A Foreign Country (28 page)

‘I understand that …’

‘And too many people on the Left were interested solely in demonstrating their own good taste, their own unimpeachable moral conduct, at the expense of the very people who were striving to keep them safe in their beds.’

‘Have some food,’ Elsa said. She rested her hand on Kell’s neck as she set the bowl in front of him, the softness of her touch a gesture of a friend’s understanding as much as it was an indication of her desire for him.

‘The kindest thing you can say about Yassin is that he was young.’ Kell suddenly didn’t feel like eating. He would have pushed the bowl to one side if it had not seemed rude or petulant to do so. ‘The kindest thing you can say is that he didn’t know any better. But try telling that to the fiancée of the doctor he would have blown up on the Tube, the grandson of the old man obliterated on the top deck of a bombed-out bus in Glasgow. Try telling that to the mother of the six-month-old baby boy who would have died of his injuries if Yassin had blown himself up in a Midlands shopping centre. Looking back at the evidence, they might have pointed out that a man like Yassin Gharani, with that back story, wasn’t likely to be in Pakistan retracing the steps of Robert Byron. He was getting high on hate. And because of what happened to him, because we allowed ourselves to hate him in return, Yassin was given a cheque by Her Majesty’s government for eight hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.’ Elsa sat down. ‘Almost a million quid, in our age of austerity. Compensation for “ill treatment”. Now that’s a lot of taxpayer money for an individual who would, in all likelihood, happily have blown up the very High Court that found in his favour.’

‘Eat,’ Elsa said.

And for a long time neither of them said anything.

Seated at an outdoor table at the Coach and Horses, a well-regarded pub on the Salisbury road at the eastern edge of Chalke Bissett, Kevin Vigors looked up from his second pint of Old Speckled Hen to see a navy-blue Renault Espace, number plate X164 AEO, coming around the corner. He stood up from the table, crossed the road to a telephone box and rang Amelia’s landline.

‘285?’

‘CUCKOO just turned into the village. Should be with you in three minutes.’

‘Thank you,’ Amelia said.

She replaced the receiver and looked at Kell, who was standing beside the Aga.

‘That was Kevin,’ she said. ‘Time for you to be going. He’ll be here in two minutes.’

Kell wished her good luck and walked to the back door, leaving the garden via the gate that connected Amelia’s house to the Shand property. Within moments he was standing with Elsa, Harold and Barbara Knight in the library, staring at the banks of surveillance screens, like traders anticipating a crash.

‘We should see him any second now,’ Kell said, taking off his coat and throwing it on a chair. Elsa looked up and caught his eye, smiling a private smile.

‘Here he comes,’ she said, returning her gaze to the screen in the upper left-hand corner.

A camera, high on a pylon with clear sight of the dark lane ahead, had picked out the approaching taxi. The twin headlights bumped along the road until the vehicle came to a halt. Kell watched as CUCKOO opened the rear door and stepped out on to the road, stretching his back after the long journey. He was wearing the same black leather jacket that Kell had searched in the hotel room in Tunis.

‘Wanker,’ Harold muttered, and everybody tried not to laugh.

Right on cue, entering the frame in the lower left-hand corner, came Amelia, her head and body in silhouette against the glare of the headlights. Though the reunion was taking place less than a hundred metres away on the lane, the team could hear no sound as she stretched out her arms and enveloped CUCKOO in a mother’s bone-crushing hug.

‘God, I hope she is all right,’ Elsa said, but Kell ignored the sentiment, because he knew that Amelia Levene would be just fine.

She buried her hate, tamped it down, hid it somewhere inside herself where it couldn’t get out.

She’d always been good at that. Compartmentalizing. Adjusting. Surviving. Ever since Tunis.

When she saw CUCKOO climb out of the cab, for a split second Amelia experienced the same untrammelled joy she had felt in Paris at seeing her beautiful son for the first time. Then it passed and the man she had known as François was an affront to her, a malign presence in her home. Yet she showed none of this with her eyes. Instead she reached out to hug him and found that she could easily say her lines.

‘Darling! You made it! I can’t believe you’re here.’

