Текст книги "A Foreign Country"

Автор книги: Charles Cumming

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

5

Kell had returned to his bachelor’s bedsit in a near-derelict Fiat Punto driven by a moonlighting Sudanese cab driver who kept a packet of Lockets and a well-thumbed copy of the Koran on the dashboard. Pulling away from the house – which had indeed belonged to a genial, gym-addicted Pole named Zoltan with whom Kell had shared a drunken cab-ride from Hackney – he had recognized the shabby streets of Finsbury Park from a long-ago joint operation with MI5. He tried to remember the exact details of the job: an Irish Republican; a plot to blow up a department store; the convicted man later released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Amelia Levene had been his boss at the time.

Her disappearance was unquestionably the gravest crisis MI6 had faced since the fiasco of WMD. Officers didn’t vanish, simple as that. They didn’t get kidnapped, they didn’t get murdered, they didn’t defect. In particular, they didn’t make a point of going AWOL six weeks before they were due to take over as Chief. If the news of Amelia’s disappearance leaked to the media – Christ, even if it leaked within the walls of Vauxhall Cross – the blowback would be incendiary.

Kell had showered at home, eaten some leftover take-away Lebanese, levelled off his hangover with two codeine and a lukewarm half-litre of Coke. An hour later he was standing underneath a sycamore tree two hundred metres from the Serpentine Gallery, Jimmy Marquand striding towards him with a look on his face like his pension was on the line. He had come direct from Vauxhall Cross, wearing a suit and tie, but without the briefcase that usually accompanied him on official business. He was a slight man, a rangy weekend cyclist, tanned year-round and with a thick mop of lustrous hair that had earned him the nickname ‘Melvyn’ in the corridors of SIS. Kell had to remind himself that he had every right to refuse what Marquand was going to offer. But, of course, that was never going to happen. If Amelia was missing, he had to be the one to find her.

They exchanged a brief handshake and turned north-west in the direction of Kensington Palace.

‘So how is life in the private sector?’ Marquand asked. Humour didn’t always come easily to him, particularly at times of stress. ‘Keeping busy? Behaving?’

Kell wondered why he was making the effort. ‘Something like that,’ he said.

‘Reading all those nineteenth-century novels you promised yourself?’ Marquand sounded like a man speaking words that had been written for him. ‘Tending your garden? Tapping out the memoirs?’

‘The memoirs are finished,’ Kell said. ‘You come out of them very badly.’

‘No more than I deserve.’ Marquand appeared to run out of things to say. Kell knew that his apparent bonhomie was a mask concealing a grave, institutional panic over Amelia’s disappearance. He put him out of his misery.

‘How the fuck did this happen, Jimmy?’

Marquand tried to circumvent the question.

‘Word came through from Number 10 shortly after you left,’ he said. ‘They wanted an Arabist, they wanted a woman. She’d impressed the Prime Minister on the JIC. He finds out we’ve lost her, it’s curtains.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know that’s not what you meant.’ Marquand’s reply was terse and he looked away, as though ashamed that the crisis had happened on his watch. ‘Two weeks ago she had a briefing with Haynes, the traditional one-on-one in which the baton gets passed from one Chief to the next. Secrets exchanged, tall tales told, all the things that you and me and the good people of Britain are not supposed to know.’

‘Such as?’

‘You tell me.’

‘What, then? Who shot JR? A fifth plane on 9/11? Give me the facts, Jimmy. What did he tell her? Let’s stop fucking around.’

‘All right, all right.’ Marquand swept back his hair. ‘Sunday morning she announces that she has to go to Paris, for a funeral. Taking a couple of days off. Then, on Wednesday, we get another message. An email. She’s strung out after the funeral and has decided to take some holiday. South of France. No warning, just using up the rest of her allowance before the top job sucks all of her time. A painting course in Nice, something that she’d “always wanted to crack”.’ Kell thought that he caught a vapour of alcohol on Marquand’s breath. It could equally well have been his own. ‘Told us that she’d be back in two weeks, reachable on such-and-such a number at such-and-such a hotel in the event of any emergency.’

