The Nursery

by Asia Mackay

I upped the volume on my iPod and kept a fast pace through the quiet streets of Chiswick.

  I was meant to be thinking of work. But Will kept creeping in. As long as I was at Eight the lies and secrets would never end. How could I stop them hurting us? How could we be a team when he didn’t know the game?

  I shook it off. We had no choice. I wasn’t quitting my job. I wasn’t quitting my marriage. I had to find a way to make it work.

  Work. That’s what I needed to think of. Would the Coyote dare to strike again? What if Peppa wasn’t the Snake? Peng was flying out tonight. If the Coyote and Snake went quiet we lost our only link to Tenebris. They’d carry on posting jobs. They’d carry on recruiting more Snakes. And the Security Services would be permanently compromised. Platform Eight would be on permanent shutdown.

  I ran along the river before circling back and heading towards home.

  I got to the start of Fisher’s Lane and saw Frederick on a bench in the playground up ahead.

  Frederick.

  I needed a whole other run to work through whatever was going on there.

  He was drinking a cup of coffee and looking at his phone. I slowed to a walk. He really wasn’t joking when he said Florence was an early riser. I checked my phone: 6.45 a.m. and she was already at the top of the climbing frame. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and headed towards them.

  Florence was shouting, ‘Daddy!’ at Frederick and he was doing a good job of pretending he couldn’t hear her. She got up higher and used both her arms to wave.

  And then she fell.

  I jolted as if I could get there in time, as if I could catch her, even though she was twenty feet away. I held my breath; she landed awkwardly. There was a pause and then a loud wail. Jesus, poor Florence, that was a nasty fall. I sped up my pace, wanting to get there to see if I could do anything to help. And then I stopped. Frederick wasn’t moving. He was still on the bench. Phone in hand, coffee in the other.

  What the hell? Did he have headphones in? I squinted. Nothing. But even if he did he couldn’t miss the fact that his daughter was lying on the ground, screaming in pain, just a few feet in front of him.

  I stopped and stared as my mind raced.

  One thought came clearest.

  He must not see me.

  I hid behind a tree. I needed to think.

  There had to be a reason. A reason why a father wouldn’t go and comfort their child in agony. I looked at Florence. She was lying on the ground just whimpering now. I wanted to go and comfort her. To pick her up and tell her it would be OK.

  And she wasn’t even my child.

  I looked again at Frederick continuing to scroll through his phone.

  Maybe she wasn’t his child?

  But even if she wasn’t she was still an innocent child in distress. I watched him take another sip of coffee.

  Was she a plant?

  Or was he playing a part?

  Put in position with a fake daughter?

  I thought of Florence’s eyes. The blue-green streak. No, she was his. I thought of the way Camilla stroked her hair and whispered to her. She was definitely his and Camilla’s. So if the marriage wasn’t a sham and the children were theirs . . . What kind of father could ignore the cries of their badly injured daughter?

  A sociopath.

  That was the answer.

  That was the only answer.

  You had to be completely devoid of emotional response to not comfort a child. Any child. Let alone your own.

  Frederick finally looked up from his phone and glanced around him. I flattened myself behind the tree. He was clearly checking to see there was no one around. No one he needed to pretend he cared in front of. I peered round the tree. He had now gone to Florence. He leaned down and pulled her roughly up by the front of her coat. The little girl stood there next to him. The whimpering stopped. He leaned down to talk to her. I couldn’t make out the words but I made out the sharp tone, and the tears continuing to roll down her face. He walked off. She followed behind, holding her hurt arm.

  I leaned back against the tree and closed my eyes.

  Frederick.

  A sociopath.

  Devoid of feeling.

  Playing the part expected of him.

  What did this mean?

  Sociopaths had no feelings. No empathy. No loyalty.

  Could he be the Snake?

  But how?

  Why?

  It didn’t make sense.

  We wouldn’t even know about the Tenebris Network if he hadn’t brought it to Dugdale.

  We wouldn’t even know there was a Snake.

  Why risk drawing attention to the fact there was a traitor? Why not just carry on raking in the money?

