Текст книги "A Foreign Country"
Автор книги: Charles Cumming
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 24 страниц)
‘You have a hire car?’
Kell shook his head. He didn’t want to confuse him unnecessarily. ‘I meant that I’ll follow in another cab.’
They swapped numbers and Kell gave the Tunisian a basic timetable – seven until midnight. He then stepped out of the car, under the pummelling sun. He could see a path leading to the beach and decided to walk.
‘You go back to the hotel,’ he said. ‘Get in the queue of taxis. If you see them, call me.’
‘Fine,’ Sami replied with a nonchalance that was by now characteristic. It was as though he was asked to undertake clandestine work of this kind all the time.
Half an hour later, Kell was back in his room. The remains of his club sandwich were still on the bedside table, shards of crisps mingled with lettuce and congealed mayonnaise. He opened the door, put the tray in the corridor, had a cold shower, then went outside on to his balcony.
The swimming pool at the Valencia was still busy. There were at least twenty people in the water, families with small children splashing and shouting in the shallows. Directly beneath Kell’s window, a woman wearing a headscarf and a long black dress was seated in a plastic chair reading a magazine. Kell looked at the guests on either side of her, the dying sun casting a shadow across the pool.
That was when he saw her.
Lying on her back on a lounger, wearing a one-piece bathing suit and a wide-brimmed hat. A beautiful woman in her early fifties reading a paperback, sipping from a cup of coffee.
Amelia Levene.
16
On a quiet Friday afternoon two weeks earlier, Amelia Levene had managed to slip away from Vauxhall Cross just after 5 p.m. and to wrestle through weekend traffic to her house in the Chalke Valley. She was all too aware, in the wake of her recent appointment as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, that this would probably be the last weekend that she would be able to enjoy in Wiltshire for many months; the responsibilities of her new position would soon require her to live in London on an almost permanent basis. That would mean making a home in Giles’s house in Chelsea with roadworks for company and a protection officer on the door. Such was the price of success.
Amelia’s house, which she had inherited from her late brother in the mid-1990s, was located along a narrow lane at the western edge of a small village about eight miles south-west of Salisbury. It was dark by the time she pulled up outside, leaving the key in the ignition so that she could hear the end of a piano sonata on Radio 3. Once it was finished, she turned off her mobile phone – there was no reception in the village – picked up her leather overnight bag from the passenger seat and locked the car.
Peace. In the darkness, Amelia stood at the gate of the house and listened to the sounds of the night. Lambs, newborn, were bleating in a field on the opposite side of the valley. She could hear the rushing of the stream that swelled in springtime, sometimes so deep that she had swum in it, borne along by the freezing current from field to field. She could see lights in the second of the three houses that shared this isolated corner of the village. The first, one hundred metres away, was owned by a twice-divorced literary agent who, like Amelia, shuttled between London and Wiltshire as often as she could. Occasionally, the two women would invite one another into their homes to share a glass of wine or whisky, though Amelia had remained discreet about her position, describing herself as little more than ‘a civil servant’. The second house, hidden behind a steep hill, belonged to Charles and Susan Hamilton, an elderly couple whose family had been in the Valley for four generations. In the seventeen years that Amelia had lived in Chalke Bissett, she had exchanged no more than a few words with either of them.
It was cold to be standing outside after the warmth of the car and Amelia took the house keys from the pocket of her coat, switching off the burglar alarm once she had stepped inside. Her weekends usually adhered to a strict routine. She would switch on the Channel Four news, prepare herself a large gin and tonic with a slice of cucumber, find the ingredients to make a simple supper, then run a bath into which she poured oil from one of the three dozen bottles lining the shelves of her bathroom, all of them birthday and Christmas gifts from male colleagues at SIS who routinely gave books and booze to men and overpriced soap products to their female counterparts.
There was plenty of ice in the freezer, lemons in a bowl on the kitchen table. Amelia fixed the gin, sliced the cucumber and drank a silent toast in celebration of her husband’s absence from the house: Giles would be in Scotland for the long weekend, earnestly researching a withered branch of his breathtakingly tedious family tree. Solitude was something almost unknown to her now and she tried to savour it as much as possible. London was a constant merry-go-round of meetings, lunches, cocktail parties, connections: at no point was Amelia alone for more than ten minutes at a time. For the most part she relished this lifestyle, her proximity to power, the buzz of influence, but there had been an increasingly bureaucratic dimension to her work in recent months that had frustrated her. She had stayed with SIS to spy, not to discuss budget cuts over canapés.
