Knight’s gaze settled on Graham. “Surely you jest,” said the SIS chief with a wintry smile.
Knight turned finally to the third man in the room, saw that no phone was in the offing, and sat down again. Gabriel was leafingthrough the documents, a look of consternation on his face. “There’s something else you neglected to tell me,” he said after a moment. Then, wordlessly, he tossed a file onto the coffee table. It was a copy of a report, filed by DI Timothy Peel of the Devon and Cornwall Police.
“Those records were supposed to have been destroyed,” said Knight.
“A single copy somehow survived the purge. It makes clear that the investigating officer thought Alice was under the influence when she crashed her car into that tree. But that’s not the reason you were so interested in making sure she was never interviewed by that detective, was it, Edward? You were far more concerned she might tell the police about the phone call she overhead that evening.”
Knight was pale with rage. “There’s only one other person in the world who knows about that, Allon.”
“And who would that be?”
“My wife.”
“Which means she must have told someone else about it. After all, no one has seen Alice since her abduction.” Gabriel was silent for a moment. “Or perhaps she put it in writing and gave a copy to a lawyer friend in the event something untoward were to happen to her.” He handed over one more document. It was a copy of a sworn affidavit—signed, dated, and notarized—made by one Alice Winter in the presence of Sophie Maxwell, solicitor at the law firm of Ambler& Rose. “I don’t suppose you mentioned any of this to the Metropolitan Police, did you, Edward?”
He made no reply.
“I’m not a lawyer,” said Gabriel. “But I’ve watched enough British detective dramas to know that DCI Chapel might conclude that you were attempting to obstruct his investigation.”
“I didn’t think it was relevant.”
“We’ll let Scotland Yard be the judge of that. And I imagineRevenue and Customs, and the Financial Conduct Authority, will want to take a long, hard look at some of your offshore banking. It appears to us like a rather glaring example of tax evasion.”
“It wasn’t.”
“How would you describe it?”
“It was a matter of life and death,” said Edward Knight, and then he told them everything.
41
St. Luke’s Mews
It might never have come to pass, Knight began, if he hadn’t popped into Annabel’s for a drink early one evening in May 2009 and found Dmitri Savin sitting alone at a corner table in the Elephant Room. Dmitri had bought his way into London’s most exclusive club—as had Knight, for that matter—and rarely missed an opportunity to show his face there. Knight, having spent a thoroughly unpleasant day with his suddenly tightfisted bankers at HSBC, was in no mood for company and settled into a table of his own with a very large glass of whisky and that week’s edition ofThe Spectator. He was lost in a lengthy article about a recent scandal involving MPs and their expenses when a shadow fell across his page. Lifting his eyes, he saw a smooth Russian face leering down at him. Then a hand appeared, smallish, white as bone, and the smooth Russian introduced himself.
“Asked if he could join me,” said Knight. “Sat down before I had a chance to answer.”
They exchanged the sort of small talk typical of the crowd at Annabel’s before embarking on a prolonged discussion of the current financial crisis. Dmitri implied that, all things considered, the collapse of global markets had been good for his business. Knight engaged inno such pretense. Everyone in London knew that developers and real estate investors were taking a drubbing.
They ordered another round of drinks, and the discussion turned more pointed. Dmitri said he had several billion sitting on the sidelines and was eager to invest in real estate while prices were still at rock bottom. His personal portfolio included several luxury homes, including his mansion in Prince of Wales Terrace, but he wanted to expand into commercial and residential property.
“By investing in your company?” asked Gabriel.
Knight nodded. “Said he had a check for two hundred and fifty million in his pocket. Said the check had my name on it.”
“How did you respond?”
“I said I didn’t want his money. And what do you suppose Dmitri told me?”
“I imagine he told you that he knew you were on the verge of insolvency and were in desperate need of cash.”
“Words to that effect,” muttered Knight.
The two hundred and fifty million pounds, he continued, went some way to stabilizing the Knight Group, but as the financial crisis turned into the Great Recession, the company’s finances grew steadily worse. Knight delivered this blunt assessment to Dmitri Savin, once again over drinks at Annabel’s, and Savin responded by giving Knight a billion pounds. The money righted the ship but left the tiller in the hand of a ruthless Russian oligarch closely associated with the country’s kleptocratic ruler. Knight knew enough about Russian business tactics to realize that the relationship was unlikely to end well, that one day his newfound partner would demand something in return. The debt came due in the autumn of 2015, when Dmitri Savin prevailed upon Knight to invest in a real estate holding company called Landmark Ventures.
“And the terms of the deal?” asked Gabriel.
“Landmark required a steady stream of capital, ten or twenty million a month. In return the company was willing to put up nothing in collateral. Nor did it provide any assurances that I would receive repayment or a share of future profits.”
