Текст книги "Stay Alive"

Автор книги: Simon Kernick

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Thirty-three

SCOPE WAS HURT but he could still move.

He could hear the sound of movement in the foliage behind him as the men who’d opened fire approached and, on the other side of him, no more than ten yards away, he could see the silhouette of the girl he’d rescued from the dog, partly concealed by a tree. But she wasn’t running, even though she’d be coming into the sights of the gunmen any moment now. She was looking back towards the road. From what Scope could gather, she’d been split up from her little sister, and wasn’t going to leave without her which, though a pretty laudable thing, was also the equivalent of committing suicide.

She was dead if she stayed where she was. And so, he knew, was he. His left side ached where he’d been hit but, when he ran his hand down there, there was no blood. Instead, he felt the satellite phone he’d taken from the dead gunman back at Jock’s place. It was still in his jacket pocket, but its casing was now badly cracked, where it had clearly taken the force of the shot and somehow deflected it. He took it out and, seeing that it was cleaved pretty much down the middle, left it on the ground.

He didn’t dwell on his good fortune. There was no time. Lifting himself as silently as possible to his feet, and using a thick bramble bush as cover, he took off at a sprint further into the woods, conscious of the sound of the leaves crunching beneath his feet as he ran in a crouching zigzag to put off the shooters, motioning angrily for the girl to follow him.

A shot rang out, then another. Then a third. All of them were close by but Scope was eating up the ground quickly, and out of the corner of his eye he could see the girl running alongside him, a few yards away, also trying to keep low as the shooting continued.

But it was sounding further away now.

‘I can’t leave my sister!’ cried the girl as she ran, her face contorted with emotion.

‘Where was she?’ Scope called across without looking at her.

‘We left her when we tried to get to the car. We were going to pick her up.’ She began to slow her pace as she talked.

‘Keep running,’ snapped Scope. ‘They’re still only just behind us.’ The shooting had stopped now, but he knew their pursuers wouldn’t be giving up that easily.

‘I’m tired,’ complained the girl. ‘And we’re running away from where we left Casey. She’s my sister, and she’s only ten years old.’

Scope suddenly saw a picture of Mary Ann as a ten year old in his mind. He and Jennifer had had a photo of her at that age on the mantelpiece in the lounge in her school uniform, her long dark hair in matching pigtails, a big grin on her face. His daughter.

His dead daughter.

‘I’ll find your sister,’ he said, without breaking pace. ‘But we need to put some space between you and them. Has she got a phone?’

‘No,’ said the girl breathlessly. ‘None of us have. We lost them in the river when the boats were overturned.’

‘What’s she look like?’

‘Blonde, pretty. No, she’s beautiful. She’s so damn beautiful.’ The girl looked as if she was going to break down.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jess.’

There was a narrow gap in the trees up ahead as they met a path and, as the two of them emerged onto it, they paused briefly. Scope turned to her, feeling in his pocket for his own mobile phone. He knew he needed to part with it because it implicated him in what had happened here, and therefore the killing of the gunman back at Jock’s place, but he had no choice if he was going to help these kids get out of here.

He checked it, but there was no signal. ‘Okay, Jess, follow this path upwards until you get to the road,’ he whispered, handing her the phone. ‘Keep to the edge so you can get out of sight if you need to, and keep moving, whatever you do. As soon as you get a signal, dial 999. Understood? Now go. I’ll try and distract them.’

They could both hear the sound of movement coming up from behind them. It would only be a matter of seconds until they were back in the sights of the gunmen. Jess nodded. ‘Find her,’ she said, then turned and started running up the gentle incline, until seconds later she rounded a corner and was swallowed up by the forest.

The sound of pursuit was coming closer now. Scope could hear their footfalls in the trees, some distance apart as the men fanned out, and he moved across the path and into the thick wall of pine trees that bordered it on the far side, weaving between them until he found a spot from which he could no longer be seen. Grabbing a thick branch from the deep carpet of pine needles on the ground, he waited a few seconds until a big shadowy figure appeared on the other side of the path, stepping onto it carefully as he slowly looked round. Scope didn’t have a very good view of him, but he could see he was well over six foot tall, and was holding a shotgun.

Scope dropped the branch onto the ground. Not too hard, because he didn’t want to make what he was planning too obvious, but not too softly either, because he wanted to be heard.

