by Henry Porter
It was two thirty. She took a walk on the hill above the cottage, passing on the way the newly installed water turbine on one of the torrents that ran down the hill. At the summit was an ancient barrow and it was from there that she dialled the office number of Isis Herrick, a friend of hers working in the British Mission at the United Nations. They’d seen each other a few times in New York, having met on a course in London more than a decade before. After Charlie’s death, Herrick took Kate out for lunch and was candid about the life of a single woman working for SIS abroad. It was lonely and everyone in the embassy assumed you were available for sex, even the married men, and that made the job difficult.
Isis answered after she was put through by the switchboard and after an inquiry about Herrick’s baby, Kate asked, ‘Know a place called Kilmartin?’
‘Yes, I think I know the place you mean,’ Isis said. ‘Why do you want to know?
‘I’m thinking of a visit.’
‘Right . . . well, I haven’t been there lately but it’s a reliable spot, very interesting and there’s a lot to see. The best part is that it’s very well-connected yet always so quiet. I can’t recommend it more highly, Kate.’
‘Really? This is a very important break I’m planning.’
‘All I can say is I’d bet my life on it. The place is unique and totally dependable, but it does take a while to get to know.’
She hung up and dialled directory enquiries to get the number for St Antony’s College, Oxford. The woman who answered in the Middle East Centre volunteered that Kilmartin was in London doing a broadcast for the BBC World Service about his book. She’d take a message and see that he got it by the end of the day. Kate told her that she was calling about the seed catalogues and left her name, but not her number.
She returned to the screen to research the best estate agents for the area. Just then, in the top of her field of vision she saw a large grey bird flash past the windows. A second later there was an explosion of small birds from the direction of some bird feeders at the end of the garden. She sprang to the window to see a trail of feathers hanging in the air and the hawk make off with its prey towards the orchard. She moved to the front door to see where it went. Across the valley a patch of sunlight expanded and rushed towards her. Around the garden the wet branches of the trees glistened in the new light. Spring was in the air. She inhaled deeply and felt something of the magnificence of the place Eyam had left her. But how on earth did he expect her to live here? She turned and noticed an inscription above the door, Le paradis terrestre est où je suis, Paradise is where I am – a quote from Voltaire, which Eyam used to enter in people’s visitor books, as though to say earthly paradise always happened to be where he was.
She returned to the computer and saw that when she’d jumped up to see the bird she had accidentally opened the computer’s internet history. She began to scroll through the entries that went back to the previous autumn. The most recent date shown for a search was on November 22nd, when a dozen or so sites were visited, all of them connected with Goa or Sri Lanka. Had he been thinking of going east rather than to Central America? Or perhaps he suspected that his movements and communications were being observed and had left a false trail with the searches. She would never know and moreover, she told herself, it didn’t matter. Nevertheless she continued to look at the history of searches. On November 14th and 15th he had used a train timetable, visited a site specialising in recordings of ancient music, read the New York Review of Books online, browsed through the lists of a second-hand bookseller named Hammonds, and consulted two American political blogs.
She was about to close up the history when she came to the dropdown lists for October 10th and 12th. Both contained hundreds of individual sites with coded headings or titles that meant nothing to her. She opened one that actually had a name: AppleOfMyEye. A magenta-coloured home page appeared with a postage-stamp picture of a child, which was quickly replaced by a panel demanding a password, credit card details and an email address. She moved down the list. Each website was the same. Image after image flashed up, then was withdrawn as the site was blocked, either by the search engine or the absence of a password. But in these fleeting shots she saw enough to know she was looking at child pornography – hundreds of children, bewildered, lost, agog, splayed, crouching, sad, held fast in the dark ocean of adult depravity.
‘Jesus Christ!’ she murmured and without thinking turned the computer off and yanked the cable from the machine. ‘Eyam didn’t do this,’ she said to herself. ‘He couldn’t do that – it isn’t him.’
She sat back and gazed at the blank screen. The only answer was that the websites and those appalling images had been placed on his computer to incriminate him. What could be a simpler way of neutralising him? A middle-aged bachelor in a remote cottage with child pornography downloaded onto his computer, his credit card details stored like the images in his hard drive, would make conviction a certainty. The shame attached to the arrest, never mind prosecution, would discredit anything he had to say.
She stood up and headed towards the end of the garden to call Russell. Before she reached the spot where she’d seen him use his phone she heard a cry and saw Nock running down the drive. He leaped a low ornamental box hedge and ran towards her, pursued by a terrier and a lurcher.
‘Is that a phone you’ve got there?’ he called out. ‘It’s urgent.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s Mr Russell.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘There’s been an accident. He’s in his car. Across the road at the end of the track.’ He stopped, his chest heaving. ‘I think he’s dead.’
