by Alan Judd
Praise for Alan Judd
‘Funny, exciting and sad, as well as revealing . . . Its clarity and pertinence demand our attention in a way which not many novels do’
New Statesman
‘Funny, intelligent and frightening’
The Sunday Times
‘Rivetingly accurate . . .’
Observer
‘Deserves all the attention it can get’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Alan Judd writes exceedingly well’
Evening Standard
‘Twisty, accomplished and engaging’
Kirkus
‘This espionage thriller is a standout’
Publishers Weekly
‘Judd is a masterful storyteller, with an intricate knowledge of his subject and a sure command of suspense’
Daily Telegraph
‘Judd keeps plot and action centre-stage . . . he has written a novel perfect for brightening up a drizzly winter Sunday’
Mail on Sunday
Also by Alan Judd
Fiction
A Breed of Heroes
Short of Glory
The Noonday Devil
Tango
The Devil’s Own Work
Legacy
The Kaiser’s Last Kiss
Dancing with Eva
Non-Fiction
Ford Madox Ford (biography)
The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service (biography)
First World War Poets (with David Crane)
The Office Life Little Introduction Book
First published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Alan Judd, 2012
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Alan Judd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-74327-566-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-84983-274-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
To William and Caroline Waldegrave
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
1
After the lock turned in the door Charles Thorough-good leaned against the cream brick wall and looked around his cell. There was a wooden bedstead bolted to the tiled floor, with a green plastic mattress and matching rectangular pillow. Above it, close to the ceiling, was a narrow window with frosted glass so thick that the iron bars outside were faint shadows. To his left, behind a low brick wall, was a stainless steel lavatory bowl with no seat or paper. Set high in the wall above the door was a camera and in the ceiling a single bright bulb behind a wire mesh.
He took it all in but his thoughts were elsewhere. He had been parted from his possessions, stripped of belt, shoelaces, watch. They were searching his two properties and two cars and confiscating his papers, computers, mobile phone, passport, diary, old address books – anything they thought they wanted. Yet, deprived of liberty and locked in a police cell, he felt strangely free. It wasn’t the heady, transitory sense of liberation that shock can bring, nor the removal of the daily burden of choice. Rather, he relished this abrupt solitude because it freed him to consider what had brought him here, and why it felt so apt. It was as if this was where the current of his life had long been flowing, towards a reckoning he had yet to fathom. But one thing shone through it all: betrayal.
He walked over to the bed, propped the plastic pillow against the wall and sat. The camera above the door hadn’t moved and it was hard to tell how much it could see – the toilet, for instance. He wondered how long it would be before he had to use it. They had permitted him to pee when they had arrested him at his London flat that morning, but he wasn’t sure what time that was. The wall clock in what he had already learned to call the custody suite had said six-fifteen a.m. when they brought him in. Searching, recording, form-filling, questions about keys, access to his house in Scotland and his cars, photographing, fingerprinting and taking his DNA had gone on for some time, but he had no idea for how long.
Nor had he any idea how long they would hold him. He assumed he would be released on police bail later that day, after interview. No-one had said as much but he couldn’t believe that the ostensible reason for his arrest – suspicion of breaking the Official Secrets Act – would merit refusal of bail. He hadn’t broken the OSA, anyway, so far as he knew. The two arresting officers were considerate, given the circumstances, and he had cooperated fully. That was a lesson he had learned long before in the old MI6. Whether or not you had anything to hide – and on espionage operations, under alias, breaking the law in foreign countries, you usually did – you made no trouble. You were the innocent abroad: naïve, anxious, bewildered, keen to help, unthreatening, trying to make them relax with you, persuading them they had the wrong man.
He had volunteered to the search team where his cars and keys were, how to find the spare mobile hidden in one of them, how the spare keys to his Scottish house had to be felt for in the angle of the rafter in the shed that housed the old Land Rover, and that it probably wasn’t locked anyway. During the photographing, finger-printing and the DNA mouth swab he was patient and obliging, taking an interest in procedures and asking questions they were pleased to answer. Officials, he knew, enjoyed explaining. In return they had handled him gently, mentioned breakfast, allowed him to take a book and reading glasses into the cell and had not handcuffed him, unlike the prisoner brought in afterwards. They were concerned that he did not want a lawyer.
It helped, of course, that he had nothing to hide, at least so far as the charge was concerned. He could think of no secrets he had supposedly caused to be published. But there were other matters, related matters he was still trying to work out, which he was determined to keep back. Above all was his growing sense that the major themes of his adult life had started with one person, Sarah; long ago they had radiated outwards from her and now were leading back to her. It was like the slow revelation of an architectural or musical harmony of which he had long had an inchoate awareness. He welcomed it, but the consequences were unclear.
