Hemlock (Charlie Cooper Thrillers Book 12), page 1
HEMLOCK
A CHARLIE COOPER ADVENTURE
MARK DAWSON
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
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PROLOGUE
LONDON, 1994
Christopher Wilmshurst shifted impatiently and glanced into the corner of his office where his secretary sat taking notes. She’d arranged this meeting with the two lawyers representing an Amsterdam-based firm of cloth merchants, and he made a mental note to remind her to be on the lookout for timewasters in future. After all, he was the newly appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Business and Trade, a job title it was going to take some getting used to. He really didn’t have time to listen to a long story about the illustrious pedigree of a foreign firm looking to expand its textile production and sales operations into the UK.
He decided to bring things to a close.
“Gentlemen, if I may interrupt you there, I know that Betty here has to prepare some papers for a meeting I have in the Houses of Parliament very shortly, so perhaps we should bring this to a close for now. It’s been fascinating to hear about your business, and I am confident we can move forward with measures to expedite your expansion into the UK market.”
He gestured towards the door. The two lawyers nodded and smiled but made no move to rise from their chairs.
Christopher Wilmshurst decided to go one step further.
“Betty, if you could find these gentlemen’s coats and then see to my ten o’clock meeting.”
She closed her notepad and hurried out of the room, leaving the door open for the two lawyers to follow. Instead, one of them stood and closed the heavy oak door.
“Gentlemen, please,” said Wilmshurst, smiling uncertainly. “We can arrange a follow-up once things have progressed, but I’m afraid we’re out of time for today.”
He’d expected that promotion to a position of this seniority would mean that his words carried greater authority, yet neither of these two men seemed to pay him the slightest bit of attention.
The second man, who had introduced himself as Thomas Smith, reached into his briefcase and took out a slender, buff-coloured file, placing it on the table in front of the government minister.
“What’s this?” asked Wilmshurst.
“Have a look,” said Smith. He had barely spoken a word in the meeting up to this point but suddenly seemed to have assumed control.
Wilmshurst glanced across to see the other man standing across the doorway as though blocking it. He opened the file. Immediately the breath rushed from his lungs, and he felt sweat prick his forehead.
“You bastards,” he muttered. “You absolute bastards.”
It had been a moment of weakness on a business trip to Paris six months earlier. Wilmshurst had been in the throes of a long and painful divorce following his wife’s repeated infidelities. His children had left home, and for the first time in a long while—perhaps the first time ever—he was asking himself what he really wanted from his life. A successful career, yes. He wanted to serve his political party and his country and be recognised for it. He wanted a certain level of material comfort: a nice house, summer holidays somewhere warm, a car that didn’t break down every week. But he also wanted to love and be loved, and he was tired of pretending that this meant he had to put up with a wife who flaunted her disdain for him at every possible opportunity. He had known about the risks of exploring such things abroad, but he never thought Paris was dangerous territory, and he’d made sure that none of his colleagues were with him as he caught a taxi to a particular nightclub that he’d heard rumours about over the years.
“Who are you?” he demanded of the man sitting across from him. “French intelligence?”
He rifled through the pictures. There was perhaps a dozen, all professionally shot. He’d never seen the young man again, but he knew that when it came to politics and reputation, the contents of this file would be enough to end his career.
The man sitting opposite studied him impassively.
“No, not French,” he said finally. “You don’t need to worry that we are asking you to betray your country to a foreign power. We are as English as you are, and just as proud of it.”
“Who are you, then?”
“Our names don’t matter. You may continue to call me Smith if that helps. What matters is that we represent a party who is keen to establish a level of influence over this government’s trade policy, and we believe you are the right person to help us achieve this goal.”
“Damn you,” said Wilmshurst, unable to prevent his voice rising in anger. He didn’t care whether or not Betty heard him through the closed door. “I’m a man of honour. You’ve badly misjudged me if you think I am going to roll over for a cheap and nasty trick like this.”
“We don’t expect an answer now,” said the man calling himself Smith. He wore something close to a look of boredom on his thin, cruel face. “But I would advise you to reflect carefully before taking any hasty decisions and telling others of our proposal. It will make no difference to us. We have taken steps to ensure that we can’t be found, so the only victim will be you and your career. I have little doubt that your wife will also take the opportunity to instruct her lawyers to squeeze even more money from you in the divorce. As for your children, it may be hard for them to look at you in the same way.”
There was a noise at the door as someone in his outer office rattled the doorknob.
“Minister?” came Betty’s voice. “Is everything all right in there, Minister?”
Smith made a curt gesture with his left hand. His colleagues stepped aside to allow Betty to open the door.
