 
## **Contents**

Publisher information

Praise for Stephen Hunt

Also by the author

Approved by Dickens

CHAPTER ONE A Delicate Noose

CHAPTER TWO Dancing With Niven

CHAPTER THREE Mrs Witchley's Other Prison

CHAPTER FOUR The Firehall

CHAPTER FIVE The Mirror Man

CHAPTER SIX Suspicious Minds

CHAPTER SEVEN Continue the adventure
IN THE COMPANY OF GHOSTS

Book 1 in the Agatha Witchley Mysteries series.

First published in 2014 by Green Nebula Press

Copyright © 2014 by Stephen A. Hunt

Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press. Distributed by Smashwords.

The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

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PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNT'S FICTION

'Hunt's imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.'

\- TOM HOLT

'All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.'

\- DAILY MAIL

'Compulsive reading for all ages.'

\- GUARDIAN

'Studded with invention.'

-THE INDEPENDENT

'To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement... a wonderful escapist yarn!'

\- INTERZONE

'Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks... affecting and original.'

\- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

'A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.'

—RT BOOK REVIEWS

'A curious part-future blend.'

\- KIRKUS REVIEWS

'An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.'

\- THE TIMES

'Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.'

\- TIME OUT

'A ripping yarn ... the story pounds along... constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked... the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.'

\- SFX MAGAZINE

'Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.'

\- SF REVU

Also by Stephen Hunt

~ THE FAR-CALLED SERIES ~

Season 1

In Dark Service (#1)  
Foul Tide's Turning (#2)  
The Stealers' War (#3)

~ THE JACKELIAN SERIES ~

Season 1

The Court of the Air (#1)  
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves (#2)  
Rise of the Iron Moon (#3)  
Secrets of the Fire Sea (#4)  
Jack Cloudie (#5)  
From the Deep of the Dark (#6)

Season 2

Mission to Mightadore (#7)

~ THE SLIDING VOID SERIES ~

Season 1

Sliding Void (#1)  
Transference Station (#2)  
Red Sun Bleeding (#3)

Season 1 Omnibus Collection (#1 & #2 & #3)

Void all the Way Down

~ THE AGATHA WITCHLEY MYSTERIES: AS STEPHEN A. HUNT ~

Season 1

In the Company of Ghosts (#1)  
The Plato Club (#2)  
The Moon Man's Tale (#3)

Season 1 Omnibus Collection (#1 & #2 & #3)

Secrets of the Moon

~ THE TRIPLE REALM SERIES ~

For the Crown and the Dragon (#1)  
The Fortress in the Frost (#2)

~ OTHER WORKS ~

Six Against the Stars  
The Alien who Ate Christmas (children's illustrated)

For links to all these books, visit <http://stephenhunt.net/novels/>
If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the Parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

\- Little Dorrit. 1856. Charles Dickens.

CHAPTER ONE

A Delicate Noose

Gary Doyle was impressed. It was only a toilet, but he had to admit, it was one sodding impressive toilet. If Doyle had succumbed to the persistent stabbing pain in his side he suspected might be bowel cancer and woken up in heaven itself this morning, Saint Peter's lavatorial facilities at the pearly gates would hardly have seemed less impressive. Taps sculpted like liquid metal. A wall-hung basin with gold inserts, a serpentine heating rail coiled with towels as soft as kitten fur. Everything discreetly stamped with unfamiliar designer names. VitrA? Hansgrohe? Is that a bad cough or the apology a German makes after he steps on your toes?

Doyle was torn between serious bog envy and investigating the contents of the toilet bowl lurking below his posterior. Gary Doyle had become the Nostradamus of irregular bowel movements. He was the Astrologer Royal of his toilet's contents, examining the celestial mechanics of what swirled in and out of the porcelain throne. Tea leaves to a flipping fortune-teller. And through such random spatterings of fate, he divined the level of pressure he suffered on his current case. The state of my illness. The progress of the suspected cancer that no sodding doctor in the health service seemed able to track down and diagnose. His wife, Emily, would be able to sue one day soon. She'll assemble all the useless quacks who prodded and probed me, but who can never find the illness eating away my insides, collect them all on the steps of a courthouse. Yes, she'll be able to take the medical establishment to the cleaners for gross negligence one day soon. Pity that I'll be dead. But you can't have everything. He reached out and touched the silky smooth toilet paper hanging from the platinum roller. Doyle was looking forward to emptying half the roll after he stopped doing an impression of a Shetland pony emptying its bowels over a paddock. Like wiping my arse with velvet. It was the kind of toilet paper only one of the richest people in the world could afford. I wonder where it comes from? Not Tesco, that much is sure. Not even the John Lewis Partnership. Maybe there was a craftsman somewhere, an artisan lovingly tending a paper-mill capable of this level of sorcery; producing such softness in paper. Wrapping the rolls in wax paper, hand delivering them to his client list of hedge fund managers, online tycoons and energy barons.

A hand knocked discreetly on the outside of the bathroom door, reminding Doyle that this was still work, potty break or no. Part of the dark orbit of his career, propelling the knives that slipped and stabbed his guts at inconvenient moments. The intrusion was enough to break Doyle's reverie and make him gaze down at the yellow puddle of urine lapped at his shoes. Not his waters, not this time. It was the dead man's urine, seeping under the toilet door. Doyle took the toilet paper, unfurling great sails of it. And why not? Forensics had already been through here, collecting every fingerprint and scrap of DNA they could Hoover up. Strutting around as though they were the stars of this particular soap opera. CSI West London. He stopped to admire the toilet's flush. Smooth, powerful, almost noiseless. What feats of plumbing technology had been developed to accomplish something so minimalist yet cleanly efficient?

There was another knock, helping Doyle make up his mind. I won't be availing myself of the bidet, not this time. Lord love a bidet. The blessing for everyone around the world with stress-shattered plumbing. Doyle unlocked the bathroom, pushing open the door. He stepped back into the class of office you could expect from the luxurious en-suite.

The room's usual occupant, Simon Werks, slowly twisted around in front of the toilet door, remade into an ornament dangling from an undoubtedly priceless chandelier. His monitor had been left glowing in the office's half-light. The flat screen on his desk was still displaying some quite dazzling filth on the screen, an HD bondage film dancing with animated adverts for correlated perversions. The lights were off in the room and wouldn't come back on. An accidental side effect of the security lockdown the building's guards had put in place after discovering Simon Werks' corpse.

Helen Thorson stood on the other side of the desk, as neat and as immaculate as always, looking up at the twisting corpse as though the body was a piece of modern art she was considering buying. Thorson had the same near-quizzical look on her face that she always wore. Not quite disapproval, not quite surprise, not quite expectation. It was a look that seemed to challenge men. As if to say. I know I'm flawlessly exquisite . . . what are you going to do for me? What you got? Oh, is that it? You could put Thorson in an interrogation room with a warm-blooded male suspect and she never had to say a word. She could just shift her head and let her dark mane of hair fall down to one side of her face and stare at the man until he was possessed by an excruciating need to fill the silence.

Spads stood behind the woman, his laptop set up on a small folding metal table, cables connected underneath the desk to the dead man's PC. You're old school, like that, aren't you, Spads. Paranoid enough to never trust a wireless connection when a hard line will do. Spads looked every bit the hacker, the geek's geek. He was still enjoying his freedom. Up to a couple of weeks ago, he had fully been expecting to be extradited to the USA for his over-familiarity with the Pentagon's firewalls. Spads wore a brown woolly hat – indoors, outdoors, hot or cold – which, he clearly believed, made him appear quite the rock star. Except that any musician's dresser would have advised against growing a scratchy beard so weak a cat could have licked it off. And a rock star might have been able to afford a service wash for the coffee-stained green sweatshirt proudly emblazoned with the slogan, U.S.S. Sulaco. There was a strange ugliness to Spads . . . an out-of-proportion face where none of his planes or bony symmetry seemed in balance. It wasn't quite the way a normal face should have appeared. Spads might have passed for Steve Buscemi's brother if you squinted at him.

'Well then,' Doyle announced to the office. 'I know what we're meant to think. Captain Perv Pants here was beating his bishop to Big Jubblies Dot Com, having a gasper with a dog collar around his neck when the desk he was standing on gave way.'

Spads spoke without looking up from his laptop. Doyle had to strain to hear him. The hacker's utterances frequently bordered on whispers. It's like working with Marlon sodding Brando.

'It was 4chanMovies.com.' The hacker often interpreted his colleagues' statements literally. Where he was positioned on the autistic spectrum, maybe that shouldn't have come as a surprise.

'What, you're a connoisseur? You going to tell me what MILF stands for, I always wanted to know?'

Spads muttered to himself and kept on working.

Doyle bent down by the desk. One of the desk's four legs had snapped away. He wore white Nitrile scene-of-crime gloves. He picked up the piece of broken wood and examined it. Not sawn or cut. Snapped, with a ridge of splinters where the leg had come away from the desk. Enough to unbalance the man having a five-finger shuffle on the desk, his neck in a noose attached to the chandelier above.

Standing up, Doyle tapped the desk's worn service. 'This desk looks out of place? Too small. His secretary next door has a bigger one for starters. You're telling me a man as rich as Simon didn't have an ego?'

'It's a mechanical desk,' said Thorson. 'Antique. Drawers rise out of its surface when you activate its gears. This piece once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte.'

'Is it expensive?' asked Spads, looking up from his screen.

'Even with its broken leg, you could swap a piece of furniture like this for a Dassault jet.'

Their tame hacker looked impressed. 'Cool.' Spads didn't have a whole lot of empathy for the rest of humanity. Hanging is a bad death, something to be feared. A deterrent. Not for nothing had it been the state's preferred method of dispatching criminals across so many centuries. Less than a month on the job with Doyle, and Spads wasn't phased in the slightest by Simon Werks's contorted features, the purple lips and the bulging eyes. Not like Doyle when he had joined the police force. Normal people always remember their first real corpse. His had been in the Tsim Sha Tsui district on the Kowloon Peninsula, a small bloodstained bundle abandoned in an alleyway, abandoned like a pile of old clothes. The victim stabbed to death over an argument with a local Triad boss. It felt an age since Doyle had experienced anything approaching revulsion at a lost life. That was what this job did to people. When it comes to death, we're all autistic now.

Thorson glanced up at Simon Werks' corpse, still twisting slowly in the noose. Even in death, his face had piercing eyes, as empty as the sky. The dead billionaire's face put Doyle in mind of the lead actor from 28 Days Later, but he struggled to bring up the performer's name. At Doyle's age, memory squirmed and protested as though he was performing an act of vivisection on his mind every time he tried to recall useless details.

'He owned two of these desks,' said Thorson. 'Napoleon, I mean, not Werks. A Brazilian industrialist picked up the piece's twin at auction a few years ago.'

Thorson knew a lot more about priceless antiques than her pay packet could justify. Perhaps the rumours about her are true? There hadn't been anything written down in Helen's personnel file. The scuttlebutt seemed unlikely, and Doyle wasn't going to ask first. Working for the Office was a little like signing up with the French Foreign Legion. When it comes to your past, "don't ask, don't tell" is the order of the day.

'So then, it looks like Werks' desk splintered under his weight, gave way. And then Master Bates here walks the wank to his doom.' Doyle tutted. His gaze settled on a security camera in the corner. One of three watching the palatial executive office. State-of-the-art digital security: high-resolution varifocal lens, motion detection; automatic day/night switch over; audio channel pick-up and enhanced infrared night vision. Doyle had already watched the camera footage. Simon Werks literally swinging from the chandelier, his bare legs folded under his bottom as he swung back and forth, his feet touching down on the desk's surface every few seconds. The rich man's grunting intermingling with the groans and slaps coming from the glowing flatscreen's built-in speakers. A bizarre pornographic circus act, Werks' naked feet hitting the desk more and infrequently as he attempted to starve his brain of oxygen while he built up to climax. Then there was the disastrous moment . . . Simon Werks' feet touching down, a terrible crunching sound as the desk collapsed. A surprised whoosh of air as the billionaire slipped, his hairy legs falling away without purchase. Werks' legs flailing at the air, the noose around his neck – available only from a very exclusive boutique in Lugano – suddenly transformed from sex toy to a deadly eighteenth century Tyburn gallows rope as he choked to death.

'All that money,' said Doyle, indicating the vast, expensive office, 'was Saucy Simon really into nonsense like this?'

'His secretary's already admitted buying the noose for him. She paid cash for it two years ago,' said Thorson.

'With what he was worth, the dirty sod could've paid every Hollywood tart nominated for Best Actress to cover him in chocolate sauce and beat it off his Hairy Harry with million pound bearer bonds. Any corporate money problems that we know about?'

'No, Werks was solid,' said Thorson. 'He's on his third fortune, and he never even spent the first two. Initial money came from the online world: his film aggregation and encryption systems helped pull the legacy movie business back from the brink. His second windfall was made from green energy technologies – backing a substantial chunk of the North African supergrid. Third pile came from aerospace, satellites and near-orbit tourism. Not a penny squandered or lost to bad investments. He still owns a majority interest in his company, ControlWerks. All its businesses are thriving and low geared. First mover advantage.'

'I love it when you do that bullshit business lingo. Saucy Simon owned the firm with his twin brother, though, right?'

'Correct. Curtis Werks is flying back from Durban where he was meant to be opening a desalination plant. The brother's as eager as the minister to keep this out of the media for the moment. Family business, now down to a single engine. The markets will spook. Werks stock is going to be slaughtered when the news of this gets out.'

Doyle thumped his chest and released a loud burp. 'Consider that my message of concern for the fund managers who're going to have to trade down their Bugattis for Lamborghinis after their next bonus. Spads, today would be good. I need to see what the building's security manager saw.'

'Werks' private camera files went into lockdown after the security manager viewed the footage,' said Spads. 'And they're sealed properly. You do know that Werks practically invented TSA-quality post-quantum zero-knowledge proof encryption, don't you?'

'Spads, the reason why you're standing here in a state of glorious freedom rather than wearing an orange boiler suit in a five-foot room-share with some serial-killing Texan cracker saving his soap rations just for you, is that Star Trek bollocks sounds like real words to you, rather than nyap-nyap-nyap. It means something in the mighty Spads-mind. So let's be about it, eh?'

There was a fierce knocking on the other side of the office door, too loud to be the last of the forensics team they had chased out. Thorson crossed over to unlock it. A tall bear of a man wearing a white, red and green rugby shirt bulldozed his way past Thorson. His receding black hairline running to silver looked like the follicly challenged equivalent of Doyle's irregular bowel movements. He doesn't seem happy to be here. Doyle wondered who had tipped him off. One of the security guards on the lobby downstairs, probably. Most of them were ex-job and liked to stay in with their Yard chums in case they ever needed police favours.

'What is Werks still doing up there?' demanded the trespasser. 'His body should've been moved to the secure pathology freezer.'

Doyle shrugged. 'I reckon it will be, officer . . .' He glanced quizzically at Thorson who was still holding the case notes folder.

'Chief Inspector Dourdan,' Thorson said.

'In charge of this investigation!' The man's words came out as a bellow.

'This morning you were,' said Doyle. 'This afternoon, I am. And it's not an investigation. It's a big radioactive puddle of piss water that needs clearing up.' He pulled out a little black leather wallet and passed it over to the officer.

'You're here for this, for a gasper, for a David-bloody-Carradine, for death by misadventure?' The policeman opened up Doyle's wallet, staring at its interior with incredulity. 'CO7? I've never even heard of any CO7. And what does it mean under the crown . . . diplomatic immunity? Is that a joke? What, you cut this out of the back of a packet of cornflakes and glue your photo on top of it? This warrant card doesn't give me word one. You're not Met, who're you with?'

'It stands for the Crap Orifice,' said Doyle, lifting the wallet back out of the furious policeman's hand. 'And this afternoon, we're crapping all over you. Check your voicemail back at the station. CTC's removed you from this case and transferred it to our jurisdiction. Goodbye, chief inspector.'

'Special Branch's yanked me out, is it? What, you spooks, or politicals?' The policeman stabbed an angry finger at Doyle. 'You stitch me up and think you're going to get one inch of co-operation out of the Met?'

Doyle shaped a telephone out of thumb and finger and stuck his hand by his ear. 'If I need a car towed, I'll be sure to speed-dial you, chief inspector. Enjoy the match at Twickenham.'

'Wanker!'

'That's just speaking ill of the dead.'

Thorson's eyes wrinkled in despair as Dourdan slammed the door behind him. She sighed and didn't bother to disguise her irritation with Doyle. 'Next time, why don't we place Spads in charge of police liaison?'

'Spads would only rub the chief inspector up the wrong way. This is as fun as it gets. How about it, Spads . . . just how much potential rammage is the Orifice up for with this one?'

'I'm past the encryption,' said the hacker. 'Come over quick. The file's going to lock itself under a fresh key as soon as it's played a second time.'

Doyle and Thorson sprinted behind the laptop, the light of the movie file washing over them. It lasted for two minutes and, much like the firm's head of security who had seen it play the first time, Doyle wished he could just call for help and then vanish to safety.

'Shit,' said Doyle. 'I mean really. Shit.'

'I don't suppose it's too late to ask the High Court to wave through my extradition to the States,' said Spads. 'Right now, being locked up inside the Florence Supermax is looking pretty good.'

'You still think we're not going to need her help,' asked Thorson.

'You tell me,' said Doyle. 'You're the one who worked with her. She was before my time.'

'You need her. We need her.'

'Get it done, then,' ordered Doyle, half a groan. 'Put the wheels in motion to spring her out.' He tapped the computer. 'Get me a copy of this film. A clean one, not the kind that ends with "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Spads." I want the file unencrypted for good.'

Thorson raised an eyebrow. 'Where are you going?'

'Back to the porcelain throne.' Doyle reached for the door behind the corpse. He had changed his mind about the bidet. As far as his long-suffering digestion was concerned, this was turning out to be a Three Flush Mystery. But then, the Office didn't get lumbered with any other sort.

CHAPTER TWO

Dancing With Niven

Psychiatric care has come on a little way since the days of Bedlam, Agatha mused. When Victorian gentlemen paid to bring their families into mental homes of a Sunday afternoon and poke sharp sticks through the cages. Handing over good money to be regaled by tales of prisoners' crimes of slaughter and sexual deviancy. Why, you could glance around my room with its thick comfortable rug and television and cosy oak reading table and you'd hardly know that you were inside a cell. Apart from the nearly blank wall that concealed the one-way mirror and the viewing room. And the straitjacket binding Agatha Witchly's arms, of course. Her jacket made it hard to dance with David Niven; the old actor's ghost wearing the same Royal Airforce uniform he had worn his 1946 hit, A Matter of Life and Death. The irony of his choice of clothing wasn't lost on Agatha. Niven had played a ghost in the film returning to make peace with his true love, played by the actress Kim Hunter. Agatha wasn't anyone's true love now. But if there is one thing I do know about ghosts, it is that you can't choose who will come to visit you, or when.

'Are they still watching?' Agatha asked Niven. The ghost considered his answer as held her, not too taut, not too loose, both of them turning to the tune of The Specials' Ghost Town playing on the television's radio setting.

'Yes,' Niven smiled, reassuringly. 'Three doctors and a nurse, the oldest one is dictating notes to his intern.'

'That would be Doctor Bishop,' Agatha whispered. She made sure she talked to the actor only when her back was turned towards the mirror's one-way viewing glass. Doctor Bishop could lip read, and she didn't want to feed his salacious case file on her anymore than she absolutely had to.

'The good doctor appears somewhat miffed,' said Niven.

'He should be.'

Niven raised an arm, thoughtfully brushing his neat moustache. 'He knows they are coming for you. Their car pulled up outside a couple of minutes ago. The doctor's had his staff ringing around the ministry all day trying to find someone with the authority to revoke your release order.'

'Good luck with that.' Agatha stopped whispering as Niven pirouetted her to face the large mirror across the room. The mirror showed no sign of David Niven. Just a silver-haired old lady of around sixty years swaying and turning in the centre of the room as if she were demented. Mirrors can never show the dead, only the living.

'When they arrive for you, tell them that you can tie the fanciest of nooses,' said Niven.

'Are you helping me?' Agatha's words came out softly, angled for Niven's ear alone.

'We like to try.'

'Thank you.'

'For the dance?'

'For letting me know they were on their way before they arrived.'

'We thought it was best.'

'Would it be presumptuous to ask you to hold me for a little longer?' Agatha asked. I haven't danced with anyone for a very long time.'

'I understand perfectly,' said Niven. 'My final dance was on the set of Better Late Than Never with Maggie Smith. At least, my last dance on this side.'

Doctor Bishop stood ramrod straight, his arms behind his back, his fingers digging into his palm in anger. He didn't deign to look around at the man and the woman as the pair entered.

'I'm Doyle,' said the man, 'this is Thorson.'

'Papers,' said the doctor. The words came out like escaping air from a grass snake.

'The Telegraph or The Sun?' Doyle tossed a sheaf of documents across to Bishop's intern, the doctor still too angry to directly address these two intruders into his realm. 'Save your time, chum, they're all in order.'

