The Marylebone Drop Read online

  It was John Bachelor who had uncovered Hess’s deception, and Bachelor who’d come up with the idea of recruiting Hannah, then about to embark on her career in the Civil Service, and allowing the BND to continue thinking her its creature. It had been a bright idea, even Taverner allowed; the one creative spark of Bachelor’s dimly lit career, but even then, the flint had been pure desperation. In the absence of his injurytime coup, Bachelor’s neck would have been on the block. As it was, he’d scraped up enough credibility to hang onto his job, and Hannah Weiss, whom the BND thought in its employ, had been recruited by the Service, which, in return for low-grade Whitehall gossip, was building up a picture of how the BND ran its agents in the field.

  Because it was always useful to have agents in place, even when the spied-upon was nominally an ally . . .

  “Snow White’s been doing well at BIS, but she feels, and I agree, that it’s time for her to move on. There are offices where she’d be more valuable to the BND, which would mean, in return, that we’d get a peek at their more high-level practices. The more value they place on her, the more resources they’ll expend.”

  “Yes, we get the basic picture,” said Nash. He shot a look at Diana, who was taking another bite from her croissant, and seemed, in that moment, to be utterly transported. “But I thought we didn’t want to get too ambitious. Maintain a solid career profile. We turn her into a shooting star, and put her in Number Ten or whatever, the BND’ll smell a rat.”

  “Yes. But there’ve been, like I say, personnel problems, and this gives us an iron-clad reason for a switch.”

  “Tell.”

  “Snow White’s manager has developed something of a crush on her.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “Late night phone calls, unwanted gifts, constant demands for one-on-one meetings which turn inappropriate. It’s an unhappy situation.”

  “I can imagine. But this manager, can’t he be—”

  “She.”

  “Ah. Well, regardless, can’t she be dealt with in-house? It’s hardly unprecedented.”

  Diana Taverner said, “She could be. But, as Richard says, it provides us with an opportunity for a shuffling exercise. And we’re not suggesting Snow White be moved to Number Ten. There is, though, one particular Minister whose office is expanding rapidly.”

  “The Brexit Secretary, I suppose.”

  “Precisely. A move there would be perfectly logical, given Snow White’s background. German speakers are at a premium, I’d have thought.”

  Oliver Nash pressed a finger to his chin. “The Civil Service don’t like it when we stir their pot.”

  “But there’s a reason they’re called servants.”

  “Not the most diplomatic of arguments.” He looked at Pynne. “This suggestion came from Snow White herself?”

  “She’s keen to move. It’s that or make an official complaint.”

  “Which would be a black mark against her,” Diana said.

  “Surely not,” said Nash, with heavy sarcasm. His gaze shifted from one to the other, but snagged on the plate of pastries. It was to this he finally spoke: “Well, I suppose it’ll all look part of the general churn. Tell her to make a formal transfer application. It’ll be approved.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Do take one of these, Richard. They’re best fresh.”

  Richard Pynne thanked her too, took a raisin pastry, and left the room.

  “There,” said Lady Di. “Nice to get something done without umpteen follow-up meetings.” She made a note in her book, then closed it. “So good of you to make the time.”

  “I hope young Pynne isn’t taking a gamble with our Snow White just to cheer his CV up. Making himself look good is one thing. But if he blows her usefulness in the process, that’ll be down to you.”

  “It’s all down to me, Oliver. Always is. You know that.”

  “Yes, well. Sometimes it’s better to stick than twist. There are dissenting voices, you know. An op like this, misinforming a friendly service, well, I know it comes under the heading fun and games, but it still costs. And that’s without considering the blowback if the wheels come off. We rely on the BND’s cooperation with counter-terrorism. All pulling together. What’ll it look like if they find we’ve been yanking their chain?”

  “They keep secrets, we keep secrets. That, as you put it, is where the fun and games comes in. And let’s not forget the only reason we have Snow White is that the BND thought they were running a network on our soil. What’s sauce for the goose goes well with the schnitzel, don’t you think? More coffee?”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  But he pushed his cup towards her anyway.

