by Jon Stock
26
Daniel Marchant pushed open the blue door, not sure what to expect. There had been no chowkidar on the front gate, and he knew the house was deserted, but for some reason he hoped that Chandar, the family cook, would be in his little outhouse, on his charpoy, sleeping off the Bagpiper whisky of the night before. It was an absurd thought, he knew. He had last seen Chandar twenty years ago, all four foot nine of him, standing proudly in his baggy High Commission chef whites as he oversaw his Nepali cousins serving chicken curry to his father and mother for their sad, farewell dinner.
The small room was hot and empty. He had forgotten how stifling Delhi could be in May, or perhaps he hadn’t noticed the heat when he was last here, as an eight-year-old child. A bare wire dangled from the ceiling, where once a lightbulb had hung. Apart from that, there was no evidence that anyone, let alone Chandar, had ever called the place home.
The other three staff rooms were similarly empty. Together they formed a single block, set apart from the main house. He struggled to recall who had lived in them all: the mali, he thought, or perhaps the ayah’s smiling brother, who sat behind a humming sewing machine all day in the searing heat. Chandar’s room was the only one he and Sebastian used to enter as children. In the afternoons, when the twins were meant to be sleeping, they would slip past the dozing ayah and help Chandar roll the chapattis he made for his own late lunch. He could still hear the hiss of the blue flame, feel the comfort of the chapattis, folded like warm blankets. Chandar’s wife sometimes came down from Nepal to stay in the tiny room too. The brothers’ visits were never the same when she was around: she scolded Chandar for feeding the sahib’s sons with cheap flour, and pinched their cheeks too hard.
Marchant walked over to the main house and peered in through a window which, like all the others on the ground floor, was protected with ornate metal bars. He remembered the cold marble hall floor, big and smooth enough for him, Sebastian and Chandar to play cricket on, although it was shiny when he lived here, not black and soiled as it was now. How long the house had stood empty he wasn’t sure. The padlock and chain on the front door suggested it must have been for years.
Behind him was the swimming pool. Its bottom was caked with several seasons of big leaves, rotting in a few inches of brackish water. The tiles, once blue and pristine, were chipped or missing, leaving a patchwork of decay. Marchant tried to force the thought away, but an image of Sebastian came into his mind, staring up at him from the bottom of the pool.
As he turned back towards the gate, he became aware of someone watching him, a figure beneath the neem tree on the far side of the lawn, where the generator used to belch out its black smoke. He walked across the brown, untended grass, reaching the trees just in time to see a young boy climb over the wall and drop down into the neighbouring garden.
‘Hey, wait,’ Marchant called, struggling to recall the correct Hindi. ‘Suno, Kya Chandar abhi bhi yahan rahta hai?’ Does Chandar live here any more?
The name ‘Chandar’ seemed to have an effect, even if his Hindi didn’t. The boy’s black hair reappeared above the brick wall a few moments later.
‘Chandar Bahadur?’ he asked tentatively, still partly concealed behind the wall.
‘Tikke,’ Marchant said, smiling. The boy’s whole face had now appeared, and Marchant knew from the glint in his eyes that he was looking at Chandar’s son.
Ten minutes later, Marchant was sitting in the cramped staff quarters of the neighbour’s house, eating chapattis and dhal with Chandar, his wife, who remained standing, covering her head with a scarf, and their only child, Bhim. Chandar’s hair was still jet-black, but there was a tiredness around his eyes that betrayed the passing of twenty years. His English was still terrible (he said the same about Marchant’s Hindi), but the chapattis were as good as ever, and they were soon reminiscing about the baby cobra Chandar had once caught in the compost heap, the rides around the lawn on the handlebars of his ancient Hero bicycle, and the Christmas when he drank too much Bagpiper and forgot to cook the turkey.
Marchant asked about his old family house next door, once one of the grandest in Chattapur, a village seven miles south of New Delhi. His mother had insisted on living off the high commission compound because of the traffic pollution in the centre of the city, even though it had meant a hazardous daily commute for his father in an Ambassador. He knew, too, that his mother would never have made that fateful drive from Chanakyapuri if they had been living in the compound like everyone else.
