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in aid of spina bifida. There are more shots over the page. Garza is mingling with the great and the good. The cast. The artistic director. The Arts Minister. Celebrities.
    The media nicknamed him ‘the Chairman’ years ago and the name has stuck. It’s almost like Garza plays up to it, dressing in charcoal grey suits, bright ties, and never being photographed without a cigar in his fist, unlit.
    Three years after Jane Lanfranchi died, Garza married a society girl with a double-barrelled surname whose father had inherited a pile in Wiltshire but had to sell it to the Government in lieu of death duties. Garza rescued the old man when the only thing he had left was a few hereditary peerages that he was trying to flog off to rich Americans. Garza took over one of the titles: the Earl of Ipswich. It must look impressive on a business card.
    Garza wasn’t always a wealthy man. He started out as a soldier - an officer, who specialised in logistics and transport. As such, he understood supply and demand and the importance of being able to move quickly.
    A lot of legends have grown up around the Chairman. Not all of them are true - but what’s not in dispute is how he made his first million. Garza helped liberate Kuwait in the first Gulf War and was on hand when the Iraqis were pushed back across the border.
    The world saw smoking convoys of vehicles, charred wreckage of luxury cars that had been looted from Kuwait and bombed by Allied planes as they fled across the desert. But that was only some of the stuff. Hundreds of luxury cars were abandoned. Untouched. Mercedes, BMWs, Jaguars and Bentleys were left sitting in the desert, the keys still in them.
    There was more. Convoys of trucks full of computers, washing machines, air conditioning units and Mont Blanc pens. The Iraqis looted everything that wasn’t bolted down and the Kuwaitis didn’t want the stuff back. Oil drilling equipment, earthmovers, yachts, helicopters, private jets - Garza found a way of shipping them out of Kuwait.
    He finished the job the Iraqis started. He looted Kuwait, stealing from rich oil sheiks, who were so relieved to have their country back they didn’t give a shit about a few missing cars or boats or planes.
    Nobody raised an eyebrow. Nobody turned a hair. The only hint of scandal came when a UK Sunday paper did an exposé about an armour-plated Mercedes, specially built for the Kuwaiti Minister for Trade, which somehow finished up under the hammer at a car auction in Croydon.
    For Ray Garza it was just the beginning. He left the army and soon he was moving massive shipments of hardware out of countries in the midst of war, famine or caught up in Africa’s perverse interpretation of ‘democracy’.
    Questions were asked in Parliament. MI6 took an interest. Nothing stuck. Whenever Garza looked shaky he managed to walk away. Witnesses disappeared. Cast iron cases crumbled. One Spanish middleman jumped off Waterloo Bridge with bricks in his pockets. A junior accountant changed his testimony, spent six months inside and that same year bought a sixty foot yacht.
    Meanwhile, Garza launched himself on society. He transformed himself into a patron of the arts, a media darling, the orchestrator of a thousand publicity stunts involving pretty girls in short skirts.
    Garza suddenly had a finger in every pie. They were La Maison pies. River Café Pies. Savoy Grill pies. They were the dog’s bollocks and the bee’s knees of pies. He was dining at the head table, supping with the great and the good and the morally bankrupt.
    His chequered past, the question marks over his business dealings, nothing seemed to matter. Not even the distant scandal of a rape allegation and a troubled teenager who threw herself off a tower block in Hackney.
    A receptionist interrupts. Ruiz looks up from the magazine. Dr Reines will see him now. He tosses the rag aside and stares at the newsprint on his fingers, wanting to wash it off.
    The doctor asks him to sit on the