“A what?”
“Never mind.” A thought crept into the back of my mind. Did Sunny Miller have a GayHoller profile? I made a mental note to check. “What have you got for me, Beaumont?”
Chapter7
Sunny
Isat outside the chief whip’s office for what could have been several days. It felt like being sent to the headmaster. When, finally, the terrifyingly triangular form of Vladimir Popov arrived to reunite me with my phone, he looked chuffed with himself, considering his government had just had a truly terrible day at PMQs. The prime minister had been forced to publicly state his support for Energy Secretary Bob Wynn-Jones, and that was the political equivalent of pulling the pin out of a grenade and sitting on it. The grenade, that is. Not the pin. Speaking of grenades, VladPop had my phone in is hand.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” he said.
“I’m so,sosorry,” I said, starting my plea bid early.
VladPop made a tutting noise as he inserted his key into his office door.
“It was an accident,” I said, fear rising inside me.
“Let’s discuss this inside, shall we? Calmly. Like rational adults.”
The chief whip swung his door open, and I stepped past him into the room. He smelt of spice, hair gel, and raw masculinity. His office was a Hansard-lined vault with a view out over the Thames and, at a quick count, at least a dozen pieces of taxidermy. The head of a deer. Some kind of ferret under a glass dome. The cat from thePet Semataryfilms. Someone had been a bit light-fingered on a visit to the Natural History Museum. It was as ghoulish as a dead-Victorian-aunt convention. Which, I imagined, was the point. VladPop sat down and placed my phone on the green leather lining of his vast wooden desk. I perched myself in one of the naughty chairs opposite.
“I like your friends,” VladPop said. He smiled broadly, revealing vampiric canine teeth. “Very much.” Then he opened my phone and started scrolling.
“Wait, how did you do that without putting in the code?”
He shrugged. “I disabled the code.”
“Don’t you need the code to disable the code?”
He shrugged again. I was starting to wonder whether Vladimir Popov reallywasa KGB agent rather than the Very Establishment fourth-generation Old Etonian descendent of a Russian aristocrat who’d fled to England a century earlier to escape the Bolsheviks.
“I’ll bring you up to speed,” he said. “Peter wanted to go a club in Vauxhall instead of Hades, because there’s a new place that’s wheelchair accessible for Nick.”
This was surreal.
“Do you mind if I ask about Nick? Why does he use a chair?”
“An accident,” I replied, shocked to find myself answering this question. “On his bike. First year of uni.”
“So young. How sad.” VladPop was still scrolling through my phone. This was a gross violation of my privacy, but I was powerless to say anything, given that not an hour ago I’d tried to kill him with it.
“Then Stavros suggested going to Maxime’s in Soho, and they held a vote and the others agreed, so you’re all going there after drag at the Duncan. You were the casting vote, so I voted in favour. I hope that works for you?”
“Er, yes,” I said. Apparently, the chief whip was now my personal assistant and diary secretary.
“Good. I thought, well, Sunny doesn’t have a boyfriend, and Maxime’s seems like the kind of place you might find the kind of chap who’d put a bit of lead in your pencil. Better than some sleazy club, hey? By the way, I’m worried about Peter’s fornicatory habits. Does he visit a sexual health clinic regularly? If not, I can get someone from the Department for Health to give him a call. They’re very discreet.”
This wasn’t just surreal. This was Salvador-Dalí-shagging-a-horse-in-Trafalgar-Square-while-Picasso-fingered-Max-Ernst levels of surreal.
“Can I have my phone back now?” I asked.
“In a minute.”
“Listen, I’m really very sorry.”
“Don’t mention it. It’s fine. Accidents happen.” He put the phone down on the desk in front of him, lining up the edges to make sure it was square with his blotting pad and pen. Everything in here, I now realised, was fastidiously clean and perfectly square with everything else. Even the taxidermy was remarkably free of dust. These were the hallmarks of a serial killer in almost any thriller you cared to watch. Vladimir fixed me with his steely blue eyes and clasped his hands in front of his chest. Here comes the kill, I thought.
“I did want to ask for your help on something, though,” he said.