And he was heard all right. The gunman immediately cocked his head, then motioned to someone else out of sight. He was already pointing the shotgun in the direction where the noise had come from when Scope took off, making as much noise as possible, running roughly parallel to the path in the opposite direction to the one the girl had taken. He heard shouting behind him and then a shot rang out, passing a good few yards behind him.

Keeping low, he continued his sprint, knowing he could outrun them, but knowing too that it was unlikely Jess could. He had to buy her time. A second shot rang out. This time it ricocheted off a tree, only a couple of yards to his left. Stealing a rapid glance, he saw that he’d strayed too close to the path, and the gunman was running down it, not quite keeping pace but not needing to, suddenly only about fifteen yards away.

Scope did a rapid turn further into the trees and sprinted for his life, half expecting to take a shot in the back at any time.

But no shot came, and a minute later he was back deep within the forest. Slowing up, he risked a glance over his shoulder, saw no one there, and turned in the direction of the river. He’d done what he could, and risked his life, to buy time for a girl he’d never met to escape from pursuers who were after her for a reason he’d probably never know. Now he was going to double back and try to find her sister somewhere in one of the biggest, loneliest forests in the country.

He no longer had any bullets in his gun. He had no means of communication. In reality, getting involved in all this was madness. Yet, Jesus, it felt good.

And if he could find that little girl, it would make it all worth it.

If he could find her . . .

Thirty-four

Last night

MIKE BOLT SANK his first pint of the week before the barman had even come back with his change.

It tasted that good.

It was just after 6.30 on a chilly Friday evening, and Bolt was in the bar of his local pub, The Pheasant, just down the road from the loft apartment in Clerkenwell that had been his home for more than seven years now. The place was full, but mainly with the local after-work crowd, and Bolt only recognized a couple of faces. He tended to get in the pub a couple of times a week, and he knew a few of the locals well enough to chat to, but they were acquaintances, not friends. He didn’t really have friends as such, not even among those he’d worked with in the Force down the years. Everyone was an acquaintance. He liked to think that it suited him just fine like that, but deep down, he knew it didn’t. The fact was, he was afraid of getting too close to people – a reaction, he supposed, to what had happened to his wife, Mikaela.

He thought of Mo Khan, who would be back home with his wife and kids, while he was sitting here alone downing pints of lager, waiting to spot someone he knew well enough to snatch a conversation with. Mo often told him that his own life wasn’t all fun and laughter. ‘Sometimes I’d give my right arm for a few minutes of peace and quiet’ was one of his typical refrains, delivered while rolling his eyes at how frenetic his existence was, but Bolt knew that Mo wouldn’t change a thing about his own life, and was only saying these things to make him feel better.

‘Needed that, eh?’ said the barman as he returned with the change. He was a young Polish guy called Marius with big tattooed arms, who Bolt occasionally saw doing weights in the gym. ‘Must have been a hard week.’ He looked at the yellowing bruise on Bolt’s left cheek where he’d been struck by Leonard Hope during his escape four days earlier, and which still hurt like hell even though nothing was broken.

‘Hard enough,’ answered Bolt, ordering a second pint. He didn’t think Marius knew that he was the SIO on the Disciple case, even though it was currently the most high-profile murder investigation in the country. He’d only worked behind the bar for about three months, and Bolt tried to keep his personal and professional life as separate as possible. Those people who knew him in here were aware that he was a senior cop, but they never questioned him about it, which suited him just fine.

But Marius the barman was right. It had been a hard week. Leonard Hope’s name and photo had been all over the news, and yet four days on from the discovery of evidence at his home that inextricably linked him to the Disciple murders, he’d still not been arrested. Nor had there been even a single sighting. It was almost as if he’d never existed, a situation that was unheard of in these days of blanket media coverage and security cameras on every corner.

The fact that they’d come so close to catching Hope didn’t help either. It made them look incompetent, and none more so than Bolt himself who, it was reported in the papers, had got to within a yard of Hope, only to lose him when the suspect had turned and knocked him out with a killer punch. The coverage was lurid, and though not entirely true, it had had the desired effect. It had made Bolt look stupid, and he’d wondered several times in the intervening days how long he was going to last as the head of the inquiry.

