Her Fugitive Heart Read online

  “David will get you files on all the guests,” Roger said. “Familiarize yourselves with them. You’ll know what to look for when they show their fancies.”

  I sensed a wheeze coming, what we called a big social engineering hack, for that weekend. At the back of my mind, I started to think that we might be the bad guys here. There were no good guys that weekend, but after I read through the guest list later on, I knew that there were even worse guys than us that we would have to pretend to cater to but really to get the goods on. That still didn’t make me feel any better. The gods loved to watch me squirm.

  “Have fun being in service, darlings,” Olivia said. “Hope it doesn’t turn into a whodunit.”

  THREE

  Come that Friday, we were off down the motorway in the company BMWs. Julia sat next to me as I drove, Mark and Benjamin in the back. Ken and Clive drove Roger and David in the other car, ahead of us.

  Olivia phoned us when we were on the road. I put her on speaker.

  “Sorry I couldn’t be with you, darlings,” she said, “but I already have my hands full back here.”

  “You’re just happy you don’t have to be out here getting your hands dirty with us,” Benjamin said from the backseat.

  “I’m not exactly having fun entertaining my parents here in London,” Olivia said. “My dad’s using me to keep Mum distracted.”

  “I wish I had rich parents to keep me from doing surveillance on dodgy tycoons,” Mark said.

  “Say hello to the combat butler for me,” she said.

  “The what?” I said.

  But she’d already hung up.

  We met Wittingsley, the mansion’s butler, when we arrived. Later, I had read the file on him that Olivia sent to my phone, and I understood what she was talking about.

  “Oy oy,” Benjamin said. “Behold the monolith that walks like a man!”

  Julia shushed him.

  Wittingsley greeted us as we drove up to the service entrance of Beam Manor. He was a big fella. Bloody hell, he was large. And looming. In a butler’s uniform.

  “Reckon Ken and Clive can take him?” Benjamin whispered.

  Julia nudged him to shut up.

  But the clash of titans that Benjamin hoped to see was not to be. The moment Ken and Clive clapped eyes on Wittingsley, they shook his hand warmly.

  “Awright, Tel?” Ken said.

  “Service treatin’ you well, then?” Clive said, smiling.

  Turns out they knew Wittingsley from way back. Clive knew him when they were in the army together. Of course they did. Large, violent peas in a pod.

  Terrence Wittingsley was not just any butler, but none of them were just any butler these days. Butlers are not just servants in tuxedos who serve dinner and receive packages. They’re an institution that goes back centuries and a source of fascination to Anglophiles from abroad. There was something about the formalism, the strict etiquette and the ritualized nature, of their jobs that non-British Anglophiles liked to make a fetish of, and it wasn’t just the idea of a uniformed servant as a status symbol for wealth and history. Any of us British punters would find the fuss foreigners made out of butlers a bit weird and classist. Senior butlers weren’t just servants. They ran the household like the manager of a company—coordinating the staff, managing the household budget, overseeing the supplies and upkeep of the manor—and they were very well paid for that. When I was teaching secondary school, I once had to explain to my students that to be in service was a very particular institution that was unique to Britain. Butlers were specially and rigorously trained at accredited academies.

  Wittingsley, in particular, was also an army veteran, who had served in Afghanistan, so he was trained in tactics, weapons, and unarmed combat before he came back to the UK and ended up becoming a butler. He was hired by Alfie Beam when Beam had made enough off his records and rock concerts to buy a mansion in Sussex. This was back in the days when being a rock-and-roll star was a bigger deal, before social media and online piracy decimated the music industry. Alfie and his wife Stephanie had been well acquainted with Wittingsley long before they got rich, and they knew he could be trusted to keep all their secrets. And Alfie had enough secrets to fill a whole wing of this mansion. Wittingsley knew the full details of Alfie and Stephanie’s finances, their drug dealers, the girls and guys they had affairs with; he probably knew where all the bodies were buried. To serve Alfie and Stephanie Beam and clean up after them for their rock-and-roll lifestyle would have needed the skills and fortitude of a combat butler.

