Red Notice

40

Clements was out of his civil-service power suit and in his weekend casuals: beige slacks and a blue V-neck. He’d been standing in the queue in the Pimlico branch of Marks & Spencer, the same place he’d bought his off-duty uniform, when he got the call.

He hadn’t liked the way the cashier had looked at him as she rang up his items: a pasta meal for one, a small salad, an individual chocolate pudding, and a bottle of passable claret. The look she gave him, hovering somewhere between sympathy and downright pity, made him feel as if he was wearing a badge on his chest reading: ‘Sad loser who lives alone. No wife, no friends.’ How was it, he asked himself, for the thousandth time in his life, that he could be so confident, so decisive, so abrasive, even around the most powerful politicians and civil-service mandarins, yet became so flustered and self-conscious when confronted by any mildly attractive woman, even a check-out operator in a supermarket?

He kept his eyes on the card-reader as he paid the bill, anxious to avoid eye contact, and it was almost a relief when his phone buzzed and he stepped away from the till to answer it.

‘Where?… How long ago?… All right, I’m on my way.’ He snatched his carrier bag, his confidence returned now. He took a cab home instead of doing the ten-minute walk. He needed to put a suit back on and dress the way he was born to.

Clements was almost excited at the thought of confronting the home secretary. Laszlo should have been killed in Hampstead, and for reasons she didn’t need to know. While she had been at her red-brick university, probably studying philosophy and dreaming of a Brave New World, Clements had been trying to keep the present one from collapsing.

He felt pretty damned superior right now; even more so than usual. He gave the taxi driver a three-pound tip after he’d been dropped at his modest Westminster flat near Horseferry Magistrates’ Court. Clements and his kind remained the backbone of this country, and this Laszlo débâcle was yet another example of why the home secretary should have listened to his advice without him having to give her all the ins and outs.

If she stopped deluding herself that she ran the Home Office, Laszlo would now be dead — and dead people couldn’t talk. By now the French might very well have captured him, and if so he would appear before the ICC — and then this government of bright new things would be begging for Clements’s help. Which, of course, as a public servant, he would give freely.

As he placed his key in the Yale lock, he couldn’t help smiling in anticipation of the meeting ahead.