They Thought I Was Dead, page 7
Dear Fräulein Sandra Balkwill,
I act, on behalf of my firm who are co-executor of the estate for the lately deceased Frau Antje Frieburg of Reutlingen, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
Beneath the terms of the will within this late deceased lady’s wishes, you are nominated as a beneficiary. If you can be so troubled as to be making connection with our office, it will be of assistance to us to please guide you as to your satisfaction of your inheritance.
Hoping we hear from us soon.
With sincerely your regards
Julia Lutz
Junior Partner
I handed the letter across the desk to the solicitor, who read it in silence for some moments. Then she looked at me. ‘Not a great translation, is it?’
‘Done by a budgerigar?’
She smiled. ‘Let’s hope it’s laid a golden egg.’
I nodded, very hard, thinking how good that would be. It could change everything. ‘So what happens next?’ I asked, trying not to sound over-excited or anxious, but very conscious of Roel Albazi breathing down my neck.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can email her, informing her I’ve verified it is you, then it’s over to you to communicate directly with her.’
I shook my head. ‘No, I – I’d like you to do that.’
I explained to her that I did not want my husband to find out about this inheritance, which – although I did not tell her – I had every expectation was going to be massive. Life-changing, for sure. I asked if she could represent me in handling the money, when it came in. I mentioned that I was potentially planning to leave him, and that I wanted the money to be paid into an account I still legally held in my maiden name.
She replied that she could not see there was any issue with that. And as my solicitor, she would carry out any instructions regarding my inheritance that I gave her.
She then had a call on her intercom that her next client was in reception. She glanced at her watch and told me to make an appointment with her assistant for the following day. Also, to fill in all the forms she needed to take me on as a client, and by tomorrow she expected to have heard back from the German law firm, with further details – and hopefully the amount of my inheritance.
I was so excited I barely slept all night. My tossing and turning repeatedly woke Roy, and I was riddled with guilt. He’d been working around the clock for the past week on a nasty case – a charred body found in a burnt-out car – and was shattered. But I couldn’t help it, I was dreaming of the fortune I was certain I was going to inherit from the estate of Antje Frieburg, widow of Claus Kauffman-Frieburg.
I did wonder why she had dropped the Kauffman, but I didn’t wonder that much. More on my mind was the fact that Antje Frieburg was the widow of the 231st richest man in Germany. I felt so confident that I texted Roel Albazi, telling him I was coming into an inheritance and would have sufficient funds to repay him entirely within just a few days, a week or so at the most.
He messaged me back that he was glad to hear this. When could he expect the first payment?
I told him there would be no ‘first payment’. He would be getting the whole lot in one go.
He sent me back an emoji of fingers crossed.
I ignored it. Albazi was history. The debt was history, and sadly, but inevitably, my husband was about to be history too. This had gone too far for me to go back to normality now. I had to be brave and see it through. I was heading to a new life, an heiress, with a baby growing inside me.
My only decision now was where to go?
And Germany was very much on my mind. Germany felt like my destiny!
I finally fell asleep, and despite my guilt and anxiety I had a very happy dream. It might not have been so great if I’d known what Carolyn Smith was going to tell me in the morning.
21
July 2007 – Looking back
‘You are not serious? Tell me you’re not?’ I blurted at the solicitor – now my solicitor – who had just given me the details of my inheritance.
I saw the top of a bus glide past the window behind her, the pane blurred by pelting rain, hunched figures with gloomy faces on the top deck, just visible between the slats in the horizontal Venetian blinds of her office. And I thought about another bus I’d seen go by yesterday, in the sunshine, and just how good I had been feeling sitting here in this same ghost chair.
How excited I had been for my future. How I had been thinking . . . Goodbye, buses, it’ll be taxis, limos and helicopters from now on – and no more flying cattle class! I’ll be turning left on planes in future, or maybe, if the amount of my inheritance is large enough, it will only ever be private jets, living the life, living the dream! Living like Tamzin – and I’d had a sudden memory about that amazing drunken night with her. About making love and kissing her, and falling asleep in her arms. My mind drifted and I was enjoying it.
