A Foreign Country (4 page)

In such a context, Amelia’s rise to power made for fascin-ating reading. There had been an astonishing amount of sexism directed towards her, particularly in the early phase of her career. In Egypt, for example, she had been overlooked for promotion on the grounds that she was unlikely to remain in the Service ‘beyond child-bearing years’. The position had gone instead to a celebrated Cairo alcoholic with two marriages behind him and a record of producing CX reports lifted from the pages of
Al-Ahram
. Her fortunes began to shift in Iraq, where she worked under non-official cover as an analyst for a French conglomerate. An Irish passport had kept ‘Ann Wilkes’ in Baghdad for the duration of the first Gulf War, and her access to officials in the Ba’ath party, as well as to prominent figures in the Iraqi military structure, had been lauded both in London and in the United States. Since then, her career had gone from strength to strength: there were postings in Washington and to Kabul, where she had oper-ational control of SIS operations throughout Afghanistan for more than two years following the toppling of the Taliban. In an indication of her ambitions for the Service, she had argued for a more robust British influence in Africa, a stance viewed as prescient by Downing Street in the wake of the Arab Spring, but one that had brought her into conflict with George Truscott, a corporatized bureaucrat with a Cold War mindset who was widely despised by the rank and file within SIS.

Kell closed the notebook. He looked at the child beside him, now sleeping in his mother’s arms, and tried to relish some sense of being back in the game. Yet he felt nothing. For eight months he had been treading water, pretending to himself and to Claire that he had taken a principled stand against the double-think and mendacity of the secret state. It was nonsense, of course; they had turfed him out in disgrace. And when Marquand had come calling, the bagman for Truscott and Haynes, Kell had jumped back aboard like a child at a fairground, relishing the prospect of another ride. He realized that any determination he had felt to prove them wrong, to proclaim his innocence, even to create a new life for himself, had been built on sand. He had nothing but his past to live on, nothing but his skills as a spy.

Somewhere over the southern Alps the cabin lights dimmed like an eye test. The flight was on time. Kell looked out of the starboard window and searched for the glow of Nice. A stewardess strapped herself into a rear-facing seat, checked her face in a compact mirror and flashed him an air-conditioned smile. Kell nodded back, necked two aspirin and the remains of a bottle of water, then sat back as the plane banked over the Mediterranean. The landing earned the captain a round of applause from three drunken Yorkshiremen seated two rows behind him. Kell had no luggage in the hold and had cleared Immigration, on his own passport, by eleven fifteen.

The Knights were in Arrivals. Jimmy Marquand had told him to look out for ‘a British couple in their mid-sixties’, he ‘a denizen of the tanning salon with a dyed moustache’, she ‘a tiny, rather sympathetic bird who’s quick on her feet but permanently in her husband’s shadow’.

The description was near-perfect. Emerging from the customs hall through a set of automatic doors, Kell was confronted by a languid Englishman with a deep suntan, wearing pressed chinos and a button-down cream shirt. A pistachio cashmere jumper was slung over his shoulders and knotted, in the Mediterranean style, across his chest. The moustache was no longer dyed but it looked as though Bill Knight had dedicated at least fifteen minutes of his evening to combing every strand of his thinning white hair. Here was a man who had never quite forgiven himself for growing old.

‘Tom, I assume,’ he said, the voice too loud, the handshake too firm, full lips rolling under his moustache as though life was a wine he was tasting. Kell toyed with the idea of saying: ‘I’d prefer it if you referred to me at all times as Mr Kell,’ but didn’t have the energy to hurt his feelings.

‘And you must be Barbara.’ Behind Knight, lingering in what Claire called ‘the Rain Man position’, was a small lady with half-moon spectacles and a deteriorated posture. Her shy, sliding eye contact managed both to apologize for her husband’s slightly ludicrous demeanour and to establish an immediate professional chemistry that Kell was glad of. Knight, he knew, would do most of the talking, but he would get the most productive information from his wife.

‘We have your car waiting outside,’ she said, as Knight offered to carry his bag. Kell waved away the offer and experienced the unsettling realization that his own mother, had she lived, would now be the same vintage as this diminutive lady with unkempt grey hair, creased clothes and soft, uncomplicated gestures.

