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She didn’t want to do the return trip to Bristol. Not all the way back and all the way here again. Though it might have been the cleanest and easiest way of avoiding Parton, she couldn’t shake the idea that the two cities were a long way apart. ‘Two hours’ didn’t do justice to the real possibility of a train cancellation, a lost ticket or a signal failure. She didn’t particularly want to luxuriate in a five-star Mayfair hotel, that wasn’t her style, but she did want to put her feet up a bit. And she felt she deserved it. Moreover, as Parton had so smugly pointed out, she had to check into the Swann Regal sometime, otherwise she’d miss her taxi – which, according to the briefing documents, was scheduled to pick her up from the forecourt at precisely 5.30am.
After an hour’s window shopping in Oxford Street, she decided to check into a budget inn somewhere. Tourist Information could probably point her in the right direction.
But that would look hugely suspicious. MI6 was almost certainly having her watched. She had to act as if she was bent on following orders. That meant going to the Swann Regal, checking into her room, and behaving herself. They might well have bugged the room too, although, since Parton apparently had his mind set on seduction, maybe not.
She’d told him she was going back to Bristol. But she was entitled to change her mind ... providing she didn’t err from the alternative script. So the Swann Regal it was. No use fighting it any longer. Just somewhere to take her shoes off and rub her toes, that’s all she asked right now. Besides, she probably didn’t have the money for an inn. ‘Budget’ didn’t necessarily mean the same thing in London as it did in the Oxford English dictionary. She bought two wrapped tuna sandwiches and a can of ginger beer and set off for Mayfair.
The Swann Regal was an exemplar of British Baroque and identical to every other hotel in the row: stucco front with ornate mouldings, heavy window frames, front door with a decorative portico. The carpet and the reception desk were tasteful in a prosaic middle-class way, consonant with what Britain, and particularly this part of the country, had long since become. The receptionist smiled warmly all the time he was taking her details. A concierge showed her to her room and she made him stand in the doorway while she looked it over. Just as, two nights ago, she’d half-expected to find Maddison sitting in her flat, so now she half-anticipated Parton.
Once she was satisfied she was alone, she tipped the concierge, turned the key in the door and left it in the lock. She showered, donned the red cotton dressing gown her father had given her for Christmas, and got into bed to sit for a while. She phoned her mum in Bristol. They talked for an hour and, afterwards, she felt a lot better. Then she rang down to reception to arrange a wake-up call for five the next morning. As a precaution, she set the alarm on her digital wristwatch.
If and when Parton knocked on her door for their dinner date, she’d be asleep. That was what she’d say later, if he ever asked. He wouldn’t dare force an entry, no matter how well he ‘knew’ the management. Would he? She put her head on the pillow to see how comfortable it was and suddenly, she felt scared. She was being brutally pushed by forces out of her control and whose agendas she couldn’t fathom - though in her sadder moments she thought she could - and the Swann Regal wasn’t a sanctuary from them: it was right in their midst. She wished she hadn’t rung her mother. Somehow, that normality had thrown what was happening into a kind of ghastly relief.
She walked to the window and looked down into the street. Hundreds of people with their heads down, trudging through the dark and the rain and the sickly commercial lighting. None of it was natural, not one ounce, and she was enmeshed in it like a fly in a carnivorous plant: stuck fast, knowing the ending was as certain and grim as a written account of it in a textbook. She shuddered and took a few deep breaths. A panic attack. Certain times, the veil was torn away and you saw life for what it actually was. What the hell was she even doing here?
She went back to the bed, lay down and pulled the covers over her. Anyone else would be considering chucking it all in and rushing back home. She knew that wasn’t an option. Not for her. She was locked into whatever bizarre game the universe was playing.
Then she looked at the ceiling, and a wave of utter peace swept over her, as unexpected as it was liberating. She almost laughed. Within three minutes, she was asleep.
She awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing. She switched on the light before answering, and knew exactly where she was as soon as she opened her eyes. She swung her legs over the side of the bed. Adrenalin burst out from some huge, hitherto untapped reserve within her and she was ready to go. Another shower, brush teeth, get dressed, re-pack case, and she was outside the hotel. 5.20. The taxi was already waiting. The driver got out, said her name and the code, presented her with a ticket marked ‘KINGJA Outward’ then held the door open for her to climb onto the back seat. She dozed lightly all the way to the airport.
The terminal was all smoked glass in metal frames. People bustled in all directions, some in obedience to loudspeaker announcements, some happy to get away from them. She followed her directions as she remembered them from the document she’d been given in MI6 – she needed to rehearse its details again once she was aboard her plane – and made her way to Caribbean Departures.
“Excuse me?” came a male voice from behind her. “Miss Ruby Parker?”
She turned around. A man in a suit, about her own age, white, refined-looking and a head taller than her. Someone she’d never seen before.
She bristled. “Do I know you?”
He advanced a step. “I’ve been sent to bring you back to HQ. There’s been a mix-up, Ruby, I’m afraid.”
She smiled humourlessly. Apart from anything else, his body language was all wrong. Someone had sent him to stop her – but who?
Then it hit her. Parton. Of course. The reason he’d been so apparently obliging yesterday was he’d been wrong-footed, that was all. He was still dead set against her, and determined to show her up as incompetent. Whisking her out of the airport and dumping her just far enough away to miss her connection – Southall, say, or Hounslow - would do the trick. If she wouldn’t go with him, he’d grab her bag by way of getting her passport. Always more than one way to skin a cat.
She had the feeling she could more than match him in a physical fight, but that was out of the question here. Right now, she’d have to rely on her ‘feminine’ persona.
He tried to yank her bag off her, but she’d seen the move coming a mile off and she held on. She screamed as loudly as she could. Everyone in the vicinity turned. He stopped struggling immediately, apparently stunned, and held his hands up. He blushed, his eyes darting wildly. Then he turned and left at a brisk walk. Two airport policemen stirred from what they were doing and went after him.
Problem solved.
Two hours later, she was over the Atlantic in a window seat with her handbag on her lap. In some ways what had happened to her in the airport had been a good thing. Without that young man, she’d never have twigged Parton still nursed a grudge against her. She recalled Maddison’s warning that night in Bristol. Parton’s sister married into one of the biggest planter families in Jamaica. He’s got long tentacles. Of course his sister’s relations wouldn’t be Partons: they could be anythings. About the only thing she could count on was that they’d be white. That made matters worse, somehow. She didn’t want to come across as some sort of inverted racist.
She needed to keep her eyes and ears open, though. In Britain, Parton might just be a bag-snatcher at two-removes. In Jamaica the stakes would be far higher.
For the first time, she realised that she could easily be dead by the end of next week. She laughed without knowing why. She felt exhilarated and happy. She didn’t even understand herself sometimes.
Two sentences from the briefing dossier returned to her with particular force. When you arrive in Jamaica, a taxi will transfer you to your hotel. There, you will be given further instructions and a loaded revolver. The sooner the better. She’d never run with the theory that having a gun meant you were more likely to become the victim of violence. There were only a few situations where that applied, and they could be discounted for statistical purposes.
Meanwhile, anyone could be an enemy. She couldn’t take anything for granted. When your own side were against you, you had to be constantly on the alert.
Maybe it was all some kind of test, see if she was up to the job. With real stakes, like Death Race 2000. If so, she didn’t know how well she’d fare, but she’d give it her best shot. Low-level academia was no kind of life. There were her parents, of course, but they were old now, and they weren’t going to live forever. Maybe it was selfish of her – she knew how grief-stricken they’d be if she died: it made her well up just thinking about it – but she had to make her own way. She couldn’t live entirely for them. Besides, she got the feeling they were just a teensy bit disappointed in her. MI6 had arranged for her to ‘pass’ her BA, even though she’d spent the whole final year abroad on Her Majesty’s Secret Service; but a Third was the opposite of a triumph. Perhaps understandably, her parents seemed sceptical that she’d qualify for the even more demanding higher degree, or that it would lead to anything if she did. They tried to hide it, but it emerged in subtle hints and undertones, especially at Christmas and family get-togethers. Twenty-five and what’s she done? That’s what it amounted to. God, if only they knew.