“Your next meeting is starting shortly, Minister,” she said, looking nervously from her boss to his two visitors.
“We’re leaving,” said Smith, standing abruptly. He didn’t bother to extend a hand. Instead, he placed a business card on the table. “We’ll see you tomorrow evening for that discreet drink we discussed, Minister. The address and time are on the card.”
He took his coat from Betty.
“Please remember my advice, Minister,” he said. “It’s best to reflect on these things in private. We look forward to hearing your answer tomorrow.”
Wilmshurt sank back into his chair, thoughts crowding his head. He could see his entire life collapsing before his eyes. He would end up impoverished, divorced, unemployed and disgraced. His friends in Parliament would distance themselves from him, and the length of time between his children’s visits would grow longer and longer. He looked around at his wood-panelled office with its view of Nelson’s Column. It had taken him so long to get here, to reach the heights of junior minister. Could he really stand to lose it all?
“Minister, are you all right?” asked Betty.
He’d forgotten she was even there.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“No, thank you, Betty,” he said, mustering a weak smile. “If you could just give me a few minutes.”
She closed the door softly.
Even as he felt sadness at the prospect of how his life could change, Christopher Wilmshurst experienced something else, something unexpected: a surge of defiance towards those two nameless men who had felt entitled to speak to him with such arrogance and disdain. The truth was that he’d felt liberated by what had happened in Paris, and he’d spent many an evening since then wondering if it would ever be possible to do something like that again. He had discovered who he really was, but he’d also learned that the knowledge was just another cage if he didn’t seize the opportunity to act on it.
Maybe this was the chance he’d dreamed of to remake his life. His children would come around. They might even prefer this new version of him.
He picked up the business card from the table. The address was a house somewhere in Chelsea. He slipped it into his pocket. He would go. Men like Smith and his colleague deserved to be told what kind of scum they were. He had a few contacts of his own. His best friend at school, Jonathan Timms, had joined the police, working his way up to a mid-level role in Special Branch. Timms had now retired, but he would be able to advise him.
If I have a recording device in my pocket, he thought, I can catch them red-handed. That’ll teach them. If I lose everything in the scandal, so be it. At least I’ll have stood up for myself.
Christopher Wilmshurst stood up and slipped his coat on. His mind was made up.
I’ll teach the bastards a lesson they won’t forget.
& nbsp; 1
The door clicked shut behind Cooper, and he immediately felt the temperature drop by several degrees. The entire building was kept at the same temperature in order to ensure the preservation of the hundreds and thousands of files stored for posterity in the vaults of the National Archives.
He approached the reception desk. “I’m looking for Margaret Kosminsky.”
The man sitting there sighed loudly at the disruption to his work and glanced up. “Who are you?”
“Benjamin Devlin,” he said. “I have an appointment.”
“And the purpose of your visit?”
“I’m looking into family genealogy.”
The man sighed again and shook his head. “Another one,” he muttered, adjusting his glasses. The reflection from the strip lighting overhead gleamed on his bald head. “Are you sure it’s Margaret you want to see?”
“Why do you ask?”
“She doesn’t get many visitors,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to make sure he was alone. “She works here in an advisory capacity while we transfer all the old records to our shiny new digital system. Once that’s up and running, there’ll be no need for the old guard, however razor-sharp their memories might be. What is it you’re interested in? Perhaps I can help you.”
“I’d rather speak to Margaret,” said Cooper.
“Why?” asked the man pointedly.
“Is that any of your business, Nigel?” said an elderly woman with a strong Yorkshire accent, suddenly appearing in an open doorway behind the desk. She wore her grey hair in a bun secured by a bright pink knitting needle. “Do I ask your visitors why they want to speak to you?”
She looked up at Cooper, appraising him in a single glance.
“Come with me,” she said.
He followed her into a back office and from there into a long corridor that seemed to stretch ahead as far as the eye could see.
“That bloody busybody,” she said, glancing over Cooper’s shoulder towards the front desk. “I bet he even told you about his ‘shiny new digital system’. Apparently, it’s going to render all of us fallible humans totally redundant. Just you wait and see, Mr Devlin. When his new system falls over one day, it’ll be people like me he comes running to for help.”
“How long have you worked here, Mrs Kosminsky?”
“I joined as a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old straight out of Bradford Girls’ Grammar School. I’m not going to tell you how many years ago that was.”
“How long have you known our mutual friend?”
Before sending him to the National Archives, Control had issued Cooper with a set of instructions more appropriate to accessing a dead drop in a hostile country.
