‘I work for an insurance company.’
Once again Tina interrupted. ‘Listen to her,’ she laughed. ‘Just listen! She doesn’t just work for them; she’s the chief executive. And it’s not a small company either: it’s one of the majors.’
Foster realized then that, whether or not she was a friend, Janet was another of Tina’s acquisitions, an accoutrement to bolster her own standing. He decided to pander to his hostess’s whims; he owed it to his old friend to keep her happy.
‘I’m impressed,’ he said to Janet. ‘No glass ceiling with your firm, then.’
‘Don’t you believe it!’ Janet smiled at him, showing perfect white teeth. ‘I just had to work harder, that’s all.’
Foster could imagine it. He found himself admiring her. He guessed she was in her early forties. It would have been quite an achievement for anybody to have reached her exalted rank at such a young age; doubly so for a woman. She looked at him over the rim of her glass and asked, ‘About you. That scandal—?’
‘Sorry,’ Foster cut her short. If they talked about the Chinese episode, the conversation would sooner or later be bound to drift on to the subject of Fiona, and that was a pain he would rather not be forced to endure. Not yet anyway. ‘It’s off limits,’ he said quietly. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’
There was a moment’s awkward silence. Tina scowled into her glass while her husband seemed to be taking great interest in the plaster mouldings edging the ceiling.
It was Janet who broke the spell. ‘No, of course not,’ she said pleasantly, without any sign of rancour at being rebuffed. ‘What shall we talk about instead?’
They ended up discussing the current scandal that had rocked the showbiz world – an opera singer had split from his beautiful and successful wife, the mother of two bright boys aged under ten, and taken up with another man, a famous ballet-dancer. The matter had greatly exercised the redtops of late.
‘This is one of the many times I say I’m switching to the FT,’ Cooper said. ‘They’ve scarcely mentioned it.’
‘Why does anyone think we have the slightest interest?’ Janet asked. ‘It isn’t as if there weren’t much more relevant and important things going on.’
Foster decided he liked her even more.
The conversation continued for a while, and then Tina stood up. ‘I’ll see how the dinner’s going,’ she said. ‘Alex, why don’t you show Dan your model now, before we eat?’ Her tone was dismissive, slightly patronizing: You big boys and your toys, it hinted.
‘Can I take a look?’ Janet said quickly as they all rose to their feet. ‘I’ve heard so much about it from Tina.’
Cooper looked at his wife. An annoyed frown crossed her face but then she nodded acceptance. ‘Of course,’ she said to Janet. ‘You can stop the boys getting overly bogged down and spoiling the meal by being late.’ There was acid in her tone.
And with that she almost flounced out of the room.
Janet’s eyebrows rose almost imperceptibly. ‘Oh dear,’ she said under her breath, and the two men briefly exchanged conspiratorial grins.
Cooper led the way to the back door and the three of them walked through the fading light along a paved path leading towards a long brick building at the end of the garden. Janet was still wearing the Pashmina and, as he followed her along the path, Foster saw her pull it further over her shoulders against the chill of the evening air.
As they reached the outbuilding Cooper opened the door and switched on the light inside. Foster had moved alongside Janet and they now both gasped. A pool of intense white light illuminated a work-table in the centre of the room on which stood a beautiful model boat, its deep-blue hull surmounted by a bright orange superstructure. High-gloss paintwork glistened under the glare of the overhead lights. Emblazoned on the side of the hull, in stark white lettering, were the numbers 17-21 and under the wheelhouse windows a plate bore the name RNLB David and Elizabeth Ackland.
‘She’s a model of the latest Newhaven boat,’ Cooper explained. ‘A Severn class.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ Janet breathed and Foster took a sideways look at her. Her eyes were shining in genuine admiration. ‘How long did it take you to build?’
‘Best part of two years. Keeps me out of mischief. She’s a fully working model. Radio controlled. She’s pretty well finished now; only a few small finishing touches, and then I’ll be able to take her out and show her off.’