‘It’s a luxury saloon,’ said Knight, as if he disapproved of the expense. His voice had a smug, adenoidal quality that had already become irritating. ‘I think you’ll be quite satisfied.’

They walked towards the exit. Kell caught their reflection in a facing window and felt like a wayward son visiting his parents at a retirement complex on the Costa del Sol. It seemed astonishing to him that all that SIS had placed between the disappearance of Amelia Levene and a national scandal were a superannuated spook with a hangover and two borderline geriatric re-treads who hadn’t been in the game since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps Marquand
intended
Kell to fail. Was that the plan? Or had the Knights come equipped with a hidden agenda, a plan to thwart Kell before he had even started?

‘It’s this way,’ said Knight, as a young woman, undernourished as a catwalk model, ran through the automatic doors and launched herself into the arms of a leathery lothario only a few years younger than Knight. Kell heard her say: ‘
Mon cherie!
’ in a Russian accent and noted that she kept her eyes open when she kissed him.

They walked out into the humid French evening across a broad concrete apron that connected the terminal building to a three-storey car park a hundred metres to the east. The airport was gradually shutting down, buses nestled side by side beneath a blackened underpass, one of the drivers asleep at the wheel. A line of late arrivals were queuing for a connection to Monaco, all of them noticeably more chic and composed than the pint-swilling hordes Kell had witnessed at Heathrow airport. Knight paid for the car park, carefully folded the receipt into his wallet for expenses, and led him towards a black Citroën C6 on the upper level.

‘The documents you requested arrived an hour ago and are in an envelope on the passenger seat,’ he said. Kell assumed he was talking about the Uniacke legend, which Marquand had sent ahead by courier so that Kell would not have to carry a false passport through French customs. ‘Be warned,’ Knight continued, tapping his fingers on the back window, as though there was somebody hiding inside. ‘It’s a diesel. I can’t tell you how many friends of ours come out here, rent a car from Hertz or Avis and then ruin their time in France by putting unleaded …’

Barbara put a stop to this.

‘Bill, I’m quite sure Mr Kell is capable of filling up a car at a petrol station.’ In the jaundiced light, it was difficult to see if her husband blushed. Kell remembered a line from Knight’s file, which he had flicked through en route to the airport. ‘Abhors a conversational vacuum. Tendency to talk when he might be wiser keeping his counsel.’

‘That’s OK,’ Kell said. ‘Easy mistake to make.’

The Knights’ vehicle, parked alongside the C6, was a right-hand-drive Mercedes with twenty-year-old British plates and a dent on the front-right panel.

‘An old and somewhat battered Merc,’ Knight explained unnecessarily, as though he was used to the car attracting strange looks. ‘But it does us very well. Once a year Barbara and I are obliged to drive back across the Channel to have an MOT and to update the insurance paperwork, but it’s worth it …’

Kell had heard enough. He slung his bag in the back seat of the Citroën and got down to business.

‘Let’s talk about Amelia Levene,’ he said. The car park was deserted, the ambient noise of occasional planes and passing traffic smothering their conversation. Knight, who had been cut-off mid-sentence, looked suitably attentive. ‘According to London, Mrs Levene went missing several days ago. Did you speak to her during the time she attended the painting course?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Knight, as if Kell was questioning their integrity. ‘Of course.’

‘What can you tell me about Amelia’s mood, her behaviour?’

Barbara made to reply, but Knight interrupted her.

‘Completely normal. Very friendly and enthusiastic. Introduced herself as a retired schoolteacher, widowed. Very little to report at all.’

Kell remembered another line from the Knight file: ‘Not always prepared to go the extra mile. A feeling has developed among colleagues over the years that Bill Knight prefers the quiet life to getting his hands dirty.’

Barbara duly filled in the blanks.

‘Well,’ she said, sensing that Kell wasn’t satisfied by her husband’s answer, ‘Bill and I have disagreed about this. I thought that she looked a little distracted. Didn’t do an awful lot of painting, which seemed odd, given that she was there to learn. Also checked her phone rather a lot for text messages.’ She glanced at Kell and produced a tiny, satisfied smile, like someone who has solved a taxing crossword clue. ‘That struck me as particularly strange. You see, people of her vintage aren’t exactly glued to mobiles in the way that the younger generation are. Wouldn’t you say, Mr Kell?’

