Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street (31 page)

She walked out of the room with the stately glide of a galleon, while Elizabeth followed meekly in her wake.

‘She has some spirit, that wife of yours, Mr Holt,' Blackstone said.

‘Yes,' Harold agreed, in a suddenly subdued voice. ‘Yes, she does.'

‘How's your head now?' Blackstone continued, looking at the bandage swathed around the top of Harold's skull.

‘Much improved,' Harold replied.

Blackstone nodded. ‘Good! But then it wasn't really that serious an injury in the first place, was it? Self-inflicted ones never are.'

‘Self-inflicted ones!' George sputtered. ‘What the hell are you talking about? My poor brother was dragged across the fourth floor of Moore's Dry Goods Store by two large men—'

‘No, he wasn't,' Blackstone interrupted. ‘Those men never existed. Oh, I know you had to have someone else to make the phone calls and plant the incendiary devices, but it would have been far too risky to get your accomplices more
actively
involved in the plot – because there was always the chance they might get caught. And, after all, they weren't really necessary, were they?'

‘Involved in the plot?' George repeated. ‘
What
plot?'

‘I'd like you to think back to the moment in the Silver Spur Saloon when the kidnappers called,' Blackstone said.

‘Why should I do that?' George asked.

‘Because you asked me
what
plot – and I'm about to tell you.'

‘Waste of time,' George said.

‘But you'll do it?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘
Harold Holt?' asks the man on the other end of the line.

‘
Yes.
'

‘
No, it ain't. Get me Holt right now – or the whole deal's off, and his father's dead.
'

‘How did the kidnapper know it wasn't Harold he was talking to?' Blackstone asked George.

‘I should have thought it was obvious. He didn't
sound
like Harold.'

‘No, that's not it at all. Alex's problem was that he didn't know the password.'

‘
Yes?' Harold says, with a slight tremble in his voice. ‘Yes, this is Harold James Holt.
'

‘Harold
James
Holt,' Blackstone said. ‘Like all good passwords, it was simple and innocuous – so simple, in fact, that I didn't recognize it for what it was at the time, though looking back, it's obvious.'

‘This is insane!' George said.

‘I must admit, you put on a good double act in that saloon,' Blackstone continued, ignoring him. ‘You with your concern for your brother's safety; him nervous, yet determined to go through with it. But that's all it was – an act!'

‘So what you're saying is that there
were
no kidnappers in Moore's?' George asked.

‘Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.'

‘Then what happened to the money?'

‘Interesting question,' Blackstone said. ‘The disappearance of the money is crucial to the illusion you wanted to create, because it was meant to prove that the kidnappers
were
there.'

‘Well, exactly!' George said. ‘I mean, there wasn't an illusion, but—'

‘So it's possible that, in order to make it disappear, Harold simply threw it on one of the fires that were blazing merrily away on Moore's fourth floor.'

‘You're saying that he would have been willing to
burn
half a million dollars?'

‘Then again, it's possible that on the journey between the police station and the saloon you switched the money for dollar-sized pieces of paper, and
that
was what Harold threw on to the fire. I don't know which of those two things actually happened, but I expect, now they know what they're looking for, the fire department should be able to tell us in a day or two.'

‘So we took Father's ransom money and either burned it or hid it?' George asked.

‘Now you're catching on,' Blackstone agreed. ‘After all, why would you
want
to pay a ransom for a man who's been dead for seven years?'

‘Dead for seven years! Father was alive
four days ago
,' George protested. ‘He may
still
be alive – and you should be looking for him now, rather than wasting time by persecuting us!'

‘The man in the bunker
wasn't
your father,' Blackstone said. ‘And once we'd realized that, a number of things that had been puzzling us suddenly started to make sense. For instance, we wondered why you would have employed such a lifeless creature as Judith to clean your father's apartment, and, of course, it was her very lifelessness – her lack of interest in anything – that recommended her. She never questioned that the man she was cleaning for was Big Bill Holt. Bloody hell, he could have had two heads and I doubt she'd have noticed.'

‘The thing you
did
have to be worried about was the laundry,' Meade said. ‘Although none of the staff had ever met your father, it was just possible that one of them would have heard he was a big man, and have started to wonder why the clothes he sent to the laundry in the basement were so small. That's why none of the clothes from the bunker
ever
did go to the laundry.'

‘
What happened to his dirty clothes
?'
Blackstone asks Judith
. ‘
Someone must have taken them away for laundering, mustn't they
?'

‘
I saw Mr Fanshawe with a bag of his laundry, once or twice
,'
the reluctant parlour maid admits
.

‘And Fanshawe, of course, was what we British would call “your loyal retainer”, bound to you both by his sense of duty and by the fact that you probably somehow found out that he was wanted for murder in England, and thus had him completely in your power.'

‘Fanshawe – a murderer! I don't believe it!' George said.

‘Now that wasn't really convincing, was it?' Blackstone asked Meade.

‘Not convincing at all,' Meade replied.

