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  And it was important to indulge Andy’s whims. He may not have been a deep thinker or a strategic whiz-kid, but he could perform a number of useful tasks well; he was especially good at promotional strategy. For that alone, Andy Turner was worth keeping happy – and Vos knew that hiring this ex-cop would make him very happy. Andy was simply part of the furniture here at Thorndike Aerospace. Like Rhodri Jones before him, the company’s CEO was overly fond of that PR-man-made-good – or at least pretended to be – and paid Andy’s consultancy a hefty retainer without even the slightest wobble. So if Vos had to find something for Andy’s new dependent to do, well … it was a cost of doing business.

  But there was more to it than that. In some ways, Vos was eager to give Harding a break. Vos had often wondered if his career would have been easier if someone had taken him under their wing ten years ago. Maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to push so hard to prove himself. Maybe he would have found subtler ways to resolve the conflict in South Africa.

  Perhaps, Vos thought, he could actually be a good influence, a guiding hand. It might just be the thing Harding needed. Naturally, Vos had done some digging into his new protégé’s background. Harding’s father seemed to have been a bit of an amoral character, and that was something Vos could identify with. Sometimes business forced a person to do things he otherwise would not choose. How far had Jamie Harding fallen from his family tree? Was he as straight-laced as he seemed? This was something Vos had tried to discern at dinner in Brixton, by raising the spectre of Rhodri Jones with Harding’s girlfriend. He’d wanted to see how the couple reacted to ideas – and, of course, business practices – that were less than angel-pure. He still didn’t really know. That was at the top of today’s to-do list – to glean whether Harding could be trusted to keep calm when operational tactics moved to the margins.

  If Harding could keep his cool, maybe this liaison with Levi Rootenberg would be a good trial run for him. That would spare Vos having to spend his time talking illegal logistics with the man.

  On the computer screen, Vos saw the vehicle he’d been waiting for. He gathered up his iPad and papers, and strode to the stairwell.

  Jamie drove up the long, straight road towards the cluster of buildings that made up Thorndike Aerospace’s main office compound, and stopped at the barrier beside the red brick security hut. Even though he was on the visitors’ list, the guard insisted he pop open the boot. Only after she had inspected his first aid kit and electric tyre pump did she direct Jamie to a tall glass rectangle of offices flanked by smaller buildings.

  Driving past the raised barrier and wheeling around the site’s one-way system, Jamie peered at the gleaming pillar of glass, hoping to spot the entrance. It seemed there wasn’t one – just a grid of opaque windows. As Jamie stepped from his Land Rover, one of the smoke-hued panels swished open and a uniformed man leaned out.

  ‘Mr Harding,’ he called. His voice echoed across the car park. ‘Eight minutes early.’

  The man led Jamie into a small lobby. ‘No need to sign in,’ he said briskly. ‘I’ve done it for you.’

  Jamie blinked, perplexed. ‘When?’

  ‘Our computer’s linked to the security gate,’ he explained. ‘As soon as you drove through, I printed this.’

  He handed over a visitor’s pass wrapped in a plastic wallet and dangling from a ribbon. ‘Mr Vos likes punctual colleagues,’ the man noted. ‘You’ve scored yourself points there.’ He raised his chin towards the lift. ‘Fourth floor.’

  As an afterthought, the man added, ‘Mr Vos is linked to the front gate, too. My guess is, he’s already waiting.’

  As Jamie rode to the fourth floor, he slipped the lanyard around his neck; his visitor’s pass dangled over his tie. As the lift doors slid open, he saw Vos standing there expectantly, just as the guard had predicted.

  Vos greeted him with a cocked eyebrow. ‘Oh, look – there’s something we can improve on immediately,’ he said. ‘Take off that pass. You’re not at a sales convention.’

  Jamie removed the identification as Vos looked him over. ‘Is that the best suit you own?’ Vos asked.

  ‘It’s about the same as all my others,’ Jamie replied.

  ‘Ask Andy Turner for the name of a tailor. Handsome lad like you shouldn’t be a poster boy for Primark.’

