BOX 88
Charles Cumming

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Charles Cumming 2020

Cover design by Stephen Mulcahey © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photographs © Marina Endermar/Dreamstime.com (church), CollaborationJS/Arcangel Images (man)

Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008200367

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008200381

Version: 2020-08-19

Dedication

for Harriette

Epigraph

‘We have as many personalities as

we have friends’

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Index of Characters

21 December 1988

London, the present day

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Keep Reading …

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By Charles Cumming

About the Publisher

Index of Characters

The Kite family:

Lachlan Kite (‘Lockie’), intelligence officer

Isobel Paulsen, Lachlan’s Swedish-American wife, a doctor

Cheryl Kite (née Chapman), Lachlan’s mother

Patrick Kite (‘Paddy’), Lachlan’s father (d.1982)

The Bonnard family:

Xavier Bonnard, Kite’s childhood friend

Luc Bonnard, Xavier’s father

Rosamund Bonnard (née Penley), Xavier’s mother

Jacqueline Ward (‘Jacqui’), Xavier’s younger sister

BOX 88:

Michael Strawson, veteran CIA officer and co-founder of BOX 88

Rita Ayinde, senior officer (UK)

Jason Franks, head of Black Ops (a ‘Closer’)

Carl Fowler, surveillance officer (a ‘Falcon’)

Freddie Lane, computer analyst (a ‘Turing’)

Ward Hansell, senior officer (US)

James (‘Jock’) and Eleanor (‘Miss Ellie’) Carpmael, office managers at ‘The Cathedral’

The Reverend Anthony Childs, a vicar

Alford College:

Lionel Jones-Lewis, Kite’s housemaster, known by the initials ‘LJL’

Cosmo de Paul, joined Alford in the same year as Kite

William ‘Billy’ Peele, history teacher

The Security Service (MI5):

Robert Vosse, leader of MI5 investigation into BOX 88

Cara Jannaway, intelligence officer

Matt Tomkins, intelligence officer

Other Characters:

Ali Eskandarian, an Iranian

Abbas Karrubi, bodyguard to Ali Eskandarian

Hana Dufour, a friend of Ali Eskandarian

Ramin Torabi, an Iranian businessman

Martha Raine, a schoolfriend of Jacqueline Ward

Zoltan Pavkov, a Serb

Bijan Vaziri, an Iranian exile

21 December 1988

They were just another American family heading home for the holidays.

A taxi had been booked to take them from their house in Pimlico, little Gaby facing backwards on the fold-down chair, her legs not yet long enough to reach the floor, every inch of the cab crammed with suitcases and boxes and Harrod’s carrier bags full of presents wrapped for Christmas. Mommy and Daddy were facing her, side by side on the back seat, her giant Hamleys’ teddy bear wedged between them. Whenever the driver braked, Gaby could feel herself pulled backwards and then forwards, weightless for an instant, like the feeling of being on the swings in Battersea Park and wanting to fly off into the afternoon sky. Her mother said: ‘Careful, sweetie,’ but there was no way she was going to fall, not with the suitcases to steady her and the handle on the door to hold onto. She loved the growl of the taxi’s engine, the Christmas lights receding in the back window, her father’s voice as he pointed out the Italian restaurant they had been to for Grandpa’s birthday, then the home of the Martins in Chelsea, the other American family they knew in London with their golden retriever, Montana, who licked Gaby’s face whenever she gave him a hug.

Mommy had told her that there were only three more bedtimes until Christmas Eve. One tonight, on the aeroplane which was taking them across the ocean to New York, then two in her bedroom at the house in Stamford. Gaby felt giddy with excitement. She would miss her friends from school – Claire and JenJen, Billy and Pi – but they had promised to stay in touch and write postcards to one another from wherever they were going.

Soon the taxi started going faster and they were on the freeway heading out to Heathrow. At the airport, the driver found a trolley. Gaby watched her parents pile the suitcases one on top of the other until Daddy insisted Mommy fetch a second trolley to cope with all the bags. He had given the driver thirty pounds saying: ‘Keep the change.’ The driver’s name was Barry. When he asked where they were going, Gaby told him: ‘New York. Pan Am flight number 103. Have you ever been to New York?’

‘’Fraid not,’ Barry replied. ‘You have a safe trip, sweetheart, lovely Christmas.’

There was a tree with tinsel but no lights near the desk where they queued with the trolleys. Afterwards Gaby showed her passport to a man wearing a turban who wished her a happy Christmas. She had to walk through a special door that detected metal while her rucksack and teddy bear went through the X-ray machine. A boy beside her was crying. Gaby couldn’t understand why someone would be crying when there were only three more bedtimes until Christmas.

Eventually, after Mommy had taken her to the bathroom and bought some earplugs in a pharmacy inside the terminal, they walked down a long corridor to a big room where the other passengers were waiting to board the aeroplane. Gaby heard American accents, lots of them, saw older children listening to music on Walkmans, a woman lying asleep, sprawled across three chairs. There was a family of Indians sitting in the corner of the lounge. The mother had a red spot in the centre of her forehead.

‘Flight’s on time,’ her daddy whispered, pointing outside to the waiting aircraft. ‘That’s the cockpit. Can you read that, sweetie?’

Words had been painted on the front of the plane, right beneath where the captain was sitting. Gaby could see him through the window, flicking switches above his head.

‘That’s easy,’ she said. ‘It says Clipper Maid of the Seas.’

They were allowed to board first because Gaby was part of a family. There were other children behind her, but no sign of the boy who had been crying when they walked past the X-ray machine. It was cold in the tunnel. There was a colour photograph on the wall of the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River, the Twin Towers behind them glinting in the sun. A tall stewardess wearing red lipstick and a pretty blue skirt said: ‘Hi there! Love your teddy bear! He’s huge!’ as Gaby walked through the big open door, right behind where the captain was sitting in the cockpit. It was dark now and the sound of the airport was deafening, but as soon as she entered the cabin and started following her father towards her seat, the noise seemed to fade away, as if Gaby had put in her mommy’s new earplugs.

They were seated towards the front of the plane. The stewardess strapped her in and gave her a set of headphones, explaining that a film would start playing once the plane was airborne over Scotland.

‘Scotland?’ Daddy asked. He sounded surprised.

‘Weather diversion,’ the stewardess replied. ‘Little bumpy tonight over Ireland.’

That was when she told Gaby that Teddy was so big he was going to have to go in a cupboard until after take-off. The cupboards were full of cases and handbags; it looked as though he was going to be squashed in there. Gaby felt like crying but she wanted to seem grown-up in front of the other passengers. The stewardess said she would give her candy to make her feel better.

‘You know they call candy “sweets” in London,’ Gaby told her.

‘Is that right?’ the stewardess replied, looking sideways at Mommy. ‘Sweets, huh?’ She had a pretty smile and very white teeth. ‘So does Santa Claus know where you’re going to be on Christmas Eve, honey? Have you told him?’

‘I don’t believe in Santa Claus. My friend Billy says it’s just my daddy dressed up with a beard.’

‘News to me,’ said Daddy, and secured his seat belt as the stewardess walked off. She was smiling.

Gaby owned a yellow Swatch. She looked at it as the plane took off; it said twenty-five past six. Mommy hated flying so she always sat between them, Daddy holding her right hand, Gaby holding her left. Mommy closed her eyes as the aeroplane climbed through the sky. It was a better feeling even than the swings in Battersea Park, the noise and the rattle and the power of the big plane taking them up towards the moon.

‘Set your watch to New York time, honey,’ said her father, reaching across and touching her wrist. ‘We’re going home.’

Beneath them, in the chill of the hold, was the luggage Gaby’s parents had checked in at Heathrow a little more than an hour earlier: clothes, toiletries, Christmas presents. Close by, secured inside a brown Samsonite suitcase loaded onto a feeder flight at Malta airport that morning, was a timer-activated bomb constructed with the odourless plastic explosive Semtex and hidden inside a Toshiba cassette recorder by agents working on behalf of the Libyan government.

Gaby and her parents and the more than 250 souls on board Pan Am 103 would never reach New York City, never return to their families for Christmas. At three minutes past seven, as the aircraft was passing over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, the bomb exploded. Those sitting towards the front of the plane were killed instantly. Others fell for over five miles, some still strapped in their seats, thrown free of the fuselage yet conscious for up to three minutes as they plunged to the ground. The wreckage of the obliterated plane, scattered over an area of 850 square miles, destroyed twenty-one houses and killed eleven residents of Lockerbie. In an instant the Clipper Maid of the Seas had been transformed into a flight of angels, violated by terror.

London, the present day

1

It was Martha, of all people, who rang Kite to tell him that Xavier Bonnard had killed himself.

The call, logged to Kite’s mobile at 11.24 GMT, transcripted by GCHQ before midday and copied to Thames House, was traced to a cell phone in the New York metropolitan area registered to ‘Martha Felicity Raine’ of 127 Verona Street, Brooklyn. The take quality was considered moderate, but a recording had been automatically archived. An analyst in Cheltenham was able to provide a full account of the brief conversation.

LACHLAN KITE (LK): Hello?

MARTHA RAINE (MR): Lockie. It’s me.

LK: | Martha. God. What a surprise.
MR: | Yes. [break, 1 second]
LK: | Is everything all right? Are you OK?
MR: | I’m afraid it’s something awful.
LK: | What’s happened? Are the children all right?
MR: | You’re sweet. They’re fine. They’re both well. No, something else.
LK: | What is it?
MR: | It’s Xavier. He’s gone. Xavier has died. [break, 2 seconds] I thought you would want to know. Perhaps you already do.
LK: | No. I didn’t. I didn’t know. [break, 1 second] I appreciate you ringing. Must be early there.
MR: | I only just found out. Thought I should ring straight away.
LK: | Yes. What happened? What …
MR | [overlapping]: They think it was suicide. They’re not 100 per cent sure. He was in Paris. In an apartment. Not his father’s place, somebody else’s.
LK: | Who’s ‘they’?
MR: | Jacqui. She rang me. She’s in Singapore these days.
LK: | What about Lena? Were they still together?
MR: | I think so, yes. Just about. Living in London. They still have the Onslow Square house. I don’t know where the children are.
LK: | (Inaudible) [break, 2 seconds]
MR: | Are you there? Are you all right, Lockie?
LK: | I’m fine. I’m in the country. Sussex. We have a cottage here.
MR: | We?
LK: | Yes. I met somebody. I got married. [break, 1 second]
MR: | Right. Yes, I did hear that. On the grapevine. I’m happy for you. Finally settling down. What’s her name? What does she do?
LK: | She’s a doctor. Isobel. [break, 2 seconds]
MR: | And what about everything else? Are you still doing those things you used to do? That life?
LK: | I’ll tell you when I see you. We can talk about it then.
MR: | Of course. Silly of me to ask. Must be beautiful there. Lovely England. I never get back …
LK: | Killed himself how?
MR: | They think an overdose. I didn’t want to pry. Jacqui didn’t go into details. Obviously she was very upset.
LK: | Yes, of course. Christ …
MR: | I’m sorry, Lock. I have to go. The kids …
LK: | Of course. School run? They must be big now.
MR: | Gigantic. Are you sure you’re OK?
LK: | I’m fine. I’ll be absolutely fine. You?
MR: | Yes. Just makes me think of the old days, you know. He was such a lovely man, such a mess. A lost soul.
LK: | Yes. He was all of those things. [break, 1 second] Thank you for telling me, Martha. I really appreciate it. It’s been good to hear your voice, if nothing else.
MR: | Yours too. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get to the funeral if it’s next week. There’s just too much on here. Jonas is going away, he has work. My au pair just quit …
LK: | I’m sure the Bonnards will understand. There’ll be lots of people there.
MR: | Everybody from that time.
LK: | Yes. Everybody.

The four members of the MI5 team gathered around an IKEA kitchen table in a damp, under-hoovered safe flat in Acton, read the transcript and, later, listened to the recording of the conversation several times. One excerpt in particular – the question Are you still doing those things you used to do? – gave team leader Robert Vosse the shot of operational adrenaline he had been craving ever since his investigation into BOX 88 had begun. Like a detective happening upon the clue that at last placed his suspect at the scene of the crime, Vosse – a big-boned, amiable man of forty-one with outsized features who wore thick-rimmed glasses and clothes from Marks & Spencer – was convinced that Martha Raine had provided concrete evidence that Lachlan Kite was a spy.

‘We’ve been digging into every nook and cranny of Kite’s existence for the past three weeks and come up with precisely sweet Fanny Adams. Nothing recorded against, not even a parking fine or a speeding ticket. A six-person surveillance team – the best of the best – has been following him around like Rain Man waiting for Kite to pop his head into Vauxhall Cross or catch a flight to Langley. Has he done that? Has he bollocks. Here is a man we are told is the operational commander of a secret Anglo-American spy unit that’s been running off the books for almost forty years, but the most Lachlan Kite has done this month is get himself a haircut and book a weekend break to Florence. Now, finally, he takes a phone call. A woman from his past says, “Are you still doing the things you used to do?” What did she mean by that? What else could she possibly have meant other than “Are you still operational as a spy?”’

Vosse was a man who liked to pace around as he spoke. His underlings, all of whom were as mystified by BOX 88 as their boss, variously stared at surveillance photographs of Kite, copies of the GCHQ transcript, half-eaten bars of Chunky Kit-Kat. Their investigation had come about as a result of a private conversation between the director general of MI5 and a disgruntled former MI6 officer who claimed that Kite had been recruited by BOX 88 as a teenager.

‘“Are you still doing those things you used to do?”’ Vosse muttered. ‘What is “that life” if not the life we are investigating? What could this Martha Raine possibly have been referring to if not our man’s thirty-year career as an industrial-strength spy? Drug-pushing? Is that it? Was he secretly a crack dealer? No. Lachlan Kite was running his own little Mission: Impossible unit without any of us knowing.’

‘Allegedly.’

This from Tessa Swinburn, at thirty-nine a contemporary of Vosse, in every way his operational and intellectual equal, who had nevertheless been overlooked for promotion due to fears within Personnel that she would soon become pregnant by her new husband and likely spend at least eighteen of the next thirty-six months on maternity leave.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Vosse asked.

‘It means we still don’t have proof. It means we still have to keep following him around. It means until we can actually catch Lachlan Kite in the act of spying, we can’t do anything about it. We can’t arrest him. We can’t interrogate him. We certainly can’t prove the existence of BOX 88.’

‘How do you catch somebody in the act of spying?’ Vosse asked, a question which, given their vocation and operational remit, took all of the team by surprise. ‘He’s not going to sit on a bench in Gorky Park and share a cigarette with Edward Snowden. We’re not going to film him orchestrating a spy swap on the Glienicke Bridge.’

‘Then why are we here, doing what we’re doing?’ Tessa asked.

‘Because we’re assembling evidence. Following leads. Building a case against a man, bit by bit, step by step.’

‘Exactly,’ said Matt Tomkins.

Tomkins, who always liked to agree with Vosse, had been employed by the Security Service for almost six years. The Kite operation was the first job that had taken him permanently away from Thames House. He was one of only five employees who knew about BOX 88; the DG didn’t want to look like a fool if the investigation proved to be a wild goose chase. Socially withdrawn, but clever and ambitious, Tomkins spent an hour every evening pumping weights at a gym in Hammersmith, another three on weekends throwing people onto crash mats at a ju-jitsu class in Barnes. Though not yet thirty, his hair had already started to recede at the crown, giving him the look of a particularly humourless and unpleasant trainee monk.

‘If the men say so,’ Tessa sighed.

She looked out onto Acton High Street. She had always been suspicious that the MI6 whistle-blower was a fantasist. It seemed implausible that BOX had existed for almost four decades without anyone knowing. Who was paying their bills, for a start? Where was it based? Was it a rogue unit or – as the DG feared – an arm of the Deep State operating with the tacit approval of Washington and Downing Street? The one-bedroom flat was situated two floors above a dry-cleaner’s. Tessa could see a clump of teenagers in school uniform on the top deck of a bus. They were gathered around the screen of a mobile phone in a way that made her think of families in pre-war London huddled in front of the wireless listening to speeches by Neville Chamberlain. She looked at her watch. It wasn’t even two o’clock. Why weren’t they in school?

‘So here’s what we’re going to do,’ Vosse announced. ‘Matt, you’re going to find out everything you can about this Martha Felicity Raine. Sounds posh. What’s a nice, well-brought-up English girl doing in New York, besides marrying a Yank called Jonas and walking her kids to school? Are they Kite’s kids? What does she do for a living? Housewife? Art dealer? Spy? How does she know our man? How far back does their relationship go? Sounded to me like she was pining for the old days, jealous of Dr Isobel and our man’s comfortable life in Sussex.’

Tomkins nodded, agreeing, writing everything down.

‘Tess,’ Vosse continued, pivoting towards Tessa Swinburn. ‘If you can tear yourself away from gazing at the splendours of Acton High Street, spend the rest of the afternoon on the corpse. Get onto Paris. Get the coroner’s report. Overdose or foul play? Furthermore: who, what, when, why and where is “Lena”? If she owns a house in Onslow Square, that says money to me, lots and lots of money. Any link to Kite? Also “Jacqui”. Who she? Sounds like a relative of the poor bloke who topped himself. What’s she doing in Singapore? I want the whole Bonnard family tree, dead and alive. I want detail. Don’t give me a trunk and a couple of branches. I want it to look like one of those big healthy sycamores you see in ads for health insurance. Massive. Now what’s left?’

Vosse briefly consulted the transcript. He had long, thick fingers and tufts of black hair on the backs of his hands.

‘Funeral,’ came a voice.

Cara Jannaway was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She was twenty-six and new to MI5 and already unremittingly bored by the job. Hadn’t anticipated the sheer mundanity of keeping tabs on the same target, day after day, moving rumours around a room, mousing files on a computer, lying to her friends about working at the Ministry of Defence, telling boys on Tinder and Bumble she was a chef, a make-up artist, a personal trainer.

‘What’s that?’ said Vosse.

‘Somebody should keep an eye on ATLANTIC BIRD at the funeral. See who he talks to.’ ATLANTIC BIRD was Kite’s operational codename, typically shortened to BIRD. ‘Maybe Martha will find a new au pair and fly over from New York. Maybe I could talk to her, find out what she meant.’

‘Meant by what?’ said Tessa. She was still looking out of the window and only half paying attention.

‘Are you still doing those things you used to do?’ Cara replied. ‘What did she mean by that? What does she know about Kite’s past that she could tell us?’

Vosse looked up. He had found a true believer. There was a smudge on one of the lenses of his thick-rimmed spectacles.

‘You got a black dress, Miss Jannaway?’

‘Sure.’

‘Pair of sunglasses?’

‘Lots.’

‘Good. Then dust them down, pick out a pair of heels.’ He examined a tea towel of dubious hygiene and laid it out on the windowsill. ‘It’s your lucky day, Cara. No office drudgery for you. You’re going to a funeral.’

