They worked in the drawing room—Mr. Marlowe and Mr. Allon, the petite Danish woman called Ingrid, and the beautiful Englishwoman who was pretending not to be the socialite who was missing and presumed dead. Precisely what they were doing was a mystery to Parish and Miss Coventry, though the confines of the cottage were such that they couldn’t help but overhear at least a portion of the proceedings—especially Miss Coventry, a listener by trade who missed nothing.
“It involves her husband,” she informed Parish on the afternoon of the first day. “Evidently he’s in business with a Russian oligarch, the one who used to live in that enormous place in Prince of Wales Terrace.”
“Not Dmitri Savin?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Parish absorbed this information in thoughtful silence. They were seated in the kitchen’s cozy little nook, partaking of their afternoon tea. Mr. Marlowe had challenged the Danish woman to a footrace in the wilds of Dartmoor. Mr. Allon and Ms. Winter were still hard at work in the drawing room.
“Do you remember the last time he was here?” asked Parish.
“It was the Rebecca Manning case, wasn’t it?” Miss Coventry sipped her tea. “A scandal for the ages, that one. Imagine, the daughter of none other than Kim Philby...”
“He found her too, as I recall.”
“He certainly has a knack for it.” She smiled. “And always the perfect guest. Such beautiful manners.”
“Unlike his little friend from Denmark.”
“Here she comes now.”
Parish peered out the nook’s leaded window and saw the Danish woman bounding across the moor. Mr. Marlowe was nowhere to be seen.
“Where do you suppose he could be?”
“I’m sure he’ll turn up soon enough. After all,” said Miss Coventry, “we’re having cottage pie for dinner.”
It would be another twenty minutes before he staggered into the forecourt. Exhausted and soaked with sweat, he slipped into the cottage without a word and headed off to his room with his tail between his legs to dress for dinner. It was a relaxed affair, noisy and filled with laughter, most of it at Mr. Marlowe’s expense. The Danish woman offered him a rematch, with a five-minute head start. Wisely he declined.
After breakfast the following morning they were back at work. Parish and Miss Coventry overheard several exchanges—through absolutely no fault of their own, mind you—that led them to believe that Ms. Winter’s husband was not nearly as wealthy as he had made himself out to be. Indeed it sounded as though Edward Knight was entirely beholden to the aforementioned Dmitri Savin, a relationship he had taken great pains to conceal from HMRC, otherwise known as His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. It appeared as though the Russian oligarch had plowed money into Knight’s firm through anumber of dodgy offshore shell companies, the kind with three-letter names like ABC Holdings and XYZ Capital. Knight in turn had paid the Russian a handsome return on his investment, somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five percent, which had been funneled into an entirely different set of offshore front companies—including something called Landmark Ventures, a Bahamian-registered shell corporation that did its banking in Nassau.
“It sounds to me,” said Miss Coventry, “as though Landmark holds the key.”
“To what, exactly?” asked Parish.
“Mr. Marlowe seems to think that Landmark is controlled by the GRU.”
“A band of thugs,” declared Parish with an uncharacteristic flash of vehemence. “Always the mailed fist, never the delicate touch. Give me a good old-fashioned Moscow Center hood any day of the week. They were worthy opponents in their day, weren’t they, Miss Coventry?”
They overheard other things as the day wore on—snippets of conversations, announcements of interesting discoveries, even the odd exchange of a harsh word—that indicated the unlikely team of burrowers toiling away in the drawing room were closing in on their target. Parish received additional supporting evidence of this theory when the young Danish woman, having forgone her afternoon training run, requested permission to attach her laptop computer to the Internet via a mobile hotspot. Parish, aghast, put his foot down.
“Not now, not ever. World without end, Amen.”
A quarrel ensued, one that all parties would later regret. Voices were raised, threats issued. Even Mr. Allon, he of the impeccable manners, joined the fray. Parish, seeking a way out of the morass, reluctantly offered the Danish woman use of the computer in hisoffice. That, said Mr. Allon, was the worst idea he had heard since Brexit. Eventually, however, the parties reached a compromise, one that permitted the Danish woman to remove the ethernet cable from Parish’s computer and attach it to hers. She did so at 7:20p.m., with Parish looking warily on. “Leave,” was all she said.
He ate a late dinner with Miss Coventry and then retired to his rooms to watch a little something on the telly. The door to his office, which was just down the corridor, was tightly closed, though it did little to dampen the relentless machine-gun clatter of her typing. Worse still was her strange music, meandering notes on a piano interspersed with the dissonant wailing of a saxophone. Parish, a devotee of Haydn and Mozart, had never heard such drivel.
She was still at it at dawn when Parish, after a sleepless night, staggered from his bed—and at 1:00p.m., when the others sat down to an al fresco lunch in the garden. She finally emerged from the office at half past four, with the laptop tucked under one arm. She delivered her findings to Mr. Allon, who in turn had a quiet word with Mr. Marlowe, who rang Vauxhall Cross from the secure phone in Parish’s office. The helicopter set down on the grounds of Wormwood Cottage a few minutes after six o’clock. Much to Parish’s disappointment, it took on only two passengers.
39
Number 10
Downing Street was deserted save for the enormous tabby cat sitting on his haunches outside Number 10. The feline eyed Gabriel and Christopher malevolently as they approached the famous black door. It swung slowly open to reveal Geoffrey Sloane, the prime minister’s chief of staff. No introductions were necessary. They were all three well acquainted.
“The PM is upstairs in the White Drawing Room,” said Sloane. “I believe you know the way.”
The understated quality of Number 10’s entrance hall concealed what the eighteenth-century prime minister William Pitt described as “my vast, awkward house.” In truth it was not one house but three—a redbrick mansion overlooking St. James’s Park, a cottage, and a town house on Downing Street that supplied the residence its iconic address. Constructed on marshy soil, the dwelling was prone to sinking and, consequently, soon became a hazardous place in which to live. Floors buckled, staircases and chimneys sagged, woodwork turned to sawdust with dry rot. So weakened were Number 10’s bearing walls that by the middle of the twentieth century admission to the upper floors was strictly limited for fear the house might collapse.
