By now, the rain had stopped. Stretching, he walked from the kitchen towards the long stone veranda and the single hardback bright blue chair given to him by the owner of a cafe in the village. The furnishings in the villa were sparse, and yet splendid. An old sagging double bed in one room, a camp stretcher in the other, and an old chintz lounge suite in the main living room were all that he had ever bought. Upended wooden beer crates served as small tables and an old rosewood door he had found in Thailand rested incongruously on four building blocks as a coffee table in front of the sofa. The rest of the place was filled with books and whatever odd items he had collected over the years. There was an antique gramophone with a brass horn and, on two walls, fine silk Qom carpets had been haphazardly hung, with other Tabriz and Isfahans scattered on the stone floors .
The walls were all white and an old wood bladed fan swished slowly from the high cool ceiling in the main room. The psychiatrists had told him to live with others, become part of a community, so he did exactly the opposite and found the old villa perched on a hillside across from the tiny village on the island of Serifos. From the front he could see the sparkling waters of the Aegean, and sitting at the kitchen table he could watch the path that wound its way down into the narrow gorge and up from the village. Visitors were infrequent but, some evenings, he would walk down and drink harsh red wine with the cafe owner, a sometimes morose, sometimes gregarious, individual called Nico. Then, the evening over, he would walk the dark path up the hillside to the silent house to await sleep, the nightmares and the demons it brought, and would later wake with his heart pounding, a silent scream on his lips sometimes two or three times before the dawn.
Sitting on the blue chair, he thought about the message the boy had bought over from the village that morning and watched as the distant ferry ploughed her way towards the harbour below.
A woman had phoned and was coming to stay. She sounded nice. Would she stay long, the boy’s mother wanted to know, because if she would, she could bring up flowers and clean sheets and some cheese and tomatoes. He slipped the boy some drachmas and said to help her with her case when she arrived in the village, then went back to work on the small gold icon.
It would be Holly Morton. He had first seen her when she was a gangly sixteen year old and he was in his last year at Cambridge. She had since married and they had lost touch until her father’s funeral. Then her husband had been killed in a pile-up on the M25 and, four months later she had phoned, just to say hello. Even then, he could hear the tension in her voice – and his offer of a place to lick her wounds had been accepted.
It was right that he should help. Holly was the daughter of his friend and mentor and the nearest thing he had to family. The Service had once been family. Teddy Morton and MI6. For him the two were inseparable because the Don had recruited him. It wasn’t just the languages ability. It was the silent strength of the loner and buckets of pure nerve that interested the faceless men in London.
It began with a student prank, common enough in Cambridge. A young man and his girlfriend inebriated enough for the dare attempted to climb the outside wall of the Kings College Chapel. Three quarters of the way up the girl looked down and, suddenly sober, froze against the hard cold stone. Her boyfriend couldn’t budge her and she began to cry, her grip weakening by the second. Quayle, returning to his College, pushed through the gaggle of watching students and began to climb the wall below her, talking all the time, encouraging her to hold on.
Pushing the boyfriend aside, he moved his body outside hers and coaxed her into moving downwards, his bulk reassuring against her back. At one point, she lost her grip and, for several seconds, the watching group below held their breath as Quayle took her entire weight on his knees, his hands gripping the gaps in the stones with almost obscene strength, before she scrabbled another hold. From below, a camera flash lit the wall and, a minute later, they dropped the last eight feet to the ground.
By breakfast, the word was out. The Cambridge evening paper had the pictures – and Quayle was certain that, if they published them, then the girl on the wall would be sent down. The College could only ignore so much; pictures in the paper demanded action. That lunch time, Quayle donned a borrowed suit and, armed with a couple of other props, walked into the offices of the newspaper, charmed his way past the receptionist and within minutes was in the photo section. After finding both the print and the negatives, he stuffed both into his briefcase and walked out, handing the receptionist a salesman’s calling card with a flourish. Not once had he been challenged.
