Legacy (6 page)

Late that afternoon he sat on the edge of the king-size bed in his room in the Park Lane Hilton, his hand still resting on the phone, his eyes on the yellow autumn leaves of the plane trees in
Hyde Park. It had been easy, yet – as he was coming to expect – his heart thumped as if he had done something difficult or dangerous. He had rung and introduced himself as Peter Lovejoy
of Gordon and Partners, an off-the-shelf alias and company name. Chantal had been recommended to him as a masseuse and he wondered whether she was free to join him for dinner at the Park Lane
Hilton that evening. As anticipated, mention of an expensive hotel produced a willing response; she agreed in convincingly French-accented English, sounding like a courteous and efficient
receptionist and stating, without his asking, her fee for dinner and what she called ‘private massage’ afterwards. It was substantial. If the treatment extended beyond midnight, a
further fee would have to be negotiated. They agreed to meet in the Roof Restaurant on the 28th floor. It was just as well he had taken the full cash float offered by Hugo’s secretary.

By seven thirty the restaurant was beginning to fill. Unlike the Savoy, there was nothing faded about the Hilton’s opulence. The burgundy seats were plush, the tables had a black satinwood
veneer and the lighting was unobtrusive. The West End was laid out below and almost all around, as if solely for the benefit of diners. As when leaning against the battlement with Rebecca that
afternoon, Charles was content to watch without participating, prolonging the state of suspension. His eye was soon caught, however, by the dark-haired woman, quite heavily made up, pausing by the
maître d’ as he checked his list before ushering her over. She was younger and taller than he’d thought, with her hair let down to shoulder length, a tight black skirt, white
blouse and a short red jacket. He stood and they shook hands.

‘Sorry I’m a few minutes late,’ she said in unaccented English. ‘A client overran.’

‘A professional hazard, I imagine.’

‘Not just overrunning. You can factor that in to your timetable. But it’s everything else as well. They want you to be mother confessor and Lord knows what else. I could write a book
on clients and their problems. Perhaps one day I shall.’

He made to pour her some water but the bottle was taken from him by the wine waiter. While they agreed aperitifs – she chose champagne and he, with an inward twinge over his expenses
claim, followed suit – he puzzled over her dropping her French accent and talking to him, a supposed client, about clients. Was it possible that this was in fact another exercise into which
he had been tricked? There were rumours of that sort of thing on the course. Was the solitary man some tables distant, with a clear line of sight, filming them?

‘Of course, in my field the law makes it worse,’ she said. ‘Interpretation is all. Your legal and client problems must be of a different order?’

‘Probably, though I daresay there’s some overlap.’ What, he wondered, could she know of his profession when he hadn’t told her anything? Was she confusing him with
someone else? ‘D’you see many of your clients here?’ he asked, taking his cue for directness from her. Hugo had recommended the Hilton because she had a regular arrangement there
with a visiting American chief executive.

She shrugged. ‘One or two of the bigger ones, though generally I try to get them to come to me. Makes for a quicker turnover.’

Such frankness made the whole thing easier. He could leapfrog several stages. ‘My own firm has an interest in one of your regulars.’ Her raised eyebrows were encouraging. ‘In
your – his – pillow-talk, to be precise.’

‘Pillow-talk? What do you mean?’

Protection of her clients was presumably a natural reaction. ‘We’ll pay for it, of course,’ he added.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

At that moment the maître d’ hurried over, leaving another woman by his desk. His brow was furrowed. ‘Mr Lovejoy?’

‘Yes?’ Charles tried to sound unconcerned.

‘Mr Kilroy, surely?’ queried the woman, sharply.

The maître d’ theatrically smote his forehead. ‘Ah, my mistake, my stupid mistake. I am so sorry. Very, very sorry.’

Mr Kilroy was the only other solitary man in the restaurant, and it was he whom she had come to meet. She left with one curious, offended glance at Charles and was ushered to the other table by
the maître d’, his apologies showering like a meteor’s tail behind her. He then hurried back to his desk and brought over a second woman, still in a welter of self-abasement. The
wine waiter appeared as she and Charles shook hands. ‘Champagne?’ Charles asked, dismissing from now on any consideration of his expense account.

