The Frenchman picked up the rest of his possessions. The bag, a book, a pair of sunglasses, the cigarettes and a bottle of suntan lotion. In the evening light he put on the sunglasses, like a matinee idol expecting to encounter a herd of paparazzi, and stepped into a pair of deck shoes. He then made his way towards the path that Kell had earlier taken to the beach.
Kell lowered the camera. He walked back into the room, threw the camera on to the bed, picked up his key and went outside into the corridor.
He was downstairs in fifteen seconds. Walking in the direction of the pool, he paused beside Amelia’s lounger, leaned over – as if to stretch a muscle – and removed the bill from the low plastic table. He stood up, placed the piece of paper in the back pocket of his trousers and continued walking in the direction of the lobby.
20
The name at the top of the bill was A.M. Farrell. The room number was 1208.
Kell went back to his room and immediately called Marquand in London.
‘I’ve found your missing girl.’
‘Tom! I knew you would do it. What’s the story?’
‘She’s staying at my hotel. The Valencia Carthage. Malot is across the road.’
‘So they’re shagging and staying apart so that nobody can trace them?’
Kell steered around the theory. He had learned to deal solely in facts. ‘She’s using a legend we haven’t seen before. Farrell. Initials A.M. Can you run a credit-card check? Should be plenty of activity through Paris, Nice, Tunis.’
‘Sure. Did you speak to her, Tom?’
‘Now why would I want to do something like that?’
‘Well, thank God she’s all right.’ There was a delay on the line, as though Marquand was trying to think of the appropriate thing to say. ‘Fucking Frogs,’ he offered eventually, ‘always stealing our best women.’ Truscott and Haynes would surely be told that Amelia was in Tunisia on little more than an extended dirty weekend. ‘Can’t Malot get his end away at home? Aren’t there supposed to be thousands of beautiful girls in Paris?’
‘You tell me,’ Kell replied.
‘What’s the story?’ Marquand asked. ‘Is Malot married as well? We can’t seem to find anything about him on the wires.’
‘Hard to tell. I’ve only seen them from a distance, sunbathing by the pool …’
‘Sunbathing by the pool!’ Marquand sounded combustible with excitement. ‘Imagine that.’
‘He’s what you might call a poser,’ Kell said, trying to keep the conversation on an even keel. ‘Wafts around the place like Montgomery Clift. Not exactly the grieving son.’
‘Perhaps he’s feeling cock of the walk about Amelia. What do they call the older woman nowadays? Cougars?’
Marquand had made himself laugh. It was the relief of a crisis averted.
‘That’s right, Jimmy,’ Kell said. ‘Cougars. Look, I have things I need to do. I’ll take a closer look at Malot. There’s always the possibility he’s DGSE. Amelia might be running a joint op in Tunis.’
‘And screwing a colleague on the side.’
Kell shook his head in disbelief. ‘Have a drink, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘You deserve it.’
He hung up, put the phone back on the desk and retrieved his camera from the bed. Looping it over his shoulder, he went outside into the corridor. In the street between the two hotels he found Sami at the wheel of his cab, lazily turning the pages of a newspaper. He tapped on the window.
‘Got something to show you.’ Kell climbed into the passenger seat and handed Sami the camera, showing him how to click through the photographs of Amelia and Malot. A day’s BO hummed around the cab. ‘These are the people I’m interested in,’ he said. ‘The woman is staying at the Valencia. The man is a guest at the Ramada. Do you recognize them?’
Sami shook his head. Two other drivers, standing beneath the bougainvillea, were staring into the car with an almost insulted impatience, like girls at a party who have not been asked to dance.
‘Maybe they’ll go out for dinner tonight,’ Kell said. ‘They left the pool twenty minutes ago. If you see them, be sure to call me. If my phone doesn’t answer, go through the hotel switchboard. I’m in room 1313. Follow them if they get into one of the other taxis. If you pick them up yourself, don’t risk speaking to me in their presence. The woman speaks English, French and Arabic, all of them fluently. Send a text message with your destination.’
‘Of course.’
Kell indicated the other drivers with his eyes. ‘And if those two start asking questions about me, tell them I’m just a jealous husband.’
21
Joan Guttmann had given Amelia the telephone number of the adoption agency in Paris. Allowing for France being one hour ahead, Amelia had rung the agency at eight thirty on Saturday morning, only to discover that the office was closed for the weekend. A second number was given on the agency’s website and Amelia had eventually spoken to a needlessly melodramatic woman who was ‘fully aware’ that Monsieur Malot’s parents had been ‘tragically and senselessly killed in Egypt’ and had ‘furthermore been apprized of the circumstances regarding Madame Weldon’. It was agreed that Amelia should not speak to François by telephone. Instead, she was advised to travel to France, to meet her son in Paris on Monday afternoon, and – at his discretion – perhaps to attend the private funeral service of Philippe and Jeannine Malot, which was scheduled for Tuesday morning in Montparnasse.