Foster took reading glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on to peer at the model. He wondered about the logistics of taking it out of this building and down to somewhere that could provide enough room for it to sail; the model was nearly five feet long and almost two feet wide and bristling with whip aerials. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it weighed.
He reached out and ran his fingertips over the smoothness of the lovely sleek hull. ‘She’s fantastic, Alex,’ he said approvingly. ‘You’ve done well.’
But before Cooper could respond they heard Tina calling them to dinner.
She produced an excellent meal: mushrooms on ciabatta in a cheese sauce to start, followed by delicious sea bass, cooked to perfection. Cooper brought out a chilled bottle of Chablis but Foster declined; he had a long drive back ahead of him and he didn’t want to risk losing his licence. ‘I’ll round the evening off with another malt later,’ he said, as he took a glass of chilled orange juice from his host.
They were about halfway through the main course when the conversation turned to the power cut that had blacked out most of southern Britain during the recent summer’s heatwave. Janet had raised the question in all innocence, and it was a natural step; she knew that both men had worked with the power industry and she was curious as to how such a cataclysmic disaster could have happened.
She didn’t catch the look that Tina flashed her, but Foster did.
‘It’s OK,’ he said quietly. ‘I can handle it.’ He had changed his mind. Earlier on he had decided not allow the conversation to venture near any subject that could have led to a reference to Fiona. But he had thought about it since then, and he realized that he had to tackle the problem now; the tragedy was a little further away and he felt more relaxed about discussing it. Anyway, he had to get back to normality at some time: perhaps that time was now.
Seeing Tina’s surprised look when he made his statement, Janet was clearly puzzled, so he explained. ‘I lost my partner in the Tube incident.’
Her hand half rose to her mouth, then stopped. ‘Oh my God!’ she gasped. ‘I’m so sorry … I didn’t know.’ She was clearly horrified that she had started the conversation.
To save her further embarrassment, Foster cut in quickly, ‘Don’t worry about it. You weren’t to know.’
‘Perhaps, but….’
‘It was a horrible thing. We’d all been warning about it for a long time now. Engineers, I mean. We saw it coming.’
‘What do you mean?’
Foster answered, ‘Back in the ’70s, what was then called London Underground commissioned a big firm of consulting engineers to look into the vulnerability of the Tube system in the face of power cuts. Their report said that the Underground’s supply system was so vital that if it was lost for as much as ten to twenty minutes, people would start to die.’
‘No!’ Janet and Tina chorused, clearly appalled.
‘But yes! Think about it. Tens of thousands of people deep underground, on trains, platforms, escalators. All dependent on lights, ventilation systems and so on. It’s almost as if they were in a giant spaceship: virtually being kept alive by a complex life-support system. Think Apollo 13; think what happened then.’
‘God!’ Janet exclaimed. ‘So what happened in the summer … you’re saying that it had been predicted?’
‘Yes. And predicted with uncanny accuracy. The consultants’ report outlined a scenario almost identical to what happened in July.’
An icy chill fell on the room, and it was several moments before Janet let out her breath and, shaking her head slowly
, whispered, ‘I’m so sorry. So very sorry. I shouldn’t have asked….’
‘No.’ Foster gave a bleak smile. ‘You weren’t to know. Anyway, life has to move on.
‘But you’re right anyway. That’s what happened. She was still alive when they got to her. She managed to tell them a little before….’ He took a deep breath before concluding, ‘Before she died. That’s how they know.’
He stopped, deep in thought, and another long silence followed. This time it was an even more awkward one, everybody wondering what to say next, how to move away from thoughts of the tragedy. In the end it was Janet who broke the spell. ‘Tina tells me you live on a houseboat,’ she said.
He let out a pent-up breath. ‘Yes,’ he replied, glad to move on. ‘Near Kingston.’
‘I’ve never known anyone who lives on a houseboat.’
‘You should go down and see it,’ Tina interjected. ‘It’s very … well, it’s very Dan.’
