Chapter 38
I’ve still got my hi-vis on, and my clipboard, and my mask. For a moment I consider trying to style it out in character as an idiot bailiff, but then I think again. This place feels official.
The window at the back of the room I’m in is … of course it is. Bolted and barred, with no key in sight. I’m going to have to get back to the street.
One rule I’ve never written down, a rule I didn’t think I’d ever have to observe or number, is simple: no physical violence. I have a horrible worry I’m about to break that rule now.
There are footsteps approaching up the stairs.
These ones aren’t like old Mr Rivers’ in his Nevis office.
Nor are they like those of Mr Lethbridge, crunching crossly across his gravel drive.
I feel like I’ve become a real connoisseur of slowly approaching footsteps in the last fortnight.
These, I would say, are the footsteps of a fit and healthy young person.
The door opens.
By the time it does, I’ve slid myself under the bottom of the bunk bed, facing the door. I look to my left, and see something that’s either a baton or a very aggressive sex toy. Just terrific.
The feet I can see are clad in rough old trainers, the laces already undone.
The owner of the feet isn’t moving suspiciously, at least. They potter back and forth to a small wardrobe in the corner of the room.
I think they’re undressing – the shoes are eased off, socks shoved into them.
Small feet. A few more rustles of cloth.
Then I feel a terrible squeeze from above, along the length of my torso.
My new friend has got into the bottom bunk, and from the feel of it, they’ve landed right on top of me.
It doesn’t matter how petite someone is, if they put their full weight on your torso, you’ll know about it. Right now, I can hardly breathe. My vision is going haywire. Is this how I die?
After thirty seconds of this, the body above me shuffles, and the pressure relents. They’ve shifted, thank God. I guess lying on me isn’t comfortable either. I reach up to my face, and silently claw my mask down so I can breathe better.
A few more minutes pass, and the body above me shifts once or twice more, then is completely still.
The breathing from up there sounds regular.
They’re not moving. I should have waited behind the door, and charged out of the room as soon as it opened.
Easier still not to have come here in the first place.
The easiest thing, really, would have been to stay in Nevis, settle down with Em, and start a new life as a conch farmer.
I’m just going to have to go for it.
You may not remember, but earlier on, I said that there are two ways of moving surreptitiously – the first is to proceed more or less as normal, the second is to go at semi-snail pace, take an age, don’t disturb a single floorboard.
And I recall confidently asserting that the first method is by far the most simple and natural.
I wish I’d practised the second a bit more now.
Here goes nothing. With agonising slowness, I reach out and transfer the trainers out of the way.
Then, for about three minutes, I eeeeeease myself sideways.
It’s bloody working. The breathing stays regular.
No further shifting. I’m almost out … little bit more …
I’ve made it. I’m beside the bed on all fours, my arms trembling from the exertion. All I have to do is get up and leave.
And then, from the crumpled trousers that have been tossed on the floor, a phone dings.
I look sideways. Staring into my face, maybe eighteen inches away, is a rather bleary-eyed young Chinese woman.
We both react at the same time. My move was going to be to slowly raise my finger to my lips, to reassert some control over the situation, then walk out of the house and sprint back to the station.
Her move, on the other hand, is a bit more direct, which is to open her mouth and scream blue murder. I run.
As I go, another door opens further up the house, and I hear footsteps descending towards me. I take the stairs four at a time, nearly breaking my neck, heave the door open, vault the low garden wall, ignore the rising swell of shouts behind me, and I’m gone.
‘This is not good.’
‘Stop saying that, Jonny. None of this is good.’
We’re back at our new home in Balfour Villas.
We keep discovering more rooms: this one is a home gym with a huge screen and plush red seats at one end, which we have dubbed the ‘gymema’.
We’re in the front row. It got late somehow, and it must be close to midnight.
Outside, the weather’s kicking up a fuss, and occasionally a loose branch taps the window, reliably terrifying me.
I ran the ten-minute walk back to the station in – I would estimate – about fifteen seconds.
By that time I couldn’t see anyone chasing me.
There had been nobody outside guarding the house, which would have created further complication.
I didn’t look back for the first half of the route, but I’m pretty sure I had given them the slip.
At the station, I phoned Em, told her I was getting on the train without explaining further, and was on the first southbound Tube before they could catch up with me.
On the train, I did the usual things – changed carriage three times, switched lines, took my jacket off when I was confident I was out of the cameras’ field of view, masked up, changed masks so they’d have a harder time identifying me, all of that.
Thanks to my mucking about underground, the others reached Balfour Villas about half an hour before me. I explained what I could about the weird server house, then fell asleep for a few hours until Em came in and woke me up because she was sick of waiting to talk more.
The only thing I salvaged from the house was the photos I took of the top few sheets of paper on the desk.
Jonny took the photos from my phone, then put them up online to be translated, using some dodgy Chinese expat intermediary on one of his illegal websites.
And he’s now telling us things are ‘not good’. No shit.
‘No, I mean, this is really a disastrous development.’ Things must be bad if Jonny isn’t even using Nineteen Eighty-Four references.
‘What is it?’ Elle asks.
‘It’s official government shit. Chinese government.’
Em asks, ‘Which bit of the government, Jonny?’
‘Unclear. Lots of terms my correspondent didn’t recognise. But he thinks it’s an espionage thing.’
‘Oh, great.’
I still haven’t quite adjusted. ‘Sorry, but it sounds like we’re saying I broke into Chinese government property today. Are we saying that?’
‘In mitigation, you didn’t know it at the time.’
‘I’m sure they’ll take that into account when they catch up with me.’
‘I read something about this,’ says Em. She taps on her phone. ‘Yes. That’s it. Look.’ She holds it out. Elle and I read it together.
