by T. M. Parris
A pause that spoke volumes. Rose Clarke spending weeks off the job to be with a friend in hospital? They were more than just friends, then. Of course, someone in the business, someone who went back years, traumatic experiences shared, that was right for Rose. It needed to be a colleague, a collaborator in the spy world of some kind, for it to work for her. Something squeezed his heart, though after all that had happened he had no expectations of her at all.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I resigned.”
She was matter-of-fact but there was a catch in her voice. He couldn’t help staring. MI6 was her life, the only thing that mattered to her.
“Another informant lost. A colleague beaten to within an inch of his life. It’s too high a price,” she said, looking at the fountain again. “It’s too much to take. Grom’s in the wind. That was my fault. I let him get away. Whatever I said to Zoe, I gave her ideas but she didn’t trust me enough when I could have helped. And I should have realised sooner about Pippin. Alastair.”
Alastair. So that was the man’s name. It fell somewhere, like a rock sinking to the bottom of a pond. He could tell her it wasn’t her fault. But they were all judgment calls that she made. It was the nature of the business that lives were weighed up against each other. That she’d become repelled by it made him love her more, though it hurt him too knowing what walking away would cost her.
“They both got through it,” he said. “And Grom has slipped away from all kinds of things. He’s a spent force now. Bankrupted. His people have deserted him. Even in Corsica, even on the boat, they didn’t stay by him.”
She looked directly at him now.
“You saw what happened?”
“We were watching.”
“You and Zoe?” He saw her adding it up. “You’ve been with her ever since?”
He didn’t try to deny it, though his face felt warm.
“I’ve been preparing her for what’s coming. The life she’s chosen. The skills she’ll need to survive.”
“Right.”
It sounded tawdry even to his own ears, even without Rose’s one-word verdict. But then came a prick of anger; he had saved Zoe’s life after all.
“What was it you wanted?” he asked.
For a moment he thought she was going to get up and walk off. But she took a breath and started talking.
“When I was in Grom’s villa, I saw a print on the wall. It was a Japanese print. Very similar to the one in his penthouse.”
The prints. He’d almost forgotten about them. Her reminder was like being slapped.
“How similar?”
“Well, I had about a second to look at it, and the place was on fire. But from that one glance, the similarity was striking. That’s why it caught my eye.”
She waited for a response but he couldn’t muster one.
“So there are three of these prints. At least. One that was in the Freeport, one in Grom’s apartment, and another in his villa. You have two of them, right?”
He nodded vaguely. He’d passed the prints to a colleague at his letting agency with instructions to store them safely somewhere.
“I don’t know if that third one has survived,” she said. “The villa suffered extensive fire damage in the end.” Another expectant pause. “Are you at all interested in this, Fairchild?”
He wasn’t sure. He wanted to be back at sea, slowly forgetting it all.
“Why are you telling me?” he asked.
She stared at her cup, gathering thoughts.
“When I told Walter that there was a second print, he was pretty dismissive. Described it as a coincidence. All these prints are alike, and so on.”
“Not this alike. They date from the same time. Same artist, same printer.”
“And now there’s a third one. Maybe.”
“I suppose Walter isn’t your boss any more.”
He’d not heard Rose doubt him before like this. Maybe there was more to her resignation than she’d said.
“You always claimed he knows more than he lets on,” she said. “I got the impression he didn’t want any focus on the prints. That it wasn’t something he wanted anyone to think about.”
That didn’t surprise Fairchild at all, but Rose being this overt was astonishing.
“Why does it matter to you?” he asked. “You’ve resigned.”
She smiled, with a little sadness. “I resigned. But then I took back my resignation. Life outside the Service just seems meaningless. Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?”
Something caught in his throat. She felt trapped in this life, just like he did. He’d have done anything then to have been able to hold her.
“There’s something else,” she said. “Our team was being watched. Right from the start. Did you ever see anything?”
He shook his head. “Are you sure?”
“I wasn’t. But now I am. It was Grom and his people. They were playing games, deliberately letting themselves get seen, then disappearing. Making us doubt ourselves. Doing enough to spook us, but not enough for us to act on it. Game-playing, like he does.”
Fairchild was trying to work through the implications.
“When you say right from the start…”
“I mean, from the day we set up in Nice. Grom may only have arrived after the robbery, but his team was here from day one. Our day one. They didn’t latch onto us in Monaco, Fairchild. They knew we were coming.”
A silence, filled with water running at the fountain and footsteps on cobbles.
“Someone within MI6 tipped him off?” he asked.
“How else could he have known?”
“You think it was Walter?” He may as well be blunt.
Rose sighed. “No, not really. It was Walter who was so keen to set up the team in the first place. But he’s holding something back. He has something on Marcus Salisbury as well.”
“The Chief?”
