The Hunt and the Kill Read online

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Prove it, Casey Benedict from the Post.’

  ‘How,’ she gestured at the opulence of Ombres Paisibles, ‘do you afford all this, Zac? You were an NHS doctor just a few years ago, and we know that you didn’t inherit anything. I’ve seen your mother’s will.’

  He didn’t rise to the bait. ‘I’m a businessman. I have investments. They’re all above board.’

  ‘We can tell the world who you are: Zac Napier.’

  He considered this. ‘Not exactly a marmalade-dropper, is it?’ He grinned down. ‘A doctor no one’s ever heard of, on an island no one can place on a map, who is using a different boring name. I’m not sure the Post’s beloved readers will be exactly fighting their way to the newsagents.’

  ‘Won’t your new friends in Mauritius be surprised?’

  ‘Hardly.’ He started to laugh. And she thought of Martin, just beyond the claws of the taxman. And the Spanish banker reunited with his elegant yacht after a mere couple of years. Liquid Asset: two fingers. Zac was right: no one in this little tax haven would be remotely interested in his name change.

  ‘Then why did you change it?’

  ‘There’s no law against it.’ He yawned, stretched a hamstring. ‘Why don’t you come inside, Casey Benedict from the Post? You’re very attractive when you’re angry.’

  She ignored that. ‘Doesn’t it worry you that people connected to Corax seem to die unexpectedly?’

  He grinned again at her. ‘No. In fact, I can think of a specific set of circumstances where it might be viewed as a genuine positive.’

  ‘But you were a doctor?’ Casey almost pleaded. ‘Don’t you care about what Corax might be?’

  ‘I’ll tell you if you’ll come inside.’ He was laughing. ‘I was most impressed by your artistry last night.’

  She blushed, furious. ‘I was told Corax could save thousands of lives. Surely you would rather do that, instead of rotting away on a beach in the middle of nowhere.’

  Zac glanced at his reflection in the sparkling windows of Ombres Paisibles.

  ‘Hardly rotting.’

  ‘It took years of medical training to get to where you were. Why would you give it all up?’

  ‘Is that what little Noah Hart asked?’

  ‘How much did your silence cost Pergamex, Zac?’ She ignored the mention of Noah.

  ‘A kiss.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If you really won’t come inside, I must be going. Tennis, you know. Dodo likes being ballboy.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she pleaded.

  Zac sighed, then leaned against the railings. ‘It’s nowhere near as interesting as you think,’ he said. ‘It was a patent infringement issue.’

  ‘A patent infringement?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A boring old patent issue. Corax was too similar to an Adsero drug, and Pergamex got warned off.’

  Pharmaceutical companies defend their patents with ruthless aggression. Every drug, as soon as it is created, is patented so that no other company can use the technology. For twenty years at least after its invention, no one else can produce a protected drug, and during that period the developer can name its price: whatever the market can bear.

  More if it saves a life.

  Most if it saves a rich life.

  We have to protect our R&D, the companies will insist. Market forces. Shareholders. Fiduciary duties.

  ‘A patent infringement?’ Casey asked again.

  ‘I know.’ Zac lobbed a neon tennis ball towards the sea, and Dodo raced past Casey, yapping excitedly, snatching it just before it reached the ripples. ‘Tedious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Adsero make zentetra, don’t they?’ said Casey. ‘And they’re developing another antibiotic too.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘But Adsero haven’t used the Corax technology for their new antibiotic. Saepio is just an enhancement of zentetra.’

  ‘So?’ He shrugged. ‘They don’t have to produce Corax.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t they? If it’s so effective.’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  He shrugged again. ‘Well, there you go.’

  Casey knew she was getting nowhere. Her shoulders slumped. ‘I hope you enjoy it all, Zac.’

  ‘Oh, I will.’ He was unabashed. ‘I will.’

  She turned away, plodding back along the beach. He watched her go.

  ‘Casey,’ he called after her.

  She glanced back. ‘What?’

  ‘Leave Pergamex alone.’ His face was serious. ‘Find something else to investigate.’

  ‘Stay away, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Stay away.’

