Chapter 51
Ludo
“This jigsaw puzzle is pants,” I said. It was Tuesday evening, and thin strips of white paper were strewn across the summer house floor.
The soundtrack to Yentl tinkled away softly in the background.
I find Barbra helps me concentrate. I was sitting on the rug, trying to sort together any strips of paper that looked like they matched, based on font, paper weight, or ink colour.
“When you said you had a surprise for me, I thought you might be taking me out to dinner or something.”
“I brought you curry,” Sunny protested. He was sitting at my desk (where our laptops were now more or less permanently set up side by side), glue stick in hand, studying a handful of strips of paper.
“Correction. You went to the house and brought out two bowls of the curry Father made.”
“Did I lie?”
“Stop trying to wind me up.”
“But you’re so cute when you’re annoyed.”
“Don’t upset me in front of Babs. She doesn’t like it.”
I spotted a flash of red on a strip of paper and extracted it, adding it to a pile of similarly marked strips.
“I think I’ve just about got all this logo on this letterhead,” I said.
Sunny jumped up and joined me on the floor, his shoulder leaning into mine as we studied the pieces. My heart still raced whenever his body touched mine. Like it was illicit. Like someone might tell us to stop it at any minute. He smelt of glue and spices.
He picked up the pieces and shuffled them around, being careful to flatten them against the rug so they didn’t tangle or tear.
“That’s it. We’ve got it,” Sunny said.
“I’ve never heard of Prometheus Power, have you?” I asked, but he wasn’t listening. He was running his fingers down the length of the portion of shredded page we had managed to piece together. “Dear Mr Windhoek… This prospectus for… investors to raise… a more renewable…”
“No mention of Newton Bardon, nuclear power, or ZephEnergies,” I said. “It looks like an ordinary covering letter for an initial public offer to me. Prometheus Power must be about to list on some stock exchange or other.”
“Maybe,” Sunny said. “But I’ve seen this logo before. In VladPop’s office. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just caught a glance of it.”
“Does it mean anything?” I nuzzled my head into Sunny’s shoulder and kissed the soft, freckled skin of his neck.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But this letter isn’t addressed to Carstairs; it’s addressed to her husband.”
A text message pinged Sunny’s phone, and he pulled it out of the pocket of his hoodie. The screen illuminated his face as he studied the message, his green eyes growing wider with every passing second.
“It’s Karma,” he said. “Torsten has talked.”
* * *
I might not quite have approved of Operation Atomic Kitten, and I might not have enjoyed spending three nights piecing together strips of shredded paper, but I had to hand it to Sunny—his dirty tabloid tricks had got results.
By Thursday evening, Sunny and I were sitting at our laptops, side by side, writing our separate stories, cross-checking every fact, making sure we could prove everything we’d discovered, and generally making our stories as watertight as possible.
When we were done writing, we read our articles out loud to each other.
The information was exactly the same, but the tone was different. This was my opening paragraph:
The Government has done a secret deal with British renewables firm ZephEnergies to build and operate a 3.
2 gigawatt nuclear power station at Newton Bardon in Leicestershire.
The Government had said that any proposals for new net zero energy projects would have to go before the new National Investment Committee, but the Sentinel can confirm the Leicestershire plant was given the go-ahead before the committee was even formed.
Whereas Sunny’s report had a bit more colour:
The grubby soviet nuclear power plant deal that ended the career of sexpot former energy minister Bob Wynn-Jones has been reheated, with the Government secretly giving the multibillion pound contract to UK-based “renewable energy” company ZephEnergies.
The Leicestershire project exploded in a mushroom cloud of scandal last month when the Bulletin revealed Wynn-Jones was having an extramarital affair with a Belarusian spy.
In the fallout, the Government announced it would create a National Investment Committee to decide which net zero projects would get the go-ahead.
But today the Bulletin can reveal that ZephEnergies was awarded the contract to build and operate Newton Bardon within days of the Cabinet reshuffle that saw the creation of Jemima Carstairs’ mega-department.
“By Saturday morning, this will be all anyone in Britain is talking about,” Sunny said.
I passed him a USB stick with his copies of all the evidence we’d collected.
“You’ll need this.”
We sat back in our chairs and smiled at each other. There was nothing left to do now but for us to pitch our stories tomorrow morning.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Starving,” Sunny said. “Shall we go up the chicken shop?”
“That’s not quite what I had in mind.” I brushed my socked foot against his leg playfully, without dropping eye contact for even a second.
It was dark, and we were lit by our computer screens.
There had been a rush of adrenaline as we wrote and as we read, but it gave way to something else now.
Where there should have been exhaustion, a kind of thrill shivered through me, a nervous energy.
Sunny’s eyes twinkled, little emerald sparkles shining out amid the peridot.
I let my foot stray a little higher. He raised his eyebrows.
I smirked. Sunny shoved his hands in his pockets and spread his legs.
