‘Is it?’ Sarah asked, her voice suddenly changing from cool to cold.
‘I’ll come back later,’ Knox said, sensing the change in her tone.
‘The hell you will.’
‘I don’t want to upset you.’
‘You think you’re upsetting me? My husband lying in a coma no one can do anything about upsets me. The one person who could help him refusing to do anything bloody infuriates me.’
Sarah had been privy to most of the details of MI5’s investigation, including Knox’s lack of cooperation.
Knox knew he owed her the truth. Holland had been more than a patron and mentor to him. Though neither of them would ever say it, the older man had become a kind of father to him, a replacement for the one he’d never had the chance to know. And in many ways Sarah had been his surrogate mother, offering her own support, ear, or advice whenever needed.
Knox wanted to tell her where he’d been the night Holland had fallen into the coma. He wanted to tell her she was right to blame him, that it was his fault. He wanted to share with her the secret he and Holland had kept for fifteen years. But he couldn’t, because Holland himself had sworn him to secrecy, and because the more people who knew about it, the more people could be hurt by it.
Sarah, however, didn’t care about that. She just wanted to know what had happened to her husband.
‘Please, just tell me where you were,’ she said, her exhaustion creeping into her voice.
Knox couldn’t bring himself to betray Holland’s trust in him after so long, even to the one person closer to him than Knox was. ‘I can’t,’ he said.
‘After everything we’ve done for you? I’m his wife, for God’s sake.’
Sarah knew her husband’s life was built on secrets, but they’d never kept any from each other. Apart from the one he shared only with Knox.
‘I can’t,’ he said.
‘That’s not your decision to make.’
‘No, it was James’s.’ As soon as the words left Knox’s mouth he knew he’d made a mistake.
Sarah’s face set hard, her tiredness and worry finally turning to rage. But she didn’t explode at Knox. Instead, she got up, kissed Holland on the forehead, and straightened his gold-rimmed glasses that sat next to his wedding ring – a thin band of bronze shaped like a belt buckle – on his bedside table.
She smoothed down her dress, picked up her handbag, and walked past Knox.
‘Say goodbye,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘And don’t come back.’
Then she left.
Knox didn’t say goodbye to Holland. He didn’t say anything. He just sat with him, going over and over his encounters with Manning and Sarah in his mind. His reason for not breaking his pact with Holland and telling Sarah where he had been was that it could ruin both his career and her husband’s. But, if Manning was now permanent director general and Knox’s professional life already lay in tatters, how much did it really matter?
After several, silent hours he decided to go up to Highgate and tell Sarah everything. It might not bring her husband back to her, but perhaps it would make her feel better to know that even if he had kept something from her, it had been to protect her.
CHAPTER 32
Knox’s London had almost been destroyed twice. Once by the Luftwaffe, and once by his parents’ deaths. Now, with Manning in control of MI5, his world was on the brink of collapse again. What no one knew was how his parents’ deaths were connected to his mentor’s coma. No one apart from Knox, Holland, and, soon, his wife.
Knox left Guy’s, walking back along Southwark Street towards Blackfriars Bridge. Rush hour was over, but there were still plenty of people about. The man who Knox had noticed following him since he’d turned out of St Thomas Street may just have been making his way to the tube and home after a long day in the office. But that didn’t explain why he was wearing the international uniform of street muscle – a large, black leather bomber jacket and a flat cap tilted low over his eyes in the middle of summer.
Knox reached the entrance to Blackfriars station at the northern end of the bridge. He passed two paper sellers trying to get rid of their last copies of the Evening Standard and the Evening News. Both were leading with stories about the rapid build-up of American military in West Berlin. Knox slowed down to read the headlines, and see if the man following him would carry on past him or linger on the bridge. He headed straight into the station and, after a moment, so did Knox.
He made his way down to the tube and stopped in the middle of the platform, already anticipating his change at Charing Cross to the Northern Line, which would take him up to Highgate.
The man in the bomber was further down the platform, keeping enough distance between him and Knox to put them in different carriages when the tube arrived. If he was following Knox, he was being smart about it. And if this was another round in Knox’s game with Peterson, he’d sent a much better player. Out of the corner of his eye, Knox watched him lean against the wall next to one of the station roundels. With the sudden context he realised the man was a giant. Six foot five, at least, and built like the side of a house.
A bright red Circle Line train pulled into the station, screeching loudly as its worn brakes grabbed at the tracks. The doors opened with a judder and a few commuters got off. Knox hung back on the platform. So did the giant. At the last moment, Knox hopped through the closing doors. So did the giant.
The train lumbered its way to the next stop, speeding up only to slow down again over and over, as if it wasn’t sure what lay ahead in the dark tunnel. Knox resisted the urge to look at the other passengers. He wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible, and the easiest way to stand out and draw attention in London was to make eye contact with people on the tube.
Temple station was empty. No one got off, and no one got on. Knox snatched a glance through the open doors before they slid shut again, but couldn’t see any movement in the next carriage.
Charing Cross was next. This time, as soon as the doors opened, Knox burst off the train and sprinted down the stairs his carriage had lined up perfectly with. He didn’t look back, so he didn’t see the giant pushing his way down the platform and into the tunnel, trying to catch up with him.
Knox reached the northbound platform of the Northern Line as a train was about to depart. It was one of the new silver deep-level trains. He stretched his arms out, jamming the nearest set of doors open. Several of the carriage’s other occupants tutted loudly as he climbed inside, angry that they’d delayed their journey home by a few seconds. But Knox ignored them. He kept his eyes on the platform, watching the giant reach the platform too late to stop the train pulling away.
Knox had lost him. But he couldn’t risk the chance that the man had guessed his destination and would follow him all the way to Highgate.
He got off at the next station, Strand. From there he could have run the short distance to Trafalgar Square station and the Bakerloo Line, or doubled back on himself and taken the Northern Line under the river to Waterloo. But he needed to make sure he’d slipped his tail, and that would be a lot easier above ground where he wouldn’t be trapped in trains and tunnels.
Both of the station’s recently installed escalators were cordoned off, so Knox took the spiral staircase that climbed a shaft next to the station’s old, original lifts up to the ticket hall. It was quiet. Knox knew that once he made it up to street level he’d be exposed as he crossed Trafalgar Square, but only for a minute.
He made it three steps up the exit that led to the south-east corner of the square before a boot slammed into his chest and sent him flying back down. He skidded several feet across the floor, sliding to a halt as the body the boot belonged to reached the bottom of the stairs. It was another man wearing an unseasonably heavy coat. This one was a few inches shorter than the giant who had followed Knox to Embankment. But he was almost as wide as he was tall and, from Knox’s viewpoint on the ground, it looked like it was all muscle.