‘It may take me a little while,’ Miles said.
‘Not a problem, old boy. We’ve got a couple of hours on London as it is. They’ll still be fast asleep.’
Miles’s contact was a middle-level officer in the Yemeni Intelligence Service called Arack, who had been a graduate student at the University of Southern California. It was never entirely clear what he had studied there, and he seemed to know the beaches north of Santa Monica rather better than the classrooms of USC. But he was a useful contact, since the Yemeni bureaucracy was both legendarily cumbersome and unreceptive to foreign approaches, and Arack was always willing to help the Americans, provided the request was relatively easy to fulfil and his reward readily forthcoming. He was known to Miles and his colleagues, semi-derisorily, as ‘Sweet Tooth’ because of his love of sugary cakes and desserts, which made payment for his services unusually easy.
Miles and Arack met now for coffee and a baklava-like concoction in a café near the Yemeni Ministry of Defence. Arack listened sympathetically while Miles explained what he was looking for. ‘We just want confirmation that the personal details we have for this student are correct and that he is known to your authorities and is in London legitimately.’
‘Is there any reason to think he is not?’ asked Arack mildly.
‘No,’ said Miles, though it didn’t take a genius to realise there had to be a question about the ‘student’, or else Miles wouldn’t be checking him out. ‘It’s just a formality.’
Arack nodded, happy to hear that this was not something he would have to call to the attention of his superiors. ‘Naturally births and deaths are registered here, as they are in the United States, and there is a department for that purpose. But you might find its office difficult to navigate. Let me make a few calls and get back to you. Give me the details please, and I would be grateful if you could ask the waiter to come over.’
Arack rang Miles just before dinner. There was a shortage of eligible Western women in Sana’a and Miles was about to have dinner with one of them – a new shapely secretary called, appropriately, Marilyn, who had come out to work in the Embassy the month before. He waited impatiently as Arack went through the standard Middle Eastern formalities, applied rigorously even to a phone call. How was Miles? As if they hadn’t met five hours before. Was not the weather good this day, and would it not be fine throughout the evening? At last Arack came to the point, though even then he spoke elliptically. ‘I am afraid I have surprising news for you, my friend.’
‘Really?’
‘We have no record of this man, you see.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I have said. There is no birth certificate, no record of an education and no passport.’
‘Could the name be spelled differently?’
‘I have pursued all possible variants. More important, the residential address you say this fellow gave in Sana’a does exist but… it is a bicycle shop. I can assure you, there is no citizen with the particulars you supplied.’
Miles mind was no longer on his date with Marilyn. ‘OK. Thank you for checking this for me.’
‘My pleasure. I wish you luck finding this gentleman. But I can assure you, it will not be in the Yemen.’
Damn, thought Miles as he put down the phone, then picked it up to cancel his date. He hoped Marilyn wouldn’t be too disappointed – though he was, especially since he realised there would be a further call to make. It looked like he would be having dinner with Bruno Mackay instead.
Chapter 32
Since Peggy Kinsolving had joined MI5, and particularly since she had been working with Liz Carlyle, she had found out a lot of things about herself that she didn’t know. At school and university she had been a quiet, studious, and rather shy girl. She loved acquiring information, categorising it, sorting it out so she could access it and apply her considerable intelligence and her almost photographic memory to it.
These were the qualities that had taken her from her grammar school in the north of England to Oxford, where as predicted she had obtained a good 2:1 degree. No one, including Peggy herself, had ever thought she had the intellectual confidence and verve that makes a first-class scholar.
Her social life at university had followed the same cautious pattern. She had joined a few societies of the intellectual type and one day, showing much daring, she had gone with a friend to a meeting of the college dramatic society, who were looking for backstage staff. Everyone in the society, it seemed, wanted to be on the stage and in the limelight, and no one was prepared to do the behind-the-scenes work. Peggy thought that job would suit her very well, and it did. She brought her formidable information-sorting skills to organising the props, the scenery, the sound effects; eventually she became completely indispensable to any performance.
She would stand in the wings, noticing every detail, knowing everyone’s part better than they did themselves and making sure that at least from a technical point of view the performance was perfect. She loved the drama but only from behind the scenes. She could never be persuaded to take even the smallest role on the stage. The thought of appearing before an audience petrified her.
Satisfied with her 2:1 and pursuing what she thought was her métier, Peggy had taken a job in a small research library, working on sorting and cataloguing the papers of an obscure female Victorian novelist. But after a couple of years she had begun to find the work dull and unsatisfying, and her social life in a small town where she knew no one was practically non-existent.
So when she saw an advertisement for a research post in a government department in London, with some hesitation she applied and found herself working as a research assistant in MI6. A chance secondment to MI5 a few years later led to her working with Liz Carlyle. At first her work had been purely research, but Liz had seen something in her young assistant that made her think there was more to Peggy than met the eye, and she had gradually encouraged her to take on a more upfront role.
At first Liz had given her some simple interviews to do, then she had moved her on to situations where Peggy had to play a role, to pretend to be someone other than an MI5 officer.
This was when they both realised that Peggy had a penchant for acting a part. Though she would still rather die than go on stage and act before an audience, put in a one-to-one situation she could convincingly present herself as anything from a housewife to a hedge-fund manager – and enjoy doing it.
Today she was an electoral registration officer. She’d dressed primly: a mid-length blue skirt, matching tights, sensible shoes, and dark paisley shirt under a navy blue blazer. She carried a clipboard and pen, and with her glasses firmly in place on her nose looked entirely like the local authority bureaucrat she was pretending to be.
At two o’clock that afternoon she knocked on the door of 29 Ashby Road. Most of the area seemed to be lived in by Muslim families, but she knew from the electoral register that this house was occupied by a Mrs Margaret Donovan. The door was opened by a large red-faced woman whom she guessed to be in her early seventies.
‘What can I do for you, luv?’
‘Mrs Donovan, is it?’ asked Peggy, and she explained that she was from the electoral office, confirming the names of the occupants of voting age in each house along the street.
‘Wasn’t there someone here a few months ago about that?’ the woman asked.