The Double Bind of Mr Rigby

by Brian Martin

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Pelham Rigby is an investigative journalist for a London newspaper, and his travels take him around the world on missions that can never be discussed. Roxanne is the beautiful wife of a Spanish businessman with a dubious past, but she only has eyes for Rigby. Arne is the powerful CEO of Myrex, Inc., a corporation that is not all it seems. When Rigby's newspaper sends him on a mission to Estonia, all four lives become entwined in an explosive series of events that threaten not only Rigby's safety, relationships and career, but his life. Increasingly drawn into the clutches of both British and American security services, and the murky cauldron of Myrex, Rigby is forced to make decisions that compromise everything he's ever believed in.

Building up to a stunning dénouement, where the action shifts from a Soviet submarine base in Estonia to a smart London hotel, The Double Bind of Mr Rigby is an exciting, absorbing thriller which will not only take you places you've never been before, but make you question whether what you are reading is fact or fiction.

Release date: April 27, 2023

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 240

Sample

Seville was at its grandest. The evening possessed a clear, bright light that burnished everything it touched. The tall palm trees stood in lines, sentinels outside the high walls of Moorish buildings. Geometrical patterns of trickling water in straight conduits and crossing, intersecting, clipped bushes, decorated its adjoining gardens. The one-way traffic system flowed ceaselessly. Tourists ambled to and fro around the hotels, fanning themselves with guide-maps and information bulletins in the late heat that would soon rapidly cool.

The Alfonso XIII, by far the best hotel in Seville, offered me rest and succour. Once it had been a royal palace: now it was a sumptuous hotel, cool and luxurious, spacious with handsome interiors. It was here that I used to meet Roxanne in the early evening during those months that I lived and worked in Seville. A central court accommodated breakfast and dining tables interspersed with exotic potted plants and pots de fleurs. Henry Miller abhorred the spruceness of northern France’s small towns and villages. Their civic pride insisted on tidiness, a well-ordered presentation to a visiting, watching world. ‘Je m’en fous de la civilisation Européenne,’ he declaimed. But here in this elegant courtyard everything was in order, nothing out of place: the panoply of flowers was perfect. There were no Henry Millers or any of his Bohemian friends under the vast awning that had been unfurled across the court to shield the patrons from the afternoon sun.


All the best American features of hotel comfort had been incorporated in the makeover to convert the palace into the city’s finest place to stay. Ease and elegance were its hallmarks; and it was here that I had arranged to meet Roxanne.

I worked for the London Journal. I had started out as an ordinary news reporter but had stumbled on a story to do with money laundering through businesses run in Auckland. The masterminds behind the scam had calculated that New Zealand being off the beaten track of world affairs would be a suitably obscure place to conduct their criminal dealings. They had not reckoned with me. I had been reporting an illegal meat-trading business that authenticated carcasses not fit for human consumption but which were fed back into the food chain. The trail led me to New Zealand and the resulting story made my reputation. I was promoted to be one of the paper’s leading investigative journalists. It was a dangerous profession. Organised crime does not like inquisitive people and it is prepared to be utterly ruthless, especially where governments are weak and are not prepared to oppose it. So, in my mid-thirties, single and hungry for adventure, I found myself fulfilling a role that I found exciting but distinctly risky.


My current assignment had turned out to be even more dangerous than I would usually have expected. Somehow I had found myself in a relationship with the remarkably beautiful wife of the magnate who ran the company I was investigating. Myrex, so far as I could discover, was a commercial complex that operated in several countries and seemed to concentrate on exploiting and developing old Soviet assets in satellite states deserted by that once dominant centralised power. My enquiries had unearthed so far some curiously dubious operations in the Baltic States. To be conducting an affair with the wife of the company’s proprietor and chairman was not altogether wise but I thought it could have its advantages. Anyway, it was her initiative that had started our liaison; she was impossible to resist.

