A fresh, Kate literally went to work.
The journey to BelTech reminded her of what had just happened in 1992: the familiar now crackling with unexpected energy. Who knew that taking the overland from Clapham Junction to West Brompton for the four-thousandth time could feel so invested with purpose?
She had decided to call her recent experience ‘The Experience’. She had a powerful intimation that it had affected her but no one else. It was real but it was false. There was no chance that the memory was just a dream and also no chance that anything had actually occurred. It was like a play or a novel or a poem–it was real while it lasted; it would park itself in her memory; it would subtly or deeply inform her view of the world… and it hadn’t happened.
Nothing in her house had changed. Charles Hunt’s profile on LinkedIn was the same pack of lies it had been yesterday. Kate’s rescuing him from bullies had made no impact on his future corruption. Kes was still the artistic director of the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End and he was still casting himself in leading roles. Amy was still a French and Spanish interpreter for an NGO. And as far as the rest of the world knew, Kate was still a depressed widow recently sacked from an under-achieving career by a buffoon who was in over his head with gangsters and crypto-fascists.
She exited the tube station and strode for the office. She felt an energy this body didn’t deserve. She was forty-five again for sure. But the fit forty-five that hadn’t just spent nine months fucking itself.
Belgravia Technologia had, naturally, nothing whatever to do with Belgravia. Charles just thought the posh-sounding name would impress potential clients and, in this, he had been proved depressingly correct. In fact, the business occupied the fourth floor of a taupe seventies office block in a quiet mews in West Brompton.
She rounded the corner of the little cul-de-sac and noticed something out of place. Opposite the entrance to the building, a tall, powerfully-built man in a long black coat was leaning against a white Range Rover and smoking a cigarette. Kate instinctively avoided his eye.
She walked into the building and clocked Ray, one of the two soon-to-retire security guards. As usual, he was picking his nose with his thumb and puzzling through a crossword. He glanced up. ‘Ah, Ms Marsden–just the fella.’ Ray either hadn’t noticed that Kate had been sacked yesterday or didn’t care. She had been with BelTech from the start and was an invaluable crossword assistant.
‘Bit busy this morning, Ray.’
‘Won’t take a jiffy.’ He read from the clue list. ‘“Razor cuts clock? Phew! That was close.” Four, two, four.’
‘Tricky one. Give me a few minutes,’ Kate replied as she breezed past.
She liked Ray, but he was never going to be the problem. The problem would be getting in and out of Charles’s office before anyone worked out what was going on. Assuming the post office’s next-day delivery service had worked its charm, Kate’s envelope would have been sorted by now and Charles’s secretary Janice would have respected the CONFIDENTIAL note, leaving it unopened in his room. As per the standing instruction, she would have done her best to stuff the mail into the antique toast rack on the windowsill behind his desk. Kate checked the time as she stepped into the lift. 12.34 p.m. She was counting on the fact that Charles was too much of an idle bastard to open his own post before lunch. If she got lucky, maybe he was already out trying to wank off Liam Fox over some grilled asparagus at the Ritz. She would simply wander in, take the memory stick, walk out and hail a cab to the Guardian on York Way.
Breathing as calmly as possible, she stepped out of the lift on the fourth floor and headed for Charles’s office. She felt several heads turn in her direction but ignored her former colleagues as she made her way, swiftly but–she hoped–casually, down one side of the open-plan space. Close to Charles’s door, Janice was at her desk but thankfully masked by the ample frame of Colin, Kate’s IT deputy. He had his back to Kate and seemed to be explaining in some detail the reason why ‘Excel can sometimes be a very naughty boy’. Kate slipped past them. Charles’s door had no window and she walked in without knocking.
Inside were three men, none of whom were Charles. To her right, two tall muscular-looking white guys standing in long black coats. In front of her, sitting across the desk from Charles’s empty chair, the back of a thinner man probably in his fifties. Close-cropped grey hair with a straight neckline an inch above the collar of his crisp, dark purple shirt. The man twisted round to look at her and Kate recognised the sleek face of Nestor Petrov.
She froze.
Fight or flight? Neither. Plan A. There’s a good chance he doesn’t know who I am.
Kate smiled and closed the door behind her.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Janice is busy and she asked me to get something for her. I’m Charles’s deputy under-secretary.’
Petrov gave her a frank physical appraisal from head to toe and then turned back to the desk with impatience. He spoke in Russian to one of the attendant heavies. Kate detected a Moscow accent. ‘How long can it take for a man to have a piss?’
‘You make him nervous, boss.’
Petrov looked at his watch and Kate moved around him, scanning the windowsill behind Charles’s chair for the toast rack stuffed with this morning’s post.
It wasn’t there.
In a daze she walked to where it ought to be and weirdly stroked a gold-plated piggy bank which had been put in its place.
Petrov continued in Russian. ‘The problem is that Marsden bitch. The file will be at her house. I don’t know what we’re waiting for. Some sentimental affection from Hunt, the idiot. Maybe he’s fucking her. We should have raided her home last night and put a permanent end to this business.’
This was not the way he tended to talk on Have I Got News For You.
Kate’s envelope remained stubbornly absent and she realised she was now just a person standing in a room trying not to shake with fear. She stared at the piggy bank, wishing she could climb inside it. Petrov spoke again, this time in English. ‘Aren’t you a little old for a deputy under-secretary?’ His English was good: Kate wondered if this was due to or in spite of twenty years of succinct conversations with English football managers and newspaper editors.
Kate turned and began brazenly going through Charles’s desk drawers. ‘Yes!’ she said, winningly. ‘Tremendously old. Second career, you see. It’s a government scheme for middle-aged women.’
Petrov was watching Kate’s search with a frown. ‘What is your name?’
Kate trusted her subconscious and came out with the first noises to enter her head. ‘Buffindra,’ she said. ‘But my friends call me Buffy.’
‘Buffy?’ Petrov’s lips curled into something resembling amusement. ‘Like the vampire-slayer?’
Kate scanned the cluttered surface of the desk and started moving things around as if to tidy it. ‘Yes, that’s it. Although, as you say, I’m far too old to be named after the slayer. But I do love her work.’ She moved this morning’s untouched copy of the Financial Times and revealed a bundle of mail held together with an elastic band.
Her envelope!
She tugged it free from the rest and stuffed it in her back pocket. ‘I just fucking hate vampires, you see.’
‘What was that?’
‘Everyone okay for tea and coffee?’
‘What did you just put in your pocket?’
Kate was moving swiftly towards the door. ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
The door swung open and Charles walked in, wiping his hands on his chinos and saying, ‘Sorry to keep you, gentlemen. Bloody hand-dryer keeps–Kate Marsden!’
‘Hi, Charles!’ Kate walked straight past him and out of the room. Behind her she heard Petrov’s raised voice.
‘That woman is Kate Marsden?… SHE JUST STOLE SOMETHING FROM YOUR DESK, YOU STUPID BASTARD!’
And then Charles: ‘Nestor, I can egregiously assure you of the large impossibility that—’
‘SHE’S GOT THE MISSING FILE!!’
Kate ran.