When The Devil Stays

Chapter Ten

Sutton arrived eight minutes late. Deliberately, Jojo thought - the kind of late that was a message rather than an accident. He was smaller than his parliamentary photos suggested, which was often the way with powerful men: the power inflated them in print and in person they were just bodies, ordinary and defeatable. He had good shoes and a bad conscience and the particular ease of a man who had been comfortable for so long that discomfort had become theoretical.

He sat down across from Jojo and did not offer his hand.

"Mr Smith," he said. His voice was smooth and well-educated and contained no warmth at all. "You've caused me considerable inconvenience."

"I imagine," Jojo said.

"The woman," Sutton said. "The auditor. Where is she?"

"Somewhere safe."

"Safe," Sutton repeated, as though the word were mildly amusing. "I'm not interested in harming her, Mr Smith. I want to be very clear about that. I'm interested in recovering proprietary financial documentation that was removed from a client's files without authorisation."

"That's one framing," Jojo said.

"It's the legal one."

"Legality is interesting," Jojo said pleasantly. "Given the documentation in question details fourteen million in quarterly payments routed through four jurisdictions to an account beneficially owned by a sitting member of parliament. I've always found that when the documentation is that embarrassing, the people who want it back tend to describe it in the most neutral terms available."

Sutton's expression did not change. He was good - Jojo gave him that. Years of committee rooms and constituency surgeries and the particular performance of public life had given him a face that revealed almost nothing. Almost.

"What do you want?" Sutton said.

"I want you to resign," Jojo said. "Your seat, your party affiliations, your directorships, your consultancy roles. A full statement to the relevant authorities - not the Metropolitan Police, we'll specify which authority - detailing the arrangement with the Hale Group from inception. Names, dates, sums, instructions." He paused. "In exchange, I'll ensure the process is handled with as much discretion as the evidence allows. You'll have time to manage the personal dimensions. Your family-"

"Don't," Sutton said. Very quietly.

"I'm not threatening your family," Jojo said, equally quiet. "I'm telling you that I understand there are people around you who did not choose this and do not deserve the blast radius. I'm offering you the opportunity to limit it."

Sutton looked at him for a long moment.

"You have the drive," he said.

"We have the drive and three forensic copies on servers in two countries," Jojo said. "The physical drive is now the least important version of what we have."

Something moved in Sutton's face. Not fear - not yet. The precursor to it. The moment when a man who has been certain for a very long time begins to do the arithmetic and finds that the numbers no longer add up in his favour.

"I'll need time," Sutton said.

"Seventy-two hours," Jojo said. "After that, the file goes to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority and their British counterpart, and the discretion I'm currently offering becomes considerably harder to arrange."

"And the woman?"

"Miss Jones is a witness," Jojo said. "She will be treated as one. She will be protected as one. She is not a bargaining position."

Sutton looked at him for a long time. Then he picked up the glass of water the waiter had brought and drank from it and set it down with the deliberate care of a man deciding which version of a very bad situation he could most live with.

"Seventy-two hours," he said.

"Starting now," Jojo said.

Sutton stood. Buttoned his jacket with the mechanical precision of someone doing the only dignified thing left to them. He looked at Jojo one last time and his expression was - not rage, not grief, but something colder and more private than either: the look of a man watching something he had built for a very long time begin to come apart.

"Your father," he said. "The logistics company. That was Hale's decision, not mine."

Jojo held his gaze without expression.

"You signed the legislation that allowed it," Jojo said. "Twice."

Sutton left. Jojo sat in the old bar with the untouched whisky and the window and the lake beyond it going dark in the early evening and felt, for the first time in two years, the specific and exhausted sensation of a weight beginning - very slowly, still contingently, but genuinely - to lift.

He paid the bill and walked back through Geneva to the flat in Eaux-Vives, and he did not hurry and he did not slow down, and when he reached the street door and climbed the stairs and knocked he heard her cross the room in the same sock-feet as last night and the door opened and she was there - fully dressed, clearly not having sat still for a moment, with the expression of someone who had spent ninety-three minutes being extremely calm by force of will and was now permitting herself to stop.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

"Well?" she said.

"Seventy-two hours," he said. "He'll fold. He has no other move."

She let out a breath - long and slow and containing, he thought, approximately the last two days of held tension - and stepped back from the door to let him in. He stepped across the threshold and she closed the door behind him and when he turned around she was closer than he'd expected, or he was closer than he'd intended, and the hallway was narrow and the flat was warm and he had just spent ninety minutes across a table from the man who had, at one remove and with complete indifference, ended his father's life, and he was tired in a way that went considerably deeper than sleep would fix.

She saw it. He watched her see it - that forensic attention of hers, reading the gap between the face and the numbers.

She reached up and put her hand against the side of his face.

Not a kiss. Not yet. Just her hand, warm and certain, against his jaw - the gesture of someone who had decided that he had been carrying things carefully and quietly and without complaint for long enough and that she was, at least for this moment, going to refuse to let him do it alone.

He closed his eyes.

Just for a moment. Just long enough to feel it - the specific and unfamiliar warmth of being seen by someone who was looking without agenda, without assessment, without anything except the straightforward human intention of letting him know that she was there.

He opened his eyes. She was watching him with that expression he still didn't have a name for, and he thought: I have been alone in this for a very long time. I did not know how much I had stopped expecting it to be otherwise.

"Come and sit down," she said quietly. "I made tea. It's probably too strong."

"I like it too strong," he said.

"I know," she said. "I noticed."

She went to the kitchen. He stood in the narrow hallway for a moment, in the warm flat above the quiet courtyard, and felt something settle in him - deep and slow, like a room finding its temperature after a long cold spell - and then he followed her.

Seventy-two hours.

And then, on the other side of it, a dinner he had already decided on the restaurant for.

He had not told her that yet.

He was looking forward to it considerably more than he had looked forward to anything in a very long time.

Seventy-two hours to the end of it.She put her hand against his face and he closed his eyes.Neither of them said what that meant. They didn't need to. Not yet.