Dear Clive. It was a sorry, sorry situation, the whole bloody thing. But at least he wasn’t around to learn that his only son has committed suicide in prison. No, the cancer had been aggressive enough to put him out of his misery quickly. There would have been nothing more undignified for a man like Clive than to have gone down slowly. And putting aside her personal sadness for the loss of one of her oldest friends, May has to look to the future. None of them are getting any younger and she is not ready to give up the ghost just yet, thank you very much. It is simply a fact: without Clive, they are freer. For all his wisdom, he just never had the imagination, or the stomach, to try new things. It was May who was constantly having to push to get the business – Christ, without her, they would have gone under years ago. And to think that originally it was Clive and Jeff who had joined forces with Nguema, her friend! Though it had made sense; when the babies were young May was happy enough looking after them, until they started school and her feet started to itch. So many young women these days try to do everything at once, and where does it get them? No, one has to pace oneself. One can have it all, just not all at once – one has to bide one’s time.
Of course, she had known everything about the business, she had been there from the start, sitting in on dinner meetings while she fed the boys, bringing the men Scotch whilst drinking in every detail of every deal. And so, slowly, and then with gusto, she had started to chip in. She had always been the one with the brains – and the beauty, as she and Jeff liked to joke. Once May came into the business, the whole thing had taken off. And she was always off the books. What would be the point of making herself visible? There were so many things one could get done from behind the scenes. That’s the problem with people these days; everyone is always so keen to be seen.
Not that May is one to live in the past. You can’t stay in the past; you have to embrace the future if you are to keep up with changing times. Apart from with perfume.
‘I’ll take this one.’ May winks at the counter girl who smiles before turning her back and preparing the wrapping. May has barely taken out her purse when her phone rings.
Her expression drops the moment she sees James McCann’s name flash on the screen. That bloody lawyer. What the hell is the point of them investing thousands of pounds on encrypted software if he’s going to call her on her personal bloody mobile?
May presses answer and takes the outstretched bag from the shop assistant before speaking into the microphone.
‘Hello.’
‘We need to meet.’
McCann is waiting for her as she makes her way across Hyde Park, towards the horror of the final days of the Winter Wonderland.
‘You look well,’ McCann says in his usual sycophantic manner.
‘James,’ she says, moving alongside him towards the gates of the theme park, where the background noise of the crowds and the godforsaken jingles will provide a useful muffler for the conversation they are about to have. May would like to believe they are safe here, but given all that has happened it would be ludicrous to believe she is safe talking anywhere, or to anyone. No, no one is to be trusted, besides Jeff, who frankly doesn’t have the wits to pull off that sort of betrayal. And the children. She can trust them implicitly on the basis that she has never told them.
May sighs, taking a sip of the coffee McCann passes her.
‘So?’ she says.
‘David’s friend,’ McCann replies, lifting the cup in front of his mouth to obscure the movement of his lips for any potential observers. ‘It’s done.’
May exhales, nodding thoughtfully. ‘I see.’
McCann sighs. ‘Did we do the right thing? Those girls have already been through so much …’
‘The girls will be fine. I’ll see to that. They might not be flesh and blood but they don’t deserve all this.’ May looks back at him. ‘Come on, don’t be glum. It’s Christmas. Besides, what choice did we have?’
Epilogue
Madeleine
Madeleine has nothing but a carry-on bag, expertly packed. After years of business travel, she knows what she is doing. Besides, she will only be staying one night, so she won’t need much.
‘G and T, please,’ she smiles at the air hostess, taking the drink and swallowing gratefully. She won’t have more than one; she has to drive when she reaches the other side, and mountain roads, after all, can be treacherous.
At Frankfurt airport she catches her connecting flight to Linz, exiting by the sign reading ‘car transfer’. She pays for the vehicle in cash and takes the A to Z from her bag. She won’t risk a GPS, which would be far too easy to trace.
Checking her rear-view mirror for any sign that she is being followed, Madeleine follows the map until she spots the exit sign for Steyr. She has never been to the house before, even though she is the one who arranged for them to have it, this part of Upper Austria being removed but conspicuous enough to facilitate the necessary hiding in plain sight. Besides, they are almost unrecognisable from the pictures in the news reports. The family photos Madeleine had issued to the press were intentionally old, and slightly anonymous, their faces caught in shadow. The photo only showed the four of them, anyway: no image of the baby has ever been released.
When Gabriela comes to the door, having been alerted to Madeleine’s arrival by the sound of the wheels in the drive, she looks so different that Madeleine almost wonders whether she has the wrong house. Her hair is cut short and dyed a lighter chestnut brown; everything about her is faded.
Madeleine can’t help but smile. ‘Hello, you.’
Madeleine follows Gabriela through the house, looking around the rooms, taking in the details of family life: the unwashed cups, the discarded school bags on the dresser.
‘The children are in the garden,’ Gabriela says as they settle at the table in the kitchen, overlooking the matchbox lawn where Sadie is holding Layla in one arm, pushing Callum on a rusty swing with the other.
Gabriela pours out two glasses of whisky from the bottle Madeleine has produced from her bag.
