Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 11

  ‘Just give it a couple of weeks,’ she said as she prepared to leave Alford the following afternoon, having spent most of the day walking around the school campus. ‘Once you get used to it, I’m sure it’ll be a great success.’

  It took Kite a lot longer than a couple of weeks.

  On his first morning, having woken at six o’clock in a tiny study on the top floor of a house on Common Lane, he had put on the tail suit his mother had ordered from Billings and Edmonds in Alford High Street and wrestled with a stiff collar for almost an hour until one of the boys with a room on his corridor offered to help. He showed Kite how to place the metal studs in the front and back collar of the starched white shirt, then to loop a narrow length of rectangular cotton over the top button so that it formed a tie.

  ‘I look like a vicar,’ said Kite when he glanced in the mirror.

  ‘Get used to it,’ the boy replied.

  This was to be his uniform for the next five years. Kite became acutely conscious of the fact that he sounded Scottish; there seemed to be no other boy in his year, even the ones called ‘Angus’ and ‘Ewan’, who was like him. He was quickly nicknamed ‘Jock’ and set about flattening his accent, making the consonants more clipped, giving the vowels more air, so that he sounded less like a run-of-the-mill Scottish teenager and more like Little Lord Fauntleroy. A couple of years later, as his peers became increasingly self-conscious about their class and background, Kite adopted a faux-Cockney twang, an affectation which remained with him – as it did with dozens of old Alfordians – into his early twenties.

  The thirteen-year-old Kite also had to adjust to the arcane language of his new school. Teachers were not ‘teachers’, as they had been in Portpatrick, but ‘beaks’ – and they were all men. A bad piece of homework wasn’t just a bad piece of homework; it was known as a ‘rip’ because it was literally torn in half by a beak, who would then instruct the boy to show it to his housemaster. Break in the morning was ‘chambers’, terms were called ‘halves’ and each year’s intake of boys was known as a ‘block’. Stranger still – though they were never given a name – were the busloads of Japanese tourists who would park outside School Hall on weekdays and take photographs of the boys through the windows. Every time Kite walked past them in his tailcoat and stiff white collar, he felt like an exhibit in a human zoo.

  Then there was Lionel Jones-Lewis. Kite’s housemaster, a fifty-something old Alfordian, was the only grown man Kite had ever met who hadn’t remarked on his mother’s beauty. He had been a scholar at Alford just after the war, taken a First in Mathematics at Cambridge, completed his military service as a submariner and applied immediately for a job at his alma mater. ‘LJL’, as he was known, had been at Alford ever since. A formidable intellectual with a peculiar fondness for the traditions and idiosyncrasies of Alford life, ‘Jumpy’ Jones-Lewis was, on the surface, a camp figure of fun, shuffling back and forth from the playing fields of Alford in Wellington boots, custard-coloured cords and his favourite purple anorak. Yet those boys who were unfortunate enough to be in his house saw a different side of Jones-Lewis. Late in the evenings he would walk into a boy’s room without knocking, hoping to catch him topless in a towel or in the process of removing his boxer shorts. Each study at Alford had its own desk where boys would do their homework in the evenings. In Kite’s first term at the school, Jones-Lewis came into his study two or three times a week and crouched beside his desk, purportedly to help him with a maths problem or chunk of Ancient Greek. In reality, he was looking forward to feeling him up. As Kite talked, Jones-Lewis would run his hand up and down his spine, stroking his lower back in a way that made the young boy freeze with anxiety. At thirteen, Kite had been unsure if this was normal behaviour for a ‘beak’ or something that he should be concerned about. When he told his mother at Christmas, she laughed it off, saying: ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. He’s only being affectionate.’ Eventually Kite asked Jones-Lewis to stop, forcibly removing his hand from his leg on a summer evening in 1985. From that day on, Kite was a marked man. Though Jones-Lewis never again laid a finger on him, he treated Kite with none of the charm and easy goodwill that he extended to other boys in the house. He made sure that Kite obeyed every rule and stricture the school could throw at him and came down hard on the frequent occasions when he stepped out of line.

