The Namedropper Page 3

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ she said again.

  ‘You can use your schoolgirl French to read the memorial plaque. There’s a pamphlet, too.’

  ‘What horrendous crime did he commit, yet escape execution?’

  ‘No one knows that, either. There’s a lot of legends. One is that he was the Due de Vermandois, an illegitimate son of Louis, although on the face of it that’s an extreme way to treat your own son. In his book, if you remember, Dumas copied Voltaire in suggesting the man was an illegitimate elder brother of Louis, fathered by Cardinal Mazarin. There’s also a lot of historical insistence that he was a Count Mattiolo, a minister of the Duke of Mantua, who tried to trick Louis during diplomatic negotiations and was punished with a totally unknown and unrecognized living death.’

  Alyce shuddered. ‘Kept locked up for forty years!’

  ‘A non person for forty years, someone whose face was never again seen except by his jailers: there’s even a story that he had to wear the mask before he was given food, so that even the jailers wouldn’t know what he looked like. If he defied them and refused to put it on, he wasn’t fed.’

  Jordan thought she was remarkably agile, disembarking at the island, as she had been boarding the catamaran. She slowly read the memorial plaque and collected the pamphlet, and in the bare cell, which was very cold compared to the outside near midday heat, she shuddered again several times.

  ‘Whatever he did, he didn’t deserve what was done to him,’ she insisted.

  ‘It had to be bad.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference.’

  By the time they returned to the anchored catamaran the crew had erected a sun awning. Alyce didn’t refuse the champagne but stopped at the second glass of Chablis and didn’t need any urging to eat the lobster with her fingers. They let the strongest heat go out of the day before swimming off the port fin, Jordan delaying his climb back on to the boat because of his momentary and too obvious excitement at seeing her, surprisingly unashamed, in the briefest of bikinis. When they got back to Cannes she said she wanted to walk back rather than call for the hotel car or a taxi, and did so almost immediately taking his hand, moving her fingers over his. She said she wasn’t hungry when he suggested dinner but that the sea air had tired her and that she thought she’d go directly to bed.

  ‘But not alone,’ she added.

  Jordan thought it was far more exciting than Ghilane might have made it discovering that Alyce was indeed a natural blonde. And very eager and proud to prove it.

  They checked out of the Carlton together the following morning, Alyce leaving the American Express office in Cannes as her forwarding address for any mail and, despite the inevitable traffic congestion on the meander to St Tropez, once they got off the autoroute they managed to get to the Residence de la Pinade and their comer tower room in perfect time for lunch on the sea-bordering terrace, even after he’d organized the necessary safe deposit box. Held by the excitement of discovery they spent the afternoon in bed in fresh exploration and decided they didn’t want the additional exertion of walking into the town in the evening. Nor to eat anything other than each other. She didn’t enjoy the following day’s bustle of the town or the clutter of polished Harley Davidson motorcycles looped like a necklace around the harbour edge so they escaped by taxi over the hill to Pampalon Plage, and the Tahiti restaurant, the first of several they visited over succeeding days – judging the Tahiti their favourite – except for the day Jordan chartered another yacht, traditionally hulled this time, to sail the coastline to the car-free lies de Porquerolles. That was the day – or rather the night, as they lay side by side, naked, recovering from their lovemaking – that Alyce suggested extending her vacation by another week and Jordan said he thought she should tell him about the status of her marriage.

  ‘There isn’t one,’ she replied. ‘Status or any longer a marriage. That day we met? The envelope? It was divorce papers I couldn’t wait to sign.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t …’

  ‘It’s not important,’ she said, dismissively. She looked steadily at him across their table. ‘Mad at me?’

  Jordan hesitated, searching for the right response. ‘Tit for tat, to balance your betrayal?’

  ‘Something like that. In fact exactly that.’

  ‘Why should I be mad?’

  ‘I used you.’

  ‘You didn’t make any secret about being married.’