Amelia had taken twenty-four hours to carry out her own vetting on the Malots’ murder and on François himself, with the assistance of an SIS asset in the DCRI, France’s domestic intelligence service. When she was confident that he was their adopted child, she considered her strategy more fully. To bring her son into her life was to entertain the possibility that he could ruin her career, ushering in the reign of George Truscott. To travel to Paris with the purpose of consoling François was to risk any number of reactions: his anger, his contempt, his pity. She had no sense of her son’s personality, only the plain fact that he had reached out to her in his hour of need. Yet such was her desire to help, and to encounter her lost child face-to-face, that Amelia quickly set aside all practical and professional considerations. She felt as though she had been given no choice; if her life was to have any meaning, any true and lasting happiness, she had to make her peace with the past.
Locking the Chalke Bissett house early on Sunday morning, she returned to London by car and went directly to Giles’s house in Chelsea. The Farrell alias – a passport, assorted credit and SIM cards – was concealed in a small box behind a panel at the back of her husband’s wardrobe. To access the panel, Amelia had to pull out more than a dozen plastic-wrapped shirts and dry-cleaned suits on hangers, piling them on the bed behind her. The cramped wardrobe had a throwback, post-war smell of mothballs and shoe polish. As well as golf clubs and hardback books, there were dozens of old newspapers stacked on the floor, hoarded by Giles as a means of keeping a permanent record of momentous events in his lifetime: the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Diana car crash; 9/11. The pages had yellowed and they crackled in Amelia’s hands as she moved them. The box safely retrieved, she rang Santander, activating two of the bank accounts for use in Continental Europe, then charged up the battery on the Farrell mobile while packing a bag for France. Ringing Giles in Scotland, she told him that she was going to Paris ‘on business’.
‘How lovely for you,’ he said, greeting the news with a characteristic wall of indifference. Amelia had the distinct impression that her husband was turning the pages of a historical document in some distant corner of Fife, busily filling in another branch of the family tree even as he spoke to her. ‘Take care, won’t you, darling? Perhaps we’ll talk when you get back.’
She booked an evening ticket on the Eurostar and cancelled all of her appointments for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Personal emails were sent out to senior colleagues explaining that she was required to attend the funeral of a close friend in Paris and would be returning t
o the Office on Thursday. Jimmy Marquand was the only top-tier officer to respond to these messages, expressing ‘my condolences for the loss of your friend’.
Finally, at around three o’clock, Amelia walked up the King’s Road to Peter Jones and bought two new outfits, one for the meeting with François, another for the funeral. Back at the flat, she packed them in a large suitcase, throwing in a couple of Ian McEwan paperbacks and a recent edition of Prospect magazine. She then walked outside and hailed a cab.
Sunday evening traffic, sparse under light rain. Within twenty minutes Amelia Levene was standing beneath the great vault of St Pancras station clutching a Business Premier ticket to Paris. The atmosphere in the station acted upon her like some romantic dream of the past: monochrome couples snatching final weekend kisses; liveried inspectors ushering passengers along the platform. Then a queue and the rigmarole of security, a female guard waving Amelia through on the assumption that she was just another chic bourgeois housewife shuttling between the two capitals. Amelia found her seat in the carriage, a forward-facing window at a table of four, and made a point of avoiding eye contact with any of her fellow passengers. The fewer people that noticed her, the better. She didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation with a stranger. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts.
She had bought a copy of the Sunday Times at St Pancras and opened it up as the train pulled away from the platform. There was a story about alleged British Intelligence complicity in torture at the bottom of the front page and she immediately thought of Thomas Kell, but found that she could not concentrate on anything more than the opening paragraph. She knew the background to the case, knew that the story had been scheduled to appear, and would ordinarily have been interested to see how the facts had been reported. But it was as though François had switched off her professional antennae; none of it seemed to matter any more.
Amelia looked out of the window and might have been nineteen again, such was her sense of anticipation at the prospect of travelling to Paris. Over a period of more than thirty years, she had constructed a new personality around the wreckage of her teenage self. She caught her own reflection in the glass and wondered at the loss of Amelia Weldon. Did she even exist any more? The next twenty-four hours would provide some sort of answer. She was going on a journey into her future. She was going on a journey into her past.
22
Kell was shaving in his room when Sami called from the taxi rank.
‘The Frenchman just came into your hotel. I asked him if he wanted a cab when he comes out. He said “yes”.’
‘That’s great, Sami. Thank you. You’re doing a terrific job.’ The small compliments of agent-running were second nature to him. ‘Keep in touch, OK? He’s probably gone inside to collect Amelia. Let me know where they ask you to go.’
‘Sure.’
The conversation had left a smear of shaving foam on the mobile phone. Kell wiped it clean and, with half a dozen sweeps of the razor, cleared his chin of stubble. He dried his face, sprayed aftershave on to his chest, and looked back at his own reflection in the mirror. A momentary reckoning before moving on. He found a clean shirt on a hanger, locked his passport in the safe and picked up the key card for the Renault. As soon as Sami called to let him know that Amelia and Malot were on the road, he would follow in Marquand’s car. If they were meeting third parties, Kell would need to get a look at their faces. That was basic operational behaviour, a tidying up of loose ends.
