by Tom Bradby
‘You’ve got the records,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘So why are you calling?’ There was real anger in his voice. ‘I told you not to.’
‘He hasn’t been cheating on you.’
Rav was silent. He didn’t invite her to go on, but neither did he ask her to hold back.
‘He hasn’t been in Scotland. He’s been with his kids at the house in Fulham.’
There was a long, long silence.
‘Rav?’
‘I told you not to fucking tell me, Kate. I begged you. Don’t you understand anything?’ He severed the connection.
19
Kate took an extra turn around Battersea Park in the fading light. Part of her wanted to burst through the door and ask Stuart about his three a.m. phone calls. Another part wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and do nothing more to disturb the already troubled surface of their pond. He’d only ask her why she didn’t trust him, and she couldn’t blame him for that because she’d have asked exactly the same question if the shoe was on the other foot.
When she got home, Stuart already had the car more or less packed. But the washing-up had not been done, or the bins put out, and the house was still a tip. Kate sublimated her anger and frustration by tearing through it at speed. She pulled the overstuffed bin-liner free and Stuart tried to leap to her aid as she carried it across the kitchen. ‘I’ll do that.’
‘Just make sure the kids are ready to go,’ she hissed, as she stormed past him, only to have it burst over the paving stones. Kate stared at the scattered contents for a moment, then caught sight of their neighbour watching through her sitting-room window. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
She scraped up the mess, almost on autopilot, until she found something stuffed into a tin of Nelson’s dog food. A condom wrapper. She stared at it for a while, her rage reignited, then went back inside, unrolled a sheet of kitchen paper, wrapped it up and shoved it into her pocket.
When she had finished, Stuart had the good sense to avoid any further conversation. Kate gave him a wide berth and climbed the stairs. She went into the bathroom, locked the door, slumped into the Lloyd Loom chair and put her head into her hands. Her heart was thumping and her hands were shaking more than they had after their encounter with the SVR wet team.
Eventually she managed to lift her head and gaze out of the window. After the endless wind and rain, it was a beautiful autumn evening, but the clear sky mocked her instead of restoring her spirits. By sheer effort of will, she managed to quieten the tumult in her mind and body, then left the refuge of the bathroom and busied herself with her packing.
Stuart pushed open the bedroom door. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ She felt as if her facial features had been carved in stone, and his expression told her she wasn’t wrong.
‘You don’t look … well.’
‘I’m fine,’ she muttered. ‘Considering.’
‘I don’t think you should have gone to work today.’
She looked at him as if he was speaking a foreign language.
‘You can’t just shrug off what happened in Greece, Kate. I can see the impact it’s had on you. No one is superhuman.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘No one would be fine after what you’ve been through.’
‘Well, I am.’
He hovered uncertainly. ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ he said.
She couldn’t remember ever seeing him so nervous.
‘I have a terrible feeling you’re not going to like it.’
She sat down on the bed, with her back to him. ‘I suspect I already know.’
‘Try not to go crazy. I can explain.’
‘It had better be good.’
He came to her side of the bed, but she couldn’t bring herself to look up at him.
‘Jed is coming with us. For the weekend.’
‘What?’
‘I did say don’t go crazy.’
‘What do you mean, Jed’s coming with us?’
‘Please bear with me, Kate. I know it’s not ideal, but it’s actually not crazy either. The Swedish porn star and I had an argument. Actually, it was worse than that. But in the end she said the situation was really very simple – she wanted to see Jed this weekend, and would only come to Rose’s house if he could join us. I offered her every argument you would have done – believe me – but you know how goddamn stubborn she can be. In the end, I thought, I’m tired, you’re tired, what the fuck does it matter? It’s a fight we don’t need to have. I called Rose. She was fine with it. Separate bedrooms and no corridor-creeping, obviously.’ He put a hand on her shoulder.
Kate shrugged it off. ‘Okay.’
‘Honestly? Jeez, you have had a bad week. I didn’t think you’d agree in a month of Sundays.’
‘You know she’s doing this to provoke us?’
‘Of course she is. But if we roll with it, she’ll get tired of fighting.’
‘I doubt it.’
Ten minutes later Jed arrived. He’d removed some of the metalwork from his piercings and selected a strange ethnic coat for his weekend wear. ‘Th-thank you very m-much for inviting me, Mr and Mrs Henderson,’ he stammered, anxiety pouring off him in waves.
‘It’s our pleasure, Jed,’ Stuart replied, gripping his outstretched hand while Kate was still struggling to concentrate.
Jed climbed through to the third row of seats in the back of the car, and Fiona followed. Kate’s mother was less obliging when they picked her up, but obeyed, uncharacteristically meekly, when Stuart instructed her to sit next to Gus. She stared stonily ahead as they crawled along the Embankment. Gus and Fiona were on their phones and Jed stared out of the window.
‘What was today like?’ Stuart asked Kate.
‘Difficult.’
‘There’s an awful lot of traffic,’ Lucy said.
‘Yes, there is, Mum.’
‘Can’t you do anything about it?’