  She smiled. ‘I started out feeling a shit, guilty I guess on several levels. I don’t any more. I feel great.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘No hang-ups, no regrets?’

  ‘No hang-ups, no regrets.’

  ‘What about my extending for an extra week?’

  ‘It sounds good.’

  They made their way slowly back along the coast, stopping at Cagnes and Le Saint-Paul and on the night before her flight from Nice stayed at the Hermitage in Monte Carlo and gambled in the high stakes room in the casino, where Alyce won £1,200 to his £2,000.

  As they left the caisse, Jordan carefully pocketing the French certificate recording his winnings, Alyce said, ‘What’s the benefit of that?’

  ‘In England gambling winnings aren’t taxable. This is proof of where the money came from.’

  ‘It makes you sound very rich.’

  ‘It’s the law. I always try to obey the law,’ said Jordan.

  At the airport the following morning Alyce said, ‘It’s been great. You’ve been great. Everything’s great.’

  ‘There’s been a lot of times we’ve thought and spoken in echoes, like now.’

  ‘Best I don’t offer my New York address?’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Nor mine in London to you.’ He hadn’t intended to anyway. ‘Keep safe and stay happy.’

  ‘And you.’

  They didn’t kiss goodbye. He stood watching her go through the departure gates. Alyce didn’t turn as she did so. Jordan stayed that night at the Negresco and the following day brought forward his return flight to London, deciding as the plane climbed out over the sea that it had been his best vacation yet. But that it was time to get back to work and briefly – although profitably – be someone other than Harvey Jordan.

  Someone like the targeted Peter Wightman.

  Four

  Identity stealing, Harvey Jordan’s dedicated profession, is an overcrowded activity, for a variety of reasons, all of them to the thief’s benefit and favour. It is a crime almost childishly – and mostly legally – easy to commit and therefore so prevalent that law enforcement agencies are overwhelmed, reducing the risk of detection and even less of arrest virtually to zero. People – supposedly clever, financially savvy people – appear to ignore every piece of advice and warning given by every financial organization or adviser. And those same financial organizations and advisers, despite that advice and those warnings, keep showering the head-in-the-sand birdbrains with ever more credit facilities and cash-gaining opportunities to be milked like a milch cow by ever ready suckling predators. Of whom Harvey Jordan judged himself the most adept, if not the most financially successful single operator.

  Jordan could have doubled, maybe trebled, his income; even gained the ultimate position of being the most financially successful. But that would have required his masterminding and controlling a gang as so many others in the business did, multiplying their ID stealing – and profits – tenfold or more. Which did not attract or tempt Harvey Jordan in the slightest. If he ran a gang, its profit would obviously have to be divided by its number, which, while increasing his personal income by as much as another tax-free £2 million a year, correspondingly increased among one or more of that number the likelihood of error, incompetence or idiotic mistake, resulting in his being caught, despite the odds against that occurring remaining in his and their favour. Harvey Jordan knew he was good. What he didn’t know – and wasn’t interested in finding out – was how consistently good others were. Nor did he imagine others, for their part, would have the patien
ce to operate with the care and attention to detail that he did and upon which he would have insisted in any extended partnership.

  It had taken him three months to prepare himself fully to impersonate Peter Thomas Wightman, a 42-year-old newly elevated senior partner in the legal firm of Jackson, Pendlebury, Richardson and Wright in Chancery Lane, in the Holborn district of London. He’d learned the man’s name and that of the firm within which he’d been promoted from the legal notices of the Daily Telegraph and further researched it from the publicly available Bar directory issued by the General Council of the Bar and Waterlow’s Solicitors and Barristers Directory, in which the names of all solicitors and barristers in England are listed. Who’s Who gave Jordan the prep school – Downside – and Balliol College, Oxford, at which Wightman had read law. From the main office of the Company House register at Crown Way, Maindy, Cardiff, he legally obtained details of the after tax profit of Jackson, Pendlebury, Richardson and Wright and the individual income and dividends to all its partners, including Wightman.

