Soft

The Executioner

Waiting for the tube at Tottenham Court Road one Monday morning, Jimmy noticed a man standing further down the platform. The man was in his late forties. Dressed in a cream-coloured raincoat and a dark-grey suit, he was reading a copy of the Telegraph, which he had folded until it was small enough to hold in his left hand. His right hand moved rhythmically, almost mechanically, between the pocket of his raincoat and his face. It took Jimmy a few moments to realise that the man was eating. What, though? Curious, he circled round behind the man, edged into a position at his shoulder. Then, peering down, he saw three glistening, chocolate-coated spheres. Maltesers! He watched them bounce and jostle in the man’s cupped palm, almost as if they were being weighed. He watched them being lifted swiftly towards the man’s lips, which had already parted, bird-like, in anticipation. He heard their crisp pale-yellow interiors surrender to the man’s determined teeth. Sometimes there was a slight delay, the man’s hand unable to find the opening in the packet, perhaps, and a look passed across his face, the troubled look of a child dreaming, but he never took his eyes off the paper he was reading and in the end his hand always emerged again and moved unerringly towards his mouth. How much of what we do is automatic? Jimmy wondered as the westbound tube pulled in.

Inside the carriage, he glanced at his watch. Seven-forty-five. It was an early start, but with a job like his he could always use the extra hour. He worked for the East Coast Soda Corporation — ECSC, as it was known in the trade — a soft-drinks company with its head-quarters in Chicago. For the past five years ECSC had been developing a new product, a soft drink known as Kwench! (the exclamation mark being part of the registered name, part of the logo). Jimmy hadn’t known what to make of the name at first. The K seemed slightly cheap, somehow, and as for the W, wouldn’t that cause problems for people who didn’t speak English? It certainly communicated refreshment, though, and as time passed, the name began to grow on him: it had a crunch to it, a succulence, something beautifully onomatopoeic working in its favour. In any case, they had launched the drink in America, and it had been a marketing sensation. They had shifted three hundred and forty-five million litres in the first twelve months. You couldn’t hope for better sales than that. Now, predictably, the company wanted to reproduce the phenomenon in the UK and, as Senior Brand Manager, the launch would be Jimmy’s responsibility. Everything depended on it: his key performance indicator for that year would be the successful entry of Kwench! into the British marketplace.

His stop came. He left the train and rode a long, slow escalator to the street. Outside the station he turned left, past the woman selling flowers, and walked quickly towards the ECSC building, which gleamed like a solid block of platinum in the bleak October light. Since it was only ten-past eight, he was alone as he passed through the revolving doors and on into the lobby. He said good morning to Bob, the security man, and waited outside the lifts. He could taste the fifteen or twenty Silk Cut he must have smoked the night before. Some friends had come round — Marco, Zane, Simone. He could still see them, sprawled at the dark oak table in his dining-room: Marco with his shaved head and his air of truculence, Zane in a purple velvet shirt, Simone’s red hair falling forwards as she leaned over the mirror. In the end he had been forced to throw them out. Still, he’d been in bed by three. He yawned. The lift doors parted. Stepping inside, he pressed the button that said 9 and felt a kind of cushioned power hoist him skywards.

In reception a tall bank of TV screens flickered quietly with images from the latest show-reel. The work was acceptable, but tame — too much sunshine, too many smiles; if Jimmy had his way, all this would change. He passed two dark-blue sofas and paused in front of the wall that faced west. One vast expanse of plate-glass, it offered a dizzying view of London’s drab extremities. The slate rooftops of Acton and Ealing. The lazy ribbon of motorway reaching towards Oxford. The endless planes making identical descents, one after another, into Heathrow. Initiate. That’s what he had to do. Initiate, and be seen to be initiating.

‘Morning, Jimmy.’

He turned. ‘Morning, Brenda.’

Brenda was the receptionist at ECSC, though with her many layers of foundation, her pendant earrings and her heavy, fleshy arms, she had always reminded Jimmy of an opera singer.

‘You’re early,’ Brenda said.

‘I’ve got a lot on. Good weekend?’

Brenda made a face. It was never good, Brenda’s weekend, but you had to ask.

‘Did you hear about the American?’ she said.

He looked at her. ‘What American?’

‘I don’t know. Some American. He’s flying in this week.’ Brenda had opened a gold-backed pocket mirror. She was applying more mascara.

‘I haven’t heard about that.’

‘I thought you were up on everything, Jimmy. I thought you were the hot shot around here.’ She smiled at him over her mirror, her eyes bland as ponds behind the wrought-iron railings of her eyelashes.

For the next few hours Jimmy had to push Brenda’s gossip to the back of his mind. At nine-thirty he had a meeting with a new below-the-line promotions agency. Between ten-fifteen and eleven he was briefed on how the US packaging for Kwench! had performed in UK research groups. By eleven-thirty he was discussing distribution levels with two members of his sales force. Towards midday, though, he ran into Tim McAlpine by the coffee machine. McAlpine worked in the financial division. He had white hair, even though he had only just turned thirty-one. At some point in his life, it seemed as if his hair had decided to conspire with his name. Jimmy thought of him as McPyrenees — or sometimes, if he had impressed Jimmy in some way, if he had risen, so to speak, in Jimmy’s estimation, Jimmy thought of him as McEverest. Watching the coffee splutter down into his polystyrene cup, Jimmy asked McAlpine if he’d heard anything about an American. McAlpine told him that a trouble-shooter was being flown over from Chicago. The trouble-shooter’s name was Connor. That was all McAlpine knew.

So it was true.

A tense week followed. The idea of an American being appointed to the UK office sent tremors of unease throughout the building. One or two of the leading brands had been under-performing during recent months, and the aggressive in-house slogans were beginning to sound hollow. Obviously there was going to be some sort of shake-up. Walk down any corridor, look in anybody’s eyes. You could see the same question lurking there. Who’s he going to fire first?

On Friday morning everyone who worked for ECSC UK received a memo. They were asked to assemble in reception at four o’clock that afternoon. No reason was given. Delayed by a phone-call, Jimmy pushed through the swing-doors with his watch showing two minutes past. Fifty people stood about, all talking quietly but urgently. A kind of voltage in the air. A negative charge. Jimmy moved towards the vending-machine in the corner. He saw Tony Ruddle, his immediate superior, throw himself almost recklessly into an armchair and lounge there, scowling …

Then two men entered from the right and took up a position in front of the plate-glass wall, the sun setting behind their heads. The buzz of voices died away. Slowly, though. With a curious reluctance. Like the sound of a car disappearing into a silent landscape. Bill Denman, the Managing Director, spoke first. He would not be talking for long, he said, not long enough, in any case, to do justice to the many accomplishments of the man who stood beside him. One of Denman’s jokes. The staff laughed, but only out of duty, or habit; the laughter was half-hearted, thin. Denman went on to announce the appointment of Raleigh Connor to the post of Marketing Director. He outlined the unique opportunity this presented to everybody in the company, himself included: they could all benefit from Raleigh Connor’s wealth of experience etc. etc. Jimmy leaned against the vending-machine, its metal case vibrating sleepily beneath his shoulder. A brief burst of applause signalled the end of Denman’s speech. Then Connor stepped forwards.

If Jimmy was disappointed, it was perhaps because he had been expecting someone who resembled Kennedy — or, if not Kennedy, then Charlton Heston — but Connor was a squat, bald man, his round head just clearing the Managing Director’s shoulder like a full moon rising from behind a mountain. He had a benign face, almost avuncular; his fingers were the fingers of a gardener. As soon as he opened his mouth, however, his authority, his true stature, became apparent. He described his appointment — rather cockily, in Jimmy’s opinion — as ‘a simple transfer of expertise’. He talked at length about ‘the future’, making it sound big, as people from that side of the Atlantic often do. He spoke in particular about Kwench! which was the first ECSC product to be launched in the UK for three years and which should, he said, substantially broaden the UK company’s brand portfolio. It was a premium product, with high profit-margins. It promised taste and satisfaction, and it was healthy too: no caffeine, very little sugar, and a unique recipe of life-enhancing ingredients which, like Coca-Cola’s Merchandise X, was a closely guarded company secret and which made it, potentially at least, the soft drink of the twenty-first century.

At that point Connor paused, and then continued in a quieter, more meditative vein. Success could not be guaranteed, he said. You had to work for it. ‘There’s nothing soft about the soft-drinks industry,’ he concluded, ‘nothing soft at all.’ His eyes drifted amiably around the room. ‘I’d like you to take that thought away with you.’

On his way home that night Jimmy found himself in the lift with Neil Bowes. Neil waited until the doors slid shut before he spoke. ‘Don’t let that smile fool you,’ he said. ‘The guy’s an axeman. An executioner.’

Jimmy looked across at Neil. There’s one in every office. A hawker of hysteria, a walking Book of Revelation. But he liked Neil. For his sickly pallor and his doomed blue lips. For the fervency with which he played his role.

‘He was in Korea,’ Neil went on. ‘Or Vietnam. One of the two, anyway. They taught him to kill with his bare hands. He carried on the same way in peacetime. A few years back he was sent to the office in LA. Fired thirty-five people in his first week.’ Eyes filled with dread, Neil watched the glowing floor numbers being extinguished, one by one. ‘Know what they call him in the States?’

‘What do they call him, Neil?’

‘Really Cunning.’

‘Sounds like an understatement,’ Jimmy said.

Neil nodded grimly.

Jimmy had to pretend to be scared, so as not to stand out, so as to blend. Deep down, though, he couldn’t help but see the arrival of Raleigh Connor as a stroke of luck. In the three and a half years since leaving university, Jimmy had, to use his own words, done all right. Within a week of graduation, for instance, he had won a place on the prestigious Proctor & Gamble Marketing Course, and no sooner had he completed the course than he was taken on as Brand Manager by a leading manufacturer of biscuits and snacks. Then, just over a year ago, he had been headhunted by ECSC UK. It was a good job with exciting prospects, and he was earning more money than any of his friends, but there were days when a sense of unreality descended, as if he hadn’t, as yet, made much of an impression, as if he didn’t quite exist, somehow. During the summer months this phantom insecurity had taken on a human form. Twenty years older than Jimmy, Tony Ruddle wore colourful bow-ties and lived somewhere in Middlesex. According to McAlpine, he had been influential in the seventies. For some reason, Ruddle had taken an instant dislike to Jimmy — which was unfortunate because he was one of three Marketing Managers to whom Jimmy was expected to report. In August Jimmy’s contract had been reviewed by the board. At ECSC, an employee’s performance was rated on a scale of 1–5, each number having an adjective attached to it. Jimmy had received a 4, and the adjective that went with 4 was ‘superior’, but whenever he stood in the lift with Tony Ruddle he felt like a 2: he felt ‘incomplete’. Ruddle just didn’t like him. And because the feeling was personal, a kind of chemical reaction, Jimmy could do nothing about it. Connor represented a whole new challenge, however, and what was more, he had been brought in over Ruddle’s head (to Ruddle’s evident disgust). Maybe Ruddle could be sidestepped, overlooked. Maybe he could even be removed from the equation altogether. Jimmy realised that he had identified an opportunity. His only concern was how best to exploit it to his own advantage.

Robot Jelly

Jimmy was just mixing his first vodka-and-tonic of the evening when the doorbell rang. Zane, he thought. It was Friday night, and Zane had told him there were some parties that were probably worth going to — one in a photographic studio, another in a warehouse in King’s Cross. He buzzed Zane in, then reached for the ice-cubes and began to mix a second drink. He was down in the basement, a large square space that doubled as a kitchen and a dining-area. The only window in the room looked at a blank white wall draped in filthy cobwebs and a pair of outdoor cupboards that might once have hidden dustbins. If you peered upwards through the smeared glass you could just see the spear-like iron railings that separated the front of the house from the street. Jimmy had painted the walls a kind of burgundy colour. The furniture had been kept to a minimum: one long oak table, eight straight-backed chairs with leather seats, black wrought-iron light-fittings and candlesticks. The effect was medieval — or, as Zane himself had once put it, ‘dungeonesque’.

Zane sat down at the table, pushed one hand through his messy black hair. He had been away, three weeks in South-East Asia, and his face and arms were tanned. He looked garish, artificial. Like those silk flowers you see in restaurants sometimes.

Jimmy handed Zane a vodka. ‘Good holiday?’

‘Great.’ Zane reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag full of grass, a lighter and some skins. ‘You still working on that orange drink? What’s it called? Squelch?’

Jimmy laughed. ‘It’s Kwench!. K-W-E.’

‘Whatever. How’s it going?’

‘I can’t say. It’s confidential.’

Zane nodded.

‘We’ve got a new boss,’ Jimmy said. ‘He’s from Chicago.’

While Zane rolled a joint, Jimmy told him about Raleigh Connor and the rumours that had been circulating.

‘He used to be special-operations man for this multi-national soft-drinks company. During the seventies something happened at one of their bottling plants in South America. Two workers drowned in syrup, and everyone walked out in protest. It was the safety regulations. They didn’t have any. Anyway, so Connor flew down there to sort things out. Three days later, back to full production.’

Zane lit the joint. ‘Drowned in syrup?’

‘The syrup they make the drink out of. They fell into a giant vat and drowned.’

‘Jesus.’

‘They made ten thousand litres out of that syrup, apparently. Sold it all. Didn’t bother telling anyone two men had died in it.’ Jimmy paused, thinking. ‘That’s thirty-three thousand cans.’

Zane offered Jimmy the joint. He dragged on it twice, then handed it back.

‘So this American,’ Zane said, ‘what’s he like?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jimmy said. ‘I haven’t really talked to him.’

