by N C Mander
‘Cheers,’ Edison said wearily, holding up his glass and grimacing.
‘Cheers, mate,’ Charlie said with more vigour.
‘Layla on duty tonight?’ Edison asked after Charlie’s wife and their children.
Charlie nodded, taking a long draw on his pint. ‘Yes, so I’m all yours, for you to regale me with your stories of last night’s conquests.’ Charlie’s green eyes flashed, and an impish look Edison had become familiar with since childhood filled his features. Edison rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, come on mate,’ Charlie cajoled him, ‘who is she?’
Edison looked at his oldest friend. They had known one another for nearly a quarter of a century, ever since Edison had arrived from inner city Newcastle at Harrow on his scholarship. Edison had been a fish out of water amidst the ceremony and ritual of the British boarding school system and would have been a prime target for the school’s bullies had Charlie, the son and grandson of Old Harrovians, not plucked him out of the lion’s den on his first day.
On that first day, swamped by his oversized new school uniform, Edison had found himself backed into a corner in the dorm as a crowd of merciless fourth formers who, having got wind of the new arrival, were taunting him for his northern accent. Charlie was supposed to be playing rugby but had returned to the dormitory to retrieve his socks. He elbowed his way through the crowds. The gaggle quietened when they saw him. Although Charlie was only in the third form, a minnow by the school’s strict, unwritten hierarchy, his older brother, Toby, was an influential sixth former. Toby was captain of the squash team and known to offer a beating to anyone who dared even threaten Charlie.
‘All right, mate,’ Charlie had said. Edison was white and bristling, not knowing who to trust, and didn’t reply. ‘You forgotten we have rugger this afternoon?’ Charlie freestyled. ‘He prefers computers,’ he explained to the startled crowd, ‘but it’s not an option this term. Come on, mate.’ Charlie placed a hand on Edison’s arm and firmly directed him toward the door. The crowds parted as they came through. Charlie grabbed his socks on his way past his trunk.
Once they were out of earshot of the startled mob, Charlie turned to Edison, ‘Where are you supposed to be then?’
Edison shrugged and pulled a crumpled timetable from his pocket. Charlie studied it. ‘Oh, you are meant to be in PE.’ He looked more closely at the piece of paper. ‘You’re in most of my lessons. Just follow me about, and you shouldn’t go far wrong. I’m Charlie Harrington-Smith. What’s your name?’
‘Scott Edison,’ Edison told him.
‘Scott Edison,’ Charlie played with the name for a while whilst they headed toward the changing rooms.
As they hurried through the enormous school that Edison was sure he would never be able to navigate, he asked his new friend, ‘How did you know I’m into computers?’
‘Lucky guess that you’re the computer whizz that won the special scholarship. Toby, that’s my big brother, he’s a Monitor, told me about it. There aren’t many boys who start a term into the year,’ Charlie replied matter-of-factly without looking at him.
‘What’s a Monitor?’ Edison asked.
‘Oh, they call them prefects in most schools. You’ll get used to all this stuff. The stuff that makes this place weird,’ Charlie assured him. Edison wasn’t sure he believed him.
When they arrived, the rest of the boys, already bedecked in their rugby kit, looked up expectantly. ‘All right lads,’ Charlie said. ‘This is Eddy. He’s all right.’ He paused, looking around at the collection of early teenage boys. ‘Ok?’ he added rhetorically.
Five years later, Charlie and Edison went up to Oxford together. Edison walked away four years on with a double first in mathematics and computation. After university, they’d lived together briefly as they began their careers – Edison in the Security Service and Charlie on a fast-track scheme at the Met which saw him quickly working for Special Branch, the division of the Metropolitan Police that would later become Counter Terrorism Command. Their professional paths had crossed regularly on joint operations and via the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Twenty-five years on from Charlie’s heroic rescue at Harrow, he was looking at Edison expectantly. Edison studied their surroundings, feeling disinclined to share too many of the details of his affair with his former colleague. Charlie and Kat still worked together frequently.
‘Don’t make me guess …’ Charlie threatened. Edison sighed, he knew better than to hold out too much longer.
