At Risk (3 page)

I
n Trumper’s in Jermyn Street, a mile to the northwest, Peregrine Lakeby settled himself into the well-stuffed comfort of his chair. With some satisfaction, he surveyed himself in the angled mirror. It was not easy to look elegant while a barber fussed around you with his towels and brushes, but despite his sixty-two summers Perry Lakeby congratulated himself that he managed it. Not for him the thread veins, pouchy eyes and multiple chins that rendered his contemporaries so physically unappealing. Lakeby’s gaze was a clear sea-blue, his skin was taut, his hair a backswept gunmetal mane.

Why he should have escaped time’s attrition when others had not, Perry had no idea. He ate and drank, if not to excess, then certainly without moderation. The closest he got to exercise was the odd bout of adultery and, in season, a few days’ shooting. If pressed, he would probably have attributed his well-preserved appearance to good breeding. The Lakebys, he was fond of informing people, descended from the Saxons.

“Good journey up to town, sir?”

Perry raised a dyspeptic eyebrow. “Not too bad, barring the mobile phone louts. People seem to think nothing of broadcasting the details of their ghastly lives to the world. And at balls-aching bloody length, too.”

Mr. Park’s scissors flickered. “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Back to the country tonight, is it?”

“ ‘Fraid so, yes. My wife’s got people coming over. The most boring couple in Norfolk, but there you go.”

“Indeed, sir. Just tilt the head, if you would.”

Perry took the train down to London once a month, on average, and usually went straight to Trumper’s. Something about the dark panelling and the badger-bristle brushes and the sensible, soapy smell of the place—some reminder of school, perhaps—was immensely comforting to him. Perry valued continuity, and he had been going to Trumper’s for several decades now. He could have gone to the barber-shop in Fakenham and achieved much the same result for a third of the price, but it would never have occurred to him to do so. His London trips were an escape—not least from the watchful eye of Anne, his spouse—and they had a ritual character that he had come to rely on.

“Chin up, sir, if you would.”

Perry obeyed, and Mr. Park patted his customer’s jowls with sharp-scented spirit.

“Will there be anything else, sir?”

Perry sat there in a pleasing miasma of talcum powder and Essence of Sicilian Limes. Not even the prospect of Ralph and Diane Munday hoovering up his gin could spoil the moment. “I don’t think so, Mr. Park. Thank you.”

He stood, and was assisted into the velvet-collared coat that he wore to town. Ascending the stairs to street level, he saw that although the wind was up, the rain had stopped, which was about as much as you could reasonably ask of a December morning.

Furled umbrella in hand, Perry sauntered westwards towards St. James’s, past the bespoke shoe shops, the hosiers, the hatters, the perfumers, the bathroom suppliers, the cuff-link emporia, and the traditional shirtmakers with their windows piled high with bolts of striped cloth. All of these establishments further heartened Perry Lakeby, confirming as they did that there was still a world where the old order counted for something, and deference was still accorded to people such as himself. And if some of the old places had closed—had been replaced by mobile phone outlets or brashly egalitarian men’s outfitters—he turned a blind eye to the fact. He wasn’t going to let it spoil his day.

Outside New and Lingwood he considered treating himself to a tie. He had a particular affection for New and Lingwood—there had been one of their shops at Eton when he was there, and indeed there probably still was one. At the last moment, however, he turned away from the door. He could hardly arrive home wearing a new tie without a present for Anne, and he wasn’t going to have the time to buy one. Or, in truth, the money. He had had to tighten his belt in recent months and if he occasionally indulged himself in certain areas he did so out of his own private funds. These funds were strictly limited, and—whatever the mitigating circumstances—not to be squandered on Liberty silk squares or presentation bottles of stephanotis bath oil from Floris.

Cigars, however, were something else. Kipling once wrote that a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke, and it was with precisely this dictum in mind that Perry crossed the street to Davidoff, on the corner of St. James’s. The shop’s proprietor greeted him politely, and showed him into the humidor room. This was one of Perry’s favourite places on earth, and for several long moments he simply breathed the Havana-scented air. The choice was, as always, exquisite, and Perry lingered indecisively over the Partagas, the Cohibas and the Bolivars. In the end the proprietor intervened, drawing his attention to a fine old canary-wood humidor containing a couple of dozen El Rey Del Mundos in various sizes. Perry took three, a Gran Corona and a couple of Lonsdales, and handed over two large-denomination banknotes in return.

Crossing St. James’s, avoiding the taxis which, these days, seemed to offer pedestrians no quarter at all, Perry made for the discreetly grand entrance of Brooks’s Club. It was his goddaughter’s birthday, and he was due to give her lunch there at noon.

Miranda Munday was the youngest offspring of Perry’s Norfolk neighbours, and Perry was still not quite sure how he had come to be responsible for her spiritual well-being. On the basis of past form, however, he had a fair idea of what the next couple of hours would hold. The twenty-four-year-old would be resolutely unimpressed by her surroundings—by the club’s vaulted ceilings, gilded mouldings, heavy burgundy draperies and forest-green leather armchairs. Instead she would comment disparagingly on the paucity of female members, frown humourlessly at the dining room menu, choose a vegetable starter instead of a main course, refuse the club claret in favour of mineral water, insist on camomile tea instead of a pudding, and regale Perry at length with the jaw-droppingly dull details of her job in advertising. Why, he wondered, were the young so deadly
serious
? What the hell had happened to fun?