The story was told with some relish by those few in the know – and, in the Masters’ rooms, an Australian tutor shook his head, saying, “That boy has more nerve than a bull ant,” and chuckling delightedly.
Edward Morton smiled and agreed. He decided there and then to talk to the people at Century.
He watched her walk up the path, the boy chattering to her, the suitcase balanced on his head. She had lost weight since he had seen her last and her hair was scraped back in a loose bun. Brown hair, blue eyes, and a sprinkle of freckles made her look younger than she was. When she arrived at the steps, her smile was forced to cover her shocked expression.
“Hello Titus,” she said brightly. “Well, I’m here.”
“So you are,” he smiled back, taking her case from the boy.
He showed her through to the bedroom and gestured at the curtainless window uncomfortably.
“I borrowed the chest of drawers. I’m sorry the mirror’s cracked.”
“Never mind, this will be very comfy.”
“I’ll put the kettle on.”
“That would be nice,” she said, the smile now genuine.
Later, her bag unpacked, she walked out to the veranda where he sat on the steps, alongside a tea tray of mismatched cups and saucers and an old dented teapot.
In the sunlight, he looked worse, the broad deep criss-crossed scars across his back that she knew could only have come from floggings .Across his shoulder a more jagged scar rose in a discoloured ridge, and through the short hair she could see other smaller scars across the back of his head.
She lowered herself beside him, took the cup from his hand, and saw the small purple circular scar above its powerful cords of tendon.
She looked up into his eyes. “My God Ti, what did they do to you?”
He looked at his hand, as if noticing the old wound for the first time, and clenched the fist.
“My own fault. You father always said I was an obstinate bugger.”
He smiled then, but his ice blue eyes were hard and flecked.
“I saw pictures once at Guys.” She raised her hand to her mouth as the realisation dawned. “Crucifixion marks. Oh my God, they crucified you… and your back?”
“Means I wear a shirt down into the cafe. Stops the tourists gawking. Drink your tea.”
They sat in an awkward silence for a minute before she lowered the cup and spoke. “Hugh phoned before I left. Hugh Cockburn.”
“I’m surprised you came then,” he replied softly.
“Why?”
“I am dangerous. Didn’t he tell you? Prolonged psychological trauma.”
“Poppycock!” she snorted. Quayle laughed, softly thinking how like her father she was. “Anyway, he sends his regards,” she finished.
They had been recruited the same year, Hugh from Oxford, and had met at the Foreign Office induction meeting. The front was maintained until they’d completed the battery and language tests and, on the third morning, the pair had been told to pack a bag. The first phase of their training was in a converted school in Lincolnshire where they were thrown in with a handful of actively serving intelligence officers from the army, three people from MI5 and an Australian identified only by his code name of ‘Douglas’. There they learnt the rudiments of fieldcraft, the networking, recruiting, cyphers and cut-outs, and endured the all important know-your-enemy lectures. where a middle-aged matronly type with a caustic tongue hammered in the latest detail
s on the KGB, GRU and their satellite counterparts, the counter intelligence people from 5 being pitted against the others for the practical sessions. Each of the nine course subjects would be expanded on in detail on later courses at other facilities.
Within days, the trainers had isolated the particular abilities of the students. Hugh Cockburn had begun to score very highly on the logistical planning and management sessions, with Quayle the opposite, very direct and preferring to think through a problem and then solve it alone. Six months later, as Quayle left for the combat school at Acton, Hugh was sent on to the languages facility to brush up his French. Their paths had crossed frequently over the years and they had remained friends – with Hugh actually working as Quayle’s controller on two occasions while under the cover of Cultural Attaché in Bucharest. Quayle’s skills had driven him underground from the start and he became one of only four British truly covert operatives on the MI6 full-time payroll. They were used all over the world wherever necessary, to support the local Station Chief on high risk tasks.
