Secret Asset

by Stella Rimington

  Stop fantasising, she told herself, relieved she had been wrong, embarrassed that she had thought she had been right. She entered Pimlico Underground Station, virtually deserted in the late morning, and took the escalator down without a single person behind her or on the opposite side, coming up. As she waited for the Victoria Line train to arrive, there were just two other people on the platform—a young black woman sitting on a bench in one of the recesses, and further down, an elderly man leaning on a walking stick.

  At Victoria she switched to the Circle Line, heading for her first appointment. This shouldn’t take long, thought Peggy; it was her second meeting, the meeting in Kilburn, from which she was anticipating some excitement.

  She’d dug further into Patrick Dobson’s extended Irish family, and discovered a lateral branch that had moved to London thirty years before. She wanted to find out if these cousins knew Dobson—he had vociferously denied any contact with the Irish side of his family. Peggy was posing as a sociology student at UCL, writing a dissertation on the Irish in London, a topic she found interesting enough that it shouldn’t be difficult to play the part. As the train stopped at South Kensington, she opened her briefcase and took out the genealogical chart she’d compiled, but then thought she had better check her notes for her first meeting, even if it wasn’t going to last long.

  It should be routine. She was going at Liz’s prompting: Tom Dartmouth’s wife had been seen in London not long before, which was unusual, since the woman was supposed to live in Haifa. “She was probably just visiting,” Liz said, “but please check it out all the same.”

  Peggy didn’t have a lot to go on from the file:

  Margarita Levy, b. 1967 Tel Aviv, d. of Major-General Ariel Levy and Jessica Finegold. Educated at the Tel Aviv Conservatory and the Juilliard School (NY). Member of the Tel Aviv Symphony Orchestra 1991–5. M. Thomas Dartmouth 1995, div. 2001. No children.

  And Margarita had not been easy to locate. At the Haifa address, now inhabited by rehoused settlers from Gaza whose English on the phone she had found difficult to understand, no one knew or cared who had lived there before them. The Tel Aviv Symphony Orchestra initially denied that Margarita had ever played for them, then after conceding she had, could unearth no forwarding address.

  Eventually, a painstaking trawl through online music sites proved more productive. A casual reference in a music student’s blog, a check in the telephone directory, and Peggy found Margarita Levy at last, giving private violin lessons. Though not in Haifa, or anywhere in Israel for that matter.

  The flat was in a Victorian mansion block off Kensington High Street. Opening the door, Margarita Levy smiled shyly at Peggy and shook hands. She was a tall, striking woman, with lush black hair neatly swept back. “Come in,” she said and pointed to the sitting room. “Make yourself comfortable. I will be right with you.” And she disappeared into another room from which came the sound of voices.

  Peggy went in and stood in the middle of the room, close to a fragile-looking Empire chair covered in worn silk. The room was comfortably furnished, with curtains tied back from the casement windows, a well-worn sofa with pale yellow covers and cushions, and chairs covered in faded chintz. Two antique side tables held an array of bibelots and marble eggs, and the walls were hung with small oil paintings, mainly landscapes, and a large portrait over the mantelpiece that looked to be of Margarita as a teenage girl. All in all, Peggy decided, it was the sitting room of a genteel, cultured woman, from a comfortable background, but now with more taste than cash.

  The door to the other room opened and a sulky pigtailed girl of about twelve came out, carrying a violin case. She ignored Peggy, and headed straight for the front door, which she slammed behind her. Margarita came into the sitting room, turned to Peggy and raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know why some of them bother. If you hate the violin that much, it is not possible to play it well.” She had the faintest trace of accent. “I blame the parents. If you force a child, what does it do? It rebels.”

  She was dressed simply but elegantly in a sleeveless black dress and a single-strand necklace of unadorned gold. Peggy noticed that she did not wear a wedding ring. “I’m going to make some tea,” she announced. “Would you like some?”

  “I won’t, thank you very much,” said Peggy. “I don’t need to keep you very long.”

