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  A police driver returned him to the school in an unmarked car. The system, it seemed, had once again come to Neil Slater’s rescue.

  At Bolingbroke’s, far from the confusion that Slater had expected, all was ordered. A tape barrier had been erected around the security lodge and there was a black Range Rover parked on the drive beneath the sick bay, but that was all.

  As Slater approached the main entrance the 1st XV rugby squad clattered down the steps past him – minus Ripley and al-Jubrin.

  ‘Thought I’d take them for some circuit training,’ one of the assistant games masters called out. ‘Hope that’s OK.’

  ‘Fine!’ Slater managed. ‘Great!’

  ‘No problem. Hope you feel better soon.’

  Slater watched the squad jog down towards the athletics track. What the hell have they been told? he wondered.

  Before he had time to surmise further, the headmaster, Pembridge, materialised in the entrance. His gesture indicated welcome, but there was considerable strain apparent.

  ‘Mr Slater. Good. My study, if you would be so kind.’

  They proceeded up the wide stone passage in silence. Pausing in the anteroom to his study, Pembridge informed his secretary that he did not wish to be disturbed.

  ‘Mr Slater,’ he began when the doors had closed behind them. ‘I – we, Bolingbroke’s – owe you a debt of thanks. Your very resourceful actions last night quite possibly saved the life of one of our boys. Thank you.’

  He extended his hand, which Slater shook.

  ‘I also understand that you made a report concerning your suspicions of a certain vehicle to the afternoon detail of MailedFist Security, and that no action was taken in this regard.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Pembridge walked to the study window. ‘Mr Slater, I will speak frankly. Had MailedFist acted on your report and telephoned the police as you suggested, we would not be having this conversation. I recall very well your reservations concerning the company, and I recall my . . . possibly rather high-handed reaction to these reservations. In apology, and in thanks for your bravery, I would like to make you a small presentation.’

  He returned to his desk and handed Slater a small box. Inside was a pair of gold cufflinks, engraved with the crest of Bolingbroke’s School.

  Apart from formal mess-dress, Slater had never owned a shirt requiring cuff-links, but he smiled appreciatively. ‘Thank you. They’re beautiful.’

  And now for the bad news, he thought, pocketing the box. It was never going to be this easy.

  ‘Unfortunately, Mr Slater, there are more people involved than just you and me . . .’

  Here we go, thought Slater.

  ‘And Bolingbroke’s – although at times we may wish that it did — does not exist in a constitutional vacuum. There is a board of governors to be considered, and there are the laws of the land . . .’

  Get on with it. If you want to bin me, then say so.

  ‘. . . and admirable as your behaviour might seem from a certain point of view, the fact remains that you have caused the violent deaths of two men while serving on the staff of this school. Caused their deaths, moreover, in circumstances which do not appear to permit an argument of self-defence.’

  ‘Mr Pembridge—’

  ‘In the final analysis, Mr Slater, the fact that you are a former SAS soldier gives you no special rights. Upon discovering the state of affairs in the sick bay, you should have rung the police, who are not quite the plodding incompetents that you seem to assume. For your information – and I have been given dispensation to tell you this — the two young men that you killed were under surveillance by Special Branch. By all accounts a major operation has been compromised.’

  Slater stared at him, disbelievingly. ‘Compromised! Two members of your security staff are shot dead. A boy is kidnapped at gunpoint. Another boy who tries to defend him is stabbed in the guts—’

  ‘Mr Slater, there is no need to raise your voice.’

  ‘And you talk about an operation being compromised?’

  ‘Mr Slater, you will kindly keep your voice down. The school is aware that some sort of incident occurred last night, and that it related to a break-in at the sick bay, but that is all. The story doing the rounds at the moment – a story I have not discouraged – is that a member of the security staff intercepted a burglar.

  ‘Now, as you know, there are only two and a half weeks of this term left to run. Miss Burney and two of the boys involved in last night’s débâcle – Ripley and Boyd-Farquharson – are in hospital in Reading, and upon their release they will go straight home. Masoud al-Jubrin is being flown to Saudi Arabia as we speak, and Mrs Mackay will be taking extended leave. None of those involved will be returning to Bolingbroke’s until the beginning of the January term.’