‘Where’s Tom?’ Madeleine asks.
‘I’m not sure,’ Gabriela replies, not meeting her eye. ‘He spends a lot of the day away from the house.’
‘How are things with you two?’
Gabriela shakes her head, taking a swig of her drink. ‘As you’d expect. He’s good with Layla, though, and the kids have adjusted to the idea. Or else, they’re building it all up to have a total meltdown later in life … Have you spoken to Ivan?’ The question rushes from Gabriela’s lips and Madeleine looks at her, trying to understand how she could have given it all up for a man she hardly knew. But then she looks away.
‘I went to see him in prison. He’s going to testify, so he will probably get a leaner sentence,’ she says, keeping it top-line. Gabriela doesn’t deserve to be kept informed, not fully; besides, Madeleine doesn’t trust her not to try to contact him or to jeopardise her family’s life once again. ‘The good news, as I mentioned, is that it looks like Vasiliev is going to be extradited as part of some trade-off between the UK and Russia. Turns out she’s pissed off a few of the high-ups over there along the way, which is fucking excellent news for us. Once she’s here, she’ll be tried. Finally, we’ve cracked the encrypted messaging system they – and hundreds of other criminals – have been using … Turns out they had such faith in it, they talked about everything in such detail we have a lot of evidence, on a lot of things …’
There are things she doesn’t want to go into. She doesn’t mention that David Witherall was arrested in Dubai under an urgent Interpol Red Notice thanks to the swift work of the international liaison officers stationed there. She doesn’t mention how Dubai was eager to assist after the Financial Action Task Force gave them a poor rating in their recent evaluation report. She doesn’t mention, either, that no one had contested his extradition to the UK, which meant he was swiftly returned to the UK. And she doesn’t mention how he was found swinging in his cell, despite having been on suicide watch.
<
br /> Her mind turns briefly to Maria, trying not to picture her face as she fell. The British press had never caught wind of that one. What interest would such a story have to their audiences? A Greek woman stumbling off the edge of a cliff on an island somewhere in the Sporades, whilst out walking on a visit home to see her mother for Christmas, was nothing more than a tragic accident in a far-off land. The media had never managed to connect it to the Witherall family – the daughters themselves were of little interest these days, even if they hadn’t been too young to legally report on.
Madeleine had checked in on Stella and Rose, out of a sense of guilt for what had happened, though she knew that it wasn’t her fault. Given that she had assisted Maria in getting her and David to the UK, she feels partly responsible, even if she knows she isn’t. Not really. Those children had lost everyone, and Madeleine had felt obliged to know what would become of them. It was some comfort to learn that David and Anna’s old friend Meg, who had given her information on Harry, was applying to adopt them.
She thinks, then, of her and Meg’s initial conversation, under the bridge after the inquest. The resentment in the woman’s tone as she told Madeleine about how she had first met Harry, when she was an intern at the paper he wrote for – how he’d tried to recruit her to spy on David – had been palpable. She hadn’t known that Harry had turned his sights on Anna, how he had manipulated her, once it became clear that Meg wouldn’t be sucked in. She hadn’t seen Anna for years, she said, not until David’s funeral.
Madeleine could tell that Meg had felt a degree of remorse for what became of her old friend, of responsibility for not having been around to save Anna. She hadn’t known Harry was involved in the way that Madeleine now knew, definitively – the way that the world would soon, once the trial was over – but she knew enough to sense something wasn’t as it seemed. She had, in her own words, smelt a rat.
‘Does he know that we’re here?’ Gabriela asks and Madeleine is momentarily confused by her drifting thoughts, but then she remembers and her expression hardens.
‘Popov? Of course he doesn’t. No one knows, apart from me and a couple of my colleagues from the Protected Persons Unit who helped facilitate the relocation. We can’t risk anyone knowing, ever … You understand that, right?’
‘Of course I do.’ Gabriela looks away.
Madeleine doesn’t mention the threats he has already received in prison. She doesn’t mention the likelihood that one day they will no longer just be threats, given Vasiliev’s web of contacts.
A few moments pass and then Gabriela speaks again. ‘What about Harry, the guy who brought us here? I liked him.’
Madeleine takes another sip of her drink, unwilling to divulge the details of his arrest. ‘I liked him too. So, what about you – do you have enough money?’
Gabriela nods. ‘We have the rent from my mum’s old house, which keeps us afloat, thanks to the account you set up for us. We’re going to be OK, I think.’
Madeleine nods tentatively.
‘I read the story in the Mail, the latest theory about the unexplained death of an English family in the French mountains,’ Gabriela says. ‘Did you arrange Saoirse’s interview with them?’
Madeleine shakes her head. ‘God, no.’ The truth, though she wouldn’t say it to Gabriela, is that it had been helpful, the implication from Gabriela’s oldest friend that she had been depressed and had intentionally driven off the side of the cliff. In the end, the papers had moved on to something else, for the moment at least – the absence of bodies put down to wild boars.
‘Do you think she really believes that I’d have done that?’ Gabriela asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Madeleine shrugs.