‘Then what?’

Marquand was holding his hair in place against the buffeting London wind. He came to a halt. A blue plastic bag cartwheeled beside him across a patch of unmown grass, snagging in a nearby tree. He lowered his voice, as though ashamed by what he was about to say.

‘George sent somebody after her. Off the books.’

‘Now why would he do a thing like that?’

‘He was suspicious that she’d arranged a holiday so soon after the download with Haynes. It seemed unusual.’

Kell knew that George Truscott, as Assistant to the Chief, had been the man lined up to succeed Simon Haynes as ‘C’; as far as most observers were concerned, it was merely a question of the PM waving him through. Truscott would have had the suit made, the furniture fitted, the dye-stamped invitations waiting to go out in the post. But Amelia Levene had stolen his prize. A woman. A second-class citizen in the SIS firmament. His resentment towards her would have been toxic.

‘What’s unusual about taking a holiday at this time of year?’

Kell felt that he knew the answer to his own question. Amelia’s story made no sense. It wasn’t like her to attend a painting course; a woman like that didn’t need a hobby. In all the years that he had known Amelia, she had used her holidays as opportunities for relaxation. Health spas, detox clinics, five-star lodges with salad bars and wall-to-wall masseurs. She had never spoken of a desire to paint. As Marquand contemplated his answer, Kell walked across the stretch of unmown ground, pulled the plastic bag clear of the tree and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans.

‘You’re a model citizen, Tom, a model citizen.’ Marquand looked down at his shoes and gave a heavy sigh, as if he was tired of making excuses for the failings of other men. ‘Of course there’s nothing unusual about taking a holiday this time of year. But usually we have more warning. Usually it goes in the diary several months in advance. This looked like a sudden decision, a reaction to something that Haynes had told her.’

‘What was Haynes’s view on that?’

‘He agreed with Truscott. So they asked some friends in Nice to keep an eye on her.’

Again, Kell kept his counsel. Towards the end of his career, he had himself become a victim of the paranoid, near-delusional manoeuvrings of George Truscott, yet he was still privately astonished that the two most senior figures in the Service had green-lit a surveillance operation against one of their own.

‘Who are the friends in Nice? Liaison?’

‘Christ, no. Avoid the Frog at all costs. Re-treads. Ours. Bill Knight and his wife, Barbara. Retired to Menton in ’98. We got them to sign up for the painting course, they saw Amelia arrive on Wednesday afternoon, enjoyed a bit of a chat. Then Bill reported her missing when she failed to turn up three mornings in a row.’

‘What’s unusual about that?’

Marquand frowned. ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘Well, couldn’t Amelia have taken a couple of days off? Got sick?’

‘That’s just it. She didn’t call it in. Barbara rang the hotel, there was no sign of her. We telephoned Amelia’s husband –’

‘– Giles,’ said Kell.

‘Giles, yes, but he hasn’t heard from her since she left Wiltshire. Her mobile is switched off, she’s not responding to emails, there’s been no activity on her credit cards. It’s a total blackout.’

‘What about the police?’

Marquand bounced his caterpillar eyebrows and said: ‘Bof ’ in a cod French accent. ‘They haven’t scraped her off a motorway or found her body floating in the Med, if that’s what you mean.’ He saw Kell’s reaction to this and felt compelled to apologize. ‘Sorry, that was tasteless. I didn’t mean to sound glib. This whole thing is a bloody mystery.’

Kell ran through a list of possible explanations, as arbitrary as they were inexhaustible: Russian or Iranian interference in some aspect of Amelia’s personal affairs; a clandestine arrangement with the Yanks relating to Libya and the Arab Spring; a sudden crisis of faith engendered by something in the meeting with Haynes. In the run-up to Kell’s demise at SIS, Amelia had been knee-deep in Francophone West Africa, which might have aroused interest from the French or Chinese. Islamist involvement was a permanent concern.