2

Lachlan Kite woke at sunrise, crept out of bed, changed into a pair of shorts and running shoes and set out on a four-mile loop around the hills encircling the cottage in Sussex. The news of Xavier’s death had hit him as hard as anything he could recall since the sudden loss of Michael Strawson, his mentor and father figure, to a cancer of the liver which had ripped through him in the space of a few months. Though he had seen Xavier only fitfully over the previous ten years, Kite felt a personal sense of responsibility for his death which was as inescapable as it was illogical and undeserved. Usually, pounding the paths around the cottage, feeling the soft winter ground beneath his feet, he could switch the world off and gain respite from whatever problems or challenges might face him upon his return. Kite had run throughout his adult life – in Voronezh and Houston, in Edinburgh and Shanghai – for just this reason: not simply to stay fit and to burn off the pasta and the pints, but for his own peace of mind, his psychological well-being.

It was different today, just as it had been on the afternoon of Martha’s call when Kite had immediately left the cottage and run for seven unbroken miles, memories of Xavier erupting with every passing stride. The stillness of the morning was the stillness of dawn at the Bonnard villa in France, thirty years earlier, the eighteen-year-old Kite sneaking back to bed after a stolen night with Martha to find Xavier passed out in his room, a bottle of Smirnoff tipped over beside him, a cigarette burned down to the filter in his hand. The rising sun was a memory of Ali Eskandarian smoking a Cuban cigar in the gardens of the house, laughing uproariously as Xavier lost to him once again at backgammon. The pain in Kite’s lungs was Strawson and Billy Peele in the safe house in Mougins, master spies urging Kite to greater and greater acts of treachery against his friend. No matter how hard he tried, whatever tricks of mental discipline he summoned, Kite could not shake off the memories. They were as clear to him as home movies projected onto the Sussex hills and the English sky. He was suddenly a prisoner of a summer three decades earlier when his life, and that of Xavier Bonnard, had been inverted by BOX 88.

Kite jogged home, showered and changed into a dark lounge suit, slipping a black wool tie into the side pocket of the jacket. He had only one pair of black shoes in the cottage and they were scuffed and dirty. He spat on the leather, rubbing the shoes with the sweat-soaked T-shirt he had worn on the run before drying them with an old handkerchief he had found in the pocket of the trousers.

‘Classy,’ said Isobel, kissing the top of his head as she passed him on the stairs. She was already dressed, the bump of her pregnancy visible beneath a blue cotton dress.

‘Old army trick,’ Kite replied, remembering his father polishing his shoes in the pantry at the hotel in Scotland, telling tall stories about a deranged sergeant-major at Sandhurst.

‘You were never in the army, were you?’

‘Dad was. They kicked him out.’

‘What for? Having dirty shoes?’

‘Something like that.’

Patrick Kite had died when Kite was eleven years old. Hearing the note change in her husband’s voice, Isobel turned at the bottom of the stairs and smiled up at him with the look of quiet understanding she employed whenever they were confronted by the myriad complications of his past. She knew that when it came to Kite’s father, ‘something like that’ could mean anything – fighting, drinking, even desertion – but did not press him for details. Kite’s long life in the secret world was a place as mysterious and concealed to her as her own background was to him. They had met six years earlier at a party in Stockholm and fallen in love with the tacit understanding that they should avoid mentioning the past as much as possible. For Kite, this was a simple matter of Official Secrecy: he was forbidden to disclose the existence of BOX 88. For Isobel, there were elements of her past – former lovers, former selves, betrayals and mistakes – of which she was ashamed. It made sense that they should both want a clean slate. Isobel had been vetted and cleared to know that Lachlan Kite was an intelligence officer, supposedly working for MI6. Her file sat on a computer, but Kite had never accessed it, both out of respect for Isobel’s privacy and because he did not want to think of her as just another source or asset. They had built a life together separate from the secret world, a life that was as precious to him as the child now growing inside her.

‘Want some breakfast?’ she called out from the kitchen.

‘Don’t worry,’ Kite replied, walking in moments later. ‘I’ll get something on the train. You go to work. You’ll be late.’

‘Sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

He stood behind her and kissed the back of her neck, his hand resting on her stomach.

‘Rambo just kicked,’ she said. ‘You missed it.’

‘Really?’ Kite dropped to his knees in a pantomime of frustration, pressing his ear against Isobel’s belly. He turned to address his unborn child. ‘Hello? Are you there? Do it again!’

Isobel laughed as Kite stood up and grabbed an apple from a bowl. She looked down at her stomach and continued the conversation.

‘Your daddy is crazy,’ she said. ‘But he looks very sexy in his suit.’

‘My whole life was designed so that I don’t have to wear one of these things,’ he said, briefly wrapping his arms around the suit as if it were a straitjacket. He took a carton of grapefruit juice from the fridge and set it on the counter.

‘How was your run?’ she asked.

‘Strange.’ As Kite poured the juice into a glass, biting into the apple, he thought again of Strawson and Eskandarian, of the long-ago summer in France. ‘Whatever the opposite of Zen is, that’s how I’m feeling. It’s the funeral. Can’t get used to the idea that Xav’s gone.’

‘You haven’t told me much about him,’ Isobel replied, picking up her car keys. ‘He was at school with you?’

‘Yes. For a long time he was my closest friend. He was around when I was recruited.’

‘OK.’

Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the conversation, but Kite wanted to tell Isobel at least something about their relationship.

‘The nature of the job took me away from him. Xav went to university, and I was travelling in my twenties. He got into rave, Ecstasy, all that Gen X stuff. Like most of the wealthier boys at Alford, he had a trust fund. Half a million on his twenty-first birthday, a flat in Chelsea, an Audi Quattro for the residents’ parking. No need to work or to prove himself. He just wanted to have a good time. He was wild and he lived well. People loved being around him. From eighteen onwards he was basically an addict spending most of his money on coke, vodka, parties – whatever would make the pain go away. None of us were wise enough to be able to persuade him out of it. He was having too much fun.’

Kite was circling around the truth. He was looking at the woman he loved, trying to explain what had happened, but holding back key facts. To tell the story of the life of Xavier Bonnard was to tell the story of Xavier’s father, Luc, and of Ali Eskandarian, the Iranian businessman who had come between them. Kite could not and would not do this because the story belonged to BOX 88. It was all in the files. One day – when they were old and grey and nodding by the fire – he would tell Isobel the whole story. There were times when he wanted her to know everything about him; others when he wanted never to speak of the past again.

‘Sounds like a classic fucked-up posh boy.’

‘He was definitely that.’

‘Too much money. Too little love.’

‘Exactly.’

‘That school,’ she said, sounding exasperated. ‘One part Hogwarts, one part Colditz. What did that writer in the Guardian call it? “A gateway drug for the Bullingdon.” Why do the Brits send their kids to these places?’

‘I’ve been asking myself that question for thirty years.’

‘No way Rambo’s going there. No way, José.’ Kite met her eyes. Though her father was American, Isobel had been born and raised in Sweden, where only diplomatic brats and royalty went to boarding schools. She said: ‘I can come with you today if it’s going to be difficult.’

He touched the side of her face. ‘You’re kind. There’s no need. You have work.’

‘When will you be home?’

The funeral was at eleven. Kite was due at a gallery in Mayfair at four where his usual dealer had a Riopelle he wanted him to look at. If the Eastbourne train was on time, he would be home to make dinner.

‘Eight?’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t be any later than that. If I run into problems, I’ll call you.’

3

Robert Vosse had given instructions that the Kite cottage wasn’t to be touched.

‘No car or van or drone or pushbike is to come within half a mile of the place. Get too close on foot surveillance and Kite will smell a rat. Follow his car for more than a couple of miles and we might as well put stickers on the headlights saying MI5 Is Following You. If Lachlan Kite is even half as experienced and thorough as we’ve been led to believe, he’ll sniff out a microphone or a camera in less time than it took Matt to make my cup of tea this morning.’

Vosse was addressing the troops at the Acton safe flat. It was a Tuesday afternoon. They had spent the day poring over the various reports the team had assembled on the Bonnard family and Martha Raine.

‘Kite’s hardly likely to blab about BOX 88 within earshot of his pregnant wife,’ said Vosse with a nod of agreement from Matt Tomkins. ‘He’s a thirty-year veteran of the intelligence world, hard-wired for secrecy and discretion. Man like that gets wind we’ve rigged his love nest for sight and sound, he’ll do a Lucan. Let him go for his jogs unmolested. Let him have his lunches at the Dog and Duck. The funeral’s all we need. Cara’s going to pop him in her pocket, aren’t you, love?’

* * *

It wasn’t quite how things worked out.

Just to be on the safe side, on the day of the funeral Vosse positioned a two-man team outside Lewes station in a plain-clothes Vauxhall Astra. Officer Kieran Dean followed Kite onto the London service while Tessa Swinburn drove ahead and boarded the same train twenty minutes later at Hayward’s Heath. Dean disembarked and picked up the Astra as Swinburn settled in a carriage adjacent to Kite and tracked him to Victoria station. After buying a pain au chocolat and a double espresso at Caffè Nero under the watchful eye of Matt Tomkins, BIRD was observed boarding a District line train to South Kensington. By eleven o’clock, Lachlan Kite was standing outside the Brompton Oratory surrounded by the great and the good of the European elite on a cold February morning blessed by clear blue skies. Wearing Nina Ricci sunglasses and a long black overcoat (both sourced on expenses from TK Maxx), Cara Jannaway approached the mourners from a starting position outside Harrods. Watching her grudgingly from a patisserie across the road, Matt Tomkins told Vosse by phone that Cara certainly looked the part, but was ‘too tall, and too striking, for effective surveillance work’.

‘You think?’

Vosse had finely tuned antennae both for the toadying of ambitious junior officers and for any carefully worded slights against colleagues. He liked Cara, always had, and didn’t want to hear a bad word against her, especially when she wasn’t around to defend herself. Vosse had known from day one that Matt Tomkins was a triple-dyed shit of outsized ego, possessed of boundless tenacity and cunning. Such characteristics were always an asset to any team, but he hoped that Tomkins would be smart enough to learn when to talk and when to keep his mouth shut.

‘I just think she’s standing out a bit too much,’ he said. ‘Needs to talk to somebody, sir. Needs to blend in.’

‘She’ll be all right,’ said Vosse, and hung up.

* * *

Kite had given up smoking on his fortieth birthday and nowadays lit up only when he needed to for cover. Standing amid the Bonnard mourners on the steps of the Brompton Oratory, he caught the smell of a cigarette on the morning air and walked towards its source.

‘You couldn’t spare one of those, could you?’

The man holding the cigarette was at least six foot six and heavily bearded. Kite did not recognise him, though he had spotted several of Xavier’s friends and former colleagues in the crowd.

‘Sure.’ The accent was American, the cigarettes a brand Kite didn’t know. The packet was mercifully clear of gruesome images of babies on ventilators, of lungs and throats decimated by cancer. Kite took a long, deep drag.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Needed that.’

‘Me too. Bad day. You knew Xav a long time?’

‘From thirteen. We were at school together.’

‘What’s that, the famous place? Alford? Students go around in tailcoats, like they’re dressed for a wedding the whole time?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Fifty-six prime ministers and counting? Every prince and king of England since 1066?’

‘Pretty sure Prince Charles went to Gordonstoun, and hated it, but otherwise you’re right.’

The American suppressed a broad grin, as though it would be tasteless to be seen enjoying himself on the steps of a funeral.

‘How about you?’ Kite asked. ‘How did you know Xavier?’

‘AA,’ the American replied, and tested Kite’s reaction with his eyes. ‘Did time together in Arizona. Dried out in South Africa. Attended meetings in London, New York, Paris. We were what you might call a travelling double-act. They should put up one of those blue plaques in the Priory.’

That explains the unmarked cigarettes, Kite thought. Bought by the carton in Cape Town or Phoenix duty-free.

‘Had you seen him recently?’ he asked.

The American shook his head. ‘Not for a year or so. I met a girl, moved back home. Xav kind of vanished, like he always did. No way he took his own life though. Not a guy with that much spirit. Must have been accidental. You?’

‘I hadn’t seen him for a long time.’

Kite looked out among the gathering crowds, the stiff-backed grandees and the poleaxed mourners. He was sure that his friend had taken his own life but didn’t want to explore that theory with a stranger who knew things about Xavier from therapy that Kite himself had never been privy to. One day he would get to the truth of what had happened, but not today. A tall woman in a long black overcoat was walking towards the church beside a short, bullish man in a pinstriped suit. With a thud of irritation, Kite recognised him as Cosmo de Paul. From Alford to Edinburgh, from MI6 to Royal Dutch Shell, de Paul had been a malign presence in Kite’s life and a consistent thorn in the side of BOX 88. Kite doubted that de Paul had spent more than fifteen minutes in Xavier’s company since the turn of the century. That he should attend his funeral merely demonstrated that he valued the opportunity to network more than he valued his friendship with the deceased.

‘Who’s the girl?’ asked the American, indicating the tall woman in the long black overcoat. She was wearing a pair of oversized Jackie O sunglasses, drawing attention to her own grief while at the same time challenging anyone to speak to her. If she was de Paul’s latest wife or mistress, Kite sent his condolences. If she was a friend of Xavier’s, it was the first time he had set eyes on her.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Time to go in. Thanks for the cigarette.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Cara’s basic cover, agreed with Vosse, was to role-play a friend from Cape Town who had got to know ‘Xav’ while he was drying out at a clinic in Plettenberg Bay. Research carried out by Tessa Swinburn had shown that Bonnard had enjoyed two separate stints at rehabilitation centres in South Africa, most recently in Mpumalanga. It was plausible that he had befriended ‘Emma’, an English teacher from East London, while passing through Cape Town. Cara hoped that by referring obliquely to Bonnard’s struggles with narcotics and alcohol, she would prevent anyone she happened to speak to from testing her legend too closely.

She was aware, of course, that Xavier had been to Alford College, a place she knew only as the school which had produced at least three of the Conservative politicians who had done so much to damage British public life in the previous decade. Looking around, she saw men in their mid-to-late forties whom she assumed were Bonnard’s contemporaries. Some of them, with their signet rings and their Thomas Pink shirts, looked like dyed-in-the-wool Tory whack jobs pining for the halcyon days of Agincourt and Joan Hunter Dunn; others seemed no different to the bland, blameless middle-aged men who haunted the corridors and conference rooms of Thames House and Vauxhall Cross. Cara had never fully understood the widespread British prejudice against public schoolboys. It wasn’t exactly their fault that at the age of eight, their parents had seen fit to pack them off to boarding school with not much more than a tuck box and a thermal vest. To Cara, who had grown up in a happy two-parent, two-sibling house in Ipswich, attending the local grammar and partying on weekends like Gianluca Vacchi, spending five years at Alford sounded like a prison sentence.

‘Hello there.’

She looked down. A squat, vain-looking man with a cut-glass accent was introducing himself.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘You look a bit lost.’

If there was one thing designed to instil in Cara Jannaway a prejudice against posh, entitled ex-public schoolboys, it was being told by this silver-spooned creep that she looked ‘lost’.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I was just about to go in.’

‘Me too,’ the man replied. ‘I’m Cosmo. Cosmo de Paul.’

‘Emma.’

They shook hands. Was it a set-up? Had Lachlan Kite become suspicious and sent him over to check her out?

‘Are you a friend? Family?’

‘Friend,’ Cara replied, grateful for her sunglasses as she looked around for BIRD. She hadn’t been able to spot him among the dense crowds moving into the Oratory and wondered if he was ahead of her, in all senses. ‘You?’

‘Xavier and I were at school together.’

‘And where was that, Alford?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Ah. Good for you.’

Cara found herself walking alongside de Paul, making halting small talk about London and the weather. She was glad to be free of the miserable, drip-drip inertia of the Acton safe flat but didn’t like it that a stranger had latched onto her in this way. She had heard that a certain type of man preyed on a certain type of woman at funerals, hoping to usher hysteria and grief into the bedroom; if this little runt with his snub-nose and Rees-Mogg pinstripe tried it on, she’d push his face into the baptism font.

‘Are you here alone?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. I don’t know anybody here. Just came to pay my respects.’

All around her, middle-aged men and women in scarves and overcoats were embracing one another, recognising faces from yesteryear and nodding respectfully. It was as if the funeral of Xavier Bonnard was not merely an occasion of great solemnity, but also a reunion of sorts for a generation of men and women, schooled at St Paul’s and Roedean and Oxbridge, whose paths had diverged some thirty years earlier, only to be brought back together by the sudden, tragic death of a mutual friend. Like the posh weddings Cara had occasionally attended, impeccably mannered ushers in morning coats were handing out the Order of Service and shepherding older members of the congregation to their seats. She fancied that she could spot the addicts and party boys among them: they were the ones with unruly hair and the Peter Pan glint in their eyes, the hand-me-down tweed suits and look-at-me patterned socks. That was the thing about upper-class druggies: they had the money to go on and on. Get hooked on smack in Ipswich and chances are you’d wind up dead. Get addicted to coke on an Alford trust fund and you could afford to get addicted all over again, just as soon as Mummy and Daddy had checked you out of rehab.

‘How did you meet Xavier?’ de Paul asked, accepting an Order of Service from a good-looking man in his twenties who looked as though he’d walked straight off the set of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

‘Out in South Africa,’ she said.

‘I see,’ he replied, absorbing the euphemism.

One of the mourners passed de Paul and touched him on the back, saying only: ‘Cosmo’ in a low murmur before settling into a pew. Cara told de Paul that she would prefer to be alone ‘at this difficult time’ and was glad to see him take the hint.

‘Of course. It was charming to meet you.’

‘Likewise,’ she said, and moved quickly along the nave.

She was staggered by the opulence of the church. Tessa’s research into the Bonnard family had revealed that Xavier’s mother, Rosamund, was the daughter of a duke whose family appeared to have owned, at one time or another, most of the land between Cambridge and Northampton. Perhaps it took that kind of old school clout to secure the entirety of Brompton Oratory for a midweek funeral. Certainly it looked as though the church was going to be three-quarters full. There were already at least four hundred people filling the pews and many more still shuffling in through the entrance. Cara stopped halfway along the aisle and turned to look for Kite. To her astonishment she saw him immediately, standing no more than ten feet away beneath a sculpture of St Matthew. It was the first time that anyone on the team had been that close to BIRD. She was struck by how easily she recognised him from surveillance photographs: the dark hair, greying slightly at the temples; the narrow blue eyes, catching light from a window in the southern facade; a face at rest, giving nothing away, but with the faintest hint of mischief in the lines around his mouth. Not a noticeably handsome man, but striking and undeniably attractive. Cara had a habit of comparing people to animals. If Robert Vosse was a cow, plodding and decent, Matt Tomkins was a vulture, circling for carrion. If Cosmo de Paul was a weasel, sly and opportunistic, Lachlan Kite was not the bird of his codename, but rather a leopard, lean and prowling and solitary.

She sat at the end of a vacant pew, removed the sunglasses and immediately took out her mobile phone.

He’s here, she typed to Vosse, glancing up at Kite as she accidentally pressed ‘Send’ too early on WhatsApp. To her horror, she realised that Kite was looking directly at her. Cara returned to the message, her heart beating so fast that her hand began to shake as she held the phone. Dark grey suit, tailored. Slim. Six foot max. Appears to be alone.