He sat on the bed and waited. His heart was thumping and Kell tried to remember when he had last felt such a rush of adrenalin. Not for months now. He took a beer from the fridge and popped the cap with his teeth, a party trick he performed, even in private. Claire always used to say: ‘You’ll lose your fucking molars.’
The text came through just after eight fifteen. Sami had written it in English.
Man and woman both. La Goulette.
Kell typed ‘La Goulette’ into a search engine on his phone and discovered that it was a coastal suburb between Gammarth and downtown Tunis with restaurants and bars that were popular in the evenings. Amelia and Malot were doubtless heading there for supper.
He grabbed the camera and walked quickly towards the entrance of the hotel. The same bellboy who had earlier accompanied Kell into the hotel was still on duty. This time there was no lobby smile, no courtesy; he clipped past bearing a tray of mint tea and biscuits. Kell, grateful for his own anonymity, went out into the sun-baked car park, unlocked the Renault from twenty metres, plugged the keycard into the ignition slot and threw the camera on to the seat beside him.
The car wouldn’t start. He tried a second time, pushing his foot down on the clutch and again pressing the button marked ‘Start’. Still no luck. For a moment he considered the possibility that he had been spotted by Amelia and that she had disabled the car, but the notion seemed too far-fetched for serious consideration. This was more likely an electrical failure. Kell tried a third time, removing the card, putting it back into the slot, pressing the clutch and again pushing ‘Start’. Nothing.
‘Why can’t they just give you a fucking key?’ he muttered, resolving to take a taxi to La Goulette.
There were no cabs on the rank. Worse still, eight pensioners were huddled beside the traffic barrier at the entrance to the Ramada, each of them seemingly impatient for a cab. Four guests from the Valencia were also lined up. One of them – a man of about Kell’s age wearing chinos and a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt – began to walk towards the main intersection, in the hope of flagging down a taxi on the highway.
‘Where are all the cabs?’ Kell asked in French, rephrasing the question in English when he drew blank stares from the geriatrics.
‘Something is happening in La Marsa tonight,’ one of them replied. He was a genial, white-haired retiree with a walking stick and sweat patches under his arms. ‘Some sort of festival.’
So Kell went back to the Renault. He tried the keycard one more time, to no effect. Finally, swearing at the windscreen, he gave up on the possibility of making it to La Goulette. Sami could keep an eye on them. He had proved nerveless and efficient thus far; there was no reason to think that he would suddenly abandon the job, or confess to Amelia and Malot that he had been paid a small fortune to follow them. Besides, Malot’s absence from the hotel had presented Kell with an opportunity.
He returned to his room and retrieved the copy of the Herald Tribune. He then walked across the street to the lobby of the Ramada and installed himself on a sofa with clear sight of the reception desk. His plan was simple. He needed to be seen. He wanted the staff, albeit unconsciously, to think of him as a resident, perhaps a husband waiting for his wife to come downstairs for supper. To that end, Kell began to flick through the pages of the newspaper. He read an article about post-Mubarak Egypt, another on the forthcoming elections in France. Behind him, installed at a grand piano in the centre of the lobby, was an elderly British guest, pink as a balloon, playing Cole Porter tunes with the lifeless accuracy of a retired music teacher. She appeared to be a fixture in the hotel, attracting smiles from passing staff. Beside her, a letter on SAGA writing paper had been tacked to a notice board: ‘Film Night. Monday. Billy Elliot.’ Kell began to feel as though he had signed up for a week at Butlins. On the stroke of nine o’clock, a small crowd gathered around the piano and the pink lady was encouraged to embark on her pièce de résistance: a rendition of Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’. Kell decided to make his move. He tucked the newspaper under his arm, checked that the desk was clear of guests, and walked towards the receptionists.
There were two of them, a man and a woman. Working on a hunch that the woman looked more likely to cooperate, he stood in front of her and rolled his fingers on the desk.
‘Bonsoir.’ Eye contact, an easy smile. Kell spoke in French. ‘I checked in this morning. Could you tell me what time the restaurant stops serving food?’
The receptionist could not have been more helpful. Drawing out a sheet of notepaper, she scribbled
down an expansive summary of the hotel’s mealtimes and amenities, suggesting that ‘Sir’ might like to take a drink at the bar before dinner, and hinting that breakfast was often extended into the morning beyond the official cut-off time. Kell was even given a map. He listened intently, expressed his gratitude, and returned to the sofa to read his newspaper for a further fifteen minutes.
At nine twenty, he enacted the second phase of his plan. Again, the strategy was simple: to give the impression that he was a guest in the hotel, returning momentarily to his room. He walked towards the bank of escalators on the north side of the lobby, waited until he was certain that he had been spotted by the receptionist, then made his way to the second-floor landing where he killed time by telephoning Sami.
As usual, the call was greeted not by a ringtone but by a cacophony of North African music. Sami’s voice only became audible after several seconds of sustained wailing and screeching violins. It transpired that Amelia and Malot had arrived in La Goulette at half-past eight. Sami explained that they had gone for a drink at a bar on the beach and had asked him to wait until they had finished supper so that he could drive them back to the hotels.
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