‘Ok, I’ve been seeing Kat, very occasionally,’ he stressed. Charlie’s face broke out into a grin. ‘What’s that look for?’
‘She’s hot!’
‘You’re married!’ Charlie eyed Edison’s left hand where his wedding ring had remained for the sixteen months since his wife’s death. ‘Touché,’ said Edison, his right hand going to the ring and twisting it on his finger.
‘How long?’ asked Charlie, more seriously.
‘It’s not exactly a regular thing.’
‘Fair enough, how many times then?’
Edison raised an eyebrow. ‘Handful of times.’
‘How big a handful?’ Charlie pressed.
‘Ok, ok, I’ve been back to her place every time we’ve been out drinking for the last three and a half months.’
Charlie quickly ran through their social calendar. With the exception of last night, he was a regular in the drinking crowd – a group of a dozen from across all the services MI5, MI6, Counter Terrorism Command and GCHQ. ‘Wow,’ he said eventually, having worked out that in the time period to which Edison referred, there had been pub sessions on fourteen separate occasions. ‘You have been having a good time.’
Edison snorted but then ventured a smile. ‘Yeah,’ he conceded, ‘I guess we have.’ He was admitting it to himself for the first time as much to Charlie.
‘Anything more to it?’ Charlie asked.
Edison shrugged and drained his beer. ‘Another one?’
‘Thanks.’
Returning from the bar with two pints in hand, Edison hoped that the conversation about Kat had run its course. It was a complicated and uncomfortable part of his life. He couldn’t forgive himself for enjoying the time he spent with her. He felt like he was cheating on his wife. It felt dirty, and Kat, a young, intelligent, not to mention stunningly beautiful woman, deserved better, he knew. To his relief, Charlie turned the conversation to Edison’s living arrangements without any prompting. It was another uncomfortable topic but marginally better than romance.
‘So, what’s happening with the flat? Are you homeless yet?’
‘Soon to be. Her majesty left a message today to say they will be in London on Thursday to get it on the market.’
‘What are you going to do?’
Edison shrugged.
Charlie considered his next comment carefully. ‘Jock told me that Tony has been looking for a roommate.’ Reclusive and unpopular, Tony was an analyst at MI5.
Edison opened his mouth to protest Charlie’s suggestion but knew he was backed into a corner. He had limited funds and even fewer options. ‘Not sure how I feel about shacking up with that particular desk monkey,’ he said.
‘At least Five would love it. You know they like to keep you close even once you’ve left the Service. Anyway, Tony’s all right. Keeps himself to himself. Bit nerdy. I’ve heard he spends his life holed up in front of his computer, playing video games. You’d never see him.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Edison, making it clear that this was another topic of conversation that needed to be brought to a close.
‘And job?’
Edison glared at his friend over the rim of his pint glass. ‘Three strikes, Charlie,’ he threatened. ‘Romance, living arrangements and work. You’ve covered all my least favourite topics, and we’re only two pints in!’
‘Eddie – I’m worried about you,’ Charlie said in the soothing tone that was familiar from their boarding school days. ‘It’s been a year and a half since Ellie …’ His voice trailed off, his own g
rief following the loss of his best friend’s wife had been all consuming.
‘Sixteen months,’ Edison snapped then breathed deeply, fighting back the desire to throw up defensive barriers and retreat into silence. If he did, he would down a few more pints alone. Drinking had been his coping mechanism. It had ultimately cost him his job.
He had rushed back to work just a week after Eloise’s funeral, worrying about his assets, set adrift, rudderless in London without him. He had been running a handful of agents across three live investigations; a straightforward people-smuggling operation, regular surveillance on a north London mosque suspected of cultivating terrorist sympathisers amongst their young worshippers, and a more complex drugs and people-trafficking ring in West London, the profits from which were being syphoned off to fund weapon purchases in Palestine. His asset on the latter operation had tried to reach him late one night, worried that his cover had been blown. At the time, Edison had been slumped over a bar, having made his way to the bottom of a bottle of whisky alone. Jan was Edison’s mole. He was a well-connected pimp in West London, embedded in the import operation that saw women and drugs being brought off lorries from the continent in Dover and distributed through a network of brothels across the South East of England. Jan was found under the Hammersmith flyover the following morning, with his wrists slit and a knife at his side. To the untrained eye, it had all the hallmarks of a suicide, but the investigators saw through the clumsy staging. The knife was Russian. The direction of the cuts was inconsistent with suicide. There were multiple missed calls to Edison’s mobile and finally a voicemail. ‘They’re here,’ Jan had whispered into the phone. ‘Help me … they know …’ The message had served to corroborate the theory that Jan’s cover had been blown, and he’d been disposed of.