I’d even thought that maybe I’d set up my own charitable foundation one day – to help causes I believed in, and to make people see the good in me. Isn’t that what really drives every big donor to charity? Altruism and ego make good bedfellows, don’t they?
That was yesterday. When my world was a sunny place and I was foolishly getting carried away spending vast sums of money that I didn’t then know I didn’t have. Now my solicitor had just rained on my parade, in keeping with the shitty day outside. And my anxiety was the worst ever.
Carolyn Smith, dressed in a crimson top, with a lace ruff neck, over black trousers, looked more formal than yesterday. And she had totally misread my reaction.
‘It’s a nice sum, isn’t it, and out of the blue!’ she replied, all breezy.
‘A nice sum? Seriously?’ I was staring back at her in utter disbelief – and maybe denial, too. Disbelief at the amount she had just read out to me, and disbelief she could think that was a nice sum.
‘Thirty thousand pounds, that’s a pretty nice amount of money, don’t you think?’ she said, like she was congratulating a small child on a sandcastle or a painting of a dog. ‘And because your aunt is a foreign national, due to a magnanimous gesture by the UK government some time ago, you won’t have to pay any inheritance tax on it.’
For a moment I was lost for words. I could sense my disappointment turning to anger. I tried to remain calm. I needed to keep Carolyn Smith onside, despite how much she was irritating me. I kept telling myself not to shoot the messenger. But it was hard with all my dreams crashing and burning around me. Only thirty sodding thousand pounds. Shit. Shit. Shit.
‘Mrs Smith – Carolyn – what you don’t know is that Antje Frieburg was married to one of the richest men in Germany,’ I said, my voice rising. I was struggling to keep down my rage. ‘For Chrissake! That’s just shaking her bloody petty cash tin at me. It’s like she’s saying, Hello, distant Englisher relative, have a few crumbs!’
Carolyn Smith was now looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read, then she shrugged a take-it-or-leave-it and that really pissed me off. And set me off.
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ I said to her, more loudly than I intended, and jumped angrily to my feet. I took some breaths to calm myself, staring at her but not knowing really what to say.
She eyed me back silently for a few moments. ‘Please sit down, Mrs Grace.’
‘My mother was right when she called her a bloody bitch!’ I said, sitting back down. ‘It’s just not as much as I’d hoped.’
‘Hoped for what?’ she probed.
‘It’s not your problem,’ I replied. ‘I’m sorry. I – I let my imagination run away – it does that sometimes. I ought to cut its sodding legs off, hobble it.’ I shrugged. ‘You see, a bigger amount would have solved all my problems.’
She looked at me sympathetically. ‘Mrs Grace – can I call you Sandra or Sandy?’
‘Sandy,’ I said bleakly.
‘OK, Sandy, let me tell you something.’ Her tone was gentle, coaxing. ‘As a probate lawyer, I see people every day who are disappointed with the amount of their inheritances. They were expecting so much more and only got a little. Everyone who sits where you are sitting, and is disappointed, thinks life isn’t fair. And they are right, life isn’t fair. Not many people are ever satisfied with what they’ve been left, and yet almost everyone is better off than they were before that relative died.’ She smiled and shrugged, then massaged her neck for some moments. ‘I’m afraid Gandhi was right in something he once said – and don’t take this the wrong way: The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.’
‘Greed?’ I echoed, my anger rising again. ‘Is that what you think it is? It’s not greed, I’m desperate.’
Giving me a quizzical look, she interlocked her fingers. ‘Well, as I’m now your solicitor, or about to be, would you like to elaborate? You can tell me – under client confidentiality.’