The service was scheduled to begin in five minutes. Cara decided to return Kite’s gaze. If she could forge a connection with him, however briefly, it was more probable that he might talk to her in the aftermath of the funeral. That was the Holy Grail as far as Vosse was concerned: to get alongside BIRD and to cultivate a relationship with him.

She put the phone back in her coat pocket, composing herself. But when she turned and looked back towards the statue of St Matthew, Kite had disappeared.

Walking into the church, Kite was suddenly confronted by the sight of Martha talking with a crowd of university friends. He had not expected her to make the trip from New York. His heart thumped as she turned around – and he realised that he had been mistaken. It was just a trick of the light. The desire to see her, of which Kite had barely been conscious, had momentarily scrambled his senses.

Looking up at the vast, vaulted ceiling, the grandeur of the Oratory reminded him of the great chapel at Alford, religion on a scale Kite had never before experienced as a bewildered thirteen-year-old boy, arriving from the wilds of Scotland in an ill-fitting suit in the late summer of 1984. That first year at his new school had thrust him into a world of privilege and wealth with which at first Kite had struggled to come to terms. More than thirty-five years later, every second face in the Oratory was a pupil from those days or a friend of Xavier’s whom Kite recalled from the 1990s. The intervening years had not been kind to most of them. Kite was blessed with a photographic memory, but some were barely recognisable. The eyes remained constant, but the features, like his own, had been bullied by time. Everywhere he looked Kite saw slackened skin, thin, greying hair, bodies warped by age and fat. To his left, Leander Saltash, once a lean, aggressive opening batsman, now a bald, stooped television director with a BAFTA to his name; to his right, a man he took to be the diminutive, acne-ridden Henry Urlwin, now transformed into a six-foot beanpole with a chalky beard. Even Cosmo de Paul, that creature of the yoga retreat and the dyeing salon, looked washed out and slightly overweight, as if no vitamin supplement or exercise regime could reverse the inevitable decline of middle age.

‘Tell me. Did I fire six shots or only five?’

Kite felt two fingers pressed into his lower back, a hand clamped on his shoulder. It was a voice he hadn’t heard in years, a voice he had hoped, in all honesty, never to hear again. The voice of Christopher Towey.

‘Chris. How are you?’

Years ago, at Alford, Towey had obsessively watched the films of Clint Eastwood, quoting ad nauseam from the Harry Callaghan series to anyone who would listen. Every time Kite saw him, Towey made the same joke. He did so again in response to Kite’s reply.

‘Well, Lachlan, to tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten myself in all this excitement.’

Kite was in a bleak, uncooperative mood, thinking of Martha and Xavier. He didn’t recognise the quote and smiled as best he could, hoping they could skirt around Dirty Harry and Sudden Impact and talk like grown men.

‘It’s good to see you.’

‘You too, mate,’ Towey replied. ‘Christ, doesn’t everybody look so bloody old?’

‘Very.’

‘Age has withered us,’ he said. With dismay, Kite remembered that they had studied Antony and Cleopatra together for A level. Towey was still locked in the classroom, a man of forty-eight stalled for ever in his school days. ‘Custom has staled our infinite variety.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ Kite felt obliged to say, and suddenly wished that he had taken Isobel up on her offer to come with him. ‘People are probably happier now than they were twenty years ago. There’s a lot to be said for not being young. Fewer choices, less pressure. You look great, Chris. How’s married life?’

‘Divorced life nowadays.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Don’t be. I’m bonking like a madman. Best-kept secret in London. If you’re a moderately well-financed middle-aged man with a British passport and some shower gel, the world’s your oyster. Poles, Brazilians, Uzbeks. Some days I can hardly walk.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘So what have you been up to lately, eh? Last time I saw you, you were working in Mayfair. Oil or something.’

‘That’s right.’ Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, BOX 88 had been mothballed. Kite had taken a long sabbatical, then worked in the oil business for a small private company financing exploratory research in Africa.

‘Still doing that?’

‘Still doing that,’ Kite replied.

It was a lie, of course. Kite and Jean Lorenzo, his opposite number in the United States, had revived BOX 88 in 2016. In one of his final acts as president, Barack Obama had approved intelligence budgets totalling more than $90 billion, 7 per cent of which was diverted to ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’, a euphemism for BOX 88. Kite was now director of European operations working out of the Agency’s headquarters in Canary Wharf.

‘Tell you who thinks you’re a man of mystery. Remember Bill Begley? Always reckoned you were a spy.’

Kite had lived so long with the triplicate lives of the secret world, never settling down, always packing a bag and moving on, working one day in London, the next in Damascus, that people from time to time had suggested to his face that he was a spy. He had a well-honed response for such occasions which he used on Towey now.

‘I confess,’ he said, raising both hands in mock surrender. ‘Get the cuffs.’

Towey, never the brightest button in the Alford box, looked confused.

‘To be honest, I wish I had gone into that life,’ Kite added. ‘Lot more interesting than the work I’ve been doing the last ten years. But from what I understand, it doesn’t earn you any money. Foreign Office pays peanuts. Are you still in the City?’

Towey confirmed that he was indeed ‘making investments on behalf of private clients’ but was soon drawn into a separate conversation with a married couple whom Kite did not know. He grabbed the chance to leave. As he crossed the aisle, Xavier’s children, Olivier and Brigitte, walked in front of him. Kite had not seen them in years and was staggered by Olivier’s likeness to his father; it was as if the seventeen-year-old Xavier had walked past and failed to recognise him. Nearby, Kite spotted a senior French diplomat talking to a member of the Bonnard family; Kite knew that MI6 had recruited his number two in Brussels as part of the broad intelligence attack on EU officials during the Brexit negotiations. Two pews beyond them, Lena – Xavier’s long-suffering wife, herself a recovering heroin addict – looked at Kite as she sat down. He had written a letter of condolence to her within hours of Martha’s call, but could not tell from her reaction if she had read it. He raised a hand in greeting and Lena nodded back. She looked shattered.

A sudden silence settled on the congregation, punctured by organ music. Kite felt eyes on him. He looked up to find the woman he had seen walking alongside de Paul – still wearing oversized sunglasses and the black overcoat – staring in his direction. Had she recognised him? She sat down and began texting on a mobile phone.

‘Lachlan?’

Xavier’s younger sister, Jacqui, was gesturing at him from some distance away. The woman in the long overcoat removed her sunglasses and briefly looked at Kite a second time. He had never seen her face before – mid-twenties, alert and attractive – and wondered what had become of de Paul.

‘Communing with the tax collector?’ Jacqui asked.

She made her way towards him and they embraced. Kite felt the dampness of tears on her cheek as she kissed him.

‘What’s that?’

‘St Matthew,’ she said. ‘You’re standing underneath his statue. He was a tax collector. And here they are, the Catholic Church selling candles at fifty pence a pop.’

Jacqui indicated a box of candles nearby. She was uncharacteristically wired and jumpy. Kite assumed she was running on Valium and beta blockers.

‘I’m so sorry about Xav,’ he said, aware that there was nothing he could do or say to make the situation any better. ‘Did you get my letter?’

‘I got it,’ she replied. ‘You were very kind to write. Nobody knew Xavier like you did, Lachlan.’

The remark served only to stir up those same feelings of guilt which had dogged Kite since Martha’s phone call. His friend’s suicide had become a set of nails drawing down the blackboard of his conscience; he wished that he could be free of remorse, but could not shake the idea that what had happened in 1989 had shaped the entire corrupted course of Xavier’s life.

‘A better friend would have protected him,’ he said.

‘Nobody can save anybody,’ she replied. ‘Xav was the only person who could protect Xav.’

‘Maybe so.’

The service was due to start. Jacqui indicated that she should take her seat and they said farewell. Kite moved towards the centre of the church as Jacqui joined her family in the front row. A few seats away from his own sat Richard Duff-Surtees, an old Alfordian of towering arrogance and sadism who had called Kite a ‘pleb’ and spat on him in his first week at the school. Eighteen months later, seven inches taller and almost three stone heavier, the fifteen-year-old Kite had knocked him out cold with a clean right hook on the rugby field and been threatened with expulsion for his efforts. Duff-Surtees caught his eye during ‘Abide with Me’ and looked quickly away. It was the only pleasing moment in an otherwise heartbreaking hour of tears and remembrance. The family had asked for a High Mass and much of the service, to Kite’s frustration, was conducted in Latin. An agnostic from a young age, he loathed the smoke and mirrors voodoo of Catholicism, felt that Xavier would have insisted on something much lighter and more celebratory. Why was it that the upper classes, when confronted by emotional turbulence of any kind, retreated behind ceremony and the stiff upper lip? Kite was all for strength of character, but he had no doubt that Rosamund Bonnard and her waxwork friends would have grieved more openly for a Jack Russell or Labrador than for the death of their own child.

Singing the final hymn – the inevitable ‘Jerusalem’ – he looked around the church and decided to skip the wake. Better to stick twenty pounds in the collection box and slip away rather than risk another Eastwood quote from Chris Towey or, worse, a face-off with Cosmo de Paul. To that end, Kite waited in his seat until the church was almost empty, then walked out through a door in the south-eastern corner, wondering where he could grab lunch in South Kensington before setting off for the gallery.

Matt Tomkins told Vosse that Cara had panicked. As the service drew to a close, Kite had remained in his seat. Obliged to stand up to allow the mourners in her row the opportunity to leave, Cara had bottled it and gone with them, fearing that Kite would turn and notice that she was hanging around. Finding herself caught in a tide of Sloane Rangers shunting out of the Oratory, Jannaway had consequently lost sight of the target and been buttonholed by Cosmo de Paul on the steps of the Oratory.

‘So where is she now?’ Vosse asked.

‘Still talking to the man she was with before. Said his name was Cosmo de Paul. Pinstripe suit. It’s obvious he’s chatting her up, sir. I told you she was too attractive for surveillance work.’

‘Don’t talk crap,’ said Vosse, who was sitting in the Acton safe flat. He had high hopes for Cara but was worried that Kite was going to slip away yet again. Three times they had followed BIRD in central London. Three times he had vanished without trace.

‘It’s not crap, sir. I just call it as I see it.’

Tomkins had been sitting at the patisserie watching the traffic go by when Cara texted, telling him to get to the Oratory as fast as possible to help in the search for Kite. He had requested the bill – an eye-watering £18.75 for two cappuccinos and a slice of chocolate cake – and strolled across Brompton Road as the mourners continued to pour out of the church. He knew from Cara’s texts that Kite was wearing a tailored grey suit and black wool tie, but so were at least fifty of the other middle-aged men standing in clumps outside the church.

‘Head to HTB,’ Vosse told him on the phone.

‘What’s that?’ said Tomkins. He knew the answer to his own question the instant that he asked it; for the past hour he had been staring across the street at two signs next door to the Oratory bearing the letters ‘HTB’. But it was too late.

‘Holy Trinity Brompton,’ Vosse replied impatiently. ‘Pay attention. Protestant church round the back of the Oratory. Brainwashed evangelical Christians claiming to be possessed by the Holy Spirit. Posters advertising the Alpha Course and a better life with Bear Grylls and Jesus. You can’t miss it.’

Vosse had obviously done his homework, walking the ground the night before. Tomkins looked for a side door into the Oratory but couldn’t spot one. There was no sign of Kite. Black cabs were pulling up outside the church all the time. BIRD could easily have ducked into one and driven off while Cara was looking the other way.

‘Hello?’

She was on the phone again.

‘Yes?’ Tomkins replied.

‘Any luck?’

He looked over and saw Cara standing beside de Paul. She might as well have been holding a placard above her head emblazoned with the words: Have YOU seen Lachlan Kite? Vosse would have a field day when he found out.

‘Not yet, no,’ Tomkins replied. ‘I’m not really dressed for a funeral. If I come any closer, I’ll stick out as much as you do.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Cara, looking up at the sky in dismay. ‘Just walk past or sit in a fucking bus stop. There are more people in Knightsbridge who look like you than there are people who look like me. Wait—’

Tomkins could tell by the note-change in her voice that she’d spotted Kite.

‘My days,’ she said. ‘I’ve got eyes on BIRD. He’s over by the wall.’

‘Another smoke?’ said the American, offering Kite a cigarette as the forecourt in front of the church slowly began to empty. The congregation was heading for a residential square to the west of the Oratory where drinks and snacks had been laid on in a hall reserved for mourners. Kite had stopped to check a message on his phone and liked the idea of a quick cigarette before lunch.

‘Would love one,’ he replied, wondering if the American had been targeted against him. ‘I never got your name.’

‘John,’ he said. ‘And you?’

‘Lachlan.’

Alcoholics Anonymous was decent cover for a phoney relationship with Xavier: most people wouldn’t pry into a stranger’s struggles with addiction, nor would anyone at the funeral know very much about Xavier’s experiences in the programme. Kite decided to probe a little deeper.

‘What did you make of Xav?’ he asked. ‘When he was down, could you bring him out of it? Did you ever have any success talking to him about his depression?’

It was a trick question. Xavier had been wild and unpredictable, but had consistently hidden his gloom from even his closest friends. Kite had never known him to complain, to cry on a shoulder, to lament the path his life had taken nor to despair over his addictions. He was, in his own particular way, every bit as stoic and uncomplaining as his mother. Outward displays of failure or self-pity were not in the gene pool.

‘Funny,’ John replied without hesitation. ‘I never knew him to be like that. Even in meetings he was always upbeat, always trying to find a way to make people laugh, to think more deeply when it came to their own situations.’ John appeared to have passed the test. ‘A lot of us were pretty down a lot of the time, present company included. Xav didn’t go in for that stuff. That’s why I can’t believe he did what they say he did. Had to be an accident, sex game or something.’

Xavier had been found in the bathroom of a Paris Airbnb, hanged by the neck. Unless somebody had staged the killing, it was suicide, pure and simple.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Kite replied.

‘I’m sorry for your loss, man.’ John put his hand on Kite’s shoulder, his long, thick beard and the bright sunlight on his back momentarily giving him the look of an Old Testament prophet.

‘Yours too,’ Kite replied. ‘The world was a better place for having Xavier in it. We’re going to miss him.’

‘Lachlan?’

Kite turned. A striking man of Middle Eastern appearance had approached him from the western edge of the enclosure. He was wearing a dark grey lounge suit with a black tie and a crisp white shirt. A navy blue handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket of his jacket. Kite did not recognise him.

‘Yes?’

‘Excuse me.’ The man acknowledged the American, tipping his head apologetically. An expensive-looking watch caught the sun on his left wrist. ‘I don’t think you will remember me. I was at Alford, several years after you. My name is Jahan Fariba.’

Kite immediately recognised the name. Xavier had spoken about Fariba on one of the last occasions they had met. He was a businessman, British-born, his parents having fled Iran shortly after the revolution. Xavier had done business with him in a context Kite could not recall. He remembered that his friend had spoken fondly of him, on both a professional as well as personal basis.

‘Jahan. Yes. Xav talked about you. How did you recognise me?’

‘I’ll leave you guys to talk,’ John interjected, shaking Kite’s hand and moving off. Kite thanked him for the cigarettes. Fariba tipped his head respectfully at the American’s departure.

‘Jacqui told me who you were,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the church. ‘She pointed you out. I wanted to introduce myself.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

Fariba was in his late thirties. Fit and tanned, he resembled a recently retired professional athlete who still worked out twice a day, eschewed alcohol and went to bed at sunset six nights a week. It was late February and rare to see someone looking so vibrantly healthy.

‘Xav spoke of you, too. He was always going on about his old friend Lachlan.’

‘He was?’

Kite never liked hearing that. Xavier had known too much about his life in the secret world. The wrong word to the wrong person was an existential threat to his cover. He preferred to be anonymous: at worst the enigma at the back of the room; at best unnoticed and forgotten.

‘Yes. He was a great admirer of yours. I always wanted to meet you. I thought this would be a good opportunity. Are you going to the drinks now?’

Fariba’s accent was located somewhere between Tehran and Harvard Business School: an Americanised English characteristic of the international jet-set. He gestured towards the square.

‘Sadly not,’ Kite replied, indicating that he was short of time.

‘Me neither. I don’t feel like it. I didn’t know many of Xavier’s friends. What’s happened is awful. Just a terrible day.’

‘It really is.’ Beneath the slick, executive exterior Kite glimpsed a softness in Fariba. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘This is what I wanted to talk to you about.’ Fariba lowered his voice to a confessional whisper which was almost drowned out by the noise of a passing bus. ‘I was with him less than two weeks ago, in Paris, the night before he died.’

Cara had worked up a possible pitch with Vosse. The drug addict friend from South Africa was too risky to play on Kite, who had known Xavier well and would quickly smell a rat. Instead she would play the art card. They knew from the MI6 whistle-blower that Kite had an interest in collecting paintings. He’d been seen at the Frieze fair back in October and had exchanged emails with several dealers. Cara had briefly studied Fine Art at university before switching to Politics and knew how to talk shit about painters and paintings. She could say she’d had a temp job at one of the galleries exhibiting at Frieze and had recognised Kite as a prospective buyer. That would be enough to start a conversation, perhaps even to lead to an exchange of numbers. Vosse had joked that he wanted Cara to get to know Kite so well that he would ask her to be the au pair for Isobel’s baby when it was born in the summer. Cara preferred to think that Kite would try to recruit her into BOX 88.

But when to approach him? Outside the Oratory, Kite had been trapped in two conversations: the first with the tall, bearded man who had offered him cigarettes; the second with a good-looking businessman, possibly of Arab descent, wearing thousand-dollar shoes and an expensive suit. After what had happened before the service, Cara reckoned she could bump Kite and take her chances with an open pitch.

‘What’s going on?’

Matt Tomkins was on the phone again, calling for no good reason other than to make her afternoon more difficult than it already was.

‘What’s going on is that you’re making me answer the phone when what I want to be doing is getting on with my job. What do you want?’

‘Just to let you know, Eve and Villanelle are outside Smallbone in the Astra.’

‘Eve’ was the codename for Tessa Swinburn, ‘Villanelle’ was Kieran Dean. Vosse had a penchant for naming team members after characters in television shows. Cara looked across the busy street. There was a branch of Smallbone of Devizes on the corner of Thurloe Place. She couldn’t see the Vauxhall Astra but assumed it was parked nearby.

‘Great. Can I go now?’ she said.

‘I guess,’ Tomkins replied.

‘Thank you, Matthew. Always nice to chat.’

She hung up. Kite was heading back into the church. It was time to make her move.

‘Do you have time to talk?’ Fariba asked.

Kite was keen to learn about Paris. It was obvious that Fariba knew something of Xavier’s state of mind in the hours leading up to his death. He looked at his phone. It was not yet half-past twelve. He wasn’t due at the gallery until four.

‘Or we can do it another time,’ Fariba suggested, misinterpreting Kite’s reaction. ‘You may not feel like talking today. We are all still in shock.’

‘No, it sounds like a good idea. I’d appreciate that. It would be helpful to find out what was going on. I hadn’t seen Xav for at least a year. If you could explain what he was going through …’

‘Of course.’ Fariba adjusted the sleeve of his jacket. His movements were clean and precise, as if life were a martial art he had taken years to perfect. ‘I can try to help as much as I can.’

