by Tim Standish
He nodded. ‘Take it steady. You’re on board a ship called the Maiden Lucy. At a party. Don’t worry, we’ll get you sorted.’
‘A party?’ I thought I had misheard him. If not, I had clearly been rescued by some sort of madman.
‘That’s right. All part of a cunning plan apparently. Come on, let’s get you sat down.’ He walked me over to where a small jumble of furniture was stacked on a black lacquered chaise longue at one side of the room. He up-righted a chair and set it down on the floor. ‘There you go, take the weight off.’
I didn’t feel in any condition to argue, and sat down on the chair while my new gaoler, if that’s what he was, took another chair over to the trapdoor, then disconnected a thick cord that curled down from the ceiling to a Morse encoder on the floor. ‘Help yourself to a drink,’ he shouted over his shoulder as he stepped up on the chair and, balancing well for such a large fellow, went back to work on some sort of apparatus that was held fast to the ceiling.
Next to me, on a small side table, was a red enamel mug and matching flask from which I poured a mugful of what turned out to be a thin beef broth. I sat, shivering, and took a few welcome sips. I looked around the room; it was ornately decorated, with floral wallpaper and lamps styled to look like Japanese lanterns. A large rug almost the width of the room was rolled up along the opposite wall. At least this cell would be slightly better furnished, I thought, and if there was one thing the army had taught me over and over again it was this: never question an opportunity to sit down with a mug of something hot in your hand.
On the chair my rescuer-cum-gaoler laboured for a few more moments, swearing loudly at the fastenings in front of him until, with a final, satisfied oath, the cylinder dropped straight down through the hole in the floor with a splash. He stepped down from the chair, moved it to one side and folded first one then the other of the two metal doors down into place. Their upper surfaces were panelled with the same wood as the floor and, with both in place, almost invisibly disguised the hatch below.
He pressed a switch on the wall and the lamps around the room changed from dull red to a low yellow glow.
‘Name’s Church. Shouldn’t be long but if anyone does wander in while I’m away, your name is Alistair Sterling, you’re a banker and you’re here for a party. You fell overboard and you’re trying to warm up.’ He walked towards the door. ‘Wait here and I’ll get you some clothes.’
I nodded, not really seeing what other response I could make.
The man called Church spun the door’s circular handle and stepped out through it, closing it behind him. I sat and waited, sipping warmth from the mug, enjoying the marked improvement in the style of my incarceration. With the trapdoor closed the noise of the river faded, and I became aware of other sounds: the low and steady vibration of engines below us and from somewhere above the faint sounds of a party in full swing. I wondered about Fuller and whether they had interrupted his evening again to let him know that I had escaped from his unescapable cell. I smiled at the thought of him hearing the news. But the smile faded at the thought of his Bureau teams combing London for me. Would they guess I was here on board and, if they did, what could the man called Church do to stop them? I took a breath, calmed myself. Whatever was about to happen, warmth and fuel were a priority, so I put those thoughts to one side and focused on the broth, drinking it down sip by slow slip.
I was on my second mugful when the locking mechanism spun again, the door opened, and Church came back into the room, carrying a large, flat cardboard box that he put down on the pile of furniture my chair had come from. In behind him walked a woman in dark grey paramilitary uniform, perhaps six feet tall, with a mannish build, a wide, sharp-cheeked face and dark brown hair tied tightly in a bun behind her head. Her eyes stayed on me as she walked into the room and stood by the wall to the right of the door, feet apart, hands loose by her side. She didn’t seem to be carrying a weapon. She didn’t look like she needed one.
‘So, this is Agent Sterling!’ said a voice. ‘How fabulous.’ I looked back to the door as a second woman strode into the room. Shorter and undeniably more feminine than her companion, she was slim rather than slight, her head covered by an oversized bronze helmet from beneath which long tresses of dark hair cascaded to just below her shoulders. She carried with her a charm and confidence undiminished by the flowing, ankle-length toga that she wore, and I stood as she strode across to me and stretched out the hand that wasn’t holding a trident. She was Indian, with large, dark brown eyes, high cheeks and a small mouth that broke into a beaming smile as we shook hands. Something about the way she did it put me in mind of a family trip to Bombay as a boy, and the drinks party to celebrate our arrival where my over-serious ten-year-old self had delighted a gaggle of ornately dressed women with my solemn handshakes and laboriously enunciated greetings.
