*
The flat she had jointly inherited from her late father wasn't a flat but a maisonette on the two top floors of a pretty white Victorian terrace house of the sort that gives Primrose Hill its charm. Her upwardly mobile brother, who killed pheasants with rich friends, owned the other half of it, and in about fifty years, if he hadn't died of drink by then, and Perry and Gail were still together, which she presently doubted, they will have paid him off.
The entrance hall stank of number 2's Bourguignonne and resounded to other tenants' bickerings and television sets. The mountain bike Perry kept for his weekend visits was in its usual inconvenient place, chained to the downpipe. One day, she had warned him, some enterprising thief was going to steal the downpipe too. His pleasure was to ride it up to Hampstead Heath at six o'clock in the morning and speed-cycle down the paths marked NO CYCLING.
The carpet on the four narrow flights of stairs leading to her front door was in its last stages of decay, but the ground-floor tenant didn't see why he should pay anything and the other two wouldn't pay till he did and Gail as the unpaid in-house lawyer was supposed to come up with a compromise, but since none of the parties would budge from their entrenched positions, where the hell was compromise?
But tonight she was grateful for all of it: let them bicker and play their bloody music to their hearts' content, let them give her all the normality they've got, because, oh mother, did she need normality. Just get her out of surgery and into the recovery room. Just tell her the nightmare's over, Gail dear, there are no more softly spoken Scottish blue-stockings or undersized espiocrats with Etonian accents, no more orphaned children, drop-dead-gorgeous Natashas, gun-slinging uncles, Dimas and Tamaras, and Perry Makepiece my Heaven-sent lover and purblind innocent is not about to wrap himself in the sacrificial flag for his Orwellian love of lost England, his admirable quest for Connection with a capital C – connection with what? for Christ's sake – or his homebrewed brand of inverted, puritanical vanity.
Climbing the stairs, her knees began trembling.
At the first poky half-landing they trembled more.
At the second they trembled so wildly she had to prop herself against the wall till they steadied down.
And when she reached the last flight, she had to haul herself up by the handrail to get to the front door before the time-switch cut.
Standing in the tiny hall with her back to the closed door, she listened, sniffing the air for booze, body odour or stale cigarette smoke, or all three, which was how a couple of months back she knew she'd been burgled before she ever walked up the spiral staircase to find her bed pissed on and the pillows slashed and foul lipstick messages smeared across her mirror.
Only when she had relived that moment to the full did she open the kitchen door, hang up her coat, check the bathroom, pee, pour herself a king-sized tumbler of Rioja, swig a mouthful, replenish the tumbler to the brim and carry it precariously to the living room.
*
Standing, not sitting. She'd done enough passive sitting for a lifetime, thank you.
Standing in front of the non-functioning all-pine, do-it-yourself reproduction Georgian fireplace installed by a previous owner, and staring at the same long sash window where Perry had stood six hours ago: Perry on the slant, birdlike and eight foot tall, peering down into the street, waiting for an ordinary black cab with its 'For Hire' light out, last numbers on its licence plate 73, and your driver's name will be Ollie.
No curtains to our sash windows. Shutters only. Perry who likes sheer but will pay his half for curtains if she really wants them. Perry who disapproves of central heating but worries that she's not warm enough. Perry who one minute says we can only have one child for fear of world overpopulation, then wants six by return of post. Perry who, the moment they touch down in England after the fucked-up holiday of a lifetime, hightails it to Oxford, buries himself in his digs, and for fifty-six hours communicates in cryptic text messages from the front: document nearly complete… have made contact with necessary people… arriving London midday-ish… please leave key under doormat…
'He said they're a team apart, not run-of-the-mill,' he tells her, as he watches the wrong taxis go by.
'He?'
'Adam.'
'The man who called you back. That Adam?'
'Yes.'
'Surname or Christian name?'
'I didn't ask, he didn't tell me. He says they've got their own set-up for cases like this. A special house. He wouldn't say where over the telephone. The cab driver would know.'
'Ollie.'
'Yes.'
'Cases like what, actually?'
'Ours. That's all I know.'
A black cab goes past but it has its light on. Not a spy cab then. A normal cab. Driven by a man who isn't Ollie. Disappointed again, Perry rounds on her:
'Look. What else do you expect me to do? If you've got a better suggestion, let's hear it. You've done nothing but snipe since we got back to England.'
'And you've done nothing but keep me at arm's length. Oh, and treat me like a child. Of the weaker sex. I forgot that bit.'
He has gone back to looking out of the window.
'Is Adam the only person to have read your letter-document-report-cum-witness statement?' she asks.
'I can't imagine so. I wouldn't bank on his name being Adam either. He just said Adam like a password.'
'Really? I wonder how he did that.'
She tries saying Adam as a password in several different ways, but Perry is not drawn.
'You're sure Adam's a man, are you? Not just a woman with a deep voice?'
No answer. None expected.
Yet another taxi passes. Still not ours. Whatever does one wear for spies, darling? as her mother would have said. Cursing herself for even wondering, she has changed out of her office clothes into a skirt and high-necked blouse. And sensible shoes, nothing to stir the juices – well, except Luke's, but how could she have known?
'Perhaps he's stuck in traffic,' she suggests, and again gets no answer, which serves her right. 'Anyway, to resume. You gave the letter to an Adam. And an Adam received it. Otherwise he wouldn't have rung you, presumably.' She's being irritating and knows it. So does he. 'How many pages? Of our secret document? Yours.'
'Twenty-eight,' he replies.
'Handwritten or typed?'
'Handwritten.'
'Why not typed?'
'I decided handwritten was safer.'
'Really? On whose advice?'
'I hadn't had advice by then. Dima and Tamara were convinced they were bugged at every turn, so I decided to respect their anxieties and not do anything – electronic. Interceptible.'
'Wasn't that rather paranoid?'
'I'm sure it was. We're both paranoid. So are Dima and Tamara. We're all paranoid.'
'Then let's admit it. Let's be paranoid together.'
No answer. Silly little Gail tries yet another tack:
'Do you want to tell me how you got on to Mr Adam in the first place?'
'Anyone can do it. It's not a problem these days. You can do it on the Web.'
'Did you do it on the Web?'
'No.'
'Didn't trust the Web?'
'No.'
'Do you trust me?'
'Of course I do.'
'I hear the most amazing confidences every day of my life. You know that, don't you?'
'Yes.'
'And you don't exactly hear me regaling our friends at dinner parties with my clients' secrets, do you?'
'No.'
Reload:
'You also know that as a young barrister who is self-employed without a paddle and terrified of where the next job is or is not coming from, I am professionally disposed against mystery briefs that offer no prospect of prestige or reward.'
'Nobody's offering you a brief, Gail. Nobody's asking you to do anything except talk.'
'Which is what I call a brief.'
Another wrong taxi. Another silence, a bad one.
'Well, at least Mr Adam invited both of us,' she says, going for cheerful. 'I thought you'd airbrushed me out of your document completely.'