The realization that he might be ousted from it frustrated him more than anything else about the whole case. It was unfinished business now. He had to be the one who brought down Hope, especially after what they’d found in his loft. A small tin box hidden under the floorboards had revealed a number of items of jewellery belonging to the female victims, some of it bloodstained. Alongside them in the box, in a clear plastic freezer bag and wrapped in clingfilm, had been the left-hand little fingers of the first three female victims. Even more gruesome had been the film footage found hidden away in a file on Hope’s PC. There were three separate films taken at each of the first three murder scenes. They were all very short and concentrated on the torture of the female victims by the man wielding the camera. Bolt had managed to sit through all the footage – seven, interminably long minutes in total – and the horror of it would stay with him for the rest of his days. He’d become used to the savagery of his fellow human beings, having been involved in far too many murder investigations over the years, but he’d never become immune to it, and he’d never come across anything like the extreme sadism that Leonard Hope exhibited. It was for this reason that Bolt wanted to stay involved in this case. He wanted to be the man who read that bastard his rights.

But they had to find him first. And right now they didn’t have a single lead to go on.

In the last few days, a conspiracy theory had emerged in the press that there were two killers in the Disciple murders: Leonard Hope, and a second man who’d helped him escape from the police. There was at least some evidence to back this up. According to Hope’s mobile phone records, the last call he’d received had been while he was driving home to where Bolt and Mo were waiting to arrest him. The call had come through at almost exactly the same time he’d started driving erratically in an effort to shake off the surveillance team following him, almost as if the caller had been warning him that he was being tailed by the police. Hope had then made a call to the same number five minutes later, lasting about thirty seconds, which was when Bolt had seen him on the phone while he was being chased. To add to the mystery, the number in question turned out to belong to an anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile that had only been switched on for the very first time four minutes before the call to Hope had been made, and had been switched off three minutes after the second conversation. It hadn’t been switched on since, and so far they’d drawn a complete blank in finding out who it was that Hope had been speaking to.

Bolt was keeping an open mind on the two-killer theory. It certainly looked as though Hope had been warned that he was under surveillance, which would suggest a second conspirator and, more worryingly, someone connected to the police inquiry. It would also have made it far easier for The Disciple to target couples rather than individuals if there were two of them, rather than one. But Bolt was still far from convinced, and the reason was simple. In the last three days, the inquiry team had turned Hope’s life upside down, and in that time they’d been unable to find a single piece of evidence suggesting he was working with someone else. They’d checked all of Hope’s phone records going back more than three years and, with the exception of that last phone number, they’d traced every person he’d talked to who was still alive (there hadn’t actually been that many), and in the process eliminated all of them as potential suspects. There was nothing on his computer to suggest an online friendship with a kindred spirit (and the film footage didn’t show any accomplice), and none of his neighbours or work colleagues had ever reported seeing him with anyone they couldn’t readily identify.

Leonard Hope had, it seemed, been the classic loner.

Bolt took a big gulp from his second pint, tired of worrying about the case. Up until today, he’d put in fourteen-hour shifts since Hope’s escape and, realistically, there was little more he, or the inquiry team, could do, which was why he’d let most of them go at 5.30 and told them not to come back until Monday morning. There was still the matter of the unidentified DNA sample found at the Rowan/Hanzha murder scene – the one that matched the DNA found on Beatrice Magret’s body fifteen years earlier. The results for that were expected in the next twenty-four hours but, even if it was a match with Leonard Hope’s DNA, which Bolt assumed was likely, it wasn’t going to help them catch him.

The second pint was going down fast and pretty soon he was going to have to make a decision. Grab a takeaway from either the Thai place or one of the local Indians, and settle down at home in front of the TV with a bottle of decent red wine, or make a night of it here, get some food at the bar, and hope that somebody turned up interesting enough to chew the fat with for a couple of hours.

He was still mulling over the alternatives, and the second pint was sitting empty on the bar, when his mobile rang. It was DS Dan Grier, who was in charge of the skeleton crew manning the Disciple inquiry incident room overnight, and Bolt picked up straight away. He’d told Grier only to call him if he had something important, and Grier was the kind of guy who knew not to waste his boss’s time.

‘Sir, I think you need to get down here right away.’ Grier’s voice was grim.

Bolt slipped off his stool and moved away from the bar. ‘What is it?’

‘We’ve got reports of a body over near Maidenhead. They think it’s Leonard Hope.’