  Kite met Xavier Bonnard on his first day at Alford. Despite their contrasting backgrounds, they became the closest of friends. Both, in their separate ways, were dealing with problem fathers: Kite’s a dead alcoholic, Xavier’s a philandering Parisian chancer living off his wife’s vast wealth and seemingly limitless patience. While Xavier couldn’t wait to be free of Alford, it was Kite’s guilty secret that he often enjoyed himself. As it was for so many children from broken or otherwise unhappy homes, boarding school provided a respite from the permanent, stuck-record sadness of his existence in Scotland. Xavier seemed to understand this: indeed, he was proud of Kite when he made fifty for the cricket team or got to second base with a girl at a party. He knew that his friend was rootless and lost, but also fearless and clever in a way that was different from so many of the other boys in their house. Without Kite at his side to laugh at his jokes, smoke his cigarettes and accompany him on illegal trips to London, where they would hide out with girls at the Bonnard house in Onslow Square, Xavier might well have cashed in his chips and gone to school at the Lycée Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington. Nothing could alter his sincerely held view that boarding school was a moral and social scandal.

  ‘Alford is basically an open prison,’ Xavier had concluded by the end of his second year. ‘Everyone gets their own cell. You’re told when to wake up and when to go to sleep, your laundry is done for you and your meals are cooked three times a day. You’re allowed out, but only when the warden says you can leave, and only if you’re back by a certain time. There are exercise yards, escape attempts, people trading porn mags for cigarettes. Contact with the outside world is limited. We have one phone in the house and otherwise have to write letters which could be steamed open by Lionel if he thinks we’re complaining about him to our parents. There are strict hierarchies among the inmates, homosexuals pursuing pretty boys, disgusting food and limited access to alcohol. You get released after serving your sentence but then have to adjust to life in the outside world. For the rest of your time on earth, you’re known as an Old Alfordian. How is that different to being an ex-con from Wormwood Scrubs or Alcatraz?’

  Xavier nevertheless did what he could to make his time at the school as enjoyable as possible. He was constantly in trouble with both Jones-Lewis and the headmaster, though the latter found it hard to disguise his affection for one of the school’s natural iconoclasts. By the time he was seventeen, Xavier had been caught with a naked girl in his room, been suspended for scaling the roof of the school chapel (with Kite alongside him) and reprimanded for leaving a live chicken – purchased from a farmer in Maidenhead – in Joyce Blackburn’s bathroom.

  Xavier was also the unwitting key to Kite’s future as an intelligence officer. A few months before the two friends were due to take their A levels, Kite was lounging around in Xavier’s study at Alford, killing time on a cold February afternoon. Xavier’s room had a permanent smell of Deep Heat and patchouli oil and was decorated in the typical Alford fashion: there were posters of Bob Marley and Nelson Mandela on the walls alongside snapshots of Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford culled from Rosamund Bonnard’s back issues of Tatler and Harpers & Queen. Maghreb-style drapes hung from the ceiling, with copies of Paris Match and The Face magazine scattered on the ground in case any girls popped their heads round the door while visiting the house. The overall effect, Kite joked, was of sitting in a tent erected by a teenage Muammar Gaddafi. His own slightly larger study was down the hall and dominated by photographs of his sporting idols – Daley Thompson, Kenny Dalglish, Gavin Hastings – as well as a poster of Jimi Hendrix setting fire to an electric guitar.

  It was snowing. X
avier had an illegal two-bar fire switched on against the cold and was trying on a vintage suede jacket he had recently bought in Kensington Market. Kite was lying on a beanbag in a moth-eaten Lou Reed T-shirt and ‘Pop trousers’ – the Prince of Wales check trousers worn by the school’s prefects. Xavier had put Transformer on in tribute to his attire. They were listening to ‘New York Telephone Conversation’. Xavier, who had not long finished smoking a cigarette out of the window, sprayed himself with Eau Sauvage to smother the smell of tobacco.

  ‘What were you saying about your dad?’ Kite asked.