  Vos strode down the hall and Jamie followed, stuffing the ID card into the pocket of his inadequate suit. Primark, indeed. I bought this suit at Marks and Spencer. As he scurried behind Vos, Jamie took in his surroundings. Considering the image Thorndike tried to project, he had expected a plush interior. Instead, the building’s decor would have suited any business park in Swindon. Rooms on either side of the hallway were formed from flimsy beige partitions that screwed into the ceiling. The floor was covered in grey carpet tiles. Maybe the disposable look is intentional, Jamie thought. That’s one thing making weapons teaches you – everything’s impermanent.

  Vos led Jamie into an anonymous box with a white pressboard table and some office chairs. Papers, folders and an iPad lay neatly in front of Vos’s seat. Jamie sat opposite. ‘This feels like a job interview,’ he quipped.

  ‘Oh, you’ve already got the job,’ Vos said flatly. In this fluorescent light, the shadows across his deep-set eyes formed a blue-grey mask. ‘We both know Andy’s done you a favour.’

  Jamie’s face grew warm and pulsed in embarrassment. Vos may have been abrupt at dinner last night, but he hadn’t been rude. The police inspector in Jamie suspected this was a tactic – Vos was establishing his dominance, and reminding Jamie they were now on his turf. Even though Jamie knew this, Vos’s ploy was working; he felt the same way he had done when the Dyfed-Powys Police announced a Serious Case Review into the events in Aberystwyth. Jamie had understood the reason why it was happening, but still, it had been like a slap. The way Vos so casually negated his abilities sparked a competitive urge. He wasn’t about to let this man play him.

  ‘You say I’ve got the job,’ Jamie said. ‘But I haven’t asked for it, and I don’t know if I’ll accept it.’

  Vos looked up at him. He seemed rather pleased.

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to work for Andy Turner at all,’ Jamie pressed on. ‘Or maybe I will work for some of Andy’s clients – but not for you.’

  Vos released a single, amused bark. ‘A confident boy,’ he observed.

  ‘I’ve had some successes in my career,’ Jamie replied. ‘Considering who you are, I’d imagine you already know that.’

  ‘Believe me,’ Thorndike’s Director for Business Development interrupted, ‘you wouldn’t be in this office unless I knew that very well.’

  He straightened his papers. ‘And it’s not only your successes I know about,’ he added. ‘Correct me if I’ve got any of this wrong …’

  For the next several minutes, Vos recounted what he knew of Jamie’s life. He knew that Jamie was the only child from his father’s second marriage, and that Jamie’s side of the family never spoke to his older half-sisters. Vos was aware that Jamie’s father, George Harding, had joined the London Metropolitan Police in 1974. He knew that in the year 2000, George’s career had been cut short by a stroke when he was only forty-five. Another stroke had followed in 2013, which had left George’s frontal lobe damaged permanently. Vos knew that Jamie’s mother, Grace, now lived alone in a Kent cottage close to her husband’s nursing home.

  Vos looked up from his papers. ‘Is that the gist of it?’ he asked.

  ‘Impressive,’ Jamie replied. ‘Just about everything worth knowing.’

  Vos smiled thinly. ‘Just about,’ he echoed. ‘But I think we need to lay the more sensitive stuff on the table, too – if only to put it behind us.’

  Jamie’s eyes narrowed. ‘OK.’

  He suspected what Vos would say before the man’s gaze had even returned to his papers: at the time of George Harding’s first stroke, he was being investigated by the Met for corruption. Such a taint was all-too-common for someone who had joined the force in the 1970s;
it was no secret that members of the Flying Squad used to tip off armed robbers for cash, or that certain officers in the Drugs Squad were dope peddlers themselves. Some of the bobbies, like Jamie’s father, had run protection rackets, shaking down the club owners and pornographers of Soho.

  Vos relayed this information with a detached and calculating air. After describing the scale of the investigation against George Harding, he leaned back and folded his arms. ‘You attended a private day school until you were eleven, and then went to boarding school in Surrey, am I right?’

  Jamie admitted that he had.

  ‘That was expensive, wasn’t it?’

  Jamie shrugged. ‘I was a kid. I didn’t think about money.’

  Vos looked dubious. ‘You were seventeen when the Met began its investigation, right? I’m guessing Daddy couldn’t keep it secret from you then.’ He leaned forward and tented his fingers. ‘Did he ever deny soliciting bribes?’

