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The plane took off, the land receded, and as they wheeled round to face Henley, he saw the Plemont encampment for the last time. Just a lot of people, that’s all: except for the absence of a central stage, nothing to distinguish it from any summertime pop festival anywhere in the world. The rostrum would come, of course. Nothing could stop Soraya’s Eve of the End of the World concert now. He hoped his sister would be okay, but he was sure she would. That established, he had to get back to London. It was ‘urgent’.
Which raised the question, what was urgent? He’d been in Jersey for a long time now, relatively speaking, and Ruby Parker hadn’t contacted him at all until yesterday. She’d have found a way if she’d wanted to. From what he’d been told, the protests still weren’t over in London. But that wouldn’t require his presence. What was it that Fenella Decristoforo-Salvaterra considered so serious that Ruby Parker had only just discovered? And were they even talking about the same thing?
He probably wouldn’t find out immediately. He had no idea where Fenella was, even whether she was in the UK, let alone London, and unless she’d taken her concerns to Thames House, she’d probably have to find him.
He needed to sleep and eat. The latter would have to wait: MI7’s overseas budget apparently didn’t stretch to an in-flight snack, not even a Twix. But you could sleep anywhere. You didn’t even need the right training. You just needed to be shattered.
He awoke when the plane bumped down on a rainy day in Henley. For a moment he thought he was back on the island. He looked across the airfield: another black saloon waiting to take him to a pre-appointed destination. Another meeting probably. He hadn’t written his report yet, but he’d been in this situation before. When you had a lot to feed back and hardly any time, they usually sent a fully briefed stenographer with a list of questions and permission to interrogate. It never made for a comfortable ride, no matter how carefully you’d played it by the book. Too much ground to cover, too little time to explain the limiting factors, nuances, qualifications.
Thus, on the car’s back seat, a man of his own age awaited him. Gwyn: they’d met once in the lunch queue. He had a notepad, a pen and a grim expression. “Welcome back to Britain,” he said curtly.
“Thank you, Gwyn.”
“You remembered my name.” He seemed unimpressed.
“Fire away then.”
He gave a ‘time is of the essence’ nod of agreement. “Describe your first meeting with the protesters.”
They arrived at Thames House just over ninety minutes later. It was still raining, and there was a traffic jam on Lambeth Bridge with New York-style peeping of horns. Gwyn got out ahead and went straight inside. Mordred followed him without trying to catch up. Colin Bale stood on duty at reception looking disgruntled as usual. No sign of Gwyn now anywhere. Presumably, the report was so red hot it had to be studied and digested immediately.
“Welcome back, John,” Colin Bale said, as if he had to.
“It’s great to be home. When’s my first meeting?”
“I understand your report’s just gone upstairs. You’re to go to the canteen, get something hot to eat and drink, and be ready for further debriefing in an hour. Someone will come and get you.”
“So it may not necessarily be an hour.”
“It’ll be at least an hour, put it that way. After that, just try and sit quietly without causing any trouble.”
“Is Alec around?”
“It’s irrelevant, John. You know the rules. You’re not allowed to talk to anyone before you’ve been debriefed. Interference with the memory, that sort of thing. Don’t read anything, don’t check your phone, don’t surf the net, don’t watch TV. The four don’ts.”
“I’ve never heard them so handily lumped together before.”
“My idea.”
“The only problem is, with ‘don’t talk to anyone’, it makes five.”
“Don’t be a smartarse, John. It doesn’t suit you.”
“Am I allowed to look at my watch?”
“Repeat, don’t be a smartarse, John. It doesn’t suit you.”
“That’s another don’t ... Sorry, sorry, I’m still slightly out of it. I’ve another question now, a genuine one. Could the firm please lend me some money for food? I’m skint.”
“We’re not idiots, John. It’s on the house. Just order what you want.”
“Thanks.”
“Have a nice day.”
He ate a butternut chilli and drank two cups of strong earl grey. Afterwards, he had a bowl of ice cream. He felt drowsy now and there were still thirty minutes left till he was called to an anonymous office somewhere to account for himself. At least. Was taking a nap a sixth don’t? How many don’ts were there, really? And fancy Colin Bale missing the fifth one – don’t talk to anyone - when he’d already mentioned it! How about ‘don’t leave the building’? Or ‘don’t look out of an interesting window’? ‘Don’t do a crossword’ was obvious, but file that under the prohibition against reading. What about ‘don’t let your mind wander’? Or the opposite: ‘don’t think too much about your story’? After all, over-reflection could be disastrous. You might subconsciously start to iron out apparent anomalies, and something important might get missed. Maybe the psychologists had got it entirely wrong. Maybe the don’ts should be converted to dos, keep the data pristine. Do talk to Alec, do check your phone, do look out of a fascinating window. But that was MI7. Why allow people to do things when you could just as easily tell them not to?
Here she came. A young woman in a pencil skirt with a notepad. She arrived at his table without breaking stride and smiled. “John Mordred?”
“That’s me.”
“You’re expected in Ruby Parker’s office in five minutes’ time.”
He took his used crockery back to the serving hatch. The canteen staff were supposed to do it, but he liked to give them a hand. “Have you got any mints?” he asked Sandra, the middle-aged lady behind the counter.
She laughed. “We’re a cafeteria, love, not a sweet shop. Thanks to you and Alec we’ve got crisps and biscuits now, but that’s where we’re drawing the line. We’ve got mint chocolate blancmange if that’s any good.”
