fic: the greater good, part two.
notes | part one
- - -
PART TWO
today
Maisie was invincible. Walking home from the station, after Erin and Rosie, she was still swinging with a heady rush between having done something terrible and something amazing. She hadn't really allowed herself to acknowledge how important the game had become to her, these past few months. Some days it seemed childish, escapist. Today it felt almost noble.
Ellie was home, which surprised her. She slung her bag onto the couch. "Did you finish up early today?"
Ellie showed her her hand, heavily bandaged. "Cut myself. Can you believe it? Twenty years of this and it's still possible."
She sounded pleased, oddly, as if the wound was evidence of all the hard work she'd been doing. Maisie remembered Erin's face as she'd gathered her daughter into her arms. Someone else would be eating dinner with her daughter tonight, and many more nights to come. She felt a rush of affection for Ellie.
"I left the dinner crowd for Frances, god knows if either of them will survive the night. So, how was last night? Did you all get uproariously drunk and spew on Jess's mum's sofa?"
Maisie had almost forgotten what she was meant to be doing this weekend. It had seemed easier not to explain to Ellie that she'd decided weeks ago not to go to Jess's party, and besides, it had meant she and Wes had been able to spend the whole night going over the plan for Operation Erin and Rosie.
"Lots of spewing," she assured Ellie. "Bucketloads. Have you eaten?"
"No. I was going to just whack on some pasta, didn't know when you'd be back."
"I'll do it," Maisie said. "Celebration."
"What're we celebrating?"
"School starts next week."
"Does it? Jesus. That sneaked up on me. God, Maisie, you've been so bloody good about these last few months of hell."
"It hasn't been that hellish," Maisie said truthfully, thinking, was it only a few months?
"All that back-and-forth to Manchester, then summer holidays a hundred miles from your mates and me working sixteen hour days, honestly kiddo you've been a star. I promise it'll get better from now on."
"Now I'll be back at school? With a metric tonne of homework every night plus study on top, and the swim team and chess club and croquet?"
"Croquet?"
Maisie threw a cushion. "Seriously, Mum, it's been fine. I've had a totally acceptable summer."
She knew there was a sense of charade to Ellie's guilt. They'd both worked out by now that they got on much better like this, when Ellie was too busy to be clingy or to tie herself up in another unsuitable relationship, and Maisie could indulge in the occasional maudlin sulk about having to be self-sufficient. She didn't mind that neither of them would ever admit it.
"Really?" Ellie asked again.
"Really really."
"Excellent. I'll neglect you more often then. Oh, I nearly forgot, these came for you."
Ellie fished two postcards from under the stack of accounts she'd dumped on top. "Haven't read them, cross my heart and hope to die. Your mates don't half get about though, do they? Lucky things."
Maisie's heart was in her mouth before she'd even touched the postcards. "Yeah, and they all love making me jealous." She made herself read Bree's first - northern India now, sorry for the silence May, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a post office up here, plus my cousin's going absolutely mental about the wedding preparations - then flipped to the second. The day's operation had left her, apparently, cool as a fucking cucumber, and she had no nerves reading it on the couch in front of Ellie, who granted didn't seem too interested and had long given up keeping track of all Maisie's friends.
It was from Scotland, but postmarked London, and clearly came from neither - it wouldn't surprise her if spies carried around a set of pre-stamped postcards for this express purpose, or perhaps they had their own post office. A view of a misty loch, fishing boats upended on the stony beach in the foreground. The same small, but wide-spaced cursive, the same curiously long-winded address notation - London, England, United Kingdom - that made Maisie expect the date to be written in the year of Our Lord. But the date, as always, printed in neat numerals with a dot between, and the message short and cryptic. I hear you've been busy? But all games come to an end. M.
Maisie's composure faltered. She mumbled an excuse and headed upstairs, but she knew before she'd dragged out the shoebox under the bed that this one was different. Someone had copied the style almost flawlessly; indeed, she couldn't even pick the flaw. But it was undeniably a copy.
"I can't do a thing with this hand." Ellie's voice from down the stairs; the house was small enough that she didn't have to shout. "Will you think me even more neglectful if we get a takeaway?"
Maisie shoved the shoebox under the bed, and pinned both the new cards to her corkboard, next to the others from Bree's Indian odyssey and Bianca in Spain and Chris sulkily stuck in Manchester, working through the most oddball selection of postcards he could find at the local shop and defacing them with his own sadistic improvements.
"Fine by me," she said, heading downstairs again, heart in her throat. "As long as there's champagne."
M, she thought - M for Malcolm, Maisie - Matthew.
She barely slept; kept jerking awake at odd hours with visions of Erin spinning around and grabbing her arm, and Rosie running across a road. Then it wasn't Rosie, it was herself, younger, and it was Tom's hand grabbing her arm, Maisie triumphant, I've been tailing you for hours, you didn't notice me.
But he had noticed, somehow, and her unconscious mind couldn't work out whether to be horrified or excited.
Sunday. Ellie was still in bed; she'd be back on the three-til-three shift tonight. Maisie dressed hurriedly: jeans and a baggy old green jumper, shoes without socks. She scribbled a note about meeting Jess in town, probably won't be back til late, stole twenty pounds from Ellie's purse and hurried out the door.
She hadn't checked the timetables, but by the time she'd made it across the still-dewy common and transferred to Clapham Junction there was a train on the platform as if waiting for her. It started to drizzle and she'd forgotten her umbrella. She pulled up the hood of her jumper.
Belatedly, she thought of calling Wes. But she didn't want him here. She sent him a photo of the rain dribbling down the train window. He sent back one of his half-packed suitcase, school shoes and textbooks strewn across the floor: WOE. She smirked. Suck it up, Carter.
Had it really been five months since they'd met, since the game started? She'd told Ellie she'd wanted to have the summer in London so they could spend time together, despite the sixteen-hour shifts and the empty house. She'd told herself it was because she'd grown apart from her friends in Manchester, their stupid dramas and paranoias, and the thing with Jess's boyfriend dumping her in favour of Maisie's almost unconscious flirting - and Maisie, mortified, realising her jealousy had had nothing to do with the boy and everything to do with her best friend.
But how much of her decision, she thought now, had had to do with Tom Quinn and his infuriating presence at the edge of her life? After Wes's revelation about the man on the Epping train, and what came after, she saw Tom everywhere. Two kids, boys, seven and four I think. Tom was married now. Did he have children? She didn't think so, but perhaps that was what America was for - putting an ocean between his job and his family.
She hadn't called Wes after their fight and his admission about the people they'd been following. She hadn't told him she'd decided to stay in London for the summer. She had spent half-term intent on being a new person, spending her holiday money on a new, more bohemian wardrobe, afternoons of French films at arty little theatres she convinced herself were study; hours at the library where she found herself more engrossed in watching glamorous university students and crusty eccentric academics than reading her own textbooks.
She'd been watching the whole time. She'd been waiting, however unconsciously, firstly for Tom, and then for Wes. When her phone rang nearly a week later she found she wasn't surprised.
- -
three months ago
"Can you meet me at the station?"
No apology, no greeting, and she was immediately irritated. "What? No, I bloody can't. What's going on?"
"I need to show you something. Can you sneak past your mum?"
"Jesus, Carter, it's after midnight."
A short pause. "Were you sleeping?"
"No," she admitted.
"So?" He sounded impatient. "Can you meet me at the station in ten minutes?"
