The Loyal Servant (7 page)

Her call was answered swiftly and an efficient voice asked how she could help.

‘PC Ralph Mills, please. It’s urgent.’

Caroline heard the plastic tap of fingers on a keyboard.

‘M, I double L, S?’ the woman on the other end asked her.

‘That’s right.’

More tapping.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve checked it three times now. Are you sure you have the right number?’

‘I’m looking at the card he gave me right now. What’s the problem?’

‘There’s no record of a Ralph Mills on the system.’

9

Angela Tate leapt out of the taxi and left her photographer to pay the fare. She pulled up her collar and picked her way along a stretch of uneven pavement towards a mass of bodies being hemmed in by a sparse cordon of police officers wearing bright yellow vests over their uniforms. Two or three ‘Save our Schools’ placards swayed in the strong wind and a faint chant calling for the sponsor of the academy’s early demise wafted from the back of the throng.

The group had gathered at the entrance to a muddy building site – the proposed location for the
Frederick Larson Business Academy for Entrepreneurial Excellence
. A dirt spattered truck filled with hardcore was parked on the road outside, its hazards flashing, the driver chatting amiably with a policeman dressed in a waterproof cape that billowed in the breeze. Both men were sipping tea from steaming polystyrene cups.

Angela sighed. The policeman was too relaxed, the protestors too polite. She dragged a strand of hair from her face and tried in vain to secure it behind an ear, but the wind whipped it from its dock and plastered it across her mouth. Her heart sank as she watched the policeman throw his head back at some joke the driver had just told him. She’d seen these kinds of well meaning protests before – meek and unthreatening, and ultimately doomed to fail.

She negotiated her way around a random lump of reinforced concrete dumped on the pavement and scanned the crowd. She recognised a few faces from earlier demonstrations. The group comprised a couple of governors, a few parents with nothing better to do on a dismal Monday lunchtime and a handful of teachers who must have nipped out of school during the midday break. By far the largest contingent was a noisy rabble of OAPs clustered in a separate huddle. One woman was standing slightly apart from the rest. It took Angela a few moments to realise the woman had chained herself to the metal railings next to the main gate. Her spirits lifted instantly. She could see the headlines already. She glanced over her shoulder to see Frank Carter at least forty yards behind her, slowly pulling his camera from its bag and looping the strap over his neck. She gestured to him to hurry up and pointed towards the woman in chains, who just at that moment started hollering. Something about freedom of speech. Angela spotted the reason for her sudden outburst. A thickset man wearing a fluorescent vest was striding towards her wielding an enormous pair of bolt cutters.

Angela picked up speed, but very quickly ran out of pavement. She reared up at the edge of a wide strip of muddy earth separating her from the protestors. She took a tentative step onto the churned-up ground and immediately felt cold mud seeping into her shoe. Another step and both heels sank completely into the yielding clay. She kept her gaze fixed on the chained woman, who had started waving a walking stick, brandishing it like a sword, swiping and jabbing the heavy handle towards the approaching yellow-vested man.

‘Don’t come any closer,’ the woman shouted. ‘You fascist pig!’ She lunged towards him. The walking stick narrowly missed the side of his head. He staggered back, losing his balance. The stick jabbed towards him again. He ducked and dodged, jerking his head sideways and back like a boxer. ‘Where’s your boss? I want to speak to Fred Larson. Get him down here.’

From this distance Angela could see the woman was younger than the rest of the group, early sixties at most. She seemed to have more energy than all the other protestors added together.

‘Oi! Stop that!’ The policeman who had been chatting to the truck driver threw his cup to the ground and sprinted towards the duelling pair, his waterproof ballooning behind him in the wind.

Angela tried desperately to lift her foot, wrenching a shoe from the ground. The heel stayed embedded in the earth, snapping clean off the sole. She pulled up the other shoe, it thwocked out of the ground intact. She limped as fast as she could towards the woman with the stick, glancing over a shoulder to check on her photographer’s progress. He was lumbering up the pavement, his chest heaving, his legs moving in slow motion.

‘For God’s sake, hurry up, Frank! You’re going to miss the money shot.’