“Salisbury almost canned this op but Walter pushed it through. How was he able to do that? And why did Salisbury not want it to happen?”
“Could just be a difference of opinion. Limited resources and so on.”
“Well, that’s what they say, but I’m starting to think there’s more to it.”
“A secret intelligence service is going to have plenty of secrets.” He was playing devil’s advocate. Defending MI6 wasn’t his natural position.
“True. But this affected me and my team, work we’re doing now. It’s not some Cold War grudge that doesn’t matter any more. If someone’s passing things on…” her eyes went back to the fountain.
“Did you mention any of this to Walter?”
“No.”
One word could say a lot. Rose wanted to trust Walter, but somehow she didn’t, quite. She was telling Fairchild all of this for a reason.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“Follow up on those prints. Find out what they mean. Find out whatever Walter doesn’t want you to know. These things all relate somehow, I’m sure. Sutherland, your parents, Walter, Salisbury, you. There’s more to dig up. It’s got to be someone outside the Service doing the digging. You have the means to do it.”
“You want me to investigate MI6?”
“Nothing as formal as that. I’m just – I’d like to see you continue to look into your own affairs. As you would do anyway, probably. Because I think they might shed light on what happened here, and whether Grom has too many friends where he shouldn’t have any at all. I appreciate I can’t ask you for anything. I’ve hardly been fair to you.” She couldn’t bring herself to look at him while she was saying this. “But this is real. I haven’t taken this to anyone else. Only you.”
Now she looked at him. No guardedness for a moment. In her eyes he saw hurt, fear, anger: symptoms of the betrayed. Rose had put her life on the line for the Service, and the lives of others. The idea that someone there wasn’t playing straight would make her foundations crumble, bring her world tumbling down.
A yacht at full sail, th
e swell of the Atlantic, green islands far away, a warm touch on his skin. That was all gone now. He would do it, of course he would. Zoe and Zack would have to fend for themselves. He had another mission now.
Chapter 65
Rose watched him walk away across the square. She wasn’t sure if he’d come. He’d be forgiven if he hadn’t, after the way she’d treated him.
She knew the body off the yacht in Corsica wasn’t Zoe; it turned out to be male, a Russian national. But she’d just assumed then that Zoe’s body was lying elsewhere, yet to be discovered. Fairchild’s reassurance eased something inside her, though she didn’t want it to show. He’d clearly given Zoe a lot of help and probably saved her life. But he also got something out of it if they ended up sleeping together. Wasn’t that a little bit exploitative of him? Something about it left a bad taste.
She ordered another tea. She didn’t have to be anywhere. Her team was disbanded, Ollie back in London, Yvonne in Paris. Though she wouldn’t be surprised if the two of them met again. They had a rapport which reminded her of herself and Alastair during their training days. But they were a little reserved towards her, she felt. Maybe it was the painting. Like Walter, they couldn’t quite believe Rose had chucked a masterpiece into an inferno with such ease. All that about the value not meaning anything, it was still sacrilege to destroy a Van Gogh. Disturbed though Rose was by these responses, she’d run through the whole train of events and was sure she did the right thing. She’d do it again, too. People were more important than paintings. Especially Alastair.
She sat thinking about Alastair. It had been an intense few weeks. Always, back at university, she’d wondered if something might happen between them, but they’d only ever been friends. In the cellar he’d held it together, but this experience had scraped layers off him, left him raw, exposed, contemplating his own death and the meaning of his life. He was needy and clingy, and Rose was happy – more than she’d imagined – to be the person he could cling to. They became inseparable, Rose spending nights at the hospital, ready to comfort him when he woke disturbed and confused. She’d never been this close to someone for so long.
By day, when awake and not in pain, Alastair related the story of Pippin’s life, how he came to be and what happened to him. At night, he cried out in his sleep about tones of gold green and dark lilac-grey, whirling autumn leaves, wind-bent corn under whirling skies. Always an obsessive – or maybe they all were in this business – Alastair had gone to work in his creation of the character of Pippin, and the quiet little thief had become entwined with the vivid imagination of Vincent Van Gogh himself, the artist’s anxieties and sensitivities becoming those of Pippin as well. Pippin saw what Vincent saw. At night Rose sat by Alastair’s bed and listened to it all unravelling, Vincent and Pippin and Gustave, because Gustave was there too, his overbearing self-belief, his crushing artistic passion dominating those around him, just as Gauguin had dominated Vincent. How did we all get so complicated? Rose mused on this during those long nights, wondering how much of the old Alastair would emerge from this maelstrom of fevered minds.
She challenged him too. Walter said Alastair went undercover to try and prove something. What was he trying to prove, and to whom? Was it self-centred to think it might be her? There was a certain rivalry between them during training, and since then Rose had been involved in more risky operational stuff than him. He never said it was her, but then he wouldn’t have laid it on her like that, even in the state he was in. Rose had enough to deal with knowing that Alastair was tortured because she’d taken the painting. When she finally found the nerve to tell him what she did with the portrait, he laughed. Was that the real Alastair or was he still in some mixed-up state? She’d find out.