  ‘And me?’ asked Slater sourly. ‘How extended is my leave to be?’

  ‘Mr Slater, a cheque is waiting for you in the bursar’s office. To your back pay, the school has added the sum of £20,000. Before you take possession of this cheque, however, we would ask you to sign a prepared form stating that your contract with Bolingbroke’s School has been terminated by mutual consent. You will also – although this has not been put in writing – agree never to mention the events of last night outside of such inquests and courts of inquiry as may demand your co-operation. This school has many friends, Mr Slater, and those friends would be very unhappy if adverse publicity concerning Bolingbroke’s were to be broadcast. So unhappy, in fact, that not even your Mr Lark would be able to help you. Do we understand each other?’

  ‘I think so,’ Slater said coldly.

  ‘I’m sorry it has come to this. You have done good things for the rugger team. I fully expect us to beat Wellington.’

  Twenty-four hours later, Slater was coaxing his ten-year-old Saab down the drive for the last time. The barriers around the lodge, he noticed, had been removed. On impulse he stopped the car and peered in through one of the windows. The interior was deserted and the monitor screens were blank. There was no sign that two men had died violently here, or indeed that the place had ever been occupied.

  ‘Took ’em away in a van,’ came a quiet voice from behind him. ‘Big fellers, the both of them.’

  It was the groundsman, Jimmy McCracken. He was holding a quarter bottle of Teacher’s whisky, and it was almost empty.

  ‘What did you see, Jimmy?’ asked Slater.

  ‘There’s a lot of blood in a man,’ McCracken said obliquely.

  ‘That there is,’ said Slater. Five hundred yards away a crowd of warmly wrapped spectators was assembling on the touchline of the 1st XV rugby pitch. ‘How long have you worked here at Bolingbroke’s?’ he asked.

  The groundsman slipped the bottle thoughtfully into his pocket. ‘Twenty-eight years now, it’d be.’

  Slater reached into his own pocket. ‘Well, I have something for you.’

  ‘You’ll not be staying, then?’

  Slater shook his head.

  McCracken opened the box with unsteady fingers and peered at the chain-linked gold cufflinks. ‘You know, I’ve been meaning to get some of these,’ he said.

  THREE

  Neil Slater looked round the studio flat that, for the time being at least, was his home. It was small, and at some point he really had to give it a lick of emulsion, but at least he now had somewhere to unpack his things. It was a top-floor walk-up in a Victorian terrace to the east of Highbury Park, and Slater had chosen it for its proximity to Arsenal tube station. He wasn’t a football fan particularly, but he had heard that the fortnightly rampage of fans through the area kept rental prices down.

  He’d arrived in London a week earlier after spending Christmas with an ex-Regiment friend and his wife. Dave and Linda Constantine owned a farmhouse outside Hereford, and had recently converted it to provide bed and breakfast. Slater had had visions of long walks on the hills and companionable mealtimes at the scrubbed-pine kitchen table, but in the event things hadn’t worked out like that. T
he Constantines’ marriage had been under strain — money problems, mostly, but Dave’s drinking came into it – and Slater found himself on the receiving end of two well-rehearsed sets of grievances.

  Dave’s was a very familiar problem, and afflicted most long-serving SAS soldiers. The time came when you had to move on, when you just couldn’t carry the weight of regimental life any more. You looked around and you saw normal people living normal lives and it just looked like the best thing in the world. And so you handed in your warrant card and you walked out of the gates and you tried it, and you discovered that normal life – or what you’d taken to be normal life – was actually a very difficult, very elusive thing. None of your military experience was any help, you couldn’t capture happiness and financial security by lying in wait for it on an icy hillside, and the attributes of toughness and self-reliance that had served you so well now started to seem like crippling deficiencies. You needed a new set of skills; you needed all that touchy-feely interpersonal stuff that you’d spent so many years sniggering about with your mates.