‘Call me Tom,’ Kell said. ‘What about friends, acquaintances? Did you see her with anybody? When London asked you to keep an eye on Mrs Levene, did you follow her into Nice? Did she go anywhere in the evenings?’

‘That’s an awful lot of questions all at once,’ said Knight, looking pleased with himself.

‘Answer them one at a time,’ Kell said, and felt an operational adrenalin at last beginning to kick in. There was a sudden gust of wind and Knight did something compensatory with his hair.

‘Well, Barbara and myself aren’t aware that Mrs Levene went anywhere in particular. On Thursday evening, for example, she ate dinner alone at a restaurant on Rue Masséna. I followed her back to her hotel, sat in the Mercedes until midnight, but didn’t see her leave.’

Kell met Knight’s eye. ‘You didn’t think to take a room at the hotel?’

A pause, an awkward back-and-forth glance between husband and wife.

‘What you have to understand, Tom, is that we haven’t had a great deal of time to react to all this.’ Knight, perhaps unconsciously, had taken a step backwards. ‘London asked us simply to sign up for the course, to keep an eye on Mrs Levene, to report anything mysterious. That was all.’

Barbara took over the reins. She was plainly worried that they were giving Kell a poor impression of their abilities.

‘It didn’t sound as though London
expected
anything to happen,’ she explained. ‘It was almost pitched as though they were asking us to
look out
for her. And it’s only been – what? – two or three days since we reported Mrs Levene missing.’

‘And you’re convinced that she’s not in Nice, that she’s not simply staying with a friend?’

‘Oh, we’re not convinced of
anything
,’ Knight replied, which was the most convincing thing he had said since Kell had cleared customs. ‘We did as we were told. Mrs Levene didn’t show her face at the course, we rang it in. Mr Marquand must have smelled a rat and sent for reinforcements.’

Reinforcements
. It occurred to Kell that exactly twenty-four hours earlier he was drinking in a crowded bar on Dean Street, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a forty-year-old university friend whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years.

‘London are concerned that there’s been no movement on Amelia’s credit cards,’ he said, ‘no response from her mobile.’

‘Do you think she’s …
defected
?’ Knight asked, and Kell suppressed a smile. Where to? Moscow? Beijing? Amelia would sooner live in Albania.

‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘Chiefs of the Service are too high profile. The political repercussions would be seismic. But never say never.’

‘Never say never,’ Barbara muttered.

‘What about her room? Has anybody searched it?’

Knight looked at his shoes. Barbara adjusted her half-moon spectacles. Kell realized why they had never progressed beyond Ops Support in Nairobi.

‘We weren’t under instructions to conduct any kind of search,’ Knight replied.

‘And the people running the painting course? Have you talked to them?’

Knight shook his head, still staring at his shoes like a scolded schoolboy. Kell decided to put them out of their misery.

‘OK, tell you what,’ he said, ‘how far is the Hotel Gillespie?’

Barbara looked worried. ‘It’s on Boulevard Dubouchage. About twenty minutes away.’

‘I’m going to go. You’ve booked a room for me under “Stephen Uniacke”, is that right?’

Knight perked up. ‘That is correct. But wouldn’t you like something to eat? Barbara and I thought that we could take you into Nice, to a little place we both enjoy near the port. It stays open well past …’

‘Later,’ Kell replied. There had been a Cajun wrap at Heathrow, a can of Coke to wash it down. That would see him through until morning. ‘But I need you to do something for me.’

‘Of course,’ Barbara replied.

Kell could see how much she wanted to prolong her return to the spotlight and knew that she might still prove useful to him.

‘Call the Gillespie. Tell them you’ve just landed and need a room. Go to the hotel, but wait outside and make sure you speak to me before you check in.’

Knight looked nonplussed.

‘Is that OK?’ Kell asked him pointedly. If Kell was being paid a thousand a day, chances were that the Knights were on at least half that. In final analysis, they were obliged to do whatever he told them. ‘I’ll need to gain access to the hotel’s computer system. I want all the details from Amelia’s room, arrival and departure times, Internet use and so on. In order to do that, I’ll have to distract whoever works the night shift, get them away from the desk for five or ten minutes. You could be very useful in that context – ordering room service, complaining about a broken tap, pulling an emergency cord in the bathroom. Understood?’