a striped waistcoat and snazzy bow tie looked up and smiled from behind the small rosewood counter, then went back to adjusting the multitude of exotic foreign bottles lining the mirrored shelving. Thick, fluffy, claret-red carpet absorbed the sound of every footfall as Jeff walked in. He had to wrinkle his nose up against a sneeze; the conditioned air was chilly and clinically lifeless.
Nicole Marchant was waiting for him, sitting by herself at a table in the corner. With her locked-down hairstyle and Chanel business suit, the bar was her perfect milieu.
“I wasn’t entirely sure if you’d make it,” she said as he sat down opposite her.
“A no-show was not an option.”
Her gaze slipped over to Krober and two other Europol officers who shuffled around a table on the other side of the bar. The carpet even managed to soak up their noise.
“Are we going to have an audience?” she asked in an arch tone.
“They know this is a private meeting.”
“Our company keeps a suite on the first floor.”
“That sounds perfect.”
She stood up.
Jeff followed her out into the lobby. He was sure it had never been this easy before.
16. TWILIGHT HOUSE
SUE BAKER WAS AN ONLY CHILD, and arrived late into her parents’ lives. Her mother was over forty-five when she was born, her father a great deal older. As such she was loved intensely, spoiled rotten, and guarded with extreme jealousy. While she was a child she considered such devotion to be wonderful, leading to a personality that the family’s politer friends called precocious. Only when she began moving through adolescence did problems with such attention-surplus really start to develop. In any other girl her particular brand of self-centered egotism might have fired a standard teenage rebellion that eventually burned itself out, as is the way of such phases. Unfortunately for Sue, she was born beautiful. Standard was never going to be an option in her life.
Her first fashion show booking was at age fourteen, to the head-shaking dismay of the Data Mail editorial (complete with hyperlinks to pictures of the event), which questioned the moral validity of such child labor exploitation on behalf of middle England. Money poured in as her career skyrocketed. There were no restraints anymore, no governors imposed on her behavior. She was dated by Europe’s aristocratic heirs and the sons of
Not that Sue had to worry about longevity. The day after her sixteenth birthday party her agency checked her into a private Swiss detox and rehab clinic. That was the first of four such sessions in the next three years, to the horror of her heartbroken mother. Gorgeous she might have been, but there were always prettier, younger girls hot for their shot at the top. For the fashion industry, Sue had stopped being news and was now bad news. She didn’t even have money left to cushion her fall. Taxes, managers, agency fees, and her head-on lifestyle with its dangerously large drug habit had consumed that. Her mother had to cash in one of her small pension funds to pay the clinic’s final bill, which meant she could no longer afford to live in the cozy country cottage her husband had left her. The Data Mail wasn’t even interested in paying for an article on a fallen wild child. At nineteen and a half she was washed up. Her entire life had been lived and was now finished; she couldn’t imagine what to do next. Then she met Jeff Baker, and three weeks later they were married.
Jeff paid for the Mulligan Residential Care Hall in Uppingham, where her mother now lived, a private home with round-the-clock nursing and hotel-style accommodation. It had been written into their marriage contract.
Sue visited at least once a week. It was a level of devotion that she fully acknowledged grew out of the guilt for her wayward teenage years. Nonetheless, she never let a week slip.
Mulligan Hall was on the town’s outskirts, its broad grounds bordering the A47 bypass. It had been built as a hotel thirty years ago, situated so that its residents could benefit from splendid views across the rolling countryside. Since then the town had expanded, surrounding it with an estate of low-cost social housing: almost identical yellow-brick boxes with silvered thermoglass windows and shiny black solar cell roof panels. The golf ball–size spheres of police District Surveillance Scheme cameras peeped out from the eaves, as ubiquitous as twentieth- century TV aerials, providing multiple coverage of the estate’s streets. A high brick wall covered in GM thorn-ivy separated the hall’s grounds from those of its neighbors.
Sue’s Mercedes DX606 coupe slid silently past the open gates. She parked in her usual spot in the shade of a big sycamore tree and walked into the lobby. The young receptionist looked up as she entered. “I think your mother’s in the garden room, Mrs. Baker.”
“Thanks.”
“Um.” The girl was coloring. “The director said to ask if you could see him when you’re finished. If you have the time.”
“That’s fine,” Sue assured her. It was an unusual request; she couldn’t think what the director wanted.
As a hotel Mulligan Hall hadn’t lasted ten years; bankruptcy arrived in the wake of global fuel rises and the increasing dominance of the datasphere. Transport and its related industries were badly hit by the societal, political, and technological changes of the new century. But the building did not go unused for long. Europe’s badly skewed demographics were giving rise to a vast demand for care facilities as the continent’s population aged and the birth rate continued its gradual decline.
In England, care homes run by the local councils were put under greater and greater pressure as the number of residents continued to increase year after year. No matter how much money Government allocated, there was never enough to provide full service, and care-staff shortages had been acute for as long as Sue could remember.
Mulligan Hall was strictly for those who could afford it, for which Sue was profoundly grateful. She couldn’t stand the idea of her delicate mother in one of the council homes. Walking down the clean, well-decorated central corridor, she could almost believe the Hall was still a hotel. It was only the function of rooms that had altered. The cocktail bar was now a physiotherapy clinic, the snooker room had become a massage and reflexology center, while the original indoor swimming pool had been greatly extended to provide all sorts of hydrotherapy. Upstairs, the entire third floor was given over to a specialist ward for genoprotein treatments. Best of all, it didn’t smell like an old folks’ home.
The garden room was a big semicircular space with tall glass walls and Victorian-style black and white marble floor tiles. Ladies now too old to lunch sipped their afternoon tea as they sat around in the room’s cane furniture. Sue’s mother, Karen, was curled up in a broad winged chair that faced the lily pond outside. The tea tray on the glass-topped table beside her hadn’t been touched.
Sue walked over to her, ignoring the stares and knowing nods from the other residents. She knelt down beside the chair, and touched her mother’s arm. “Hello, Mummy.”
Karen’s attention wavered from the small screen, where she was watching Nicholas Parsons asking the questions on
“Susan, hello.” Karen gave her daughter a slightly puzzled look.
Sue picked the remote off the table and turned the volume down. The way genoprotein treatments had stabilized her looks in her midtwenties seemed to be a constant source of confusion to the old woman now. At least Karen had recognized her today. The last few years had seen a steady deterioration in her condition. The biomedical companies liked to claim that they’d defeated Alzheimer’s disease with their treatments and therapies.