The policeman in the waterproof slowed right down and stopped beyond walking stick swiping distance, holding his palms aloft.

‘Come on now, love. Let’s be sensible about this, shall we?’

The huddle of senior citizens gathered around the old woman and the policeman like a hungry gang of twelve-year-olds in a school playground, baying for blood.

‘Stay away from me – Nazi!’

She pulled back the walking stick and thrust it forward and up in a wide arc. The handle accelerated past the policeman’s nose, and knocked off his hat.

‘Right that’s it,’ he said.

He charged towards her and made a grab for the circling three-foot baton. He snatched nothing but air. The effort rocked him sideways.

Finally Frank Carter caught up with Angela.

‘You want to ease up on the pie-eating, Frank.’

The pensioner, a glint in her eye, swung the stick again, like a golfer at the tee and hit the policeman’s hat twenty yards in the air. It landed with a splash in a muddy puddle.

‘You getting all this, Frank?’

Two yellow-vested policemen broke away from the ragged cordon surrounding the other protestors.

‘There’s more where that came from.’ The woman was screaming now. ‘Don’t think you can bully me – just because I’m old and frail.’

The police officer stepped in again. This time he reached for her arm, but she was too quick for him. The stick came crashing down in a diagonal swoop and only just missed his right cheek. He stumbled awkwardly and dropped to his knees.

For a moment the stick wavered in mid air, the woman stood motionless, her mouth gaping. A pair of liver-spotted hands grabbed the stick and passed it to a blue-haired woman nearby and in an instant it was absorbed into the crowd, melting away behind a wall of pink, wrinkled, entirely innocent faces.

The two policemen finally arrived and helped their colleague to his feet, one of them handed him his hat. He shrugged away their hands.

‘Arrest her. And anyone else who so much as opens their mouths.’ He turned away, brushing mud from his trousers. ‘And get those bloody chains off.’

The man with the bolt cutters hesitated, keeping a healthy three feet between him and the woman. After a few moments two female constables appeared. The woman smiled at them and seemed quite happy to let them hold down her arms as the cutters chopped through the chains like scissors through bacon.

Angela hobbled over to join the little procession of two police officers and old age pensioner as they made their way to a waiting squad car.

‘Would you like to make a statement?’ Angela said as she approached.

‘Who are you?’ The woman looked her up and down. ‘And what happened to your shoe?’

‘Angela Tate,
Evening News
.’ Angela waved her business card in the woman’s face.

‘Never read it.’

‘Well, even so, we do have a very big circulation.’ She forced a smile at the woman. ‘Think how much all that publicity would help your cause.’ She managed to reach around one of the policewomen and slipped her card into a pocket of the OAP’s cardigan.

After a few moments they reached the police car and the woman looked into Angela’s face. ‘Jean Henderson,’ she said. ‘Retired. Widow. Mother of three, grandmother of five. Sixth on the way.’ Her mouth softened into a smile. ‘That the sort of thing you’re after?’

Angela smiled back at her and nodded. She turned to one of the policewomen. ‘Which station are you taking her to?’

‘Catford.’

‘I’ll see you down at the station, Mrs Henderson.’

‘Call me Jean.’

A policewoman pressed a hand on the top of Jean Henderson’s head, flattening her soft curls, and pushed her under the door arch of the police car. She climbed in after her and pulled the door firmly shut.

In broken heels, Angela limped back to the entrance of the building site, just as the big truck of hardcore was reversing in. The remaining protesters had drifted away. Frank was scrolling through the images on his camera.

‘Any good?’ Angela asked.

‘Dynamite. Assuming no more shock Cabinet reshuffles happen overnight, we might even get the front page.’

Angela slapped him on the back. ‘Now we just need to find ourselves a cab.’

The last of the OAPs eased themselves into a waiting minibus. The driver was leaning on the bonnet finishing a cigarette. ‘Maybe we can cadge a lift with that lot back to the High Street – we know they’ve got at least one spare seat.’

She glanced around the site and spotted a group of thickset men gathered around the entrance to a Portakabin. They were wearing suits beneath their high-visibility jackets and highly polished Oxfords on their huge feet. They had wires trailing out of their ears.