Kite looked up to see Cosmo de Paul scuttling away from the funeral, hailing a cab which did a U-turn opposite Smallbone of Devizes. Doubtless he had lunch at White’s in the diary or a pressing engagement with a Russian woman half his age charging £300 per hour. Looking back along Brompton Road, Kite saw the woman in the long black coat standing alone outside the enclosure. She was talking on the phone. There was something about her that didn’t sit well. For thirty years Kite had been at risk from surveillance and his antennae were finely tuned. It was possible that a team had been put on him at the funeral.

‘You have a family?’ Fariba asked.

‘One on the way,’ Kite replied.

‘Wonderful. Congratulations.’

‘And you?’

Fariba held up his right hand and showed Kite four splayed fingers.

‘Jesus. You’ve been busy.’

‘Not me. My wife does all the hard work. When is your child due?’

‘Late summer.’

Kite had forgotten to put money in the collection and explained that he was going back inside. While there, he looked quickly at Facebook on his phone and searched for Xavier’s profile. Jahan Fariba’s photograph came up as one of Xavier’s contacts. He put a twenty-pound note in the collection box and went back outside.

To his surprise, the woman in the long black overcoat was waiting for him on the steps.

‘Excuse me. It’s been driving me mad,’ she said. ‘Have we met before?’

She removed her sunglasses. Kite ran her features – soft brown eyes, a button nose, peroxide blonde hair and a wide, singer’s mouth – through a memory palace of names and faces, but turned up nothing.

‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘Did we meet through Xav?’

‘No. Definitely not.’ The woman stared at Kite intently. ‘I’m Emma,’ she said, offering a hand to shake. Her skin was soft and cold to the touch. ‘It’s the weirdest thing. Your face is so familiar.’

If she was a friend or colleague of de Paul’s, it was possible she knew of him by reputation, but Kite didn’t want to establish the link.

‘I know!’ she said, suddenly remembering. Her face was overcome with relief. ‘I was working for one of the galleries at Frieze. You came in and chatted to my colleague. I think you were interested in buying something.’

‘Really? What a good memory you have.’

‘Never lets me down,’ she said, tapping the side of her head. ‘I just couldn’t place you.’

She had a sharp south-eastern accent, London or Essex or Kent. The fact that she had made no effort to soften its edges made Kite think that she wasn’t interested in blending into Xavier’s rarefied world. She was dressed like a model or fashion designer but, on closer inspection, the coat and black leather boots were off-the-peg.

‘Which gallery were you working for?’ he asked.

‘Karoo,’ she replied. ‘Based in New York. We were mostly displaying Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Marc Quinn.’

That was all Kite needed to know that ‘Emma’ was not who she was pretending to be. In thirty years of collecting and selling paintings, he had never had a conversation with a New York gallerist about Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk or Marc Quinn. Several collectors he knew had piled into the Cool Britannia crowd in the 1990s and made small fortunes as a result, but to Kite a lot of the work by the Young British Artists of that period was soulless Groucho bullshit. For the second time in less than half an hour he was obliged to set a trap for a stranger.

‘Are you sure that was at Frieze?’ he said as though still searching the recesses of his mind for some distant recollection of the encounter.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Frieze.’

Whoever Emma was, she hadn’t done her homework. Karoo would have been selling Turks and Quinns at ‘Frieze Masters’, a parallel exhibition dedicated to older works of art located in a separate area of Regent’s Park. So who was she and what was she trying to achieve by speaking to him?

‘Well, it’s amazing you remembered,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I ended up buying anything last year. Are you still in that world?’

‘Nah. It was a temp job. Didn’t fancy making it permanent. Didn’t do it for me.’

‘I see.’ In his peripheral vision, Kite could see Fariba waiting for their conversation to finish. ‘Look, I’m going to be rude and take off,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we can’t chat more, but I’ve got a meeting to go to.’

The woman looked crestfallen. ‘Oh. OK.’

‘Do you have a card?’

‘Me?’ she said. ‘Afraid not.’ Looking up hopefully, she added: ‘You?’

Kite was carrying a business card in his own name with an address, email and phone number which would flag as soon as anyone tried to use them. By sunset BOX 88 would know exactly who Emma was working for.

‘Lachlan,’ she said, holding the card in both hands. She pronounced the name in the correct way, making ‘Lach’ sound like ‘Lock’, and bowed slightly as she studied the text. ‘Well, at least I had the right person.’

‘You did,’ Kite replied with false enthusiasm. ‘I’m really sorry, but you’ve caught me at a bad time. Thanks for coming over. I wish I had your memory for faces.’

He walked back towards Fariba, trying to assess what was going on. If MI5 were investigating BOX 88, Xavier’s funeral would be a natural place to mount a surveillance operation against him and to make a pitch using a friendly young woman. Kite was bound to attend the service; they could set everything up in advance. But why the clumsy approach? It was possible that ‘Emma’ was private sector, working on behalf of a client who had taken an interest in him for reasons that were not yet clear.

‘Are you OK to go now?’ Fariba asked.

‘Sure.’

‘I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of booking us a table at Theo Randall’s restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel. You may know it. It’s discreet and the food is very good.’

‘I know it well.’ The Intercontinental was on the north-eastern side of Hyde Park Corner, close to a safe house on Hertford Street that BOX 88 had been renting for the past two years. ‘Took my wife there for her birthday,’ he said. ‘Shall we get a cab?’

‘I have a driver,’ Fariba replied with the nonchalance of the super-rich. ‘He’s waiting around the corner. I can meet you there if you want to walk? Otherwise he can take us whenever you’re ready.’

Matt Tomkins had seen the whole thing: Cara’s chat on the steps of the church; what looked like an exchange of business cards with the target; then BIRD walking off with his businessman friend towards a silver Jaguar XJ parked illegally on Egerton Place. There was a chauffeur at the wheel, working the hazard lights, but nobody had got close enough to take a picture of him. Tessa Swinburn had passed the number plate to Vosse, who was running it through the database at Thames House. Tessa had come on a moped with the intention of following the Jag while Kieran Dean tailed in the Astra.

‘What happened?’ Tomkins asked as Cara joined him outside South Kensington station. She had covered the short distance from the Oratory on foot and looked flushed with success in a way that irritated him.

‘I got his details,’ she said, producing Kite’s card from the pocket of her overcoat.

‘We already have his details,’ Tomkins replied tartly.

‘Not these ones.’ She made him look closer. ‘The mobile is different. And the email. Cheltenham attacks those, we might get somewhere.’

Tomkins was forced to concede that Cara had made a breakthrough. He experienced a surge of resentment, sharp as bile. It was not enough that he should be regarded by Vosse as the most capable member of the team; others, particularly Cara, had to fail.

‘So what are you going to do?’ he said. ‘Call him?’

‘Dunno,’ she replied. ‘Need to talk it over with Robert.’

‘Robert.’ Not ‘Mr Vosse’ or ‘the boss’. Tomkins wondered if they had a friendship outside of work. Maybe they went for drinks in the pub or tapas and talked about him behind his back. Maybe they were sleeping together. That kind of thing happened all the time at Thames House.

‘He’ll tell you to go for it,’ he said.

‘Might do. Might not.’

Tomkins’s phone started to ring. Speak of the devil. It was Vosse.

‘Cagney?’

‘Cagney’ was Tomkins’s codename. Cara was ‘Lacey’.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Did you see the driver of the Jag?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You with Lacey?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Ask her if she got a look at him.’

Matt lowered the phone and asked Cara what she’d seen. A woman was screaming at her infant son outside a branch of Five Guys and it was difficult to make himself heard.

‘She didn’t see him,’ he told Vosse. ‘Why? What’s going on?’

‘What about the bloke who walked off with our man? You said he was from the Middle East?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Tomkins replied. ‘Lacey did.’

Cara scrunched up her face, trying to work out what the two men were discussing.

‘Fine. Lacey said it.’ Tomkins could hear the irritation in Vosse’s voice. ‘What did you think? Was he likely from that neck of the woods?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Tomkins replied.

‘And it looked like they’d never met before but were getting along famously?’

That was an accurate characterisation of what Cara had told Tomkins, so he said: ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ and waited to find out why Vosse was sounding so agitated.

‘There’s just something that doesn’t ring true.’

‘What’s that, sir?’

‘This guy’s wearing a flash watch and walks around in thousand-pound shoes, right? According to Villanelle, there was a chauffeur in the driving seat of the Jaguar.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So explain this: why was the Jag rented from Europcar two days ago?’

4

The chauffeur was wearing a cheap black suit and a peaked cap. He opened the back door for Kite but did not acknowledge him. Kite took a last look up at the red-brick mansion blocks of Egerton Gardens and climbed inside, checking the windows and mirrors for moving vehicles. Sure enough, a dark blue Vauxhall Astra pulled out behind them as the driver moved away. Fariba had settled in beside him and was fastening his seat belt. Kite turned and reached for his own, taking the opportunity to look behind the Jaguar and commit the Astra’s number plate to memory.

‘Did you know that Edward Elgar was married at the Brompton Oratory?’ Fariba asked.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Also the racing driver James Hunt. And Alfred Hitchcock.’

‘Wikipedia?’ Kite asked.

Fariba laughed. ‘Yes! How did you know?’

Kite assumed the question was rhetorical and sat back in his seat, wondering where the surveillance was coming from. It had been a feature of his long career that minor setbacks never troubled him very much; if anything, they got his blood moving a little quicker. But a tailing Astra and a clumsy approach from a charming, if inexperienced woman at the funeral still required attention. If the heat was coming from MI5, Kite needed to tread carefully; if he was being looked at by amateurs in the private sector, he would put a surveillance team of BOX 88 ‘Falcons’ onto them that afternoon and find out who was paying their bills.

‘Do you have a favourite Hitchcock film, Lachlan?’ Fariba asked.

Kite wasn’t much of a movie buff but said Vertigo because it was the first title that came to mind. He thought of James Stewart falling from the top of a high building and pondered the change in Fariba’s mood. On the steps of the church he had been polite to the point of deference; now, spread out in the back seat of his executive limo, he had relaxed into the role of international plutocrat, making empty chit-chat as his valeted Jag slipped through the Knightsbridge traffic.

‘One of my favourites too,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we agree.’

Kite checked his mobile. He had sent a message on WhatsApp to Isobel but she had not yet seen it. He sent another – Very sad service. Heading off for lunch with a friend of Xavier’s. See you tonight. Love you – and put the phone back in his jacket. One of the mourners was crossing the road opposite Harrods. Kite recognised him as Rupert Howell, a sports jock nicknamed ‘Lazenby’ at Alford on account of his saturnine good looks and jaw-dropping success with women. His hairline had since receded at such a rate that, from a distance, he looked like the elderly John Profumo.

‘Something else I learned from Wikipedia,’ said Fariba.

‘What was that?’ Kite asked, turning to face him. He looked briefly in the rear-view mirror but could no longer see the Astra.

‘During the Cold War, the KGB used to leave dead drops in the entrance to the Brompton Oratory.’

Kite knew the story but played dumb. He wondered why a man like Fariba would use the term ‘dead drop’ without going to the trouble of explaining it.

‘Really? I had no idea the Oratory was such an interesting place.’

‘Neither did I. Neither did I.’

The mood wasn’t right. Was it nerves or something more sinister? Perhaps Fariba was anxious about their imminent chat over lunch.

‘Where are you from?’ Kite asked the driver.

‘He doesn’t speak English,’ Fariba replied quickly.

The chauffeur responded in a language Kite identified as Farsi, using a word – ‘jakesh’ – which had been a favourite of an Iranian colleague who had done some work for BOX 88. It struck him as odd that a chauffeur would employ such a word – which translated roughly as ‘pimp’ – in a conversation with his boss and wondered at the context.

‘Where’s he from?’ he asked.

‘Isfahan,’ Fariba replied.

‘Just arrived?’

‘No. He has lived in London for many years.’

Was it Kite’s imagination, or did Fariba’s answers seem strained? To work for BOX 88 was to live in a more or less permanent state of low-level paranoia; Kite had grown used to it in the way that a diabetic becomes accustomed to injecting himself with insulin four times a day. He was wary of Fariba just as he had been wary of the woman in the long black overcoat. Something was wrong.

The Jaguar passed through a canyon of construction work on the western approach to Hyde Park Corner. To the north, repairs were continuing to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, gutted by fire and now rising again over Knightsbridge; to the south, the narrow facade of a nineteenth-century apartment block had been preserved behind thick steel scaffolding. The building behind it had been torn down. In its place, a steel-and-glass tower, doubtless financed by Chinese, Russian or Gulf money, was gradually being craned into the sky.

‘What house were you in at Alford?’ Kite asked.

‘ACDP,’ Fariba replied.

Housemasters at Alford were known by their initials, not surnames. Kite remembered ACDP and the location of the house, tucked away towards the back of the school close to a wooded area where boys would go to smoke Silk Cuts and look at copies of Penthouse and Razzle.

‘Where was that? Close to my house?’

Fariba hesitated. ‘Which one were you in?’ he asked. ‘Remind me.’

‘Lionel Jones-Lewis.’

‘The maths teacher?’

‘Yes. The maths teacher.’

It was an odd, but not inaccurate way of describing Jones-Lewis – more commonly remembered by old Alfordians as ‘Jumpy’ – a bachelor housemaster who had somehow managed to avoid being fired despite three decades of predatory behaviour towards the boys in his care.

‘Look at the arch. So beautiful at this time of year.’

The Jaguar was circling Hyde Park Corner. The Wellington Arch at the centre of the vast roundabout looked no more or less impressive than it usually did.

‘Yes, it is very beautiful.’ Kite knew that Fariba was trying to change the subject, so he pressed his point. ‘We were almost side by side. LJL was down by the music schools, next to ACDP. We probably passed one another in the street every day.’

‘I don’t know,’ Fariba replied. ‘I think you and Xavier had left by the time I went to Alford.’

Neither of the two houses Kite had mentioned were situated anywhere near the music schools. Either Fariba wasn’t concentrating on what Kite was saying or he was lying.

‘Your tutor. Who were you up to?’

Kite had again employed arcane language specific to the school which only an old Alfordian would recognise. Fariba visibly faltered before answering, like a sudden and unexpected glitch in a well-oiled machine.

‘Tutor?’ he said. ‘Are you one of those English public schoolboys who likes to talk about Alford all the time, Lachlan?’ He took out his mobile phone and waved Kite’s questions away as he began to tap out a message. ‘The truth is, I don’t remember. It was all so long ago. Do you want to know my date of birth? My mother’s maiden name?’

They were passing the Intercontinental, the driver indicating into the left lane as a motorbike overtook him on the opposite side. Like the itch at the back of the throat which foretells a period of sickness, Kite knew that he was in grave danger.

‘Could you pull over for a second?’ he said.

‘But we’re almost there.’

The driver turned off Piccadilly onto Old Park Lane, passing the Hard Rock Cafe. He spoke to Fariba in Farsi. Fariba gave a clipped, aggressive reply. Kite could feel their apprehension as the Jaguar passed the Playboy Casino and made an immediate right turn onto Cheshire Street. Rather than looping back towards the Intercontinental, they were heading east, deeper into Mayfair.

‘You’re going in the wrong direction,’ Kite said as a car sounded its horn in the street behind him. ‘The restaurant is the other way.’

‘It’s quite all right, Lachlan.’ There was a forced nonchalance to Fariba’s reply. ‘We have a car park here that I prefer to use.’

Kite knew what was coming. It was an Iranian speciality. Fariba’s team would have control of the car park and would likely switch him to a second vehicle as soon as they’d stripped him of his clothes and mobile. Kite was intensely angry with himself for letting his guard down at the funeral but had no time to mourn his mistake. The chauffeur had turned off Cheshire Street and was heading towards a barrier at the entrance to an underground car park. A man in a dark suit raised the barrier then lowered it as soon as the Jaguar had passed. The car nosed down a steep ramp towards an ill-lit basement where two more men waited in the shadows. Kite knew that if he tried to open the back door it would be locked. So it proved.

He was cramped for space and had only seconds to make his move. Disconnecting his seat belt, Kite raised his hips so that his weight was pitched forward onto his legs. In the same movement he twisted quickly left, then right, using the momentum to slam his elbow into the side of Fariba’s throat. Fariba gasped as Kite struck him a second time, but he had not made a clean connection with the carotid artery. Speed was critical. Grabbing a fistful of Fariba’s hair, Kite now turned and drove his left knee up into the Iranian’s face, but the chauffeur hit the brakes at the moment of impact and Kite was unbalanced, managing only to slam Fariba’s head against the window as he fell backwards. With the Iranian momentarily dazed, Kite reached forward and grabbed a loose section of the driver’s seat belt, twisting it tightly around his neck in an effort to choke him. He had to get into the passenger seat and leave the car by the front door, taking his chances with the men outside. But his grip on the belt was poor and the driver tipped back his chair to loosen the strain on his neck, pulling at the joints on Kite’s hand so that he was forced to release the belt.

Fariba had now recovered. Calling out to the driver in Farsi he threw several punches into Kite’s kidneys and snatched at his trailing foot in an effort to restrain him. Kite kicked back, striking Fariba in the face, then pushed forward into the front section of the car, pulled sideways by the driver as he tried to reach for the passenger door. Leaning forward, Fariba put his arms around Kite’s waist and pulled him towards the back seat with astonishing strength. Kite freed his right hand and used it to gouge the driver’s eyes. He could feel the softness of the eyeballs beneath his fingers and pushed harder, the driver yelping like a wounded animal. Fariba saw what was happening and chopped down on Kite’s arm. The joint in his elbow screamed in pain. Then the door behind him opened and a third man entered the car. Fariba shouted at him as he slammed the door.

Kite was wedged between the two men and unable to move. The third man pinned his arms behind his back and seized Kite’s neck in a headlock. The driver straightened his seat and moved the Jaguar down the ramp, rubbing one eye and swearing under his breath. Kite thought of Isobel, of their unborn child. Whatever ordeal was planned for him, he could now do nothing to stop it.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ he said, struggling to break free of the headlock.

Fariba smiled, shaking off the adrenaline of the fight.

‘You did well,’ he said, nodding towards the driver who was still muttering in Farsi. He was a large man, ponderous and cruel, and Kite knew that he had made an enemy of him. ‘I thought everything was going so smoothly. Xavier said you were the best of the best.’

‘Fuck you,’ said Kite, fearing what his friend had told them.

Fariba exchanged a look with one of the men outside the car. He lowered the window and took a syringe from him, indicating to the man holding Kite that he should squeeze more tightly around his neck.

‘It will be best if you don’t kick out,’ he said, and immediately stabbed the needle through Kite’s suit trousers into the muscles of his right thigh.

Kite winced, feeling the needle almost at the bone, but the strength of the man’s hold on him was so great that he could make no meaningful sound.

‘I had such an interesting series of conversations with Xavier,’ said Fariba. ‘He told me all about the summer of 1989. All about Luc Bonnard and a woman named Martha Raine. Cast your mind back to that time, Lachlan. I need your memory. When you wake up, I want you to tell me everything you can about Ali Eskandarian.’

5

‘Just because he rents a Jag from Europcar doesn’t make him a terrorist. Doesn’t make him BOX 88 either.’