  Wittingsley was a literal major domo. He commanded a whole staff of housekeepers, valets, footmen, junior butlers, and maids at Beam Manor.

  And according to his file, he was not to be fucked with. Apparently, he’d foiled at least one attempt to kidnap the Beams’ son when he was little. Wittingsley put the would-be abductor in the hospital, and the poor sod never walked right again.

  “Imagine that,” Mark said. “The butler’s the bloody Batman!”

  Wittingsley showed us to our rooms in the lower floors, near the kitchen and the pantry. We were the help, so we got the servants’ quarters. Even so, these were very nice rooms, better than any bedsit you would be paying a fortune in rent for in London these days.

  “We’re on a minimal staff at the moment,” Wittingsley said. “While Mrs. Beam is away, not much needs to be done other than the usual upkeep. Pretty soon, we’ll all be gone.”

  “How do you mean?” Julia asked.

  “Mrs. Beam is talking about putting the mansion up for sale. Now that her husband is gone, she’s been spending more and more time in Spain and is thinking about moving there permanently. She won’t be needing my services anymore.”

  “Will you miss all this?” Julia asked.

  “It hasn’t been the same since Mr. Beam passed away,” Wittingsley said. “The house has taken on a melancholy air. Might do the missus good to start fresh abroad. She’s got at least one gentleman friend to keep her company over there.”

  “Wittingsley, mate,” Benjamin said. “Care to show me the guest rooms? I’m gonna give ’em a once-over.”

  And with that, Wittingsley left us to it while he led Benjamin to bug the rooms.

  “If we know our Tel, he’s not gonna have to worry about money for a while,” Ken said.

  “How much do you reckon he’s got saved up?” Clive asked.

  “More than enough,” Ken said. “Since he doesn’t gamble. The bigger issue is what’s he gonna do with himself. Man needs a mission, that one.”

  “How did Roger blag this place anyway?” I asked.

  “He knew Alfie Beam back in the eighties,” Mark said. “Helped cover up the messy parts of Alfie’s overdose when that old rocker finally karked it, helped with the funeral arrangements, made sure Steph got the money and assets and kept them away from Alfie’s thieving manager. Roger’s been close with Steph ever since.”

  “Think he shagged her?”

  “Roger likes us to think he did,” Mark said. “But Olivia heard from Cheryl that it never happened, much as Roger might have liked to. And he wasn’t married yet at the time.”

  “I’m sure Cheryl would have had something to say about that,” I said.

  “Like cut his bollocks off, you mean?” Mark grinned.

  “He’d have been lucky if that was all she did.”

  FOUR

  We took a tour of the mansion and the rooms to get the lay of the land. We were going to be moving all over the place all weekend, so it wouldn’t do to get lost. Wittingsley told us that Roger had sorted out what parts of the mansion would be off-limits to the guests so we could keep their wanderings around the mansion within a designated area. Those off-limits parts were where we and the staff could hide out away from the guests. Benjamin directed us to hide webcams and microphones all over the guests’ rooms so Roger could record them. When that was done, we all went out to the garden to share a spliff. Marcie savored the strain Mark had brought, one that generated a calming buzz. She ha
d been rather tense over the past year, for obvious reasons.

  “ ’Ere, Marcie,” Benjamin would keep baiting her, “how are you lot operating now that your president is a fucking moron and the whole world thinks that?”

  Much of the apocalyptic chaos we’d been feeling in the air this past year was down to the American president, who was probably the worst ever in history. He seemed to stumble through all aspects of politics and diplomacy like a demented bull in a china shop, committing faux pas after faux pas, insulting America’s allies, including Britain, and even slagging off his own intelligence services. I read in the papers that morale in the CIA was at an all-time low. Benjamin knew exactly what buttons he was pushing when he reminded Marcie of all this.

