“Where to?”
“Heathrow,” said Fat Charlie.
“Right you are,” said the cabbie. “Which terminal?”
“No idea,” said Fat Charlie, who knew that, really, he ought to know. It had only been a few days, after all. “Where do they leave for Florida?”
GRAHAME COAT SHAD BEGUN PLANNING HIS EXIT FROM THE Grahame Coats Agency back when John Major was prime minister. Nothing good lasts forever, after all. Sooner or later, as Grahame Coats himself would have delighted in assuring you, even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked. While his planning had been good—one never knew when one might need to leave at a moment’s notice—and he was not unaware that events were massing, like gray clouds on the horizon, he wished to put off the moment of leaving until it could be delayed no longer.
What was important, he had long ago decided, was not leaving, but vanishing, evaporating, disappearing without trace.
In the concealed safe in his office—a walk-in room he was extremely proud of—on a shelf he had put up himself and had recently needed to put up again when it fell down, was a leather vanity case containing two passports, one in the name of Basil Finnegan, the other in the name of Roger Bronstein. Each of the men had been born about fifty years ago, just as Grahame Coats had, but had died in their first year of life. Both of the passport photographs in the passports were of Grahame Coats. The case also contained two wallets, each with its own set of credit cards and photographic identification in the name of one of the names of the passport holders. Each name was a signatory to the funnel accounts in the Caymans, which themselves funneled to other accounts in the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein.
Grahame Coats had been planning to leave for good on his fiftieth birthday, a little more than a year from now, and he was brooding on the matter of Fat Charlie.
He did not actually expect Fat Charlie to be arrested or imprisoned, although he would not have greatly objected to either scenario had it occurred. He wanted him scared, discredited, and gone.
Grahame Coats truly enjoyed milking the clients of the Grahame Coats Agency, and he was good at it. He had been pleasantly surprised to discover that, as long as he picked his clientele with care, the celebrities and performers he represented had very little sense of money and were relieved to find someone who would represent them and manage their financial affairs and make sure that they didn’t have to worry. And if sometimes statements or checks were late in coming, or if they weren’t always what the clients were expecting, or if there were unidentified direct debits from client accounts, well, Grahame Coats had a high staff turnover, particularly in the bookkeeping department, and there was nothing that couldn’t easily be blamed on the incompetence of a previous employee or, rarely, made right with a case of champagne and a large and apologetic check.
It wasn’t that people liked Grahame Coats, or that they trusted him. Even the people he represented thought he was a weasel. But they believed that he was their weasel, and in that they were wrong.
Grahame Coats was his own weasel.
The telephone on his desk rang, and he picked it up. “Yes?”
“Mister Coats? It’s Maeve Livingstone on the phone. I know you said to put her through to Fat Charlie, but he’s off this week, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Shall I tell her you’re out?”
Grahame Coats pondered. Before a sudden heart attack had carried him off, Morris Livingstone, once the best-loved short Yorkshire comedian in the country had been the star of such television series as Short Back and Sides and his own Saturday-night variety-game show Morris Livingstone, I Presume. He had even had a top-ten single back in the eighties, with the novelty song, “It’s Nice Out (But Put It Away).” Amiable, easygoing, he had not only left all his financial affairs in the control of the Grahame Coats Agency, but he had also appointed, at Grahame Coats’s suggestion, Grahame Coats himself as trustee of his estate.
It would have been criminal not to give in to temptation like that.
And then there was Maeve Livingstone. It would be fair to say that Maeve Livingstone had, without knowing it, featured for many years in starring and costarring roles in a number of Grahame Coats’s most treasured and private fantasies.
Grahame Coats said, “Please. Put her through,” and then, solicitously, “Maeve, how lovely to hear from you. How are you?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
Maeve Livingstone had been a dancer when she met Morris, and had always towered over the little man. They had adored each other.
“Well, why don’t you tell me about it?”
“I spoke to Charles a couple of days ago. I was wondering. Well, the bank manager was wondering. The money from Morris’s estate. We were told we would be seeing something by now.”
“Maeve,” said Grahame Coats, in what he
thought of as his dark velvet voice, the one he believed that women responded to, “the problem is not that the money is not there—it’s merely a matter of liquidity. As I’ve told you, Morris made a number of unwise investments toward the end of his life, and although, following my advice, he made some sound ones as well, we do need to allow the good ones to mature: we cannot pull out now without losing almost everything. But worry ye not, worry ye not. Anything for a good client. I shall write you a check from my own bank account in order to keep you solvent and comfortable. How much does the bank manager require?”
“He says that he’s going to have to start bouncing checks,” she said. “And the BBC tell me that they’ve been sending money from the DVD releases of the old shows. That’s not invested, is it?”
“That’s what the BBC said? Actually, we’ve been chasing them for money. But I wouldn’t want to put all the blame on BBC Worldwide. Our bookkeeper’s pregnant, and things have been all at sixes and sevens. And Charles Nancy, who you spoke to, has been rather distraught—his father died, and he has been out of the country a great deal—”
“Last time we spoke,” she pointed out, “you were putting in a new computer system.”
“Indeed we were, and please, do not get me started on the subject of bookkeeping programs. What is it they say—to err is human, but to really, er, mess things up, you need a computer. Something like that. I shall investigate this forcefully, by hand if necessary, the old-fashioned way, and your moneys shall be wending their way to you. It’s what Morris would have wanted.”
“My bank manager says I need ten thousand pounds in right now, just to stop them bouncing checks.”
“Ten thousand pounds shall be yours. I am writing a check for you even as we speak.” He drew a circle on his notepad, with a line going off the top of it. It looked a bit like an apple.