CHARLES CUMMING
A Foreign Country

Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012

Copyright © Charles Cumming 2012

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photographs © Josephine Pugh/Arcangel Images (cityscape); Henry Steadman (foreground and figure, right); SuperStock (bench, seated man); Shutterstock.com (all other images)

A Colder War extract © Charles Cumming 2013

Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Extract from The Spirit Level copyright © Seamus Heaney

Published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 2001

Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber

Extract from The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley © 1953 Hamish Hamilton reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd

Extract from Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham © 1928 William Heinemann reproduced by kind permission of A P Watt on behalf of the Royal Literary Fund

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © March 2012 ISBN: 9780007346448

Version: 2016-05-03

Dedication

For Carolyn Hanbury

Epigraph

‘There’s just one thing I think you ought to know before you take on this job … If you do well you’ll get no thanks and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help. Does that suit you?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Then I’ll wish you good afternoon.’

W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Tunisia, 1978

Chapter 1

The Present Day

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Beaune, Three Weeks Later

Chapter 80

The Background to A Foreign Country

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By Charles Cumming

About the Publisher

Tunisia, 1978

1

Jean-Marc Daumal awoke to the din of the call to prayer and to the sound of his children weeping. It was just after seven o’clock on an airless Tunisian morning. For an instant, as he adjusted his eyes to the sunlight, Daumal was oblivious to the wretchedness of his situation; then the memory of it took him like a shortness of breath. He almost cried out in despair, staring up at the cracked, whitewashed ceiling, a married man of forty-one at the mercy of a broken heart.

Amelia Weldon had been gone for six days. Gone without warning, gone without reason, gone without leaving a note. One moment she had been caring for his children at the villa – preparing their supper, reading them a bedtime story – the next she had disappeared. At dawn on Saturday, Jean-Marc’s wife, Celine, had found the au pair’s bedroom stripped of its belongings, Amelia’s suitcases taken from the cupboard, her photographs and posters removed from the walls. The family safe in the utility room was locked, but Amelia’s passport, and a necklace that she had placed there for safekeeping, were both missing. There was no record at Port de la Goulette of a twenty-year-old British woman matching Amelia’s description boarding a ferry for Europe, nor any airline out of Tunis with a passenger listing for ‘Amelia Weldon’. No hotel or hostel in the city had a guest registered under her name and the few fresh-faced students and ex-pats with whom she had socialized in Tunis appeared to know nothing of her whereabouts. Presenting himself as a concerned employer, Jean-Marc had made enquiries at the British Embassy, telexed the agency in Paris that had arranged Amelia’s employment and telephoned her brother in Oxford. Nobody, it seemed, could unravel the enigma of her disappearance. Jean-Marc’s only solace lay in the fact that her body had not been discovered in some back alley of Tunis or Carthage; that she had not been admitted to hospital suffering from an illness, which might have taken her from him for ever. He was otherwise utterly bereft. The woman who had brought upon him the exquisite torture of infatuation had vanished as completely as an echo in the night.

The children’s crying continued. Jean-Marc pulled back the single white sheet covering his body and sat up on the bed, massaging an ache in the small of his back. He heard Celine saying: ‘I am telling you for the last time, Thibaud, you are not watching cartoons until you finish your breakfast’ and it took all of his strength not to rise from the bed, to stride into the kitchen and, in his fury, to smack his son through the thin shorts of his Asterix pyjamas. Instead, Daumal drank from a half-empty glass of water on the bedside table, opened the curtains and stood on the first-floor balcony, gazing out over the rooftops of La Marsa. A tanker was moving west to east across the horizon, two days from Suez. Had Amelia left by private boat? Guttmann, he knew, kept a yacht out at Hammamet. The rich American Jew with his contacts and his privilege, the rumours of links to the MOSSAD. Daumal had seen how Guttmann had looked at Amelia; a man who had never wanted for anything in his life desired her as his prize. Had he taken her from him? There was no evidence to support his baseless jealousy, only the cuckold’s fear of humiliation. Numb from lack of sleep, Daumal settled on a plastic chair on the balcony, a smell of baking bread rising up from a neighbouring garden. Two metres away, close to the window, he spotted a half-finished packet of Mars Légère and lit one with a steady hand, coughing on the first lungful of smoke.