He had followed Connor down a corridor one morning and he remembered Connor’s movements, how they seemed to be made up of parts of circles rather than straight lines, his head pushed forwards, his shoulders rounded — the shambling, almost disconsolate walk of a wrestler who’s just lost a fight. He remembered the slow, indulgent smile he received when he caught up with Connor at the lift and introduced himself.

‘It’s strange.’ Jimmy shifted in his chair. ‘He looks sort of — kind.’

Zane watched the red glow at the end of his joint.

‘No one seems to know what he’s doing here,’ Jimmy went on. ‘They’re all scared they’re going to be fired. Walking round like they’re in the middle of a minefield or something.’

‘Not you, though.’ Zane smiled lazily.

Jimmy smiled back.

‘I almost forgot.’ Zane dipped a hand into his jacket pocket. ‘I brought you a present.’

He slid a cellophane bag across the table. The size of a crisp packet, it had the words ROBOT JELLY printed on the front in futuristic, brightly coloured capital letters. Inside the bag were sweets. Like jellybabies, only robot-shaped.

‘It’s from Bali,’ Zane said.

But Jimmy hardly heard him because he had just remembered something else. On his way home that evening, on the Northern Line, he had sat opposite two secretaries. They had looked flushed, almost windswept, as if they had been walking in the countryside in winter. They must have had a few drinks together in a wine bar after work. He could imagine the blackboard on the street outside, the names of cocktails scrawled in coloured chalk. He could imagine the bright-orange fin-shapes of the tortilla chips in their terracotta bowls. Both girls wore slightly transparent white blouses and carried copies of the Evening Standard. Classic Oxford Street, they were. Cannon fodder for the office blocks. Shoot fifty down and another fifty would spring up in their place. He doubted he would have noticed them at all if he hadn’t heard one of them say spaceship. She had dark hair, and she was wearing deep red lipstick, which was fashionable that autumn, and as she leaned forwards, enthusiastic suddenly, a delicate gold chain slid past the top button on her blouse and trembled in the air below her throat, as if divining something. After listening for a few moments, he realised she was using the word spaceship to describe the packaging of a new beauty product. She was telling her friend that it was better than anything she’d come across before. You should try it, she was saying. And her friend probably would try it, Jimmy thought, because she had been told about it by somebody she knew. There was nothing interesting or unusual about their conversation. It was the kind of conversation people had all the time. That was the whole point.

He tore the cellophane packet open and peered inside. That man he’d seen a month ago, with the Maltesers, the secretaries on the tube … and now this so-called ROBOT JELLY. An idea was beginning to take shape. In some quite physical sense, he felt he was being nudged. Or prompted. He looked up. Zane was staring at him, a cigarette halfway to his lips.

‘It’s all right,’ Zane said. ‘You don’t have to eat them.’

When Jimmy woke up the next morning, he saw eight gnomes standing on a patch of Astroturf outside his bedroom window. Eyes half-closed, head pounding, he counted them again. Yes, eight. His upstairs neighbour, Mrs Fandle, must have bought a new one. Jimmy lived in what estate agents call ‘a ground-floor-and-basement maisonette’. If you stood in his bedroom, which was at the back of the house, and looked through the window, you had a view of the terrace belonging to the flat above — but your eyes were on a level with the floor, with the Astroturf itself. In the summer Jimmy would sometimes wake to see a deckchair just a few feet from his head, the stripy fabric straining under the weight of Mrs Fandle’s body, her bare legs white and veined and monumental. Luckily it was October now, and the temperature had plummeted. He only had the gnomes to deal with — though, seen from below, they could seem imposing, sinister, like highway sculpture in America. Once, not long after moving in, he dreamed the gnomes had taken over. In his dream, of course, they’d multiplied. He found them in the hall, on the sofa, halfway up the stairs. One was lying on his back under the grill, like someone in a tanning centre. When he opened the fridge, two of them were standing on the inside of the door, the place where you keep juice and milk. They were everywhere he looked. It had been a kind of nightmare.

Dehydrated but incapable of moving, he dozed on, imagining the cold tap running, ice-cubes jingling in frosted pints of water. Waking again, he reached for the glass beside the bed. Though he could see that it was empty, he brought it to his mouth and tipped it almost upside-down, thinking he might find one drop of precious liquid at the bottom. But no, nothing: he must have drained it during the night. His head ached terribly — a soft, dull thudding; he saw bags of sand being dumped one after another on to a road. On top of that, there was an unpleasant padded feeling, a kind of claustrophobia. He felt as if his brain had been packed in cotton wool. As if it was about to be sent somewhere by post. FRAGILE stencilled on the front in red. THIS SIDE UP. He put his feet on the floor. Sat still for a moment, forearms on his knees, head lowered. Probably he shouldn’t have taken the Temazepam, not after all that vodka and champagne. And probably the E hadn’t helped. Parties.

He struggled to his feet and walked unsteadily out of the bedroom and down the half-flight of stairs into his living-room. Thinking he might like some air, he slid the picture-window open. The smell of lavender drifted in from the small, walled garden. He was almost sick. Turning away from the window, he passed through a narrow doorway to his right. He stood at the wash-basin in the bathroom, staring at his image in the mirror, the whites of his eyes gelatinous, like the transparent parts of eggs. His face slid off the mirror as he opened the medicine cabinet. He scoured the shelves, hands moving clumsily. There was a choice. Solpadeine, Paracodol and one dog-eared box of something left over from a holiday in Thailand. He chose the Paracodol. Down in the kitchen he opened the fridge and lifted out a can of Kwench!. American import, still unavailable in the UK. Swallowing two pills, he drank the contents of the can, then climbed the stairs back to the bathroom and took a shower.

Later, when the pounding in his head had faded, he sat in the living-room, a cup of coffee on his lap. Saturday TV flickered mutely in the corner of the room. Outside, in the garden, the bleak sunshine silvered half a tree-trunk, one narrow strip of grass. He found the packet of sweets Zane had given him and emptied it on to the table. The robots were the curious, translucent red of human skin three layers down. Something Connor had said in a meeting the day before came back to him. The objective of advertising is to change the behaviour of the consumer so they purchase more of the product. Connor had been stating the obvious, of course, but it was strange, wasn’t it, how things could suddenly become obscure when they were put into words. The more Jimmy thought about it, the more the sentence seemed to gather meanings. He began to arrange the robots in fighting formation. Unusual smell, they had. Like certain kinds of plastic. Like toys. What Connor had said, though. The words that almost swaggered in the middle of that simple sentence. Change the behaviour. The dark-haired secretary on the tube, the small red figures lined up on the table. There was a connection there, a hint. An opportunity. Jimmy sat back, staring at the wall. Outside, the sunlight faded and the room darkened in an instant, as if a cloth had been thrown over the house. The route his thoughts were taking now was unpremeditated, shocking, but he felt he was seeing with absolute clarity. Maybe it would be impossible to implement. And yet, if he could do it. If it could be done …

He snatched up his keys and his ECSC ID, and left the flat. On his way up Mornington Terrace he passed a house with four motor bikes and an overturned dustbin in its front garden: Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ churned and howled from an open window on the second floor. He walked on. The clicking of a train as it slid lazily into Euston or King’s Cross, the same sound as someone running down a flight of stairs: two clicks, a gap, two clicks, a gap … He reached his car, an MG Midget, almost twenty-two years old. He didn’t usually give names to things. In this case, however, with a number-plate like YYY 296, he hadn’t been able to resist. Delilah started fourth time, as always. Jimmy turned left, over the railway, and followed the northern edge of Regent’s Park. At Paddington, he joined the Westway, that casual, delicious curve of motorway that led to the White City exit. The closest thing London had to a piece of race-track. It was here that he’d once got up to 93 m.p.h. in Marco’s Triumph Herald. Where was Marco, anyway? He hadn’t heard from him for days. He reached the office in twenty minutes and parked on a single yellow line. Bob stood on the pavement outside the building, rocking gently on his heels, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

‘Not like you, coming in on a Saturday.’ Bob’s oblong head wobbled on his neck, a sure sign that a joke was on its way. ‘Haven’t you got nothing better to do?’

‘Did it last night, Bob,’ Jimmy said, and winked. He hadn’t, though. Hadn’t done it for about three weeks.

Bob chuckled.

Jimmy couldn’t resist telling Bob why he’d come in. ‘I’ve had an idea, you see.’

‘An idea, eh?’ Bob looked away into the sky, his face vague and peaceful, utterly unthreatened. I’ve just been to Venus would have elicited the same reaction. Venus, eh?

For the next three hours Jimmy worked on his proposal. It would be a tactical document, he decided, since the budgetary implications of his plan were still unknown. Every now and then he left his desk and walked to the window. To the north the sky had darkened, blurred. Rain would be falling in Cricklewood, in Willesden Green. Once, while he was standing at the window, staring out, he heard a voice behind him call his name. He looked over his shoulder. Debbie Groil stood ten feet away, her arms folded across her breasts, as if she was feeling cold.

Debbie worked in Communications. Earlier in the year, while they were attending a sales conference in Leeds, she had invited herself up to his room at one in the morning. He remembered how she lay across his bed, four buttons on her blouse undone, pretending to be drunk. Haven’t you got nothing better to do?

‘You were miles away,’ she said, smiling at him curiously.

‘Debbie. I didn’t know you worked weekends.’

‘Just a few things to clear up.’ Her smile became fatalistic. ‘Seems like we’re always clearing things up.’

Jimmy nodded. Communications took responsibility for relations between the company and the media. Sometimes they were required to generate publicity, but, more often than not, they had to field awkward enquiries, or defuse potentially explosive situations, not lying exactly, but choosing their words carefully, choosing which truth to tell.

‘You don’t fancy a drink, I suppose?’ Debbie had taken a step forwards, her eyes filled with hopeful light.

Jimmy gestured towards his desk. ‘I ought to finish up.’

‘OK,’ she said, sighing. ‘See you Monday then.’

‘See you, Debbie.’

Sitting in front of his computer again, Jimmy read through what he had written so far. He wasn’t sure. He just wasn’t sure. Should he destroy the document right there and then, delete it all? But then, if something was truly ground-breaking, it could often appear excessive, couldn’t it? At the very least, it would be an indication of his commitment, his creativity. And he could always step away from it, back down. He could always say, ‘Well, it was never intended to be taken literally. It’s a blueprint, for heaven’s sake. A paradigm.’ He worked on for another half an hour, taking great care with his vocabulary. He used company language, making sure he incorporated all the appropriate action verbs. He wanted the document to read in such a way that even Tony Ruddle would be hard put to find fault with it.

Later, when it was dark, he picked up the phone and called Simone. He had met up with her the previous night, at the party in King’s Cross. She had just returned from New York where one of her artists was showing — Simone worked for a gallery — and claimed not to have slept for days. Her cocaine-pale face, that shoulder-length red hair. It had been good to see her. Somehow, though, at two-thirty in the morning, they’d lost each other. And not long afterwards he’d walked out on to the street and caught a taxi home.

‘Hello?’

‘Simone, how are you?’

‘I just got up,’ she said, yawning.

He glanced at his watch. Twenty-past five.

‘What happened to you last night?’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere.’

‘Oh Jimmy. I looked for you all over. You disappeared.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Went to some club. Flamingo something.’ She laughed. ‘It was terrible.’

Jimmy stared out into the darkness. ‘What are you doing tonight?’

‘I don’t know. Get a take-away maybe. Watch videos.’ Simone paused. ‘You want to come over?’

Each Wednesday morning, at ten o’clock, the various members of the project team on Kwench! assembled in the boardroom on the fourteenth floor. Lasting an hour, the meeting acted as a forum in which you were encouraged to raise questions, voice opinions or recommend objectives for the week that lay ahead. On the third Wednesday in October, Connor took his place at the table for the first time. Dressed in a dark-blue blazer with gold buttons, and a pair of pale-grey trousers, he talked for forty-five minutes without a break. Once in a while, Ruddle nodded or murmured in agreement, but no one else dared intervene. At a quarter to eleven, as Connor delivered his closing remarks, his voice lowered, deepened, the boardroom table seeming to reverberate. He leaned forwards. His fingers joined at the tips, forming a temple on a level with his chin, and his eyes travelled slowly, almost hypnotically, from one face to the next. The sun glanced off the flat, gold surface of his signet ring.

‘Does anyone have any questions?’

Seated some twenty feet away, Jimmy was thinking about the building, how it must have been designed to reflect company philosophy. Look at the way the sun streamed through that sheer glass wall. It had to be intentional, a metaphor. For bright ideas. Clarity of thought. Accountability.

‘Any comments?’

Connor wanted input, but nobody was prepared to speak, not at this late stage. Nobody wanted to be noticed for the wrong reason.

Jimmy realised he had no more than fifteen seconds before Connor’s eyes reached his own. What should he do? His heart swooped suddenly, then speeded up. Obviously you had to hold the great man’s gaze. You tried to look unflinching, purposeful. Maybe you even nodded, as if you’d thought about what he’d said and you agreed with it. Then what? Well, maybe nothing. Maybe that would be enough.

Five seconds.

‘No?’

He felt as if he had swallowed some of the new product and it had got trapped, a little pocket of effervescence fizzling inside his chest. He glanced at his hands, one placed calmly on the other. Was this the moment? Was it? When he looked up again he found that he was looking into Raleigh Connor’s eyes — which, naturally, were pale-blue. He found that he was talking.

‘I think, sir, that we should fire the agency.’

In the silence that followed, Jimmy could hear the high-pitched scream of half a dozen brains.