"Mum's working nights," she said, not really an answer.
"Good, see you then."
It was stifling outside, humid clouds boiling overhead, and she immediately regretted the jeans she'd been comfortable in in the cool of her room. If she went back now she'd be late, and worse, she might change her mind. Crazy person, she reminded herself. But she didn't really mean it.
Wes led her down midnight streets at a brisk pace. She quickly gave up on asking him questions, reduced instead to dawdling in the blasts of cool air from nightclubs and bars, ignoring drunk catcalls from the backs of passing cabs and glancing over her shoulder for muggers and murderers. Then suddenly there was a man in an alley and Maisie's heart nearly stopped.
But the man nodded at Wes as if he was expecting him, and opened an anonymous door into the alley. He was wearing a security uniform. Wes nodded loftily in response, like they were a pair of freemasons, as he lead Maisie through the door.
They were in a dark corridor which was about ten degrees colder than outside. The guard had not come with them, but he didn't need to. Wes knew where he was going. Maisie hurried after him as the corridor twisted and turned. "Where the hell are we?" she hissed.
He glanced at her. "You don't know?"
"Would I ask if I - "
The corridor ended abruptly. They'd come to a courtyard, lit by shadowy light from somewhere Maisie couldn't determine; equally ambiguous running water. And a wall of names. Maisie had never been here before but yes, now she knew where they were.
She stood in silence next to Wes, forgetting for a moment that she was shivering with cold. Jesus, the names. She found herself searching, though she knew Tom's would not be there. She only realised what she was looking for when she saw the Carters.
Finally, she understood. Why Wes was like he was. How they'd got in here. How he knew things he shouldn't know.
The game.
But it wasn't his parents' names Wes was looking at. It was one of the new ones, second-to-last. Maisie shivered suddenly as she wondered how often they updated the list. Once a year? Once a month?
N. SHEPHERD, the name said, and Wes said, "That's him."
"The man we were following?"
"He went on an op in Tripoli. He left the children with his sister. And he never came back."
Maisie nearly asked him how he knew, and then she nearly asked him if that was what had happened to him, and then she nearly asked if that was what the game was about. But she didn't ask, because she already knew. This was why they'd followed a spy with kids, and this was why, by Wes's divine judgement, he didn't deserve them.
"We can't stop people dying in Tripoli, Wes," she said finally, thinking, Jesus, can we?
"No," Wes said. "But we can stop them going."
The next morning they were outside the house of Nathan Shepherd's sister. Maisie demanded to know how on earth Wes knew this stuff, ready to fight for it, but of course this time he put up no defence. "There's this guy in HR," he said casually, hands deep in his pockets. "He's a complete moron. Thinks he's betraying personnel details to an anarchist group who're blackmailing spies to fund their takeover of the government."
"But he's really supplying them..."
"To me, yeah. I'll turn him in pretty soon, don't worry. I mean he's an utter idiot, seriously, but sooner or later he's going to figure out how big the market is."
They turned back to the surveillance for a while. "She works in a different section," Wes said presently, as they watched Nathan Shepherd's sister moving about the kitchen. Every now and then she bent out of sight, to speak to a child, Maisie realised. "Can you believe it? Her brother's murdered and she still goes back there every day."
"Maybe she's trying to get whoever killed him," Maisie said uncertainly. "Before they kill someone else."
Wes gave her a withering look. "The Greater Good? Oh please." The way he'd said it it had capital letters. "What kind of Greater Good is there if she dies too? We're not in a Rupert Brooke poem."
Maisie had become good at biting back questions she knew wouldn't be answered. "So what do we do?" she asked instead. "Knock on the door? Tell her to resign before it's too late or by our lord the pirate king she'll be sorry?"
"No," Wes said. "Don't be stupid. She wouldn't listen to us and we can't let her know who we are." He paused. "But she'll listen to one of the kids."
There wasn't really a plan, after that. Maisie had her exams and left Manchester behind for good, then there was just the city and the long hot summer. She and Wes spent days eating ice cream in the park, making up stupid voices for the tourists who passed by out of earshot, and going to see trashy movies just to flick popcorn at the back of people's heads - generally doing all the wildly immature things neither of them as only children had ever got to do.
"How old are you, nine?" Maisie would say scornfully sometimes, when Wes was being especially ridiculous, and he'd roll his eyes and give her his best Valley-Girl impression, "how old are you, forty-five?"
Wes told her stories, most featuring his father in an improbably heroic role, and Maisie scoffed and rolled her eyes and said "come off it, that never happened", and generally indulged him.
Most of the time, though, they'd follow somebody, even as they were busy pretending to be doing something else, and Maisie got the same thrill from it whether she knew who they were following or not. Sometimes Wes would say how many kids he or she had. That was the only time she knew it was real.
After Nathan Shepherd's sister, there was Mark Cheng's resignation, then Harriet Garner's. One, two, three people who would never appear on the wall of names. Wes wouldn't tell her what he said to their children. Was it a threat? A plea? A retelling of his story, don't let your parents end up like mine - but all of them sounded implausibly dramatic.
"Depends," he said eventually, after she'd fed his ego with enough badgering. "It has to be different every time, and subtle. It's one thing to fool the kids and another to fool the parents. They can't know it's coming from us or someone at Five will notice the pattern."
Not for the first time, she wondered if the thrill of getting away with it was half of Wes's purpose. But was she just trying to justify her own guilty thrill by dragging down his supposedly noble cause? Wes had never actually called it a game, she realised. It had been her, Maisie, who'd needed that layer of just-pretend.
"What about the people they protect? I mean, if they aren't doing their jobs any more - "
Wes pulled a face. "Somebody else is. Come on, do you really think the safety of London depends on one person? People are replaceable."
Erin was the fourth. Wes told her how Rosie had been kidnapped, and Erin had returned to work afterwards as if nothing had happened. He sounded half amazed and half furious. Maisie had again asked how on earth he knew such information.
"If someone's telling you this, you need to turn him in."
"The idiot in HR? Oh, I have turned him in. After I got Erin's address. It was Uncle Harry told me about what happened to her kid."
She hesitated. "Really?" The Uncle Harry of his spy stories was a noble figurehead to whom his father had been unquestioningly loyal.
"He's a serious security breach sometimes," Wes said offhandedly. "He still thinks I'm eight years old and can't understand big words and obscure Greek euphemisms."
"So?" Maisie asked. "Same as before, surveillance, find the kid's school, track her movements til you can get her alone and say your magic words to her?"
Wes shook his head. "Erin's daughter was kidnapped at gunpoint, and she didn't resign. The normal method isn't going to work. We need to do something better."
- -
today
It was only when the train pulled up at the village station that Maisie realised she didn't know where Tom lived, or - unbelievably - if he was even called Tom in this partition of his life.
The station was windswept and deserted. She sat on the edge of the platform for a while, telling herself there was no hurry, then she walked up and down the main street. Sunday - even the pub was closed.
Back at the station, she wrapped her arms around herself, slowly feeling dumber and dumber. She didn't have the postcard with her, but she remembered every word, and now the certainty that had hurried her to board a train to the middle of nowhere seemed laughable at best. What was she doing here? Was she that desperate for his approval that she'd seen a message where there wasn't one? Fuck cryptic postcards which may or may not be from Tom. If he'd wanted to see her, why hadn't he just called her, or sent her a goddamn facebook message?
She should go home. She should turn around right now and go home.
Except the train back to London wasn't for two hours, and the rain was getting heavier.