  Xavier took the jacket off and threw it onto the bed.

  ‘He’s inherited a house in the South of France, near Mougins. Said I can invite a friend to stay in the summer. Wanna come?’

  By then, Kite had been to Xavier’s family homes in London, Gloucestershire and Switzerland. One more addition to the Bonnard real estate portfolio came as no surprise.

  ‘Would love to.’

  ‘You won’t have to work at the hotel?’

  Ordinarily, Kite spent at least three weeks of the school holidays helping his mother out at Killantringan, but she had put the hotel on the market and sold it to a couple from Glasgow. They were due to take over in July. Xavier remembered this and corrected himself.

  ‘Oh, that’s right. Your mum’s moving out.’

  ‘What are the dates?’ Kite asked.

  Xavier shrugged. He clearly planned to be there all summer, smoking pot, drinking vodka, chasing French girls.

  ‘All I know is my godfather is coming to stay at some point. An old Iranian friend of my dad’s. I call him the “ayatollah”. They met in Paris when I was a kid. You’ll like him. Come whenever you want. Tu es ici comme chez toi.’

  Kite’s French was good enough to understand the colloquialism: ‘My house is your house.’ At this stage, his only plans for the future involved passing his A levels and getting a summer job to make a bit of money before going to Edinburgh University in the autumn to read Russian and French. He said he would take the train down to Cannes sometime in July, reached for an almost-empty carton of orange juice lying on the floor beside him and finished it off.

  ‘Cool,’ Xavier replied. ‘Stay for as long as you like.’

  It was as simple as that. An invitation which would change the course of Lachlan Kite’s life, accepted unthinkingly on a cold afternoon in February.

  Without realising it, Xavier Bonnard had set his friend on the path to BOX 88.

  13

  Cara Jannaway opened her front door just in time to catch the start of Channel 4 News. She poured herself a glass of white wine and had drunk almost half of it before Krishnan Guru-Murthy had finished reading out the headlines.

  She lived alone in a one-bedroom flat west of Hackney Marshes. Vosse had given her the night off as a gesture of appreciation for her work earlier in the afternoon. Cara’s colleagues, Kieran Dean and Tessa Swinburn, had been tasked with following Zoltan Pavkov home; Matt was due to relieve them at eleven o’clock. Cara didn’t envy him the night shift. It had been a long, eventful day and she was looking forward to running a bath, ordering a Deliveroo Thai and watching at least two episodes of Succession – three, if it wasn’t getting too late and she felt like bingeing a third of the season. Before that, however, she had one more job to do. Vosse wanted her to call the number on the card Kite had given her at the funeral, ‘just to see if there’s any possibility someone picks up’. Vosse had suggested it was a way for ‘Emma’, her gallerist legend, to stay in character. If and when Kite got out of whatever situation he was in, he would hear the voicemail and perhaps respond to Emma’s call. Cara had her doubts about the strategy, thinking it was an unnecessary risk, but Vosse had pulled rank.

  She dialled the number. It rang out: seven, eight, nine times. Then:

  ‘This is the Vodafone voicemail service for – Lachlan Kite.’

  Kite had recorded his own name onto the automated message. It was startling to hear his voice, as if the events of the afternoon had never taken place and he was still at large, a free man giving MI5 the slip. Cara had rehearsed what she was going to say, trying to combine a tone of professionalism with a friendly rapport.

  ‘Er, hi Lachlan. It’s Emma from the Brompton Oratory. We met outside the funeral this morning and you kindly gave me your card. I was the woman who used to work at Karoo during Frieze. It was really nice to bump into you again. I’ll try you another time.’

