Conflict of Interest

‘Do it.’

As the man pointed down the corridor, Merlin noticed his hands were covered in thin, skin-white rubber, the same as the mask. And it clicked into place. It was a clean-room suit – the kind used in laboratories and high-tech factories. Merlin had seen people wearing them on his visits to clients’ electronics plants. He’d been told they ensured that not a single trace of the wearer could ever escape: not a hair; not a flake of skin; not a fingerprint. They were DNA-proof.

‘Hurry up!’ ordered the other, as they made their way down the passage, Merlin’s hand damp around the briefcase handle.

In the spare room he?

?d set up a trestle table with a computer for those weekends when work was unavoidable. Now he placed the briefcase under the desk.

‘That’s where you usually keep it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now strip off and get into your wetsuit.’

Merlin stared at him in disbelief. The shock of it all was quickly changing to adrenalin-powered fury. These guys weren’t small-time burglars. But who in Christ’s name were they? And how did they know he had a wetsuit?

‘What the hell is going on?’ The words came out in a screech.

Suddenly the two men were each side of him, pinning him to the wall.

‘Just do what we tell you,’ the taller man menaced, face pressed close to Merlin’s, breath stale with beer and cigarette smoke, ‘or I promise, I’ll fucking kill you.’

Merlin began taking his clothes off, dumping them in a pile in the middle of the room. Heart pounding in his chest, he wondered how he could get away from them. Who were these people? His mind raced as he recalled the threatening telephone calls he’d taken on his mobile phone. ‘Be very careful,’ anonymous, well-bred voices had told him, ‘you’re playing with fire’. As an analyst he was used to anger and threats. He’d had sinister calls in the past. On the basis of his advice, major companies could fall out of the sky. The preferred means of persuading him to reconsider his view usually involved lunch with the Chairman in some smart, West End restaurant. But physical intimidation? How Neanderthal could you get?

Now he’d stripped down to his jocks and made a move towards the back of the door from which his wetsuit was hung. He’d had one idea to get out of this. It was a long shot – but the only shot he had.

‘Off.’

‘But I don’t ever—’

‘Off!’

Removing his final layer, he was filled with furious indignation. He reached towards the wetsuit. Would this work, he wondered? Work or not, he had to try. Instead of taking the wetsuit off its hook, he seized a golf club from the bag which hung behind it on the back of the door. It was a five-iron and he swung it with all the wild force he could muster, so that it curved through the room, smashing the knife from the hand of the shorter thug and sending the taller one diving for cover.

Then he ran. Out of the door. Down the corridor. Into the hallway and towards the car. If he could get to the car and lock himself in before they caught up … But maybe they’d taken the key out of the ignition. They probably had. He’d better set off across the cliff tops and hope he could outrun or outsmart them.

It was a moment’s indecision, but it cost him his escape.

The shorter man had already grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘I’ll fucking smash you! I’ll fucking smash you!’ he kept repeating in a hysterical scream.

Then the taller one had caught up on the other side and seized him round the chest. ‘Len – leave off!’

The three of them halted, panting, in the driveway.

‘He needs his fucking head kicked in.’

‘Leave off. Just get him back inside.’

They’d turned and were heading back towards the front door.

‘I tell you, he needs—’

‘Len!’ The tall man cut him short. ‘We can’t have any marks.’

In that moment, the truth became suddenly and terrifyingly clear to Merlin de Vere. They’d made him pack away the groceries so everything looked normal. The clean-room suits meant there wouldn’t be a single trace of their presence left behind. Now, ‘We can’t have any marks.’ It all added up to the same thing. He knew, now, they were going to kill him. Tomorrow morning, when Denise arrived, she’d find him dead – and it would look like an accident. Just what kind of accident, he couldn’t possibly have imagined.

Chris waved his new staff card at the peak-capped gauleiters behind the marble security desk, and strode into reception. It was six weeks after his first meeting with Mike Cullen and five minutes to eight on Monday, September I – his first morning at Lombard. Eight was the time Mike had told him to be there, in a tone that implied a gentle start to the day. When they had discussed working hours in detail, Mike had said he really didn’t mind when Chris came and went so long as he got the work done. But, he repeated, Chris could expect seventy-hour weeks when things were busy. And Chris assumed, correctly as it turned out, that things were busy all of the time.