Spy Out the Land (23 page)

She nodded, and as he walked past her he pecked her on the cheek.

From one wife to another, she thought, walking out behind him.

‘I think I’ll get a coffee and bite to eat. Anyone want something from the machine downstairs?’

Nobody did, so Iwan Morelius left the room alone. He took the lift, but once he was in the lobby he walked past the vending machine and out into the evening sunshine. He walked briskly down the
street, heading east until he came to the gates of the yellow-painted church. A few people were milling around the gravestones. Checking he hadn’t been followed from the office, Morelius
walked past them and into the church.

It was dark and cool inside. He let his eyes adjust as he walked rapidly around the perimeter. Once he was sure it was empty, he slid into the pew furthest from the altar on the left and removed
a small notepad and pencil from his pocket. After checking he was unobserved once more, he wrote in minuscule but very neat letters in Swedish:

He looked around again. The church was otherwise perfectly still, the sole movement motes of dust floating in shafts of sunlight.

Morelius turned to the back of the notepad, where tiny numbers were listed in groups of five. He picked a line, then spent ten minutes encoding the message on a fresh page. When he’d
finished, he crossed out the numbers he’d used and tore the completed message from the notebook. He folded the page in half, and again the other way, then reached for the pale green hymn book
from the pew. He checked it was the right copy – there was a small pencilled asterisk on the bottom corner of the front page – and placed the piece of paper in the small pouch attached
to the inside of the back cover.

Then he closed the book and put it back in the pew. He stood, nodded at the altar reflexively, and walked back out into the street. On the next corner was a telephone booth, and he slipped into
it and dialled a local number. He let it ring four times, then hung up and redialled. This time he let it ring twice before hanging up again.

Less than a mile away in Södermalm, a young woman walked rapidly to the hallway of her apartment and fished some car keys from a bowl on the dresser.

Rachel found the memorandum a few minutes after eight. It was just a couple of paragraphs long, but it told her everything she needed to know. Triumphant, she had dialled
Sandy’s house, but nobody had picked up. She had got Tombes to keep trying, but after half an hour there had still been no answer. Deciding to bite the bullet, she’d prised the page
away from its folder, placed it in her attaché case and marched out to her battered but trusty little Austin 1300.

She had driven past the Harmigans’ house countless times, but usually averted her eyes from it. She knew it was absurd, but she found that if she ignored Sandy’s life away from her
she could almost convince herself it didn’t exist. But she knew the address, a discreet square in Mayfair with its own padlocked garden. She felt like a Dickensian orphan with her nose rubbed
up against the window just looking at it. She parked in an illegal spot opposite and ran up the steps.

A woman answered the door a few seconds after she had rung the bell. Although she had never met her, Rachel knew at once that it was Celia Harmigan. She looked pretty much exactly as she’d
imagined her: crimped hair, almost blue-black and falling to her neck, heavily kohled eyes in a pale face with a wide, almost masculine jaw, high cheekbones, a slash of red at the mouth, and a dark
gown draped over her tall and terribly slender figure. Around her neck she wore a silver necklace with a striking pendant, long and thin and ending in a sharp tip, like the nib of a pen.

‘I’m looking for Sandy Harmigan. It’s urgent. I’m Rachel Gold, from the office.’

Celia Harmigan’s lips parted slightly. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I know who you are.’ Her voice was lower pitched and more attractive than Rachel would have thought possible
from her ghoulish appearance. Celia drew the door wider. ‘Do come in,’ she cooed. ‘You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid, as Sandy’s in a meeting.’

Rachel stepped into the hallway. Here she was, then, in the heart of Sandy’s private world. It was, of course, immaculately tasteful. Directly ahead of her was a spiral staircase with
gleaming banisters, and to the right an antique dresser and large gold-framed mirror. She suddenly had an image of her parents walking in, and cringed. Mum would have ‘oohed’ and
‘aahed’ like she had when she’d visited her rooms in Cambridge, and Dad would have nodded approvingly at Celia. ‘Nice pile you have. Very nice.’ And then at the first
opportunity he’d have leaned in and whispered in Rachel’s ear: ‘Stay close to this lot, Rach – how the other half live, eh?’