‘What about known aliases?’ He felt the dryness of his hangover again, the bluntness of three hours’ sleep. ‘Isn’t it possible she’s running an operation, one that Tweedledum and Tweedledee know nothing about?’

Marquand conceded the possibility of this, but wondered what was so secret that it would require Amelia Levene to disappear without at the very least enlisting the technical support of GCHQ.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘The only people who know about this are Haynes, Truscott and the Knights. Paris Station is still in the dark and it needs to stay that way. This leaks out, the Service will be a laughing stock. God knows where it would end. She’s due to meet the PM formally in two weeks’ time. Obviously that meeting can’t be cancelled without creating a gold-tinted Whitehall shitstorm. Washington finds out we’ve lost our most senior spy, they’ll go ballistic. Haynes wants to find her within the next few days and pretend that none of this happened. She’s due back Monday week.’ Marquand looked quickly to his right, as though reacting to a sudden noise. ‘Look, maybe she’ll just show up. It’ll probably be some smoothie from Paris, a Jean-Pierre or a Xavier with a big cock and a gîte in Aix-en-Provence. You know what Amelia’s like with the boys. Madonna could take notes.’

Kell was surprised to hear Marquand talk of Amelia’s reputation so candidly. Philandering, like alcohol, was almost an Office prerequisite, but it was a male sport, jocular and off the books. In all the years that Kell had known her, Amelia had had no more than three lovers, yet she was spoken of as though she had slept her way through seventy-five per cent of the Civil Service.

‘Why Paris?’

Marquand looked up. ‘She stopped there on the way down to Nice.’

‘My question stands. Why Paris?’

‘She went to the funeral on Tuesday.’

‘Whose funeral?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’ For a dyed-in-the-wool careerist, Marquand didn’t seem unduly concerned about admitting to gaps in his knowledge. ‘All this has happened very fast, Tom. We haven’t been able to get a name. Giles thinks she went to a crematorium in the Fourteenth. Montparnasse. An old friend from student days.’

‘He didn’t go with her?’

‘She told him he wasn’t wanted.’

‘And Giles does what Giles is told to do.’ Kell knew all too well the mechanics of the Levene marriage; he had studied it closely, as a cautionary tale. Marquand looked as if he was about to laugh but thought better of it.

‘Precisely. Dennis Thatcher syndrome. Husbands should be seen and not heard.’

‘Sounds to me like you need to find out who the friend was.’ Kell was stating the obvious, but Marquand appeared to have run out of road.

‘Do I take that as an indication that you’ll help?’

Kell looked up. The branches of the tree were obscuring a charcoal sky. It was going to rain. He thought of Afghanistan, of the book he was meant to be writing, of the vapid August nights stretching ahead of him at his bachelor’s bedsit in Kensal Rise. He thought about his wife and he thought about Amelia. He was convinced that she was alive and convinced that Marquand was hiding something. How many other re-treads would be sent on her tail?

‘How much is Her Majesty offering?’

‘How much would you need?’ It was somebody else’s cash, so Jimmy Marquand could afford to splash it about. Kell didn’t care about the money, not at all, but didn’t want to appear sloppy by not asking. He plucked a figure out of the damp afternoon sky. ‘A thousand a day. Plus expenses. I’ll need a laptop, encrypted, ditto a mobile and the Stephen Uniacke alias. Decent car waiting for me at Nice airport. If it’s a Peugeot with two doors and a tape deck, I’m coming home.’

‘Sure.’

‘And George Truscott pays my speeding fines. All of them.’

‘Done.’

6

Kell caught a flight out of Heathrow at eight. As he was switching it to ‘Flight Mode’, a text message came through on his mobile phone:

Don’t forget appointment tomorrow. 2pm Finchley. Meet you at the Tube.

