When The Devil Stays

Chapter Four

Geneva in January was beautiful the way things were beautiful when they didn't care whether you noticed - grey lake, pewter sky, old buildings the colour of old bone. The taxi from the airport took them through the city centre without speaking, Jojo in the front, Anna in the back watching the streets and reminding herself to observe everything. Old habit. You never knew what would matter later.

Claudine Martel's office was on a narrow-cobbled street in the Vieille Ville - the old town - above a watchmaker's shop that looked like it hadn't changed since 1910. The building door was heavy oak and brass, and the staircase inside smelled of old paper and woodsmoke and the specific quality of serious work done over a very long time.

Claudine herself was not what Anna had expected.

She was perhaps sixty, compact and precisely dressed in grey wool, with close-cropped silver hair and the kind of face that had once been striking and had aged into something considerably more powerful than striking. She stood up from behind a desk the size of a dining table and looked at Jojo with the expression of someone who had expected him and then looked at Anna with the expression of someone who had not.

"Jojo", she said, in accented English. "You brought a variable."

"A necessary one," he said. "Claudine, this is Anna Jones. She's the auditor who found the Hale account."

Claudine's eyes moved to Anna with an attention so focused it was almost physical. Then she crossed the room and held out her hand.

"Miss Jones," she said. "Tell me - did you keep copies?"

"Of everything," Anna said.

Something in Claudine's expression shifted - satisfaction, precise and controlled. She released Anna's hand and went back behind her desk.

"Sit down," she said. "Both of you. We have a great deal to discuss and not a great deal of time in which to discuss it. Jojo - the MP what's your current evidence chain?"

"Circumstantial through three layers," Jojo said, taking the chair to Anna's left. "The payment structure, the routing sequence, the Cayman registration. All of it points, but none of it proves. The account is registered to a holding company that requires one more link to tie directly to a named individual."

"And that link," Claudine said, looking at Anna, "is on your drive."

"I think so," Anna said. "There's a signatory name on a quarterly authorisation document - the kind of thing that gets buried in supplementary filings because nobody reads supplementary filings. I saw it twice before I understood what I was looking at. It took me three hours to work out why the name was familiar."

"And why was it familiar?" Claudine asked.

"Because I'd seen it on a list of parliamentary interests six months earlier," Anna said. "A financial interests register. His name was on it as a passive investor in a consultancy firm. The consultancy firm's registered address-"

"-matches the Cayman holding company," Jojo finished. He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite name. Not surprise - he didn't do surprise easily, she was beginning to understand. Something closer to the look of a person who had just found the last piece of something they'd been building for a very long time.

"Yes," Anna said.

Claudine set down her pen.

"Miss Jones," she said carefully, "do you understand what you have?"

"I understand what I found," Anna said. "I'm still working out what it means to have it."

"It means," Claudine said, "that a sitting member of the British parliament has been receiving payments from one of the country's largest private equity groups in exchange for - we can prove this from the policy record - three pieces of legislation that directly benefited the Hale Group's holdings over the last six years. It means corruption at a level that this office has not seen from a British case in over a decade." She folded her hands on the desk. "And it means that the people who want that drive back are not going to stop at one watcher in an airport."

The room was quiet.

Anna was aware, suddenly and acutely, of the weight of the encrypted drive in her coat pocket. She had been aware of it all day - it was the kind of awareness that didn't go away - but it had been abstract until this moment. Now it felt very specific. Very heavy. Very much like a thing that people had done serious things to retrieve.

"What do we do next?" she asked.

"Tonight," Claudine said, "nothing. You stay here - I have rooms above this office, you'll be safe. Tomorrow morning, my technical team will image the drive. We build the chain of evidence properly, the way that survives a court. Then we go to the appropriate authorities - not the British ones, not yet; there are jurisdictional reasons to begin here." She paused. "This will take weeks, not days. Possibly longer."

"I have a job," Anna said. "A flat. A life."

"The Hale Group's legal team will have filed an injunction against you by morning," Claudine said, not unkindly. "Your firm will have received a call. The flat is in Marcus Hale's name, yes?"

