The Nursery

by Asia Mackay

  ‘That’s good,’ said Hattie, nodding. ‘From that we can surmise he met with someone in Switzerland who rang him the next day, potentially arranging a meet in London.’

  ‘And the meet could’ve been with the Coyote,’ cut in Geraint. He pressed a few buttons. A map of London projected onto the whiteboard. ‘The sightings and mobile phone tower records we have of George Pig that afternoon are all around here.’ He circled New Cavendish Street and Harley Street. ‘This is an interesting area for George Pig to be visiting as, as you will see here –’ he motioned towards a red dot – ‘this is Asia House. Who, according to a visa application form, sponsored a Patrick Ng’s arrival into the UK on a flight from Switzerland that morning.’

  ‘And you think Patrick Ng is the Coyote?’ asked Robin.

  ‘We have no way of knowing,’ replied Geraint. ‘Professor Patrick Ng is from Beijing University with a specialisation in pan-Asian – European economics. That’s if it was the real Patrick Ng who entered the country.’

  ‘Lex, you need to make sure Frederick keeps a close eye on George Pig at work,’ said Hattie. ‘If the Coyote is now in London he’s going to meet with him again. There must be a safe house in the area.’

  Geraint motioned towards the map on the whiteboard. ‘We’ve had no hits for George Pig on the street CCTV, despite his mobile phone logging him there – he’s probably arriving by car to a building with an underground car park.’

  Hattie looked round at us all. ‘We catch George meeting with the Coyote and we’ve cracked it. We’re on our way to closing down the Tenebris Network.’

  Chapter Twenty

  A MOTHER IN A CANADA GOOSE jacket bounced up to me.

  ‘You’re Gigi’s mother, yah?’

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’

  ‘Did you know that Miss Jenna is not Montessori-trained?’

  ‘I . . . I did not.’ I struggled to place who Miss Jenna was. I figured she must be either the middle-aged dark-haired one or the new young blonde one.

  ‘Well, don’t you think it’s outrageous that they are marketing themselves as a Montessori nursery yet one of the key members of staff has no Montessori qualification?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely.’ I read the situation and figured agreeing was the only option.

  ‘I’m going to—’ Canada Goose mum was cut off by Frederick’s arrival at my side.

  ‘Afternoon, ladies.’

  ‘You’re Florence’s dad, correct?’

  ‘Yes. I have no name of my own.’

  The mum ignored him and repeated what she had just told me.

  ‘Good God, but what are we are paying those hugely inflated fees for then?’ he replied monotonously.

  ‘Yes. Quite. I’m going to petition the owners. I . . .’

  She abandoned the conversation upon seeing the nursery doors open and jostled past the other parents to get to the front of the queue. The rest of us obediently lined up.

  ‘How was the WAF play date yesterday?’

  ‘It was great. You have a beautiful home.’

  ‘Thank you. It was a lot of work and a lot of meetings but I’m very happy with how it all turned out.’ Again, it didn’t surprise me that Frederick had taken the lead in the house renovation. He really was gunning for Superhusband of the year – early morning shifts with the kids, writing out Wow cards, helping his wife with her work, managing the house build, and all that with a full-time job that was more demanding than most.

  ‘What have we got here?’ Frederick reached down to the ground and picked up a Cinderella Barbie with a missing head. He waved it at me. ‘Don’t you find there’s nothing more ominous than a doll with a missing body part?’ He ran a finger over the neck stump. ‘An innocent subject. Butchered.’ He propped the headless doll up on the steps. She did look a little terrifying, a victim of a brutal crime, still perfectly dressed in her grand blue ball gown.

  ‘You could start up the West London Mafia and that could be your calling card to your enemies. Forget horses’ heads at the end of the bed, you can do decapitated Disney princesses.’

  He laughed. ‘You’d be my first hire. I don’t think I’d do too well as a sinister mob boss without you by my side.’

  We smiled at each other.

  It was nice he found me funny.

  When did I last make Will laugh?

  When did I last try to?

  Florence and Gigi came out together and stomped down each step of the Portakabin. They were each brandishing yet another folder of splodged artwork.