  Marcie knew not to react or show weakness, but I could see her cheeks grow red and feel that heat rising from her. She would just smile and look up from her carton of yogurt and say, “Ahh, we just do what we always do.”

  Benjamin would bait her at least once a day, every day, his South London sneer varying in thickness, and her answer and smile would be the same, with her smile varying in tightness.

  There had been a tense, rather apocalyptic atmosphere not just in the office, but in the world in general as well, in the past year, a feeling that things might go completely pear-shaped at any moment. That it might be something inevitable or something that came out of left field didn’t make any of it better. We were living in a time when the world felt unmoored, and Benjamin, of course, found it all a great laugh. His mischief-making was not without insight, which made it all the more galling for Marcie. As a CIA agent whose cover was a PR specialist and private investigator, Marcie Holder was supposed to be one of those people in the shadows who knew what was what, or at least pretended to as they scrambled to play one-upmanship with the intelligence agencies of every other government out there, including the UK’s. That she was using Golden Sentinels Private Investigation and Security Agency meant we were her assets, part of her network, and on the firing line of whatever horrible shit might come next.

  I remember Marcie telling me that for decades the CIA were often at odds with the president of the United States in varying degrees, and they would just do whatever the hell they wanted in secret anyway. This was virtually standard procedure. If he really pissed them off, they would do little things to fuck with him, subtly going against him or undermining him, sometimes without him even knowing it. That explained all the off-the-books ops and subcontractors they used to ensure deniability. They would find ways to circumvent review, oversight, create workarounds and apparatus for deniability. Subcontractors like Golden Sentinels, for example. While Roger formed the firm with Cheryl, Marcie was his controller, and much of the firm’s coffers were bankrolled from jobs Marcie brought him. That made us her assets, whether we liked it or not.

  We were part of that apparatus. Golden Sentinels Investigations and Security was one of the many independent contractors the Company employed to get information for them so that they could deny to the president and the Senate Intelligence Committee that they were doing anything untoward. Mark and I wondered if we would be used in an op they might pull against the president. That would mean we could end up pissing off the US government, and it would be naïve to expect Marcie or her bosses to lift a finger to protect us if we got rumbled for doing what they paid us to do. Ever since the Company had entered what could now be considered open warfare with their own president, we had the feeling we were falling deeper into the rabbit hole of possible doom. I was seeing the gods a lot, which would suggest we weren’t being paranoid.

  I suppose we should have been relieved that the job this weekend was one from Roger himself and not Marcie. Still, she was showing an inordinate amount of interest in it, which was worrying. She said that given her background in public relations, this weekend was a nice diversion from the political shit going on in the Company.

  “All these bigwigs,” she said. “Good to keep track of.”

  “Like who you might turn?” I asked. “Sources of information, possible assets?”

  “You never know,” she said.

  “So you don’t know everyone Roger invited?” I asked.

  “He didn’t show me the list,” she said. “Like he didn’t want me to know.”

  “As his controller, do you feel the need to know all the dodgy dealings he gets up to?”

  Marcie shrugged. “As long as he doesn’t do anything to compromise our plans,” she said (by “our” she meant the CIA, and by default, US interests), “he can do whatever he likes. And anyway, I’ve met some of these guests before. A lot of them are former clients. I just didn’t expect Roger would invite nearly all of them. It’ll be interesting to find out just what kind of business proposal he’s pitching to them.”

  “What play do you reckon Roger’s going for?” I asked. “Money or power?”

  Marcie winked at me. I was the pupil impressing the teacher. She liked that I had sussed it out.

  “He’s looking for investors,” she said. “But investors in what? That’s what I really want to know.”

  “So Marcie,” Mark said. “How is the war with your own president going?”

  “Naaah, we’re not at war with the president,” Marcie said, a bit too breezily, and laughed, a bit too quickly and too long. “I’ll say it again: the intelligence agencies are not at war with the president.”

  We watched her walk off to mingle and make introductions.