According to Bhim, who translated his father’s words into near-perfect English, the house had stood empty for a year after the Marchants left, then the landlord’s only son, an IT graduate, had returned from California and moved in with another man. The landlord, a retired army colonel, discovered his prodigal son was gay, chucked him and his boyfriend out, and had let the house stand empty ever since as a symbol of his family’s shame. A smile crept onto the boy’s face when he relayed the last detail. Chandar had moved around Chattapur, cooking his famous chicken curry for various expats, and was now working for a young Dutch family who, by chance, had moved into the house next door.
‘But my father says he will always remember working for Marchant Sahib,’ Bhim said. There was a pause in the conversation as Marchant looked around the tiny room, listening to the clatter of the water cooler by the window, the Bollywood film music coming from the oversized radio-tape recorder in the corner. ‘Is sir still alive?’ Bhim asked, with a sensitivity that suggested he already knew the answer.
‘No, he’s not,’ Marchant said. ‘He died two months ago.’
There was no need for Bhim to translate. Chandar bowed his head for a few moments, staring at the dusty concrete floor, and then started talking animatedly to his wife, who went over to the charpoy and pulled out a metal trunk from underneath it. Marchant watched as she opened the trunk lid and rummaged around inside. A moment later, she handed Chandar a handwritten letter, which he looked at for a token moment, as if reading it, and then passed to his son.
‘My father received a letter from Ramachandran Nair, your father’s driver. He used to live here. Now he is back in Kerala, his home place.’
Marchant remembered the driver’s name – they used to call him Raman – but he couldn’t picture his face. Bhim started reading the letter, his father barking incongruously fierce instructions at him in a way that Marchant suddenly recalled. His memories of Chandar were faint, but he could still remember that sense of contrast: one moment the subservient cook in the company of his father and guests, the next bossing everyone around in the kitchen, where Chandar was king.
‘Ramachandran says your father visited him last year, in the monsoon,’ Bhim said, his eyes scanning down the letter. Marchant felt an imperceptible drying of his mouth. Suddenly there was a new connection between this place he was in and the past of twenty years ago, like the ignition sparking in his father’s old Lagonda.
‘Does he say why my father was there?’ Marchant asked.
There was another pause as Bhim carried on reading.
‘He says he was worried about Marchant Sahib. He looked very tired. He didn’t eat his wife’s curry. “I asked him why he had come to Kerala”’ – Bhim was translating directly from the letter now – ‘“and he told me he had come on family business.”’
Marchant smiled to himself. His father would never have disclosed what he was doing, of course, even to his faithful old driver. He had heard the words ‘family business’ more than once in his childhood, an expression that his father’s generation had used whenever they were referring to state secrets.
27
‘It was a precaution, Marcus, nothing more,’ Sir David Chadwick said, watching Fielding carefully as he poured them both a gin. ‘She was never working for them as such. Ultimately she answered to you, to us.’
Fielding remained silent, looking out through French windows at a posse of female statues in the garden. There were three of them, their crude curves lit up by spotlights sunk around an orna
mental pond. Chislehurst seemed to be full of naked garden statues, Fielding thought, at least on the private road where Chadwick lived. Statues and speed bumps and video-linked doorbells. Even Fielding’s driver, parked outside in his official Range Rover, had been taken aback by the ostentation.
‘The Americans insisted on it,’ Chadwick continued, filling the silence. Fielding made him nervous when he was in this sort of mood, his reticence impossible to read. ‘Unfortunately, we weren’t in a very strong position to argue. You know as well as I do how things were. We were in turmoil. No leads on the bombing campaign, the Chief of MI6 under suspicion.’
Fielding still said nothing as he turned to take his drink. He had asked to meet outside London, and Chadwick had thought that inviting him to dinner at home would be the perfect solution, particularly as his wife was out at choir practice for the evening. The informal setting would allow them to talk properly about the future of the Service, how it might start to rebuild itself after the damage inflicted by the Stephen Marchant affair, and what the hell he had done with Daniel Marchant. Did he also want to show off the Edwardian-style orangery that had been added since he took over as Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee? Perhaps. But now he was regretting it, because Fielding somehow knew about Leila.