  I needed to get to the Platform.

  Right after I dropped Gigi, dressed as a piece of corn, off at the harvest festival.

  *

  I looked around the church. Frederick and Florence weren’t here yet. How bad was her arm? Maybe she’d had to go to hospital? I looked at the motley crew of toddlers dressed as root vegetables and tried to shake off the thought they were using our children as props to decorate a very sparse-looking church. It wasn’t like any of these two-year-olds would be capable of joining in the rousing rendition of ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ they had planned. I shook it off. Considering this was free childcare on a Sunday morning, I shouldn’t question it.

  With Gigi safely planted with the rest of the crop, I waited by the church doors for them to arrive.

  My heart skipped a beat as I saw Frederick open the church gate, a pale Florence dressed in a carrot costume alongside him.

  Frederick smiled at me as he walked down the pathway. He was wearing chinos and a light blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up. He looked so normal. So handsome. A good apple. With a rotten core.

  I smiled back.

  ‘How’s Peng?’ he asked as he ushered Florence through the church doors and towards a waiting Yvonne. I watched her walk slowly down the aisle. That poor girl. ‘Lex?’

  ‘I . . . She’s fine.’ I needed to remember everything was normal. I needed to brief him and get to the Platform to investigate him. ‘Hattie is with her. We’re not letting her out of our sight now. I’m just waiting for an update on Peppa. Jake and Cameron have been following her and that woman she met with in the playground.’

  ‘What do you think happened last night? Who spiked the nuts?’

  ‘The Coyote could’ve been one of the catering staff. We’re running deeper checks on all the IDs now.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Just be on standby. Unless you hear from me, meet us all at Christie’s this afternoon for the auction. We should know more by then.’

  ‘We’ve nearly made it.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and stared down at me. I looked up at him and it took everything to not flinch. To not shrug his hand off and slam him up against the door by his throat and ask him what the fuck was wrong with him. What kind of person could ignore their child in pain?

  ‘We have.’ I tried another smile. ‘All the more reason to be on the alert.’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  We both turned to see Miss Jenna.

  ‘Gigi’s corn head has fallen off and she says you have a special way to fix it?’

  I looked over Miss Jenna’s shoulder to see Gigi waving at me to come over.

  ‘Right. Yes. I know exactly what to do.’ I followed Miss Jenna down the aisle. I turned back to Frederick. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  He held up a hand and turned and left the church.

  My special way to fix the corn head onto Gigi involved a series of bulldog clips and an elastic band.

  ‘There you go. Now don’t move or speak or laugh too much and it will be fine.’

  I looked round the church. It was slowly filling up with the congregation. A series of parents were all frantically adjusting their little darlings’ costumes. Rochelle’s son was the sun. He was wearing a bright yellow ray headdress that was around three-feet
wide and made from cardboard, industrial glue and a steely determination for one-upmanship.

  ‘I know I could just Amazon one-click a costume but it just doesn’t give me the same joy and satisfaction,’ she was telling another mother.

  The vicar addressed everyone as I headed towards the exit. ‘The service will begin in ten minutes. Please try and use this time for quiet contemplation.’ A peaceful hush descended on the church.

  A quiet that was shattered by the sound of my phone ringing. I looked down. It was Jake. ‘Sorry,’ I mouthed round to everyone looking at me and answered it as I walked quickly out the side door next to the altar.

  ‘You need to meet us at Bill’s Restaurant in Fulham. Come now.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  JAKE AND CAMERON were waiting for me outside Bill’s.

  ‘What’s the update?’

  Jake motioned inside the restaurant. ‘Peppa and the playground woman are right at the back. We can’t get close to them without being noticed. We still have no ID on the woman. Time’s running out. I suggest you just walk in and talk.’

  Jake was right. Peng was leaving this afternoon. Risking blowing my cover was worth it if it could fast-track us answers.

  I walked into Bill’s. It was still early and, apart from Peppa’s table at the very back, there were only two other occupied tables at the front. Peppa and the woman were deep in conversation. I walked straight towards them.

