by William Boyd
His house was small and detached, and was set in the centre of a raked rectangle of mud, part of a tentative development called Albion Village established by an optimistic builder. On the ground floor there was a garage, kitchen and dining room, and above, a sitting room and bedroom with a bathroom off the landing. Another atticy bedroom with an en suite shower lurked under the roof tiles, lit by skylights. The place smelt of paint, putty and builder’s dust and the honey-coloured cord carpet had been recently laid, strewn with offcuts. On either side of him, forming a rough arc, were the six other houses of Albion Village, all of similar but, tastefully, not identical design, some occupied, some with the builder’s tape still crisscrossing the windows. A small, pseudo-community, awaiting its members, with its newly sown green grass and spindly wind-thrashed saplings, purpose-built on the very eastern fringe of the city, another small encroachment on the wastelands.
And it was all his, bought and paid for. His little home in Silvertown… He began to note down the very minimum he would need to make it habitable – bed, sheets, pillows, blankets, sofa, armchair, desk and chair, TV, sound system, pots and pans. The kitchen was fitted, no dinner parties were envisaged, so a few tinned and frozen foods would suffice. Curtains? He could live awhile with the complimentary roller blinds. The odd table lamp would be welcome but they, by definition, required tables and he wanted to have the house ready as quickly as possible, with as little fuss and distracting choice. Why did he need another place to live? Good question, Lorimer. Insurance, he supposed. Same old story.
So, it was Flavia Malinverno. The name itself couldn’t be better, couldn’t be more perfect. And how would you be pronouncing that, Miss? Flahvia? Or Flayvia?
Marlobe brandished a newspaper at him, the headline exposing some government U-turn on its tax and pension plans.
‘Looks like snow,’ Lorimer said.
‘This country needs a fucking revolution, mate. Sweep them away-politicians, financiers, fat cats, civil servants, toffs, nobs, TV personalities. String ‘em up. Get the people back running things. Hard-working people. You and me. Our sort. Fucking violent bloody revolution.’
‘I know what you mean. Some days –’
‘Got some white carnations for you, mate – special. Fiver. Ta.’
Suspended from his door, held by a strip of festive Xmas sticky tape, was a folded note. It read: ‘My Dear Lorimer, One day soon Jupiter will be all yours. Thank you so much. Yours ever, C. H.’
Lorimer felt useless regrets crowd around him as he read it through again, weighing the consequences of his generosity. If only he had not been so precipitate… Still, he supposed it was a ‘good thing’ he had done. At the very least Jupiter might find his appetite had returned, now his execution had been forestalled.
In his hallway he ritually rested his palm on his three helmets in turn and wondered, suddenly, if Ivan would take them as part-exchange for the Greek one. A swift computation of their collective value told him he would still be some way short of the requisite amount but it would certainly be a leap forward towards his goal. Thus cheered, he put King Johnson Adewale and his Ghana-beat Millionaires on the C D and poured himself a small tumblerful of vodka. Lady C. Haigh. Curious, he had never wondered about her Christian name, never even imagined her with one. ‘C’ – what could it stand for? Charlotte, Celia, Caroline, Cynthia, Charis? A young girl’s name, conjuring up the 1920s and ‘30s, Oxford bags, bright young things, trophy hunts, illicit weekends in provincial riverside hotels… As the vodka hit and the highlife rhythms gently thudded through the flat he allowed himself a small smile of self-congratulation.
Chapter 5
Lorimer set his alarm for an early rise – a mere gesture, this, as he tossed and turned and was wide awake by 4.45. So he read doggedly for a while, managed to doze off again and woke at 7.00 feeling drugged and stupid. He bathed and shaved and changed the linen on his bed, then, like an automaton, he hoovered the flat, wiped down the surfaces in his kitchen, took his shirts and smalls to the laundry, and two suits to the dry cleaners, visited the bank and bought some food at the ShoppaSava on Lupus Street. These mundane rituals of bachelordom did not depress him, rather he saw them as proud domestic testimony to his independence. What was it Joachim had said to Brahms? Frei aber einsam, ‘ Free but lonely.’ Brahms was, perhaps, the greatest bachelor the world had known, he thought now, as he selected some freesias from the ShoppaSava’s newly installed flower stand. Brahms with his genius, his unshakeable routines, his huge dignity and his ineffable sadness. There was the exemplar, this was what he should aspire to, he reflected as he bought some lemony ranunculus and spotted tall apricot tulips, assorted pot plants of the most vivid green, ferns, eucalyptus, gypsophila and ranked boxes of daffodils at one-third the price Marlobe charged. Well enough stocked, he thought, when did they put this in? No carnations, though, that franchise was still securely Marlobe’s.