‘
Merci, monsieur
.’ She was shorter and older than her predecessor, presentably dressed in a mauve suit, though her gold necklace and ear-rings were large and gaudy. She
laughed at his doctored explanation of what had happened. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘I should not have been so late. I was – what is the expression? –
overrun?’

Charles smiled, as he had a few minutes before, remarking that it was hard to regulate business when you were self-employed. Always too much or too little.

‘You work for a big corporation?’ she began.

He described the multifarious international activities of Gordon and Partners, impressing himself with their range and variety. She was attentive and flattering, her dark eyes fixed on his and a
smile in perpetual readiness. Her sustained determination to please was effective despite its brittleness. Had he been what she thought, her ready sympathy and her questions – none seriously
probing but all seeking answers which it might please him to give or which she could use to praise him – would have made for an easy, undemanding, self-indulgent evening.

It was less easy to get her to talk about herself. She seemed unused to it; presumably most of her clients preferred to talk about themselves. After the champagne and a couple of glasses of
wine, she said as much herself, after asking how old he was. ‘Most of my clients are middle-aged and married. They want to talk about their marriages and their jobs as much as they want
anything else.’

‘Their wives don’t understand them?’

‘No, really, sometimes they don’t, I think. They want to relax, these men. They have pressure in their jobs, pressure from their children, pressure from their wives who are always
wanting something.’ She shrugged and smiled. ‘Women are always wanting.’ She was divorced, she told him, and maintained two children at boarding school. ‘It makes work in
the holidays a little difficult.’ Her French accent fluctuated slightly.

He glanced at the woman who had first joined him, now talking happily to the older man. Lawyers, perhaps; maybe she was being head-hunted. ‘Perhaps she was after all a colleague of
yours,’ he said, insincerely.

She gave a cool assessing glance. ‘I don’t think so. But I think he would like it if she were.’

He felt they were now sufficiently relaxed for him to be frank, or at least as frank as he was permitted. Pitch her in the restaurant, in public, Hugo had advised – provided there was
decent table separation – rather than in his room afterwards because then if the whole thing went pear-shaped she couldn’t claim there’d been any monkey-business. Hugo barked and
twitched at the thought.

Charles leant forward across the table. ‘Claire, there’s something else I want to tell you.’ His use of her real name was calculated. She looked at him without expression.
‘I don’t work for the company I was telling you about. In fact, I work for the Secret Service. I’d like to talk to you about one of your clients. Just talk, that’s all.
We’ll pay the same fee as for a massage.’

This time it was real, his first recruitment pitch, subject of many lectures and much speculation. The frankness was liberating; the effect, to judge by her open-mouthed stare, striking.

‘Is everything all right, sir – madam?’ The maître d’ stooped over Charles’s shoulder, hands clasped in supplication.

‘Fine, thank you.’

‘I am so sorry for the confusion earlier.’

‘It’s quite all right. Don’t worry.’

‘I was confusing Lovejoy and Kilroy.’

‘Of course, yes. Mistakes happen.’

The maître d’ looked across to the other table, rubbing his hands. ‘The lady, she is happy now, also.’

‘Good, I’m very glad.’

Claire stood. ‘Excuse me.’ She picked up her handbag.

‘This way, madam,’ said the maître d’, ushering her towards the Ladies’. He was followed by Charles’s silent curses. He debated with himself how long he
should wait if she didn’t reappear and imagined the politeness with which his humiliating failure would be received in Head Office. Everyone would eventually get to hear about it. Putative
agents who fled from him at first contact would become part of office mythology, like the Whippett and the policewoman.

‘Bet you thought I’d done a bunk, didn’t you?’ She reappeared from behind, speaking now in the unmistakable accent of outer London. ‘I nearly did. Thought you might
be the police but then I reckoned this isn’t the way they go about it and I didn’t want to leave you in the lurch, ’specially in a nice place like this.’ She sat and looked
at him, then smiled and touched his hand with her fingers. ‘Listen, love, if you die with a look like that on your face, they won’t wash your body.’

He grinned. ‘I look miserable when I’m happy. My features relax and make me look more serious than I feel.’

‘Tragic, I call it. Anyway, so long as you don’t want me to kill no one I’ll do anything you like with them. All the usual services. What about another bottle?’

