Turbulence (Stone Barrington #46)(35)

“Out of an abundance of caution, I expect.”

“I expect so.”





27



DURING LUNCH, Gracie, Henry’s wife and the cook, came into the breakfast room. “There’s that Mr. Lance at the door again, Mr. Barrington,” she said with a sniff of distaste. “Shall I let him inside?”

“Please do, Gracie,” Stone said. “Put him in the library with a fresh bottle of scotch, and see if you can find me a chilled bottle of fino. We were out, last time I checked.”

“It’s already there, sir, in the little fridge.”

“Ask him if he’d like a sandwich, too, and take it to him in there.”

“Yes, sir.”

They finished their lunch, then went into the library and found Lance devouring a plate of sandwiches, with two fingers of scotch at his side.

“You must have missed breakfast,” Stone said, pouring a couple of glasses of the fino and taking a seat on the sofa with Kelly.

“How’d you guess? I had to meet Bill Eggers early at Heathrow.” Bill Eggers was the managing partner of the New York law firm, Woodman & Weld, in which Stone was a partner.

“What brought Bill to London?” Stone asked, also mystified at why Lance had met him.

“I did,” Lance said. “He demanded a seat on Concorde; he’s just a bit out of date.”

“All right,” Stone said, “I’ll bite. Why?”

“Backstory first,” Lance said. “Perhaps you’ll recall, Stone, that, during the last century the Labour government, between the wars, decided that too much land and money were passing from one generation of the aristocracy to the next, so they instituted death duties. I was going to add, ‘draconian’ to that, but it would have been too alliterative. Still, it hit hard. Primogeniture was still the law, so when the earl, or whatever his title was, died, second and third sons were packed off to the Church or the Army, daughters were married off to the richest available suitors, and the eldest boy found himself up to his weak chin in more land, houses, furniture, and art than he could fritter away before his death. Pretty soon he got a bill from the Inland Revenue for a big chunk of the value of all that and discovered that he had inherited less cash than he had imagined he would.”

“Yes, Lance,” Stone said, “I am aware of all that.”

“So,” Lance continued, undeterred, “it was time to sell off a lot of what he owned to raise the cash he didn’t have with which to pay the death duties, and he was lucky if he was left with a small house in Chelsea and a country cottage in Dorset that needed rethatching. A slightly less distasteful alternative to that—and one that would deny the Labour government the funds—was to give the place to the National Trust, which would spend a lot of money fixing up all the things the former owner had neglected, then offer him a floor or a few rooms of his ancestral home in which he could have his friends down for the weekend; this for the term of his life, when his heirs would be turned out onto the nearest country lane. An even more distasteful alternative would have been to sell the estate to a passing wealthy American, who would spend his dotage complaining about what it cost to run the place.”

“Are we up to the present day, yet?” Stone asked wearily.

“Nearly ’bout,” Lance replied. “Among the aristocrats this happened to were the descendants of the twelfth Duke of Kensington, a royal cousin and a possessor of more land and houses than anyone should rightfully have. While his heir, the thirteenth duke, was contemplating how to wring as much money as possible out of it, the aforesaid American turned up on his doorstep—in the person of a gentleman of some financial repute who, in fact, was acting on behalf of our old friend, Selwyn Owaki, who wanted to wallow in all this elegance without his name actually being attached to it. He offered a sum that only a dealer in drugs or arms or both could issue a check for, and Owaki thus became the owner of Kensington House, in Oxfordshire, and most of its contents. A Rembrandt or two went to the National Gallery, in order to make duke thirteen look good.”

“Kensington House?” Stone said. “Is that the one with the collection of African wildlife in the backyard?”

“It is,” Lance said, “among them something like forty lions whose work it is to eat the other inhabitants, whose task it is to breed faster than they are eaten. That part of the estate actually turned a profit and kept a roof on the big house out front.”

“So what the hell would Selwyn Owaki do with such a white elephant?”

“Well, he throws extravagant parties and dinners, at which he feigns to be a guest, instead of the host. He plays golf—badly, by all accounts—on his private course, and, naturally, he rides to the hounds, as a good aristocrat should. He also maintains an airstrip on the property, which he paved and lengthened to accommodate his little fleet of jets.”

“Ah,” Stone said.

“A tiny bit like you,” Lance added.

“Lance, will you ever get to the point?”

“The point is: after your little dinner at the bo?te in Mayfair, an aircraft owned or hired by Owaki swooped into Red Hill to drop off the much-desired nuclear artillery warhead. Instead, apparently upon a signal from Owaki, it passed by Red Hill and flew elsewhere.”

Stone shifted uneasily in his seat. “And?”