Matt Tomkins and Cara Jannaway had jumped into a taxi outside South Kensington station and were trying to catch up with Dean in the Astra. Vosse was coordinating the pursuit from Acton.

‘Maybe we should discuss this later,’ Cara replied, nodding in the direction of the driver.

‘Fair enough,’ said Tomkins, and checked his mobile for Dean and Swinburn’s positions.

Cara addressed the driver.

‘Excuse me? Could you head to the Mandarin Oriental at the top of Knightsbridge?’

‘What’s that, luv?’

The driver had one ear tuned to the traffic, the other to James O’Brien on LBC. He turned down the volume on the radio.

‘I said can we head towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel just before Hyde Park Corner?’

‘Sure thing. No problem.’

‘See?’ said Tomkins. ‘He’s not even listening to what we’re saying.’

When the driver turned the volume back up, Cara indicated that it was secure to talk.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘His normal car could be in the garage. He might have rented the Jag to keep up appearances. Might be an operation they’re working together. Who knows?’

‘Who knows—’

‘But who’s the flash Arab? Looked like they’d never met before, then they go off together. BIRD sent a message to his wife saying he was heading to lunch with a friend of Xavier’s—’

‘I know that,’ said Tomkins petulantly. ‘I read the group chat. Could be he’s bullshitting his wife.’

‘Speaking of group chats …’

Vosse had sent a message to the team with an update on the Jaguar. The vehicle had been rented for only two days by a woman named ‘Pegah Azizi’ using a French driving licence which Thames House was checking with Paris. The vehicle was due back by six o’clock that evening.

‘Azizi. What’s that?’ Tomkins asked. ‘Iranian?’

‘Sounds like it.’

Cara typed a reply: No sign of a woman in the Jag.

They could both see that Vosse was replying.

My thoughts exactly, he wrote. BIRD almost at Hyde Park Corner. Stay on him.

Cara switched lists, returning to the location feeds for Dean and Swinburn. Vosse was the only one with a fix on Kite’s position.

‘We’re too far away,’ she said, knowing that coverage of Kite’s phone wouldn’t be enough to pinpoint his position if he went into a high-rise or basement.

‘Relax,’ Tomkins replied. ‘It’s lunchtime. They’re probably going for something to eat. We just wait outside whatever restaurant they choose, pick BIRD up on his way out.’

Cara looked into her lap.

‘What if they’re not going to lunch?’

Tomkins looked at her blankly. ‘Where are they going then?’ he asked.

‘I dunno.’ She stared out at the stalled London traffic, windscreens blinking in the lunchtime sun. ‘I just have a weird feeling about this.’

Tessa Swinburn’s moped became boxed in at a set of traffic lights near the Mandarin Oriental and she lost sight of the Jaguar as it pulled away towards Hyde Park Corner. Kieran Dean had managed to stay on Kite’s tail a little longer, but his luck ran out on Old Park Lane when a double-parked Uber blocked his way while waiting for a pickup outside the Playboy Casino. Sounding the horn on the Astra, Dean watched in frustration as Kite’s Jaguar made a right turn onto Cheshire Street, quickly disappearing from view. Less than a minute later, a Chinese man with a fat gut and an empty wallet wandered out of the casino and clambered into the cab. Moments later Swinburn was at last on Cheshire Street, passing a small, dimly lit underground car park. He assumed that the Jaguar had gone deeper into Mayfair and turned north in the direction of Shepherd Market. A lorry was unloading on a double yellow and Dean was again obliged to wait while the driver wheeled a trolley off the road. He then continued along the western edge of Shepherd Market, emerging within spitting distance of the Saudi embassy. There was no sign of BIRD in any direction.

Vosse called as Dean was waiting at a set of lights outside the Curzon cinema.

‘Are you lot taking the piss?’ he shouted. ‘Villanelle’s in outer space, Cagney and Lacey went the wrong way on Piccadilly. What the fuck are you doing on Curzon Street? Get your arse back to the Playboy Casino. BIRD’s probably gone in there for a flutter with his pal from the Middle East.’

Dean reached for his second phone, loaded Waze and typed in ‘Playboy Casino’ as the lights turned green and a car behind him leaned on its horn. The journey time was estimated at less than five minutes, but he would have to go back out onto Park Lane and loop round via Hyde Park Corner.

‘On my way,’ he said.

Vosse had already hung up.

Cara had wanted the driver to turn north at the Hard Rock Cafe, but Tomkins had insisted that she’d seen the wrong car. As far as he was concerned, BIRD was still heading east towards Piccadilly Circus.

‘Think about it,’ he told her. ‘They’ve got the Ritz up there, The Wolseley, White’s and Boodle’s. That’s where men like that go for lunch. Not Shepherd’s Market.’

Cara thought he was talking shit but knew that she didn’t have the luxury of arguing with him: by the time Tomkins had realised his mistake, BIRD would be long gone. So, as the taxi waited in traffic, she thanked the driver, opened the door and stepped out onto the street.

‘Where the fuck are you going?’ Tomkins shouted.

‘She’s leaving you, mate,’ said the driver as Cara slammed the door. ‘Still want the West End, do we?’

The cab pulled away. Tomkins was left alone in the back, watching Cara hurrying along Half Moon Street in her black boots and long winter coat. He tried calling her phone but she wouldn’t pick up. Instead he texted Vosse and told him what Cara had done, only to receive the reply: At least somebody is using their initiative.

By then, the taxi was outside Fortnum & Mason, BIRD’s Jag was nowhere to be seen and Matt Tomkins was out of the hunt.

Cara understood from the group message that Vosse wanted the team to look for Kite in the area surrounding the Playboy Casino. There was a Four Seasons Hotel across the street, a branch of Nobu outside the Hilton on Park Lane, Theo Randall’s restaurant at the Intercontinental as well as a number of private members clubs – the Royal Air Force, the Cavalry & Guards – in the area. All of them would need searching.

Find BIRD, he had written. Find the car. Villanelle’s going to the Playboy. Divide up the rest. Let’s get control of this situation.

Cara could not shake off the sense that something was wrong. She looked at Kite’s last known position on the corner of Old Park Lane and wondered why his phone had gone down. A basement? A signal black hole? Or something more sinister?

She entered Cheshire Street from the east. A van emerged from a side road ahead of her, turned right and almost knocked her off her feet as it sped downhill in the direction from which she had come. Two men were in the front, both of Middle Eastern origin, both wearing dark jackets and white shirts. The man in the passenger seat had a beard but no sideburns. Their appearance seemed at odds with the nature of their work; as the van turned left at the bottom of the street, she saw KIDSON ELECTRICAL SERVICES emblazoned on the side next to a London phone number and a website address. Memorising the number plate, she reached the corner and saw that the van had emerged not from a side street, as she had first thought, but from a small underground car park. There was an office block next door with a space outside for smokers. Two Chinese women in floor-length puffer jackets were vaping near the entrance. Cara spoke to the younger of the two women.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Did two guys go in there? Both in grey suits and black ties, forty-ish? One of them British, the other from the Middle East?’

‘Don’t know anything,’ the woman replied. It was obvious that she spoke only limited English.

‘Didn’t see anyone,’ her companion added. She had bad teeth and a mangled London accent. ‘Ask him.’

A security guard with a goatee beard and acne scars was coming through the door. Cara asked him the same question and received the same answer. No, he hadn’t seen two men in grey suits and black ties. Perhaps they were around the corner in the casino? She gave him a brisk nod of thanks and turned her attention back to the car park. A sign on the wall said ‘FULL’, but the barrier was up and Cara could see movement inside a security hut at the base of the ramp. Her phone pulsed in her hand as she walked towards the hut, momentarily losing her footing on an uneven section of pavement. At the same time, a short, defeated-looking man in a brown woollen hat emerged from the hut. He was in his late fifties and wore a blue quilted jacket, torn at the shoulder, and scuffed black shoes. Like the security guard, he had a rough complexion but was very pale. Cara saw the stubborn, exhausted features of a man who had spent most of his life being pushed around.

‘Can I help you?’

An Eastern European accent. Cara guessed from his features that he was from the former Yugoslavia. She reached the bottom of the ramp so that they were face to face. The car park was small with a low, breeze-block ceiling and space inside for no more than two dozen vehicles. A section of torn plastic pipe had been left along one wall next to a black mini-skip with ‘Commercial Waste’ written on it.

‘Have two men been in here? Both wearing grey suits and black …’

There was no point in continuing. She had seen the Jaguar. Parked towards the rear of the car park beneath a faded poster of couples sitting around a roulette table in a packed casino. The man seemed to sense what she had seen and took a defensive step backwards.

‘That car,’ she said, pointing at it. ‘Where’s the owner?’

He shook his head. ‘What is this? Can I help you?’

‘Yeah. You can. That Jag.’ Cara continued to point at the car. ‘How long’s it been here?’

‘What do you want, please?’ he asked, and Cara saw that he was afraid.

‘I told you. The Jaguar.’

‘You have car here? What is your name, please?’

On her second day at Thames House, an instructor had told Cara’s intake that MI5 officers had the power to arrest members of the public and would be given identification cards made up by the Met so that they could pass for police officers. She had never had cause to take out her ID, but did so now, watching the attendant’s already pallid features pale still further as he realised what was happening.

‘Let’s do this the other way round,’ she said. ‘What’s your name, sir?’

‘Zoltan,’ he replied.

Cara suppressed a smile. It sounded like something he had made up on the spot, the sort of name you would give a robot dog in a Marvel movie.

‘And you’re the security guard here?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘You’ve been here for the last hour?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘So you saw that Jaguar coming in here less than ten minutes ago?’

The attendant shook his head. ‘I was having cigarette.’

‘Cigarette? Where?’

Zoltan pointed up the ramp onto Cheshire Street.

‘So you didn’t check the Jaguar in?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You didn’t see the driver? You didn’t give him a ticket when he entered?’

‘No, miss. Is there a problem?’

‘Not yet, there isn’t.’ Cara could see that he was anxious. ‘I’m just asking some questions.’

She walked towards the Jaguar, looking around for CCTV. There was a dusty, fixed position camera on the far wall, a dome lens in the ceiling closer to the hut. Standing in an empty parking space beside the Jaguar, Cara cupped her hand against the driver’s window and looked inside. Nothing had been left on the seats.

‘So you didn’t see them?’

‘Excuse me, miss?’

‘You didn’t see who got out of this car? Three men, ten minutes ago.’

‘No. Like I tell you, I was having cup of coffee.’

‘Oh, it’s coffee now?’ said Cara. ‘A minute ago it was a cigarette. You should make your mind up, Zoltan.’

He took off the woollen hat and quickly flattened down his hair as if it would help him to organise his thoughts more carefully.

‘Cigarette with coffee. Both. On my break.’

Cara walked back towards the hut. A sign bolted to the wall said: ‘Petroleum Spirit. Highly Flammable. Switch Off Engine’. As she passed Zoltan, she said: ‘So who was minding the car park while you were away?’ and watched his eyes slip at the question.

‘Sorry, miss?’

‘I said who was minding the shop?’

‘Nobody. They just came in.’

Guilt was coming off him like the smell of old oil and rats’ piss in the car park. It annoyed Cara that Zoltan was so bad at lying, that he couldn’t even summon the energy to deceive her with a basic degree of competence.

‘They just came in,’ she repeated. ‘Who? The men in the Jaguar?’

‘Yes. That is right. The men in the Jaguar.’

‘They didn’t need a ticket?’

‘No. They come here all the time. That’s their space.’

The guard pointed at the Jaguar. It was the first meaningful attempt he had made to deceive her, but the remark sealed his fate.

‘So this is a branch of Europcar, is it?’ Cara asked.

Zoltan looked bewildered.

‘What, please?’

‘Never mind.’

Without bothering to seek his permission, she walked into the security hut. Zoltan followed her. A digital radio was tuned to a station playing ‘Tiny Dancer’. Zoltan turned it down as a Serbian-speaking disc jockey began speaking over the end of the track.

‘Are those CCTV cameras in operation?’ Cara asked.

‘Not working.’

‘Is that legal?’

Zoltan shrugged.

‘Mind if I see for myself?’

He didn’t have the courage to demand a warrant or to try to buy time by calling his boss. He managed to say only: ‘OK, sure’ before indicating the bank of television screens above his filthy, cluttered desk. Within minutes Zoltan had showed her how the security system worked, comprehensively contradicting his earlier claim that the CCTV in the car park was broken. The footage was blurred and indistinct, but as she moved through it, Cara was able to see images of every car and human being that had been on the ramp between midday and half-past twelve.

‘Where’s the rest of it?’ she asked when the footage suddenly cut off.

‘No more,’ he replied. ‘I go on coffee break, cameras they stopped working.’

‘Because you switched them off?’

Zoltan smiled broadly and shook his head in apparent amusement as he said: ‘No! Of course not.’

‘No?’ She watched him put the woollen hat back on his head. ‘You sure about that, Zoltan?’

‘One hundred percentage, yes. I am sure.’

Cara’s patience was now running low. She fixed the guard with the look her father described as ‘Medusa on crack’ and waited for him to come clean. He was standing next to an old kettle and a newly opened box of Yorkshire teabags, rocking very slightly backwards and forwards as he ducked in and out of eye contact.

‘Zoltan?’

‘Yes?’

‘Who switched off the cameras?’

‘Nobody.’

Cara leaned towards the bank of screens and fast-forwarded from the point at which the images had blacked out. Sure enough, new footage appeared shortly after twelve fifty. Zoltan made a noise in the back of his throat as Cara clicked through several still images of the white van marked ‘Kidson Electrical Services’ as it moved up the ramp. There was no sign of Kite, nor of the two men from the Jaguar.

‘Seemed to be working ten minutes ago,’ she said and waited for what she hoped would be a suitably earnest and detailed apology. When it wasn’t immediately forthcoming she said: ‘How much did they pay you?’

At that point Zoltan broke. He collapsed onto a squeaking office chair with some of the foam leaking out of it. He put his head in his hands. The wheels on the chair kept dragging back and forth on a torn section of the Daily Express as he shuffled and begged and moaned. He started speaking in Serbian, doubtless cursing his wretched luck and his shabby, half-baked lies. It was probable that his whole life had been a series of failures, each following relentlessly on the heels of the last, leading to this final humiliation.

‘What’s that, love?’ Cara asked. ‘You want to tell me something?’

‘I cannot,’ he said eventually. ‘I promised.’

‘Promised who?’

‘The man.’

‘What man?’

‘The man who paid me.’ Zoltan looked up with pleading eyes. ‘He said if I tell anyone what he did, he kill me.’

Cara called Vosse and told him everything. While she waited for him to make the journey from Acton to Mayfair, she instructed Zoltan to close the car park then took a more detailed look at the CCTV. The white van had been parked in the space beside the Jaguar where she had stood and looked through the driver’s window. A bollard had been placed beside it to reserve a slot which the Jaguar had later occupied. Cara knew that Kite had most likely been transferred into the back of the van which had driven past her on Cheshire Street. She passed the vehicle details by text to Vosse, wondering why Kite had so readily agreed to get into the Jaguar in the first place. Was it a deliberate switch? Had he been trying to throw off MI5 surveillance in a patch of dead ground? Surely not. If BOX 88 was all it was cracked up to be, they wouldn’t employ a man as Olympically stupid as Zoltan to clean up after them.

Cara had made Zoltan a cup of tea and discovered that an unidentified Iranian man had paid him three grand in cash to shut the car park for twenty minutes and to turn a blind eye to whatever went on. She suspected that Zoltan had made similar arrangements with the same man in the past, but did not press for details. Instead she asked for a description of the Iranian’s appearance and manner, neither of which matched her memory of the man with whom Kite had been talking outside the Oratory. Released from the torture of telling lies, and perhaps hopeful that his full cooperation might mitigate against the need for arrest, Zoltan described the Iranian’s behaviour and movements immediately prior to Kite’s arrival in the Jaguar. Three men had been left in the car park at half-past twelve – all Middle Eastern, all without names – while Zoltan had gone for a cigarette and a cup of coffee at a branch of Caffè Nero near Green Park station. By the time he got back, the Jaguar was parked underneath the poster and only two of the men remained.

‘What were they wearing?’ she asked.

‘Smart,’ said Zoltan. ‘White shirts. Suit jackets.’

‘Officer Hawtrey.’ It was Vosse, using one of Cara’s cover surnames as he came down the ramp. ‘So this is him, is it?’

Zoltan stood up, unsteady on his feet. Vosse wasn’t dressed in police uniform, but that didn’t seem to concern the Serb, who nodded his head obsequiously as Vosse approached.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Cara. ‘Zoltan Pavkov.’

Vosse addressed the suspect.

‘My name is Galloway, Mr Pavkov. Chief Inspector Galloway of the Metropolitan Police.’ Cara caught his eye and grinned while Zoltan was looking the other way. ‘I’m here to ask you some subsidiary questions. I understand from Officer Hawtrey that you have a sum of money on the premises that you’d like to show us.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’ Zoltan hurried into the security hut, emerging moments later with a Harrods carrier bag stuffed with twenty- and fifty-pound notes.

‘And this was given to you by the Middle Eastern gentleman this afternoon?’ said Vosse, taking the bag and inspecting its contents.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Can I speak to you for a moment in private, Chief Inspector?’ Cara asked.

‘By all means.’

Leaving Zoltan alone at the base of the ramp, Cara and Vosse walked towards the Jaguar.

‘Any sign of the van?’ she asked.

‘Kidson Electrical? Not yet.’

Vosse touched the roof of the Jaguar and peered inside. ‘Looks spotless. They probably wiped it for DNA and fingerprints. Have you checked the boot?’

‘Locked,’ she replied. ‘What about BIRD’s phone?’

‘Still down.’ Vosse turned through three hundred and sixty degrees. ‘Which means we could well be standing right on top of it.’

They looked around. Cara’s eyes immediately settled on the black skip with ‘Commercial Waste’ written on it. Vosse followed the direction of her gaze and arrived at the same conclusion. The lid on the skip was closed and appeared to be locked.

‘Mr Pavkov,’ he called out. ‘Do you have a way of opening that?’

Zoltan looked beyond the section of torn plastic pipe and said: ‘Yes.’

‘Could you do that, please?’

It was just as they had both feared. Inside the skip, thrown on top of a heap of old rags and plastic bottles which reeked of vomit and mould, was a dark suit jacket and a pair of black leather shoes. Vosse gasped at the stench as he leaned in to retrieve Kite’s belongings, finding his wristwatch, house keys, wallet and mobile phone in the pockets of the jacket.

‘Fuck,’ said Cara.

‘Fuck indeed,’ Vosse concurred.

Cara didn’t need telling that Kite’s shoes, watch and wallet had been abandoned for the same reason that the kidnappers hadn’t wanted his phone: any or all of them could contain a tracking device which would lead BOX 88 to their door. Wherever Kite had been driven, he had been taken there in a new set of clothes or his naked body dumped in a landfill, never to be seen again.

Vosse’s phone sounded in his back pocket. He took it out and looked at the screen.

‘Tell me something I didn’t know,’ he sighed.

‘What’s happened?’ Cara asked.

