The Oktober Projekt (10 page)

‘I was at my mothers.’

She used her mother as a fortified outpost knowing he would
never venture there. Angie’s father, a retired merchant banker unconditionally
dismissed Nick as a waste of effort and the last time Nick ran into her mother,
she badgered him on his failings, his immunity to her daughter’s needs.
 

‘Any particular reason?’

‘I’ve had a busy week. I’ve got a dealer interested in my work.
Guy thinks next year is going to be my year,’ she said, lowering the pointed
toe of a boot towards the next step, testing the water. ‘He’s planning a
retrospective before pushing my new work at his gallery in Hoxton.’

‘Great.’

‘Don’t pretend that you care.’

‘Fine. Listen, I want you to pack. Stay at your mothers or
check into a hotel.’ His head swam and the way he had to hold himself straight
he wondered if his ribs had fully knitted together?

‘No.’

‘It’s important.’ He desperately wanted to smile, to laugh at
the bizarre situation but he jammed his jaw together, flexing the bones in his
cheeks.

‘I’m bust Nick, Guy gave me a deadline to have everything
finished.’
 

Perhaps I should have issued deadlines too, he thought. ‘You
can’t stay here.’

There was a good nine feet and fifteen stairs between them. She
folded her arms, her dark eyebrows accentuating her position of no surrender
and no concessions, she’d made far too many in the past.

‘I’m not being thrown out of my own house.’

‘There’s been an incident, I think it’s best if you keep your
distance from me and this place for a while.’
           

‘No Nick, don’t say it, please don’t lie to me, don’t try and
possess me through fear.’

‘Any strangers called while I was away?’ He wanted to hold her
tight, remind himself how light and good her body felt.

‘How bad is it?’

‘An answer Angie, I need an answer. Yes or No?’

She slammed her hand on the banister. ‘No,’ she said,
determined not to be treated as a child, not to be forever answering to Nick.
Even though she hadn’t allowed the woman claiming to represent a film location
company into the house, she was damned if she’d tell him.

He broke a rule and moved up a stair. Instinctively Angie
retreated, surrendering one for safety or insurance. She had a great thing
about distance, physical and mental, she would never give, never actually come
out of herself and reveal a weakness, an emotion. The lager was still in his
hand, he wanted to take a drink, but that would give her another reason to
despise him.

‘If anyone does call you’re not familiar with, you ring the
police and our emergency number, got that?’

When she laughed, Nick’s pulse trebled.

‘Do you understand?’

‘Of course. Am I not permitted to make any decisions without
the master of the house being present?’

Her righteousness annoyed him. ‘Start packing.’ He advanced and
brushed past without looking at her.

‘Did you hear me?’ he called over his shoulder going into the
bathroom, putting down the can, running the shower.

‘Not until you tell me what’s going on?’

‘Nothing’s going on, it’s just a precaution,’ he shouted from
inside the cubicle.

When he emerged draped in a towel Angie hadn’t budged, waiting
to resume, her fury yet to reach its peak.

‘I’ve lost two officers and
I haven’t time to argue,’ he warned her.

He made for the bedroom and she followed cautiously behind.

‘Lost how? Unaccounted for? Missing?’ She asked outside the
door.

‘Lost as in dead,’ said Nick, dressed in dark cords, blue shirt
and v-neck sweater.

‘Christ, what have you done?’

‘Me?’ Nick lifted his head from lacing his Oxford shoes to
check if she was talking to him. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

The daylight had gone and the upstairs corridor was filled with
deep shadow. Down the walls, her unframed oils depicted abstract women with
faces of purple and red. After she’d hung them he’d asked for a clue, a
preferred reading.
 
She’d replied
with a laugh that she was painting out her angst, her animus; and she’d done
such a complete job that Tom would never pass them alone in the evening.

‘Don’t tell your folks there’s a scare on, just say you need a
break from me, that’s always got you sympathy and a place to stay before. If
you go to a hotel, pick one you know,’ he explained, passing her on the way to
the stairs. ‘Don’t be on your own if you can help it.’

‘If I say no?’

‘I can’t guarantee your safety, I’m more or less suspended.’

‘You’re pathetic, know that?’ she said, following him down the
stairs.