  Jamie lowered his gaze. ‘He couldn’t, really. I heard too many rows between him and my mother.’

  Vos nodded. ‘Here’s what I’m guessing: he said he’d only done it to put you through school.’

  Jamie knew that his silence was an answer. That was exactly what George Harding had said. Jamie’s father had always harboured the dream that his only son would attend Oxford, and maybe later read for the Bar. George had known that such a career demanded a better pedigree than a Croydon cop’s son could get at the local comprehensive. As it happened, Jamie had not achieved anything like the grades needed for an Oxford college, even with his costly schooling. He ended up reading Criminology at a university not far from London, but quite a distance from the Russell Group.

  Vos offered Jamie a rare smile. ‘Listen, kiddo,’ he said, ‘I don’t give a shit about any of this. I only raise it to make a point.’

  That you can find out anything you want about me? Jamie wondered.

  ‘The point is this,’ Vos continued. ‘Your dad wasn’t a bad man.’

  Jamie snorted. ‘No?’

  Vos feigned surprise at Jamie’s response. ‘Do you think he was?’

  Jamie paused. He tried to decide what he actually felt about his father. ‘No, he wasn’t bad,’ he said quietly.

  ‘That’s a good answer.’ Vos placed his elbows on the table and clasped his hands. ‘Your dad broke the law, and, many would say, betrayed his oath. And yet, you tell me that he wasn’t bad.’ Vos leaned forward. ‘Why would you say such a thing?’

  Jamie stared at Vos. ‘Why would you?’

  Vos smiled with one corner of his mouth. ‘Touché,’ he said, and added, ‘Now you and I are ready to talk about morality.’

  Discussions about morals, it seemed, came with refreshments. Vos stuck his head out the door and yelled at the first employee he saw to dash to the staff room and fetch tea and biscuits. As he waited to be served, Vos pursed his lips contemplatively, and then asked, ‘Did you ever do anything at the Met that you were ashamed of? You know, the way Daddy did?’

  Jamie was certain this question wasn’t nearly as casual as Vos made it sound. He straightened his shoulders. In a clear voice – the very same tone he had employed at the Serious Case Review after the Aberystwyth debacle – he said, ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t imagine so,’ Vos said with a smile. ‘And yet, we’ve established that you don’t think your father was a bad man.’

  Jamie fought a niggling urge to stuff Vos’s tie into his mouth.

  ‘Your dad’s reaction to his circumstances is the crux of this issue, my friend. We live in an imperfect world. Some may even call it corrupt.’ Vos tapped his finger lightly against the pressboard table-top. ‘The rules we pay lip service to – we call them morality – tend to fall down in practice. Your dad was set against villains he could never defeat, in a system stinking with corruption. He was told to play by rules that were no more than a public relations smokescreen. If you ask me, he made the only move that was available to him. Hell, it was expected of him. The fact that he was later punished is evidence of the hypocrisy built into the system.’

  Vos spread his hands in a shrug that suggested he’d just proved something.

  There was a tapping at the door. A young male staffer came in with a tray laden with all the fixings for tea, as well as a plate of biscuits. He set it on the table.

  ‘Oh, look,’ Vos said flatly, ‘Jammie Dodgers. You spoil us.’

  The lad flushed and apologised. They were all the staff room had, he said.

  Jamie sat silently. He told himself that Vos had said all of that as some kind of ploy to win him over. And yet, Vos was the first person Jamie had ever heard make a solid defence of the things that George Harding had done. Jamie’s mother had tried, of course, back when everything had gone pear-shaped. However, Grace Harding’s words had been more a plea for Jamie’s sympathy and understanding, tinged with a kind of mourning for his father’s recent stroke. Vos, on the other hand, made no apologies. He accused the system and blamed society on George Harding’s behalf. On the surface, Vos’s tortuous logic did offer some sliver of comfort. That fierce defence served as a rebuttal to the ambivalence Jamie had always felt towards his father.

  He had always thought of those mixed emotions as a closely guarded secret. No research could have revealed the conflict that had churned in Jamie’s mind for nearly two decades. Still, despite the apologies for George Harding that Vos had just made, Jamie knew the ambivalence from which he suffered had nothing to do with any moral confusion. It was very clear that his father had been in the wrong. What Jamie felt was the emotional vertigo of trying to love someone who’d done bad things, and nothing more.

