The line went dead. Alexia put the phone down, gasping for breath.
She closed her eyes and the view from her office window popped into her mind: the silver Thames and its deadly currents snaking their way around her, cutting her off like Rapunzel in her tower.
Somebody out there hates me.
The waters were rising.
Chapter Twelve
Alexia De Vere tapped her desk impatiently with a Montblanc silver fountain pen. Commissioner Grant, the senior Metropolitan Police Officer in charge of her personal security, was late for their three o’clock meeting. If there was one thing Alexia disliked, it was lateness.
Her first boss in politics, an odious Liberal MP named Clive Leinster, had been a stickler for punctuality and it was a lesson that had remained with Alexia throughout her career. God, Clive was an asshole, though! Working as his personal assistant had changed Alexia’s life, but he himself had been a horror. In his midforties, married, and an appalling letch, even by Westminster standards, Clive Leinster was short and wispily bald, with knock knees, bad breath, and a receding chin to match his hairline. It was a miracle to Alexia Parker (as she was then) that Clive Leinster had found one woman prepared to sleep with him, never mind several.
“Power’th an incredible aphrodithiac, Alexia,” Clive would breathe huskily over her desk after one of his long, boozy lunches. After a month it was painfully clear that the type of personal assistance Clive Leinster was looking for was not the sort that Alexia was prepared to offer. “You’ll never get ahead in Wethtminthster if you’re not prepared to play the game, you know.” Clive sneered as Alexia packed up her desk.
“At least I can say ‘Westminster,’ ” Alexia shot back. “And I’ve every intention of playing the game. Just not with you.”
Marching out of Leinster’s office with her head held high, Alexia was convinced she’d get another job in a heartbeat. In fact, she spent the next six months back behind a bar at the Coach and Horses on Half Moon Street.
“No MP will touch me,” she complained to one of her regulars, a shy, young financier named Edward De Vere. “It’s like I’ve got the plague or something. That fucker Leinster must have poisoned the well.”
“I can ask a few questions at the Carlton Club, if you like. See if there are any rumors knocking around.”
“You’re a member of the Carlton?” It was the first time Alexia had realized that Edward De Vere must be well connected. Politically well connected, that is. The Carlton Club was an exclusive—the exclusive—Tory Party members club in St. James’s. Like all would-be Conservative politicians, Alexia would have sold her soul to have access there, but there were no women allowed. Even if there had been, unknown barmaids with no family or connections to recommend them were probably not at the top of the Carlton membership committee’s wish list.
Two nights later, Edward De Vere was back in the bar.
“So, did you hear anything?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“Well?” Alexia leaned forward across the bar, accidentally affording her customer an excellent view of her breasts. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“I’ll tell you on two conditions.”
“Conditions?” She frowned.
“Actually three conditions.”
“Three?”
“Three.”
“And they are?”
“The first is, don’t shoot the messenger.”
Shit, thought Alexia. He must have heard something bad. Really bad.
“I would never do that. Go on.”
“The second condition is that you call me Teddy. ‘Edward’ makes me sound like such a stiff.”
Alexia laughed. “Okay. Teddy. And the third?”
“The third is that you agree to have dinner with me on Friday night.”
Alexia considered for a moment. She already had a date on Friday night, with a dancer from the Royal Ballet named Francesco. Her gay colleagues at the pub were beside themselves with excitement about it.
“Lucky you,” the Coach and Horses landlord had cooed, staring unashamedly at Francesco’s crotch in the promotional pictures Alexia showed him. “He certainly carries all before him, doesn’t he?”
“It was love at first tights!” Stephane, the bar manager, giggled.
By contrast, Edward De Vere—Teddy—looked like a gauche little schoolboy. Ruddy-cheeked, awkward, and painfully reticent around women, Teddy was the archetypal British upper-class male, and not in a good way. And yet he had plucked up the courage to ask Alexia out. And he was funny. And a member of the Carlton Club. More important than all of this, he knew why Alexia was being blackballed by Westminster MPs and he wasn’t going to tell her unless she agreed to have dinner with him.