I so much wanted to tell her. I badly needed to confide in someone, just to unburden myself. But, as I stared across the desk at her, I suddenly felt so scared and inferior. There she was in her expensive clothes, her name on the company letterhead, living her dream – so I presumed. And here was I, a total mess, hooked on diazepam, deeply in debt to a very dangerous man, and about to leave my husband. I shrugged my shoulders and said, simply, ‘I guess I was just hoping – like you say most of your clients are – for more.’
‘It’s like they say,’ she responded, looking at me curiously, ‘many of the things you can count, don’t count. And many of the things you can’t count, really count.’
I said nothing, just sat there thinking hard.
‘Now let’s get the paperwork sorted,’ she continued, matter-of-factly.
I took a deep sigh, then tried to snap out of it, searching for any thread of positivity to hang on to. Thirty thousand pounds. If I got lucky – and my luck was long overdue for a turn for the better – I could turn it into a lot more. At least the £150,000 I desperately needed to pay slimeball Albazi.
My whole body shuddered each time I thought about him and thought about what he would do when he found out I didn’t have all the money I’d promised him.
‘How long will it take to receive this money?’ I asked her.
‘International banking transfers can be done pretty much instantly,’ she replied.
‘You mean you could have this in your client account before the end of today?’
‘If that is your instruction, yes.’
‘And once you have received the funds, could you pay them in cash to me?’
Carolyn Smith paused. ‘I could, yes, but under money-laundering regulations I would have to ask you what you planned to do with the cash.’
‘And if I said stick it on a horse or a roulette wheel, what would happen?’
‘The answer is nothing. It’s your money, you would be free to do what you want with it.’ She frowned. I could see from her puzzled expression that she had no idea what I was saying or planning. Or how badly I needed to multiply that amount by five.
That I was already thinking of the various points on the roulette table where I would place my chips. And trying to ignore that irritating voice inside my head that was telling me to be sensible and to at least not risk the lot.
Carolyn Smith told me it would take her a couple of days from receipt of the funds from Germany to get me the cash. A couple of days was good, I told her. A couple of days would give me time to think clearly. But even as I left her office, an anguished plan was taking shape in my mind.
22
22 July 2007 – Roel Albazi
The Song Wu Corporation headquarters were housed in a massive seven-storey building that was part warehouse, part offices. It was one of many ugly precast concrete structures that rose, with the very barest nod to Planning, in the building frenzy that followed in the aftermath of the Second World War. If anyone wanted to be anonymous, this New England hill area of Brighton, a short distance from the station, was the place to do it.
The ground floor and basement contained the vast range of food products, mostly imported from China, which the Corporation supplied to restaurants and specialist grocery stores around the south of England. On the floors above were the administration offices.
It was one of Song Wu’s affectations that visitors to her penthouse office were never permitted to arrive under their own steam, they were always brought here in a blacked-out Mercedes, and Roel Albazi, sitting in the dark rear of the car that had collected him from outside his office in Shoreham, had never liked this.
It was all part of her psychological play. Making visitors – and all visitors were here for business purposes – feel a little out of their comfort zones, a little beholden to her, and a little bit weakened and subservient. If a meeting went well, you were chauffeured back again afterwards. But if it did not go well, you were escorted to the receiving bay and then you were on your own. Albazi knew the game but what choice did he have?
The inscrutably silent chauffeur – just like all the Song Wu staff – did not respond to any of Albazi’s attempts at conversation. Twenty minutes after collecting him from outside his Shoreham office, the Mercedes dipped down a steep ramp beneath a rising, shuttered door, into the lower level of the ground floor, passing a forklift truck stacked with pallets, and pulled up in front of the metal gate of the elevator.
Albazi’s door was opened by a security guard with a rictus smile and equally dead eyes, who pressed the button for the elevator. The wide metal door opened as painfully slowly as the creaking, groaning and clanging ride up that followed. Albazi wondered every time he came here why Song Wu didn’t spend just the tiniest bit of her fortune on modernizing at least the lift – surely it drove her nuts too? But then, everything about this place indicated someone who didn’t care about their surroundings, just what it enabled – the money.