10
A Wonderfully Private Institution
Peter Kilmartin rose from the small table in the stacks of the St James’s Library where the new volume on the Akkadian language had absorbed him for the past hour. The book still lay open at a colour image of the bronze head of King Sargon. Kilmartin had always been convinced it was in fact a portrait of Naram Sin, one of the builders of the city of Nineveh and the subject of his own book. But identification seemed to matter less after the head had vanished in the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, which had been a moment of near physical anguish for him. The loss in those first weeks of the war over a decade before was incalculable – the jewellery from the royal tombs at Ur, tablets containing the first written poetry and one of the earliest accounts of the Flood, thousands and thousands of objects that had not yielded their secrets.
On the facing page was a map of Assyria superimposed on modern-day Iraq. Kilmartin stared at it, thinking about the fate of the antiquities of Mesopotamia. On the whole he liked Americans, but the trouble was not one of their bloody generals knew that if you sank a shaft at the site of Nineveh, outside the modern city of Mosul, you would travel nearly a hundred feet down before hitting virgin soil – a hundred feet that took you back to the invention of agriculture and the very first cities in the history of mankind. They parked their bloody tanks in the oldest civilisation of the world, and pleading military priorities and a kind of unembarrassed folksy ignorance, let the sacking of the museum commence.
His gaze moved to the rooftops on the western side of St James’s Square. He’d do better to concentrate on the young woman he was about to meet. She didn’t know what he wanted and after serving eighteen months in prison she would certainly be on her guard against being trapped. He hoped his friend the priest would reassure her.
He picked up the volume, tugged the light switch and walked to the end of the stacks in near darkness, his feet ringing out on the metal plates. Through the grid of the floor and the ceiling above him he could see one or two people working at small tables, or searching the bookshelves. He thought of King Ashurbanipal’s great library at Nineveh and was somehow certain that it possessed the same bookish calm. He loved this place, particularly the stacks, which he thought far superior to the library’s Reading Room. That was for people who wanted to sleep or work – no
t to think.
Before reaching the end shelves he dropped down and pulled a book from the bottom shelf and looked at the lending record at the front. It had been taken out three times since 1995. That wasn’t good enough. Eventually he found one with a clean page, noted down its title and the library code on the spine and, having placed a postcard of a Samuel Palmer watercolour at page 150, returned it to the shelf. He left the stacks, stooping as he went through the door to join the carpeted stairway down to the hall. Ishtar’s Tongue – not a felicitous title, by any means – was stamped at the desk where he had a few words with Carrie Middleton, who had been there as long as he could remember and occasionally stored one or two items for him in the rare books safe. He didn’t leave immediately, but instead waited by the entrance for a cab to drop someone off at this corner of the square. The walk to St Mary’s Church was no more than a few minutes, but taking a cab meant his journey was unlikely to be monitored. Even though he was working for the prime minister he’d rather not leave a footprint.
The drop-in centre at St Mary’s crypt was stuffy and lit by strip lighting. The Reverend Roger Hopkins, his oldest friend, sat at a table in a dog collar and worn leather jacket with the young woman. As Kilmartin approached a small, sharp face looked up to search his without embarrassment.
‘Hello there,’ said Hopkins, throwing himself back. ‘Coffee?’
‘Tea, I think,’ said Kilmartin. ‘Thank you.’
‘This is Peter – the man I was telling you about.’
‘The spook,’ said the woman with undisguised hostility.
‘And this is Mary,’ continued Hopkins.
‘I’ve been retired,’ said Kilmartin pleasantly, ‘for quite some time now.’
‘Once a spook . . .’
‘That is what they say.’ He paused. ‘It’s very good of you to agree to talk to me.’
‘I’m not here to talk, just listen.’
‘Fine, I am very happy to—’
‘I want to know. Are you trying to set me up? I did my time. I lost everything – job, career, boyfriend, flat. It’s total bloody shite, you know? My friends won’t have anything to do with me. It’s like I’ve got leprosy. I can’t find work and I’m watched the whole fucking time. I wish I’d never got dragged into this business.’
In the unforgiving light of the crypt her face possessed an extreme, martyred beauty. She was short – no more than five foot two – with natural dark-brown hair and brown eyes. Her hands moved restlessly, sometimes seeking the shelter of the sleeves of her jersey.
‘But as I understand it you contacted David Eyam,’ he said quietly. ‘You got in touch after the first committee hearing. Isn’t that right?’
She shrugged. ‘That’s not true, not that it matters now he’s dead.’
‘I haven’t come here to offer you sympathy, salvation or even a means of revenge, but I do believe that we share a concern and I hope to be able to do something about that by bringing to light some of what you gave our friend.’
‘I can’t tell you anything.’
Hopkins reappeared with the tea. ‘I expect a healthy donation to the centre for all this, Peter,’ he said jovially. ‘It’s very quiet here at this time; you shouldn’t be disturbed.’ He went off to deal with a young man who had slumped across a table at the far end of the crypt.
‘You don’t look fifty-five,’ she said. ‘More like late forties. Are you sure you aren’t in government service?’
‘I’m fifty-seven actually and feel it. Any illusion to the contrary is due to good genes. I have some Basque blood swimming about me.’
She appraised him. ‘I had a visit last week. They came to tell me that if I said anything I would be put back in jail or prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act again and given a longer sentence. My family couldn’t take that. I’m taking a risk just talking to you.’