“All right, fine. I’ll have dinner with you.”
“On Friday.”
“Yes, on Friday. Now, for pity’s sake, what did you hear?”
Teddy De Vere took a deep breath.
“Clive Leinster told the entire House of Commons bar that he slept with you and you gave him crabs.”
“I . . . he . . .” Alexia spluttered, too outraged for speech. “Fuck! How dare he? The lying little . . .”
“I’ll pick you up at seven.” Teddy beamed. “We’ll go to Rules.”
Rules was unlike any restaurant Alexia had ever been to. Since moving to London, she had occasionally been taken out to smart establishments where they served champagne and oysters, and where pretentious maître d’s lorded it over their wealthy clientele by denying them the best tables.
Rules was in a different class to any of those places. Yes, it was expensive, but the menu read like a boarding school lunch board: toad in the hole, spotted dick, jugged hare, steak and kidney pudding, jam roly-poly. The average age of the waiters must have been eighty if they were a day, all of them men and dressed as if they’d walked off the pages of a Dickens novel, in long black aprons and stiffly starched shirts. Everything about the place, from the overcooked vegetables, to the smell of beeswax on the polished wood floors, to the cut-glass accents ricocheting off the walls, was as upper-class English as Buckingham Palace.
The moment she walked through the door, Alexia realized two things.
The first was that she did not belong here.
The second was that Teddy De Vere did.
“You’re not still miffed about the crabs thing, are you?” Teddy asked, in a voice Alexia could have wished were at least a decibel lower.
“No, I am not miffed,” she whispered back. “I’m furious. Everyone knows the only way in to the Commons for a woman is as a secretary. I’m wildly overqualified, but now, thanks to that asshole, I don’t stand a chance. I mean, as if anyone could give Clive Leinster crabs! As if he isn’t alive with them already, the revolting little pervert.”
Teddy De Vere chuckled. “You know you have a marvelous way with words, Alexia. You should be a politician.”
Alexia prodded her unappetizing Yorkshire pudding. “One day.”
“Why not today? There’s a seat going begging in Bethnal Green.”
Alexia laughed. “It’s not begging for me.”
“It could be,” Teddy said seriously. “I put some feelers out at the Carlton Club the other night, in between spying for you. They’re looking for someone different to contest that seat. A ‘younger, more modern face’ was how Tristan put it.”
“Tristan? As in Tristan Channing?”
Teddy De Vere nodded. “We were at Eton together.”
Of course you were. Tristan Channing ran conservative central office. He was the closest thing to God within the party. “Young and modern is one thing. But do you really think a woman from my background has a chance in that seat?”
“Why not?” Teddy shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there? Forget all this nonsense about being a secretary and throw your name in the hat. What’s the worst that can happen?”
It was hard to believe that that conversation had taken place more than thirty years ago. And now here she was, home secretary. I always had ambition. But Teddy was the one who pushed me. He gave me the confidence and he opened the doors.
“Home Secretary? Commissioner Grant has arrived.”
Alexia’s permanent private secretary, Sir Edward Manning, broke her reverie. Immaculate as ever in a bespoke three-piece suit, with his hair smoothed flat against his scalp, Edward smelled faintly of the same Floris aftershave that Teddy wore.
“About bloody time. I’m supposed to meet the Russian ambassador at four-fifteen, you know. My day just got completely squeezed.”
“I know, Home Secretary. This shouldn’t take too long.”
A couple of influential Russian oligarchs based in London were spitting teeth at the new regulations Alexia had proposed to Parliament, designed to close tax loopholes for the super rich and to prevent Russian money from being laundered through the City. As a result, the ambassador had demanded a meeting, and Sir Edward had granted it. Russian oligarchs were not the sort of people whom the Home Office wanted as enemies. Commissioner Grant was going to have to cut to the chase.