by Alan Judd
‘So you arrived, chatted over a drink or two, had dinner, chatted and drank a bit more, went to bed,’ said Corduroy. ‘What did you chat about? How did they greet you?’
If they want detail, they can have it, he thought, as much as they want. It was still raining when he reached Durham and it was hard to find a parking space on the steep terraced street. Two of the street lights weren’t working and Rebecca had taken a long time to answer his knock.
‘God, you look young, you rat,’ she’d said. They kissed on the cheeks.
‘Not as young as you. Sorry I’m late.’
‘You’re not. We all are. Dave’s only just got in and I was worried I wouldn’t be back in time. Bloody meetings.’ She closed the door and squeezed his hand. ‘A wet rat, too. Bet you’ve been up and down to Sctoland a dozen times without dropping in.’
‘No, I’ve been in Scotland a while, reading and writing.’
‘With some handy highland lass within reach?’
‘Not at all. A silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, as someone else put it.’
‘Tell that to the marines.’ She pointed upstairs. ‘You’re in John’s room. He’s at Winchester. Final year, would you believe. I can’t. Take your things up and come and have a drink. And stop staring at me. I know I’m coming out of my jeans. You haven’t put on an ounce, have you? Rats don’t, I s’pose.’
Her dyed brown hair was cut short, making her face rounder, but despite what she said she had kept her figure, more or less. Unlike David, whom Charles found on the sofa with a laptop and a good deal more fat and less hair than when they last met. Formerly a thick-set, energetic man, he now struggled to get up.
Charles held up a hand to stop him. ‘Don’t.’
‘I need another drink. Anyway, we’ve got to hang around Rebecca in the kitchen and get in her way and irritate her, otherwise I’ll be in trouble for having blokes’ talk with you and leaving her out.’
Corduroy picked up his pen again. ‘So you’re all three in the kitchen with drinks and talking. What about?’
‘About the book I’m writing – supposedly finishing – and about Rebecca’s job, people we’d known, why I was going back to the office—’
‘What did you say about that?’
‘That I didn’t know yet; but that it was temporary; and involved looking at some old case files.’
‘What did Dave Horam say about that?’
‘Nothing. But it was at that point that he asked me about the cinema bomb in Birmingham, which had happened that day. I didn’t know about it. I’d turned the car radio off because the rain gets into the aerial connection and it becomes very crackly. So he told me about it.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He just described what was on the news. He assumed it was someone in al-Qaeda wanting revenge for the death of Usama bin Laden. He also assumed that I’d know all about al-Qaeda, which I don’t. He was angry about the bomb.’
‘It’s still an open question, the AQ angle,’ said DS Westfield. ‘Could be a self-starter, an autonomous AQ sympathiser who’s taken it upon himself to put the world to rights, or a lone fruitcake. Still no identification of the body.’
‘But definitely a suicide bomber?’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Corduroy. ‘Crude device, unstable. Could’ve gone off accidentally.’ He held his pen upright. ‘So your friend Mr Horam was angry about it, was he?’
‘He’s not my friend, he’s Rebecca’s. But yes, he was. Anger fuelled by alcohol.’
He described how David kept returning to the television in the sitting-room, channel-hopping for more of the story, demanding to know why the bombers couldn’t be stopped. ‘Why aren’t they under surveillance, these al-Qaeda fruitcakes? Enough bloody cameras everywhere.’
‘It may not be them at all,’ Charles remembered saying.
‘Fat lot of difference if you’re blown to pieces,’ David shot back.
What most interested the two policemen was whether Charles had said anything about how many people it took to keep someone under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He remembered David asking but couldn’t remember what he’d answered; the figure in David’s article of thirty to forty, including foot followers, mobile followers, interception and transcribing, was familiar. It could have come from him, or it could have been put to him by David, or it could have been a figure he’d seen in the newspapers. If he had suggested it, he told them, it would have been based on guesswork rather than knowledge. He had spent most of his operational career as one of the hunted, not a hunter, apart from a couple of periods with an MI5 surveillance team in London and a week with the FBI on a joint operation in Hawaii.
