‘So what’s this all about, Sloppy?’
‘Simple. The country’s in a total fucking mess and we might just be able to do something about that. We’ve got to find out if anyone’s making money from this siege nonsense. Need to see if there are any trails, then discover where they lead.’
‘A wild-goose chase.’
‘I don’t chase wild geese, I shoot them. Saves all the trouble.’
‘It can’t be done, not just like that. There are procedures, protocols for this sort of thing, and you know that we of all people have to work by the rules.’
‘Rules? There are no rules for this one. It’s not just money, there are people’s lives on the line here, so bend the bloody rules, break them, if necessary, whatever it takes, so long as we get the answers we need.’
‘This isn’t just one of your PR stunts, it comes from the top, right?’
‘Look,’ Sloppy insisted, directing their attention to the hostages huddled together on the television screen, ‘right now there is no top. No one to cuddle us or cover our arses. And I can’t promise there’ll be invitations to tea and biscuits at the palace next week, because right now we can’t be sure there’ll even be a bloody palace. We can only do what we think is right. It’s called using our initiative.’
The doors of the lift sighed as they opened, spilling another couple of colleagues into the room. They were carrying large insulated satchels over their shoulders.
‘I can’t help you in this,’ Sloppy said. ‘You are the people who know what to look for and which buttons to press on your shiny screens. Do what you have to do, call up friends and call in favours, get them out of bed or away from whichever bar they’re propping up, but whatever we do, it has to be done now. Tonight.’
‘And if there are any repercussions, you’ll get us out of jail, will you?’
‘I can only promise you two things,’ Sloppy replied. ‘That if any of you lands in the shit, you won’t be alone. I’ll be right there along with you. The only other thing I’ll promise is an endless supply of what I consider to be the finest curry in town.’
The two recent arrivals opened the satchels and the aroma of Indian cooking began to attack them all.
‘So how about it?’ Sloppy asked.
For a moment there was silence. These were men and women, mostly young, whose professional lives ran by clearly set rules; they were the police force of the City who worked by means of methodical, painstaking inquiry. No one paid them to rush about taking initiatives. Outside the windows of their office, the world was dark, the City skyscrapers left abandoned to the cleaners and the night owls. It seemed almost surreal. Most of them were desperately undecided, waiting to see in which direction the wind would blow.
Eventually, a grumbling voice broke the silence. ‘Whatever. Anyway, my ruddy mother-in-law’s visiting,’ it complained.
‘You wouldn’t have a veggie biryani in there by any chance, would you?’ one of the younger women asked.
‘What time is it in the Caymans anyway?’ another demanded.
‘I just want to make sure no one gets curry on my keyboard,’ insisted another as he threw his coat over the back of his chair. The others began to move and, like an old steam locomotive, puffing and complaining, the enterprise got underway.
10.36 p.m.
There are many pieces that go together to make up a disaster. Some of these pieces may be small but, nevertheless, can be of crucial significance. One such piece was Levrenti Valentin Bulgakov. He was in his late sixties, a swollen blot of a man with a decidedly delicate heart condition who lived in exile in Islington. That, apparently, was where former KGB officers went to die when they ran out of secrets and grew perilously short of friends.
Bulgakov was an old hand, with a track record stretching across much of Central Asia and the Middle East, but he’d made his reputation in Afghanistan. He’d arrived there in the late Seventies when the Russians were interfering and creating such a godless mess in the hope that when it was all over they would be the only big beasts left in town. The recipe had been simple. Find conflicting loyalties and stir vigorously. Play one faction off against the other, one tribe against the next. Bulgakov had been at the heart of it, working out of the Residency and sowing disorder everywhere he stepped. In the end the chaos the Soviets created grew so intense that it surprised even themselves, and they had been forced to send in their own troops. The 108th Motorised Rifle Division arrived in Kabul on Christmas Day 1979, where they found Bulgakov waiting to welcome them. He’d even done his own bit for the invasion by shooting the Afghan head of counter-intelligence, putting a bullet through his back while the man poured him tea. After that, things had got really untidy. The Soviet Army stayed for a decade, during which time thousands of villages were destroyed, a million Afghans killed, four million made refugees, and somewhere along the way they even managed to kill the US ambassador. As Bulgakov was fond of saying, you couldn’t break heads without cracking a few skulls. Confusion reigned throughout the country, and Bulgakov was in his element.
Then that treacherous impostor Gorbachov had arrived and hijacked the Soviet system, and called the invasion of Afghanistan a mistake. Just that. And he made them withdraw, the job only half done, tails between legs. At that point the blame game had begun, and all those who had been associated with the invasion became non-persons. Overnight Levrenti Valentin had gone from being folk-hero to fall guy.
