeev became rich in the era after the fall of communism. However, they faced problems removing their wealth. Currency controls limited how much could leave. In addition, tough regulations required proof that funds entering Britain were not from dubious sources." She took a large gulp from her glass. "Robbie was just the man to help. He had a disorderly habit of forming dangerous associations and had become a multimillionaire almost overnight after developing a close friendship with a notorious London ganglord. The ganglord had links to the Russian mafia, and that Robbie laundered money for the crime group. Indeed, it was after meeting the gang lord that Robbie began closing multimillion-pound deals with loads of cash. He mastered the art of covering up a money trail."

"Anyone else involved?" I ask.

"Robbie became one of Akinfeev's most trusted British friends, helping to launder his money into Great Britain, using it to buy fabulous cars and luxurious homes on his behalf, and concealing the oligarch's ownership behind opaque offshore vehicles. Robbie did a lot of global shopping for Igor," Amber continued, "He couldn't walk in the UK and set up bank accounts; so the Russian would wire shitloads of money from his offshore accounts in Cyprus and Robbie would go and buy him his cars and his shit."

"Did you ever question your ex-husbands business dealings?"

"There were sobering signs that Robbie's new Russian connections placed him in peril. First, when Akinfeev visited him at home, Robbie asked me to remove their two small daughters from the house for their safety. Then, a man approached me who said he worked for MI6 and who warned me, these people are dangerous, and by getting involved with them, you're risking your life."

"Did this MI6 man have a name?"

"He never gave it," she replies.

"Where did you go?"

"Miami, Florida."

"Did you know that the British government had granted Akinfeev political asylum while you were out in Miami"

"No, I didn't." The brittleness shrilled in her voice seemed to surprise her. She visibly took some deep breaths to calm herself down.

"Because of continual threats from the FSB, and informed counter-terror officers assigned to monitor his safety and that he topped a hit list of Kremlin opponents living in Britain. In one early plot, MI5 received intelligence that Russian assassins planned to stab Akinfeev with a poison-tipped pen as he showed up at court to fight attempts to extradite him to Moscow. When I worked at Thames House, I had to regularly alert the oligarch to credible plots to kill him on British soil."

While she's listening, Amber crosses her legs. Her lips tighten and twitch at the corners as I tell her what I know about Akinfeev and Zelenyy.

"I attended fifteen crisis meetings relating to the oligarch's safety, three of which concerned serious assassination plots. Akinfeev's notorious partiality to young women made him a sitting duck for honeytraps," I continued, "while Akinfeev's reliance on Viagra exposed a vulnerability to poisoning. I had to tell him to leave the country on at least five occasions because there were excellent reasons to think that they would assassinate him, and our information was that the risk to him was in the UK."

"That was around about the same time Robbie's wealth ballooned," Amber interrupted. "An asset schedule prepared in the Queen's bank shows that Robbie was now worth £279 million. An elite real estate broker wrote recommendation letters describing him as the most important single private client the firm has within the UK. He went with Akinfeev and Zelenyy to a boys' dinner in London with a former US President, a Finnish billionaire and major Tory donor. He had become friends with a notorious retail billionaire, a restaurant group owner, and a reality TV mogul."

"Where were you while your husband was living the high-life in London?" Blanche asks with a hint of bitterness.

"We were now spending more and more time in Miami, where Robbie bought a prestige property on the waterfront of Coconut Grove. It was then we crossed paths with Trevor Marshall."

"The former Foreign Secretary?" I ask

"The very same."

"They met at a glitzy South Beach steakhouse, and Robbie and Trevor hit it off immediately," Amber explained.

Blanche's eyes narrowed with female intuition. "You didn't like him?"

Amber shook her head. "Robbie soon invited Trevor to fly to London on his private jet and had two Rolls-Royce Phantoms waiting on the tarmac. He put Brown up in a five-star London Hotel, and they partied till dawn at the favourite nightspot of the two Princes, where they both blew £75,000 a night on cocaine and magnums of Dom Pérignon that he'd shake up and spray all over the crowd." She paused, gathering her thoughts, before continuing. "The two grew close enough for Robbie to bring him into Akinfeev's inner sanctum, and that was the moment Trevor unknowingly became a participant of chaos that would leave him terrified for his life."

Blanche and I exchanged glances.

"How do you mean?" I press.

"Robbie took Trevor to a discreet club in Berkeley Square where Akinfeev was waiting with two lethal-looking bodyguards who freaked Trevor out by following him every time he went to the bathroom."

"How did they all get on?" I ask.

"Famously," Amber says, "Robbie leased himself, Trevor, and Akinfeev three grand townhouses neighbouring each other on Eaton Square in Belgravia, complete with gleaming white columns and balconies overlooking private gardens. Then, Akinfeev filled his house with teenage prostitutes, flew in from Lithuania and asked the others to watch them while he was away."

"And did they?"

Amber nodded. "Oh, I'm pretty sure they did. It was what led to our separation and divorce."

"Oh?"

"Robbie admitted that he had looked after the Latvian girls a bit too much."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I say.

Amber dismissed what I said with a wave of her hand. "It's not your fault.

But I tell you something, Akinfeev's almost childlike reliance on Robbie fascinated me."

"How do you mean?"

"One day in Miami," she recalled, "I answered Robbie's phone, and it was Akinfeev. My love, he said to me, without waiting to hear that he was speaking to me. Get on a plane. I need you in London. I have lost the Phantom of Love. Mystified and somewhat suspicious, I asked Robbie, What is the Phantom of Love?"

"And?"

"You won't believe this," she said, almost laughing, "the missing item was a £500,000 vintage Rolls-Royce that Robbie had bought for Akinfeev via an offshore front company in the Cayman Islands. The vehicle featured an interior that is nothing less than magnificently palatial, and according to Robbie, with leather upholstery."

"What had he done with it?" Blanche asked.

"Akinfeev had given the Phantom to an 18-year-old girlfriend as a present, and she had called to say it had gone."

"I know someone who will find it," Robbie said to me. "And, to my astonishment, he did."

I smiled, but then Amber's tone changed.

"But hovering over them was a dark threat that only intensified," she said, her voice somewhat deeper. Even though Akinfeev knew he would get killed, he refused to stop poking the bear, savaging the Russian President in articles, TV appearances, and speeches. Robbie told him, Igor doesn't wind the government up, but he never listened."

"I remember," I said, "Any time Akinfeev launched a new broadside on the Kremlin, a flurry of activity was picked up by GCHQ interception apparatus staring at Russian telecommunications, suggesting that the threat level had risen. It was almost as if you got a chill wind from the East," I added.

"By then, Akinfeev was stoking unrest against the Kremlin right in Russia's back yard," Amber said.

"Yes," I agreed. "I discovered pumped about $30 million into Ukraine to help fund a Revolution. The uprising toppled the country's pro-Kremlin government and undermined the Russian President's influence. Akinfeev was also meddling in the politics of Georgia and Belarus."

"And Robbie was right behind him, pushing a massive infrastructure project in Kiev and booking a private jet for meetings in Tbilisi."

"Akinfeev's billions must have so blinded him that he just couldn't see the danger."

"The billions come when Igor turns up," Amber says nervously, "But it comes with cancer. And cancer kills you."