At the checkout counter he turned and surveyed the patient queues of customers waiting to pay their money – there was no one he recognized, but again he had felt that strange sensation of being observed, as if someone who knew him was lurking near by just out of sight, playing a game with him, seeing just how much time could pass before he was discovered. He waited at the door a while by the news-stand, buying some papers and magazines, but no one emerged who was familiar.
He decided to breakfast at the nearby Café Matisse (Classic British Caffs no. 3), where he ordered a fried egg and bacon sandwich and a cappuccino, and flicked through his weighty pile of reading matter. He preferred the Matisse at this time of day to all others, early, before the shoppers trooped in for elevenses, when the place was mopped and swabbed and relatively smoke-free. He had been coming here for four years, regularly, and had yet to receive even a nod of welcome from the staff. Mind you, he had outlasted them all: the turnover of personnel at the Matisse was extraordinary. He saw that the rangy South African girl was still here and the lugubrious Romanian too. He wondered vaguely if the tiny Portuguese one had left, the one who flirted with the bikers – the wealthy middle-aged men, paunchy in their leathers, who descended in a group at prearranged times of the week to drink coffee and stare lovingly at their immaculate Harleys, all spangling chrome, parked up on the pavement in full view. Maybe she had indeed gone, perhaps she’d trapped one of these portly, well-heeled free-spirits into marriage? For he saw there was a new girl doing the front half: she looked darkly Latin, with long, wiry hair, the slim body of a sixteen-year-old but the face of a haughty duenna.
‘Thanks,’ he said to the Romanian as she suddenly clattered his sandwich down in front of him. She swept off as ever, wordlessly, with a toss of her blue-black hair.
The Matisse owed its name to a single reproduction of that Master’s work, a late-period blue nude which hung on the wall between the ladies’ and gents’ lavatories. Its cuisine was notionally Italian but the menu boasted many a familiar English standard – cod and chips, lamb chops and roast potatoes, apple pie and custard. As far as he could discern, not a single Italian currently worked in the place but it must have been the traces of that influence, perhaps lingering on in the basement kitchen, that ensured at least the coffee’s surprising excellence. He ordered another cappuccino and watched the customers come and go. Everyone smoked in the Matisse, apart from him; it almost seemed to be a condition of entry. The counter staff and the waitresses smoked during their breaks and every customer, young and old, male or female, fervently followed suit as if they used the place as a brief smoking respite from their otherwise smokeless days. He looked around him now at the types scattered around the big gloomy rectangular room. A middle-aged couple – style: Eastern European intellectual – the man looking uncannily like Bertolt Brecht, both bespectacled, both in drab zip-up waterproof jackets. A table of four consumptive hippies, three men with lank hair and poor beards and a girl (rolling her own), bead-swagged with a flower tattooed on her throat. In one of the booths down the side was the obligatory lost-waif couple, two chalk-
faced girls, black-clad, talking worriedly in furious whispers – too young, in trouble, pimp-fodder. And behind them a man smoking a tiny pipe who looked like a member of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, tangle-haired with big muddy shoes, unshaven, wearing a collarless shirt and baggy corduroy suit. At the counter two unnaturally tall girls were smoking and paying. Breastless, hipless, they had swan necks and tiny heads – models, he assumed, there must be an agency near by – they drifted in and out of the Matisse all day, these lanky, freakish females, not beautiful, just differently made from all the other women in the world. All human life ventured into the smoky interior of the Matisse at some stage; if you sat long enough you would see everyone, every prototype the human species had to offer, every product of the gene pool, rich or poor, blessed or afflicted – which was the key to the place’s strange and enduring allure, in his opinion. Even he, he realized, must sometimes attract such idle speculation – who is the quiet young man in the pin-stripe suit? A journalist on an upmarket weekly? A lawyer? A Eurobond dealer? – with his dry cleaning and pile of newsprint.