“It’s just, I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes’ time and I didn’t get to brush my teeth this morning.”
She rummaged in her pocket and offered him a Polo. He thanked her twice and they laughed gently at her quip about smokers always having mints. As he left her for his meeting, he realised he’d unwittingly done a don’t.
Gwyn was sitting in the corridor outside Ruby Parker’s office. Standard procedure. You’d keep the stenographer to hand in case there were transcription issues, which there usually were. Mordred knocked and went in. Ruby Parker sat behind her desk, still reading what was presumably his report. She didn’t look happy.
“Welcome back, John,” she said as if saying those words was a formality that had to be got through.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“We’ll come to that later,” she said. “First, your report.”
“I wondered why you didn’t contact me earlier,” he said.
“You went off-brief,” she replied, “but not in a bad way. We expect agents to use their initiative, and when they do, I nearly always assume that they know more about conditions on the ground than I do. I try not to interfere.”
“So I’m not in any trouble?”
“It says here that Fenella Decristoforo-Salvaterra made indirect contact with you, and told you to return to London as a matter of ‘urgency’.”
“Correct.”
“You’ve no idea what she was referring to?”
“No. She didn’t speak to me. She spoke to Soraya Snow.”
“What do you think she meant by ‘urgent’? You must have formed a theory of some kind.”
“I assumed it was something to do with her father. Whose location is one major purpose of this investigation.”
She harrumphed. “It may interest you to know that he’s not in Britain. At least, not so far as we know.”
“But I thought he’d been seen entering Heathrow.”
“Someone was. And they had his passport. The cameras conclusively show that, despite appearances, it wasn’t him, only a lookalike.”
“Who would do a thing like that? Why?”
“We don’t know. John, Phyllis has been abducted.”
The words took a second to register. “My God. How? When?”
“Yesterday evening at 7.15 give or take a minute either way. Somewhere between Saint Paul’s Cathedral, from where she’d just called in, and Barbican Tube station, where Ian was awaiting her.”
“In the ‘City of London’, in other words. As opposed to real London.”
“Obviously, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but I know what you mean, yes. Within the territory of the City of London Corporation. Two days ago, Norman Pruett, the Remembrancer, turned up dead on Dartmoor. Murdered, we think, although the post-mortem’s still out. He’d been hiding out on a retreat at Buckfast Abbey, and according to the monks, apparently in fear of his life. Very uncommunicative, very jumpy, very despairing. I mention the fact simply so you know what may be at stake.”
“They can’t have killed her, surely.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The two cases belong in different categories. By the sounds of things, the Remembrancer was running away from someone, and they caught up with him. Phyllis is another matter. You don’t go to all the trouble of kidnapping someone just to kill them. You could do that with a bullet from a rooftop, or push her in front of the train at Barbican.”
“Did the Lord Mayor contact you when you were in Jersey?”
“The Lord Mayor of London?”
“The same.”
“No. What for?”
“He claims he did. Horvath, the private security firm he bought out to help him bring the protests to an end, say the same thing.”
“Then they’re lying. What were we supposed to have talked about?”
“A job offer. How you might go and work for them.”
He laughed. “I hope you didn’t give that idea any credence.”
“I’d have contacted you earlier if I’d thought there was the slightest truth in it. The unexpected upshot is, the Lord Mayor has invited you to a meeting.”
He paused slightly as his brain put the various pieces together. “To talk about Phyllis.”
“That’s one plausible assumption, and why you have no option but to attend.”
“I assume everyone in the building’s out looking for her.”
“All those we can spare. And the Met’s Special Branch. And now that I’ve read your report, and things in Jersey appear to be stable, I’ve recalled Annabel, Edna and Tariq.”
“That’s a lot of manpower. Enough to get a result, surely?”
“I’m not so sure. The City’s a very secretive place, and not everyone with a stake in it feels any loyalty to this country whatsoever.”
“So when’s my interview with the vampire?”
“He asked to see you as soon as you arrived back in this country.”
“Right now, effectively.”
“Amber’s got a suit ready for you. Take your time. I’ll let him know you’re on your way over, but it won’t hurt to keep him waiting a little.”
“Are we sure he didn’t kidnap Phyllis as a way of pulling me out of Jersey? Because if he and Pownall have been in contact – if Jersey is part of the offshore ‘spider’s web’ tax experts like Nicholas Shaxson say is run from the City of London – then he may have got the impression I was the one pulling the strings out there. If so, me showing up at his house will demonstrate that I’m no longer in that position. Maybe he’ll let Phyllis go.”
“Nice idea, but if that’s all it is, and he does, how could he conceivably stop you returning to Jersey on the next plane out?”
“He could arrange for someone to ‘meet’ me at Jersey airport. Or even en route to Heathrow.”
Ruby Parker rubbed her forehead once. “We’re speculating. We don’t even know for sure that Cavendish is behind Phyllis’s abduction. It could be anyone.”
“But no one’s owned up to it yet, which is itself odd. Put it another way, if he’s not going to offer Phyllis in exchange for me signing a job contract, why does he want to see me?”
“Think about it, John. He’s definitely not going to offer Phyllis in exchange for your services. The City may have some of the world’s most ingenious lawyers on a retainer, but even they couldn’t make that sort of contract stick. No, it has to be something else. As to what, I think it’d be faster for you to go and find out than it would for us both to sit here hypothesising until we find something that makes sense. If it seems prudent or harmless, report straight back to me afterwards. Otherwise, sit tight and I’ll find you.”
He got up. “Understood.”