She dismissed the thought and took stock of the rest of her surroundings. To the right of the mirror a door was slightly ajar, a sliver of pale yellow wallpaper visible through it. Had Celia
just come out of that room to answer the doorbell? Was that where the meeting was being held? And
what
bloody meeting? Sandy had told her he was going home to eat.

‘I just need to talk to him for a couple of minutes,’ she said to Celia Harmigan’s skeletal back. ‘Can he not come out?’

The older woman turned, then leaned in so her face was hovering over Rachel’s. ‘I was wondering if you’d ever dare show your face in this house,’ she said. Her voice was
as calm and polite as it had been before.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.’

Celia registered the look of apprehension on Rachel’s face and smiled. ‘Oh, don’t be scared, I’m not going to scratch your eyes out. A few months ago I might have, yes,
when I still wasn’t sure if you were screwing him.’ She laughed as Rachel flushed. ‘Oh, come now. You surely didn’t think I wouldn’t find out?’

‘Please, I don’t know what you think you know, but—’

Celia raised a hand. ‘I had you followed by a grubby little man from Shadwell. You were rather careful, I’ll give you that, but then of course you’ve been trained to avoid
tails. But once he showed me the photographs, I felt strangely empty, actually. All that hatred I had built up for you just wasn’t there any more. “My rage is gone, and I am struck with
sorrow.” Everything’s in Shakespeare, don’t you find?’

Rachel felt the blood rush into her eardrums and something rising in her throat, a mix of shame and horror. This woman had seen photographs, of her . . . She wanted nothing more than to turn
round and leave the house, but at the same time she was glued to the spot. She couldn’t leave. She had to speak to Sandy.

‘I think . . .’ she said, ‘I think perhaps you’ve misunderstood.’

Celia Harmigan’s eyes flashed at her. ‘Oh, no, Miss Gold, I’ve understood perfectly. It’s an
adventure
.’ She said the word with a sneer, her nostrils
flaring. ‘Perhaps he’s even convinced himself he loves you.’ Her eyes flickered over Rachel. ‘Well, I’m sure you’re perfectly . . . lovable. But he won’t
leave me, do you understand?’ Her jaw tightened. ‘That won’t happen.’

Rachel was conscious of a soft, padding sound somewhere nearby. The door across the hallway had widened and someone was coming through, a man, brogues stepping over the thick carpet. Sandy. She
caught a glimpse of a polished conference table behind him, and the dim shape of several figures seated around it, the one directly ahead of her wearing a dark checked jacket. She couldn’t
see his face, but she was sure she recognised the jacket from the COBRA meeting – it belonged to Harry Bradley. What the hell was he doing here?

The door closed with a discreet click, and Sandy strode up to her.

‘Rachel? Has something happened? More news of Dark?’

She looked up at him. Her head was still dizzy from the onslaught by Celia, whose face remained glacially calm, for all the world as though she hadn’t just confessed to hiring a private
detective to trail her.

‘Yes,’ Rachel managed to get out. ‘Can we talk?’

‘Of course.’ Sandy took Celia by the arm and whispered something in her ear. She nodded, and glided towards the door. Sandy turned back to Rachel.

‘Wait in there,’ he said, gesturing to a door on the other side of the hallway. ‘I’ll be back in a minute and you can fill me in.’

‘What’s the meeting about? I saw Harry Bradley.’

‘Yes, I’m smoothing things over with the Yanks. It just came up, and I wasn’t near the phone.’ He touched her arm. ‘Sorry. I’ll be back in a
minute.’

She nodded and, half-dazed, walked into the room he had indicated, which appeared to be his study. It was a near-replica of his office, with the same clubby furniture and gleaming dark wood.
There was a large leather armchair in a corner of the room and she walked quickly to it and collapsed into its embrace. She realised her hands were shaking. She took a deep breath and tried to
think through what had just happened.

