It occurred to Luke that this was a fairly ironic choice of metaphor, since Hector had the key in his pocket, but he kept the thought to himself.
‘You can go back to the office after lunch, tell the Human Queen, thanks awfully but you’re happier serving out your time on the ground floor. Draw your pension, keep away from drug lords and colleagues’ wives, lie on your back and spit at the ceiling for the rest of your life. No bones broken.’
Luke managed a smile. ‘My problem is, I’m not very good at spitting at the ceiling,’ he said.
But nothing was going to stop Hector’s hard sell: ‘I’m offering you a one-way street to nowhere,’ he insisted. ‘If you sign up to this thing, you’re fucked all ways up. If we lose, we were two failed whistleblowers who tried to foul the nest. If we win, we’ll be the lepers of the Whitehall–Westminster jungle and all stations between. Not to mention the Service we do our best to love, honour and obey.’
‘This is all the information I get?’
‘For your own preservation and mine, yes. No nookie unless you come to the altar first.’
They were at the door. Hector had produced the key and was about to turn the lock.
‘And about Billy Boy,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s going to put the arm on you. Bound to. Stick-and-carrot stuff. “What’s that mad bugger Meredith been telling you? What’s he up to, where, who’s he hiring?” If that happens, talk to me first, then talk to me again afterwards. Nobody’s kosher in this thing. Everyone’s guilty till proven innocent. Deal?’
‘I’ve managed pretty well on the counter-interrogation stakes this far,’ Luke replied, feeling it was about time he asserted himself.
‘All the same,’ said Hector, still waiting for his answer.
‘Is it
‘Could be Russian. Could be
Did Luke ever
No, he did not.
Even as they sat down to what Hector happily described as the second-worst lunch in the world, first prize yet to be awarded, Luke was still, if he was true to himself, entertaining lingering doubts about whether he was being invited to join the sort of private war that the Service was from time to time led into against its better judgement, with disastrous results.
Hector’s opening shots at affable small talk did nothing to put these anxieties to rest. Seated in the outer regions of his club’s sepulchral dining room, at the table closest to the clatter of the kitchen, he treated Luke to a masterclass in the uses of indirect conversation in public places.
Over the smoked eel, he confined himself to inquiring after Luke’s family, incidentally getting the names of his wife and son right, a further sign to Luke that he had been reading his personal file. When the shepherd’s pie and school cabbage arrived, on a clanking silver trolley ferried by an angry old black man in a red hunting jacket, Hector passed to the more intimate but equally harmless topic of Jenny’s marriage plans – Jenny, it turned out, being his beloved daughter – which she had recently abandoned since, according to Hector, the chap she was involved with had turned out to be the most unmitigated shit:
‘Wasn’t love on Jenny’s part, it was addiction – same as Adrian except, thank God, it wasn’t drugs. Chap’s a sadist, she’s an old softie. Willing seller, docile buyer, we thought. We didn’t say anything, you can’t. Hopeless. Bought ’em a sweet little house in Bloomsbury, all fitted out. Vulgar bugger needed three-inch-deep wall-to-wall carpets, so Jenny needed ’em too. Hate ’em personally, but what else can you do? Couple of minutes’ walk from the British Museum, and just right for Trotsky and her D.Phil. But old Jenny rumbled the little turd, thank God, full marks to her. Good recession price, the landlord was broke, I shan’t lose money. Nice garden, not too big.’
The old waiter had reappeared with an incongruous jug of custard. Waved away by Hector, he muttered an imprecation and shuffled off to the next table twenty feet away.
‘Got a decent basement too, which you don’t often see these days. Pongs a bit. Not offensively. Used to be someone’s wine cellar. No party walls. Decent amount of traffic going past outside. Only luck she didn’t have a baby by the chap. They weren’t taking precautions, knowing Jenny.’
‘Sounds a blessing,’ said Luke politely.
‘Yes, well it could be, couldn’t it?’ Hector agreed, leaning forward in order to be sure of being heard beneath the din of the kitchen. By now Luke was half wondering whether Hector had a daughter at all. ‘I thought you might care to take the place over rent-free for a bit. Jenny won’t go near it, understandably, but it does rather need living in. I’ll give you the key in a minute. Remember Ollie Devereux, by the way? Son of a White Russian travel agent in Geneva and a fish-and-chip lady in Harrow? Looks about sixteen going on forty-five? Helped you out of a scrape when you fucked up a probe-mike job in that St Petersburg hotel a while back?’
Luke remembered Ollie Devereux well.
‘French, Russian, Swiss–German and Italian, if we need ’em, and the best back-door man in the business. You’ll be paying him cash. I’ll give you some of that too. You start at nine sharp tomorrow morning. Give you time to pack up your desk in Admin and take your pins and paper clips to the third floor. Oh yes, and you’ll be shacked up with a nice woman called Yvonne, other names irrelevant: professional bloodhound, butter wouldn’t melt, balls of steel.’
The silver trolley reappeared. Hector recommended the club’s bread-and-butter pudding. Luke said it was his favourite. And custard would be great this time, thank you. The trolley left in a cloud of geriatric fury.
‘And will you kindly consider yourself one of the chosen few, as of a couple of hours ago,’ Hector said, dabbing at his mouth with a moth-eaten damask napkin. ‘You’d be number seven on the list including Ollie, if there was a list. I don’t want an eighth without my say-so. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ said Luke this time.
So perhaps he had said ‘yes’ after all.
That afternoon, under the stony gaze of his fellow detainees in Administration, and reeling from the effect of vile club claret, Luke gathered together what Hector had called his pins and paper clips and transferred them to the seclusion of the third floor, where a dingy but acceptable room with a door labelled COUNTERCLAIM FOCUS did indeed await its theoretical occupant. He was carrying an old cardigan, and something moved him to hang it over the back of the chair, where it remained to this day, like the ghost of his other self whenever he dropped by of a Friday afternoon to say a cheery something to whomever he happened to bump into in the corridor, or put in his week’s fictitious expenses which he later religiously paid back into the Bloomsbury housekeeping account.
And the very next morning – he was just starting to sleep again in those days – he embarked on his first walk to Bloomsbury, exactly as he was walking there now, except that on the day of his maiden voyage, sheets of blinding rain were sweeping across London, obliging him to wear his neck-to-toe waterproofs and a hat.
First he had checked out the street – hardly a problem in the deluge, but there are some operational habits you can’t change, however much sleep you get and hard walking you do – one pass north to south, another from a side street feeding into the road bang opposite the target house, which was number 9.
And the house itself as pretty as Hector had promised, even in the downpour: a late-eighteenth-century flat- fronted terrace house of London stock brick on three floors with freshly painted white steps leading up to a newly painted door of royal blue with a fan window above it, a sash window either side of it, and basement windows to each side of the front steps.
But no separate outside basement staircase, Luke duly noted as he climbed the steps, turned the key and went inside, then stood on the doormat, first listening, then hauling off his drenched overclothes and extracting a pair of dry slip-ons from their carry-bag under his waterproof.
The hall richly carpeted in screaming deep-pile vermilion: legacy of the little turd that Jenny had rumbled just in time. An antique porter’s chair in strident new green hide. A period mirror, lavishly regilded. Hector had meant to
