| |
Mordred couldn’t tell what it was, but there was something about the way they all looked at him when he came back from helping the police over the Chester hit-and-run that meant something wasn’t quite right. They’d disappeared when he’d been most vulnerable, and now here they were again, but not quite who they’d been before. It felt like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Alec, Annabel, Phyllis, even Edna and Ian – even Ruby Parker for God’s sake: they’d somehow exited the planet while he’d been out, and now alien creatures animated their bodies.
He noticed it first when he got to his desk. Phyllis was waiting for him. She was furious, apparently, that they’d been taken off the Frances Holland case. And for a few moments, he shared her anger. Until he saw it was bogus. Not entirely, but hidden so deep beneath something more important as to be worth discounting as the cause of her present frame of mind.
Then Alec: she’s upset, don’t you think you’d better do something to cheer her up, maybe dinner ... Like it was normal for Alec to start caring about people’s feelings or offering dating advice. Where was we’re off the Holland case, so coming up to the canteen? for example, or now we don’t have to worry about Frankie Holland any more, fancy celebrating? said ironically with the overriding implication of alcohol?
And Edna and Ian, so quiet.
Only Annabel was normal, but that was because she was Annabel. She didn’t do easy-to-read. Or even in-any-way-readable.
He might have put it down to nerves. He’d been in a pretty weird mood walking over to Mansion House. The twenty-minute long sensation of thinking a bullet might go through his brain at any moment had seen to that.
But then he’d been in to see Ruby Parker. He explained where he’d been, how the police had plied him with tea and questions, and how he hadn’t been able to ring base. To give her credit, whatever alien was inhabiting her body, it must be a pretty top-notch one, because it alone seemed conscious he might suspect something was up. ‘She’ told him they were off the Holland case, and tried to put a mixture of indignation and resignation into her tone, but it fell flat.
By this time, he had a plan. He found Phyllis – two strides away from his desk, talking to Annabel and so suspiciously findable – and told her he’d like to take her out to dinner to cheer her up. Annabel moved off like the trap was sprung.
“Oh, that’s really thoughtful of you!” alien-possessed Phyllis replied.
“I didn’t think you’d say yes!” he replied.
“We did agree we’d go out before Capri. Just to prove I’m not trying to pull a fast one. I really do like you, John.”
“Thank you, and I like you too. Are you sure you want to go out?”
“Absolutely.”
“I thought you’d say, ‘No, sod off, I just want to sit around in my pyjamas and mope’. I mean, that’s what I’d do if my investigation had been stymied. And I’d try to think of ways I could re-open it.”
She shrugged. “Maybe we could do that together. You’re supposed to be the Saint Jude of failed investigations. Why don’t you bring your pyjamas round to my place?”
Nice reply, but hang on, this was moving too fast for Phyllis. For a moment, he was wrong-footed.
“I’m offering you dinner,” he said, to test the waters. “You should come to my place.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she replied. For some reason, the temperature had just dropped a notch. Suddenly, an idea occurred to him.
“How about Burger King at Waterloo station?” he asked as innocently as he could. “I really want to sample their vegetarian menu.”
She smiled. Relief. “Okay!”
“I was only joking,” he said. It felt cruel. Even an alien didn’t deserve Waterloo Burger King as a first date. “I want it to be a surprise.”
She put a hand on her extra-terrestrial-infested chest. “Phew!”
Right. Something was up. Phyllis + Burger King + Alec Being Nice + My Place But Not Yours + Annabel Exits Stage Left = ?
Phyllis was a decoy. For some reason, Annabel was about to burgle his flat.
They ended up at The Counting House, just because he couldn’t think of anywhere else. Because he was still supposed to be living at Thames House, Amber gave him a suit, and he went straight from his desk at 8pm. It was packed as usual, but he’d rung ahead, and it was a weekday, so it felt fairly routine. He had potato gnocchi and she smoked haddock, and they drank wine and tried to make conversation.
But it was never easy, relaxing with someone who can’t relax but pretends it’s not an issue. Or relaxing when you know your flat’s being burgled and the person sitting opposite you is in on it. For a while, he’d toyed with sneaking home and setting traps for the intruders – a Dr No hair or two – but decided against it. What was the point? He had nothing to hide. If they wanted to search his stuff, good luck to them. Maybe they could tidy up a bit while they were on.
Although, no: he did have things to hide. He hadn’t been home for some time, and last time he had, he’d left in a hurry. He should probably have vacuumed, and the bathroom was in a bit of a state. And the kitchen: that teabag in the sink, and the stuff he should have put in the pedal-bin before setting out for work that morning.
