A Foreign Country (29 page)

‘Have we still got decent visuals?’ Kell asked, moving behind Elsa, in her habitual seat at the table. He looked up at the three screens feeding video surveillance of CUCKOO’s bedroom and bathroom. In the lower right-hand corner, Amelia was taking a roast chicken out of the Aga.

‘You want sound?’ Harold asked.

‘Only if he talks. Has he got a radio on in there? Any music?’

‘Nothing.’

In a silent row, Kell, Elsa and Harold watched CUCKOO, near-hypnotized as he took pairs of folded underpants and balled-up socks from his suitcase, placing them in a wardrobe at the edge of the screen. He hung three shirts on hangers and draped a pair of linen trousers against the back of a chair. A book came out, a framed photograph. Kell took a sip of his drink.

‘Where’s Kevin?’ he asked. ‘Did you get him on the radio?’

Harold’s voice was tight with apology. ‘Yes. Sorry, guv. Amateur hour. He’s parked now in the lay-by but didn’t get there in time to see Giles’s car. Anybody else appears, he’ll flag them down and radio in straight away. I’m sorry it was switched off. I was busy with the live feeds, let it slip …’

Kell put him out of his misery. ‘Forget it.’

Again they turned their attention to the footage from the house, three faces lit up by the flickering feed. Amelia was setting a table for two in the kitchen. CUCKOO had made his way into the bathroom.

‘This is where he gets his kit off,’ Harold said, but the joke fell flat. Kell wondered if he had been drinking to calm his nerves.

‘What’s he carrying?’ he asked.

In his right hand, CUCKOO was holding an open laptop, which he rested on a stool beside the bath. He then locked the door, sat on the closed toilet seat and proceeded to tap in a sequence of letters.

‘Can we see that, can we see what he’s typing?’ Kell asked.

‘It’s being taped,’ Harold replied. He had put a camera in the ceiling light precisely for this purpose. ‘I can go back and look at it later.’

‘Do that,’ Kell replied, though there was an edge of doubt in his voice. Had Harold picked the best angle? It looked as though the lid was obscuring the keyboard. ‘Elsa, can you read the wi-fi?’

‘Bringing it up now,’ she said, and he looked down to see a screen of code on her primary laptop, an analysis of the Internet activity in Amelia’s house. ‘Must be something he wants to hide,’ she said. ‘Why else would he lock himself away?’

CUCKOO spent five further minutes checking email on Wanadoo; Elsa could not be certain what he was reading or writing.

‘It’s encrypted,’ she said. ‘I need the laptop. I need to get into the guts.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Barbara told her, her soft, mellow voice a welcome corrective to the tension in the room.

Kell turned and smiled. He was grateful that Barbara was on the team; she had a dignity and strength of character that obliged people around her to behave as they would in the presence of a grandmother or distinguished matriarch. In a lower screen, Amelia was removing the cork from a bottle of wine.

‘Hang on.’

Harold had seen something. CUCKOO had placed the laptop on the floor and was standing up. From his back pocket he took out a mobile phone and opened the casing. He then reached into the ticket pocket at the front of his jeans and removed what appeared to be a SIM card.

‘Good luck with that,’ Harold muttered as CUCKOO put the SIM into the phone, closed the casing and powered it up. ‘More chance of getting a signal at the bottom of a swimming pool.’

The team looked on as Vincent stared at the phone, waiting for a signal from what Kell assumed was a French network. After two minutes, he switched it off and replaced the SIM in his jeans.

Everybody was thinking the same thing. Kell turned to Barbara.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you need to get your hands on that.’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘All part of the service.’

Kell set an alarm for five o’clock and was downstairs before sunrise. He found Elsa awake in the library wearing a T-shirt and a pair of sleeping shorts, watching the live infra-red feed from the darkened rooms of Amelia’s house. She turned as he walked in and seemed startled to see him.

‘Oh, it’s you. You gave me a fright.’

He stood behind her.

‘Have you been awake all this time?’

The team had watched Amelia and CUCKOO eating dinner: they had listened to their conversation; to Amelia’s flawless impersonation of a loving mother; to CUCKOO’s word-perfect portrayal of François Malot. At midnight, CUCKOO had yawned and gone upstairs to bed, running a bath under Harold’s unforgiving gaze – ‘Bubbles? What kind of a man gets into a bath with
bubbles
?’ – before getting into bed and reading a few pages of the novel that he had removed from his suitcase. Amelia had emailed Kell a report at half-past twelve, confirming that Barbara should appear at the house just after nine o’clock in the morning. Kell had then gone upstairs to bed, where Harold and Barbara were already asleep.