‘Fire the agency?’ Easing back in his chair, one hand still resting on the table, the American seemed unruffled, almost amused. ‘And who would you replace it with?’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘We need an agency, surely. That’s the way this business functions.’ Jimmy could sense Connor’s mind working on a number of levels at once, like the police raiding a building.

‘At the moment, yes. But things are changing.’ Jimmy leaned closer. He couldn’t afford to lose the American, not now. ‘It’s not the agency as such, sir — though it’s true, they’ve not been performing well. It’s advertising as a whole. Advertising as we know it, anyway. It’s becoming redundant, superannuated. It’s had its day.’

‘I hadn’t realised.’ This was Tony Ruddle, the note of sarcasm unmistakable.

Jimmy ignored him. ‘What we need,’ he said, still speaking to Connor, ‘is a completely fresh approach.’ He paused. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a document …’

A smile flickered at the edges of Connor’s mouth. ‘I’d be happy to look at it.’ He glanced round the table. ‘Anything else?’

That evening, as Jimmy stood in his kitchen mixing a drink, he started laughing quietly. He’d remembered something that had happened during the meeting, a moment he could see quite clearly, as if it had been photographed. After he had recommended that the agency be fired he had glanced across the table. Neil’s face. His face just then. It was the first time in his life that Jimmy had ever seen a jaw actually drop.

Two days later, at lunchtime, Raleigh Connor’s secretary called Jimmy on his private extension and told him that Mr Connor would like to see him. Jimmy slipped his jacket on. His heart was beating solidly, heavily, and something had tightened in his throat.

When he knocked on Connor’s door and walked in, Connor was on the phone. He was standing by the window, his free hand inserted into his blazer pocket. He had left his thumb on the outside, though, which gave him an incongruous, slightly rakish air. The same navy-blue blazer with gold buttons, the same dove-grey trousers. Possibly he had a wardrobe filled with clothes that were identical. He noticed Jimmy, motioned him towards a chair. Jimmy sat down. His proposal lay on the table in front of him. Someone had scrawled on it in bright-red ink. Would that be Connor’s handwriting?

‘Sure, that’s no problem,’ Connor was saying. ‘Sure, Bill.’ Finally he replaced the receiver and stared at it, rather as if the phone was a clockwork toy and he had just wound it up and now he was waiting for it to do something. Jimmy thought he should speak first.

‘You wanted to see me, sir.’

Connor took a seat. Using both his hands, he adjusted the position of Jimmy’s proposal on the table, the way you might straighten a painting on a wall. Then he looked at Jimmy and shook his head.

‘You took one hell of a risk giving me this.’

Now they were alone together, one on one, it felt as if the rumours about Connor must all be true. The tanned skin that covered his bald head was corrugated, tough, and his nails had the stubborn quality of horses’ hooves. The muscles in his jaw flexed and rippled, as if he was chewing a stick of gum, yet Jimmy had the feeling Connor’s mouth was empty. It was a tic — a clue: Connor was somebody who could chew more than he bit off.

‘Let me ask you something.’ Connor leaned over the table, his jacket tightening across the shoulders. ‘Do you believe in right and wrong?’

Trick question? Jimmy couldn’t tell. Then he thought: The man’s American.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘And what, in your opinion, is the difference?’

The blinds behind Connor’s head were playing games with Jimmy’s eyes. Jumping forwards, jumping back.

‘It’s hard to put into words —’

‘Exactly,’ Connor said.

Though Jimmy hadn’t even begun to answer the question, it seemed as if he had somehow boarded Connor’s train of thought.

‘There’s a grey area, isn’t there,’ Connor went on. ‘This document,’ and he touched it with his fingers, fingers that could well have killed, ‘it’s interesting. It’s very interesting.’

Jimmy waited.

‘Seems to me that it occupies a grey area, though.’

‘That depends,’ Jimmy said.

‘On what?’

‘On the execution.’

Connor’s gaze hadn’t wavered. Had he turned this same look on the North Koreans, the Vietcong?

‘Yes,’ Connor said at last. ‘I think so too.’

And suddenly the atmosphere changed. Connor leaned back in his black leather chair, hands folded on his solar plexus. He seemed relaxed and genial, almost sleepy, as if he’d just eaten a fine lunch.

‘So tell me,’ he said. ‘How did you get the idea?’

Jimmy said he wasn’t sure he could identify the source. There had been no sudden flash of inspiration — rather, the idea seemed to have developed gradually, in its own time, not allowing itself to be discovered exactly, but revealing itself, the way a Polaroid does; the man with the Maltesers, the secretary on the tube, the packet of sweets from Indonesia — they had all been stages in its growth. Then, about a week ago, his friend Marco had come to dinner, Marco with his shaved head shining in the candle-light … Marco happened to mention that, when he was a student, he had answered an ad in the paper that had been placed by a pharmaceutical company. They paid you a hundred pounds a week to participate in a drug trial. To Marco, this had sounded like a pretty good deal. In fact, he’d done it three times. That night, after Marco left, Jimmy had thought: Yes. Why not advertise? You could offer people cash, the going rate, and then, without them knowing, you could fill their heads with product images. Then out they’d go, quite happily, into the world …

At the edge of his field of vision he saw Connor nodding.

The word ‘subliminal’ was often misused, Jimmy explained. What people meant when they said ‘subliminal’ was actually ‘sub-rational’. But this idea of his, this really was subliminal: the subjects would be genuinely unaware of how they were being manipulated. You’d create a core of two thousand people whose brand loyalty would be unthinking, unquestioning — unconditional. During the course of their daily lives, they’d tell everyone they knew about your product — but in an entirely natural way. Just like the secretary on the tube.

‘You see, that’s the real beauty of it,’ he went on eagerly. ‘There are people doing it already. Only they do it of their own free will, of course; they choose what product they’re going to talk about. All we’d be doing is guiding them a little. Prompting them. So it would be Kwench! they’d talk about. And though you’d be creating word of mouth, no one would think it strange. Our people wouldn’t look any different to anybody else. Wouldn’t behave any different. The whole enterprise would be invisible. Disguised. Because it’s based on human nature …’

‘Yes, I see that,’ Connor said slowly. ‘My problem is, how do you plant the images?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jimmy frowned. ‘It has to be done in the same way that drug companies do it. Afterwards, the subjects have no idea what drugs they’ve taken, no notion of what the side-effects, or long-term effects, might be. They’re paid their hundred pounds, and that’s the end of it. It’s possible they might even be required to sign some kind of contract, waiving the right to sue.’ Once again, he noticed Connor nodding. This time he allowed himself a smile; he had known that last point would appeal to an American. ‘Having said all that, I’m not sure how you plant the images.’ His smile dimmed. ‘In the end, it’s only a concept. An idea.’

He waited for a reaction, but none came. The air in the office seemed charged, glassy. For a moment, he found it hard to breathe.

‘Leave it with me,’ Connor said at last.

‘You think it’s got potential?’

‘I’ll keep you informed.’ Connor rose to his feet, showed Jimmy to the door. ‘And, by the way, James, I’m treating this document as confidential. You should probably keep the contents to yourself.’

Outside the office, Jimmy pushed his hands into his pockets and walked towards the lift, head lowered, a wide grin on his face.

James.

Tact

For three weeks Jimmy waited for Connor to respond to his proposal. During the regular Wednesday meetings of the project team he would study the American’s face for some clue as to his intentions. He learned nothing. Nobody referred to Jimmy’s suggestion that the advertising agency should be fired — nobody except Tony Ruddle, that is, whose disdain was visible in the twist of his thick, chapped lips.

Then, one afternoon in late November, Jimmy’s phone rang and when he picked it up, he heard Connor’s voice on the other end.

‘We’re going ahead with Project Secretary,’ Connor said. ‘I thought you’d like to know.’

‘Project Secretary?’ It took Jimmy a few moments to understand the full implication of what Connor was saying, that his proposal had been given the status of a project, and that it already had a name.

At five-thirty that afternoon Connor spoke to him in private in his office. ‘The Wednesday meetings will continue as before,’ he said, ‘only now, within the project team, there will be another, smaller team, a cell, if you like, which nobody will know about. It will have three members. You, me — and Lambert.’

‘Lambert?’ Jimmy said.

‘Lambert is our external supplier.’

Jimmy didn’t follow.

‘It’s the same as any other promotion,’ Connor explained. ‘We’re going to need someone on the outside to set the programme up and run it for us, someone with the right level of expertise …’

So Ruddle would not be involved. Jimmy’s heart began to dance.

‘Are we going to advertise?’ he asked.

‘I think we have to,’ Connor said, ‘if only as a front.’ He paced up and down, his shoulders rounded, his hands pushed into the pockets of his trousers. ‘If we don’t advertise at all, we’ll arouse suspicion. And besides, without advertising, I’m not sure we can guarantee distribution …’

‘I had a thought,’ Jimmy said.

Connor waited, the grey blinds vibrating behind him, like the gills of some enormous, primeval fish.

‘It might be good to advertise in a very basic, almost old-fashioned way. I’m talking about posters, really. Half teaser, half mnemonic. All they would say is Kwench!. The word itself. Or maybe not even that. Maybe just the colours. It would intrigue the people who haven’t heard of Kwench! yet. It might also prompt our new sales force, our ambassadors —’

‘Ambassadors?’ Connor said.

It was Jimmy’s turn to explain. ‘That’s what I’m calling the people who’ll be going through our programme. Because that’s the role they’ll be playing. If you look up ‘ambassador’ in the dictionary you’ll see that there’s an archaic definition. An ambassador is quote ‘an appointed or official messenger’ unquote.’ He paused. ‘In more recent definitions, the word ‘mission’ is often mentioned …’

Connor nodded. ‘There is also, is there not, the sense of someone acting on someone else’s behalf —’

‘Exactly.’

‘Ambassadors.’ A smile appeared on Connor’s face, a smile that seemed to rise from underneath, slowly but steadily, like spilled liquid being soaked up by a paper towel.

From where he was sitting, on the other side of Connor’s desk, Jimmy watched the smile spread. He had the curious feeling he had just witnessed some kind of product demonstration, though he didn’t think he could have said exactly what the product was.

The first meeting with the external supplier took place on neutral ground at the end of the month. The location had been kept secret, even from Connor’s PA — according to Connor’s diary, he was visiting distributors in Middlesex — and, as they crossed the city that morning, Connor had once again stressed the highly confidential nature of the undertaking. ‘What is required here,’ he said, ‘as I’m sure you understand, is tact.’

Jimmy glanced out of the window. Dawn had brought very little light with it. A dark, bitter day. Leaves rattling against the taxi’s hubcaps as it swayed into Park Lane. The hotel Connor had chosen for the meeting lay just to the north of Marble Arch. With its stark, pale-grey façade, it looked suitably anonymous. Jimmy waited on the pavement while Connor paid, then followed him up the steps and into the lobby. He could have predicted the decor. Potted plants, brass fittings. Upholstery the colour of Thousand Island Dressing. He could have predicted the hotel guests as well — air hostesses with matching luggage, businessmen from out of town. But there were things he could not predict, the day itself, what it might hold, and this uncertainty fed into his muscles until they thrilled and sizzled like the wires on an electric fence.

‘And the name, sir?’ The girl behind reception had a wide, improbable smile, and wore her dark-blonde hair in a frisky pony-tail.

‘Connor.’

Once Connor had registered, the girl handed him a Ving card, which he immediately passed to Jimmy. Jimmy studied the piece of rectangular grey plastic. Ving cards always reminded him of props from Star Trek: though they had only just been invented, they seemed oddly primitive, antiquated — out of date.

Upstairs, on the fifth floor, he slid the card downwards into the lock. The light altered from red to green. He opened the door and walked in. It was a hotel room like any other — a double bed, a TV, air that smelled of dry-cleaning.

‘What time’s Lambert due?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Eleven,’ Connor said.

They were early.

Connor drank a bottle of sparkling water from the mini-bar. Jimmy took a seat at the round table, a blank notepad in front of him. He didn’t really know what to expect. Connor had told him that Lambert was being flown in at the company’s expense. From Europe, he had said. Would Lambert take his proposal literally? No doubt that was one of the aims of the meeting — to discuss tactics, to identify a strategy. Jimmy glanced at Connor who was standing at the window, hands clasped behind his back. Outside, it had begun to drizzle.

At five to eleven the phone rang. Connor picked it up and listened for a moment, then he said, ‘Yes, 506.’ He put the phone down and turned to Jimmy. ‘Lambert’s here,’ he said. Rather unnecessarily, Jimmy thought. Perhaps Connor was nervous after all.

The man who walked into the room had thick but neatly parted light-brown hair and wore a biscuit-coloured overcoat. Though the rain was now beating against the window, neither his hair nor his overcoat were wet, which only added to the mystique surrounding him, lending credence to the idea that he might be capable of extraordinary things.

‘Lambert,’ Connor said. ‘James Lyle.’

The palm of Lambert’s hand felt dry, slightly gritty, as though it had been dusted with chalk. Jimmy watched as Lambert removed his coat, folded it lengthways and laid it across the bed. Lambert’s hands were gentle and nurturing, almost chivalrous, so much so that Jimmy found himself imagining that the coat was not a coat at all, but a woman who had been turned into a coat — as a punishment, perhaps, or even by mistake. The idea seemed both absurd and possible, and Jimmy suddenly felt giddy, a little faint, as if he’d smoked too much grass. He poured himself a glass of water and drank half of it. Rain was tumbling past the window now. The bare branches of the trees shone like polished stone, and the sky was so dark that they had switched the lights on in the offices across the street.