When this woman spoke, though, her accent was pure essence of Mayfair, with a cheerfully exclaimed ‘What an absolute delight to meet you!’ as if we had run into each other by surprise at a tea party.
‘Britannia, I presume.’
She laughed loudly, still shaking my hand and treating me to another wide and cheerful smile. ‘Well done, Sterling. How lucky we are that you made it across in one piece. I do hope you weren’t too banged around? Everything, as they say, hunky dory?’ She tapped my chest with the trident for emphasis.
‘Indeed.’
Her tone, smiles and flapping hands were of a county hostess meeting a late arrival from the station. Finally letting go of my hand, she glanced around at the room.
‘Oh that is good news! Well, welcome aboard! Kitty and I will head back up. Do join us as soon as you can. Oh and Church, do sort this out,’ she pointed the trident at the furniture, ‘and let’s be on our way.’
‘I am grateful, madam, for you bringing me here but I rather think that you have me mistaken for someone else, I’m not –’
And she stopped, and for a second the smile dropped, her lips thinned, and there was nothing in her eyes but intellect: deep and razor sharp. She stepped towards me, her cheery bluster vanished, and a focused, quietly confident tone in its place. This close to her I could see flecks of amber in the brown that made me think of cat’s eyes.
‘We know who you are, Captain, and who you are pretending to be. We know why you are here and exactly why you shouldn’t be. Millbank will have their brightest and fastest out looking for you, so, all in all, it’s probably best if we look after you for now and probably best if you use a different name, wouldn’t you say? By the time we reach Westminster, you will have been here all evening, indistinguishable from all the other guests at a rather exclusive and wonderful party. So do humour me, Captain, let’s call you Sterling for now and let the explanations catch up with us later. As far as I am concerned Milady or Ma’am should see us through the evening.’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
She smiled again, a beaming grin that made the world a brighter place and the steel of her mind slipped back beneath a cloak of amiable jollification. She turned on her heel to leave, then froze halfway. ‘And do hurry up, we really should be on deck. I think it’s almost time for the fireworks! And don’t forget the costume.’ This last shouted over her shoulder as she strode out and down the corridor, her dark-haired aide pausing for a moment and then moving out through the door after her, rubber-soled shoes squeaking slightly as she walked along after her mistress.
‘A bit like being in a typhoon, isn’t it?’ said Church after they had both left. ‘Even when you know what’s coming, it doesn’t make it any easier.’
‘If I’m honest all of this is a bit like being in a typhoon. Where am I? And who the blazes are you people?’
‘Well,’ said Church, ‘if I stopped to tell you all that we’d miss the fireworks. And you don’t want to miss the fireworks, do you Mr Sterling?’
And something in the way he shifted his stance brought a polite threat of injury into the room in a way I would have been wary of even if I hadn’t just
been nearly drowned. Whoever they were, it seemed as though playing along with them for now was my best option.
Church nodded, made a satisfied sound. He picked up the box he had brought with him and passed it over to me. I looked down at the large label on it: printed in a large theatrical script was ‘Debenham and Freebody’ and then, handwritten underneath in purple ink, ‘Fawkes.’
‘Right,’ he said, pulling a folding chair away from the wall and sitting down. ‘Let’s get you dressed, get upstairs and get this bollocks over with.’
6. Ghosts
The briefing room was at the rear of the house. Large, lighter squares showed where pictures had hung on pale green wallpaper in what must have been a drawing room at some stage. French windows stretched from floor to ceiling providing a glimpse of a neat garden, bare of leaves beneath a dull, clouded sky. A projection screen was set up on a decorator’s trestle table in front of the windows; a short arc of unmatched chairs faced it.
