But inside the car frosted air circulated, and to all outward appearance Ingrid Tearney was unruffled by heatwave or grim thoughts. Her summer outfit was new, the fruit of a recent upturn in her finances, and her mannish features were relaxed into a benevolent-seeming mask. She looked like the friendly grandmother, the one who offers oranges, but behind that mask steam valves hissed. Judd’s telephone summons had come from the man himself instead of the usual lackey, but he’d given no clue as to what it was about. His tone, though, had reeked of triumph. Whatever game he was about to play, he’d been dealt a useful hand.
Still, let the chips fall. Dame Ingrid didn’t negotiate with politicians.
Unless they had her by the throat.
At the minister’s residence, the front door was opened by a pretty young man with the faintest hint of a lisp. Nobody doubted Judd’s heterosexuality, which was as enthusiastic as it was indiscriminate, but his entourage tended towards the fey—Judd hadn’t dubbed them his camp followers for nothing. It was always possible the quip had occurred to him first, and he’d chosen his retinue accordingly.
“Dame Ingrid,” he said now, as she entered his office.
“Home Secretary.”
“I’ve taken the liberty.”
Which sounded like a bullet-point summary of his Home Office tenure to date, but was in fact a reference to the tea tray on a nearby table.
Following his guide, she sat in an armchair. The room, she noted, remained much as it had done during his predecessor’s ministry, which is to say that not only was it still walnut-panelled, book-lined and Turkish-rugged, but that Judd hadn’t even bothered to have the art changed: some drab
“Milk? Sugar?”
She shook her head.
Peter Judd poured, placed cup and saucer on a table by her elbow, and lowered himself into the chair opposite.
He was a bulky man, not fat, but large, and though he had turned fifty the previous year, retained the schoolboy looks and fluffy-haired manner that had endeared him to the British public and made him a staple on the less-challenging end of the TV spectrum: interviews conducted on sofas, by scripted comedians. Through persistence, connections and family wealth, he’d established a brand—“a loose cannon with a floppy fringe and a bicycle”—that set him head and shoulders above the rest of his party, and if the occasional colleague had attempted to lop that head off those shoulders in the interests of political unity, they’d yet to find the axe to do the job. Tearney’s own file on him was long on speculation, short on facts. So clean of cobwebs, in fact, that she was sure he’d airbrushed his past of serious sins as carefully as he arranged his haystack of hair.
He was eyeing her now in a manner that suggested he was about to enjoy what followed.
“So, minister,” she said, never keen on being made to sign her own punishment slips. “What seems to be your problem today?”
“Oh, I have no problems. Only a bagful of solutions awaiting opportunities.”
She pretended not to sigh, or at least, pretended she didn’t want him to notice her trying not to. “So this is social? It’s always a pleasure, Minister, but I am somewhat busy.”
“So I gather. Bit of a rumpus over your way this morning, what?”
“Rumpus” was a favourite PJ-word; one he’d employed to describe a recent tabloid splash about his friendship with a lap dancer. It was also a term he’d used in reference to both 9/11 and the global recession.
“What sort of, ah, rumpus would this be?”
“An incursion.”
He meant the Cartwright business, she realised. Which was unimportant and without consequence, which meant there was something to it she wasn’t yet aware of.
“I’d hardly call it an incursion,” she said. “An off-site agent lost his bearings. The Park can be disorienting.”
“So I recall.”
“Besides, the incident was done and dusted inside twenty minutes. When I left, the young man was being, ah, chided by our head of security.” She sipped again at her tea. “Are you sure such matters are worth your attention? I’d have thought there were weightier issues on your desk.”
Though the question of how he’d become aware of Cartwright’s frolic almost before she had was a matter Dame Ingrid definitely didn’t consider minor.
“I deem few things beneath my attention,” he said, adopting the plummier tones ex–public schoolboys use when bringing words like “deem” into play. “And certainly not those issues which call into question the integrity of our national Security Service.”
“‘Integrity,’” she said. “Really?”
He leaned back in his chair. “More tea?”
“I’m fine.”
“Sure? You don’t mind if—?”
She shook her head.
He refreshed his cup, and stirred the contents slowly, not taking his eyes off her.
“Minister, precisely what is this about?”
