“I told them about our initial meeting and told them I had left your employ.”
Hedger looked relieved. “All right, now I want you to take me through this incident, step by step, and tell me exactly what happened and exactly what they asked you.”
“It was a big car, black, with blackened windows; a limousine, I believe. Plenty of room for me to lie facedown on the floor with some palooka’s foot on my neck.”
“Describe the two men who took you.”
“Big, muscular.”
“What did they say to you?”
“Shut up.”
“What?”
“They told me to shut up. Oh, one of them told me to undress, once we reached their location.”
“Accent?”
“Pretty hard to determine from the words ‘shut up,’ but I’d say British.”
“Class?”
“I didn’t ask them where they went to school.”
“No, class; social class: upper or lower?”
“Jesus, I don’t know, but it’s hard for me to believe that members of the upper class indulge in broad-day-light kidnapping. Lower, I guess.”
“What about the other men, their accents?”
“Only one of them spoke. His voice was smooth, cultivated, definitely upper class, but there was some sort of accent underneath it.”
“You mean a foreign accent?”
“You know the actor Herbert Lom?”
“Yes.”
“An accent like that, sort of—foreign, but British upper class at the same time. It’s as if he were born elsewhere but educated here.”
“Do you know anyone else, an Englishman, with the same kind of upper-class accent?”
Stone thought about it. “James Cutler,” he said, “and his solicitor, Julian Wainwright.” Also Sarah and her parents, but he didn’t mention that.
“Do you know where Cutler and Wainwright went to school?”
“Eton, I believe.”
“Ah.”
“Ah, what?”
“Just ah. That would indicate someone fairly high up in the food chain.”
“What food chain?”
“The food chain in whatever country he’s from. They don’t ship out butchers’ sons to be educated at Eton.”