Chapter 1

On the Sunday morning Andrew got a lift back into London from a taciturn bloke named Steve. He dropped Andrew off near Regent’s Park and they arranged to meet at 8.00 that evening outside Headquarters. Jim and Freya were still at church when Andrew got home so he started some laundry and sat in the kitchen eating soup until they got home. Freya looked concerned when they got back but nothing could be said so all he got was.

“How do you keep ending up in these situations?”

Andrew laughed.

“I think it was a lovely lady brandishing an application form who is to blame.”

And that was it. Over lunch they talked around the issue without getting into details.

“Will we see you much?”

“I have no idea. I was told I would be there and ‘other places’, and they checked I had a passport.”

Eyebrows were raised from both of them.

“I hope to get back here at the weekends but I am still trying to sort out the rules. I got driven this weekend but I presume I am not going to have my own driver every weekend so then it will be train and maybe flight schedules. Who the hell knows.”

“Before we forget there are a couple of phone messages for you, both Helena and Navya called yesterday and I told them you would be back today. I think they were looking to meet up with you. Are any friends going to come down and stay?”

“I had not had a chance to ask you if it would be okay for someone to come and stay.”

“Don’t be silly Andrew. Of course they can come and stay.”

Well that saved him an awkward conversation. Andrew went through and called Navya first. It was a how are things going, catch up kind of call. She was already bored of working at her dad’s business and asked if they could meet the following weekend. Andrew agreed, but did tell her his job had him working out of town and would call if he couldn’t make it. They were on the phone for a while, not really talking about anything, she was just bored and wanted someone different to talk to. Eventually he got her off the phone but the call with Helena was just as long. She was chatty but there was a hesitation with her when Andrew asked how things were going at home. She too wanted to get together the following weekend but oddly did not want to meet on Saturday but rather wanted to wait until the following day when it would just be the two of them. Sometimes Andrew could be very slow on the uptake. Finally he called Suzanne and it was good to hear her voice. She had started her job and it was going well. Without going into any details Andrew explained how he was working out of London on the job and did not yet know when he would be free to come to Edinburgh. Hopefully in two weeks.

“Jim and Freya are getting married at the end of the summer and they have invited me. I know that these big fancy events are not your scene but I would love for you to be my date at their wedding. It is Saturday the 15^th of September. You don’t have to give me an answer now but would you think about it please?”

She said all the right things but the joy was missing. Andrew hoped she would consider it and come down. He hoped that getting her to commit to the first of these occasions would take a lot of the worry away. Sure they were daunting but she was a beautiful talented woman who could hold her own in any company. Just talking to her made him happy and Freya noticed it when he came through.

“All you need to do is talk to a pretty young woman, or two or three, and you get a smile on your face.”

Jim chuckled and Andrew’s smile widened.

“I just follow Jim’s example. He is always so happy.”

Jim laughed out loud and Freya flushed prettily.

“You sweet-talking devil. And you, stop encouraging him”

They took him out for an early dinner at the little Italian restaurant around the corner from the flat before he repacked his big backpack and headed down to Earl’s Court. Steve was as quiet on the way back to Colchester as he had been on the way into London.

Andrew’s first proper week on the job was a constant learning exercise. He and Vestergaard constantly switched back and forth between pupil and teacher. By the end of the Monday they were ‘Vestie’ and Jock, it was just easier. When you have a crime in the first five minutes of the hour-long TV show and you need 10 minutes for the dramatic dénouement at the end, the intervening time makes police work seem easy. Andrew was disavowed of that notion very quickly. Vestie spent hours on the phone trying to track down who knew about the AIMS program, which departments had been allocated copies when the Department of Industry bought 1,000. That was the thing. It wasn’t like they had only sold the government seven copies, yes the government was huge but a thousand copies of something must be somewhere. Then Andrew had another idea.

“Inspector, the Open University course had one single week where we had to attend Milton Keynes for an assessment. While I was there I met two civil servants who were also attending the course. One was in the Treasury, Steven Glamp, and the other was here at the Ministry of Defence. His name was Nigel something but I can’t remember the surname. Can I call the course administrator and get the name from her?”

“Why? Do you think he will be able to help?”

“When I had the meeting with the Minister, the first meeting, there were five civil servants with him, including one from the Treasury. I mentioned Steven’s name to that guy and less than a month later Steven called and let me know that he had been promoted and given new responsibilities because he was doing the course. I don’t think I mentioned Nigel’s name. I have no idea what he did, he never mentioned it but I figured given that he was doing the same course as me he may have some knowledge about computers and software.”

“Fuck it, give it a try. Anything to move this forward.”