  When Margarita moved into the kitchen next door, Peggy followed her as far as the doorway. The kitchen was tiny; opposite it Peggy could see a small bedroom, next to the room used for giving lessons. That seemed to be the extent of the flat, which went some way to explain to Peggy how a violin teacher could live in Kensington.

  While the kettle boiled, Margarita took out a china cup and saucer. “How long have you been back in England?” asked Peggy.

  “Back?” asked Margarita. She was filling the milk jug. “What do you mean?”

  Peggy racked her brains. Had she made a mistake? She’d read Tom’s file for the umpteenth time before setting off that morning. No, she was certain of what it said. “We had you down as living in Israel. Not London. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I haven’t lived in Israel for over ten years. Not since I married Tom. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea?”

  “Actually,” said Peggy, curious about the discrepancy between Tom’s file and the facts, “I’d love one.”

  Margarita put tea things on a tray and carried it into the sitting room, where Peggy sat down carefully on the Empire chair. Margarita poured the tea, then, sipping from her own cup, she sat back on the sofa and looked at Peggy. She hesitated for a moment. “Tell me something, is Tom all right?”

  “He’s fine, I believe.”

  She looked only slightly reassured. “I was worried when you asked to see me about him. Pakistan is so dangerous these days. I thought perhaps something had happened to him.”

  Peggy realised the woman didn’t know Tom was back in London. It must have been an acrimonious divorce, she thought. “When did you last speak to Tom?”

  Margarita grimaced and shook her head. “Not since he went to Pakistan.” But then she added, “I did see him, at a concert two or three years ago. I assumed he was back on leave. But we didn’t speak. He had someone with him.” She smiled ruefully and shrugged her shoulders. “So I just waved at him during the interval.”

  It wasn’t acrimonious, Peggy now realised. She had come here expecting anything—anger, bitterness, jubilation, or even complete indifference. But not this sense of sad bewilderment.

  “You were married in Israel, were you?” asked Peggy.

  “No. We married over here and I’ve lived here ever since.”

  “That must have been quite a change for you. To leave all your family and friends like that.”

  “Of course,” Margarita said simply.

  “Though at least there was Tom’s family over here.”

  Margarita shook her head. “Not really. His mother died before I even knew Tom. And I only met his stepfather once, when we first came to England. He was perfectly friendly, but Tom didn’t want anything to do with him.”

  “Was Tom close to his natural father?”

  Margarita shook her head again. “He had died too, when Tom was only a boy. His stepfather raised him, and Tom took his name. He resented that, I know—it was at his mother’s insistence. And it’s true to say Tom idolised his own father, though he never knew him as an adult at all.”

  “That’s often the case, isn’t it?” asked Peggy, trying to sound sympathetic. “If a parent dies before a child grows up, they don’t have any objectivity about them.”

  “You mean, they don’t get to see the feet of clay?” Margarita said, looking amused by the English expression.

  “Yes. Though I’m sure Tom’s real father was entirely admirable.”

  “I’m not,” said Margarita dryly, with a hint of acerbity.

  “Oh?” said Peggy neutrally, willing the woman to go on.

  Margarita stirred her tea with her spoon aimlessly
. “You must know he killed himself.”

  “Well, yes,” lied Peggy, trying to stifle her astonishment. “How old was Tom then?”

  “He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Poor thing,” she added. “He didn’t find out until he was almost grown. That much I do know,” she said, as if established facts were thin on the ground when it came to her ex-husband.

  “Why did he kill himself? Was he depressed?” ventured Peggy.

  “He had made a mess of things, so possibly.”

  “Was this in London?” Peggy asked, thinking she should be able to track down the details quickly enough. The real father’s name would be on Tom’s original application form.

  “London? No. He’d gone to New York. He was a journalist there. I can’t remember exactly; I believe he got into trouble writing about Ireland. Tom didn’t talk about it. He only mentioned it once, when we first started seeing each other.”

  At the memory, her melancholy seemed to return. She looked at Peggy. “It is odd, isn’t it,” she said, “how sometimes people talk less, not more as the years pass.” It struck Peggy that she wasn’t expecting an answer. Margarita reached for the teapot. “Another cup?”