Finchley. The death throes of his marriage. An hour with a grim-faced guidance counsellor who offered up platitudes like biscuits on a plate. It occurred to Kell, clicking his seat belt on the aisle, that this was only the second time that he had left London in the eight months since his departure from SIS. In mid-March, Claire had suggested a ‘romantic weekend’ in Brighton – ‘to see if we can be more than ships passing in the night’ – but the hotel had played host to an all-night wedding party, they had slept for only three hours, and by Sunday were lost in a familiar blizzard of recrimination and argument.

A young mother was seated beside him on the plane, a toddler strapped into the window seat. She had come prepared for the battle ahead, producing a bag stuffed with magazines and stickers, sugar-free biscuits and a bottle of water. Every now and again, when the boy fidgeted too much or screamed too loudly, his mother would offer up a knowing smile that was halfway to an apology. Kell tried to reassure her that he couldn’t care less: it was only an hour and a half to Nice and he liked the company of children.

‘Do you have kids of your own?’ she said, the question that should never be asked.

‘No,’ Kell replied, picking up a green plastic figurine that had fallen on the floor. ‘Sadly not.’

The mother was preoccupied throughout the flight and Kell was able to read the notes he had made from Amelia’s classified file without being concerned about wandering eyes: the man in the seat across the aisle was engrossed in a spreadsheet; the woman behind him, over his left shoulder, asleep on an inflatable neck pillow. He knew most of Amelia’s story already; they had swapped secrets during the strange intimacy of a fifteen-year friendship. Her journey into the secret world had begun at a young age. While working in Tunis as an au pair in the late 1970s Amelia had been talent-spotted by Joan Guttmann, a deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. Guttmann had brought Amelia to the attention of SIS, which had kept an eye on her at Oxford, making an initial move to recruit soon after she had been awarded a starred First in French and Arabic in the summer of 1983. After a year at MECAS, the so-called ‘School for Spies’ in Lebanon, she had been posted to Egypt in ’85 and to Iraq in ’89. Returning to London in the spring of 1993, Amelia Weldon had met and quickly become engaged to Giles Levene, a fifty-two-year-old bond trader with thirty million in the bank and a personality described by one of Kell’s former colleagues as ‘aggressively soporific’. The file noted, with a passive anti-Semitism of the sort Kell believed had largely died out within SIS, that Levene was considered ‘ambivalent’ on Israel, but that his wife’s ‘attitudes in that area’ should ‘nevertheless be monitored for indications of bias’.

In such a context, Amelia’s rise to power made for fascin-ating reading. There had been an astonishing amount of sexism directed towards her, particularly in the early phase of her career. In Egypt, for example, she had been overlooked for promotion on the grounds that she was unlikely to remain in the Service ‘beyond child-bearing years’. The position had gone instead to a celebrated Cairo alcoholic with two marriages behind him and a record of producing CX reports lifted from the pages of Al-Ahram. Her fortunes began to shift in Iraq, where she worked under non-official cover as an analyst for a French conglomerate. An Irish passport had kept ‘Ann Wilkes’ in Baghdad for the duration of the first Gulf War, and her access to officials in the Ba’ath party, as well as to prominent figures in the Iraqi military structure, had been lauded both in London and in the United States. Since then, her career had gone from strength to strength: there were postings in Washington and to Kabul, where she had oper-ational control of SIS operations throughout Afghanistan for more than two years following the toppling of the Taliban. In an indication of her ambitions for the Service, she had argued for a more robust British influence in Africa, a stance viewed as prescient by Downing Street in the wake of the Arab Spring, but one that had brought her into conflict with George Truscott, a corporatized bureaucrat with a Cold War mindset who was widely despised by the rank and file within SIS.

