by
Isbey’s office always reminded me of the sitting room of a venerable gentleman’s club. The leather seats were covered with straps and buckles and the walls sported portraits of dead prime ministers and photographs of Household Cavalry bands. The view from the windows was of old London and the Thames and I could see Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament on the far side of the river. Isbey was an ex-Colonel who still used the title in retirement. When he was a baby, he probably had epaulettes on the shoulders of his romper suit. He had a round, surprisingly soft face but everything else about him, from the small moustache to the creases in his trousers, was crisp and firm. He stood and met me with a handshake and a “good morning” that, like most of the things he said, betrayed nothing as decadent as an emotion.
The larger of the two men sitting in front of his desk rose to introduce himself. Ernst Bakst was one of those men who turned a handshake into a finger-crushing contest. I always thought this was the sort of pastime people should grow out of when they graduate from primary school but I gave back as good as I got, keeping a poker face to show I hadn’t even noticed. He was probably two inches taller than me, which made him a good six foot, and he was about fifty years old. He might have been an athlete in earlier years but much of the muscle that once padded his chest had moved south. The flesh of his stomach pushed against his belt, marring the lines of his expensive-looking suit. His neck was a fold of fat and his features all seemed exaggerated, fleshy lips under a Slavic nose and heavy brows.
“Your superior here,” Bakst nodded towards Isbey, “has been glowing in his commendations of your abilities, Mr. Hastings.”
Strictly speaking, as I worked for the agency on a contract basis, Isbey wasn’t my superior, but I let it go. “Which abilities are those, Mr. Bakst?”
“Why, the ability to protect those who need protecting,” Bakst told me. I tried to think who he reminded me of and settled for Sydney Greenstreet, circa Maltese Falcon.
“What do you need protecting from?” I asked.
He gave a short bark of a laugh. “I don’t need your services for myself, sir. I wish to engage them on behalf of my associate, Dr Robert Roden.”
I took a proper look at his companion for the first time. Roden was no more than five eight and slightly built, with a sharp nose and narrow, appraising eyes. He held out a hand that, when I clasped it, felt like a pessimistic eel.
“And why would Dr Roden need protecting?” I drew up a chair and we all sat down opposite Isbey.
“Professor Roden is a noted expert in his field…” Bakst started.
“Which is?”
“The study of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature.”
“Ah,” I said, “the high-risk world of international Shakespearean research.”
“I have engaged Dr Roden to perform an important errand for me. It is essential that nothing disturb its smooth process. I’m sure nothing will, of course. Your presence will be precautionary only. I have discussed this engagement with Colonel Isbey and I understand it’s what you would call a Grade 5 exercise.”
I glanced across the desk at Isbey, who was leaning forward and steepling his fingers under his chin. Under the agency’s assignment rating system, Grade 1 meant that the client was high profile, like an A-list movie star or a prominent businessman, and a definite threat had been made. Grade 5 was the other end of the scale, where there was no perceived danger but the client wanted general protection from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
It sounded dull but assignments had been thin on the ground and, if you suffer from my condition, idleness is more curse than blessing. “When do we start?”
“Ah,” said Bakst. His stare left me and fastened on Isbey. “You’ve already started.”
***
An hour later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of Roden’s Mercedes as he drove westwards through the heavy London traffic. The sky was clear apart from a few clouds lurking like burglars on the horizon and I reached inside my jacket for my sunglasses.
“So,” I said. “We’re going to Stratford?”
He glanced sideways, piggy eyes suspicious as if he thought I was prying into family secrets. “That’s right,” he told me. “Stratford-upon-Avon.”
“As in Shakespeare and all that.”
He sniffed. “You’ve heard of Shakespeare then?”
“His name came up a couple of times when I was at school.”
“‘The whining schoolboy, with his satchel, creeping like snail…’”
“‘…unwillingly to school’. We studied ‘As You Like It’ in the fifth form.”
He looked outraged that anyone should have sullied the memory of Shakespeare by letting the likes of me near his plays. We made the M1 and he accelerated and pulled the car into the outside lane to pass a lumbering French juggernaut.
“Know a bit about Shakespeare, then, do you?” I asked him.