Thirty-five

‘JESUS CHRIST,’ SAID Bolt, as he and Mo Khan stared down at the ruined corpse of Leonard Hope. ‘I’m glad I hadn’t got round to eating dinner tonight.’ The two pints of lager he’d drunk in The Pheasant sat heavily in his stomach, making him feel nauseous.

‘I have to say, it’s not a pretty sight,’ said the DI from Thames Valley CID, a big round man called Joe Ruckley, who was standing to Bolt’s right, and whose face was far too cheery under the circumstances.

Leonard Hope lay on his back in a small culvert, partly concealed by brush, about five yards from a path that led down to a road around thirty yards away. The area was partially wooded and there were no buildings nearby. Hope himself was naked, except for a pair of grey boxer shorts. A ring of halogen lamps had been set up round his body to illuminate his many injuries, a significant number of which appeared to have been inflicted by deliberate torture. There were round burn marks the size of fifty-pence pieces all over his torso where a blowtorch, or something similar, had been applied to the skin. Both his nipples appeared to have been burnt off and, where his right eye should have been, there was little more than a charred lump of flesh. There was also a single stab wound to his neck that looked to have severed his carotid artery and was almost certainly the cause of death. It was difficult to tell how long he’d been dead for, or how long he’d lain here (although Bolt didn’t think it could have been that long, because there were no signs that any animals had been at him), but the body in front of them was definitely that of Leonard Hope.

‘There are also burn marks to the groin under the boxers,’ said Ruckley matter-of-factly. ‘Three of them. One to the end of his wanger that’s pretty much sealed the whole thing up down there, and one each to the bollocks. There’s not much left of either of them, and what there is just looks like a couple of half-melted Maltesers. Do you want to take a look?’

Bolt swallowed. ‘Thanks for the kind offer, Joe, but I think we’ll take your word for it. Unless you want to see, Mo.’

‘I think I can picture it well enough in my head,’ said Mo. ‘Far more than I want to.’

Bolt turned back to Ruckley. ‘So what have we got so far?’

‘The body was found by a dog walker at about two thirty this afternoon. The doctor took the body temperature at four p.m. He reckoned he’d been dead for between twenty-four and thirty-six hours at that point. As you can see, he was definitely killed elsewhere. Whoever did it put his pants back on him for some reason, then brought him here, but made no real attempt to hide the body. It’s possible they were disturbed, but probably more likely they just dumped it and left. Obviously, he was tortured for some time before he was killed. The doc reckoned some of those burns could have been done quite a few hours apart, so the killer went to town on him, then finished him off with a stab wound to the throat.’ Ruckley shrugged. ‘That’s pretty much it so far. We’re going to do a fingertip search of the area tomorrow, and SOCO have been over the scene taking samples, but we haven’t turned up anything useful yet.’

Bolt frowned. ‘And the doctor was sure it was twenty-four to thirty-six hours he’d been dead?’

Ruckley nodded. ‘Adamant.’

‘So that means the earliest he died was four a.m. yesterday morning, which is a full two and a half days after he went missing. We need to know what he was doing during that time, and who he was with.’

‘Do you go for that second killer theory they’re bandying around in the papers?’ Ruckley asked him.

Bolt took another look down at the body, no longer feeling any hatred for Leonard Hope. Now he just looked pathetic lying there, pale and mutilated; it was clear that, one way or another, he’d paid the price for the terrible things he’d done. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said, turning away. ‘Thanks for your help, Joe. It’s appreciated.’

‘Can we move the body now? The pathologist is waiting for it, and I want to get home for my supper. The wife’s cooking meatballs. I just hope to God she hasn’t burned them. I hate being reminded of work when I’m at home.’ He chuckled at his own joke.

Bolt didn’t join in the laughter. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s all yours. Enjoy dinner.’

He motioned for Mo to follow him and they walked back in the direction of their parked car, and away from the bright glare of the halogen lamps. Mo looked tired and frustrated. The case, it seemed, was getting to him too, and he’d seemed uncharacteristically down when Bolt had phoned him at home – where he’d been watching a movie with his wife and youngest two kids – to tell him the news. Bolt had told him he didn’t need to come out to view the body, but he’d insisted, which was Mo all over. He had an almost annoying sense of duty.