I crept my foot higher and found the spot where his body was responding to my touch.
I realised, then, what this new feeling was.
It was power, and the anticipation of power. And it was a rush.
Sunny pulled off his hoodie, revealing his beautiful pale skin dashed with the amber and umber of a million freckles.
He was lean, and the intercostal muscles of his ribs created tiger stripes that curved around to his back.
His blush-pink nipples were as hard as shot in a roasted pheasant.
Still, I held his gaze. He did not move.
We were playing a power game of our own now, and the anticipation was too much for me.
I let my foot fall to the floor. I took my glasses off, crept out of my chair like a predator stalking its prey, crouched on the floor between Sunny’s knees, and gently tugged down his joggers.
“Bugger me rigid, Sunny. Do you ever wear pants?”
* * *
Half an hour later, we were both sprawled out naked on the rug on the summer house floor, exhausted, completely sated.
“I think I have at least a thousand tiny paper cuts on my back and butt,” I said.
“Let me check,” Sunny said.
“If I roll over, I’ll get them on my front too.”
“Roll over.”
I did as I was told. The room was dark, lit only by the bluish light from my laptop screen.
“I can’t see any,” Sunny said.
“I can feel them.”
“Do you want me to kiss it better?”
“Yes, please.”
Sunny kissed the nape of my neck, his warm breath making my skin tingle.
“Where does it hurt? Does it hurt here?” He kissed my shoulder blade, his lips lightly grazing the flesh, giving me goosebumps all over.
“Yes,” I said. “Everywhere.”
“Even here?” He kissed the small of my back.
“Yes.”
“Here?” He kissed the round of my butt.
“Yes.”
“All better?”
“Yes.”
“You really have a smashing arse, you know that?” He smacked it, and I rolled over, theatrically kicking a leg high and straight into the air.
“It’s all those years of ballet,” I said, secretly enjoying the sting where his hand had been. Sunny climbed up the rug until his lips met mine. We kissed. His mouth was warm, and his lips tasted of lube and sex.
“We should shower,” I said. Sunny nodded.
There was a knock on the sliding glass door of the summer house.
“Bollocks!” Sunny said, a look of panic on his face. He commando-rolled buck naked along the floor and behind the bed.
“Ludo?” It was Father.
“Just a minute!” I called out, scrambling to throw on some clothes.
Fortunately, the curtains were drawn. We were in the middle of a top-secret mission, after all.
But considering this was a top-secret mission, we had evidence scattered absolutely everywhere.
How were we meant to explain all this shredded paper?
Some bizarre kitty litter role play? He knocked again.
“Do you boys want supper?” Father said.
Somewhat dressed, I pulled the curtain around myself, hiding the room from view, and slid the door open a little. I straightened my clothes. I say my clothes; I was in Sunny’s sweatpants and hoodie, which had been the nearest things to hand. My father rolled his eyes.
“Are you boys hungry? It’s leftover curry, I’m afraid, but then curry is always better a few days later.”
“Actually, Sunny has promised to take me to the chicken shop. But thanks all the same.”
“You’re foregoing my famous beef massaman curry to eat at some cockroach-infested high-street fast-food joint?”
Sunny wasn’t having this culinary delight disrespected. “High-street chicken shops are our cultural heritage,” he called out from behind the bed. “They’re iconic institutions, like seaside penny arcades and Miriam Margolyes, and we must use them or we will lose them.”
Father frowned. “It’s a chicken shop, not the English National Opera,” he muttered. He tried to peer into the room, but I pulled the curtain tightly around me.
“You heard Sunny,” I said. “It’s my patriotic duty as an Englishman to go to the chicken shop.”
“There’s a better class of cockroach this side of the Finchley Road,” Sunny added. “The Hampstead ones wear hairnets.”
Father squinted.
“You’ve got a piece of shredded paper in your hair,” he said, plucking it free. I snatched it from his hand.
“How strange.”
“What are you boys up to in there? You’ve been cooped up in here every night this week.”
I felt my face flush. My heart pounded in my chest.
“I don’t think you actually want an answer to that question, do you?” I said. “If you really think about it.”
Father looked down to see I was wearing Sunny’s sweatpants. He raised his eyebrows and slowly nodded.
“Right you are,” he said, eyeballing me suspiciously one last time. Then he turned on his heel and walked back to the house. “Enjoy the chicken shop.”
It was a lucky escape.
Sunny and I showered together in the tiny summer house en suite, almost until the water ran cold.
I turned the big light on so we could find our clothes and get dressed.
The room was a disaster zone of shredded papers, dirty plates, and strewn clothes.
Sunny packed his laptop into his rucksack, making sure he had his USB stick with the copies of the primary evidence.
As we left, I looked around at the mess.
I wasn’t sure I could face coming back to clean this up.
I turned off the big light, leaving the room illuminated in the soft blue light of my laptop screen.