Dead Line

by Stella Rimington

  It niggled at her for several days, until now, staring idly out as the blue tits were joined by a couple of blackbirds, she felt she had to act. In the old days, when she was still working, she would have been able to do some digging herself, but as a Highgate housewife, she felt powerless. Hang on, she thought, there must be somebody from the past who could give me some advice. Even if it was just to tell me to mind my own business and stop worrying. And she realised that of course there was someone, a sort-of friend, whom she hadn’t seen for a while but knew well enough to ring up out of the blue. Someone whose judgement she respected, too, which was more important now than simple moral support. She got up and went to the wall phone by the kitchen door.

  ‘Liz Carlyle,’ Liz said mechanically, for she had been immersed in an agent runner’s report when her phone rang. ‘Liz, it’s Sophie Margolis.’

  ‘Hi there,’ said Liz, surprised. It had been a couple of years since she’d seen Sophie, and probably six or seven since Sophie had left the service. They’d kept in touch, at least at first, meeting for the occasional lunch. When the baby had been born, Liz had sent a present. What was his name? Zack, that was it. Hadn’t there been another one since? Liz felt a pang of guilt, since she hadn’t sent a present the second time round.

  They exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes. Sophie told Liz about her children, and how David was doing in the City (very well, apparently), and a recent holiday in Umbria. Liz did her best to sound cheery about her own single existence, and realised she had yet to plan a holiday for herself.

  Then Sophie said, ‘Listen, it would be wonderful to see you. David and I were hoping to get you over for supper. Any chance?’

  ‘Of course. I’d love to.’

  ‘David’s mother is visiting from Israel. She’s American but moved to Tel Aviv when she got divorced last year.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. He was the monster from hell. Even David would admit that, and he’s his son. Listen, I know it’s not much notice, but could you come this Saturday?’

  ‘Oh, Sophie, I’m sorry but I’m going down to my mother’s this weekend.’ Yes, thought Liz, to meet this Edward man at last. She wasn’t going to miss that.

  ‘What a pity. How about next week some time? Say Wednesday?’

  Liz looked at her diary. It was accusingly empty. ‘That would be fine.’

  ‘Great. You know where we are. Shall we say eight o’clock?’

  ‘Fine.’

  But Sophie wasn’t ready to ring off. ‘Liz, we do want to see you, but I’d better confess - I have a slight ulterior motive.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Maybe Sophie was going to set her up with some City friend of her husband. Liz stifled a yawn. She could arrange her own romantic life, thank you very much.

  ‘Well, it’s about David’s mother. You see, she’s been going around with a man from the Israeli Embassy. A much younger man. And apparently…’

  Two minutes later Liz had a pencil and was writing carefully. ‘K-o-l-l-e-k. Got it. Let me look into it, and I’ll let you know on Wednesday.’

  Sophie was just putting the phone down when Hannah came in, holding Zack’s hand.

  ‘Hi Hannah,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I was just talking to an old friend I haven’t seen in ages. I’ve asked her to dinner next week; I think you’ll like her. Her name’s Liz Carlyle.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Hannah, steering Zack to a chair by the table, while Sophie went to start on his supper. ‘How do you know her?’

  ‘We used to work together. In Personnel.’ She switched the kettle on. Hannah seemed to like the English habit of a cuppa in the late afternoon.

  Hannah nodded. ‘Oh yes. That job you used to do.’

  She said this with such irony that Sophie turned and stared at her.

  ‘Sophie, I’ve always had a pretty good idea of what you did for a living. The idea that you were in Personnel is just absurd.’ She held a hand up. ‘And no, David didn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sophie, since it was all she could think of to say. She was annoyed her ruse had been found out. The sooner Liz checked out Danny Kollek the better.

  SIXTEEN

  So much for leaving early, thought Liz, as the roadworks signs appeared and the traffic began to slow. She had left her desk in Thames House at four, collected her dark blue Audi Quattro from the underground car park and headed off, hoping to reach her mother’s house in Wiltshire in time for a walk before supper.