Foster looked at her, wondering just what ‘very Dan’ meant.
‘I’d like to,’ Janet said smiling at Foster.
‘Sure. Come down sometime. She’s called Lake Goddess. Moored just upstream of Kingston Bridge, on the Middlesex side. She’s in a bit of a mess at the moment … after….’
Foster took in a deep breath. His initial fears had been justified. The evening was indeed proving to be tough. Initially, the conversation had flowed easily enough. But now it kept reverting to Fiona. The carefully constructed, civilized and polite structure that everybody had been at pains to create, to hide the past tragedy, was collapsing about them.
In spite of everyone’s best efforts, the walking-on-eggshells atmosphere persisted throughout the remainder of the evening, and it was a relief when Janet and Tina left the room to put away the dishes, leaving the men alone to talk.
When they were alone Cooper poured malts for them. Normally a gin-and-tonic man, he had decided to share the malt with his friend. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said quietly, as he handed Foster’s drink to him. ‘And I don’t mean the small size of your drink; I mean that conversation back there.’
‘Forget it, Alex. I have to get my life back on track. This is the first social event I’ve been to since … since the summer. It was bound to be hard. Must get better from now on.’
‘I’ll drink to that, mate!’
They clinked glasses and sipped at their drinks silently for a few moments.
Then Cooper spoke, again very quietly so that his wife couldn’t hear. ‘I’m sorry about Tina’s matchmaking too.’
Foster grinned. He had guessed. ‘Not a problem. She means well.’
‘That’s for sure. Trouble is, she never listens to me. When she said she was going to ask Janet to come here tonight I said … well, I didn’t think it would be a good idea.’
‘Oh well!’ Foster thought carefully as he sipped his drink. Then he asked, ‘But what about Janet? She’s a good-looking woman. No partner?’
‘Well there was,’ Cooper stared ruefully into his drink. ‘They were married. He was some big shot in retail. Went off with the daughter of one of his company’s partners.’
‘Christ! That doesn’t sound like a good career move for him.’
‘Depends. The new woman’s old man liked him, so it was OK. Anyhow, in the end I was glad she came. I felt sorry for her. It was Tina who thought you two would be a good match.’
Foster smiled. ‘I’m not ready for another involvement, pal,’ he said. ‘Not right now anyway.’
They were silent for a while, old friends sharing a drink in pleasurable company with each other.
‘So there’s nobody in your life?’
‘That’s right,’ Foster took a thoughtful sip of his malt and grinned again. ‘Nobody. I’ve lived the life of a monk for the last three months, Alex. I’m not used to that and it’s beginning to get to me.’
At that, the two women re-entered the room, gaily chattering like old school friends. They sat down and Cooper poured them drinks.
‘Dan,’ Tina said, ‘Janet’s been asking about the thing in China. I’ve been telling her what I know. But can you fill in some of the details for her?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Janet apologized. ‘I know it’s a sore point with you. It must bring back painful memories. But it sounds fascinating. I read the reports of the public inquiry in the newspapers, so I know a little bit about it of course. I think everybody does.’
‘I’m amazed that you remember anything at all about it,’ Foster said, raising his eyes from his malt. ‘It was years ago. A nine-day wonder, I would have thought.’
‘It was anything but a nine-day wonder,’ she laughed. ‘It almost brought down the government.’
Something in her voice made Foster look at her as she sipped her wine. He hadn’t been counting glasses but he guessed she must have had most of a bottle already.
‘That it did,’ Foster agreed. ‘A minister had tried to cover up a huge illegal deal that he’d brokered. It was for a computer system for power stations. The deal was a subsidy, to help British exports into China, but it broke loads of European Community rules. He’d have got away with it too, if there hadn’t been a serious fault in the computer system.’
‘Gosh!’ Janet said. ‘How interesting! I hadn’t realized how complicated electricity was until then. But The Times had a very nice explanation. For a while it made me think twice every time I turned on a light.
