“He’s trying to. I got out.”
Jerome shook his head in confusion.
“Freddie mentioned Boo. Boo’s a part of this?”
“She was undercover at school. She’s a . . . police officer.”
“I should have realized that,” he said. “The way she just arrived and ended up in your room. Did Charlotte know that?”
“I don’t think so. Look . . .” The way we were standing was too awkward to maintain, so I grabbed his hand. I think this shocked him. I know it shocked me. But there we were, holding hands. His hand was warm, and he squeezed, locking the connection. This little throwaway gesture had changed everything, and now that there was touching, his presence was more real.
“This is mad,” he said. “I don’t even know how this is happening. I didn’t think Freddie would be right.”
“I promise you, when this is over? I’ll explain everything. Every single thing. But now, there’s no time. So I need you to not say anything to anyone about where I am. It could get me hurt, and it could hurt the effort to find Charlotte.”
“I’m supposed to meet Jaz in three hours,” he said.
“You can’t tell her,” I said, shaking my head. “You can’t tell anyone. I know this is a lot to ask. I know it. But I can text you a few times a day and let you know I’m okay. And when it’s over, maybe we can talk? Thorpe trusts you. He said I should talk to you because he thinks you’ll listen, and he thinks you’ll help.”
“And do you trust Thorpe?”
This was a fair question. It wasn’t like I knew Thorpe that well. But everything he had done so far had been designed to help me or . . .
I remembered the intake form that was still in my pocket.
Stephen had trusted Thorpe, though.
“I trust him enough,” I said.
“I’m worried about you,” he said.
When he looked up at me, I remembered what had attracted me to him in the first place—before my life went crazy. Jerome was this really nice mix of competent and loose. And his face was kind. Everyone talked to Jerome, which was part of the reason he was a popular prefect.
“A few days,” Jerome said.
“That’s all.”
“And you’re going to text me?”
“I’ll text you.”
He balled his hand into a fist and rubbed it on his mouth in thought.
“This freaks me out,” he said. “But I’ll do it. If I don’t hear from you . . .”
“You will.”
“What do I say to Jazza?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “You say nothing.”
“Yeah.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I say nothing.”
I heard the chime of the door, and the creak as it was forced back open. Thorpe and Freddie rejoined us.
“Are we all set here?” Thorpe asked.
I had the uneasy feeling that he had seen the whole thing. It wasn’t that Jerome and I had been doing anything in particular, but I didn’t like the thought of being closely observed, especially not with Jerome. Especially when we were meeting again after what had happened between us, in a time when weird and terrible emotions were always following me like a dark cloud.
“All set,” I said, looking down.
“I assume you can make your way from here, Jerome?”
Jerome retrieved his Oyster card from his pocket and waggled it at Thorpe.
“Good. Freddie will be coming with us.”
Freddie appeared mildly dazed. I took it she and Thorpe had had a conversation inside as well. She went right to the backseat of the car and put herself in it.
“Okay, then,” I said, looking from Thorpe to the car and back again.
“Get in,” Thorpe said.
There would be no long good-bye, which was probably best. As I got into the car, Jerome came to the door and stopped before I shut it.
“When will you text?”
“Two times a day,” Thorpe said, from the driver’s side.
“Three.”
“Fine. Shut the door.”
I shut the door, and then we were driving off, leaving Jerome standing on the street.
• • •
We drove along the river, but Thorpe didn’t bother to tell us where we were going. I had a look at Freddie in the side-view mirror and found that she was looking back at me, all apple cheeks and eager eyes.
“Your term ended a week ago,” Thorpe said to her. “When are you due home to your family?”
“A few days,” she said. “I told them I was staying here to finish up some work.”
Having gotten what he wanted, Thorpe didn’t feel obligated to add any follow-up. Freddie leaned back. I would occasionally turn my eyes to the mirror to see if we were still watching each other. She had shifted her attention to our route. We stopped in front of what looked one of many London apartment buildings—it could have been Hawthorne, my building at Wexford, just painted white with a black roof. I noticed a sign that read KING’S COLLEGE STUDENT RESIDENCE.
“Get some clothes,” he said. “Enough for a day or two. Make it a small bag. Bring your laptop and anything you’ve collected that’s relevant. Be back in ten minutes.”
Freddie half fell out of the car in her effort to be quick. Thorpe pulled into an empty space up the street and stopped the car but kept it idling.
“You had one instruction,” he said. “Stay indoors.”
Here it was. I wanted him to do it. I wanted him to get self-righteous so I could level him with the knowledge that I knew what he had done—or hadn’t done—for Stephen. But that was all he said. Thorpe was a bit of a mic-dropper, and he left me no open conversational door to lob my grenade into. All I could say was, “Yeah?”
“So why don’t you tell me what caused you to disobey a straightforward instruction.”
“Because I read Stephen’s report.”
No glint of recognition. To be fair, we had several bags of Stephen’s reports, so that had really not been specific enough.