The book they had allowed him – after one of the officers had opened and shaken it – was Jane Eyre. He had been shamed into reading it by Rebecca, the former MI6 secretary in whose Durham house he had stayed on his way south a few weeks previously. With the licence of past intimacy, she had scolded him for not reading more of the other half of humanity.
In fact, what had now happened went directly back to Rebecca rather than to Sarah. Or, more precisely, to David Horam, her journalist partner and author of the article that had led to Charles’s arrest. Charles had skimmed it the day it came out, but only because he knew the writer. It was a comment piece, typical of a Sunday p
aper that could neither ignore the events of the week nor find anything new to say. David’s subject was the afternoon bombing of a cinema in Birmingham, in which a young man had been killed and two people slightly injured. The bomb had gone off in the gents and the victim, whose remains were unidentified, was thought to have been the bomber. It wasn’t clear whether he had intended to kill himself or whether the cinema had in fact been his target. There wasn’t much of him left; no-one had noticed whether he carried a bag and the usual indication that a suicide belt had been worn – an intact head – was unavailable. The device was packed with nails, like some that Charles remembered from the streets of Belfast, decades before.
Despite media speculation that it was the work either of al-Qaeda or of a lone-wolf sympathiser, there was nothing to link it to any particular group or cause. There had been no claim, it was not part of a coordinated attack and there seemed no obvious reason why a half-empty cinema showing a film about struggling New York musicians should have been the target, unless it was significant that the director was Jewish.
David’s article called for more resources to combat terrorism, proposed that legal structures should be modernised to cope with the evolving threat and ended with a paragraph on the problems of surveillance, which quoted figures from an unidentified security source on the number of staff needed to watch someone round the clock. The SIA – the new Single Intelligence Agency, by which Charles had been temporarily re-employed – should, Charles assumed, have been pleased with it. It was supportive, unlike other articles in the same paper written by someone called James Wytham during the past year. They were well-informed pieces quoting from leaked documents, albeit vitiated by implausible conspiracy theories and carping assumptions of wrongdoing. They had damaged the SIA because the factual truths meant that the implausibilities and assumptions were taken as equally true. There had been questions in Parliament, media demands for shake-ups and calls for the retirement of Charles’s friend and mentor, Sir Matthew Abrahams. He was the SIA’s first head and before that had been the last chief of MI6. Charles could not believe that Matthew had anything to do with his arrest, or even knew of it. He would, as soon as Charles was free to tell him.
He opened Rebecca’s copy of Jane Eyre, thinking he should have brought Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. That seminal evocation of communist tyranny began, he remembered, with the cell door closing on Rubashov, loyal servant of the Party that was about to devour him. Rubashov leaned against the wall as Charles had done, then lit a cigarette while he considered his position. Presumably that would be a further offence here.
He pictured his ancient Penguin Modern Classics copy on the bottom shelf of his rooftop flat in the Boltons, not far from London’s Brompton Road. The cover was a detail from Francis Bacon’s Man in Blue; a seated, faceless man, a bureaucrat, the sort who, with a stroke of his pen, would have legitimised Rubashov’s betrayal after years of pitiless loyalty to a rationalist illusion.
But any comparison of himself with Koestler’s hero was ludicrously presumptuous. Rubashov’s beliefs had been chiselled out of suffering and hard thinking; Charles had merely imbibed his from the comfortable social and intellectual world that had nurtured him. After university he had joined the army, after that MI6. Patriotism, though it was unfashionable to express it, ran deep and he had willingly risked his life for his country. He had been generous, he hoped, in friendship; but his public generosity was limited by dislike of the crowd, mistrust of theory and by the easy assumption that, above subsistence level, there was not much that should be done for mankind as a whole. He thought the urge to improve the human condition was too often dangerously close to the urge to control. Born into a generation that prided itself on wanting to change the world, he had only ever wanted to join it, to feel part of it. The desire to be of some service to the state had been strong in him. It still was. That why he had agreed to come back. And it had led him to a police cell.
There was a rattle of keys and the door opened. A plump policeman with a farmer’s red face looked solemnly at him. ‘Fancy a spot of breakfast?’
The word made him hungry.
The policeman beckoned conspiratorially. ‘Sit and eat it in reception if you like. Watch ’em all come in. More interesting than sitting here.’
They sat on a bench against the wall in reception. The clock showed twenty to nine. It was reassuring to know the time again, like a glimpse of headland to a sailor in a sea-mist. A man in civilian clothes brought Charles a fried breakfast on a tray, with a mug of tea for the policeman. He wondered how long you had to be a guest of Her Majesty before you were provided with toothbrush and paste.