'In order? In order for THAT?' The doctor's hand jabbed across towards the one-way glass. Agatha Witchley turned slowly in the centre of the room, her head resting at an unnatural angle. Her rheumy blue eyes stared back at the glass with defiance written across every line of her forehead. 'Does Agatha Witchley look like she's ready to be released from the unit?'

'Is the straitjacket really necessary?' asked Thorson. She didn't bother to disguise her contempt for the unit's methods. 'At her age?'

'Last Tuesday,' spat the doctor, 'Witchley shattered the knee bone of one of my orderlies and dislocated the shoulder of a second staff member when they attempted to remove the pills she'd been hiding under her sofa's cushions. She did that with her bare feet, no shoes. With her straitjacket on!'

'You've seen the release papers,' said Doyle. 'Now, chuck me the keys to her nut-shirt, Doctor Mengele. We'll be taking tea and biscuits with the old girl before she leaves with us.'

'Has anyone told the Israeli Embassy she's being released?' demanded the doctor.

Doyle raised an eyebrow.

'That's why she was admitted to us, man,' spat the doctor. 'Haven't you fools even read her case notes? She was dragged from the Israeli Prime Minister's jet on the tarmac of Heathrow after she attacked his bodyguards. She was planning to kidnap him and take him to The Hague for war crimes. She's a stalker, psychotic . . . devious, violent, displaying every sign of extreme paranoia. For crying out loud, she believes she can talk to John Lennon and Julius Caesar. She suffers from severe compulsive disorders. Twelve months of treatment in the unit and I haven't even made a dent on her state of mind.'

Doyle pointed to a dispensary in the room's corner. 'The code for her room and the keys to her nut-shirt, or I'll take that syringe and find a new home for it up your hairy, dark porcelain-pincher.'

'If I can't find anybody inside the ministry willing to rescind her release from the unit, I'll telephone the Israeli Embassy and have their lawyers slap an injunction against all of you,' warned the doctor.

'Thank you for your concern, doctor,' said Thorson. 'We will be handling her case from here.'

When Doyle and Thorson entered the secure unit, Agatha was no longer spinning around in the middle of the carpet. The old lady waited for them, sitting calmly on her sofa. She was pouring three cups of tea with her feet, using her toes to hold the teapot as if an Indian faker had trained her in his arts.

'Hello, Witchley. I'm Gary Doyle. I believe you know my colleague here, Helen Thorson.'

Indeed I do. So, a man. Is the Office under new management? 'Sit down, dearie.' She indicated the two armchairs opposite. There was a huskiness to her voice, deep and sensual, a tone that looked to have taken Doyle by surprise. 'Hello, Helen. If you've got the keys to my little fashion accessory here, you might do me the favour of releasing me now.' She nodded down towards her straitjacket and added, 'Then I might be able to pass you a chocolate hobnob, without the delicate scent of my toes intruding.'

Doyle gazed appraisingly at Agatha. He appeared to be in his early fifties, the slightly brutish features of a boxer with acne-scarred cheeks and black hair turning to silver at the sides – a man who filled his Crombie coat with six brutal feet of well-aged muscle. It isn't a kind face, but it might be a just one.

'What makes you think I've come to release you from this nut-house, love?' he asked.

'I don't receive many visitors here. You have the whiff of the Office about you, also, Mister Doyle. And you appear far too sane to be a psychiatrist.'

Thorson looked at the table. 'Three cups laid out ready. Lucky guess?'

I never keep a man guessing – he's sure to find the answer somewhere else. Agatha eased back in the sofa, pale blue eyes switching between her visitors. She passed Doyle his cup clutched between the toes of her foot. 'You, I would say, are a quarter Chinese, on your grandmother's side. Born in Essex. Service with the Royal Hong Kong police force. Repatriated after the island was handed back to the communist party. Returned to the UK and joined the police, probably at too junior a position for your experience. Later offered a position in the Office by a superior who felt threatened by you and only too glad to see you transferred out from under his or her feet.'

'Thank you, Michel-de-bloody-Nostradamus,' said Doyle.

'Don't mind me, dearie,' said Agatha. 'I'm just a little miffed that Margaret didn't come here personally to spring me out of the unit.'

'The old girl retired,' said Doyle.' Last year. She's sitting in the House of Lords now as Baroness Rosalinda of Trumpton or some old bollocks. I'm the new head of section.'

'She must've done something right, then,' said Agatha. Shittysticks, I do hope it wasn't leaving me here to rot.

'All right then,' said Doyle. 'Good enough. Get Miss Marple here out of her nut jacket.'

Agatha shook her head as Thorson produced the key, twisting and writhing for the minute it took the straitjacket to fall off.

Doyle kicked the jacket into the corner. 'If you could do that, why not take it off before we arrived?'

'The doctor would have only sent more orderlies in to try to put it back on again,' explained Agatha. 'I don't enjoy hospitalising the staff here. Some of them are nice enough. They've got a job to do, after all. Quite a few of the patients on the premises actually do have mental health issues.'

'More than a bloody few,' said Doyle. He passed Agatha a bag containing the exact same clothes she had been admitted with.

'It'll be nice to be able to put something on that doesn't need to be tied at the back,' said Agatha, tugging at the blue hospital gown hanging from her diminutive frame.

'Of course, you know they would have allowed you to wear your own clothes for good behaviour?' said Thorson.

'Oh bobbins,' smiled Agatha. 'There was never much chance of that, was there?' She fixed Thorson with a steely glare. 'Am I needed, Helen?'

Doyle answered for the woman. 'Enough for the minister to scrawl his signature on the order ending your tea break inside this loony bin.'

'Excellent, excellent. Then you've mastered the arrangement between the Office and the government, Mister Doyle. New in Margaret's boots or no.'

'The arrangement?'

'You are passed the jobs no one in their right mind would wish to take on. In return, you can ask for as much rope, in as many different varieties as you please, to hang yourself.'

Doyle's eyes narrowed.

'Don't worry, dearie. I can tie the fanciest of nooses.'

Just as Niven had said, using the phrase seemed to throw Doyle's composure for a second.

'Unless you want to save me a lot of arse-ache and tell me the name of the murderer now, love, how about you get changed and we run you home before Doctor Mengele out there finds a way to keep you locked in his dungeon?'

Agatha shuffled off to the tiny bathroom, the bundle of her clothes under her arm held as tight as an aid parcel by a refugee. Her clothes were in a transparent bag, air vacuum-removed to save space, making a tiny crumpled brick. Her handbag was in a separately sealed packet. Yes, this is what I was wearing when I was admitted. A musty smell emerged as she broke the seal; what you expected after garments had been stored unlaundered for over a year. But at least they're mine. Agatha removed the clothes one by one, whip-cracking the garments across the basin, working out the creases. Unsealing her handbag, she checked its contents. Her Mont Blanc pen was there. So was the little steel hole punch, custom made with a dial on top to vary the shape of the holes it could make. Even her purse and money. The mental unit's clerks are growing boringly honest. Agatha should have felt elation at being free, instead she felt a tingle of apprehension. Why is that, I wonder? She stared in the mirror. Behind her, sitting on the wet-room's shelf was Groucho Marx, his eyebrows moving up and down as if he was attempting to do press-ups with his forehead.

'Am I doing the right thing, Groucho? What do you think of my Office colleagues' proposal?'

'Why, I'd say it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.' He removed the cigar he was smoking and twirled it between his fingers. She could almost taste the smooth flavour as its delicate aroma filled her nose. That was one thing she was looking forward to, smoking her treasured stock of Vegas Robainas again. There is, she suspected, a method to the way these ghosts appear to me. Like Tarot cards. A hidden significance to the order of their appearance. If only she could puzzle the order out. But who is Groucho in the suite of my haunting? The Hanged Man or The Chariot? Agatha dropped the hospital gown to the wet-rooms' floor and began to pull on her clothes. The silk blouse, then the berry-coloured corduroy trousers, finishing with her favourite cable-knit lambswool cardigan.

'I think I shall have to take my chances, Groucho. I have been hovering between the worlds myself, vacationing inside the unit. I need to swallow my principles and accept Mister Doyle's offer. It is time to see what's been going on outside in the real world.'

'Those are my principles, too,' said Groucho. 'If you don't like them, I have others.'

He had vanished by the time she turned around, which was very like him. Opening the door fully dressed, Agatha faced her two liberators. Salvation always comes at a cost.

'I'm ready to go. You can take me to prison now.'

CHAPTER THREE

Mrs Witchley's Other Prison

There was peacefulness about the Tower of London out of hours, a calm clinging to it like pollution from the cars crawling past outside. The tranquillity of calling the Tower home after it was shut to tourists during the evening. Before five-thirty when the gates closed, Agatha Witchley often enjoyed drifting among the crowds of tourists. A single snowflake lost among a storm. Nobody dreamed of asking the unimposing old lady the way to the Queen's Stairs or to explain the history of the Lieutenant's Lodgings. She was indistinguishable from one of them. A visiting American, German, Australian. After the gates shut, the usual deep silence fell upon the Inner Ward and galleries and gardens and keeps. A quiet broken only by the rare scarlet and blue flash of a passing yeoman warder or one of their family living inside the fortress. Agatha's house nestled in among theirs. A tiny, snug terraced dwelling at the end of the Outer Ward, running along the moat-facing side of Tower Green. Theirs was a small colony living inside the ancient prison's historic confines; a community in which Mrs Witchley was always destined to be an outsider. The staff never had much to say to me. Not a Non-Com, not one of the members of the Sovereign's Bodyguard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary – the only people who should have been allowed to claim service and shelter inside the Tower. But if their shunning of Agatha was an attempt at ostracism, it was one that she was glad of. Swapping war stories and tales of soldiers' comraderies in third world policing actions held little interest for her. Living in the Tower offered Agatha security and tranquillity, and that was everything that mattered to her.

North of the river lay the City of London, quiet and empty after its office workers had departed for their houses in the Shires and flats in the Docklands. Their glass palaces – Gherkins and Shards and Pinnacles – haunted by poorly paid Australians behind the security desks of expensive atriums, wearing starched blue uniforms designed to resemble police tunics, fingers tracing over phone screens. Waiting for timers to rouse them every few hours for a quick walkabout of empty floor after empty floor. For Agatha, their atriums were illuminated tableaus for her late-night strolls across the Square Mile's empty streets. Overtaken only by black cabs heading away from the throb of entertainment around Leicester Square, bringing home late night lawyers and consultants and IT staff – all the bottomfeeders that feasted on the dead flesh of derivative traders' billions. How pleasant it would be to work as a night watchman in one of those steel and glass pyramids, Agatha marvelled. Striding through the empty arteries of power. Devoid of all the human passions that surged across such offices during the day. The tedious triviality of minding trillions in hot-flows; stripped of stress and meaning by the emptiness of its stage. A ghost among the living. It must be how the phantoms that come to me feel.

Agatha knocked on the front door of her small terraced house, snugly nestled against the Tower's outer wall, her tapping as much a matter of practicality as a courtesy. She didn't have her keys with her. The other person inside her home knew she was coming. Agatha's two liberators from the Office had called ahead. She had insisted on it, otherwise Bouche might not believe it was really her. While many might disapprove of the Frenchman's caution, Agatha gently cultivated it. Frequently, Vincent Bouche's suspicious nature was all that had separated the two of them from joining the company of ghosts. Bouche opened the door, a bear-built man of late middle age with suspicious yet vulnerable eyes, a beard that was more stubble than whiskers. He ran a hand through his dark unwashed hair. 'It is you, madame?'

'So it seems. It hasn't been that long, has it, Vincent?' asked Agatha, stepping over the threshold.

An excited snorting sounded from behind the living room door. Saucisses had recognized her voice, the so-called miniature pig the two of them kept as a pet, scratching at the wood.

'You haven't eaten Saucisses yet then?'

'One day, madame. Filthy swine. I forgot to give him the breakfast yesterday. He eats my sock, left one only. Just to show me. Not the right sock. Only the left.'

It was a wonder their neighbours hadn't rustled Saucisses from their small garden and practised a little amateur abattoir-craft on the pig. Vincent Bouche was even less popular with the Beefeaters than Mrs Witchley. Agatha was unlike enough from the Yeoman Warders that they could write her presence off as an aberration, the Queen's charlady, as they jokingly referred to her. But Bouche resembled the Tower's staff . . . an ex-solider, with decades of service in the French Foreign Legion, the Légion étrangère. Able to match them in war stories of corpses and bullets and friend's bodyparts jokingly concealed in mess tins. They might laughingly call Vincent the Mighty Bouche, but the Frenchman was close enough to them for his trespass here to be deeply resented. Agatha stared down the narrow corridor of the hallway. Everything is exactly the same, as if I had never been away. Her Thomas Brigg umbrella with its whangee bamboo handle poking out of her elephant stand, the slightly wonky photograph of Paris in the sixties by Jerry Schatzberg, the threadbare green carpets that hadn't been changed by the Crown Estate for as long as she had lived here. Bouche followed Agatha to the boot room. It seemed perverse in a house so compact to have a room solely dedicated to hanging up your jacket and storing your boots, but the quarters were meant to billet Yeoman Warders, with a Beefeater's uniform almost as important as the man.

'The head doctors, they phone me to come in and talk to them after they took you. I say no. If I come in, it is to snap their necks and break you out.'

'Having you locked up in an observation cell next door to me at Stick Hill or wouldn't have helped either of us.'

'C'est des conneries. I tell the scum at the Office. You do their shit; they are all smiles and happiness. You are caught doing your own, and their loyalty, it runs out like a dry riverbed. They revoke your diplomatic immunity, like this.' He clicked his fingers.

'Well, I'm out now. I have a feeling our boat is about to be refloated once more.'

'Why should we help them, eh? Let them feast on their ignorance. We stay here, rest of the world can go phoottt.'

'I will be travelling to the Monument tomorrow,' said Agatha. 'We'll see what's to do, then.'

Bouche shrugged in his particularly Gallic way as Agatha climbed the narrow staircase towards her bedroom. 'I am cooking navarin in the back.'

'That, I certainly have missed,' said Agatha. 'Along with you, old friend. I could always have left Stick Hill, you know. Under my own steam. But sometimes it's good to take time out to be alone with your thoughts.'

'Alone? To be alone, yes, you walk the streets at night. As quiet as it is here, that is healthy. But at Stick Hill they give you the drugs and the electrical shocks.'

'Drugs, frequently. The shocks, only once,' smiled Agatha. And I only had to drown one doctor and two orderlies to put them off their bathing routine.

Upstairs, the room was also exactly as she had remembered it. Bouche had attended to the bedroom in her absence, dusting and vacuuming it. The chamber had the air of a shrine. The timeless, hermetic spotlessness of a room that had been a road-death's child's. Or a plane crash. She opened the top drawer on her chest. The photo was still there, taken in the last century. Her husband Sylvester, her two boys – Harry and Carl. She had taken the picture in the snow outside Liverpool, her sons swaddled in blue overcoats and bobble-top hats that gave them the look of Christmas gnomes. Sylvester was bending over behind them, squeezing his six-foot frame into the picture. His face ruddy and purple from the cold, a slight mist fogging from his mouth; the exertions of the snowball fight a few minutes before she had snapped the photo. The colours on the Polaroid paper seemed faded and washed out compared to modern digital photography. That was how she remembered the world of long ago. Faded and Technicolor. A happier age. Oh my boys, all my boys. She closed the drawer, sealing her family in the cold; locked and frozen, just as they had been caught in her memories.

The drawer next to the photo frame was the one with her Vegas Robaina cigars. Almost impossible to buy in Europe. She opened the drawer, removed the box and took out a cigar, lifting up the cigar cutter. A discrete present from Buckingham Palace after she refused a second-rate honour many years ago. The cigar cutter was her very own Aladdin's lamp to burnish. The only ghost she could summon at will, rather than trusting to the capricious afterworld to supply her with what was needed . . . the lamp's previous owner. Agatha felt his presence as she opened the portico doors at the front of the room, a small balcony with a view of the Bell Tower and the Queen's House. She sliced the cigar's closed head off and lit it. To her right, the dark weight of the Thames slid past inexorably, snaking across the capital.

'Mrs Witchley,' rumbled the ghost's voice behind her. 'Your vacation has been cut short, I see.'

'Yes, Winnie,' said Agatha. She sensed him draw closer to her back.

'Ah, Tower Bridge. The grand old crossing still stands.'

'As does England.'

There was a harumph of approval. A plane passed overhead, the engines of a jet taxiing down towards City Airport, collision lights flickering as though the aircraft was a passing UFO.

'Mister Whittle's engines are still in use, I see. Noisy, smelly things.'

'They are trying to develop electric engines for aircraft, now,' said Agatha. 'What's left to frack won't last many more decades. They even have a name for the problem. Peak oil.'

'Strange days, Mrs Witchley.'

'Strange days, indeed.' Agatha puffed out a ring of smoke into the cold evening air, watching it dissipate. A Yeoman Warder stood on a balcony at the end of the terrace, another mote of smoke climbing upwards. Ignoring her presence, of course, not even going to pass comment on her absence after so much time. 'Things aren't normal, are they Winnie? I can feel it in my bones. An ache that shouldn't be there.'

'Normal,' the ghost's voice reverberated as if he chewed the word. 'A pedestrian concept. I met with very little that was normal during my life. Matters run to the humdrum in the absence of strife. What was there to do then, doing the quiet days?'

'Build garden walls?' said Agatha.

'I fear, Mrs Witchley, that for you the time to lay bricks has passed. Some people are put on this Earth to meet strife, others to cause it. Great events seek us out. That is always the way, whether you are a Wellington, a Cromwell or a Marlborough.'

'I'm not such a person, said Agatha. 'Few know my name. I'll never be remembered.'

'They cannot be allowed to,' rumbled the voice. 'But we know.'

Is that a comfort? A small one, perhaps. 'How bad is it, this time?'

'Worse than anyone suspects, dear lady.'

'What is at risk?'

'Far too much, I am afraid.'

Agatha drew on the Vegas Robaina, feeling the sweet smoke fill her lungs. 'And it is all down to me again, I suppose.'

'That is the nub of the issue. There is no one else quite like you, Mrs Witchley.'

'My boys were,' said Agatha. 'And my husband.'

The ghost said nothing, but then he didn't need to. Her family was no longer here. Only Agatha remained. Lucky me. 'Well then. It's a good thing I have you in my corner. And Groucho Marx of course. What would I do without Groucho?' Agatha sniffed the air. She smelt the lamb and garlic wafting from the kitchen's rooftop ventilator fan. Bouche's stew. It reminded her how long it had been since she had eaten something that hadn't been listed on a mental institution menu; where the three main food groups were Salty, Watery, and Overboiled. But I have work to do first.

Agatha pulled a chair out onto the balcony and settled down to read the case notes given to her by Gary Doyle. The price of her readmission to the Office. There was a little bulge inside. A memory stick shoved into the folder's pocket.

Winston Churchill's form had dissipated by the time she went back inside her bedroom. Much like cigar smoke in the evening air.

***

Agatha finished explaining the details from the Office's case notes for Bouche's benefit as she spooned up her navarin. She relished the Frenchman's alchemy of carrots, sliced potato, lamb and parsnips dissolving in her mouth. The rich stew was nearly enough to banish the tedious memories of a year of hospital food. Not quite, but nearly. Nobody could slice vegetables quite as thin with a knife as Bouche could. Nobody could throw one as proficiently, either.

'A murdered rich American,' said Bouche. 'I prefer the old days. When Bulgarians had poison in their umbrellas and Russians had communism in their hearts.'

'If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future,' said Agatha. 'Now who was it who told me that?'

'It was not me,' said Bouche. 'So, the Office says this rich man, this Simon Werks, was assassinated? But he is found hanging with his trousers on the floor and the sex toy around his throat. How is this murder?'

'I dare say I will find out tomorrow when I visit the Office at the Firehall.'

Bouche speared a piece of celery from the autumn-coloured contents of his plate. 'You listen to the dead too much. Les morts. It is time you listen to the living. We should not again involve ourselves in the affairs of the Office.'

'You don't have to help this time, Vincent. It would appear my assistance in this affair is the price of my freedom.'

'I do not need the licence of such pushers of pens to permit me my freedom, those goblins in their stone lair. You do not either. It is not just the dead who can become ghosts. We disappear. They will not find us. Who do they have to catch us? Children. If the babies cannot find us listed on Google, they give up and go back home.'

'The old don't like change,' said Agatha.

'A white straightjacket without sleeves, too tight, is also a change. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. We can escape to France.' Vincent seemed to consider the idea, then rejected it. 'Non. France is as bad as here these days. Algeria, still I have friends in Algeria. We shall drink mint tea and eat sweet makroudh in Algiers. The Casbah swallows everything.'

'I'm too much of a mouthful for it. Besides, I told Helen I would help the Office with their murder.'