I stood next to a marble-topped sideboard, sipping thick Arabic coffee from a porcelain coffee cup decorated with small, pink roses. The coffee was wonderfully dark; precisely foamed and gently perfumed in a way that very nearly, but not quite, managed to erase the lingering memory of absinthe.
I was washed, clean shaven and wearing a new, perfectly tailored suit that had been waiting for me in the room where I had slept. I felt oddly as if I was attending an interview by mistake.
From the outside this looked like every other house in the terrace; a private residence, infrequently occupied by its county-dwelling owners. In fact, according to Church’s brief and grudging explanation as we had travelled back here from the boat this morning, it was the headquarters of a quasi-governmental organisation that he called ‘The Map Room’. What this had to do with me, he hadn’t told me. I assumed that, like my erstwhile captors the Bureau of Engine Security, this ‘Map Room’ thought I knew something of value in relation to Cooper, or Canada, or both.
The door opened and Church came in, leaving it ajar. He walked over to the sideboard and stood staring at it for a moment or to, then looked at me. ‘No tea?’ I shook my head gently. He gave a disappointed grunt, then carefully poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot and took a sip. Grimacing slightly, he reached for the sugar and used the tongs to deftly drop several cubes into his cup. Once again, the normality of the situation left me feeling slightly bewildered. Somewhere Fuller was marshalling a search to recapture me and here was what looked like some sort of secret policeman from the decidedly dubious end of the scale offering me tea.
‘You sleep alright on the boat?’
‘Just fine.’
‘There’s a cot set up in one of the rooms upstairs that you can use till we get you some digs sorted. I’ll show you later.’ He stirred his coffee and tasted it. ‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘It’s not horrible.’ He took another mouthful. ‘So. Did your new friends buy the switch?’
I thought back to night before, ran through my first encounter with the other guests on the boat. I nodded. ‘As far as I could tell.’
‘That’s good. What did you talk about?’
‘Diamonds. Horses. America. Advice on investments.’
‘What advice did you give them?’
‘Never play cards with a Frenchman. Quite well received. Who was the other Fawkes?’ We’d met him in the corridor on the way up to the party wearing a costume identical to mine. At Church’s nod, his mask still on, the other Fawkes had briefed me succinctly and expertly, providing me a potted history of his experience so far. The final part of his handover, before I joined the party, was to give me the bottle that he’d ‘popped out to fetch’. Taking his place, still, it seemed, in role as Alistair Sterling the banker I slotted back into a gaggle of raucous partygoers with a comfort dually born of his briefing and my own memories of similar parties from my younger days in London. Wide eyes. Arch exchanges. Loud laughter. ‘Too much drinking and very little sense,’ as my father had described it once. Getting the sense that, short of diving off the boat or shouting for help, I was being left to my own devices, I had taken the opportunity at face value and set out to try and forget that I was still, to all intents and purposes, a prisoner.
‘Just a bloke. No one that you’ll meet again anytime soon.’
‘And who I am supposed to be today?’ I asked. ‘Still a banker or am I something else?’
‘That depends on you, old son,’ he said, draining his coffee. He put his cup down as the door was pushed open and a man wearing a butler’s uniform walked in carrying another chair. ‘Morning, March.’
‘Mr Church.’ He put his chair to the left of the projector and stood to face us. ‘Good to see you back, sir. The others will be here momentarily.’
‘No chance of tea is there, March?’ asked Church.
‘Mr Collier did specify coffee, sir, but there will be tea arriving later.’
‘Fine,’ said Church in a tone of voice that conveyed very clearly the opposite. ‘Who else is coming for this?’
‘Mr Collier will be briefing, Miss Green assisting and I think one of the Jays will be joining you.’
‘Any news from Regal?’
‘Nothing overnight, Mr Church. If you’ll excuse me, I ought to finish.’ Church nodded and the butler walked over to the table, flicked a switch on the projector then went behind the screen and started pulling the curtains across.