  Slater himself had attempted to address these issues by applying for the post at Bolingbroke’s. He’d come with a glowing letter of recommendation from his former CO (a Bolingbroke’s old boy, usefully) and a determination to make a success of his new life. If this involved a few humiliations along the way, then so be it. If some of the parents and teaching staff chose to see him as their social inferior, then let them – it would be their problem, not his. He’d make a new life for himself on the rugby touchline, have his own chair in the staff room, fix himself up with a local girlfriend, become part of the establishment. And if he’d had his doubts – if, at times, it had occurred to him that he was merely exchanging one barracks for another – well, there were worse things than institutionalisation.

  Dave Constantine had laid claim to less modest ambitions. He had invested his entire twenty-two-year service gratuity of £37,000 in a private security company named Radfan that another former Regiment member was setting up. Things had looked good for a while, but then the microchip fabrication plant which was Radfan’s biggest corporate client went bankrupt and defaulted on a large sum owing. Radfan’s financing had been shaky from the start – they had badly overextended themselves buying hi-tech surveillance equipment – and the bad debt finished them off. Of his £37,000 Dave Constantine recovered just £1200. Severely depressed, he spent the money on reslating the farmhouse roof and upgrading the plumbing. You could charge more for bed and breakfast if you had power showers, Linda had heard.

  And so Dave had found himself turning back the bed-sheets and plying the Toilet Duck. The guests had come in twos and threes in the summer months, but the venture had never really taken off. The fact that the proprietor smelt of whisky at breakfast-time probably didn’t help. Nor did Linda’s tense and sometimes bruised countenance.

  To escape the recriminations and the silences Slater went running, pounding the icy country roads for hours at a time, often returning well after dark. His stay at Wormbridge had come to an end after a joyless New Year’s Eve party at the farmhouse. After announcing that he had decided to accept an offer of work as a mercenary in Sierra Leone, Dave had passed out cold. A tearful Linda had then invited Slater into her bed. He had turned her down as tactfully as he was able, but hadn’t been able to face the couple the next day. Leaving a note and a generous contribution towards the household budget, he had slipped away at first light.

  He’d driven straight to London, and used the remainder of the day scouting the Highbury area. At nine o’clock the next morning, after a night at a cheap hotel, he’d visited the first estate agent. By midday he was pocketing the keys to 28 Mafeking Terrace, and forty-eight hours later, after hiring a van and scouring the Holloway Road’s second-hand furniture and kitchen shops, he had the place in working order. The fridge had a weird shuddering hum that no amount of tinkering seemed to fix, and he preferred not to think too closely about the provenance of the cooker – but it was a base.

  The other reason — apart from affordability — that he’d chosen the area was that it was on the Piccadilly underground line. Although he’d been unwilling to involve himself with bodyguard and private security work when he’d first left the Regiment – the work hadn’t promised the clean break he’d been looking for – Slater had reviewed his options over the course of those long runs through the Herefordshire hill-country. The pay-off from Bolingbroke’s wouldn’t last long and his choices were few. Working as a bodyguard had its down-sides – you had to wear a suit, for a start – but by all accounts the money was good. The Piccadilly Line ran through Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Belgravia, which is where most of the work was. Bodyguarding hours were long, and Slater didn’t want to spend a second more than necessary getting to and from work.

  His time at Bolingbroke’s was now a distant memory. Ever-present, however – despite Lark’s involvement – was the nagging worry that the affair at the school would have serious consequences for him.

  The Saudis, he was certain, would not wish news to get out about the attempt on Masoud al-Jubrin, and it was probably to accommodate the Saudis that the police had been stood down and the terrorists’ and the dead security men’s bodies had been spirited away by an MI6 cleaning team. No sense jeopardising an entire arms-sales programme because of a local unpleasantness – especially one that that would reflect so poorly on all parties.

