Part 2
The Service, the bloated spider at the centre of the worldwide web of secrets and leverage, had not noticed the first moves of a new player.
Dr Edward Edgar was not a man to surrender to lack of caution. He bided his time. He hosted more of his dinners. He took infinite precaution to see whether there was any reaction to his intervention in the case of Sir Maxwell Melville and his bank. There was none. No retaliation, no reprisals, not a twitch of the web.
Dr Edgar decided to cast his own net a little wider.
Which brings us to the affair of the Russian émigré Alexia Michelova Gdina, and her curious puppies.
My good friend Mr Sole was able to track her down to a lovely Italianate villa in Tuscany, and she was most cooperative once we had settled a small difficulty she was having with a local gambling den.
The dogs in question are Russian, of course, of the breed Bolonka Franzuskaya literally "French lapdogs", said to have come to Moscow with Napoleon. The Tsarist court had no history of toy dogs, preferring practical animals like their lean hunting Borzois, so the little Bolonkas conquered where Bonaparte was driven back. Throughout the Twentieth Century, the Soviet authorities quite naturally made it almost impossible to bring a Bolonka out of the country, but since then the borders have been slightly more accommodating.
Alexia Michelova was never to be seen without at least three of the little animals and sometimes as many as six or even seven little white fluff-balls, playful, inquisitive, adorable and identical. Too identical. Obviously, as a mark of status, the more of a rare breed she could be seen with, the higher her standing, but any close examination would reveal the pups to be indistinguishable down to the comical splash of colour over the left eye that gave them a look of a quizzically raised eyebrow.
Now, Gospozha Gdina had become friends with the Lyon family, and it was while staying with them at their London townhouse that she met Dr Edgar over dinner. They had chatted amiably over the consommé, but between the fish course and the entrée, he turned and asked her whatever had possessed her to allow her story to appear in the Press.
Well, of course the lady had no idea. In fact, she feigned shock at the very idea that the Press might be interested in her, and this in spite of her courting celebrity.
But Dr Edgar took from his black dossier a couple of photographs, screen grabs from the security cameras in the Gdina's Wiltshire mansion, showing the enterprising and athletic young journalist vaulting the estate wall, slipping across the formal gardens and entering a specific room in the stable block. Entering that room and examining the machine that was kept there. It hardly mattered that the young woman was unlikely to understand the workings of the device; she could see what it did and that was enough.
The Soviet-era cloning technology was, to put it bluntly, rather crude and nasty and the results, I am afraid to say, did not tend to survive for very long. Alexia Michelova might have been callous enough to use the results as a disposable accessory, but she was not so inured as to be ignorant of what common knowledge would do to her reputation, particularly in a nation that prides itself as a dog-loving one. Not to mention whatever action the former KGB might choose to take if it was revealed she and her husband had absconded with slightly more than a breeding pair of lapdogs.
She did well to contain her somewhat volcanic temper – they were, after all, at a dinner party – but you can be sure that the security staff were in for, at best, an unpleasant time. What, however, was she to do about the girl from the newspaper?
"Hmm," said Dr Edgar, setting aside his distaste for the lady's narcissism. "If you would permit me to take care of everything, I have a friend who has a friend who might be able to arrange supper with her editor."
"And you are able to have this man fix things for me?"
"Oh, I'm sure I can," said Dr Edgar, smiling and turning to talk to the eminent economist on his other hand and spent the rest of the evening in pleasant discussion of the currency markets.
But a day or so later there was a fire in the stables extensively covered in the local newspaper though, to the surprise of the fearful Mr and Mrs Gdina, no machinery of any kind was discovered by the fire brigade or the reporters. Sadly, the story was missed by a certain stringer for the gossip pages of a Fleet Street rag because she had, most unexpectedly, found herself with a plum assignment to Los Angeles, ostensibly to help her get over the shock of a burglary at her home in Clapham in which she had lost her laptop and all her recent work.
Another small check in his dossier, a useful – and grateful – contact made by returning certain equipment to the FSB, and Dr Edgar's game advanced again.