‘Pegah Azizi doesn’t exist. Or should I say: Pegah Azizi n’existe pas.’

‘Fake driving licence?’

‘And credit card.’

A car came down the ramp. Zoltan waved it away shouting: ‘We are full!’ as Vosse put the phone back in his pocket and picked up Kite’s wallet.

‘Brian’s trying to get the CCTV from Europcar, but I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ he said. ‘Ten to one “Pegah” was wearing sunglasses and a hijab. We’d have an easier job finding Amelia Earhart.’

‘So what do we do?’ Cara asked. For the first time in her relatively short career, she had felt the blood rush of operational excitement, but was suddenly at a loss for ideas. She knew that formally arresting Zoltan risked exposing the secret investigation into BOX 88, but couldn’t think how else to proceed. ‘Do we call it in? Tell the police? Contact Six?’

Vosse took his time responding. He was flicking through Kite’s wallet litter, pulling out Visa and Oyster cards, dry-cleaning receipts, a driving licence. A burglar alarm was going off somewhere in the neighbourhood and he looked up, grimacing at the noise.

‘We do nothing,’ he said.

‘Excuse me?’

Cara was trying to remember her training. It frustrated her that she wasn’t able to work out why Vosse was suggesting such a course of action. Was she going to be asked to cover up Kite’s disappearance? Was Vosse going to stand down the investigation into BOX 88? He saw the confused look on her face and put her out of her misery.

‘We let him go,’ he said, nodding in the direction of Zoltan Pavkov, who was pacing at the bottom of the ramp, rubbing his hand over his head and massaging the back of his neck. ‘We keep his money, but we send him back to work. Tell him he’s been a lucky boy. Tell him he has nothing to be afraid of. The world needs good car park attendants and he’s one of them.’

Cara wondered out loud if it would work.

‘Of course it won’t work.’ The beaming grin which accompanied Vosse’s reply was the cheeriest thing Cara had seen all day. ‘He’ll panic. He’ll call his paymaster. And because we’ll be all over Zoltan’s phones, because you and Cagney will be sitting outside his flat tonight, and because Eve and Villanelle are going to be following said Mr Pavkov home this afternoon and waiting for him when he comes into work tomorrow morning, we’ll find out inside the next twenty-four hours who the fuck has kidnapped Lachlan Kite.’

6

When Kite regained consciousness he found himself lying on a hard bed in a small, windowless room fitted out with little more than a solitary bulb and a stained hessian rug. There were no pictures on the walls nor any other furnishings, save for a low plastic table close to the door on which someone had placed a bottle of water. As far as Kite could tell, there were no surveillance cameras. He was still wearing his shirt and suit trousers, but the jacket had been taken and his shoes were missing. There was no sign of his watch, wallet or mobile phone. Kite felt in his trouser pockets for his house keys, but they too had gone. All this was just as he had expected, just as he himself would have done in similar circumstances. The Iranians had been thorough. He was surprised that they had left the wedding band on his left hand; perhaps it had proved too difficult to remove.

The absence of a camera troubled him for two reasons. Firstly, it suggested that the security outside the room was watertight and that Kite’s captors were not concerned about the possibility of escape. Secondly, it indicated that they wanted to leave no record on film of what was about to happen to him. Kite leaned on what he could remember from his SERE training but knew that survival would depend mostly on a mixture of intuition, experience and blind good luck. He had been held captive once before, but in a different context and with no genuine risk to his life. He was brave, but he was also pragmatic. He understood the psychological demands of long-term confinement and accepted that few people can withstand the sustained sadism of a trained torturer, just as no person can survive indefinitely without food and water and rest.

As soon as he tried to move off the bed he felt a stabbing pain in his right thigh. He pressed his hand against the muscle, remembering the fight in the car. He was hungry and thirsty. Crossing the room, he broke the seal on the plastic bottle and drank from it. The top of his head was almost touching the bulb in the ceiling and there was no more than a few feet on either side of him in which to stretch and move. As he turned the metal handle of the door, finding it locked, Kite felt an ache in his kidneys but was otherwise free of pain. He recalled pressing his fingers into the driver’s eyes. He hoped that he had done him lasting damage.

Kite sat back on the bed and closed his eyes. There was no discernible smell in the room except for his own stale sweat: no damp, no food, no cleaning products. It was possible that the Iranians had smuggled him into their London embassy, but more likely that he was in a safe house on UK soil. Moving Kite to an aeroplane and attempting to fly him back to Iran would have been too risky.

He listened for sounds that might give him some clue as to his whereabouts. It was extraordinarily quiet. All he could hear was the low hum of a ventilation system. Kite knocked against the wall with his knuckles and felt the dull, unyielding thud of what was probably brick or fibreglass. If the room had been soundproofed, that might indicate that it had previously been used for the purposes of torture, or simply that he was being held in a built-up area where any noise from the room might alert a passer-by. That Kite was not yet dead was an obvious sign that the Iranians intended to interrogate him. It was then that he recalled what Fariba had said in the car.

I need your memory. When you wake up, I want you to tell me everything you can about Ali Eskandarian.

Was it his imagination or had Fariba also mentioned Martha? Kite thought of Isobel and the morning they had spent at the house, Rambo kicking against her belly, the child he had craved for so long and might now never see nor touch. He remembered his conversation with Fariba outside the church and cursed himself for telling him that Isobel was pregnant. There was no precedent for hostile states harming the spouses of targeted MI6 and CIA officers, but in the age of Trump and Putin, of Xi and Assad, all bets were off. During periods when he was not overseas on an operation, Kite was usually in touch with Isobel several times a day. Without knowing the exact time, he knew that many hours had passed since he had last texted her. When he failed to return home, she would inevitably ring around their friends, eventually calling the emergency number he had given her which connected to the desk at BOX 88. By morning, there would be a team of Turings combing CCTV and signals intelligence for clues to his whereabouts. By then, however, it might be too late. Kite knew that Fariba’s team would kill him as soon as they had extracted whatever information was required; you didn’t grab a British intelligence officer on UK soil then spit him back once you were done. He needed to buy some time, to conjure a story about Eskandarian which would satisfy the Iranians while protecting the sanctity of BOX 88.

Why now? Why come for him thirty years after the events in France? The British had played no role in the assassination of Qasem Soleimani; it was implausible that the Quds Force were embarked on revenge. Kite could only assume that word of the ongoing backchannel negotiations between BOX 88 and the Iranian leadership had leaked to elements in MOIS, Iran’s intelligence service. Personnel from the United States had been secretly meeting senior government ministers from Tehran at a hotel in Dubai without the knowledge or approval of the White House. Perhaps Fariba assumed, incorrectly, that Kite was a member of the negotiating team? But why the specific interest in Eskandarian? Was there a mole inside BOX 88 with access to the file from 1989? Perhaps Fariba’s interest was just a bluff, an opening move in a much longer game of interrogation. It was impossible to know.

Lying back against the flat, hard pillow, Kite remembered the woman outside the Brompton Oratory and the glimpse of the Vauxhall Astra tailing his Jaguar from Kensington. It was a slim ray of hope. If ‘Emma’ had been part of a larger surveillance team, it was possible that several vehicles had followed him onto Hyde Park Corner. If the Jaguar had been sighted on the ramp leading down to the car park, there was a chance that Kite’s absence had been noted. Unless he could somehow fashion an escape, his odds of survival depended on who had been following him. If Emma was private sector, he was out of luck. She would go back to her office, write up a report on Kite’s disappearance and head home for pizza and Netflix. If, on the other hand, she was MI5, Thames House had both the experience and the resources to probe more deeply into what had happened. Access to CCTV, number plate recognition cameras and cell phone activity might lead to a rescue attempt. Kite acknowledged the irony: BOX 88 had survived undetected for decades. That the Security Service might come to Kite’s aid in his hour of need would be a welcome, if awkward slice of good fortune.

Yet he could not rely on outside intervention. The Iranian team that had grabbed him were thorough and professional, gaining control of the car park, likely making the switch in dead ground and transporting him, apparently without interference, to a safe house prison which was under their command. Kite considered his options for buying time. That he would deny he was a serving intelligence officer was a given: it was the golden rule Strawson had drummed into him at the age of eighteen. Never confess, never break cover, never admit to being a spy. Xavier may have told Fariba that Kite was MI6, but Kite would insist that he had stopped working for British intelligence many years earlier. They had the wrong man. They had made a mistake. I remember nothing about Ali Eskandarian. Let me go.

Kite rolled onto his side and stared out into the room. There were other tricks he could employ, though it would be risky to do so against trained MOIS personnel. He could complain of suffering from high blood pressure or diabetes and insist that medication be brought to him. He could feign psychological breakdown. Sticking to his cover as an oil executive, Kite could tell Fariba that he was insured against kidnapping and offer a release fee of several million dollars. But he doubted that such an approach would work. There had been something targeted and specific in Fariba’s behaviour. It was obvious that he wanted information, not money.

The noise of a key turning in the lock. The door opened. Kite sat up to find the chauffeur pointing a gun at him. To his satisfaction, he saw that he had developed a black eye the colour of a ripe aubergine, the stain spreading across the bridge of his nose. In his left hand the driver was holding a clear plastic bag containing three aluminium boxes.

‘Eat,’ he said, placing the boxes on the table.

The chauffeur turned to leave. He had a look on his face of distilled contempt.

‘Any chance of a knife and fork?’ Kite asked with an edge of sarcasm.

‘Fuck you,’ he replied.

‘I thought you didn’t speak English?’

Kite smiled as the driver slammed the door. There was a portion of boiled rice in the first box, some moussaka and several cubes of grilled chicken. Kite ate the chicken, waited for the rice and moussaka to cool, then scooped them into his mouth using his fingers. He wiped his hands on the tails of his shirt and lay back on the bed, wondering about Isobel. She was not a person prone to panic or anxiety, but he did not like the idea of her worrying about him while she was pregnant. He entertained the foolish idea that Fariba would listen to what he had to say, thank him for his time and let him go, but it was a forlorn hope.

The key turned again in the lock and the door opened. A well-built man in his thirties whom Kite did not recognise came into the room. He had a thick beard with no sideburns and addressed him in heavily accented English.

‘Come with me.’

The man was dressed in a similar fashion to the goons Kite remembered from the ramp: dark trousers, white shirt, black shoes. As Kite stood up, he was sure that he saw a trace of cocaine in the base of the man’s nostril: a tiny fleck of white powder caught in a damp nest of hairs. The man did not meet Kite’s eye, nor try to bind his hands or prepare himself in any way for the possibility of an escape attempt. Instead he turned his back on the prisoner, leading him down a narrow, low-ceilinged passage lined with framed reproduction watercolours of European birds and flowers. Kite realised that he was on board a boat of some kind, almost certainly a large ship, likely not at sea because he had sensed no lateral movement in the water. The carpet was cheap and thin, and there was a very faint smell of diesel. The realisation gave him renewed hope. Ships have flares. Ships have hidden rooms and passages. Ships have radios.

‘In here,’ said the man, opening a door at the end of the passage.

Kite was shown into a room with blacked-out windows lit by two anglepoise lamps. Vinyl plastic sheets had been taped to the floor. For the first time he was afraid. There was a couch against the far wall covered in a white dust sheet with a wooden coffee table in front of it. Several cardboard boxes had been piled up in the corner of the room next to a television with a cracked screen. Two chairs were stacked on top of one another nearby. The guard lifted off the first of them, turned it in the air and set it down in the centre of the room, close to a metal toolbox.

‘Sit,’ he said.

Kite had no choice but to do as he was instructed. He waited for the guard to grab his hands and bind them, but he did not do so. Instead he left the room by a door in the facing wall and told Kite to wait. Kite looked around. Anything could happen in this place. Teeth. Toenails. Fingers. They had prepped the room. It would take all of his courage to withstand what was coming. He had to try to stop thinking about Isobel and to trust that she would be OK. He had to have sufficient faith in himself that he would not reveal the identities of BOX 88 agents and personnel under torture. If they were going to kill him, he hoped that his son would never find out what had happened here. And he prayed that it would be over quickly.

The door opened. Fariba walked in. He had changed out of the suit and was now wearing blue designer jeans and a white collared shirt. He smiled at Kite as if to reassure him. He still looked every inch the international playboy, fit and lean, as relaxed as if he had just walked off a yacht in Miami Beach and ordered a round of cocktails at the Delano. Kite wondered what had become of the real Jahan Fariba. It would have been simple enough for the Iranians to prevent him from attending the funeral and for the man standing in front of him to have assumed his identity.

‘Lachlan,’ he said breezily, as though Kite was an old friend whom he’d kept waiting for an unnecessary length of time. Fariba raised an apologetic hand and gestured at the vinyl sheets lining the floor. ‘I’m sorry about all this. How are you feeling?’

‘Just wonderful, thank you. Never been better.’

Fariba checked that the door behind Kite was locked and said: ‘Sure.’

‘What’s going on?’ Kite asked. ‘Who are you?’

‘Who am I?’ Fariba seemed to find the question amusing. ‘Well I’m not Jahan Fariba, that’s for sure.’

‘What’s your real name?’

‘My real name is Ramin Torabi. You may choose to believe that. You may choose not to believe that. I don’t care either way.’

The Iranian’s American-accented English was already beginning to grate. Torabi removed the dust sheet from the couch and sat down. The cushions were finished in cheap black leather. He made himself comfortable and stared at Kite with apparent fascination.

‘Wow. It’s quite something to have you here. Xavier told me so much about you.’

‘Did you kill my friend?’

‘Did I kill Xavier?’ The Iranian tried to sound affronted by the accusation, but his reply was deliberately provocative. ‘Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. It’s not particularly important.’

‘It’s particularly important to me.’

‘I’m sure that’s the case, buddy, but like I told you, I really don’t give a shit.’

If there was one thing Kite hated being called, it was ‘buddy’. He wanted to get up from the chair and finish what he had started in the car, but knew that as soon as he attacked Torabi, half a dozen armed Iranian goons would come rushing through the door to his rescue. This time there was a camera in the room, a dome lens in the ceiling. They were watching what was going on. Kite looked down at the metal toolbox. In one movement Kite could open it and use whatever was inside as a weapon. He knew that it had been placed there to tempt him.

‘Seriously,’ Torabi continued. ‘I don’t want to keep you here any longer than I have to. Truth is, we didn’t think you’d react in the way you did. You were good! You sensed the danger. You kind of forced our hand when it came to getting you under control, you know?’

Kite saw that he was expected to reply, so he said nothing.

‘I want to say something important before we start out. I understand how a situation like this works from your point of view. You’re a professional. You’ve been brought here. You’re trained for situations like this.’ Torabi produced a glib, insincere smile, lit a cigarette and blew a lungful of smoke at the ceiling. ‘You’ve been taught never to reveal anything about what you do. The first and the last rule of intelligence work – the same goes for Iranians as it does for Brits – is never confess. It’s like Fight Club! The first rule of spying is you never talk about spying!’ Torabi laughed explosively at his own joke, apparently under the impression that he was the first person to have made it. ‘Men like you and I respect those rules. But I want us to take a time out and go past all that bullshit if we can. I know who you are, I know what you’ve done. So the sooner we dispense with the usual “I’m-innocent, you-have-the-wrong-guy” shit, the quicker we can get this thing over.’

‘Can I speak?’ said Kite.

‘Not yet. I’m not finished.’ Torabi swept a hand through his carefully combed hair, inhaling on the cigarette. ‘You must have seen so many changes throughout your career.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Starting out as a young intelligence officer in the last years of the Cold War, seeing the Berlin Wall come down, the collapse of the Soviet experiment. The West triumphant. You had won! Then suddenly nothing to do. No role to play any more.’ Torabi waved the cigarette in the air and made a face of mock disappointment. ‘What was the purpose of MI6 when you had nobody to spy on? You and men like your associate, Cosmo de Paul, you must have been so lost. I would love to speak to you about all this when we’re done. Really I would.’

De Paul’s name fell like an axe on Kite. What had Xavier said? Why did Torabi assume that de Paul was his ‘associate’? Perhaps it was a deliberate tactic, the name casually planted to see how the prisoner would react. Kite maintained a poker face. It was clear that Torabi had prepared his speech in advance, intending to unsettle or confuse Kite while simultaneously calming any nerves of his own that he might be feeling.

‘Ramin,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.’ Kite knew that his denials would fall on deaf ears, but it was nevertheless essential to buy time by playing the innocent. ‘My name is Lachlan Kite, I’m an oil—’

‘Please!’ Torabi raised a hand and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I already told you. This is what I don’t want us getting into. So much bullshit, it insults the hard work and sacrifices we’ve both made during our careers. Let’s not waste time denying who we are, huh? Tell me what it’s been like, seeing everything change. One quiet day in the 1980s, no cell phones; the next, just a few years later, everybody is carrying one. Same thing with the Internet. No Facebook, no email, no apps; then suddenly everything is available online for the world to see. Spying has changed! I’m younger than you by – what? – ten years. I came into our profession long after the true Cold Warriors had left.’ Torabi accompanied this remark with the same self-satisfied smirk with which he had reacted to his Fight Club joke. ‘Your generation must have found it so difficult doing your job in the way that you’d been trained to do it. No more IRA to fight. No more ETA. No polite telephoned warnings to a newspaper from the latest Sunni group before they blow themselves up on the Central line. No more travelling under alias. No more false passports, no more dead drops and one-time pads. You’ve witnessed a generational change. It’s like talking to someone who lived through the age of steam and found himself travelling on a fucking space ship! How have you survived all this time? You’re a dinosaur, man. What a privilege to be sitting with you. Truly. What a privilege.’

Coke, thought Kite. He’s high on something. These guys are all using. They need it for their nerves, to get through whatever it is they’ve been ordered to do. The guard who came to the room was on it. The chauffeur was probably jacked up on a couple of lines when he drove the Jaguar to Cheshire Street. That was the anxiety Kite could feel coming off them just before the fight. He thought of Xavier’s troubles with drugs, of all the summer nights in his early twenties with Martha at raves outside London, Strawson berating Kite for ‘wrecking his brain with Ecstasy’.

Torabi was still banging on:

‘What fascinates me is, for all that time – thirty years of international diplomacy, Thatcher, Blair, Reagan, Clinton, Trump – you guys continued to hate my country. The British, the Americans, they knew the Saudis had bankrolled ISIS and 9/11. They watched as Sunni – not Shia – suicide bombers brought carnage to London and Paris and Madrid. You let the fucking Jews build a wall around Palestine and drive Arabs into the sea. But it was all still the fault of Iran.’ Torabi gave a contemptuous laugh. ‘We were the bad guys! We were the ones you punished, the nation you tried to destroy. Not the Saudis. Not the Russians. Not the Chinese. Why little old Iran?’

Kite was as fascinated by Torabi’s impassioned, sophomoric argument as he was perplexed by its purpose. Was his captor hoping to use Kite to broker a peace deal, unaware that BOX 88 was already doing just that with his own government’s ministers in Dubai? Or was Torabi’s heartfelt outpouring nothing more than an attempt to justify whatever violations lay in store for Kite in this chamber of horrors? Either way, he had no choice other than to continue to play the mystified innocent.