  Pembridge, in his turn, would do all that he could to hush up the affair for the sake of the school. But that still left a lot of mouths to be stopped: Mrs Mackay, Jean Burney, the Ripleys, the Boyd-Farquharsons, the families of the security men . . . If any one of them went to the press then there would be some very hefty deals to be brokered. And the security services, as Lark had impressed on Slater on more than one occasion, really hated to do deals of that sort.

  No, Slater would be made to take the drop if there was a court of inquiry. There would be a lot of talk about post-traumatic stress and the difficult circumstances of his departure from the Regiment, but in the end they’d leave him swinging in the wind. He just had to hope that it never came to that. It was a worry, though, and a serious one.

  How should I dress for the interview? he wondered.

  Minerva Close Protection was a small but very successful company set up by a former Guards officer. Based in Knightsbridge, the company employed a number of ex-SAS soldiers, among others, to guard and otherwise minister to its stable of super-wealthy clients. The work often involved counter-surveillance and evasive driving in addition to straight body-guarding – if Minerva clients appeared in the newspapers, they prefered it to be at a time and in a context of their own choosing.

  Slater had been recommended to Minerva by Tommo Goss, an ex-Coldstream Guardsman who had spent two years with G Squadron. There was a large number of private security companies based in the West End, Goss had explained to Slater over a pint, but there was a limited amount of really top-drawer work. And a lot of companies ripped you off, charging up to a thousand pounds a day for your services and only passing on a quarter of that figure to you. Minerva played fair, Goss said, and if you played fair in return you could expect to make a lot of money.

  ‘What do you mean, “play fair in return”?’ Slater had asked.

  ‘Don’t cut out the agency by offering to deal direct,’ Goss answered, ‘and don’t dip the quill in company ink.’

  ‘Dip the—’

  ‘Don’t bang the female clients. Those are the two basic rules. And the boss, Duckworth, is a canny bugger — he’ll find out if you’re playing around. He won’t say anything, but you won’t hear from him again either.’

  Slater decided to attend the interview in the clothes he stood up in. No point in trying to go smart – he’d only get it wrong.

  Within thirty minutes of leaving Mafeking Terrace he was entering an anonymous block overlooking Hyde Park. The offices, which were on the eighth floor, were quietly expensive. A receptionist showed Slater to a waiting area contai
ning a large abstract painting and current editions of Vogue and the New Yorker. Nothing suggested that this was a company staffed principally by ex-special forces soldiers and secret service personnel.

  Five minutes later the receptionist was back. She was very pretty – the almond-shaped eyes and wide smile giving the lie to the severely tailored grey suit. She also, Slater guessed, represented a test for potential employees like himself. If you couldn’t resist trying it on with her, you were probably not suitable bodyguard material. Tearing his eyes from her trim figure, he tried to give an impression of watchfulness as he followed her across the silent carpet past a series of closed doors.

  Peter Duckworth was a tall, languid figure in – Slater guessed – his early fifties. His hair was silver and his suit of exquisite cut. His eyes twinkled.

  ‘Mr Slater – Neil – come in. Coffee?’

  Slater was not deceived by the affable manner. There was something lethal about Duckworth.

  For ten minutes the former Guards officer quizzed Slater about his SAS activities. Slater’s responses were neutral and in several instances he felt it prudent not to answer – the man was a civilian, after all.

  ‘And I understand that you’re a close friend of Tom Goss, is that right?’

  ‘We were in Belize together, instructing on the jungle warfare course,’ said Slater.

  Duckworth nodded and helped himself to a biscuit from the tray at his side. ‘Good. Lovely. Well, let me tell you a bit about what we do here . . .’

  Duckworth spoke for twenty minutes. Slater guessed he had given the same talk, word for word, many times before. The company’s clients, he explained, were people of wealth – he used the phrase as if it were a form of victimhood. Their lifestyles were not ordinary lifestyles, their needs were not ordinary needs, their behaviour was not ordinary behaviour. ‘Nevertheless,’ said Duckworth, ‘you will behave at all times as if it was. You will not be petulant, and you will not stand upon your dignity. You will refuse a client’s request only if, in your judgement, to accept it would compromise that client’s security. Do you understand?’