  It was a beautiful late summer afternoon, the sky an unbroken blue, but the Audi, which she had bought second hand several years ago with some money her father had left her, had no air-conditioning. To take her mind off the traffic fumes sucked in through the open window, she tried to imagine the smell of the countryside around Bowerbridge and of her mother’s house, filled as it always was with flowers.

  But something was spoiling the picture. It was the thought of this man Edward. What would she find when she got there?

  The invitation had arrived the week before. Susan & Edward - Drinks, handwritten on an At Home card. A joint invitation, she had noticed with dismay - had this man Edward actually moved into Bowerbridge? Would everything there be different?

  It was easier to think about work, and as she sat waiting for the car in front to move, her mind drifted back to the previous day’s troubling conversation with Chris Marcham, after he’d surprised her in his Hampstead house. Marcham had turned out to be a man in his fifties, she reckoned, tall with longish hair, casually, almost raffishly dressed - a yellow jumper with a hole in one elbow, cracked brogues, and trousers that could do with a wash.

  After the first shock and the discovery that Liz wasn’t actually a burglar, Marcham had relaxed a bit. She had introduced herself as Jane Falconer, her standard cover, but rather than claiming to be from the Home Office, as she would normally have done, she’d said right away that she was from the Security Service. After all, she knew this man to be a casual source of MI6.

  ‘Do you work for Geoffrey Fane?’ he’d asked suspiciously.

  ‘No, I’m with the other service.’

  ‘Ah, MI5.’

  ‘Do you have a gardener?’ Liz had begun.

  ‘No,’ Marcham had replied, looking mystified. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Liz explained how she’d disturbed a man apparently working in the garden. She’d noted with interest that Marcham had shown no sign of wanting to report the intruder to the police.

  As the traffic freed itself and she swung the Audi into the fast lane, Liz recalled the conversation that had followed. She’d decided beforehand that there was no point in alarming him about a threat she couldn’t be sure was real, so she’d explained instead that she’d come to see him about the forthcoming peace conference at Gleneagles. Intelligence sources, she’d said, without being specific, had picked up a higher level than usual of ‘chatter’, much of it relating to Syria, and there was concern that there might be an attempt to derail the conference. Since he was an expert on the country, she’d remarked flatteringly, and had just come back from interviewing President Assad, she wondered if he could help.

  It turned out he knew already from sources in Damascus that Syria planned to attend the conference, but he claimed no insight into who might try to keep that from happening. The country certainly had plenty of enemies, he conceded, but since all of them seemed to have decided that it was to their advantage to attend the conference, none seemed likely to want to sabotage it.

  Marcham had been impressed by President Assad, who’d seemed to him far savvier than his detractors allowed, not at all the puppet of his late father’s henchmen, much more his own man. It didn’t sound to Liz as if the journalist was writing anything about Bashar Al-Assad that would prove particularly provocative, either to the Syrians or their enemies.

  Yet there had been one odd exchange which, as the Audi picked up speed, Liz was puzzling over. Marcham had said at one point, ‘You might want to talk with your counterparts
in Tel Aviv. Though doubtless you already have.’

  ‘Doubtless,’ she had replied dryly. ‘Have you?’

  He wasn’t expecting the question, for he had suddenly seemed unnerved, stammering hesitantly, before finally saying, ‘I talk to lots of people.’

  Including Mossad, Liz concluded, making a mental note of this. If he was talking to Mossad as well as MI6, God knows who else he knew in the intelligence world. Including the Syrians, perhaps.

  There’d been something else strange too. They’d been sitting at the kitchen table and suddenly without warning or explanation, Marcham had got up and firmly shut the door to his bedroom. He hadn’t wanted her to see inside, not realising of course that she already had. What was he trying to hide from her? There was nothing remarkable in there that she could remember, except perhaps the crucifix on the wall. But what was wrong with that?

  There was something not quite right about the man. She felt it instinctively. Something he wasn’t saying. Something worth exploring further. I’ll think about it after the weekend, she thought. First I need to concentrate on Mother and this Edward character.

