by David Mark
And I don’t blame her for the decision she made.
EPILOGUE
October 2, 2010
It took forty-three years for Cordelia to finally find Loveday Parker. He had existed under a dozen different aliases in the decades since the war. None really suited him. He was no Guy Pevington or Simon Arbuthnot. He was no Tim Kernick or Emmet Trent. The only name that fitted him was a solitary letter. He used to use it as a signature, in green ink, on the top-secret documents that crossed his desk and which went straight on to the Home Secretary and Her Majesty once they had been properly vetted.
For a short while, in the late 1950s, Loveday Parker had answered to the name of ‘X’. He ran a very specialized unit within MI6. He had the power to make decisions that changed the world, and he knew enough secrets to bring governments to their knees. He was not a good man or a bad man. He was simply the leader of a spy network that spanned the globe.
Cordelia and Felicity sit at his bedside in the comfortable, private hospital where Loveday lays dying. He is eighty-seven years old, though the chart at the foot of his bed declares him to be three years younger.
For the last four years he has been known as Patrick Bainton and has been living in a pleasant apartment on a leafy Victorian road in Weymouth. He has not had to suffer many hardships since leaving MI6 in 1969. His cover as a diplomat ensured he earned a good pension and he has received large dividends from the half-dozen global companies of which he is a major shareholder. He is also an honorary fellow of his old university and gives generously to Westminster School, where he spent his formative years and which gave him respite from the life he endured at the family home in Gilsland, where his elder sister tortured him without mercy whenever she found opportunity.
‘Loveday,’ says Cordelia. ‘Wakey-bloody-wakey.’
He coughs afresh. It’s a horrid, rasping sound; a match struck on brick, and then he starts to gag as the fluid in his lungs bubbles up to spill onto his chin and pyjamas.
‘Cordy, he’s almost gone,’ says Felicity, shaking her head. She looks weak and old, sitting back in the hard-backed chair and starting to shiver.
She had been unsure whether to make this trip. John is in the first stages of dementia and she does not want to be away from him. He’s still John, a lot of the time, but there are moments when he forgets that he’s long since retired from work or that he doesn’t live in Brampton or that one of his sons is dead. Brian killed himself in prison in 1977. He’d been Pike’s accomplice in a post office robbery. The postmistress had been killed and Brian, overcome with guilt and terrified of Pike trying to silence him, had turned himself in and given evidence against the older man. Brian couldn’t handle prison. He hanged himself the day they took away his radio for some minor breach of prison rules. Pike did his time without difficulty. Served eighteen years for murder then came home to his mam’s house. He’d only been out a week when his past caught up with him. He was killed with a solitary blow to the head in an alleyway outside a Newcastle nightclub. The only witness described, a tall, dark-haired old man who smelled of wood-shavings and wore a gypsy-scarf around his neck.
‘You in there, Loveday?’ asks Cordelia.
She’s peering at him like a specimen on a slab. She has little sympathy for the condition he is in. Old age strips the veneer from people – that’s what Felicity used to say. And Cordelia knows herself to be a hard, stubborn woman. It is the face she wears for the world and it is the one she knows to be her true self. Half a century in counter-intelligence and she has yet to find any evidence that she is wicked. Difficult, yes. Unflinching, certainly. She has even been called ‘ruthless’ by certain broadsheet newspapers that have yet to make their mind up about her brief tenure at the top of MI6. But she is pleased to fall well short of wickedness. Her grandchildren would find it hard to hug somebody evil, she feels sure of that. And they dote on their fearsome, funny grandmother.
Loveday coughs again and then manages to wriggle upright. There is still an intelligence in his eyes and despite the watery lenses, the blue irises are sharp and focussed.
‘Mrs Hemlock,’ he says, and there is a slight smile to his lips.
‘It’s not been Hemlock for a long time.’
‘She’s a baroness,’ says Felicity, from her chair. ‘Retired now, though she still goes to meetings.’
Cordelia hides her smile behind her hand. The ‘meetings’ are the cross-party intelligence and security committee and her statutory attendance days at the House of Lords.
‘You’ve come for me?’ asks the man in the bed, wheezing. ‘After so much time? Why?’
‘Because you’re dying,’ says Cordelia, flatly. ‘And I’m old and so is everybody who remembers what happened. And if I don’t ask you now, I’ll never know.’
Loveday wets his lips. He screws up his eyes.
‘Was I talking? In my sleep?’
‘German. Arabic. You cried out a lot. Said her name.’
