He was already sitting at the table. As Liz approached he stood up to greet her with a warm handshake. He was tall – a couple of inches over six foot – and lean, with fair hair worn a little longer than Liz remembered. She had also forgotten how good-looking he was, with regular features and startling green eyes. He was wearing a lightweight grey check suit with a blue silk tie decorated with small hippos. He looked, thought Liz, extremely un-policeman-like.
Pearson said, ‘I’m glad you could make time for lunch.’
‘It’s good to see you. What brings you down to London?’
‘It was the Police Chiefs Council meeting yesterday,’ he said, ‘and I’ve stayed on for the counter-terrorism sub-committee this morning.’
Liz nodded. ‘There’s plenty to talk about on that front at the moment,’ she said. Chief Constables from all over the UK convened regularly to exchange information and receive briefings from external agencies about new laws, new methods, new threats. In the past, Liz had attended a couple of them.
‘So,’ said Pearson, ‘is work keeping you very busy these days?’
She was grateful for the question. In recent months, so many people thought it appropriate to open a conversation by asking how she was feeling, as if they alone had thought to ask; worst of all was being asked how she was in her ‘inner self’. Implicit in these questions was the unspoken query: Are you any better yet? As if grief were a disease to recover from.
‘Yes, fairly busy,’ she acknowledged. ‘I’ve moved back into counter-espionage. It’s busier than I expected. I’m sure you’ve got plenty on yourself.’
He smiled. ‘You can say that again. Every time I start to think I’ve mastered the job, something rears up and bites me hard.’
The waiter came up and they ordered, then chatted casually for a while, leaving work to one side. Pearson was a lot more relaxed than the robust figure she remembered from the operation outside Manchester, and she found she was able to ask him about himself, which was a relief; she was fed up with having to fend off questions about herself. It turned out he liked football and supported Manchester United, all very predictable (Liz tried not to yawn), but also chamber music and the later albums of Pink Floyd, which was not. He spent most weekends when he wasn’t on duty walking in the Lake District or helping his brother-in-law, a fisherman who owned a boat in Southport.
‘That doesn’t sound like much of a break.’
‘Oh, it is,’ he said. ‘I can’t get a mobile signal when we’re more than a mile offshore. It’s the one place no one can get at me.’
Liz laughed. ‘I understand completely. Sometimes I wish the mobile phone had never been invented. Yours seems the perfect solution.’
‘There’s only one problem with it.’
‘Oh?’
‘I get seasick.’ He made a face and Liz laughed. ‘I’ve tried everything – from Dramamine to brandy – but nothing works. Anyway, what do you do when you’re not working?’
Liz paused for a minute. In the past few years the answer would have been simple enough – she’d see Martin, sometimes in Paris, sometimes here. She supposed they had done the usual things couples do – go to a gallery, walk through the park, have dinner together at their favourite places. But what they did didn’t seem to matter much; it was being together that counted.
She realised Pearson was waiting for an answer and racked her brains, trying to remember what she had done in the years when she’d been on her own. It seemed a millennium ago. She shrugged. ‘My mother lives in the country down in Wiltshire; sometimes I go there at the weekend. It’s where I grew up.’
Pearson said, ‘I sense a “but” coming up.’
‘You’re right. My father died a long time ago, but now my mother has a nice boyfriend –’ she gave a small laugh ‘– if a seventy-five-year-old man can be called a boyfriend. It’s just that…’
Again she hesitated. ‘Three’s a crowd?’ Pearson suggested.
Liz nodded. ‘Exactly. They’re very good to me; when they come up to town we often have dinner or see a play, and I know I’m always welcome down there.’ She felt almost apologetic for not appreciating this more, but found herself saying exactly what she felt. ‘It’s just that before, when my mother was on her own, I used to feel I was looking after her. Dutiful daughter et cetera, though since I’m close to her it wasn’t a chore. But now I feel sometimes that she and Edward – that’s her boyfriend – are looking after me.’
‘And you don’t like that?’
‘Not much,’ she confessed.
He nodded sympathetically. ‘The problem is that the alternative – not seeing them – can get pretty lonely. At least it was for me.’
‘Why’s that?’ Liz asked. There had been no mention of a wife or children in his account of his weekends, which had surprised her – she knew he was in his late forties.
‘I was married,’ he said, and Liz instinctively guessed: bad divorce, no children, lots of girlfriends. But he said instead, ‘My wife died just a few years after we’d got married.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
He looked at her with a smile. ‘So am I. It was almost twenty years ago – I was just a copper on the beat then, which tells you how young I was. When people learn that my wife died but also when she died, they seem to expect me to say, “That’s okay – it was a long time ago.” It was a long time ago, but that doesn’t really help. I imagine you’re finding that out yourself.’
‘Yes. I can almost hear people thinking, Get over it. I would if I could, believe me.’
‘It does get better,’ said Pearson, his voice brightening a little. ‘It’s not that you start to forget the person, or don’t think about them every day. It’s just that other things happen to you, you meet other people, your life gets full of things that have nothing to do with the person you’ve lost. And that does help.’
They had ordered coffee and now, when the waiter brought their cups, Pearson shifted a little uneasily in his seat. Liz could sense he didn’t often talk about himself; but then neither did she. She changed the subject. ‘So how did your meetings go?’
He gave a small half-smile to acknowledge her diplomatic shift. ‘They were good,’ he declared. ‘Funnily enough, something came up in one of them that made me think of you. We had a summary that must have come from your people – they weren’t precise about the source, but I assume it’s your end of things. It was about increased Russian activity here in the UK, just as you said earlier.’
‘Yes, that would be right. It’s definitely something we’re concerned about. The Russians always had a large espionage component here, and it never exactly went away, but after the end of the Cold War we had a decade of decreased activity. Frankly I think we all became slightly complacent; we were so focused on terrorism. Anyway the Russians are back with a vengeance now, and we’re having to catch up fast.’
Pearson was listening carefully. He put his coffee cup down when Liz had finished speaking, and looked thoughtful. ‘The thing is, ordinarily this wouldn’t have much to do with my patch. You know far more about it than I do, but as far as I understand it, most of the Russian espionage going on in this country is focused on London.’
‘It depends where their targets are. But it’s true that the key centres of British power – in politics and finance in particular – are inevitably in London, along with the Russian Embassy.’