No answer.
‘Where are you meeting her?’
‘In a whorehouse,’ he snapped, heading for the door.
‘Have I offended you somehow?’
‘Not yet. But you’re getting there.’
‘Perhaps you’ve offended me. I may go back to my flat. I need some serious sleep.’
But she stayed, with the smell of his round clever body still on her and the print of him in the bedclothes at her side and the memory of his watcher’s eyes smouldering down at her in the half light. Even his tantrums excited her. So did his black side, in the rare moments when he let it show: in their lovemaking, when they were playing games and she brought him to the brink of violence, and his wet head would lift as if to strike, before he just, but only just, pulled back. Or at BUCHAN meetings when Maltby with customary perversity decided to needle him about a report – ‘Is your source illiterate as well as omniscient, Andrew, or do we have you to thank for his split infinitives?’ – and little by little the lines of his fluid face hardened and the danger light kindled in the depths of his eyes and she understood why he had christened his greyhound Retribution.
I’m losing control, she thought. Not of him, I never had it. Of me. More alarming still to the daughter of a terminally pompous Law Lord and the former partner of the immaculate Edgar, she was discovering a distinct appetite for the disreputable.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Osnard parked his diplomatic car outside the shopping complex at the foot of the tall building, greeted the security guards on duty and rose to the fourth floor. Under sickly strip-lighting the lion and unicorn boxed eternally. He typed a combination, entered the Embassy’s reception lobby, unlocked an armoured glass door, climbed a stair-case, entered a corridor, unlocked a grille and stepped into his own kingdom. A last door remained closed to him and it was made of steel. Selecting a long brass pipestem key from a bunch in his pocket, he inserted it the wrong way up, said fuck, removed it and inserted it the right way up. Alone, he moved a little differently to when he was observed. There was more rashness to him, something headlong. His jaw slumped, his shoulders hunched, his eyes looked out from under lowered brows, he seemed to be lunging at some unseen enemy.
The strongroom comprised the last two yards of corridor converted to a kind of larder. To Osnard’s right lay pigeonholes. To his left, amid a variety of incongruous articles such as fly spray and toilet paper, a green wall-safe. Ahead of him, an oversized red telephone reposed on a stack of electrical boxes. It was known in the vernacular as his digital link with God. A sign on the base said, ‘Speech on this instrument costs £50.00 per minute.’ Osnard had written beneath it the word ‘Enjoy’. It was in mis-spirit that he now lifted the receiver and, ignoring the automatic voice commanding him to press buttons and observe procedures, dialled his London bookmaker, with whom he placed a couple of bets to the tune of five hundred pounds each on greyhounds whose names and appointments he seemed to know as well as he knew the bookmaker.
‘No, you stupid tart, to win,’ he said. When had Osnard ever backed a dog each way?
After this he resigned himself to the rigours of his trade. Extracting a plain folder from a pigeonhole marked top secret BUCHAN, he bore it to his office, switched on the lights, sat himself at his desk, belched and, head in hands, began to read again the four pages of instructions that he had received that afternoon from his Regional Director Luxmore in London and at considerable cost to his patience deciphered with his own hand. In a passable imitation of Luxmore’s Scottish brogue, Osnard mouthed the text aloud:
‘You will commit the following orders to memory’ – suck of the teeth – ‘This signal is not repeat not for Station files and will be destroyed within seventy-two hours of receipt, young Mr Osnard… You will advise BUCHAN forthwith of the following’ – suck of the teeth – ‘you may give BUCHAN the following undertakings only… you will administer the following dire warning… oh yes!’