‘Course I am, that’s what attracted you in the first place,’ he
called, deliberately banging about in the kitchen. Hung behind the dining table
receiving natural light from the French doors, was the latest in a series of
Angie’s large-scale oils. This one he hadn’t seen before, a colossal canvas of
a naked, bleeding woman giving birth to a malformed infant. Must be denoting
her latest layer of individuality decided Nick, collecting the keys to his car.

‘Tell Gus you’re going to have put back your exhibition,’ Nick
suggested, facing her.

‘It’s Guy and you’re not in a position to tell me what to do.’

‘I don’t want anything to happen to you,’ he said, in memory of
something they once had, possibly shared.

She glanced at her watch then straightened her head, sighing.
‘Really, that’s very considerate of you Nick. Twenty years too late, but nice.’

She didn’t even rate him enough to hate him any more; that
special loathing and resentment they had so carefully nurtured the last few
years had matured, acting as an invisible sibling that had managed to outlive
Tom.

‘I have warned you,’ he said, slipping the Nokia into his
pocket.

‘Couldn’t you have asked?’

‘About what?’

‘Taking my old phone,’ she said, scooping up the odds and ends,
returning them to the base of the wicker hen.

‘Do you mind?’

‘You paid for it, a present to make up for one of your overdue
trips if I remember. Have it.’

Accepting the offer, Nick thought it pointless trying to find
anything else to say, nothing would justify his being there, his concern, so he
left using his own phone to make two calls on the way out.

• • •

The budget hotel was in Earls Court, a
peeling scar in a Regency terrace of run-down bedsits around the corner from
Philbeach Gardens. A hotel masquerading as an economy bed and breakfast, a sign
in a window warned potential guests that it regrettably did not cater for
families or pets. Drizzle soaked into its grey facade, spreading thin damp
fingers over the grubby windows and large pools of rain gathered on its worn
steps before running off onto the pavement.
 

The receptionist, a harsh woman with round sad eyes, dragged
her gaze reluctantly from a magazine devoted to puzzles.

‘What will it be dear?’ she asked with an ironed smile as Nick
entered.

Calling from a side office a heavy male voice intercepted her
question, taking it upon himself the trouble of answering. ‘Mr. Arrowsmith’s
expected, Glenda,’ announced Freddy Easton.

Nick glimpsed him along with the hotel’s archaic switchboard in
a cluttered office behind Glenda. Easton wore a determined fixer’s face and a
blazer perpetually smeared by pipe ash. In his sixties, he limped from a
shrapnel wound he boasted about when drunk. Nick could smell the tobacco on
Easton’s clothes from where he stood, as individual as a fingerprint; aromatic,
a special blend of herbs mixed by a Bengali on Brick Lane.

‘I’ll walk you up, sir,’ he offered gallantly.

‘There’s no need, Freddy, I’ll find my own way.’

‘He hasn’t moved an inch. No one’s been in either.’

Straightening his blazer as if to go on parade, Easton’s watery
eyes followed Nick as he turned the corner. Ireland? The Falklands? The first
Gulf War? A trouble spot before that? Nick had forgotten where Easton had
picked up his limp, pension and devotion to all matters of intelligence,
allowing CO8 to use his hotel for meetings of an arm’s length nature.
 

The narrow stairway took Nick into a different world its carpet
as thin as paper, a fire extinguisher holding it in place at the landing’s
curve. Badly framed prints of Thames sailing barges were moored along the
corridor and given half a chance they’d have upped anchor and never returned.
Nick strode up four steps into an annex where Fleur-de-lis wallpaper covered
the bumps in a tight passage. The room was the sixth in a dull line of seven.
Nick knocked once and walked right in.

‘You Bensham?’ asked Nick.

Lubov’s handler, a young SIS officer barely out of training
nodded. Two chairs were pulled to attention before an electric fire, its one
bar burning an inconsistent orange. Nick sidestepped the chairs, going instead
to the window.

‘Have a seat,’ said Nick, but Bensham refused to move, standing
to attention with a square flex-less stance. For a terrible moment Nick feared
Bensham was about to make a run for it, only for Bensham to sweep past him
across the room to lay claim to a space of his own, the ends of his check scarf
sucked outwards by the draft.

‘I’m fine standing,’ said Bensham.

‘We haven’t much time, so we’ll keep it brief,’ Nick decreed,
wondering why they’d pawned Lubov out to this twenty-something novice?
 