He sniffed, as though the Merc’s air conditioning system was puffing out sulphur. “I’m a professor of English Literature.”
“What university?”
“I have tenure at Oxford.”
I suppose I was impressed, just a little. He may have been a tad arrogant but I figured he must know his Hamlet from his Piglet.
“That’s why we’re going to Stratford, is it?” I prompted. “Something to do with Shakespeare?”
He pulled the car back into the middle lane, cutting up a little Nissan and ignoring its driver’s flashed-light protest at his lack of indication. “You don’t need to know.”
“If I’m to look after you the way I’m supposed to, I probably do.”
He gave me a sour look and I guessed he was torn between a desire to impress me with his knowledge and a natural reluctance to commune with a lower form of life. “Let us simply say that we are on a quest for literary enlightenment.”
“And it’s valuable, is it, this ‘literary enlightenment’?”
He gave me another rancid look and reached for the car stereo, raising the volume some way above talking level. A CD clicked into place and I recognized the lush melodies of Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. From the volume, I also guessed my injection of crass commercialism into the conversation had further offended his delicate sensibilities. Too bad. I’ve always liked Russian composers, as it happens. I pushed back against the leather seat and let the music soak into my bones.
***
The weather was still bright when we arrived in Stratford. Coaches in the parking lots on the edge of town disgorged brightly-dressed tourists who blinked in the sunlight and straggled along the footpaths. Roden, as might be expected from a professor of Eng. Lit., seemed to know his way around the place. We took an ancient-looking stone bridge over the river and turned left, driving past the Festival Theatre and then, further along the road, onto the forecourt of a hotel called The Almoner’s Arms. I gazed at the building’s flaking Tudor front without enthusiasm. Since I’d been doing work for the agency, I’d become an unwilling expert on second rate hotels and I could see that the owners of this one had decided to go for the ‘unrestored antique’ look while cleverly managing to avoid ‘quaint’.
Roden parked the car and we grabbed our bags and strolled into a lobby that looked like a snapshot from a fifties movie, all drab furniture and faded pot plants. The walls were hung with Shakespearean portraits and old maps of Stratford. There was even a suit of armor in the far corner. The bits of the room that weren’t dusty would have looked better if they were.
“We should get a double,” I told Roden, as we walked towards the front desk. “Twin beds.”
His mouth dropped. “We’ll get adjacent rooms. In the unlikely event that I need you, I’ll knock on the wall.”
If it had been a high security job I’d have argued but this was a Grade 5 effort and, at this level, the agency’s rules were flexible. “Have it your own way,” I told him.
“Thank you so much.”
We signed the register and, once we’d received our keys, rode to the second floor in a lift that was almost as ancient and free from restoration as the rest of the hotel. The world’s oldest bell boy started to carry our bags down the hallway, searching for our room numbers with a look of bemusement, as though he’d never been here before. I took the bags from him and let him concentrate on his search, tipping him and shooing him away after he’d opened my door in preference to letting him come inside and get completely lost.
My room was basic but after some of the places I’d slept when I was in the army, anything that was dry and bug-free was fine with me. I dropped my bags onto the bed and then left, locking the door behind me. Roden was already waiting for me in the corridor and we took the creaky lift back downstairs and strolled out into the late-morning sunshine.
The town was full of sightseers, blocking the sidewalks and clogging the tight streets as they made their way between Shakespeare’s birthplace, the museum and various other points of historical interest. Apart from the odd disparaging remark – apparently he thought the birthplace was a fraud perpetrated by the local corporation – Roden didn’t seem any more inclined to talk now than when we were in the car. I let him lead the way and we roamed around until, at one o’clock, we fetched up at one of the town’s many old pubs. This one had a garden next to the narrow, murky Avon and we ordered light lunches and carried drinks – a pint of bitter for him and an orange juice for me – into the sunshine. A sparse lawn, separated from the street and the river bank by a low wall, was sprinkled with wooden tables occupied by tourists and lunching shop workers. We found an empty table and sat down under a striped umbrella. Roden still wasn’t talking and I sipped my juice and left him to his silence.
It was all very uneventful until, after a couple of minutes, Roden climbed to his feet and began to walk away from me. I stood at once and started after him but he waved me back to my seat. “I’m supposed to go wherever you go,” I said patiently.
