He moved to the open fire and scrunched up the large middle pages.
The travel section had a picture of a beach in Beirut. He stared at the image of the Bristol Hotel and wondered if twenty-four years in a row was enough for Lundy.
He screwed up the sheet and pressed it into the fireplace. Eventually he came to the last of the paper: the inside of the first and last pages.
Cricket scores on the right, news of a successful Gemini space rocket launch on the left.
He screwed the sheet up without turning it over to look at the front page.
The fire had a bed of old ash, which was perfect for building on. He pushed the scrunched up balls into a base layer.
Finally, he added a few twigs before fishing out a small log from the basket, placing it on top of the pile.
He rummaged in the wood basket for the packet of Swan Vestas matches.
Holding the lighted match against the newspaper, the flames took hold. The paper curled up quickly with the heat, revealing an RAF hat and a pair of eyes looking out at him, before the fire quickly consumed it.
Belkin paused for a moment, before using a stick to push the log further into the centre of the growing fire.
Standing up was an Olympian effort.
He put a hand out to the wall to help his balance, before sitting at the wooden dining table in the centre of the room. After balancing his strongest reading glasses on the end of his nose, he settled down to read of the Lions’ heroics down under.
27
SUNDAY 3RD JULY
“You’re not authorised to contact anyone at West Porton.”
Susie sighed. Roger hadn’t answered this time. Instead, she’d been connected with a more senior desk officer.
“I had to initiate contact. May saw me leave the house. He also turned up at the peace camp, twice. He nearly compromised me.”
“I see. And he was working with Milford?”
“Sort of. They worked on the project together, but May didn’t share his concerns. So we are drawing a bit of a blank at the moment. But the tapes that went to Blackton will hold the answer.”
The man paused. “The Service has someone there who will spot anything out of the ordinary with the mainframe computer. It’s a prized asset and under a great deal of scrutiny. Best keep your distance. They’re twitchy about this one.”
“So I understand.”
“This is your first field case, isn’t it?”
“Second, actually.”
“Well, be careful.”
He hung up.
Susie strolled around a quiet Sunday afternoon Salisbury, going over her training.
Pay attention to anything out of place, however insignificant. Try to picture what’s considered normal, what routines people follow, then investigate anything out of the ordinary.
BACK AT THE B&B, a parcel was waiting for her.
She broke the seal on the pouch and pulled out a set of personnel records.
So, Mark Kilton had an MI5 file. A red flag.
It dated from the BAC TSR-2 project cancellation. They observed Kilton to have had contact with Number Ten through back channels. It was a brief note and nothing came of it.
Susie made her own notes.
Ambitious and prone to step outside protocols?
She read his official service record.
Fighter pilot in the war. Battle of Britain, North Africa, Malta. By D-Day, he was at Bentley Priory.
Early jet test pilot after the war, commanded one of the first squadrons to equip with Meteors. Went through the Empire Test Pilots’ School. Promoted to squadron leader. And then…
Odd. His career faltered at that point. Desk jobs in London. Then, suddenly in 1965, he’s promoted and handed the Royal Air Force Test Flying Unit as its founder commanding officer.
She checked the date on the MI5 note about TSR-2.
So that was his reward.
The personal side of the file was brief. Wife, two children. Son died aged eleven from sepsis, daughter married with a baby somewhere in Hampshire. Wife Margaret died in 1965. Last year.
Still raw?
But nothing else. No debt, no financial impropriety. None of the things she might expect to find in the circumstances.
She lay back on the bed and let the information wash over her, allowing her mind to roam.
A dead child, a dead wife. God knows how many dead pals from the war.
That’s a lot of death to live with.
After completing her coded notes, Susie moved the papers to the floor and lay back on her bed. She closed her eyes and allowed the sounds from the garden to float through her mind.
She spent a few minutes shifting through her immediate thoughts, closing off the day-to-day until she was ready. In the quiet of a first floor room in a semi-detached B&B on the edge of Salisbury, she went through everything that had happened, moment by moment.
Her eyelids glowed yellowy-orange as the diffused sunlight filtered through the net curtains and fell on her face.
The answers lie in the shadows. Something that was said that was not quite right. Someone in a room who shouldn’t have been there.
The ‘recall’ sessions in training had been marred by men giggling. An eccentric former MI6 tutor taught them a technique to pull memories from hidden parts of your brain. Most of the men dismissed it as hokey. But Susie liked the idea of something that could give her answers.
The tutor had described it as a cross between meditation and self-hypnosis, insisting that the subconscious memory held a vast amount of information hidden from conscious thought.
He had urged them to let their minds roam freely.
Don’t force it.
Don’t try to remember anything specific.
Let your mind think for itself.
Susie often practised alone in her tent. She always came away refreshed, even if she hadn’t been searching for anything.
She learned the trick was to follow rather than push. The instructor likened it to picking out the faintest of stars in the night sky by looking just away from them, allowing them to register in peripheral vision.
Thinking about something else, when you were keen to learn more about a particular event, was counterintuitive, but it worked.
She steadied her breathing, becoming conscious of her chest rising and falling.
A van clattered in the distance, trundling over uneven cobbles.
Susie allowed the man-made noise to mix with the birdsong until it drifted beyond her hearing range.
Her mind felt cluttered and busy. She’d learned a lot in eight days.
The newspaper where she’d first read of the crash floated into view. She went forward to conversations with May, then backward to the peace camp visits he’d made.
That look on his face. Desperation? No, something else. Determination. Words, images, sounds, all floated by. She resisted the temptation to concentrate on any one thing, allowing the flow of thoughts to continue unfettered.
After several minutes, she sat up and made two notes.
Number. Who?
Tapes off West Porton. How?
She curled up, this time for a nap.
The image of Rob May’s face was back in her mind.
Frightened and weighed down.
He was pinning much on her ability to help him. But she had so little to go on, and the man who knew everything was dead.
The only thing she could see clearly was the A33 back to London.
28
MONDAY 4TH JULY
“Friday? Is that possible?” Red Brunson asked.
Kilton turned over a piece of paper with a series of boxes. Each one represented a flight, concluding on Friday that week.