It seemed that everyone else in the room was doing the maths, as I was. His Lordship had apparently netted a million in cash, a million in art and my quarter of a million in diamonds.
The meeting continued for another hour as assignments were made, and we were asked to remain available but not to hinder the investigation. The codename for the operation was to be Operation Peer Pressure. How many more neat sound bites could be extracted from this heinous man’s campaign of hate, I wondered?
Chapter 3 7
Vastrick Security Offices, No 1 Poultry, London. Tuesday 2pm.
Dee and I were enjoying a late sandwich lunch in her office. The sun was shining and the air conditioning was trying to keep up. At last we were enjoying a glorious spell of late summer weather in the Capital. We were actually having fun, despite the seriousness of the case. We felt comfortable together; we were a good fit, or at least I thought so. I intended to speak to Dee at some point about our ‘relationship’ but I hadn’t found the right time yet. Perhaps I never would. Like all of my relationships, I would have preferred it if the girl just got the message without my having to say it out loud.
Perhaps I had been tainted by my experience with Julie Tate. What a great time we’d had together. We were compatible in every way. Then, when I decided to verbalise what we both felt and where it might go, she smiled kindly and touched my arm. She didn’t need to say anything, I knew already, but she said it anyway.
“Josh, of course I love you, but like a brother!”
The door to the office opened, snapping me out of my reverie. A young woman walked in. She looked to me to be about fifteen, but she was in her early twenties. I must be getting old, I thought. Her name was Alana and she was pretty and slightly built. She was one of Vastrick’s best investigators, and her nickname was Nancy Drew.
Alana sat down at the desk with us. I cleared away the empty Prêt a Manger sandwich cartons and made some space for Alana’s file. Alana’s excitable manner of speaking convinced me she really must be fifteen after all.
“I have something here that should be of interest.” Alana sat down and opened the file. “I searched for a link between Lord Hickstead and Don Fisher on the internet but found nothing. I word searched all biographies and autobiographies, but they don’t mention each other. In the end, I had to laboriously trawl through the NaNA.”
“What is Nana?” I asked, showing a degree of ignorance that the other two could not comprehend. Alana patronised me with a patient explanation.
“NaNA is the National News Archive. It attempts to scan all of the newspapers published and digitise their content. It goes back to the 1800s now and is relatively complete back as far as the 1960s.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of it,” I admitted, not understanding how such a valuable resource had escaped my notice.
“That’s probably because it’s a subscription service on a secure server, and the subscription is between six hundred and two thousand pounds a year.” I must have looked shocked because Alana tried to explain. “It’s good value for money if you are a foundation member, like Vastrick. We get complete access to both the digitised archive and the hard copies. We can print as much as we like and as we pay so much we are allowed to use the universal search engine, which will look for a word or phrase or person anywhere in the archive. The regular users can only search for a particular edition, and they have limited printing rights.”
“OK, I accept I might be ignorant. What did you find?” The front page of a long defunct newspaper was pushed in my direction. It had a blue banner with white lettering that proudly proclaimed “TODAY, Britain’s only colour newspaper”. There was a wide angle photo which showed three well known rock stars, including a young looking Fisher, with five more soberly dressed men behind them. In the background we could see the crowd of over a hundred thousand excited rock fans.
“Look closely, Josh, on the back line, on the extreme left. That is a young looking Arthur Hickstead sharing the stage with the stars of Rock Relief 88, twenty two years ago.”
Alana explained that the concert had been held in July and that the shadow cabinet had all been on holiday and so they were represented by a member of their party’s ruling National Executive Council, Arthur Hickstead. As the Trades Unions were donating one million pounds, Arthur was being interviewed just before Elton John came on stage. The TV audience at that point was a UK record and, as it was a simulcast with the USA, Hickstead had a chance to address more people than the Prime Minister could hope to reach and he obviously relished the task. When the camera came to him he was beaming, and he began a short prepared piece about helping Africa’s workers in being represented. But within seconds of him beginning his speech, Don Fisher stormed into the tent studio, grabbed the camera lens and looked straight into it. He might have been high on something but he said, and I quote: ‘This is all bollocks, there are kids starving out there, get your hands in your flaming pockets and give ‘til it hurts. The suits will give their money because it looks good on the balance sheet but we want your cash and we want you to care.’ Arthur never appeared on camera again because, after the foul mouthed outburst, Fisher used another F word, not flaming as I just said. The producers cut Arthur’s speech and had the cameras cut away to Elton John.
In the Guardian the next day, Arthur Hickstead was described as being livid when he was quoted as saying ‘We have given a million pounds to this charity and we expect more respect. That foul mouthed yob won’t get another penny from us.’ Behind him a crowd of young adults booed him and, according to the reporter, he stormed off and boycotted the after concert event.”
That could have been a good motive for blackmail, I supposed, being humiliated in front of the UK’s biggest ever TV audience. We thanked Alana for her help and were about to go back to the operations room when my BlackBerry rang. The screen informed me it was Inspector Boniface.
“Hello, Inspector.”
“Josh, can you come to the station as soon as possible? Don Fisher wants to speak to you.”
Chapter 3 8
City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London. Tuesday 4pm.
I have to admit that at school and college I was a radical. I was very anti-establishment, but there was something that irked me even more than the establishment, and that was sell-outs. I loved punk rock music and its sentiment, but I naively believed that the bands were shunning riches, the high life and celebrity that they claimed to hate so much. So, when they all made their money and joined the very establishment they had purported to be rebelling against, I was disgusted and disappointed. To me, principles are for life, and I know some very rich people who are still radical and anti-establishment. To see millionaire pop stars living the high life they raged against when they were struggling sickened me.
In my opinion Don Fisher was both a sell-out and a hypocrite. He looked like a rebel, his grey and receding hair usually worn in a ponytail, suit jacket over torn jeans, unshaven, but he wasn’t. I recalled seeing him in an interview on TV two years ago, when he told working class parents not to take their families to McDonald’s or out to dinner but to give the money to his charity instead. The interviewer, who had been a well-known left wing agitator in his youth, asked Don why his eldest daughter was out on the town wearing six hundred pound shoes and carrying a designer bag of equal value if he was so concerned about families wasting money. Don replied that his kids were grown up, and they made their own choices. The interviewer pointed out that two of his kids were in full time education and one had an internship earning her fifteen thousand a year. He must be subsidising their jet set lifestyle, he suggested. Don hadn’t liked the questions about his family or his partying with the very establishment figures he made his reputation disparaging, and stormed out of the interview.