  ‘Hello, poo poo head,’ said Gigi to me.

  ‘Hello, poo poo head,’ copied Florence to Frederick.

  The girls erupted into giggles.

  ‘Now, Florence. We don’t talk like that, do we?’ said Frederick with a straight face.

  Florence stopped laughing and her head dropped. I marvelled at how obedient she was, while Gigi carried on dancing around still shouting, ‘Poo poo head, poo poo head!’

  ‘Gigi, stop that. It is not a nice way to talk.’ The annoying American mother who liked to spam us all with health studies into the effects of processed sugar on children’s development was staring at us unsmiling. Her pale son stood quietly in front of her watching. The poor sod had had a cake made of cacao and sweet potato for his birthday party.

  I leaned down and whispered into Gigi’s ear, ‘Stop saying “poo” or no chocolate when we get home.’

  Gigi stopped. I straightened up. Appearance was everything and right now it looked as though I had some control over my daughter.

  ‘Good, no more silly words. You’re a big girl now. We talk nicely.’ I held my head up high as we walked past the line of mothers waiting to pick up.

  ‘Yes, Mama. Talk nicely get chocolate,’ Gigi said.

  Goddammit. My smile fixed in place, I ushered her after Florence and Frederick. I was sure I heard the American mother mutter ‘cycle of addiction’ as we left the courtyard.

  The girls ran ahead together as Frederick and I walked across the green.

  ‘One Ghost got away.’

  ‘Did they get anything?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it but we’re tracking him down to be sure.’ I looked across at him. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m fine. Slept well, actually. Surprising, all things considered.’

  I didn’t want to pry further.

  ‘How are the Pigs?’

  ‘Peppa implied she was going to be out of London for the weekend.’

  ‘I’ve heard from Dionne that Peppa is bringing her daughter to the WAF pottery café morning tomorrow. But I guess she could still head out of town afterwards. We’ll look into it.’

  ‘George Pig is leaving the office in an hour. Requested leaving early for vague “family reasons”.’

  ‘Kate said he was slammed at work and they’ve had to cancel a Cornwall trip next week. So there’s no way he’ll be going home.’ I thought for a moment how it was going to be pretty depressing if he was having an affair too.

  ‘You need to make sure he’s followed. I’ll keep watching Peppa at the office.’

  I pulled out my phone and emailed Whistle the update for Robin to get in position to follow George as soon as he left the office.

  I turned to Frederick. ‘I still think the Coyote will strike at the Wycombe shoot tomorrow. Hattie has got me inside Cherwell Castle as a Protection Officer but he’s struggling on getting anyone else in.’

  ‘I was at school with Lord Wycombe. He’s actually already invited me to the shoot and the dinner. So you don’t need to worry. I’ll be there to back you up. To hold your bag for you when you go get the bad guy.’ He smiled.

  ‘Don’t put yourself down. You handled yourself just fine last night.’

  We watched as the girls skipped ahead across the green, exclaiming at the daisies dotted across the grass. I envied them. Who really wanted to grow up and have to deal with all the other crap life threw at you. Like mortgages, and problems at work, and people trying to kill you . . .
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  *

  I dropped Gigi at home to a waiting Ganma and hopped on my bike to the Platform. I screeched into the underground car park just as Jake was climbing into a black BMW with a siren on top.

  ‘We’ve got the missing Ghost. Just had a 999 call from someone saying that that paedo off Facebook had been secured and that it was getting pretty heated.’

  We went full pelt to Clapham, siren blaring.

  I checked my watch. The Facebook post had found the Ghost fast. I looked at how many hundreds of thousands of times the post had been shared. The parent network was alive and well and out for blood for anyone who was a threat to their children.

  Jake spoke to me over the blare of the siren. ‘You need to talk to Will.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Next weekend. He wants to surprise you. He asked me to make sure you aren’t working those days. I didn’t know how to tell him I couldn’t control whether or not a Chinese minister was going to be assassinated and how that might affect you being granted time off for a mini-break to the Cotswolds.’