Don’t refer to me by name at any point, he’d said, and make sure you use a clean alias identity that doesn’t link back to Group Fifteen in any way. You’ll need to come up with a reason for your visit that obscures the truth. Margaret won’t ask you any personal questions. Don’t offer any information about you or your mission. Is that clear?
“Since the file in question was created,” she said curtly.
They came to a door marked Material for Destruction: Authorised personnel Only. She pushed it open.
“Why is it kept in here?” he asked. “Is the file going to be destroyed?”
“Not if I can help it,” she said. “This is the only place I can keep it safe from the prying eyes of the management here. No one’s interested in material that’s flagged for the incinerator.”
The room was vast, easily the size of a sports hall. Row upon row of high metal shelves stretched as far as Cooper could see. Taking hold of a wooden ladder on wheels, Margaret Kosminsky set off at pace, stopping around midway down one of the aisles. She climbed to the top rung and extracted a single file. She handed it to Cooper.
“There’s a chair down there,” she said, pointing to the edge of the room. “Read the file and then return it to me. Only me—do you understand? From what our mutual friend tells me, you’ve a pretty good memory, so I trust there’ll be no need for notes of any kind.”
Cooper nodded to indicate he understood her instructions. “Anything else I should know?”
“In the thirty years since that file was created,” she said, “you’re the only person other than our mutual friend and me who has looked inside it. He must have a fair degree of confidence in you to grant you access.”
“I hope I can live up to it.”
“So do I,” she said, turning on her heel. “Those bastards deserve taking down for what they did.”
2
Cooper’s first impression was one of surprise that the file contained only six sheets of typed paper. Given the secrecy surrounding it, as well as the fact that Control and Margaret Kosminsky had clearly gone to some lengths to conceal its existence for thirty years, he’d expected considerably more.
The file had been opened following the death of a junior trade minister in the Conservative government of the early 1990s. Most deaths were investigated and resolved by the police, but over the years it had become a matter of government protocol that the three intelligence agencies—MI5, MI6 and GCHQ—contributed to the investigation into the demise of any serving politician.
As he leafed through the pages, Cooper dimly recalled the incident from what he’d seen on news bulletins. Christopher Wilmshurst had been found dead in the main bedroom of the house where he lived alone. An empty bottle of aspirin near to his bed held his fingerprints, and it didn’t take the police long to determine that Wilmshurst was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce and as a result under considerable pressure. There were no signs of forced entry and no unexplained bruising on the body. A handwritten note on his desk downstairs indicated that he’d decided to end his life because of what he described as ‘intolerable professional and personal pressures’ and expressed the wish that his children would find it in their hearts to forgive him for leaving them without a father. According to the file, the detectives spoke to a number of Wilmshurst’s colleagues in Parliament, and none knew of any enemies or personal entanglements beyond the complicated situation with his ex-wife. She was briefly questioned by police, along with her new partner, but they were on holiday in Copenhagen when he died and so were quickly ruled out of the investigation.
That might have been the end of it if it weren’t for an old friend of Wilmshurst called Jonathan Timms. When he read about his old friend’s death in The Times, Timms contacted the detectives immediately and told them about a conversation he’d had with Wilmshurst one day before his suicide. Timms’s witness statement was included in the file in full:
Christopher came in agitated and clearly in a state of high emotion. Once I had calmed him down with a whisky, he told me that he’d been approached by two men purporting to be lawyers who revealed that they were in possession of incriminating evidence related to a romantic encounter with a young man Christopher had engaged in during a visit to Paris. They threatened to reveal the evidence, which came in the form of explicit photographs, if he didn’t help them steer government policy in a direction of their choosing. Christopher was insistent that he was not going to acquiesce to their demands and wanted to take a recording device to the meeting so that he could capture evidence that would allow him to turn the tables on them. I warned him not to play games with such serious-sounding men, but he was adamant. I gave him a piece of equipment: a tape recorder that can be concealed inside a glasses’ case. He promised me that he would call to confirm that he was home safely afterwards, but the call never came. The next morning, I read of his suicide.
The apparent murder of a government minister galvanised the investigation, and the Metropolitan Police quadrupled the number of detectives working the case. They quickly established that the two men who had visited Wilmshurst at his office represented a Dutch cloth merchant that did not exist beyond a single registration document filed in The Hague. This document was their one clue. Handwriting studies were inconclusive, and the piece of paper did not contain any workable fingerprints, but detectives were able to establish that the small registration fee had been paid from a Swiss account. The bank in question refused to give detectives any information, but the Swiss intelligence service agreed to activate a highly placed covert source in the banking world who revealed that the account belonged to a British company called the Hemlock Consultancy.