Striding through the club’s entrance, he greeted Jenkins, the hall porter, disposed of his coat, and placed his umbrella in the long mahogany stand. Eleven thirty. Half an hour to wait.

On impulse, instead of going straight upstairs, he turned right into the club’s backgammon room, where two members were finishing a game.

“Morning, Roddy,” said Perry. “Simon.”

Roderick Fox-Harper MP and Simon Farmilow regarded him for a moment without recognition. “Lakeby, isn’t it?” asked Farmilow, eventually.

“Peregrine Lakeby. Time for a board?”

Farmilow’s eyebrows rose. He was a well-known tournament player, but if this pigeon was offering himself on the altar . . .

“Tenner a point?” suggested Perry, driven by the other man’s silence to reckless bravado.

The game did not take long. Farmilow’s first throw was a double six, which automatically doubled the stakes. A couple of minutes later, his position established, he turned the doubling dice from two to four. Rather than concede, and go down to the tune of £40, Perry accepted the raise with a faint smile—a smile which remained in place as, with faultless courtesy, Farmilow constructed a prime, closed Perry out, and gammoned him. A gammon, as both players knew, redoubled all existing stakes.

“Another?” asked Perry, his voice a little less steady than before.

“Why not?” agreed Farmilow.

This time things went a little better for Perry. A reasonable series of early throws encouraged him to double, but before long his opponent was bearing off his last counters.

“Call it a morning?” Farmilow suggested.

“I think I might,” murmured Perry. Moving to a table at one end of the room, he wrote out an IOU to Farmilow for £100 and placed it in the slotted wooden box. He might as well have bought Anne that damned scarf. Still, accounts didn’t have to be settled until the year’s end. The day wasn’t ruined.

Miranda Munday, her unremarkable figure enclosed in a beige suit, was waiting for him in the hall. As they climbed the winding staircase together Perry mused that at least she usually buggered off pretty quickly after lunch. With the help of a taxi he would easily be able to make his 2:30 appointment in Shepherd Market. At the thought of that appointment his hand tightened on the banister, the back of his neck prickled and his heart thumped like a regimental drum. Every man needs a secret life, he told himself.

O
n the other side of the river, a mile to the east, a Eurostar train from Paris was pulling in to the terminus at Waterloo station. Halfway along its length, a young woman stepped from the soporific warmth of a second-class carriage in to the bracing chill of the platform, and was borne on a hurrying crowd towards the terminus building. Electronic announcements echoed along the covered way, overlaying the rattle of baggage trolleys and the whirring of wheeled suitcases—sounds so familiar to the woman that she barely registered them. In the past couple of years she had made the journey to and from the Gare du Nord at least a dozen times.

She was wearing a parka jacket over jeans and Nike trainers. On her head, a brown corduroy Beatles cap from a stall on the Quai des Celestins, its peak pulled low over her face, and—despite the overcast day—a pair of aviator sunglasses. She looked somewhere in her early twenties, she was carrying a holdall and a large rucksack, and there was nothing to distinguish her from the other long-weekenders who spilled cheerfully from the train. A careful observer might have noted just how little of the woman was actually on display—the parka entirely disguised her figure, the cap completely covered her hair, the sunglasses obscured her eyes—and a very careful observer might have wondered at her unseasonally sunburnt hands, but on that Monday morning no one was paying a great deal of attention to the day’s second consignment of passengers. The non-EU passport-holders were submitted to the customary examinations at the gate, but the vast majority of passengers were nodded through.

At the Avis rent-a-car counter, the woman joined a four-strong queue, and if she was conscious of the CCTV camera mounted on the wall above her she gave no sign of it. Instead, opening the morning’s edition of the
International Herald Tribune,
she appeared to bury herself in a fashion article.

A sharp mobile phone beep from beneath the counter greeted her arrival at the front of the queue, and the assistant excused himself for a moment to read a text message. When he looked up again it was with an absent smile, as if he was trying to think up a snappy reply. He processed her with due courtesy, but he could tell from her cracked nails, poorly kept hands and choice of car—an economy hatchback—that she was not worthy of the full beam of his attention. Her driving licence and passport, in consequence, received no more than a glance; the photos appeared to tally—both were from the same photo-booth series and showed the usual blank, slightly startled features. In short, she was forgotten by the time she was out of sight.

Slinging her luggage on the passenger seat, the woman eased the black Vauxhall Astra into the stream of traffic crossing Waterloo Bridge. Accelerating into the underpass, she felt her heart race. Breathe, she told herself. Be cool.

Five minutes later, she pulled in to a parking bay. Taking the passport, driving licence and rental documents from her coat pocket, she zipped them into the holdall with her other passport, the one she had shown at the immigration desk. When she had done this she sat and waited for her hands to stop shaking from the delayed tension.

It was lunchtime, she realised. She should eat something. From the side pouch of the rucksack she took a baguette filled with Gruyère cheese, a bar of hazelnut chocolate, and a plastic bottle of mineral water. She forced herself to chew slowly.

Then, checking her mirror, she pulled out slowly into the traffic stream.

R
eading through the Marzipan file at her desk in 5/AX, Liz Carlyle felt the familiar sick unease. As an agent-runner, anxiety was her constant companion, an ever-present shadow. The truth was grimly simple: if an agent was to be effective, then he or she had to be placed at risk.