  I frowned. ‘You ruined the surprise now – I didn’t know he was planning the Cotswolds.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘OK, OK, just say what I told him, which is: we’re all on standby for a big information leak from America.’

  ‘Too late – I already said we’re on standby for a Russian informant coming in. Is that going to be a problem?’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll adjust my story to yours when I see him.’

  Will was seemingly ignoring my directive to not plan anything until work had calmed down. I didn’t know whether to be touched at his dedication to us getting away together or annoyed that he wasn’t listening to me.

  As we approached the location the 999 caller had given, there was a bustle of around thirty people, nearly all women, on the street corner. We pulled to a halt next to them. There was a lot of shouting and jostling.

  ‘I’ve done nothing! I’ve done nothing!’ came the lone male voice shouting from inside the circle. We got out of the car.

  ‘Police! Coming through,’ I yelled above the din.

  ‘Lock him up and throw away the key!’

  ‘Fucking paedo!’

  ‘Here. This is his.’ A couple of women handed me a battered brown wallet. ‘It fell. His name is John Thompson.’

  ‘Thank God you’re here.’ John himself said this.

  We got to him and Jake grabbed him under his right arm while I took his left.

  I tried to address the crowd over the yells of abuse. ‘Thank you, everyone. We’ve got him now.’

  We headed back towards the car, with people parting to let us through.

  We pushed John into the car.

  ‘Hey, why am I in the back? Shouldn’t you be arresting them all for assault? What have I done wrong?’

  ‘How about breaking and entering a covert underground government agency?’

  ‘I . . . I . . . I want a lawyer.’

  Jake laughed and started the engine.

  ‘Do you really think this is how it’s going to work? Where we’re taking you, you’re going to wish to be back with that baying mob.

  ‘Save us some time, and yourself a lot of pain, and tell us what you took with you.’

  The man shook his head vigorously.

  ‘I took nothing. Everyone around me started dying and I figured we weren’t paid enough for that so I should get out while I still could. It was meant to be fucking empty. No one said that there’d be a fleet of assassins down there.’

  Jake smirked. ‘There wasn’t a whole fleet. Just one. That one.’ He nodded at me.

  I grinned and gave John a little wave.

  ‘Fuck me. A girl? You’re shitting me?’

  ‘How about we drop John back off with that other bunch of girls he was having such trouble with?’

  ‘OK, OK, I’m sorry. I just . . . Look, I took nothing, OK? I know nothing.’

  *

  Jake took John on to the Warehouse to join the rest of his colleagues in a continued interrogation with Cameron. If he had taken anything they would find out. I doubted he had. Having met him I was inclined to believe he was more of the cowardly running-for-his-life ilk and not efficient-operative-making-fast-getaway-with-the-goods.

  I returned to the Platform to help with the Snake hunt.

  ‘Robin is in position,’ said Hattie, ‘waiting for George to exit Six.’

  ‘Frederick seemed to think Peppa might be leaving London after the WAF pottery café morning tomorrow.’

  ‘We should get a tracker on her,’ suggested Geraint.

  ‘I don’t like it.’ Hattie shook his head. ‘She finds a tracker and it’s game over. Both Peppa and Tenebris know we’re onto them.’

  ‘How else we goin’ to keep eyes on them?’ asked Pixie. ‘She’s trained. We can’t risk losing sight of her location.’

  ‘Wherever she’s going she’s bringing her daughter, Bella. Dionne the nanny is away for the weekend and mentioned that Peppa had various things planned with her.’ I was flicking through our surveillance photos of Peppa, Dionne and Bella. I looked at the dolly clasped in Bella’s hands. I’d never seen her without it. It was in every surveillance photo.

  ‘Dolly,’ I announced.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bella’s dolly. She takes her everywhere with her. We find a replacement and stick a tracker inside it.’

  Hattie nodded. ‘Do it.’

  I looked at Geraint and Pixie. ‘We need to source an identical doll by this afternoon so it’s ready in time for tomorrow morning’s WAF meeting.’

  Pixie’s fingers were flying across her laptop.

