And today, of all days, with his French connection clamoring for attention at Heathrow, was the day for his jog.
Something would have to give.
Between organizing the breakfast table with muesli and jams, cups and saucers and bowls, Gerald Tremayne set about selecting a helper among his fellow denizens of the school run, someone generous enough to step up to the plate without expecting too much in return, or asking too many questions, or constructing conspiracies and gossip from the abrupt break in cherished routine.
“Hi, Rosemary, Gerald here,” he began. “I know it’s ridiculously early. But I wondered if…”
By the time his daughters had tucked into the yogurts and granolas prescribed by their mother—and the Marmite on toast with side orders of crisp bacon he felt they needed for stamina—it was all arranged.
“Rosemary will pick you up from school today,” he told them as he drove them with their satchels and music books and sports kit. “She’ll get you as far as Kentish Town. Stick together and take the bus from there. I won’t be late.”
He had expected his daughters to protest against this disruption of their comfortable, chauffeured routine, this rare descent from the pampered uplands of the familiar.
But Portia, the elder of the two, already tiptoeing across the divide between girlhood innocence and teenage complexity, seemed relatively enthusiastic.
“Kentish Town? Whereabouts in Kentish Town?”
“Near the tube station, I imagine.”
“Okay.”
fourteen
It ranked as one of the prized luxuries of the job and, sometimes, Dolores Tremayne felt mildly guilty about enjoying it as much as she did. Back home, she imagined the morning chaos and bustle, the burned toast and the spilled milk, the girls demanding freshly laundered school blouses and dazzle-white knee-socks as Gerald hovered and chivvied and panicked and cracked jokes, shepherding them along as X, the cat, wove through his long legs and tried to trip him.
“Yellow card for that, X,” he would say jokingly and the girls would laugh, dutifully, at this worn, familiar humor, all part of the ritual.
In her junior suite there was no such hurly-burly, no requirement to consider the needs of third parties. She clambered naked from the luxuriant folds of the massive down comforter on the super-king-sized bed; bathed at her leisure, anointing herself from the array of expensive toiletries provided by the ever-attentive management of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. She stepped onto the weighing scales in the bathroom and noted with approval that her efforts in the fitness center had been rewarded with an unchanging body weight despite the business lunches and dinners; she caught sight of herself—deliberately—in the steamed-up mirror and approved the anatomical sculpture that had thus far defied age and gravity.
Dolores Tremayne pulled on the thick toweling dressing gown the hotel provided and powered up the laptop on the walnut-inlaid desk in the suite’s small but perfectly formed sitting room. Before turning in she had left her breakfast order outside her door and knew that, at the appointed hour, there would be the waiter’s discreet tap to announce the arrival of hot coffee, oven-warm croissants and luscious bircher muesli, borne on tray or trolley with crisp white linen. Burnished coffeepot and cutlery. Jams in dainty individual pots. Butter on little circles of hallmarked sterling silver. Thick folded napkins—or should she call them serviettes? Scrambled eggs under a shiny dome that the waiter removed with the flourish of a stage magician.
Abracadabra!
The miracle of room service breakfast in a five-star watering hole.
With several hours to spare before her connection to Detroit, she turned to her emails only when coffee had been poured and she had lightly buttered a croissant and taken a first forkful of the light-as-a-feather Rühr-eier that the hotel chefs did so well.
She wished she had opened her in-box earlier, for several things were amiss.
The first that caught her eye had been sent from her elder daughter’s email address—unusual because their favored means of communication on her travels were Face Time or Skype so that Dolores could feast her eyes on her children and determine from the backdrop to the conversation whether her standards for the upkeep of the apartment were being maintained—cushions plumped and geometrically positioned; throws adorning the sofa with the precision of hospital ward bedding; TVs silent within the hours earmarked for homework; kitchen displaying no evidence of procrastination with the washing-up, or of the telltale frying pan that betrayed her husband’s culinary preferences. She was not, in fact, above timing her calls at moments when she could guess where her children would be, a natural enough instinct: the protection of the brood from harm in the shape of neglect, of chaos that might be expected to flow from male supervision or from cleaning ladies who sensed that the true power behind the administration of the household was absent.
But this email was different. It had been sent hours earlier and she must somehow have missed its arrival in the champagne-drinking, self-congratulatory moments of her last night in Munich. The subject line was empty—alarm bell number one. And in the space reserved for the message there was a jumble of letters that looked like those scrambled forms you have to decipher on certain websites to establish that you are a human individual and not simply a malicious computer program gone phishing.
It said this:
“H@L#P?”
She glanced at her watch. Her late start meant that her daughters would be in class by now. She tried her husband’s cell but, as it frequently did, it went straight to voice mail. “Hi there. Leave a message. Be well.” No name, no number. Just a treacle-smooth voice that sounded like an invitation to far more than telephonic communication and the exchange of information.
