‘Cheers,’ she said. Beneath the table she slipped off the shoes and began kneading her feet. ‘I actually thought he was going to approach me tonight.’
‘What would you have done?’ asked the man.
Knowing the answer would upset him, she said, ‘Gone with him, of course.’
‘It’s been a year,’ protested the other woman. ‘It’s stupid.’ Crossing the bridge, her partner had touched her breast, twice, pretending it was an accident but she knew it hadn’t been. She knew there was no objection she could make either. Dirty bastard.
‘Difficult to imagine that he was once so good, isn’t it?’ said the man reflectively.
‘I don’t think he ever was,’ said the girl in the prostitute’s disguise. ‘I think it’s some typical bureaucratic mistake in Moscow; the sort of thing they do all the time.’
The man shook his head positively. ‘Not this one. Charlie Muffin is important, for some reason.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’d better get back to the embassy.’
The two women looked at each other, irritated. It was the third night in succession he’d avoided buying any drinks and they were sure he was charging more on his expenses than they were.
‘This is a shitty job,’ complained the girl who had been fondled. ‘Really shitty.’
By the time they got back, the telephone conversation between Charlie and Rupert Willoughby had already been reported to Moscow. And Kalenin knew the protection he had evolved was possible. The priority cables were already arriving from Dzerzhinsky Square.
‘I’m bored.’
Rupert Willoughby didn’t bother to look up from his book at Clarissa’s protest. ‘As usual,’ he said.
‘Amuse me then.’
‘I’m your husband, not your jester.’
‘And fuck all good at either.’
‘You really shouldn’t swear,’ said Willoughby. ‘You always sound as if you’re reading the words from a prompt card.’
‘Fuck!’ she said defiantly.
‘Still not right,’ said Willoughby, knowing the condescension would irritate her even more. He lowered the book to look at her. She was moving listlessly around the apartment, lifting and replacing ornaments and running her hand along the top of the furniture.
‘Jocelyn and Arabella have taken the yacht to Menton,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘They’ve invited me down.’
‘They usually do.’
‘I thought I’d go.’
‘Why not?’ Intent on her reaction, he said, ‘I’m seeing Charlie Muffin tomorrow.’
‘Charlie!’ She stopped. The brightness was immediate. ‘I’d love to see him again.’
She’d tried hard enough after New York. Which is what had planted the idea in Willoughby’s mind after the man’s telephone call and the yacht invitation.
‘I’ll ask him to dinner,’ he promised.
2
The office of the intelligence director was on the Waterloo side of the Thames. Sir Alistair Wilson asked the driver for the cross-over route through Parliament Square; purposely early for the meeting with the Permanent Under Secretary responsible for liaison between the department and the government, he’d heard the displays were particularly good this year and he wanted to see for himself.
The rose beds in St James’s Park were by the lake, bursts of Ophelia and Pascali and Rose Gaujard. He leaned forward, studying with an expert’s eye the colour lustre and feeling the texture of the leaves. Growing roses was Wilson’s hobby and he liked to see a naturalness about their arrangement, not this patterned rigidity, as if they were sections of some jigsaw puzzle. But over-arranged or not, the blooms were better than his. It had to be the soil in Hampshire, full of chalk. When he got the chance, he’d talk to the gardener about increasing the compost to balance. Wilson smiled at the thought; he was going to do so much, when he got the chance.
Distantly, somewhere in the direction of the Mall, a clock bell chimed and he set off towards Whitehall. For a man who until five years before had commanded a Gurkha regiment and been seconded to intelligence with a reputation for efficient discipline, Wilson’s appearance was a personal contradiction. Careless of the obvious amusement it caused within his working circle, he wore a deerstalker, because it had flaps he could bring down over his ears in the winter and after so much time in India he suffered from the cold. The suit was good but neglected, thick tweed – again for the cold – but the trousers were absolutely without crease: although there were lots of the wrong sort, crimped tiredly behind the knees and elbows. The overcoat, of forgotten fashion, was too long and over-padded at the shoulders and cuffs, and again at the elbows the wear was obvious; in another six months, it would be threadbare.
He was bonily thin and the face was hawkish, big-nosed, with sharp, attentive eyes. Greying hair escaped from beneath the hat, like a plume, heightening the bird-like appearance. He moved awkwardly, limping where the left knee refused to bend. Wilson had come unscathed through Europe, Korea and Aden but almost lost his leg when a polo pony fell and rolled on him in Calcutta. For years it had irritated him, because of the physical hindrance, but now he was only aware of it in the coldest weather, when the ache settled deep in his calf.
After the confetti of memoranda and demands for speed, Sir Alistair knew that the location of the leak, coupled with the timing, would increase rather than diminish the pressure. It was like sailing out of the fog and seeing the rocks only yards away.
Sir Berkeley Naire-Hamilton hurried fussily across the office to meet him, hand outstretched. ‘Good to see you, my dear fellow. Good to see you.’
‘And you,’ said Wilson.
‘I’ve tea. Earl Grey, I’m afraid. All right? You’ll take it with lemon, of course?’
The man bustled around a side table where the tea things were set, asking the questions automatically without any wish or expectation of a reply.
Wilson accepted his tea and, instead of returning to his ornate, over-powering desk, Naire-Hamilton seated himself opposite the director on a matching, wing-backed chair.
‘Delighted to hear there’s a breakthrough,’ he said.
‘I’m not sure you will be,’ warned Wilson.
‘What do you mean?’ demanded the permanent civil servant. Naire-Hamilton was a florid-faced, balding man, a rim of tightly clipped white hair hedged around his face. There was the hint of a minor stroke or some facial paralysis, which had caused the left-hand side to collapse slightly, making one eye more pronounced than the other. Naire-Hamilton had a tendency to the flamboyant, with broadly striped suits and pastel shirts with matching ties. It went with the vague foppishness of the office. It was traditional Whitehall, like bowlers and striped trousers with black jackets and vintage Dow with Stilton. The furniture was predominantly Georgian, bulbous-calved with a lot of leather, and there were ceiling-to-floor bookcases with volumes that couldn’t easily be removed because they’d remained unread for so long that the covers were stuck edge to edge. The walls were panelled and hung with portraits of bewigged chancellors and diplomats and there was a large and heavily decorated grandfather clock. It ticked with a constantly sticky, hesitating tick, demanding to be listened to in case it didn’t reach the next second. Wilson found the clock irritating. He wasn’t sure about Naire-Hamilton either.
‘Rome,’ announced Wilson.
‘You can’t be serious!’ Naire-Hamilton brought his hand up over his sagging eye, a habit of embarrassment.
‘I wish I weren’t.’
‘That’s… it’s…’ Naire-Hamilton’s hand moved from his eye, in a snatching gesture, as if he could pick the proper expression from the air.
‘…where the traitor is,’ said Wilson.
Naire-Hamilton carefully replaced his teacup on a wine table beside his chair and said, ‘Tell me why you’re so sure.’
‘Four months ago we started transmitting in monitored batches through normal Foreign Office channels an apparently genuine advisory document, recommending the manner of British response to Russian efforts to increase its influence throughout Africa.’