Lambert sat down at the table, his briefcase on the floor beside his chair. If Jimmy had been asked to describe him, he would have found it difficult. He would have been tempted to generalise. Clean-cut, he would have said. Classic features. Clichés, in other words. He thought Lambert looked more like a doctor than anything else, an impression that was reinforced when Lambert began to speak. He had a voice that was quiet and firm, a voice tailor-made for diagnosis. I’m sorry, but you have cancer. Jimmy could hear him saying it. If Lambert had a sense of humour, he kept it hidden under layers of discretion and professionalism.

After talking for almost half an hour about unconscious information processing, what he called ‘perception without awareness’, Lambert suddenly tightened the focus.

‘Basically,’ he said, ‘you’re looking at a three-month programme. April to June.’

Connor’s head lifted slowly, as if it weighed much more than other people’s. ‘That’s the earliest start-date you can give us?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Connor jotted something on his notepad.

‘The drug-trial scenario won’t work,’ Lambert said. ‘I’m recommending another route. I’m recommending a sleep laboratory.’ He waited, expecting another challenge, perhaps, but neither Connor nor Jimmy spoke. ‘It’s less high-profile,’ he explained, ‘less contentious. It’s got the same things going for it, though. You define the parameters — obstructive sleep apnoea, polysomnography, whatever — then you advertise for subjects to fit that profile. You pay them a fixed sum. After that, they’re yours.’

‘And you can set that up?’ Connor said.

‘Yes, I can.’

‘How would you go about it?’

Lambert was staring at the surface of the table. ‘Let’s just say I’m affiliated to a university.’

‘But there are dangers if it gets too medical, aren’t there?’ said Jimmy, speaking for the first time. ‘I mean, if doctors are involved?’

Lambert didn’t raise his eyes from the table. ‘My feeling is, you stay abstract. You focus on research, sleep studies. That way you get to choose exactly who your subjects are. Your target market.’ He grinned mirthlessly. The speed of it reminded Jimmy of lizards catching insects with their tongues.

‘And the technology?’ Connor asked.

‘The technology’s all taken care of,’ Lambert said. ‘However, I should warn you. We’ve carried out some tests and the results are not conclusive, not by any means.’ He took a breath. ‘This project is experimental. No money back, no guarantees.’

Jimmy glanced at Connor, but Connor was nodding.

‘Talking of money,’ and Lambert started drawing noughts on his notepad, ‘this is not going to be cheap …’

‘I’m aware of that.’ Connor rose to his feet and spoke to Jimmy. ‘You’ll have to excuse us for a few minutes.’

When the two men had left the room, Jimmy leaned back in his chair, hands locked behind his head, and for a few moments his mind was completely blank. The wind and rain had died away. Through the wall to his right came the monotonous buzz of an electric razor. His eyes drifted round the room and came to rest on Lambert’s coat. He stood up, walked over to the bed. He hesitated, then lifted the collar on the coat and peered inside. No label. The coat was high-quality — cashmere, by the feel of it. He let the collar go. Would Lambert know that somebody had tampered with his coat? He heard voices outside the door and froze, still bent over the bed, but the voices passed on down the corridor. Bolder now, he slipped a hand into the outside pocket of the coat. It was empty. In the other pocket he found a grey-and-yellow Lufthansa boarding pass, the small piece that passengers retain. LAMBERT/D MR, it read. From MUC to LON. MUC — that was Munich, presumably. Jimmy noted the flight number and the date, then put it back. Sitting at the table again, he reached for the remote and switched on the TV. He watched CNN until he heard Connor and Lambert outside the door, then he turned the TV off and stood up. Lambert only stayed long enough to collect his coat. He shook hands with Connor, nodded at Jimmy, then he was gone. Connor opened the mini-bar and took out a small bottle of sparkling water.

‘So what did you think of Lambert?’

‘Impressive,’ Jimmy said. ‘No wasted words, no promises he couldn’t keep.’ Jimmy paused, thinking back. ‘Actually, he reminded me of someone from a soap opera.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

‘No.’

Smiling, Connor finished his water and placed the glass on the table. ‘I imagine that’s the way he likes it.’

‘Have you known him long?’

Connor’s eyes lifted, collecting bleak light from the window. ‘What makes you think I know him?’ Connor reached for his raincoat and put it on. ‘There are things I’m keeping from you,’ he said, ‘for your own protection.’

Jimmy was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I do have one concern.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Doesn’t it worry you that what we’re attempting is actually impossible, that we might be spending all this money for nothing?’

‘What’s advertising,’ Connor said, ‘if it’s not a risk?’

*

Outside the hotel they climbed into a waiting taxi. As it joined the flow of traffic, Connor spoke again.

‘You understand, of course, that we’re going to have to hide the financing.’

Jimmy turned to look at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Well, obviously we can’t route the financing through the usual channels.’ Connor stared through the window at Hyde Park, its trees slowly dissolving in the mist. ‘I can authorise the expenditure, but I’ll still need something on paper, some kind of evidence, to account for it.’ Connor paused. ‘I want you to think about that.’

Jimmy thought about it as they rounded Hyde Park Corner. He got nowhere. They passed Harrods, its huge dark bulk made delicate by strings of lights. He watched the people streaming along the pavement, down into the tube, heads bobbing, like shallow water running over pebbles.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I like the name.’

‘Project Secretary?’

Jimmy nodded. ‘I like the way it’s got the word secret built into it. I didn’t see it right away.’

Connor was silent for a moment, then he turned and smiled at Jimmy. ‘You know, I didn’t even realise.’

That night, at ten-past twelve, Jimmy’s phone rang. He pressed MUTE on his TV remote and reached for the receiver.

‘Jimmy? Is that you?’

He recognised the voice. It was Plane Crash. He had met her at a music-business party Zane had taken him to. Her real name was Bridget.

She wanted him to come over to her place.

Her place. He remembered her bedroom, how it was littered with open suitcases, dirty clothes, unpaid bills, odd shoes — things scattered everywhere, and sometimes unidentifiable. It looked as if a plane had crashed in it. That was why he’d given her the nickname.

She was telling him to jump into a cab. It would take him twenty minutes, door to door.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve got to be up early.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come to you.’

‘That’s not a good idea.’ He thought quickly. ‘How about dinner tomorrow?’

She hesitated.

‘I’ll meet you in that bar on Ledbury Road,’ he said. ‘At eight.’

‘You’ll cancel on me,’ she said.

‘I’ll be there,’ he promised.

When he walked into the bar the following night, Bridget was sitting in the corner, drinking Tia Maria on the rocks. He apologised for being late. Bridget shrugged, as if she was used to it, and just for a moment Jimmy felt they were a couple who had been together for years, a couple who were weary of each other — so weary, in fact, that they couldn’t do anything about it. He almost turned around and left. Instead, he sat down and lit his first Silk Cut of the evening. Bridget lit a Cartier. She was wearing black — a tailored jacket and a tight, thigh-length skirt. Her dark hair was shorter than he remembered it, shaped into a kind of bob.

‘I like your hair,’ he said.

She touched it with a hand that seemed uncertain. ‘The weirdest thing,’ she said. ‘The man who cut it cried the whole time I was there because his mother had just phoned up and told him she’d only got six months to live.’ She touched her hair again. ‘Didn’t do a bad job, considering.’

‘You’re terrible,’ Jimmy said, but he was laughing.

His drink arrived, the tonic bubbling over deliciously clumsy chunks of ice. He lifted the glass, drank greedily. And felt the vodka begin to wrap his brain in silver. Bridget was telling him about a band she wanted to sign — she’d seen them play at the Astoria the night before — but he found that his mind was wandering. That afternoon, while briefing the advertising agency on Kwench! creative strategy, he had thought of a possible answer to the problem Connor had given him, the problem of how to hide the financing of their secret project. Why not ask someone at the agency to bill ECSC UK for services that had never been provided? Someone, yes — but who? His eyes had come to rest on Richard Herring, his opposite number. Of course, he would have to wait until the time was right, until he had some leverage. A surplus of goodwill, for instance. A debt that was commutable. On returning to the office, he had explained his idea to Connor.

‘Herring?’ Connor said. ‘I’m not sure I know him. What kind of relationship do you have?’

‘We’ve been working together since April. We get on pretty well —’

‘Remember what you said a few weeks ago about firing the agency?’ Connor paused, then smiled slowly. ‘Looks like we might need them after all.’

A rapid chinking sound broke into Jimmy’s thoughts and he looked up to see Bridget tapping her drink with a cigarette lighter.

‘You didn’t hear a word I said.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jimmy said. ‘I just lost track.’

She slumped back in her chair, her hand still toying with the lighter. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

It annoyed him, the way she seemed to expect disappointment, the way she carried that expectation around with her. It tired him. He wondered if he could catch it from her, like a disease. It didn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility. He thought that perhaps it would be best if he didn’t see her again.

‘You’re only interested in yourself,’ she was telling him now. ‘You don’t give a shit about what anybody else is doing.’

He was watching her carefully. Her face looked clammy. Like blancmange.

‘You’re dishonest and deceitful.’ She paused. ‘And underhand.’

Which might not be a bad thing, he thought. After all, they were qualities that would come in pretty useful during the next few months.

‘You’re incapable of a relationship.’

With you? he thought. Yes, you’re probably right.

Somehow, though — and this disconcerted him — he didn’t manage to go home. Somehow, he managed to stay out with her till one in the morning, by which time they were both drunk. Somehow, he found himself in the back of a taxi, her lipstick black and glistening as triangles of orange light spun through the car, her cigarette three sparks on the road behind them, her mouth suddenly on his …

During the night he woke up, a dream still real in his head. He had dreamed about the dark-haired secretary. She was sitting on his sofa in Mornington Crescent, her thin gold chain gleaming in the sunlight that slanted through the half-open picture-window. He had said something to upset her, though. He had said something he shouldn’t have, and she had turned away from him, her eyes damp and despairing, staring into the corner of the room, her lips drawn tight (strange how clearly he remembered her). He was trying to explain that he hadn’t meant it. What he’d said had come out wrong. He’d been joking. But she only shook her head. Tiny rapid movements — fractions of a movement, really. He couldn’t make her understand. She went on sitting there, the sunlight in the garden and a warm breeze streaming in, her face hard, yet wounded. And then, inexplicably, the roar of the tube, and the window black behind her …

He was finding it hard to breathe. Bridget had left the central heating on, and she had drawn the curtains, too. There was no light in the room, no air; he felt as if he had been sealed in a tomb. Her clock’s green numerals said 3:25. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he began to dress.

‘Don’t go.’

He looked round. ‘I’ve got to.’

‘Be nice to me,’ she murmured. ‘You could at least be nice to me.’

By the time the taxi pulled up outside his house, it was four-fifteen. On the main road the traffic had quietened down. He could hear the giant ventilation units in the building behind him. An eerie sound. Like someone breathing out, but never running out of breath. To his left he could see the shop in the Esso petrol station. A dark-skinned man sat behind the cash-till, his mouth stretched in a yawn. From a distance he appeared to be singing.

Once inside his flat, Jimmy emptied his pockets on to the bedside table and then, for the second time that night, took off all his clothes. Through the window he could see the gnomes arranged in small groups on the Astroturf. They looked wrong in the dark — ill-at-ease, almost embarrassed. They looked the way people at a cocktail party might look if, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the host turned off all the lights. Somehow it reassured him, though, to see them standing there, outside his window, in the gloom. He climbed between cold sheets and was asleep in minutes.

Halfway through December, Jimmy arranged to meet Richard Herring for a drink in Soho. It had been a crisp, bright winter’s day. If you breathed in deeply, you could smell knife-blades and the skin of apples. Towards the end of the afternoon, the sky browned along the horizon, like paper held over a fire; at any moment, you felt, it might burst into dramatic flames. Once the sun had gone, though, the temperature dropped, and people hurried through the streets with their heads bent, as if afraid of being recognised. Jimmy reached the pub first and sat in a corner booth with a pint of Guinness. A small crowd stood at the bar, the overflow from some office lunch or party. They had been drinking for hours, and now they were telling jokes. It seemed like a good place for what Jimmy had in mind. If Richard chose not to take his proposition seriously, then all that background laughter would come in useful. It’s all right, Richard. Just kidding. Ha ha. At that moment, with the clock showing ten-past six, Richard pushed through the door, his face tight and bruised with cold. Jimmy waved him over.

The timing of events can seem coincidental, but if you’re responsible for the timing, if you planned it, then you know it’s no such thing. Jimmy had chosen the moment carefully — partly because Christmas was close and everybody in the industry was beginning to relax, but also, and more importantly, perhaps, because of what had happened earlier in the week. On Tuesday the advertising agency had presented their campaign for Kwench! and ECSC had rejected it. It wasn’t the campaign that had been asked for. It didn’t fit the brief. An awkward meeting, then, with consternation, even bitterness, on one side, and disappointment on the other. But, sitting in the pub that evening, Jimmy elected not to mention it. He felt Richard had to bring the subject up himself — and, looking at Richard he suspected that he wouldn’t have too long to wait: a subtle tension showed under Richard’s eyes and around his mouth, almost a kind of guilt, which gave his usual aristocratic nonchalance a brittle edge. They had been talking for less than twenty minutes when Richard lifted his glass and began to swirl the Guinness round inside it.

‘About the presentation,’ he said.

Jimmy feigned a sombre look.

‘They’re having another crack at it.’ Richard put his drink back on the table and studied it with narrowed eyes, as if assessing the quality of the product. ‘They should come up with something before the holiday.’

‘Thing is,’ Jimmy said, ‘it’s Connor. He’s not happy.’