  19

  Casey didn’t sleep on the long flight home. Instead, she researched Adsero, reading everything she could find, which wasn’t very much. She trailed through baggage collection behind Miranda, and waited impatiently while Miranda retrieved her car.

  ‘I was driving back from Gloucestershire,’ Miranda explained, ‘when I was packed off to Dubai.’

  ‘The problem is,’ Casey began, when they were safely on the M4, ‘that Adsero are notoriously secretive.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I can’t even find the name of someone who works in their antibiotic division, let alone who is working on their new drugs,’ said Casey. ‘I suppose I could always go and loiter round the pubs in Milton Keynes.’

  ‘How tempting. You have to give up on all this, Casey. You agreed.’

  Casey ignored Miranda. ‘On top of that, Elias Bailey is famously taciturn.’

  Over the previous thirty years, Elias Bailey had built Adsero from minnow to behemoth. On the plane, Casey had pored over the only interview he had ever given: a slot in the Argus on Sunday reserved for the most successful tycoons. For this article, Bailey had chosen to meet the journalist in the staff canteen in Milton Keynes.

  According to the interview, Bailey had spent part of his childhood in South Africa and part of it in England. He then studied natural sciences at Cambridge. After working as a research scientist for a few years, he seized control of Adsero in a particularly brutal takeover. The city didn’t like him, Casey extrapolated from catty pieces in the business columns, but it adored Adsero’s booming profits. Despite the frugal staff canteen lunch, Bailey now owned several houses around the world, including a ski lodge in St Moritz. Controversially, he also owned a vast game reserve in northern Zimbabwe.

  The interviewer noted that Bailey was fascinated by Zimbabwean wildlife, and especially dedicated to the conservation of the black rhino. The rhino herd was protected by armed gamekeepers.

  Bailey took his privacy extremely seriously and flew around the world on his own jet. A ‘well-known philanthropist’, the paper called him.

  Throughout the article, Bailey focused on the virtues of the modern pharmaceutical industry, extolling its ‘visionary creativity’. A heart transplant, just over three years earlier, had only increased his enthusiasm for the industry.

  Casey studied the photograph that accompanied the interview, and then tracked down three other pictures online. In his late fifties, Bailey’s hair was grey, cut close and receding. His eyebrows had remained black, drawn together in a scowl. He had very dark brown eyes, and a lifetime under the African sun had left a few blotches on his cheekbones.

  ‘Still attractive though.’ Miranda peered over Casey’s shoulder.

  ‘Not my type.’

  In one photograph, Bailey was talking to the head of the IMF at Davos. In another, the US president was smiling at him chummily.

  ‘There is no way,’ said Miranda, changing lanes as they passed the tower blocks at Brentford, ‘that Elias Bailey will tell you anything about Corax. At his level, you only talk to very big cheeses. It would be impossible for us to fake that.’

  The words hung unsaid: and maybe you can’t. Not again. Not ever.

  ‘I could ask to go round the Milton Keynes site,’ Casey th
ought aloud, ‘as acting health editor.’

  She had already messaged Heather as she fidgeted at passport control. Sorry to interrupt your maternity leave, Heather, but do you know much about Elias Bailey and Adsero?

  Interrupt away. I’m bored senseless. No, never got near them, I’m afraid.

  ‘Bailey’s private investigators are meant to be phenomenal, too,’ Miranda added. ‘They wouldn’t let him go into a meeting with just anyone. They’d give whoever it was a proper background check first. Douglas – you know, that guy on the business desk – found himself dating one of Bailey’s investigators within three days of writing just one page lead about Adsero. Poor Doug only guessed a month into it all. And even then it was only because he was on a night out with this girl at Gigi’s, and they bumped into one of her other targets. Apparently, it was all a bit awkward.’

  ‘Probably the only way Doug can get a date,’ said Casey, ‘if we’re realistic.’

  ‘Poor thing. He really liked her,’ Miranda went on. ‘I was talking to Delphine about Adsero, and I gather that the Argus said that Bailey only gave them that Sunday interview because halfway through their divorce his ex-wife gave them some dirt, which Bailey didn’t want out there. So the Argus swapped the dodgy story for the interview, fair exchange.’