‘I need reassurances that there’s no one else,’ Fielding eventually said.
‘She was the only one,’ Chadwick replied, joining him at the window. ‘No one was happy about it, Marcus.’
‘Except Spiro. And Armstrong.’
‘We needed to know if it ran in the family.’
‘Which is why I suspended Daniel Marchant.’
‘And that was the right and proper thing to do. But it wasn’t enough, I’m afraid. Daniel began to go a little off-message when Stephen died, started to show all the signs of a renegade.’
‘He knew the rules, that we’d go after him if he became another Tomlinson.’
‘The Americans wanted more assurances – not a bad call in the light of the marathon attack.’
Fielding laughed dryly. ‘Which Daniel Marchant thwarted.’
‘Leila’s account of the incident is a little more ambiguous.’
‘Not in the debrief I read. No doubt she told others what they wanted to hear.’
‘You’ve approved her three-month attachment?’
‘Of course. With a proviso that she never returns.’
‘How did you know, by the way?’
‘How do any of us know anything in this business? We join the dots, squint a little, turn things on their side and try, with a lot of luck, to see the bigger picture.’ He paused. ‘She didn’t debrief properly, after meeting one of her best Gulf contacts. I knew the CX had gone elsewhere. She knew I knew. Then she asked for a transfer.’
Chadwick said nothing, matching Fielding’s silences with one of his own.
‘There’s something else you should know,’ he said. ‘MI5’s had a breakthrough on the running belt. As we suspected, there was a remote-detonation option from a mobile phone. But it was configured to work only on the TETRA network.’
Chadwick sensed that, for the first time that evening, he had unsettled Fielding. TETRA was only used by the emergency services and the intelligence agencies. Terrorists would love to have access to TETRA – it would allow them to detonate a bomb even if the main mobile networks had been knocked out – but its use was tightly restricted (although not tightly enough for Fielding’s liking).
‘And?’
Chadwick went over to the mahogany sideboard, where a brown A4 envelope lay next to the silver drinks tray. He pulled out a photo, glanced at it and walked back over to Fielding by the window.
‘Take a look at this,’ he said, handing it over. The photo was a grainy image of the London Marathon, a screen-grab from the BBC’s helicopter camera. In the middle of the picture was Daniel Marchant, surrounded by other runners, and holding a mobile phone in his right hand. The unit had been circled in yellow marker.
‘You can just make out the short aerial,’ Chadwick said. ‘MI5’s certain it’s a TETRA handset. Motorola.’
‘Of course it bloody is,’ Fielding said. ‘How do you think we were able to talk to him out on the course? I understood he borrowed Leila’s.’
‘Apparently not. He brought his old one along, according to her. The one he should have handed in when he was suspended. We’ve checked the phone records at Thames House, and she’s right. She rang him on his old encrypted number.’
Fielding wasn’t convinced. He knew Marchant’s suspension hadn’t been as thorough as it might have been, partly because of his own reluctance to withdraw one of his best agents from the field; but failure to return an office phone, particularly an encrypted one, would not have been missed by even the most routine of Legoland’s security checks. He needed to make his own enquiries.
‘Has it ever occurred to you that someone might be setting Daniel Marchant up here?’ Fielding asked, looking at the photo for a few seconds before passing it back. ‘Knowing what a weak case there was against his father?’
‘Setting him up? Why?’
‘Oh, come on, David. You know as well as I do that there are plenty of people who would rather the Service didn’t dine at top table any more.’
‘I’m not sure even the Americans would risk the life of one of their own ambassadors to frame an MI6 officer.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is that why you’re protecting Daniel? You still believe he’s innocent?’
‘We’re not protecting him, not now.’
‘Prentice gave Spiro the runaround in Warsaw. You know Langley’s recalled him?’
‘The man’s a fool.’
‘Where is Daniel, Marcus?’