Richard stared even harder at his glass. Behind him, at the bar, two men and a woman were singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. The woman wore red high-heels and held a thin cigar in the air beside her ear. One of the men had put on a paper hat, but it was too small for his head, and it had split.

‘Connor,’ Jimmy said thoughtfully. ‘He’s not happy with the work. In general, I mean. He’s thinking of making you pitch.’ Jimmy mentioned the names of two other agencies, both famous for their creativity.

‘Jesus.’ Richard propped one elbow on the table and let his forehead drop into the palm of his hand. He stared at the table, his eyes unfocused. If the agency lost the account, his job would be on the line.

‘I don’t know,’ Jimmy said after a while. ‘I might be able to talk to him.’

‘What about Tony?’

‘Ruddle?’ Jimmy shook his head. ‘No real influence. Not any more.’ He couldn’t resist a smile. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, studying the end of his Silk Cut, ‘I seem to get on pretty well with Connor …’

‘If you could have a word with him,’ Richard said, without lifting his eyes from the table, ‘I’d really appreciate it.’

‘Yeah.’ Jimmy sighed. ‘Another drink?’

Up at the bar the woman with the cigar was still singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ — all by herself this time. She was making up her own words: it was no longer the ‘ground’, for instance, that was ‘hard as iron’, no longer the ‘frosty winds’ that ‘made moan’. Though drunk, the man in the paper hat was beginning to look daunted.

When Jimmy returned to the booth with the drinks, he made sure he sat down more heavily than usual. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re not the only one with problems …’

‘No?’ Richard looked almost hopeful.

‘This is strictly between you and me, Richard.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ve got an issue here,’ Jimmy said.

He explained what he needed. Richard listened and then, when Jimmy had finished, he said, ‘How much money are we talking about?’

Jimmy told him.

The skin tightened on Richard’s face. He lifted his glass and drank almost half of what was in it. Behind him, and seemingly in response to this sudden intake of alcohol, the man in the paper hat slid sideways off his stool. The woman stared at him for a moment, then laughed a deep, inhaled laugh.

‘Obviously you don’t have to give it to me all at once,’ Jimmy said. ‘It can appear in instalments, if that makes it easier. A bit here, a bit there.’ He paused. ‘It’s only paper, remember.’

Richard looked up, a sudden belligerence lowering his eyebrows, drawing his chin forwards. ‘Where’s the money going?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

Richard didn’t take his eyes off Jimmy’s face.

‘It’s not going to me, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Jimmy smiled wistfully into his drink. ‘If only. No, it’s just a problem I’ve inherited.’

A silence fell between them, but Jimmy had the feeling Richard believed him.

At last, and with a faint sardonic smile, Richard said, ‘How soon would you need,’ and he paused, ‘the first instalment?’

On Monday, at eleven in the morning, Richard called. Jimmy thought he was going to say that he had changed his mind, that he couldn’t possibly involve himself in something so dubious, and in an attempt to postpone his own disappointment he told Richard how ill he had been on Friday night. For lunch that day he had eaten roast teal on a bed of Puy lentils, he said, and then, if he remembered rightly, he had drunk Guinness with Richard, at least five pints. Suddenly, towards midnight, he felt as if his stomach was alive inside him, whole somehow, like a trapped animal. He seemed to have spent most of the weekend in his bathroom, bent over the toilet bowl.

‘I thought teal was a colour.’ Richard was laughing.

‘It was,’ Jimmy said. ‘I won’t describe it to you.’

‘Listen,’ and Richard scarcely paused, ‘that paperwork you asked me for, I’m having it biked over. It should be with you by midday.’

Strategically, Jimmy thought it would be a mistake to sound too relieved, or too grateful. Instead, he simply told Richard that he was seeing Connor for lunch, which allowed Richard the room to draw his own conclusions. At the end of the phone-call it was Richard who thanked Jimmy rather than the other way round.

In the restaurant that lunchtime Jimmy studied the menu for less than a minute, then ordered a Caesar salad and a bottle of mineral water. It was all he could face. Also, it would fix him in Connor’s mind as one of a new breed of marketing executives; the clean-living image was bound to appeal to Connor, who had spent most of the last decade in Southern California.

As Jimmy’s decaffeinated cappuccino arrived, he began to tell Connor about the meeting with Richard and the subsequent delivery. The American had been looking out across the restaurant floor, thinking he had recognised someone, an old colleague, but now his head turned back towards Jimmy, turned slowly, remorselessly, which gave Jimmy the feeling that he was at the planetarium, observing the movement of a celestial body.

‘You solved it already?’ Connor said.

‘I think so.’

Connor wanted to know how.

‘I told him you were thinking of moving the account. I told him I’d try and talk you out of it. If that was what he wanted.’

‘You blamed me?’

A bubble of fear rose through Jimmy as he wondered if he’d gone too far. ‘It seemed the obvious thing to do.’ He paused. ‘It seemed believable. Your reputation …’

‘Yes. I can see that.’

Jimmy reached into his jacket pocket and took out an envelope. He handed it to Connor, who prised the seal open with his big, blunt fingers. Connor lifted out the invoice and unfolded it.

‘Twenty-five thousand,’ Jimmy said.

‘Well,’ said Connor, smiling, ‘it’s a start.’

Synchro

For the launch of Kwench! ECSC UK hired the top floor of a five-star hotel in Kensington, complete with roof garden, swimming-pool and a panoramic view of the city. It had been Jimmy’s idea to have the water in the pool dyed orange, but Connor had thought of the synchronised swimmers, a stroke of genius which, in Jimmy’s opinion, proved the American was worth every penny of his reputedly enormous salary. An orange swimming-pool, it was memorable in itself — but then, while the champagne was being served, nineteen girls stepped out on to the terrace, dressed in tight-fitting orange hats and sleek blue one-piece bathing-costumes. In single file, they marched towards the deep end, their heads thrown proudly back, their toes pointing. They climbed down into the water and, accompanied by the soundtrack from the first Kwench! TV/cinema commercial, they began to run through various routines, their movements graceful, intricate, and perfectly orchestrated. Every now and then, observing a music cue, perhaps, or following some logic of their own, the girls broke out of the patterns they were creating and formed the word KWENCH! on the surface of the pool. The first time this happened, there was an involuntary gasp from the crowd, and then delighted laughter and a small, spontaneous burst of applause.

‘Seems to be going pretty well.’

Jimmy turned to see Raleigh Connor standing beside him. Connor was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt and a pair of casual trousers. His forearms, which were thick and tanned, reminded Jimmy of cold roast chicken.

‘It couldn’t be going better,’ Jimmy said.

During the thirteen-week run-up to the launch he had been surprised by the smoothness of the operation. Their only real worry had been that the advertising spend might be seen to be too meagre (of course, if you counted the cost of Project Secretary, it wasn’t meagre at all), but Jimmy managed to take that worry and turn it to the company’s advantage. In a daring presentation to the sales force at the end of January, he had stressed the product’s secret formula, a cocktail of natural ingredients that would enhance the lives of all consumers, and he had claimed that its unique character would be reflected in the marketing, part of which would be subterranean, invisible — a mystery promotion. In reality, of course, no such promotion existed. It was just a smoke-screen — a sort of double-bluff, in fact — but the sales force went away happy, believing they could create excitement on the strength of what he had said, and the off-trade order figures for the following month showed that his strategy had worked. People sometimes argued that marketing was damage limitation, the art of preventing things from going wrong. If that was the case, then ECSC UK’s marketing of Kwench! had been exemplary.

‘It looks so effortless, doesn’t it,’ Connor said, and, as he spoke, the girls sprang up out of the water, their bodies vertical and seemingly suspended for a moment in mid-air. ‘You have to watch what’s happening below the surface, though. You have to see the work they’re putting in.’ Moving closer to Jimmy, he pointed down into the pool. Jimmy saw the girls’ hands rotating frantically.

Connor shook his head, impressed. ‘They say it’s like running the four hundred metres without breathing.’

‘You don’t notice it, do you,’ Jimmy said. ‘I mean, you’re not supposed to.’

They might have been discussing their own clandestine schemes, Jimmy thought, and, judging by the smile on Connor’s face, he thought so too. During the past few weeks they had developed a peculiar affinity, a kind of understanding; at times they seemed to be able to communicate in code. Connor gripped him briefly by the upper arm, sealing something, and then withdrew into the crowd.

Jimmy remained beside the pool. As all the girls were wearing identical hats and bathing-costumes, it was hard to tell them apart, but Jimmy had already decided which one was the prettiest: whenever they formed the word Kwench! in the water, she simply turned on to her back, became the top half of the exclamation mark. He watched the swimming until it ended, then he moved away. He had been drinking champagne since midday, and he thought it was probably time he did some of the coke Zane had biked over that morning. A shame he had to do it alone, but then he could hardly offer it to Richard Herring, could he?

The toilets were spotless — gleaming sinks and mirrors, white towels piled in downy heaps, the hypnotic trickling of water. Once he was locked into a cubicle he felt in his pocket for the tiny envelope. He chopped the coke on the cistern, which was flat and black, almost as if it had been designed for that very purpose. Yes, the smoothness of the launch had astonished him. In January, for instance, the agency creatives had presented to the company again, and this time they hadn’t tried to be too clever. They had produced a three-stage poster campaign, based on a gradual revelation of the Kwench! logo, and a TV/cinema commercial that did the same job, only in a slightly wittier and more dramatic way, the central image being a visual pun in which the top half of the Kwench! exclamation mark doubled as a glass filled with the product. The tagline said, simply, Kwench it! Straightforward advertising, but effective, energetic — bold. During the presentation Jimmy had applauded the agency’s achievement. He had also coined a new phrase, exclamation marketing, which Connor had been repeating ever since.

He ran one finger across the top of the cistern, collecting the last few grains, and licked it, then he pulled the chain. His heart was jumping. Probably the cocaine had been cut with amphetamine. Unlocking the cubicle, he opened the door. Directly in front of him, no more than ten feet away and bending over a wash-basin, was Tony Ruddle. As Jimmy hesitated in the doorway, Ruddle looked up and saw him reflected in the mirror. Ruddle swung round, hands dripping.

‘Constipation?’ he said.

Jimmy stared at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘It took such a long time,’ Ruddle said and, smiling unpleasantly, he moved towards the hand-drier on the wall and pressed the silver button.

He must be drunk, Jimmy thought, as he walked over to a wash-basin and turned on the hot tap.

‘You enjoy yourself,’ Ruddle shouted over the roar of the machine. ‘Enjoy your fifteen minutes. Because that’s all you’re getting.’

Had Ruddle guessed what he’d been up to? Surely not.

‘I’m watching you,’ Ruddle shouted. ‘You just remember that.’

Jimmy pictured the miniature white envelope at the bottom of his pocket. 1903, he thought. The year they took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola. Almost a century ago. And that was probably the closest Ruddle would ever get to it. Suddenly he was grinning. Though he knew it wasn’t wise.

The roar of the machine cut out and in the sudden hush Ruddle walked up behind him. He could feel the push of Ruddle’s breath. Its sour, brackish reek thrust past his shoulder, hung under his nose.

‘… and I’m going to be there when it does,’ Ruddle was saying. ‘Oh yes, I’m going to be there, don’t you worry.’

Jimmy turned to look at him. ‘Does what?’

Wrongfooted, Ruddle gaped.

‘I have to say,’ and, once again, Jimmy couldn’t keep the grin off his face, ‘that suit with that bow-tie, it’s fucking terrible.’

Ruddle took another step forwards. Backing away, Jimmy felt the thick porcelain lip of the wash-basin press into the small of his back.

‘You think you’re clever,’ Ruddle hissed.

Christ, the man was frightening close-up. Those teeth crammed inside his mouth like an untidy shelf of books. That breath …

Ruddle stepped back, panting.

‘We’ll see about that,’ he muttered. ‘We’ll see.’

Jimmy watched Ruddle lunge towards the toilet door, trousers slightly flared, hands flapping at hip-level. It must be that mid-life crisis people talk about, he thought. Ruddle ought to be careful. What happened if your blood pressure got too high? That was a stroke, wasn’t it?

On his way back to the roof garden Jimmy took a wrong turning. He found himself in a kind of corridor or hallway, an artificial lemon fragrance in the air. The overhead lighting was discreet, indirect, but somehow he still felt exposed, as if Ruddle might, at any moment, spring foaming from a hidden alcove. He noticed a pink upholstered chair with slender golden arms. He sat down. Plants grew complacently around him in brass tubs. In the distance he could see three silver doors. A bank of lifts.

As he sat there, not sure what to do next, a door opened halfway down the corridor and a girl appeared. She was looking over her shoulder; one of the straps on her backpack had twisted, and she was trying to straighten it. She had short blonde hair, which was still damp from the shower. She wore a loose cotton shirt and clinging lycra cycling shorts. Her legs were bare.

‘You were part of the exclamation mark,’ he said.

She looked round. She had the coolness, the stillness, of a vision. She seemed familiar — or, at least, not unexpected — though he knew he had never met her before.

He stood up, moved towards her. ‘When you made that word in the water,’ he said. ‘You were part of the exclamation mark, weren’t you?’

‘Oh yes.’ She laughed a little, lowering her eyes. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it …’

‘Synchro?’

‘What?’ He didn’t follow.

‘That’s what we call it,’ she said. ‘It’s such a mouthful otherwise.’ Slightly self-conscious, she reached up and pushed her fingers through her hair. He noticed that it had a greenish tinge to it, the same colour as young corn.

‘I thought it was great,’ he said. ‘I really did.’ He saw her look beyond him, towards the lifts. ‘You’re not going, are you?’

She smiled. ‘Well, yes …’

‘Do you think I could see you again?’ His boldness took him by surprise.

