A Foreign Country. Charles Cumming

hotel, then sent a text message initiating the final part of their plan.

      Time check 1.45. Lobby green. You?

      Barbara responded immediately.

      Yes. Will be in position from 2. Good luck.

      Kell was putting the phone back in his pocket when Pierre emerged from reception and asked if Monsieur Uniacke needed anything further from the bar.

      ‘Thank you, no,’ Kell replied. ‘I’m fine.’

      ‘And how is the wi-fi? Still working to your satisfaction?’

      ‘Completely.’

      He waited until Pierre had returned to the office before texting Bill Knight.

      Clear?

      Nothing came back. Kell watched the clock on the laptop tick through to 1.57 and knew that Barbara would already be in position. He tried again.

      Clear outside?

      Still no reply. There was nothing for it but to proceed as planned and to hope that Knight had the situation under control. Kell disconnected the laptop from the socket in the wall, tucked it under his arm, took his now empty glass of mineral water to the reception desk and placed it on the right-hand side of the counter beside a plastic box filled with tourist brochures. Pierre was back in his chair in the office, drinking Coke, wallowing in astro-physics.

      ‘Could I check something?’ Kell asked him.

      ‘Of course, sir.’

      ‘What rate am I paying on my room? There’s a confirmation email from my office that seems lower than I remember.’

      Pierre frowned, approached the desk, logged into Opera and clicked into the Uniacke account. As he did so, Kell lifted the laptop on to the counter and placed it approximately two inches from the bowl of potpourri.

      ‘Let me see.’ Pierre was muttering, squinting at the screen. ‘We have you on …’

      Kell put an elbow on to the laptop, let it slide along the counter, and sent the bowl of potpourri plummeting towards the floor.

      ‘Fuck!’ he exclaimed in English as it exploded in a cluster bomb of petals and glass. Pierre reared back from the counter with a matching ‘Merde!’ of his own as Kell surveyed the delightful chaos of his creation.

      ‘I am so, so sorry,’ he said, first in English and then, repeating the apology, in French.

      ‘It doesn’t matter, sir, really it doesn’t matter. These things happen. It can easily be cleaned up.’

      Kell, bending to the floor in pursuit of the larger chunks of glass, searched for the French phrase for ‘dustpan and brush’, but found that he could only say: ‘Do you have a vacuum cleaner?’

      Pierre had now made his way out into the lobby and was standing over him, hands on hips, trying to calculate the best course of action.

      ‘Yes, I think that’s probably a good idea. We have a Hoover. I will clean everything up. Please do not worry, Monsieur Uniacke.’

      ‘But you must let me help you.’

      Pierre dropped to the floor beside him. To Kell’s surprise, he even placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. ‘No, no. Please, you are a guest. Relax. I will fetch something.’

      ‘I think I saw one on the stairs on the way up to my room. Is that where you keep them? I can get it for you. Please, I’d like to help …’

      It was the only risk in his strategy; that the night porter would be so concerned about the security of the front desk that he would accept a paying guest’s offer of help. But Kell had read his personality correctly.

      ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I can fetch it. I know the cupboard. It’s not far. If you wait here …’

      The phone pulsed in Kell’s pocket. He took it out as Pierre walked away. Knight had finally deigned to reply.

      All clear out here Commander. Over and out.

      ‘Prat,’ Kell muttered, checked that Pierre had gone upstairs, and slipped behind the reception desk.

      10

      Barbara Knight had closed the door of her room, put the sausage bag on the floor outside the bathroom, poured a cognac from the mini-bar and telephoned her husband.

      The conversation had gone better than she had expected. It transpired that Bill had begged a cigarette from a passer-by, found himself a seat at a bus stop thirty feet from the entrance to the hotel, and was busy killing time trying to remember the details of a love affair between the French Consul in Lagos and the daughter of an Angolan oil speculator which had been the talk of their three-year residency in Nigeria more than twenty years earlier.

      ‘Didn’t he eventually have a hand cut off or something?’ Knight asked.

      ‘Darling, I don’t have time for this now.’ Barbara closed the curtains and switched on one of the bedside lights. ‘I think it was a finger. And I think it was an accident. Look, I’ll have to call you later.’

      She had then replied to a Kell text message – Yes. Will be in position from 2. Good luck – removed her blouse and skirt and, wearing only a pair of tights and a white Hotel Gillespie dressing-gown, walked out into the corridor. Less than a minute later, Barbara Knight was standing on a step halfway between the first- and second-floor landings, holding her shoes and listening out for the footsteps of the blond-haired porter with wretched acne who had only recently checked her in.

      Pierre duly appeared at 2.04 a.m., jerking back in fright at the white apparition bearing down on him with a mop of wild hair, clutching a pair of shoes.

      ‘Madame? Are you all right?’

      ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re here.’ Barbara was shuddering in mock-frustration and had to remind herself not to overcook the act. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather lost. I was on my way downstairs to see you. I was trying to leave my shoes outside to be polished, you see, but I’ve only gone and locked myself out of my room …’

      ‘Please, madame, do not worry, we can …’

      She interrupted him.

      ‘And now I can’t remember for the life of me which floor I’m supposed to be on. I think you kindly put me in 232, but I can’t seem to find …’

      Pierre guided Madame Knight to a safe landing on the first floor. It was to the unanticipated advantage of the Secret Intelligence Service that the night porter’s own grandmother was in the early stages of dementia. Recognizing a kindred spirit, he had put a kindly hand in the small of Barbara’s back and informed her that he would be only too happy to escort Madame Knight to her room.

      ‘Oh, you’re so kind, such a nice young man,’ said Barbara, brandishing a keycard from the pocket of her dressing-gown. ‘I have the damned thing right here, you see? But of course nowhere does it tell you the number of one’s wretched room.

      Kell had worked quickly. The reservations software was open at a welcome page on the desktop; Pierre was still logged in. With the porter attending to Barbara’s needs, he clicked ‘Current’ and was taken to a grid that gave him access to information on every guest in the hotel. The room numbers appeared in a vertical column on the left-hand side of the grid, the dates of occupancy on a horizontal line at the top of the screen. He found the matching dates for Amelia’s stay, clicked on ‘218’ and was taken to the details for her room.

      It was a measure of Kell’s self-confidence, as well as his conviction in Barbara’s ability to detain Pierre, that he took the risk of printing out a three-page summary of Amelia’s stay, including details of her room service orders, laundry bills and any phone calls she might have made from the landline in her room. He then returned to the welcome page, took the documents from a printer in the office, folded them into his back