"Fuck," she said, and kicked the metal seat.
"Maisie, isn't it?" said a voice behind her.
She whipped around, the rain making a worse blur of her vision. "No," she said abruptly, too late.
The man was staring at her as if he'd seen a ghost.
"Who the hell are you? How do you know my name?" Suddenly she was terrified. "What's happened? What's happened?"
She made to grab his arm and shake him from his stupor, but he was stronger than he looked, and before she knew it he had her by the wrist. People here must think I'm crazy, she thought absently. So far all she'd done in public was shout and cry.
"Come on," the man said. His grip was like a vice but his voice was gentle. "Come on, let's get out of the rain."
- -
"I don't want to talk about it."
Dimitri must have looked more heartbroken than he'd meant, because Erin softened almost immediately. "Come in, if you like. But you won't change my mind."
"I'm not here to change your mind," he said, stopping in the hall to step around the half-packed boxes. "Where are you off to then?"
"Wales. Mum's got brothers there, I think she's wanted to go back for years. The only reason she's stuck around in London is for me."
"What will you do?"
Erin shrugged. "The law degree will probably come in handy."
"No shit. You've a law degree?"
"Well, five-sixths of one. Service poached me before I could finish." She was making coffee, clearing drawings and crayons off the table before putting down the mugs. Big old mugs, chipped and tea-stained, World's Best Mum and Budapest, Hungary. Dimitri flashed back a moment to his first smug assessment of Erin's minimalist life, and flinched that he'd got her so wrong.
"I'll probably have rings run round me by all these snappy new graduates," she was saying. "I'm not sure I even remember the difference between a tort and a subpoena."
"At least you knew once," Dimitri said dubiously.
"Come on, sailor boy, you're not so dumb."
She hit him on the arm, and suddenly they were touching. Dimitri's skin tingled. But Rosie was playing upstairs and Erin was going to Wales and Dimitri wasn't an idiot. He pulled her into him for a brief embrace.
"What happened, Erin?"
She shook her head. "Nothing."
"Please don't - "
"No, Dimitri, it really was nothing. We were at the street fair, you know, Rosie wanted to see the dancers. Crowds everywhere. I told her and told her, but she's five years old, she can't be expected to - It's just when I saw she was gone, I panicked."
"You lost her in the crowd?"
"I only let her out of my sight for a second, to answer my bloody phone. Then when I looked up she was gone. I probably would've found her sooner, if I'd gone looking the right way."
"Someone pointed you the wrong way?"
"A kid, D. Not a conspiracy. Little kid in a baseball cap, she went that way." Erin shook her head, as if still admonishing herself. "Anyway, I found her at the park. A girl had been keeping an eye on her. She remembered how to phone me, like I taught her. It can't have been more than a few minutes we were apart. But that feeling when I realised she was gone - god, it was ten times worse than before, because this time I thought it was over. I understand now. It's never over. It'll never be over until I get out."
She shook her head. "If I ever have to make that decision again..."
Dimitri pulled her close again. "You won't," he said. "You won't have to."
After they'd drained their coffee, he offered to help Erin pack, knowing she'd turn him down. "How's the team?" she asked.
Dimitri hesitated, knowing they'd both been avoiding the question. "Section D's been disbanded, and Harry forcibly retired. Apparently you were the non-negotiable condition of his reinstatement after the tribunal."
Erin nodded at her empty coffee mug. "I thought that might happen, but I was hoping they'd've seen sense by now... I'm sorry, D."
"It's okay, it's fine. Calum and I are managing gamely back in Section A. Ruth's been seduced by the Home Sec. Places found for everyone. Harry had a lot of enemies, Erin, not your fault."
"I know." She smiled sadly. "Perhaps it's for the best."
Rosie skipped in to show him a drawing she'd made. Dimitri was duly appreciative of her complicated explanation, then he took advantage of Erin being busy at the sink.
"I got lost," Rosie answered. "A nice lady helped me. I don't get lost any more, because I'm grown up now."
Dimitri crouched to her height. "Who was the nice lady, Rosie?"
"It's okay," Rosie said, with surprisingly adult reassurance, "she wasn't really a grown-up. I'm not supposed to talk to strange grown-ups."
"What did she look like?"
Rosie thought. "A fairy princess."
Dimitri wondered if there'd been CCTV of the street. Eyewitnesses would be useless. In those crowds, at a street fair full of clowns and balloons, who would've turned a head at a little girl walking hand-in-hand with a fairy princess?
- -
Tom's house wasn't as Maisie had imagined, but then, she'd been unable to imagine it at all when she'd tried. It was small, perhaps part of what had once been a larger house; a strip of garden hazy in the rain. There were a few sad-looking plants in the window, a red letter-box. Books. No photographs. A painting of a grey sea, grey sky.
She wrung out her hair, perversely satisfied that it dripped all over the carpet, then moved into the kitchen. "Where's Tom?"
Malcolm was arranging the tea tray with great care. "I'm afraid he's had to go overseas. Do you take sugar?"
"Where? To America? Why?"
He brought the tray to the table and sat down opposite her. "I'm sorry, but even if I wanted to tell you I couldn't. I've been retired a good few years, you see. It's been a long time since I've had operational details."
"But Tom's retired too," she retorted, then: "Isn't he?"
"Oh yes. He's been out of the service longer than I have, even. But I'm afraid that doesn't make his business trips any more a matter of public scrutiny."
Maisie gave up. She'd eaten nothing since last night and the tea was absurdly comforting. All the questions that had been burning her up on the journey had died in her throat. How could she rephrase them to this stranger, who was somehow less of a stranger than Tom's house, Tom's life?
Malcolm put down his cup. "I'm sorry if I frightened you, before. I - well, you were this big last I saw you. And you've grown up so much."
It wasn't an answer, but something in his voice made Maisie unwilling to press further. "S'okay," she said. "I don't remember you."
"Quite expected. You were very little."
"Did Tom tell you I was coming?"
Malcolm frowned. "No. He was called away on very short notice, but that's no excuse. He asked me to look in on the place while he was away, but he was already gone when I got here."
Maisie raised an eyebrow at the dead geraniums. "Watering the plants?"
"I suspect they're a lost cause. For the dog, mainly."
"Tom has a dog?"
"Full of surprises, our Tom. She's in the garden, seems to like the rain, funny old thing. You can meet her later if you'd like."
Maisie had a sip of tea. Outside, the wind whipped up the rain and slammed it against the glass.
"I never thanked you for the postcards."
Malcolm, as she'd expected, looked away awkwardly. "It's hardly worthy of thanks. I hope I never worried you or anything like that."
Maisie shook her head. "I don't think I ever understood half of what you wrote, but I liked them. I liked that all the places we'd been to were tied together, back when we were moving so much. It made me feel safe somehow."
Malcolm nodded.
"That last one you sent," she said, just to make sure. "Have you been there?"
"Dresden? Goodness no, not for a long time."
Maisie carefully folded the Scotland postcard into the knot of her feelings about Tom. She couldn't ask Malcolm about it, not when he was trying so hard not to look at her, fixing on a point over her shoulder when he couldn't avoid it, or staring straight through her. Perhaps he was embarrassed, she thought. The postcards had been something at a distance, and here she was drinking tea right in front of him. It was clear he knew nothing of the game, of Erin Watts or Nathan Shepherd or the others.
"You wrote to Wes too," she said, not a question.