She looked at him quickly, and seemed to hesitate.

‘Are you with anyone?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘kind of.’

‘So am I. Kind of.’ He saw a barren mountainside with wreckage scattered over it. Men picking gingerly through split suitcases and pieces of twisted metal. Bridget’s bedroom. ‘Well, not any more, actually,’ he said. ‘Are you in the phone-book?’

‘No.’

‘So how will I find you?’

She thought for a moment. ‘I train at Marshall Street Baths most evenings.’ She began to walk away from him, then stopped and looked over her shoulder. ‘Or sometimes it’s Seymour Place.’

He watched her step through the silver doors and press the button for ground floor. As the doors closed over her, she was looking downwards, at her feet.

He found the roof garden eventually, asking the housekeeper first, and then a waiter. When he walked out into the sunshine, most of the guests were staring up into the air. Bill Denman had just released one thousand orange balloons over the city, each one stamped with the Kwench! logo. Jimmy stood next to Richard Herring and watched the balloons shrink against the bright-blue sky. He wished he had been able to implement his traffic-light idea. He had wanted to jam all Central London’s traffic-lights on amber. Not for long. An hour or two would have been enough. Imagine the chaos! The publicity!

‘Jimmy,’ Richard said. ‘You having fun?’

That night, on his way home, Jimmy tried to decide whether or not he was worried about Tony Ruddle. He didn’t think he was, not really. Not so long as he continued to be indispensable to Raleigh Connor. After all, what real leverage did Ruddle have? What strings could he pull? Jimmy could only see two options. Either Ruddle would have to try and turn Bill Denman against Connor — and Jimmy couldn’t imagine how Ruddle’s influence on the managing director would be stronger than Connor’s — or he would have to resort to blackmail. To blackmail someone, though, you need information, and Ruddle didn’t have any — at least, not yet (though he did appear to sense that he was being excluded from something, which might explain his rancour and frustration, that tantrum in the hotel toilet). Still, Jimmy thought it would do no harm to cover himself.

The next morning Jimmy saw Connor in his office. He talked about the friction that existed between himself and Tony Ruddle. It seemed to be personal, he said, a matter of chemistry. There had been, and he paused, outbursts.

Connor’s head lifted slowly, but he didn’t say anything. At times he could seem almost oriental. The half-moon eyelids. The use of silence.

Jimmy waited.

At last Connor spoke. ‘I believe Mr Ruddle’s having some kind of domestic problem. His wife.’

‘I see.’ Jimmy thought he’d probably said enough. ‘Well, I just wanted you to be aware of it,’ he added. ‘I didn’t want anything to jeopardise the project.’

Connor nodded. ‘I appreciate that.’

‘As a matter of interest,’ Jimmy said, ‘how’s it going?’

Connor’s veiled look cleared. He rose to his feet and began to pace up and down in front of the blinds, his arms behind his back, his left wrist enclosed in his right hand. ‘You know, James,’ he said, excited suddenly, ‘I hadn’t imagined the scale of it.’

‘The scale?’

Connor said that Lambert had taken him to see the project at the beginning of the week.

‘What’s it like?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Peaceful.’ Connor smiled.

He had watched subjects sleeping in their private cubicles, he said. It was a strange sight. Outside the ward a control room had been set up. The subjects were kept under strict medical surveillance. They were also monitored on video. Lambert had hired three assistants who worked round the clock, in shifts. Every night they processed between twenty and twenty-five people. That was, roughly speaking, one hundred and fifty people a week. Six hundred a month.

‘In mid-July,’ Connor said, ‘we hit two thousand.’

‘July? I thought it was a three-month programme.’

‘Since it seems to be running so smoothly,’ Connor said, ‘I can think of no reason why we shouldn’t extend it for another month.’ He stopped and looked at Jimmy levelly, from under his heavy eyelids. ‘Can you?’

‘Well, no.’ Jimmy thought for a moment. ‘Do you think I could see it too, sir?’

‘No, I’m afraid that —’

‘I’d be very interested,’ Jimmy said. ‘After all,’ he added gently, ‘it was my idea.’

‘I’m aware of that. But Lambert’s in charge up there and this is his directive. “No sightseeing tours” was how he put it.’

No sightseeing tours. Jimmy could imagine Lambert using those exact words. He was disappointed, but not entirely surprised. His involvement in the project had never been one hundred per cent. There are things I’m keeping from you.

‘By the way,’ he said, brightening a little, ‘did you hear about the balloons?’

Connor nodded.

The day before, a dozen of the Kwench! balloons had been caught in a freak air current over Central London. Swooping down into Westminster, almost to ground level, they had bombarded Prince Charles as he arrived at the Abbey for a memorial service. The balloons had appeared on TV as the last item in the early evening news, the anchorman referring to Kwench! in passing as a ‘marketing phenomenon’. That morning the Mirror had published a photograph of Prince Charles looking startled as a Kwench! balloon bounced off his shoulder. Jimmy was thinking of having T-shirts printed. The national media had become involved, the Royal Family too. There was no doubt about it. Kwench! was well and truly launched.

The Carbonated Brain

On a humid evening halfway through June, Jimmy ran up the steps that led out of Piccadilly Circus tube. A man stood on the street-corner, selling Japanese-style paper fans; the heatwave was in its second week. Jimmy turned north, loosening his tie. Simone had invited him to an opening, and he was late, as usual. It had been a momentous day, though. Truly momentous. At a meeting of the project team that morning he had finally been able to demonstrate the impact Kwench! had had on the soft-drinks market in the six weeks since its launch. The Nielsen off-trade figures had come in, revealing widespread availability in supermarkets throughout the country. The on-trade figures were looking healthy too. Kwench! appeared to have cannibalised almost every sector of the market: the fruit carbonates, obviously, but also the lemonades, the juices, and even, to some extent, power brands like Coke and Pepsi. Sales were a staggering 24 per cent ahead of budget, a statistic that could only partly be explained by the hot weather. Jimmy’s personal contribution to this early success couldn’t be quantified, of course, but, then again, it couldn’t be underestimated either. Just recently, with Tony Ruddle still away on holiday — some kind of rest-cure, presumably — there had been talk of a re-shuffle. According to one rumour, Jimmy was being considered for a promotion in the autumn. As a member of Connor’s inner circle, as Connor’s protégé, in fact, he was beginning to feel that there was no limit to what he might achieve.

Seven-thirty was striking as he arrived at the gallery, and it was so crowded that people had spilled out on to the pavement. Jimmy pushed through the glass doors and on into a huge white space where spotlights burned like miniature suns. Simone was deep in conversation with two men. One of them had eyes that seemed to float in their sockets, as if suspended in formaldehyde. Jimmy decided not to interrupt — at least, not for the time being. Instead, he moved towards the bar.

He drank his first drink quickly, and was just reaching for a second when he noticed an old woman standing at his shoulder. Her eyebrows had been drawn on in brown, and she was smoking a cigarette in an extravagantly long tortoiseshell cigarette-holder. But it was her glasses that intrigued him most: with their dark-yellow lenses and their thick black frames, they looked as if they might have been made during the fifties, in a city like Istanbul or Tel Aviv.

‘I hope you don’t think I’m one of those people who wear sunglasses at night,’ she said when he complimented her on her appearance. ‘They’re for my eyesight. I have photophobia.’ She looked past him, into the room, and, drawing on her cigarette, let the smoke dribble from one corner of her mouth. ‘Ah, here’s my niece.’

They were joined by a girl in her early twenties, wearing a sleeveless orange dress. Her hair was black, and hung in tangled ropes below her shoulders. The skin beneath her eyes looked shaded-in, as if she had not been sleeping well.

‘This wine,’ and she made a face, ‘it’s foul.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said the older woman, though she didn’t seem particularly disturbed by it.

‘I wish they had Kwench!.’ The girl turned to Jimmy. ‘It’s a new soft drink. You should try it.’

Jimmy couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

‘What,’ the girl said. Because he was staring at her, not saying anything.

‘Kwench!?’ the old woman said. ‘What’s Kwench!?’

The girl began to explain Kwench! to her aunt. Jimmy was still staring at the girl. Could she really be one of his ambassadors? She was certainly saying the right things. But maybe that was just a coincidence; after all, the secretary on the tube would have sounded exactly the same. That orange dress, though — was that coincidental too?

Touching him on the arm now, the girl told him she was getting through three or four cans of Kwench! a day. Her fridge was full of it. In fact, she said, and she began to laugh (a happy ambassador!), she was probably going to have to buy a bigger fridge. And she opened her eyes wide, signalling that things had got completely out of hand.

He was laughing as well. He had never imagined that an ambassador could be funny. Earnest, yes. Remorseless. But not funny. This girl, though — she was like someone you might meet at a party, someone you might think of taking home …

He watched her push her hair away from her face, as if she was walking in a forest and her hair was a stray branch or bramble that blocked her path. He noticed how her bracelet tumbled down her forearm towards the dark crease of her elbow –

Imagine if he told her where he worked!

All of a sudden he began to feel claustrophobic. The girl was still talking, talking, talking — and always about the same thing, the only thing she could think of. He received a vivid, flashed image of the inside of her head. Her brain appeared to have liquefied. Not only that, but it was carbonated too, each cell brimming with frenetic orange bubbles. He could almost hear it fizzing.

The spotlights burned; the room blackened at the edges. Muttering an excuse, he turned and plunged into the crowd …

He emerged at last and stood on the pavement, sweating. Cool air, car horns. The mingled scents of jasmine and fast food. He doubled over, retching. Nothing there. He slowly straightened up again. Lambert had been right to deny him access to the project. Obviously you could get too close.

He leaned against an iron railing, let his head tilt backwards on his neck. A solitary pale-pink cloud floated in the sky above Hanover Square. It looked like something that had been mislaid, he thought, and the strange thing was, its owner hadn’t even realised.

American For Disaster

Sitting high above the swimming-pool on a wooden bench, Jimmy watched the officials walk up and down in their white outfits, name-tags dangling on frail silver chains around their necks. At the shallow end, the girls stood about in bathrobes, their faces serious and eager, their voices hushed. Instrumental music filtered at low volume through the sound system. Crystal Palace on a Saturday afternoon.

During the last month and a half he must have phoned the baths at Marshall Street and Seymour Place on at least a dozen different occasions with enquiries about the synchronised swimming, but the training sessions always seemed to take place at midday, or in the early evening, and he rarely left the office before seven. Then, one lunchtime that week, he had tried a new approach. He called Marshall Street and asked if they had a girl training there, a girl with short blonde hair.

‘You mean Karen?’

He took a chance. ‘Yes. That’s her.’

‘She’s just leaving.’

‘Could you put her on?’

There was a jumble of sounds, a silence, then a voice said, ‘Karen here.’

‘My name’s Jimmy Lyle,’ he said. ‘I met you at the Kwench! party. In that hotel in Kensington.’ He paused, hoping he wasn’t talking to the wrong person. ‘You were part of the exclamation mark,’ he said, ‘remember?’

‘That was weeks ago,’ she said.

His heart turned over. ‘I know.’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Slow of me.’

She laughed. ‘You weren’t slow the last time I saw you.’

No, he thought. But there were reasons for that.

‘Are you doing anything this weekend?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got a competition. At Crystal Palace.’

‘Maybe I could come along.’

‘It’d probably be boring for you.’

He smiled. ‘Probably.’

So far, though, he had no regrets. Leaning forwards, with his arms resting on the bench in front of him, he felt lulled by the atmosphere, almost drugged.

For half an hour the girls warmed up. They swam rapid, stylish widths of crawl, or else they simply floated in the shallow end, rolling their shoulders so as to loosen the muscles. He noticed Karen immediately. She was wearing a white rubber hat that said WARNING on the front, and on the back, in smaller letters, SWIMMING CAN SERIOUSLY IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH. He watched her drink from a litre bottle of Evian, one hand propped on her hip. He watched her smooth some kind of gel on to her hair. He didn’t think she’d seen him yet.

Then, at two o’clock, there was an announcement, the words merging under the glass roof, blurring into one continuous hollow sound. The judges took their seats. According to the programme, the first part of the competition — ‘Figures’ — was scheduled to last three hours. Only one Karen appeared on the list of entrants — 24. Karen Paley. So now he knew her name.

And suddenly, it seemed, the competition was beginning. A girl in a black one-piece costume swam towards the deep end, moving sideways through the water, almost crablike. When she drew level with the judges, she flashed a smile that was wide and artificial — the smile of an air hostess, a beauty queen. She turned on to her back. Floated for a moment, so as to compose herself. Then executed the required figure — which, in this case, was called FLAMINGO BENT KNEE FULL TWIST. One by one they came, the girls, in seemingly endless succession. They all smiled the same smile, all followed the same sequence of movements, yet Jimmy didn’t find it in the least monotonous. If anything, the opposite was true. He felt he could have watched it almost indefinitely. It was like a highly esoteric form of meditation. The warm air, the green water. The repetition … Looking around, he saw that most people had fallen into a kind of trance — not just the spectators and the officials, but the girls themselves: the way they swam to the side of the pool when they had finished, so languorous, so dreamy, as if they had been hypnotised by their own performances. And, all the time, that music playing — slowed-down, slurry versions of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and ‘Lara’s Theme’, Officials in white uniforms, the continual murmuring of voices, music that echoed eerily under a high glass roof … it reminded Jimmy of visiting a hospital, somehow, or an asylum: all this going on, but separate, parallel — cocooned.

