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‘Why didn’t you follow him?’
‘He slipped out of sight. There were that many people about …’ After a pause, the other said, ‘You did the right thing to phone me.’ ‘Do you think it’s serious?’
‘Very serious. I’ll arrange to have him collected tonight. We’ll have to move him.’
‘Where?’ The priest was alarmed.
‘Leave that to me. I’ll figure it out.’
The message came at eleven a.m. the Monday following his exchange with Kate Taylor. Chris had been in a new business meeting, helping to prepare a client pitch, and had returned to his office when Lotte gave him half a dozen messages. One was personal.
‘A guy called Roger called. Said the sofa you were interested in is now in stock.’
‘Good,’ he’d nodded, walking towards his desk.
‘What kind is it?’ she asked now.
‘Kind? Oh,’ he had to think for a moment before gesturing dismissively, ‘just a kilim thing.’
That lunch-time he told Lotte he was going out for a sandwich. Often he just ordered down something from the Lombard kitchen, though if he could afford the time he liked to go out to stretch his legs. On this particular occasion though, he had more than roast beef baguette on his mind. Chris glanced at his watch as he approached the shop. A couple of minutes before one-fifteen. He headed towards the fresh fruit section, glancing across at baskets of apples and oranges and bananas. He was reaching out for a Red Delicious when he saw the man he was looking for, a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit. Their eyes met for an instant. Then the other man was taking an envelope out of his jacket pocket and handing it to Chris, who quickly slipped it into his own suit. It happened in an instant. Then Chris went to collect some sandwiches before heading for the tills. He couldn’t wait to get back to the office.
Back on the fourth floor, he closed his door behind him before moving over towards his desk, retrieving the envelope from his pocket and tearing it open. The letterhead said ‘Advance Security’.
Dear Mr Treiger,
Further to your enquiry, we have conducted an electronic sweep of your property under the auspices of carrying out industrial cleaning of all carpets and curtains. Our sweep identified microphone transmission devices in the following locations …
Then followed two and a half pages of line-by-line entries for each room of his home. There were microphones in every single room – even the spare bedrooms he never used; both telephone receivers, of course; out on the balcony. Christ – even the bathroom was bugged.
Having his suspicions had been one thing. But knowing that they were justified was, as he discovered now, quite another. Everything, every damned thing he’d said for the last God-knew-how-long had been picked up. Recorded. Listened to. That must be why whoever it was had gone after Judith. They’d heard every damned thing the pair of them had said. They knew she had a story. They’d trashed her place trying to find it. They’d probably planted her place with bugs too.
He didn’t think he’d ever received such a disturbing letter. All the itemised details of room lights, picture frames, bedside tables – he’d been living in a broadcasting studio without being aware of it. At the end of the letter, Advance Security outlined two courses of action he could take: to have the bugs removed, or to disable them with a blocking mechanism. Chris knew that neither option was really available to him; on no account could he alert his pursuers to the fact that he knew they were monitoring him.
Charlotte came in from her office and took one look at him and the Prêt-a-Manger bag on his desk. ‘Something not agree with you?’
‘What?’
‘Are you okay? You’ve seemed sort of … edgy today.’ Not just today, she couldn’t help thinking. Since his encounter with Elliott North, a week ago, he’d seemed strangely withdrawn.
Chris met her look of concern for a moment, then suddenly realised this place must be bristling with bugs too. ‘I’m fine.’ He tried a hearty laugh. ‘I don’t think this sandwich is really my style. Too garlicky.’
‘I’ll order something from the kitchen if you like?’
‘It’s OK, thanks. Maybe later.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’m really not hungry any more.’
Seven-thirty p.m. two days later found Judith in her VW Beetle on the South Circular. She’d had the lock of the passenger door fixed, the driver’s side panel-beaten and had paid for a full service and assorted repairs. It had cost her nearly six hundred quid. But she was back in business for at least another ten thousand miles, she reckoned. She’d had trouble getting away from the office this evening. A breaking story about the merger of two oil giants had had three senior staff pulled off their usual briefs, and it was all hands to the pumps. Judith had pleaded a prior engagement with a PR company. Carter hadn’t been happy, but couldn’t complain. Quite apart from all the legwork she’d done on his behalf in the past two days, she’d also done a count of all The Herald business bylines, and found she’d had more than anyone in the past week.
Besides, nothing was going to keep her away from this meeting. Ever since this morning she’d been barely able to think of anything else. On her way to the tube station she’d stopped at J. P. Patel’s. As good as his word, Sanjay had not only found families who had pulled children out of bondage in Indian clothing factories, he’d even arranged for her to meet them – tonight. She’d overlooked his assumption that she had nothing already planned. This was no time to be precious.
He’d scribbled down an address on the corner of a day-old newspaper. Looking it up later in her London A-Z she’d found a street in Southfields, a suburb just north of Wimbledon with a strong Asian community. Turning into the street now, she found rows of terraced houses the same as in any other middle-class suburb in the country. As for the meeting, she didn’t know quite what to expect, but she thought she’d better plan a few words to say at the beginning. She’d start with child labour as an issue in general, and then talk in particular about companies whose products were sold in Britain. She wasn’t going to mention Starwear specifically – she’d seen too many cases where journalist prompting had produced all the right answers to begin with, only to backfire later. She didn’t know how well they all understood English. Best to keep it simple.
The house belonging to R. J. Patel looked no different from most of the others on the street. Shortly after seven-thirty she pressed the buzzer. The door was opened by a genial-looking man in a shirt and tie. ‘Come in, come in,’ he smiled, waving her into the house. ‘It’s Judith, right?’
She soon found herself in a full-length lounge-cum-dining room, with twenty or thirty people sitting on two rows of chairs that ran down each side. Some were in suits, having evidently come straight from work. Children played on the adults’ knees or on the floor in front of them. There were warm smiles and greetings as Judith glanced about them. She couldn’t help feeling slightly taken aback, having imagined the meeting would be smaller, more low key. This all seemed very organised. A dining-room chair had been placed in front of the mantelpiece, separate from all the others and clearly intended for her.
‘Thank you all for coming,’ R. J. Patel was saying, as conversations died down and parents shushed their children. ‘This is Judith who works for a national newspaper. She wants to ask us about child slaves in India.’ He turned to Judith and gestured towards the chair.
‘Thank you very much for giving up your time.’ She glanced slowly round the room. There was total silence as she met all those intense, anxious expressions. She’d always felt hesitant speaking to groups, and she felt even more apprehensive as she experienced, here and now, the scrutiny of men and women to whom child labour was not just some shock story they’d read about in a magazine. These were families who’d been through it. Who were going through it still. Desperate families who’d lost their children to the unimaginable horror of enslavement and whose lives, whatever the outcome had been, would always be scarred.