At the end of one of the side aisles, a black-tied pianist played Mozart on a Bechstein. I sat at a table a little distance from him and listened to the rapturous music that shifted me from the worries of my predicament. A young waiter emerged from the recesses and asked if I would like anything. His request was on the edge of ambiguity: it might have been a sexual overture. Others might have caught the fly: ‘A Scotch and soda, please.  Perhaps you could bring one to my room a little later, too.’ ‘About 10.30, sir?’ ‘That will do well. I look very much forward.’ So a tryst is made between a wearied traveller and a good-looking young chap from a local village with little money and his way to make in the world, who has nothing to sell except, as it were, his soul to the Devil.

I ordered a Dry Martini, assured that in this American Spanish institution, the bar would know how to mix it. Outside of Manhattan or away from Massachusetts Avenue in DC, I have learned to be wary of ordering the classic cocktail. Once in Oxford, at what was reputedly an international hotel, in answer to my Dry Martini order I had received a wine glass of Martini Seco. When I explained that the drink should have gin in it, I was served another glass with a measure of Gilbey’s and charged for two separate drinks.

This youth’s Dry Martini was first-class, two-thirds gin to one of vermouth, a twist of lemon, chilled in the shaker. If his personal service was as good as this and he had not already contracted Aids, then he would surely do well.

I sat sipping the Martini, musing on what the boy was thinking, and daydreaming in the balming influence of Mozart’s music.

So, while lost in thought waiting for Roxanne, Belmont showed up. It was a surprise. I had not expected to see him. He drifted in, shabbily chic, in what had once been a well-cut coat but now well-worn, threadbare at the cuffs and sagging slightly under the left armpit, not that he would have been carrying his gun then. He reminded me of the recent chairman of the Publishers’ Association whom I had once met in literary London: he habitually wore a shoulder holster but carried in it his mobile telephone. To begin with, those who knew him and his past experience as a Special Forces senior officer would freeze as he shifted his jacket to one side and reached for his phone. Belmont’s role for years had been that of the British representative to the equivalent of the Chamber of Trade in Seville; but in the news world we knew that he doubled working for the intelligence service, something that he always denied.

Belmont, aquiline, fair-haired, physically elegant even if his clothes were not, sauntered towards my table and subsided into one of the cane chairs. He flicked the lick of blonde hair across his forehead, and with a mere hint of gesture signalled the boy to him. He ordered the same restorative tincture as mine.

‘It’s great to see you, B,’ I said. ‘Even better to see you’re still alive. What’s news?’

He no more than brushed the conical-shaped glass with his lips. ‘No news here; but have you heard what’s happened in London?’ I replied that I was out of touch: I had not talked to anyone at home since yesterday.

‘I caught Willy as he was leaving the office,’ he said. ‘London is in turmoil. Pall Mall and Waterloo Place are pretty well devastated. It was a car bomb apparently; went off at about three. There was gridlock. The Duke of York’s statue is pockmarked by shrapnel.’

‘Who was responsible? Was it Al-Qaeda? Does anyone know? Have you been on to HQ yet?’

He ignored my last remark. ‘Why are you asking so many questions? Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s better; after all you’ve got the contacts. Willy will talk to you. He’s guarded with me. Give him a ring. He must know what the word is on the Albert Embankment.’

Willy worked at MI6 headquarters and talked in a sort of code, a cipher language, which those of us who knew him well were, for the most part, able to interpret. Always mindful of the Official Secrets Act, he delivered his hints, his nods and his winks with a quiet discretion. I had known him up at Oxford where he had read History and with a methodical, calculated, cold-blooded efficiency gained himself a First. That was the sort of guy he was. When he put his mind to something, then look out. He ruthlessly put into the shade the star history student of our year who thought he had the flair and intelligence; but up against Willy, he became slightly demoralised and at the end flunked to a good Second. Willy was recruited while he was a short-service commissioned officer in the Army to the Security Services and served in the field to great effect in Germany and later on in Moscow. He then became home based. He enjoyed the paperwork of policy-making and the measure of control that he had over younger colleagues on active service. He occasionally interviewed new hopefuls. His one key question to them was always a poniard thrust, ‘Are you prepared to kill someone when the necessity arises?’

My bottom line with Willy was that he was immensely useful for my investigative work. He would give me invaluable hints about people and enterprises. I reckoned that he felt I might be useful to him because of my newspaper work and confidential sources. Thus we had an unexpressed understanding of intelligence cooperation. So far it had all worked well.

