JAKE AND CAMERON were waiting for me outside Bill’s.
‘What’s the update?’
Jake motioned inside the restaurant. ‘Peppa and the playground woman are right at the back. We can’t get close to them without being noticed. We still have no ID on the woman. Time’s running out. I suggest you just walk in and talk.’
Jake was right. Peng was leaving this afternoon. Risking blowing my cover was worth it if it could fast-track us answers.
I walked into Bill’s. It was still early and, apart from Peppa’s table at the very back, there were only two other occupied tables at the front. Peppa and the woman were deep in conversation. I walked straight towards them.
‘Suze? Suze! Is that you?’ Peppa jolted at the sound of her name and turned towards me, her face frozen. All her body language was shouting that she’d been caught. Caught doing something she shouldn’t.
But then her face relaxed at the sight of me.
‘Alexis! Hello.’ She stood up. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just meeting a friend for breakfast. How about you?’ I leaned towards the woman with her, holding out my hand. ‘Hi there, I’m Alexis.’
The woman took it – ‘Sasha. Nice to meet you.’ – and she shook it. She had an Australian accent.
‘How come you’re all the way back here? It’s such a nice morning.’
Peppa smiled. ‘We’re hiding.’
‘Hiding? From who?’
‘Other mothers from nursery.’ Peppa cast a glance over my shoulder. ‘I’m trying to steal Sasha off one of them and they’re all almighty gossips.’
Sasha giggled. ‘It’s all rather funny, isn’t it? This trying to avoid being seen.’
I looked from one to the other. ‘So, Sasha, you’re a nanny who works for another mum at the nursery?’
She nodded.
Peppa spoke quickly. ‘I know there’s an etiquette and all but Dionne is leaving and Sasha is great and, well, I’m happy to pay more to show her how valued she’d be if she moved over to us.’
For. Fuck’s. Sake.
No stealing secrets. Just stealing a nanny.
A few hacks of the nursery and their parent contact list and Geraint could easily verify all this, but looking between the two of them I knew it was the truth.
I needed to get into the Platform and start proving I was right about Frederick. He was the Snake. There were no Pigs left and no other explanation.
*
‘Is Peng safe?’ Hattie and Geraint were seated in the meeting room when Jake, Cameron and I arrived.
Hattie answered. ‘She’s at the Embassy all morning with back-to-back meetings, followed by a lunch there, before they leave for Christie’s. Pixie is in a van outside. If she leaves unexpectedly she’ll call it in. But we can presume as long as she’s there she’s safe.’
Everyone was silent as I announced my theory about Frederick.
‘He’s the Snake. He has to be.’
‘He couldn’t just be a shit dad?’ asked Cameron.
‘A sociopath is the most likely person to be a traitor. All about the money. No feelings of loyalty. No remorse at getting colleagues killed.’
I thought of him sitting there coldly as his own daughter writhed in pain at his feet.
Hattie’s phone rang. He looked down at it. ‘It’s the lab.’ He answered. ‘What have you found?’ He nodded silently. ‘Thanks.’ He hung up and looked round at us. ‘Lex was right. Both the EpiPens contained a lethal dose of arsenic.’
Jake whistled slowly. ‘Good save, Lex.’
‘It was the clearest move – the Coyote wouldn’t even need to be in the room when Peng died. It would be the perfect cover. He just needed to spike the food with nuts and once Peng suffered an adverse reaction, one of her own team would unwittingly kill her with a spiked EpiPen. They would be the ones under suspicion. It would be chaos. Impossible to pull apart.’
‘How the hell did the Snake – Frederick, or whoever – get to all the EpiPens?’ said Jake. ‘They must have someone inside the delegation.’
I thought it through.
‘We did this.’
Everyone turned to look at me.
‘We got Frederick access and a reason to be near the delegation – he was one of us. I was updating him on what we’d learned, on the delegation’s movements. Everything. He could’ve swapped the EpiPens over at the Natural History Museum event or Cherwell Castle.’ I paused. ‘If I’m right, it explains why he came to us with Tenebris. He needed us to have direct access to Peng. The Snake never had a contact within the delegation. He didn’t need one. We did all the dirty work, giving him all the information he needed to make the hit.’
Hattie leaned back in his chair; his fingers formed a bridge.
‘It sounds like we’ve been used.’
Jake shrugged. ‘How do we know Peppa isn’t also a Snake? That they’ve been working together? This nanny thing might be true but there’s still the dry-cleaning link to the Embassy.’
Geraint shook his head. ‘That’s looking like a dead end now. Peppa has booked a Rentokil visit for next week. Her house has a moth infestation, apparently. It explains the sudden increase in dry-cleaning visits. Only way to kill the sods and save your cashmere.’
‘And I finally tracked down the dry cleaner’s sister,’ added Pixie. ‘The reason we’ve been having trouble locating her is because she’s on maternity leave. She hasn’t set foot in the Embassy in the last two months.’
