23 Gwennap Head
Gwennap Head
It began, like most things these days, with a few pithy words on a social media platform controlled by a reactionary billionaire.
The culprit was a gadfly British podcaster who specialized in celebrity gossip and scandal. She had discovered, thanks to
her reputedly impeccable sources, that Alice Winter, the dazzling wife of real estate mogul Edward Knight, had vanished while
on holiday on the island of Ibiza. The brief item caught the attention of a reporter from one of the lesser London tabloids,
and with a single phone call to the Policía Nacional he confirmed its accuracy. His story appeared on the paper’s website
shortly before seven the following morning, and by lunchtime it was all anyone in Britain was talking about.
Attempts to reach Edward Knight would prove unsuccessful, but at half past four that afternoon he was spotted entering New
Scotland Yard, headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, accompanied by a team of high-priced lawyers. The Met’s press spokeswoman
declined to characterize the nature of the discussions, saying only that Knight had been fully cooperative. No, she added
pointedly, the billionaire was not considered a suspect in his wife’s disappearance.
But what, precisely, had happened to Alice Winter?
And why was her disappearance coming to light only now, some three weeks after the fact?
It emerged the next day, thanks to an unauthorized press leak from Scotland Yard, that she had been abducted during her Ibizan holiday—and that her husband, like many exceedingly wealthy men before him, had decided to quietly meet the demands of the kidnappers rather than involve the authorities.
A prominent figure in London’s private security industry theorized that the billionaire had likely retained the services of an experienced kidnap-and-ransom specialist to negotiate the terms of the deal.
Another expert suggested that the ransom payment might well have exceeded the $17 million demanded by the kidnappers of John Paul Getty III, grandson of the oil tycoon and art collector.
Edward Knight, for his part, had nothing to say on the subject of ransom, or much else, for that matter. Holed up in his mansion
in Hans Place in Knightsbridge, he issued a single written statement, pleading with the kidnappers to release his wife at
once. But when three additional days passed with no sign of her, friends and associates of the billionaire feared the worst.
So too did authorities in Spain, where kidnappings by Basque separatists had once been commonplace. The payment of ransom,
said one former counterterrorism official, did not guarantee the release of the hostage. Indeed, in some instances, it placed
the hostage in even greater danger. The Metropolitan Police spokeswoman, while refusing to confirm that a ransom had in fact
been paid, gently criticized the official’s remarks as “unhelpful.”
Britain would awaken the following morning to a report in the same lesser tabloid that Alice Winter had been found wandering
dazed and disoriented through the streets of Barcelona. A hasty retraction soon followed. Yes, a British woman had been discovered
in Barcelona, but her condition was the result of nothing more perilous than a night of heavy drinking. The Madrid newspaper
El País published a lengthy follow-up story replete with harrowing anecdotes of English debauchery on Spanish soil.
The leader of the British far right responded by calling on his fellow countrymen to cancel their summer holidays in Spain and remain in England instead.
The leader of Spain’s growing anti-tourism movement declared it a fine idea.
Lost in the unseemly Anglo-Spanish spat was the fact that a human life was at stake, a life that the British press placed
under a microscope—her middle-class suburban upbringing, her years at Cambridge, her short-lived career in journalism, the
extramarital affair that ended Edward Knight’s first marriage. The billionaire issued another statement, this time asking
for privacy. The press responded by turning their sights on Knight’s opaque real estate empire and his repeated brushes with
His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. A loose-cannon legal analyst on the American airwaves wondered whether Knight might have
played a role in his wife’s disappearance, a theory that quickly gained traction on social media. When a wife vanished, the
thinking went, the husband was usually to blame.
The scrutiny relented, though, when a respected investigative reporter from The Guardian revealed that a large ransom had indeed been paid and that the kidnappers, as was often the case, had not lived up to their
end of the bargain. The Metropolitan Police, according to the story, now feared that Alice Winter had been murdered by her
captors, a fear shared by her husband. On the evening the story appeared on The Guardian’s website, he conducted an impromptu news conference on the doorstep of his home in Hans Place. Several reporters present
made note of his ashen, haggard appearance. He looked, they said, like a man who believed he would never see his wife again.
Missing from The Guardian’s otherwise authoritative account were several crucial details, including the enormous size of the ransom payment, the manner in which the money had been paid, and the identity of the man who had negotiated the terms of the deal.
He was not, as some had speculated, connected to London’s lucrative K&R trade, but he was an expert nonetheless and had the scars to prove it.
The newest were the four deep lacerations above his left ankle, a parting gift from a malevolent, deer-red German pinscher named Oscar.