‘Fancy a drink this evening? Torquil asked, leaning round Lorimer’s office door. Then coming in and mooching about as they talked, fingering a picture frame (Paul Klee) and leaving it a degree or two awry, touching the leaves of his potted plants, drumming a rhythm on the flat top of his PC.
‘Great,’ Lorimer said with scant enthusiasm.
‘Where is everybody?’ Torquil said. ‘Haven’t seen you for days. Never known an office like it, all this coming and going.’
‘We’re all on various jobs,’ Lorimer explained. ‘All over the place. Dymphna’s in Dubai, Shane’s in Exeter, Ian’s in Glasgow –’
‘I don’t think our Dymphna likes me at all,’ Torquil said, then grinned. ‘A cross I shall just have to bear. What’re you up to?’
‘Tidying up a few things,’ Lorimer said ambiguously – Hogg was very against discussion of their respective adjustments.
‘Hogg’s given me this Dupree job to finish off. Seems pretty straightforward. Paperwork, really.’
‘Well, it is, now that he’s dead.’
‘Topped himself, didn’t he?’
‘It happens. They think their world has been destroyed, and, well…’ He changed the subject. ‘Look, I’ve got an appointment with Hogg. Where shall we meet?’
‘El Hombre Guapo? You know, Clerkenwell Road? Six?’
‘See you there.’
‘Don’t mind if I bring someone along, do you?’
Hogg was standing, scarfed and coated, in the middle of his orange carpet.
‘Am I late?’ Lorimer asked, perplexed.
‘See you in Finsbury Circus, in ten minutes. I’m going out the back way, give me five minutes. Leave by the front door – and don’t tell Helvoir-Jayne.’
Hogg was sitting on a bench beside the bowling green in the small oval square when Lorimer arrived, his chin on his chest, looking thoughtful, his hands thrust in his pockets. Lorimer slid himself down beside him. All around the neat central garden were the leafless plane trees with their backdrop of solid, ornate buildings with a few frozen workers smoking and shivering in doorways. The old city, Hogg always said, as it used to be in the great days – which was why he so liked Finsbury Circus.
Twenty yards away a man expertly juggled three red balls to an audience of none. Lorimer realized Hogg was staring fascinatedly at the juggler, as if he’d never seen the trick done before.
‘Bloody marvellous,’ Hogg said, ‘sort of mesmerizing. Run over there and give him a pound, there’s a good lad.’
Lorimer did as he was told, dropping the coin in a woollen hat at his feet.
‘Cheers, mate,’ the juggler said, the balls still following their apparently tethered trajectories.
‘Bloody marvellous!’ Hogg shouted from across the square, and gave the juggler the thumbs up. Lorimer saw him rise to his feet and stride off without a backward glance. Sighing, Lorimer followed briskly but had still not caught him up by the time he entered a modern pub set incongruously in the corner of an office block with a good view of the giant ochrous waffle iron of the Broad-gate Centre opposite.
Inside, the pub smelt of old beer and yesterday’s cigarette smoke. A row of lurid computer games winked and clattered, thundered and swooshed, trying to entice players, the technobarrage competing successfully with some jazzy orchestral muzak emanating from somewhere or other. Hogg was having a pint of pale, frothy lager drawn for him.
‘What’ll it be, Lorimer?’
‘Mineral water. Fizzy’
‘Have a proper drink, for God’s sake.’
‘Half of cider, then.’
‘Jesus Christ. Sometimes I despair, Lorimer.’
They carried their drinks as far away as possible from the squawking and beeping machines. Hogg drank two-thirds of his pint in four huge swallows, wiped his mouth and lit a cigarette. Neither of them removed their coats – the vile pub was cold as well.
‘OK, let’s have it,’ Hogg said.
‘Standard torching. The subcontractors were running late, facing a big penalty, so they started a fire in the gymnasium. It must have got out of control. There was no way they wanted to destroy five floors and all the rest.’
‘So?’
‘So I still can’t see 27 million quid’s worth of damage. I’m not an expert but the place wasn’t trading, wasn’t finished. I can’t see why the claim is so large.’