I suffered another absinthe-induced twinge as they were talking, and it made me think of Edgar. He used to love the filthy stuff. And I saw the flash of pistol again, Edgar falling to the platform again. Choking on his own blood, struggling to speak. Eyes dulling as he died.
‘Sterling.’ Church’s voice brought me gratefully back to the room. Mostly back. ‘Do you want some more coffee?’ I shook my head. ‘You sure, you look like you need it.’
‘No thank you, I’m fine as I am.’
I watched Church refill his cup, and add another small pile of sugar cubes to it. A quick stir and he went to sit down on one of the chairs. I followed him over there, putting the image of Edgar out of my mind with a tight swallow and sat next to Church. I leaned towards him as March bustled about the room. ‘Jay?’
‘J as in J Company.’
I thought for a second. Found myself frowning. ‘There is no such thing as a J Company.’
Church leaned toward me and winked slowly. ‘Stick around, son. You’ll go far.’
‘Church.’ The voice came from the doorway where a tall, slightly stooped man stood, dressed in a slightly old-fashioned looking grey suit, hands in pockets and perfectly still. ‘And, this must be Sterling, I presume?’
‘It is,’ said Church before I had a chance to reply.
‘Collier.’ He smiled a thin, fleeting smile and stepped across the room with a precise, unhurried stride. We both stood. ‘How do you do?’ His handshake was the only part of him that moved.
‘How do you do?’
‘Good to have you with us, Sterling.’
‘I’m sure it is, Mr Collier, but no one has explained to me what “being with you” might actually mean.’
‘All in good time, Sterling, all in good time.’ Collier turned away from me, spying the butler as he stood over the projector, mild puzzlement furrowing his brow as he stared at it, brass cartridge of slides held uncertainly in one hand. ‘Don’t worry, March,’ Collier instructed him, ‘You can leave that for Green to sort out.’ He glanced at a flat, grey metal wristwatch. ‘When she arrives.’
March murmured a grateful ‘Thank you, sir’, carefully placed the cartridge down on the table next to the projector and, with a precisely brief bow, left the room, closing the door behind him with the care of a man for whom smooth transitions have become a point of pride. Collier walked two careful paces to the chair facing us, turned, sat and folded one leg over the other then, hands in pockets, he stared up at the ceiling. His socks, I noticed, were a dark shade of purple.
The door opened and a woman strode in purposefully, folder
under one arm: dark woollen suit, shirtwaist and tie, auburn hair piled high. Collier seemed oblivious as she dropped her folder on the table, picked up the slides where March had left them and deftly slotted them into the projector. She clicked a switch that lit up the screen with the first slide: a plain white background with a simple title: ‘Directive 74’ and, underneath, ‘Sterling/Church’.
She turned round. ‘All set, Mr Collier.’
Collier’s head tilted down from its examination of the ceiling. He acknowledged Miss Green without turning round, words gently ambling out into the room: ‘Thank you Miss Green. And this is Executive Sterling.’
‘Sterling, of course! Hello Mr Sterling, sorry!’ Her manner and enthusiasm might have marked her out as American; her accent unmistakably did. Northern. New England I thought, so perhaps she had got out before the worst of the war reached them. She picked up her folder and came to sit down on the other side of Church. She flicked through the papers, then suddenly stopped and threw her hand across Church with a ‘Pleased to meet you, by the way.’ We shook hands.
‘Likewise.’
She turned back to her papers and, finding the place she was looking for, looked up at Collier.
‘Thank you, Miss Green.’ Collier had settled in the chair, projector control in one hand. ‘And thank you, Mac, for joining us.’
‘Sir.’
I turned in surprise at the new voice to see that, seemingly appeared from nowhere, a man in labourer’s clothes now sat at the opposite end of the row, chair slightly back from the empty seat next to him. He slouched, unshaven and, at first glance, unremarkable but, on closer inspection, masking an alertness, a readiness for action. He caught my eye and nodded, one professional to another. He took out a crumpled packet of cigarettes and lit one while Collier continued.
‘And so, as we are all here, I suggest that we begin.’ I raised my hand. ‘Yes, Mr Sterling?’