  As she came in through the back door of Bowerbridge she was met with a strong smell of cooking. Curry, with a spicy tang that made her hungry. What was her mother up to? She was a competent cook, but old-fashioned and very English. Stews, soups, shepherd’s pie, homemade fishcakes, a Sunday roast - these were her standard dishes. Now, on the stove a large casserole was bubbling, source of the delicious smell. Rice sat in a measuring cup, waiting for a saucepan to boil. On the table there was a half-drunk glass of white wine, and a copy of the Spectator.

  ‘You must be Liz,’ said a voice, and she looked up as a man entered from the direction of the drawing room. He was tall and slim, with tidy greying hair and thin-framed glasses. He had a long, sunburned face with high cheekbones and friendly eyes, and was wearing a beige jumper and dark corduroy trousers.

  ‘I’m Edward,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I’m afraid your mother’s been delayed at the nursery.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Liz, thinking he didn’t look at all how she had expected. No tweeds, no pipe, no bufferish moustache.

  ‘I hope you like curry.’ He sniffed the air. ‘A bit overpowering, I’m afraid.’ He grinned disarmingly, and Liz found herself grinning back.

  ‘I’ll just take my bag upstairs,’ she said.

  Up in her room, Liz put her bag down and looked out of the window at the tulip tree, its flowers over now at this late stage of the summer; the tree itself was almost the height of the house. They had grown up together, she thought. Her father had planted the tree when her mother had been pregnant with Liz.

  She looked around at her bedroom, unchanged since she was a little girl. There was a watercolour on the wall of the Nadder River, painted by her father, a keen naturalist who had fished the river every summer. Liz would often accompany him, and he’d taught her how to manage a rod and the names of flowers and trees and birds. He’d have been sad that she had ended up living in London.

  Next to the painting was a framed photograph of Liz, aged nine, sitting on Ziggy, her pony, wearing a black velvet riding hat and smiling toothily for the camera. Liz laughed at the sight of her younger version’s pig-tails, and remembered how bad-tempered Ziggy had been. Once he’d even bitten the riding instructor.

  She unpacked quickly and changed out of her office clothes into jeans and a T-shirt. Before she went down, she took a quick peek in her mother’s room. She was expecting the worst: Edward’s brushes on the dressing table, a trouser press in one corner. But it looked unchanged. And across the landing in the spare room, she saw a suitcase next to the bed. Edward’s, still unpacked. He must have just arrived today, she realised, remembering he lived in London. Perhaps he hadn’t moved in after all.

  She went downstairs, noticing on her way through the living room a framed photograph on one of the side tables. It showed a posed group of Ghurkhas, wearing dress uniform and sitting in three neat rows, their bayoneted rifles held upright. Two English officers were at the end of the front row, presumably their commanding officers. One looked like a younger version of Edward.

  ‘There’s an open bottle of Sancerre in the fridge,’ Edward declared when she joined him in the kitchen. She poured herself a glass and sat down at the table, while he bustled about the stove.

  ‘You’ve had some sun, I see,’ Liz ventured, feeling pasty and pale by comparison.

  ‘Comes with the job.’

  ‘Are you still in the army?’ asked Liz with surprise.

  ‘No, no. They packed me off in ’99. I work for a charity now; we help the blind in developing countries. At least we try to help them - you wouldn’t think politics could get in the way of something so straightforward, but it does. I travel a fair amount because of it - India, Africa once in a while. Funny how people think if you’ve got a tan you must have been lolling about in a deckchair in the Bahamas. Sadly not.’

  ‘I saw the photo in the next room.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘I brought it down to show your mother. She insisted on seeing a picture of me in uniform.’

  ‘Were you with the Gurkhas for long?’

  ‘Thirty years,’ he said, with a touch of pride. ‘Very fine soldiers,’ he added quietly.

  ‘You must have got around a bit,’ said Liz, sipping her wine, which was deliciously dry and cold. Here we go, thought Liz: tales of Aden and derring-do. She wished her mother would hurry up.

  ‘A bit,’ he said. ‘The Falklands, the first Gulf War, six months in Kosovo I’d sooner forget.’