Some of his class had made the transition with little difficulty, transferring effortlessly from the KGB to its young sister, the FSB, or moving into banking or oil or mineral exploitation and cleaning up in the post-Soviet privatisation jamboree. They became oligarchs and hideously rich in the process. But although Bulgakov had garnered huge experience he had found few friends, and not just because he was a paedophile. He wanted to remain loyal to a system that no longer existed, and was too slow to accept the changes going on around him, let alone profit from them. Eventually, in despair, he had packed his bags along with a caseload of sensitive papers and followed the exodus to London where several of his old colleagues had already made the journey. But the stupid English! Although they were polite and professed gratitude for his offer when he opened his case of intelligence files, Mitrokhin had got there first, his trunks stuffed to the lid with some of the finest secrets the West had ever seen. They had no need for Bulgakov, so they had thanked him for his kindness and shown him the door. They’d offered no appointment, no pension, grew embarrassed when he was forced to raise the matter himself. The only thing they let him have was a residency permit, rather like a dog licence; no one had the heart to kick him out. So he had stayed, and been forced to find another route to salvation.
Although he had few friends, he was a man of many contacts and he had hung around the margins of the tsarist courts set up in exile by youngsters like Ambramovich and Berezovsky and Gusinsky. He’d used his knowledge to gain a little leverage and make a few millions here and there in those early days, but he had never been accepted as one of the band and when, inevitably, the information he had grew stale and lost its force, they had no qualms about discarding him. As the years passed, Bulgakov had grown old and sick. He had also grown implacably envious. His looks deserted him, his sexual prowess let him down, his breath turned sour, he found himself down to his last few millions and that, in his mind, seemed like punishment. He found the injustice of it all rubbed in over breakfast every morning as he scoured his newspaper, and after dinner every evening when he scanned the Internet, reading about the rich kids, the new guys on the block, none of whom had done half of what he had. He couldn’t even read the football results without feeling pain. Bulgakov believed he deserved more than these upstarts could ever dream of and, as he fretted, he developed an old man’s sense of unquenchable rage.
Yet the means of his retribution was at hand. During these last hours he had switched his attentions between television screen and Internet link, watching both the siege and the markets. And as he saw the chaos, hi
s hopes soared. Never again would they turn their backs on Levrenti Valentin Bulgakov! He was about to show them, visit his revenge upon the richest men in Europe, humiliate them, and make sure they would remember him. The prospect made him even more breathless than usual.
He hurried to his appointment that night by the bridge over the Regent’s Canal, popping peppermints for his breath, chuckling to himself. He was sweating when he arrived, his eyes glassy bright with a mixture of celebration and expectation. He knew he wouldn’t live for ever, but what time was left to him would put right all the many wrongs that had been done to him. He could settle scores, buy friends and afford the prettiest boys in the business; even if he was no longer able to join in himself, he could still watch the show.
It was with such happy thoughts as these that he met his contact at the shadow-dimmed steps that led down to the canal, and it was with these thoughts that Levrenti Valentin Bulgakov died. His body came to rest at the bottom of the steps. It didn’t really matter that his heart couldn’t stand the shock; the fall alone would have killed him.
10.38 p.m.
Harry was still sitting on his doorstep, hugging his knees to his chest like some homeless vagrant trying to keep himself warm. The cold had long since travelled up through his body but he ignored it; there was too much else to occupy him, for the longer he sat on his own doorstep, the more he realised he didn’t belong here. He didn’t know if he belonged anywhere any more. His father had once joked that the reason Harry was an only child was because he was an experiment that had failed, yet as much as Harry had tried to slough off the banter, it had struck home and struck deep. Perhaps that’s what had driven him all these years, an unconscious attempt to win the approval of his dead father, a desire that he should belong somewhere. People assumed he was entirely self-contained, a man who lived off his many successes, yet they had no idea how much he had always needed others.
Bloody Mel. She wasn’t home, and wasn’t coming home, no matter how much he tried to persuade himself otherwise. The light hanging above the door was off, and it was a habit of hers to leave it blazing to greet her when she was coming back late. The only light came from lamps inside the house that were part of the security system, someone pretending to be home. He sat in darkness, and punished himself for being a fool.
There was a pub further down the mews. It was a place of too much kitsch and too little change for Harry’s liking yet it was always busy, crowded with estate agents and advertising wannabes, and as he sat on his darkened doorstep, two customers tumbled out and on to the cobbles. They were clearly the worse for wear, laughing, clinging to each other for support. The mews had never been the best-lit stretch of town and the occasional old-fashioned street lamps cast long and forbidding shadows, yet there was enough light for Harry to see them, a young woman and an older man, and judging by the way they fell upon each other they were unlikely to be father and daughter. An embrace upon the cobbles quickly turned into desperate fumbling in a doorway where they thought they could remain unobserved; they didn’t see Harry almost opposite. The woman was complaining in a whisper that he was ruining her blouse, but soon there was nothing more than giggles that turned to urgent moans, and lumps of pale flesh peering out of the shadows.
As Harry observed their struggle, he found himself feeling nothing, neither titillation nor contempt, just an emptiness inside. It was far from being the first time he had watched people having sex; trips to the seedier basements of Soho had been a rite of passage at Sandhurst while his intelligence work in Northern Ireland had required him to witness far more than this, yet as he watched this ageless act taking place in the doorway of an art gallery, he had only one thought throbbing insistently inside his head. Where the hell are you, Mel? Where are you with my child?
