The Art of Danger by Stuart Doughty

Author:Stuart Doughty [Doughty, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

The bomb had been in the Harrods bag given to Morina by the Lexus driver. Why was Morina so ham-fisted as to blow himself up?

Time to think: what if?

What if Morina had been duped? Suppose he’d been given instructions for some fictitious mission. He’d been handed an explosive device and told to set the timer then place it. But suppose there was no timer.

The Lexus driver had operated the explosive by remote control.

The intended victim was Morina.

Either his handler wanted rid of him before the police caught him and he talked. Or, once he’d obtained the picture he was simply expendable. Or, taking the fantastically unlikely view that his boss had some kind of morality, maybe the boss had been disturbed by the unnecessary loss of life and thought it was time to remove him from the scene.

But why the charade? If they wanted rid, why didn’t they just shoot him? Cosh him on the head? Push him under a train?

I reckoned they wanted to set Morina up. He was an Islamic Kosovan and they wanted him to look like a failed terrorist. This would divert the police down a blind alley and away from whatever it was they were planning.

If I was right, it meant the three murders were simply collateral damage. The sole purpose of what happened at BetterWork was to steal the Amberger picture.

I’d always believed this but now the theft felt even more significant and troubling.

I found myself doodling an ornate picture frame on my office A4 pad. Then I put a big question mark in the space where a picture would go.

I stood up and paced around the office. Well, in a manner of speaking. The room wasn’t big enough for pacing so I mooched across to the window and gazed out. I had no view of St Paul’s from there but I could see the church of St Lawrence, Jewry. One of the great survivors: destroyed in the Fire of London, rebuilt by Wren, bombed in the Blitz, then repaired and restored. I wasn’t after spiritual guidance. It was just the most beautiful object I could see from my window. ‘Truth is beauty’, Sage had told me self-importantly, as if he were announcing the discovery of a new vaccine. As if he were Einstein chalking up his General Theory in front of the Royal Society. Well, I’d looked up Keats’s poem. The line actually starts, “Beauty is Truth”. It comes from his Grecian Urn ode. And what I’m afraid came immediately into my head was the silly and ancient schoolkid joke, ‘What’s a Grecian Urn?’ To which the answer was, ‘Twenty Euros an hour.’ Was Sage just a bad joke or something worse?

I turned from the window, put my hands in my pockets and the feel of Morina’s keys brought me back to the here and now. I pulled them out, weighed them in my palm, tossed them on to my desk.

People keep keys in a pocket or bag. Leaving them in a briefcase in a car’s boot meant Morina didn’t need them often.

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