  ‘Suze? Suze! Is that you?’ Peppa jolted at the sound of her name and turned towards me, her face frozen. All her body language was shouting that she’d been caught. Caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  But then her face relaxed at the sight of me.

  ‘Alexis! Hello.’ She stood up. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just meeting a friend for breakfast. How about you?’ I leaned towards the woman with her, holding out my hand. ‘Hi there, I’m Alexis.’

  The woman took it – ‘Sasha. Nice to meet you.’ – and she shook it. She had an Australian accent.

  ‘How come you’re all the way back here? It’s such a nice morning.’

  Peppa smiled. ‘We’re hiding.’

  ‘Hiding? From who?’

  ‘Other mothers from nursery.’ Peppa cast a glance over my shoulder. ‘I’m trying to steal Sasha off one of them and they’re all almighty gossips.’

  Sasha giggled. ‘It’s all rather funny, isn’t it? This trying to avoid being seen.’

  I looked from one to the other. ‘So, Sasha, you’re a nanny who works for another mum at the nursery?’

  She nodded.

  Peppa spoke quickly. ‘I know there’s an etiquette and all but Dionne is leaving and Sasha is great and, well, I’m happy to pay more to show her how valued she’d be if she moved over to us.’

  For. Fuck’s. Sake.

  No stealing secrets. Just stealing a nanny.

  A few hacks of the nursery and their parent contact list and Geraint could easily verify all this, but looking between the two of them I knew it was the truth.

  I needed to get into the Platform and start proving I was right about Frederick. He was the Snake. There were no Pigs left and no other explanation.

  *

  ‘Is Peng safe?’ Hattie and Geraint were seated in the meeting room when Jake, Cameron and I arrived.

  Hattie answered. ‘She’s at the Embassy all morning with back-to-back meetings, followed by a lunch there, before they leave for Christie’s. Pixie is in a van outside. If she leaves unexpectedly she’ll call it in. But we can presume as long as she’s there she’s safe.’

  Everyone was silent as I announced my theory about Frederick.

  ‘He’s the Snake. He has to be.’

  ‘He couldn’t just be a shit dad?’ asked Cameron.

  ‘A sociopath is the most likely person to be a traitor. All about the money. No feelings of loyalty. No remorse at getting colleagues killed.’

  I thought of him sitting there coldly as his own daughter writhed in pain at his feet.

  Hattie’s phone rang. He looked down at it. ‘It’s the lab.’ He answered. ‘What have you found?’ He nodded silently. ‘Thanks.’ He hung up and looked round at us. ‘Lex was right. Both the EpiPens contained a lethal dose of arsenic.’

  Jake whistled slowly. ‘Good save, Lex.’

  ‘It was the clearest move – the Coyote wouldn’t even need to be in the room when Peng died. It would be the perfect cover. He just needed to spike the food with nuts and once Peng suffered an adverse reaction, one of her own team would unwittingly kill her with a spiked EpiPen. They would be the ones under suspicion. It would be chaos. Impossible to pull apart.’

  ‘How the hell did the Snake – Frederick, or whoever – get to all the EpiPens?’ said Jake. ‘They must have someone inside the delegation.’

  I thought it through.

  ‘We did this.’

  Everyone turned to look at me.

  ‘We got Frederick access and a reason to be near the delegation – he was one of us. I was updating him on what we’d learned, on the delegation’s movements. Everything. He could’ve swapped the EpiPens over at the Natural History Museum event or Cherwell Castle.’ I paused. ‘If I’m right, it explains why he came to us with Tenebris. He needed us to have direct access to Peng. The Snake never had a contact within the delegation. He didn’t need one. We did all the dirty work, giving him all the information he needed to make the hit.’

  Hattie leaned back in his chair; his fingers formed a bridge.

  ‘It sounds like we’ve been used.’

  Jake shrugged. ‘How do we know Peppa isn’t also a Snake? That they’ve been working together? This nanny thing might be true but there’s still the dry-cleaning link to the Embassy.’

  Geraint shook his head. ‘That’s looking like a dead end now. Peppa has booked a Rentokil visit for next week. Her house has a moth infestation, apparently. It explains the sudden increase in dry-cleaning visits. Only way to kill the sods and save your cashmere.’