Bloody hell. He had a lot to hide.
The thing is, normally she would have known he was distracted and called him out on it, but being a decoy means making yourself amenable, so she was being doubly alien. Even he was being alien now.
“How’s the gnocchi?” she asked.
“Great. How’s the haddock?”
“Lovely.”
“That’s good. How’s the wine?”
“Very nice. How’s yours?”
“Tasty.”
End of conversation. On any other date, this would have set a big neon sign flashing, and it would have read INCOMPATIBLE. But there weren’t any rules here. They could still be perfectly matched for all anyone knew.
“Do you know what I like about you, John?” she said suddenly.
“The way I’m house-proud.”
“That, yes. But I mean, what else?”
“My curly blond hair.”
“And the fact that your clothes always look freshly ironed.”
That was another thing. He’d forgotten to put the ironing board away. Bloody hell, he couldn’t even remember whether he’d unplugged the iron now. Fine meal this was turning out to be. Mind you, with a bit of luck, his flat might have burned down.
And that clump of hair in the bath.
“Thanks,” he said.
Annabel unlocked the front door and entered quickly, looking at the door closure. She gestured Alec, Edna and Ian in and switched the lights on. They removed their shoes and coats and pulled on latex gloves.
“We’ve got two hours,” Annabel said. “Phyllis is taking him back to her place afterwards, hopefully - although we can’t count on it. She’s convinced he suspects something, and I agree with her.”
“What are we looking for?” Edna asked.
“You know the hypothesis,” Annabel replied. “‘This flat’s occupant is working for the Chinese’. Anything of relevance, however tenuous. Now, John doesn’t do online banking, so the first thing we need to do is find his bank statements. Absence of them would count as suspicious. Next, to access his home computer. We’ve got Tariq on duty back at base. He’s going to discover John’s password and check bank account details from John’s statements. Direct debits, that kind of thing. Everything you find, report it to me. Be gentle. You’ve all got phones. Photos, if necessary, are good. Otherwise, use your initiative. Any questions?”
They all shook their heads.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“How’s the gnocchi sauce?” Phyllis asked.
He’d had enough of this. “Fine. It’s a kind of tomato creamy thing with spinach and mozzarella.”
“I didn’t ask what it was,” she said tetchily. “I said, ‘how’.”
“And I said ‘fine’.”
“Look, what’s wrong with you this evening, John? I thought we got on, but you’re behaving very strangely.”
“Well, so would you be.”
She took an affected sip of her wine. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“If Annabel was burgling your flat.”
“Er ...”
“I built a webcam into the wall,” he lied. “It transmits to my watch.”
She looked at him. A mixture of embarrassment and fury. She didn’t know which to give precedence to, because she didn’t know whether he was bluffing. But then nature decided for her and she blushed.
“You’re making that up,” she said with only 95% conviction, and as if there was still hope for the charade.
“You do realise I’m an expert in reading people’s faces? And good at detection. I’ve been sitting here all evening thinking, ‘Maybe I should tell her I know’. But another part of me says, ‘No, whatever it is they’re after, it’s probably for your own good, and - as Billy Joel says - you’re an innocent man. Just do what she’s doing: talk about your gnocchi and her haddock. Humour her.’ But I don’t want to humour you any more. Every time I do that, I’m patronising you. It doesn’t feel right.”
She sipped her wine again. “So you’re confronting me because you respect me.”
“Correct.”
“I can live with that. It’s rather flattering, actually. Now, before I ring Annabel and tell her the cat’s out of the bag, a few questions.”
“Fire away.”
“Although since you’re so clever, perhaps you can ask yourself those questions, and answer them, and I’ll just sit here and listen and maybe take a few notes.”
“I’m not that clever.”
“So you don’t know why we’re burgling your flat?”
“No, but then I would say that. I’d have gone home before Annabel arrived, removed everything incriminating, and now I’d be sitting here, pretending I didn’t know what it was about.”
“Do you know what it’s about?”
“No.”
She sighed.
“But then, I would say that,” he added. “Don’t make that face. You brought this upon yourself.”
“Selves. I’m not working alone.”
“Who else? Although no, hang on, I do know that. Alec, Edna, Ian and Ruby Parker. And that’s not a guess, before you ask.”
“You can see them through your watch-thingy.”
“That was just a lie. I made it up.”
She sighed again and put her knife and fork together on the plate. “Okay, you win. Let’s get down to business.” She caught the waiter’s eye. “Two more glasses of the house wine, please. Large.”