‘As a matter of fact, I agree with almost everything you’ve just said,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never understood why the Americans have targeted Iran for so long, unless it’s revenge for the humiliation of the embassy siege, which happened outside the living memory of more than three-quarters of the population. Maybe it’s because you stoked the insurgency in Iraq or bankrolled Hizbollah for thirty years. How do I know? The Iranian government hates Israel. A lot of Americans don’t hate Israel. I’m not clairvoyant, but could that have something to do with it? There’s no point in asking me these questions. I’m not a politician, Ramin. I’m just a guy who reads the Economist and the New York Times. There’s no point in keeping me here if you think I’m some kind of spokesman for the British government. These are questions you should be asking in Downing Street or, better still, Washington.’

Torabi met Kite’s denial with a slow, disappointed shake of the head. He looked down and scratched at a non-existent mark on his jeans. Kite stuck to his strategy.

‘When you say that I’m a spy and I’ve somehow been trained for this eventuality, that I get kidnapped in broad daylight all the time and this is somehow a normal day for me, the only truthful thing I can tell you is that you really do have the wrong person.’

Torabi sighed heavily and looked along the couch, as though a third party in the otherwise empty room might have heard what Kite had said and been similarly disappointed.

‘You see, buddy, this is what I didn’t want us to go through. Next thing you’ll be telling me you need urgent medication for Type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure or whatever they teach you to say to buy yourself time—’

‘If I could just finish—’

‘Sure. Go ahead.’

Kite moved towards a more detailed denial using what he knew about Xavier’s personality.

‘I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘I don’t have diabetes. I don’t have high blood pressure. You mentioned Martha in the car.’ Torabi looked up expectantly. ‘You mentioned Ali Eskandarian. You were with Xavier in Paris and clearly asked him what happened when we first left school a very long time ago in the summer of 1989. Is that right?’

‘The summer in France. Yes.’

Kite knew that he was on the right track. He took a deep breath.

‘Because I’ve spent so much time in the last thirty years travelling overseas, Xavier always believed that I worked for MI6. He wasn’t alone. A lot of people have come to that conclusion. In fact there was even a guy I spoke to at the funeral who told me he thought I was a spook. I’m not, Ramin. Never have been. You’re barking up the wrong tree.’

‘So where did you learn to fight like that?’

It was the obvious flaw in Kite’s strategy. He had reacted quickly and violently to the Iranians in a way that was highly unusual for an ordinary citizen. An instinctive lie jumped to his rescue.

‘I didn’t say I couldn’t defend myself,’ he said. ‘I was mugged when I was thirty and I’ve been doing martial arts ever since. You obviously weren’t who you said you were. I recognised the word “jakesh” and was pretty sure your driver was calling me a “pimp”. You weren’t familiar with Alford, despite claiming you’d been there as a boy. You were driving away from the restaurant and taking me into a car park with a bunch of heavies in black suits waiting on the road. I got scared. As you no doubt know, I’m a rich man. I travel in South America and the Middle East. My company takes out substantial kidnap and ransom insurance for its employees. I thought you were after my money.’

Torabi appeared to have stopped listening. He turned towards the door and shouted: ‘Kamran!’

The chauffeur walked in. This time he was wearing sunglasses to cover the black eye. Kite would have found it funny had Torabi not stood up, walked behind his chair and put his hands on Kite’s shoulders.

‘Ask the prisoner if he works for MI6,’ he said. ‘If he denies it again, break one of the fingers on his right hand.’

7

Five hundred miles away, Xavier Bonnard’s good friend Jahan Fariba woke up in a Frankfurt hotel room with no idea of the time and no memory of having gone to bed. He felt exceptionally well rested, but anxious and uncertain. Bright sunlight was visible around the edges of the curtains. There was a light on beside the television, another in the bathroom.

He looked towards the bedside table but could not see his phone, which he usually left charging overnight. It was only then that he discovered he was still partially dressed. Pressing his feet together under the duvet, Jahan realised that he was wearing a pair of socks. Pushing back the duvet, he saw that he was wearing the same shirt he had worn on the previous day for the meeting with the Iranians. He always took his watch off last thing at night, but it was still on his wrist.

He looked at the time. It was just after three o’clock. At first Jahan assumed that it was three o’clock in the morning, but the sunlight outside contradicted this. Perhaps his watch had stopped? But the second hand was moving as normal and the date had moved forward. It was the day of Xavier’s funeral. Jahan had been due to catch a 7 a.m. flight to London. With a mixture of bewilderment and intense frustration, he realised that he had overslept.

How was it possible? He sat up in bed and looked around for something to drink. Padding into the bathroom, he drank several mouthfuls of lukewarm water, scooping it into his mouth from the tap. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, trying to remember what had happened the night before. He had met the Iranians in the lobby. Early evening drinks had turned into dinner, dinner had turned into … what? He had no recollection of anything that had taken place after they had sat down in the restaurant. There had been beers during the meeting, then probably some wine with the meal. Jahan was not a heavy drinker but he could usually hold his liquor. Certainly he had no memory of the night descending into cocktails and digestifs. Christ. Had he collapsed and been dragged to the room by the Iranians? Had they quietly called the front desk and arranged for Mr Fariba to be escorted back to his room? If that was the case, it was probably the end of the business deal.

Jahan found his suit jacket in a heap on the floor. He picked it up and went through the pockets, looking for his phone. There were four messages from his wife in Rome, half a dozen from various friends, as well as a text from the airline noting that he had failed to make his flight. A couple of old Alfordians who had been expecting to see him at the funeral had written to say that they had looked for him, without success, at the Brompton Oratory.

Jahan downloaded his emails. There were no messages from the Iranians. Should he write to them and try to find out what had happened? Maybe not just yet. It would only embarrass both parties. Better to wait and to contact them in a couple of days. Jahan realised that he had no memory of what they had discussed at the meeting, only that both men had seemed enthusiastic about the rebuilding project in Syria.

He was annoyed to have missed the funeral. Xavier’s death was a tragedy and Jahan had wanted to pay his respects to one of the most interesting and amusing men he had ever met. He tried to load Facebook on his phone, but the password on the account wasn’t working and – to his confusion – there was only a blank space where his profile picture had been. Instead he wrote an email to the friend in London with whom he had been due to stay that night:

Gav, I’m really sorry. I overslept and missed my flight. Missed the funeral too. Not like me to be so disorganised. I think I must have eaten or drunk something last night that didn’t agree with me. I’m so sorry, but I’m not going to be coming to stay with you guys. Still stuck in Frankfurt and will just go straight home to Rome. Please accept sincere apologies for messing you around. Send my love to Kitty and the kids and hopefully see you soon. Jahan x

8

The chauffeur stood in front of Kite. With a blunt, joyless expression on his face, he said: ‘Do you work for MI6?’

Kite leaned on years of tight scrapes and crises, slowing everything down, trying to breathe evenly, trying to think of a way to stop what was about to happen. He clenched his hand into a fist, wondering how Kamran would go about breaking the fingers. With pliers? With a hammer from the toolbox? Certainly with pleasure: it would be more than adequate revenge for the black eye.

‘Kamran,’ he said, trying to sound as calm as possible. ‘I’m sorry about your eye. I was frightened. I was trying to defend myself. I apologise.’ His words had no discernible impact on the driver, though Torabi looked interested. Kite kept going, determined to deny both men the satisfaction of knowing that he was afraid. ‘It’s difficult to answer your question. Yes, it’s true, when I was a very young man, I worked for MI6.’ Torabi’s eyes flicked up. ‘That’s why your boss may be confused. Even by telling you this, I’m committing treason, but I don’t want a broken finger.’ He tried to laugh. ‘I value my hands!’

Kamran looked at Torabi, who indicated that they should continue to listen.

‘By the time I was twenty-five, I quit.’ Kite prayed that what he was saying was going to work. ‘In fact, if I’m completely honest, I was sacked. So the answer to your question is this: I do deny that I work for MI6 because I haven’t worked for them since 1994. And I’ll keep on denying it until I don’t have any fingers left.’

‘Why?’ said Torabi.

‘Why? Because it happens to be the truth.’

The partial, if inaccurate, confession had a miraculous effect. Torabi and Kamran exchanged a few words in Farsi and the chauffeur left the room.

‘So it is true.’ Torabi closed the door behind him. Kite felt a droplet of sweat fall onto the back of his arm. ‘In the summer of 1989, while on holiday with the family of Xavier Bonnard and Iranian businessman Ali Eskandarian, you were working for British intelligence?’

Kite lied again.

‘Not to my knowledge at the time, no. I was what you might call a useful idiot. The Americans took advantage of me. I was a friend of Xavier’s who became embroiled in what happened. Mr Eskandarian was a businessman with links to the highest levels of the Iranian government, yes, and was therefore a person of enormous interest to the CIA. At the tender age of eighteen, I was hardly aware of this. I spent most of that summer drinking wine, smoking weed and chasing girls, including Martha Raine. Afterwards, the Americans questioned me, pretending to be consular officials, and obtained my side of the story. One thing led to another and I was later put forward for a job at MI6 during my first year at university. The CIA had recommended me. I went to Russia, I partied a little too much, MI6 found out – and they sacked me.’

‘That’s not what I heard.’

‘And what did you hear, Ramin?’

Almost everything Kite had said, with the exception of his youthful enthusiasm for red wine and Martha Raine, was an invention.

‘I heard that you knew what you were doing. That Xavier later found out about it and was upset. He blamed you for a long time. Isn’t that true?’

Kite remembered Xavier’s rage and hurt, the lies he had been forced to tell as his friend’s world came crashing down. Thirty years on, he was using those same lies again on Torabi.

‘Xavier had the wrong end of the stick. His father got in his ear and blamed me for what happened. That wasn’t true. It was the Americans. Christ, it was all so long ago! Why the hell do you need to know all this now?’

‘All in due course,’ Torabi replied, tapping out a cigarette and offering one to Kite. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I should have asked before if you smoked?’

‘Only when I want to.’

Torabi lit the cigarette and stood up. Kite also rose from his chair. The plastic floor rippled beneath his feet.

‘Enough for now,’ said the Iranian. ‘I have business to attend to. You will be taken back to your cell until I am ready to deal with you. When I come back we’ll start again. You’ll tell me everything you remember.’

‘About 1989?’

‘Yes.’

Kite assumed that Torabi would allow enough time to pass for his prisoner to fall asleep, then order his goons to wake him up.

‘Where am I?’ he asked.

‘That is not important.’

‘Are we on a boat?’

Torabi looked surprised. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘The smell. The size of the rooms.’

‘Maybe you are. Maybe you’re not. Like I said, it’s not important. Hossein will take you to your room.’

Kite could see that he would make no further progress.

‘My wife is pregnant,’ he said, hoping for a last-minute favour, but expecting nothing. ‘She’ll be worried. I’ll be perfectly happy to answer your questions, but I’d appreciate it if you would somehow get a message to her explaining that I’m OK.’

Torabi opened the door, preparing to leave. Hossein, the man who had earlier escorted him to the interview, entered the room.

‘You’re OK for now, Mr Kite,’ Torabi replied. ‘Who’s to say if you’ll be OK later.’

9

Kite turned to Hossein and told him that he needed to use the bathroom. They were halfway along the corridor leading back to his cell.

‘The what?’

‘The bathroom. The toilet. The loo.’ It was like a brief insight into the absurdities of the British class system: saying ‘loo’ meant you were posh; when Kite had used the word ‘toilet’ in his first term at Alford, the thirteen-year-old Cosmo de Paul had told him he was ‘common’. ‘Where can I find it?’

There was a door at the end of the passage. Hossein was holding a two-way radio and used it to call Kamran. The chauffeur duly appeared and the two men instructed Kite not to lock the door as they stood outside the bathroom, waiting for him to finish.

Kite used the time to assess what the room could offer. A small, blacked-out porthole confirmed that he was indeed on board a ship. He kept the tap running to provide a covering noise for a brief search of a cupboard beneath the sink. Inside he found two unused bars of soap, bottles of bleach and cleaning fluid, but not what he had hoped for: hydrogen peroxide hair dye or white spirit, something flammable and highly sensitive which could later be either forcibly ingested by the guards or used as an improvised explosive. There was an out-of-date box of codeine, some diarrhoea medication and a few pills for seasickness. Kite put six of the codeine tablets in the pocket of his trousers, closed the cupboard and switched off the tap. At the last moment, he noticed a nail protruding from the wall beneath the sink. He grabbed the head and moved it back and forth, trying to disturb the plaster, but had succeeded only in shifting it a few millimetres from the wall when there was a knock on the door.

‘Let’s go,’ said Hossein.

‘Two minutes.’

Kite looked around for other loose screws or nails which he could prise from the walls and later use in a fight. There were none that he could see. The shower curtain was held up on plastic hooks. A metal towel rail might come away from the wall easily enough if Kite needed to use it as a weapon. There was a towel draped over it. He flushed the toilet and went out into the corridor.

‘Everything OK, gentlemen?’ he asked.

Neither man responded. Hossein waited until Kamran had closed the bathroom door, put a gun in the small of Kite’s back and walked him to his windowless cell. As he reached for the door handle, Kite glanced down at Hossein’s watch and saw the date and time. It was just after eleven o’clock at night on the day of the funeral. He wondered what Isobel was doing, how she was coping with his disappearance. Doubtless by now she had called the emergency number and whoever was on duty at BOX 88 had instigated a search.

‘Do either of you have a phone?’ he said, noting that neither Hossein nor Kamran had searched him as he came out of the bathroom. ‘If you could get a message to my wife—’

‘Forget it,’ said Hossein. Kamran had already turned and was walking back down the corridor.

‘I can pay you when I get out.’

Kite held out no hope that Hossein would oblige; he simply wanted to find out what kind of man he was dealing with. A loyal colleague of Torabi – or a foot soldier? There was a momentary flicker of interest in his eyes, but his response was by the book.

‘You couldn’t afford me.’

‘Hossein!’

Kamran had summoned him from the end of the corridor. Hossein pushed Kite through the open door, so that he almost tripped over on the low plastic table, then slammed it shut behind him.

‘Hey!’ Kite cried out.

He heard the key turning in the lock, then the murmur of the two men as they spoke in Farsi outside. Kite walked over to the bed, put the codeine pills under the mattress and lay down. He was suddenly exhausted, yet knew that he would find it almost impossible to sleep. Torabi had organised everything so carefully: the car park, the ship, the switch of identity with Fariba. Kite knew what it was about Ali Eskandarian that the Iranians were so desperate to find out. What he could not understand was why it had taken MOIS thirty years to track him down.

10

The hours following the disappearance of Lachlan Kite gave Cara Jannaway her first opportunity to see the Security Service doing what it did best. For a woman who was not easily impressed, who had found her first year at MI5 to be peculiarly repetitive, even boring, it was quite an afternoon.

Within forty-five minutes of Vosse meeting Zoltan Pavkov, he had obtained a Home Office warrant to saturate the Serbian in round-the-clock surveillance. A technical team was dispatched to Zoltan’s flat in Bethnal Green, rigging the kitchen, bathroom and living room with listening devices and adding a live feed from the camera in his laptop computer for good measure. Zoltan’s shabby Fiat Punto was parked outside and received the same treatment: microphones were placed behind the dashboard and a tracking device in the recess between the boot and the back seat. Reaching an analyst at Thames House, Vosse instructed him to collate and analyse a file detailing Pavkov’s landline and Internet usage, as well as his online banking records. Threatening arrest, Vosse had told Zoltan to hand over his phone, then invited Cara to take him for a ten-minute walk around the block while he cloned its contents via Bluetooth and downloaded an application which would transmit all of the phone’s subsequent activity to a laptop in the Acton safe house. If Pavkov was dumb enough to call the Iranians, Cheltenham would catch every word.

Even then, Vosse wasn’t done. Following a quick lunch in Mayfair, Kieran Dean and Tessa Swinburn were given instructions to follow Zoltan when he came off shift at four o’clock. Matt Tomkins was told to go home and get some rest, then to drive over to the Bethnal Green flat at 11 p.m. to take over the stakeout. Meanwhile number plate recognition cameras had spotted the white van in the City, moving east through Whitechapel. The last known sighting of ‘Kidson Electrical Services’ had occurred on East India Dock Road at 14.35, indicating that the vehicle was probably located within a one-mile radius of Limehouse.

‘Needle in a haystack,’ said Vosse, ‘but at least it gives us an area to aim for. Once we see some activity from Zoltan’s mobile, he’ll get us to within fifty feet of BIRD.’ Cara’s boss held up the cloned device in his oversized hand. ‘I’m going to look at his messages, check who he’s been talking to. We’ll call a few numbers, see who picks up. Unless the Iranians are being very, very careful with their comms, we’ll have BIRD back home by the weekend.’

Cara didn’t necessarily share Vosse’s optimism but certainly admired his confidence and self-belief.

‘What about BIRD’s stuff?’ she asked, pointing to Kite’s belongings. Vosse had placed them on the boot of a nearby car.

‘BIRD’s shit?’ he replied, with a knowing look. ‘Good question. They left his wallet behind, his shoes, his phone, his watch. What does that tell you?’

Cara liked it when Vosse taught her on the job. She knew that she could learn from him, that he enjoyed the feeling of being the veteran taking an apprentice under his wing.

‘Well, I suppose they’re worried about being tracked,’ she replied.

‘More than that.’

Cara was stumped. She walked over to the car and picked up Kite’s watch.

‘Says Omega Constellation.’ She held it up for Vosse. ‘Looks genuine, looks expensive. Must be worth at least a grand. But they didn’t nick it.’

‘Quite,’ Vosse replied, looking proud of his pupil. ‘And the wallet?’

‘Plenty of cash inside. Same deal. They were in a hurry, didn’t have time to help themselves to a bit of easy money.’

‘Go through it,’ said Vosse. ‘Might be useful later. Photograph the bank cards, there might be accounts we don’t know about. Look at where he’s been going on his Oyster, use the driving licence to check if he’s hired any cars lately. There’s a couple of business cards in there. Make a note of the names, they might cross-reference with someone in the BOX 88 research. I looked earlier. There are four photos. Keepsakes. One is Isobel, find out who the other people are. There’s an old laminated picture of a cheerful-looking bloke standing behind a bar. Maybe Kite’s father? Another one of a woman who looks a lot like him, taken more recently. Could be his mother, his sister. Are they still alive? If we can match the faces, we can start to piece together where BIRD is from, who he cares about, who might have information for us. Speaking of which, have a look at the activity on Isobel’s profile for any sign of contact. Chances are she’ll start to worry when she doesn’t hear from him. Usually when he’s away they text one another. She might know something we don’t. Who these people are. Why they’re interested in BIRD. What they plan to do with him.’

‘What about the mobile?’ Cara asked.

‘Tricky.’ Vosse ran his tongue around his teeth, like someone at dinner fretting over trapped food. ‘Tried cloning it while you were walking the dog.’ He nodded towards the ramp, where Zoltan was smoking his ninth cigarette of the afternoon. ‘No dice. More firewalls than Xi Jinping’s underpants. Without the access code or a fingerprint, it’s a Cheltenham job. Could take days.’

‘Shame,’ said Cara. She was developing a sneaking regard for Kite’s tradecraft.