He couldn’t see – and didn’t want to see – everything that was going on in the shadows, but he couldn’t miss the girl stretching out her fingers until they curled around a plant that was growing in one of the gallery’s luxuriant window boxes, grasping it ever tighter until, with one final involuntary spasm and a strangled cry that caught in her throat, the stem was wrenched out by its roots. It made a hell of a mess.
For a moment there was silence, nothing but panting, but then Harry could hear complaints. About the damp earth and bits of twig that had got everywhere, the fact that he hadn’t even bothered taking off his bloody raincoat, and the tear in her blouse. Soon the pair grew sullen, wrestling with zips and buttons and buckles once more, and he was muttering about finding her a taxi.
‘And twenty quid,’ Harry called softly.
The couple froze; only now did they see him on his doorstep.
‘Twenty quid,’ Harry repeated, ‘that should cover it, for the plant.’
‘Fuck you,’ the man snarled, until Harry rose slowly but purposefully to his feet. The man caught the sense of menace. ‘Oh, what the hell,’ he grunted, struggling as he dug into a pocket while at the same time trying to fasten his belt. Eventually he emerged with a note that he stuffed through the letterbox. ‘Bloody do-gooders,’ he muttered as he made a final adjustment to his clothing.
‘But cheap at the price, wouldn’t you say, darling?’ the girl declared in a refined accent that tinkled like a chandelier in Knightsbridge. ‘Buck up, the poor fellow’s only jealous. Probably hasn’t had a good shag in months.’
Which had been true, until last night . . .
‘Anyway, time for me to be away,’ she announced. She linked her arm through his and dragged him away, her hips swinging provocatively as they left Harry behind in the shadows. He watched them disappear. She would soon be home, unlike Melanie. Where the hell was she? And what had their marriage been about? Perhaps their life together amounted to little more than what he had just seen, something that was animalistic, essentially mindless, and over. This morning he had been in love with her, and now . . . all that was left was an empty light. This was pointless, she wasn’t coming back, not this evening, not ever. Three wasted years. And he wondered how many notes the lawyers would make him pour through her letterbox as a mark of his gratitude. Considerably more than twenty quid a pop, he suspected, but none of that would matter if only – if, please God – he could save the child.
He was standing in front of his house taking one final look at his old life when a car swung into the mews, its headlights white, blinding. For a moment his spirits rose in hope . . . But, no, not Mel; it was his police driver.
‘They need you, sir,’ the driver called through the window. ‘The commander implied it was rather urgent.’
He shouldn’t be here, he had to get back. Leave all this behind. He climbed in, and the driver put his foot down.
11.00 p.m.
It wasn’t until that moment that Celia Blessing realised you could hear the tolling of Big Ben from inside the chamber. Up to this point she had always been distracted, but now everything was so quiet, with people talking in nothing but whispers, that she could hear the bell as a dull, distant thudding, like the closing of a castle door.
‘I do so love this place,’ she said distractedly, ‘but you never have, have you, Archie?’
He grunted. ‘Always struck me that the Lords is the last desperate resort of people who’ve got no future nor even much of an interesting past. We only get the second-class crooks in here. The top class all go off and live somewhere warm.’
‘You’re such a smelly old cynic,’ she said, but without malice.
‘Cynicism’s been a good friend to me. Rarely let me down.’
‘Oh, why are we here?’ she sighed.
‘I reckon, lass, because neither of us have much else better to do.’
Sadly, Celia realised he was right. She had come to that lonely stage in life when she spent too much time looking back. It was all very well growing old disgracefully and running your umbrella along life’s railings, but when you’d annoyed as many people as possible and told yourself you’d thoroughly enjoyed it, you still had to return home to a cold hearth and deal
with it on your own. That’s why you spent your evenings looking back, surrounded by memories, not because you were eaten up by the warming comforts of nostalgia but because you were becoming afraid to look too far forward. Old age was a little like being confronted by a rebellion in the colonies. You simply closed your eyes and refused to recognise it, until you were forced to. Then you declared that you would give in gracefully, and hated every joint-aching minute of it.
‘What’s wrong with you, Archie?’
He sniffed. Typical of a bloody woman to be so direct. No man would ever come out with something so blunt. ‘I hate bloody sandwiches,’ he muttered.
‘No, really. What’s wrong with you?’
He paused before he spoke again. He’d had no practice in doing this, there had been no one else to tell. ‘Got cancer. Inoperable. Maybe six months.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Made my will. Cats’ home included. No children, you see. Damned body never was any good. That’s why the wife left me all those years ago.’
‘Hang on, what about . . . ?’
‘Sonya? How desperate do you think a man has to be to try it on with a money-grubbing little tart like her? The open arms of aspiration and the parted legs of desperation, that’s what one of the press buggers wrote, and I fell into both. Truth be told, I actually enjoyed the headlines. Did my street cred no end of good. Stood me a whole month’s worth of free drinks in my local.’ His face brightened. ‘You see, lass, there’s always some good to be found even in the stickiest situation.’
‘Evidently your wife didn’t think so.’
‘Oh, but I got my own back on the bastard she ran off with.’
‘How was that?’
‘I let him keep her.’ There was an engaging twinkle in his eye, but the smile took courage.