“Ask me anything you like.”
“Are you working for the Chinese?”
He laughed. “No.”
They sat in silence looking at each other. Then it hit him. That wasn’t a starter-question, a canard designed to disorient him so that when the real question came it would be like a punch out of the blue. No, it was the question.
“Bloody hell,” he said incredulously.
“What?”
“You’re serious.”
“Deadly.”
“Who says I’m working for the Chinese? Grey. It must be Grey. It can only be Grey, right?”
“It’s Grey. I’m not even sure I should have told you that.”
“So let me see ... They must have told you this sometime between me setting off for Mansion House, and me getting back to Thames House. But they can’t be sure, otherwise they’d simply have presented Ruby Parker with the evidence. I’d be out on my ear, and possibly in the clink. So they don’t know. Which of course they can’t.”
“All spot-on so far. With the possible exception of the final sentence.”
“Now they wouldn’t have told you unless they had to, because that’s not Grey’s style. So you must have somehow compelled them. In some way, their suspicions leaked out against their will, and they decided the only way they could limit the damage was by admitting you to their confidence but swearing you to secrecy. And we’ve all been removed from the Holland case as a way of reducing my sphere of influence.”
“Keep going. I’ll tell you when you’re getting cold.”
“Now Grey wouldn’t have asked you to investigate me. They wouldn’t have hauled us off the Holland case if they thought we could work together. So the only reason Annabel’s round at my flat is because you want to find out for yourselves.”
Their wine arrived. They cheers-ed each other.
“Has it occurred to you,” he asked, “that if there was any burgling to be done, Grey would probably have done it long ago? If there was anything to find, they’d have found it?”
“A flat’s a dynamic entity,” she replied. “New things arrive every day. Besides, you might know they’d been round. You might even have been expecting them in advance. Now they’ve gone, you might not be anticipating another visit.”
“Expecting burglars is part of being in MI7. Every time I leave home, I hang up my stocking and put out a carrot for Rudolph.”
“Don’t joke, John.”
“Now my questions. One: what makes them think I’m working for the Chinese? I assume you compelling them means you at least got to the bottom of that.”
“We don’t know precisely. We know their theory. We don’t know how much evidence they’ve got to substantiate it.”
“They can’t have much. What’s their theory then?”
“Dao-ming Chou, who we met in Siberia, is a Chinese agent. She lured you into a honey-trap, and you’re still in there.”
“It was Ruby Parker who told me she works for Black.”
“According to Grey, her real name is Wan Chunmei. And Ruby Parker admits that everything she once thought she knew about her turned out to be fabricated.”
“What sort of secrets would I be giving her? As far as I know, the Chinese want technological secrets, especially military ones. The US C-17, the Black Hawk, the Humvee. Their espionage tends to be of the good old industrial variety. Seriously, what could I give them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it. Think of the great British moles.”
“Donald Maclean,” she said.
“Kept the Russians informed about US energy policy. Helped them rate the relative strength of their nuclear arsenals. I couldn’t do anything remotely resembling that.”
“Guy Burgess.”
“The Marshall Plan negotiations. Kim Philby: details of Anglo-American cooperation. And Anthony Blunt passed secrets the British had decrypted from the Germans during World War 2. And now, John Mordred, the sixth man. What does he pass?”
Phyllis sat for a while. The waiter took their plates away. She slowly sipped her wine. Eventually, she met his eyes.
“You’re right,” she said. “It makes no sense whatsoever.” She took her phone out.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“What do you think? Ringing Annabel. I’m going to put it on speakerphone.”
It rang for a few seconds.
“Hi, I - ”
“Phyllis,” Annabel interrupted. “I was just about to ring you. John’s in the clear. Bloody hell, all these different direct debits he’s got. Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Shelter, PETA, Oxfam, MSF, the RSPCA ... Anyway, it turns out he made two fairly big donations to Falun Gong last year. You know, the Chinese meditation and exercise cult? Weird, but he is a bit weird. Anyway, everyone agrees that Beijing regards Falun Gong as enemies of the state. The consensus over here is that he couldn’t be both passing secrets to the MSS and cash to its enemies unless he was clinically insane.”
Mordred took the phone. “I did it because I felt sorry for them.”
Silence. Annabel was obviously re-adjusting. She must be pretty rattled, because the process wasn’t usually lengthy enough to register as an audible pause.
“John,” she said calmly, as if it was the nicest surprise in the world. “Apologies for referring to you as ‘a bit weird’.”