They took coffee in the lounge, where he told her that he wanted to talk about a client of hers, a Russian official called Viktor Koslov.

She raised her eyebrows and resumed her French accent. ‘Peter, you are not wanting me to seduce someone? How disappointing.’

‘Another time.’

‘Maybe tonight,
monsieur
. You had better be careful.’ She dropped the accent. ‘No, but who did you say? I can’t think of any client called that.’

Charles described him. She insisted she had no Russian clients and for a while he thought it possible that the office had misinterpreted Koslov’s relations with her; that it was indeed an
intelligence relationship, but one in which she was his client rather than he hers. If that were so, she was bound to go on denying it. They were getting nowhere. Eventually he had to tell her that
he believed she had seen Koslov that afternoon.

She looked puzzled. ‘You don’t mean Erik? He’s from Finland.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘He’s Finnish. He’s in timber. He’s rich. He showed me photos of his huge house in Helsinki and of reindeer. He’s a nice man, Erik. He’s fond of me.
He’s one of my sugar-children, the ones I’m trying to grow into sugar-daddies to look after me in my old age or if I have to give up work. Every girl needs one. More than one. But
you’re not having me on – he’s not called Erik and he’s not Finnish?’

‘Absolutely not.’ This assertion was an act of faith. It had happened that surveillance had got the wrong man. ‘He’s a Soviet diplomat and he’s not rich.’

‘Cunning little sod.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘So you’ve been following me around, have you, to see who I see?’

‘We were following him.’

‘Serve him right. What about another packet of Stuyvesant? It’s got me going, this has.’

Either Viktor’s deception, or his relative poverty, irritated her and she became happy to talk. She described him as polite, educated, intelligent, typical of real Scandinavians she had
met. She greatly valued politeness and consideration in her clients, rating Germans the best and Iranians and Japanese the worst. Erik treated her as a mistress and had at first been embarrassed by
paying her – not reluctant, but embarrassed as if for her sake. She had got him over that and now they made a bit of a joke of it, with her allowing him to please and surprise her by giving
her more. He was generous in that way, especially given that he wasn’t really rich after all. He had no odd habits, special requests or perversions. In fact, he was a good lover, keen,
considerate, controlled yet straightforwardly expressive. ‘Like when you see a really good tennis player on the telly,’ she said. ‘Nice style, everything as it should
be.’

They had met through her occasional early morning walks with her poodle in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. She did it more often later in the day, for business reasons. ‘A dog is a help.
It attracts attention and people think you’re not in a hurry, so they stop to pat it.’

‘Gives you a reason for being there,’ said Charles.

‘Yes, and it’s easy to get into conversation. I’ve had some good clients that way.’ She didn’t normally expect business on her early morning walks, which were for
her own and the dog’s sake, but she saw this same man once or twice and they were soon on smiling and nodding terms. One day he stopped and patted her dog and asked its name, which was Lucy.
After that, they talked a little whenever they met. This had happened over some months. It was during this period that he told her he was a Finnish businessman.

‘What did you say you were?’ asked Charles.

‘Masseuse. No point in beating about the bush.’

‘Did he realise what you meant?’

‘Not at first, no. Later, when he did, he was a bit cast down. I didn’t see him for a fortnight. Then when I did he said he’d been at home on holiday with his wife.
P’raps he was.’

‘Where did he say he lived?’

‘Other side of the park. I never asked where or his phone number or anything like that. Not professional. It frightens them. He used to ask me a lot about which hotels I went to, how much
they cost and so on, but when I told him he could come to my flat if he liked, he didn’t, not for weeks. And when he did he was very nervous, too nervous, you know. He just had tea and
went.’

‘Did he say anything about it?’

‘He kept saying he couldn’t tell me what a big step that was for him. Kept saying it. I s’pose he couldn’t.’

An unauthorised visit by a Soviet official to the home of a westerner, especially that of someone who had picked him up in the park and who would be assumed to work for the British security
organs, was more than a decisive step. It was disaffection and rule-breaking of a sort that could have ended his career, at least. Unless, of course, Koslov had other motives. ‘And after that
you became lovers, or he your client, or however he saw it?’