He closes his eyes at that. Swallows, painfully. He wriggles his left arm free from under the covers. The pyjama sleeve is knotted at the elbow, just below the stump.
‘She did this,’ he says, quietly. ‘Held my hand in the harvester because I wouldn’t do what she wanted.’
‘And what did she want?’ asks Cordelia.
‘Everything I had. She was just cruel. Just liked pain. Some people see a duckling and coo about how pretty they look with their brothers and sisters and their mother. Other people throw a rock. That was Audrey.’
‘And yet you allowed Christopher to recruit her?’ asks Cordelia, sitting back in her chair. ‘Why?’
‘We were made of the right stuff,’ says Loveday, with a faint smile. ‘Father was part of the right clubs. We knew the right people. It wasn’t hard to be selected – you just had to be a good chap. I was good at codes. Good at strategies. It wasn’t unusual for members of SIS – MI6, as it is now – to use their families for some operations. And when they started building the POW camp, it was a perfect cover for Audrey.’
‘Christopher?’ asks Felicity, quietly. ‘How did he end up part of it?’
Loveday finds the strength to give a slight shrug. ‘He had a flair for it. I did well in the early days of the war and was running my own unit by ’42. I bumped into Christopher on a trip home. He was still scribbling in his notebook. Still writing stories. He wanted to do his bit and I was in a position to help him. We got him a position as a foreign correspondent for a news agency. Told them back home he was a wireless operator. He proved himself very useful.’
‘Fairfax never said,’ mutters Felicity.
‘As far as his family knew he was a wireless operator, far from danger. In truth he was a valuable member of my unit. It was a huge sacrifice, pretending he had lost his life, but the job demanded it and he carried the pain without showing it, even as he knew the agony his father must be going through.’
‘But you allowed him to corrupt the village he was from,’ says Cordelia. ‘You let him place Favre in your sister’s house.’
Loveday blinks. Holds his eyes closed for several breaths. He seems to be making up his mind.
‘When Christopher caught Favre, after the war, he saw the value in him. He knew names and dates and places. He was a survivor who had only worn the Milice uniform to be allowed to inflict pain. He would do whatever it took to survive. Vile as he saw him, he knew he was an asset. We wrung out every last piece of information from him and set him up with a new life in Ireland. He was Swiss, so we said. We got him a job as a numbers man at a cattle auction. He was never supposed to come to Gilsland.’
‘But he did …’
‘Audrey was struggling with the farm. She needed help. She was setting up networks of intelligence with her little postcards and her food parcels and we saw the potential for expanding it. Favre could be critical to that work. He knew people who could be persuaded to assist. And the farm would be the perfect cover.’
Cordy looks at him for a time. She is perfectly still. Her li
ps become a thin line.
‘He was doing it again,’ she says, without emotion. ‘Killing. Hurting. In Ireland. I’ve seen the press reports – mysterious disappearances, bodies vanishing from graves. He used what he had over you to get himself away from it and into yet another new life. After all you did to free him, he was going to cause embarrassment to your unit. A survivor like Favre would have sensed opportunity. He must have wanted more than the life you gave him in Ireland. He wanted a house and money and a little freedom. And you wanted to be able to keep an eye on him. You gave him your sister.’
Loveday swallows. He tries to hold Cordy’s gaze and then turns to the wall. ‘They deserved one another.’
Cordy looks over her shoulder to where Felicity is sitting, shaking her head.
‘When Marcel went looking for his abuser …’ begins Cordelia.
‘I told them he was coming. Questions had been asked. He was digging around.’
‘So Audrey and her husband told Fairfax their cover story. Favre said he was a victim and his torturer was on his way. You wrapped the poor sod’s brain up with guilt and barbed wire.’
‘Audrey’s work was valuable. It had to be protected …’ begins Loveday.
‘And so did your little empire,’ finishes Cordelia. ‘You dumped a killer in the middle of a community that had no idea what was living in their midst.’
‘Eventually, it would have been taken care of,’ says Loveday. ‘Christopher was already working on a solution.’
Cordelia breathes out, long and slow. She’s nodding to herself. Her long white hair makes her look somehow spectral, in the light of the yellow room. She seems half-formed. She pulls herself up, and though the action pains her, she does not let it show. She can handle pain.
‘That’s all?’ asks Loveday, and gives in to a cough. ‘You’ve been looking for me all these years and you’re just going to ask me a handful of questions and leave?’