  But that was all he said. Liz gratefully noted how adroitly he changed the subject, asking her where she lived in London. Within minutes Liz found to her surprise that she was telling him all about her flat in Kentish Town, when she’d bought it, how she’d done it up, what she still had to do to it. He was a sympathetic listener, interjecting only occasionally, though at one point he made Liz laugh out loud with an account of living in a leaky tent while on manoeuvres in a Belize rainforest.

  The ice was broken, and though Liz sternly reminded herself to reserve judgement, they continued to talk about all sorts of things, including music, and she saw Edward’s face light up as he described a Barenboim concert he’d been to recently at the Barbican. They were talking about acoustics, of all things, when Susan Carlyle came through the back door, a bunch of freshly cut flowers in her arms and a look of relief on her face to find the two of them chatting.

  They had supper in the kitchen, then sat together in the sitting room, reading and listening to Mozart. By ten, Liz found herself stifling a yawn. ‘I’m for bed,’ she declared. ‘Is there much to do tomorrow to get ready for the party?’

  Susan shook her head. ‘All in hand, dear. Thanks to Edward.’

  Upstairs Liz fell quickly into a light sleep, then woke up as her mother and Edward came up the stairs. Doors closed, another opened; Liz gave up trying to decipher what was going on, and this time fell soundly asleep.

  In the morning she drove into Stockbridge, having established that there really wasn’t anything she could do to help. When she came back her mother was at the nursery, but Edward was busy - the wine had arrived, and he’d put a clean tablecloth on the dining-room table, vacuumed the sitting room and dusted. My God, thought Liz, instead of the Colonel Blimp she’d been expecting, Edward was turning out to be a New Man.

  The party was a success, full of long-standing friends of her mother’s, most of whom seemed to know Edward already. There had been a few new faces, and even someone Liz’s age - Simon Lawrence, who owned an organic farm nearby. They’d been at school together, but Liz hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years. He’d grown immensely tall, but still had the apple-cheeked fresh face she remembered.

  ‘Hello Liz,’ he’d said shyly. ‘Do you remember me?’

  ‘How could I forget you, Simon?’ she declared with a laugh. ‘You pushed me into Skinner’s pond the summer I turned f
ourteen.’

  They’d chatted for half an hour, and when he’d left Simon asked for her number in London. ‘I try and avoid the place as a rule,’ he confessed cheerfully, ‘but it would be lovely to see you again.’

  On Sunday, for once Liz slept very late, and realised work had been taking a physical toll. When she came down to the kitchen Edward was just starting to fix lunch, and declined all offers of help, giving her a welcome cup of coffee and a hot croissant instead. He explained Susan had popped over to the nursery garden for a minute; Sunday was its busiest day.

  Liz sat and read papers, noticing a column about the Gleneagles peace conference. Breakthrough or Breakdown? was the headline, and Liz thought again how fragile were the prospects of peace and how important it was for the conference to be a success.

  After lunch she and her mother walked up the hill at one end of the Bowerbridge estate. Edward stayed behind; he seemed to sense that Liz wanted some time alone with her mother.

  At the top, they paused to look down at the Nadder Valley stretching below them. The long, dry summer meant the trees were turning early, and the oaks down in the valley were already a palette of orange and gold.

  ‘I’m so glad you could come down,’ her mother said. ‘Edward’s been wanting to meet you.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said Liz. She could not resist adding, ‘He seems quite perfect.’

  ‘Perfect?’ Her mother looked at Liz sharply. ‘He’s not perfect. Far from it.’ She paused, as if considering his faults. ‘He’s sometimes very vague - you know what men are like.’ She paused. ‘And sometimes he gets awfully sad.’

  ‘Sad? What about?’

  ‘I imagine it’s his wife. She was killed, you see, just after he retired. In a car accident in Germany.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Liz, regretting her slight sarcasm. ‘It must have been awful.’

  ‘I’m sure it was, but he doesn’t talk about it. In the same way, I don’t talk to him about your father. There doesn’t seem much point. We enjoy each other’s company, and that’s what seems important now.’