'Her? Then you break your word to rob a thief. Who cares? A billionaire is dead, maybe by the hands of his enemies. So what? All rich, powerful men have enemies. This case is not for the cause. Nobody believes in the cause anymore. The best we have is religion and only Arabs believe in killing for heaven these days. The war over ideas is finished. The posters of Che Guevara have been rolled away. All we have left to kill each for is the money. Money and the plastic merde it can buy.'

'Winston seems to think otherwise.'

'Les morts,' he spat. 'Their words are dead too. You want to know who killed this billionaire? Everyone with a dollar in their pocket. We all killed him. Yes . . . à chaque jour suffit sa peine. Because their kind kills us. With their streets with each shop the same as the next. With their burgers that look like flattened turds and their phones the size of lighters that are thrown away every year for the better, shinier toys. With all the comrades' jobs that they send to Asia except their own. There are a billion reasons Monsieur Simon Werks had to die, all with the faces of dead presidents' printed on them. Tell the Office to raid his safe deposit box in Bern. They will find the killers inside his vault. Already jailed.'

'As I said, you really don't have to help me with this murder.'

'Pah.' He stabbed the air with his fork. 'Who else is there is to help Madame Agatha Witchley? All the little children at the Office? Helen Thorson? The police? The secret intelligence service of the British?' He put on a weak, trembling voice. 'Will shooting criminal demonstrate lack of empathy or respect? Let me first check health and safety laws for definition of unintended collateral damage.' Bouche banged the table, making his plate jump. 'No, direct action is always the best. Direct action where direct action is needed.'

'This calls for a more subtle approach.'

'Of course you will need my help. Such a man,' said Bouche. 'The problem will not be finding out who wants this Simon Werks dead. It will be eliminating the few who wanted him kept alive.'

'Perhaps, we shall see. Did you know Margaret has retired? There's an ex-policeman in charge of the section now. A Mister Gary Doyle. A large, crude fellow. Rather old school in his methods, I suspect, although not quite as old school as you or I.'

'Les flics. But is he a professional? Their Office is a graveyard. That is why it calls to you and your phantoms. It is filled with those whose careers have died, thrown only cases that cannot be solved. Cases that even if you do solve, will bring you nothing but a stream of warm piss from above. I was in the legion, yes. I know the stench of the suicide squad. I smell this thing at the Office.'

'Well, at the very least, I will be in the charge of someone other than psychiatric doctors.'

Bouche picked up one of the knives off the table and flung at it the ceiling's exposed beams, the length of stainless steel sinking deep and left quivering in the wood. 'If it is assassination, I will help you pin down the leads.'

CHAPTER FOUR

The Firehall

Doyle parked his car in Pudding Lane, only just remembering to leave the small blue oblong of the parking permit visible on his dashboard. Doyle's 1969 Chevrolet Nova was always getting clamped, minor infractions against parking restrictions so arcane you needed to be a lawyer to comprehend their complexity. That is the problem with driving a classic car . . . wardens seem to go out of their way to target me, You'd think the enforcement team are playing muscle car bingo between themselves. He had caught a traffic warden once, shaking his car, trying to dislodge the permit from the dashboard and send it sliding back, where the warden could take a photograph of the permit illegally obscured by a road tax sticker. Doyle had taken a video of the warden doing the dirty deed on his mobile phone, using it to blackmail the man into silence over the slapping that had followed. In the Royal Hong Kong Police Force you learned how to hurt someone without leaving bruises. Not that the island's current set of masters cared anything about such niceties. There aren't enhanced interrogation techniques in Hong Kong anymore. Only interrogation techniques. One-size-fits-all. Doyle was the last of a dying breed. And he had been exiled to the Office to die quietly . . . occasionally, even usefully. He got out of the car and pulled his coat on. The days were getting colder as winter approached. As he slipped the car keys into his pocket, he noticed a tiny triangle of fabric missing at the bottom of his green wax-coated coat, pea-sized, as if someone had shot at him with a weird-shaped pellet and he had failed to register the hit. Doyle sighed. If that's the boy with his scissors again, he can kiss goodbye to his electronic time this weekend. It was only the day before that Doyle's son had scattered a dozen spherical toys at the top of the stairs, little plastic things that transformed into robots with Korean names when you tapped them with a magnet. It was like the roller-skate gag from the children's shows all over again, with Doyle playing the long-suffering part of TV dad.

Ahead, the towering rise of the Monument to the Great Fire of London waited, throwing him into shade. Two hundred feet of Portland stone spearing up towards a gunmetal sky; its Doric column topped by a gold-leafed orb above the viewing platform. The view from the top of the column had been better once. St. Paul's and the Thames and the winding streets filled with hansom cabs. Now what does it give out on? Mirrored needles of glass, a Shard set against the heavens, the weary shuffle of Regulatory Reporting Accountants and Asset Transfer Associates crossing London Bridge. The first of the day's tourists were yet to appear in the square, Chinese salarymen and Brazilian steelworkers and Midwest farmers from North Dakota, visitors who would patiently circle the small square in expectant spirals, queuing in Monument's shadow.

It was ironic, really. The column had originally been built as an astronomical viewing platform, not a tourist attraction. But the clatter of carts and the mob's constant vibrations had rendered the delicate instruments of seventeenth century astronomy blind as soon as it was completed. So instead, London filled the spire with itself. With humanity. And it had continued doing so for three hundred years. With no lift and hundreds of steps to climb on foot, the attraction's queues had diminished over time. Visitors chose the London Eye just down the river and the Shard's viewing level opposite, the skyscraper able to effortlessly lift tourists sixty times higher than the Monument's elevation. Much like Doyle, the Monument was a relic from a less sophisticated age. But unlike Doyle, tourists only ever got to ascend the Monument's steps, never descending down the spiral pit concealed beneath. While the scientist Robert Hood had built the Monument's exterior, it was Sir Christopher Wren who had secretly designed what lay below the column. The project had been a quid pro quo for King Charles II's commission for a new London . . . one that was never constructed, despite most of the original city having been burnt to the ground during the Great Fire of London. Those who worked below jokingly spoke of their workplace as the world's first panic room. The staff operating there still referred to the buried chambers by Wren's original non-de-plume, the Firehall. Originally, Wren's series of connected underground vaults had been intended as a concealed refuge and strongroom for the Stuart dynasty and their wealth, an insurance against the Restoration failing and falling to a resurgent Commonwealth. As the centuries passed, the concealed lair went on to fulfil similar functions. During the Hanoverian era, the underground palace had been fitted out as an Arabian boudoir and used for King George II's secret assignations. Wellington had packed the Firehall full of rifles and gunpowder, planning to use it to co-ordinate a London militia of propertied gentlemen if the 1830's revolutions and agitations spread from the continent to Britain. Finally, Lord Palmerston had passed the vaults to the Circumlocution Office, where the dark, windowless arcades had been swapped between the Office's various sections supporting the great Empire's commerce, industry, empire and security. And with the Office, ownership had stayed, fulfilling that celebrated organ of state's purposes. Stuffed with the British Museum's artworks and Egyptian sarcophagi during the First World War's zeppelin raids. A secret bunker for London's resistance movement during World War Two – one thankfully never called to service, hidden and trembling during the years of the Luftwaffe's furious bombardment, the dust from its arched buttresses barely dislodged by V1 and V2 rockets. Unable to be effectively retrofitted to survive nuclear assault and radiation poisoning in the fifties, the Firehall had been linked to the Cold War's secret underground tube network, a covert train line connecting it into the hidden bunker complexes beneath the many civil service buildings, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace . . . the capital's subterranean centres that went by such classified names as Pindar, Q-Whitehall and Scheme 3245. And now, like some abandoned train stop, Sir Christopher Wren's hidden palace was still in service with the Office. A solitary Bombardier transit-carriage rumbled through the Firehall's underground platform concourse at the end of each month, carrying confidential paperwork for Section Six of the Circumlocution Office to archive, shred or burn.

Doyle knocked on the metal door set in the Monument's base and the ticket collector let him inside before opening the round metal mesh cover to the old empty laboratory downstairs. Once inside the empty stone chamber, Doyle triggered its concealed door and descended the set of corkscrewing stairs that had been revealed. Blue lighting strips screwed into the walls flickered every time a tube train rattled by on the District Line. The spiralling stairs eventually passed into a vault, a smaller version of the crypt at St Paul's cathedral. No doubt it had felt more like a church before the government's last carbon initiative had seen the chamber's ancient lamps stripped out and replaced with LED lights. Up-lighters gave the space the feel of a not particularly successful nightclub, as though one of the arches under a railway line had reluctantly been granted a drinks license. It was hot, always coal mine-febrile, so deep below the surface. The operating heat from the computer rooms and furnace chambers here frequently overwhelmed their air conditioning vents.

Mrs Rogers sat behind the reception desk at Passport Control, the ponytail of her long dreadlocks tied back by a crunchy. This morning she wore a brown knitted jumper just slightly lighter than the hue of her skin, her neck circled by a scarf in warm brown and orange Cashmere. The red fingernails of her hand balanced a phone in one hand and a milk bottle in the other. Her son, Kendon, was lodged in the baby carrier strapped across her front. She buzzed Doyle through the rotary security turnstile, waving him in as she grumbled into a wireless earpiece, giving him a thumbs-up as he deposited a bag of milk on the desk for the fridge next to her swivel chair. The milk was in green biodegradable packaging; so thin it squirmed in Doyle's hand like a fowl trying to escape the abattoir's electrified knife. Mrs Rogers' baby sling didn't accessorise her shoulder holster, locking an upside down .45 in place; so close her little baby might lurch across and give its trigger a curious tug. Mamma with a gun. Don't mess with the mamma. An angry diminutive whine sounded from the phone in the pocket of Doyle's jacket as the Office's all-encompassing jamming signal severed the phone's connection. It shouldn't work this deep down anyway, except for the hotspots of connectivity from the Tube tunnels running above. But the Office took no chances. Much like a little subterranean Amish community, the tiny state-within-a-state didn't really do the twenty-first century, not the way everyone else did. It's one of the saving graces of exile down here. There were lakes deep underground where evolution had slowly ground away at the lizards and insects living below, producing legions of blind, albino curiosities. As Doyle walked through the stone corridors, he noted many of the same forces at work in the Circumlocution Office. Locked away down here without natural light, out of sight and mind, those that laboured in the vaults had abandoned all the usual strictures and customs of work enforced on staff on the government's payroll. To be dispatched down to the Firehall, you had to be considered unemployable everywhere else to start with. Mean of habit. Bent in mind. Eccentric in spirit. What does that say about me? A suit or tie down here would appear as alien as a flash of crimson skin pigmentation in a cavern's blind newts. Many of the computer technicians attending the vaults' server rooms were naturists. They could be seen travelling through the passages on little two-wheeled Mexican Segway knockoffs, au naturel. Tattoos and piercings their only ornament: the pasty-skinned inheritors of humanity's technological legacy. Doyle had even seen staff smoking down in the Firehall, foul-smelling Romanian brands smuggled over on the Channel Tunnel. Rites of human sacrifice would not have seemed more outlandish in the modern day. Smoking indoors. Now, there's sedition for you. The sartorial best you could hope for from the staff pushing postal trolleys filled with beyond-secret documents were thrash metal T-shirts, heads bobbing to the beat on coin-sized music players' wireless headphones. Even Doyle, as straight a worker as could be found in the Firewall, usually kicked off his shoes and spent the rest of his day pacing the subterranean palace in his slippers. It's another realm, down inside the Firewall. Quite literally. The territory had been given independent status as a British Crown Dependency when Charles Dickens became head of the Circumlocution Office, the cunning old rascal wangling royal consent after he'd faked his death in 1870. The miles of passages and vaults beneath London were independent of such inconveniences as the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the oversight of the Police Complaints Commission, the Health and Safety directives, the Geneva Convention and all similar vexations. That suits me just fine. Doyle enjoyed being the law almost as much as he disliked being bound by it. And the fact that his salary was paid as tax-free as if he were working in Saudi Arabia was quite literally an added bonus.

Doyle ducked under an archway designed for the height of courtiers fed by a seventeenth-century diet. He passed into the chamber he had staked out as his section's own. Entering at the top of stone steps that led to the chamber's floor, the stairs were choked by piles of paper-stuffed cardboard folders lashed together with tight plastic straps. Doyle leant over the balcony and called down to Spads and Thorson, their desks lost among the clutter scattered across the vault. 'Who's dumped this crap up here?'

'Section Six,' said Thorson. 'The furnaces are offline and they're backing up.'

'Isn't that a pip. Tell them to get their ovens fixed,' growled Doyle. 'Or I'll feed a ream to the next paper pusher who sticks their pencil-neck inside here.'

Thorson shrugged behind her monitor. 'It's not the furnace that's broken. They've blown their carbon allowance for the week.'

Doyle clumped down the stairs, picking his way through the detris of filing. 'Carbon allowance? We're the Papal State of Perished Paperwork. You tell me how global warming applies to us?'

'Our smoke's vented above St. George's Lane. The local council picks up the carbs for any pollution we emit.'

'God give me strength. Where is Miss Marple?'

'On her way,' said Thorson. 'She's coming in via her vet's. She has to drop off her pig for its annual check-up.'

'Why did I even ask? Spads, you got Saucy Simon's last MPEG and Testament unencrypted yet for me?'

'I cracked it last night,' said the hacker, clearly pleased with himself. Sleep was an optional extra in his trade. 'Only after turning a couple of bot-nets in Mumbai. I tapped them for the additional processing power.'

Doyle picked his way through the clutter. Not the Circumlocution Office's wayward filing this time. The Firewall was still used as a storage annex of the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. Frequently, Doyle's chamber appeared less like a place of work and more like a baronial hall waiting for a spring-clean by the National Trust. Thomas Lawrence oil paintings, medieval axes, rusty halberds and old flintlock rifles hung on the vault's walls alongside modern video screens and a glass-framed set of instructions from the 1970s on what to do in the event of a biochemical attack.

'Outstanding. You can use the Gameboy at lunchtime.'

'What's a Gameboy?'

'Shit, I'm not that old, am I? And you're not that young.' Doyle hung his jacket on the handlebars of a penny-farthing leaning against the wall and flourished the folder he had been leafing through in bed the night before. Agatha Witchley's name was stencilled in italics across its plain manila cover. 'You want to tell me how Witchley ever passed positive vetting?' growled Doyle. 'I've disappointed my teachers with essays longer than this.'

'What you see is all we've got,' said Thorson, as though that explained everything.

'You worked with the old girl for years,' said Doyle, flicking through the meagre handful of pages wedged between the folder's cover. 'We've never found out more than this about where she's from, who she is?'

Thorson shook her head. 'Agatha claims memory loss if you push her. It's possible. All we know for sure is that she was the only survivor of Flight I-267 from Rio de Janeiro to Berlin, via Madrid. Last century, of course. The PLO was thought to be behind the luggage bomb that destroyed her plane, although they never officially claimed responsibility. Her husband and two sons were on the same flight. Agatha survived treading water for two days before an Italian navy destroyer picked her up. That's got to affect you.'

'And her passport was burnt up in the explosion, very convenient.'

'We know that someone with her name was listed on the plane's passenger list. No record of her exists before that in any country with archives we have access to. No marriage or birth certificate, not for an Agatha Witchley or her husband and children.'

'Border control was old school back in those days,' chipped in Spads. 'I wouldn't want to try and run what they ran without computers.' Doyle could tell from Spads voice that the hacker wished he'd been in there, first on the ground to computerise all the airlines' paperwork. He'd been like a dog with a bone when he first saw what the Circumlocution Office had to offer someone with his talents. A whole hidden state's worth of digital filing systems and antiquated databases. Obfuscation through complexity, convolution through perplexity, and bureaucracy will set you free. Handing the U.S. extradition authorities a fake death certificate for a prison drug overdose that never happened, getting the FBI off Spads' case, that had just been the icing on the cake for the section's tame hacker.

'I do recall being there, Spads,' said Doyle. Yeah, I'm old enough for that. When the Berlin Wall was something you got shot for trying to cross, not a piece of acrylic-mounted builders rubble on a Potsdamer Platz tourist stand mixed in with models of the Brandenburg Gate.

'I always got the impression that our previous governor knew more about Agatha's life,' said Thorson.

'If she did, she didn't take time to commit it on paper here,' said Doyle. 'The baroness is well out of it now; probably wants us to fail, just to make her time with the section look better.'

'I think the paucity of Agatha's file was discretion on the part of the baroness, rather than sabotage. She always rated Agatha. As do I. The woman closes cases.'

Doyle shrugged. The baroness hadn't rated Agatha Witchley highly enough to invoke diplomatic immunity to protect her from the wrath of the Israeli government. He sighed. You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps. 'You don't believe Gypsy Jen's clairvoyant bollocks, do you, Thorson? You don't believe in ghosts?'

'I'm not sure I'm even ready to believe in people.' A buzzing emitted from a red lamp fixed behind a small statue of the goddess Demeter, Passport Control letting them know that they had a visitor. Thorson pointed to the image of Mrs Witchley passing through the security gates on their CCTV screen, a monochrome fresco of surveillance feeds assembled from dozens of chambers and passages flickering from on high against their wall. 'You can ask her yourself.'

The old woman resembled a duck as she waddled along, swinging a long black umbrella ahead of each step as though she was clearing rats from her path.

'I thought you might be bringing me a packet of bacon,' Doyle called when Witchley entered at the top of the stairs.

'Saucisses is doing quite well, thank you,' she replied, picking her way carefully through the boxes of paperwork with the tip of her umbrella. 'A small touch of Osteomalacia aside.'

Witchley's desk had been left abandoned inside the chamber, one of five empty units without a workstation on its surface. They were old school in the Firehall. No tablets, no wireless. Everything on hardened systems surrounded by snaking colour-coded cables. You could set off an EMP blast down here and not take us out. Doyle's section short-staffed as always. Witchley headed for her desk, then hung up her jacket on the back of the chair and laid her umbrella carefully along the edge of the work surface.

'It's not raining outside,' said Doyle. I wouldn't be surprised if she turned up in a bowler hat.

'Were you never a member of the Scouting movement, Mister Doyle? Always be prepared. I anticipate inclement conditions.'

'I've asked for a computer to be installed for you this afternoon,' said Spads, indicating her desk's empty surface.

'This is Spads,' Thorson introduced the hacker. 'The new boy. Spads is his online handle. So far, he's refused to tell us his real name.'

'Admirable caution. You've joined our merry band through the obituary route I take it then, Spads?' said Mrs Witchley. 'You can cancel that delivery for me. I won't be using the Office's systems.' She pulled out a little smart phone, as black as her umbrella. 'I prefer to access my own, remotely. Although not down here, obviously, deep within our little Sargasso Sea of counter-electronic warfare.'

As always when something made little sense to Spads, he stared blankly at the old woman without comment, the statement orbiting around his mind, stuck in a holding pattern and waiting clearance to land.

'Charles Babbage advised me it would be better that way,' she explained, crossing over to Spads' desk. 'And besides, the climb to the top of the Monument to find a working Wi-Fi signal is good exercise. It helps prevent my joints from seizing up.'

'Charles Babbage is dead.'

'I certainly hope so,' she smiled. 'Otherwise I would probably be mad, hmm?' Witchley hovered behind Spads' workstation, staring at his screen. 'That's a ferocious amount of processing cycles you're leaching from the cloud. Image comparison and shadow texture analysis? I take it there is more to the death of Simon Werks than the initial police verdict of suicide by misadventure would indicate?'

Doyle answered for the hacker. 'Did you watch the security camera footage on the memory stick?'

'Indeed I did. You might've warned me. Pain and sex blended together. Autoerotic asphyxiation is much like a Black Russian . . . a waste of perfectly good Vodka and Tia Maria best consumed apart.'

'The footage you watched is what building security filmed. But there was another recording. Simon Werks had a concealed camera hidden below the surface of his computer screen. Only Werks and the man on his security team who installed it, one Luke Wilder, knew it was there. It was shooting footage when Werks died.' Doyle nodded at Spads. 'Show the old biddy what the private camera took.'

As the hacker started the QuickTime movie, Doyle noticed Mrs Witchley was clutching what looked like a tiny steel hole-punch in her hand. She unobtrusively leaned over and slipped it below the bottom of Spads' jacket hanging on the back of his chair, closing the punch's teeth and snipping a swatch of fabric out. Bloody Nora, so that's how my coat was mangled. It seemed conversing with spectres wasn't the only mental disorder the old woman had. Maybe she's into Voodoo as well? Be after my hair next, and I haven't got that much to spare anymore.