Even the smell of him was a betrayal, the aftershave he had worn at the hotels, his oils beside the pool. At times Amelia had felt an almost sexual desire to hold this man, to touch his skin, the sweet ache of a mother’s love for her child. She had thought of him as so handsome and sophisticated; she had marvelled at the job Philippe and Jeannine had done in raising such an interesting young man. And now this. An agent of French Intelligence in her own home, seeping into every crevice of her privacy and self-esteem. The days since Kell had broken the news to her in London had been, without question, the most wretched of her adult life; worse than the months following François’ adoption; worse than the death of her brother. She had only two consolations: the knowledge that she was a better liar than Luc Javeau, the snake Paris had sent to deceive her; and the real possibility that François was alive and that Kell could get to him in his captivity.

‘Come inside and unpack,’ she said, the taxi driver heading further down the narrow lane in order to find space outside the Shand house in which to turn around and set off on the long journey back to London. ‘We have the whole weekend ahead of us. Nothing in the world to worry about. What will you have to drink?’

At first, Kell did not recognize the voice; it was almost as though he had been speaking to a different man in the ferry disco. But then the cadences, the slick phrasing, the bizarre self-confidence of the CUCKOO personality came back to him, and he realized that he was listening to a master liar, a man who had all but absorbed another personality and embodied that which he had been instructed to impersonate. It was one of the quiet, shaming secrets of their secret trade; how quickly the spy
wanted
to set his own character aside and to inhabit a separate self. Why was that? Kell had no answer to it. He remembered how much his dissembling, the layers of his persona, had distressed Claire. He thought of her in America, far away among vineyards and Californians, and had to force off a surge of jealousy.

Elsa was beside him at the table, staring at the live feed from Amelia’s sitting room, listening to CUCKOO’s conversation through the speakers that Harold had set up in the library.

‘Who’s hungry?’ Harold asked, standing in the doorway holding a stack of ready-made pizzas.

‘This is not pizza,’ Elsa replied, looking at the boxes and making a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘This food is a disgrace. Wherever you get this, Tom, the supermarket should be closed down.’

‘Hang on a minute …’

One of the screens had caught Kell’s eye. Two white lights were flickering along the lane in what might have been a replay of the final stages of CUCKOO’s journey.

‘Who the fuck is that?’ Kell said. The car was moving steadily towards them, about thirty seconds from the parking area above Amelia’s garden. ‘Get Kevin on the phone.’

‘No reception,’ Harold said.

‘He’s got a radio, hasn’t he?’ Kell felt his temper rising, the threat of the operation going wrong almost before it had begun. ‘Elsa, check the radio.’

She scraped away from the table, found the radio in the kitchen, came back into the room.

‘Switched off,’ she said.

Kell couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He swore at Harold, because the link to Vigors had been a Tech-Ops responsibility. Harold was still holding the pizzas, like a delivery man waiting for a tip. ‘Put the fucking food down, Harold. Find out who this is.’

He pointed at the screen, the car now moving past Amelia’s house, beyond the scope of CCTV. Kell could hear the low growl of the engine as it approached.

‘It could just be people coming to supper next door,’ Barbara suggested. ‘Might even be the taxi. CUCKOO may have left something in the cab.’

‘It could be anybody,’ Kell replied, and ran outside.

He was just in time to find a burgundy Mercedes turning around in the lane. He closed the gate to the Shand house and stood in the road, holding a hand up to catch the driver’s eye. Kell knew who it was. He recognized the hunched figure at the wheel, the Blair-era sticker in the rear windscreen: ‘Keep Your Bullshit in Westminster’. The Mercedes came to a halt, mid-turn, and Kell heard the noise of an electric window sliding down.

‘Yes?’ came a voice. ‘Can I help you?’

He walked around to the driver’s window and leaned in.

‘Giles. Fancy seeing you here.’

Giles Levene was not a man noted for his ebullient personality, nor for a particularly wide range of facial expression. He greeted Kell with the same bland inconsequence that he might have reserved for an electrician who had come to read the meter.

‘It’s Tom, isn’t it?’

‘It is. Any chance you could switch off the engine?’

Giles, polite and accommodating to a fault, switched it off.

‘And the headlights please.’

The headlights snuffed out.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. If he was surprised to find Thomas Kell standing outside his house at ten o’clock on a Friday evening, he did not betray it.