  Vos ushered the young employee out of the room. ‘Did you notice?’ he asked. ‘The kid’s twenty, and even his suit’s better than yours.’

  ‘I’ll ask Andy about that tailor,’ Jamie said.

  As Vos poured tea and shoved the entire plate of Jammie Dodgers Jamie’s way, he murmured, ‘Let’s broaden this out, shall we? Let’s turn our attention to the global political arena.’

  Jamie took a sip of tea. It was a relief to move away from a focus too close to home. ‘Sure,’ he said.

  Vos pursed his lips and stared upwards to the polystyrene ceiling tiles. ‘Would you agree that no two governments have exactly the same standards of morality?’

  Jamie considered. ‘It depends on what kind of morality you’re talking about.’

  Vos blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Some standards are internationally agreed upon,’ Jamie went on, ‘and therefore beyond the interests of any one government. I’m thinking mainly about human rights law.’

  Vos chuckled darkly. ‘Oh, yeah – the subject of your forthcoming master’s degree.’

  ‘It’s important,’ Jamie said. ‘Governments commit to each other not to practice torture, or to condone slavery, or to conduct executions without a fair trial.’

  Vos’s chuckle increased in volume. ‘And look how well that’s been observed,’ he said.

  ‘Levels of observation may vary,’ Jamie said, ‘but human rights laws are fundamental to democracy.’

  ‘Have a biscuit,’ Vos said.

  Jamie picked up a Jammie Dodger and nibbled politely.

  Vos angled his head. ‘We could argue that, now and then, any government needs to look the other way,’ he conceded. ‘But let’s not get off-topic. Can you at least agree that, beyond the lofty ideals of human rights, a government’s international conduct and the domestic laws it passes reflect its own particular priorities?’

  Jamie washed down the sticky jam and dry crumbs with a swallow of tea. ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘And that it justifies its priorities according to its own standards?’

  ‘Sure…’

  Vos nodded. ‘Good. Then let’s turn our attention to global trade. Where money is concerned, we can assume that whatever laws a country makes will depend on what it wants to achieve at a particular time. Does that make sense?’

  ‘I suppose so.’
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  ‘Governments set laws to help themselves, yet part of the game requires everyone to pretend that the standards behind those laws are sacrosanct. And we’ve already established that they’re not – they’re based on expedience.’ Vos sighed heavily, as if his own weary shoulders carried the weight of human folly. He levelled his sunken eyes on Jamie. ‘So, what are we to do?’ he asked.

  Jamie returned his unblinking gaze. ‘Who do you mean by we?’ he asked.

  ‘I mean this company,’ Vos said. ‘Me, you, everybody. We pay lip service to laws that we know are transitory and often wrong … then, we do what everyone knows needs to be done.’

  Vos picked up a biscuit and waved it for emphasis. ‘The government knows it, foreign powers know it, we all know it. We also know that if we’re caught doing whatever’s necessary, we’ll be slapped on the wrist and expected to look ashamed. That calms an indignant public. It helps them to forget.’

  He dropped the Jammie Dodger onto the table. Its edge shattered into crumbs. ‘But, in exactly the same way they treated your poor old dad, it’s only a show. For the decision-makers of this world, it’s an important show, because it still means mission accomplished. The system carries on.’

  Vos leaned forward. ‘We’re all in the game.’

  The two men remained silent for a moment. Finally, Jamie set down his mug of tea and grinned. ‘I’m not entirely sure I am,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t fool yourself,’ Vos said. ‘You’re a player whether you want to be or not, simply by virtue of the fact that you’re breathing.’

  Vos brushed the biscuit crumbs to the floor and pulled a document wallet from his pile of papers. He slid it towards Jamie. ‘The question is,’ he concluded, ‘do you want to make the game work for you?’

  SEVEN

  Sara knew all about the connection between the physical and the mental. She understood that the body reacted to emotional upset as a way of telling the brain that things were going wrong. It served as an encouragement to change direction. And if Sara had been advising a client, she’d have said that this morning’s vomiting, the headache and feelings of ill-ease, were a clear warning to stop doing whatever had caused those sensations in the first place.