They became close, holding hands without even thinking about it, needing each other, needing to share what neither of them could share with anyone else. In the meantime the treatment continued, procedure after procedure, all painful, none entirely successful. She couldn’t leave him, not like this.
But things were changing again. The nightmares were receding. Alastair had moments of stillness, not holding back, just not having anything to say. Like he was before – a quiet, kind listener. He needed time to think and get to grips with who he was now. Time alone, not with Rose distracting him with her own angst. They were becoming companions now; intimacy was too strong a word. What was next? Maybe Alastair would go back to Hong Kong, manage to take up his old life somehow. Or maybe the world of secrecy wasn’t for him any more. They hadn’t had that conversation yet.
It left her feeling empty. Even more so with Yvonne and Ollie, Fairchild and Zoe. Was there something wrong with her that she couldn’t be close to anyone? Always before, she’d blamed her job and the difficulties of having to keep so much a secret. But she had no such excuse with Alastair, and still she knew, even now, already, that they weren’t going to become a couple. They were friends. Good friends, lifelong friends, but that was all. This episode was born out of danger and fire and trauma, and those would all fade, although they would both be changed, particularly Alastair, whose leg would give him pain for the rest of his life. Now the emotional weight was lifting, she felt a sense of loss which stabbed her particularly as she watched John Fairchild walking away.
And now she couldn’t trust the Service any more. There really was nothing in her life except MI6; the moment she’d sent the resignation email she’d been overwhelmed with a terrible emptiness. But now she had to reconsider all that, look over her shoulder all the time, wonder if Grom or his acolytes would show up for her next assignment. He should be history, but not if he was getting help. She was alone with this; even Ollie and Yvonne didn’t know that she’d recognised the moped rider in Arles, that she knew for sure Grom had been tracking them.
She didn’t like being in Fairchild’s debt. She made it clear she was trusting him, and him alone, with this. And she told him about the print. If she hadn’t, he’d never have known. He ought to feel he owed her for that. His disaffection with the UK establishment was something she’d never liked about him, but now it was useful. His motivations may be selfish but she understood them. He was the only person she could think of who could really get to the bottom of this. What that meant, of course, was that they were tied to each other until this thing was resolved. She thought she wanted nothing more than an end to John Fairchild in her life, but she’d called him back in, and this could go on for some time.
She called the waiter and asked for the bill. Walter would shortly assign her elsewhere. A fresh start with no Grom on the horizon. At least in theory. There were still threats, there was still work to do protecting British interests. She still believed in all that. She just didn’t know any more if everyone else did. She needed to commit once again, send other people into the battlefield and maybe go in herself as well, no longer sure that everyone was fighting the same war.
She paid the bill and got up to leave. She’d done what she could.
Whatever was coming next, she’d have to be ready.
The Clarke and Fairchild series
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nbsp; Clarke and Fairchild will next meet in Japan, and in subsequent novels wherever there are interesting political stories to tell. Both characters grow and develop over the series; Fairchild will eventually discover everything about his past and Grom’s motivations. My inspiration for Rose is the Judi Dench interpretation of M in the later Bond films, and an imagining of what this M would have been like earlier in life when she was in the field. Some of the other characters will also make appearances in later books. I hope you stay with us for the journey.
Author note
While I did a good amount of research for this novel (see my Facebook page for more), I didn’t hesitate to take liberties and stretch, or even completely transgress, the boundaries of what would be possible in real life.
The idea of a Van Gogh worth half a billion dollars is inspired by the true story, as told by Ben Lewis in The Last Leonardo, of the Salvator Mundi, a recently discovered masterpiece attributed to Da Vinci which was eventually sold at auction for US$450m. Given the question marks over whether any of it was really painted by Da Vinci, the idea that a clearly authenticated Van Gogh could sell for $50m more doesn’t seem unfeasible. The lawsuit described by Laurence on his lunch date with Zoe is based on one that’s detailed in this book and in numerous other places.
The Portrait of Theo is of course fictional, though Vincent’s close relationship with his brother and differences with Paul Gauguin are documented in Van Gogh’s letters. Many of Pippin’s observations, particularly about colour, are drawn from these letters.
Browsing in a bookshop (yes, people still do that!), I was delighted to discover The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair. It’s a beautifully-presented book (this one wouldn't work as an e-book, you need the physical copy) detailing the history of dozens of tones and shades of colour, where they came from, how difficult they were to produce, and how expensive and in fact poisonous some of them were. I made extravagant and perhaps sometimes self-indulgent use of the evocative names of some of these colours throughout the novel.