‘Well.’ Where to begin? Kell looked up the lane towards the tree-shrouded light in CUCKOO’s room. ‘We’re running an operation in your house. Amelia is in there …’

‘I know Amelia is in there.’ Giles was looking ahead, through the windscreen. His Mercedes was mid-way through a three-point turn, facing the Hamilton house. ‘I wanted to surprise her. I was hoping we would spend the weekend together.’

Kell heard movement in a nearby tree, the clack of a bird. He could not work out what was more extraordinary: the idea that Giles still believed, after more than a decade of marriage, that Amelia would welcome a ‘surprise’ visit from her husband; or the fact that she had forgotten to tell Giles to stay away for the weekend.

‘I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,’ he said.

Again, Giles did not seem unduly perturbed. ‘Not going to happen,’ he repeated, as though in a kind of daze. Kell felt like a policeman redirecting traffic away from the scene of an accident.

‘Is there any chance you could go back to London tonight, turn around and head for home?’ he suggested.

‘Why? What’s going on in there?’

Kell feared a long, drawn-out conversation. It was an unseasonably mild night and he was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt. He was reluctant to invite Giles into the comfort of the Shand house, not least because all those computers, all those TV screens, might prove too much for him.

‘Is this about her son?’ Giles asked. He made a minute adjustment to his rear-view mirror, as though something might be coming up behind the car. ‘Has she got François in there?’

Kell was about to say: ‘In a manner of speaking’ but didn’t want to overplay his hand. He knew that Amelia had told Giles about Tunis, about Jean-Marc Daumal, but her husband had no idea that CUCKOO was an impostor. Knowing that Amelia’s husband was a stickler for protocol, Kell retreated behind the convenient screen of the Official Secrets Act.

‘Look, I’m afraid I can’t say anything at this time,’ he said. ‘Even with your clearance level, Giles, I’d be hauled over the coals if …’

He was interrupted by a sudden animation in Giles’s face. He was frowning like a bad actor as he said: ‘Weren’t you booted out?’

Kell felt a muscle twist in the base of his spine and stepped back from the car, standing up to free it. ‘Brought back in from the cold,’ he replied. He placed his hands on the roof of the car, which was already damp with dew. ‘Look. If it’s too far to drive, the Office can put you up in a hotel in Salisbury. I’m profoundly sorry. I can see that this is very inconvenient. Amelia should have let you know …’

A characteristic stillness returned to Giles’s features, the emotional reticence of a stalled and defeated man. ‘Yes,’ he replied quietly, still staring out of the windscreen. ‘Perhaps she should have.’

There was a silence to which Kell contributed only the scuffing of his feet on the damp ground and a quick tap-tap of his hands on the roof. He knew why Amelia had married Giles Levene – for his money, for his loyalty, for his relative lack of ambition, which would never be allowed to impede her own – but in this moment he felt that Giles had made a wretched choice in accommodating Amelia’s many faults. He would have been better off alone, as the dysfunctional bachelor he seemed so closely to resemble, or with a younger wife, who might at least have been able to provide him with children. Kell’s heart went out to Giles, but he wanted nothing more than for him to switch on the engine and to head back up the lane to the village. As if in answer to his prayers, Amelia’s husband conceded defeat and turned the key in the ignition.

‘It seems I have no choice,’ he said. ‘If you see Amelia, will you tell her I was here?’

‘Of course I will,’ Kell replied, and felt a strange and disconcerting kinship with his fellow cuckold. ‘Best if you avoid talking to her on the phone or by email this weekend.’ It was like seeing off a friend whom he had betrayed. Giles nodded, as though absorbing yet another disappointment in a long ritual of humiliations. ‘I’m sure Amelia will explain everything on Monday.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she will.’

‘Who was it?’ Barbara asked when Kell came back into the house.

‘Amelia’s husband,’ he replied, taking a bottle of Heineken from the fridge and popping the cap. ‘He’s gone back to London. Any change over there?’

Kell nodded in the direction of Amelia’s house and a chastened Harold immediately set about making amends for his earlier mistake.

‘CUCKOO’s gone upstairs,’ he said. ‘Unpacking in his room. Amelia suggested he take a shower before dinner but so far all he’s done is admire himself in the mirror and smelled the sheets to see if they’re clean.’