‘They were ours, sir?’
‘The major was. James Foley. Funnily enough, he killed himself the other day. I did wonder if guilt had anything to do with it.’
‘Was there anyone else you recognized?’
Sir Edward hesitated. ‘It was dark.’
‘All the same, sir …’
Tom heard the ambassador shift in his seat, sensed rather than heard him open his mouth to say something, then shut it again. He waited, giving Sir Edward time to find the words.
‘There was a terrorist outrage in the Lake District about ten years ago. I don’t know if you remember it?’
Lord Brannon. Tom remembered.
‘Who else, sir?’
Sir Edward fell silent and Tom wondered if that was it. If the conversation was over. He’d just decided it was when Sir Edward spoke again.
‘How secure is this line?’
‘I have Marshal Milov’s promise that it’s totally secure. It’s the one General Rafikov, the rezident, uses to report to the Kremlin. That’s why things have been set up like this.’
‘Well,’ Sir Edward said heavily, ‘I don’t imagine even Milov would want what I’m about to say recorded. There were a dozen men in that disgusting little room. Ours, French, American, Soviet …’
Here it comes, Tom thought.
Dmitri Luzhin. A name he didn’t recognize.
‘Soviet negotiator,’ Sir Edward said.
Oh sweet God. Tom sat back. He could see how Moscow wouldn’t want that known. ‘The arms talks?’
‘One of their best.’
‘Anyone looking to derail the treaty?’
‘Would do well to start there,’ Sir Edward agreed. ‘I’m not sure I’d have told anyone else this, Tom. And I’m not sure I’d have told you if not for your boy.’
‘You didn’t think of …?’
‘Gods, Tom.’ Sir Edward sounded exasperated. ‘Of course I thought of reporting it. But I was a lieutenant and they were senior officers. I never went back. I might not have told anyone. But I never went back. You think it’s easy living with the shame of not reporting it?’
‘One last question.’
‘Ask away.’
‘Did you ever see Caro’s father in there?’
‘In that room? Christ, Tom. Don’t even think it. Eddington came to the lodge, right enough …’ The ambassador stopped. Realization striking. ‘You have the membership list? Dear God. Of course you do. You must.’ He sounded slightly sick. ‘No wonder everyone wants your head on a plate. You ever played cards with Eddington?’
‘No, sir. I haven’t.’
‘Can’t hold a poker face to save his life. It wasn’t boys or cards Eddington came for. It certainly wasn’t that obscene little room at the back. This isn’t something to tell your wife, Tom, but he couldn’t get enough of the women.’
Tom let out a deep breath.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, meaning it.
88
The Rolls had swept up the drive and scattered gravel in front of Great-Uncle Max’s house, its door slamming with a satisfying thunk. Its engine had ticked like an erratic clock as it cooled. In other circumstances Charlie would have enjoyed that.
He’d seen the driver get out, come towards the house and vanish inside. But the man still hadn’t come upstairs. After a while, Charlie decided that the man was obviously doing something else and he should go back to escaping.
Everything turned on the hairgrip.
It was a very ordinary hairgrip; a thin length of wire bent back on itself, with fat blobs at the end so girls didn’t scratch their scalps on sharp metal.
There was a single strand of hair hooked through the bend like thread through a needle. Charlie wondered whose it was and wished he hadn’t. It was blonde, like Becca’s. He imagined the owner had this room before him. Perhaps she’d tried to escape and someone had grabbed her hair. That would pull a grip out. If you were a girl and someone grabbed you by the hair.
Charlie’s brain wasn’t really built to panic. At school, one of his biggest problems was that he wasn’t good at fear. Sometimes he’d get hit and it was always a surprise. Other boys seemed to be able to work out when they were about to be bullied and see it coming. He never could. And the things that really upset him, like noise and untidiness, barely seemed to touch others at all.
But he thought he was probably afraid now.
‘Charlie,’ a voice said.