“How is Hugh?” Quayle asked.
“He’s fine. Thinks you got the shitty end of the deal.”
“Did he say that?” Quayle was surprised. It would have been most unlike Hugh to breach security by even discussing personnel he associated with.
“No, but I could tell. All this bloody cloak and dagger nonsense. Daddy was the same. All the mysterious trips down to London to see chaps in some boring club. Foreign Office my eye!”
Quayle said nothing.
“Go on,” she said, “deny it!”
“Deny what?” he grinned.
“You’re bloody impossible, the lot of you!”
“Drink your tea” he said patiently.
She smiled and looked at him. “Its nice to see you again, Ti…”
During the first few days they took lots of walks through the hills, eating in small tavernas whenever they were hungry. It was Holly, having badgered him out of the house, who did most of the talking. People who came across the odd looking couple found it difficult to label them, the pretty English woman and her big silent companion. He had a way of making men uneasy in his presence, his motives and intentions unknown. The effect was softened by the woman, who sometimes threw her head back and laughed, touching his arm like a comfortable old friend, and at other times sat locked in her own thoughts.
As the days went by, they dropped into an easy routine. Quayle worked on his icons at the big kitchen table which they had moved onto the veranda, a pair of incongruous bi-focal spectacles on his nose, while Holly sat on a big cushion against the white stucco wall, devouring his library or sometimes preparing scones in clouds of flour dust. Meals were simple affairs of feta cheese salads with fresh sardines, or bread from the village with spiced meats and bottles of cold beer.
The nights were when things were different, each with their private pain in the dark lonely hours, Holly in the old saggy bed, and Quayle with his nightmares across the other side of the house on the camp stretcher.
It was the first night that Holly understood Hugh’s veiled warning about Quayle, when she heard him moaning and crying out in his sleep. She had walked through to his room and, in the moonlight, had seen him bunched up, teeth grinding, the wounds in his subconscious open and weeping.
Suddenly he jerked awake, his eyes wide and unseeing. Then he saw her in the doorway and smiled hesitantly, obviously embarrassed at being seen. But it was Holly who felt the intruder. Half of her wanted to go and hold him like you would a child who had bad dreams, and half of her was frightened by it all. For her Titus Quayle wasn’t just a man. He was a hero figure from her childhood, the strongest man she had ever known, and what in God’s name had happened that could drive something so strong into a sweating moaning huddle the moment his conscious relaxed?
Some nights, when it was very bad, he got up and smoked on the veranda – because awake he could handle it. If she too was awake, she could smell the smoke, and sometimes she got up and they played chess.
It was in the second week, when the wind shrieked and rain lashed through the cracks under the doors, that she gathered up her blankets and crept through to his room, dragging the mattress after her. She had never liked storms and. as she lay awake in her loneliness, a jagged pitchfork of lightning flashed across the room. Quayle lowered his left hand down, his fingers running through her hair. In the dark and thunder it was what she needed. Feeling that, not even the storm could touch her she slept.
The mattress stayed on the floor beside Quayle’s stretcher and, one night, soon after – when his demons came and he lay rigidly tense and sweating – she climbed up onto the cot and soothed him, holding his head against her breasts. He could hear her heart beat through the thin t-shirt. The next day, she moved the mattress back to the bed that night she slept spooned against his back.
Nothing was said by either about the arrangement and, on the third night they slept together, Titus slept through without waking for the first time in over two years.
Some days he borrowed Nico’s brother’s boat, a brightly painted traditional twenty-two footer, and they sailed around to one of the remote bays. Holly dozed in the sun on the foredeck and Quayle – now Hemingway-esque, with a new stubble beard – sat hard in the stern, the sheets and tiller in his hands as he coaxed the old boat to windward, sometimes muttering sweet things to her, sometimes calling her all the nasty names a man can call a boat.