Security cam footage filled the monitor, angles distorted through the prism of a wide-view fish-eye lens – wider at the image's centre and narrower around the edges. Two men in maintenance overalls working half way up a stepladder, faces covered by balaclavas; a third man below, pulling at a hoist attached to the ceiling with a vacuum seal. Simon Werks was oblivious as they manoeuvred his prone body into position, only starting to emerge into consciousness after they had slipped him into a support jacket and noose dangling from the chandelier. Werks was really beginning to thrash as the group cut his attachment to the hoist, leaving him dangling in the air at the end of the noose. It didn't take long for the billionaire to choke to death. He must have been heavier than he looked. Werks wore a mask, a ball-like rubber sex toy to gag him, which his killers left on his face as they untied a set of weights from his feet and removed the support jacket with a single slap on its release catch. The third man kicked out the leg of Napoleon's mechanical desk, catching the desk's side before it could bang on the floor. With the billionaire's corpse left swinging from the chandelier, the three masked workmen shrank into the corner of the camera's view, packing up their gear, opening a window and boarding a window cleaning platform. Taking their equipment, they sealed the window behind them before being hoisted out of sight.

'So, two conflicting versions of his death,' said Agatha. 'One a murder, one a suicide. But which recording is correct?'

'Pixel for pixel, both recordings are,' said Spads. 'I've been running each of the files through video processing and as far as my software is able to tell, neither of the recordings are faked.'

'Now I see why you had me released from Stick Hill.'

'We're branching into care in the community,' said Doyle. 'Anything occur to you about this?'

'Three possibilities,' said Agatha. 'First, Mister Werks committed suicide and he or a third party decided to make his death appear like a murder. Second, he was assassinated and his death made to look like suicide. Third, he is still alive and both tapes are fakes.'

Doyle nodded. 'And any of those is a real mind frying fun-fest puddle of no-win whichever way you cut it. Right down our street.'

'How was the Office brought into this affair?'

'That's down to the same bloke who installed the private security camera in Saucy Simon's monitor; Luke Wilder, he called it in. He's part of the company's security detail. He used to be a copper and phoned an old mate of his in Special Branch after building security found Werks doing his chandelier impression. Lukey Boy reviewed the footage from the secret camera and gave his mate the nod that the suicide was a fake, told plod where to find the secret camera inside the monitor. The news bounced around the Home Office until it was cut out and flushed through to the orifice.'

Agatha drummed her fingers on the desk. 'Mister Wilder is under protective custody?'

'He's vanished, is what he is,' said Doyle. 'You can listen to the call he made for yourself. His pants must've had more skid marks than the Dakar Rally; the fear was really on him.'

'Under his own protective custody then,' said Agatha. 'Always the safest kind.'

'All three of your options require a very high proficiency with faking film footage,' said Thorson.

Spads agreed. 'If the murder's a prank, it's an expensive hoax.'

'It's not impossible,' said Agatha. 'Our dead friend might have wanted to commit suicide and leave a mystery behind him, a legend. Conspiracy theories are rarely forgotten. But that's the least likely option, all the same. I don't think Mister Werks wanted to enter history as another Kennedy and grassy knoll conundrum. He had a hidden camera installed. That suggests he believed he was at risk and didn't fully trust his own security team.'

'Paranoid, then,' said Thorson. 'Wanted to see who was logging into his terminal when he wasn't about?'

Witchley shook her head. 'Paranoid, such a nasty word, Helen. Cautious, that's how I would describe Mister Werks. You can never be too cautious. I think that in hindsight events have rather vindicated his vigilance.'

'We're close to eliminating your third option,' says Doyle. 'I've arranged for someone I trust to do a second autopsy on the sly and match the DNA. She'll make sure which twin it is we've got on the slab, and rule out a plastic surgery look-alike. Anyway, I can't see any motive for Werks to pull a Reginald Perrin on us. Why would he want to fake his death and disappear? No money problems. Who wouldn't want to be Saucy Simon? What man wakes up one morning and realises he's developed an allergy to the leather on his chauffeur-driven Aston Martin?'

'You would be surprised,' said Agatha. 'But I agree with the general premise. Occam's razor, Lex Parsimoniae. The most straightforward alternative is the second option. A person or persons unknown murdered Simon Werks and wanted his death to appear like an accident. Someone knew about Mister Werks proclivity for autoerotic asphyxiation inside his office and provided for a tape to be faked showing an unfortunate death indulging his perversion. Then a hit team arranges for the fiction to become a reality. Quite ingenious, really. You make your victim's death so excruciatingly embarrassing that the chances are the victim's own family will cover it up for you.'

'Faking the tape,' said Thorson, 'feeding it into the building security system and replacing the real footage of the assassination. That's pro-work.'

'Premier League shit,' added Doyle.

'It's very important that whatever drug the assassination team used to sedate Mister Werks is isolated from his blood. That drug is the only evidence we're going to winkle out of the scene of crime. I trust your friendly coroner is proficient in such matters?'

Doyle tapped his watch. 'It's not my first time on this merry-go-round, love. We're on the clock with this case. Home Office wants to be ahead of the game before the news of Saucy Simon's death gets leaked to the press.'

'There's a news story on the internet which says that Mister Werk's twin suddenly cancelled his appearance at a business event in Durban. I trust we will be able to talk to Curtis Werks shortly?'

'Already arranged. His British home is in Surrey. The interview will be there,' said Doyle.

'Show me the segment before the assassins released Mister Werks' feet again,' requested Witchley.

Spads restarted the footage and fast-forwarded to the point Witchley had asked for, freezing the image for her. Witchley tapped the screen, indicating the hitmen's assembly mechanism. 'Custom suction attachment, weights and pulley. This machine isn't some industrial system that was re-purposed. This was built-to-order with only one function in mind, lynching a man and making it appear like a suicide.'

'Guess it wasn't a home assassination kit from Amazon,' said Doyle.

'Engineering; medical knowledge; forensics expertise; leaving nary a trace inside the room or on the body. Not many people are so professional. Mossad. The SVR and a couple of the other Russian services, the MSS in China, a few other state actors. Corporations, perhaps. Where they can afford a private security force with staff that are ex-security service. Motive, that's the trick here. Find the motive and the rest will follow.'

'Might have been his business competitors?' mused Spads.

'A possibility,' said Witchley. 'Although a slim one, I suspect. Even the Russians don't act like Russians these days.'

'The Chinese could have done it,' said Doyle. 'If they thought Saucy Simon was becoming a danger to one of their key markets. Trust me, them I know.'

'An avenue to explore when we meet with Curtis Werks. What developments do their firm have coming down their R&D pipeline? Anything that Simon Werks was personally involved in which his killing might derail. I would like the monitor with the concealed camera put into the hands of Frank Ludington in the Office's workshop, can you arrange that?'

Doyle pointed to the billionaire's screen squatting on the chamber's stone floor. 'Spads can walk it around. And before you ask, Lukey Boy's details are on the grid with GCHQ. All we've pulled so far is a false negative flashed on his car's plates from a speed camera over a flyover in Hull. If he cards, cash-points or pays with plastic we'll know about it.'

Agatha didn't look convinced. 'As an ex-policeman, I would be disappointed if Mister Wilder was so easy a pickup. He has experience of how our trawler casts her nets. Aside from Werks' twin, is there anyone he was close to who we can talk with? Wife, girlfriend? Background information from the usual sources appears a little sparse.'

Doyle looked meaningfully at the old woman and waved her personnel file at her. 'Déjà vu, on that one. Pot. Kettle. Black.'

Witchley just smiled. 'The less privacy the age allows, the more comfortable it feels to embrace the shadows.' She indicated the vault around them. 'And there are so many shadows down in the Firehall. But then, perhaps that's the point; this is where information goes to fossilise.'

'Saucy Simon didn't have a wife or a girlfriend. We've traced a few payments to a high-class escort agency called Lace Flowers. Last used over twelve months ago, so not exactly a regular punter. I guess the noose and a few good bondage site subscriptions were all he needed to keep him fluffed up.'

Witchley shrugged. 'His residence is in London?'

'Owns the penthouse in One Hyde Park.'

'It will need to be searched,' said Witchley.

'Thorson, that'll be you and Spads. Myself and Miss Marple here will go to interview the twin.'

'I should see the corpse, before that,' said Mrs Witchley.

Doyle made a face. 'What's looking at Saucy Simon's stiff going to tell you?'

'Not as much as listening to the rest of the dead,' said Mrs Witchley. 'But, one can never tell. Give your pathology contact a nudge; see if the sedative's been identified yet. Helen, perhaps you could accompany me. And Spads, do deliver the monitor to the workshop and see what Frank has to say.'

If the look on Spads' face was anything to go by, he appeared dismissive of the idea. 'Board swappers. What are they going to tell us?'

'That sometimes what you run isn't as important as where you run it,' said Witchley. 'Don't be so supercilious towards the physical. Take the screen around to him and you might be surprised, young man. Not every puzzle is a coding problem.'

***

The office's workshop lay at the end of a maze of claustrophobic corridors, a doorless stone arch that gave onto a vaulted chamber. Spads poked his head in and glanced around. The room's walls were mounted with rickety shelves, the clatter from thousands of hard disks removed from their computer casings filling the chamber. Spads realized he was looking at a battery farm for computer storage. Each drive connected to a reading arm, feeding a slim cable that joined a snake of coaxial wiring bracket-punched into the ancient wall. The drives danced with the sound of a thousand chattering teeth, the shelves they rested on shaking and vibrating below the spinning media. Down at the other end of the room, surrounded by crowded workbenches and plastic carts full of more hard disks, sat the man he'd been sent to find. Frank Ludington rolled between the benches on a wheeled office chair, his dark black fingers searching out pieces with a watchmaker's precision, selecting from a litter of equipment scattered across the surface. Mid-fifties with Caribbean-white teeth, an arc of white in the underlit room. Ludington glanced over as Spads hovered at the entrance, trembling with the weight of the flat screen under his arm.

'Come in, why don't you.'

'I will,' said Spads. 'I need to come in.'

'You're the software boy that Agatha was phoning me about, I reckon.' He looked up from his reading spectacles, string ties on the frame looped around his neck.

'I'm Spads.'

'So you say.' His white stubby beard twitched in amusement, the lines of his mouth crinkling as he wiped an oily hand on his overalls, before extending a palm towards Spads. 'You look more like a Gerald Cuthbert to me.'

Spads hand was uncertainly reaching out to shake the proffered hand before he realized just what the old man had called him. 'How did—?'

'Hell, boy. You think Frank Ludington's my real name? Half the people down here've got fiction stamped on their passports. The office feels more like a witness protection scheme than a crown protectorate most days.' He snickered.' Maybe when people say you got to go underground, this is what they mean, eh? Firehall's been around long enough for that saying to have originated down here. Well, someone christen me Gerald, I'd get me a new handle too.'

Spads swung the dead billionaire's monitor around and landed it on the worktop, not taking his eyes from the rumbling mass of hard drives. 'The Tube train brings old drives in here, too?'

'Every week, regular as taxes,' said Ludington. 'Just like us, eh, boy? Too useful to be thrown away, just needs to be forgotten. Tucked away, until the day come again.' He lifted up a hard disk; its aluminium case tied with tight plastic cord marked 'Ministry of Defence S.O.D'. Secure Only Disposal. Using wire cutters to slice away the plastic, Frank tossed the tie into an open bin bag and placed the drive on a moving belt that looked as though it should be rotating sushi dishes. The belt ended up at the far end of the room, an industrial arm on a wheeled platform marked Honda Automotive picking hard disks up, slotting them into the shelves and latching on a network connection for their contents to be sucked into the Office's systems. Green recycling crates lay in front of the shelves, and every so often a network connector would disengage, another robot limb trundling across and covering the disc in a lead box – a quick whining magnetic discharge to wipe it – and then the erased drive tumbled down towards the collection boxes.

'So, you're the fool that's been choking our pipe with data packets from the cloud? Bandwidth down here is kind of thin, in case you haven't noticed. Sir Christopher Wren didn't exactly design this royal hidey hole with optical cabling and wireless relays in mind, the internet not being too popular back in the seventeenth century.'

Spads flexed his arm, working out the creaks from carrying the screen. He pointed to the shelving. 'Where does the data go that you're mirroring?'

'You really are a coder, aren't you? All this time here, you've never walked down to the Office's mainframe level? Like nothing you've seen before. Homebrew kit, just to keep things interesting. Non-standard, to minimise leakage. Big old prehistoric cabinets, solid-state drives and a Linux fork that's the Galapagos Islands as far as any system evolution you'd recognize. All the paper files are captured digitally too, before they're incinerated. Quite a sight to behold. An OCR scanning line that can chop a telephone directory and read the data in less time than it takes a man to spit.'

'Just like us,' said Spads. 'Filed, but not forgotten. Not completely, anyhow.' He had been meaning to investigate Wren's underground palace. But geographical complexity confused him sometimes. The hacker often found it easier to ignore than explore. In the old flat in East London where Spads had lived for the first twenty years of his life, he had only ever walked the same route to the bus stop. Never explored the maze of roads that led off his street, never ventured through the parks and squares nearby. It always embarrassed Spads when someone stopped him on the pavement to ask him the way to a road that was probably only a minute away . . . he could give the questioner no answer and had to pretend he was visiting the area too.

Ludington rolled over to the monitor, lifting up a screwdriver set from the mess on the surface. 'Sure is strange, right, the crap that sinks down this deep. Like some dead, rich, white guy with two different deaths on him. Simon Werks, too. What a world.'

Spads glanced up at the ceiling. It was hung with model aircraft and spaceships suspended from string, left slowly spinning in the draft from the hard drives' cooling fans; model kits carefully put together and expertly painted before decals had been applied. 'The SDF-1 Super Dimension Fortress, from Macross Frontier.'

'You know your anime. Good to see some of the kids today still getting themselves half an education. Here, hold the back of the screen for me while I pop this . . .' In Ludington's hands, the monitor was quickly stripped apart, pieces of the set spread in an arc of components in front of them. Turning over the rear glass substrate of the screen, the engineer ran his hands across four blue cables emerging from each corner, each of them linked to a marble-sized sphere hanging from the back. 'Now, this is a piece of work. They've drilled their camera in next to the control system, motion activated too. See how it's connected to the power unit? Every time someone moves, the camera feeds the computer with an image file.'

'The footage it collected was encrypted,' said Spads. 'As far as we know, only Werks and a single man on his security payroll had the key to unlock the file.'

'You think? Here's the kicker, you can access the surveillance footage remotely too,' said Ludington. 'All the movies that this camera took were duplicated out through the power supply, using the building's own electric wiring as a line. My bet, there's a router at the other end pumping this stuff out on a private party line.'

Spads hummed, pushing the skin of his cheek around, massaging it as he mused over the engineer's discovery.

'You want to sneak a peek at what was being filmed inside Simon Werks' office, that's the way to do it,' added Ludington. 'Nothing to trace on a bug sweep. No out-go broadcast inside the building. Router's probably tucked away in the company's accounting department, one port winking at the world.'

'Werks might have wanted to access his camera remotely,' said Spads.

'Hell, we both know that would be done easier on the dead boy's computer if the extra feed was for himself; remote desktop already built-in and as hardened as it can be with hackers like you about, right? No, the remote feed wasn't installed for Simon Werks. He didn't know about it. This was a concealed extra. And it sure wasn't put in by the hit team to watch their mark. They even suspected there was a concealed camera inside the victim's screen and they would have swapped in a fake drive and taken the original hard disc with them. If Agatha asks what my guess would be, I'd say that the hidden out-go was installed by your missing corporate security manager, in cahoots with whoever built the camera for him. And that dude, they know what they're about. Blackmail, maybe. Werks' kind of fetish webcam action isn't going to sit too good with the investors at Davos, eh? I reckon your man on corporate security, he figured he'd collect himself a little just-in-case traction on his boss. Never too early to protect yourself against the next downsizing.'

'I can find the router,' said Spads. 'Then trace it back to the receiving address.'

'Lots of proxy servers to hack on that journey,' said Ludington. He picked up a pad and pencil and scribbled down a list of names. 'Agatha said your missing corporate security officer used to be police on the Met, which means his contacts should be local. Here're the people in town I'd finger as being good for your camera, they're craftsmen all. Any of their bandwidth been joining the dots with the Werks Building, then you've found your camera designer, maybe your missing corporate security manager too if you get lucky.'

'Would you help me find the router?' Spads asked. 'It would be quicker that way. I could try, but following wiring, it's the wrong kind of real for me.'

'A bit of fieldwork out in the clear? That's not something I get asked to do often. Picking up hard disks to erase is as far as I usually walk.'

'Please?' said Spads. 'I'm meant to be going to Simon Werks' flat next with Helen to help examine it for evidence.'

'Miss Thorson? That's fine work. Well, all right then. I'll play network engineer for you just this once. Maybe in return you can get me her phone number.'

'You mean hack it?'

'I mean ask for it.'

Spads shrugged apologetically. 'I think that might be the wrong kind of real for me, too.'

***

'Well then, Helen,' asked Agatha as she and Thorson walked the corridor towards the morgue's cold room. 'I trust you've been prospering without me. Although not too much, I hope.'

'I can't complain,' said Thorson. There wasn't much irony in her tone, given that complaining was largely all she had done on the way to the morgue. 'Actually, I could, but much good would it do me. How anyone expects me to pay my rent on what the Office pays us . . .'

'Who was it that said expensive tastes and a little ambition are life's only requirements? How is Mister Doyle shaping up in Margaret's shoes?'

'Not much difference in the great scheme of things. Slightly less of a stickler for the rules, slightly more of a bastard.'

'I wouldn't believe in great schemes. They rarely amount to much in the long term.'

They reached the doors at the end of a dimly lit windowless corridor where Doyle's tame pathologist was waiting for them. A tall, reedy-looking woman about Doyle's age, her white coat was pulled tight against more than the chill of the basement. She looked like she belonged here, below the narrow backstreets of Stratford, close to the old Olympic facilities. A curator for the shells of the dead; prodding and probing those who had passed. They exchanged a cursory greeting and she swung the doors open and pointed out a pile of paper sick bags to her visitors. 'If you're not comfortable with dead or naked bodies . . .'

'More comfortable than I should be,' smiled Agatha, weakly. Mine normally have clothes on.

'I only have feelings for expensive luxuries,' added Thorson. 'Normally it's a weakness. But in here . . .'

'I vomited away my first five months here,' said the doctor. She led them towards a steel table, lumpy outlines under cover, bright and harsh in the room's arclights. 'You'll be amazed at how many different ways people end up in a mortuary. So many different ways to die, each with their own signs.'

Agatha stopped in front of the slab. The body lay on it, covered over with white linen. 'And how did Simon Werks enter here? In your opinion?'

'I didn't need Doyle's scene of crime report to tell me the cause of death – the strangulation was obvious. As far as the blood works, you're in luck. My husband works in the laboratory upstairs, and he expedited the toxicology results for me. The victim was tranquillised by some kind of methoxyflurane compound. It's not the normal variety found in hospitals. A synthetic variant probably. The regular kind leaves organ traces of dichloroacetic acid and inorganic fluoride, especially in the kidneys. This left hardly any residue. If Doyle hadn't asked me to put this one through on the QT as a crash priority, the methoxyflurane would have completely dissipated by the time a regular autopsy was performed. No trace of foul play.'

'Any signs of a needle mark, doctor?' asked Thorson.

The doctor pulled back the sheets covering Simon Werk's corpse, revealing his head and chest. There was a wide-eyed innocence to his face, framed by a dark mop of hair and high cheekbones that agreed with the fourth generation Irish ancestry in the files the Office had dug up on the man.

'No. He wasn't injected. From how his eyes appeared when he first came in, I would say sprayed in the face with an aerosol. Osmolality in his residual urine suggests a concentrated dose. Enough to knock the victim out in seconds. Unconsciousness would last fifteen minutes at the most.'

'Have you heard of anything like this being used before?'

'Not like this. Some armies use the regular type of methoxyflurane for emergency battlefield amputations. But re-engineered in this way? None of its uses would be honourable ones. Take out a target for capture and interrogation. A spot of quick date rape. Put a security courier out for long enough to cut the briefcase off his handcuffs, maybe.'

Agatha rocked slightly, leaning on her umbrella. 'Roll the victim off a cliff without leaving signs of a struggle and make it look like suicide?'

'Exactly that sort of mischief.'

'Which armies use the basic compound the drug derived from?' asked Agatha.

'Currently the French, Australian and New Zealand forces,' said the doctor. 'Only for very rough and ready amputations in extreme conditions. Other forces used it in the past, but it's fallen out of favour.'

'Yes, those damn marauding New Zealanders,' said Thorson, sarcastically. 'Always causing trouble out in the world.'

The doctor pulled the sheets all the way back and Agatha tugged on a pair of transparent Nitrile gloves to examine the naked body. For a man who worked behind a desk and had started out in programming, Simon Werks appeared fit enough. A little pale, perhaps. Not toned enough to be considered vain. Efficient, Agatha thought. Tending the engine of the flesh and always making sure it was fed the right fuel. A good diet from a personal chef, with the company gym at ControlWerks' London office at his disposal at any hour of the day. So who did you annoy, Simon? Whose skin did you get under for you to end up like this, laid out all pale and white and sad? The state of the body didn't tell her anything new. A death card stuffed in the mouth would have been nice, the Jack of Clubs with an assassin's signature on it. But nobody did anything with a Mafia flourish these days, not even the old crime families. It was an odd thing, but Agatha's ghosts rarely appeared to her in the presence of corpses. Are they put off? It seemed a strangely squeamish trait among their own, if so. Agatha had been hoping that Simon Werks' spectre might surface, but that, on reflection, was far too much to hope for. So annoyingly obtuse. It's as if they enjoy teasing me.

