Inspector Diligent talks urgently into his Airwave. The Downing Street gate draws back and the Keystone Cops performance changes to something more sinister, as officers dash for cover and bring weapons to bear on the doorway.
Men and women stumble around in front of the Number Ten railings. They don’t look as if they’ve left the office due to a fire alarm: they look dazed and confused, as if they’ve awakened from a disturbing dream to find that the dream was real. There’s a blur of motion, and suddenly one of them sprouts a black cloth hood and takes a dive, feet swept out from under him. A moment later Bee is sitting triumphantly on his back, locking handcuffs around his wrists. He twitches and tries to say something: instead of listening she pulls out a taser and zaps him in the arse.
Jim, the SA, and I move forward into the crowd of evacuees. A very distinguished-looking senior politician nearly runs headlong into me as I sling my violin case over my shoulder. “You can’t arrest him!” he’s shouting at Jim. “He’s going to be our next Prime Minister! He’s going to save the Party!”
I look the Chief Whip in the eye. “You have got to be kidding.” He doesn’t seem to hear me. I reach into my handbag and grab the spare heavy-duty ward bracelet. “Wear this, you’ll feel better.”
“But you can’t—”
He’s still raving as I slither past him. The Mandate is having his rights read to him by a very smug-looking Chief Superintendent Grey. There’s chaos on all sides, but I put my hand on Bee’s shoulder and lean close to her ear. She tenses as I say, “Come with me. Don’t say anything.”
“All right—Dr. O’Brien?”
“Over here.” I lead her away from the throng of confused staffers and agitated cops. “Did he—”
“Boss? I can’t see you!”
I draw a deep shuddering breath. Okay, so it’s really happening to me. “Never mind that right now. I was just going to say, good job. And now let’s get you out of here before those nice officers from SO17 remember you and realize that you’re still missing.”
“Thanks.” Bee is still buzzing with adrenaline. I guide her towards the front gate. “But how are you doing this, boss? I didn’t know you had a superpower!”
I force myself to keep going. “Neither did I, Bee. But it seems to work, and if it works, don’t knock it.”
* * *
Catching the Mandate red-handed in the act of trying to suborn one of the Home Secretary’s most senior colleagues is about the best possible way to end a week that began with the HomeSec effectively demanding that we prove our worth or be shut down. But it’s no cause for complacency.
The good news is, we’ve nailed the Mandate. He’s going to be charged with aggravated trespass, abduction (of the Chief Whip), and attempted electoral fraud. He’ll get his vote, all right—but it’s going to come from twelve jurors, the count is going to be read out to him over a CCTV link from a courtroom, and he’s going to win a seat in a high-security prison cell, not Parliament.
The bad news is that half the afternoon is soaked up by all the paperwork involved in wrapping up the incident, including the necessary handling guidelines once we’ve booked him into the secure lock-up at Belgravia nick. As I tell the custody officer: “You will need earplugs and high-power wards—my people will provide them. Do not speak to him, do not listen to him under any circumstances. Communicate in writing only, no more than one sentence at a time. If you’ve got any hearing-impaired custody officers, now would be a great time to offer them some overtime. Oh, and your front desk staff need to monitor the behavior of the custody officers in direct contact with the subject by CCTV at all times. External vault door control, not internal.”
The list goes on, seemingly endless. I’m still half convinced they’ll slip up and let him walk away by the end of the weekend.
The rest of the afternoon and early evening I spend writing a report, eyes-only, for Mrs. Jessica Greene. I explain in words of one syllable exactly what the Mandate is capable of and why he was able to walk right into the door next to the Prime Minister’s residence, and what the consequences would have been if we hadn’t stopped him: a new PM and then a new Home Secretary before the election.*
Thankfully there are no currently scheduled by-elections, so we don’t have to add a murder investigation to the Mandate’s account. (It’s pretty hard to prove murder to a jury who are mesmerized by the accused, especially when the alleged victim—whichever MP the Mandate had decided to replace—will almost certainly turn out to have left a suicide note.) I’m pretty sure that trying the Mandate is going to present the Ministry of Justice with a huge headache as it is—maybe a tribunal of judges wearing wards and earplugs?—but that’s not our problem to worry about.