With a solid build, Nick even thought
of him as burly, Bensham’s fair hair had been cut fashionably short and his
entire demeanour was set for self-defence. His square angular face carried what
Nick had already come to recognise in many new recruits as a cock-sure belief
in their own ability; an arrogance that Nick could pick out now in Bensham’s
eyes, the way his small mouth was twisted in a slight sneer.
            

‘Is this off the record?’ Bensham demanded, his eyes narrowing
in self-protection. ‘I only agreed because Rossan said it would be.’

‘No cameras, no recorders,’ Nick told him. ‘And it’s Mr. Rossan
to you.’

Completely unfazed, Bensham
dug his hands deep into the pockets of his tailored overcoat. ‘Lubov was a
complete nightmare,’ he stated boldly, ‘and there’s no way I’m taking
responsibility for the trouble you had,’ Bensham concluded, his eyes waiting
for agreement.

‘You have no idea of the trouble I had, hear me? You don’t.
Foula and your agent died when I tried to get them out. I had a stint and
beatings in Moscow you won’t even comprehend, so behave,’ Nick warned him,
‘otherwise Mr. Rossan will have you transferred to the Mad House. Lubov and
you, tell me all about it. Sit down and don’t leave a thing out.’

Opting for a corner of the bed rather than a chair, Bensham
pushed back his coat and let out an expansive sigh. ‘After I’d got a Box 1 on
completion of my training, I was assigned to RUS/OPS,’ he began as though
rehearsing for an interview. ‘I did ten months in London getting the hang of
things, then I got a Moscow slot with Lubov attached.’

‘You and him hit it off straight away, did you?’ It was taking
Nick all his reserve not to knock Bensham clean off the bed.

‘Hardly,’ he answered with a sarcastic smile. ‘Lubov was a
hangover from the old days and when I inherited him, he’d already had a string
of handlers. Lubov was pretty miffed when I turned up to take over the reins,
but I’d been warned that Lubov was a high-maintenance, low-grade producer of
the unremarkable kind, so that’s what I expected.’

‘Rumour or fact?’

‘Someone in RUS/OPS mentioned it, I can’t remember who.’ Nor
did he care, if his shrug was anything to go by.

When Nick failed to press him, Bensham took up his discourse
once more. ‘If Lubov didn’t get paid on time, he’d have a tantrum, threaten to
shop me to his superiors, or even turn himself in. So I knew he was kind of
unstable, a volatile loner who hated his wife, his work, even himself, which
meant it wouldn’t take a lot to push him over the edge.’ In Bensham’s
considered opinion, after he’d assessed Lubov fully for all of three months, he
categorised him as nothing more than a dreamer. ‘I even went as far as
proposing to RUS/OPS that it might be an idea to cut Lubov loose. After all,
he’d never brought anything of any value to the table for me, so I thought it
might be expedient to make a clean break with the past.’

‘That was very astute of you. How did RUS/OPS respond?’

‘More or less agreed that we weren’t in the business of
providing monthly pensions for washed-up agents, but I shouldn’t cut the
strings immediately. I had to bring him on message first, so to speak.’

‘Christ, with all your considerable experience of agent
handling, he should have been thankful you were looking after his interests.’

Rebuked and stung, Bensham glared hard at Nick. ‘He shouldn’t
have strung me along, should he,’ he whined, forever the victim.

‘Strung along how?’

Defiantly smiling, Bensham reflected for a moment before
introducing the key evidence on his own behalf. ‘He demanded a deal didn’t he,
pure fantasy. Lubov wanted an ex-senior officer to meet him in Moscow, nothing
or no one else would do except our most recent ex-Chief. He kept blathering on
that I shouldn’t trust a soul except this respected high-ranking ex-officer.’

‘But you didn’t take him seriously,’ Nick reminded him cruelly.
‘What did Lubov do?’

‘He wasn’t best pleased,’ Bensham sourly admitted. ‘Blew a
gasket, his top, blew nearly everything. Told me I didn’t understand the big
picture, I was going to jeopardise and wreck years of work. We had a bit of a
ding-dong, I told him this was his last chance to impress me, he’d better put
up or shut up.’

‘That must have reassured him. And Lubov finally brought a
sample to the table did he?’ From Bensham’s reluctance to answer, Nick guessed
he must have done a lot more than that.