"Yes. I write to a lot of the children." He paused. "Not that either of you are children any more."
It dawned on Maisie, slowly, where Wes had got his names, his list of addresses and ages. Had Malcolm given it to him knowingly? Surely not. If Tom trusted him, he was hardly a man to be frivolous with the privacy of agents' families, and neither was he a man easy to fool. Wes, however, was possessed of more cunning than Maisie had before realised. He had also chosen to lie to her before betray Malcolm's trust.
Or perhaps she was wrong. At least some of Wes's wildly implausible stories had turned out to be true; why not the one about the anarchist in HR, and Uncle Harry's discretions?
"And how is our mutual friend Wes?" Malcolm asked, as if reading her thoughts. "He hasn't been skipping school again, has he?"
"Not too much." She smiled shyly, circling the pattern on the tablecloth. Spies like Malcolm had never fitted in to Wes's stories, or the game, but she found herself comforted that they existed. "Malcolm, what happened to Wes's parents?"
Malcolm raised an eyebrow in mild surprise. "You haven't asked him?"
"No. I - I don't know. I didn't think he'd want to talk about it."
"Well, a lot of it's classified of course, but no harm it would do now. Would you like to know?"
Maisie looked up at him, then away. She shook her head. Something about Malcolm's calm made her feel like a child again, in a way that Tom's had only made her angry and frustrated.
"If you could've stopped them going," she said hesitantly, "stopped them - wherever they were going. Would you have?"
Malcolm stared out the window for so long that she thought he wasn't going to answer. "Yes," he said finally. "Yes, Maisie, I would've. I'd've stopped them all." He stood, collecting the tea things, and offered her a sad smile. "I think that's why I'm retired, don't you?"
- -
"You spoke to her?" Calum looked for a second as if he was about to prove that his lover theory was real, but curiosity got the better of him. He sat on Dimitri's desk. "What did she say?"
"Nothing. I mean, nothing happened. She lost Rosie in a crowded street and she panicked." Dimitri gave him the rest of the story. "It was an accident."
Calum stared at him for a long moment. Fuck you, Dimitri thought, I used to be good at this.
"And if it wasn't an accident, it wouldn't matter anyway," he admitted. "There's no CCTV in that street, or in the park."
Calum gave him a withering look. "Jedi, much to teach you I have." He spun around to his computer. "What was the date again?"
"Twenty-eighth."
"And the time? The exact time?"
"I don't know," he said, then realised he did. "Around one o'clock. The carnival started at twelve. I told you, there's no CCTV, I've already looked."
"Patience, young one. Saturday afternoon... Wandsworth... SW18. There, six thousand and fourteen results."
Dimitri stepped closer. "What on earth is that?"
"Photos. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, et cetera et cetera. All the hipster kids are posting to at least three of them. Course most of them are private uploads, or at least the geographic data is private. A small matter to someone of my skills. And then pooling them into this sexy streamlined interface is a piece of proverbial gateau."
Dimitri scanned through the photos. "You set all this up for - ?"
"Entertainment, obviously. You should see the stuff that comes up for three a-m Soho." Calum paused, savouring the thought, then added, "Of course it crossed my mind that it might have surveillance value, once I work out the illegality thing."
"You're a dick, Calum."
"Tell me something I don't know."
"So did anyone take a photo of Rosie with a strange woman, at around one o'clock?" He'd edited out fairy princess, for obvious reasons.
Calum started typing. "Highly unlikely. But she'd have done a reconnaissance, wouldn't she, if it was planned? A couple of hours of surveillance at least. That ups the chance of her being photographed by a hipster. Lots of hipsters at street fairs, Dimitri. Craploads of them. There, I sent all six thousand and fourteen images to your terminal. Search away."
Dimitri went back to his desk, not much else to say. Sometimes he missed Tariq so much it hurt. He wondered if he'd like Calum more if he wasn't the polar opposite of Tariq, but realised he probably wouldn't.
- -
"It was weird," Maisie told Wes on the phone one night, a week into term. "It was like Malcolm recognised me, but didn't want to."
She'd told him about her trip south, but made it into a bored afternoon's excursion, leaving out the postcard and most of the conversation.
"Course he did," Wes said. "You look like someone he used to know."
"Really? How'd you know?"
There was a pause. Wes sounded distant; she heard a whistle in the background and realised he was outside, near a playing field perhaps. She pictured a group of idiotic boys in the mould of Jess's idiotic ex-boyfriend, driven through militaristic drills by a tyrant who'd had the same education, shoving each other over in the mud when he wasn't looking. "I recognised you, too. I thought I did."
"Come off it," she said, but there was another pause, and she could tell he wasn't lying. "Who? Who do I look like?"
"I don't really remember her. It was when I was really small. She came to the house a few times, I saw her downstairs drinking wine and gossiping with my dad."
"What's her name?"
"She said it was Kate."
"What's her real name?"
"No idea."
"You don't know?"
"She never said."
"Oh, whatever. As if that's stopped you finding out tonnes of other stuff."
She could almost see him shrug in response. He was more adult on the phone, recognising the childish part of their relationship as incompatible with distance, or perhaps it was being back at that god-fearing school in the middle of nowhere that changed him.
"What happened to her?" Maisie said hesitantly. "Is she on the wall of names?"
"Don't know, do I," Wes said, with impeccable logic. "Don't know her name."
Something was pushing at the edge of Maisie's memory, something from when Tom had still been Matthew. A tall woman, blond possibly: hello Maisie, do you like the teletubbies? Maisie, scornful of being patronised even then: I'm not a baby.
Was she who Maisie looked like, now? She tried in vain to remember the woman's face, and got a flash of Ellie crying for her troubles. Jesus, why was everything from then so tangled together?
"How is your esteemed not-father, anyway?"
Maisie ignored the baiting. "He wasn't there. Just Malcolm. He was on some fucking mysterious overseas holiday."
"Arsehole," Wes said.
She bit her lip to stop smiling. "I got a postcard," she said finally, by way of explanation. "I thought he wanted to meet."
"A postcard? Not from Malcolm?"
"It looked like one of Malcolm's, but it wasn't. A good copy. I thought - "
"Let me see it."
"Sure. Here you go."
Wes sighed. "Take a photo and send it to me, would you? I need to see it."
"You really don't," Maisie assured him.
"Come on, you can't tell me that and then not show me. I'm going crazy up here, Maisie. Rugby at one end and chapel at the other and my brain's being pummelled to mush in the middle. Plus the new kid I'm roomed with is all snivelling homesick in his pillow, another week of this and I swear I won't be responsible for throttling him. Show me."
Maisie dutifully photographed the postcard, front and back, and lay on her bed with her feet against the wall while she waited for Wes to receive it. She took a moment to feel sorry for any kid who had to share a room with a hard-as-nails arrogant genius who'd been boarding since he was eight.
"That's not from Malcolm," he said, when she picked up again.
"I know. I told you."
"Then why do you think it's from Tom?"
"I don't know, because it's not from Malcolm. M for Matthew." Silence. "Who else would it be from?"
"How many other postcards have you got from Tom? Signing as Matthew or otherwise?"
"None. He never wrote to me."
"Then why the hell would he start now? And pretend to be Malcolm? And tell you he wanted to meet when he knew he wouldn't be there?"
"It doesn't actually say a time or place," Maisie pointed out, but Wes wasn't listening. "Who else would it be from? Wes? Do you know?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," Wes said with deep seriousness. "But we should find out."
