Carter & Carter: The Man With No Name

Michael Carter stepped off the jet bridge at Heathrow with the unhurried gait of a man who had never once worried about a delayed flight or a missing case. First class did that to a person. It made the whole business of travel feel like something happening to someone else, at a comfortable distance, while you simply walked through it.

Beside him, Nicky matched his pace without trying, her heels clicking against the polished floor in a rhythm that had always struck Michael like punctuation. She'd slept most of the flight from Milan, her head against the window, and had woken only when the cabin crew came round with coffee somewhere over the Alps. He'd let her sleep. She'd earned it after the week they'd had chasing rumours through dusty archive rooms that smelled of mould and old men's cigars.

They bypassed the baggage carousels entirely, their cases having gone straight through to the car, and came out through the arrivals doors to find a driver in a dark suit holding a small white card that read CARTER & CARTER in neat, unfussy print.

"They could at least make the sign a bit more exciting," Nicky said, tucking a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. "Something with a bit of flair. Gold lettering, maybe."

"You want flair, we'll get you a limousine with your name painted down the side," Michael said. "Until then, this will have to do."

"I could live with that."

"I don't doubt it."

The driver said nothing beyond a polite good evening and took their cases, and within a few minutes they were folded into the back of a Mercedes gliding out onto the motorway toward the city, the last of the daylight bleeding orange along the horizon behind them.

Nicky rested her head briefly against Michael's shoulder, the way she had done as a child on long car journeys back from their father's country house, when the world had seemed a good deal simpler and far less inclined to shoot at people. Michael let her stay there a moment before she straightened, composing herself, the way she always did, as though she'd caught herself doing something faintly embarrassing.

"Do you think there's anything in it?" she asked. "The letters. The gold. Any of it?"

"I think somebody wants us to think there is," Michael said. "Which is not the same thing at all."

The Carter Global offices occupied the top two floors of a converted building overlooking the river, close enough to the old family firm's original headquarters that their father still liked to remind people, at every opportunity, that the view had once been his. Carter Global Enterprises had made the old man his fortune three decades before, back when shipping and property still built empires the old-fashioned way, and though he had sold most of it off for an obscene sum some years back, he had kept enough interest in the building to make sure his children's little media venture had a decent address.

Carter Global itself was smaller, quieter, and considerably more discreet than the shipping empire that had spawned it. Officially, it was an investigative media outfit, chasing down stories from Reykjavik to Rome, checking facts before selling them on to news agencies who preferred not to have their names attached to anything that might later prove embarrassing. Unofficially, when a story refused to check out through ordinary channels, Michael and Nicky had developed something of a reputation for going and checking it out themselves.

The lift doors opened onto the top floor, dark but for the security lighting along the corridor, and Michael flicked on the main lights as they walked through to the office they shared, an open space of glass and dark wood that their father had once called "far too much money for two people who still argue over who left the biscuits out."

Nicky went straight for the drinks cabinet, pulling down two glasses and a bottle of something amber that Michael recognised as one of their father's better whiskies, quietly redirected from the family cellar some months earlier.

"After the week we've had," she said, pouring, "I think we're allowed."

"I won't argue."

She handed him his glass and dropped into the chair opposite his desk, tucking her legs beneath her, and for a while neither of them said anything, content simply to sit in the quiet after the noise of Milan.

"So," Nicky said eventually. "Letters between Churchill and Mussolini. A missing diary. Gold that apparently walked out of Italy in 1945 and never turned up again."

"All fifty years old," Michael said. "All supposedly buried, burned, or lost. And yet somebody, somewhere, is talking about them as though they're about to surface."

"Which makes no sense unless somebody's about to make a great deal of money out of them surfacing."

"Or somebody's about to lose a great deal of money if they do."

Nicky considered that over the rim of her glass. "You don't spread rumours about half-century-old paperwork for the fun of it," she said. "Not unless there's a plan behind it. Political, financial, or both."

"Which is exactly why I want Julie pulling everything she can find on new political movements. Anything that's popped up across Europe in the last two years. If somebody's using old history to build something new, there'll be a paper trail somewhere."

Nicky reached for the phone on the desk and dialled through to Julie's extension, though it was gone eight and Julie had almost certainly gone home hours before. She left a message anyway, brisk and efficient, the way she always was when she wanted something done first thing.

"There is," Michael added, once she'd hung up, "a rather more pleasant way to spend this evening, if you're not too tired."

Nicky raised an eyebrow at him over her glass. "Go on."

"Lord Slater's having one of his parties tonight. Out at the house. He's the closest thing this country has to an authority on Mussolini's Italy, and if anyone can tell us whether any of this is worth taking seriously, it's him."