He shook his head as if he was talking to a small child. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Orders,” I said. “Except when you’re safe and snug in your hotel room, I don’t let you out of my sight.”
“It’s perfectly all right,” he grumbled. “I just happen to have seen a colleague of mine. He works in the Literature department at the university.”
I hesitated. I knew Oxford was only a few miles away, but he’d given no previous indication that he knew anyone in the pub garden. He pointed towards a table by the river that was occupied by a bald, middle-aged man in light-colored slacks and a hounds-tooth sports jacket. The man’s face was unremarkable except for the eyes, which were small and unusually close-set: when he saw me looking at him, he glanced away, apparently fascinated by the contents of the mock-wicker basket on the plate in front of him. I had to admit the guy didn’t look dangerous. He was about as well-built as a canteen waiter in a Sumo training school and I could sense his timidity from where I stood.
“Look, Hastings.” Roden was tapping his fingertips against the seams of his trousers and his lips were tight around his teeth. “Bakst didn’t say you had the right to eavesdrop on every innocent conversation I had. You’re just supposed to protect me, that’s all.”
I shrugged and watched him walk over and sit down in front of the other man. I did a quick scan of the garden – nobody was taking the slightest interest in any of us – and sat back down just as my ploughman’s lunch arrived. Roden had ordered scampi and I thanked the waitress and asked her to take the plate over to him. The waitress laid the plate in front of him and got a glare for her trouble. More tourists in loud clothes and sun hats arrived and I could hear hassled parents by the river tell their offspring to sit quietly and stop throwing French fries at the ducks. I wondered what the hell I was doing here. As threats to personal security went, everyone in this place was about as threatening as Mickey Mouse on Prozac.
Roden, however, had discovered a new enthusiasm for conversation. I could see him leaning forward over his scampi and talking animatedly. The other man looked as though he wished he were somewhere else, but the Professor probably had that effect on most people. Eventually, Roden reached across the table and prodded his index finger into the other man’s chest. His companion nodded his head and then, dropping his napkin onto the table, stood up and headed back inside the pub. A few seconds later, I saw him emerge from the front door onto the street and hurry away in the direction of the town center.
Roden came back, carrying his plate, and sat down beside me.
“Pleasant chat?” I asked.
He stared at me. “I imagine our conversation would have been of little interest to you.”
“Just trying to be friendly.”
“That’s not necessary. Keep me safe and your opinions to yourself and I’m sure we’ll both be satisfied with the arrangement. Just remember you’re the hired help.”
“Ah,” I said. “‘A rogue and peasant slave am I’.”
He scowled at me for a moment. “All right, you’ve heard of Hamlet.”
“Something else we did at school.”
He shoveled scampi and French fries into his mouth and glared at a passing duck. I could tell he wasn’t too impressed with me. Maybe he’d expected Jean-Claude Van Damme.
***
When we returned to the hotel, Roden announced that he needed to talk to someone in reception. I leaned on the counter beside him and checked out the faces in the lobby. After he’d attracted the clerk’s attention, he asked if anything had arrived for him. The man behind the desk checked and shook his head, his face bland.
“Are you quite sure there’s nothing?” Roden asked. “I was expecting a package of some sort. Or a fax.”
“There’s nothing under your name, sir,” the clerk replied.
Roden glanced sideways at me and scratched his chin. “It could have been addressed to a Mr. Sadler,” he said at last.
The receptionist checked again and, again, shook his head.
“I wish to be notified the moment something arrives,” Roden demanded. He stalked off in the direction of the lifts and I had to hurry to catch up with him. When the lift door closed, he glowered at the walls as the contraption groaned its way upwards.
When we reached the second floor, I walked along the corridor with him until we reached his room. As soon as he’d unlocked the door, he stepped inside and tried to slam it in my face. I blocked it with my foot and, against his objections, pushed past him and checked that everything inside was as it should be and there were no scary monsters hiding in the bathroom. It was all in order, in that tidy manner that hotel rooms have assumed from Hong Kong to Chicago, right down to the folded sheet of paper on top of the toilet roll and the foil-wrapped mint on the pillow of the bed. Roden watched me with his arms crossed and I made him promise to call me if he planned to leave the room. He treated me to another of his collection of sneers.