‘Anyway, it’s not a secret figure, is it?’ he concluded. ‘Not a breach of the OSA?’
‘It’s very authoritative, the way it’s put. The article says it’s from a spokesman.’
‘Does it? I don’t remember. I only skimmed it when it came out.’
They looked surprised. Freckles produced a photocopy from a blue folder. ‘Take your time, don’t hurry.’
Charles re-read the article. The sentences about surveillance were underlined in red. They were nothing exceptional. He had read them, or similar sentences, dozens of times. He took his time over reading. The police were treating him decently, but they had arrested him, they were the enemy, he owed them no favours despite the mutual civility of their exchanges. They could wait. Time, he thought again, was on his side.
‘Do you recognise any of these words or figures as yours?’ asked Corduroy eventually.
‘As I said, they’re familiar, but I don’t remember whether or not I said them. Either way, they don’t amount to much.’ Certainly not enough to have someone arrested, he thought. There was a pause.
‘You appreciate we have to follow things up in the current climate, with all these Whitehall leaks,’ said Freckles. ‘Especially as they quote the SIA assessments, Cabinet Office papers, that sort of thing. Lot of pressure on us at the moment.’
Charles nodded. Whatever his feelings, it was important to appear sympathetic. ‘You have to do what you’re asked.’
Freckles produced more photocopies. ‘This sort of thing, you see. Have a look through.’
They were more cuttings from David’s paper under the James Wytham byline, going back nine or ten months. The earlier ones quoted mainly from Cabinet Office papers, the later from SIA threat assessments. Some passages were marked in red. There were no quotes from raw intelligence reports, but there were extracts from what were described as intelligence assessments prepared for ministers. Although he hadn’t seen the original assessments – they dated mostly from before his return – Charles could see they were genuine. The phrasing was typical, the judgements plausible. The source must be a serial leaker, and a clever one, because what was leaked was not seriously damaging. The extracts were chosen with care. Whoever had done it had made sure it was the fact of the leaks rather than their content that was dangerous. They discredited the SIA without revealing its secrets.
‘You’ve got your hands full,’ Charles said.
‘Do you recognise any of the documents on which these articles are based?’
‘Not as far as I know.’ He flicked through the cuttings again. ‘No, I don’t recognise them.’
‘Could you have seen them if you wanted? Do you have access to them?’
‘Probably. I guess they’re on screen. But the only documents I’ve read since starting with the SIA are old MI6 ones, paper files related to Gladiator. Plus some more recent emails.’
There was another pause. He resumed reading, again taking his time. Trying not to make it obvious, he lingered over a short unmarked paragraph near the end of one article. It quoted the CIA as saying they had no assets in core AQ. He read and re-read it. He knew where it must have come from, where it could only have come from, and it made up his mind for him. No longer would he wait for his innocence to be accepted in the absence of evidence to the contrary. He would engage; he would
take the battle to the enemy, certain now that there was one.
He handed back the papers. ‘I think I would like legal representation after all.’
3
They switched off the recorder and Freckles left to fetch the list of legal aid lawyers. He also returned with the name of a partner in a City firm recommended by the SIA.
‘He’s the one they use in cases like yours, the one I mentioned earlier,’ he said. ‘He’s specially cleared and briefed to represent you, not them; but they pay for him.’
‘Are there many cases like mine?’
Freckles shook his head and smiled.
Charles asked them instead to look up the number of another City firm. ‘I think I know someone there,’ he said. ‘I’ll try her first.’
He had to make his call from the phone on the wall in reception. It was busier and noisier now, with more prisoners being processed. A policeman leading a young man by the arm brushed his shoulder as he asked the firm’s switchboard for her, giving both her maiden and married names. ‘We don’t have a Sarah Measures,’ said the soft-spoken switchboard girl, ‘but we do have the other one, Sarah Bourne.’