"And if it turns into one of his parties," Nicky said, "I assume you mean the sort where half the guests are twenty-two and none of them are there for the history."

"Almost certainly. But he'll talk to us. He always has."

Nicky finished her drink and stood, smoothing down her travel-creased dress. "Give me twenty minutes," she said. "And take your car, mine will only complain about the drive at this hour."

"Your MG can stay exactly where it is," Michael agreed. "We'll take the Giulietta."

By half past nine, they were pulling up the long gravel drive of Lord Slater's country residence, the house lit up gold against the dark of the surrounding fields, music and laughter drifting out through open windows. Michael had changed into his tuxedo without complaint; Nicky had gone for a red dress, backless, that drew rather more attention from the valet parking the cars than either of them had strictly intended.

Inside, the party was in full swing. Lord Slater held court near the fireplace, a heavy-set man well into his seventies, red-faced and jovial, a tumbler of whisky permanently attached to one hand and a rotation of considerably younger women drifting in and out of his orbit like moons.

"He never changes," Nicky murmured.

"Why would he? It's worked for him this long."

They waited, mingling politely, exchanging small talk with people neither of them knew and would likely never see again, until a lull presented itself and Michael caught Slater's eye across the room.

"Carter," Slater boomed, extracting himself from his admirers with visible reluctance. "And the lovely Nicola. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"A word, if you can spare one," Michael said. "In private."

Slater's eyebrows lifted, but he led them through the crowd and down a corridor lined with portraits of men who all seemed to share his same self-satisfied expression, into a library thick with the smell of old leather and older whisky.

"Well," Slater said, settling himself behind his desk and topping up his glass from a decanter that lived there for exactly that purpose. "This sounds serious."

"Mussolini's papers," Michael said. "Correspondence with Churchill. Petacci's diary from thirty-seven. And whatever happened to the Italian gold that never made it home in forty-five."

Slater laughed, a short, dismissive bark. "Good God. Not this again."

"You've heard the rumours, then," Nicky said.

"I've heard them for thirty years, my dear. Every decade or so somebody dusts them off and tries to sell them to a fool with more money than sense. There are no letters. There is no diary. Whatever Mussolini had was confiscated or burned in forty-five, and that's the official record, and the official record happens, for once, to be correct."

"And if it weren't?" Michael asked.

Slater's amusement faded a fraction. "If there were letters that could embarrass a man like Churchill even now, fifty years dead or not, you can be sure there are governments who would move heaven and earth to have them destroyed rather than see them printed. That much I'll grant you. But the gold—" he waved a hand, dismissing it entirely, "—that's long gone. Sold, spent, sunk in some lake for all anyone knows. Chasing it is a fool's errand, and I'd have thought better of you two."

"Thank you for your time," Michael said, standing.

"Don't sulk about it, Carter. Have a drink before you go. Enjoy the party." Slater was already reaching for the decanter again, his attention drifting back toward the door and whatever awaited him beyond it.

They left him to it. In the corridor outside, two young men were coming the other way, both immaculately dressed, both handsome in the sharp, groomed way of men who spent money carefully on their appearance. They passed close enough that Nicky, in her red dress, would ordinarily have drawn at least a glance. Neither so much as looked at her. They walked on toward the staircase and up, toward the private rooms, without breaking stride or conversation.

"Well," Nicky said once they were out of earshot, "that's a first."

"Maybe they're not interested in women," Michael said.

"Or maybe they had somewhere more important to be than looking at me."

Michael said nothing, but something about the taller of the two had snagged at the back of his mind, a face he felt he ought to place and couldn't, not there, not with the noise and the whisky and Slater's dismissal still ringing in his ears.

The drive back to the Carter family home was quiet. Nicky watched the hedgerows blur past in the dark, and Michael kept turning the man's face over in his mind without success, until eventually he gave up and let the silence sit between them, comfortable in the way that only came from a lifetime of not needing to fill every gap with words.

The next morning, Nicky arrived at the office to find Michael already there, surrounded by files stacked in uneven towers across his desk, several pinned open at photographs.

"You've been busy," she said, dropping her bag by the door.

"Come and look at this."

She came round the desk and looked over his shoulder at a file open to a photograph of a man in his late thirties, dark-haired, sharply dressed. It took her a second to place him.

"Last night," she said. "The corridor."

"Nico Zacardi," Michael said. "Thirty-nine, from Bologna. Minor record back home, nothing that would keep him out of polite company. But he's tied to something called Reborn."

"Reborn?"

