It looked like the beginning of a week of hard work; we had a meeting with the various people involved with the new European Network. It went as all initial meetings go; some individuals requiring definitions, and others wanting copies of memos that had long since been put through the shredder.
LJ and I seemed to make a reasonably good team; I turned major objections into minor objections and LJ’s speciality was ironing out the minor objections. As Ferran & Cardini were a commercial profit-making organisation, I thought that the discussions were successful enough but I could see that Clive Bingham-Carter from MI6 was going to cause a few problems for us. He insisted upon all kinds of procedural rigmarole, hoping that LJ would slip up or get annoyed, or both. But LJ had been weaned on this sort of thing. He let Bingham-Carter talk himself to a standstill and then paused a long time before saying, “Oh yes?” as though he wasn’t sure that Bingham-Carter had made his point. Then LJ made his point all over again in careful measured syntax as though speaking to a small child. LJ would rather split a hair on the back of his neck than an infinitive.
Roberts was a new, young and intelligent graduate from Cambridge that the Partners had borrowed from MI5, in my absence. He was a tall, good looking twenty six year old who wore tailored suits, went to see plays in small theatres and was apt to use long words where short ones would do. He was sitting at my desk when I entered my office using my computer terminal. I asked him what he thought he was doing. Flushing with embarrassment he stood up and quickly introduced himself. He apologised profusely for being there and informed me that he had been assigned to work for me, for the time being by Mr Levenson-Jones. I put him to work at a vacant computer terminal in the main office; I still wanted to find out more about Oliver Hawkworth and his business dealings. Hawkworth had the best lawyers to weave an intricate web of companies, within companies, within holding companies. It would be a long task.
On Thursday morning Jasper Lockhart phoned from a public call box. Tats took the call and said that I would meet him at the Kensington address that Lockhart gave her at 9.30pm.
I was busy all that afternoon. At 8.00 pm I shut down the terminal on my desk and put my laptop into its case. I’d completed a superficial report of the assignment in Dorset, marking the Poseidon file “closed” and submitted it to LJ for initialling. Using his gold fountain pen he initialled each page without comment then gave the file to Zara, but his eyes never left mine.
Exotic cars lined both sides of the cobbled street in that part of Kensington.
Number 21 Charlotte Mews had a pearl blue Jaguar convertible parked outside with two men in short sleeved shirts and jeans leaning up against it drinking cold beer out of bottles. I tapped the heavy lion head doorknocker against its polished brass back plate and an attractive young woman wearing a French maid’s outfit and mask covering her eyes opened the door. “Please, come in — enjoy,” she said. Her voice sounded familiar, although she was attempting a very bad French accent.
“Dancing to the left, booze and smokers straight on and out onto the terrace.” She patted me lightly on the arse before disappearing into the packed room of dancers.
There was a dense scrum of smokers and drinkers around the rear of the house; men with gelled hair sticking up in all directions and girls talking about their latest man and how much he was worth. In the corner there was a serious tequila-drinking contest under way and a man attempting to drink a yard of ale.
I reached the big table at the far end. Behind it was a very large man wearing an ill fitting dinner suit and a foul coloured dickey bow.
He said, “There’s only gin, vodka, beer and what looks like…” He shook the bottle of cream liquid viciously, “… Bailey’s.” He held it up to what light there was, and said. “Bailey’s” again. A girl with a long cigarette holder and wearing a twenties style outfit said, “I really would recommend my surgeon, he’s done wonders for my tits.”
I took my drink and wandered off through a doorway into a small but very well equipped fitted kitchen. A girl wearing a cat suit, complete with long tail and painted whiskers on her face, was eating canapés and talking on her mobile phone. I turned around. The girl who liked her tits was now talking about lipo-suction. Nowhere did I see Jasper Lockhart. It was just as crowded outside on the terrace except for a small octagonal summerhouse at the far end of the walled garden.
Inside were three people all dressed in black. The soft music came from a CD player and the gentle fug of reefer smoke drifted around the small dimly lit room. They all turned their heads slowly as I stepped into the open doorway.
One removed its dark glasses. “Jake Dillon, you old rogue, you came after all. Well, don’t just stand there, come in. Shut the bloody door, will you, you’re letting all this wonderfully mellow air get away.”
Jasper Lockhart dismissed his two nubile girl friends, got up and shook my hand vigorously.
“Great to see you, pal,” he said in a slurred voice.
“Great party, don’t you think?” One of them said as they left.
“Fascinating,” I said. He shook his head a couple of times in an attempt to sober up, getting up and throwing open the door to the wooden building he took great lungfulls of fresh air, which seemed to make him feel worse and turned him a strange tint of green. After he had been to the bathroom Jasper Lockhart wanted a word with me. He went out to his car with uncertain steps.
The girl in the French maid’s outfit and mask was holding the shoulders of another girl who was being spectacularly ill into a flowerbed.
Chapter 34
“Do you know what?” said Jasper Lockhart once we were seated in his car.
He was looking around the dashboard and under the seats anxiously. I asked what he was looking for. “Listening bugs, old son,” he said, switching on the radio.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“I’m being followed, that’s what the problem is,” he said.
“Really?” I said.
“Absolutely and without a shadow of a doubt, although I wasn’t sure until today. That’s when I decided to phone you.”
“I don’t know why you phoned me,” I said. “What can I do?” I paused. “It’s gone too far for me to get involved, Jasper.”
“Too far?” said Jasper Lockhart. “What’s gone too far?”
“Look, I don’t really know too much about it,” I said, like I’d said too much already.
“You mean the business down in Dorset, don’t you? All that stuff with George and that chap Robert Flackyard?”
“What do you think?” I said. “You’ve been dabbling in some pretty heavy stuff. Can’t Hawkworth help you?”
“He says he can’t get involved. What’s going to happen now?”
I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You know I could get into some seriously deep shit for just talking to you.”
Jasper Lockhart said, “Yeah,” about four times.
After what I considered to be an appropriate length of silence I said, “It was because you tried to con me that started to make things drop into place you know,” I said casually. “When you became part of an official MI5 enquiry,” I dropped in for good measure.
Jasper Lockhart repeated the word five a few times, changing it from a statement to an interrogative. “What you mean is that they’ll come for me during the night?”
“Well,” I said, “that’s a little melodramatic, this is England after all. Things like that only happen in films and spy books, don’t they? No. These guys are good, I mean really good. Your death will almost certainly look like a traffic accident or something along those lines.”