It was by no means the gravest injury he had ever suffered, even as a result of an encounter with an angry canine, but it
was surely among the most humiliating. He spared Irene and Raphael the shameful details—they were under the impression he
had merely turned an ankle during his brief visit to Ibiza—but he told Chiara the unvarnished truth. She reacted, as he anticipated
she would, by reminding him of her unambiguous warning about serving as the bagman. His ill-considered response—that he was
not, technically speaking, the bagman because there had been no actual bag—did little to mollify her anger. He was lucky,
she said, that the kidnappers hadn’t left him on the side of that Lower Austrian road with a bullet in his head. For reasons
he failed to disclose, he did not dispute the point.
He allowed himself, during the first seventy-two hours after his return to Cornwall, to entertain the hope that Alice Winter
would likewise turn up along some remote stretch of European roadway. His hopes faded, though, as the days slid by with no
sign of her. He was confident he had taken every measure possible to bring her out of captivity alive, including the extraordinary
step of placing himself in the hands of her abductors. The mistake, he told Chiara one evening as she prepared their dinner,
had been Edward Knight’s.
“He never should have authorized the transfer of the money without a final demonstration of proof of life. It was a violation
of the most basic rules of the kidnap-and-ransom game.”
“What would you have done if you were in Edward’s shoes?”
“I would have hired someone like me and let him do his job.”
“And if I was the one who had been kidnapped?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t be standing on the doorstep of my Knightsbridge mansion making tearful appeals.”
The second of the two proof-of-life photos, the one the kidnappers had left in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, somehow found
its way onto the front page of The Daily Mirror. Gabriel feared that the next photograph to appear in the British papers would be his—and that the Metropolitan Police would
soon be knocking on his door. He was, after all, the only person other than Alice to have laid eyes on the kidnappers. For
some reason they had allowed him to live. It was, he thought, their only mistake.
There was one more false sighting—a beach in Biarritz, a fortyish woman from Leeds who had had too much to drink—but after
that the trail appeared to go well and truly cold. By the second week of July even the tabloid press was beginning to lose
interest in the story. Gabriel, his lower leg sufficiently healed, resumed work on the Bellotto. On a windblown Wednesday
afternoon he was retouching the prow of a traghetto crossing the Grand Canal when he heard a car coming up the long drive.
It was a Volvo ES90, a model frequently used by plainclothes officers of the Metropolitan Police. He was relieved, therefore,
when the driver’s-side door opened and Edward Knight stepped into view.
This time they set off eastward along the clifftops toward Penzance. Their pace was unhurried, contemplative, in part because
Gabriel was favoring his left ankle.
“And where,” inquired Edward Knight, “did this unfortunate incident take place?”
“In the woods outside a Lower Austrian town called Falkenstein.”
“And when the police arrived?”
“There were no police.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Practice.”
Knight smiled briefly in spite of himself. “Can you ever forgive me, Allon?”
“Whatever for?”
“Getting you involved in this mess. You were a damn fool to place yourself in the hands of the kidnappers.” Knight lowered
his voice. “And damn brave as well. Imagine my surprise when the phone rang and that awful voice told me that they were going
to kill you if I didn’t send the money.”
“You shouldn’t have listened to them.”
“And what if they weren’t bluffing? What if they had killed the great Gabriel Allon? I couldn’t have lived with that on my
conscience,” said Knight. “I rang Peter Hoffmann and ordered him to initiate the wire transfer.”
“At what time?”
“Shortly after six a.m. Zurich time. The kidnappers called me a few minutes later to say that CyproBank had received the money and that you and Alice
would be released unharmed. Obviously that turned out not to be the case.” They slowed to a stop and stood shoulder to shoulder
atop the cliffs near Porthchapel Beach. “Would you mind, Allon, if I asked you a difficult question?”
“You want to know why the kidnappers released me and not Alice.”
Knight nodded.
“Once you wired the money, they had no incentive to release her.”
“They promised they would.”
“They’re kidnappers, Edward. They say a lot of things that aren’t true. Which means there’s a distinct possibility that you will soon receive yet another demand for money.”
“I’m afraid DCI Douglas Chapel of the Metropolitan Police told me the same thing. He also said it’s possible the kidnappers
never intended to release Alice because she might be able to identify them.”
“It sounds to me as though DCI Chapel knows a thing or two about the K&R game.”
“He seems to.”
“Did you tell him the name of your negotiator?”
“I’m afraid I had no other choice. Needless to say, he’d like a word with you.”
“Unfortunately I have no plans to travel to London at this time.”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Allon, but you’re expected at New Scotland Yard at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Gabriel turned to face Edward Knight. “Shall I bring along my solicitor?”
“You’re not a suspect, if that’s what you’re suggesting. DCI Chapel would simply like your assistance in clearing up one or
two details.”
“Such as?”
“I should probably let him explain,” said Knight. “I wouldn’t want anything to get lost in translation.”