  Jordan discovered Wightman’s age – but far more importantly for his eventual purposes the maiden name of the man’s mother – by paying a series of ten-pound search fees for details of births, deaths and marriages from the Family Records Centre, ECl, London. The maiden name of Wightman’s mother had been Norma Snook. On the marriage certificate to John Wightman, an accountant, she was described as a solicitor. Peter Wightman had married Jean Maidment eighteen years earlier, at St Thomas’s Church, Maidstone. There were three children, and from the voters’ register records at the British Library he’d found the family lived in Kitchener Road, Richmond, Middlesex, and by memorizing the number plate as he drove past the detached property – and then checking at the national car registration office in Gwent, Wales, purporting to have been involved in a slight traffic accident with someone who had not stopped – confirmed that Wightman’s car was a dark green, two-year-old Jaguar.

  The detail of Jordan’s research was continued in the form of the final precaution he always took just prior to embarking upon a new operation; this was never to work from the address of the flat in Marylebone, which he owned under his own, genuine name, but always from another apartment rented in the name of his intended victim. That, for his assault upon Peter Wightman, was in Sydney Street, in Chelsea, from which he worked countrywide and with his usual untroubled and undetected success for a month, which ended with a somewhat disappointing profit of £154,000.

  His final role for Sydney Street was to use it as the base for his next rental in Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge, under the name of Paul Maculloch, a Harley Street cosmetic plastic surgeon whose Al credit rating Jordan intended to use to its full and hopefully increased advantage.

  He’d telephoned ahead to warn the Marylebone concierge of his return and when he arrived, the man, John Blake, already had his accumulated mail bundled and waiting for him.

  ‘A good trip, Mr Jordan?’ enquired the man.

  ‘I’ve known better,’ admitted Jordan, picking up his letters.

  Five

  Attorneys-at-law was stridently displayed in red, beneath the identifying letterhead of Brinkmeyer, Hartley and Bernstein recorded in black typescript. The Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022 address of the firm was in black, too. So, running down the right-hand side of the covering letter, were the names of the fifteen lawyer partners, headed by those of the three company founders. The man who had in legibly, rounded letters signed Jordan’s letter – David Bartle – was the fifth in the list, presumably indicating his seniority. The letter, dated three weeks earlier, announced itself to be a summary of the official documents that were enclosed, couched in stiffly formal legalese.

  Harvey William Jordan was cited under N.C.G.S Section 1-52(5) as defendant in the forthcoming preliminary hearing, date still to be negotiated and agreed between all involved parties, in the cross-petitioned divorce action between Alfred Jerome Appleton and Alyce Louise Appleton, nee Bellamy. Alfred Jerome Appleton was bringing suit against Harvey William Jordan claiming substantial damages for alienation of affection and criminal conversations, resulting in the initiation of divorce proceedings. Coupled and enjoined in those proceedings were further, but separately itemised, claims brought by Alfred Jerome Appleton for stress, loss of earnings resulting from that stress, public humiliation and derision resulting from that stress, damages and loss of commercial earnings and public confidence in the firm of Appleton and Drake from the forthcoming divorce proceedings, and medical and counselling expenses resulting from each and every aspect and condition arising from each, several or all of those allegations against Harvey William Jordan.

  David Bartle sought immediate written acknowledgement of receipt of his letter and its accompanying formal claims, together with the name, street and city address, email and telex contacts with Harvey William Jordan’s attorney with whom all further and future correspondence leading up to the indeterminate hearing date could be conducted.