The expected summons arrives in my email inbox around seven o’clock. See Me, Monday, 9:30 a.m. It comes directly from the Head Mistress’s appointments secretary. This is the first Home Office meeting I’m actually looking forward to, I realize. Even though I’m pretty sure that the reward for a job well done will be a royal bollocking for still not having found Freudstein.
As I’m about to go home, I get a final email, this time from Jim: “Scored tickets for the final night of La traviata at Covent Garden tomorrow at eight p.m. Invitations to a reception afterwards. Want to eat first? We could make an evening of it.”
Ooh, sounds like fun. I smile to myself and send back: “Yes, and yes.” I pause. “What’s the party dress code?”
“Black tie,” he replies. “Our host is a sheikh. The hospitality will be something special.”
“Ok,” I send. And just like that, I have a date.
17.
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
So, Saturday.
I wake up early, stung by the realization that I said yes when Jim escalated to formal, but the only suitable outfit I’ve got that’s not five years out of date is a bit risqué. So I brave the autumnal clouds and the weekend shoppers, and head for Peter James and competitors. In the end, I do not buy a new dress, because everything that looks good doesn’t fit, and vice versa. On the other hand, once I’ve spent hours fruitlessly wandering department store floors, my existing gown doesn’t look so extreme. So I end up buying something much more useful: a calf-length black coat with silver detailing. It’s cheaper than a posh frock, and I can get a lot more mileage out of it. I then blow what’s left of my budget on a frivolous sequined clutch, opera gloves, and a new pair of court shoes with heels just tall enough to help me look Jim in the eyes without crippling me.
I get home at two in the afternoon: hungry, tired, and suffering from just a little ennui at the frivolity of it all. I’m old enough to know better than to play dress-up party doll for a man, especially one I’m not married to and need to be able to look in the eye next week at work. Or to blow a ton of cash on shoes and a handbag and a ticket to the opera, when I could just as easily rent it on DVD. Never mind the whole dating in the workplace thing—that can go horribly wrong in so many ways that it’s not even funny. On the other hand, there hasn’t been a lot of frivolity in my life these past few years, has there? Let alone fun. And Jim and I are both grown-ups, I tell myself. I can handle this, as long as it doesn’t go too far. So I chow down on a very austere edamame salad I bought on my way home, then go upstairs to shower and begin preparing myself for the ritual of a formal night out—a kind of formal that Bob and I haven’t done in longer than I care to remember.
Around four, my phone buzzes. I pull it out of the evening clutch; it’s a message from Jim: Want me to pick you up at 5:30?
Yes, I send back. Then I go into panic mode. I’ve showered and done my hair and I’m half-dressed, but I’m not ready. The next hour passes in a blur. Finally, I look in a mirror. A stranger looks back at me: sleepily sophisticated, all lip gloss and crimson nails. She doesn’t look like me at all. Her red hair (the gray stragglers dyed into compliance) hangs loose in a waterfall over the shoulders of her lace-topped bl
ack gown: she’s a striking stranger, my princess-world twin sister. There is jewelry: a silver chain supporting a discreet silver bangle, earrings, bracelets that contain heavy-duty wards. It’s as if I’m looking into a magic mirror that shows me who I might have grown up to be if I’d settled on “trophy wife” as my life’s ambition in secondary school. (All look at me rather than look at what I do.) I wouldn’t want to be her every day, but it’s an interesting role to try on for an evening. I pull my new shoes on, wiggle my toes to make sure they still fit as well as they did in the shop, go downstairs (proving I can walk in them without breaking my neck), and pull on my coat. Just in time for my phone to ring.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. We’re parked outside. Want to come out and meet me?”
“Sure,” I say. I check that Lecter’s asleep in the safe, energize the wards, arm the burglar alarm, and let myself out.
There is a stretch limo sitting in front of the house. It’s not huge—you’d never fit a full-length one through London’s twisty suburban streets—but for our purposes it counts. Jim stands beside the door, holding it open for me. He wears a tux well: I suddenly no longer feel overdressed. He takes my hand with a smile. “I hope this meets with your approval, ma’am?” he asks as I climb in. There are wide leather seats and a minibar in front of us with a bottle of sparkling wine sitting in a silver tub. Jim climbs in next to me, fastens his seat belt, and leans forward: “We’re ready,” he tells the driver.