- - -
part three
- - -
PART TWO
today
Maisie was invincible. Walking home from the station, after Erin and Rosie, she was still swinging with a heady rush between having done something terrible and something amazing. She hadn't really allowed herself to acknowledge how important the game had become to her, these past few months. Some days it seemed childish, escapist. Today it felt almost noble.
Ellie was home, which surprised her. She slung her bag onto the couch. "Did you finish up early today?"
Ellie showed her her hand, heavily bandaged. "Cut myself. Can you believe it? Twenty years of this and it's still possible."
She sounded pleased, oddly, as if the wound was evidence of all the hard work she'd been doing. Maisie remembered Erin's face as she'd gathered her daughter into her arms. Someone else would be eating dinner with her daughter tonight, and many more nights to come. She felt a rush of affection for Ellie.
"I left the dinner crowd for Frances, god knows if either of them will survive the night. So, how was last night? Did you all get uproariously drunk and spew on Jess's mum's sofa?"
Maisie had almost forgotten what she was meant to be doing this weekend. It had seemed easier not to explain to Ellie that she'd decided weeks ago not to go to Jess's party, and besides, it had meant she and Wes had been able to spend the whole night going over the plan for Operation Erin and Rosie.
"Lots of spewing," she assured Ellie. "Bucketloads. Have you eaten?"
"No. I was going to just whack on some pasta, didn't know when you'd be back."
"I'll do it," Maisie said. "Celebration."
"What're we celebrating?"
"School starts next week."
"Does it? Jesus. That sneaked up on me. God, Maisie, you've been so bloody good about these last few months of hell."
"It hasn't been that hellish," Maisie said truthfully, thinking, was it only a few months?
"All that back-and-forth to Manchester, then summer holidays a hundred miles from your mates and me working sixteen hour days, honestly kiddo you've been a star. I promise it'll get better from now on."
"Now I'll be back at school? With a metric tonne of homework every night plus study on top, and the swim team and chess club and croquet?"
"Croquet?"
Maisie threw a cushion. "Seriously, Mum, it's been fine. I've had a totally acceptable summer."
She knew there was a sense of charade to Ellie's guilt. They'd both worked out by now that they got on much better like this, when Ellie was too busy to be clingy or to tie herself up in another unsuitable relationship, and Maisie could indulge in the occasional maudlin sulk about having to be self-sufficient. She didn't mind that neither of them would ever admit it.
"Really?" Ellie asked again.
"Really really."
"Excellent. I'll neglect you more often then. Oh, I nearly forgot, these came for you."
Ellie fished two postcards from under the stack of accounts she'd dumped on top. "Haven't read them, cross my heart and hope to die. Your mates don't half get about though, do they? Lucky things."
Maisie's heart was in her mouth before she'd even touched the postcards. "Yeah, and they all love making me jealous." She made herself read Bree's first - northern India now, sorry for the silence May, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a post office up here, plus my cousin's going absolutely mental about the wedding preparations - then flipped to the second. The day's operation had left her, apparently, cool as a fucking cucumber, and she had no nerves reading it on the couch in front of Ellie, who granted didn't seem too interested and had long given up keeping track of all Maisie's friends.
It was from Scotland, but postmarked London, and clearly came from neither - it wouldn't surprise her if spies carried around a set of pre-stamped postcards for this express purpose, or perhaps they had their own post office. A view of a misty loch, fishing boats upended on the stony beach in the foreground. The same small, but wide-spaced cursive, the same curiously long-winded address notation - London, England, United Kingdom - that made Maisie expect the date to be written in the year of Our Lord. But the date, as always, printed in neat numerals with a dot between, and the message short and cryptic. I hear you've been busy? But all games come to an end. M.
Maisie's composure faltered. She mumbled an excuse and headed upstairs, but she knew before she'd dragged out the shoebox under the bed that this one was different. Someone had copied the style almost flawlessly; indeed, she couldn't even pick the flaw. But it was undeniably a copy.
"I can't do a thing with this hand." Ellie's voice from down the stairs; the house was small enough that she didn't have to shout. "Will you think me even more neglectful if we get a takeaway?"
Maisie shoved the shoebox under the bed, and pinned both the new cards to her corkboard, next to the others from Bree's Indian odyssey and Bianca in Spain and Chris sulkily stuck in Manchester, working through the most oddball selection of postcards he could find at the local shop and defacing them with his own sadistic improvements.
"Fine by me," she said, heading downstairs again, heart in her throat. "As long as there's champagne."
M, she thought - M for Malcolm, Maisie - Matthew.
She barely slept; kept jerking awake at odd hours with visions of Erin spinning around and grabbing her arm, and Rosie running across a road. Then it wasn't Rosie, it was herself, younger, and it was Tom's hand grabbing her arm, Maisie triumphant, I've been tailing you for hours, you didn't notice me.
But he had noticed, somehow, and her unconscious mind couldn't work out whether to be horrified or excited.
Sunday. Ellie was still in bed; she'd be back on the three-til-three shift tonight. Maisie dressed hurriedly: jeans and a baggy old green jumper, shoes without socks. She scribbled a note about meeting Jess in town, probably won't be back til late, stole twenty pounds from Ellie's purse and hurried out the door.
She hadn't checked the timetables, but by the time she'd made it across the still-dewy common and transferred to Clapham Junction there was a train on the platform as if waiting for her. It started to drizzle and she'd forgotten her umbrella. She pulled up the hood of her jumper.
Belatedly, she thought of calling Wes. But she didn't want him here. She sent him a photo of the rain dribbling down the train window. He sent back one of his half-packed suitcase, school shoes and textbooks strewn across the floor: WOE. She smirked. Suck it up, Carter.
Had it really been five months since they'd met, since the game started? She'd told Ellie she'd wanted to have the summer in London so they could spend time together, despite the sixteen-hour shifts and the empty house. She'd told herself it was because she'd grown apart from her friends in Manchester, their stupid dramas and paranoias, and the thing with Jess's boyfriend dumping her in favour of Maisie's almost unconscious flirting - and Maisie, mortified, realising her jealousy had had nothing to do with the boy and everything to do with her best friend.
But how much of her decision, she thought now, had had to do with Tom Quinn and his infuriating presence at the edge of her life? After Wes's revelation about the man on the Epping train, and what came after, she saw Tom everywhere. Two kids, boys, seven and four I think. Tom was married now. Did he have children? She didn't think so, but perhaps that was what America was for - putting an ocean between his job and his family.
She hadn't called Wes after their fight and his admission about the people they'd been following. She hadn't told him she'd decided to stay in London for the summer. She had spent half-term intent on being a new person, spending her holiday money on a new, more bohemian wardrobe, afternoons of French films at arty little theatres she convinced herself were study; hours at the library where she found herself more engrossed in watching glamorous university students and crusty eccentric academics than reading her own textbooks.
She'd been watching the whole time. She'd been waiting, however unconsciously, firstly for Tom, and then for Wes. When her phone rang nearly a week later she found she wasn't surprised.
- -
three months ago
"Can you meet me at the station?"
No apology, no greeting, and she was immediately irritated. "What? No, I bloody can't. What's going on?"
"I need to show you something. Can you sneak past your mum?"
"Jesus, Carter, it's after midnight."
A short pause. "Were you sleeping?"
"No," she admitted.
"So?" He sounded impatient. "Can you meet me at the station in ten minutes?"
"Mum's working nights," she said, not really an answer.