‘Frank.’ She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him towards her. ‘Poke your long lens through the fence and get a few shots of the site, will you? Include that little bunch by the hut. Fred Larson seems to be taking security of his building sites very seriously these days. This lot look more like secret service agents than bouncers.’

She continued to stare at the incongruous huddle as Frank fired off a dozen or so shots. One of the men turned round and spotted them. He shouted something and started running towards them. Frank lowered the camera to his chest and held up his hands in surrender. Still the hulk charged at them, two of his colleagues joining the chase. Angela grabbed Frank’s arm and dragged him away.

10

The catering trolley, laden with trays of curling sandwiches and plates of sliced fruit covered in cling film, rattled out onto the lobby of the fifth floor, leaving Caroline alone in the lift. She jabbed the ‘7’ button and leaned back against the wall as the doors creaked shut. It was the first time she’d been on her own all day. She took a deep breath and caught a lingering whiff of egg mayonnaise.

At lunchtime Pam had insisted on walking her to Prêt and escorting her back again, telling her at least half a dozen times how tired and pale she looked. Reminding her at every opportunity just how traumatised she must be feeling. Caroline knew Pam was still hoping for an unexpurgated account of last Thursday night and she was determined to reveal precisely nothing, switching the conversation back to their investigation into the missing CD-ROM.

Caroline glanced at herself in the mirrored walls of the lift, suddenly feeling as if she was standing in a department store changing room, exposed and vulnerable, waiting for Trinny and Susannah to pounce. Pam was right about one thing – apart from the dark circles under her eyes, the colour had completely drained from her face. Maybe she should have taken some time off. Certainly she felt as if she was running on empty, relying on strong coffee and sugary snacks to get her through the day.

She lowered her gaze and checked her watch, eager to focus on something other than her 360-degree reflection. It wasn’t yet 4:30pm. She should still be able to catch Martin Fox’s PA before she knocked off for the evening. After the unexplained disappearance of PC Mills, Caroline needed to speak to someone about the minister, and Consuela was the only suitable candidate. Throughout the day she’d left the PA countless phone messages and sent enough emails to be accused of spamming. All of them had been ignored.

After what seemed an impossibly slow ascent to the seventh floor, the doors finally slid open. Caroline rushed towards the widening gap only to discover a five-foot high metal cage blocking her exit. The cage was attached to a wooden palette and was full of office chairs. She grabbed the metal mesh with both hands and pushed, but the palette wouldn’t budge. The lift doors started to close, then jerked to a halt, the sensors detecting Caroline’s presence on the threshold. She turned her shoulder towards the palette and heaved with all her weight. Still it wouldn’t move. She stepped back, holding a hand against the door as it tried to slide shut.

‘Hello!’ she called. She waited for a response. None came. The seventh floor was normally alive with activity at this time on a Monday afternoon. She listened carefully. The only sound above the rattling of the lift doors as they tried to shuffle shut, was the permanent hum of the air conditioning.

Then she heard the ping of another lift arriving on the other side of the lobby.

‘Hello!’ She shouted louder this time. ‘Can you help? I seem to be trapped.’

She was answered by the sound of huffing and puffing followed by the squeal of unoiled wheels.

‘Hello!’ she hollered again.

‘All right – keep your hair on.’

That was all she needed.
Why did it have to be Ed Wallis?

‘I can’t get out of the lift.’

‘Is that you, Caroline?’

Caroline sighed. ‘Yes. Are you going to help me or what?’

Ed grunted. ‘I’m not sure I should with that attitude.’

Dear God save me from this man.

‘Please Ed, I really would appreciate it.’ She had to force out every single word.

‘Put it like that…’

Through the stack of chairs and grid of metalwork, Caroline watched the security guard wander slowly to the other side of the palette and kick at something on the bottom. He tugged on the metal cage and the palette rolled gently away from the lift.

‘There we are… no harm done,’ Ed said.

Caroline glanced up to see an empty palette standing directly in front of the other lift.

