Clown Town полностью

There were cars at the lights, but not many: It was outside rush hour, outside school set-down. At a rough estimate—and not counting the three adults supervising children in the play area, the old man walking his dog and the two couples playing tennis—only eight or ten people saw River carry a crowbar to the mild-looking house midway down the row, apply it to the door at lock height, and put his whole body weight into leverage. The lock gave way with a splintering noise and a small cloud of dust, and he was inside, shouting Sid’s name; Louisa, in his wake, pointlessly trying to shield him from view, but conscious of being the object of stunned attention. River dropped the crowbar in the hallway. Someone sounded their horn, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was all the sounds Louisa couldn’t hear; the alarm that had been triggered when the crowbar’s edge slipped into place and was now bellowing their presence; the clatter of boots hitting the ground. River shouted Sid’s name again, but no one replied.

Nice plan, thought Louisa.

We’ve got three minutes.

In his days of spads and lackeys—political appointments made by party bosses to ensure he didn’t get into trouble, or no more than could be kept from public view—there would have been smoke signals going up: PJ is bored. Never a good sign. PJ is bored, meaning he’d be seeking adventure. The best that could happen was he’d disappear for an afternoon with his best friend’s wife, “PJ’s best friend” being a temporary post, candidates assessed largely on the condition of their wives. The worst-case scenario was that he’d start creating policy, and nobody wanted that. But those days were behind him, and the only brakes on his behaviour were those imposed by his own self-restraint, so it was pure chance he wasn’t snorting coke off a teenage hooker’s breasts when his phone rang, early afternoon. His screen read “Number withheld.”

“Diana. Lovely to hear from you.”

“I’ve set up a meeting.”

“How splendid.” Judd was looking through his study window onto the garden, where Xanthippe and some friends were recovering from the previous evening’s excesses, the four of them sprawled across three sunbeds like an exercise in fractions. “But I’m pretty sure the, ah, whispering of sweet nothings into receptive ears was your function.”

“Peter, we can do this two ways. You can insist on being a pompous prick, and we’ll get nowhere. Or you can listen to what I’ve arranged, agree that it meets your requirements, and put your happy face on. Shall we continue?”

“Since you put it like that, I’ll choose door two. Who’s my lucky confidante?”

“Dominic Belwether.”

He allowed silence to gather. Belwether, the new Security Minister, was a rarity among the current intake of MPs inasmuch as he had a hinterland, having done several tours of duty with the armed forces, and generally kept quiet about it. Because of this, he was one of the political faces of the moment, and if the face was somewhat round and a bit shiny, that did him no harm with the electorate, particularly that large and growing sector which didn’t give a fuck about politics. And if the Whitehall rumour tree was still reliable—its rustlings reached Judd through his erstwhile party colleagues, the way sound travels through dead leaves in autumn—Belwether was being groomed for higher things.

Judd said, “Interesting choice.”

“Because?”

“Because you’re not famous for cosying up to rising stars. And nor, unlike every career pol ever, do you grow moist in the company of graduates who’ve seen active service. But then . . . Do you know, I heard a rumour about Belwether. From a friend of a friend.” He paused, allowing Diana time to draw up a mental family tree: what kind of friends friends of Judd might have, given that Judd didn’t have any friends, not really. She was doubtless picturing trolls. “That in his army days, he worked on . . . special assignments.”

“Peter—”

“Waterproof.”

“Oh, not that canard. Again. Waterproof didn’t happen, Peter. And I was nowhere near it when it wasn’t happening.”

“So you’ve said. But if it did happen, someone had to be in the vicinity. Those black sites didn’t take out ads in The Lady. And Belwether was well-placed, wasn’t he, in his eastern European postings, to make the kinds of contacts Waterproof might need?”

Which weren’t the kind of contacts you’d put on your CV afterwards. The Waterproof protocol had been a form of anonymised rendition, whereby bad actors were removed from the stage without benefit of curtain calls; their destination, prison blocks in former Soviet states, whose regimes were prepared to exchange hard time for hard currency. Those rumoured to have been on the receiving end had, understandably, been unavailable to appear at the eventual inquiry, and would no doubt have been disappointed by its final ruling.

“So I do hope,” Judd went on, “that in choosing him as a cutout, you’re not issuing a veiled threat.”