  ‘And I finally tracked down the dry cleaner’s sister,’ added Pixie. ‘The reason we’ve been having trouble locating her is because she’s on maternity leave. She hasn’t set foot in the Embassy in the last two months.’

  I took this in. ‘I think Frederick is the Coyote and the Snake. He was the one selling information that sabotaged those previous Six missions. And he just tried to assassinate Peng.’

  ‘He might still succeed,’ said Jake. ‘Peng doesn’t fly out until tonight. We still have the auction at Christie’s to get through.’

  ‘We need absolute confirmation. And if Frederick is involved we need to know to what degree. He might have got close enough to Tenebris to know who the people behind it are. We need names.’ Hattie turned to Geraint. ‘Do a full search into Frederick’s finances, background, everything you can get your hands on. If he has the resources to run, we need to cut them off. We need to take him alive and find out everything he knows.’

  I remembered something Camilla had said. ‘His wife’s art gallery. One of us should pay it a visit. Frederick helped with their accounts. That could be an easy place to hide money.’

  Hattie looked at me. ‘If Frederick is the Snake he knows that we’re going to put this together. He knows that once we get the EpiPen results confirming poison, we’ll work out that someone in or close to the delegation had to be involved. You need to throw him off. Make him believe we’re onto someone else.’

  Hattie was right. Frederick couldn’t know we suspected him.

  I got out my phone and texted: We think Peppa is doing so well she has a PA working for her. Meet at Christie’s at 5 p.m.

  Frederick pinged back straightaway: OK. See you there.

  ‘I’m going to try and meet with Dugdale face to face,’ said Hattie.

  ‘You don’t think Dugdale is in on it?’ I’d known Duggers the longest and couldn’t believe he would have any role in tearing apart the Security Services he held so dear.

  Hattie shook his head. �
�Highly unlikely. But if I lay everything out for him, he can at least shed some light on exactly how the hell this could be happening.’

  I thought back over the last few days. How different everything looked if Frederick wasn’t one of us but one of them.

  Goddammit.

  ‘The invasion at Platform Eight. Outside Gigi’s nursery I said something about nuts. Frederick must’ve thought I was talking in code. That I was talking about work. He thought we’d cottoned on to the EpiPens. That’s why they took the risk of breaking in. They thought we were about to unravel their whole plan.’

  All that drama.

  All those dead Ghosts.

  Robin.

  Gone.

  Just because my daughter went to nursery with a peanut in her pocket.

  Jake nodded. ‘And when Frederick realised we didn’t have a clue about the EpiPens, they went ahead with the plan.’

  A throwaway comment I’d made to someone I thought was a colleague, a friend, had set off a chain of events that led to so much bloodshed.

  How had I been such a shitty judge of character?

  His deadpan sense of humour. He wasn’t fucking deadpanning, he just didn’t have a sense of humour. He wasn’t dry. He was deranged. And that meant . . . he didn’t actually find my jokes funny. And he didn’t have respect for women – all his refreshing lack of issue with reporting to a woman was just another part of his condition. I couldn’t believe . . . I couldn’t believe I let my mind go places it shouldn’t have. How could I have been so blind? How could I have missed the signs? Was the flirting another manipulation? To confuse me with this pretence of attraction? God, how could I be so easily played? It was all an act. All of it.

  Jake put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t even think of blaming yourself. This is all on him. And we’re going to make him pay. I’m going to make him pay.’ From the minute Jake had found out about Robin, he had been on the edge of losing it. He just didn’t know where to direct the rage, the pain. But now he did. Now he had a target. Someone to blame. And no one was going to hold him back.

  Hattie heard the steel in Jake’s voice and looked up sharply. He addressed the room. ‘Remember the greater good here is ending the Tenebris Network. If Frederick is the Snake he’s the best link we have. He will have a working access login to the website. He will have received payment from them. They would’ve set up a way of exchanging information. These are all trails we can follow. He’s our only chance of finding the people running Tenebris and getting it permanently shut down and have Eight back up and running.