‘That’s the one. They’re the same person.’
A prisoner started shouting and a woman sitting alone on the bench began to weep. Doors banged, voices were raised, more people came and went but no-one paid the woman any attention. Charles put his hand over one ear.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ said the girl.
‘Sarah Bourne – that’s the one.’
‘Sorry, could you speak up, please?’
He repeated it twice more, then had to do the same with his own name. The prisoner who was shouting was the pale young man he had seen brought in that morning. Still handcuffed, he was undergoing more processing and tried to kick one of the officers holding him. A policeman shouted at him to pack it in, and he shut up. The silence that followed was broken only by the woman snuffling, until Charles was put through.
‘Charles?’
She had always had a slight catch in her voice when she began to speak on the phone. It was so intimately reminiscent that it was a moment before he replied.
‘Yes, I’m here. It’s me. Sorry to surprise you.’
‘That’s all right. No need to be.’
‘I was wondering if I could use your professional services.’ He explained as briefly as he could. The woman stopped snuffling and listened. He wished the pale young prisoner would resume his protests.
When he finished she said: ‘I’d no idea you were in the SIA. Nigel hasn’t mentioned it. Does he know?’
‘Yes. Can you come?’
‘Of course, of course I’ll come.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t do criminal work any more, so I’ll have to clear my lines here with the people who do. But I will come, Charles, I promise. As soon as I can.’
Back in his cell, sitting on the green plastic mattress with Jane Eyre again open and unread before him, he was filled with the sense of approaching completion, of a circle about to be made whole. It seemed irresponsible to be pleased with this fusion of the public and private, but it felt like a summation.
Decades before, when they were undergraduates together, Sarah had said: ‘I know what you should do, you should join MI6. You should be a spy.’
He was kneeling before the gas fire in his room, trying to toast a slice of bread on the end of his father’s old army jack-knife and changing hands because of the heat. ‘Why?’
‘You’d enjoy it. It would be fun, all that subterfuge, secret inks and following people. You don’t want a proper job. You don’t want to work. You want fun.’
‘I have fun. I have you.’
She knelt and put her arms round him, causing the bread to drop off the knife. ‘I’m not your bit of fun, Charles Thoroughgood. I’m much more serious than that. You may not realise it, but you’ve got me for life.’
She proved prescient, though not in the way either might have thought. By the time they’d left Oxford they were already estranged and he had joined the army, not MI6. The army offered a decisive break, a dramatic gesture, albeit one addressed more to himself than to her, because she was no longer around to witness it. It was on leaving the army that he found he knew someone who knew someone and was offered an introduction to MI6. He remembered her words when he accepted; but by then she had married Nigel Measures, and he thought he would never see her again.
He and Nigel had lived on different staircases in the same college. Their subjects overlapped and they’d shared tutorials for two or three terms. Nigel was short and assertive, with black hair, restless dark eyes, a quick intelligence and a fondness for innuendo. He invented apt, sometimes cruel, nicknames for people. He and Charles had never been close but there was sufficient mutual respect and wariness for each to take care to get on with the other. Only once had they approached hostility and only once greater intimacy, both occasioned by Sarah.
It was true that Nigel had met her first but Charles had got to know her himself, without knowing that. A collision in the door of the Pusey Library while she struggled with books and folders led to apologies, embarrassed smiles and the explosion of an enormous Yes. Charles made frequent needless visits to the library, which in turn had led to further sightings, brief acknowledgements and then, at the second time of asking, a morning coffee in George Street, when the five minutes she said she had became fifty, and later – made possible only by Charles’s having a car – dinner in the Studley Priory hotel outside Oxford. Then all that followed.