'What do you think, Mrs W.?' Thorson asked Agatha.

'It doesn't feel right, Helen. Anyone savage enough to kill a man for business normally requires their actions to be recognised by the world at large. If the South Americans had undertaken this job, for instance, Mister Werks would have been found in pieces in a public place with a very explicit note explaining his supposed sins against them. Framing his death as a suicide invalidates all life insurance he might have had, so we can remove that as a motive. It's the silence of this act that bothers me most. To snatch a life so quietly. If we were hunting a single murderer, I might propose a serial killer with celebrity tastes. But this was very much a hit, from the deployment of the exotic aerosol sedative right down to the professional kill team. Just like the old days.'

'These aren't the old days.'

'No,' said Agatha. 'That they certainly are not.' She felt a wellspring of sympathy rise within her for this departed soul. Imagined Simon Werks as he would have been when he was a young child, playing on his game consoles and reading the computer manuals that had brought him here, to this slab, to this unanticipated end. Not much different from my two boys, Harry and Carl. Had they looked as pale and as dead as this, floating in the dark waters of the Atlantic? Bobbing in the wreckage of the jetliner. The sea took everything. Everything but Agatha Witchley and the cold knot of anger eating, eroding and biting into the pit of her desiccated womb. She who the waters had washed up, bitter and distrustful, leaving only justice and vengeance and the hope she might one day understand the difference between the two. Simon Werks was cold. So cold. She could feel his pain, his pain that had passed, gathering inside her, like the company of ghosts. She looked up and noticed the doctor holding a paper bag out to her.

'Are you alright?'

Agatha shook her head. 'I believe I'm completely empty.'

'It takes you that way, sometimes. I'm holding this one in cold storage as a John Doe, rotating the paperwork until you want me to declare,' said the doctor. 'Any idea how long that's going to be?'

'Until Simon Werks' absence is noted or the news is leaked – either by someone at his company, or ourselves in a more controlled manner,' said Agatha. 'If our hand is forced early, we'll go with suicide by hanging on the death certificate, thank you. It wouldn't do to tip off his killers that we're on their trail. Hopefully, we'll discover who slipped the noose around his neck before that comes to pass.'

'You know, if Gary Doyle keeps on asking these kind of favours from me in the name of queen and country, I'm going to ask to be put on retainer with you people.'

'I wouldn't bother,' said Thorson. 'Our kind of money won't change your life.'

Agatha gazed down at Simon Werks' corpse. But his had. And like most of money's strange gravities, not for the better.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Mirror Man

'Who are the bullet catchers?' asked Agatha. Their car drew up outside the imposing walls of a country estate. There was a gaggle of tall young men and a woman standing outside the wrought iron gates, the greens of Hunter boots and Barbour jackets meant to indicate that they were merely estate staff. Layers of tweed to cover the bulges where their concealed weapons were carefully strapped away. An hour from the motorway exit, this was the kind of isolation that money could buy when you were rich enough. Every view, every secluded Surrey field and furrow on the way in belonging to Werks.

'They're with MI5,' said Doyle, his fingers tapping the wheel of the steering wheel as he waited. 'The Home Office didn't want to take any chances with the last of the dynamic duo. As long as Curtis Werks stays in the country, he's going to have more bodies on him than the Italian PM in a swinger's club for his birthday.'

Serenely professional, the agent who came to the car's window walked away with Doyle's passport, discreetly checking its chip against his admittance list with an RFID reader that he'd pulled out from the back of a quad bike. While he was doing that, a woman strolled over and casually examined the underside of their car with a mirror on the end of a long steel rod, one of her colleagues running a wand-sized scanner in his hand across the chassis of the car as if it had to drive through airport security. Agatha suspected that Doyle was disappointed these agents weren't showing more interest in his hoodlum Chevy Nova's supersport's package. What is the point of tooling around in a boy's toy if it isn't admired? These children are young enough to have never driven anything other than hybrid cars. The first man returned and delivered the passport back through the open window, passing no comment as the large gates opened automatically on rollers.

'We're on the list. We're coming in,' growled Doyle. He nudged the car over a cattle grid, jouncing briefly, before all four tires bit into the wide drive's gravel and they crunched their way down a private lane bounded on both sides by thick woodland, vegetation damp and green under the dull sunless sky. Agatha passed no comment as small red targeting dots winked on and off their car as they wound their way towards the mansion. Even the marksmen of the Special Air Service grow bored when they're out camping.

Agatha tapped the car's dashboard. 'Of course, Mister Doyle, you understand that the real problem with classic cars like your Chevy, apart from the additional pollution, is it lacks the basic modern security features needed to deter car thieves and other ne'er do wells.'

Doyle pulled at the edge of his jacket with his left hand, revealing a pistol in its shoulder holster. 'It's got the best security feature of all, love. If anyone steals the Nova, I'm going to kill them.'

'Well, there always is that. You do realise the officers on the gate might as well pack up and go home,' said Agatha. 'There's not going to be any assassination attempt on Curtis Werks' life.'

'Who told you that one, love, Julius Caesar?'

'Common sense, Mister Doyle. I have been checking the twins' itinerary. They spent enough time together that there was ample opportunities to kill both of them and make it look like an accident. Two for the price of one. A car accident. A plane crash. Food poisoning. A kidnapping attempt gone awry.'

'Maybe the plan is to kill the twins separately, leave some time between each murder?'

'Difficult to arrange. Harder yet to make a double death spaced apart appear as serendipity. The surviving twin is forewarned, now. Even without the service officers here, Curtis Werks has ample private security on hand to protect him.'

'If the killers' motivation was business, Saucy Simon's murder might have been a shot across the bows for his brother. A warning. Withdraw from a key market, sell out to us or else. We can get you anywhere you go. We can even make it look like an accident.'

'That's quite an imagination you have.'

'Said the woman who thinks that she's the bleeding ghost whisperer. We'll see. We need to find out if Curtis received any tip-offs Saucy Simon was for the chop, either before or after the hit.'

'You're not a believer in the afterlife, then, Mister Doyle?'

'No I'm bloody not. Here's the thing, Gypsy Jen. You and all the other nut-jobs who claim to be channelling Elvis and Martin Luther King, why is it only ever the celebs? There are billions of people who've croaked. Why is it always James Dean on your private party line to the next world, eh? Why is it never Jane Smith the bog cleaner who shuffled off this mortal coil in total obscurity back in 1826, Jane Smith who nobody's ever heard of?'

'I'll tell you my theory on that,' said Agatha. 'Ghosts are mostly memory. The pattern of a soul imprinted on the collective consciousness of the world. In the old days, people were familiar with Napoleon and Queen Victoria, so those personages were the spectres most frequently conjured up during séances. The weight of memory, to use your own example, does not favour Jane Smith, honoured only by her own family and friends. Today, with broadcast media, the shared burden of the universe favours James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Those are the figures lodged in humanity's group consciousness.'

Doyle shook his head. 'Shit.'

'But that's only my conjecture. Maybe heaven does exist and God's an Elvis fan.'

'Okay, well here's another one for you, then. Why you? Why Agatha Witchley? What makes you so special? How come when my poor old bladder wakes me up for my midnight promenade to the bathroom, I don't find Heath Ledger having a ghostly shave and dropping me a few tips on who murdered Simon Werks? Why you and not me?'

'There is a reason for that,' said Agatha. 'But I am afraid I can't tell you. It's simply not allowed.'

'Of course, that would be too easy. We're not talking Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense here are we? I see dead people. You're dead, I'm dead. This is the afterlife and all that bollocks.'

'I'm very much alive and on this mortal coil, Mister Doyle. So are you. Sadly for Simon Werks, that's an adventure someone has stolen from him.'

'It's all in the mind, love. Your subconscious makes the connections and joins the dots together, but if you want to believe that it's Dean Martin appearing and singing the answers to you, well, sod it if I can't take a joke. Right now, I'll take all the help I can get.'

'Then we have an understanding, Mister Doyle. Just like the one that existed between Margaret and myself.'

'Yeah, well the baroness is well out of it.' Doyle turned his Chevy into a crescent drive, pulling up in front of a three storey-high Georgian pile, acres of white stone on the mansion's frontage, a sweep of stairs leading up to a marble column-lined entrance that wouldn't have looked out of place if Cinderella had been hopping down the treads on a single slipper. Doyle parked next to three identical government Range Rovers, the green of their chassis so dark it might as well have been black. Agatha got out. Behind her stretched a manicured lawn on a slope leading down to a river; elaborate topiary with Greek statues on either side.

'Why do I feel like I'm on the set of Pride and Prejudice?' said Doyle.

'I believe the current owner of this house is good for considerably more than four or five thousand a year, Mister Doyle.'

'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a copper in possession of a good murder case will be in want of Saucy Simon's twin spilling his guts out to the rozzers,' said Doyle.

'Curtis Werks has just lost his brother, and twins are often very close,' chided Agatha.

'I'll be the soul of tact and sensitivity . . . you might even think I passed a sociology degree.'

The imposing front doors opened before Agatha had a chance to reach for the bell pull. Not by any liveried butler . . . a tall shaven-headed man in a blue suit conservative enough for him to have run as a politician. Tight, tailored and trim. He wrinkled a nose that only a rugby player's wife could love and touched his earphone as he motioned them inside. There was a low indecipherable buzz from a voice at the other end. 'They're in. Two for two. Car is stationary. Confirm no driver.' The guard indicated a guest book on a stone-topped table. The book seemed an antiquated ritual in an age of biometric security. Agatha rummaged in her handbag for a pen and signed them both in.

Doyle tutted in disapproval at her plump little Mont Blanc pen as she slipped it into her handbag. 'More money than sense. What's wrong with a ninety pence Biro?'

'You can't put a price on quality, Mister Doyle.'

Rugby Man gave them the most trifling tilt of his head, then left, muttering into his earpiece and not bothering to check if his charges walked behind him. Follow the bullet-catcher, they did. Werks' country pile loomed around them, as imposing inside as out. Their footsteps resounded loud across a large hall that could have been used by the Natural History Museum to host a Diplodocus display, open doorways giving onto rooms with tall sash windows, period green plasterwork, polished floors and antique furniture. Shadows moved in doorways as they passed, and Agatha realized they weren't nearly as alone as the echoing emptiness of the grand spaces suggested. Another man joined them as they progressed down the house's main ground floor corridor, the newcomer sporting a grey three-piece suit, his hair running to silver around his cropped temples, a whippet to Rugby man's bulldog. He boorishly didn't bother to introduce himself, either.

'I'll need you to spend no more than half an hour with Curtis Werks. We have other visitors due to arrive, and your presence can't overlap with theirs.'

Doyle grunted. 'And I'll need you to take your spook nose, stick it in this pile's antique shitter, and hold it here until I've taken as long as I need to get my answers. This is a murder investigation. My murder investigation.'

'The next round of visitors—'

'If I discover a cadre of ninjas hiding in one of the urns here, you can draw straws to see who's going to take a bullet for Werks. Until then, you can do what all good guard dogs do . . . stay quiet and watch for burglars. If you're needed to bark, I'll whistle.'

The agent appeared as if he was about to remonstrate with Doyle, but Agatha tapped his lapel with her Office passport as they reached the entrance to what looked like the library. 'My apologies, gentlemen. A cultural misunderstanding. We do things a little differently in our country.'

Agatha only just made it through the threshold as Doyle began to close the door on the two spooks' faces. She glanced around. The library contained shelf upon shelf of leather-bound tomes, bookcases fitted into the wall, brown walls mounted with large electric candles and a collection of porcelain in glass cabinets arrayed in front of a sweep of high windows. Under the looming white ceiling everything inside appeared smaller than it should do. Curtis Werks gazed sadly on the view outside, herbaceous rose borders and a granite-edged pool with ornate waterspouts spraying out. A magazine-sized tablet computer rested on his lap as he leaned back in an armchair. His skin had a better tan than his brother's, a healthy ruddy shine to it. Or perhaps that just comes from being alive? I wonder what you're thinking, Mister Werks? Not only anguish, but worry too. Real worry, if I'm any judge. Other than that, he was a mirror of the dead man Agatha had visited in the mortuary. The mirror man wore the smart-casual uniform of venture capitalists around the world – dirt-yellow chinos and a dark black roll-neck shirt. There was nobody else in the room. No secretaries or bodyguards – either his own or the state's hastily assigned bullet-catchers. The library door shut. A set of piercing blue eyes swivelled around to view the two newcomers. Agatha was struck by the sudden impression that such eyes should have belonged to a ghost, so clear she could almost stare through them and out of the window. But this is the twin who lived.

'You're the specialist team from the British government?' Werks asked in a soft-spoken Pennsylvania baritone. 'Please, do sit down.'

Doyle nodded brusquely. 'Gary Doyle. Agatha Witchley. We'll stay standing. You might want to sit.'

'All the better to intimidate me, is it? Well then,' said Werks, 'Perhaps you can start by telling me what evidence you have that my brother was actually murdered rather than dying in an unfortunate accident?'

'You don't seem too upset over his death?' observed Doyle, sidestepping the billionaire's question.

'I don't need British civil servants to tell me the manner I should grieve,' snapped Werks, running a hand through his dark mop of hair. 'Of course I loved Simon. We were as close as any pair of twins in the world. But our work is important to us. It was everything we built together. I don't know what's going to be worse . . . the news reaching the markets that Simon died accidentally as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation, or the news hitting Wall Street that he was murdered in a professional execution. And now you people tell me I'm a target for assassination too. Do you have any idea how that is going to play out? Now, have the courtesy to tell me why the hell you think Simon's death is murder?'

'I know this is a novel experience for you, but in this deal, I ask the questions,' said Doyle. 'You answer them.'

Werks scowled. Agatha trusted it wasn't because Groucho Marx was coalescing into solidity. The dead comedian stood on their side of the crystal panes, taking in the parkland's sweeping views. I can only trust our interviewee doesn't have the gift.

Thankfully, Werks appeared utterly oblivious to the ghost's presence. 'I have a copy of the footage from our London building showing the unfortunate way my brother died. And if it was murder, I can only assume it was murder by hypnosis or brainwashing of my brother.'

'Yeah, you have a tape, I have a tape,' said Doyle. 'Mine's way more interesting than yours. Our politicians haven't filled your house with more spooks than the Haunted House at Disneyland because your brother's choice of fetish web sites put the Home Secretary's nose out of joint.'

'What, this cop thinks I'm working for the Home Secretary?' laughed Groucho. 'I used to employ a secretary at my home. I gave her a raise when I found out there were three other companies after her . . . the gas company, the water company, and the electricity company.'

'Will this mean trouble for your firm, Mister Werks?' asked Agatha, ignoring the spectre twirling his cigar.

'We'll be going down the tubes when the news gets out. There have been rumours floating around the street that ControlWerks is about to be stalked by a consortium of private equity buy-out funds, the largest players with more money than God. Simon's death is just the kind of thing they've been waiting for. Our stock price will collapse. They can move in and buy us out at a discount.'

'I was under the impression you owned a controlling stake in your firm,' said Doyle.

'Together we had a controlling stake,' said Werks. 'Simon's will doesn't leave his stock to me. It leaves the stock to a variety of charities. They'll sell. They always do. No non-profit can resist making one. I lost our controlling stake in ControlWerks the moment he died. We agreed on that when we set up the company. We never wanted the firm to get in the way of our relationship. Half for Simon, half for me, straight down the middle.' There was a round wooden table next to Werks with an intercom sitting on it, and he leaned over to activate a call. 'I'll have my coffee now.' He looked at his two visitors. 'Given we're in England, tea?'

Doyle nodded. 'White, no sugar, ta.'

'Just a cup and a jug of hot water, please,' said Agatha. 'Piping.'

Werks passed on the order via an old-style speaking tube to the staff while Groucho Marx peered in at the billionaire's touchpad, glanced up at Agatha and shrugged, indicating mystification over the small computer. Agatha turned to the side to obscure her hand from the two men's view and shooed her fingers at Groucho. Not now. Go away. Instead of disappearing, the spectre leaned in closer and put a semi-transparent arm around Werks' shoulder. 'What would you do if a bull charged you?' The ghost shifted his head to indicate he was going to answer his own question. 'Why I'd pay whatever it charged,' grinned Groucho, trying to imitate Werks' drawling Pennsylvania accent.

'So what about your will?' asked Doyle.

'Unlike Simon, I have a wife and four children – and my will provides comfortably for them. Still, the vast bulk of my estate will eventually pass to charity. The Gates Foundation and a few other smart causes who know how to deliver bang for buck. The organisations that attempt to address the causes of the world's problems, rather than paying people fat salaries to hose money around on the fires. Or worse yet, ignoring the problems that keep them in gravy, spending all the money on raising more of it.'

'Well, sorry for your loss and all that,' said Doyle, 'but from where your underpaid old plod is standing, getting paid hundreds of billions by a crew of investors to take early retirement . . . that sounds like a nice problem to have.'

Curtis Werks' face distorted in disgust at the idea. 'It was never about the money. Simon and I were both paper billionaires before we turned twenty-five. If we had wanted to waste our lives drinking Truffle Martinis on liner-sized yachts at the Cayman Reef Resort, we would have been doing that decades ago.'

'That's not a waste in my book, chum. That's a lifestyle aspiration.'

'ControlWerks is about changing the world, it is about doing something, being the best in any goddamn market we choose, or creating new sectors from scratch. The buy-out funds will fire most of our staff and milk our portfolio of patents like a milch cow. The day after a take-over, the only innovative thing coming out of ControlWerks will be the patent infringement claims. If that happens, I might as well put a noose on and jump off my desk.'

Groucho jabbed a thumb in Werks' direction. 'I'd lend him my book of suicide tips, but I suspect he won't be bringing it back.'

Agatha sighed in Groucho's direction. 'Your firm means that much to you, Mister Werks?'

'It meant that much to both of us,' said Werks. 'It's our legacy to the world.'

There was a knock at the door, and Rugby man admitted a South American member of staff carrying a silver tray weighed down with coffee, a plate of biscuits, a pot of tea, and a steel jug steaming with hot water. With the tray's contents distributed, Agatha dipped into her handbag again and removed what looked like a normal plastic teaspoon and a square tea bag. Her teaspoon didn't change colour when she dipped it into the water. Pure water, then, unadulterated.

'You have a favourite brand?' Werks asked of Agatha. 'My kitchen probably has it. You won't believe how specific our global clients and partners are when it comes to tea.'

'My queer little tastes are rather ossified,' smiled Agatha.

'Global clients, eh. You doing any business in China or Russia?' asked Doyle, sipping from his cup. 'Business that might make their foreign services add you to the "not so helpful" list. The kind of party animal who gets served radioactive Polonium-210 cocktails rather than a Truffle Martini?'

'Our low orbit tourism arm, SpaceWerks, is run out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but there's nothing about our operations in Russia to upset anybody. It's is a cash cow for them. And without us, it's a business with no wealthy Western tourists turning up at the launch pad to pay for all their expensive rocket fuel. We have a wide range of manufacturing deals with China, and we launch a couple of communication satellites each year from their country. But our Chinese operations are run in conjunction with a local equity partner, Lucky Tiger House. Our friends at LTH ensure all the right party officials are fed and watered at sufficient intervals; that the indigenous pork barrels are suitably oiled. If ControlWerks is brought out and used primarily as a patent troll, China's factories will lose the majority of our business. China and Russia's secret service might conceivably send agents to protect us, but never to target us. Their local interests have a great deal to lose.'

'And the Billionaire Boys had no warning that someone was gunning for them? Either before your brother died or after?'

Werks shrugged. 'We feature in the Fortune Five Hundred every year. Of course we receive death threats. All too regularly. Usually, they're on the order of: "You and your brother invade my mind at night and steal my software designs: give me your every last dollar or I will destroy you." The people who send in such threats can barely string a list of demands together without using crayon, let alone slip past my firm's security detail. Nothing credible or specific in that line has been received, not to my knowledge. I'll have my head of security e-mail you with copies of everything unpleasant sent to us for the last five years.'

'Talking of which,' said Doyle. 'You wouldn't happen to have any idea where Luke Wilder has happened to relocate? He's the senior officer on your London security team.'

'I might recognize his face if I saw him, but the name means nothing to me, I'm afraid. Our firm's security staff are sourced through a private military security contractor called PegasusEnForce. They only use top ex-policemen, intelligence officers and military personnel. Guards are rotated through PegasusEnForce's roster of clients every year or so, to minimise opportunities for internal corruption . . . being blackmailed, bribed, threatened, turned and the like. I barely learn to remember my own guards' names before they're switched out. I can have our client manager with PegasusEnForce talk to you, if it's relevant.'