What if they’d killed her? What if she was buried under a flowerbed? Those gardeners probably knew where she was buried.
‘Charles … Stop it.’
Becca didn’t call him Charles. Not even when she was angry. Granny did, sometimes. Towards the end, Becca hadn’t really seemed to notice he existed at all. And now she didn’t, and he was the one remembering her.
You mustn’t cry, he told himself crossly.
He tried to tell himself it was Becca who had said that but she was gone.
She was fading no matter how hard he tried to keep her there. No matter how hard he tried to call her back. He woke up looking for her, and sometimes she was there, and sometimes she wasn’t. And he was finding it harder and harder to remember her face. He had a photograph. He wasn’t meant to because Mummy had hidden the photographs because they made everyone sad.
But Charlie had one at the bottom of his sliding pencil case, under his six-inch ruler, his dividers and protractor. The only time he ever hit someone at school was when they tried to steal his pencil case.
It was her photograph he was protecting.
You can do this, he told himself.
It was something that Becca would say when she was helping him with something. Like learning to tie his shoelaces. There had seemed to be so many better ways than the way Mummy wanted. It was Becca who explained that it wasn’t about the quickest, prettiest or even most efficient way of tying laces. It was all about being able to tie a bow.
Was he really telling her he couldn’t manage a bow?
Glancing at his reflection in the window, Charlie gave himself a Paddington stare. Was he really telling himself he couldn’t pick that lock?
89
Tom ran through what he’d learnt from Sir Edward.
Flo Wakefield had definitely been the man on the door. Sir Edward, little more than a boy himself, had taken his Russian there. And Caro’s father had spent his evenings getting drunk with German girls for whom servicing their conquerors was marginally better than being dead.
That this was a Thank God moment was horrific. But Tom would have been lying to pretend it was anything else. The idea of Lord Eddington being involved in Patroclus was more than he could bear. If the post-war city could be distilled into one place, it was that lodge in Tegelerforst; and its darkest manifestation was the room at the back.
It was Brannon and Foley who interested Tom, because both had alpha next to their names in Flo Wakefield’s notebook. And both were dead, Tom reminded himself. As was Cecil Blackburn, also marked alpha. Edward Masterton had been beta. Tom would put money on his Russian friend being beta too.
Charles Eddington was gamma.
Was it that simple? Everyone marked alpha came for the room at the back. Those marked beta came for the room that Edward Masterton and Nicolai found. The gammas, the Eddingtons of the world, came for the women, alcohol and gambling. Maybe Wakefield had read Huxley’s Brave New World with society divided into alphas, betas, gammas and deltas.
Maybe that was how those in that room thought of themselves. Men who stood above the herd. A group to whom lesser laws didn’t apply. If that was true, then every person marked alpha was at risk from Sir Cecil’s memoirs. No wonder Sir Cecil thought he was in a position of power. No wonder he was dead.
At risk from Sir Cecil’s memoirs …
But not necessarily, Tom imagined, in the way they thought.
Funnily enough, he killed himself the other day. I did wonder if guilt had anything to do with it. As well as Colonel Foley, found alone at his cot
tage, there was Sir Henry, killed by an overdose. Robby Croft, Master of Hounds and roué about town, fatally thrown at a fence. Tom wondered if the notebook wasn’t more dangerous than the memoirs.
He needed to reclaim it, and soon.
Without being spotted, without being followed, without being seen.
General Rafikov could organize their return. He’d probably be delighted to organize their return. Tom just didn’t rate his own chances of getting them back unexamined, un-photographed and on time …
He’d trust Wax Angel with it.
But he’d trusted her with finding Charlie, saving him.
What Tom really wanted to do was drop everything, return to England and find Charlie. Killing his kidnappers could come later. Only, returning would be the quickest way to get Charlie killed. He thanked God for Wax Angel. She’d stepped in at the very point that contradiction had threatened to tear him apart.