Footsteps in the bedroom. The children had stopped crying. Celine appeared at the balcony door and said: ‘You’re awake,’ in a tone of voice that managed to harden his heart against her still further. He knew that his wife blamed him for what had happened. But she did not know the truth. Had she guessed, she might even have comforted him; her own father, after all, had consorted with dozens of women during his married life. He wondered why Celine had not simply fired Amelia. That, at least, would have saved him from this season of pain. It was as though she wanted to torment him by keeping her in the house.

‘I’m awake,’ he replied, although Celine was long gone, locked in the bathroom under her ritual cold shower, scrubbing the child-altered body that was now repulsive to him. Jean-Marc stubbed out his cigarette, returned to the bedroom, found his dressing-gown discarded on the floor and walked downstairs to the kitchen.

Fatima, one of two maids assigned to the Daumal residence as part of the ex-pat package offered by his employers in France, was putting on an apron. Jean-Marc ignored her and, finding a percolator of coffee on the stove, prepared himself a café au lait. Thibaud and Lola were giggling with one another in an adjoining room, but he did not wish to see them. Instead he sat in his office, the door closed, sipping from the bowl of coffee. Every room, every smell, every idiosyncrasy of the villa held for him a memory of Amelia. It was in this office that they had first kissed. It was at the base of those oleander trees at the rear of the property, visible now through the window, that they had first made love in the dead of night, while Celine slept obliviously indoors. Later, Jean-Marc would take appalling risks, slipping away from his bedroom at two or three o’clock in the morning to be with Amelia, to hold her, to swallow her, to touch and manipulate a body that was so intoxicating to him that he actually laughed at the memory of it. And then he heard himself entertaining such thoughts and knew that he was little more than a romantic, self-pitying fool. So many times he had been on the brink of confessing, of telling Celine every secret of the affair: the rooms that he and Amelia had taken in hotels in Tunis; the five April days that they had spent together in Sfax while his wife had been in Beaune with the children. Jean-Marc knew, as he had always known, that he enjoyed deceiving Celine; it was a form of revenge for all the stillness and ennui of their marriage. The lying kept him sane. Amelia had understood that. Perhaps that was what had bound them together – a shared aptitude for deceit. He had been astonished at her ability to finesse their indiscretions, to cover her tracks so that Celine had no suspicion of what was going on. There were the mischievous lies at breakfast – ‘Thank you, yes, I slept very well’ – combined with a studied indifference towards Jean-Marc whenever the two lovers found themselves in Celine’s company. It was Amelia who had suggested that he pay for their hotel rooms in cash, to avoid any dubious transactions appearing on Jean-Marc’s bank statements. It was Amelia who had stopped wearing perfume, so that the scent of Hermès Calèche would not be carried back to the marital bed. There was no question in Jean-Marc’s mind that she had derived a deep satisfaction from these clandestine games.

The telephone rang. It was rare for anybody to call the house before eight o’clock in the morning; Jean-Marc was certain that Amelia was trying to contact him. He picked up the receiver and said: ‘Oui?’ in near-desperation.

A woman with an American accent replied: ‘John Mark?’

It was Guttmann’s wife. The WASP heiress, her father a senator, family money stinking all the way back to the Mayflower.

‘Joan?’

‘That’s right. Have I called at a bad moment?’

He had no time to lament her blithe assumption that all conversations between them should be conducted in English. Neither Joan nor her husband had made any attempt to learn even rudimentary French, only Arabic.

‘No, it is not a bad time. I was just on my way to work.’ He assumed that Joan wanted to arrange to spend the day at the beach with his children. ‘Do you want to speak to Celine?’

A pause. Some of the customary energy went out of Joan’s voice and her mood became businesslike, even sombre.

‘Actually, John Mark, I wanted to speak with you.’

‘With me?’

‘It’s about Amelia.’

Joan knew. She had found out about the affair. Was she going to expose him?

‘What about her?’ His tone of voice had become hostile.

‘She has asked me to convey a message to you.’