Hogg reached inside his coat and drew out a folded photocopy and handed it to Lorimer.
‘Because the place is insured for 80 million.’
Lorimer unfolded the copy of the original Fortress Sure policy and leafed through it. He could not make out the signature on the final page.
Lorimer pointed at the scrawl. ‘Who’s that?’
Hogg drained his pint and stood up, ready to fetch another.
‘Torquil Helvoir-Jayne,’ he said, and headed for the bar.
He came back with a packet of beef and horseradish crisps and another foamy pint. He munched at the crisps carelessly, causing a small shrapnel fall to dust his coat front. He swilled lager round his clogged teeth.
‘So Torquil over-insured.’
‘Way over.’
‘Big premium. They were prepared to pay’
‘Everything was dandy until those arseholes started their fire.’
‘It’ll be a hard job proving it,’ Lorimer said, guardedly. ‘Those guys, Rintoul and Edmund, there’s a kind of desperation there. Semi-nuclear, I would say’
‘It’s not their problem – or rather,’ Hogg corrected himself, ‘let’s make it Gale-Harlequin’s problem. Pass the buck. Say we suspect foul play and won’t cough up.’
‘We’ll have to pay something.’
‘I know,’ Hogg said venomously. ‘As long as it’s nowhere near 27 mil. Pitch it low, Lorimer.’
‘Me?’
‘Why not?’
‘Well… I’ve never done anything this size. We could be talking millions of pounds.’
‘I hope we are, Lorimer. Big bonus for you, my son. Big day for GGH. Big smiles at Fortress Sure.’
Lorimer thought about this a moment.
‘Torquil has fucked up,’ Lorimer said, reflectively.
‘Big time,’ Hogg said, with almost glee, ‘and we have to pull the baby out of the burning bush.’
Lorimer admired both the mixed metaphor and the use of the first person plural.
‘Go to Gale-Harlequin,’ Hogg said. ‘Tell them we suspect arson. Police, fire brigade, inspectors, hearings, eventual prosecutions. Could take years. Years.’
‘They won’t be happy’
‘It’s a war, Lorimer. They know it. We know it.’
‘They paid the big premium.’
‘They’re property developers. My heart bleeds.’
Despite his instinctive alarm Lorimer felt his heart quicken at the prospect. Applying the arcane formulae that calculated, graded and further refined the amount
of the loss adjuster’s bonus, Lorimer considered that he could be looking at six figures. There was one other matter that troubled him, however.
‘Mr Hogg,’ he began slowly, ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but why, after all this, has Torquil come to work at GGH?’
Hogg gulped lager, noisily expelled carbonated breath.
‘Because Sir Simon Sherriffmuir asked me, as a personal favour.’
‘Why would he do that? What’s Torquil to Sir Simon? ‘
‘His godson.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yeah. As clear as a gnat’s chuff, eh?’
‘Do you think Sir Simon knows something?’
‘Have another cider, Lorimer.’
12. The Specialist. Hogg says to you: ‘It’s a big world, Lorimer Let your mind play with the concept “armed forces” for a moment. That concept contains your army, your navy and your air force, not to mention ancillary or subsidiary services – medics, engineers, cooking, sanitary, police, etcetera. These larger subdivisions are divided in turn into battle groups, army corps, regiments, wings, battalions, flotillas, squadrons, troops, flights, platoons and so on. All very organized, Lorimer, all very neat and proper, all very above board and as obvious as a warm white loaf, sliced. Thoroughly thought-through, plain for all to contemplate and analyse.
‘But in your armed forces you’ve also got your specialist élite units. Very small in number and with vigorous and highly demanding selection procedures. Many fall by the wayside. The choice is fundamental, is absolute, membership very restricted. SAS, SBS, Navy Seals, your Stealth bombers, spy planes, saboteurs, your FBI and MI5, agents and sleepers in the fields. Secrecy shrouds them, Lorimer, like a shroud. We’ve all heard of them, but we know next to fuck-all about them, in brutal reality. And why is this the case? Because they do vitaljobs, jobs of vital importance. Covert operations. Counter-insurgency. Still part of the larger concept of “armed forces”, yes – but a tiny sub-sub-sub-section, and, also to be borne in mind, one of the armed forces’ most deadly and violently effective components.