She lit a fire, went upstairs to run the bath and took a tub of homemade pesto from the freezer, setting it to defrost in the microwave. There was a pile of post beside the cooker and she flicked through it with one ear on the television news. Amid the bills and postcards were two copies of the Chalke Bissett magazine and three stiff-backed ‘At Home’ invitations to drinks parties in the county that she immediately co-opted as kindling for the fire. By eight o’clock, Amelia had changed into a dressing-gown, checked her emails, poured a second gin and tonic and found a packet of spaghetti in the larder.
That was when the telephone rang.
17
The envelope had borne a Parisian postmark and was addressed to Mrs Joan Guttmann, c/o The Century Club, 7 West 43rd St, New York, New York.
It had been forwarded by the club to Guttmann’s apartment on the Upper West Side and brought up to the fourteenth floor by Vito, the doorman on whom Joan relied for everything from weather reports to grocery deliveries.
The letter had been written in English.
Agence Père Blancs
Rue la Quintinie, 147
Paris 75015
France
Dear Mrs Guttmann
It is with the deepest regret that I must inform you of the deaths of Mr Philippe Malot and Mrs Jeannine Malot, who have passed away while on vacation in Egypt.
The next of kin has recently made contact with our agency, as a result of a clause inserted in the Last Will & Testament of his late father. In accordance with the terms of our arrangement, the agency has therefore taken the decision to contact you.
Should you wish to take this matter further, I suggest that you either write to me at our Paris address or telephone me at a time convenient to you. Allow me to say that, according to the terms of French law, you are under no obligation to do so.
Yours, cordially
Pierre Barenton (Secretary)
Joan Guttmann had dialled the number.
18
The Stone Age answering machine picked up. Amelia heard her own voice, faded and scratched through repeated playbacks. The caller did not hang up, but remained on the line, and Amelia was startled to recognize the voice of Joan Guttmann, now surely in her early eighties, leaving a croaky smoker’s message:
Amelia, honey. It’s your old friend from New York. I have some news. You wanna give me a call sometime? I’d love to hear your voice.
Her first thought was to pick up the receiver, but she knew that a call from Joan Guttmann meant Moscow Rules: no names on an open line; no talking about the past. That was why she hadn’t identified herself. In case anybody was listening in. In case anybody ever found out about Tunis.
Amelia was out of her dressing-gown and into a pair of jeans and a sweater within two minutes. She grabbed a Barbour from the utility room, put on some Wellington boots, locked the house and went back to the car. She turned it around in the lane, drove into the village and parked a hundred metres from the pub on the Salisbury road. There was a telephone box on the corner, mercifully un-vandalized and still accepting coins. Amelia turned on her mobile and found Joan’s number buried in the contacts. Then the long, drawn-out ring of an American telephone, the click of somebody picking up.
‘Joan?’
The two women had not spoken for almost ten years. Their last encounter had been both brief and distressing: the funeral service of Joan’s husband, David Guttmann, who had suffered a heart attack while working at his office in Manhattan. Amelia had made the journey across the Atlantic, expressed her condolences all too briefly at a service on Madison Avenue, then returned to the UK on a red-eye from Newark three hours later. Since then, there had been no contact between them, save for the occasional email or hastily scribbled Christmas card.
‘Amelia, how are you? You’re so clever to call back so soon.’
‘It sounded important.’
It hadn’t sounded important, of course. The message had been as deliberately mundane as any Amelia had ever heard. But ‘news’ from Joan Guttmann meant only one thing. Something had happened to François.
‘It is important, honey, it really is. Are you OK to talk?’
‘As long as you are.’
Joan cleared her throat, buying time. It was difficult to tell whether she was apprehensive about what she had to say, or merely searching for the right words. ‘Did you happen to see the French newspapers at all this week?’
Amelia didn’t know how best to answer. She kept abreast of events in France, but no particular developments had been flagged up in the previous few days. She began to respond but was interrupted.