  “They’re totally at war with the president,” Mark said.

  “We are in deep shit,” I said.

  FIVE

  Wittingsley had the staff line up and greet the guests as they arrived in their limousines. Very posh, very old-school to have the butler and household staff formally greet the guests as if they were the aristocracy. All part of Roger’s ploy to make them feel really special, and they expected nothing less. He was giving them their fantasy of living a grand aristocratic weekend. Judging from their files, these were wide-boy types, self-made men who didn’t inherit their money. The closest they got to the Establishment was to donate money to the Tory Party. Roger must have been offering them something ridiculously grand.

  By late afternoon on Saturday, the party was kicking off proper and the gods were very present here this weekend. It kicked off with a drinks reception in the garden, all very Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  We had acquainted ourselves with the guests’ profiles in the form of dossiers Roger had us read the week before, in preparation for the party.

  “The better to anticipate their needs,” Roger said. “And the chinks in their armor.”

  “Quite an international coterie of rich bastards,” Mark said.

  There were three Britons—Julian Reeves, Marcus Hastington, and Stewart Hartley—all prominent donors to the Conservative Party. We decided to just call them “The Tories” to keep things simple. Of course they requested the specialist services of Madame Felicity’s highly in-demand dominatrix Mistress Tania and her assistants, with all their expenses and equipment charges paid in advance. There was Jürgen Kleiner, a German venture capitalist who had made his fortune in investing in rare minerals, oil, and other resources, as well as some arms companies. There was Jüst DeBeer and his three brothers, South Africans who owned a telecoms company in Johannesburg.

  “All middle-aged, right-wing white blokes, total net worth a few tens of millions of pounds,” Mark said. “Must be a hell of a business plan.”

  “And Laird Collins?” I said. “Interzone? What’s Roger planning? Some kind of joint venture? Interzone means guns and mercenaries. None of this smells good.”

  As the help, we hung on the fringes to watch. The gods were romping. They were frolicking. They were whooping it up in this garden, weaving in and out between the guests and the staff like they belonged here. I didn’t like that. It never bode well for me. Lord Shiva was leading a dance down the path in the distance. Lakshmi was here, in her element amidst this wealth and abundance. Kali wagged her tong
ue and whirled in anticipation of the coming chaos this weekend could throw up. Ganesha with his elephant’s head and sage eyes swayed and jigged. They were all dressed in their best finery since this was a proper party. They were in for a right do, and they expected that I would deliver it to them. How I was supposed to do that, I had no idea. That was what made it fun for them. I was going to put on a show.

  I wonder if I’ll ever not be unnerved by the sight of Lord Shiva in Armani or Kali in Versace.

  Our phones pinged. Benjamin had texted us all a video of the head of the neo-Nazi party of Ukraine dropping dead of a heart attack in the middle of a speech.

  “Well,” Mark said. “That’s unusually gratifying.”

  “How does he find these links?” I asked.

  “He has a feed that looks out for them,” Mark said.

  “WiFi in the basement’s really good,” Benjamin said on the Bluetooth.

  “Roger’s asked me to stay close to the Tories in case they say anything interesting,” Julia said. “They’ve taken a shine to me.”

  “Of course,” Mark said. “They want an English Rose.”

  “More specifically,” Julia said, “they want me to sit and watch Mistress Tania abuse and humiliate them. They even offered to pay me.”

  “Should we tell them that before Julia started working for us, she was drugging and raping a Tory MP on a regular basis?” Benjamin asked, perfectly rhetorically.

  “That might only turn them on even more,” Julia said. “And pay me even more.”

  “Don’t worry,” Marcie said. “Cheryl’s issued all the ladies with these anti-pervert flamethrowers.”

  Wittingsley had furnished the girls with what looked like a small, longer-than-normal metal tube that I thought was a lipstick, until Marcie flicked the switch and a pink jet flame shot out the end.

  “Bloody hell,” I said. “Where did these come from?”