‘If it wasn't our father in there, why did we pay the Pinkertons a small fortune to guard him?' asked George, changing tack.

‘The Pinkertons were there to keep out unwanted visitors, who might discover the truth,' Blackstone said. ‘Besides, it all contributed to the illusion – the place wouldn't be worth guarding if Big Bill wasn't there, but it was being guarded, so he
must
be there.'

‘Let me see if I understand this,' George said. ‘You're saying that our father died seven years ago, and that we've been keeping his death secret since then. Is that right?'

‘Half-right,' Blackstone said. ‘You had to keep his death a secret, because the business was your father, and your father was the business, and if it had become common knowledge that he was dead, the shares would have collapsed. That's when you came up with the idea of him becoming a hermit, and, I must say, you played that out to perfection.'

‘
How can you say that Father was cowardly to take the precautions he did?' Harold demands angrily. ‘And that's what you're doing, isn't it – calling him a coward?
'

George's expression softens. ‘I never used that word, little brother,' he says, in a much gentler voice. ‘What he did was weak, rather than cowardly.
'

‘You get the point?' Blackstone asked Meade. ‘As long as they were discussing him in those terms, the main question we would be asking ourselves was which one of them was painting a more realistic picture of their father. And whatever side of the fence we eventually came down on, our automatic assumption would be that their father was still alive.'

‘Very clever,' Meade said, with mock admiration.

‘You said I was
half-right
about your preposterous theories,' George said.

‘Yes, I did.'

‘So in what way was I
half-wrong
?'

Blackstone walked over to the window, and looked out. Virginia and Elizabeth were walking in the garden. Virginia had her hand firmly on Elizabeth's arm, and was talking earnestly to her. Elizabeth, for her part, looked as if she might collapse at any moment.

Blackstone ran his hand across his forehead. The room was hot and sticky with guilt and denial, and what he really needed at that moment, he decided, was a breath of fresh air.

‘So in what way was I
half-wrong
?' George repeated, from behind him.

Blackstone turned around.

‘You were wrong to assume that I believe your father simply died,' he told George.

‘But I thought you just said that he—'

‘He didn't simply
die
at all. You murdered him.'

TWENTY-NINE

T
he four men walked slowly through the gardens which overlooked the ocean. They were not entirely alone. Posted at a discreet distance were several uniformed policemen. But the officers weren't really necessary, Blackstone thought – because George wouldn't try anything without Harold's say-so, and Harold was too smart for that.

‘Do we have to go through this charade?' George asked.

‘No, it's entirely your choice,' Blackstone told him. ‘If you'd prefer it, we can have the conversation in Coney Island police headquarters.'

‘Oh, get it with it, then,' George said.

‘I intend to,' Blackstone said, coming to a sudden halt. ‘It was roughly on this spot that I had my talk with Fanshawe, no more than an hour before he died. He'd come up to the room that you'd assigned us, to ask if we wanted anything to drink. Did you know that?' He paused. ‘But of course you knew it – because one of you had sent him up there to be
noticed
.'

‘Perhaps, rather than that, one of us sent him up there to see if you were thirsty,' Harold said.

But he didn't say it as if he expected to be believed, because – unlike his brother – he already knew the game was lost.

‘You sent him so he could be noticed,' Blackstone said firmly, ‘and so he could deliver the script which you had written for him – a script which you hoped would establish that you stood to gain nothing by your father's death.'

‘
So Big Bill's still running the business
?'
Blackstone asks, looking out over the ocean.

‘
Not really,' Fanshawe replies. ‘Mr George and Mr Harold make most of the decisions since he signed the company over to—
'

‘
Since he signed the company over
to them
?
'

‘
For God's sake, don't tell anybody I told you, or I'll lose my job.
'

‘It must have been while Fanshawe and I were talking that you realized he had made a big mistake earlier that morning,' Blackstone said to Harold.

‘Really? And what mistake might that have been?'

‘Fanshawe hadn't taken a breakfast tray down to the bunker – which meant he already knew, before he even got there, what he would find. If
you
could spot that mistake, the chances were that I would too, and Fanshawe suddenly stopped being a valuable asset and became a very dangerous liability. He had to die, so George – I assume it was George – lured him into the woods, half strangled him, and then hung him from the tree.'

‘So now it's not our father you're accusing us of killing, it's our butler,' George said.

‘I'm accusing you of killing both of them,' Blackstone replied. ‘And those two murders are just a start.' He lit up a cigarette. ‘I think we'll go down to the bunker, next.'

‘I . . . I don't want to go down to the bunker,' George gasped, in a half-strangled tone.

‘For God's sake, George, be a man for once!' Harold said.

There was very little room for four men to stand in the small guard room, but though George and Harold seemed uncomfortable about rubbing shoulders with the others, Blackstone himself appeared to be perfectly at ease.

‘I can't tell you
exactly
what happened that night, but I think I can give you a rough outline,' Blackstone said.