‘Do you think that guy’s always a joker like that?’ asked Mo, when they were out of earshot of the dozen or so officers and mortuary attendants still at the scene, and away from the lingering smell of decomposing flesh.

‘Probably. You know what it’s like. For some people, it’s just the best way of dealing with it all.’

Mo grunted. ‘He just gets on my nerves.’

They walked in silence back to the car. ‘So what do you think?’ Bolt asked him.

‘There wasn’t a second killer working with Hope,’ said Mo, leaning against the car. ‘We’ve never found any evidence linking him with someone else; all the missing trophies – the fingers, the items of jewellery – were found at Hope’s home. It was Hope who was spotted by Richard Oldham loitering alone outside the Morris murder scene the day before they were killed; and there was only one killer at the Rowan/Hanzha murder scene.’

‘Who we know about,’ Bolt pointed out. ‘There might have been another killer upstairs who Amanda Rowan didn’t see when she disturbed the murder of her husband and his mistress.’

‘It seems unlikely though, doesn’t it? If there were two killers, they could easily have ambushed and trapped her upstairs.’

‘As it happens, I agree. But that leaves us with an even bigger problem. Who the hell murdered Hope?’

They were both silent for a minute. Bolt was thinking. ‘Someone helped Leonard Hope escape,’ he said at last. ‘He never left the area on foot. We’d have caught him if he had. And he didn’t steal a car because none were reported stolen. So someone must have whisked him off, probably in the back of a car, and it’s got to have been the person he was on the phone to.’

Mo nodded. ‘That’s the theory that makes the most sense. Then he goes to ground, probably with the person who took him. They looked after him for a couple of days, then, for whatever reason, decided to torture and kill him, and dump his body out here in the middle of nowhere.’

‘But how did the person know Hope was being tailed?’

‘The only way would be if you already knew the police were onto him.’

The inference was obvious and it troubled Bolt. ‘You think it’s someone from the inquiry?’

‘Well, no. What would be the point? Everyone on the inquiry team’s trying to catch the killer, so why risk your career to help him escape?’

Bolt sighed. ‘There are over a hundred people on the team. All of them knew for three days that Leonard Hope was a suspect. I know we swore them all to secrecy, but some of them would have talked to friends, family and particularly other cops. So there are probably a couple of hundred people at least with access to that information.’

‘But we’re still left without a motive,’ said Mo. ‘Why would you help him escape? There’s just no reason for it that I can think of.’

‘It could be a vigilante thing. Maybe it was a cop who didn’t think Hope was going to get the treatment he deserved in prison. I mean, let’s face it, whoever killed him really wanted to make him suffer. He must have died in absolute agony.’ Bolt was surprised to realize that the thought of Hope dying in agony pleased him.

Mo shook his head. ‘I don’t buy the vigilante angle.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because most cops I know are professional, and detached enough not to take everything so personally. How many of them get so wound up in a case that they can’t think straight, and end up being prepared to risk their career, their pension, and twenty years behind bars just to make sure a man who’s going to go to prison for the rest of his life anyway dies in agony? And even if there was one prepared to put a plan like that into action, he couldn’t have done it alone. It requires organization, and real balls, because there’s no guarantee he’d have been able to get Hope in a car with him.’ Mo shook his head again. ‘I’m sorry, boss, but there’s no way it was some Dirty Harry-style cop.’

When he put it like that, it didn’t make much sense to Bolt either. ‘But someone helped him. Someone who hated him enough to burn his balls into Maltesers with a blowtorch.’

Once again they were silent for a few moments. Bolt took a deep breath and looked up at the night sky. It was a clear night but the stars were obscured by the thick orange glow of London to the east and the lights of planes as they queued up in a long, sweeping semi-circle for their approach into Heathrow Airport, the low rumble of their engines providing a constant background noise. He was stuck, and it irritated him. Worse, Leonard Hope’s death was only going to increase the pressure on him. Now it looked like they’d never find out exactly what had happened.

‘Shall we head back to town?’ said Mo, shivering as a gust of cold wind blew across the road, then opening the car door. ‘We need to get in touch with the victims’ next of kin and let them know that they’re not going to get their day in court.’

‘Jesus,’ sighed Bolt, opening the passenger door. ‘What a pig’s ear.’ And then, as Mo started the engine, a thought struck him. ‘The victims’ next of kin,’ he said aloud. ‘Now they’d have a real reason to hate Leonard Hope.’

