Don and Blake’s meeting with Perkins and Clarice Dow

Don Challenor and Blake’s meeting with Keith Perkins and Clarice Dow turns a tentative lead about the Nightingale account into a negotiated exchange—and exposes the gap between their knowledge of Jack Harkness’s past and the investigators’ knowledge of his business affairs. Its decisive disclosure is the name behind Luscinia: Jane Glasson, whose disappearance and possible connection to Holly Walsh’s treatment give the inquiry a personal thread running through the opaque financial case against Harkness.

Arranging the exchange

Holly Walsh gives Don Challenor Perkins’s number, and Don makes the call while he and Blake are in the New Forest. He proposes a face-to-face discussion about the Nightingale account, stressing that he and a friend have information potentially connected to Perkins’s investigations. He offers an exchange rather than a request for confidential details, and identifies Blake as his companion. When Perkins asks where they are, Don says they are in Lyndhurst; they settle on Fleet Services on the M3, an hour later. Don identifies himself by saying he will arrive in a seventies MG.

The call is presented through Blake’s first-person account: she reads Don’s expression before he tells her that he has got something wrong again. Yet the practical outcome runs in their favour. Don ends the call with a heavy sigh and tells Blake that Perkins has agreed to meet. Their discussion has turned an uncertain approach into a specific appointment, with a location, a time, and an agreed reason to talk.

First terms and guarded introductions

At Fleet Services, Don and Blake get out and walk around the back of a Volvo. Perkins looks at them without speaking until Don addresses him; Perkins acknowledges Don and Blake by name. The spare introduction gives way to a wary negotiation. Don has inferred that Perkins was hired by creditors of Harkness to look for their money. Perkins confirms the broad outline, clarifying that he works for a lawyer representing smaller creditors, including subcontractors, and has nothing to do with Quintagler Industries.

When Perkins asks what the pair want, Blake answers with the single name Luscinia. Perkins refuses to discuss the details of his inquiries and offers a possible ex gratia payment if their information proves useful. Don answers that they are not trying to make money from what they know. The distinction matters to the meeting’s terms: the pair are presenting themselves as holders of a lead who want reciprocal information, not as informants seeking a fee. Perkins’s response nonetheless keeps the exchange bounded by his own control over what he will disclose.

What each side knows

Don and Blake explain their proposal by separating their respective knowledge. They know more than Perkins and Dow about Harkness’s early life in Cornwall; Perkins and Dow, they acknowledge, know more about the later business career. Don asks them to talk through that history. Perkins leaves the dates and details to Dow, identifying her as the expert on them.

Dow describes Harkness as John William Harkness, known as Jack, born on February 29, 1956. He attended Truro School and St John’s College, Cambridge, on scholarships, and graduated with a first-class degree in Archaeology and Anthropology. Dow says that between 1978 and 1981 he was effectively off the grid, then reappeared in Switzerland as personal assistant to Lenore Furgler. Furgler had recently inherited control of her father’s Basel-based pharmaceutical company, Furgler Gesellschaft. During the 1980s, Harkness gained a seat on its board with responsibility for company strategy. Dow’s account presents both his rapid rise and the family’s division over him: Furgler trusted him, while her sons did not.

The information exchange also brings the scale and uncertainty of the financial case into view. According to Dow, Quintagler alleges that Harkness diverted funds over several years to subsidiaries of shell companies he ultimately owned; those companies are also alleged to have supplied bribes to doctors. She emphasizes that these are allegations, not established findings. The alleged bribes account for only a fraction of the money said to have been taken, and the investigators do not know where the rest went. The shell companies are based in tax havens with limited accounting and disclosure requirements, leaving Perkins and Dow without a clear trail.

Dow distinguishes the Nightingale account from that larger network. It was opened in London and, in her description, is a one-off involving comparatively small sums. Perkins is preoccupied by the unresolved question of what happened to the billions Quintagler says Harkness may have taken: what he bought, or what he used the money to finance. Blake tests whether the possibility is that he funded something enormous and still unknown. The suggestion is not an answer to the case, but it reveals the scale of the investigators’ uncertainty: the money’s alleged movement is visible in outline, while its ultimate purpose remains obscure.

Naming Jane Glasson

Don’s account of Luscinia supplies the meeting’s most consequential disclosure. He says that Luscinia met Harkness in Cornwall in the early 1990s, disappeared while at university in 1996, and would now be forty-three. He identifies her as a schoolfriend of Holly Walsh and explains the pair’s suspicion that she has been using the Nightingale account to pay for Holly’s Ditrimantelline treatment. Clarice tests the logic rather than accepting it: the woman would have to be connected to Harkness in a way the pair do not yet understand, and perhaps still connected to him. Don’s reply makes the proposed link conditional on the account actually using Harkness’s money.

The pair also make clear that they want the investigators’ information about Harkness, not just a judgment on their own theory. Don proposes that Perkins and Dow provide what they know in return for the Cornwall history he and Blake possess. Perkins agrees to broker any further information fairly and asks for Luscinia’s real name. Don gives it: Jane Glasson.

The response is notably less affirmative than the disclosure might have promised. Perkins considers Jane’s involvement in Harkness’s present life unlikely and doubts that Harkness had anything to do with her disappearance. Dow is more measured, but sees no practical investigative route to the proposed connection. For Jane to have channelled Nightingale money to Holly, she would need to be an insider at Harkness Pharmaceuticals; verifying that would require personnel records the investigators have no means of accessing. She warns that the lead may be a non-starter. The meeting therefore produces a name and a plausible question, not confirmation: Jane’s identity clarifies who Luscinia is, while her role in the account remains unproved.