“What report?” he asked.
“His intake form.”
“His intake form?”
I think he was genuinely confused. My bombshell moment was not having quite the boom! effect I had been going for. I dug it out of my pocket and shoved it at him. He accepted it and looked it over. The longer I watched him, the more I realized that he really hadn’t seen this document before. Three heavy wrinkles appeared in his forehead as he processed the contents.
“Where did you get this?” he said, looking up.
“Stephen had it,” I said. “It was in the box of stuff from his bedroom.”
Thorpe considered the paper for a moment more, then leaned back against the headrest. He looked very tired.
“All right, Rory,” he said. “I’ll speak to you candidly, because I need you to listen and to understand my position on this. We need to come to an understanding. Do you agree?”
“I . . . yes?”
“When I was given the assignment to oversee this group,” Thorpe said, “I had absolutely no idea what to make of it. I thought it was a training exercise. Training exercises are quite common, and they can go on for some time. I was given a set of instructions, told that I needed to find a certain kind of person. Young people, highly intelligent and skilled, who had had near-death experiences before eighteen and then reported certain visions. They gave me the termini. They told me about restarting the squad and set me to work. And I did it. I made contacts at a number of hospitals and clinics. And one day, Stephen’s name popped up. He was in the hospital following a suicide attempt.”
He looked over at me, I think checking to see if I knew this already.
“He told me,” I said.
“I thought he might have. He’s open about it.”
“That’s about the only thing,”
I said.
“That’s part of what made him a good candidate. He had a good sense of discretion. Normally, no one would be recruited while still recovering from an incident like that. Working for a secret service is stressful, and it requires silence. And someone recovering from a suicide attempt and a trauma needs less stress and the opportunity to talk about anything and everything. What made his situation unique was that he couldn’t talk about what had happened to him because it involved people that others couldn’t see. He was also exactly the kind of person you’d want to recruit—top marks, top schools, physically competent.”
Some rain pattered on the windscreen, and he hit the wipers for a moment. Then he looked at the paper again.
“I didn’t write this report,” he said, holding up the paper. “The contents don’t shock me, but had I known the contents, I would have proceeded differently. I thought he had done better than this on the risk-assessment tests.”
A moment of Thorpey silence. The air in the car became heavy with our thoughts.
“Stephen was very closed off emotionally,” Thorpe said. “This is not an uncommon trait amongst people in the security services. But what I came to realize is that he was a very compassionate person who grew up in an atmosphere where compassion wasn’t valued. He didn’t know what to do with it. So instead of weighing a situation in terms of his own safety, he simply threw himself into it.
“He had been through a system that produces very professional people, very smart people—but sometimes very broken people. Eton’s reputation is well earned. Stephen was focused, someone who wanted to devote his life to helping others—and he’d never been put in a position where he could do that. This job gave him meaning and purpose. Whatever happened, whatever risks were taken—he wanted to take them. Stephen was highly intelligent. He made his own choices.”
“So . . . that’s okay, then?”
“No,” Thorpe said sharply. “This is where we need to be clear about my position. It was only after meeting Stephen, actually talking to him, seeing what he was doing—only then did I realize that this was not an exercise at all. It took me some time to come to grips with that, and Stephen was helpful. I regarded him not just as my recruit, but as my friend. If you think I don’t care about what’s happened on a personal level, then you are much mistaken.”
His voice had acquired an edge I’d never heard in it before. It wasn’t like it broke, or that he was crying. The words were coming quick and sharp, with a little intake of breath at the end of the sentences. Thorpe was leaning toward me, making sure I took in every word.
“Stephen cared very much about your safety. That was obvious to me from the start. So if you value Stephen, and you value how he felt and what he actually sacrificed himself for, you need to be more careful, and you need to listen to me. Can I get you to agree to that much, for his sake?”
“Yes?” I said.
It was like I’d just been subjected to my own personal thunderstorm, one that passed as quickly as it had come. Thorpe leaned back. He relaxed his expression in what seemed like a very intentional way, cleared his throat, and looked up at Freddie’s building and checked his watch. His phone made a noise, and he pulled it from his pocket.
“Nothing at Stephen’s parents’ house,” he said. “Callum and Boo are going back to Highgate to meet us.”
“What about his parents?” I said.
“They haven’t been informed,” Thorpe said.
“Why?”
“For a number of reasons,” Thorpe said. “When an officer in a security service dies on duty, certain measures are taken to secure information about that individual. Families are not informed what they actually did for a living. Stephen’s parents think that he was a police officer, which he technically was. They stopped speaking to him at that point, I believe. And in this particular case . . .”
Here, Thorpe stopped and took a deep breath. Something had unsettled him.
“His body was removed from the hospital morgue, and all records of his being there were expunged.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s secure,” Thorpe said. But he said it without his normal sharpness. “I believe he was removed for a specialist autopsy. When they need a body for a funeral, we can supply an unclaimed one.”