‘I’ve no idea. Clearing his father’s name, I assume.’ Fielding finished his drink. ‘And if you really want to see the Service’s reputation restored, I suggest we let him.’
28
After twenty-four hours in India, Daniel Marchant concluded that he wasn’t under surveillance, but he still took no risks as he was driven in a cream-coloured Ambassador taxi, ordered by Chandar, from Chattapur up into the centre of New Delhi. At Qutb Minar, in Merauli, he asked the driver to pull into the dusty car park, near the landmark monument, where they waited for ten minutes under the shade of some trees, engine and air conditioning still running.
The driver stood beside the car in his white uniform. It was obvious that he was having a smoke, but he still tried to conceal the cigarette, cupping it in his hand as he shifted from foot to foot. A tour guide handed him a leaflet and glanced hopefully in at the window at Marchant, but moved on when the driver swore at him. Marchant wound down the window, felt a wave of hot air, and took the leaflet from the driver. A few sweltering Western tourists were drifting around the complex, being informed about the tower’s 399 steps, how it had been begun in 1193 by Qutbud-din Aibak, the first Muslim ruler of Delhi. No one mentioned the stampede in 1998, when the lights went out in the tower and twenty-five children were crushed. Marchant remembered reading about it at the time. Visitors weren’t allowed up the tower any more.
Marchant watched as the party of tourists climbed back into their minibus. The place was now empty. Nobody seemed to have followed him. Monika and her colleagues had given him a head start, but it would only be a couple of days at most. He also assumed that Prentice had done his best to hamper the Americans on the ground. But he knew it wouldn’t be long before the connection was made between David Marlowe and Daniel Marchant. The CIA had a big station in Delhi. He wondered what the CX from Langley would be saying once they had worked out he was in India: suspended MI6 officer on the run, suspected of trying to eliminate US Ambassador.
Why did they still think he was behind the attempted marathon attack? How could anyone interpret his actions that day as anything other than loyal? Only he and Leila knew what had happened out there on the streets of London, how he had come to be propping up Pradeep as they stumbled towards a deserted
Tower Bridge. He wanted to talk to her now, go through the events again to find any ambiguities; and yet, for the first time since they had met, a new emotion had crept imperceptibly over the horizon.
Perhaps it was the change of continents, the physical separation that had been imposed on them. But he knew it wasn’t that. They had been apart before. Again he asked himself, how could the Americans view his actions as suspicious, even through the warped prism of his father’s guilt? Leila was the only other person who knew what had happened. Her explanation should have clarified his role, spared him the waterboard; but it hadn’t, and he couldn’t help resenting her for that.
Before his resentment grew into something more troubling, he realised that he was looking at it all from the wrong end. It didn’t matter whether the Americans thought he was guilty or not. They needed him to be guilty, to damn the father through the son. And in order to do that they had either distorted the evidence, wilfully ignoring the debriefs, or the whole thing had been an elaborate set-up. That would explain why he and no one else had spotted the belt. He knew, though, that the Americans would be unlikely to sanction such a risky plan. Either way, Leila was the one person who could have proved his innocence. Why hadn’t she cleared him?
He sat back in the taxi and closed his eyes. He hadn’t had time to think since he had touched down in India, a land that was so full of conflicting memories for him. His arrival at Indira Gandhi airport late the night before had been much more stressful than he had expected. Passport control hadn’t questioned his Irish passport or the tourist visa in the name of David Marlowe, but the security measures at the airport had surprised him. There had been police officers everywhere, randomly checking luggage. Outside, army trucks lined the main approach road to the city, soldiers sitting in the heat.
The scene reminded him of Heathrow in 2003, when Scimitar and Spartan reconnaissance vehicles had rolled in to guard the terminals. He had been an undergraduate in Cambridge at the time, and had read the chilling newspaper reports: it had been one of those exhilarating, self-affirming moments when he knew what he wanted to do with his life. If only he had acted on it then, been honest with himself and his father, rather than wasting years pretending he wanted to be a journalist, trying to do something – anything – other than follow in his father’s footsteps.
