‘Lockie,’ Kite replied, shaking his hand.
‘Good flight? Everything OK at Heathrow?’
‘Everything was fine, thank you.’
Kite felt a sense of unease, as if Childs was going to sit him down and explain that, regrettably, BOX 88 had decided to dispense with his services. Instead he said: ‘I’m to show you the way,’ and put his hand on Kite’s arm, guiding him towards a door in the side of the church. ‘Forgive all the cloak and dagger. There are a number of ways in and out of The Cathedral, but all first-timers get the full Monty. Bit of a tradition. Everything will make sense in just a moment.’
Childs unlocked the door using two separate keys, invited Kite to step forward, then studiously bent down to secure the locks again before continuing. They were now in a short corridor leading to an office. Inside the office Kite could see an antique wooden desk piled high with coloured booklets and magazines. There was a typewriter on the desk and a half-finished jug of orange squash next to some plastic mugs of various colours. Kite was reminded of Sunday school classes at the church in Portpatrick. Instead of going into the office, Childs unlocked a second door, again using two keys, and beckoned Kite to follow him.
They walked down a flight of stone steps into what Kite assumed was the crypt. The walls were constructed of grey breeze-blocks. There was no carpeting on the floor.
‘This way please,’ he said, walking towards a third locked door. The vicar knocked three times in quick succession, paused for a moment, then three times again. Kite now wondered if he was the object of an elaborate practical joke.
The sound of a bolt being drawn back. Kite waited as the heavy steel door was opened by someone on the other side.
‘You’ll be looked after from here,’ said Childs as a man of at least sixty wearing denim jeans, a collared shirt and tweed jacket appeared on the other side of the door, nodded at Kite and said: ‘Welcome.’
Like Janki before him, the vicar turned swiftly around and walked back in the direction from which he had come. Kite was lost for words. He simply said: ‘Bye then.’
‘This way, son,’ said the man. He had an Arthur Daley accent and a twinkle in his eye. ‘I’m Jock. Look after the place with my wife. They call her Miss Ellie, like the Ewings. Gettit? Only a short walk from here.’
‘Jock’ was the nickname Kite had been given in his first days at Alford. He wondered what ties this cheerful, sixty-something Cockney had to Scotland. They were now standing at one end of a long, underground bunker, presumably a relic of the war. The area was dimly lit but again neither cold nor damp. Kite was so bewildered by what was happening that he struggled even to respond to Jock’s greeting.
‘All this must be very unusual for you,’ he said, sensing Kite’s confusion. ‘Did the Reverend explain? We don’t always come in this way. Just on special occasions, star guests. Anthony as gatekeeper.’
They reached the far end of the bunker. Jock unlocked another steel door and Kite was shown into a well-lit, furnished foyer in what was presumably the basement of a building on the opposite side of the square to the church. Two men in suits were waiting for him. They did not introduce themselves, they were neither of them particularly welcoming nor cheerful. To break the tension, Kite said: ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume,’ but he had misjudged the moment; they looked at their shoes. He stepped into a lift with the three men and stood in the corner, his face flushed with embarrassment, wondering why Peele or Strawson had not come to meet him. When the doors eventually opened, he was invited to make his way along another long passage in what was evidently a modern multi-storey office block. Each of the rooms on either side of the passage was a large glass-fronted office with slatted blinds. There was a smell of instant coffee and cigarette smoke. Kite could hear the ringing of telephones and the chatter of a Telex. In one of the offices he glimpsed a map of the Middle East; in another, people were standing up and watching CNN on a colour television. By the time he had reached the door, Jock and the younger of the two men were no longer with him.
The older man knocked and walked straight into the room without waiting for an answer.
‘He’s here,’ he announced.
Seated in a chair by the window, looking out through a partially open Venetian blind, was Michael Strawson. Kite had expected as much. He felt that he was always walking into strange rooms in which the American was waiting for him.
‘Lockie,’ he said. He looked tired and distracted, as if Kite’s arrival had shaken him from deep contemplation. ‘How was your flight?’
‘Fine, thanks. Good to be here.’
‘So you met Sebastian?’
Kite was keen to claw back some of the face he had lost in the lift and said: ‘No. Actually, he didn’t introduce himself.’
Strawson seemed surprised by this and cut the man a look.
‘Oh. This is Sebastian Maidstone, my number two here in London. Sebastian began life in SIS, he’s across what’s been going on in France.’
‘What’s happened to Luc?’ Kite asked him. He was shaking Maidstone’s hand and had the sense of a controlling, calculating man who did not approve of him.
‘I’ll let Michael discuss that,’ Maidstone replied. He forced a smile onto his face which managed to be both inauthentic and powerfully condescending.
‘Give us five minutes, will you?’ Strawson told him.
Kite was relieved to see Maidstone leave the room. He had reminded him of a particularly starchy beak at Alford who had several times taken pleasure in sending Kite to see the headmaster for some minor infraction of the school rules. Strawson went back to his chair and invited Kite to sit with him