He couldn’t risk using Rafikov to reclaim the notebook in case he decided to keep it; because, if the notebook would do in place of the memoirs, Tom needed it at hand, so that he could give it to Charlie’s kidnappers. And he would give it to them. He had no doubt about that.
He needed them to make contact.
That was the one thing that really worried him. Why no one had made contact. Why no one would tell him the price he was expected to pay.
90
The secret was in how you broke the hairgrip.
You needed it in two parts and they had to be slightly different.
Charlie snapped it on the bend, working it backwards and forwards until the metal grew hot and sheared where he wanted. One side of the hairgrip kept most of the bend, which made it his torsion bar. The other side had just enough bend left to use as a pick. Pushing the torsion bar into the Yale’s slot, Charlie turned it to set the tension and began to work at the pins. He did it first by feel, and by trying to listen for clicks as they rose, while the tension on the cylinder kept them from falling. After a while, he gave that up and simply shut his eyes.
If you emptied your head, the bit of you that wasn’t paying attention could work out which pins you’d managed to raise and how many you had to go. It was the last of them that gave Charlie trouble.
Realizing that brought him back to himself.
The half-hairgrip putting tension on the cylinder kept getting in the way and stopping his pick from reading the first pin. What he didn’t want, what would really make him cry, was if the torsion bar slipped free and all the pins dropped back into place. Because then he’d have to start again.
And starting again would make him tense. And most things in life were much harder to do when you were tense. Scottish kings and spiders aside, Charlie wasn’t sure that he could face it. He was finding it really hard to do once.
He’d almost given up, and knew it was only a matter of time before the bar slipped and the pins betrayed him, when the pin rose and the cylinder turned slightly. Charlie didn’t dare believe he’d done it. He put a little more pressure on the bar, expecting it to slip free and everything to lock solid. Instead the cylinder turned inside the lock and the catch came free.
Very slowly. Very slowly indeed, Charlie hooked his little finger into the keyhole of the useless Victorian lock below and pulled the door towards him.
It was gloomy on the landing because the curtains were closed.
Opening them slightly, he squinted at the purple Rolls-Royce, but it was too far away to see if Great-Uncle Max had removed the keys. It was too nice a car to be owned by the man who owned it. It deserved someone better. Someone who didn’t make you late back and lock you in a room without clothes.
Charlie sucked his teeth.
He needed to remember how to make a car start if the keys weren’t there. Except remembering wasn’t the right word because he’d never known. Also, what if Great-Uncle Max came to investigate?
Investigate was a word used lots at school.
Lots of things were investigated. They usually ended badly for the boy concerned. The boy concerned was used almost as much. Charlie wondered for a moment why Great-Uncle Max hadn’t come to see where he was.
The answer was obvious, though. He didn’t need to, because he already knew. Charlie was locked in a room until needed.
Only, he wasn’t locked in any more, was he?
Time to go, Charlie decided.
Shutting the door to the room he’d been in, so that everyone would think he was still in there, he turned for the stairs. He was halfway down the first flight when he met a white-haired man coming up.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ the man said.
Charlie looked at him. ‘Who are you?’
The man scowled. Probably because that was a rude thing to say. He made a shooing gesture to say that Charlie should back up. And since it was rude to cross on the stairs, Charlie did.
‘I’m Great-Uncle Max,’ the man said.
‘No, you’re not. You can’t be.’ This man was small with wispy white hair and wore a red velvet jacket. He looked nothing like Great-Uncle Max.
‘We’re all Great-Uncle Max.’
The man held a tray with a bowl of shredded wheat on it. The blue jug next to it probably held milk. Charlie wasn’t tall enough to tell.
‘Now. What are you doing out here?’
‘I woke up. I wanted to find someone.’
‘And the door just opened?’ this new Great-Uncle Max asked.
‘It wasn’t properly shut,’ Charlie said. He needed to stop the man thinking too hard about that. So he looked at the bowl, and said, ‘If I eat that is it going to make me go to sleep again?’