Once the anchor was down, he would free dive to the bottom stretching his lungs, always counting to sixty before slowly surfacing .Today he didn’t dive, but swam ashore with powerful measured strokes, and she watched him jog up the hillside to a white building, its trellised patio covered in bright blooms of bougainvillaea. Ten minutes later he returned with a bag in his teeth and, pulling himself over the side of the boat, held it up grinning.
“Ice. One needs ice with Ouzo!” And, with that, he produced a small bottle of Ouzo from his wet pocket.
It was that week that Holly asked a relative of Nico’s who was about to visit Athens a favour and, when he returned, she presented Quayle with a set of fine sable hair brushes. It was the first spontaneous present that anyone had ever given him and he accepted them awkwardly, not knowing what to say. The next day he used them for the fine gilt work on a Seventeenth Century Romanian piece. He reciprocated with a feisty little black tom kitten, who stood with his tiny paws set, and hissed at everything until she scooped him up. Sitting in the palm of her hand, pressed up against her cheek, he found her acceptable, and from that moment on forgot the hiss and began playfully biting her hair.
People in the village began to notice other changes. Bright potted plants now sat on the windowsills, curtains hung in the bedroom window, and Quayle seemed to smile more when shopping in the store. He would also take time with the people, perhaps take an Ouzo and a plate of sardines, and he showed the children a trick with a coin that he seemed to pluck from their ears. There was a rumour that he was a doctor struck off for drinking because, when the body of a tourist was washed up on the beach, he seemed to know how long it had been in the water just by looking at it, and why else would he live on the Island unless he was struck off? The women of the village, who loved to gossip, liked the change. Some Sundays, Holly walked down to the village and attended church, not understanding the service but worshipping nevertheless. The women of the village liked that and smiled at her. It was not good for a man to be alone, but they did agree that living together was unseemly and with luck they would marry soon. It was only really talk – for the island had long been smothered in tourists in the summer, and modern values mixed happily with the Greek Orthodox beliefs.
The eccentricity of the image was strengthened when Nico had one of his periodic problems paying the bank back their loan.
The restaurant was doing well – but Nico favoured his luck with the cards too often and, being a great lover, he was therefore proverbially an unlucky gambler. This surely was the reason, he morosely told Quayle.
“Bullshit Nico, you just don’t cheat as well as they do. How much are you in for?”
“I must have three hundred thousand drachmas at the bank on Friday,” he replied, “or it is gone… poof!” He waved his hand in the air dramatically.
The next day, a boy arrived with six hundred thousand in an envelope –and Nico, knowing who it was from, duly wrote out a share transfer on a paper serviette for half of the raucous noisy sixty seat taverna until the debt was repaid. Signing with a dramatic flourish, he thanked all the Saints profusely and sent the boy back up the hill. The next day, the Englishman was not only a struck-off doctor, but a rich one, with another story that he was a famous respected smuggler. That night, there was much smashing of plates and emotional singing – but Quayle and Holly remained in the villa on the hill.
“He will be terribly disappointed,” she said.
“So let him. I just lent him some money. He’s going on like I donated a kidney.”
“He loves you like a brother,” she admonished – and Quayle smiled briefly, turning up the lamp wick. They were sitting on the veranda and, down below, the coloured strings of lights along the waterfront twinkled in the warm breeze.
“How long will you stay here?” she asked. “I mean, it’s wonderful and peaceful and warm, but…”
“... but not enough going on for a person like me?” he finished ruefully.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. I like it still. I own this place, so if I go I will always come back sometime. Nico would keep an eye on it. I know a man in Italy. His name is Marc. He deals in paintings. He wants me to go into business with him. I find them and he sells ‘em. The trouble is the very good ones are in Russia, and the Russians take a dim view of their national treasures being hawked on the open market. That means being a bit clever about it, and Marc isn’t the clever type.” He smiled again in the soft light. “He’s the type who gets caught. Just like Nico.”
“Then you best ignore it?”
The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller Page 3