38 Wormwood Cottage
Wormwood Cottage
The trouble began immediately after breakfast. Not surprisingly the Danish woman called Ingrid was to blame. The problem was
her computer. She required it, she declared, in order to review certain sensitive documents stored on an external hard drive.
Her entreaties, while passionate, left Parish unmoved; it was strictly forbidden by Wormwood Cottage rules. When informed
of this, the Danish woman demanded to see the actual rule book, but once again Parish demurred. This too, he explained, was
prohibited.
She took her case to Mr. Marlowe, and Mr. Marlowe had a go at Parish on her behalf. “Look here, old sport,” he began in that
clubby West End voice of his. “Surely we can find some sort of elegant solution to our little problem.”
“It’s not our problem,” was Parish’s riposte. “It’s hers.”
“And mine too, you see. Because we need to review those documents tout de suite.”
“I’d be happy to print them for her.”
“There’s enough material on that disk to fill a warehouse. Now, give me the damn computer.”
Parish surrendered it after first compelling the woman to affix her signature to a memorandum of understanding regarding the use of the computer.
It could be operated, the document made glaringly clear, only in an offline mode.
Any attempt to connect the device to the Internet would leave the user liable to criminal prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.
Never mind that she was a Danish citizen and as such was not subject to the OSA; Parish would find some way to punish her.
He was as wicked as the rest of them and didn’t take kindly to being crossed.
They worked in the drawing room—Mr. Marlowe and Mr. Allon, the petite Danish woman called Ingrid, and the beautiful Englishwoman
who was pretending not to be the socialite who was missing and presumed dead. Precisely what they were doing was a mystery
to Parish and Miss Coventry, though the confines of the cottage were such that they couldn’t help but overhear at least a
portion of the proceedings—especially Miss Coventry, a listener by trade who missed nothing.
“It involves her husband,” she informed Parish on the afternoon of the first day. “Evidently he’s in business with a Russian
oligarch, the one who used to live in that enormous place in Prince of Wales Terrace.”
“Not Dmitri Savin?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Parish absorbed this information in thoughtful silence. They were seated in the kitchen’s cozy little nook, partaking of their
afternoon tea. Mr. Marlowe had challenged the Danish woman to a footrace in the wilds of Dartmoor. Mr. Allon and Ms. Winter
were still hard at work in the drawing room.
“Do you remember the last time he was here?” asked Parish.
“It was the Rebecca Manning case, wasn’t it?” Miss Coventry sipped her tea. “A scandal for the ages, that one. Imagine, the
daughter of none other than Kim Philby . . .”
“He found her too, as I recall.”
“He certainly has a knack for it.” She smiled. “And always the perfect guest. Such beautiful manners.”
“Unlike his little friend from Denmark.”
“Here she comes now.”
Parish peered out the nook’s leaded window and saw the Danish woman bounding across the moor. Mr. Marlowe was nowhere to be
seen.
“Where do you suppose he could be?”
“I’m sure he’ll turn up soon enough. After all,” said Miss Coventry, “we’re having cottage pie for dinner.”
It would be another twenty minutes before he staggered into the forecourt. Exhausted and soaked with sweat, he slipped into
the cottage without a word and headed off to his room with his tail between his legs to dress for dinner. It was a relaxed
affair, noisy and filled with laughter, most of it at Mr. Marlowe’s expense. The Danish woman offered him a rematch, with
a five-minute head start. Wisely he declined.
After breakfast the following morning they were back at work.
Parish and Miss Coventry overheard several exchanges—through absolutely no fault of their own, mind you—that led them to believe that Ms. Winter’s husband was not nearly as wealthy as he had made himself out to be.
Indeed it sounded as though Edward Knight was entirely beholden to the aforementioned Dmitri Savin, a relationship he had taken great pains to conceal from HMRC, otherwise known as His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. It appeared as though the Russian oligarch had plowed money into Knight’s firm through a number of dodgy offshore shell companies, the kind with three-letter names like ABC Holdings and XYZ Capital.
Knight in turn had paid the Russian a handsome return on his investment, somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five percent, which had been funneled into an entirely different set of offshore front companies—including something called Landmark Ventures, a Bahamian-registered shell corporation that did its banking in Nassau.
“It sounds to me,” said Miss Coventry, “as though Landmark holds the key.”
“To what, exactly?” asked Parish.
“Mr. Marlowe seems to think that Landmark is controlled by the GRU.”
“A band of thugs,” declared Parish with an uncharacteristic flash of vehemence. “Always the mailed fist, never the delicate
touch. Give me a good old-fashioned Moscow Center hood any day of the week. They were worthy opponents in their day, weren’t
they, Miss Coventry?”
They overheard other things as the day wore on—snippets of conversations, announcements of interesting discoveries, even the
odd exchange of a harsh word—that indicated the unlikely team of burrowers toiling away in the drawing room were closing in
on their target. Parish received additional supporting evidence of this theory when the young Danish woman, having forgone
her afternoon training run, requested permission to attach her laptop computer to the Internet via a mobile hotspot. Parish,
aghast, put his foot down.
“Not now, not ever. World without end, Amen.”
A quarrel ensued, one that all parties would later regret.
Voices were raised, threats issued. Even Mr. Allon, he of the impeccable manners, joined the fray.
Parish, seeking a way out of the morass, reluctantly offered the Danish woman use of the computer in his office.
That, said Mr. Allon, was the worst idea he had heard since Brexit.
Eventually, however, the parties reached a compromise, one that permitted the Danish woman to remove the ethernet cable from Parish’s computer and attach it to hers.
She did so at 7:20 p.m., with Parish looking warily on. “Leave,” was all she said.
He ate a late dinner with Miss Coventry and then retired to his rooms to watch a little something on the telly. The door to
his office, which was just down the corridor, was tightly closed, though it did little to dampen the relentless machine-gun
clatter of her typing. Worse still was her strange music, meandering notes on a piano interspersed with the dissonant wailing
of a saxophone. Parish, a devotee of Haydn and Mozart, had never heard such drivel.
She was still at it at dawn when Parish, after a sleepless night, staggered from his bed—and at 1:00 p.m., when the others sat down to an al fresco lunch in the garden. She finally emerged from the office at half past four, with
the laptop tucked under one arm. She delivered her findings to Mr. Allon, who in turn had a quiet word with Mr. Marlowe, who
rang Vauxhall Cross from the secure phone in Parish’s office. The helicopter set down on the grounds of Wormwood Cottage a
few minutes after six o’clock. Much to Parish’s disappointment, it took on only two passengers.