‘You are clever, aren’t you?’ the man said. ‘They told me you were. Very clever, they said. A little strange but very clever. No, it won’t make you go to sleep. But it will stop you being hungry. You are hungry, aren’t you?’
Charlie was. Very.
‘Back we go then. We have to keep you safe. I’ll have to make sure the door’s shut properly this time.’ The man smiled, slightly sadly. ‘Don’t worry. This will all be over soon.’
91
‘What do you want?’ Amelia demanded.
‘Your help.’ Tom put the wine he’d just bought in front of her, slid himself on to the velvet banquette and scanned the Palasthotel’s darkened bar.
‘The boy behind the counter is new,’ Amelia said. ‘And there’s a young woman in the corner with a paperback who’s doing a bad job of not staring.’
‘Have you heard from your friend?’
Amelia paused with her glass halfway to her mouth.
‘If she hasn’t been freed yet,’ Tom said, ‘she will be. The case is now closed.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘I’m certain.’
‘I thought you were meant to be in West Berlin.’
‘I am meant to be in West Berlin. A few things happened.’
‘To do with Claudia Strauss?’
‘Your friend? In part …’
‘Thank you,’ Amelia said. She leant forward and kissed his cheek. ‘You should understand,’ she said, ‘that I don’t usually make a habit of this. Making up to strange men in bars.’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘That was your cue to say you don’t either.’
‘I don’t –’ Tom didn’t finish that sentence and felt rather than saw Amelia turn to look at him. The lighting inside the Palasthotel’s bar was dim but it was good enough for him to read the sudden sharpness in her eyes.
‘I used to,’ he admitted. ‘And take them to bed.’
‘Christ,’ she said. ‘That’s –’
‘Honest.’
‘Are we being tapped?’ Amelia asked, suddenly worried.
‘It’s possible. Are you planning to say anything you shouldn’t?’
Her mouth quirked. ‘It’s probably too late in my life to start worrying about that. All the same, do you think we are?’
‘It’s possible,’ Tom said. ‘Also cameras.’
<
br /> ‘Cameras?’
‘Most rooms here are wired for sound. Some of the suites, though, have cameras in the light fittings above the beds and behind the vanity mirrors in the bathrooms.’
‘Great,’ Amelia said. ‘I’ll never pee again. You said you needed help …’
Tom hesitated.
‘Major Fox. What do you actually want?’
‘My son’s been kidnapped from his school in Kent.’ Tom muted his voice to a whisper. ‘I need your help retrieving something that I believe might save his life. I’d like to do it now.’
Amelia’s face froze at the first statement. Tom watched her wrestle with the second. When she spoke her voice was as sombre as his had been.
‘This has to do with my father …’
He thought it a question and then realized it wasn’t. It was a simple statement. She glanced towards the exit and he gave a slight nod. Finishing her glass in a single gulp, she said, ‘I’m going to powder my nose.’
‘I’ll buy you another.’
Having ordered drinks for both, Tom headed for the men’s lavatories, seeing Amelia standing beyond. They took the stairs to the ground level and left through doors beyond the auditorium. As they passed, the last speech of the day ended and dutiful clapping began. A few moments later, doors opened, and delegates for whatever conference it was began streaming out.
‘Lucky timing,’ Amelia said.
In the car park, Tom glanced back but saw no shadow. When he looked again thirty seconds later the result was the same. Cutting between parked cars, he headed for Spandauer Strasse, away from the area he wanted. Tom intended to work his way back to the iron bridge when he was certain they hadn’t drawn attention. It was twilight, with couples walking arm in arm, and families going home.
Tom and Amelia looked less out of place than they might.
‘And you really didn’t kill my father?’
‘I really didn’t kill him.’
‘But you have killed?’
When Tom stopped, Amelia nudged his arm to keep him walking. ‘That’s a question you don’t ask,’ Tom said.
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