"Good, see you then."
It was stifling outside, humid clouds boiling overhead, and she immediately regretted the jeans she'd been comfortable in in the cool of her room. If she went back now she'd be late, and worse, she might change her mind. Crazy person, she reminded herself. But she didn't really mean it.
Wes led her down midnight streets at a brisk pace. She quickly gave up on asking him questions, reduced instead to dawdling in the blasts of cool air from nightclubs and bars, ignoring drunk catcalls from the backs of passing cabs and glancing over her shoulder for muggers and murderers. Then suddenly there was a man in an alley and Maisie's heart nearly stopped.
But the man nodded at Wes as if he was expecting him, and opened an anonymous door into the alley. He was wearing a security uniform. Wes nodded loftily in response, like they were a pair of freemasons, as he lead Maisie through the door.
They were in a dark corridor which was about ten degrees colder than outside. The guard had not come with them, but he didn't need to. Wes knew where he was going. Maisie hurried after him as the corridor twisted and turned. "Where the hell are we?" she hissed.
He glanced at her. "You don't know?"
"Would I ask if I - "
The corridor ended abruptly. They'd come to a courtyard, lit by shadowy light from somewhere Maisie couldn't determine; equally ambiguous running water. And a wall of names. Maisie had never been here before but yes, now she knew where they were.
She stood in silence next to Wes, forgetting for a moment that she was shivering with cold. Jesus, the names. She found herself searching, though she knew Tom's would not be there. She only realised what she was looking for when she saw the Carters.
Finally, she understood. Why Wes was like he was. How they'd got in here. How he knew things he shouldn't know.
The game.
But it wasn't his parents' names Wes was looking at. It was one of the new ones, second-to-last. Maisie shivered suddenly as she wondered how often they updated the list. Once a year? Once a month?
N. SHEPHERD, the name said, and Wes said, "That's him."
"The man we were following?"
"He went on an op in Tripoli. He left the children with his sister. And he never came back."
Maisie nearly asked him how he knew, and then she nearly asked him if that was what had happened to him, and then she nearly asked if that was what the game was about. But she didn't ask, because she already knew. This was why they'd followed a spy with kids, and this was why, by Wes's divine judgement, he didn't deserve them.
"We can't stop people dying in Tripoli, Wes," she said finally, thinking, Jesus, can we?
"No," Wes said. "But we can stop them going."
The next morning they were outside the house of Nathan Shepherd's sister. Maisie demanded to know how on earth Wes knew this stuff, ready to fight for it, but of course this time he put up no defence. "There's this guy in HR," he said casually, hands deep in his pockets. "He's a complete moron. Thinks he's betraying personnel details to an anarchist group who're blackmailing spies to fund their takeover of the government."
"But he's really supplying them..."
"To me, yeah. I'll turn him in pretty soon, don't worry. I mean he's an utter idiot, seriously, but sooner or later he's going to figure out how big the market is."
They turned back to the surveillance for a while. "She works in a different section," Wes said presently, as they watched Nathan Shepherd's sister moving about the kitchen. Every now and then she bent out of sight, to speak to a child, Maisie realised. "Can you believe it? Her brother's murdered and she still goes back there every day."
"Maybe she's trying to get whoever killed him," Maisie said uncertainly. "Before they kill someone else."
Wes gave her a withering look. "The Greater Good? Oh please." The way he'd said it it had capital letters. "What kind of Greater Good is there if she dies too? We're not in a Rupert Brooke poem."
Maisie had become good at biting back questions she knew wouldn't be answered. "So what do we do?" she asked instead. "Knock on the door? Tell her to resign before it's too late or by our lord the pirate king she'll be sorry?"
"No," Wes said. "Don't be stupid. She wouldn't listen to us and we can't let her know who we are." He paused. "But she'll listen to one of the kids."
There wasn't really a plan, after that. Maisie had her exams and left Manchester behind for good, then there was just the city and the long hot summer. She and Wes spent days eating ice cream in the park, making up stupid voices for the tourists who passed by out of earshot, and going to see trashy movies just to flick popcorn at the back of people's heads - generally doing all the wildly immature things neither of them as only children had ever got to do.
"How old are you, nine?" Maisie would say scornfully sometimes, when Wes was being especially ridiculous, and he'd roll his eyes and give her his best Valley-Girl impression, "how old are you, forty-five?"
Wes told her stories, most featuring his father in an improbably heroic role, and Maisie scoffed and rolled her eyes and said "come off it, that never happened", and generally indulged him.
Most of the time, though, they'd follow somebody, even as they were busy pretending to be doing something else, and Maisie got the same thrill from it whether she knew who they were following or not. Sometimes Wes would say how many kids he or she had. That was the only time she knew it was real.
After Nathan Shepherd's sister, there was Mark Cheng's resignation, then Harriet Garner's. One, two, three people who would never appear on the wall of names. Wes wouldn't tell her what he said to their children. Was it a threat? A plea? A retelling of his story, don't let your parents end up like mine - but all of them sounded implausibly dramatic.
"Depends," he said eventually, after she'd fed his ego with enough badgering. "It has to be different every time, and subtle. It's one thing to fool the kids and another to fool the parents. They can't know it's coming from us or someone at Five will notice the pattern."
Not for the first time, she wondered if the thrill of getting away with it was half of Wes's purpose. But was she just trying to justify her own guilty thrill by dragging down his supposedly noble cause? Wes had never actually called it a game, she realised. It had been her, Maisie, who'd needed that layer of just-pretend.
"What about the people they protect? I mean, if they aren't doing their jobs any more - "
Wes pulled a face. "Somebody else is. Come on, do you really think the safety of London depends on one person? People are replaceable."
Erin was the fourth. Wes told her how Rosie had been kidnapped, and Erin had returned to work afterwards as if nothing had happened. He sounded half amazed and half furious. Maisie had again asked how on earth he knew such information.
"If someone's telling you this, you need to turn him in."
"The idiot in HR? Oh, I have turned him in. After I got Erin's address. It was Uncle Harry told me about what happened to her kid."
She hesitated. "Really?" The Uncle Harry of his spy stories was a noble figurehead to whom his father had been unquestioningly loyal.
"He's a serious security breach sometimes," Wes said offhandedly. "He still thinks I'm eight years old and can't understand big words and obscure Greek euphemisms."
"So?" Maisie asked. "Same as before, surveillance, find the kid's school, track her movements til you can get her alone and say your magic words to her?"
Wes shook his head. "Erin's daughter was kidnapped at gunpoint, and she didn't resign. The normal method isn't going to work. We need to do something better."
- -
today
It was only when the train pulled up at the village station that Maisie realised she didn't know where Tom lived, or - unbelievably - if he was even called Tom in this partition of his life.
The station was windswept and deserted. She sat on the edge of the platform for a while, telling herself there was no hurry, then she walked up and down the main street. Sunday - even the pub was closed.
Back at the station, she wrapped her arms around herself, slowly feeling dumber and dumber. She didn't have the postcard with her, but she remembered every word, and now the certainty that had hurried her to board a train to the middle of nowhere seemed laughable at best. What was she doing here? Was she that desperate for his approval that she'd seen a message where there wasn't one? Fuck cryptic postcards which may or may not be from Tom. If he'd wanted to see her, why hadn't he just called her, or sent her a goddamn facebook message?
She should go home. She should turn around right now and go home.
Except the train back to London wasn't for two hours, and the rain was getting heavier.