  Lady Di took it, crossed to the table in the corner, and poured him another cup. When she turned, he was reaching for a pastry.

  She made sure not to be smiling on her return.

  Solomon Dortmund said: “It was a drop.”

  “Well, I’m sure something was dropped—”

  “It was a drop.”

  When he was excited, Solomon’s Teutonic roots showed. This was partly, John Bachelor thought, a matter of his accent hardening; partly a whole-body shift, as if the ancient figure, balancing a bone china teacup on a bone china saucer and not looking much more robust than either, had developed a sudden steeliness within. He was, like most of those in Bachelor’s care, an ambassador from another era, one in which hardship was familiar to young and old alike, and in which certainty was not relinquished lightly. Solomon knew what he knew. He knew he had seen a drop.

  “She was a young thing, twenty-two, twenty-three.”

  John Bachelor mentally added ten years.

  “Blonde and very pretty.”

  Of course, because all young women were very pretty. Even the plain were pretty to the old, their youth a dazzling distraction.

  “And he was a spook, John.”

  “You recognised him?”

  “The type.”

  “But not the actual person.”

  “I’m telling you, I know what I saw.”

  He had seen a drop.

  Bachelor sighed, without making much attempt to hide it. He had much to sigh about. An icy wind was chasing up and down the nearby Edgware Road, where frost patterned the pavements. His left shoe was letting in damp, and before long would be letting in everything else: the cold, the rain, the inevitable snow. His overcoat was thinner than the weather required; it was ten-fifteen, and already he wanted a drink. Not needed, he noted gratefully, but wanted. He did not have the shakes, and he was not hungover. But he wanted a drink.

  “Solly,” he said. “This was Fischer’s, on a Tuesday morning. It’s a popular place, with a lot of traffic. Don’t you think it possible that what you thought you saw was just some accidental interaction?”

  “I don’t think I saw anything,” the old man said.

  Result.

  But Bachelor’s hopes were no sooner formed than destroyed:

  “I know. She passed him an envelope. She dropped a pile, he scooped them up. But one went into his coat pocket.”

  “A manila envelope.”

  “A manila envelope, yes. This is an important detail? Because you say it—”

  “I’m just trying to establish the facts.”

  “—you say it as if it were an outlandish item for anyone to be in possession of, on a Tuesday morning. A manila envelope, yes. C5 size. You are familiar with the dimensions?”

  Solomon held his hands just so.

  “I’m familiar with the dimensions, yes.”

  “Good. It was a drop, John.”

  In trade terms, a passing on of information, instructions, product, in such a manner as to make it seem that nothing had occurred.

  Bachelor had things to do; he had an agenda. Top of which was sorting his life out. Next was ensuring he had somewher
e to sleep that night. It was likely that the first item would be held over indefinitely, but it was imperative that the second receive his full and immediate attention. And yet, if the milk round had taught John Bachelor anything, it was that when an old asset got his teeth into something, he wasn’t going to let go until a dental mould had been cast.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Have you a sheet of paper I can use? And a pen?”

  “They don’t supply you with these things?”

  Bachelor had no idea whether they did or not. “They give us pens, but they’re actually blowpipes. They’re rubbish for writing with.”

  Solomon chuckled, because he was getting what he wanted, and rummaged in a drawer for a small notebook and a biro. “You can keep these,” he said. “That way you will have a full record of your investigation.”

  I’m not an investigator, I’m a nursemaid. But they were past that point. “Young, blonde, very pretty.” He wrote those words down. On the page, they looked strangely unconvincing. “Anything else?”

  Solomon considered. “She was nicely dressed.”

  “Nicely dressed” went on a new line.

  “And she was drinking tea.”

  After a brief internal struggle, Bachelor added this to his list.

  Solomon shrugged. “By the time I knew to pay attention, she was already out of the door.”

  “What about the man?”

  “He was about fifty, I would say, with brown hair greying at the temples. Clean-shaven. No spectacles. He wore a camel-hair coat over a dark suit, red tie. Patterned, with stripes. Black brogues, yellow socks. I noticed them particularly, John. A man who wears yellow socks is capable of anything.”