‘A phone is a thing of beauty, Cara, a joy forever. Its loveliness increases.’

‘Keats used a mobile?’ she said, wanting Vosse to know that she’d understood the reference.

‘Clever you,’ he said. ‘Imagine what we could get from that thing.’ Vosse looked down at the phone. ‘All those names and numbers, all those places BIRD’s visited, every message he’s sent, every Uber he ever ordered …’

‘A goldmine.’

‘But the men who took it didn’t want it.’

Cara saw that Vosse had realised something critical. She couldn’t tell if the breakthrough had only just occurred to him or if he had been sitting on it for some time.

‘Didn’t even take the SIM card,’ he said, pointing at the slot in the phone. ‘Didn’t take his watch or his money. No, they want something that couldn’t be found in BIRD’s phone calls, his emails, his text messages.’

‘What’s that?’ Cara asked.

‘They want his memory.’

11

Kite lay back on the bed. He closed his eyes, taking his mind back to 1989, a place which held the answers to each of Torabi’s questions, a vault containing the operational secrets of BOX 88.

The memories were as clear to him as they had been for thirty years – every encounter, every thought, every conversation – as if he had written a detailed account of his experiences at Alford, in Scotland and later in France, and was reading from it in the dark, soundless cell.

* * *

It is early November, the events of the summer three months behind him. The eighteen-year-old Kite is in Martha’s bedroom in Finchley, her parents away for the weekend, her older brother out at a birthday party. They have the house to themselves.

Most of Kite’s friends had taken off on their gap years: picking fruit in Australia; taking South-East Asia on a Shoestring around Thailand and Indonesia; others burnishing CVs with teaching jobs at primary schools in Uganda and Tibet. Xavier was in Paris with his family, dealing with the aftermath of the summer. Strawson had asked Kite to stay put in London: BOX 88 wanted to put him through advanced training before he went to university the following year.

‘Tell me about your dad,’ said Martha. ‘You’ve never said much about him.’

She was in bed rolling a joint, Kite sitting in a chair by the window watching people come and go in the winter street below. Ten days later, in that same house, he would be in the living room with Martha’s parents watching the Berlin Wall being torn down on the Nine O’Clock News. Had anyone else asked the same question, Kite would have shut them down. He had been avoiding the subject of his father for half his life. But Martha was different. He wanted to tell her everything.

‘Dad was called Paddy,’ he said. ‘Pierce Patrick Kite, but everyone knew him as Paddy. He wasn’t born in Ireland. My grandparents lived in London during the war and only moved back to Dublin in the 1950s. Dad must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time. He had a sister who died in the Blitz as a baby – Aunt Catherine – so like me he was a kind of only child by default.’

‘You had a sibling who died?’ Martha asked. She looked concerned, as if Kite had suffered a terrible loss about which she had known nothing.

‘No, no.’ He poked her leg with his foot. ‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters. It was just me and Mum and Dad.’

Martha nodded, relieved, going back to rolling the joint. They had bought a packet of Rizlas and some cigarettes at a mini-supermarket on Regents Park Road. Martha had insisted on going to a place where her face wasn’t known in case the man who ran the corner shop at the end of the street told her parents she was smoking pot.

‘What did he look like?’ she asked.

From his wallet Kite took out two colour photographs: the first showed his father proudly standing at the bar of the hotel in Scotland, arms folded, grinning from ear to ear; the second was a picture of his parents sitting on a picnic rug at the Wigtown Show on a bright summer day in 1978.

‘Wow, your mum is beautiful,’ she said. ‘They look happy.’

‘They were.’

‘Your dad’s got such a glint in his eye. Looks very kind, but naughty. Bit like you.’

Kite turned from the window and watched as Martha lit a small lump of treacle-brown hash with her Zippo and crumbled it onto the Rizla.

‘Whenever people talk about Dad they say he was a typical hard-drinking Irishman who seduced the girls and flew down the wing for the first XV and liked to quote Keats and Bob Dylan when he was pissed. I don’t know how much of that is true. There are a lot of myths around Dad. I know he preferred Scottish whisky to Irish, Tennant’s to Guinness. His Dublin friends would come over on the boat from Larne and tease him about that. I grew up around bottles of Laphroaig and Lagavulin, six-packs of Kestrel lager and McEwan’s Export. There was alcohol everywhere. My father would hide half-bottles in the pockets of his suits and hang them in the cupboard. Whenever I smell booze on someone’s breath, I instantly think of him and kind of hate them for it. Even at school on weekends when we were getting pissed, it was enough to make me stop drinking if I smelled it on someone. One time, Xav drank a bottle of sherry from an off-licence in Windsor in the space of fifteen minutes and threw up in his room. A friend and I had to clear up the mess, get him out of his clothes and into bed before Lionel, our housemaster, found him. Would have been expelled if he’d got caught – he was on final warning. It was like parenting him. I’d parented my dad when he was drunk, so what was the difference? He’d be out of his head at three in the afternoon and say: “Don’t tell your mother, it’ll only upset her.” He’d pass out in different places. I remember Mum crying in their bedroom as she tried to wake him up for work. He was never violent or aggressive, but I can’t think of a single moment when he wasn’t drinking. At breakfast once, when I was about eight, I picked up his glass of orange juice by mistake, took a sip and it was full of vodka. He screamed at me to put it down, but it was too late. I spat it out and started crying.’

‘Jesus.’ Martha was holding the rolled joint, as if it would be disrespectful to light it while Kite was speaking so candidly. ‘Was he drinking when your mum met him in Ireland?’

‘Dunno. Maybe. Maybe not. Are you going to light that?’ Martha clicked the lighter, the paper burning fast so that the end of the joint briefly flamed, sending up a plume of smoke. ‘When he was a young man he was quite political apparently. Not IRA, but definitely on the side of the Catholic Irish, the Republicans. Then he married Mum, an English Protestant girl, which is basically why they decided to leave Dublin and come to Scotland. Dad had been running a pub in Temple Bar so he knew the hospitality business, how to change a keg, find waiters, chefs, that kind of thing. Somebody told me a pub is perfect cover for an alcoholic. Everything you need is right at your fingertips. So they bought a hotel together in the back of beyond, near Stranraer on that little peninsula that sticks out like a haemorrhoid from the south-west corner of Scotland.’

Martha laughed at that, giggling as she took a second hit on the joint. Kite asked if he should open a window, but Martha said no, it was too cold, and anyway she didn’t want her neighbours smelling the hash.

‘We’ll have to go there one day, drive up,’ said Kite, bending over and kissing the inside of her thigh as he took the joint. ‘It’s such a beautiful place. There’s new owners now; apparently they’re doing up all the rooms. The nearest village is Portpatrick – nothing but a harbour and a crazy golf course where I’d go a lot after Dad died just to be on my own or hang out with a friend who worked at the hotel.’

‘Gary the waiter,’ said Martha, remembering that Kite had mentioned him in the summer. She seemed to be able to recall everything he told her: every name, every anecdote, every detail.

‘Yeah, that’s right. Gary.’

He took a long draw on the joint, held the smoke deep in his lungs and passed it back. Martha set it in a scallop shell ashtray by the bed and stared at him, huge eyes drawing in Kite’s words.

‘The hotel is called Killantringan. It’s a beautiful old country house with a lawn in front running down to the sea. Surrounded on all sides by steep hills at the end of a long, isolated road. There’s a cliff walk to the north which eventually takes you into Portpatrick. One night, in 1982, Mum and Dad had an argument about his drinking and Dad took off into the garden, ended up walking along the beach with a bottle and then somehow up over the rocks in the darkness and onto the path leading to the cliffs. He fell. Lost his footing at the top. Somebody found his body the next morning. And that was that.’

‘I’m so sorry, Lockie.’

‘Mum closed the hotel for three weeks, took me out of school and we went to stay with my granny in Sligo. When we got back, everything changed. I was expected to be the man of the house from then on, to work behind the scenes, helping out in the kitchen, turning down the beds at night, unloading deliveries with the other kitchen staff, chatting up the guests. I hadn’t even turned twelve. I feel as though I went from being a child to a grown-up in the space of six months, you know? Then one day Mum announced that I was going to boarding school. No discussion. It wasn’t anything either of us had ever talked about or mentioned – it would never have occurred to Dad. Not one of the big Scottish schools, either: Glenalmond or Fettes or Gordonstoun. No, she was sending me to Alford College, the most famous school in the world, five hundred miles away in the south of England. Turned out the head of admissions was an old boyfriend of hers. He arranged for a bursary, the rest of the fees would be paid by Dad’s life insurance. I’d be starting in September ’84, which was less than a year away. She said I was too clever to go to one of the local schools and she didn’t want me to feel trapped by the hotel, by how provincial things were up there. She said it would mean I’d have more of a life, more opportunities, play sport, meet interesting people …’

‘Interesting people like Xav,’ said Martha. Kite couldn’t tell how serious she was being.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Like Xav.’ He took another hit on the joint and passed it back.

‘Were you upset?’

‘Don’t think so, no.’ It hadn’t occurred to Kite that he might have been. ‘Actually, I remember being quite excited. Alford sounded a bit of an adventure. Being stuck in Scotland reminded me of Dad all the time and I was sick of feeling that way. If I was on the beach, just going for a walk, I’d think of him on the cliff or remember making dams with him in the stream that ran into the sea from the hills. We’d build these huge sand walls, massive blockades strengthened with rocks and driftwood and bottles. Great lakes of water would build up behind them. Dad would hum the Dambusters tune and say in his thick Irish accent: ‘It’s like the fockin’ Aswan, Lockie!’ Then we’d throw stones at the top until the dam started to break, bit by bit, until finally it gave out and a torrent of water would rush down to the sea carrying all the sand and seaweed and beach crap we’d used to build it up.’

Kite could feel the joint working through him. Martha took another hit and sat up against the headboard.

‘It was the same if I was in Portpatrick or Stranraer or up in the hills behind the hotel. Dad was everywhere. He’d given me an air rifle for my birthday. We used to go shooting together, looking for rabbits. Just Dad and me, walking for hours. The first one I shot had myxomatosis. Usually the rabbits would run away as soon as they heard us coming, but this one was so ill it just sat there, stock-still, waiting for me to kill it. I was ten. Dad lay beside me in the heather, showed me how to load the pellet into the rifle and line up the telescopic sight. When I hit it, he reacted like I was the Sundance Kid. He was so happy for me! For days afterwards he would refer to me in front of the guests as “the Red Baron”. I didn’t know what he was talking about. So that’s what it was like once he was gone. Just this big absence, this hole where his gigantic personality used to be. I was so confused and angry with him for dying, you know? I felt like he’d let me down, let Mum down, made all of us so sad, the staff at the hotel, his friends. There were probably four hundred people at his funeral, mourners who came over on the ferry from Ireland, friends who drove up from England or flew into Glasgow and Prestwick. He touched a lot of lives.’

‘What about your mum?’

Kite waited, weighing up the most diplomatic response. Martha had yet to meet his mother; he didn’t want to tip the scales against her in advance.

‘It hardened her, no question,’ he replied. ‘Here was this glamorous woman, married to a man she loved more than any wife had ever loved any husband as far as I could tell, but he’d loved alcohol more than he’d loved her. More than he loved me, come to think of it. Dad’s true friends were Smirnoff and Gordon’s and Famous Grouse. Those were the half-bottles I’d find in the pockets of his jackets in the cupboard where he hung his suits. Twice a week a van would come down from Whighams of Ayr carrying six dozen cases of wine and another of spirits for the hotel. Dad would be waiting to greet it like Joanne Whalley was going to jump out in a nurse’s uniform.’

‘She was the one in The Singing Detective?’ Martha asked.

‘Yeah. That’s her.’

Martha climbed off the bed, came over to the window and hugged Kite. When they kissed he could smell the smoke on her breath and felt dizzy. The next thing he knew she had put Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me on her record player and they were making stoned love to ‘Catch’. Afterwards they went downstairs to the kitchen, made ham and cheese sandwiches in a Breville toaster and brought them back up to Martha’s room with a bottle of Bulgarian white wine stolen from the fridge.

‘So how did you do Common Entrance if you were going to a local school in Portpatrick?’

Kite was now in bed wearing a pair of boxer shorts, watching the naked Martha flicking through her record collection.

‘Put the other side of the Cure on,’ he said.

‘It’s a double album,’ she replied, removing the record from the sleeve and putting it on the turntable. Lowering the needle, she hit the vinyl in the wrong place so that it scratched midway through the first song.

‘What’s this?’ he asked as the song began again. He was looking at the bright red lips on the album cover.

‘“Just Like Heaven”,’ Martha replied. ‘You’ll love it.’

‘Mum hired a private tutor,’ he said, answering Martha’s question about Common Entrance, the exam every boy had to take if he wanted to get into Alford. ‘Name was Roger Dunlop, as in Green Flash. He was a colleague of Billy Peele’s from Alford with no wife, no family, made extra money in the holidays cramming boys for Oxbridge and A levels. He came up to Killantringan three times, stayed for free, taught me eight hours a day then arranged for me to sit all the exams at the hotel with a retired headmistress from Castle Douglas invigilating to make sure I didn’t cheat.’

‘Did you?’ Martha asked, climbing into bed beside him.

Kite was drunk on his share of the Bulgarian wine and still slightly stoned.

‘Cheat?’ he said. ‘Moi? How could you even ask that question?’

In France, Xavier had told Martha that he and Kite had been less than model schoolboys, constantly in trouble with Lionel Jones-Lewis and permanently in the headmaster’s office on one charge or another.

‘You cheated,’ she replied deadpan.

‘Fine.’ Kite raised his hands in mock surrender and looked around for more of the wine. ‘I’d never studied Latin,’ he continued when he had found and poured it. ‘My dad was a working-class lad from Dublin. My mum was an ex-model who went to parties with Jean Shrimpton and left school at sixteen. They didn’t exactly read The Odyssey to me as a bedtime story.’

‘That’s a good job,’ said Martha. ‘The Odyssey is Greek.’

‘Smart arse.’ He pinched her shoulder. ‘Anyway, Latin was what nice prep school boys from Sunningdale and Ludgrove were taught from the age of eight. They didn’t go in for it at Portpatrick primary in 1982. Probably still don’t. We had Miss Mowat, who was brilliant at maths and science, but not so good when it came to dead languages which hadn’t been spoken in Scotland for two thousand years.’

‘So poor Lachlan felt justified in cheating?’

Kite laughed at how much she was enjoying teasing him.

‘Fully justified,’ he said, and this time pushed her over so that she almost knocked the butts and ash out of the scallop shell. ‘Alford insisted that all boys needed Latin, so I had to sit for hours and hours with Roger declining amo, amas, amat and translating endless paragraphs describing Hannibal crossing the Alps. I was actually all right at it, just couldn’t remember a lot of the vocab. The night before the common entrance was a Sunday and the chef decided to walk out because Mum hadn’t given him a pay rise. She’d stepped in and was cooking for a full dining room of thirty-odd people. I was chopping onions and carrots in the kitchen and fetching stuff for her from the fridge. Didn’t get to bed until eleven and had no time to revise. Did you see The Godfather on TV the other day?’

Martha, who was straightening out the bedclothes, shook her head.

‘OK, well Dad had rented it on video from a shop in Stranraer and never taken it back. The shop had given up on the fine, so we sort of owned it. I’d watched it at least six times without Mum knowing. There’s a bit where Al Pacino tapes a gun behind a cistern in the bathroom of an Italian restaurant so that he can go in there, grab it and shoot the two people he’s having dinner with. I just stole that idea. On the Monday morning I stuck a Latin dictionary behind the cistern in the staff toilet where the headmistress wouldn’t see it if she went in after breakfast. Then, halfway through the exam, when I’d memorised all the words I didn’t recognise, I asked if I could be excused. She said fine, no problem, I went into the staff toilet, stood up on the seat, pulled the dictionary down, quickly looked up all the words I didn’t know, flushed the toilet and went back to the exam.’

‘How did you do?’ Martha asked.

‘Got four points out of five,’ Kite replied.

‘Smart arse.’

The next day, Kite and Martha slept past one o’clock and went for lunch at Pizzaland. Back at the house, Martha’s mother rang from Chicago, where she was giving a lecture at Northwestern University. Martha made no mention of Kite staying with her. Her parents knew she had fallen for a boy over the summer, but they had yet to meet him.

Returning to the bedroom, they put on Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me for perhaps the fifth time in twenty-four hours, got back into bed, smoked another joint and opened another bottle of wine which Kite had bought in Swiss Cottage. Martha was seventeen and looked her age; Kite was eighteen but could pass for twenty-three or twenty-four. Telling her about his childhood, he had felt released from a straitjacket of secrets and shame. For years, Kite had kept the nature of his father’s death hidden, even from Xavier, telling nobody that Paddy Kite had been an alcoholic. At Alford, to survive was to remain concealed; to thrive was to put on a mask, projecting nothing but confidence and strength to the outside world. It had occurred to Kite that, in many ways, the school was the perfect breeding ground for a career in intelligence. During five years at boarding school, he had learned how to vanish into different versions of himself: how to survive on charm and intuition; when to fight and to take risks; when to impose himself on a situation and when to melt into the background.

Martha took out two Marlboro Reds, lit both of them and passed one to Kite. She asked how he had felt when he first arrived at Alford. Kite considered his answer for some time. Martha was at a crammer in North London after a brief stint at boarding school had ended in expulsion. He knew that, like most people, she thought of Alford as a nightmare fusion of If … and Another Country.

‘You must have missed your mum,’ she suggested.

Kite felt the bump of his mother’s absent love and deflected the question. ‘Yes and no,’ he said. He tugged distractedly at one of the hairs on his chest. ‘Every house at Alford has a matron in it who’s supposed to be there to look after the boys. They call them “dames”. A kind of surrogate mother.’

The cigarette hadn’t lit properly. Kite took the lighter from her, trying again. One of the best things about leaving Alford was the realisation that he would never again have to set eyes on Joyce Blackburn, the ghoulish, humourless spinster who had been his ‘dame’ for five long years. A mean-spirited ally of Lionel Jones-Lewis, she had been widely loathed by every boy who had passed through Kite’s house.

‘So she looked after you?’

‘In the way that Nurse Ratched looks after Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, yes.’

When he saw that Martha looked shocked, Kite reassured her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It was OK. Alford was fine.’

‘That’s it? Fine?’

Martha stubbed out her cigarette in the scallop shell and climbed out of bed. She suddenly seemed angry.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Your father dies, your mother decides to send you five hundred miles away to boarding school, you effectively leave home at the age of thirteen – and you’re telling me it was “fine”?’

She wants to protect me, Kite thought. She wants to know everything about me so that she can be my secret sharer and confidante. If I tell Martha about my life, she will accept the decisions I have made, the insecurities I have felt, and she will love me. The realisation came to him in a euphoric moment, rushed through his mind by the joint and the wine and the constant, repeating pleasure of making love to her. Looking back, that was the moment when Kite knew that he wanted to be with Martha Raine for as long as she would take him.

‘OK,’ he said, with a degree of uncertainty. ‘It wasn’t always “fine”.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I’ll tell you the truth if you like. I’ll tell you the whole story.’

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