At last he heard Karen Paley’s number called, and there she was below him, rolling on to her back and straightening her legs. He couldn’t help noticing her body as she lay on top of the water, her breasts just lifting clear of it, the fabric of her costume clinging. He saw her take a breath. Slowly her hands began to revolve, slowly her head and shoulders disappeared beneath the surface. In less than a minute it was over, and she was reaching for the silver steps and climbing from the pool. While she waited for her marks, she caught sight of him, high up on his wooden bench; the smile she gave him was quite different to the smile she had given the judges only moments before. Afterwards, she walked the length of the pool, her blonde head lowered, as if deep in thought. She moved like a dancer, her bearing upright, her feet slightly splayed. He watched her pick up an ice-blue cloth and, bending, rinse it in the water at the shallow end. She wrung it out and wiped the moisture off her body, then she put on a dark-green robe and a pair of stretchy socks with soles, not unlike the slippers you get on aeroplanes sometimes.

About ten minutes later he heard footsteps and turned in time to see her sitting down beside him.

‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ she said. She had slicked her hair back behind her ears. A small red mark showed on the side of her left nostril where the noseclips had gripped it. ‘People don’t usually watch the figures. They prefer the solos, the duets. It’s more dramatic.’

‘They’re missing out,’ Jimmy said. ‘I haven’t seen the solos or the duets, but I can’t imagine them being better than this.’

She looked at him warily, thinking he might be mocking her.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘There’s something soothing about it. Almost hypnotic.’

‘So you’re not bored?’

‘No. Not at all.’

She glanced at the clock above the shallow end.

‘I thought maybe we could do something afterwards,’ he said, ‘if you’re not too tired, that is.’

‘There are fifty of us and we have to do three figures each,’ she said. ‘It’s going to take a while.’

‘I know. I’ve got the programme.’

‘You don’t mind?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

They sat in silence for a moment. He looked down at her hands, which lay folded on her lap. He noticed the small round bone on the outside of her left wrist, how prominent it was, and how the vein curved past it, towards the knuckle on her little finger.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re good, are you?’

She smiled. ‘You didn’t see me do that figure?’

‘Yes, I did. But I can’t tell.’

‘Last year I had a trial for the Olympic team,’ she said. ‘They take twelve girls. I came thirteenth.’ She looked at him quickly, almost defensively. ‘I’m not bad.’

‘Why didn’t you get in?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t think my legs were long enough.’

He laughed.

‘Really,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it comes down to that. The look of things.’ She glanced at the clock again, then stood up and tightened the belt on her robe. ‘I should be going back.’

‘I’ll see you later,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I don’t think your legs are short,’ he said.

She smiled again. ‘Nobody said they’re short,’ she said. ‘They’re just not long enough, that’s all.’ She turned and climbed the steps towards the door, a muscle flexing just above the tendon in her heel.

Jimmy peered down into the pool. The figure had changed. The new name on the board was PORPOISE SPINNING 180°. He leaned forwards, trying to see the difference between one girl’s execution of the figure and the next. He couldn’t, though. Not really.

At four-forty-five, his mobile phone rang. He pressed TALK and put it to his ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that you, James?’

There was only one person in the world who called him James. With the phone still pressed against his ear, he climbed the steps and stood by the open window.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s me.’

Outside, black clouds jostled one another in the sky. The air seemed to be changing shape.

‘James,’ and there was a pause of three or four seconds, ‘we’ve got ourselves a situation …’

A situation? Jimmy thought. Wasn’t that American for disaster?

By the time he walked out of the Leisure Centre, thunder was rolling across the rooftops and the first drops of rain were beginning to darken the car-park asphalt. He thought it would probably take him at least an hour to reach Chelsea, which was where Raleigh Connor lived. Driving north, through the wet streets, he remembered the way Karen’s leg had appeared, perfectly motionless and vertical, above the surface of the pool. Her foot first, then her calf, then her knee and, finally, her thigh. The figure had been so controlled — there wasn’t a single ripple, not even a drip — that, for a few moments, the water became solid. Seeing her leg rise into the air had seemed magical, almost supernatural — like seeing a sword being drawn, smooth and gleaming, from a stone. He thought of how her skin had shone.

At the next traffic-lights he took out his mobile phone and rang the Leisure Centre. He asked the woman who answered if he could leave a message for Karen Paley.

‘Tell her I was called away,’ he said, ‘an emergency at work. Tell her I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll try.’ The woman sounded doubtful.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘It’s very important.’

‘I said I’ll try.’

Jimmy found Connor’s street without any trouble, parking on a meter about a hundred yards beyond the house. As he walked back he saw the front door open. Lambert crossed the pavement and bent down to unlock a black BMW. He was wearing a different coat — hip-length, waterproof, pale-grey. As before, Jimmy was struck by Lambert’s ordinariness. If aliens ever landed and they wanted to take a human being back to their own world, they would have to choose someone like Lambert. He was so typical. He was practically generic.

‘Lambert,’ Jimmy said.

Lambert looked round, showed no surprise. ‘Are you going in?’

Jimmy nodded. He watched Lambert ease himself into the car and close the door behind him. After a moment the electric window slid down. ‘This thing,’ Lambert said, ‘it’s moved to a whole new level.’ He twisted the key in the ignition. The engine roared. ‘A whole new level,’ he said and, glancing over his shoulder, pulled smoothly out into the road. He drove to the junction, indicator flashing, then turned the corner and was gone.

Standing on the pavement, Jimmy remembered how the girls had smiled when they appeared before the judges. A smile that, in his memory at least, was now beginning to resemble the ghastly, exaggerated smile of the dying, or the dead.

Connor met Jimmy at the door. Though Connor was dressed in casual clothes — a navy-blue cardigan, slacks, a pair of well-worn leather slippers — he looked less relaxed than usual; his skin seemed paler, his lips thinner. Jimmy followed him down the hallway and into a large, open-plan living-room. Two white sofas faced each other across a floor of polished wood. A black Labrador lay sleeping on the rug by the fireplace, its hind legs twitching as it dreamed. Through the french windows hollyhocks and roses could be seen, and a lawn with a stone birdbath in the middle. It occurred to Jimmy that he had never tried to imagine Connor’s life outside the office.

‘Nice dog,’ he said. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Earl.’ Connor bent over, stroked the dog’s sleek head. ‘I just got him back. He was in quarantine for six months. Out at Heathrow.’

‘Did you visit him?’

‘Every Friday.’

Jimmy nodded. He thought he remembered Connor leaving early on Friday afternoons. He didn’t know what else to say, though. He had never owned a dog, or even liked them particularly.

‘I saw Lambert outside,’ he mentioned after a while.

Connor straightened up. ‘I’ve told him to shut down the operation. As of today.’

‘What happened?’

‘There’s been some kind of leak.’ Connor turned, the garden dark behind him. ‘Lambert says it’s watertight his end. I said the same.’ He faced Jimmy across the room. ‘Was I right?’

‘There’s only you and me,’ Jimmy said, ‘and I’ve said nothing.’

‘Well, there’s a journalist out there who’s got the idea that there was something,’ and Connor paused for a moment, ‘something illicit about the launch of Kwench!.’

Later, sitting on the sofa, he explained that he had set the appropriate wheels in motion and Jimmy knew better than to ask him to elaborate. Presumably this was what Lambert had meant when he referred to ‘a whole new level’. They were going to have to bring Communications in, Connor said. Maybe somebody from Finance too. Debbie Groil and Neil Bowes would have to be briefed on the project, otherwise they’d be in no position to handle media curiosity.

Jimmy nodded. ‘Yes, I can see that.’ He took a deep breath, let it out again. ‘They’re not going to like it.’

Connor ignored the remark. ‘I’ve called a meeting for Monday morning. Eight-thirty. I want you there.’ He rose to his feet, showed Jimmy to the door. ‘I’m sorry to break into your weekend like this.’

They stood on the front step for a moment, looking out into the street. The storm had moved away. There was a dripping in the trees and bushes, and the smell of rain on grass. A car drove by, house music pumping from its open windows.

‘By the way,’ Connor said, ‘where were you when I phoned? It sounded strange — the background …’

‘Crystal Palace,’ Jimmy said. ‘I was watching the synchronised swimming.’

Connor looked at him. ‘That’s a new interest, I take it.’

Jimmy smiled faintly, but didn’t comment.

When he was sitting in his car again, he took out his mobile and called the pool. This time a man answered. Jimmy asked if he could speak to Karen Paley.

‘I’m sorry,’ the man said. ‘You can’t.’

‘I must be able to. She’s competing there today.’

‘You don’t understand,’ the man said. ‘It’s finished. It’s all over.’

Cheops

Monday morning, half-past eight. Sun slanting through the glass wall of the boardroom. From Jimmy’s point of view, the weather couldn’t have been more ironic. Bright ideas, clarity of thought, accountability — they were all ideals that had been seriously undermined by what Connor had told him over the weekend; they could come crashing down at any moment, like statues in a revolution. Jimmy sent a surreptitious glance across the table. Debbie Groil seemed to have opened her wardrobe in a defiant mood that morning. She had chosen a scarlet blazer with gold buttons, and a frothy white blouse. Her tights, Jimmy knew without looking, would be blue. Sitting next to Debbie was Neil Bowes. He looked sallow, bilious, the skin under his eyes hanging in the kind of loops that curtains have in cinemas. He would have spent a sleepless night, imagining the worst — though, actually, this was worse than he could possibly have imagined; Jimmy had to keep reminding himself that both Neil and Debbie had been summoned to the meeting knowing nothing of what was on the agenda. Only Connor seemed unconcerned, his hands clasped loosely on the table, his gaze passing beyond the glass and out into a complacent sunlit world.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘perhaps we should begin.’

As they were all aware, he went on, the launch of Kwench! had been an extraordinary success. During the first two months of distribution in the UK, sales of the brand had been phenomenal. They had forced most sectors of the market to sit up and take notice. Everyone in the room had played a part in that success, and everybody in the room was entitled to a share of the credit. However, he added, and here his voice dropped an octave, there had been a secret aspect to the launch, an aspect that had been highly original, highly innovative. They had found themselves in new territory, territory that nobody had ventured into before. There had been unpredictable elements, factors they hadn’t always been sure they could control. Which was only to be expected, given the lack of precedent.

Debbie was looking at Connor now, a blank and yet unflinching look, and Jimmy knew instinctively what she was thinking. How long can someone talk without actually saying anything? At that precise moment, though, Connor seemed to sense her impatience because he launched into a detailed outline of Project Secretary — its infrastructure, and the philosophy behind it. He talked persuasively about the excitement of creating word of mouth — quite literally creating it. He even made use of Jimmy’s private vocabulary, describing the people who had been through their programme as ‘ambassadors’. He was just building to a climax when Debbie interrupted.

‘You know, I had a journalist on the phone on Friday afternoon,’ she said, ‘all very nice, very charming, and I was thinking: What does he know that I don’t know? What’s he on to?’ She lifted her eyes to the window and shook her head. ‘I can’t believe you went ahead with something like this.’ She looked at Neil, but Neil was staring at his notepad as though he was hoping it would turn into a trap-door and he could disappear through it. ‘If you’d come to me six months ago,’ she went on, and her voice was shaking a little now and her throat had flushed above the ruffled collar of her blouse, ‘if you’d told me about this, I would have said —’ She checked herself. ‘Well, it’s unrepeatable.’

Jimmy was struck by her outspokenness. No one had ever dared to address Connor quite so directly — at least, not in his experience. To his surprise he found himself admiring her.

‘This is not about recrimination, Debbie,’ Connor said calmly. ‘This is about pragmatism. We have a situation on our hands. What we’re doing here this morning is deciding how best to deal with it.’

‘So what exactly is the situation?’ she said.

‘Probably you’re not aware of this,’ Connor said, ‘but I have several people working for me in the media, people who supply me with information. It helps me to plan strategies. It can also act as an early-warning system. Towards the end of last week I received a communication from one of these people.’ He took out a pair of half-moon spectacles and put them on. After straightening the sheet of paper that was lying in front of him, he looked up for a moment, over the thin gold rims. ‘I’ll just read the relevant passage.

A freelance journalist is thinking of writing an in-depth piece about your company, with particular reference to the division responsible for Kwench!. It seems unlikely that the piece will be favourable. In fact, the journalist in question appears to have information, or access to information, relating to practices that he describes as highly irregular, if not actually illegal. At this point, his source is still anonymous, though I don’t expect it to remain so for much longer. The allegations of irregularity relate specifically to the way in which Kwench! has been marketed. He details instances of bizarre behaviour on the part of certain consumers, and speculates as to the origins of this behaviour. There is some talk of a subliminal campaign, though there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to back this up as yet …’

Connor removed his spectacles. ‘Talk,’ he said, ‘Rumour. Speculation. That, I feel, should be our first line of defence —’

‘But it’s true,’ Debbie broke in. ‘You just admitted it.’

‘Truth is not the issue here.’

There was an edge to Connor’s voice that Jimmy had never heard before. Debbie looked as if she had just been dipped in liquid nitrogen: touch her with your finger and she would shatter into a million fragments.

Feeling sorry for her, Jimmy stepped into the silence. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘if this article comes out, it could be pretty damaging …’

Connor folded his spectacles, each separate click of the slender golden arms against the frames quite audible, like twigs snapping in a wood in winter. ‘Clearly this journalist, whoever he is, must be discouraged. The article must not be written.’

‘What about the source?’ Jimmy said.

‘Cheops,’ said Connor.

Jimmy stared at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

Connor eased back in his chair. ‘Do you remember the story of the pyramids at Giza? Once they were completed, the Pharaoh had all the slaves who’d been involved in their construction put to death. That way, the design would remain a secret.’ Connor smiled faintly. ‘Let’s just say that I’ve taken equivalent precautions. Figuratively speaking, of course.’

