“Sounds like fun,” Rudi said, imagining a room full of English Parliamentarians and legal types solemnly ploughing their way through a three-course meal prepared by Mrs Gabriel. He assumed bread pudding would feature somewhere, or the mysterious substance known as ‘Spotted Dick.’ Comfort food for men of Empire.
“Wouldn’t mind staying out of the way, would you?” asked Mr Self in that English way which was really an order.
“If you give me some money I could go to the theatre,” Rudi suggested. “Fiddler On The Roof at the Savoy.”
Mr Self thought about it. “Not a bad idea. I’ll see if I can get you tickets.”
Rudi shook his head. “It’s okay. I was only joking.”
Mr Self tipped his head to one side and regarded Rudi as if examining the hitherto unsuspected parameters of joking. “Alternatively,” he said finally, “you might want to turn in early. It’s going to be dreadfully boring. Very dry.”
“Perhaps I could cook for you,” Rudi said.
Mr Self considered this for roughly a femtosecond before shuddering. “And upset our Mrs Gabriel? Oh no, no thank you.” He laughed, but there was no humour at all in his body language. “No, I think we’d best leave the catering to her, old son.”
Rudi shrugged. “As you wish.” He went back to his book – Brad and Angelina were adopting another child – but Mr Self didn’t move. Rudi looked up. Mr Self was watching him. “Was there something else?”
Mr Self kept watching him. Rudi could almost hear him composing a report. “Subject offered to cook dinner.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No.” And he left.
Rudi laid down his book and looked out of the window at barristers and solicitors and clerks and tourists and local workers going past below. He thought he and Mr Self understood each other very well by now, and expressed that understanding with an atmosphere of polite mutual distrust. Still, a party was interesting. And whoever was behind Smithson’s Chambers would know that it was interesting. He wondered if it was a test.
THE DAY OF the party dawned wet and windy. Mrs Gabriel’s breakfast – fried eggs, fried bacon, grilled tomatoes and a rather horrible Cumberland sausage – was hurried and not even up to her own less than exacting standards. The little woman hurried about the Chambers with a vacuum cleaner and a tattered cardboard box full of cloths and cleaning solutions, making a valiant and rather noteworthy attempt to bring the cluttered and dusty rooms up to a standard which would not offend legal bigwigs and Ministers of Parliament, and everywhere she went she kept having to move Rudi out of the way because he was sitting or standing just where she needed to clean or dust or hoover next, and finally this enraged her so much that she spluttered that it would please her very much indeed if he would just go out and leave her in peace to get the place ready, please. To which Rudi protested that it was raining. Which broke Mrs Gabriel’s reserve entirely and caused her to say, in a very loud voice, “I don’t care if it’s cats and dogs pelting down outside, sir. I need to get this place ready!”
Unwillingly, grudgingly, Rudi put on his shoes and shrugged into his jacket, and, collecting an umbrella from the elephant’s foot stand by the door, went out into the wet windy world.
Which wouldn’t have fooled anyone, but that wasn’t the point. The point was simply to cause nuisance. So he unfurled the umbrella and put it up and set a brisk pace up to the archway and out onto Fleet Street, imagining a surveillance team being scrambled as he turned left and stepped out towards Trafalgar Square.
It was a dreadful day, but he felt lighter of heart than he had for some weeks. He had already been more than averagely fit, and his long rambles around London had tempered him, and he put on as much of a spurt of speed as the other umbrella-bearing pedestrians allowed as he reached Trafalgar Square and worked his way around the various street crossings to Admiralty Arch.
The vehicle gate of the arch was closed off, but the pedestrian ones remained open, fitted with scanners manned by drenched policemen. He slipped through, past the ivy-choked bulk of the Citadel, and into St James’s Park.
Once in the park, he slackened his pace, wandering seemingly aimlessly. He treated it like one of Fabio’s training exercises, scoping out likely locations for dead drops but not being quite as careful as he normally would. He imagined the surveillance team – and he knew they were there, they could not not be there, his departure from the Chambers had been too obviously stage-managed for them to ignore it – arriving flustered, catching up, seeing him looking for somewhere to stash – or collect – something. What could he be planning? What could be going on in his mind? What could he possibly be going to do later? He imagined Mr Self snorting at all this but being unable to ignore it, just in case. Rudi was so obviously, transparently, taking the piss, but how to be certain? Could it be a double-bluff…?
So he spent a leisurely hour in the park, then he picked up his pace again and walked down to Victoria, and from there onto the Embankment for a nice calm stroll back to the Temple and Smithson’s Chambers, where Mr Self was waiting with a barbed glance and a flustered and busy Mrs Gabriel was waiting with a cold collation – a couple of cold chicken drumsticks, some thickly-sliced ham, doorsteps of white bread, salted butter, and a pot of tea – and a request to please stay out of my way for the rest of the day, please, sir. Rudi smiled. Been a bad boy. Sent to bed without my dinner.
On the way up to his room, carrying a tray laden with Mrs Gabriel’s efforts at supper, he saw Mr Self again, and the look that passed between them was so freighted with meaning and nuance that it could have won a Nobel Prize for Literature, or at least an Oscar. It was a look, finally, of acknowledgement, of recognition. They smiled at each other. Mr Self’s smile was ghastly. It made Rudi’s heart lift like a dirigible.
BUT IN THE end, the day had merely been mischief, a diversion from the creeping boredom that had been gathering around him. It had been fun, in an anarchic kind of way, but now it was over and he was contemplating his cold collation, he felt a bit low, almost post-coital. Annoying his hosts had been terribly gratifying at the time, but it hadn’t actually achieved anything.
He took up Brad Pitt again, and read while the antique streetlamps outside came on and the noises of Mrs Gabriel clattering about trying to clean up downstairs were gradually replaced by an expectant silence and a scent of roasting meat and boiling vegetables mushrooming up through the Chambers, and then, quite slowly, the increasing hubbub of a dinner party getting into gear in the rooms beneath his feet.
Rudi lay on his bed, reading by the light of the little green-tasselled bedside lamp, listening to the murmur of conversation on the floor below, judging the arrival of each course by lulls in the noise. It sounded as if quite a few bigwigs and MPs and assorted top hats had responded to Mr Bauer’s invitation.
At some point between the main course and dessert, Rudi got up from the bed and went over to the door of his room. He opened the door quietly and stepped out onto the landing.
Smithson’s Chambers, like the other Chambers on King’s Bench Walk, occupied a building on six floors. The ground floor was where the main business of the Chambers was conducted – interviews with clients, administration and so on. The first, second and third floors were accommodation. Bedrooms, dining rooms, sitting rooms, the kitchen. The sixth floor was a chaotic space under the eaves of the roof, piled haphazardly with old furniture and dusty rolls of carpet and cardboard boxes of ancient ribbon-tied legal files.