The subsequent investigation had resulted in a swift dismissal for Edison. The details of his failings were kept quiet by his sympathetic head of section, Tanya Willis. ‘He’s a fantastic officer,’ she had told the committee convened to investigate the matter. Only a couple of them had known of Edison’s connection to the Sir Donald Hughes affair. Eventually, Edison’s departure was explained on mental health grounds, and he received a significant stipend from the agency.
‘I’m not drinking so much now,’ Edison assured his friend, finishing the remainder of his beer in a single gulp. ‘Another one?’
Charlie rolled his eyes but didn’t decline. ‘My round,’ Charlie insisted. ‘It’s getting cold, and it’s quieter in there,’ he nodded at the building behind him as a dozen women, bedecked in pink sashes, burst out of the door and made their way unsteadily toward the tube station, ‘now the hens have flown the coop.’
Whilst Charlie went to the bar, Edison settled himself into a cosy armchair and surveyed the pub. In another snug, was a couple in their sixties, barely speaking to one another, occasionally sipping at their gins and tonics. Further away, at a big slab of a table surrounded by benches, was a crowd of students, nursing their drinks through to opening time at the nearby nightclub. The only other drinker in the vicinity was a short, slight, black man poring over his smartphone. Briefly, he went outside. He reappeared, sat down, only to jump up moments later and slip out the door once more. Edison assumed he was taking a call but noticed the smartphone still sat on the table. Had he forgotten it? Edison swiftly crossed to the table, picked up the phone and followed its owner out the door, hoping he would catch him before he got too far. To his surprise, the man was just outside. Edison was sure he saw him slip a mobile into his pocket as he turned. He seemed startled to see Edison. ‘Sorry mate,’ Edison said hurriedly, proffering the mobile he was holding, ‘thought you might have forgotten this.’
The man stared at Edison’s outstretched hand, holding his smartphone, for an instant before composing himself. ‘Thanks,’ he said eventually, taking it from Edison. ‘Would’ve been well annoyed to forget that.’ He paused. ‘Thanks again,’ he said, slipping the phone into the pocket of his leather jacket – the same pocket Edison was sure he’d put another phone into moments earlier. The man turned on his heels and loped off in the direction of Clapham Common tube station. He moved quickly for such a short man. Edison watched him go, committing to memory what he was wearing, out of habit rather than any genuine suspicion. Some habits die hard. Converse trainers, dark jeans, black leather jacket, single earring, gold chain round left wrist, no other jewellery, dark beanie hat, he repeated to himself three times as the man disappeared into the darkness.
‘Are you ok?’ Charlie’s voice interrupted Edison’s focus. He had backed the door open whilst holding the newly acquired pints in both hands and two bags of crisps under one arm.
‘Yeah, guy forgot his phone,’ said Edison as he relieved his friend of one of the pints. They made their way back to their table. Once they were seated and the bags of crisps were opened, Edison said, ‘So work …’ offering the topic before his friend had a chance to bring it back up. ‘I think I’ll look to take on some private stuff.’
Charlie scoffed, ‘Really? Errant husbands cheating on their wives? You’ll last a month.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ said Edison, picking out a phrase his mother loved to use.
‘Hmmmm,’ was all Charlie said, not disguising the scepticism in his voice.
The conversation moved on to more mundane topics, mostly centred around Charlie’s family life; the sporting activities the children would be engaging in over the coming weeks, an early summer trip up to the Highlands, Charlie’s eldest son’s entrance exams for Harrow. Edison allowed the conversation to wash over him as the effects of the beer began to do the same. Together, the friends enjoyed a fourth and a fifth pint before Charlie declared that he had better be getting home if he was to make the following morning’s five-a-side match.