Kell closed the notebook. He looked at the child beside him, now sleeping in his mother’s arms, and tried to relish some sense of being back in the game. Yet he felt nothing. For eight months he had been treading water, pretending to himself and to Claire that he had taken a principled stand against the double-think and mendacity of the secret state. It was nonsense, of course; they had turfed him out in disgrace. And when Marquand had come calling, the bagman for Truscott and Haynes, Kell had jumped back aboard like a child at a fairground, relishing the prospect of another ride. He realized that any determination he had felt to prove them wrong, to proclaim his innocence, even to create a new life for himself, had been built on sand. He had nothing but his past to live on, nothing but his skills as a spy.

Somewhere over the southern Alps the cabin lights dimmed like an eye test. The flight was on time. Kell looked out of the starboard window and searched for the glow of Nice. A stewardess strapped herself into a rear-facing seat, checked her face in a compact mirror and flashed him an air-conditioned smile. Kell nodded back, necked two aspirin and the remains of a bottle of water, then sat back as the plane banked over the Mediterranean. The landing earned the captain a round of applause from three drunken Yorkshiremen seated two rows behind him. Kell had no luggage in the hold and had cleared Immigration, on his own passport, by eleven fifteen.

The Knights were in Arrivals. Jimmy Marquand had told him to look out for ‘a British couple in their mid-sixties’, he ‘a denizen of the tanning salon with a dyed moustache’, she ‘a tiny, rather sympathetic bird who’s quick on her feet but permanently in her husband’s shadow’.

The description was near-perfect. Emerging from the customs hall through a set of automatic doors, Kell was confronted by a languid Englishman with a deep suntan, wearing pressed chinos and a button-down cream shirt. A pistachio cashmere jumper was slung over his shoulders and knotted, in the Mediterranean style, across his chest. The moustache was no longer dyed but it looked as though Bill Knight had dedicated at least fifteen minutes of his evening to combing every strand of his thinning white hair. Here was a man who had never quite forgiven himself for growing old.

‘Tom, I assume,’ he said, the voice too loud, the handshake too firm, full lips rolling under his moustache as though life was a wine he was tasting. Kell toyed with the idea of saying: ‘I’d prefer it if you referred to me at all times as Mr Kell,’ but didn’t have the energy to hurt his feelings.

‘And you must be Barbara.’ Behind Knight, lingering in what Claire called ‘the Rain Man position’, was a small lady with half-moon spectacles and a deteriorated posture. Her shy, sliding eye contact managed both to apologize for her husband’s slightly ludicrous demeanour and to establish an immediate professional chemistry that Kell was glad of. Knight, he knew, would do most of the talking, but he would get the most productive information from his wife.

‘We have your car waiting outside,’ she said, as Knight offered to carry his bag. Kell waved away the offer and experienced the unsettling realization that his own mother, had she lived, would now be the same vintage as this diminutive lady with unkempt grey hair, creased clothes and soft, uncomplicated gestures.

‘It’s a luxury saloon,’ said Knight, as if he disapproved of the expense. His voice had a smug, adenoidal quality that had already become irritating. ‘I think you’ll be quite satisfied.’

They walked towards the exit. Kell caught their reflection in a facing window and felt like a wayward son visiting his parents at a retirement complex on the Costa del Sol. It seemed astonishing to him that all that SIS had placed between the disappearance of Amelia Levene and a national scandal were a superannuated spook with a hangover and two borderline geriatric re-treads who hadn’t been in the game since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps Marquand intended Kell to fail. Was that the plan? Or had the Knights come equipped with a hidden agenda, a plan to thwart Kell before he had even started?

‘It’s this way,’ said Knight, as a young woman, undernourished as a catwalk model, ran through the automatic doors and launched herself into the arms of a leathery lothario only a few years younger than Knight. Kell heard her say: ‘Mon cherie!’ in a Russian accent and noted that she kept her eyes open when she kissed him.