‘Her people usually clear the roads in advance,’ Stuart said, ‘but they’re having the day off.’
‘It’s a disgrace. Where is everyone going?’
‘Out of London for the weekend,’ Kate said. ‘Just like us.’
‘Why on earth are they doing that?’
‘God knows, Mum.’
Stuart started to laugh.
‘So many cars. There is a lot of traffic.’
‘I was thinking poison,’ Stuart murmured. ‘But I may just resort to a blunt instrument.’
‘It’s not funny.’
‘Who is that boy?’
‘Which boy, Mum?’
‘The one in the back, with that awful jacket.’
Gus snorted. Like father, like son, Kate thought.
‘That’s Jed. He’s a friend of Fiona’s. We just introduced you. And it’s a very nice jacket.’
‘He looks simply awful.’
Kate swung around. ‘I’m so sorry, Jed. My mother isn’t very well.’
‘It’s fine, Mrs Henderson. Fiona told me. I understand.’ He gave her a sheepish grin. ‘And I worry about the jacket, some days.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Lucy said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘I know, Mum. You’re an example to us all.’
‘Always have been,’ Stuart said. ‘Or so I’ve been told.’
‘People in glass houses …’ Lucy muttered. ‘If you ask me …’
‘Thank you for the words of wisdom, Mum, but we’re not asking you.’
‘Who is that boy?’
Kate glanced over her mother’s shoulder and rolled her eyes at Jed, who suddenly, and rather delightfully, followed Gus’s example.
Over the course of the next hour, the state of the traffic and the offensive nature of his jacket shared top billing in Lucy’s increasingly monotonous string of complaints. Gus took cover beneath his headphones, and Fiona handed Jed one of her earpieces to share. Kate tuned in to Kenny
Rogers on Magic FM. When her mother suddenly went silent, she hardly dared breathe, but looked back as the traffic on the M40 cleared and saw that all four of their passengers had fallen asleep.
‘Have you told the girl’s parents?’ Stuart murmured.
‘Mother and stepfather. I don’t think they’re going to miss her. That’s where the trouble started.’
‘Hmm. Doesn’t it always?’ He risked a grin as he glanced in the rear-view mirror.
‘Julie’s going to Belgrade, to try to rescue her younger sister.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘It’s the least we can do. By which I mean the least I can do.’
‘Not everybody wants to be rescued,’ Stuart said, keeping his eyes peeled for the slip road that would herald the final phase of their journey. ‘Did you ever think of that?’
Kate’s aunt lived with her ex-investment-banker husband in considerable style just beneath the Ridgeway in the Oxfordshire countryside. A pair of wrought-iron gates glided open as they turned off the road and closed again as they made their way along the gravel drive to where Rose and Simon were waiting at the grand entrance of their Georgian mansion.
‘Bloody hell,’ Stuart said. ‘Is it my imagination, or does this place get bigger every time we turn our backs on it?’
After the greetings, Simon showed Kate and Stuart to the folly at the far end of the formal garden, which was done up in the luxury one might expect of the finest country-house hotel, complete with roll-top bath and a fireplace in the bedroom. ‘We’ll keep an eye on Lucy and the young,’ he said, ‘but Rose thought you two could probably use some privacy.’
At dinner, Jed was the centre of attention for the first two courses. Much to their distress, Rose and Simon had never had children of their own, and asked him the sort of questions that made Kate embarrassed by her own lack of the right kind of curiosity. He answered with scrupulous politeness and gentle wit. His parents were doctors, his father a GP and his mother a psychiatrist. ‘When we got up her nose as kids, she used to hit us with textbooks.’
Stuart winked at Kate, but she was still in no mood to wink back.
Lucy stared at ‘that boy’ throughout the meal, as if she were about to launch another wave of invective but she held back, perhaps because she’d suddenly remembered her habitual need to cast herself in the role of Fairy Godmother in front of the grandchildren.
Simon and Stuart pitched into an animated discussion about the state of the nation over port and Stilton, then retired to the billiards table. The children went to watch TV, and Rose escorted Lucy to bed. Kate was painfully aware that she had said hardly a word during the evening, and knew her aunt had sensed something was wrong.
When she came down, Rose tore Kate away from the washing-up and made herbal tea for them both. ‘What the hell?’ She smiled. ‘You only live once!’
They settled next door by the fire, a lovely room with low beams, antique panelling and modern Scandinavian fixtures.
‘You look tired,’ Rose said.
‘Looks can be deceptive.’ Kate sighed. ‘I’m completely and utterly knackered.’
‘Work, the children, or both?’
‘Both, probably. But I guess my mother deserves a fair amount of the credit.’
‘Jed is a nice boy.’
Kate nodded and sipped her tea.
‘You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to,’ Rose said.
‘It’s more a question of where I should start.’ Kate gazed into the fire. For a moment, she thought of telling Rose about the condom wrapper in her pocket and the suspicion that was tearing her apart, but she couldn’t bring herself to articulate it. ‘Don’t you feel tired sometimes?’
‘I’m not in the front line in the way you are.’