I did not respond to Belmont’s Albert Embankment remark. He changed the subject and asked about Roxanne. He had met her once or twice at parties, not in my company, and once with me in an obscure restaurant where Roxanne and I had gone to avoid being seen. It was there that Belmont had shown up. He, too, had been trying to keep out of sight for reasons not the same as ours.

The trouble was that Roxanne was the wife of this prominent businessman, the president of the city’s leading commercial forum. I had met her first when I was invited to give a lunchtime address on the British Press’s attitudes to Spain and the European Community. I had been seated between the president and his wife. After my talk, when I had sat down, Roxanne had rested her hand on my knee and congratulated me on what I had said. There was no mistaking the warmth of that touch. I knew at once that she was making a move, and I responded. She was gorgeously attractive, slim, dark-haired, shapely: she was elegantly made up and scented unmistakably with Chanel Number 5. I had placed my hand on top of hers and pressed gently. She stretched her fingers, shifted her position and stroked softly upwards, caressing the inside of my thigh. Her intention was clear: she had decided. The final decision was up to me, and I could not resist. It is extremely flattering to receive such an immediate approach from an extraordinarily beautiful young woman.

The president was oblivious to what was going on between us. He was bound up with the elderly wife of a business colleague seated on his left. Roxanne and I spoke in undertones: should we meet later? Was I busy? Where would be a good place? I mentioned a small bar by the railway station.

‘It’s out of the way, quite private. We’re not likely to be noticed, and if we are we can say we met by chance.’

Roxanne was eager. We arranged to meet at half past six. For an hour we talked. She told me that she had been struck by my presence as soon as I had arrived next to her at lunch. She had felt an immediate frisson that she was still experiencing. It was not that she did not like her husband, she did, but the flame had died. It surged and flared in my company. All this, of course, was entirely physical: we had hardly explored each other’s intellects.


‘We must be careful,’ I said. ‘We don’t know each other. We don’t know if we can talk to each other.’

Roxanne dismissed my anxiety. She knew instinctively that we were at one both physically and mentally. She would hear nothing of caution along those lines. She did advise it so far as her husband was concerned. He was an influential, powerful man who did not like to be crossed and who was conventional in his attitude towards his family. If honour was impugned, he would stop at nothing to wreak revenge. The manners of the great Sevillian commercial families were not dissimilar to those of the great Italian mafia dynasties. Roxanne was the English wife of a Spaniard of note. It was necessary for everyone’s safety that we were discreet. He was eminently dangerous. Provoke the viper and it would bite. In the end, after he had discovered our liaison, it did not matter. So long as we kept ourselves out of the public eye and did nothing embarrassingly outrageous, her husband raised no objections. It turned out that he followed his own interests, his own sexual liaisons, which involved a succession of not only delightful young women but also young men. He seemed quite content that I entertained his wife. Had he grown bored with her? I do not know. I do know that he was engaged in that fruitless quest of always looking for something different, something new.

I told Belmont that Roxanne was well, indeed, that she was flourishing. Since we first had met and Roxanne had suffered the epiphany that I found difficult to believe was caused by my presence, she had lightened in spirit. There was a joy in her looks, an eagerness in her mood: her happiness was infectious and affected those she was with. Why should I have this effect on someone? I could not understand it. I was just an ordinary newspaperman, in a sense a hack journalist, quiet, dull, out of the way. The sort of work I did, the assignments I was given, would have destroyed James Bond by their boredom. I have always wondered who did Bond’s paperwork.

‘Roxanne should be here soon. I’m waiting for her. If you hang on a while, you’ll meet her,’ I said.

‘You’re a lucky bastard,’ he said. ‘How did you pick her up?’

I wondered if it would be ungallant to point out that it was the other way round and decided that it would not matter: Roxanne would be totally unconcerned. So I said to Belmont, ‘I didn’t. She picked me up, in a manner of speaking. Though I agree, I’m a lucky bastard.’

‘Why doesn’t that sort of thing happen to me?’ Belmont complained.