‘Something really quite terrible has happened. It’s Philippe and Jeannine. They were on vacation in Egypt. They were mugged, attacked on a beach. They’ve been murdered.’ Amelia leaned against the freezing glass of the phone booth, a hammer blow. ‘The thing is, your boy has been in touch. He must have somehow traced me through the system at Père Blancs. I’ve had a contact at Langley look into it, run some background. He checks out. It’s François. I guess he’s reaching out or something. He’s lost his parents and he’s hurting. I couldn’t keep it from you, honey. I’m so sorry. I really need to know what it is that you want me to do.’
19
Looking down from his balcony, Kell saw that Amelia Levene was not alone.
Ten feet in front of her, emerging from the Valencia hotel pool, came a fit-looking man in his early thirties wearing navy-blue shorts and a pair of yellow-tinted swimming goggles. He had a lean, exercised physique and moved through the shallows with a slow, self-conscious swagger, a man used to being stared at by women. He pulled the goggles down around his neck and Kell saw that his face precisely matched the image in the photograph of François Malot. The same firm jawline, the easy good looks, the lightly stubbled chin. Amelia, sensing him, looked up from her book and reached across to pull a towel from a neighbouring lounger. She then stood up and passed the towel to Malot, at arm’s length, to prevent herself getting wet. Malot appeared to thank her and wiped his face clear of water. He dried his back and chest, wrapped the towel around his waist in the style of a sarong and sat on the edge of the lounger, looking in the direction of the pool. Amelia appeared to be staring at him, as if trying to think of something to say, but then returned to her novel.
Kell went quickly into the room and retrieved his camera, firing off several shots with the telephoto lens tight on the scene. He had the opportunity to observe Amelia and Malot for some time and tried to reject the possibility that they were working together; surely Amelia would never allow her guard to drop to the extent of going swimming with a male colleague? Their body language was relaxed and familiar, but not overtly intimate: they did not project the heat of lovers. Amelia was attentive and oddly deferential towards him in a way that was unfamiliar to Kell, pouring Malot a glass of water from the bottle on the table, even offering him a cigarette as he walked to the edge of the water.
He began talking into a mobile phone. The dying light of the sun threw the musculature on Malot’s back into sharp relief and he was smoking the cigarette with studied cool, head tilted to one side, lips set in an ironic smile. From time to time, he would allow the hand holding the cigarette to fall to one side and run his thumb across the dark hairs of his stomach, smoke drifting against the skin. Amelia, meanwhile, had come to the end of a chapter in her paperback. She closed the book and placed it on the low plastic table beside her, nestling it between the packet of cigarettes and the litre bottle of water. Kell caught the title in the telephoto lens: Solar, by Ian McEwan. She then signed the bill, pulled on a hotel dressing-gown, securing it with a cord around her waist. Kell found all of this compelling to watch; her beauty had long been a source of fascination to him. Amelia put on a pair of white hotel slippers and walked towards Malot, indicating that she was going to head indoors. The Frenchman broke off from his conversation, kissed her affectionately on the cheek and pressed his wristwatch, as if making an arrangement to meet for dinner. Amelia then turned and walked in the direction of the hotel, entering through a side door less than thirty metres from Kell’s balcony. It was obvious that they were staying in separate hotels; another layer of obfuscation added by the veteran spy in order to cover her tracks. Less than a minute later, Malot strolled back to the lounger, brought his telephone conversation to an end, and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. He removed the towel, allowed it to drop to the ground, and put on a pristine white T-shirt which he had produced from a bag. At one point, Kell thought that he caught Malot flirting with an attractive woman on the opposite side of the pool. The woman seemed to be smiling at him, but was then distracted by her young daughter and averted her gaze.
The Frenchman picked up the rest of his possessions. The bag, a book, a pair of sunglasses, the cigarettes and a bottle of suntan lotion. In the evening light he put on the sunglasses, like a matinee idol expecting to encounter a herd of paparazzi, and stepped into a pair of deck shoes. He then made his way towards the path that Kell had earlier taken to the beach.
Kell lowered the camera. He walked back into the room, threw the camera on to the bed, picked up his key and went outside into the corridor.
He was downstairs in fifteen seconds. Walking in the direction of the pool, he paused beside Amelia’s lounger, leaned over – as if to stretch a muscle – and removed the bill from the low plastic table. He stood up, placed the piece of paper in the back pocket of his trousers and continued walking in the direction of the lobby.