The policeman looked at Charles’s breakfast. ‘Same as what we have, that is. Same kitchen.’
Charles, his mouth full, nodded his appreciation.
The outer door was banged open by two broad, squat men with shaven heads and no necks, both wearing jeans and leather jackets. One was black, the other possibly Turkish. Between them they half-dragged, half-carried a pale young man in handcuffs, shoving him onto the other bench. One went to the desk while the other stood alongside their prisoner, still gripping his upper arm. The young man’s features were thin, his expression resentful, almost bitter. It was easy to imagine him as vicious. The middle-aged burgher in Charles, reassured to see such robust enforcers of the law, ceased worrying about toothpaste.
His policeman nudged him. ‘People say it’s a real education, watching what comes through here.’
Later the policeman took his tray away and left him alone. More prisoners were brought in, all young and generally cosmopolitan. One attractive young woman, who looked Eastern European, was addressed with fatherly familiarity by the custody sergeant.
‘Seen you here before, haven’t I?’ he said as he took her details. ‘Not your first time, is it? And I told you before what I’m telling you now. Pack it in, stop it, don’t do it any more. If you do you’ll keep getting arrested and one day you’ll find yourself in prison and you won’t like it. It’s no life, I’ll tell you that for nothing. There’s lots of other things a girl like you can do. Go and do them.’
The handcuffed young man was processed as Charles had been, but with his captors watchful on either side of him. He struggled when first being searched but then sullenly cooperated until taken down the corridor to the cells, when he began shouting until the cell door slammed shut on him. Then one of Charles’s arresting officers appeared, the taller one, a man of about thirty with sandy hair and freckles, wearing a light grey suit. He looked reassuringly bureaucratic, Charles thought. He could deal with bureaucrats.
‘Searches are going well. They’ve nearly finished your flat. I don’t think the neighbours are aware.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Not much chance of neighbours poking their noses in at the Scottish house, I gather.’
Charles’s house on the north-west coast was yards from the sea, sheltered by a rocky outcrop at the edge of a bay facing the Summer Isles. His nearest neighbour was a modernised croft across the bay, the holiday home of a well-known television journalist. Perhaps he would be accused of leaking to him next. There were half a dozen other dwellings scattered at intervals along the unmade track leading to the bay.
‘They’ll know,’ he said. ‘They notice everything up there. So little happens.’
The house was white-walled, red-roofed, built in the 1970s, practical, spacious and almost weather-proof. He loved it for half the year, provided he could escape to London whenever he wanted. He wasn’t lonely there – he had persuaded himself he never felt lonely – but recently he had been tempted to escape more often. He told himself that had to do with the book he was writing rather than the place.
‘They let themselves in easy enough,’ continued the policeman. ‘It wasn’t locked, like you said. But they’ll use the spare keys to lock it when they leave.’
‘There’s no need up there.’
‘Until it happens. You should lock it.’
‘I k
now.’
The policeman sat. ‘They’ve done your car, too. I’ve never seen one of those. 1968, isn’t it?’
They discussed his car. It struck him as he spoke that he might have chosen such a rare and idiosyncratic breed partly because it symbolised something of the very national culture that was now disowning him. He obligingly went through what the Bristol cost to run, what he’d paid for it, what it was worth. They then considered whether the policeman should replace his Honda.
The policeman lowered his voice. ‘You know it’s going to take a while, all this? It’ll be this afternoon before we interview you. Are you sure you don’t want legal representation? Your service would pay for it, they told us. They’ve got a list of lawyers they trust. Unless you’ve got your own?’
Charles had only ever used lawyers for conveyancing. He didn’t think he needed one now. He was confident that he had no case to answer, and a lawyer might only prolong the process by arguing. ‘I’m happy to answer whatever you ask. If I think I would like legal advice, I’ll let you know.’
Later, when left alone again, he wanted to pee. He approached the custody sergeant, suggesting he return to his cell to do it so that no-one need escort him.
‘That’s a help. I see you’re getting the hang of this place.’
Someone closed the cell door on him while he was peeing into the steel bowl. He waited a while before pressing the red button on the wall, then waited a longer while for the peephole cover to slide back.
‘What do you want?’
It was not the friendly farmer. ‘I was allowed to wait in reception. The custody sergeant let me sit on the bench. I came back here for a pee and someone closed the door.’
‘Told you could come out again, were you?’
‘I think it was understood. By the custody sergeant.’
The shutter slammed. This time the wait was long enough for Charles to sit on the bed and open Jane Eyre again. The first line was apt: there was indeed no possibility of taking a walk that day. Eventually the keys rattled and the door opened.
