The Hawk Is Dead

70

Monday 27 November 2023

At a few minutes to 7 p.m., Roy Grace sat at the kitchen table, across from Cleo. They were surrounded by the detritus of Noah and Molly’s playthings that were strewn around the floor, along with several ragged, chewed dog treats and toys, including a hedgehog from which Humphrey had pulled out most of the fluffy innards. Grace didn’t mind, he found the sight comforting, a reassurance of normality in a world that seemed to be losing its grip.

Or was it he who was losing his grip?

The weather certainly had lost its grip, with rain pelting down outside, interspersed with hail.

‘You OK, my love?’ Cleo asked, and dug her fork into her steaming, microwaved Keralan cod curry that came with black rice and broccoli. Neither of them were into convenience food but they’d found an online company that made products that actually seemed healthy, and on evenings when both of them had had busy days, quick meals like this were a good and inexpensive option.

‘Sorry, I’m not being very chatty, am I?’

‘You’ve spoken to the dogs more than me since you got home, but that’s fine. I’m not jealous, I know where I sit in the pecking order!’ She smiled.

Humphrey and Kyla were both slumped in their adjoining baskets. Noah had abandoned what looked like the Lego interpretation of a city that had just suffered an earthquake of some magnitude on the Richter scale. Molly’s upturned red plastic food bowl was lying under her high chair.

‘Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but of looking outward together in the same direction. Do you know who said that?’

‘Someone very wise,’ he replied. ‘It’s true.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Do you think we do it?’ she asked with a teasing look.

‘Stare into each other’s eyes or in the same direction?’

‘I suppose that depends on whether we’re sitting opposite each other eating a meal — or driving somewhere in a car.’

He gave her an uncertain smile, picked up his fork and speared the rice, turning some of it over and releasing steam. ‘I’m sorry — I had a rather mixed day.’

‘At Buckingham Palace?’

‘Some of the time, yes. I had another meeting with The King.’

She smiled again. This time it was the kind of warm, interested, gorgeous smile he’d fallen in love with soon after he’d first met this amazing, beautiful woman.

Then she quizzed, ‘How many couples in the world, at this moment, are having their evening meal and one of them tells the other, so casually, Oh, I had another meeting with The King today?’

He gave a bemused look. ‘It is extraordinary, surreal. It’s an immense privilege, I know but — hell...’ He shook his head. ‘The responsibility of this whole thing.’

She looked at him sympathetically. ‘I know.’

‘It might be easier if I felt the top brass had my back. But I had a meeting with Downing this afternoon and he went and read out a litany of past assassination attempts on British monarchs — giving me the clear impression he feels I may not be right in my hypothesis that The Queen was not the intended target.’

‘But you are certain she wasn’t, right?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m as certain as it’s possible to be.’

‘And Glenn? He has good instincts.’

He nodded. ‘Glenn’s with me. But until we arrest the shooter we can’t be one hundred per cent sure.’

‘Are you getting closer to that?’

‘I think we could be if...’ He shook his head. ‘If I hadn’t run into a detective who thinks one day soon he will be my boss.’

‘Oh God, not another Cassian Pewe type?’

‘Not exactly, but he does rather fancy himself and thinks he’s a comedian.’ He shrugged. ‘The one positive is the progress Scroope’s made with the coded entries in the diary. There’s only a few bits of it that are currently baffling him. He thinks they may be names — but they could be items, locations — we really don’t know at this stage. There are five altogether. They’re different to the rest of the code — in that they appear to be cryptic clues.’

She smiled. ‘My grandad on my mum’s side would have had fun with those — he used to give us all cryptic puzzles inside our Christmas crackers every year.’

‘Is that where you got your love of crosswords, Sudoku and puzzles from?’

‘Yes, I’m sure it was him who started me off. Can I have a look at them or are they classified?’

‘I’ll have to get you to sign under the Official Secrets Act if you succeed in deciphering them!’

‘Deal!’

He unlocked his phone, then turned it round to face her.

‘R I S K K?’ Cleo read the letters aloud from the screen.

‘Scroll down,’ he urged.

She ate another mouthful, then read out: ‘E J N W.’

She looked up at him and he just nodded, then she scrolled down again. ‘R S Z K Y Z N K Z K S. These are what the tortoise man can’t decipher?’

‘He’ll get there. He’s working on the key but time is critical.’

She read out the next: ‘N X W K X Z X W K X.’ Then the final one, ‘J F K Y.’

She studied them for a moment, frowning. Then she jumped up and went over to the Welsh dresser, returning with a lined notepad and a pen. She wrote in large letters, R I S K K, then chewed another mouthful of her food, deep in thought.

Grace watched her as she started jotting down numbers, then tapped the pen against her teeth before jotting down some more. An instant later she seemed distracted and was looking past him, over his shoulder. Then he heard Noah’s voice. He turned to see his son, in his Ghostbusters pyjamas, walking barefoot into the room. ‘Mummy, Daddy, I can’t sleep.’

Cleo and Roy both jumped up. As they did so, his job phone rang.

‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.

Cleo signalled that she would take care of Noah.

Grace heard a voice at the other end that he recognized and did not fill him with any kind of joy. At all.