You had to love the days before data protection. Andrew phoned Mary Young at the Open University and she remembered him, she could hardly forget the 18-year-old who was the first to graduate from the course. Andrew made up some tale about going to be in London and wanting to connect with some of the people he had met and remembered there was a Nigel somebody there. Five minutes later he had both Nigel Mountjoy’s name and his office phone number. Andrew thanked her and turned back to Brodie.

“Nigel Mountjoy. Here is his number.”

Various contacts were phoned to find out what he did before they called him. It turned out Mountjoy was involved in something in Northern Ireland but details were not forthcoming. Andrew had done the legwork getting his details but Brodie decided to talk to him directly. He was back in less than five minutes.

“He knows nothing, he is still working on the course and hopes to be finished by the end of the year. But he has never been contacted about, and never heard of, the AIMS software.”

Back to square one. It was Wednesday before they were able to track down someone in the Department of Industry, although now it was Trade and Industry. The British Government spent £25,000 buying 1,000 copies of AIMS but they found that 975 of the copies were sitting untouched in a warehouse in Wolverhampton. The government bureaucracy had bought them under political pressure, had no idea what to do with them so had stored them. More than £20,000 sitting getting obsolete by the day. Putting that aside they finally found out who had the 25 copies of AIMS, the Property Services Agency, the arm of the government that oversaw all government construction, both civil and defence related.

There were lots of ongoing issues with the PSA but they had no impact on that case. Someone knew ‘someone at Croydon’ and finally on the Friday morning they had a copy of AIMS, as originally sold to the government in the autumn of 1981. Why was this a big deal? In between chasing all these dead-ends looking for a copy of AIMS, they sorted and reviewed paper for a week, checking the files, all grouped together in folders to see if there were copies of disks. They had come up empty. So on Thursday night Andrew was told the team were going to West Germany to see the original documents and he was going too. They hoped to gain access to the original files as well as interview the soldiers at the Regiment. Andrew was told to pack for two weeks and would not be home from Germany in the middle weekend.

He didn’t recall ever being given an option and when he thought back about that summer he was treated very differently to how he expected. When Andrew had been assigned to this investigation, he was part of the team and was to go with the team and be part of the team. Never mind the fact that he was a summer student expecting to shuffle files around in the basement of the headquarters building. Andrew was the computer expert for a multi-agency investigation into potential espionage. When you put it that way he was James Bond’s nerdy lovechild. But he was also the ‘kid’ who had no control over his life, was being dragged around the UK and Europe, and was a virtual prisoner to this investigation. He was all but forbidden to have contact with anyone outside the team, who were all at least 10 years older than him. So sure it sounded glamorous but the reality was isolating and boring.

Never being one to cope well with doing nothing, in the evenings Andrew sat and noodled on the system that Tony and Maggie wanted him to create so that they could keep track of modelling assignments, and who had worn what, and when. Given that he was thinking about AIMS all the time during the day Andrew wiled away the evenings designing a simple database structure. He spent a lot of his time thinking about the field structure, lengths, all the details of what they wanted. By the end of the week he had an outline of what he wanted to create, and knew he could use routines from both his Open University project and AIMS as the basis of the database. Having seen the value of a snappy acronym he repurposed one with much darker connotations and created the Modelling Activity Database, MAD.

Given that they had to be at Earl’s Court at 6.00 on Monday morning for transport to the airfield Andrew was able to leave at lunchtime on Friday. Other than Vestie Andrew had little to do with most of the rest of the team, especially as lots of them seemed to come and go. He had packed up one of the computers to be shipped with them and once that was complete he headed out. What had been even more surreal was that another member of Manners’ staff had come out to get the computer and files back to the Headquarters building. Andrew was now on the investigative team and didn’t have to do such things. He cabbed to the station, lucked out and caught an express train into Liverpool Street and was back in the flat late afternoon. When Andrew got back from swimming at Marshall Street Jim and Freya were home. He had swum for an hour, as much to just enjoy the feeling of swimming as anything. Andrew had become very spoiled over the years and missed swimming whenever it was denied or unavailable to him. That day there was no deep thinking, it was all about letting the stress and uncertainty bleed away. Over dinner he updated Jim and Freya.

“I am going to be away for the next two weeks and won’t be back over the weekend. When I get back I plan to go to Edinburgh for the weekend. I will let you know if anything changes and where I will be the third week. At present I have no idea.”

“This job is not turning out how I imagined it would.”

“For me too, but I am assigned to this for the rest of the summer. It is important, and they think I am making a difference, doing things that no one else on the team can, so all this moving about is part of it.”

After dinner Andrew phoned Navya to confirm meeting the next day.

“Abigail called this week, she is going to be in town and wanted to meet up. Do you mind if she joins us Andrew?”

