‘Just stay out of Mary’s way for a bit. She’s convinced you’re probably going to get Tim court-martialled or killed or at the very least scare off Rachel.’
I noted that Tillie didn’t say anything about the allegation that I was a traitor. She was bound to have seen it on the web. Despite her age and rural upbringing, Tillie was very internet-savvy and very little that affected her family passed her by. I was glad of her silence and followed gratefully as Tillie gave Kate a quick guided tour.
Ravenswood was a beautiful farm, built of Kentish blue brick with a thatched roof, but above all, it was cosy. There were signs everywhere that generations of families had grown up here. There was even one small room which had an incongruously ugly slate floor, put in to accommodate a much-loved but incontinent old family dog. Tillie took us round the house and chatted enthusiastically about her pride and joy, an exquisite ornamental garden, built round an ancient pond, in which every single plant and tree bore something edible. Finally, she showed us to a bedroom at the end of house. It was tiny and had a deeply comfortable-looking double bed which only just fitted between the walls. There was no other sleeping accommodation.
‘I’ll leave you to settle in,’ she said, ‘tea’s always on the go downstairs if you want it.’
Before the atmosphere with Kate could get too tense, I said quickly, ‘there’s no point in brooding. We need to keep busy. It’s time for you to spring into action.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. It’s time for your Intake Editor skills. We need to identify the Arab by the swimming pool. He’s the only new element that’s entered the picture so far.’
I expected an argument but Kate seemed relieved.
‘OK’ she said, ‘choose the best picture out of the bunch you took and I’ll get to it. She smiled suddenly ‘My BBC career is pretty much fucked anyway. I may as well go out in style.’
‘Every journalist in the known world will know about the fight and your involvement,’ I said, ‘how will you deal with that?’
She laughed. ‘I know I made a few enemies while I was on the desk, but I also made a few friends. Choose the pic and lend me your cell. I’ll take it from there.’
It took only a few minutes to crop and enlarge the best image of the Arab who had been with Omar. When I’d finished, I handed the cell to Kate.
‘Who are you going to start with?’
Intake Editors were the news equivalent of the parliamentary Chief Whip. It was their business to know where everyone was and what they were doing. Also like Whips, they tended to know a lot about the private lives of correspondents and producers: who was sleeping with whom, what their sports and hobbies were, and where they were likely to spend their leave.
‘Our best shot is Ben Ferrara but he’s definitely out.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s seriously ill.’
Ferrara was one of the stars of Television News. He was an expert on the Middle East and had spent more time in Iraq than almost any other BBC correspondent.
‘No chance at all of reaching him?’ I asked.
‘None, he’s strictly off limits. Since he caught that infection in Basra, he’s had two kidney operations and he’s in a clinic somewhere in Scotland.
‘So who might be reachable? Could we try Ferrara’s producer?’
‘Susannah Lonergan? No. She’s brand new. Poached from ITN. I think we should go for Clare Dale. She was in the region for most of the nineties, as a freelance first, then she joined World Service staff. Or there’s Michael Gettner in Cairo.’
‘Clare Dale’s in Geneva now isn’t she?’
‘Yes, we should be able to get her straight away. They’re only an hour ahead of us.’
But it turned out not to be so straightforward.
Kate called Dale’s mobile first and got no reply and not even an answer-phone message. She tried the Geneva office next. A man with a Swiss accent answered and said he was the office intern. Clare was on holiday and she had not left a contact address. Any editorial queries were being handled by the Zurich stringer.
‘She’s a very attractive woman and I know she’s not gay,’ Kate said, ‘she’ll almost certainly be on holiday with a boyfriend. Iris in Brussels knows her well. I’ll give her a call.’
She reached Iris easily enough, fended off questions about the fight but didn’t get a satisfactory answer about Dale’s boyfriend.
‘Apparently she used to go out with Peter Liddell in News24 but they broke up a few months back. She doesn’t know if there’s a replacement yet.’
Kate grinned, ‘Moira Claiborne would know but we aren’t that desperate yet. Can you log in as Aaron again?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘give me a couple of minutes.’