Lambert, Jimmy thought.

‘Hand in hand with any measures I might have taken,’ Connor was saying, ‘are the measures I expect Communications to take — deflecting any attacks the media might be planning, keeping publicity to an absolute minimum.’ His gaze settled on Neil and Debbie. ‘I know I can trust you both to do an effective job on this.’ He paused. ‘It could be a busy week.’

Debbie muttered something, but Connor ignored her.

‘Bowes,’ he said. ‘You haven’t said a word.’

A new silence began — moment after moment of embarrassment that quickly accumulated, became exquisite.

‘Bowes?’ Connor said.

At last Neil cleared his throat. ‘There’s an old Chinese proverb: “The wisest man lets others speak for him.’”

Connor stared at Neil for a few seconds, then his shoulders began to shake. ‘That’s good, Bowes. That’s very good. “The wisest man —”’ Connor was laughing.

The meeting broke up in an atmosphere of surreal good humour. Even Debbie had smiled at the proverb.

Jimmy followed Neil and Debbie across the boardroom to the door, then he paused, allowing them to go on without him. When they had disappeared round the corner, he turned back. Connor was writing in a small black notebook.

‘How much do you know about the source?’ Jimmy asked.

Connor glanced round. ‘Almost nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s believed to be someone who participated in the programme.’

‘So they saw through it, somehow?’

‘It would appear so.’

For the rest of the morning Jimmy worked at his desk, but he found it hard to concentrate. The documents that he was dealing with seemed artificial, hollow. The lines of type were just shapes on a page; they had no meaning. Whenever he looked up, everything around him appeared unnaturally bright and quiet.

At lunchtime he ran into Neil outside the lifts.

‘That proverb,’ he said.

‘I made it up.’ Neil looked at his floor. ‘He bought it, though, didn’t he. Bit worrying, that.’

The doors opened and Jimmy followed Neil into the lift. Once the doors had closed, Neil turned and faced him. ‘What part did you play in all this, Jimmy?’

‘It was my idea.’

The distances between Neil’s features seemed to grow.

‘It was only an idea,’ Jimmy said. ‘I mean, I never really thought —’ He cut the sentence short, unsure where it was leading.

‘What’s going to happen?’ Neil said.

Jimmy frowned. ‘It’s hard to say. I imagine he’s been in situations like this before, though.’

‘Yes,’ Neil said. ‘I imagine he has.’

That night Jimmy woke up suddenly, the covers thrown aside, the sweat on his chest already cold. A dream came back to him in its entirety. He had been to dinner with Margaret Thatcher. There were others present, perhaps a dozen in all, the men in evening dress, the women wearing jewels. On the dining-table stood silver candelabras, flower arrangements, bowls of fruit. He sat on Thatcher’s right and for most of the night she had talked to him, talked to him as if she knew him well, as if they were close friends. He could still see her leaning towards him as she spoke, one hand on his wrist for emphasis. That hair, that nose. That voice.

Thatcher!

He couldn’t remember what it was that she’d been saying, only that she’d been confiding in him and that her conversation had been littered both with intimate details of her life and with the names of great world leaders. He had to admit that, despite himself, he had been flattered by her attentions, if a little mystified. There had even been a moment when he thought: Should you be telling me all this?

After dinner he found himself standing in the library. Wing-backed chairs, wood-panelling. Books bound in leather, brown and red and gold. At first he assumed he was alone. But then he realised someone was in the room with him. He turned round, saw Thatcher sitting beside a crackling log fire. She seemed to be asleep, her hands in her lap, her mouth slightly ajar. He approached her, spoke to her. She didn’t answer. He touched her shoulder. She didn’t wake. He shook her gently and her head fell sideways until her chin was resting on her collar-bone. Then he understood. She wasn’t asleep at all. She was dead.

He moved to the library window, which was tall and had no curtains. The land fell away in front of him. He could see the lights of the city below him and, beyond the lights, an area of darkness which he knew to be the sea. It was late now. One in the morning, maybe two. He stood at the library window and looked out over the city. Thatcher’s dead, he thought, and I’m the only one who knows.

One arm cushioning his head, he lay in bed, struck by the wealth of detail in the dream, its unusual precision. Then, closing his eyes, he turned over and went back to sleep.

At half-past seven he woke again. He dressed quickly and drank a black coffee standing in his kitchen. Outside, the sun was veiled in thin white cloud. It would burn off later.

On his way to the tube he bought a newspaper. Thatcher did not appear to have died during the night. In fact, there was no mention of her on the front page at all. Even so, for the next few hours, he felt as if he had been caught up in extraordinary events, as if he had somehow stumbled into history.

On Wednesday evening, at nine o’clock, he parked his car in Bridle Lane and then walked north, towards Marshall Street. When he reached the swimming-pool, Karen Paley was leaning against the wall outside, a short flared skirt exposing her bare legs, her hair already dry.

‘You got the message, then,’ she said.

He smiled.

On Tuesday Bob had called him from the lobby. A package had arrived for him by hand. Things had been so tense that week that Jimmy viewed this unexpected delivery with some suspicion. Could it be a communication from the journalist? Inside the package he found a pair of swimming-goggles — and that was all. What did it mean? Closer examination of the goggles revealed a message written on the inside of the rubber strap you slip over your head: MARSHALL STREET. TOMORROW. 9 P.M.

He kissed Karen lightly on the cheek, thinking it was strange how erotic even the faintest smell of chlorine had become for him.

‘I’m sorry about Saturday,’ he said. ‘There was nothing I could do.’

‘That’s all right. A woman came and told me.’

They walked slowly in the direction of his car. It was another hot night — the temperature still up in the seventies, even after dark. People would be eating in their gardens, sleeping under single sheets. And Lambert in the city somewhere, putting slaves to death. Figuratively speaking, of course.

‘How did it go?’ he asked.

‘I came second.’

‘Out of fifty? That’s pretty good, isn’t it?’

She sighed. ‘There’s a figure they asked us to do. It’s called the Knight. I can never seem to get it right.’

‘What’s so difficult about it?’

She started to explain and then broke off with a smile. ‘Almost everything,’ she said.

He didn’t know what she expected from the evening — which, after all, had been her idea this time. He didn’t know what he expected either. He remembered something Simone had said when he told her he had a date with a synchronised swimmer. Well, there have got to be some pretty interesting positions. He smiled to himself. After the hours he’d put in recently, it felt like a release just to be out.

‘I’m not really your kind of girl, am I,’ Karen said suddenly.

‘Aren’t you?’ Still smiling, he turned to her.

‘You’ve only seen me twice,’ she said, ‘and then only for a couple of minutes. You might have made a mistake.’

He noticed her profile for the first time, and how her top lip curled upwards, back on itself, which made her look both trusting and provocative. He wanted to kiss her.

‘You don’t know what I’m like,’ she said. ‘You might be disappointed.’ She paused. ‘You might think I’m boring.’

‘Why would I think that?’

‘I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I don’t go to clubs —’

‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘Not if you’re doing all that training.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘Well,’ and she hesitated, ‘I’m married.’

For a moment Jimmy thought he must have misunderstood. ‘You’re married? I thought you said you weren’t with anyone.’

‘No, that was you. I said kind of.’ Karen was looking at the pavement as she walked along. ‘He’s always away, my husband. Out of the country. That’s probably what I meant.’ She paused, then said, ‘He’s in securities.’

They had reached the car, which was parked in the shadows against a wall. Jimmy turned to face Karen. Behind her, there were three tall steel waste-bins, and stacks of cardboard boxes that were stuffed with bubble-wrap and ghostly blocks of polystyrene.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

He was thinking about the uncertainty and apprehension he had lived with for the last few days. He was thinking that any difficulties she might place in his way couldn’t possibly compare with those he might soon face at work. A kind of recklessness swept through him, and he put his arms around her waist and drew her towards him. She did not resist. Through her shirt he could feel the thin columns of muscle that ran down the middle of her back. It must have lasted minutes, their first kiss, and they didn’t move from where they stood, the smell of Spraymount coming from a photographic studio nearby, the hollow roar of air-vents overhead. He kneeled in front of her and kissed the skin where it thickened slightly, just above her knees, then moved slowly up the inside of her thighs.

Once, he looked up. She was leaning against the car, her hands on the bonnet, her head tipped back. From where he was, below her, he could only see her throat, the curve of her chin, and then the sky beyond her, cloudless, almost black. He put his face against her body, breathed her in.

Not long afterwards she touched his shoulder, and the pressure made him stop what he was doing and glance up at her again. She was looking past him, down the alley. Two men stood on the cobblestones, no more than twenty yards away. One of them was smoking. Slowly Jimmy rose to his feet. Taking Karen by the hand, he led her to the door on the passenger’s side and opened it for her. Then, trying not to hurry, he walked back round the car. The men seemed to have edged closer, though they weren’t actually moving. They were just standing there. Watching.

Inside the car he fitted the key into the ignition and twisted it. The engine turned over, but didn’t fire.

‘It’s all right,’ he murmured. ‘It never starts first time.’

The fourth time he tried, the engine spluttered, caught. He flicked the headlights on, expecting to see the two men in front of him, lit up, but they had vanished. He looked over his shoulder. They were nowhere to be seen. Puzzled, he drove quickly over the cobbles and then turned right, into Brewer Street. Neon splashed through the car’s interior.

‘Where did they go?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see.’ If she was frightened, she didn’t show it.

‘How long had they been there?’

‘I don’t know.’

At the traffic-lights he turned to look at her.

‘You were so calm,’ he said.

‘And you.’ She took his left hand and guided it between her legs. But the lights altered and he had to take his hand away, change gear. They were driving south, down Regent Street.

‘Let’s go to my house,’ she said.

He looked at her again. ‘What about your husband?’

‘He’s in Japan today.’

‘And tomorrow?’

‘South Korea,’ she said. ‘Seoul.’

Down into the tunnel under Hyde Park Corner, white lights along the tiled walls like the dotted line you have to sign on forms if you agree to everything above. A curve to the right, a curve to the left, then up into Knightsbridge, which always seemed dim after the brightness underground. Since Haymarket she had wanted his left hand under her skirt and so far they had been lucky with the lights, green all the way. As they drew level with the Sheraton Tower she came against his fingers, her head pushed backwards, her eyes closed. And she had been giving him directions the whole time: turn left here, stay in the right lane, go straight on …

They passed a shwarma place — scarlet plastic seating, the fatty glitter of the meat. They were in Kensington now, though he couldn’t have said where exactly. He liked the feeling of suspension — not thinking, just driving: obeying her instructions. He’d almost forgotten they were on their way somewhere and that, sooner or later, they would arrive — or, rather, it had begun to seem irrelevant. A slight disappointment, a kind of nostalgia, rose through him when she touched him lightly on the arm and said, ‘We’re there.’

He parked on the north side of a narrow, elongated square. Her house was part of a terrace of tall houses, all built out of the same beige brick, their front doors guarded by pillars of dark-pink marble. He followed her up the steps, his eyes on a level with the hem of her skirt, which swayed giddily against the backs of her thighs. She undid three locks, then they were in.

Once inside the flat he could no longer hear his footsteps. The carpet was deep enough to silence any movement. It was like walking on snow. They moved along a dark passageway towards the back of the house. In the kitchen she switched on a lamp and opened the fridge. She poured a glass of chilled white wine for him and a tumbler of sparkling water for herself, then she led him into the living-room. They lay down on the sofa with the lights out and the TV on. Some cable channel. He watched the flicker of the pictures on her skin, the play of light and shadow hectic, almost tribal …

After a while he thought he heard a car pull up outside the house. With the TV on, though, he couldn’t be sure. A key could turn in the front door, and then that carpet, deep as snow. Her husband could be standing in the room before they noticed. And even then –

Japan, he told himself. Korea.

Later, she asked if he was thirsty.

‘Yes,’ he said.

She left the sofa and walked naked across the room, her spine shifting in the half-light, a subtle movement that reminded him, just for a moment, of the tail of a kite.

She returned with a tall glass and handed it to him.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘Guess.’ She fitted her body next to his, her skin cooled by the walk out to the kitchen.

He brought the glass to his lips and tasted it. Kwench!.

‘It’s not bad,’ she said. ‘I’ve been buying it.’

At some point in the middle of the night he leaned over her and saw that she was staring up into the dark. The whites of her eyes were slightly marbled, like the surface of the moon. He could just hear the sound of her breathing — as delicate as wind in grass, not the tidal ebb and flow of someone sleeping.

‘It’s not you, is it?’ he said.

She stared at him without moving.

He spoke again. ‘It’s not you who’s going to the papers?’

‘What about?’ she said.

He examined her face for signs that she might be lying, but she only sounded confused and the confusion didn’t seem feigned. It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. The glass of Kwench! she had offered him was just a glass of Kwench!.

‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘What are you talking about?’

He lay down, the back of his head fitting into a hollow in the pillow. Above him the darkness was vibrating.

‘Jimmy, you’re scaring me.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.’

In the morning, as she was dressing, she suddenly said, ‘You woke me up last night. Do you remember?’

He looked at her in the bathroom mirror. She was standing behind him, in the middle of the bedroom, her face tense with wonder at the memory. ‘You asked me all these questions,’ she said.

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. You asked me if I’d been to the papers.’

‘The newspapers?’

‘I suppose so.’ She moved to the chest of drawers and opened it. ‘It was strange. Like you thought I was going to sell them a story or something. You were really worried about it …’

Still looking at her in the mirror, Jimmy shook his head.

‘I must have been dreaming,’ he said.