“Don’t care Navya. It will be nice to catch up with both of you. I have missed having some friends around to chat to. Everyone is older where I am working and so it will be good to see you both.”

Abigail lived out west somewhere, in the Cotswolds, so they would meet her off the train at Paddington. The following morning Andrew was waiting for Navya at Baker Street when she got off the Tube, they were going to change lines. Andrew surprised her with his greeting.

“Put me down, you big Scottish giraffe. Gah.”

He nearly kissed her.

“What brought that on? I am Navya remember, the one that doesn’t swoon at your feet.”

“Just happy to see you. Feels like it has been a long summer already. Too many soldiers, not enough pretty women.”

“You need your eyes checked but I will take it.”

She changed tone.

“Has it been that rough?”

“I think it is more the difference with College life. We are so spoiled there. It is relaxed, mostly fun and mixed. It is only when you live life outside our bubble that you see how things are for a lot of people.”

“I know what you mean. Cambridge can have its moments of sexism but it is nothing compared to what I see day in and day out. It has been three and a half weeks at Dad’s business and it feels like three and a half months. I still have two more months of it to deal with. After one year Ru found a job at a law office where she could get some experience. And she had done the same thing again this year so she has escaped the worst of it. Talking of which, somehow word got back to the firm that hired her that she had met Lord Barnes. They asked her in for a meeting, all very informal, but she said that their tone to her was a whole lot different than before. Even being friends with someone who has friends in high places has changed things. To be honest I think she is a bit conflicted. She wants to change the world and do it all through her own efforts. So this undermines that, but at the same time it has helped her be noticed and raised her profile internally. Anyway she says hi, and asks that you pass on her best wishes to Lord Barnes and Mrs. Moray.”

“I will do that. I wonder how her firm found out? Do you think she mentioned it?”

“No, she thought the meeting was just a standard meeting, pre-hire stuff, payroll info, that sort of thing. She was taken aback when they asked about Lord Barnes.”

“Knowing him, I wouldn’t put it past him to have mentioned it in such a way that it got back to the partners. She also was introduced to a couple of the other Lords as well. It will be interesting to see how the other articling students treat her when they find out.”

“Yeah, she thought about that as well. Is it going to mean they stay away from her, or will it put a target on her back? Maybe both.”

They had switched lines and were on the way to Paddington while they chatted.

“I didn’t realise that you were so friendly with Abigail. I thought she had paired up with Emma, just as you and Helena had done.”

“You really are clueless Andrew. Emma got herself a boyfriend in term three and was all loved up. Did you not notice that she was not around much?”

His face told her the answer.

“Of course you didn’t. You can be so self-absorbed sometimes.”

Harsh but fair.

“Emma dropped Abigail like three day old fish so the three of us hung out more during term three. You were so focused on studying that you never noticed. She is a nice person who is just shy. I must admit, I dismissed her at the beginning of the year, she seemed so aloof and I thought she didn’t like me but I think it was just shyness. Anyway, I went out to stay with her a couple of weeks ago for the weekend, she lives in a lovely town in the Cotswolds. She is going to stay with me tonight.”

“I never even noticed that Emma wasn’t around. After that terrible dinner at the start of the year she always kept her distance. Abigail was the same, she kept her distance but I didn’t even manage to upset her over dinner. Like you, I thought she was aloof. It is unkind but I thought she had the ‘I’m too pretty to talk to you’ syndrome.”

Navya snorted.

“Really?”

“Like I said it was unkind. We never hit it off and if Helena and Leslie hadn’t clued me in on her knowledge and interest in the fashion world I would never have realised that she would appreciate a scarf. I think I spoke to her more in the last couple of days of term than I had since the start of term two.”

Andrew shrugged. The other part of Leslie’s assessment was left unsaid.

“Yeah, well you did a good thing there. She was so pleased that you gave her a scarf. I don’t think she realised that you still had some left. How many do you still have?”

“Four, no five I think. Why?”

“No reason. Someone’s sister has tried to borrow it a couple of times, that’s all.”

“I thought I bought the daughters with gold or camels or something, not scarves.”

Navya shrieked with mock outrage and pummelled him.

“You arse. Camels? If you are going to be a shit, then at least be accurate.”

“Yes dear. Sorry.”

“I swear you just like being hit sometimes.”

Navya tucked her arm into his as they left the station and the two of them walked along happy in their friendship. Andrew was pleased that she could be so comfortable doing this knowing that it was friendship, nothing more. He was also pleased that some of the tension from term three had dissolved. They got up to the overland station from the Tube just after the Bristol train arrived so Andrew stood like a lighthouse at the back of the concourse and magically Abigail found them.