Dammit, she thought. In a few hours, a cab would transport her to the airport where she would board a feeder flight to Frankfurt am Main for a connection to Detroit. The bookings were set in stone. When her children next emerged from the confines of classrooms and music studios and sporting facilities, she would be somewhere over the Atlantic. A joke, maybe, she wondered, but Portia did not make jokes. Irony was not her style. Neither was deception. She was a serious child, whose teachers said she did not make friends easily, a bit of a loner, though nothing you could point to as psychologically abnormal. It was just that she tended to take matters too literally, to the point of gullibility. In Portia’s world—a slightly lonely world at that—people were what they said they were.
While she was considering her apparently limited options, her laptop pinged to announce a message in the in-box, this one from company headquarters, sent via a server that automatically encrypted sensitive material. In capital letters, the subject line declared: URGENT—ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT IMMEDIATELY.
Intrigued, she clicked on an attachment and entered her company passwords and ever-updating access codes from the SecurID device issued to senior management to keep secrets away from the prying eyes of lesser employees.
“Re: Detroit.
“Please read the enclosed press release that is about to be issued by our counter-party in Detroit. As you will see, it relates to our emissions control software installed in their diesel engines, specifically the defeat device developed at their request. It is essential that you have no contact with them and postpone your visit. Do not speak to any of their executives or journalists you may know who will doubtless be trying to contact you given your high profile in recent articles. Ensure that any data relating to this device is encrypted, stored and removed from public areas of any computer you use. Discretion is essential in this matter. This message is being sent to all our executives, developers and sales personnel with knowledge of this particular software. It is not a personal reproach. Please acknowledge receipt.”
Well, that’s interesting, she thought. In her experience, one of the main reasons that very senior bosses were able to remain in very senior positions with very substantial remuneration packages was their ability to divert blame onto the lower levels, onto the people
, like her, who performed their assigned functions well, without necessarily being apprised of the big picture. The message, she noticed, was not signed by an individual: the trail of deniability and obfuscation had already begun. She had been concerned about this particular software because, while a degree of economy with the truth about emissions from diesel engines was the industry norm, the discovery of deliberate computerized efforts to conceal the true levels of pollution bore the seeds of reputational disaster. She had said so when the big bosses completed the negotiations to develop and supply it but she had been poo-pooed. The impact on the bottom line was too big to ignore, she had been told. If we don’t do it, the French will. Or the Germans. Or the Koreans. Or someone. She would need to look out for herself. When another big motor manufacturer had been caught in a similar scam, the cost had run to billions. And, of course, the hunt for scapegoats had taken no prisoners. Every catastrophe for one, the business mantra went, was an opportunity for another. So her company had been quick off the mark to develop yet more sophisticated software to feed a hungry market for deception.
“Are you sure this is the right thing? I mean, not morally. Of course. Just tactically. Strategically,” she had asked at an encounter with her division chief who sat on the executive committee and collected Aston Martins for a hobby.
“Don’t you worry your sweet little head about that,” he had drawled in a phony Texas accent and she had been so incensed by the gender implications of his comment that she had not fought the battle.
Now she wished she had.
Now they were telling her to go home and take cover.
They’d find out what her sweet little head could come up with, that was for sure.
Before anyone else thought of it, she scrolled back in her outgoing email and found the messages expressing her concerns—and the replies telling her to simply get on with it and do as she was told. Or consider her position. She forwarded them to a personal in-box behind a firewall, initially set up to keep Gerald Tremayne’s creations and drafts beyond the view of prying eyes. (He had not used it much of late, she noted, but she was glad to be able to avail herself of its protection.)
Then she clicked on the flight schedules from Munich. With a little ingenuity—and recourse to low-cost airlines that she would normally avoid—she found a connection that would get her back to Gatwick just after lunchtime. Not her favorite airport, but it had the advantage of transit links almost to her doorstep in London. She clicked, booked, entered credit card details, downloaded boarding passes to her smartphone. Hastily, she finished off her packing and called down to reception to say she would be checking out a little earlier than planned and would require a car to the airport. By the afternoon, she would be stepping from the overland train at Victoria station and switching to the tube for a quick, easy run to Kentish Town. Then the bus home. Imagine that! On her own ticket, the life of chauffeured sedans and fawning concierges fell away like a slough. It sounded like she had perhaps better get used to it. But she would, she figured, be home in time for tea and husband and children. And a nuzzle from X. What a surprise it would be for all of them.
fifteen
It had been a difficult morning, spilling over to early afternoon. There had not been many clients but they were dispersed over a relatively wide area. He should write Soviet-era spy-thrillers, Gerald thought. Servicing dead-letter drops. Running his joes. Before technology made them all irrelevant.
There had been an unforeseen glitch when he espied the Hampstead Heath Constabulary exercising fearsome dogs with sleuth-like nostrils that quivered for any whiff of illicit substances. He had been obliged to undertake a time-consuming diversion along the Ponds. Last thing he needed: some huge bloodhound leaping onto him, trembling with the scent of contraband.
