Uncommon Enemy (4 page)

‘Do you recognise any of these words or figures as yours?’ asked Corduroy eventually.

‘As I said, they’re familiar, but I don’t remember whether or not I said them. Either way, they don’t amount to much.’ Certainly not enough to have someone
arrested, he thought. There was a pause.

‘You appreciate we have to follow things up in the current climate, with all these Whitehall leaks,’ said Freckles. ‘Especially as they quote the SIA assessments, Cabinet
Office papers, that sort of thing. Lot of pressure on us at the moment.’

Charles nodded. Whatever his feelings, it was important to appear sympathetic. ‘You have to do what you’re asked.’

Freckles produced more photocopies. ‘This sort of thing, you see. Have a look through.’

They were more cuttings from David’s paper under the James Wytham byline, going back nine or ten months. The earlier ones quoted mainly from Cabinet Office papers, the later from SIA
threat assessments. Some passages were marked in red. There were no quotes from raw intelligence reports, but there were extracts from what were described as intelligence assessments prepared for
ministers. Although he hadn’t seen the original assessments – they dated mostly from before his return – Charles could see they were genuine. The phrasing was typical, the
judgements plausible. The source must be a serial leaker, and a clever one, because what was leaked was not seriously damaging. The extracts were chosen with care. Whoever had done it had made sure
it was the fact of the leaks rather than their content that was dangerous. They discredited the SIA without revealing its secrets.

‘You’ve got your hands full,’ Charles said.

‘Do you recognise any of the documents on which these articles are based?’

‘Not as far as I know.’ He flicked through the cuttings again. ‘No, I don’t recognise them.’

‘Could you have seen them if you wanted? Do you have access to them?’

‘Probably. I guess they’re on screen. But the only documents I’ve read since starting with the SIA are old MI6 ones, paper files related to Gladiator. Plus some more recent
emails.’

There was another pause. He resumed reading, again taking his time. Trying not to make it obvious, he lingered over a short unmarked paragraph near the end of one article. It quoted the CIA as
saying they had no assets in core AQ. He read and re-read it. He knew where it must have come from, where it could only have come from, and it made up his mind for him. No longer would he wait for
his innocence to be accepted in the absence of evidence to the contrary. He would engage; he would take the battle to the enemy, certain now that there was one.

He handed back the papers. ‘I think I would like legal representation after all.’

T
hey switched off the recorder and Freckles left to fetch the list of legal aid lawyers. He also returned with the name of a partner in a City firm
recommended by the SIA.

‘He’s the one they use in cases like yours, the one I mentioned earlier,’ he said. ‘He’s specially cleared and briefed to represent you, not them; but they pay for
him.’

‘Are there many cases like mine?’

Freckles shook his head and smiled.

Charles asked them instead to look up the number of another City firm. ‘I think I know someone there,’ he said. ‘I’ll try her first.’

He had to make his call from the phone on the wall in reception. It was busier and noisier now, with more prisoners being processed. A policeman leading a young man by the arm brushed his
shoulder as he asked the firm’s switchboard for her, giving both her maiden and married names. ‘We don’t have a Sarah Measures,’ said the soft-spoken switchboard girl,
‘but we do have the other one, Sarah Bourne.’

‘That’s the one. They’re the same person.’

A prisoner started shouting and a woman sitting alone on the bench began to weep. Doors banged, voices were raised, more people came and went but no-one paid the woman any attention. Charles put
his hand over one ear.

‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ said the girl.

‘Sarah Bourne – that’s the one.’

‘Sorry, could you speak up, please?’

He repeated it twice more, then had to do the same with his own name. The prisoner who was shouting was the pale young man he had seen brought in that morning. Still handcuffed, he was
undergoing more processing and tried to kick one of the officers holding him. A policeman shouted at him to pack it in, and he shut up. The silence that followed was broken only by the woman
snuffling, until Charles was put through.

‘Charles?’

She had always had a slight catch in her voice when she began to speak on the phone. It was so intimately reminiscent that it was a moment before he replied.

‘Yes, I’m here. It’s me. Sorry to surprise you.’