'You never can tell.'

Agatha leant forward on her umbrella, using its heft as a walking stick. 'Who are the private equity firms being floated as names in the take-over of your firm, Mister Werks?'

'Greenrock Capital is putting the consortium together. They'll be able to separate the real names behind the deal from the market rumours, if you can get them to talk to you.'

'Not a bleeding problem. You think Greenrock might want the Billionaire Boys dead?' asked Doyle.

'The only assassins they usually have on staff are their lawyers,' said Werks. 'If the private equity industry has moved beyond that, then the world if going to become a very, very scary place.'

Doyle lay his empty teacup down on the reading table. 'My kind of town.'

'Now you get to ask Curtis how close to his twin he was,' Groucho suggested to Agatha as he hovered behind the industrialist. 'Though how their mother had twins is beyond me. She never went on a double date in her life.'

'How close were you to your brother?' asked Agatha. 'Is it possible he had a situation developing in his life that you didn't know anything about?'

'As far as ControlWerks is concerned, I am in charge of the business aspects of the company while Simon handled our technological prospects and research. But he was always involved with and understood what I was working on, and vice versa. Operationally, I run the energy and media side of the firm while Simon handled space tourism and commercial orbital, but there were enough crossovers between us that we could always cover for each other.'

'And as a person?'

'We both like ideas more than people.'

'That's a very Silicon Valley weakness,' said Agatha.

'Perhaps it is at that. What else? Simon was more private than I am. Less social. He rarely went to parties, not even our firm's functions. A lot harder-nosed when it came to matters of business. We both expect a lot from our staff. There's never been any room for the mediocre at ControlWerks. It has to be said that Simon worked far longer hours than me recently. I've been spending quality time with my wife and boys. It was a source of a small amount of tension between us, but we never properly argued over it. I told Simon he should get married too. Bring someone into his life he could leave his legacy to.'

'Having a family does anchor you,' said Agatha, attempting to keep her voice neutral.

'Anyone your brother fired recently?' said Doyle. 'The kind of Mister or Mrs Pissed-Off who would know where your London building's alarms and sensors are located?'

'We always put our largest effort into hiring the best people at the start,' said Werks. 'Our second greatest effort goes into retaining them. After that, we offer our employees the rare chance to make a difference and innovate. For which they are exceptionally well-remunerated.'

Gary Doyle pulled a face, sucking on a lemon as though the inspector had inadvertently tuned into Curtis Werks' silky voice on a business channel.

Werks continued, nonplussed, 'It's expensive for the firm to lose people, bad for morale too. I insist on having the lowest staff turnover in every industry we operate in. So no, we haven't fired anyone. There hasn't been a redundancy in ControlWerks since its formation. A few staff have left over the years to do their own thing, almost all financed by our own seed fund. My ex-PA set up the Courtesans' Mist lingerie line with our backing. She's a millionaire now, for God's sake. I'm struggling to find the motive here.'

'Not a range of underwear that flatters me anymore, sadly,' said Agatha. 'Although I have seen them sold in Harrods. Your family. They need to be protected immediately. If this murder is a matter of commercial leverage, they will be in grave danger.'

'Already done,' said Werks. 'My main residence is outside New Canaan in Connecticut. I've paid PegasusEnForce to divert a small private army that was due to arrive in South America to train the locals in more effective methods of interdicting drug crops. They're now gainfully employed scaring our neighbours. If it transpires their employment is not so gainful, I will be sorely tempted to send your branch of the British state the full bill.'

'Lucky we're not in the phonebook,' said Doyle.

'You can never be too cautious, Mister Werks,' noted Agatha. She raised her umbrella. 'One must always anticipate inclement conditions.'

'So, straight out with it, then. Who do you think might want your brother killed?' asked Doyle.

'Realistically, no one,' said Werks. 'How the hell do you even begin to get into the mind of someone who wants to kill a man over business? If it was a mugging in some developing nation where Simon was inspecting one of our new solar plants, if his wallet had been lifted, or he was shot resisting a kidnap attempt, I could at least understand it. But in our office? In London? In Mayfair? That's cold insane. I still can't believe his death was anything other than a terrible, sordid accident. If it weren't for half a regiment of the British special forces sneaking in from the woods to borrow tea from my housekeeper, I'd think this whole thing was a goddamn hoax in poor taste. Who do I suspect? Nobody. So realistically, I have to suspect everyone we've ever dealt with.'

Doyle grunted. There was something bear-like in a grunt like that. 'Well, that's it, then. Me and Miss Marple here will be off to interview a few private equity fund managers and charity heads and anyone else who stands to benefit from this mess. I'd say don't leave town, but with your businesses that'd be a waste of time, wouldn't it? So just make sure your Learjet's juiced to fly back quickly if we need you.'

'I have Simon's funeral to arrange and ControlWerks' future to salvage,' said Werks, bitterly. 'I'll be found around your green and pleasant little land for a while. It's vital that news of Simon's death isn't leaked before ControlWerks has a Poison Pill defence in position and my bankers have constructed every financial defence in place. If the news of Simon's demise slips out before that, all that we've built together will be swept away. Both our lives' work.'

'For me, not so important,' said Doyle. 'But I'm sure the Home Secretary gives at least half a hoot about another bump in the unemployment numbers, so if the news leaks, I do have one promise for you, it won't come from my end.'

They left Curtis Werks sitting there in his armchair, grim-faced and pecking intently at the touchscreen on his lap. Groucho Marx had evaporated into the ether, although Agatha could swear she could still smell the ghost's cigar smoke. It made her realise how much she needed one too. Dealing with that comedian is quite literally purgatory. The company of ghosts wasn't her only distraction. Doyle seemed amused as they navigated the corridor, passing state security minders as still and wordless as the statues of Roman emperors in the alcoves. He rubbed his hands together.

'You appear uncommonly happy, Mister Doyle.'

'Oh, misery always loves company on the porcelain throne, Mrs Witchley. Especially when it's a three flush mystery. What's that German word for it . . .?'

'Schadenfreude,' said Agatha. 'Either that or Porzellansitz.'

Doyle curled his fingers into a mock cup and tapped them against a wineskin clutched in the fingers of a marble statue of Pan. 'No, I do believe it's Prost!' He reached for the pocket where he kept his phone, but Agatha placed her hand on his and stopped him.

'I'm calling Thorson. Find out if her and Spads have tossed Saucy Simon's flat yet.'

'The man whose death we're investigating developed the current standard for cell tower cryptography,' said Agatha. 'I think a little guardedness might be in order.'

'Give it a rest. The Office's phones are set up with secure circuits as standard.'

'Secure is a relative concept.'

'You hiding a basket of carrier pigeons on you, love?'

Agatha smiled. 'Let me tell you how we did it in the old days . . .'

***

Spads had to work to keep his eyes off Helen Thorson's shapely legs as they rode the large, expensive elevator up to the no-doubt equally large, expensive penthouse flat that had been Simon Werks' London residence. His colleague possessed the class of flawless beauty that swivelled heads and left men panting, mixing that aloof attitude of hers with a chill that would have given George Clooney pause in asking her out on a date. The way Thorson wore her pressed green trouser suit, the right edge of buttoned-down preppy chic to offset her supermodel sheen, broadcasting the fact she graciously dressed like a librarian to stop her blinding lesser mortals. Just to give all the other women a fighting chance. For a hacker like Spads, being around the woman was agony. A cruelty on the same scale as distributing T-shirts with photographs of fast food to famine victims and making the poor gits wear it as they scrabbled about in search of puddlewater to drink and aid trucks to follow. I'm starving here. Starving. He had asked Helen once about where she bought her clothes. It was a question he had picked up from one of his mother's weekly magazines left piled around their flat. The ten point checklist to discover if he is Mister Right. She had rattled off a list of unfamiliar Japanese names, like Shiroma, Junya Tashiro and Hisui. That had surprised Spads. He had been expecting the usual suspects – Dior, Prada and all those French and Italian lines that were meant to signal style and good taste. From a different world, but at least one Spads could point to up in the luxury constellation of brands, spinning far out of his reach, and put a name to. But Helen Thorson, she was beyond that. Just as connoisseurs of Marvel, Dark Horse and DC Comics had branched off, finding Spiderman and Batman a little too obvious and colonized the distant shores of manga and anime, so Helen, in her own way, had made a similar decision. When it came to fashion, Helen Thorson was a Manga Girl. It's one of the many things we have in common. She would realize this too after he had worked his way through the remaining nine questions. He had them all ready for Helen, just waiting for the right time to be asked.

Helen exited the lift ahead of him, the top floor corridor leading to a single apartment . . . double wooden doors in the passage, locked. Most of the wall behind him was glass, a bird's eye view out on Hyde Park, double-decker buses running up and down the road, a few commuters on bicycles sticking to the park's cycle lanes and leaving the road free for motor traffic. Spads looked at the door. Not much of a lock for a residence this exclusive. Probably figured they didn't need it, with the scowling bodybuilders in blazers manning the foyer. Entering the underground garage in Thorson's car had been like he'd imagined passing into Fort Knox would be. Manned checkpoint booths and steel gates thick enough to absorb a grenade blast and only need a polish to bring them back to pristine. Thorson produced the keycard for the flat, given to them by the ControlWerks people, fully cooperating as the few staff who knew about their co-founder's death struggled to keep the news under wraps. She unlocked the door and stepped through the doorway. Spads' phone went off as the femme fatale he accompanied was busy punching the deactivation code into the wall's alarm panel.

'Cuthbert,' trilled his mother. 'Cuthbert, I've been calling you all day. Your phone's always dead.'

'It's not dead; we just have really poor reception at work.'

A disappointed hiss at the other end. My mother was born disappointed. 'And you can't get them to give you a landline on your desk? After all you've put me through. Not even able to visit my old congregation in case I'm recognized.'

'No personal calls. You know how it is, we're monitored. There's a single switchboard and everything comes in and out through it. Just like the old days, when you were a secretary.'

'Of course they monitor you, after all you've put me through!'

'That's not a problem. Taken care of. I'm not a hacktivist now. I'm co-operating.'

'Not with me, you're not. Calling constantly and all you can do is worry me with your dead phone.' Sometimes Spads wished the cover story of his mother's relocation to Australia, grieving over her recently deceased son, had slightly more of an element of truth to it. To Spads, the new identity his mom had been given seemed all too similar to her old one. She was still his mother. She still seems to believe managing my life is a fulltime job. An extradition waiting to happen. Didn't she get it? I'm running with the Fedz now. Hacking for the man. With Helen by his side, he even had Dana Scully to play partner to his Fox Mulder. Angelina to his Brad.

'I'm going to check your cookies, Cuthbert. I know how to do that on your computer. I'm going to make sure you're not looking at anything you shouldn't be. Your own mother, checking your cookies.'

Thorson coughed in a bored, are-you-finished-yet type of way.

Spads covered his phone's microphone. 'Just my flatmate playing up, Helen. That's all.'

Thorson indicated the flat's anteroom and tapped her watch impatiently.

'It's no wonder your father left us, ran away,' hissed the voice from the throne. 'With you for a son.'

He wasn't my true father. 'I'll try and come back on time tonight,' said Spads. He hung up and switched his phone to vibrate. It had always been difficult for his mother. She could see the way her son glowed, the old girl warming herself against his illumination even as she lacked the most basic intellectual tools to understand his manifest destiny. She had spent her life in service to him; sharing his trials and their sacrifices together had made her bitter. Spads had a theory and even his own mother couldn't understand it. He hadn't told the theory to her, of course. Nor anyone else. They wouldn't understand either. How could ordinary people begin to comprehend that the universe was a computer, and each new generation of humanity was merely an additional processing cycle carrying the software towards its ultimate aim . . . to decrypt god? This was Spads own private religion – one he was Pope, prophet and sole worshipper for. The only thing surprising about it was that nobody else had seen it, appropriated the idea before him, Moore's law written in flesh and progress. From cave paintings evolving into Photoshop. From saddles evolving into Saturn Ten rockets. The software multiplying and being fruitful. Spads' religion wasn't to be shared, he had realized that very early on in his life. Once, when he was having his head flushed down the toilet in a Croydon comprehensive, he had briefly thought about sharing his faith with his brutish tormenters. But that wouldn't have been enough to stop the other boys ostracizing him – it might even have made matters worse. The light that shone from Spads, the gulf between himself and the normal pupils was just too wide. So instead, Spads had stayed inside the school's computer lab as much and long as was allowed, avoiding the tediously ungifted bulk of humanity, a clockmaker learning how the cogs and gears of the universe fitted together. Learning how the system inside mirrors the system outside. God was canny, to hide in mathematics that only the most worthy could comprehend, to anchor that achingly beautiful glory in the ritual and observances of software, burying the large system within the small, each reality running in emulation inside the other, nested realities like Russian babushka dolls. Just like the Christ that Spads' mother seemed so obsessed with, she sensed the saviour's light shimmering inside her son. And Spads too had spent his years in the wilderness, training himself, proving himself; his light keeping everyone else away from him. He was lonely, of course. But that was the way it seemed it had to be. He had never found his Mister Myagai, never come across the Yoda to train his inner Jedi. He was too far ahead of his peers to put the gang together, for the Avengers to ever assemble with him as a member of the team. Spads had proved himself to God by climbing the mountain alone. When he wanted to understand something, he took it apart and put it back together again. Then he would code it from scratch and make it better, at least twenty percent more efficient each time. Despite the pain and the solitude, Spads had kept the faith, and just as he knew he would, God had kept him too. When the FBI appeared, demanding his extradition to the USA for testing himself against their systems, their envious hands clutching an orange hood to make him blind, salivating at the thought of parading him on the Perp Walk towards their vile gladiator pit of a prison, the universe has swiftly stepped in, saving its favourite son. A quick faked-up suicide in a crowded East London prison. Then resurrection in a hidden temple of secrets, his own private Styx where the river carried in not souls, but sub rosa documents which only the pure of heart were allowed to access. Spads had been moved behind the curtain, elevated to the cabal, given access to the tools of the priesthood. What he didn't know was if Helen Thorson was here as a test for him, part of his terrible hunger of loneliness in the desert, or as a reward for his service to the universe? He was still thinking about that one.

'The logs at Werks' ISP show a computer somewhere in here,' said Spads. 'I'll find it and see if there are any hidden extras inside the screen.'

'You do that,' said Helen. She turned around taking in the surroundings of the flat. You could tell she liked what she saw. Even an innocent like Spads could see this place dripped with wealth. Gold, silver and platinum colours everywhere you turned, polished and offset by deep brown wood. Sofas, modern, soft and luxurious. Glass cabinets filled with dark abstract sculptures. One of the walls had an oil painting of James Dean divided like a puzzle across separate squares of canvas. As a display of wealth, Simon Werks' London office seemed restrained by comparison. Simon's office probably had more visitors, so who was the entrepreneur trying to impress at home? Women like Helen, his hidden God whispered.

'When it comes to accruing expensive art and antiques,' said Helen, 'there are two main types of collectors . . .'

Spads nodded, indicating he was listening. He enjoyed listening to Helen almost as much as looking at her. All knowledge is useful. To be approached with humility.

'The first type use consultants to pick and choose for them,' she continued. 'The second make their own selections and personally read auction books sent out by Christies and Sotheby's, even if they send agents to bid for them to help keep the prices low. You can tell the difference from how a collection is displayed. If a consultant is responsible for curating purchases, the most expensive objects are placed at the forefront of a home, as a testimony to their hard work and skill. If buyers are making the selections personally, they tend to position their most expensive objects in places where only they can see the purchases.'

'Which of the two was Simon Werks?'

'He hired his taste in,' said Helen. 'And he picked staff with impeccable discrimination to buy for him.' Helen drew out her own phone and activated its camera function before walking through the flat, taking photographs from a variety of angles. Spads wasn't sure if she was making a record so they could put things back in the same spot after the search, or recording it for the others back in the Office. Probably the latter, he decided. They were here with ControlWerks' permission, and Simon Werks no longer cared much about anything. Certainly not a Warhol out of place by two inches.

Spads entered a dining room laid out with a full service, eight chairs, the settings with four plates piled on top of each other, every plate slightly smaller than the one underneath, three silver forks on the left, three knives on the right. Each with their own purpose, just like a programming language's function library. How would you eat pizza like that? Maybe one of them is a pizza fork? He located the man's home office, a relatively small desk joined to a large wooden shelving unit, infused with a light-sabre golden glow from hidden uplighters. A small Apple laptop rested on the desk and Spads felt a moment of deep disappointment in Simon Werks. That the man who had led the development of modern commercial cryptography would value style over substance, brand over brawn. He had expected a home-brew kit, something cryogenically-cooled and overclocked to the max, not this single piece of machined aluminium purchased from some designer boutique masquerading as a computer store. This isn't cool. Custom was cool: factory was mean and beggarly. It was like breaking into the studio of your favourite grunge musician and finding their MP3 player filled with Barry Manilow tracks. Well, he's dead now. I shouldn't think badly of the deceased. He pulled around his canvas courier bag and removed his own laptop, then cracked the casing on Werks' computer so he could connect directly to its drive. As he was mirroring the data, his phone began to vibrate. He slid the phone out to inspect the caller display. It was Frank Ludington from the Office.

Spads cleared his throat before speaking. 'Yes?'

'Found your router inside the Werks building. It was still powered up. I've pulled details of where it was broadcasting the hidden feed.'

'It would have been sending to a proxy server,' said Spads. 'The first of many. I'll need to trace the feed back to its source.'

'Give you something to do,' said Ludington, 'other than asking Helen for her number.'

'Has he asked you for your telephone number yet?' recalled Spads. 'That's question number three.'

'If you say so, man. You owe me one, remember.'

'I won't forget.' Spads flipped the phone shut and kept working on the dead billionaire's laptop. He made sure to mirror the drive at a magnetic level, security systems and all. Plenty of time to crack it later, in the comfort of the humid stone chambers under Monument.

Helen appeared with a couple of books under her arm. She set them down on the desk and walked over to the office's shelves to check the titles on the spines. 'He kept those two on his bedroom table, bookmarked towards the back, so he had nearly finished reading them.'

Spads inspected the titles. The Me I Will Become, and The Light Within My Perfection, both by someone called Tom Roberts. He presumed the photos on the front were of the author. They were both of the same man. The writer looked tall and complete and happy. 'I've never heard of him.'

'He's a Christian evangelist. Runs a number of religious TV stations out in the states, along with a network of churches. A very profitable network.' She started tugging books off the shelves and piling them next to the first two. 'More of the same. All Roberts Foundation Press.'

'Paper books,' said Spads. 'Not digital.'

'You're right!' she exclaimed as the realisation dawned on her. 'We never found an e-book reader in Simon's flat or office. Not a single work of fiction here, just these church cash-ins. Which means our dead friend wasn't a serious reader.' Helen examined the inside of the dust jackets, turning one around to show Spads. 'Signed by Tom Roberts himself.'

The collector within Spads kicked in. 'That makes them valuable.'

'That's why they're paper books. You can't charge the devout thousands for a digital download. Faith needs to be kept as solid as possible. New editions printed annually, so his congregation can repurchase the entire collection every year.' She tapped the open page. 'And this is the latest edition. Nothing older in his collection. I think Simon Werks found his faith quite recently.'

The lights on Spads' kit lit up, indicating the drive had been sucked clean, so he reassembled the laptop and stowed his gear away while Helen perused the books. She was sliding them back onto the shelves when the front door chimed. A brief flash of panic crossed Spads' face, but Helen tapped the handbag where she kept her pistol. 'Assassins don't knock. Just remember what ControlWerks told the building manager.'

'We're with the company.'

Helen shrugged. 'No, we're with the Office.'

They walked towards the flat's front door. Spads was happy to let Helen answer it. Talking to new people was something he rarely did unless he had to. A short, older woman waited outside, wearing a black leather jacket, tight trousers and a look that was about four decades too young for her. She gazed short-sightedly at them through glasses that filled most of her pinched face, and when she spoke, lips wobbled wildly that wouldn't have looked out of place on Mick Jagger. 'I am Lenochka. Does Mister Werks wish me to clean today? Nobody tells me flat is busy until I arrive. Every other day I come. Nobody tells me flat is busy.'

'Please do come in,' smiled Helen, 'don't mind us. We're looking to remodel the flat with a more contemporary balance of style. Something a little more twenty-first century.'

The cleaning lady waddled in suspiciously, going to a section of wall in the hallway and sliding it back, disturbing the hall's minimalist lines by revealing a cupboard full of plastic buckets filled with cleaning products, upright mops and an industrial strength vacuum cleaner so spotless it might never have been used. 'Is Mister Werks working in office? I leave office to last if he is working.'

'He's not here. He's taking some quiet time, you know, away from things.'

'Ah,' she said, hanging her leather jacket inside the cupboard and putting on a blue apron. 'Religious retreat. He says he is going on one.'

'Yes, the retreat in America, I think,' said Helen. 'You probably know Mister Werks' tastes better than we do. We've not met him yet, unfortunately. Have you worked for him long?'