‘Harold woke me at three,’ Elsa said, popping a stick of chewing gum in her mouth. ‘He said nothing had happened. CUCKOO has been asleep since about one.’

Kell looked at the screens. He could hear the low, regular sighs of CUCKOO’s breathing and felt like a doctor watching a patient in intensive care.

‘No sign of Amelia?’ There were no cameras in Amelia’s bedroom or bathroom; Kell had afforded her that privacy.

Elsa shook her head.

‘None.’

But Amelia was the first up. She appeared in the kitchen just after six in a pale silk dressing-gown tied tightly at the waist. She switched on Radio 4, made herself a cup of tea, then returned to her bedroom, away from the gaze of the cameras. Moments later, Harold came down into the library.

‘Day Two in the Big Brother House,’ he intoned in a thick Newcastle accent. ‘Amelia is in the Diary Room.’ He walked over to the table, stood behind Elsa and looked up at the master image from the bedroom. ‘CUCKOO is fast asleep. He has no fooking idea that today he faces eviction.’

Kell laughed. Elsa did not understand the joke.

‘What are you talking about?’ she said.

It was another two hours before CUCKOO woke up, climbed out of bed, walked into the bathroom with a pyjama-tenting erection, stared at himself in the mirror, squeezed a spot beneath his chin and emptied his bladder in the toilet.

‘Here we go,’ said Harold. ‘Elvis is in the bathroom.’

Kell went into the kitchen to find Barbara seated and dressed, a bowl of muesli and yoghurt on the table in front of her.

‘CUCKOO’s awake,’ he told her.

‘Yes. I heard.’

She looked alert and focused, her make-up slightly different, as though she had deliberately put on another face for the part.

‘Amelia wants you there at nine,’ he said. He glanced at his watch. ‘That looks about right. CUCKOO had a bath before he went to bed, so chances are he’ll be downstairs when you come in. How are you feeling?’

He remembered their first meeting in Nice, Barbara’s shy, apologetic smile, the bustle and speed of her mind. A couple of days in the old country, away from Bill, appeared to have rejuvenated her. She was enjoying being back in the game.

‘Oh, I’m looking forward to it,’ she said, and grinned as she met Kell’s eye. ‘Let’s hope we get the bastard. Let’s hope we really
get
him.’

Vincent Cévennes – dressed as François Malot, channelling François Malot,
being
François Malot – was sitting alone in the kitchen of Amelia’s house when a figure appeared at the door, tapping on the glass. For a split second he thought that it was François’ mother coming in from the garden, but soon realized his mistake. The lady looking through the window had a slight arthritic stoop and was several years older than Amelia Levene. She appeared to be in her mid-sixties and from a different social class. She was holding up a set of keys. A cleaning lady, Vincent assumed. And so it proved.

‘Good morning,’ she said, a broad and friendly smile spreading across her face beneath a bloom of white hair. She was wearing a pair of Wellington boots and he presumed that she had walked from the village. ‘You must be François?’

Vincent stood up to shake her hand. ‘Yes,’ he said, feigning an inability to understand English. ‘Who are you, please?’

‘You look a bit startled, love. Bless you. Did Mrs Levene not say I was coming?’

Amelia walked into the kitchen.

‘Ah, I see you’ve met. Barbara, you’re so kind to have come on a Saturday.’

‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ Barbara replied, removing her overcoat and boots and taking them into the utility room. Vincent turned to Amelia.

‘Your housekeeper?’ he asked.

‘My housekeeper.’ Amelia nodded towards the sink. ‘Hence the piles of washing-up. I was too tired to do it last night. She’s marvellous, comes whenever I’m down. My brother employed her when he was living here, knows the place from top to bottom. She’s getting on a bit, but still very fit and absolutely insists that she’s not ready to retire.’

‘And she knows who I am?’

Amelia smiled and shook her head. ‘Of course not.’ She reached out and touched Vincent’s arm. ‘I’ve told her that you’re Giles’s godson, staying for the weekend en route to Cornwall. Is that all right?’

‘Perfect,’ Vincent replied.