I took this in. ‘I think Frederick is the Coyote and the Snake. He was the one selling information that sabotaged those previous Six missions. And he just tried to assassinate Peng.’
‘He might still succeed,’ said Jake. ‘Peng doesn’t fly out until tonight. We still have the auction at Christie’s to get through.’
‘We need absolute confirmation. And if Frederick is involved we need to know to what degree. He might have got close enough to Tenebris to know who the people behind it are. We need names.’ Hattie turned to Geraint. ‘Do a full search into Frederick’s finances, background, everything you can get your hands on. If he has the resources to run, we need to cut them off. We need to take him alive and find out everything he knows.’
I remembered something Camilla had said. ‘His wife’s art gallery. One of us should pay it a visit. Frederick helped with their accounts. That could be an easy place to hide money.’
Hattie looked at me. ‘If Frederick is the Snake he knows that we’re going to put this together. He knows that once we get the EpiPen results confirming poison, we’ll work out that someone in or close to the delegation had to be involved. You need to throw him off. Make him believe we’re onto someone else.’
Hattie was right. Frederick couldn’t know we suspected him.
I got out my phone and texted: We think Peppa is doing so well she has a PA working for her. Meet at Christie’s at 5 p.m.
Frederick pinged back straightaway: OK. See you there.
‘I’m going to try and meet with Dugdale face to face,’ said Hattie.
‘You don’t think Dugdale is in on it?’ I’d known Duggers the longest and couldn’t believe he would have any role in tearing apart the Security Services he held so dear.
Hattie shook his head. ‘Highly unlikely. But if I lay everything out for him, he can at least shed some light on exactly how the hell this could be happening.’
I thought back over the last few days. How different everything looked if Frederick wasn’t one of us but one of them.
Goddammit.
‘The invasion at Platform Eight. Outside Gigi’s nursery I said something about nuts. Frederick must’ve thought I was talking in code. That I was talking about work. He thought we’d cottoned on to the EpiPens. That’s why they took the risk of breaking in. They thought we were about to unravel their whole plan.’
All that drama.
All those dead Ghosts.
Robin.
Gone.
Just because my daughter went to nursery with a peanut in her pocket.
Jake nodded. ‘And when Frederick realised we didn’t have a clue about the EpiPens, they went ahead with the plan.’
A throwaway comment I’d made to someone I thought was a colleague, a friend, had set off a chain of events that led to so much bloodshed.
How had I been such a shitty judge of character?
His deadpan sense of humour. He wasn’t fucking deadpanning, he just didn’t have a sense of humour. He wasn’t dry. He was deranged. And that meant . . . he didn’t actually find my jokes funny. And he didn’t have respect for women – all his refreshing lack of issue with reporting to a woman was just another part of his condition. I couldn’t believe . . . I couldn’t believe I let my mind go places it shouldn’t have. How could I have been so blind? How could I have missed the signs? Was the flirting another manipulation? To confuse me with this pretence of attraction? God, how could I be so easily played? It was all an act. All of it.
Jake put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t even think of blaming yourself. This is all on him. And we’re going to make him pay. I’m going to make him pay.’ From the minute Jake had found out about Robin, he had been on the edge of losing it. He just didn’t know where to direct the rage, the pain. But now he did. Now he had a target. Someone to blame. And no one was going to hold him back.
Hattie heard the steel in Jake’s voice and looked up sharply. He addressed the room. ‘Remember the greater good here is ending the Tenebris Network. If Frederick is the Snake he’s the best link we have. He will have a working access login to the website. He will have received payment from them. They would’ve set up a way of exchanging information. These are all trails we can follow. He’s our only chance of finding the people running Tenebris and getting it permanently shut down and have Eight back up and running.
‘G – you and Pixie need to go through all the intel we have on Frederick. We re-look at everything we’ve learned over the last few days. The wife’s art gallery – we need accounts, all painting records. Everything. The Committee wants proof. We find the money, we have the confirmation we need to take Frederick down.’
Hattie turned to Jake and me. ‘Go search his house. It’s unlikely there’ll be anything there but it’s worth a try.’
Would it be empty now? I checked my watch. Shit. I was meant to be picking Gigi up. I’d never make it on time.
‘Jake, let’s go. I need to get Gigi on the way and drop her with my mother-in-law. We can then search Frederick’s house.’
I rang the nursery as we approached the Platform’s car park. ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve been stuck at work. I’ll be there fifteen minutes late.’ Yvonne was silent. ‘It won’t happen again.’ She still remained silent. ‘Listen, I was going to volunteer to host the next parent coffee morning.’
‘That would be wonderful. Thank you. I am leaving the church shortly but I will ensure my staff know you’ll be late. Pick-up will be at the nursery.’ She clicked off.
I must remember to try that silent technique in my next interrogation.