‘Did you park this one here?’ Caroline straightened her jacket and fastened the top two buttons.

Ed shrugged.

‘Bloody stupid place to leave it.’

‘You shouldn’t even be up here. It’s strictly out of bounds.’ He patted a hand against the name tag pinned to his chest. ‘Authorised personnel only.’

‘Authorised? What’s going on?’

‘Refurb.’ Ed flashed a mouthful of stained teeth at her.

‘This floor’s only just been refurbished.’

‘Well, they’re doing it again.’

He started walking to the glass wall at the end of the lobby and gestured for her to follow him. He stopped opposite the double doors leading to the ministers’ offices. The doorway was sealed with long sheets of black plastic taped along the doorframe.

‘No one’s said anything official,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got a sweepstake going downstairs.’

‘What are you talking about?’

He leaned in close and blasted fried onion breath into her face. She backed away.

‘Infestation. That’s what’s behind all this,’ he said. ‘My money’s on rats. But I picked cockroaches out of the hat.’ He lifted a hand to his head and started scratching. ‘I won’t see that fiver again. Mind you, we may never find out for sure – they’re stripping everything out tomorrow.’

‘They’re what?’

‘Stripping my arse – fumigating more like.’

‘Those chairs in the palette, they were new this year. Where are you taking them?’

‘To the pulping van parked round the corner. Have you seen it?’

Caroline shook her head, too bewildered to speak.

‘It’s in Abbey Orchard Street. You should take a look – watch it in action. Eats through everything like it’s made of cotton wool. Amazing bit of kit.’

‘But there’s nothing wrong with the chairs.’

‘I’m just following orders.’ He placed a hand in the small of his back. ‘Though I shouldn’t really be doing this at all. Not with my sciatica.’ He kneaded his fist into a fleshy buttock. ‘What are you doing up here, anyway?’

Caroline hesitated. She didn’t want to tell Ed about Consuela. She didn’t want to tell Ed anything, especially not after his little chat with Prior.

‘I left a file here the other day.’ She ducked around Ed and marched towards the doors and inspected the plastic sheeting. She started to pick at the tape holding the sheets in place.

‘You can’t do that!’ Ed squeezed his bulk between Caroline and the door, arms outstretched.

‘Oh come on, Ed.’ She feigned a smile. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’

Ed narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s it worth to you?’

Caroline stopped what she was doing and frowned at him.

‘If I
was
to let you in… how would you… you know… show your gratitude?’

‘Oh piss off, Ed.’ She turned back to the doors and tried to scratch the edge of the tape with a fingernail. ‘Do you have a penknife?’ she said. ‘Or some keys? I don’t want to a rip a great hole in the middle of it.’

‘You can’t go in there, end of. Health and safety. It’s just not safe – all the floorboards are up.’

‘There aren’t any floorboards.’

‘If you don’t stop I’ll have to call for back up.’ He pulled a walkie-talkie from his pocket.

‘Oh for God’s sake.’ Caroline stormed past him and hurried back to the lifts. She punched the
down
button and wondered at the effort someone was making to eradicate every last trace of Martin Fox from the seventh floor. She stabbed the button again as Ed appeared at the end of the lobby. He slowly folded his arms, clutching the walkie-talkie in one hand.

‘Where have they moved all the support staff to, while they’re doing the refurbishment?’ she asked him.

He didn’t answer.

‘Please yourself. I’ll find out from someone else. Maybe your line manager.’

He walked towards her, his puffy face breaking into a smile. ‘There’s no need to be like that.’ He slipped the walkie-talkie back into a pocket. ‘They’re all over the shop. Wherever they could find a spare desk.’ He stopped just inches away from her, she could feel the heat coming off him. ‘It’s been a logistical nightmare.’

Not what Caroline needed to hear. That meant Consuela could be anywhere, possibly even camped out in the building the department shared with the Department of Work and Pensions in Tothill Street.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘You after someone in particular?’ He moved a step closer. ‘Maybe I can help, track them down for you.’ He looked her up and down. ‘Is it anything to do with, you know, what happened the other night?’

The lift arrived and Caroline gratefully slipped through the doors without answering.