I located the wireless network and logged onto the BBC system. With Kate’s prompting, I went to the Off Base list, compiled by the planning division of Newsgathering, the unit which handled correspondents. It listed every correspondent and producer, showing where they were normally based and whether they were there. It confirmed that there was no holiday telephone number for Clare Dale and also showed that the other friend of hers that Kate was looking for, Millie Drake, was off base at a European summit conference in Stockholm.
‘That shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Kate said, ‘Peter Wise is acting as Newsgathering editor in Stockholm. He’ll find Millie for me.’
He did, although Kate had some difficulty keeping his curiosity about the newsroom fight in check. It took him less than ten minutes to put Drake on the line from one of the briefing rooms at the Summit where she was listening, she told Kate, to an exceptionally boring speech from the Dutch Agriculture Minister. She was surprised and amused when she discovered the urgent query was about Clare Dale’s love life but knew Kate well enough to give her an answer.
‘She’s moved in with a German bloke in Geneva. Really dishy. Called Raine Hartig. Dark, lean and mean, you know the type. He’s a correspondent for Die Welt.’
‘That could mean she’s in Geneva and just doesn’t want to be disturbed by Intake,’ Kate said, when she had finished chatting to Drake, ‘I’ll get the Die Welt office number.’
That took only a moment, but she was told by a colleague that Hartig was also on holiday.
‘You don’t know if he’s still in Geneva, do you? I need to speak to him really urgently. I’m a friend of Clare Dale and a family problem has come up.’
I couldn’t hear the answer but I gathered Hartig was not in Geneva, though Kate did not look too discouraged. She scribbled a note on her pad, thanked the colleague and rang off.
‘We might just be lucky,’ she said, ‘this guy thinks they’re in Washington. Hartig is due to cover the visit of the German Chancellor next week and he thinks he went a few days early with Clare. If they’re in Washington itself, they’ll be at the Monarch Hotel. Die Welt has a great deal there, apparently.’
Kate got the Monarch number and asked for Hartig. She didn’t really expect to find them straight away, but when Kate called the hotel and was transferred to the room, Hartig answered immediately. She apologised and explained that she was looking urgently for Clare. She added quickly that it wasn’t an assignment and she wasn’t trying to interrupt the holiday. It turned out that Dale was in the health club pool. Hartig promised to have her call as soon as she got back.
‘I know the Monarch,’ Kate said, smiling, ‘the pool is amazing. There’s a gym above it and the windows form a kind of gallery on three sides. The exercise machines all face inwards so when you swim, you see this amazing array of backsides belonging to people sweating their guts out on bikes and ski treadles.’
We waited for Dale to call and within half an hour, we had our breakthrough. Dale was happy to help. She didn’t have a computer with her at the hotel, but she gave them Hartig’s e-mail address, with a promise of confidentiality. I e-mailed the photo of the Arab to Hartig and within a few minutes Dale called back. I took the call and heard immediately the confidence in Dale’s voice.
>
‘It’s definitely Jabbar Massoud,’ she said, ‘he’s the son of Abdul-Jalil Massoud, one of the architects of Saddam’s germ warfare programme. His father was involved in the Halabja massacre when Saddam’s army used chemical warfare to attack a village in Kurdish Iraq. Seems the son is a chip off the family block. A real nasty piece of work.’
‘Of course, I said, ‘I thought I recognised the face. I knew the father. The son’s very like him.’
It wasn’t much but it felt good to have made a start. But the exhilaration didn’t last long. I suggested a swim in the pond but before we went down, we decided to check the websites for the latest developments and the hammer blows came in quick succession.
The first hit was on Kate. We logged onto UpstairsBackstairs and there was a brand new lead.