They walked out into the humid French evening across a broad concrete apron that connected the terminal building to a three-storey car park a hundred metres to the east. The airport was gradually shutting down, buses nestled side by side beneath a blackened underpass, one of the drivers asleep at the wheel. A line of late arrivals were queuing for a connection to Monaco, all of them noticeably more chic and composed than the pint-swilling hordes Kell had witnessed at Heathrow airport. Knight paid for the car park, carefully folded the receipt into his wallet for expenses, and led him towards a black Citroën C6 on the upper level.

‘The documents you requested arrived an hour ago and are in an envelope on the passenger seat,’ he said. Kell assumed he was talking about the Uniacke legend, which Marquand had sent ahead by courier so that Kell would not have to carry a false passport through French customs. ‘Be warned,’ Knight continued, tapping his fingers on the back window, as though there was somebody hiding inside. ‘It’s a diesel. I can’t tell you how many friends of ours come out here, rent a car from Hertz or Avis and then ruin their time in France by putting unleaded …’

Barbara put a stop to this.

‘Bill, I’m quite sure Mr Kell is capable of filling up a car at a petrol station.’ In the jaundiced light, it was difficult to see if her husband blushed. Kell remembered a line from Knight’s file, which he had flicked through en route to the airport. ‘Abhors a conversational vacuum. Tendency to talk when he might be wiser keeping his counsel.’

‘That’s OK,’ Kell said. ‘Easy mistake to make.’

The Knights’ vehicle, parked alongside the C6, was a right-hand-drive Mercedes with twenty-year-old British plates and a dent on the front-right panel.

‘An old and somewhat battered Merc,’ Knight explained unnecessarily, as though he was used to the car attracting strange looks. ‘But it does us very well. Once a year Barbara and I are obliged to drive back across the Channel to have an MOT and to update the insurance paperwork, but it’s worth it …’

Kell had heard enough. He slung his bag in the back seat of the Citroën and got down to business.

‘Let’s talk about Amelia Levene,’ he said. The car park was deserted, the ambient noise of occasional planes and passing traffic smothering their conversation. Knight, who had been cut-off mid-sentence, looked suitably attentive. ‘According to London, Mrs Levene went missing several days ago. Did you speak to her during the time she attended the painting course?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Knight, as if Kell was questioning their integrity. ‘Of course.’

‘What can you tell me about Amelia’s mood, her behaviour?’

Barbara made to reply, but Knight interrupted her.

‘Completely normal. Very friendly and enthusiastic. Introduced herself as a retired schoolteacher, widowed. Very little to report at all.’

Kell remembered another line from the Knight file: ‘Not always prepared to go the extra mile. A feeling has developed among colleagues over the years that Bill Knight prefers the quiet life to getting his hands dirty.’

Barbara duly filled in the blanks.

‘Well,’ she said, sensing that Kell wasn’t satisfied by her husband’s answer, ‘Bill and I have disagreed about this. I thought that she looked a little distracted. Didn’t do an awful lot of painting, which seemed odd, given that she was there to learn. Also checked her phone rather a lot for text messages.’ She glanced at Kell and produced a tiny, satisfied smile, like someone who has solved a taxing crossword clue. ‘That struck me as particularly strange. You see, people of her vintage aren’t exactly glued to mobiles in the way that the younger generation are. Wouldn’t you say, Mr Kell?’

‘Call me Tom,’ Kell said. ‘What about friends, acquaintances? Did you see her with anybody? When London asked you to keep an eye on Mrs Levene, did you follow her into Nice? Did she go anywhere in the evenings?’

‘That’s an awful lot of questions all at once,’ said Knight, looking pleased with himself.

‘Answer them one at a time,’ Kell said, and felt an operational adrenalin at last beginning to kick in. There was a sudden gust of wind and Knight did something compensatory with his hair.

‘Well, Barbara and myself aren’t aware that Mrs Levene went anywhere in particular. On Thursday evening, for example, she ate dinner alone at a restaurant on Rue Masséna. I followed her back to her hotel, sat in the Mercedes until midnight, but didn’t see her leave.’