‘But then, what happened in the summer? It wasn’t just the Tube, was it? London lost all its electricity. And wasn’t most of the country blacked out too?’
‘That’s right. Well, most of the South, anyway. You see, the grid system’s like a house of cards in some ways; take one away and the whole lot comes tumbling down. There’s plenty of redundancy built in but – two incidents on the same day, when plant was already down for the summer overhaul programme so that the system was already stretched – that was all it took. It’s called “cascade tripping” and, well, everybody knows what happened. The fact is, though, that nobody’s quite sure about the details. At least not right now. Still, it’s early days; there’s a lot of investigation going on. But, what is known is that there was a major fault on one of the cables feeding London, though that wouldn’t have been enough to cause the mayhem, not on its own. What compounded the situation was a big power station tripping at about the same time. The two simultaneous faults were more than the system could handle—’
‘What do you mean when you say that a power station “tripped”?’ Tina interrupted.
‘Just that. It shut down suddenly.’
‘And nobody knows why?’ Cooper asked.
‘There are all sorts of rumours going round, but basically it’s a mystery. All I’ve heard indicates that the plant’s computers decided to shut it down.’
‘Computers?’ Janet asked.
‘Yes. All these things are controlled by computers these days.’
‘It was a computer problem in China too, wasn’t it?’ Janet asked.
‘It was similar. But the problem there was a generic fault. It was a weak point in the design, which caused a fatal accident in Hong Kong, and could have been much worse on the mainland plant, because it was nuclear.’
‘But that’s not what happened here in the summer.’
‘No. This time it seems that everything worked well. It looks like the computers just took it into their heads to suddenly shut down the plant. That, coupled with the cable fault, was all it took, and when London fell off the system the resulting instability brought the whole grid to its knees.’
‘Any clues as to why? I mean, what caused the power station to shut down?’ Tina asked.
‘No. No clues. Or, at least, none that I know of. But then, I’ve not actually been involved in the investigation that’s been going on. Other people are working on it. But I do know the firm involved in the investigation and they’re a good bunch. Anyway, all in all, I’m glad to stay away from it.’
Janet stared at him and a slight frown crossed
her face. She leaned forward to put her glass down on the small table in front of her. The base of the glass caught the edge of the table and some of the wine spilled out. Janet mumbled an apology. Tina sprang to her feet and almost ran to the kitchen, returning a moment later with some paper towels which she used to mop up the spill.
‘Don’t you think you should get involved?’ Janet continued, when the spill had been mopped up. ‘To me it sounds very similar to the case in China, at least in that it involves computers, and power stations and things like that – things you seem to have specialist knowledge of, and experience. It’s meat and drink to you, surely.’
The question annoyed Foster. She’d had a fair bit to drink, and her words were slightly slurred, but that was no excuse. What right had she to tell him whether he should or should not get involved? ‘This isn’t an Agatha Christie detective story, you know,’ he said tetchily. ‘It’s a major investigation. The government’s appointed a good firm of consultants, proper experts, to look into it. The engineering equivalent of Hercule Poirot turning up, sticking his nose in and saying that his “leetle grey cells” are telling him something … well, that’s just not going to happen.’ He felt the slight touch of humour might just cool down a situation that was becoming uncomfortably warm. It might deflect her.
But she persisted. ‘So you’re not even going to try.’
‘No,’ Foster retorted, his rising annoyance beginning to show in his tone. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Even though your partner was killed?’
His response was slow to come. ‘I’ve said, no.’
The chilly silence was back. It hung threateningly in the air. Tina and Alex were intently studying the after-dinner drinks that they were holding.
But Janet seemed oblivious of the chill. Clearly, she was not one to be easily rebuffed. She pressed on doggedly. ‘Earlier on you talked about the consultants’ report, the one that forecast the disaster. I don’t know if you meant it, but I felt that you were hinting that there was some sort of conspiracy.’
The Darkfall Switch Page 3