‘That’s all right. No need to be.’

‘I was wondering if I could use your professional services.’ He explained as briefly as he could. The woman stopped snuffling and listened. He wished the pale young prisoner would
resume his protests.

When he finished she said: ‘I’d no idea you were in the SIA. Nigel hasn’t mentioned it. Does he know?’

‘Yes. Can you come?’

‘Of course, of course I’ll come.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t do criminal work any more, so I’ll have to clear my lines here with the people who do. But I will
come, Charles, I promise. As soon as I can.’

Back in his cell, sitting on the green plastic mattress with
Jane Eyre
again open and unread before him, he was filled with the sense of approaching completion, of a circle about to be
made whole. It seemed irresponsible to be pleased with this fusion of the public and private, but it felt like a summation.

Decades before, when they were undergraduates together, Sarah had said: ‘I know what you should do, you should join MI6. You should be a spy.’

He was kneeling before the gas fire in his room, trying to toast a slice of bread on the end of his father’s old army jack-knife and changing hands because of the heat.
‘Why?’

‘You’d enjoy it. It would be fun, all that subterfuge, secret inks and following people. You don’t want a proper job. You don’t want to work. You want fun.’

‘I have fun. I have you.’

She knelt and put her arms round him, causing the bread to drop off the knife. ‘I’m not your bit of fun, Charles Thoroughgood. I’m much more serious than that. You may not
realise it, but you’ve got me for life.’

She proved prescient, though not in the way either might have thought. By the time they’d left Oxford they were already estranged and he had joined the army, not MI6. The army offered a
decisive break, a dramatic gesture, albeit one addressed more to himself than to her, because she was no longer around to witness it. It was on leaving the army that he found he knew someone who
knew someone and was offered an introduction to MI6. He remembered her words when he accepted; but by then she had married Nigel Measures, and he thought he would never see her again.

He and Nigel had lived on different staircases in the same college. Their subjects overlapped and they’d shared tutorials for two or three terms. Nigel was short and assertive, with black
hair, restless dark eyes, a quick intelligence and a fondness for innuendo. He invented apt, sometimes cruel, nicknames for people. He and Charles had never been close but there was sufficient
mutual respect and wariness for each to take care to get on with the other. Only once had they approached hostility and only once greater intimacy, both occasioned by Sarah.

It was true that Nigel had met her first but Charles had got to know her himself, without knowing that. A collision in the door of the Pusey Library while she struggled with books and folders
led to apologies, embarrassed smiles and the explosion of an enormous Yes. Charles made frequent needless visits to the library, which in turn had led to further sightings, brief acknowledgements
and then, at the second time of asking, a morning coffee in George Street, when the five minutes she said she had became fifty, and later – made possible only by Charles’s having a car
– dinner in the Studley Priory hotel outside Oxford. Then all that followed.

One day, in the early weeks of the affair, he’d suggested tea in his room. She hesitated. ‘D’you mind coming to mine again?’

‘Okay.’

‘It’s just that – to be honest, I’m uneasy in your college because there’s someone there who’s been pursuing me. It’s embarrassing, because I
haven’t told him about you, and every day I don’t it becomes more difficult. It’s stupid of me, I know. I’ll have to find a way.’

‘Who?’

She told him, explaining that she had met Nigel at a birthday breakfast party, punting on the Cherwell. She had found him charming, saw that people were a little in awe of him and was flattered
by his attention. But the aggression of his pursuit had put her off, conducted as it was in public without regard for how she might feel in front of others. By the time she’d begun to see
Charles, Nigel’s invitations – usually notes he dropped in her pigeonhole or delivered by college messengers – were arriving daily. She accepted some of the more neutral and
social ones, avoiding the personal, but his campaign intensified. Now he had invited her to the Merton ball.

‘I’ve got to tell him, I must. I can’t let him take me without him knowing. But it’ll be awful, because it’ll be perfectly obvious I should’ve told him before
but chickened out.’

‘Can’t you just say no?’

‘Of course I could, but it’s difficult without a reason. And I don’t want to lie. Anyway, I’d love to go to a ball.’

