33 Lauterbrunnen
Lauterbrunnen
economy into the worst recession since World War II. Hardest hit was the property market, with the average British home losing
twenty percent of its value, almost overnight. The declines in the commercial real estate sector were even more severe. One
closely watched index plunged a catastrophic forty-six percent.
Edward Knight weathered the storm with only minor losses, or so he claimed. In truth the Knight Group was hemorrhaging cash.
Twelve months into the crisis, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. A sale of existing assets was not an option, for
there were no buyers and prices were at rock bottom. Knight asked his man at HSBC for an additional line of credit and a restructuring
of his current debt, and was denied both. Having nowhere else to turn he sought a private solution to his problems. He found
one in the form of a billionaire Russian oligarch living grandly in London.
“Which one?” asked Gabriel.
“Dmitri Savin.”
“The name rings a distant bell.”
“Made a mountain of money in Russian chemicals,” said Alice.
“Fertilizers, if I’m not mistaken. Poor Dmitri found himself at the wrong end of sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine and was forced to return to Moscow, leaving a couple billion in frozen assets behind in the West, including his enormous mansion in Prince of Wales Terrace.
It has since fallen into a state of disrepair, much to the dismay of Dmitri’s former neighbors. ”
“An art collector, isn’t he?”
“Aren’t they all? Bloody Russians,” she murmured.
“They’re not all bad, you know.”
“Name one good Russian, Mr. Allon.”
“I’ve always been rather fond of Tchaikovsky.”
“What about Pasternak?” she asked.
He quoted a line from Zhivago. “‘And remember, you must never, under any circumstances, despair.’”
She finished the passage for him. “‘To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.’”
Gabriel regarded her for a moment, then asked, “Why on earth were you always posting all those silly photos of yourself online?”
“It wasn’t me, Mr. Allon. It was just a role I was playing. Dazzling Alice Winter, glamorous wife of a billionaire. But it
turns out that Edward would have gone under if Dmitri Savin hadn’t thrown him a lifeline.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
“Difficult to say. But if I were to hazard a guess, it would have been in the neighborhood of two billion pounds. Once Edward
accepted Dmitri’s money, the Knight Group was little more than a Russian subsidiary.”
But all that, Alice added quickly, was long before she came on the scene.
In the winter of 2009, as Edward’s business was crumbling, she was a recent graduate of Cambridge looking for work as a journalist. In her mind’s eye she saw herself as a muckraker and crusader, a defender of the poor and dispossessed, an exposer of corruption, a righter of wrongs.
And yet even with her vaunted Cambridge education she found it difficult to land a job in an industry that had been cast into disarray by the rise of the Internet.
Eventually she found work at a magazine that catered to the posh set.
After spending a few years writing about restaurants and dim-witted pop stars, she landed an interview with a notoriously publicity-shy real estate investor named Edward Knight.
“And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“It was love at first sight?”
“Not exactly. Edward hated my story and told me so in no uncertain terms. He rang a few days later to apologize and asked
whether I might have dinner with him. I felt obliged to accept.”
“You began an affair?”
“That very night.”
“He was married at the time.”
“To Mildred,” said Alice. “Or Mildew, as I used to refer to her. It wasn’t one of my finest hours. But if it hadn’t been me,
it would have been someone else.”
“The divorce was rather costly.”
“Which was the reason Edward insisted I sign a prenuptial agreement. The terms were draconian.”
“But you signed it nevertheless.”
“I was in love.”
“Were you really?”
“Close enough,” she admitted.
“There was a sizable age difference.”
“And how old is your wife, Mr. Allon?”
“No comment.”
“Rascal,” she hissed.
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
“Wait until you get to know me a little better.”
“Any chance of that?”
“That depends on the rest of your story.”
It was the kind of story, she said, that used to grace the pages of her old magazine—the mansions in Knightsbridge and Devon,
the private jet, the yacht, the celebrity friends. She and Edward were much in demand and were seen in all the right places,
with all the right people. She began to chronicle their remarkable life on social media, and her notoriety grew. Edward did
not discourage her habit, quite the contrary. Dazzling Alice was good for Edward’s business.
But by then he was already ensnared in a relationship with a Kremlin-connected oligarch from which he could not extract himself.
Alice knew nothing of Edward’s ties to Dmitri Savin—that is, until Dmitri met a beautiful young Russian model and decided
to divorce his wife of twenty-eight years. The wife, who was called Masha, retained a powerhouse London law firm to represent
her and came to the first meeting armed with a trove of documents she had downloaded from her husband’s computer.
“Those documents painted a true picture of Dmitri’s enormous net worth. They also contained a list of companies in which he
held a controlling stake. One of the companies was the British real estate firm known as the Knight Group.”
“Oh dear,” said Gabriel.
“I’m afraid it gets better. You see, the law firm that Masha chose to represent her is the same firm where my friend Sophie
Maxwell practices. In fact, dearest Sophie was assigned to Masha’s legal team.”
“She saw the documents?”
Alice nodded.
“And then she told you about them?”
“That would have been unethical, Mr. Allon. But let’s just say that I was made aware of Dmitri Savin’s relationship with my husband. Never mind how.”
“And your reaction?”
“I rang my friend Ella Burns. And what do you suppose Ella told me?”
“That HSBC stopped doing business with your husband in 2009.”
Alice placed a forefinger against the end of her nose.
“Did she have documents as well?”
“Chapter and verse.”
“And where are those documents now?”
“Stored on a carefully hidden external hard drive, along with Dmitri Savin’s treasure trove. And they can be yours if you
can somehow get me out of this mess.”
“We’re not there yet, Alice. In fact, we’re not even close.”
“You want to know why I staged my own abduction in order to embezzle a half billion dollars from my husband?”
Gabriel didn’t bother with a reply.
“For a start,” said Alice, “there was the prenuptial agreement.”
“How much would you have received?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“I’d rather you did.”
“A lousy ten million.”
“You would have been practically penniless,” said Gabriel acidly.
“It’s not easy to be poor after you’ve been rich.”
“Ten million isn’t exactly poor, Alice.”
“It would have been a nest egg, nothing more. But there was another reason why I did what I did, Mr. Allon. A much more important
reason.”
Which brought them, at long last, to the early-morning hours of the twelfth of February, when Alice Winter, having had far
too much to drink, and in a state of profound emotional distress, wrapped her Aston Martin roadster around a tree a mile from
her husband’s grand estate in the English county of Devon.