  “I’ve often thought so,” Bachelor said, but only because Solomon was clearly awaiting a response.

  “He ordered coffee and a slice of torte. He was right-handed, John. He held the fork in his right hand.”

  “Right-handed,” Bachelor said, making the appropriate note in his book. The clock on the kitchen wall was making long-suffering progress towards twenty past the hour: with a bit of luck, he thought, he’d have grown old and died and be in his coffin by the time the half-hour struck.

  “And he was reading the Wall Street Journal.”

  “He brought that with him?”

  “No, he found it on a nearby seat.”

  “The one the girl had been using?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure about that? Think carefully. It could be a crucial detail.”

  “I think you are playing the satirist now, John.”

  “Maybe a bit.” He looked the older man in the eye. “Things like this don’t happen any more. Drops in cafés? Once upon a time, sure, but nowadays? It’s the twenty-first century.” He’d nearly said the twentieth. “People don’t do drops, they don’t carry swordsticks.”

  “You think, instead, they deliver information by drone, or just text it to each other?” Solomon Dortmund shook his elderly head. “Or send it by email perhaps, so some teenager in Korea can post it on Twitter? No, John. There’s a reason why people say the old ways are the best. It’s because the old ways are the best.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Enjoy? No. I am doing my duty, that is all.”

  “And what do you want me to do about it?”

  Solomon shrugged. “Do, don’t do, that is up to you. I was an asset, yes? That is the term you use. Well, maybe I’m not so useful any more, but I know what I saw and I’ve told you what I know. In the old days, that was enough. I pass the information on.” He actually made a passing motion here, as if handing an invisible baby back to its mother. “What happens to it afterwards, that was never my concern.”

  Bachelor said, “Well, thanks for the notebook. It will come in handy.”

  “You haven’t asked me if there is anything else.”

  “I’m sorry, Solomon. Was there anything else?”

  “Yes. The man’s name is Peter Kahlmann.”

  “. . . Ah.”

  “Perhaps this information will help you trace him?”

  “It can’t hurt,” said Bachelor, opening the notebook again.

  The previous night had been unsatisfactory, to say the least; had been spent on a sofa not long enough, and not comfortable. His current lodgings were reaching the end of their natural lease, which is to say that after one week in the bed of the flat’s owner—a former lover—he had spent two in the sitting room, and now the knell had been sounded. On arriving the previous evening, he had found his battered suitcase packed and ready, and it had only been by dint of special pleading, and reference to past shared happinesses—slight and long ago—that he had engineered one final sleepover, not that sleep had made an appearance. When dawn arrived, reluctantly poking its way past the curtains, Bachelor had greeted it with the spirit a condemned man might his breakfast: at least the wait was over, though there was nothing agreeable about what happened next.

  And all that had brought him to this point: none of that was pretty either. Especially not the decision to cash in his pension and allow his former brother-in-law to invest the capital—no risk, no gain, John; have to speculate to accumulate—a move intended to secure his financial future, which had been successful, but only in the sense that there was a certain security in knowing one’s financial future was unlikely to waver from its present circumstance. And he had to give this much to the former brother-in-law: he’d finished the job his sister had started. When the lease on Bachelor’s “studio flat”—yeah, right; put a bucket in the corner of a bedsit, and you could claim it was en suite—had come up for renewal last month, he’d been unable to scrape together the fees the letting company required for the burdensome task of doing sweet fuck all. And that was that. How could he possibly be homeless? He worked for Her Majesty’s government. And just to put the icing on the cupcake, his job involved making sure that one-time foreign assets had a place to lay their head, and a cup of sweet tea waiting when they opened their eyes again. They called it the milk round. It might have been a better career choice being an actual fucking milkman, and that was taking into account that nobody had milk delivered any more. At least he’d have got to keep the apron; something to use as a pillow at night.