I looked at him. He was handsome enough, and his down-at-heel air had a captivating charm of its own peculiar kind. The problem was that he radiated unhappiness, an uncertainty, which I could see disturbed people. Was it Dr Johnson who said that you have a duty to be cheerful? Belmont had not heard that apophthegm. Too often he was in the grips of a desperate gloom that could not help affect those he was with. Women, attracted at first by the unconventional untidiness of the man and his shabby good looks, were soon put off. There was no joy, no lyricism in his soul.

He drained his Martini and went before Roxanne arrived. He was going to leave five euros but I told him to forget it: he could buy mine next time round. That was never to be. As always, I regret intensely not having said goodbye to him properly. I liked him. Despite his melancholic cast, he was a good friend to me, reliable, hospitable and kind. I miss him terribly now.

It was not long, ten minutes or so, before Roxanne appeared. We greeted each other. She kissed me on both cheeks, then full on the lips. She did not want to sit down.

‘I have left the car right outside. Let’s go. I want to see the sun set,’ she explained.

‘Don’t you want a drink? Sit down, relax. Listen to the Mozart.’

‘No. Come on or we’ll be too late. I want to drive out past the airport. I want to watch the sun settle behind the Sierras.’

There was no resisting her determination. I caught the boy’s eye. That was not difficult. I felt that he was constantly aware of what was going on and always looking out for the half chance of an assignation. I was probably wrong but that was the way my mind worked. In my trade, you had to be open to all possibilities. The various permutations of human psychology were never far from the front of my mind. I quickly paid the bill, complimented him on his considerate service and tipped him. I noticed the clear expression of pleasure with which he took the compliment and his few paltry euros.

Roxanne and I, holding hands, left.

In general, Belmont was a man of familiar and regular habit. He took coffee at eleven: he went for tapas at a quarter to two. You noticed when he wasn’t there. His death came as a shock. The graveyard poet, Thomas Gray, records the immediately recognisable feeling, ‘One morn I missed him on the customed hill … Another came.’ The following verse announces the sad news, ‘The next with dirges due in sad array/Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne.’ Thus it was with Belmont. It was reported that he fell under a train, that favourite form of murder in the developing lands of the Wild West of America, much neglected though in the chronicles. His foresight of his possible end would have been much more dramatic. He would have half expected to meet his fate stepping towards an acquaintance, holding out his right hand for the affectionate shake, finding it grasped by the other’s left, the right holding the revolver which was to blow his chest away. That was the trademark of Pat Garret’s deputy, Bob Ollinger. To be forcibly nudged off the edge of a platform, cut to pieces and crushed by a slowing train whose momentum although diminishing was definitively awful and as relentless as a juggernaut, was not the way he foresaw his end.

Belmont left the world in the early evening. He had been waiting for a train up from the coast. The platform was reasonably crowded and he was standing in a group of people who huddled at the spot where the rear of the train would halt. As the engine noisily ground its way into the station, there was a surprised cry from Belmont, so it was reported by an onlooker to the police investigator, he seemed to lose his footing, fell towards the track and hit the front of the loco as it trundled past. The huge weight of the train gave him no chance and he was dead within seconds: peine forte et dure. He was barely recognisable when I saw his corpse in the morgue the next day. It was listed as a terrible accident. The bystanders were aghast: there were many witness statements. It occurred to no one that he might have been pushed.


Those of us who knew him could not help but wonder. Belmont was careful, constantly aware. We all knew that he was a target: his past was unforgiving. He regarded himself as a sort of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed by an umbrella stab on Waterloo Bridge. The ricin-tipped ferule ensured that Markov, as it were, met his Waterloo.

Our reservations about Belmont’s demise were justified. Some days later I heard from Willy in London that a deciphered message on the night of the railway accident listed Belmont as victim in a successful elimination exercise. It came as no shock. The opposition, whatever it was, was unrelentingly active and determined.

Belmont’s fate put us all on alert. Since he had gone, and later we realised that the enemy’s confidence was such that they could list him as victim before the dreadful event, we knew we were all vulnerable. It was necessary to be extremely careful. Whatever organisation it was, they knew their own capabilities, entertained no doubts about their effectiveness, and were quite clearly lethal. By contrast, even though I had the support of a major newspaper in a still powerful country, I knew I was hog-tied by red tape and bureaucratic accountability.