  ‘What happened to the wife?’

  ‘Very, very quiet in Cape Town. Signed a brutal NDA for a decent chunk of Adsero shares. Delphine said that there were public interest issues around the wife’s story anyway, so the Argus were quite happy to swap it for a sit-down with Bailey himself.’

  For a low profile individual like Bailey, the Argus would have to show there was a public interest in writing about his private life. Public interest and what the public are interested in aren’t exactly the same thing.

  ‘Could you find out what the story was?’

  ‘Probably. Delphine would certainly be able to find out,’ said Miranda. ‘She’s still buddies with them all at the Argus, especially Jessica Miller and that lot.’

  Jessica Miller had taken over the investigations team at the Argus after Miranda joined the Post. Miranda and Jessica maintained a reasonably friendly rivalry.

  ‘If it was anything good, they would just have run it, surely?’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘He hasn’t married again. And he never had any children.’

  ‘Sensible man.’ Miranda drove on.

  ‘I’m going to head to the office.’ Miranda yawned as they approached central London. ‘Just for a couple of hours. Find out what Hessa and Tillie have burned down in my absence.’

  ‘I’ll head home then,’ Casey mumbled.

  ‘See you soon.’

  ‘Sure.’

  But when Miranda got back to Queen’s Park five hours later, Casey was sitting on the doorstep.

  ‘Well,’ said Casey. ‘You wouldn’t want me to get rusty.’

  ‘I might,’ Miranda sighed, stepping over her.

  ‘I got most of the way back to my flat,’ said Casey. ‘And then realised something.’

  ‘You astonish me.’

  ‘What exactly are you working on at the moment?’ Casey asked, as she followed her into the kitchen.

  Miranda eyed Casey as she sorted through her post. ‘Are we pretending you’re not still reading my emails?’

  ‘As a sidebar,’ Casey grinned. ‘I think pissoffCasey is quite a rude password.’

  ‘Not rude enough, evidently.’

  ‘So you’re investigating Ambrose Drummond?’

  Miranda waited a beat. Then: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you knew.’

  Ambrose Drummond was a junior health minister. A long-time political fixer, he was the son of a former trade minister, and the grandson of a former chancellor. All three of his sons were at Eton, preparing for the family mantle. Drummond’s seat in Gloucestershire had a 20,000 majority, and he only visited it for shooting weekends. His wife, on the other hand, was rarely seen in London. Drummond held directorships in London, Hong Kong and Singapore, and his register of interests – the list of financial information that all MPs have to disclose – revealed extensive shareholdings, not all of them inherited.

  Widely regarded as the kingmaker behind the new Prime Minister, Drummond’s influence reached far beyond the health brief. Most of his media profile revolved around his selection of gaudy ties, but he was sent out on Newsnight when the government was on the back foot. ‘A safe pair of hands’. An operator.

  Drummond had a booming voice, a florid face and a regular table at the Cinnamon Club, Quirinale and Russet. ‘A wheeler-dealer with a finger in every pie,’ the Post’s sketchwriter noted snidely. ‘And the waistline to match.’

  ‘What’s the story about?’ asked Casey.

  Miranda sighed, switched on the kettle. ‘Usual thing,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Your common or garden conflict of interest.’

  A conflict of interest: when an MP’s personal interest collides – disastrously – with the interests of their own voters. MPs were always supposed to err on the side of their voters. Often, they didn’t.

  Several times in the past, Casey and Miranda had presented themselves as charming businesswomen, offering a small payment here, a generous fee there.

  The requests were small: a question in Parliament, a small adjustment to a piece of legislation.

  The headlines were big.

  ‘What’s the conflict for Drummond this time?’

  ‘Hessa’s running this one,’ said Miranda. ‘She’s presenting as a company director from Hyderabad, asking Drummond to sort out a piece of legislation blocking the import of certain antibiotics to the UK.’