“I have work to do,” he told me. “And I shall eat in my room tonight. Do you think I’ll be safe ordering my own food from room service and brushing my own teeth?”
“Don’t open the door to anyone without identifying them first, okay?” I told him. “Anything strange or suspicious happens, don’t think twice, just call me. Bang on the wall, use the phone, whatever. Any time.”
“‘For some must watch while some must sleep,’ eh? I’m sure you recognize the quote, as you’re such an expert on the melancholy Dane.”
“Right. ‘I shall all times the perfect guardian be’,” I replied. As I closed the door behind me, I noticed he looked a little nonplussed. No doubt he was struggling to work out just where in Shakespeare’s vast canon I’d found those particular lines.
As well he might, the bastard. I’d just made them up.
***
I watched an old Bogart film on TV and then read a few chapters of the book – a history of the Norman Conquest – that I’d brought with me. My concentration waned. I got up and, pushing the curtains aside, looked from the window. I heard the chimes of midnight from a church clock and was adrift on a sea of darkness.
Churchill used to call his depression the ‘black dog’ but I’ve always seen my ailment as something more feral. Wolf-like. I could detect the creature, now, circling just beyond the peripheral vision of my mind’s eye. I pulled the drapes closed and sank a couple of mini-bottles of scotch, against my old shrink’s advice that alcohol made my condition worse. The night was warm and I stripped to my underclothes and lay on the bed with only a sheet over me, trying to keep my memories at bay.
I suppose at some point I fell asleep. Certainly, something roused me. I never have that experience people talk about where they wake up in a strange room and, for some seconds, don’t know where they are. At the moment I wake up, I always know exactly where I am. I kept still apart from the slightest movement of my head as I glanced at the bedside clock. It was just past two a.m. There was no light in the room except for the clock’s display and the tiny red light on the TV’s control panel. Everything was quiet but the tingling in my fingertips told me something was wrong.
I moved my head again, raising it an inch off the pillow. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention but I could hear nothing other than the sound of my own breathing. Then something changed and I realized that the TV light had disappeared as something or someone had moved between it and the bed.
As quietly as I could, I slipped my legs from under the sheet and reached over and pressed the switch on the bedside lamp. The light dazzled me and it was a second or so before I could react to the two figures standing a couple of feet away from me.
They were both dressed in black, their faces hidden beneath balaclavas, and they were both very large. One of them was holding a slim-bodied torch, no doubt turned off the moment I’d started to stir. I finished getting clear of the sheet and pushed myself forward. Before the first of the men could move, he’d collected the side of my foot in his stomach. He collapsed with a grunt as the wind was knocked out of him.
The other guy was too fast for me, though. As I came back to defensive stance, he pushed something towards my face. There was a hiss of gas and I felt my eyes tear up and my lungs start to burn.
Instinctively, I dropped my head and, as I did so, he hit me on the back of my neck with something that felt unreasonably hard.
***
I came to some time later and tried to move. None of my limbs wanted to co-operate. I managed to turn over and lay on my back on the floor. The blow I’d received had left me with a violent headache and either I had concussion or the gas they’d used was still affecting me: my mind wanted to go off on little side-trips of its own and I kept having the strangest visions, familiar yet alien, as though I was reliving every dream I’d had for the past month. I rolled over again and forced myself up, first to my knees and then, shakily, to my feet. Now I felt sick but at least that took my mind off the dizziness. My door was unlocked, which was no great surprise: the lock was as old as the rest of the hotel and would have presented a pro with as much trouble as a pair of marshmallow handcuffs.
I stepped along the hallway and knocked on Roden’s door, leaning on the frame to steady myself. There was no response and I banged harder a couple of times and then pressed my ear to the scratched wooden surface. I couldn’t hear anything except a ringing in my ears. I shook my head to try to clear it. That turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea. I waited until the worst shafts of pain stopped shooting between my spine and my eyes and then, in a rare moment of lucidity, decided to try the door handle. The door swung open.
The room inside was pitch black. I pressed the light switch and peered around. The door to the tiny bathroom was open so I could see almost every inch of the place. Everything was pretty much as I’d seen it the previous evening.