  This time, when Peggy said no she didn’t change her mind.

  As she left the flat, she rang the Dobson relations in Kilburn and postponed her visit. She needed to see Liz Carlyle right away. It was one thing to find Tom had misled the Service about his wife’s whereabouts—you could argue Judith Spratt had done the same thing. It was another to find for the first time a possible link between Tom and Liam O’Phelan.

  It’s the American connection, thought Peggy, thinking of the talk the don had given that night at the Old Fire Station. “From Boston to Belfast: Britain’s Dirty War in Northern Ireland and Abroad.”

  She left the mansion block and walked quickly up to Kensington High Street. Turning into the Underground, she was surprised to find the eastbound platform unusually crowded for this hour. A muffled voice over the loudspeaker announced that due to an incident at Paddington Station, Circle Line trains were subject to delay. She saw from the overhead signal board that the next one wasn’t expected for another twelve minutes. She waited impatiently as more and more lunchtime passengers gradually filled the platform.

  At last, the board signalled one minute before the train arrived, and Peggy moved towards the front of the platform, determined to get onto it, since a time for the next train had not even been posted. Gradually working her way through the crowd, she ended up close to the yellow line. Too close, she decided, and tried to take a step back, but the crowd was simply too dense for her to move.

  Thank God the train’s coming, she thought, as the board read NEXT TRAIN APPROACHING. She tried again to step back as she saw its yellow headlight in the tunnel, but there seemed to be no free space behind her. She was blocked from moving sideways by a builder holding a toolbox to her left; on her right, a stout woman stood clutching two MS shopping bags to her chest.

  Suddenly as the train broke out of the tunnel Peggy felt a pressure in the small of her back, nudging at first, then more insistent, and pushing. Her feet started to inch towards the track and she instinctively tried to dig her heels in. “Stop,” she shouted, but the noise of the onrushing carriages drowned the sound. She felt both her feet move again, well over the yellow line, moving irresistibly towards the platform’s edge. Panic seized her, and suddenly she screamed, involuntarily, the noise like the drawn-out pitch of a locomotive’s whistle. Then all went dark.

  The man seemed to be wearing a uniform, and on her face she felt something wet and cold. The blur in her eyes suddenly resolved itself and she saw with snapshot clarity a station attendant in front of her, extending an arm as he dabbed at her cheeks with a wet tissue. She was sitting on a plastic chair in what looked to be a large broom cupboard under the stairs of the Underground station.

  “What happened?” she asked, though she had a fair idea she was still alive. If there were an afterlife, she decided, it would not look like this.

  “You fainted, Miss.” The man stopped dabbing with his tissue. “It was a bit of a crush.” He got up and looked down solicitously at Peggy. “Take some deep breaths.”

  “I don’t remember,” said Peggy, feeling puzzled. Then she recalled the insistent pressure on her back, the propelling firmness that was carrying her steadily towards…

  The stationmaster was saying, “Lucky for you the woman next to you saw you starting to drop. She said she thought you were going to topple over right in front of the train. But she managed to grab you in time—there was a builder bloke who helped her haul you back. The only casualty was a pair of trousers she’d just bought for her husband.”

  “I am sorry,” said Peggy, trying to pull herself together. “Did she leave her name?”

  “No, once I arrived on the scene she took the next train. Said she was late as it was.”

  And Peggy suddenly remembered her own sense of urgency. She stood up, a little wobbly, but the dizziness soon receded. The man looked at her anxiously. “Are you sure you’re fit to travel?”

  “I’m all right now,” she declared, then smiled at the attendant. “I’m very grateful for your help.”

  He stepped out from the room onto the platform and looked at the board. “You’re in luck. The next train’s due in two minutes.”

  “Thank you,” said Peggy, but she was already moving towards the escalator. She’d decided that in the circumstances, she deserved a taxi, but she would certainly not claim it on her expenses. No one except Liz was going to be told how she’d given in to panic.

