He walked in the darkness, grinding his feet into the fine pebbles and the emptied shells. He turned his back to the sea. The great black holes of Southmarsh and Northmarsh were around the clustered lights of the village. He felt a sense of safety, of belonging. It was his home. He moved on, retraced his steps, and came back into the village. Brisk footsteps were hurrying towards him, a bouncing torch beam lit the pavement, then soared and found his face.
"Hello, Frank, it's Basil. Choir practice drifted on, why I'm late out, and same as you, I suppose I felt like a prisoner in the vicarage with that dreadful rain today. Got to get out, get a bit of air before bed."
"Evening, Mr. Hackett."
"Please, Frank, not the formality, not among friends even those, forgive me, whom I do not see on Sundays!"
"A deserved slap on the wrist."
"Not to worry it's what people do that matters, not where they're seen to be. If all my worshippers were as involved in the welfare of the village as you and Meryl, I'd be a happier man… You look a bit drawn, had bad news?"
"Everything's fine."
"Before I forget, I hear Meryl's visiting Mrs. Hopkins. She's very kind, a great help to that lady, awful when arthritis cripples an active woman and I've got you down for churchyard grass-cutting this summer, on my rota."
"No problem."
"Well, bed beckons.
"Night, Frank."
"Goodnight."
He walked across the wet grass of the green towards the light above the front door and his home. He still did not know what he would tell her or when.
Chapter Three.
The atmosphere hung like gas, poisoned, in the house, and had for three days and three evenings. It clung to the rooms, eddied into each corner, was inescapable. They went their own ways, as if the atmosphere dictated that they should separate themselves from each other. The stench of the silence they carried with them was in the furniture, in their clothes, and had seeped to their minds.
He stood on the green, beyond his front gate, and gazed out over the rooftops towards the expanse of the gunmetal grey sea.
Stephen came down the stairs each morning, gulped half of his usual breakfast, and waited by the door for his mother to take him to school, or by the gate for the other half of the school-run to collect him. He came home in the afternoons and bolted for his room, came down for supper, then fled upstairs again. The atmosphere between his mother and his stepfather had filtered into his room. Twice, from the bottom of the stairs, Perry had heard him weeping.
It was a bright morning, there would be rain later, and the wind brought a chill from the east.
Since he had pleaded for time Meryl had not spoken of his problem. She was brisk with him, and busy. She called shrilly to him for his meals, dumped his food in front of him, made sharp, meaningless conversation while they ate. It was as if they competed to be the first to finish what she had cooked so that the charade of normality might be over more quickly. If he spread work papers on the table in the kitchen then she was in the living room with her embroidery. If she had an excuse to be out, she took it, spent all of one of the three days helping with the nursery class and staying late at school to scrub the floor. He knew that she loved the house and the village, and that she feared that both were being pulled, by the poison, from her. They slept at night in the same bed, back to back, apart. The space between them was cold. She had looked into his face once, the only time that her eyes had flared in anger, when she'd pushed him aside and run up the stairs to her son's room, in answer to his weeping.
He watched the gulls flying lazily over the sea, and felt jealous that such matters did not trouble them.
His life, many times, in those three days, played in Frank Perry's mind. He remembered his many friends at Shiraz, where the gases were mixed, before the project's move to Bandar Abbas, where the warheads were constructed, and more friends there. They had entertained him and kissed his cheeks when he gave them gifts, and were deceived. At the thought of his betrayal, he screamed silently across the winter-yellowed grass of the green, and the rooftops where the first smoke of the day crawled from the chimneys, and the open depth of the sea. It was not his fault: he hadn't been given a chance to do otherwise.
Emma Carstairs drove up, smiling and chirpy. She pushed the door open and belted her horn. Stephen ran past, without looking at him, and dived for the car as if to escape.
Frank heard Meryl's brisk shout behind him. The car drove away. There was a call for him. The Home Office in London. He went back into the house and heard her washing up the breakfast things. She hadn't asked him why the Home Office had rung. He picked up the telephone.
He felt like a Philby or a George Blake. Bettany, who had rotted in gaol on an Official Secrets Act sentence, would have felt like this when he'd made his first communication with the Soviets. He took the phone card from his wallet. Geoff Markham had come out of Thames House, doubled back behind the building, scurried up Horseferry Road for the first bank of telephones. The brewery answered, through to Marketing, a shout for Vicky. He felt he was breaking faith, and the furtiveness exhilarated him. He told her that the bank was giving him an interview for a place in investment brokerage; his application had been short listed down to the last three. She squealed, she said he was brilliant. He gave her the details. She growled that she would bloody murder him if he blew it and started on about her teaching him interview technique. She had wanted him out of what she called that creepy job and into proper work since they'd first shared a bed. He rang off. He wouldn't have dared make that call inside Thames House. He felt elation that he had been short listed and the same sense of shame as when he'd sent off the application to the bank with the necessarily limited personal background. It was what Vicky had told him to do she had torn the job advertisement from the Situations Vacant.
He took the back-streets to the bridge, crossed over. The great building, the home of the Secret Intelligence Service, the green and cream and tinted-glass monstrosity, was enemy territory to most of his seniors at Thames House. When Cox or Fenton went across the river to Vauxhall Bridge Cross, they always said, after they'd legged it back, that they felt they ought to wash their hands. He asked for Ms Flowers, and the security staff at Reception looked at him and his Security Service ID as if they were both worthless.
She took him into a bare interview room on the ground floor. She laid a file in front of her on the table, and leaned her elbows over it, covered it with her bosom.
He talked.
"We went down under prepared to see him, went with big holes in what we knew. We knew that his new name and identity were blown open how and where is what we did not know. We told him his life was under threat, but we didn't know the extent of the threat… It was difficult to assess who was the blind and who the one-eyed. We're sending him the Blue Book. We need help and have to have answers to questions."
She snorted derisively.
"Ask away. Whether I'll answer, that's a different matter. And you should know the importance we give to the Iranian weapons programme. Attention, among the ill informed was directed towards Iraq, which is just comic cuts, cartoon-strip stuff. Iran is the big player. Iraq has no global following, Iran is a focus point for billions of Muslims. Iran matters." She guarded the file with her elbows.
"Who was Frank Perry?"
"His name was Gavin Hughes. He was a pushy young salesman in an engineering manufacturing company at Newbury. He sold commercial mixing machines, mostly for export."