Under the heading: ‘Mystery deepens after fight in BBC World Service’, it said, ‘Senior editor John Saxon, alias Cartwright, is still missing after being involved in a fight in the BBC World Service newsroom. According to eyewitnesses, the fight began with an unprovoked attack by Saxon on an official visitor to the newsroom. One report said the fight was over a former girlfriend of Saxon. Attention is now focused on Saxon’s current girlfriend, round-the-world yachtswoman Kate Allison, who has failed to report for work since the incident and is said to be hiding Saxon. There are reports that two of the main sponsors of Allison’s next sailing venture, the Chelverton Cup, are considering cancelling their support. A spokesman for Bridgenorth Paper, one the biggest backers, said ‘we are watching the situation very closely. If Allison is an accessory to a criminal act, we would not be able to continue our sponsorship.’
‘I’m really sorry Kate,’ I said, ‘Vossler’s trying to stoke up a feeding frenzy. He wants to set the hack pack on us to help them smoke us out.’
‘Fuck him,’ Kate said, ‘if Vossler thinks he can scare me like that, he doesn’t know me. That kind of stuff just makes me mad as hell.’
I believed her but I’d have been a lot happier with the ‘one for all and to hell with the consequences’ attitude if I thought she really believed in the cause.
There wasn’t time to discuss it though because two minutes later, it was my turn.
Under the banner Breaking News, Upstairs quoted ‘officials in high places’ as saying that the Italian government had issued a warrant for my arrest. I was used to stories developing fast but the momentum of this one was stunning. Vossler might have wanted this to happen, but only the Brits could have pulled the levers fast enough. SIS held all the paperwork which had supposedly been put in abeyance as part of the deal for me to leave the Service.
Now, apparently, the Interior Ministry in Rome had issued a statement saying that the Italian government was seeking my immediate extradition on a charge of a murder committed during an intelligence operation I had supposedly sabotaged. The stitch-up was watertight. Because of the security implications, no lawyer could challenge my arrest by demanding that the Italian government produce evidence to support the extradition request. If everyone was malevolent enough – which they clearly were – I knew could easily be locked up in an Italian jail within a week.
Chapter 15
I woke soon after seven and slipped out of bed without waking Kate. The room was already full of light and a male chaffinch perched on a fence below the window was in full song. I put on a pair of trousers and sat in a small chair at the foot of the bed and watched Kate’s morning contortions. We hadn’t been sharing a bed for long but I was already fascinated by the way she liked to gather the duvet and as many pillows as possible tightly around her. It was as though onshore she could not get enough bedclothes. She was wearing briefs and a heavy cotton T-shirt, which I presumed was for modesty as the low-ceilinged room had been warm through the night. Yet her body thermostat was definitely odd. Sometimes, she seemed far colder than the outside temperature justified; at others she generated a fierce heat which almost burned when our bodies touched. I watched as she scrunged the bed linen in ever tighter creases and smiled a secret smile as though this was the kind of comfort she dreamed of during her ocean voyages.
It was an idyllic scene and I found myself wishing that this was a country holiday with a beautiful girlfriend but such a fantasy was no help at all. The reality was that we had hit a brick wall. We had located the enemy but with no resources to take my so-called campaign any further and there was a serious chance that we would be gently ousted from our only base before too long. Tillie was clearly on my side but her husband George hadn’t had his say yet and he could well side with the rest of the family in wanting to protect Tim’s career.
I considered the options which took a depressingly short time. First, I had to get Kate to safety. The obvious choice was to persuade her to go sailing until my situation was sorted out one way or the other. At sea, she would be safe from Omar, but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to talk her into it. My own choices seemed to have narrowed to one: to make some kind of deal with Virginia. Over the past year I had compiled a dossier on her that would, at the very least, cause her serious embarrassment and, if I played it right, could seriously damage her career. It had always been my bargaining chip of last resort but it looked as though I would have to cash it in now.
These gloomy thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. It was Tillie, carrying a tray of coffee. Kate stirred, half awake and pulled herself up, hugging the duvet around her.
‘Morning,’ Tillie said cheerfully, ‘sorry to disturb you this early, but George would like a word. He’s gone wood-cutting and said could you go over to Grange Cross.’
‘After breakfast OK?’ I asked.