Barbara came back into the room. She had changed into a pair of old tennis shoes and was wearing a nylon smock. A ritual of small talk began. Vincent looked on as Amelia filled the kettle and prepared a cup of tea for the cleaning lady, knowing that she liked milk but no sugar. A shortbread biscuit was produced from a tin. Amelia tried her best to involve him in their tedious chit-chat, but Vincent – having insisted that François Malot had never learned to speak English – could not and did not wish to participate. If anything, he found that he was slightly offended by Barbara’s presence, not because it affected the operation, but because Amelia had neglected to mention that a stranger would be joining them in the house. He hoped that she would not be staying long. As Barbara put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and set about the washing-up, Vincent excused himself from the kitchen and went back upstairs to his room. After locking the bathroom door, he switched on his laptop and saw that there were no messages waiting for him on the server. He sent an email to Luc updating him on the housekeeper’s arrival, then shaved with the electric razor that he had set to charge overnight. It was one of the little changes Vincent had made in his morning routine. François, he had decided, preferred the deeper stubble left by an electric razor; Vincent himself had always opted for the greater closeness of a wet shave. He had also changed his aftershave, taken up smoking – Lucky Strike Silver, the same brand as François – and removed a Cévennes family ring from the little finger of his right hand. All of these gestures were small, if vital details that had assisted Vincent in what he liked to call his ‘chameleonic shift’, a phrase that pleased him. Having closed the lid of the computer, he poured a glass of water from the tap and sipped at it as he contemplated the day ahead. Thus far, he could be reassured that the weekend was proceeding as planned. Dinner the night before had been a success; he felt that he had built on the relationship between François and Amelia that they had established in Tunisia. However, his primary objective for the next twenty-four hours, as agreed with Luc, was to lay the groundwork of a possible move to London. This he would do at a convenient opportunity, perhaps at dinner that evening or lunch on Sunday prior to leaving for Paris.

Vincent had only one reservation, which he would necessarily conceal from Luc. The previous night he had set aside a strange and unsettling feeling of desire for Amelia, an anomaly that – in the clear light of a new day – he put down to alcohol and to the solitude of his position. He needed a woman at least once every week – he had come to realize this about himself as a young man at the Academy – and stressful situations often raised in him an inconvenient desire.

Ignore it, he told himself, and went back to the mirror to check his appearance. He brushed his teeth, combed his hair, then walked down to the kitchen.

‘Choices,’ Amelia was saying. Kell could hear her voice coming through the speakers in the Shand library. ‘We could go into Salisbury and see the cathedral, if that would interest you. We could go for a walk. There are lots of lovely pubs in the area if the idea of lunch appeals. What do you feel like doing?’

Amelia was seated opposite CUCKOO in the sitting room, drinking a cup of coffee. In more than twelve hours of interaction, she was yet to put a foot wrong: the loving mother; the consummate hostess. CUCKOO, wearing a different pair of trousers to those in which he had concealed the SIM, was smoking a cigarette, a habit that had raised Barbara to new heights of mischief.

‘Oh, he’s a
smoker
, is he?’ she had said to Amelia, spotting CUCKOO’s packet of Lucky Strike Silver on the kitchen table. Her remarks were well within earshot of CUCKOO, who was pretending not to be able to understand. ‘Well, if a Frenchman wants to kill himself, I’ll not be stopping him. You tell Mr Levene he should have done a better job looking out for his godson’s health.’

In due course, Amelia was able to persuade CUCKOO to join her on what she described as ‘a short walk around the village’. Kell’s preferred option, of a longer lunchtime trip into Salisbury, was rejected.

‘That gives us an hour, at best,’ he told the team. ‘Depends how long Amelia can keep him out there. As soon as they reach the gate behind the house, we go in.’ Kevin Vigors, the surveillance man, had been tasked with following them at a discreet distance; in the event that they turned for home, he was to alert Kell so that the team would have time to evacuate CUCKOO’s room. Amelia was not carrying any kind of communication device with which to contact the team. That was standard SIS tradecraft; if CUCKOO spotted it, the game would be up.

It was another hour before they left the house, time in which Elsa and Harold, who had assembled their technical kit in three small bags, made last-minute checks while Vigors kept an eye on the live feeds. Finally, as the grandfather clock in Amelia’s hall struck half-past eleven, Amelia and CUCKOO emerged from the house wearing matching green Wellington boots and Barbour jackets culled from the utility room.