One day, in the early weeks of the affair, he’d suggested tea in his room. She hesitated. ‘D’you mind coming to mine again?’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s just that – to be honest, I’m uneasy in your college because there’s someone there who’s been pursuing me. It’s embarrassing, because I haven’t told him about you, and every day I don’t it becomes more difficult. It’s stupid of me, I know. I’ll have to find a way.’
‘Who?’
She told him, explaining that she had met Nigel at a birthday breakfast party, punting on the Cherwell. She had found him charming, saw that people were a little in awe of him and was flattered by his attention. But the aggression of his pursuit had put her off, conducted as it was in public without regard for how she might feel in front of others. By the time she’d begun to see Charles, Nigel’s invitations – usually notes he dropped in her pigeonhole or delivered by college messengers – were arriving daily. She accepted some of the more neutral and social ones, avoiding the personal, but his campaign intensified. Now he had invited her to the Merton ball.
‘I’ve got to tell him, I must. I can’t let him take me without him knowing. But it’ll be awful, because it’ll be perfectly obvious I should’ve told him before but chickened out.’
‘Can’t you just say no?’
‘Of course I could, but it’s difficult without a reason. And I don’t want to lie. Anyway, I’d love to go to a ball.’
‘Tell him you can’t because you’re going with me.’
‘Am I?’
‘Looks like it.’
Neither he nor Nigel mentioned it and their relationship continued outwardly as before. The frequency and urgency of Nigel’s invitations to Sarah diminished but he still asked her to social events, and sometimes she went. She was always in demand but Charles didn’t mind. It flattered him that other men were keen to show off the woman who filled his waking moments. Nor did he doubt her; the at first barely credible fact that he really was preferred to all others made him more generous than jealous. In retrospect it seemed a golden age, a time with no beginning and no end; but the reality had been no more than a few weeks.
Early one morning, after a forbidden night spent in her all-female college, Charles left as usual over the garden wall before anyone was about and walked across the university parks back to breakfast in his own college. He loved those cool summer mornings after hot near-sleepless nights and this time detoured into the fields on the other s
ide of the Cherwell. Returning, he saw Nigel standing on the high arched bridge, elbows on the railings, looking down into the slow water. He must have been aware that someone was approaching but did not look up. His dark eyes seemed more bulbous than usual and his expression was remote and self-absorbed. He would have made no acknowledgement if Charles had not stopped.
‘Don’t do it, it’s not worth it,’ Charles said, regretting it immediately.
Nigel straightened and turned. ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he said quietly. ‘Where – you’ve been—’
Charles nodded. Neither of them wanted it said. ‘How about some breakfast?’
‘No, thanks.’
Detachment, remoteness and introspection were uncommon in Nigel. He normally seemed fully engaged, whatever he was doing. He clearly wanted to be alone now but Charles didn’t know how to leave. It felt too abrupt to walk on without saying more, but he wasn’t sure what note to strike.
‘I really love her, you know,’ said Nigel, suddenly. ‘I hope you do.’
‘I do.’ Charles walked on, wondering why he had never told her.
Although neither he nor Nigel ever referred to the encounter, they began to see more of each other and became friendlier, though still without quite being friends. Nigel lingered to talk after the tutorials they shared, sometimes sat on the bench next to Charles at meals in hall; Charles reciprocated in the JCR bar or in the White Horse, the narrow pub on Broad Street. There was no awkwardness; Nigel was a stimulating companion who normally made no demands on his audience other than that they should share his humour, which was sharp and playful. He neither offered nor sought intimacy. They never discussed Sarah, but Charles would mention her in passing, trying to show that she wasn’t an issue between them. In fact, just hearing himself say her name was a constant and secret pleasure.
Once, Nigel came to his room late at night, grinning, his eyes shining. ‘Sorry, bloody rude of me, bloody late. I’m a bit pissed, boozing in the JCR since dinner. Got an essay crisis, too. Have to be up all night; but got to sober up first. Couldn’t give me a coffee, could you?’