I was simply a journalist. The London Journal employed me and provided me with all sorts of cover and excuses for being in surprising places at odd times. My closest friend and confidant was Mark, an entrepreneurial investment manager, who worked in conjunction with an old friend of his: they settled spare cash funds of a number of influential clients in timely, advantageous investments. Mark cultivated his business intelligence sources. He knew people in the financial press, columnists and commentators on the stock market, analysts, traders and brokers. He was an assiduous luncher within the Square Mile and a participant in constant mobile telephone conversations and conference calls. He approached as closely as was possible to the dangerous edge of insider trading. He knew what was going on. His clients prospered. He knew much that was advantageous to me.


Although Mark was younger than me, I had known him for years and cared for him intensely. We had many of the same interests intellectually and the same sense of humour. He was easy to work with. We knew each other’s mind. We shared interests in ideas, social and political: we read and discussed Chomsky, Edward Said and the Hitchens brothers. We followed the progress of the contemporary novel and talked about poetry. Mark was a poet himself: he had no collection out but had published one or two poems in the Times Literary Supplement. Thus our interests coincided. I had first met him four or five years ago, at lunch in a restaurant, the Gay Hussar, with a crowd of friends. We had sat opposite each other, and, from the very first, conversation flowed. There was an immediate empathy. Our friendship was established. There was always an urgent need to communicate ideas. At a distance, when travelling, we kept in touch by email and phone. The constant cut and thrust of debate was an essential part of our intellectual survival: we both depended on it.


Mark was an elegant, somewhat unconventionally dressed Anglo–American. When we first met he must have been about twenty-eight. He had originated in Los Angeles, Culver City, the inspiration of an American father and English mother. His early years were spent on the East Coast, New York and Boston. Then his father split and his mother returned to England. Mark kept his contact with the States, returned there often, and was looked after by his father’s family, especially by his grandparents. He spoke with a traditional, well-educated English voice slightly softened by American accent and idiom. That, together with his good looks and gentle manners, proved fatally attractive in the sport of love, and a succession of women fell for him. During those days in Seville, just after Belmont’s death, I was glad Mark was not around. I should have feared his effect on Roxanne. I knew instinctively that she would have been attracted to him. More than at any other time, I could not have survived Mark’s competition. My renewed affair with Roxanne enabled me to come to terms with Belmont’s extinction. His death depressed me more than I had expected or realised. Thoughts of mortality made me gloomy. Roxanne saved me from myself, and her expert attentions in the practice of the art of love gave me consolation and pleasure. Together we recaptured the original thrill of our relationship. It was renewal, reawakening.

I had expected my three days back in Seville to be fun. I had looked forward to meeting Roxanne again although I could not have predicted that we were to take up where we had left off in our sexual life. I should have known. Her sexual voracity was always wild, exuberant. Why should she have changed? She was her old seductive self. She took the initiative: I responded. That was the nature, the balance of our relationship. What I had not foreseen was the shock of Belmont’s death, murder, assassination – I had difficulty giving his demise a name when speaking of it to colleagues and friends. The image of his mangled corpse that I had seen and identified in the hospital morgue simply haunted me. I had experienced that common feeling. That corpse was not Belmont. Where was the essence of the man? Where was that wearied, sad spirit, that dejected soul? Roxanne helped me; she distracted me, although sometimes in those brief moments of post-coital tristesse, I was more deeply depressed than I had ever been.


Back in London, I immediately contacted Mark. It was always good to hear him. As I have said, we enjoyed a remarkable empathy. I told him what had happened. I described Belmont’s body in the morgue. For me, it was a sort of exorcism. He listened with sympathetic attention and heard me out. He fulfilled the role of analyst. I hinted at my intimacies with Roxanne without revealing the details. Mark’s imagination was good enough to see what would have happened. There was some part of my life with Roxanne that I wanted kept from him. I was deeply suspicious of his rivalry. I nursed a suppressed knowledge inside myself that he would prove a threat to the stability of my very existence with Roxanne. I knew instinctively that he would revolt, surreptitiously, insidiously. His loyalty to me . . .