The Invisible Code(11)

Ten minutes later, the detectives had hailed a taxi and were heading south towards Victoria. ‘My guess is he wants an explanation about the memoir,’ said Bryant.

‘Then why would he ask to see me as well?’

‘You’re mentioned in the title of the book, John. You’re as involved in this as I am. I think he might have found something unpalatable in one of the chapters and taken objection.’

‘I wonder if it’s the part where you refer to MI7 as a secure ward for the mentally disenfranchised, or the bit where you describe his department as a hotbed of paranoid conspiracy theorists with a looser grip on reality than a stroke victim’s hold on a bedpan handle?’

‘I’m impressed you remembered that,’ said Bryant, pleased. ‘There’s nothing in the book that breaches the Official Secrets Act, and that’s the only thing he can get me on. Anna triple-checked it.’

‘Yes, but Anna Marquand is dead.’ Bryant’s biographer had supposedly died of septicaemia in the South London home she shared with her mother, but she had passed away shortly after being mugged by an unknown assailant. The case remained unsolved.

‘You know my feelings about that,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m sure Kasavian’s department is implicated somehow. He might not have been directly involved, but I bet he knows who was.’

‘I’m not so convinced any more,’ said May. ‘You honestly think the Home Office found something in your memoirs that was so damaging they would commit murder to cover it up? They’re part of the British government, not the Vatican.’

‘I think they might have gone as far as condoning an unlawful killing, if it involved the Porton Down case.’ Bryant sucked his boiled sweet ruefully.

Porton Down was a military science park in Wiltshire, the home of the Ministry of Defence’s Science & Technology Laboratory, DSTL. The executive agency had been set up and financed by the MOD to house Britain’s most secretive military research institute. Three years ago there had been a rash of suicides at a biochemical company outsourced by the DSTL. The project leader at the laboratory had turned whistle-blower, and had been found drowned. At the time, Oskar Kasavian had been employed as the head of security in the same company. It might have been coincidence – government defence officials moved within a series of tightly overlapping circles – but the absence of information made Bryant suspicious.

‘Why do something so dramatic?’ asked May. ‘Why not simply slap an injunction on the book?’

‘That would be the best way to draw attention to it, don’t you think? Do you honestly imagine governments can’t make people disappear when they want to? Looks like we’re here.’

The taxi was pulling up in Marsham Street, the new Home Office headquarters. The building had won architectural awards, but to Bryant’s mind its interior possessed the kind of anonymous corporate style favoured by corrupt dictators who enjoyed picture windows in the boardroom and soundproofed walls in the basement.

‘A word of advice, Arthur,’ May volunteered. ‘The less you say, the better. Don’t give him anything he can use as ammunition.’

‘Oh, you know me, I’m the soul of discretion.’

May’s firm hand on his shoulder held him back. ‘I mean it. This could go very badly for us.’

‘That’s fine, John, so long as you remember that he is our enemy. Anna Marquand was more than just my biographer, she was fast on her way to becoming a good friend; someone I trusted with the secrets of my life. And she may have paid for it with her own.’

In the immense open atrium, the detectives appeared as diminished as the figures in a Lowry painting. A blank-faced receptionist asked for their signatures and handed them plastic swipe cards.

Three central Home Office buildings were connected from the first to the fourth floors by a single walkway. This formed part of a central corridor running the length of the site, commonly known as the Bridge. Kasavian’s new third-floor office was in the only part of the building that had no direct access to sunlight. As the detectives entered his waiting room, they felt the temperature fall by several degrees.

Kasavian’s assistant looked as if she hadn’t slept for months. ‘Perhaps he drains her blood,’ Bryant whispered from the side of his mouth. She beckoned them into an even dimmer room. Kasavian was standing at the internal window with his back to them, his hands locked together, a tall black outline against a penumbra of dusty afternoon light. In this corner of the new century’s high-tech building it was forever 1945.

May glanced across at his partner. Arthur Bryant had no interest in what others thought of his appearance. His sartorial style could most easily be described as ‘Post-war Care Home Jumble Sale’. It was usually possible to see what he had been eating just by glancing at his front. John May prided himself on a certain level of elegance, although his police salary did not run to handmade suits. When Kasavian turned, May instantly recognized the Savile Row cut of charcoal-grey cloth, the lustrous gleam of Church’s shoes, the dark glitter of Cartier cufflinks, and felt a twinge of jealousy.