‘I suppose it depends how you define the front line. I could put it down to losing someone this week, a young girl who deserved an awful lot better, and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was my fault. I could also claim it’s because we’re all overworked and underpaid. I might even blame it on the fact that, like every middle-aged woman, I find trying to be a mother and a wife at the same time as a warrior for truth is not as easy as we all feel the need to make it look. But I’d be able to live with that if I didn’t feel we’re being overwhelmed by an incoming tide that we’re completely powerless to hold back.’
‘I suspect that every generation has to grapple with its own version of that.’
‘But in the old days, it seemed like a fair match, didn’t it? We faced off against the KGB. The two intelligence services, each at the heart of their respective establishments, locked in combat, with a succession of victories and defeats. As long as we could spot their feints and sleights of hand, we could go home reasonably secure in the knowledge that our world – the safe, civilized, free West – would continue along its relatively well-maintained tram tracks. It isn’t like that any more. They go behind us and around us and beyond us to the people and the country at large, whipping up hostility and division and dissent, their tentacles reaching down a thousand different alleyways. I don’t know which front we should be most energetically defending now. And the only thing I can say for sure is that it’s a battle we’re losing. It’s not just that they come over here and murder people right under our noses, but they get a distressingly large number of people to believe it’s all a conspiracy by the British government. It’s bloody surreal at times.’
‘But that makes what we do more important than ever, doesn’t it? Which at least gives our work a sense of urgency and purpose.’
‘That’s what I keep telling myself.’ Kate looked up. ‘While we’re on the subject of urgency and purpose, can I ask you something about work?’
‘Of course,’ Rose said, but her smile was suddenly devoid of its usual warmth.
‘Who decides to put a red flag on a file?’
‘The management committee.’ The flames danced in her eyes. ‘As you well know.’
‘Sorry. And, yes, I do know.’ She paused. ‘I was looking into something last week. I mentioned it to Jane.’
‘Oh?’
Kate frowned. Rose’s expression remained opaque. But it was impossible that she didn’t know. ‘I was asking about someone I had to assess for recruitment a long time ago.’
‘And you tried Registry?’
‘Yes, I did. And the file on her was closed. I tried to use Finance to reverse-engineer an enquiry, as you once taught me. I was pursuing something else today, and that led to a dead end too, with another big red flag.’
‘It happens.’
‘Rarely, though. At least, I thought that was the theory. And the odd thing is, I know of no connection between those two files. So why would they both be closed? It’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’
Rose shrugged.
‘It had to be by order of the management committee? There’s no other way?’
‘Yes. And no.’
‘But you’re on the management committee.’
‘Not present at every meeting.’
‘One of the red flags was signed by you.’
Kate had rarely witnessed the flint at Rose’s core, but did so now. A reminder, perhaps, if one were needed, that you didn’t get to the top of the Service without it.
Rose leant forward to throw another log onto the fire.
‘You’re not going to help me, are you?’ Kate said.
‘Of course I’m going to help. But I won’t put either of us in a position we might both regret.’ She turned. ‘I look upon you as a daughter, you know that. And I feel a tiny bit responsible for luring you into the Service. But for those endless conversations on the way to Cornwall, you might have been safely installed at Goldman Sachs by now, earning a king’s ransom.’
‘Not really my style.’
‘Your father always held me responsible, and he was right. So, I will always do my best to help you. But there’s a handful of things that are more important than family, and this is one of them.’
‘Is that a piece of advice?’
‘Possibly.’
‘To do what?’
‘Tread carefully.’
‘What’s the connection between the two closed files?’
‘That’s not treading carefully.’
There was a long silence as Rose appeared to weigh up how much she should say. ‘Ian,’ she said eventually. ‘He’s the connection. But he dragged in Alan. And Alan is unlikely to forgive him for that.’
Despite the fatigue and the alcohol, Kate’s brain was turning faster now. ‘So that’s what they meant when they talked about “another” attempt at disinformation. Ian brought in Irina, but kept her to himself. And she sold us a pup.’
‘Correct.’
‘What breed of pup?’
‘We paid Irina a lot of money over quite a number of years. She was Ian’s prized asset and he dined out on her. She seemed to be a never-ending source of quality material. And some of it was undeniably true. You know how clever the Russians are. They hooked us with lots of sprats so that we’d swallow the mackerel whole.’
‘The mackerel?’
‘Sorry. We’re getting a bit zoological here, aren’t we? The mackerel was cast-iron intelligence that the German treasury minister was a paedophile who had been caught and turned by the Russians. We had everything – internet history, emails, phone records, videos of him with a series of under-age boys … Hideous, of course. We went over and over it. It was totally convincing. Everything checked out.’
‘Except it was all fake.’
‘Every single bit of it.’
‘And we’d already handed it over.’
‘Worse than that. The foreign secretary had used it as leverage. So it blew up in his face in the most embarrassing way imaginable. It was a miracle no one on the German side leaked it to their press.’
The fire crackled, and sent up a small shower of sparks. ‘If that was Ian’s operation – if he owned it from first to last – why didn’t it ruin him?’
‘The second closed file gives you your answer. But I can see you no longer need it.’