They embraced outside the pub and made promises to meet up again soon. Charlie set off unsteadily toward the comfortable semi-detached home on the west side of the common where his wife and three children waited. It was the life for which Edison had been destined. It was the life he and Ellie had been planning. It was the life that had been cruelly taken from him the day the doctor had told them both that it was cancer that was aggressively consuming Ellie’s body and that there was nothing they could do but manage the pain.
Edison pushed these thoughts out of his mind, along with the almost overwhelming desire to return to the bar for a whisky. He trudged toward the tube station at the north side of the common. It was quiet for a Saturday night – the early evening’s revellers had headed into central London, leaving only a handful of people milling around the tube station. The fried chicken shop would be busier later, and Edison would not usually have paid it a second glance but for a familiar diminutive figure disappearing into it, dressed in dark jeans, a leather jacket and wearing a single earring. Two hours had passed since Edison’s brief exchange with the solitary drinker in the Windmill. Why was he still loitering around the station?
‘Pull it together,’ Edison muttered to himself. Fifteen years in the Security Service had left him on a default setting of ‘suspicious’. Edison admonished himself, burying his hands into his pockets and deciding that he would walk the three miles home rather than getting onto the tube.
He strode off purposefully along Clapham High Street, sidestepping a couple of the sash-wearing hens who were noisily smoking a cigarette outside a nightclub. As he went, Bantam watched him from the fried chicken shop, cursing himself for his earlier misstep that had brought him face to face with his boss’s quarry. Nothing to be done, thought Bantam, as his mind turned to how he was going to get back to Poplar this late at night.
Chapter Three
1140, Sunday 25th June, St George’s Wharf, Vauxhall, London
Compared with the previous day’s overcast weather, Sunday dawned bright, and light flooded Edison’s flat. He perched at the kitchen island, absentmindedly dunking a teabag in and out of his mug until it reached a suitable shade of turpentine. Tea brewed, Edison padded across to th
e window and drank in the view. London’s skyline basked in glorious sunshine, and the rays of sun danced across the Thames. To the right, the river curved past Vauxhall, skirting the imposing golden building that housed MI6 and on to Westminster, where Thames House, the home of the domestic Security Service, MI5, hid behind an effusion of summer leaves, and the Houses of Parliament rose in all their majestic grandeur.
That corner of London was always infected with crowds of tourists, but from Edison’s lofty vantage point, he thought it looked even busier than normal. Where were his binoculars? He found them amongst a selection of his few belongings in what had been the drinks cabinet. Back at the window, he put the binoculars, a relic from his former career, to his eyes, only to see a foggy grey mist. The lenses were filthy, having been neglected for so long. Edison untucked his shirt, breathed heavily on the glass and rubbed vigorously at the greasy residue with his shirt tail. Now, with a clear, magnified view of the crowds on the corner of Westminster Bridge, Edison recognised the barriers and banners of a charity run.
Edison hung the binoculars round his neck with the strap and let them fall onto his midriff. He looked down at his ample girth with a twinge of embarrassment. He turned to view his profile in the full-length mirror Ellie had installed to reflect as much of the pale northern light into the flat as possible. She loved the light. Edison was taken aback by what he saw. His face was haggard, his hair unkempt and he was sporting three days of stubble on his once defined features. His chin was now jowly with weight gain. Below his broad shoulders and ample chest, the binoculars rested against his protruding belly. The untucked shirt added to the study of dishevelment which he had subconsciously cultivated for the last year and a half. He glanced at his watch, it read eleven forty-five. He turned back to the window and raised the binoculars to his face again. The Service issued good quality lenses, but these had been a gift from Donald Hughes, bestowed on Edison in his early days in the Service. They magnified every detail by ten times. He watched the fit, lithe runners streaming around the corner from the Embankment for their final push to the finish. He glanced back at his reflection. He swallowed the final mouthful of tea. Something was going to have to change.