"Fuck," she said, and kicked the metal seat.
"Maisie, isn't it?" said a voice behind her.
She whipped around, the rain making a worse blur of her vision. "No," she said abruptly, too late.
The man was staring at her as if he'd seen a ghost.
"Who the hell are you? How do you know my name?" Suddenly she was terrified. "What's happened? What's happened?"
She made to grab his arm and shake him from his stupor, but he was stronger than he looked, and before she knew it he had her by the wrist. People here must think I'm crazy, she thought absently. So far all she'd done in public was shout and cry.
"Come on," the man said. His grip was like a vice but his voice was gentle. "Come on, let's get out of the rain."
- -
"I don't want to talk about it."
Dimitri must have looked more heartbroken than he'd meant, because Erin softened almost immediately. "Come in, if you like. But you won't change my mind."
"I'm not here to change your mind," he said, stopping in the hall to step around the half-packed boxes. "Where are you off to then?"
"Wales. Mum's got brothers there, I think she's wanted to go back for years. The only reason she's stuck around in London is for me."
"What will you do?"
Erin shrugged. "The law degree will probably come in handy."
"No shit. You've a law degree?"
"Well, five-sixths of one. Service poached me before I could finish." She was making coffee, clearing drawings and crayons off the table before putting down the mugs. Big old mugs, chipped and tea-stained, World's Best Mum and Budapest, Hungary. Dimitri flashed back a moment to his first smug assessment of Erin's minimalist life, and flinched that he'd got her so wrong.
"I'll probably have rings run round me by all these snappy new graduates," she was saying. "I'm not sure I even remember the difference between a tort and a subpoena."
"At least you knew once," Dimitri said dubiously.
"Come on, sailor boy, you're not so dumb."
She hit him on the arm, and suddenly they were touching. Dimitri's skin tingled. But Rosie was playing upstairs and Erin was going to Wales and Dimitri wasn't an idiot. He pulled her into him for a brief embrace.
"What happened, Erin?"
She shook her head. "Nothing."
"Please don't - "
"No, Dimitri, it really was nothing. We were at the street fair, you know, Rosie wanted to see the dancers. Crowds everywhere. I told her and told her, but she's five years old, she can't be expected to - It's just when I saw she was gone, I panicked."
"You lost her in the crowd?"
"I only let her out of my sight for a second, to answer my bloody phone. Then when I looked up she was gone. I probably would've found her sooner, if I'd gone looking the right way."
"Someone pointed you the wrong way?"
"A kid, D. Not a conspiracy. Little kid in a baseball cap, she went that way." Erin shook her head, as if still admonishing herself. "Anyway, I found her at the park. A girl had been keeping an eye on her. She remembered how to phone me, like I taught her. It can't have been more than a few minutes we were apart. But that feeling when I realised she was gone - god, it was ten times worse than before, because this time I thought it was over. I understand now. It's never over. It'll never be over until I get out."
She shook her head. "If I ever have to make that decision again..."
Dimitri pulled her close again. "You won't," he said. "You won't have to."
After they'd drained their coffee, he offered to help Erin pack, knowing she'd turn him down. "How's the team?" she asked.
Dimitri hesitated, knowing they'd both been avoiding the question. "Section D's been disbanded, and Harry forcibly retired. Apparently you were the non-negotiable condition of his reinstatement after the tribunal."
Erin nodded at her empty coffee mug. "I thought that might happen, but I was hoping they'd've seen sense by now... I'm sorry, D."
"It's okay, it's fine. Calum and I are managing gamely back in Section A. Ruth's been seduced by the Home Sec. Places found for everyone. Harry had a lot of enemies, Erin, not your fault."
"I know." She smiled sadly. "Perhaps it's for the best."
Rosie skipped in to show him a drawing she'd made. Dimitri was duly appreciative of her complicated explanation, then he took advantage of Erin being busy at the sink.
"I got lost," Rosie answered. "A nice lady helped me. I don't get lost any more, because I'm grown up now."
Dimitri crouched to her height. "Who was the nice lady, Rosie?"
"It's okay," Rosie said, with surprisingly adult reassurance, "she wasn't really a grown-up. I'm not supposed to talk to strange grown-ups."
"What did she look like?"
Rosie thought. "A fairy princess."
Dimitri wondered if there'd been CCTV of the street. Eyewitnesses would be useless. In those crowds, at a street fair full of clowns and balloons, who would've turned a head at a little girl walking hand-in-hand with a fairy princess?
- -
Tom's house wasn't as Maisie had imagined, but then, she'd been unable to imagine it at all when she'd tried. It was small, perhaps part of what had once been a larger house; a strip of garden hazy in the rain. There were a few sad-looking plants in the window, a red letter-box. Books. No photographs. A painting of a grey sea, grey sky.
She wrung out her hair, perversely satisfied that it dripped all over the carpet, then moved into the kitchen. "Where's Tom?"
Malcolm was arranging the tea tray with great care. "I'm afraid he's had to go overseas. Do you take sugar?"
"Where? To America? Why?"
He brought the tray to the table and sat down opposite her. "I'm sorry, but even if I wanted to tell you I couldn't. I've been retired a good few years, you see. It's been a long time since I've had operational details."
"But Tom's retired too," she retorted, then: "Isn't he?"
"Oh yes. He's been out of the service longer than I have, even. But I'm afraid that doesn't make his business trips any more a matter of public scrutiny."
Maisie gave up. She'd eaten nothing since last night and the tea was absurdly comforting. All the questions that had been burning her up on the journey had died in her throat. How could she rephrase them to this stranger, who was somehow less of a stranger than Tom's house, Tom's life?
Malcolm put down his cup. "I'm sorry if I frightened you, before. I - well, you were this big last I saw you. And you've grown up so much."
It wasn't an answer, but something in his voice made Maisie unwilling to press further. "S'okay," she said. "I don't remember you."
"Quite expected. You were very little."
"Did Tom tell you I was coming?"
Malcolm frowned. "No. He was called away on very short notice, but that's no excuse. He asked me to look in on the place while he was away, but he was already gone when I got here."
Maisie raised an eyebrow at the dead geraniums. "Watering the plants?"
"I suspect they're a lost cause. For the dog, mainly."
"Tom has a dog?"
"Full of surprises, our Tom. She's in the garden, seems to like the rain, funny old thing. You can meet her later if you'd like."
Maisie had a sip of tea. Outside, the wind whipped up the rain and slammed it against the glass.
"I never thanked you for the postcards."
Malcolm, as she'd expected, looked away awkwardly. "It's hardly worthy of thanks. I hope I never worried you or anything like that."
Maisie shook her head. "I don't think I ever understood half of what you wrote, but I liked them. I liked that all the places we'd been to were tied together, back when we were moving so much. It made me feel safe somehow."
Malcolm nodded.
"That last one you sent," she said, just to make sure. "Have you been there?"
"Dresden? Goodness no, not for a long time."
Maisie carefully folded the Scotland postcard into the knot of her feelings about Tom. She couldn't ask Malcolm about it, not when he was trying so hard not to look at her, fixing on a point over her shoulder when he couldn't avoid it, or staring straight through her. Perhaps he was embarrassed, she thought. The postcards had been something at a distance, and here she was drinking tea right in front of him. It was clear he knew nothing of the game, of Erin Watts or Nathan Shepherd or the others.
"You wrote to Wes too," she said, not a question.
"Yes. I write to a lot of the children." He paused. "Not that either of you are children any more."