Michael slid a second file across the desk. "A political movement. Started in Italy, spread to Norway, France, Spain, Portugal. Fringe stuff on paper, but well-funded fringe stuff, which is always worth a second look. Officially it's about restoring national pride, whatever that means this decade. Unofficially, there's talk they've recovered lost gold, Nazi gold, Italian gold, take your pick, and they're using it to bankroll god knows what across half the continent."

Nicky flipped through the pages, her expression shifting from curiosity to something more focused. "And last night a man tied to all that was walking round Slater's house like he owned it."

"Which is what I can't work out. Slater laughed the whole thing off. Papers destroyed, gold long gone, nothing to see. And yet."

The door opened before Nicky could answer, and Julie came in balancing a tray with coffee and pastries, setting it down on the corner of the desk with the practised efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times before.

"Thought you might need this," Julie said. "You both look like you've been up all night."

"Some of us have," Michael said.

Julie reached over and switched on the small television that sat on the shelf behind Nicky's desk, more out of habit than intention, the way she always did first thing to catch the headlines. The BBC news flash cut in mid-sentence, a presenter's face grave beneath the studio lights.

"...confirmed this morning that the historian and peer Lord Slater was found dead at his country residence overnight. Police have not yet released details of the circumstances surrounding his death, though a spokesperson described it as sudden."

The room went very still. Nicky's hand had stopped halfway to her coffee cup.

"We were just there," she said quietly. "Last night. We spoke to him."

Michael was already on his feet. "Julie, get me whoever's handling this. Whatever station covers his address, I want a name and I want it in the next ten minutes."

Julie didn't ask questions. She simply nodded and left, already reaching for the phone in the outer office.

It took closer to an hour than ten minutes, but Detective Sergeant Alan Jones arrived at the Carter Global offices looking every bit as sharp as his reputation suggested, a young man in a well-cut suit who might have stepped out of a catalogue if not for the notebook he carried like a permanent extension of his hand.

"Mr Carter. Miss Carter." He nodded to each of them in turn, his accent unmistakably Northern beneath the polish. "I understand you were guests at Lord Slater's last night."

"We were," Michael said. "Our families have known each other for years. He was a friend."

It wasn't strictly true, not in the way Michael said it, but it bought them something, an assumption of grief that made a policeman more inclined to talk than to interrogate.

"I have to ask," Jones said, "whether you were aware of any drug use on his part. Recreational, prescribed, anything at all."

"Absolutely not," Michael said, and meant it. "He drank like it was going out of fashion, but drugs, no. Never. I'd stake a great deal on that."

"Then you'll understand why I'm here," Jones said. "Because he died of a heroin overdose. Which, by all accounts from everyone we've spoken to so far, doesn't fit the man at all."

"No," Nicky said, "it doesn't."

Jones made a note, then glanced up. "Anything unusual last night? Anyone who didn't belong?"

Nicky exchanged a look with Michael before answering. "Two men. Foreign, well-dressed, walked past us in the corridor near his library. Didn't so much as glance at either of us, went straight upstairs toward the private rooms."

"Would you recognise them again?"

"One of them, yes," Michael said. "I've already got a name, as it happens."

Jones's pen paused. "You've already got a name."

"Nico Zacardi. Bologna. It's in the file if you want it."

The detective studied him for a moment, the way a man does when he's trying to decide whether he's being helped or handled, and then made another note. "We found a letter in Lord Slater's jacket pocket," he said. "An invitation. To a meeting. Signed by an organisation calling itself Reborn."

Nicky's gaze flicked to Michael, who kept his expression carefully still.

"I don't suppose either of you know anything about that," Jones said.

"Not yet," Michael said. "But we're going to."

Jones closed his notebook, apparently satisfied for the moment, or at least unwilling to press further without more to go on. He left them his card, a request to be contacted the moment they learned anything useful, and the polite but firm instruction that Carter Global was not, under any circumstances, to conduct its own investigation into a police matter.

Michael waited until the lift doors had closed behind him before he spoke.

"Julie," he called through to the outer office. "Book Nicky a flight back to Milan. Today if you can manage it."

Nicky looked at him sharply. "And what about you?"

"I'll stay here. Somebody needs to look at this from London, and somebody needs to be back on the ground in Italy before whoever's behind Reborn realises we're looking at all." He met her eyes, and for a moment the easy banter of the night before was entirely gone, replaced by something quieter and more serious. "Watch yourself out there, Nic."

"I always do," she said, though they both knew that wasn't strictly true either.

Julie appeared in the doorway a few minutes later with a printed itinerary in hand. "There's a flight at four this afternoon," she said. "I can have you at Malpensa by evening."

Nicky took the sheet, glanced over it once, and folded it into her bag.

"Right," she said, standing. "Best go and pack, then."