The opaque divider in front of us whirrs up, then the car begins to move. The suspension is very soft, and a good thing, too: Jim fills two champagne flutes and hands one to me. “You look marvelous,” he says quietly. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
Slightly star-struck, I take the glass: “And you’ve outdone yourself, you smooth mover!”
“I thought we should start as we mean to go on.” He looks quietly smug. “Might as well celebrate our success.”
“To success,” I say. Chink of glassware. I take a sip: bubbles in my nose. “Past and future.”
It takes half an hour for the limo to rock and sway across the bridge and into the heart of the theater district, by which time our glasses are running dry—but rather than offering a refill, Jim raises a finger. “Nearly there,” he says.
“Nearly where?” I ask.
“Surprise.”
The car pulls in beside a slightly grubby red carpet that runs out to the curb. Then I see the restaurant awning: “Oh my.” I’m not used to dining in restaurants owned by chefs with their own TV show.
“Don’t worry, the pre-theater option is very reasonably priced. We have”—he pushes back his cuff to reveal an antique Rolex Oyster—“seventy-five minutes. And we have a reservation. They’ll be ready for us.”
He hands me out of the car, and we walk together to the door, which a uniformed doorman opens before us. I feel very self-conscious, but not in my usual bad, vulnerable, cross-hairs-on-the-small-of-my-back way. Once inside, an attendant takes my coat; Jim’s pupils dilate as he sees my dress properly for the first time. “Good golly, Miss Sakamoto, you’re beautiful!” he misquotes.
“Science!” I whisper, with emphasis, and grin at him. His answering smile is qualitatively different from anything I’ve seen on his face before, and for a moment the part of me responsible for self-restraint hopes that I haven’t gone too far.
Dinner is a blur. Small portions, designed not to inconvenience the stomach of the theatergoer: it’s beautifully laid out but not terribly filling. Jim’s conversation is witty and entertaining and we skirt around work delicately. “If only we could organize the whole planet as well as you’ve organized your department,” Jim says wistfully. “You could bring about world peace and abolish poverty and crime! Except we’d have to elect you planetary overlord first.”
“Nah, I’m really not up to that job,” I tell him. “Anyone who could do it well is sane enough not to want it. Anyone who wants it is by definition unsuitable. Anyway, it’s a committee job—even being head of state for one country is too big a job for a single person to do without a whole team working behind the scenes. What do you say?”
“At ACPO team-building sessions we have this discussion on days with a Y in their name.” He pauses to eat a mouthful. “It’s called the setting-the-world-to-rights session. You can probably imagine the direction it takes when you get a room full of twenty mildly inebriated senior police officers with PhDs in sociology or criminology.”
“It’s probably a good thing they don’t have their hands on the levers of power, then. When your tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. They run the Police: QED.”
“They’re not quite as simple-minded as that,” he says, mildly.
“No, of course not.” I reach across the table and touch his hand reassuringly. “But. ‘Rules are rules,’ and their career path has conditioned them for decades to believe that laws should always be enforced even-handedly. Rule of law and all that. It’s not their job to ask how the laws are made, and who benefits from them. Rules are fine for machines, but human beings aren’t perfect spheres of uniform density and negligible frictional coefficient.”
“Ah, the spooks viewpoint.” His lips purse in good-natured amusement. “Any number of shades of gray.”
We finish up in the restaurant. I go to powder my nose and while I’m gone, Jim summons the limo: as we reach the front door, it’s at the end of the red carpet, waiting for us. He booked it for the whole evening, I realize with a frisson of doubt and secret excitement. I’m conflicted: unsure how to react. Bob moved out a couple of months ago, but I’m not ready to put a dot at the end of that sentence and move on: it’s all a bit fast. On the other hand, it’s fun and magical and an excuse for escapism: romance, even. Bob is many things, but there is not a single romantic bone in his body. Whereas Jim, who one might expect to be a stolid, plodding policeman, has a barely submerged romantic streak as wide as a motorway. Setting the world to rights indeed!