I’d been ready to receive a stream of invective if it turned out I’d woken my client from his slumbers. There was no need to worry, though. There was no sign of Roden’s suitcase and the bed was empty. The man was gone.
In the movies, someone gets a whack on the head, has a little nap and then wakes up and leaps right back into action.
Life’s not really like that. I groped around and, after a few false starts, managed to find my way back to my own room. I was still feeling nauseous and I had to concentrate hard as I grabbed my mobile and thumbed Isbey’s private number. I could hear the ringing of the phone on the far end for what seemed like hours before he answered. He sounded pretty disgruntled at being woken up at such an ungodly hour until I told him why I’d called. When he asked me how I was feeling, I answered truthfully. There’s no point playing the hero at times like this. If you can’t function properly, you’ll only endanger other people by pretending you can. Isbey agreed with my self-diagnosis of concussion, making it sound as though it was my own silly fault. I couldn’t argue: if I’d thought there was any threat at all from the notorious Stratford-upon-Avon underworld, I’d have rigged an alarm to my door. I told Isbey as much and he told me, quite sensibly, that it was too damn late to worry about it now. His voice remained as calm as ever as he went on to instruct me that I was to do nothing but hang on where I was until I heard from him again. I clicked off the phone and allowed myself one thump of my fist on the dresser. It hurt me more than the furniture. I lay on the bed, discovered that only made me feel worse, and sat instead on the room’s only chair, trying to stop my head from spinning.
Ten minutes later, Isbey called back. He’d got hold of Bakst, he said. The client was furious that I’d managed to lose Roden but was insistent that I was to avoid alerting the police. Roden was to be found, but the agency, rather than any official body, would be doing the finding.
Maybe if I’d been thinking more clearly I’d have argued but, as it was, I decided to leave Isbey to consider the situation’s moral dimensions. He once told me he went to Gordonstoun School at the same time as Prince Charles and I was sure they’d have covered this sort of thing in their ethics classes.
Meanwhile, Isbey told me, he’d be sending someone to pick me up and bring me back to London. The agency, he said, always looked after its people, even when they’d proved themselves to be complete idiots. He gave me orders to wait in my room until I got another call on my mobile. Then I was to go downstairs and meet the driver he’d already sent to collect me.
***
It was 6am by the time Isbey’s driver collected me and nearly ten by the time we made it back to London and through the traffic to the agency’s offices.
Isbey had arranged for the firm’s doctor to check me over and he examined the bump on the base of my skull and manipulated my neck. I told him about the gas that had been squirted into my face and he cleared his throat and told me breezily that I’d be right as rain in a few days time. He prescribed aspirin and three days off work.
Left to myself, I’d have been ready to head back to Stratford the next day but Isbey had been hovering in the background and listening while all this was going on. “I’m afraid that prescription must be regarded as an order,” he said.
I sighed. It was, after all, no skin off Isbey’s nose. I was a contractor and, if I wasn’t working, he didn’t have to pay me. I was sure he’d be able to find some willing volunteer to take my place. I bowed to the inevitable and he summoned his driver again and had her drive me home.
It was late morning by the time we arrived back at Madame George’s. Faith, the driver, insisted on carrying my bags inside and stopped in her tracks when, through the open door from the hall, she saw the inside of George’s salon. The Lovely One herself was up and about – unusually early in the day for her – and when she saw me she rose from her chaise longue, a vision in blue crushed velvet against the bright red upholstery. She flounced over to me and planted a kiss on my cheek, pulling back in alarm when she saw me wince.
I never fully understood the way that Madame George felt about me. We’d met several years earlier, when I was on one of my first jobs since my return from oblivion. I’d had been brought in to protect Chantelle, one of the ladies of the house, from a stalker. I lived in for a week and nothing much happened until, one night, the unhappy client got in past the regular house protection and I stopped him as he was on the brink of remodelling Chantelle’s face with acid. That, I’d thought, was that. I moved back home but, the next day, George and Chantelle visited me with a ‘thank-you’ bouquet of flowers, took one look at my pathetic bed-sit, stuffed my personal belongings into a couple of carrier bags and moved me into an empty room on George’s top floor. I’d lived there ever since, one of a disparate group of souls that George had taken a fancy to over the years and who shared the house with its working occupants.
