A club was a different place during daylight: the bar shuttered, the tables wiped. The balloons had all been burst. But this, in fact, was business as usual, because Nob-Nobs was mostly closed; had only opened the previous evening as a private hire. Its owner, a trust-fund wannabe mover and shaker learning the hard way that post-uni event management was a different story, was happy to do Judd a favour, or even two; the first, a knock-down price for the party booking; the second, allowing him access this evening, in the absence of other custom. No doubt he imagined he was greasing his way into Judd’s good books with his largesse. But Judd didn’t have good books, and for him, giving discounts betrayed uncertainty about your value. Give him a freebie, you were lunch. Still, learning that lesson would stand the pup in good stead. When the club folded at a heartbreaking loss, it wouldn’t come as a total surprise.
Though as far as actual security went, he’d be on his own.
“I’ve used up credit I don’t have persuading Belwether to speak to you,” Taverner had said. “And it’s got to be somewhere private. Somewhere you won’t be seen. Last thing he needs is to be written up on a Westminster blog, having a tryst with one of his party’s sworn monsters. You’re lucky he’s intrigued.”
Judd had said, “And you can’t simply pass on my message yourself?”
“You asked for access, Peter. This is access. What more do you want?”
An honest answer would have been a single word. Seb.
His current personal protection team—discreet, well-dressed, expensive—did its job, but the truth was he missed his one-time factotum, a word chosen to piss people off. Seb himself had never cared what Judd called him so long as the terms of his employment remained elastic. Thus he had performed the usual duties of a gentleman’s gentleman—driving, dry-cleaning, dealing with tradesmen—while also, on occasion, fucking up people’s shit. Jeeves with a sockful of ball bearings. He could be very persuasive when the situation demanded. Even when it didn’t, you paid attention.
One evening, though, Seb had gone out on a job requiring maximum deniability and had never showed up again. Judd had monitored body-recovered-from-river stories for months following, but no joy. In other circumstances—any that had not involved him instructing Seb to commit murder, for example—he would have pointed the police in the direction of one Jackson Lamb, but as things were, that might have proved unproductive. Lamb remained an unresolved item on Judd’s agenda, but in the ongoing absence of Seb was likely to remain so. This new crew fulfilled its remit with dedication and intelligence, but when it came to fucking up people’s shit, he needed freelance talent.
Still, this was business as usual. While personal security was a must-have for someone with Judd’s history, a meeting with an up-and-coming pol, even one from the party he’d spent his career alternately mocking and vilifying, was unlikely to end in violence.
So he’d simply said, “All right, then. Eight p.m.,” and given her the address.
Phone once more in hand, he stood now in the centre of Nob-Nobs’ dance floor. The previous evening the room had been awash with sound and light; coloured rays chasing each other, glancing off the young and the shop-soiled alike. Tonight it felt like a cavern; the floor damp where cleaners had mopped up spillages, and the air refreshed by artificial means, rather than anything as retro as an open window. Noises off included a transistor echoing tinnily on a staircase and the wheeze and suck of a Hoover. There was probably an equation you could apply, the time and effort it took to clean up after a party versus the time and effort it took to make the mess; or, more fundamentally, how much you paid those doing the cleaning compared to how much the partygoers spent. But that was how the market worked. You went to the party or you mopped up afterwards. Secure in his status as one of life’s partygoers, he called one of its mopper-uppers. “You’re off the hook.”
“. . . Excuse me?” said Devon Welles.
“I said you can stand down. The evening’s your own.” A woman roughly the same shape as the vacuum cleaner she was pushing appeared from behind the bar, and Judd’s eyes followed her while he spoke. “Kick back, hang loose.” His precise enunciation was the oral equivalent of using tweezers. “Or whatever it is you do when you’re not at work.” Welles was one-time Met and former Service; now private sector, and unlike Seb, not someone you’d ask to break a journalist’s legs, though the task clearly wasn’t beyond him should he have a hankering. Having him as a shadow added a touch of class, reminding Judd how important he was, in the unlikely event it slipped his mind. But Christ, he was boring.
“Where are you?”
“You’re off-duty. That’s not your business.”