The opera itself is almost an anticlimax. Verdi, doomed lovers, romantic tragedy: What more is there to say? It is, needless to say, a solid, reliable performance with one or two call-outs. Jim has found us seats at the front of a large box, but it’s also home for the evening to other groups—corporate executives and their WAGs (and in some cases, HABs). They’re all dressed to the nines so we don’t stand out. It makes for an odd combination of intimacy and anonymity, and so we sit knee to knee for two and a half hours.
The final curtain call is over; the lights come up. Conversation rises around us. “The evening is still young,” Jim murmurs, “and the magic carriage won’t turn into a pumpkin until one o’clock. What do you say?”
“I say, hello evening . . .” He offers me his arm: I take it, and we return to the limo (one of several queuing patiently outside the crush in front of the Royal Opera House). I slide into it gratefully. “Where to next?” I ask.
“I have something in mind.” His eyes twinkle wickedly. He knocks on the partition: “Destination four, please.”
“Wait, where—” The car begins to move.
“It’s a surprise,” he says. Quietly: “Do you trust me?”
“I—” I look him in the eye. “This is all a bit fast.”
“I’m sorry. If you want, I’ll give you a lift home immediately—”
“No, that won’t be necessary.” I relax. He’s fast, but smooth—and he knows when to back off. He’s a grown-up: more grown-up than Bob will ever be. Is that what I’ve been missing? A real grown-up man in my life? I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’ll ever be sure, frankly. His attention is flattering, very flattering. I’m absolutely dead certain he’s been working up to this for some time. But he’s given no hint of it before now. “Surprise me,” I tell him, stretching luxuriously.
“Happily. It’ll take about twenty minutes to get there. Would you care for a top-up?”
And so
we get through our second champagne flute of the evening.
* * *
Some time later we pull up alongside another red carpet. “You can leave your coat in the car,” Jim tells me, “he’ll pick us up when we’re ready to go.” So I shed my heavy outer shell and Jim helps me out of the limo, and we walk along the runner. There are reporters here, paparazzi: one or two flashes go off and I almost flinch before I realize that they’re not aimed at me.
“What is this?” I hiss in his ear, a rictus smile baring my teeth at the world as I lean on his arm.
“Look up.”
I look up. “Wow, it’s Minas Tirith!” Yes: the red carpet leads to a glass entrance and an atrium with a ceiling high enough that our office building could fit comfortably under it. We’re at the foot of the London Shard, the tallest building in the European Union. It’s pretty small beer by Chinese or American standards—it doesn’t even make the top fifty skyscrapers worldwide—but it’s the tallest here. And Jim is leading me across the lobby red carpet towards a bank of express elevators.
“I scored two tickets to a very exclusive party,” Jim confides in me. “I’m afraid this qualifies as work, not pleasure: hope you don’t mind.”
I tighten my grip on his arm. Dammit. “Why?”
“I thought you ought to be here to see it.”
“To see what?”
“I got wind of it yesterday afternoon from a source at the Yard, via the Integrated Intelligence System. It’s a meet-and-greet for persons of interest to our host, his eminence, Sheikh Ammar Al Nuaimi. I very much doubt he’ll be seen in public here tonight, but there may be some discreet invitations to his apartments downstairs from the observatory level. Most of the guest list are investment bankers and political lobbyists, but word is that he is extremely interested in meeting three-sigma powers: I barely had to express interest . . . ah, here we are.”
The spacious glass-walled lift to the observation deck is stunningly fast and smooth, and my ears pop on the way up. We don’t have it to ourselves, mind you: the other passengers are a mix of middle-aged couples and younger and more glamorous hangers-on, all in evening dress. Nobody I recognize. At the top, the doors open and white-gloved attendants direct us out onto a floor which serves as an open-air viewing platform. It’s surrounded on four sides by giant triangular glass walls and support trusses that extend several stories above us. We’re sheltered from the wind, but it feels light and airy and a little bit chilly: a harbinger of early autumn. Waiters with drinks trays and bottles circulate discreetly. Jim and I both accept glasses of white wine. “Do you recognize anyone here?” I ask.
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