  Casey nodded. The Indian factories produced tonnes of antibiotics a month. Cheap generics, out of patent mostly. As health editor, Casey had written about the antibiotics leaching into Hyderabad’s rivers from the factories. In one analysis, the level of ciprofloxacin in factory wastewater was higher than it would have been in the blood of a patient taking regular doses of the drug.

  ‘But Hessa’s family’s from Bangladesh,’ said Casey. ‘Not India.’

  ‘Do you really think Drummond cares?’

  ‘What does he want in return?’

  ‘He wants a shareholding in the Hyderabad company – in a trust, obviously – and two weeks in the Maldives.’

  ‘So he’s going for it?’

  ‘He is indeed. We thought we might front him up in the Maldives, just for a laugh.’

  Casey imagined Hessa pursuing the rotund Ambrose Drummond around a five star resort in the Maldives.

  ‘I’m not sure if the nation is ready for Drummond in his swimming trunks.’

  ‘No, probably not.’

  ‘When are you going to see him?’

  ‘Next week sometime? We did the recordings in Dubai. Hessa and Tillie have been going through the tapes while I was in Mauritius.’

  Going through the tapes, transcribing every word, was a tedious but necessary task. Once that was done, the reporters would put together a list of questions. Once everything had been checked over by the Post’s in-house lawyers, they would confront Drummond with the evidence.

  ‘Was Tillie doing anything in the scenario?’

  ‘She was Hessa’s PA.’

  It was always useful for one of them to play the PA role. Tillie would be able to smile, have it all explained, a useful idiot. I don’t understand how these legislations work at all! It doesn’t make any sense to me! How exactly are you going to change it?

  And Drummond’s own PA might always have something to moan about, to Tillie the friendly counterpart.

  ‘Can you wait for a bit?’ Casey asked. ‘Before fronting up Drummond?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you said it yourself,’ Casey explained. ‘Bailey will only talk to really big cheeses. So do you think he’d make time for a health minister?’

  20

  It wasn’t easy to work out when Elias Bailey would next be accessible. His profile was deliberately low, fe
w of his appearances announced in advance.

  ‘We need to get him somewhere where he will have time for a conversation,’ reasoned Casey. ‘He’d be far too busy at something like Adsero’s AGM. We need him and Drummond to meet in private.’

  Business journalists often bought the single share required to access a company’s annual meeting. ‘But I’m a shareholder,’ they’d announce proudly, marching unstoppably through the door.

  ‘You can’t go to sodding Davos,’ Miranda said firmly. ‘You’ve already turned over too many of the attendees. You’d be lynched. Stoned with canapés. Workshopped into oblivion.’

  ‘Could we pack Drummond off to the Milton Keynes site? Bailey would probably turn up for a ministerial visit. Especially if Drummond dragged the PM along.’

  ‘But how do we get Hessa into that meeting?’

  ‘We have to hurry up on this,’ Miranda warned Casey, a couple of days later. ‘It’s not fair on Hessa. It’s her first really big story, and things always go wrong when we delay.’

  They were in the investigations room, Casey sprawling on the sofa. It was late in the evening, the office almost empty.

  ‘I know. And I am really sorry about that. But what could go wrong with Hessa’s story now? Drummond doesn’t seem suspicious at all,’ said Casey. ‘And he’s so pally with Hessa now, that he’s given her about fifteen other stories. Archie got the splash yesterday with something Drummond mentioned to her in passing.’

  Dash had decided to run the story about class sizes under the political editor’s byline, just in case Drummond got curious about Hessa Khan’s sources.

  ‘Drummond might get shuffled out any minute,’ Miranda pointed out. ‘The PM’s under pressure to shake things up.’

  Miranda had once had an excellent story about a defence minister held for several days, ‘by an absolute tool of a lawyer at the Argus’. During the delay, the defence minister had been sacked. ‘We ran the story anyway.’ Five years later, Miranda was still cross. ‘But who really cares about yet another dodgy backbencher?’

  Casey was fiddling with Tillie’s stapler. ‘Drummond won’t get demoted. The PM owes him.’

  ‘Well, some other paper might do him over for something completely different.’