Cordy gives him a tight smile. ‘I haven’t been looking for you,’ she says. ‘You never really mattered. A report simply crossed my desk a week ago asking whether we planned to reveal your true identity when you die, which will be in about six days according to your surgeon. My inclination was that we let your death go unremarked. But I did think it was a good opportunity to come and ask the one thing that has been pestering me for a long time, and which Flick here was keen to see resolved. I’ve dug deep and there’s no doubting you did a good job in covering everything up. What happened to your sister?’
Loveday pushes back into his pillows. He starts to choke on the mucus in his throat and it takes a long time for him to be able to breathe sufficiently well to talk. Neither woman tries to help him.
‘His death didn’t touch her,’ he says, at last. ‘She saw the body and it was like she was looking at an animal hit by a car. She came with us willingly. Her network hadn’t been compromised. She ran it from a new location for the best part of eighteen years. She stayed with the section longer than Christopher or I. I didn’t go to her funeral but I know there were many there who spoke of the great service she did her country.’
‘She was a cold, wicked bitch,’ says Felicity.
‘And she was one of the best,’ says Loveday, before closing his eyes, exhausted.
Outside, a black Bentley is waiting in the car park. A soft rain is falling from a pale blue sky.
As the two old ladies approach the car, a tall man in a black suit emerges from the driver’s seat and approaches with a large umbrella. Cordy gives a curt nod of thanks. Flick grins. They walk arm in arm to the vehicle and with a little difficulty and shuffling of limbs, climb into the warm, leather-lined interior.
‘You already knew all that,’ says Flick, under her breath. ‘You told me all that years ago. You said.’
‘Nice to have it confirmed,’ says Cordy, settling back in her chair.
‘You don’t think it was cruel? Asking an old man to remember the things he did so long ago?’
Cordelia considers this then shakes her head. ‘No. There’s no time limit on accountability. You can change everything about yourself but the evil you did will always drag along behind you. And if you pretend it isn’t there, it’s up to somebody else to hold it to your face and demand you look.’
Felicity stares at her old friend for a moment, then gives a nod. She starts rubbing her sore knees. Checks her watch, as Cordelia opens her handbag and checks her sleek mobile phone for messages. There are too many to deal with so she scrolls through them until she finds the one she wants. It’s from her grandson, Arthur. He will be graduating from university on the same day she is due to be presented with an honorary doctorate from her old college at Oxford. He wants to know if they could dress to match. He will be there to report on the day for the Daily Telegraph, though in truth, he is only using the job as a stepping stone to a book deal. He has always been a scribbler. Always loved stories. Arthur is her favourite grandchild. He makes her smile just by thinking about him. She was not around enough when her own children were growing up but she has been a doting grandmother, whatever her son and daughters might imply when they have had a glass of wine too many. Arthur always talks to her frankly. Asks her about the service. Where she was based, how she was trained, how many agents she recruited and how many spies she brought to the side of Queen and country. She rarely tells him the truth, and if she does, she makes it sound like a lie. She is very good at this.
‘Will they drive me to the train station?’ asks Flick, pointing at the driver and the large, surly bodyguard in the front passenger seat.
‘They’ll drive you all the way home,’ says Cordelia.
‘No, everybody will look if they see me getting out of a great posh car,’ protests Felicity.
‘Let them look,’ says Cordelia.
Felicity shakes her head and sighs. ‘You’ve a wicked side to you, Cordelia,’ she says with a smile.
Cordelia reaches out a hand and takes her friend’s fingers in her palm. She turns to her and gives the kind of smile that the staff at Thames House do not know exists.
‘You’re so much more than you let yourself believe,’ says Cordelia. ‘You’re strong and loyal and brave …’
Felicity squeezes Cordelia’s hands with her own and tuts, embarrassed at the fuss. They sit in silence, warm and comfortable, heads resting against one another’s. Felicity does not speak for a time. She is thinking of Fairfax and Christopher and all the things that were and are and might have been. Finally she nods.
‘Seems wrong to make that the end of it,’ says Felicity, quietly. ‘Seems wrong to just leave it at that.’ She peers at her friend, all innocence. ‘Your grandson. Arthur. He’s a writer, isn’t he? Have I got that right?’
Cordelia grins. Her eyes are bright and there’s a blush to her cheeks. Then she switches off the recording device in her handbag and gives a nod.
She calls Arthur. Decides, on impulse, that the time has come.
Their story will go under the ground in the cool of the little church.
One day, perhaps, it will be read.