At home, there’s a local commercial for an unclaimed freight store where they sell—you may be ahead of me here—unclaimed freight. They just sell things. The owner is a small-headed man who screams the words UNCLAIMED, UNCLAIMED, UNCLAIMED FREIGHT! over and over in the commercial, until you are at least 90 percent certain that unclaimed freight is the thing being talked about. This is all that was going through my mind when Thorpe started talking about an UNCLAIMED, UNCLAIMED, UNCLAIMED BODY! Like maybe there was a warehouse of unclaimed bodies somewhere, next to the unclaimed sofas and TVs and tires. And maybe you could buy one and take it home and dress it up and pretend you had a friend. Except it would be an unclaimed body and would keep falling off the unclaimed sofa you had also just purchased, and eventually you would have to store it in the unclaimed freezer or it would rot.
It was possible I was mentally leaving the situation at hand, because I could not process a world in which Stephen was a body that was going to be autopsied.
It was cold in the car, and Thorpe suddenly didn’t look so high and mighty. He looked younger than my dad—definitely more built than my dad, though. His white hair was the thing that always threw me off.
“When did your hair turn white?” I asked him. I didn’t really care. I just needed to change the subject.
“When I was in my gap year,” he said.
“Before college?”
“I was eighteen,” he said.
“Why did your hair turn white when you were eighteen? Was it a medical thing, or—”
“Rory,” he said again. I had gone too far into personal time with Thorpe. His voice was not unkind, though. “I realize things have not been easy for you, and I’m sorry for that, but things are what they are. And now you understand where I am coming from. From now on, I need you to be more compliant. I’m trusting in what you said you saw. I believe you. If we’re to find Stephen, we need to work together. Agreed?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Tell me what happened in that graveyard.”
My eyes were burning a bit with impending tears, so I gave them a quick rub and cleared my throat.
“Stephen kept notes,” I said. “In one of those A-to-Z map books. He put notes on all the pages about ghosts they’d found, and on the Highgate Cemetery page, there was one about an informant, someone named the Resurrection Man. So I went over to see what I could find out about where people appear after they die. I found him, and he was really talkative, and he said he wanted to take me on a tour of the place. But really what he wanted, once he found out what I was, was for me to take out some other ghost—some creepy, messed-up thing. He said the cemetery was his, and he wanted this other thing gone. We kind of got in an argument, and . . . then he threw rocks at me. I hid in the tomb for a minute so I wouldn’t get hit. He locked me in.”
“And attempted to set it on fire?” Thorpe asked.
“I don’t know if it would have been that big of a fire,” I said. “The gate was open to the air, and there weren’t that many leaves. I think he was trying to stop me or scare me because I said I was going to blast the crap out of him—and I am. I’m going to go back and do that.”
“Perhaps later,” Thorpe said.
“Yeah. Later.”
“But he had nothing useful to say.”
“Nothing he told me.”
He looked into the rearview mirror. “There’s Freddie.”
“So she’s coming with us?”
“She is indeed. She’s been working on this case longer than we have. She’ll take some training, but Stephen thought highly of her. He planned on recruiting her.
She was next on the list and had already been vetted, which is why we can do this now.”
Freddie was struggle-running with what looked like a massively heavy duffel bag.
“What did you do to Jerome’s phone?” I said.
“I don’t need to do anything to access his phone. Mobile phones aren’t very secure. He should know that. He seems like the type who would.”
Freddie reached the car and breathlessly got inside, dragging the bag in after her.
“Right!” she said brightly. “I have my computer and a few books that might be useful. Where are we off to? What happens now?”
“You’ll be meeting the rest of the team,” Thorpe said. “Though I gather you have some idea already of who they are.”
“Some,” she said, leaning forward. “There’s Boo. There’s the guy who looks like an athlete of some kind. And the one in charge . . . is his name Stephen?”
I gulped a bit of air and waited to see how Thorpe was going to answer that.
“Officer Dene died in the line of duty,” he said plainly.
“What? Oh—oh, I . . . What happened?”
I bit down hard on my lip and hoped Thorpe would be his usual self and offer no long explanation.
“There was an accident,” Thorpe said. “We won’t be discussing it in detail right now.”
“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “You seemed close. I didn’t mean to . . .”
We seemed close? What the hell had Freddie seen? Stephen and I had never done anything in public. We’d only kissed once, and that was inside, with the curtains shut, in a place she had likely never been. This thundered through my mind. Why did we seem close? Oh, my mind. My broken, frazzled mind. My emotional needle was swinging between “there is a body” to “we seemed close—maybe he liked me all along” from second to second, which made me wonder for another second if feelings were to be trusted at all. Then the needle started wobbling in confusion and my meter cracked in half and I stared out the window.
“This is what happens next,” Thorpe said. “We are going to the safe house, which I’m hoping you haven’t blown.”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “Well, Jerome . . . not even Jerome. I had him meet me nearby. I never took him there.”
The Shadow Cabinet Page 12