‘I think I will have a bath first, if you don’t mind, dear.’
‘Of course.’ He gave her a familiar shy smile, quick like a wingbeat, and kissed her forehead. ‘I will wait up with some tea.’
‘Yes, dear. Tea would be lovely.’
He stood watching as she went up the stairs to the master bathroom. She closed the door behind her and sat down, back against the door, and let the tears come.
* * *
Later, she awoke in their bed, shaking. The warmth of the tea and the bath had faded. Chills of bone-deep exhaustion ran down her spine, but she could not get back to sleep. She looked at Joe next to her and wanted to embrace him again, bury the image of Kulagin’s face in his broad back.
Instead, she sat up and hugged her knees. She did not want to wake him. He had trouble sleeping. At night, the soul-fragments he carried from the war spilled out and made cold spots in the bedroom. When it got really bad, tendrils of ectoplasm sneaked out from his mouth and nose like the roots of a dead white plant. He was calm now, for once, asleep on his belly in a half-crawl, clutching his pillow.
Besides, holding him too tight would feel like grinding the ends of a fractured bone together, wrong and cruel, and she was not ready for that, not yet.
She sneaked out of the bed, wrapped herself in a dressing gown and went into the hallway. The house was quiet. It was four in the morning. She stopped at the door of the empty nursery and thought of Kulagin’s wild children. Then she went into her study, sat down in front of the electric typewriter and started writing her report.
* * *
‘And exactly why was it, Major, that you felt the need to leave the room at that juncture?’
Brigadier Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker, Director of Section B of the SIS—Counter-subversion—leaned over his desk and pushed his tanned, angular face forward until it looked like he was about to launch himself at Major Allen’s throat. It was five thirty in the afternoon, and both Rachel and Allen had been summoned to the director’s office for a debriefing.
‘Well, the thing is, sir, Mrs White was, uh…’
Allen squirmed. He was holding the sweat-blotted remains of his report in his thick-fingered hands like a talisman. Rachel sat quietly next to him, glad that Harker’s fierce scowl—accentuated by the brigadier’s coal-black eyebrows—was not directed at her for the time being.
‘Come on, man, spit it out!’
‘Well, sir, she asked me to leave. And she was not entirely decent when I reluctantly complied.’
‘Bloody hell, White! The Soviets may resort to honeytrap tricks, but we have to stick to fair play or we are no better than they are. What did you think you were doing?’
Rachel cleared her throat and flinched. It still hurt to talk, and she was wearing a scarf to hide the bruises.
‘Sir, the major’s version of events is—’
‘White, I do not care whose version is correct.’ The brigadier sat down heavily. ‘The fact is that Kulagin played us for fools. Look around you, both of you. What do you see? Where are we?’
Harker waved at the rough, whitewashed walls of his tiny office. The single small window high up on one wall showed a dismal glimpse of the Wormwood Scrubs green, gently furred by frost. A rusty electric heater in a corner struggled to keep the room at Harker’s preferred Bombay temperature.
Rachel and Allen glanced at each other and stayed silent.
‘Exactly! The bloody Spooks get Blenheim Palace and crystal castles in Summerland, but where does Her Majesty’s real Secret Intelligence Service end up? In a prison. Miraculously, we get a chance—one chance!—to catch the Spooks with their spectral pants down, and what happens? One of you lets our source fight a duel and the other, the other—’ Harker’s face was red as his fury almost choked him. ‘The other first saves him and then lets him blow his brains out! And gets her picture taken for the blasted Sunday paper.’
The brigadier slammed his palm on an open page of The Times on his desk. It showed a blurry photograph of the scene in the Langham, a surprised-looking Kulagin with Rachel’s arms wrapped around him. Thankfully, her face was not visible.
‘The last time I checked, we still had the word “Secret” in our job description, for God’s sake.’
Harker took a deep breath. ‘You are dismissed. But make no mistake, we are not done. I will confer with Vivian and the deputy chief regarding the ultimate fate of Mr Kulagin. If I can use your hides to patch the holes in this sinking ship, I will. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Allen said. The major slunk out of the room, head bowed, the tattered remains of his report in one hand, trying to make his hulking form as small as possible. Rachel waited until he closed the door behind him.
‘What is it, White?’
Rachel could barely get a whisper out.
‘There is one item I … omitted from my report, sir. For your ears only.’
‘And what would that be?’
‘Mr Kulagin did volunteer some information, sir. The identity of a mole within the SIS. Code name FELIX. In the Summer Court.’
Harker blinked. ‘Well, well, well. Now that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?’ he said.
‘I thought so, sir.’
‘Perhaps God is not a Communist after all. So who is this FELIX, then?’
‘Peter Bloom.’
The brigadier raised his eyebrows in a furry wave of astonishment. Then his eyes brightened.
‘I see what is happening here, White. I see what is happening. I should have seen it from the start.’ He paused and massaged his forehead.
Rachel seized the opening. ‘Sir, it is my recommendation that we act upon this information with all possible speed and inform Noel Symonds’s Section in the Summer Court. With respect, sir, it might go down better if it came from Deputy Director Liddell.’
Harker clicked his tongue. ‘No. Absolutely not.’
‘Sir, I know how strongly you feel about us making the collar here, but the Russians are not stupid—they will assume that Kulagin has told us everything he knows. They might extract Bloom, dismantle his network. And as Bloom’s in the Summer City, sir, surely the Summer Court is better placed to—’
The brigadier held up a hand. ‘White, you have been here longer than I have, yes?’
Rachel nodded. Yes, and you are on that side of the desk only because you went to Eton with Sir Stewart and are able to pee standing up, she thought to herself, keeping her face neutral.
‘Joined in nineteen seventeen, sir, just before the war ended.’
‘All that experience and you still don’t see it, do you? Well, let me break it down for you.’ He held up a finger. ‘A rambunctious Russian turns up, causes all manner of trouble, claims he wants to defect, but clams up when senior officers are present. Why?’
Rachel stared at Harker blankly.
The brigadier continued, ‘Because he thinks he has a better chance of fooling the female officer assigned to interview him, of course! He pretends to open up, makes her feel special, then gifts her with information, claiming that there is a mole in a sister Service. He gives her a sound trashing just to make sure he looks serious. And finally, he blows his brains out, so we can’t question him further.
‘We take his “information” at face value, make complete fools of ourselves in front of the Spooks, and while we squabble, the Russians have a field day with those bloody Luddites and other idiots who think the dead are taking their jobs. How does that sound to you, White?’
Like the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life, Rachel thought. The rage flowed into her, icy and potent like vodka. It filled her to the brim until it felt like any motion or word could disrupt its delicate surface tension and spill it out, all at once.