Except for her office itself, that was something else. As the elevator finally stopped with a jolt, the doors opened onto what could have been an anteroom in a Chinese palace. High, domed ceiling, bright red, gold, black and mother-of-pearl, with ornate lanterns, huge vases and figurines on plinths. At the far end were double bamboo doors, ornately latticed, with a clone of the guard down below standing in front.
As Albazi approached along the mosaic tiled floor towards him, the guard put out his hands, cautioning him, then patted him down. Only when he was satisfied that the Albanian was packing nothing more lethal than a mobile phone did he pull open the double doors to reveal Song Wu’s opulent office. Although Albazi had been here on many occasions, it never failed to impress.
She sat behind her magnificent, uncluttered, black lacquer desk, with a view through the window behind her across the streets and terraces to the east of the city and the racecourse, staring imperiously at her visitor. She was plump, but her girth was elegantly disguised inside a red silk blouse embroidered with Chinese symbols and tied at the front with a huge red bow. Matching bright red fabric earrings, like miniature sash cords, hung either side of her face, and a large ruby pendant on a gold chain nestled among the fleshy folds of her neck. She wore gold rings on each of her fingers, the nails of which were immaculately varnished.
A solitary joss stick stood in a jade incense burner on either side of the desk, from which rose little coils of jasmine-scented smoke. The only other objects on the desk were three exquisitely carved ivory photograph frames facing away from him, a red leather-bound notebook and a red pen.
If Song Wu was anyone else, Albazi was certain she would be considered obese, but she wasn’t anyone else. Somehow, she managed to carry her size with elegance, and even elan. Compared to the rest of her body, her face seemed disproportionally small, but she was strangely attractive, Albazi thought, with a perfect complexion, and black hair harshly raked back into a chic bob. She had a tiny rosebud mouth and eyes the colour of a glacier. He had once been to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and she reminded him a little of the caricature of the queen. But there was no humour in Song Wu’s world. Or music. Or, so far as Albazi could tell, joy.
Without moving a muscle, both her arms resting on her desktop, she said, ‘Sit down, please, Mr Albazi.’
He sat, knowing better than to attempt any small talk.
As he perched on the edge of one of the two chairs facing her, Song Wu said, calmly, ‘You don’t know where they are, Mr Albazi?’ Her cut-glass English had no trace of an accent and she spoke with an almost girlish voice like a rather old-fashioned BBC newscaster. ‘Two hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds of my money? How do I know these people are real? How do I know you have not just made them up, Mr Albazi? Invented them as a way to steal my money, just like your predecessor?’
Her voice was getting louder, icier. But she remained deadly calm, too calm.
Roel Albazi sat uncomfortably, trying hard to look confident, although inside he was shaking. He was trying to focus, remembering what was important. Mianzi – Face. He needed to show Song Wu this and to allow her this, too. Face. Strength and respect. But being in her presence took all his confidence away. The whole ritual of arriving here was designed to do exactly that, he knew.
‘We have located two of the defaulters,’ he lied. He was trying to sound strong and hard, to keep face, but his voice came out small and almost reedy. ‘Alan Mitten and Robert Rhys. Skender has their addresses, he is going to sort them out.’
‘Sort them out?’
‘Collect.’
‘And this Sandra – Sandy – Grace? What is the update?’
‘We are on it.’
‘We?’
‘Me, Skender and Karter.’
She gave Albazi a strange look. He couldn’t figure it out but it unsettled him. ‘You and Skender and your little gorilla. You are very dependent on Skender, aren’t you?’
‘He’s a good man, as is Joe Karter.’
‘I decide on who is a good person and who is not, Mr Albazi.’
‘Of course. But they both worked for me for ten years before I – we – began to work for you and I completely trust them to do any job I give them.’