‘I think he’d like you to go before,’ Tillie said, ‘but if you’re hungry I can fix you something.’
‘No that’s fine. I’ll go right now.’
‘Can I come too?’ Kate said sleepily, ‘it looks like a lovely morning to be up and about.’
‘Why don’t you take the buggy,’ Tillie said, ‘it’ll be quicker than the car. I’ll have breakfast ready when you get back.’
I waited until Tillie had left, and poured some coffee. ‘This may not be good news,’ I said, ‘Tillie’s the boss in farming matters but if George wants us to leave, she won’t go against him.’
‘Then we’d better go find out,’ Kate said, ‘I can be ready in a couple of minutes.’
The buggy was a Honda quad bike, with wheels caked in mud and manure and a double leather seat that was close to splitting open from heavy duty wear. Grange Cross was little more than a clearing deep in woods belonging to a local absentee landowner. Woodsmen working for different employers shared it as a base to leave tools and exchange gossip and I knew that George Overton would not have suggested it unless he could vouch for anyone else who would be there. In the final approach, the road became a track and led towards a cluster of three makeshift huts in the clearing. Two pheasants were pecking at a compost heap the woodsmen had made to feed a common vegetable patch, which looked seriously the worse for lack of rain. A stocky red-haired man was splitting logs, swinging his axe with the ease of long use. He stopped work as we approached and introduced himself as Geoff Peever.
‘You must be Kate,’ he said admiringly, almost ignoring me. ‘George said you were a looker.’
Kate accepted the compliment with a smile and Peever explained that George Overton had gone to see another game-keeper and would be back very soon.
‘Have a mug of tea,’ Peever said, ‘he should be back by the time we’ve brewed up.’
Two other woodsmen broke off from chain-sawing logs and formed a small group around us. We chatted for a while about the effects of the dry weather and though it was all very relaxed and friendly, I noticed something slightly odd about their attitude. There was a feeling of expectancy, of something about to happen. They almost seemed to be acting at enjoying their tea and were not very good at it.
Then suddenly without any warning, a small pile of wood shavings about three feet from Kate erupted like some
thing out of a sci-fi movie and Tim Overton rose up out of the ground, to peals of laughter from the woodsmen.
Kate jumped to her feet, spilling her tea.
‘Jesus,’ she said, then she broke off, laughing. ‘If you get any closer than that, you’ll have to marry me!’
Tim smiled approvingly. He was a thin rangy man, with fair hair that was already thinning. He was wearing drill trousers and a pale khaki T-shirt and was deeply tanned.
‘Great nerves,’ he said admiringly to Kate ‘not many people recover that quickly.’ He dusted off the rest of the wood shavings, put down the tiny metal device he had been using as a combined periscope and breathing tube and offered his hand. Then he gave me a hug and took a mug of tea from Peever.
‘How on earth did you do that?’ Allison asked.
‘Tim began his military career as a sniper,’ I said, ‘but he ended up teaching the instructors a few wrinkles. There are three generations of game keepers in the family, not to mention the odd poacher.’
Peever got up and gestured to the other woodsmen.
‘Time to get back to work,’ he said, ‘these folks need to have a proper talk.’
‘I didn’t want to drag you into this,’ I said, when they had gone.
‘You didn’t drag. I heard, I read, I came,’ Tim said.
‘You’re supposed to be on holiday with a new girlfriend. She’s not going to be very impressed.’
Tim grinned. ‘Far from it, she’s a lively lass and she can’t wait for the action to start. Anyway, we can’t go away, Rachel has to give evidence at the Old Bailey this week.’
I looked around. ‘Where’s George?’
‘Back at the farm. I’ve brought you out here so we can have a little chat away from everyone.’
He sat down on a log. ‘Kate you need to hear this too.’
He turned to me. ‘John, everyone who knows you will bet anything they own that you wouldn’t call on them to help you out of this mess. We can hear the song now – ‘Oh, it will ruin their careers, they’ll get court martialled or fired or jailed.’ Tim went through a pantomime of wringing his hands, while smiling at Kate.
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