  It was difficult for Jordan to think, as cold as he was, shivering as he was, which had nothing to do with how cold he felt. There was too much to co-ordinate, to put into the order in which he had to deal with it, get out of it. How to get out of it? The wrong question, he corrected himself, the shaking subsiding. How had he got into it? Been found? Discovered? And by whom? A private enquiry agent – a private detective – obviously. Jordan felt a fresh sweep of unreality, snatching out for the discarded papers, shuffling through until he found the itemised statements of claim. It was all there, his suite number at the Carlton hotel in Cannes, registered as a solitary occupancy but pointedly separated by only a short distance along the same corridor from that of Alyce. And then their odyssey. Their room number, as Mr and Mrs Jordan, at the Residence de la Pinade at St Tropez and the hotels at Cagnes and at Le Saint-Paul and the Hermitage in Monaco. As well as all the restaurants in which they’d eaten, the name of the catamaran as well as that of the chartering company, in which they’d sailed to the prison of the man in the iron mask, and to Porqerolles – even, astonishingly, their individual winnings that last night at the Monaco casino. Not a private detective, acknowledged Jordan. An expert himself in the gathering of facts and information, Jordan knew it would have needed a squad to have assembled all this. And it wouldn’t be confined to just specific times against specific dates in individually identified hotels and places. There would be photographs, possibly dozens of photographs, an engulfing mud slide of identifying collages.

  The coldness melted under a burn of personal anger. How, to someone supposedly so professional at always being – and remaining – Mr Invisible, could it have happened to him? How could he have remained so blissfully, blindly, stupidly unaware of his every move being tracked and recorded as intimately by not one but perhaps several! Several so obvious they not only kept him and Alyce under constant, twenty-four-hour surveillance but doubtless took albums of supporting, claim-incriminating photographs! Everything – his carefully hidden and absolutely protected offshore fortune, his Mr Invisible anonymity, his very existence – was threatened. He had to find a way out. An escape. He finished the first glass of wine and immediately poured himself a second. But then stared at it, untouched. Not again, not this time, he warned himself. He’d never been a true alcoholic; not able to function without it. He’d just needed the escape from reality that booze provided.

  What – where – was his escape now?

  Was he subject to the jurisdiction of American divorce and civil courts? He didn’t think he was or could be but he’d need legal advice. The word legal echoed in his mind, like a cracked bell. Harvey Jordan’s absolute and essential necessity, the watchword by which he drew breath to survive, was always to avoid the very thought of contact with any legal authority. Now, today, his name and his address – God only knew how much else from all the legally and publicly accessible sources Jordan himself so assiduously pursued – was now legally, traceably, recorded! Displaying him to everyone and everything. It was right for him to feel
so cold. He was, figuratively at least, naked, exposed for all to see and know and to dissect as and how they chose.

  Not quite, came the faintly – too faintly – welcoming contradiction. They’d restricted themselves to France, to Alyce Appleton’s carefully noted and recorded departure from Nice airport on the official legal documents before him. American not English private detectives then, hired to follow Alyce from New York and watch her and anyone with whom she came into contact. If they’d continued to keep him under observation – stayed with him all the way back to England – they would have followed him to Sydney Street and after that all over England, not here, to Marylebone, where the papers had been delivered. Jordan snatched out again, not for the documents but for the envelope in which they’d been delivered, the recorded delivery sticker belatedly registering, now as brightly as if it were in multicoloured neon. Attomey-at-law David Bartle, from Brinkmeyer, Hartley and Bernstein, had documentary proof of his having received the accusations made against him. He couldn’t deny the claims had been delivered. How had the law firm got this correct address? His mind momentarily blocked again, then cleared. It had to be the Carlton hotel. Not just an hotel: a grand hotel, in every definition of the accolade, one of whose services was permanently holding in its files the names, personal details and preferences of its regular clients from their first and succeeding visits, a source of information Harvey Jordan had himself utilized in the past. If he’d been followed on the return flight from Nice – instead of being abandoned there – and to Chelsea his assumed name of Peter Wightman would have been discovered, against comparison with the inevitable French photographs, and British police possibly brought in to resolve the mystery of conflicting identities. So he’d been lucky with a partial escape, Jordan decided, trying to rationalize his problems. But partial escape wasn’t enough. It had to be complete.

  Jordan was waiting in the apartment lobby for the arrival the following morning of the attentive doorman, John Blake, who at once confirmed his signing for the recorded delivery of the American letter.