At Nice airport he telephoned his mother, using the operational number he had dialled in order to fly the signal a day earlier. The same answering machine picked up. Kite left a brief message saying that he was flying home early, giving the number of the British Airways flight and the time it was scheduled to land. He hoped that the Falcons were listening, but could not shake the feeling that he had been used by BOX and now abandoned. Martha told him that her brother was coming to pick her up and that they could give him a lift into town if his mother wasn’t available. She asked where Kite was going to stay. He lied and said that his mother had rented a flat in Chelsea. He bought Martha lunch at a café in the airport, picked up a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Jim Beam in Duty-Free, and slept most of the way to Heathrow.
There were no delays at Passport Control. They collected their luggage and made their way out of the baggage hall. Martha’s older brother, a tall, dark-haired Morrissey clone in black jeans, Doc Martens and a moth-eaten turtleneck, was waiting for her in Arrivals wearing a look of studied apathy. Kite assumed that he knew what had happened in Vence, but he offered no evident signs of sympathy nor showed any interest in his sister’s well-being.
‘Jack, this is Lockie. He was staying at the house. Can we give him a lift?’
Kite shook Jack’s clammy, indifferent hand and looked around for his mother. There was no sign of her. All around them people were hugging, yelping and kissing. A few bored taxi drivers were leaning on a metal rail holding up signs with names scrawled on them in marker pen. ANDREW & JAMES RAMSAY. MR V. BLACKETT. DYLAN PATHMAN SPENCE. Kite looked along the rail. Beneath a poster advertising Concorde flights to New York, a Sikh man in his mid-fifties was reading a copy of the Financial Times. When he looked up and saw Kite, he produced a small rectangular card on which he had written: ‘MR L. KITE’.
‘Ah, my mum’s sent a taxi,’ he said, his spirits instantly lifted. He waved at the driver and indicated that he would come over as soon as he had said goodbye to his friends.
‘I’ll call you tonight,’ he told Martha.
‘Or I can ring you,’ she said. ‘What’s the number at the flat where you’re staying?’
Kite said that he didn’t know. They hugged one another and kissed briefly, aware of Martha’s brother standing only feet away moodily smoking a roll-up and clicking his tongue to the rhythm of a song in his head. Kite waved Martha off in the hope that he would see her within a few days, as soon as BOX 88 had concluded their debriefing. He made his way over to the driver.
‘Master Lachlan?’
‘Lockie, yes.’ He didn’t like being called ‘Master’. It reminded him of flying south from Scotland as an unaccompanied minor, British Midland stewardesses fussing over him at the end of the school holidays.
‘I am Janki. The Financial Times is a very interesting newspaper. My car is this way.’
Kite had the good sense not to enquire how Janki had known what flight he was on; BOX 88 would have heard Rosamund booking the tickets on the phone. Instead he asked where he was being taken.
‘The Cathedral, of course,’ Janki replied, turning and catching Kite’s eye. ‘I understand this is to be your first time?’
57
If Kite had been entertaining any thoughts of quitting in the aftermath of Luc’s arrest, they evaporated as soon as he learned that he was to be welcomed into the inner sanctum of BOX 88. The unmoored, rootless feeling that had dogged him all summer vanished. His period of probation was over; he had finally been accepted as a bona fide intelligence officer. The operation in France may have ended in chaos, but his own role in it was surely blameless. Peele and Strawson had seen what Kite could offer. He had done what had been asked of him. That Eskandarian had been kidnapped by the exiles was the fault of Carl and Peele and their associates, not of Lachlan Kite. If they had been given advance warning about the kidnapping and alerted him, perhaps Kite might even have been able to do something to prevent it.
‘Do you know this part of London?’ Janki asked as they were coming off the A4 at Hammersmith.
‘Not really,’ Kite replied. ‘I’m from Scotland. Whenever I stay in London, it’s usually further east, in Kensington and Chelsea.’
‘Ah yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Where the Alford boys live.’
They parked in front of a church in a square that Kite did not recognise. He got out of the car and looked around for a street sign, but couldn’t see one.
‘Just in here,’ said Janki, locking the car and leading him towards the church.
They walked up a short flight of steps and the driver knocked on the door. Without waiting for a response, he turned the handle and indicated to Kite that he should go inside. Kite moved forward, waiting for Janki to join him. It was dark and cold in the vestibule. To his surprise, he saw that the driver had turned around and was already walking back in the direction of the car.
‘I just wait here?’ he called out.
Janki did not respond. Kite turned and peered down the aisle, wondering if Peele or Strawson were waiting for him in one of the pews. There appeared to be nobody in the building save for a rotund, middle-aged vicar standing at the altar within touching distance of a vast silver cross. He was wearing clerical robes and shifting from foot to foot.
‘You must be Lachlan,’ he said as Kite approached