The air left Anna's body in one quiet exhale.

She had known this. She had known it since the moment she'd walked out of her building yesterday. She had simply not let herself look at it directly, the way you didn't look directly at something very bright that you weren't ready to see clearly yet.

"Yes," she said.

"Then you understand."

"I understand," Anna said quietly.

She felt, rather than saw, Jojo look at her. She didn't turn. She kept her spine straight and her expression still and she absorbed it the way she absorbed everything - let it settle somewhere manageable, got on with the work.

Later. She would feel all of it later. Right now, there was only the next step and then the step after that.

Claudine stood, signalling the end of the meeting in the decisive way of someone who ran a tight operation and kept tight hours, and moved toward the door of the inner office. She paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at Jojo.

"One room or two?" she asked.

"Two," Anna said, before Jojo could open his mouth.

He said nothing. He had the grace - or the self-control - not to smile.

The room Claudine gave her was small and warm, with a window that looked out over the cobbled street and a bed with a white duvet that looked like the most inviting thing Anna had seen in thirty-six hours. She sat on the edge of it and held the drive in both hands and looked at it for a long moment.

A knock at the door.

She knew before she opened it.

Jojo stood in the narrow corridor holding a clean phone, still in its packaging, and a paper bag that smelled of bread and something warm. He held both out without speaking. She took them. She almost said thank you and didn't, because she wasn't ready to be that undefended yet, and he seemed to understand this - or at least he didn't push it.

"The phone is unregistered," he said. "You can call your sister."

"I know," she said. Then, because it was honest: "Thank you."

He nodded. Started to turn.

"Jojo."

He stopped.

She stood in the doorway holding a phone and a paper bag and the drive that had upended her entire life and looked at the man who had walked her out of an airport and onto a plane and into a situation that was considerably more serious than she'd understood this morning, and she said the only thing she had left that was true:

"I don't know if I can trust you yet. But I think - I think I'm glad it was you."

He looked at her for a moment. In the low light of the corridor his eyes were very dark and very steady and gave away, as always, almost nothing. Almost.

"Get some sleep," he said quietly. "Tomorrow is going to be complicated."

"More complicated than today?"

"Today was straightforward," he said. "We were only running."

He walked down the corridor. She watched him go. She stood in the doorway until his door closed and then she stood there a moment longer, looking at the space where he had been, and thought: that is a man with walls built so precisely you almost don't notice they're there.

She was beginning to notice.

She closed her door. Sat on the bed. Opened the phone and dialled her sister's number from memory, and when her sister answered on the second ring with a voice full of sleep and worry - Anna, where are you, I've been calling- - Anna closed her eyes and said, very steadily:

"I'm safe. I can't tell you where. I'll explain everything soon, I promise."

She stayed on the phone for four minutes. She kept her voice level the entire time. When she hung up, she sat in the dark for a long moment and let herself feel, briefly and privately, how frightened she actually was.

Then she put the drive under the pillow, lay down fully clothed, and was asleep in less than three minutes.

In the room next door, Jojo sat in the dark for considerably longer.

He sat with his phone in his hand and a message on the screen that had arrived forty minutes ago - from a number only four people in the world had - and he read it for the third time and felt the particular weight of a thing he had known was coming and had not wanted to arrive.

The message said: The Hale Group knows she's not in London. They have people in Geneva. You have until morning.

He set the phone face-down on the nightstand.

Through the wall - thin old walls, the kind that carried sound like a secret it couldn't keep - he could hear nothing. She was already asleep. He had heard her voice on the phone, low and careful and holding itself together with the particular discipline of someone who was very good at not falling apart.

I think I'm glad it was you.

He pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose and sat in the dark and thought about what morning would bring, and about all the things he still hadn't told her, and about the specific and inconvenient truth that somewhere between a coffee shop at Heathrow and a corridor in Geneva, this had stopped being only about the case.

That was his first mistake.

He wouldn't make a second.

They had until morning.Jojo knew it. He hadn't told her yet.He was already deciding what that said about him.