“I’m OK,” I told her. “I just had a little problem.”
Faith was recovering her poise. “Somebody took a swing at his head,” she said.
George clutched my face in her hands. “You poor dear!” She turned and took my bags from Faith and, fussing me along in front of her, carried them up the three flights of stairs to my room.
***
When George left me, I took more aspirin and lay back on the bed. I’d finished the account of the Norman Conquest and I picked up a financial history book – a ‘biography’ of the British pound – that I’d bought a few days earlier. At some point, I must have slept. It was nearly three o’clock when the phone rang and I heard Isbey’s clipped enquiry after my health. I told him I was fine and that, irrespective of what the doctor said, there was no reason why I couldn’t be back at work tomorrow. I should have saved my breath, of course. Isbey’s career as a staff officer had taught him to play it straight all the way. As far as the agency was concerned, I’m sure that was why he was where he was, and fair enough, too. Put someone like me in his job and within hours the whole operation would have looked like a student flat on a Sunday morning.
“All right, Colonel,” I said. “I’ll play the impatient patient for a few days.”
“You know it’s for the best, Hastings.”
“Any news on Roden?”
“We have no new information but we’re on the case.”
“Have you called up his colleagues at the university?”
“Of course we have. They say he’s on a sabbatical. Nobody’s seen him for weeks and nobody expects to see him until the start of the next term.”
“What about where he lives?”
“Same story again. The neighbors say he keeps himself to himself…”
“Did you find his car?”
“No sign of it, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve been thinking about why the two lads back in the hotel would bother coming to my room in the middle of the night. It stands to reason they must have been looking for Roden, not me.”
“That stands to reason.”
I thought about Roden’s ‘quest for literary enlightenment’ and wondered just what that little phrase concealed. “So why did they come after me?”
“They could have picked the wrong door,” Isbey pointed out. “Maybe they realized they were in the wrong room and attacked you because you’d woken up and disturbed them.”
“And then they popped next door and picked up Roden?”
“It could have happened like that.”
“It’s possible,” I conceded. “It seems unlikely, though. I mean, there must have been some way they’d found out what room Roden was in-”
“I should imagine they might have offered the chap on the front desk a small inducement,” Isbey interrupted.
“Has anyone asked him?”
“Of course. The gentleman in question denies everything.”
“That’s probably what happened, though,” I said. “But, if that was the case, why didn’t they get the right room first time?”
“They bungled it?”
“Unlikely. These lads came equipped with capsicum spray or something similar. I’d say they were professionals.”
I heard him sigh. “So what’s your hypothesis, Hastings?”
“I reckon Roden took such a dislike to me that he asked them to pop in and beat me up before they had him away.”
“Would you like to make a serious suggestion?”
“They’d already looked in Roden’s room and they only came to mine because they hadn’t been able to find him.”
“Why wouldn’t they have been able to find him?”
“Because he’d already left of his own accord?”
He was silent for a few seconds. “Roden’s playing his own hand. It’s possible.”
“Better be careful with any follow-up action,” I told him.
“You may be sure we’re being very careful. We have already deployed a two man team.”
It was a typical agency approach to a potentially risky situation. The duo would comprise an ex-policeperson, who would supply investigation and detection skills, and an ex-soldier in case there were problems. It wasn’t that the ex-cops on the agency’s books were exactly pushovers: it was more that the ex-Army faction were the experts when it came to keeping themselves and others safe. It was a strategy that, in the gospel according to Isbey, had always proved itself in the past.
“Tell them to watch out for themselves,” I urged him. “The boys who popped in to see me last night were the size of tyrannosaurs. And they were probably a bit meaner.”
“The team will be under orders to trace Roden and then take no further action. Once we have a line on our man, I intend to talk to Bakst again before we make any decisions.”
I fingered the lump on the back of my head. I hated to think of others being sent to finish a job that I’d started. “Who have you assigned?” I asked.
“One of them’s a chap called Brett Young…”
I thought I remembered meeting him a year or two back. “Ex police?”
“That’s right. He was a Detective Inspector in the CID. Metropolitan Police. Sound chap.” He paused. “The other man’s Geordie Thorpe.”
I knew Thorpe, of course, rather better.