  45

  Westminster Green, a small patch of grass opposite the Houses of Parliament, is a favourite spot for TV journalists to interview MPs. In rainy weather its microphone and camera positions are protected by umbrellas. Today, in the June sunshine, a small crowd was gathered to watch the BBC’s political correspondent interviewing a member of the Cabinet.

  From where she was sitting on a bench in Victoria Tower Gardens, across the road, Liz could not hear the interview, although she could recognise the two participants, and she guessed that the subject was the counter-terrorist legislation the Government was attempting to get through Parliament, in the face of much opposition. Like most of her colleagues Liz had her own views on the Government’s proposals, but for the most part she chose to keep her own counsel, reflecting that they would make very little change to the nature of her work.

  Liz was waiting for Charles Wetherby. When she had rung to ask to see him urgently, to her surprise he had insisted that they meet outside Thames House. She had made the ten-minute walk to the little park, and was now enjoying the warm afternoon, trying to catch some sun on her face. If she were right about her conclusion, she wouldn’t be seeing much sun or the outside world any time soon.

  When Wetherby joined her on the bench a quarter of an hour later, Liz plunged straight in with a description of Peggy’s interview with Tom Dartmouth’s ex-wife. Then she summarised her recent interviews, setting out their contradictions which she now thought she had resolved. Through a mix of intuition, logic and Peggy’s finds that morning, Liz had come to a conclusion. “Let’s go through it all again slowly,” said Wetherby and Liz knew that he was not doubting her analysis, but was trying to assure himself that her conclusion had not emerged from some misperception or misreading which might mislead him too.

  “You believe O’Phelan was the recruiter for the mole, at the instigation of Sean Keaney. Just explain again why?”

  Liz thought carefully for a moment. “Because,” she said, trying to speak as clearly as she was thinking, “O’Phelan was at Oxford; he held strong nationalist views; and he had a connection to Sean Keaney through this woman Kirsty, who by her own admission befriended O’Phelan at Keaney’s instigation.”

  A man in pinstripes passed by the bench and nodded at Wetherby. Despite the day’s bright sun, he was carrying an umbrella, tightly furled. Wetherby nodded back at him, then smiled at
Liz. “The Treasury. One of Her Majesty’s more old-fashioned servants. All that’s missing is the bowler hat.” He returned to their subject. “Anyway, let’s agree for the moment that O’Phelan was the recruiter. How do we know it wasn’t Michael Binding he recruited?”

  “We don’t for sure, but it seems improbable. There can’t be any question that the two of them fell out: O’Phelan’s original reference could not have been intended to help Binding get into the Service.”

  Wetherby nodded in agreement. “I saw the file. After a letter like that, Binding was fortunate to be accepted.”

  Across the street, the Minister was holding his hand up, calling for another take. Liz continued: “It’s true that their accounts of why they fell out differ: O’Phelan said it was because Binding’s work was second-rate; Binding says it was because he had a row at a party with Kirsty.”

  “And who do you believe?”

  “Binding,” Liz said without hesitation.

  Wetherby gave an ironic smile. He knew Liz’s opinion of her patronising colleague. “Why’s that?” he said, not challengingly, but to try and set out the sequence of argument. Liz thought Wetherby would have made an excellent teacher—he was relentlessly searching for clarity.

  “I don’t believe Binding was a bad student. He had a First from Manchester, and he’d worked too hard to get to Oxford simply to down tools when he was there. In any case Binding’s own story may make O’Phelan look vengeful and malicious, but it doesn’t cast Binding himself in a very good light.”

  “The ‘go back to your peat bog’ remark?” When Liz nodded, Wetherby asked, “If you ruled out Binding as our mole, why did that lead you to Tom?”

  “It didn’t, until he added his own ingredient, which was an account of O’Phelan that didn’t square with what anybody else had told me. Tom claimed O’Phelan was a sexual predator with his male students, yet none of the evidence from Binding and Maguire, or the police investigation into his murder, backs that up. In fact, the student Tom claimed O’Phelan jumped on was the same rugby heavy who, according to Binding, tried to chat up Kirsty at the party in St. Antony’s.”