After almost three weeks of this he told his mother that he needed a break and caught the train back to Euston. |He checked in to ‘Hotel Bonnard’, his nickname for the house in Onslow Square, and spent three days partying with Xavier, getting drunk at The Fridge and buying more Ecstasy in Mud Club. Kite could find no trace of Alison Hackford in either venue and decided to turn up unannounced at her flat on the final night of the holidays. When a man answered the door, Kite pretended to be a Jehovah’s Witness and scarpered.
The next day he was back in his house at Alford, a schoolboy of eighteen pulling on his tailcoat for the final time. As the term progressed, Kite played cricket for the second XI, saw plenty of Billy Peele, spent a long weekend packing up his belongings at Killantringan and sat nine A-level papers in the space of three weeks. By the middle of June, his five-year encounter with Alford College was over.
As if he had been waiting for the whistle to sound on his pupil’s final exam, Peele left a note in Kite’s pigeonhole congratulating him on finishing his A levels and inviting him to a celebratory dinner at Colenso’s, an upmarket Italian restaurant in Windsor. Kite was surprised to discover that no other boy had been invited; perhaps Peele intended to organise a series of farewell meals of which Kite’s was the first. He duly obtained permission to attend the dinner, put on a sports jacket and a pair of jeans and walked the short distance down Alford High Street into Windsor.
He had passed Colenso’s many times in five years but had never eaten there. A pretty, glass-fronted building with views over the Thames, the restaurant was typically frequented by day trippers and elderly couples taking their Alford grandsons out for lunch. A lone oarsman was piloting a single skull towards Queen’s Eyot, a family of swans moving lazily in his slipstream. Kite had been told to arrive at seven but was five minutes late. Unable to spot Peele at any of the tables, he checked the reservation with a waitress and was surprised to be told that Peele had booked a private room for four guests. Removing his jacket, Kite followed the waitress up a short flight of stairs and was shown to the door of a small dining room overlooked by Windsor Castle.
‘Just in here, sir,’ she said.
Sitting on the far side of a circular wooden table covered in a white cloth and a vase of flowers, was Billy Peele. Beside him, to Kite’s astonishment, was the young black woman he had helped on the Stranraer train. Next to her, slimmer and clean-shaven and rising to his feet as Kite walked in, was Michael Strawson.
‘Lachlan,’ he said, dropping a napkin onto the table. ‘Congratulations on completing your exams. May I formally introduce you to my associate, Rita Ayinde. I believe you two know one another from Scotland. Billy and I are old friends. I hope this isn’t too much of a surprise. We’ve invited you here today because we wanted to talk to you about something.’
25
‘It was so much easier with your friend,’ said Torabi, taking the gun from his waistband and laying it on top of the pile of boxes. The weight caused the boxes to topple slightly and they came to rest against the wall. ‘Xavier was an addict. He was weak. He wanted to talk, he wanted to tell the truth about what happened. All I had to do was take him to lunch, buy him a bottle of wine, some coke. Next thing you know, he’s back at my apartment opening up like a canary.’
‘It’s singing,’ said Kite.
‘What’s that, buddy?’
‘It’s “singing” like a canary. Not “opening up”.’
‘You think I give a shit?’
Kite felt the wire around his wrists. He looked at the gun resting on top of the boxes, no more than six feet away. Since the call with Isobel he had been struggling to fight a mood of fatalism which had settled on him.
‘He obviously didn’t tell you what you needed to know or I wouldn’t be here.’ Xavier was dead. Kite had nothing left with which to mourn him. The only thing of importance now was saving Isobel. He had to get off the ship. He was convinced that he had been followed by MI5 and that a full-scale manhunt was underway. Torabi’s decision to keep him on the boat suggested that he was not aware of the threat. Either that or he was certain that Kite’s location could never be discovered.
‘It’s not a great look for a guy of forty-eight, is it?’ the Iranian continued. ‘To be addicted to cocaine, to alcohol, to a life of what you can only describe as self-indulgence. To be incapable of saying no to yourself. To have so little control of your own mind, your own appetites. A man should have conquered his demons by the time he is middle-aged. He should have come to terms with himself.’
‘I didn’t realise you were such a philosopher.’
Kamram was standing behind Kite, occasionally applying pressure to his forearms so that the wire dug deeper into his wrists.
‘My wife is pregnant.’
‘I know! When is the child due, Lockie?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Then tell me about Eskandarian.’
‘I’ve already said. I don’t have the special information you need. Xavier knew more about what happened that summer than I do. It was his house, his catastrophe. I was just a guest.’
‘A guest who was a spy for MI6.’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
At least they appeared to have no knowledge of BOX 88. That was one small consolation. Torabi picked up a sheet of paper from behind the television. His physical movements were still eerily smooth and precise. Standing with his legs slightly apart, his back straight, he proceeded to read from the document in a manner