‘Sure they would, boss, but none of them knew Hope’s identity before we announced it, and that wasn’t until after he was already on the run.’

‘What do we know about Ivana Hanzha’s family? You know, George Rowan’s mistress. I heard word that her old man’s one of those Russian oligarchs. Someone with a hell of a lot of money and good contacts.’ As SIO on the case, Bolt hadn’t had to deal with the next of kin, but now he was beginning to wish he had.

Mo sat forward, looking more interested now. ‘His name’s Vladimir Hanzha, and we haven’t gone into his background too much. I mean, it’s not as if he’s a suspect or anything, and from what I gather his daughter’s been estranged from him for the last five years. But, yeah, the word is he’s a bit of a shady character, like a lot of those guys. I still don’t see how he could have got hold of Leonard Hope, though.’

‘And maybe he didn’t. But we’re running low on leads, and he’s got to be worth talking to. I’m going to call Sam Verran.’

Sam Verran was a former colleague of both Bolt’s and Mo’s in SOCA, the Serious and Organized Crime Agency. A career cop with only a year to go until retirement, he was an expert in Russian and Eastern European crime networks, and the extent to which they’d impinged on the UK organized-crime scene. He knew all the key players, and quite a few of the not-so-key ones as well, and if anyone could give them a lowdown on Ivana Hanzha’s old man, it would be him. And if he couldn’t, then it meant the old man was clean.

Bolt hadn’t spoken to Sam Verran since he’d left SOCA, which was close to two years back now. They’d promised to remain in touch but, as was so often the case, they hadn’t, which was a pity because Bolt had always liked him. He hesitated for a moment, vaguely embarrassed to be calling Verran at 8.30 on a Friday night because, if he remembered rightly, he hadn’t responded to Sam’s last email about a SOCA reunion drink. But only Verran could give him the answers he needed, so he didn’t hesitate for very long.

Verran answered after the second ring. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said in a strong Essex accent. ‘The wanderer returns. I thought you’d retired and moved abroad, I haven’t heard from you in that long.’

Bolt chuckled, getting comfortable in his seat as Mo pulled away from the kerb. ‘You know how it is, Sam. Work never stops, does it?’

‘How’s it going on the Disciple case? I’ve seen you on the TV taking a lot of flak from those media assholes, as if they could do any better catching the guy. Any news on him yet?’

‘Nothing right now,’ said Bolt, who didn’t want to tell Verran about Leonard Hope before he’d spoken to his boss in Homicide and Serious Crime Command, ‘but we’ll get him eventually.’

‘So, what can I do for you, Mikey-boy? I’m assuming this isn’t a social call.’

‘Not entirely, no. I was wondering if you could give me some info on Vladimir Hanzha.’

‘Ah yes. His daughter was one of The Disciple’s recent victims, wasn’t she? She was the one killed along with her lover at his place. The wife disturbed them.’

‘That’s right. My colleague – you remember Mo Khan, don’t you?’

‘Course I do.’

‘Well, he’s been hearing rumours that Vladimir Hanzha’s involved in some dubious dealings, and I thought, who better to talk to than my old mate Sam Verran to find out if they’re true.’

‘But what’s he got to do with the Disciple case?’

‘Nothing as far as I know,’ said Bolt, deflecting the question. ‘I just need some background.’

‘Fair enough. To tell you the truth, I don’t know anything about Hanzha for sure, and he’s not under active investigation, but you’re right, there are rumours and, off the record, I reckon there’s some meat to them. The point is, though, he’s got big money, big connections, and a very big team of lawyers, so you’ve got to be very careful. The official line is he’s an entrepreneur who arrived in this country in the late 1990s with the equivalent of about ninety million in sterling in his pocket, which he made from the sale to Exxon of a natural gas company he owned back in Russia. Since then, he’s invested in a number of companies and projects in the UK and overseas – commodities, property, a couple of big holiday resorts. Even through the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s, he’s managed to double his personal wealth to a hundred and eighty million. He donates money to charities; he counts a number of big businesspeople, a few lords and ladies, and even a couple of politicians as his friends; and because he’s not one of the big billionaire oligarchs, he’s managed to keep a fairly low profile.’ Verran paused. ‘That’s the official line.’