  He was in a pub having these thoughts, having drunk the large scotch he hadn’t needed but wanted, and now working on a second he hadn’t thought he wanted but turned out to need. In front of him was the notebook Solomon had given him, and on a fresh page he was making a list of possible next moves. There were no other ex-lovers to be tapped up, not if he valued his genitals. Hotel, he’d already crossed out. His credit cards had been thrashed to within an inch of their lives; they’d combust in the daylight like vampires. Estate agents he’d also scored through. The amount of capital you needed to set yourself up in a flat, a bedsit, a vacant stretch of corridor in London, was so far beyond a joke it had reached the other side and become funny again. How did anyone manage this? There was a good reason, he now understood, why unhappy marriages survived, and it was this: an unhappy marriage at least had two people supporting it. Once you cut yourself loose, disinvested from the marital property, you could either look forward to a life way down on the first rung or move to, I don’t know, the fucking North.

  But let’s not get too wrapped up in self-pity, John. Worse comes to worst, you can sleep in your car.

  Bachelor sighed and made inroads on his drink. At the top of this downward spiral was work, and the downgrading of his role to “irregular,” which was HR for part-time. A three-day week, with concomitant drop in salary: You won’t mind, will you, John? Look on it as a toe in the waters of retirement . . . He’d be better off being one of his own charges. Take Solomon Dortmund. Dortmund was a million years old, sure, and had seen rough times, and it wasn’t like Bachelor begrudged him safe harbour, but still: he had that little flat, and a pension to keep hi
m in coffee and cake. There’d been a moment an hour ago when he’d nearly asked Solomon the favour: a place to kip for a night or two. Just until he worked out something permanent. But he was glad he hadn’t. Not that he thought the old man would have refused him. But Bachelor couldn’t have borne his pity.

  Feisty old bugger, though.

  “I waited until he’d left,” Solomon had said. “There is always something to do on the High Street. You know the marvelous bookshop?”

  “Everyone does.”

  “And then I returned and had a word with the waiter. They all know me there.”

  “And they knew your man? By name?”

  “He is a regular. Once or twice, he has made a booking. So yes, the waiter knew his name just as he knew mine.”

  “And was happy to tell you?”

  “I said I thought I recognised him, but too late to say hello. A nephew of an old friend I was anxious to be in touch with.” Solomon had given an odd little smile, half pride, half regret. “It is not difficult to pretend to be a confused old man. A harmless, confused old man.”

  Bachelor had said, “You’re a piece of work, Solly. Okay, I’ll raise this back at the Park. See what they can do with the name.”

  And now he flicked back a page and looked again: Peter Kahlmann. German-sounding. It meant nothing, and the thought of turning up at Regent’s Park and asking for a trace to be run was kind of funny; beyond satire, actually. John Bachelor wasn’t welcome round Regent’s Park. Along with the irregular status went a degree of autonomy; which meant, in essence, that nobody gave a damn about his work. The milk round had a built-in obsolescence; five years, give or take, and his charges would be in their graves. For now, he made a written report once a month, unless an emergency happened—death or hospitalisation—and kept well clear until summoned. And this non-status was largely down to the Hannah Weiss affair.

  Hannah should have been a turning point. He’d recruited her, for God’s sake; had made what might have been a career-ending fiasco a small but nonetheless decorative coup, giving the Park a channel into the BND: a friendly Service, sure, but you didn’t have to be in John Bachelor’s straits to understand what friendship was worth when the chips were down. And given all that had happened since—Brexit, he meant—Christ: that young lady was worth her weight in rubies. And it had all been down to him, his idea, his tradecraft, so when he’d learned he wouldn’t be running her—seriously, John? Agent-running? You don’t think that’s a little out of your league?—he’d got shirty, he supposed; had become a little boisterous. Truth be told, he might have had a drink or two. Anyway, long story short, he’d been escorted from the premises, and when the Dogs escorted you from Regent’s Park, trust this: you knew you’d been escorted. He might have lost his job altogether if they could have been bothered to find a replacement. As it was, the one morsel he’d picked up on the grapevine was that Snow White, which was what they were calling her now, had been farmed out to Lady Di’s latest favourite: one Richard Pynne, if you could believe that. Dick the Prick. You had to wonder what some parents thought they were doing.