Kell met Knight’s eye. ‘You didn’t think to take a room at the hotel?’

A pause, an awkward back-and-forth glance between husband and wife.

‘What you have to understand, Tom, is that we haven’t had a great deal of time to react to all this.’ Knight, perhaps unconsciously, had taken a step backwards. ‘London asked us simply to sign up for the course, to keep an eye on Mrs Levene, to report anything mysterious. That was all.’

Barbara took over the reins. She was plainly worried that they were giving Kell a poor impression of their abilities.

‘It didn’t sound as though London expected anything to happen,’ she explained. ‘It was almost pitched as though they were asking us to look out for her. And it’s only been – what? – two or three days since we reported Mrs Levene missing.’

‘And you’re convinced that she’s not in Nice, that she’s not simply staying with a friend?’

‘Oh, we’re not convinced of anything,’ Knight replied, which was the most convincing thing he had said since Kell had cleared customs. ‘We did as we were told. Mrs Levene didn’t show her face at the course, we rang it in. Mr Marquand must have smelled a rat and sent for reinforcements.’

Reinforcements. It occurred to Kell that exactly twenty-four hours earlier he was drinking in a crowded bar on Dean Street, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a forty-year-old university friend whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years.

‘London are concerned that there’s been no movement on Amelia’s credit cards,’ he said, ‘no response from her mobile.’

‘Do you think she’s … defected?’ Knight asked, and Kell suppressed a smile. Where to? Moscow? Beijing? Amelia would sooner live in Albania.

‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘Chiefs of the Service are too high profile. The political repercussions would be seismic. But never say never.’

‘Never say never,’ Barbara muttered.

‘What about her room? Has anybody searched it?’

Knight looked at his shoes. Barbara adjusted her half-moon spectacles. Kell realized why they had never progressed beyond Ops Support in Nairobi.

‘We weren’t under instructions to conduct any kind of search,’ Knight replied.

‘And the people running the painting course? Have you talked to them?’

Knight shook his head, still staring at his shoes like a scolded schoolboy. Kell decided to put them out of their misery.

‘OK, tell you what,’ he said, ‘how far is the Hotel Gillespie?’

Barbara looked worried. ‘It’s on Boulevard Dubouchage. About twenty minutes away.’

‘I’m going to go. You’ve booked a room for me under “Stephen Uniacke”, is that right?’

Knight perked up. ‘That is correct. But wouldn’t you like something to eat? Barbara and I thought that we could take you into Nice, to a little place we both enjoy near the port. It stays open well past …’

‘Later,’ Kell replied. There had been a Cajun wrap at Heathrow, a can of Coke to wash it down. That would see him through until morning. ‘But I need you to do something for me.’

‘Of course,’ Barbara replied.

Kell could see how much she wanted to prolong her return to the spotlight and knew that she might still prove useful to him.

‘Call the Gillespie. Tell them you’ve just landed and need a room. Go to the hotel, but wait outside and make sure you speak to me before you check in.’

Knight looked nonplussed.

‘Is that OK?’ Kell asked him pointedly. If Kell was being paid a thousand a day, chances were that the Knights were on at least half that. In final analysis, they were obliged to do whatever he told them. ‘I’ll need to gain access to the hotel’s computer system. I want all the details from Amelia’s room, arrival and departure times, Internet use and so on. In order to do that, I’ll have to distract whoever works the night shift, get them away from the desk for five or ten minutes. You could be very useful in that context – ordering room service, complaining about a broken tap, pulling an emergency cord in the bathroom. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ Knight replied.

‘Do you have a suitcase or something that will pass for an overnight bag?’

Barbara thought for a moment and said: ‘I think so, yes.’

‘Give me half an hour to check in and then make your way to the hotel.’ He was aware of how quickly he was improvising ideas, old tricks coming back to him all the time; it was as though his brain had been sitting in aspic for eight months. ‘It goes without saying that if you see me in the lobby, we don’t know each other.’