Celia knew. All right. She knew. She had followed her, she had photographs, and she was staying by Sandy anyway. And yet, despite the shock of this, her mind was already racing elsewhere. There
was something else going on here. She had the peculiar feeling she had not just stepped into a private world, but a secret one. And something about it was wrong, somehow. She needed to grasp it
before the thought left her. Yes, Celia knew about the affair, but leave that to one side. What was her
role
? Harry Bradley was here, and several others, apparently having some sort of
conference with Sandy. This was strange enough in itself. But Celia also seemed to be involved in some way – she had just walked back into the meeting room and Rachel felt sure she had
emerged from it to answer the front door.

Did Sandy keep her so well informed of Service business that he let her sit in on meetings with the head of CIA Station?

She got to her feet again and walked around the small space thinking, her eyes taking in the bookshelves as she did. It was a fairly predictable collection, she saw: leather-bound editions of
Dickens and Hardy sprinkled with some non-fiction about the Second World War. All very respectable, but she doubted Sandy had much time for reading. She stopped as she reached a spine that read
‘HARMIGAN’ in large typeface.

Intrigued, she picked it from the shelf and saw the title.
Safe Conduct
. Of course, his memoir. She’d read a cheap paperback edition of it years ago, but the film stuck out in her
mind more – it had become a staple of Sunday afternoon television. The edition she now held in her hands was a hardback, a first edition by the look of it. The jacket featured a striking
watercolour of a man creeping along some docks, presumably representing Sandy on his mission in Saint-Nazaire. It was a key scene in the film, too, she remembered. Beneath the title, a line of
blocky text read ‘The Most Extraordinary Memoir to Emerge from the War’. The back cover was taken up with a black-and-white portrait of the young author, his dark hair severely parted
in the style of the day as he gazed confidently at the camera. He’d been a handsome devil, and hadn’t he known it.

She opened the book and it fell open at the illustrations, most of which were photographs of him throughout his life. There he was training with his parachute regiment as a sombre-looking
21-yearold, followed by a snapshot of him in the back of a Sunderland flying boat, a jaunty smile and his thumbs aloft as he prepared to fly into Norway. What a war he’d had, and now he was
here in Mayfair with that harridan . . . She flicked the page over and stopped short.

It was a photograph, sepia-toned and grainy like most of the others. The sun shone down on a group of men seated in a stone courtyard. Bamboo poles were visible behind them. In the centre of the
group Sandy peered out from beneath a straw hat, wearing a white shirt, baggy trousers and some pointed leather slippers, his face deeply tanned. To his left was a younger man, Asian, with delicate
features, and to his right was another white man wearing shorts and holding an old-fashioned pistol. The caption read: ‘Irregular warfare school, Kelantan, December 1958’.

The man directly to Sandy’s right was Tom Gadlow.

She closed her eyes and tried to picture the photograph anew. It was something she had done for many years, since a day in
shul
when she was in her teens. It had been a warm morning and
her mind had been drifting. She had glanced up and seen a woman seated a few feet away who she hadn’t recognised. Then with a start her features had somehow rearranged themselves and she had
realised it was her aunt, Hannah. But that fraction of a moment when she had seemed a stranger had troubled her. She had always been very close to Auntie Hannah and previously would have sworn
she’d have recognised her anywhere, at once. The moment had taught her that even if you thought you knew something or someone completely, early impressions could shape your perception of them
and as a result you could miss things – data – that had been sitting there in front of you all along. You had to look at everything through fresh eyes, especially if you were convinced
you already knew the full story.

Over the years, the creation of such ‘Auntie Hannah moments’ had become part of her working methodology. Sometimes when she was looking at ciphers she tried to visualise them in her
mind as concrete images, floating pictures she could travel around and examine until the solution eventually presented itself to her. But now her mind stubbornly refused to co-operate – she
remembered the photograph of Gadlow, but however hard she tried she couldn’t manage to summon it up as a detailed image and felt overcome by frustration.

There was a noise from just outside the room and Rachel opened her eyes with a start. She quickly shut the book and replaced it in the shelf, then turned to the door as it swung open. Sandy
stood there, his hands clasped together expectantly.

She smiled faintly, wondering whether she should ask him about the photograph or tell him that his wife had followed them and claimed to have photographic evidence of their affair. But what
would be the point in either case? She had to think things through first, away from here. Right now she felt out of her depth, and almost claustrophobic. So instead she just nodded and with an
effort dragged her mind back to the reason she had raced over here in the first place.