'Four years I work here,' said the old woman. 'Every other day.'

'It's a clean flat,' said Helen. 'He can't have many visitors, no parties or dinners.'

'He is good man now,' said the cleaner. 'No parties, no girls. No mess.'

'Really, I heard he enjoyed that type of life? We were told to make sure any furniture we purchase has an anti-stain coating for alcohol spills.'

'First three years, yes. Always mess to clean up. Ash on floor. Wine on floor. Stupid girls. Some of them from Poland, the kind that ask for money, giggling and saying rude things, thinking I cannot understand. Not now. No more stupid pretty girls. Mister Werks asks me to pray with him when I come here, sometimes. We kneel by window. He has clean life and clean flat.'

Spads experienced a moment of regret listening to the cleaner's tale. Simon Werks was one of the few people Spads might have confided in concerning his personal religion. Perhaps Spads could have got the billionaire to understand the fundamental truths of the universe. Saved him from wasting his time on the same fatuous teachings his mother seemed obsessed with. Werks had made many worthy contributions to the uplift of humanity. If only he had believed better, perhaps God would have stepped in and saved the billionaire just as Spads had been saved. Keep me as the apple of thine eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.

'You pray with him?' Helen sounded sceptical.

'It is true, here . . .' Lenochka grabbed Spads by the sleeve and dragged him along the corridor to the large window overlooking Hyde Park, pulling him down in front of the tall pane of cold glass. 'Like this.'

It was looking out the window, in that brief moment, Spads had his epiphany. A red bus drove down the road in front of the park, the ninety-nine to Woolwich High Street. Flashing along the digital billboard on its side, the advert showed a shop assistant making a phone out of his fingers and the logo of the phone shop being promoted rolled into place, along with a cartoon speech bubble reading 'Call John.'

'John 9:9,' whispered Spads. Mother's preaching tone surfaced in his head. Some said, "It is he." Others said, "No, but he is like him." But the Son of God kept saying, "I am the man." Spads shivered with the power of the revelation. Simon Werks couldn't be saved. But his contribution can still be honoured. He can be avenged. This is the test I have been given, to find the killers behind Werks' murder. You test those who are righteous and examine the deepest thoughts and secrets. Let me see your vengeance against them, for I have committed my cause to you.

With her apron on, the old woman smelt of chlorine and lavender, but Spads no longer cared. I have been shown my path. It all makes sense. If he had been locked up in a super-max prison on the other side of the Atlantic, incarcerated with all those meathead bullies and psychopaths in their human zoo, he could never have been deployed as a true servant of the universe.

'He is American, but he is good now,' said the woman, as if the ancestral memory of superpower rivalry was still embedded deep in her soul. Americans could be good, if they tried hard. She got up from her knees. Spads did the same.

Helen made a doubtful clucking noise as the old woman waddled off to drag buckets and dusters out of the cupboard. Helen motioned back toward the home office with a graceful flick of her head, resting her back against one of the sofas. 'Check you've copied all the data and we'll make a last pass for anything we've missed.'

'I am the man,' said Spads.

'You the man,' she agreed, cheerfully. 'So, Simon Werks needed to believe in something more than vast amounts of money. But only towards the end. What does that tell us?'

'Something bad happened to him?' speculated Spads.

'Like what?'

'Life, I think.' Life was often enough to confound Spads.

'No, he used to enjoy his life. There's something more, that we're missing . . .'

Spads looked at Helen, as cute as a button in her expensive, artful, manga clothes. 'I think we all need something more,' he said.

'There are no atheists in foxholes,' noted Helen.

'Is that a saying?'

'An aphorism. Something my father used to tell me. He was career army.'

'You have a father?'

'No, a mad scientist cloned me' She moved to a tall display table with a miniature raft carved from pale-green jade, a Chinese figure who might have been Buddha sitting in the boat with a basket of flowers, an attendant and a deer. 'What you think?'

He walked over to get a closer look. Spads wasn't sure if Helen was asking what he thought of the jade piece, or the idea she had been spawned in the lab of some mad scientist. 'Is the figure Buddha?'

'No, she's Ma Gu, an immortal identified with the elixir of life in Taoist scripture. A piece inferior to this sold for two million last year to a Chinese industrialist.' Helen picked it up, feeling its heft, no longer than a pen, then she opened her handbag and dropped the miniature inside, clinking as it jounced against her Beretta BU-9 Nano sub-compact pistol. 'This is my something more.'

Spads' eyes widened. 'You can't take that.'

She raised a finger to her lips. 'Of course I can. Simon Werks didn't even care about this when he was alive, let alone now. Look how the pieces stand out against the walls and offset his ceiling. These were chosen for the colour scheme – do you have any idea how insulting that is to a real collector? If a Picasso or a Henry Moore figurine had gone better with the carpet, then that's what his gallery would have installed in the flat.' Helen pointed to a mottled green jade-faceted vase on a neighbouring display table. 'A Qianlong-period baluster. Now that's worth twenty times as much.'

Spads moved to stand in front of it. 'You can't steal it. They'll catch you!'

Helen laughed. 'Too big to hide on the way out. And they've already caught me. Why the hell do you think I'm working for the Office?'

Spads gawked at her. It seemed like his day for epiphanies. 'What if the building has concealed cameras in here?'

'They don't, I swept for them. But even if there were cameras here, that's the point of you, Spads, isn't it? Something substantial to hack. You felt alive when you kicked down the Pentagon's firewalls, that much I know. You had to feel good doing that.'

'The FBI was going to extradite me!'

'You're good with systems. I'm good with more physical concerns. Think of the things we could do together.' She leaned in and gave him a hot, warm kiss on the lips. Helen tasted like cinnamon. She tasted like manga. A reward for his service or a test? Spads was just about leaning towards the former. Point seven – he needs to tell you that you are a radiant woman and that you are enough. It almost made sense now.

CHAPTER SIX

Suspicious Minds

Agatha peered through the tiny glass lens built into her door to see who had rung her bell. Nobody ever called on them at the Tower. Certainly not the locals, who wouldn't even acknowledge a good evening from her as she set off on her nocturnal walks.

Vincent Bouche appeared at the end of the corridor, a cook's apron with the colourful figure of a cartoon waiter printed on it springing against his knees as he stalked towards the door. He still had the razor-sharp vegetable knife in his hand he had been using to slice apples. 'Anyone we know, madame?'

'It appears to be Spads. He's the electronic warfare specialist currently attached to section seven.' There was a distant excited snaffling from the kitchen as Saucisses scratched at the closed door. The miniature pig was the only one in the household who enjoyed receiving visitors. As long as they scratched him under the snout, he was content. Agatha was not so easily fobbed off. Nor was her housemate.

Bouche pressed his face to the spy-hole. 'One of the Office's babies. Not a pretty one. Too much time searching the internet. Bad for his skin.'

Agatha's housemate stepped to the side, out of sight as she opened the door. 'Spads, I wasn't expecting you. You should have called ahead.'

'I wanted to,' complained Spads. 'Doyle says it's Moscow Rules from now on. That means we don't trust our phones unless it's an emergency.'

'Really? I wonder who could have given him that idea? It seems admirably prudent, however.' Agatha indicated the warmth of the corridor and stepped aside for him to enter. As the hacker squeezed past, she felt the rim of his coat, locating the hole in the fabric. A pea-sized pentagon. She made a subtle hand signal to Bouche confirming their visitor's identity and he lowered his knife, then she closed the front door. Spads started in alarm as he realized someone had stepped out as silently as an assassin behind him.

'Spads, this is Monsieur Bouche, Vincent Bouche. He's operated as something of an honorary member of the Office for decades, so you can be completely candid with him.'

'I'm not on your social networks or your search engine indexes,' said Bouche. 'I am like les morts, yes? I am like one of Madame Witchley's ghosts.'

Spads had a look on his face like a startled rabbit expecting to be garrotted for the pot. 'Okay. I am the man.'

'You are a baby. But you may learn.' Bouche turned and headed back to the kitchen.

'Don't mind him. Vincent isn't terribly good around new people.'

'I understand,' said Spads. 'I'm not very good around new people, either.'

'So much in common.' Agatha led Spads down the corridor and opened the door to the living room. Inside sat a worn terracotta-pattern sofa in front of a wall-mounted television, a multi-slot Blu-ray recorder below the entertainment screen, but that was the only free space. The majority of the room was given over to transparent crates of gleaming disks and removable storage drives connected to a pair of computers. The space was made even smaller by weighed-down shelves erected across every spare gap. She could see from the way his eyes lit up that he appreciated the custom system set-up.

'Well then, Spads. I presume you're here with news from the Office, although you're welcome to stay for Vincent's Moules marinière.'

'Is that food?'

'An extremely tasty dish, as long as you enjoy mussels.'

'My, well . . . flatmate gets very angry if I don't eat with her.'

'Jealously is the least admirable of the seven sins,' said Agatha. 'You shall stay for dinner, then. Now, the Office . . .?'

Spads rummaged around in his leather courier bag, green and tan with the image of a fox stencilled on the flap. He pulled a paper file out from behind his laptop. Agatha accepted the folder from him and called to Bouche to bring her reading glasses. The Frenchman appeared with Agatha's spectacles, leaving the living room as she speed-read through Helen's notes and examined the photographs of Simon Werks' flat. Spads' locating a hidden feed broadcasting Werks' surveillance footage to an external location was a breakthrough she hadn't been anticipating. No less welcome for it. God-bless the world's blackmailers. She allowed a smile to settle on her face when she read about the murdered billionaire's recent conversion to born-again Christianity. 'You'll find no atheists in foxholes.'

'That's exactly what Helen said.'

'Of course she did, she's a clever girl. Now then Spads, have we received permission from ControlWerks to access Simon Werks' financial records?'

Spads shook his head. 'They are held in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The company says the records are private, part of his estate. We need to speak to his lawyers.'

'Do you need permission?'

'Banks have a way of doing things. Their protocols are often the same. Bank compliance manuals are thick, but static. Staying static is never a good thing. Only evolution works.'

He seemed to be speaking in a wider sense than just software, but Agatha bit back her curiosity. 'Well then, I would say they're probably asking for it, don't you think? Specifically, I would be very interested in any large donations to charity, religious or otherwise, made from Simon Werks' estate in the last year.' She handed the file back to Spads. 'And I would suggest deleting the photographs of the living room tomorrow when you check in at the Office.'

'Why?'

'That's where the most valuable antiques are on display. Before and after photos are highly prized by insurance investigators.'

Spads had the courtesy to blush. That confirms my suspicions about Helen's latest bout of kleptomania, at least. From the kitchen came a muffled noise. One of The Doors' albums being played too loud. Bouche only played music loudly when he sulked. It was amazing; it was as if he could actually sense Agatha extending a dinner invitation to their visitor.

'I'll be going back to the Office later,' said Spads. 'I'm close to completing the IP trace for the hidden feed. That should lead us to the missing security guard, Luke Wilder . . .'

'Something to keep you and Helen out of mischief, then. Helen a little more than you. I doubt if collecting objects d'art is at the forefront of our absent security man's mind right now.'

'Frank Ludington helped me track down the secret router. You were right about him.'

'You need to have people around who you can rely on, who you can trust, who will stand against your back. Especially when you're working for the Office, in our field of expertise.'

'Is that a lesson?'

'I believe it is.'

Spads reached for a quaintly analogue paper notepad with a pencil jammed into its spine. It must hold precious content indeed for Spads not to trust it to his PDA or laptop. Agatha pushed the hand holding the notebook gently back into his canvas bag, but not before getting a glimpse of a list that looked suspiciously like it had been copied from the advice pages of a woman's magazine. 'You don't need to write that down. Simply remember it.'

Spads stared towards her shelves, asking the question that had obviously been nagging him since he entered the living room. 'Why do you have so many discs when you can stream shows on demand?'

'There's a sadness in old television shows, don't you think?' said Agatha, standing up and brushing a row of CDs labelled M.A.S.H: the complete series. 'All those people, tuning in every week to catch the latest episode. Discussing which character they like best with their friends. Blogging about plots and updating their social apps with ideas of where stories should head. And then the series are gone. Just a memory, a few lost zeroes and ones on a video-streaming server. Nothing you can leave for your children. Hardcopies lasted for centuries, Chaucer and Shakespeare handed across the generations as a legacy. But who remembers Callan or Kojak? That's what our world has become. Not enough attention or memory left in our crowded world to sing of the Wombles around the tribe's campfires.'

'But why record the shows?' he said, indicating her banks of humming storage devices. 'Why create an offline mirror?'

'It's an almost impossible task, rewriting histories on the paper page; even more arduous to tamper with every book at the same time. But after you've digitised everything, why, then there's only the charge of an electron spin separating Stalin as Monster from Stalin as Saviour. I'm taking snapshots of humanity, our knowledge, and the value isn't in what's recorded. It's in locating what's might be erased, or already has been. You think this is a clutter of storage devices, trying to capture the digital river? It's not. You can't capture the river, the river is only flow. My room here is pure Zen. I'm making use of what is no longer there.' She reached over and waved her hand through the doorway. 'Just like the space that allows us to enter the room. What's not there is as important as what is.'

'I so don't understand,' said Spads.

'At the Office, most of its work is absorbing the secrets people no longer care to know, storing them away for a rainy day that will never come. You might say this is the opposite face of that task, preserving the truth rather than merely hiding it. Pro bono work, carried out by way of my penance.'

Spads shook his head, confused, examining the shelves' contents as if they might help him. 'ChiPs, Airwolf, F Troop, Daktari, Rising Damp, My Favourite Martian, The Rockford Files.' He recited the obviously unfamiliar titles like Latin at a Mass. 'Are they the truth?'

'More than you might think.'

'Did God tell you to preserve them?'

'Actually, it was Steve Jobs back in the day. Let's just say we both have our peculiar little ways, Spads. In my case, it's one of the many perils of Mister Doyle cancelling my staycation at this country's most secure mental institution.'

'Doyle. I almost forgot. He asked me to tell you that you two have an interview tomorrow morning with the head of Greenrock Capital. It's been arranged in a club in London. The man's called William T. McCarley. His fund wants to buy ControlWerks.'

'So I hear. Fast work indeed. Could you gauge from Mister Doyle how willingly the firm granted the interview?'

'Doyle didn't look happy. He never seems happy.'

'Making people happy isn't his business, friend,' said Agatha. She grinned. 'Let's see how unhappy we can make your, well . . . flatmate.'

In the kitchen, The Doors album was rising to a crescendo, Jim Morrison opining on the majority of the children being insane. You're not wrong, Jimmy. It was time for dinner for three, four if you included their pig. And that was just the guests who were alive.

***

Doyle kept a wary eye on his sat-nav, suckered to the windscreen, a piece of twenty-first century high tech intruding on his classic car's dash, checking for the little flash of red on the screen that would indicate an available parking space in the area. The seat next to him still had the boy's car seat strapped into it, the boot too full of junk to stow the chair and Agatha Witchley hovering behind his shoulder in the back, leaving him feeling a lot like the chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy.

'There we are,' said Mrs Witchley. She pointed to a car pulling away from the curb, leaving an empty space along the Mayfair street. It was under an oak tree, the white splatter of bird crap on the roofs of the nearby Porsche four-wheel drives nearly enough to put Doyle off from taking the space, as were the litter of acorns fallen on top of the cars. He resigned himself to a wiping of his beloved Chevy Nova later on. He manoeuvred in manually, parked up, then swung the door out into the pavement. The parking meter was pay-by-phone, and at Mayfair prices, Doyle resigned himself to taking out a second mortgage to pay for the time the two of them would spend interviewing Greenrock Capital's head money muncher.

'Real men don't use autopark,' said Mrs Witchley, in a tone friendly enough he could almost believe she wasn't being sarcastic.

'You get a chance to read up on William T. McMoneybags last night?' retorted Doyle.

Mrs Witchley shut her door and turned to look at the sweep of white stone, iron railings and faux temple columns fronting the building they had parked alongside. 'I believe I was somewhat side-tracked by the history of the institution we're to meet him in.' The entrance to the Plato Club waited before them, six steps leading to an open set of double doors at the front of a wide three-storey Georgian façade – a black silhouette of the Greek philosopher's head enamelled on a discrete brass plate, not even the club's name, just the words subscription library under the head's contours.

'Yeah, he's sending us a message by meeting us here. The Big I Am. Davos Plus for the crowd that actually get invited to Davos. This place is so far beyond exclusive, that they're having a laugh. British Prime Ministers get turned down for membership in the Plato Club.'

'Only the ones who are no longer in power,' said Mrs Witchley. 'It wasn't so much the exclusive nature of the membership that had me entranced – all of London's private clubs play that game. No, it is the genius of portraying the club's headquarters as a subscription library.'

'That's not genius, love, it's fake snobbery. We're so clever we read books on actual paper, hand-bound in the leather of rare endangered goats. You won't find Lee Child's latest pot-boiler on our shelves, but you will have to pay the cost of a car park full of new Mercedes every year to join.'

'You can't put a price on good company, Mister Doyle. But that's not the genius of this place. The club's characterized as a library. During the last London riots, seventy million pounds worth of electronic goods were taken and nearly as much in designer trainers and clothes. Bobbins, even pound stores were cleared out and set on fire. But not one single bookshop or library was looted. Not one. Nobody steals books. Nobody puts a brick through a library. You are either too educated to vandalise a library, or not nearly educated enough. The only protesters a library ever sees are the mobs of local pensioners when they hear it might close. This—' she indicated the building, '—is the world's most exclusive stealth building. Rendered invisible by the use of two simple words. Yes, I would call that genius.'

Doyle watched in growing impatience as Mrs Witchley bent down by the side of his Nova. She opened her handbag and began scooping up handfuls of acorns from the gutter into her handbag. I know I'm going to regret asking, but . . .'

'My pig has rather an appetite for the common acorn, Mister Doyle. He can't get enough of them.'

'Well, that's all right then. You really are two cards short of the complete Pokemon set, love.'

'I don't suppose it will help if I told you that Churchill visited me last night after I finished taking a rather splendid supper with young Spads. Call it a coincidence, but he mentioned acorns, too. Churchill that is, not Spads. I'll take that as a premonition.'

'See the future too, can they, without even reading your tea-leaves? Very versatile.'

'I don't think time moves for the passed in the same way as it does for us. I did question one of them, once. All I was told was that being afraid of what happens after you're dead does you about as much as good as being afraid of not being around before you were born.' She stopped filling her bag, lifted up a single acorn, removed her little set of steel pincers, and used the hole punch-like device to pierce a cavity in the oak nut. Agatha held up the acorn to the light, the morning sunlight filtered through the little triangle she had punched through the seed. You'd think she was a jeweller who'd found a diamond in the street.

She chuckled to herself as she wedged the acorn in the groove of Doyle's engine bonnet and dropped the little device back in her handbag. 'What was it Winnie said to me, again? Who knows what English oak shall grow from a little acorn.'

'You want to feed the birds, Gypsy Jen, you can wipe off my Nova afterwards. The little tweety gits are going to whitewash her under the leaves here as it. Look . . . you missed a few acorns on the top of that Lamborghini Aventador behind us. You want me to help bag them for you, or shall we go and see if William T. McMoneybags is bloody bumping off company founders so his fund can clean up?'

'You will need to demonstrate the tact and diplomacy for which you are legendary,' said Mrs Witchley. 'Mister William T. McCarley has extended us the courtesy of inviting us to dine at an institution where heads of state and oligarchs take breakfast. Besides, if Mister McCarley's innocent, he won't know that Simon Werks is dead, and it would be unfair of us to give him the commercial advantage of that news.'

'Innocent.' Doyle chewed at the word like an unwelcome fishbone. 'The T. should stand for tosser, anyone who insists on using their middle initial in their name.' He pulled out a City of London warrant card as he walked up the steps towards the Plato Club. 'This is our cover . . . fraud squad. McMoneybags has been told we're investigating the ControlWerks take-over for possible insider trading. We'll see if he lets slips that he knows Saucy Simon is laid out on a morgue slab, rather than sunning himself with a bunch of church hippies out in California.'

Doyle and Mrs Witchley walked into the club. They found a cloakroom and reception alcove in a short corridor, and a pair of liveried doormen, black jackets with tails and a discrete Plato Club logo on their ties in gold. The taller of the two men smiled at them. 'Mister McCarley's guests?'

Doyle nodded and the man indicated the cloakroom, while his colleague checked their arrival off on his tablet. 'Welcome to the Plato Club. And would Mrs Witchley care to leave her umbrella in the cloakroom?'

'Mrs Witchley would not, young man. Something to lean on at my age is always appreciated – and as you can clearly see, I am far too young to sport a walking stick.'

Doyle rolled his eyes. What is it about women? Vanity at the old biddy's age. His grandmother had been the same right up until her last day in the nursing home. Buying silk blouses online she couldn't afford and having someone come in to do her hair every fortnight, well into her nineties.

'Very good. Sir, madam, the morning room is this way.'