‘Tell him you can’t because you’re going with me.’

‘Am I?’

‘Looks like it.’

Neither he nor Nigel mentioned it and their relationship continued outwardly as before. The frequency and urgency of Nigel’s invitations to Sarah diminished but he still asked her to
social events, and sometimes she went. She was always in demand but Charles didn’t mind. It flattered him that other men were keen to show off the woman who filled his waking moments. Nor did
he doubt her; the at first barely credible fact that he really was preferred to all others made him more generous than jealous. In retrospect it seemed a golden age, a time with no beginning and no
end; but the reality had been no more than a few weeks.

Early one morning, after a forbidden night spent in her all-female college, Charles left as usual over the garden wall before anyone was about and walked across the university parks back to
breakfast in his own college. He loved those cool summer mornings after hot near-sleepless nights and this time detoured into the fields on the other side of the Cherwell. Returning, he saw Nigel
standing on the high arched bridge, elbows on the railings, looking down into the slow water. He must have been aware that someone was approaching but did not look up. His dark eyes seemed more
bulbous than usual and his expression was remote and self-absorbed. He would have made no acknowledgement if Charles had not stopped.

‘Don’t do it, it’s not worth it,’ Charles said, regretting it immediately.

Nigel straightened and turned. ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he said quietly. ‘Where – you’ve been—’

Charles nodded. Neither of them wanted it said. ‘How about some breakfast?’

‘No, thanks.’

Detachment, remoteness and introspection were uncommon in Nigel. He normally seemed fully engaged, whatever he was doing. He clearly wanted to be alone now but Charles didn’t know how to
leave. It felt too abrupt to walk on without saying more, but he wasn’t sure what note to strike.

‘I really love her, you know,’ said Nigel, suddenly. ‘I hope you do.’

‘I do.’ Charles walked on, wondering why he had never told her.

Although neither he nor Nigel ever referred to the encounter, they began to see more of each other and became friendlier, though still without quite being friends. Nigel lingered to talk after
the tutorials they shared, sometimes sat on the bench next to Charles at meals in hall; Charles reciprocated in the JCR bar or in the White Horse, the narrow pub on Broad Street. There was no
awkwardness; Nigel was a stimulating companion who normally made no demands on his audience other than that they should share his humour, which was sharp and playful. He neither offered nor sought
intimacy. They never discussed Sarah, but Charles would mention her in passing, trying to show that she wasn’t an issue between them. In fact, just hearing himself say her name was a constant
and secret pleasure.

Once, Nigel came to his room late at night, grinning, his eyes shining. ‘Sorry, bloody rude of me, bloody late. I’m a bit pissed, boozing in the JCR since dinner. Got an essay
crisis, too. Have to be up all night; but got to sober up first. Couldn’t give me a coffee, could you?’

He sat heavily in Charles’s armchair, an ancient sliding wooden structure that creaked loudly. ‘Hume and causation. Or Hume and something. You’ve done that one, haven’t
you?’

‘I’ve written it. Haven’t had my tutorial yet.’ The essay was on his desk. ‘Here.’

Nigel took it. ‘They want me to run for president of the JCR. Nicholson, Richards and the others. They hate the thought of Miles getting it.’

‘Do you want to?’

‘Don’t know.’ He watched Charles plug in the kettle and spoon the instant coffee. ‘Surprised you don’t make real coffee. You seem the sort of person who
would.’

‘Do I? Perhaps I should then. But it takes longer.’

‘Thing is, Miles is such an egregious shit. One of those people whose face is always in front of you, you can’t get away from him. There’ll be even more of him if he’s
running the JCR.’

‘Do it, then. I’ll vote for you.’

‘But is it really me, Charles?’

‘I don’t know. Never seen you look so solemn about anything.’ Except for that morning by the Cherwell, he thought.

‘I mean, this could be the start of my political career. It’s truly a life-changing decision. Don’t you think?’

‘I’d never thought of the JCR like that.’

‘It is, though. It’s a question of whether to enter the public arena, to wield the broadsword, or whether to exercise power from behind the scenes, as I imagine you would.’