‘What the hell is a dark police station?’
‘It’s basically an unofficial embassy overseas,’ says Jonny.
‘You base a few of your people there, but you don’t register them the same way you do an embassy or a consulate or whatever.
And once those people are installed, they can do various things on your behalf without being acknowledged by the host government. ’
‘What are they for?’
‘It’s all in the piece, Al.’
I read on. ‘Pressuring dissidents to return … secretive bases overseas … Oh, wow. We’re talking proper George Smiley stuff here.’
‘I don’t think they would get the reference, but yes.’
‘Says here we asked them to shut them all down.’
‘Guess they must have forgotten this one.’
Em gets up and walks the length of the room and back, kicking the treadmill as she passes it.
‘This is what Davy started doing three years ago,’ I say. ‘He was setting up these secret police stations for the Chinese government. Bad places, places you wouldn’t think to look for them. Near Chinese communities too, I suppose.’
‘It won’t just be China,’ says Em. ‘There will be lots of countries running similar things.’
‘This is what he wanted to confess,’ I say. ‘He got too uncomfortable with it, wanted to get out, contacted the police … then someone he was working with found out he’d made the appointment and whacked him.’
‘Who?’
‘Whoever’s in his shared inbox. Whoever he has this UAE account with.’
‘It doesn’t feel very espionage, turning up at someone’s door and blowing them away,’ says Em. ‘It feels more gangland. I still think it was one of his colleagues from his end of the operation.’
‘But either way,’ says Elle slowly, ‘this is what Davy was up to.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So now we have potentially caught the interest of agents from dozens of hostile foreign powers.’
‘I told you it wasn’t good,’ says Jonny. He’s back on his laptop.
‘And we still don’t know who Davy told about his appointment with the police. It was in his diary in code, and he didn’t make the booking through Mrs P from his office. Even that Kate woman didn’t know what he was going to confess. He was being careful.’
‘Not careful enough,’ says Em. ‘What are you typing, Jonny?’
‘Checking our online security. This bloody weather has smashed up two of my cameras outside. Although I doubt I can do anything if the world’s top intelligence agencies want to know our whereabouts.’
‘There was another story about this kind of thing recently,’ says Elle. ‘I feel like it was … on TV. When did we last watch TV?’
Em and I think. Jonny keeps typing.
‘I haven’t seen any TV since the moment we discovered who Davy was,’ I say. ‘It was on the news, remember? At the other Balfour Villas place.’
‘Yes. That’s it. And there was something else …’ Elle gets her phone out. ‘Some other news story that day. It was after the report about Davy.’ She types, frowns, narrows the dates down, then, as Em and I look at each other, she quietly says, ‘Bingo.’
‘What?’
She holds out her phone. ‘The other story was about an Iranian spy ring being busted on the south coast. Remember?’
‘So what?’
‘Do you have Lulu Harcourt’s number?’
‘I’ve got it,’ says Em. ‘Are you saying there’s a link between Davy and that story?’
‘Maybe. Wasn’t Lulu’s first story, the one before she told you about her dad, about an Iranian guy?’
‘Oh, shit. Her ex-boyfriend. The one who took photos of her asleep. What was his name?’
‘Faisal,’ I say.
‘Exactly. Jonny, where are you going?’
‘Installing two new cameras outside,’ he says, waving some kit. ‘Won’t be a moment.’
‘Be careful, please.’ As Jonny lumbers into the hall, Em continues. ‘Where was I?
‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘You’re saying Faisal went out with Lulu and took those threatening pictures not because he was a creep but to send a message to Davy?’
‘Maybe. Davy’s doing these deals, setting up dark police stations all over the country.
He does a deal for the Iranians. It goes wrong somehow and they’re at risk of exposure.
The Iranians hold him responsible – maybe he screwed up.
They go to him and say they want new premises pronto.
He refuses. But they’ve got his daughter as leverage and they start gathering photos to send as a threat.
Only it doesn’t work, because Lulu gets in the way and their operation gets busted.
But Davy makes the connection, and he’s so freaked out by the threat to Lulu that he makes an appointment with the police.
He wants to confess everything, get some witness protection for his immediate family, get out. ’
‘That could be what he argued with Rob Wallace about.’
‘Or Rob Wallace found out about the appointment with the police, was worried he was going to confess everything and tank the business, and offed him. Either way, that’s how it goes.’
‘It’s a nice theory, if the timings stack up,’ I say. I’m struggling a bit. Considering one government’s overseas espionage operations was a bit much for one day. Two is overload.
‘I really think we should give Claudia a call,’ says Elle. ‘This is exactly her line.’
‘No,’ says Em. ‘How many times do I have to say it? We are not begging for her help.’
‘It’s not begging, it’s—’
‘Just stop it, Elle. She can find out about all this afterwards, when we’re vindicated and the whole thing has been dealt with without her stupid help.’
‘You’re being petty.’
‘You’re being sentimental. You don’t remember what it was like growing up with her,’ says Em.
They scowl at each other, and a cold wind blows through the gymema.
‘Jonny must have left the front door open,’ I say. ‘I’ll just pop and shut it.’
I head out, leaving them to their argument: through the main living room, the subsidiary study, and into the large Romanesque hall, with its embarrassing squillionaire’s chandelier thirty feet above and its unforgiving marble tiles beneath.
The door has indeed been left open, although that’s not the main thing I focus on as I pull up. Here’s what draws my focus instead:
There’s a man in the hall. He’s not Jonny. I can tell because of a few key differences.
1) Jonny is a foot taller than this guy.
2) Jonny isn’t Chinese.
3) Jonny doesn’t habitually carry a fucking big knife.