Nine hours later, midday, local time, the plane touched down in Kingston. A bleaching light at the doorway forced her to squint for a split second, and she descended the collapsible stairs into air hot and heavy with fragrance. She boarded the shuttle with forty other passengers, black and white, male and female, old and young, all looking shattered. A short journey across the runway and she entered Arrivals and retrieved her case from the carousel. A tall white man with a strikingly handsome face stood by the exit with a sign saying ‘Ruby Parker’ in heavy felt-tip. She saw him a split second before he saw her. He didn’t look very welcoming, but she didn’t expect him to be.
“The car are this way,” he said, marching ahead, opening all the doors then allowing them to flip back on her.
“Er, excuse me,” she said coldly.
He stopped and turned round. “There a problem?”
“I’m not saying you have to go ahead and hold the doors for me, but it would be nice if you didn’t drop them as you went through. I am a human being.”
He looked baffled for a moment, then showed his palms. “Really sorry. Me enant tinking.”
Somehow, this hit her harder than any door. She’d seen the man holding up the sign through her London eyes: as a representative of the white middle-class. Now that slipped away. No, he probably wasn’t ‘white’, not in the sense she was used to, anyway. More what the locals called ‘creole’, but with a hint of Chinese. His trousers were too short for him, his shirt didn’t quite fit and he had a gold chain round his neck. How he’d morphed from that to this, she didn’t know, but somehow it was a good transition, and the apology mollified her.
“Can me take for your bag, Miss?” he said.
“Thank you.”
He picked her case up and went ahead. When a door came, he held it open for her, then when she’d passed through, ran to overtake her. Two doors in quick succession forced him into contortions, trying to manage them and the case at the same time. She wished she hadn’t said anything.
When they got to the car – an old covered Land Rover – he held the seat forward for her to get into the back, then lifted in her case to go next to her and ran round to get in the driving seat. She’d noticed a cassette-player on the front seat, so she knew what was coming. When they set off, he leaned to one side, there was a click, and a fast ska tune played. She had a weird sense of recognising it from a completely different context. The Guns of Navarone, that’s right.
The road took them along an isthmus bordering a huge harbour. A minute later, they slowed to go through Kingston. A mix of coloured New Orleans-style houses with verandas, beige tiles and ornate balconies, long, nondescript shopping rows crisscrossed with wires, high rise blocks, brutish chapels with courtyards of shrubs, shantytowns and slums, road surfaces of various qualities and streets packed with pedestrians and unpredictable vehicles. In the background, the Blue Mountains slumped like great beached whales. Occasionally Kingston looked just like any suburb in Britain; then a huge palm tree would appear with a street vendor beneath it selling ‘coconuts and crab’. Cars continually peeped each other. The Guns of Navarone – if that’s what it was – segued into reggae.
They were travelling north, towards the mountains. The houses thinned, the verdure became thicker and they began to climb ‘Mount Airy Road’. They turned off into the forest. By now the temperature had dropped slightly. Even so, she was sweating. She needed a drink. More than that, she was still suspicious. Could he be taking her out here to shoot her? He didn’t strike her as the murdering kind, but then, she’d only just met him. From Parton’s point of view, it would probably make sense to get it out of the way as early as possible. She hadn’t even asked him for identification, although that probably wouldn’t have helped. She should probably have sat in the passenger seat.
Just as she was scanning for makeshift defensive weapons – there was a metal bolt tightener on the floor at her feet – the car slowed to a halt, the cassette stopped dead. The driver applied the handbrake, got out, ran round to the passenger side, and held the seat forward for her to exit. Take hold of the tightener – yes or no?
No, because they were in front of a hotel. Her hotel. The Duke of Albemarle. Two women stood in the forecourt, dressed in ironed summer frocks, and with their hands folded in front of them. Obviously the welcoming party.
They didn’t look particularly welcoming.