After a walk around the block to try to calm her nerves, Caroline returned to the fourth floor to discover her section of the academies division was completely deserted.

As she got closer to her desk, she spotted a large bulky object sitting on top. She rounded a bank of filing cabinets to discover a baby’s car seat, complete with baby, had been dumped between her computer and in tray.

A farmyard smell was emanating from the red-haired, podgy-faced baby. Caroline scowled at it. The baby scowled back. Then it started to cry. Quietly at first, building to a wail in a few short seconds. Caroline looked frantically around the deserted office. Why weren’t her colleagues fawning over its cute little fat fingers and toes? Where was its mother? Who was its mother?

She stared into its reddening face, the cheeks glistening now with fresh-sprung tears. There was something very familiar about the way the baby’s eyebrows bunched up towards its nose. It took a few more moments for the penny to drop. The baby was the spitting image of Tracy Clarke. Tracy had been threatening to show off her firstborn to the rest of the team ever since she’d left the maternity suite. This had to be her little boy. But where was Tracy? The crying ratcheted up another notch. Caroline took a step towards it. The baby gulped air into its tiny lungs then let out an unearthly scream. Thankfully the shriek was violent enough to bring Tracy out of her hiding place.

‘Ohhh, chicken. What’s all this nonsense?’ Tracy hurried across the office, holding out her arms. ‘Hey Caroline! Thanks for keeping an eye on him.’ She snapped loose the straps restraining his fat little body, lifted him onto her chest with a grunt and bounced him up and down. The crying didn’t subside.

‘Mummy’s poor little one. What
is
the matter?’ She bounced him some more. ‘I think it was meeting all of Mummy’s friends, wasn’t it poppet?’ She smiled at Caroline. ‘Must be a bit overwhelming, so many strange faces at his age.’

‘Everyone’s seen him then?’

‘They’ve all said hello – haven’t they, lovely boy? And now auntie Caroline wants to say hello too.’ She shoved the baby into Caroline’s arms. ‘Say hello to auntie Caroline.’

The weight of the child shocked her; he almost slipped from her grasp. She pushed his ugly red face over her shoulder and found herself bouncing him before she knew what she was doing. The farmyard smell intensified.

Tracy grabbed Caroline’s office chair and wheeled it towards her. ‘Hope you don’t mind me using your chair – it was the only one free when I got here.’ Tracy pointed at the cardboard box full of office stationery and paperwork sitting on top. ‘I wheeled my stuff up from the car park on it.’

‘What is all this?’

‘Just my work stuff. As I was coming in anyway, thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.’ Tracy beamed at her. The baby had stopped crying. ‘Look at you – you haven’t lost your touch. He’s as happy as anything now. How old’s your youngest?’

Caroline felt the baby deposit a mouthful of something warm and lumpy down her back. ‘Ben was eight last month.’

‘God, the time goes so fast, doesn’t it? Ever thought about having another?’

Caroline said nothing. She thrust the baby back at Tracy and found a tissue in her pocket to wipe away the slimy puree that was fast soaking through her blouse.

‘Are you back soon, then?’ Caroline said.

‘Only a few more weeks off. Not sure I can bear to be apart from this little angel, though. I know I’ll be in floods the minute I leave the house.’

Caroline forced a smile at the little red-faced monster. She lifted the heavy box from her chair and deposited it on Tracy’s desk.

‘Cheers Caroline.’

Caroline pushed her chair back under the desk and reached for her phone, hoping Tracy might take the hint. She wanted to try Consuela again before she left for the evening, and didn’t need an audience.

Tracy shifted the baby from one shoulder to the other. ‘I just wanted to say, Caroline…’ She was speaking in a whisper. ‘About that terrible business, you know…’ She looked towards the ceiling. ‘On the seventh floor.’

Caroline picked up the receiver and didn’t respond.

‘Well… I mean. It must have been a terrible shock – what with you working so closely with the minister… are you OK? You know, in yourself?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Only Pam was telling me how she thinks you should probably be at home, recovering.’

‘It’s nice of you to be concerned, but there’s really no need.’