  Cara hung up and took a long gulp of wine. She was struck by the thought that nobody would ever hear her message, that she might never see Lachlan Kite again. She went into the bathroom and switched on the hot tap, pouring a glug of bath oil into a stream of steaming water. The room quickly began to smell of lavender. Cara took out her mobile and tapped the Deliveroo app, repeating her regular order with a local Thai restaurant for stir-fried chicken and basil with a side of jasmine rice. The Tinder icon alongside showed thirty-four notifications. She opened it up and clicked through the profiles of the nine boys with whom she had recently matched, then spent the next fifteen minutes replying to their messages, playing it cool with short, gnomic answers and deleting anyone who called her ‘babe’ or ‘darling’. Five minutes later her food had arrived. Cara tipped the driver, wolfed the stir-fry, sat in the bath reading a book for half an hour – and fell asleep in front of the television before she had even managed to locate the first episode of Succession.

  Cara Jannaway’s voicemail was recorded and filed on a server at BOX 88 headquarters and an alert sent to Kite’s desk. In keeping with Service protocols, the number she had used to make the call was automatically investigated by a software programme known as INTIMATE KUBRICK and a report dispatched internally to B6, the Section within BOX 88 with responsibility for overseeing and maintaining agent cover. The report contained all open source information linked to Cara Jannaway’s mobile number, including her home address, date of birth, banking and tax statements, education and employment history, medical records and a list of recent travel destinations. Hyperlinks within the report offered B6 access to her email, Instagram and Facebook accounts as well as to the list of apps downloaded to her iTunes account (which included Tinder). These could be investigated upon request.

  It was Cara’s position at MI5 that triggered a warning within INTIMATE KUBRICK so that the report was flagged for ‘Immediate Attention’.

  Officer with the Security Service (UK). Ministry of Defence cover (joined October 2018)

  Line Manager: Robert Vosse

  Lachlan Kite’s colleagues at ‘The Cathedral’ – the colloquial name for BOX 88 headquarters in London – now knew that their boss was under investigation by MI5.

  Kieran Dean and Tessa Swinburn had followed Zoltan home from the Mayfair car park. It was arguably the easiest follow that either of them had ever been on, so oblivious was the target to any possibility that he might have picked up a tail.

  Vosse had a fix on the Pavkov mobile but there was always a danger that the Serb might dump it on the Tube and try to throw them off. He had shown no obvious signs of intelligence – far less of training in anti-surveillance – but he might have watched the odd thriller or documentary on Channel 5 and learned a thing or two about being followed.

  But no. Not Zoltan. Walking behind him on opposite sides of the street, sometimes at a distance of less than twenty metres, Dean and Swinburn were able to follow the Serb onto a packed Jubilee line train at Green Park underground station with extraordinary ease. Alighting one stop later at Bond Street, the unwily Serb travelled east towards Bethnal Green, picking up a six-pack of lager and some groceries at Tesco Metro on his way home. At no point did he use his phone, speak to any member of the public nor show any outward display of nervousness or concern about the day’s events. When Swinburn called Vosse to tell him that Pavkov was safely housed, Vosse switched to the audio feeds from the Bethnal Green flat and was able to watch the target through the lens of the Serb’s laptop computer, variously pulling the ring on a c
an of Stella Artois, opening a letter from Tower Hamlets Council and scratching his arse as he slumped into a deep brown couch.

  ‘Doesn’t seem all that bothered,’ Vosse observed, wondering why, at the very least, Pavkov hadn’t texted the Iranians to warn them that the police knew what had happened to Kite. ‘Are you sure he didn’t meet someone on the Tube? Pass a message in Tesco? Send a WhatsApp on a burner phone we know nothing about?’

  ‘Hundred per cent, Bob,’ said Tess, who was by then sitting on a bench in a park overlooked by the flat, waiting for Matt Tomkins to take over. ‘Never left our sight. Didn’t talk to anyone, not even a checkout girl.’

  Another four hours went by before Zoltan Pavkov finally contacted the Iranians. In that time, Swinburn and Dean had gone home, Matt Tomkins had come on shift and the Serb had closed the lid on his laptop, bringing an end to any possibility that Vosse would be able to continue to watch what he was doing.

  ‘I think he’s gone to bed, sir,’ Tomkins observed just before one o’clock in the morning. ‘Heard the toilet flushing five minutes ago, sound of someone brushing his teeth. Lights have been switched off in the kitchen and living room. Feels like he’s called it a day.’