“Mind if we look in the rucksack, sir?”
The End. Of everything. Marriage, career, fatherhood, family, freedom. And for what? The question was always the same. The clients were small-time, social users, predictable. The cash flow was modest. Routinely, he plowed his potential profits back to ease the strain on the family budget that would soon become apparent if he financed his consumption on the open market. Locked into the cycle of what was beginning to look ominously like what they called a habit, the only escape was to break his dependency, jettison his secret cell phone, take his cold turkey on the chin and risk the retribution of those further up the deadly chain. Even then, if he finally wrote the Big One that propelled him onto the bestseller lists, he would live in constant fear of being exposed by his erstwhile associates. As a user, you could flaunt addiction as testimony to the agony and suffering of the tortured, creative soul. Pushers generally got a worse press. It was at moments like that—when the inner illumination of his plight shone most brightly—that he most needed a quick snort to face the enormity of his predicament. All his working life he had been uneasy about this part of his portfolio. You could pretend it was harmless, but it wasn’t. He had watched enough documentaries to understand the violence and bloodshed compressed into every grain of narcotics. Maybe his clientele could handle what he sold them. But how many lives got ruined by it? How close was he to ruining his own?
He pounded on, along footpaths and sidewalks, halting briefly for the exchange of anonymous cash for diluted product, cut with cheaper powder, handed over at prearranged locations. The narrow path near the big church. The spot away from the security cameras outside the library. The alley next to the kebab shop. Behind the overflowing garbage skips. A place that reeked of urine and defeat.
On his pay-as-you-go phone, he called himself Dougie.
“Cheers, Dougie. Same time next week?”
“Cheers, mate. Sure. The usual?”
In the end, he was so exhausted and short of time that he risked taking the bus home, the class-A drugs in his rucksack replaced by wodges of cash. Laughable, really. Would you see Walter White or Pablo Escobar standing in line with their Oyster cards to swipe across the electronic reader next to the driver’s cabin?
“Novelist Drug Dealer Went by Bus.”
“The Peddler on Public Transport.”
He lived in fear of ridicule as much as arrest.
Once home, he peeled off his sweaty running gear and showered. On his rounds he took nothing that would definitely identify him—no credit card or legit cell phone or driver’s license or utility bill. It was the closest he could get to anonymity in case the heavy hand of the law descended on his muscled, well-toned shoulders. He gathered together the bits and bobs of his existence in the parallel world inhabited by his wife and daughters and lovers.
He clambered into the Range Rover.
The game was in play. Faites vos jeux. Rien ne va plus. His world was spinning on the wheel of fortune, and no one’s luck lasted forever.
After this he would turn over a new leaf. And it wouldn’t be a coca leaf, either. He would clean up his act, revive monogamy, write. One last hurrah and then the straight and narrow.
He thought briefly of ignoring Mathilde de Villeneuve’s demand for chauffeuring and other services. Then he recalled the stories after her husband’s fall from grace—and the likely consequences of disobedience. Acid on the Range Rover. Mathilde ringing his doorbell. Confrontation. Doom.
He noticed a missed call from Dolores on his smartphone, but there was nothing much he could do about it. By now she would be aboard a long-haul flight from Frankfurt to Detroit. Business class. Out of range. Out of contact. Not quite out of mind.
Hot towel, madam? Champagne?
He knew this because her schedule was held in place by magnets on the door of the fridge so that her family could follow her progress through five-star hotels and overnight flights in the flatbed sharp end of airplanes, across continents and oceans, hither and thither, never ceasing, wrapping the planet in the latticework of her successful, executive lifestyle. Transparency, she called it. But sometimes the itineraries looked more like bragging. Or taunts. Look how busy and successful Mummy is, they seemed to say, w
hile Daddy spoons out the spag bol. One day, he thought, I will post my own schedule on the fridge door, from drug den to boudoir. And then we’ll see how transparent she liked it to be: 0830 school run; 0930 screw neighbor; 1030 score drugs; 1130 seduce stranger; 1420 pick up lover (Terminal 5); 1630 pick up daughters. No. Scrub that.
There had been a time, it is true, that idle thought of his own counter-schedule with its stations of self-indulgence and danger gave him some vengeful pleasure, but the more he contemplated the bookends of his daily routine, the more he came to think that it fell far short of what he had promised himself and Dolores. Where was the mention of an interview on Radio 4 with Mariella Frostrup or James Naughtie—those literary gatekeepers; an invite to the big festival in Hay-on-Wye; the Booker Prize short list; a movie deal with Columbia Pictures; a call from his agent to announce the outcome of the auction of his latest rights?
He was not even invited to fill in the gaps between the gigs down the road in Kentish Town anymore.
Dolores’s distant presence, incommunicado at 35,000 feet, would offer some frail protection for his hectic trip to the arrivals gate at Heathrow. At least he would not be required to invent some fiction to cover his tracks—the only kind of fiction he seemed to get round to these days.
Cat Flap Page 13