20
The name at the top of the bill was A.M. Farrell. The room number was 1208.
Kell went back to his room and immediately called Marquand in London.
‘I’ve found your missing girl.’
‘Tom! I knew you would do it. What’s the story?’
‘She’s staying at my hotel. The Valencia Carthage. Malot is across the road.’
‘So they’re shagging and staying apart so that nobody can trace them?’
Kell steered around the theory. He had learned to deal solely in facts. ‘She’s using a legend we haven’t seen before. Farrell. Initials A.M. Can you run a credit-card check? Should be plenty of activity through Paris, Nice, Tunis.’
‘Sure. Did you speak to her, Tom?’
‘Now why would I want to do something like that?’
‘Well, thank God she’s all right.’ There was a delay on the line, as though Marquand was trying to think of the appropriate thing to say. ‘Fucking Frogs,’ he offered eventually, ‘always stealing our best women.’ Truscott and Haynes would surely be told that Amelia was in Tunisia on little more than an extended dirty weekend. ‘Can’t Malot get his end away at home? Aren’t there supposed to be thousands of beautiful girls in Paris?’
‘You tell me,’ Kell replied.
‘What’s the story?’ Marquand asked. ‘Is Malot married as well? We can’t seem to find anything about him on the wires.’
‘Hard to tell. I’ve only seen them from a distance, sunbathing by the pool …’
‘Sunbathing by the pool!’ Marquand sounded combustible with excitement. ‘Imagine that.’
‘He’s what you might call a poser,’ Kell said, trying to keep the conversation on an even keel. ‘Wafts around the place like Montgomery Clift. Not exactly the grieving son.’
‘Perhaps he’s feeling cock of the walk about Amelia. What do they call the older woman nowadays? Cougars?’
Marquand had made himself laugh. It was the relief of a crisis averted.
‘That’s right, Jimmy,’ Kell said. ‘Cougars. Look, I have things I need to do. I’ll take a closer look at Malot. There’s always the possibility he’s DGSE. Amelia might be running a joint op in Tunis.’
‘And screwing a colleague on the side.’
Kell shook his head in disbelief. ‘Have a drink, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘You deserve it.’
He hung up, put the phone back on the desk and retrieved his camera from the bed. Looping it over his shoulder, he went outside into the corridor. In the street between the two hotels he found Sami at the wheel of his cab, lazily turning the pages of a newspaper. He tapped on the window.
‘Got something to show you.’ Kell climbed into the passenger seat and handed Sami the camera, showing him how to click through the photographs of Amelia and Malot. A day’s BO hummed around the cab. ‘These are the people I’m interested in,’ he said. ‘The woman is staying at the Valencia. The man is a guest at the Ramada. Do you recognize them?’
Sami shook his head. Two other drivers, standing beneath the bougainvillea, were staring into the car with an almost insulted impatience, like girls at a party who have not been asked to dance.
‘Maybe they’ll go out for dinner tonight,’ Kell said. ‘They left the pool twenty minutes ago. If you see them, be sure to call me. If my phone doesn’t answer, go through the hotel switchboard. I’m in room 1313. Follow them if they get into one of the other taxis. If you pick them up yourself, don’t risk speaking to me in their presence. The woman speaks English, French and Arabic, all of them fluently. Send a text message with your destination.’
‘Of course.’
Kell indicated the other drivers with his eyes. ‘And if those two start asking questions about me, tell them I’m just a jealous husband.’
21
Joan Guttmann had given Amelia the telephone number of the adoption agency in Paris. Allowing for France being one hour ahead, Amelia had rung the agency at eight thirty on Saturday morning, only to discover that the office was closed for the weekend. A second number was given on the agency’s website and Amelia had eventually spoken to a needlessly melodramatic woman who was ‘fully aware’ that Monsieur Malot’s parents had been ‘tragically and senselessly killed in Egypt’ and had ‘furthermore been apprized of the circumstances regarding Madame Weldon’. It was agreed that Amelia should not speak to François by telephone. Instead, she was advised to travel to France, to meet her son in Paris on Monday afternoon, and – at his discretion – perhaps to attend the private funeral service of Philippe and Jeannine Malot, which was scheduled for Tuesday morning in Montparnasse.