He nodded. ‘Look, I have a certain remit. Let’s call it an assignment from the very top. And that will explain to anyone who wants to know what I am doing talking to you. You’re not the only one.’
‘You write books,’ she said accusingly. ‘I looked you up.’
‘Not on your own computer, I hope,’ he said quickly.
‘I’m not that stupid.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I am at a slight disadvantage in all this. I was out of the country for the period of our friend’s exit from government and then your prosecution. I missed most of it and because there was nothing in the media I’m afraid I was not aware of what was going on until a long time afterwards.’
‘And now Mr Eyam’s dead,’ she said, sitting back and folding her arms. ‘I mean, you have to admit it all looks pretty convenient.’
He gave a shake of his head. ‘That’s not my style.’ He paused to drink his tea. ‘Let me just remind myself about your part in all this.’
‘Still,’ she said, unwilling to leave the subject, ‘they could have got someone else to do it – favour for favour. A shipment of cocaine overlooked, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody is exactly beating their chest over David Eyam’s death. He’s out of the way. He can’t cause any trouble now.’
‘Can I make an assumption? You were a high flyer. You must have been for them to entrust you with this information . . . with this project.’ He had added that wording hopefully. ‘But you see I’m at a disadvantage because I don’t know what it was. There’s no trace of a mention in the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report, but then of course you wouldn’t expect that because—’
‘Because the prime minister with the consultation of the committee excludes part of the report that would be prejudicial to the discharge of the functions of the intelligence agencies,’ she said as though reciting something dull in class.
‘Exactly,’ said Kilmartin, saluting her good memory with a nod. ‘And because the hearings are held in private there is no Hansard record. No journalists’ notes. Nothing to say what was discussed in that committee.’
‘So you’ve got nothing?’
‘Well, there are the members of the committee of course, but a glance down the list tells you that none of the nine is sufficiently onside to encourage an approach of the sort I have in mind. Yet they must have been interested in order for them to ask Eyam about this project in the first place. If the thing were so off limits, the chairman, who is very much the prime minister’s man, would have put a stop to it. So, I conclude that there was a move in the committee to examine whatever it was that you knew about, a move that may have been secretly frustrated.’
‘Look, this isn’t doing anything for me. I’m going.’
‘Please don’t, Mary,’ he said firmly. ‘We both understand how important this is. I am asking you to stay and hear me out.’ She sat back and looked the other way. ‘You said you were working for someone at the top. Why should I talk to you?’
‘I told you that so you would know there was a way we could both explain this conversation if ever you or I were asked about it. Look, I was a friend of David Eyam’s. I had complete faith in his judgement. I believe that what he and you did was the right thing.’
‘Not in the eyes of the law.’
Kilmartin offered her a look of regret. ‘I have managed to get hold of most of the transcript and I realise going through your case that you were not charged with passing anything to him; that there was no evidence that you ever met or communicated in anyway. But your lawyer made little of this.’
All the tension and angularity of her being flared in her eyes. ‘Don’t be so fucking dumb. You’re missing the whole point. I was charged with copying certain documents and information; that was enough to send me to jail. They didn’t have to prove that I passed the information to someone in order to demonstrate I was in breach of the Official Secrets Act. The mere act of copying was enough because it showed intent.’
‘Are you saying you never met Eyam?’
She leaned forward with her face close to the table. ‘Look, I can’t do this. I don’t know who the hell yo
u are. If I admit anything to you they could charge me with the crime they never managed to bring to court – of actually leaking information.’
He drew back concessively and nodded. ‘I do understand your fears, but this isn’t about you.’ He stopped and slid an envelope towards her. ‘This is your membership of the St James’s Library. I have paid for your subscription. All you need do is go along with these forms signed and collect your membership card. It’s a private library, a wonderfully private institution.’
She said nothing. He picked up the postcard. ‘On the back of this I have written the location and title of a book. If you want to talk, simply leave a message where you find a similar card in the book. If you wish to give me something, but fear leaving it in the book, ask for Carrie at the front desk and she will keep it. She is completely reliable. You will be able to devise your own means of disguising what you hand to her. A hollowed-out book may seem rather old-fashioned but I have always found it works perfectly in those circumstances.’
She looked down at the card.
‘Please think about this. I need your help. But please also remember we’re in the business of resistance, Mary. You will have to be very, very careful. Do not mention this to anyone. Memorise what’s on the card and destroy it.’
She rose suddenly, scraping her chair on the floor. Then she leaned towards him with her delicate white hands splayed on the Formica of the tabletop. ‘I’m going.’
‘Please,’ he said, gesturing to the chair. ‘I want to say one more thing.’
She remained standing but did not leave.
‘Unless we hit them, Mary, this will go on and people like you will be hounded and harassed for as long as they choose. We’re fighting for something here. It’s nothing less than the good order of government and freedom, two things I feel rather strongly about. I believe you do too.’
‘Fine words, Mr Kilmartin, but that is the kind of sentiment that put me in jail. I don’t know who you’re working for and that is the only thing that interests me.’