It dawned on Maisie, slowly, where Wes had got his names, his list of addresses and ages. Had Malcolm given it to him knowingly? Surely not. If Tom trusted him, he was hardly a man to be frivolous with the privacy of agents' families, and neither was he a man easy to fool. Wes, however, was possessed of more cunning than Maisie had before realised. He had also chosen to lie to her before betray Malcolm's trust.
Or perhaps she was wrong. At least some of Wes's wildly implausible stories had turned out to be true; why not the one about the anarchist in HR, and Uncle Harry's discretions?
"And how is our mutual friend Wes?" Malcolm asked, as if reading her thoughts. "He hasn't been skipping school again, has he?"
"Not too much." She smiled shyly, circling the pattern on the tablecloth. Spies like Malcolm had never fitted in to Wes's stories, or the game, but she found herself comforted that they existed. "Malcolm, what happened to Wes's parents?"
Malcolm raised an eyebrow in mild surprise. "You haven't asked him?"
"No. I - I don't know. I didn't think he'd want to talk about it."
"Well, a lot of it's classified of course, but no harm it would do now. Would you like to know?"
Maisie looked up at him, then away. She shook her head. Something about Malcolm's calm made her feel like a child again, in a way that Tom's had only made her angry and frustrated.
"If you could've stopped them going," she said hesitantly, "stopped them - wherever they were going. Would you have?"
Malcolm stared out the window for so long that she thought he wasn't going to answer. "Yes," he said finally. "Yes, Maisie, I would've. I'd've stopped them all." He stood, collecting the tea things, and offered her a sad smile. "I think that's why I'm retired, don't you?"
- -
"You spoke to her?" Calum looked for a second as if he was about to prove that his lover theory was real, but curiosity got the better of him. He sat on Dimitri's desk. "What did she say?"
"Nothing. I mean, nothing happened. She lost Rosie in a crowded street and she panicked." Dimitri gave him the rest of the story. "It was an accident."
Calum stared at him for a long moment. Fuck you, Dimitri thought, I used to be good at this.
"And if it wasn't an accident, it wouldn't matter anyway," he admitted. "There's no CCTV in that street, or in the park."
Calum gave him a withering look. "Jedi, much to teach you I have." He spun around to his computer. "What was the date again?"
"Twenty-eighth."
"And the time? The exact time?"
"I don't know," he said, then realised he did. "Around one o'clock. The carnival started at twelve. I told you, there's no CCTV, I've already looked."
"Patience, young one. Saturday afternoon... Wandsworth... SW18. There, six thousand and fourteen results."
Dimitri stepped closer. "What on earth is that?"
"Photos. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, et cetera et cetera. All the hipster kids are posting to at least three of them. Course most of them are private uploads, or at least the geographic data is private. A small matter to someone of my skills. And then pooling them into this sexy streamlined interface is a piece of proverbial gateau."
Dimitri scanned through the photos. "You set all this up for - ?"
"Entertainment, obviously. You should see the stuff that comes up for three a-m Soho." Calum paused, savouring the thought, then added, "Of course it crossed my mind that it might have surveillance value, once I work out the illegality thing."
"You're a dick, Calum."
"Tell me something I don't know."
"So did anyone take a photo of Rosie with a strange woman, at around one o'clock?" He'd edited out fairy princess, for obvious reasons.
Calum started typing. "Highly unlikely. But she'd have done a reconnaissance, wouldn't she, if it was planned? A couple of hours of surveillance at least. That ups the chance of her being photographed by a hipster. Lots of hipsters at street fairs, Dimitri. Craploads of them. There, I sent all six thousand and fourteen images to your terminal. Search away."
Dimitri went back to his desk, not much else to say. Sometimes he missed Tariq so much it hurt. He wondered if he'd like Calum more if he wasn't the polar opposite of Tariq, but realised he probably wouldn't.
- -
"It was weird," Maisie told Wes on the phone one night, a week into term. "It was like Malcolm recognised me, but didn't want to."
She'd told him about her trip south, but made it into a bored afternoon's excursion, leaving out the postcard and most of the conversation.
"Course he did," Wes said. "You look like someone he used to know."
"Really? How'd you know?"
There was a pause. Wes sounded distant; she heard a whistle in the background and realised he was outside, near a playing field perhaps. She pictured a group of idiotic boys in the mould of Jess's idiotic ex-boyfriend, driven through militaristic drills by a tyrant who'd had the same education, shoving each other over in the mud when he wasn't looking. "I recognised you, too. I thought I did."
"Come off it," she said, but there was another pause, and she could tell he wasn't lying. "Who? Who do I look like?"
"I don't really remember her. It was when I was really small. She came to the house a few times, I saw her downstairs drinking wine and gossiping with my dad."
"What's her name?"
"She said it was Kate."
"What's her real name?"
"No idea."
"You don't know?"
"She never said."
"Oh, whatever. As if that's stopped you finding out tonnes of other stuff."
She could almost see him shrug in response. He was more adult on the phone, recognising the childish part of their relationship as incompatible with distance, or perhaps it was being back at that god-fearing school in the middle of nowhere that changed him.
"What happened to her?" Maisie said hesitantly. "Is she on the wall of names?"
"Don't know, do I," Wes said, with impeccable logic. "Don't know her name."
Something was pushing at the edge of Maisie's memory, something from when Tom had still been Matthew. A tall woman, blond possibly: hello Maisie, do you like the teletubbies? Maisie, scornful of being patronised even then: I'm not a baby.
Was she who Maisie looked like, now? She tried in vain to remember the woman's face, and got a flash of Ellie crying for her troubles. Jesus, why was everything from then so tangled together?
"How is your esteemed not-father, anyway?"
Maisie ignored the baiting. "He wasn't there. Just Malcolm. He was on some fucking mysterious overseas holiday."
"Arsehole," Wes said.
She bit her lip to stop smiling. "I got a postcard," she said finally, by way of explanation. "I thought he wanted to meet."
"A postcard? Not from Malcolm?"
"It looked like one of Malcolm's, but it wasn't. A good copy. I thought - "
"Let me see it."
"Sure. Here you go."
Wes sighed. "Take a photo and send it to me, would you? I need to see it."
"You really don't," Maisie assured him.
"Come on, you can't tell me that and then not show me. I'm going crazy up here, Maisie. Rugby at one end and chapel at the other and my brain's being pummelled to mush in the middle. Plus the new kid I'm roomed with is all snivelling homesick in his pillow, another week of this and I swear I won't be responsible for throttling him. Show me."
Maisie dutifully photographed the postcard, front and back, and lay on her bed with her feet against the wall while she waited for Wes to receive it. She took a moment to feel sorry for any kid who had to share a room with a hard-as-nails arrogant genius who'd been boarding since he was eight.
"That's not from Malcolm," he said, when she picked up again.
"I know. I told you."
"Then why do you think it's from Tom?"
"I don't know, because it's not from Malcolm. M for Matthew." Silence. "Who else would it be from?"
"How many other postcards have you got from Tom? Signing as Matthew or otherwise?"
"None. He never wrote to me."
"Then why the hell would he start now? And pretend to be Malcolm? And tell you he wanted to meet when he knew he wouldn't be there?"
"It doesn't actually say a time or place," Maisie pointed out, but Wes wasn't listening. "Who else would it be from? Wes? Do you know?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," Wes said with deep seriousness. "But we should find out."
- - -
part three