The doorman led them through a large hall, an expanse of Italian stone with a sweeping white staircase curving up and splitting into two bridges of marble with dark wrought iron for banisters, the treads climbing up across two storeys. Off to the right, the morning room was a high-ceilinged chamber filled with light from its sash windows, tables surrounded by easy chairs and occupied by club members drinking tea and coffee and nibbling at sandwiches and croissants. Many of the faces were vaguely familiar to Doyle from television, although he wouldn't have been able to name half of them if pressed – a rum crew of politicians, industrialists and celebs. William T. McCarley dined alone. There was a reading table by his side, a selection of tablet devices fanned out, each with a different newspaper on its screen. Members of staff appeared and pulled out chairs for Doyle and Mrs Witchley, the visitors announced by name by the doorman, and, after inquiring after the guests' preferences for food and drink, the two of them were left alone with the fund manager. Matching McCarley's short ginger hair, the man wore a brown three-piece suit bordering on orange; a tweedy pattern that made him look like Rupert the Bear gone to work on Wall Street. Elegant but showy, it wasn't the sober anonymous blue stealth suit favoured by most bankers. His solid ruddy features gave the impression of a man who was used to doing things his own way. I know how that goes.

'So, Britain's interested in my fund's activities? I thought you guys were all about the free market again these days?' Doyle had expected the American accent from his file, although this man lacked Curtis Werks' patrician edge. McCarley could have been a prizefighter from New Jersey.

'Free?' said Doyle. 'How often does Greenrock get out of bed in the morning for free?'

McCarley shrugged. 'We like to earn our money. That's an American thing. A little like an American fund taking over an American company.'

'An American firm which has a London Stock Exchange listing, as well as a U.S one,' said Mrs Witchley. 'Besides, I was under the impression that markets and money were global these days.'

'I know what you guys have heard. The usual David and Goliath narrative, with Greenrock playing the part of the evil giant. For all of their supposed shyness with the press, the Werks boys do a good PR job on the rags-to-riches story, don't they? Werks is their mother's name, not their father's. Their father was a Connolly. Their old man took the Werks name so the wife's family wouldn't object quite so much to a penniless Mick marrying into a German packaging fortune. It's real easy to start a software business when the first eighty million comes from granny.'

'And you, I presume, are a self-made man?' said Agatha.

'Damn straight. My father was a teamster. Drove haulage for the same company in Nevada for thirty-eight years until the day it went bust. The next morning he stole his truck from a bailiff's lot and drove it off a bridge and into a canyon outside Winchester. I ever figure there's not a place in the world for what I do, I'll do the same damn thing. There's no safety-net fortune to catch my carcass. What I've done with Greenrock has been funded solely by the Bank of Hard Work.'

A tray appeared with coffee, tea and sandwiches cut into neat little triangles. Doyle tucked into the sarnies while Mrs Witchley fastidiously ignored her share. 'And what do you do, Mister McCarley?'

'My fund's not the barbarians at the gate, lady. Greenrock Capital is like a team of foresters in the woods. Sometimes we find a little vacant soil, so we plant an acorn and we water it, and something good grows up from nothing. That's venture capital. Other times we find a big old oak that's been there for centuries, but most of the tree's dead wood, diseased. To keep it alive, you've got to cut out the dead bark to preserve the healthy. That's a private equity buy-out.'

'And which of those two analogies would a ControlWerks deal fall under?'

'Well, I'd have to say that particular one would be a big juicy apple tree, with a pair of hayseeds tending it and letting half the fruit rot on the tree, rather than picking 'em and selling 'em like they should be. I own a piece of that land and that tree. Purchased fair and square on the open market. And those two hayseeds, much as I prod and poke them, don't seem minded to bring out their baskets and get on with the harvest.'

'And how far are you willing to prod?'

McCarley raised his hands. 'Only what's legal. Of course, that's not always so easy to work out, what with the European Union and the Fed fattening up the compliance books every year, but I have plenty of advisors to take care of that.'

'And if you buy out ControlWerks, what happens to the two brothers?'

'Well, in that regard, they're no different from my father. They like driving down their own road and they wouldn't enjoy backseat driving any more than I do. They're going to get booted out of the cab one way or another, sooner or later. Kinder and cleaner all around to make it sooner.'

'Caught between a rock and a hard place,' said Agatha. 'Hence your fund's title, perhaps?'

'Nah. I wanted to call it Kryptonite Capital, but I wasn't allowed to trademark the name.'

'We're going to need a list of all the funds in your consortium of buyers,' said Doyle.

'They're private-minded, sir, they don't much like governments getting in their face.'

'Well, ye-ha, Willie, we're having us a ho-down, and your partners are all invited. And when they've arrived for the bleeding square-dance, we'll crosscheck their stock purchases just to make sure the cousins haven't been kissing each too much.'

'There's no damn inside dealing with ControlWerks. I don't care what the Werks brothers are alleging.'

'Alas, these days the British government doesn't take much on trust when it comes to financiers,' said Mrs Witchley. 'A few too many bailouts along the journey. It would be very helpful if you could give us a list of the others involved in the consortium.'

McCarley waved his hand in disgust. 'You'll have it – much good may it do you. But you bear in mind this information is beyond commercially sensitive. If I find the names on it leaked to scupper our bid just because some pork-barrel Brit politicians are worried about jobs in their constituency, my lawyers will nail your ass to the wall. Be coming after you for billions, you hear?'

Doyle affected a posh English accent. 'Old chap, keeping secrets is our bread and butter.'

'Make sure it is.'

With their interview terminated, one of the serving staff appeared. As the man led them out, the footman who had escorted them inside arrived with a fashionably dressed woman to replace them at McCarley's table. She looked too old to be the fund manager's secretary, probably too old to be his wife too, if Doyle was any judge of character.

'You know,' said Doyle. 'I've just seen McMoneybags pay for lunch, so why does it feel like he's eaten mine?'

'I know that woman's face from somewhere,' said Witchley, glancing back at the table. 'It's on the tip of my tongue.'

'Unless you're secretly the Duke of Westminster's sister and you've been dining here on the sly, love, I don't see how . . .'

'Christine Lormand,' said Mrs Witchley, snapping her fingers. 'The second to last head of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. She retired ten years ago.'

'The French spooks at the DGSE? She's not here working as the club's cake waitress, then?'

'You know, the sedative that was used to tranquillize Simon Werks was derived from a substance still used by the French army.'

'That's a bit tenuous, love. I mean, I get that everyone loathes the Frogs, but still . . . give the cheese-munchers a break. The doc's report said the drug's used by the Australians too, but until we see Skippy the Kangaroo hopping around with a vial of tranquillizer tied around its neck, I'm not going to put them in the frame for the murder either.'

'I might have been a little unfair to you and your theories, Mister Doyle. Perhaps there is a commercial motive at play after all. Did you get the impression that McCarley wasn't being entirely honest with us back there?'

'Do bears lay big brown ones in the woods? Of course he wasn't telling the whole truth to us. But is it because his mates really are playing the market on the side, knowing ControlWerks shares are going to rocket as soon as the takeover begins. Or does the old sod know that Saucy Simon is dead and suspect we've rumbled Werks' suicide as a fake?'

'He should have had a lawyer sitting in,' said Mrs Witchley. 'If he believed he really was meeting with the Fraud Squad, he would have had representation. Shittysticks, what sort of American meets the Fraud Squad without at least three lawyers present?'

'The totally innocent kind or the completely guilty kind. Which leaves us right back at square one.'

'I thought you might just punch him in the stomach, plant a spray of methoxyflurane in his jacket pocket and arrest him in front of his peers.'

'You haven't developed a very good impression of how I do things,' said Doyle, stepping out through the club's entrance and into the morning sunshine. 'When my scumbags do time, I really do want them to have done the crime. If I'd been into taking Easy Street, I'd still be in Special Branch pulling antiterrorism cases.'

'How very old-fashioned of you,' said Mrs Witchley. 'And I mean that as a compliment.'

'Elvis been suggesting you make friends and influence people?'

'Not recently, Mister Doyle.' Mrs Witchley had her phone out, pecking intently at the small buttons of its keyboard.

'Oi, what happened to sending all our comms by carrier pigeon?'

'Oh, I trust my phone. I wrote its security software myself – well, with a smattering of help from Charles Babbage. Yes, that's what I remembered . . .' She turned the mobile's screen around to show Doyle the photograph of Christine Lormand on a corporate web page. 'Meet the executive chairwoman of PegasusEnForce.'

'The company protecting Curtis Werks and his family!'

'Indeed. A small world. So, how safe is Caesar when the Praetorian Guard are seen meeting with Brutus?'

'Oh crap!'

'A little indelicate, but essentially accurate.'

'No, I mean, oh crap!' Doyle pointed to the empty parking space where his car should have been. Please, God, don't tell me I've been towed. He sprinted over to the space on the curb, a great big vacancy of automobile between a Mercedes four-wheel drive and the bright yellow Lamborghini. A traffic warden with dreadlocks stood vigil inspecting the time left on the Mercedes' meter, his camera phone out for proof. Doyle stomped in front of him. 'You! Did you tow the Nova? There's at least a bloody hour left on that meter.'

'That old-fashioned smoker was yours?' shrugged the traffic warden. 'Driven off a couple of minutes ago, man. Three young kids – thought they couldn't afford nothing better than a rust bucket to tool around in.'

Mrs Witchley knelt in the vacant parking space and picked up the Nova's broken aerial lying on the tarmac. 'The old aerial hack. Snapped off and used to open your door lock. I did warn you about the security on last century models.' She indicated the cars on either side. 'Biometric identification, you see? They would take at least half an hour to hotwire.'

Doyle kicked the oak tree on the pavement in fury. 'Little hoodie scumbags, I'm going to kill them. My Chevy Nova. What's the wife going to say?'

Mrs Witchley had her phone to her ear. 'Hello, I would like to report the theft of a car, registration details are—' She halted as the thud of an explosion echoed through the streets, a distant chorus of chirping car alarms set off, muffled screams and panic marked by a column of black smoke spearing up above houses and shops a few roads away. That's a familiar song. Doyle had watched Bomb Disposal trigger a suspect package inside a car in Westminster five years ago. The resulting havoc had sounded a lot like that.

'The thieves knew the aerial hack,' said Mrs Witchley, sadly, sticking something in the street with the snapped-off length of metal. She raised an acorn in front of Doyle's face, the metal emerging through a neat triangular hole punched straight through the seed. 'But they didn't know the old acorn trick . . . that the fact this tumbled onto the road meant the bonnet had been opened and the engine tampered with.'

Doyle looked dumbly at the acorn, as if it was a tooth abandoned by a fairy. Bloody Nora.

'Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.'

'My flipping Nova!' Faces peered through the tall glass panes of the Plato Club. One of them was McCarley's, and it might have been the distortion of the window's mirroring, but there seemed more disappointment than curiosity on his face as to what was happening outside.

'We're on the right trail, Mister Doyle. When they slip a bomb inside your car, you know someone is getting anxious.'

Too shaken to feel the full fury of the fate that had so nearly befallen them, Doyle had his own phone out, trying to get through to Curtis Werks' mansion. He switched the mobile to speakerphone for Witchley's benefit. At the other end, a faint automated voice was repeating: 'This number is out of service. This number is out of service.' He killed the call and tried the Office, Mrs Rogers answering the call for passport control. 'Doyle. Put me through to Spads.' The hacker picked up, his slightly nasal voice sounding hesitantly at the other end. 'Section Seven.'

'Spads, get me a priority line to the Curtis Werks mansion in Surrey, any bloody way you can.'

Give the boy his due, he didn't argue or question. A literal order had been issued and he obeyed it literally. Doyle began sprinting towards the sound of the car alarms, the old biddy following by his side, surprisingly sprightly on her legs for her age. The line went quiet for a couple of minutes before Spads returned at the other end. 'Engineer's logs show the local telephone exchange down due to its fibre-optic trunk being accidentally severed by the water company, and all four cell towers in range have failed, too. At the same time!' Yeah, like that's going to happen. I've stopped believing in coincidences today. 'I can't patch you through, not with the area busted like that.'

'What about the army people out there?' puffed Doyle as he rounded the corner of the street. There was chaos ahead. All traffic in the road halted, the burning wreckage of Doyle's Nova rolled over by the force of the explosion, little more than a chassis with a couple of melted wheels. Nothing left of the joyriders who had been driving it. Black smoke billowed over the scene. Wounded shoppers and pedestrians sat bleeding nearby, some crying, others screaming for help. They would make it, though. Doyle could see the car bomb had been professional, a directed back-blast to decapitate its driver and passengers. Continuity IRA would have filled the car with ball bearings, a multi-directional blast front that would have shredded the whole street. Someone feels the same way about me that I feel about hoodies. He regretted the sentiment almost as soon as he thought it. Car theft wasn't a capital offence in Britain. It wasn't even a capital offence is Saudi. But blowing up a Chevy Nova should be!

'Short-range radios only,' said Spads. Doyle had to max out the phone's volume to hear the hacker's voice over the commotion around him, the speakerphone buzzing and vibrating in his hand. There was a strange tapping noise and he realized it was Spads striking a keyboard at the other end.

'The SAS are operating under MI5 control on a purely domestic mandate,' spat Mrs Witchley. She leaned her umbrella against the broken glass panes of one of the stores, dropped her handbag and began ripping the shirt from the chest of a blood-covered shopper, making a tourniquet of it for the victim's leg. She sounded enraged by the callous bombing. 'All our people at the house and grounds will be on the civilian circuit for communications.'

'We need to get Curtis Werks to safety, Spads. Werks is about to be targeted, killed like his brother. Give Hereford a shout,' ordered Doyle. 'See if the Who Dares Wins boys have got an off-protocol satellite phone hidden on the grounds. Then you telephone every police station outside the range of the communications dark hole, get them to send plod around to the house, fast and armed.'

He flipped his phone shut. Mrs Witchley murmured something to the man she was helping, and then left him to talk to Doyle. The walls of the street echoed to the doppler shift of approaching ambulance sirens. This is London, all right. One thing the city still did right, after centuries of bombs left by paddies, religious death cultists and anyone else with a serious grudge and a bomb-making manual downloaded from the internet. Nobody could get you to hospital quicker with all the surgery and blood bags in place to stitch you back together.

'The police won't be able to get there fast enough, Mister Doyle. If they've cut the phones, they're moving in now.'

'Unless you can summon angels to bleeding fly us there, Gypsy Jen, in addition to your poltergeist mates, we're royally pooch-screwed.'

The old biddy pointed her umbrella towards the rooftops, a pair of red twin-engined helicopters from the London Air Ambulance service settling down over the nearest crossroad. The street had been sealed off by first responders holding the space clear for the choppers to land, more of their colleagues roaring out of side streets on motorbikes, rotating lights behind the seats flashing off the paused traffic.

'Here come your angels. In for a penny, in for a pound?'

'Pounded,' growled Doyle, bunching his fingers into a fist. 'Just pounded after this. You've taught me Moscow rules, love. Well, Gary Doyle's got his own set. Let's see how the bastards enjoy playing by Hong Kong rules.'

Mrs Witchley glanced at the carnage around them, her brown-check Trilby hat almost lifted off in the choppers' downdraft. Doyle always thought he had detected a gleam of lunacy in her eyes, but this was the first time he had seen her properly mad, almost shaking with suppressed rage. 'This is not done. Collateral damage. It is entirely unnecessary. They cannot be permitted to do this again.'

Again. Doyle recalled what little the Office had of Witchley in its files and in that brief moment, he realised that she didn't just commune with ghosts. The old biddy was capable of making them too.

***

Helen Thorson stared up at the second storey office from the alleyway. The clientele of the Highgate kebab shop seemed unusually upmarket . . . smartly dressed office workers wandering towards Archway tube station and picking up lunch on the way back to their desks. Dirty windows upstairs and peeling paint, a nondescript sign falling down behind the glass – they're really not doing their part in keeping up with the neighbourhood, are they? It might look like a failing estate agency upstairs, but according to Helen's sources, this particular sole trader offered an interesting line in surveillance cameras. Everything the aspiring private detective needed to catch errant husbands cheating. Or the aspiring security manager might find essential in blackmailing his boss. Her phone vibrated on silent and she checked the caller. Spads, from their Firehall extension.

'I'm outside the address,' whispered Helen. 'I've surveilled it for an hour and nothing's moving inside. A postman called with a package to sign for, and nobody came down to answer the door. Time to test their locks.'

'Are you sure you need to break in?' asked Spads.

'Only if you're sure this is where the feed from Werks' office ended up.' Helen felt certain without further confirmation from the hacker. Screw the IP addresses and multiple servers playing their elaborate hidden game of pass the parcel. The feed from the secret camera ends up in a shop supplying hidden cameras. How much more evidence do we need? 'Get off the line. You're only meant to be ringing me in emergencies.'

'This is an emergency. Doyle says Curtis Werk's life is in danger, and I can't raise anyone at the mansion. It sounds as though whoever killed the first Werks twin is going after his brother. You shouldn't break in there without me.'

'And what are you going to do, slap the firm's owner over the head with a computer manual? I'm not burgling the Louvre, here. This is what I do. If Curtis Werks is in danger, then Surrey is where the trouble is. All I'm looking to find is a steer on where Werks' head of security is hiding out.'

'Be careful in there,' said Spads. 'Expressing care regularly is point number five.'

'No. Looking after number one is always the point.' She shut the phone and slipped across the road, covering the lock with her handbag, pretending to rummage around inside it for her key while taking her favourite mortice deadlock pick to the outside door. It didn't take longer than a minute. There was a second door inside a narrow shabby corridor, the firm's name on the door: I-See Solutions. This door had a shiny nickel security cylinder lock with anti-bump and pre-snap protection, an expensive German marque that suggested a very healthy sense of defensive awareness. Perhaps the show of grime on the windows upstairs is actually camouflage? Helen experienced a brief flicker of disquiet about going in alone. Come on Helen. You've been hanging around Mrs W. for too long. Her paranoia is starting to rub off on you. Maybe this lock is just for the Highgate insurance premiums. The inside door's German engineering didn't last long against the tools of her trade she kept concealed in her handbag. Helen left the light off in the stairs corridor, feeling her way up in the dim illumination. It grew lighter nearer the top. Someone had left a half-eaten noodle container on the treads, the sauce set as hard as concrete, but not even beginning to put off the flies crawling over it. The bugs were more interested in the abandoned meal than the pool of blood spreading out from the corpse face down in the middle of the floor. Helen groaned. Mr I-See, or our missing security guard? It looked as if the corpse died clutching a soldering iron in his right hand. Probably been using it on whatever electronics were inside the shiny steel case on the workbench. If the victim had been trying to use its gas-torch tip as a weapon, it hadn't proved anywhere as effective as the gun that had shot him twice. From the dark patch of blood on the spine of his coat and the exit wound on the rear of the skull, this had been a professional job, too. One in the heart, one in the head. Nothing like belt and braces when you wanted to remove any doubt concerning your victim's vital signs before you walked out.

Helen felt the hard prod of the metal cylinder in her back just as she noticed the distorted reflection of the postman's uniform in the steel case in front of her. Her eyes' flicked downwards to the Beretta BU-9 Nano sub-compact winking from the bottom of her handbag. The pistol might as well have been back in Italy rolling along the firearm manufacturer's production line for all the good it was going to do her down there.

Helen sighed heavily. 'Not a postman, after all, then.'

'Good of you to open the doors for me.'

'Wasn't it?'

As the gun fired, more of a spit than an explosion, Helen just had time to register that the pistol was silenced. Subsonic ammunition to reduce the sound . . . a suppressor of superior calibre.

***

When the doors on the back of the three Transport for London vans opened, it wasn't track maintenance workers who jumped out, but large men with blackened faces, assault rifles and dark kevlar flak jackets. On the face of it, the small enclosed courtyard off King William Street didn't contain much of value for twenty mercenaries. Only a single shed-sized ventilation unit that went down to the Tube tunnels below. Among other things. Pulling out a rugged shock-protected tablet, the team's leader fingered through a carousel of faces on the screen. Faces that Mrs Witchley would have instantly recognised, even though the photos were many years old . . . Spads, Mrs Rogers, Frank Ludington. 'These are the key targets again. There are no friendlies down below and nobody will hear your guns.'

'We don't have a map of the kill zone,' ventured one of the men with a South African accent, adjusting a set of night vision goggles strapped around his head like an insect's mandibles. 'No details.'

'The chambers below are too ancient for maps. Too secret. But there is no armour. This is not assaulting a missile silo. No doors that need welding torches to cut open. More like open cellars. Just finish everybody you come across. Only the staff on the reception desk will be armed as matter of course. Mostly civilians you will come across.'

'Easy work,' said another soldier, his accent closer to Serbian.

'Easy work,' agreed the leader.

With the ventilation unit opened and the shaft exposed, they began to throw out their grappling lines and descend into the darkness, dropping down towards the Firehall.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Continue the adventure

The mystery deepens in the second novella of the Agatha Witchley series . . . The Plato Club.

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