Amelia had taken twenty-four hours to carry out her own vetting on the Malots’ murder and on François himself, with the assistance of an SIS asset in the DCRI, France’s domestic intelligence service. When she was confident that he was their adopted child, she considered her strategy more fully. To bring her son into her life was to entertain the possibility that he could ruin her career, ushering in the reign of George Truscott. To travel to Paris with the purpose of consoling François was to risk any number of reactions: his anger, his contempt, his pity. She had no sense of her son’s personality, only the plain fact that he had reached out to her in his hour of need. Yet such was her desire to help, and to encounter her lost child face-to-face, that Amelia quickly set aside all practical and professional considerations. She felt as though she had been given no choice; if her life was to have any meaning, any true and lasting happiness, she had to make her peace with the past.
Locking the Chalke Bissett house early on Sunday morning, she returned to London by car and went directly to Giles’s house in Chelsea. The Farrell alias – a passport, assorted credit and SIM cards – was concealed in a small box behind a panel at the back of her husband’s wardrobe. To access the panel, Amelia had to pull out more than a dozen plastic-wrapped shirts and dry-cleaned suits on hangers, piling them on the bed behind her. The cramped wardrobe had a throwback, post-war smell of mothballs and shoe polish. As well as golf clubs and hardback books, there were dozens of old newspapers stacked on the floor, hoarded by Giles as a means of keeping a permanent record of momentous events in his lifetime: the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Diana car crash; 9/11. The pages had yellowed and they crackled in Amelia’s hands as she moved them. The box safely retrieved, she rang Santander, activating two of the bank accounts for use in Continental Europe, then charged up the battery on the Farrell mobile while packing a bag for France. Ringing Giles in Scotland, she told him that she was going to Paris ‘on business’.
‘How lovely for you,’ he said, greeting the news with a characteristic wall of indifference. Amelia had the distinct impression that her husband was turning the pages of a historical document in some distant corner of Fife, busily filling in another branch of the family tree even as he spoke to her. ‘Take care, won’t you, darling? Perhaps we’ll talk when you get back.’
She booked an evening ticket on the Eurostar and cancelled all of her appointments for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Personal emails were sent out to senior colleagues explaining that she was required to attend the funeral of a close friend in Paris and would be returning to the Office on Thursday. Jimmy Marquand was the only top-tier officer to respond to these messages, expressing ‘my condolences for the loss of your friend’.
Finally, at around three o’clock, Amelia walked up the King’s Road to Peter Jones and bought two new outfits, one for the meeting with François, another for the funeral. Back at the flat, she packed them in a large suitcase, throwing in a couple of Ian McEwan paperbacks and a recent edition of Prospect magazine. She then walked outside and hailed a cab.
Sunday evening traffic, sparse under light rain. Within twenty minutes Amelia Levene was standing beneath the great vault of St Pancras station clutching a Business Premier ticket to Paris. The atmosphere in the station acted upon her like some romantic dream of the past: monochrome couples snatching final weekend kisses; liveried inspectors ushering passengers along the platform. Then a queue and the rigmarole of security, a female guard waving Amelia through on the assumption that she was just another chic bourgeois housewife shuttling between the two capitals. Amelia found her seat in the carriage, a forward-facing window at a table of four, and made a point of avoiding eye contact with any of her fellow passengers. The fewer people that noticed her, the better. She didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation with a stranger. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts.
She had bought a copy of the Sunday Times at St Pancras and opened it up as the train pulled away from the platform. There was a story about alleged British Intelligence complicity in torture at the bottom of the front page and she immediately thought of Thomas Kell, but found that she could not concentrate on anything more than the opening paragraph. She knew the background to the case, knew that the story had been scheduled to appear, and would ordinarily have been interested to see how the facts had been reported. But it was as though François had switched off her professional antennae; none of it seemed to matter any more.
Amelia looked out of the window and might have been nineteen again, such was her sense of anticipation at the prospect of travelling to Paris. Over a period of more than thirty years, she had constructed a new personality around the wreckage of her teenage self. She caught her own reflection in the glass and wondered at the loss of Amelia Weldon. Did she even exist any more? The next twenty-four hours would provide some sort of answer. She was going on a journey into her future. She was going on a journey into her past.