  ‘DollyWorld stopped making this type of doll last year. But there’s one on eBay from a seller in Hoxton. I can get a courier to pick it up within the hour.’

  Pixie pressed a few buttons and the Hoxton dolly image was projected onto the whiteboard alongside the real dolly.

  I assessed the two photos.

  ‘Bella’s dolly has clearly been through the washing machine countless times. And look here – the hem of her dress has come undone. There’s a small hole in the hood. And there’s one patch here that seems to be the most faded of all – that must be where she rubs it. It has to be perfect. Gigi can spot a fake Monkey a mile off. There’s no way of knowing this little girl won’t be the same. Soon as it arrives you need to get to work on it.’

  A ping came in to all of our phones. An Uber alert. George Pig had requested an Uber and Robin had accepted the job.

  One of Eight’s preferred method of securing targets for interrogation was through waiting for them to book an Uber and then sweeping them back to Platform Eight in a modified car with unlockable passenger doors and soundproofed tinted windows. Or in this case taking them to whichever destination they inputted, safe in the knowledge there was no greater way to know where your target was going than by being the person driving them there.

  ‘The destination is the corner of New Cavendish and Harley Street,’ read out Hattie.

  ‘Asia House is on New Cavendish Street,’ said Geraint.

  ‘He’s either going there or they have a designated meeting spot or safe house close by. Lex, get to Asia House. If he goes in there we can presume he’s the Snake. G, Pixie, start checking CCTV of New Cavendish Street in the last twenty-four hours. We need to know if anyone else we recognise has been there.’

  *

  I parked my bike just off New Cavendish Street and took out my phone, checking the Platform Uber app. Robin was just about to turn the corner. I looked up and saw him. He gave me a nod as he pulled to a halt next to where my bike was parked. I stared down at my phone as George Pig got out the car.

  I watched as he set off in the direction of Asia House.

  It was looking promising.

  I followed behind. ‘We’re watching through the CCTV,’ Geraint came in through my earpiece.

  I kept a good twenty feet behind him. Not so close he would
notice me. We were four doors down from the entrance to Asia House.

  In my ear I heard Geraint. ‘Asia House are hosting an event called Asian Development Outlook. That can be your cover.’

  I kept my eyes on George. He walked straight past Asia House and into the café two doors down. The meet must be happening there. The café was busy but I spotted him in the corner by the door as I entered. He was standing by a table. He looked over at me as I walked in. I stared straight ahead and went up to the counter. I spent a couple of seconds admiring their pastries before risking a look around.

  George Pig was nowhere to be seen.

  Dammit, could he have recognised me from somewhere? Had I spooked him?

  I rushed out the door and looked up and down the street. He can’t have gone far. Could he have slipped into Asia House already?

  I was about to call Robin for back-up but then I spotted him.

  He was walking away from me just up ahead. How had I missed him? I walked fast; the distance between us closed. He was a street ahead when I noticed something was off. He was walking slowly. Why? I crossed the road. I was now ten feet behind him. Was he . . . was he pushing something?

  He suddenly stopped and turned towards a building entrance. I caught sight of what he was pushing, and the building he was going into.

  Everything became clear.

  We had got it so wrong.

  *

  A few phone calls when I got back to the Platform confirmed that I had reached the correct conclusion.

  Zurich doesn’t just have private banks.

  It also has Dignitas. A place where those with terminal illnesses could go to die. And Asia House was on the street next to the Harley Street Clinic.

  There was no traitor visiting private Swiss banks and having covert meetings with assassins.

  Just a man trying to reconcile his wife with her mother before she died.

  I had taken one look at the occupant of the wheelchair George was pushing and I had known. Even with a scarf delicately tied round her head, I could see the family resemblance.

  ‘I don’t get it.’ Robin shook his head. ‘The woman in the wheelchair could be a plant? He could still have been meeting the Coyote inside the clinic?’

  ‘It’s his mother-in-law. She’s got terminal cancer. He found out she’d booked herself into Dignitas. He flew out there to talk her down and bring her home.’