‘In the interview, she didn’t mention the baby,’ Gabriela adds quietly.
‘Perhaps she was trying to protect you.’
‘Do you think she knows?’ Gabriela says, and Madeleine frowns.
‘Of course not. Unless you told her, which you didn’t …’
‘I didn’t,’ Gabriela replies. ‘I just said I was in trouble and I needed her help.’
Madeleine reaches for her drink. ‘So then she helped you.’
‘Yes,’ Gabriela says, as though working something out. Her gaze remains fixed at a point somewhere in the distance, her expression unchanging though her eyes finally fill with tears, which she makes no effort to wipe away.
Madeleine says nothing as Gabriela reaches for her hand. They sit for a while in silence, their fingers resting next to one another’s, watching the children through the window.
‘Thank you,’ Gabriela says, after a while, as though the thought has just occurred to her. ‘I don’t think I said that before. You’ve been so good to us, you’ve saved our lives.’
Madeleine takes a final sip of her drink. She looks away. ‘What choice did I have?’
Author’s Note
The Second Woman is the third of three connected books, following on from Part of the Family and A Double Life. Each is a stand-alone novel that is also one in a series – not so much a trilogy as a triptych – that can be read in any order, with each book homing in on a strand of a larger, more complex web. I wanted to explore what happens when you look at the same crime from a number of perspectives, always with a woman at the centre of the story.
The genesis of this project was similarly manifold.
As with some of the best tales, it began in a pub, when a journalist friend told me about a trial he was reporting on involving a shipping company accused of dumping deadly toxic waste near a playground in a developing country. In the days that followed, as I read through the court transcripts, I knew I had my crime.
But for me, first as a news reporter and now as a writer of fiction, the most interesting thing about a crime is not the crime itself. In this sense, these books started to brew in my teens and early twenties, as I attempted to reconcile my own memories of the smiling grandfather I recalled faintly from childhood trips to Moscow with the public image of the double agent Kim Philby. As I considered his many faces – father, husband, friend, traitor, hero – questions began to emerge in my mind: How and why do we dupe the people we love; what is the impact on those we betray and on ourselves; and ultimately, what happens when the deceiver is a woman?
These books were inspired, in part, by some of my favourite espionage novels and political thrillers, and they deal, in various settings, with the elements of intelligence that interest me most. They are not traditional spy stories. Rather, they are an attempt to shift the focus so that we might reimagine a traditionally male world through a female lens.
Usually, when we think of women and criminality, we think of strong-armed accomplices or victims – and statistics around women in prison demonstrate that they often are. But not always. When a woman commits a crime that is typically thought of as ‘male’ – and in doing so, demonstrates the characteristics associated with that crime, often at odds with notions of femininity and motherhood – then her actions are almost always perceived, at least in part, through the prism of her domestic setting. She was a mother, a sister, a daughter – and look what she did.
I wanted to explore the distinct duality of roles that women face in their everyday lives and give each of my protagonists her own sense of agency, her own cross to bear and her own distinct flaws. So we have Anna, who must betray her family in order to protect them; we have Gabriela, who, in uncovering a double agent, finds herself living a double life; and we have Maria, bound and ultimately destroyed by loyalty.
I hope you find the books as entertaining, transportive and, dare I say, as exciting to read as I found them to write.
Acknowledgements
This book was finished whilst homeschooling in lockdown and I am wildly grateful to my husband, Barney, who was not only my first reader but who kept us all (relatively) sane during these turbulent times, and to my children who allowed themselves to be shouted at and stuck in front of the TV for hours on end whilst we attempted to work with everyone u
nder one trembling roof.
Huge respect and gratitude to my inimitable editor, Ann Bissell, for her excellent guidance and patience; to Julia Silk, super-agent and occasional therapist; and to the brilliant team at Borough – Felicity Denham, Katy Blott, Izzy Coburn, Alice Gomer, Andrew Davies, et al. I’m so thankful for your support and talents.
Special thanks to my dear friend Hannah Foster for introducing me to the island of Alonnisos over the course of various summer holidays, first as teenagers, then as adults. It continues to occupy my thoughts. To my excellent police advisor, Richard H, for steering me away from glaring factual errors (any remaining are fully my own responsibility). To Vilma Nikolaidou – thank you, a million times, thank you. To my mum, who is a beacon of all things good, but not too good, because that would be boring. And finally to Xander, to whom this book is dedicated: good things come in threes!
About the Author
Charlotte Philby worked for the Independent for eight years as a columnist, editor and reporter, and was shortlisted for the Cudlipp Prize for her investigative journalism at the 2013 Press Awards. A former contributing editor and feature writer at Marie Claire, she has written for the New Statesman, Elle, Telegraph, Guardian and Sunday Times, and presented documentaries for the BBC World Service and The One Show. Charlotte is the granddaughter of Kim Philby, Britain’s most infamous communist double-agent, the elusive ‘third man’ in the notorious Cambridge spy ring. This is her third novel.
Also by Charlotte Philby
Part of the Family
A Double Life
About the Publisher
The Second Woman Page 31