‘You’ve seen her?’

It was like hearing that a relative, assumed dead, was alive and well. He was certain now that she would come back to him.

‘I have seen her,’ Joan replied. ‘She’s worried about you.’

Daumal would have fallen on this expression of devotion like a dog snatching at a bone, had it not been necessary to sustain the lie.

‘Well, yes, Celine and the children have been very concerned. One moment Amelia was here with them, the next she was gone …’

‘No. Not Celine. Not the children. She’s worried about you.’

He felt the hope rushing out of him, a door slammed by a sudden wind.

‘About me? I don’t understand.’

Another careful pause. Joan and Amelia had always been close. As Guttmann had entrapped her in charm and money, Joan had played the caring older sister, a role model of elegance and sophistication to which Amelia might one day aspire.

‘I think you do understand, John Mark.’

The game was up. The affair had been revealed. Everybody knew that Jean-Marc Daumal had fallen hopelessly and ridiculously in love with a twenty-year-old au pair. He would be a laughing stock in the ex-patriot community.

‘I wanted to catch you before you went to work. I wanted to reassure you that nobody knows about this. I have not spoken to David, nor do I intend to say anything to Celine.’

‘Thank you,’ Jean-Marc replied quietly.

‘Amelia has left Tunisia. Last night, as a matter of fact. She’s going to go travelling for a while. She wanted me to tell you how sorry she is for the way things worked out. She never intended to hurt you or to abandon your family in the way that she did. She cares for you very deeply. It all just got too much for her, you know? Her heart was confused. Am I making sense, John Mark?’

‘You are making sense.’

‘So perhaps you might tell Celine that this was Amelia on the phone. Calling from the airport. Tell your children that she won’t be coming back.’

‘I will do that.’

‘I think it’s best, don’t you? I think it’s best if you forget all about her.’

The Present Day

2

Philippe and Jeannine Malot, of 79 Rue Pelleport, Paris, had been planning their dream holiday in Egypt for more than a year. Philippe, who had recently retired, had set aside a budget of three thousand euros and found an airline that was prepared to fly them to Cairo (albeit at six o’clock in the morning) for less than the price of a return taxi to Charles de Gaulle airport. They had researched the best hotels in Cairo and Luxor on the Internet and secured an over-60s discount at a luxury resort in Sharm-el-Sheikh, where they planned to relax for the final five days of their journey.

The Malots had arrived in Cairo on a humid summer afternoon, making love almost as soon as they had closed the door of their hotel room. Jeannine had then set about unpacking while Philippe remained in bed reading Naguib Mahfouz’s Akhénaton le Renégat, a novel that he was not altogether enjoying. After a short walk around the local neighbourhood, they had eaten dinner in one of the hotel’s three restaurants and fallen asleep before midnight to the muffled sounds of Cairene traffic.

Three enjoyable, if exhausting days, followed. Though she had developed a minor stomach complaint, Jeannine managed five hours of wide-eyed browsing in the Egyptian Museum, where she declared herself ‘awestruck’ by the treasures of Tutankhamun. On the second morning of their trip, the Malots had set off by taxi shortly after breakfast and were astonished – as all first-time visitors were – to find the Pyramids looming into view no more than a few hundred metres from a nondescript residential suburb at the edge of the city. Hounded by trinket-sellers and under-qualified guides, they had completed a full circuit of the area within two hours and asked a shaven-headed German tourist to take their photograph in front of the Sphinx. Jeannine was keen to enter the Pyramid at Cheops, but went alone, because Philippe suffered from a mild claustrophobia and had been warned by a colleague at work that the interior was both cramped and stiflingly hot. In a mood of jubilation at having finally witnessed a phenomenon that had enthralled her since childhood, Jeannine paid an Egyptian man the equivalent of fifteen euros for a brief ride on a camel. It had moaned throughout and smelled strongly of diesel. She had then accidentally deleted the picture of her husband astride the beast while attempting to organize the pictures on their digital camera at lunch the following day.

On the recommendation of an article in a French style magazine, they had travelled to Luxor by overnight train and booked a room at the Winter Palace, albeit in the Pavilion, a four-star annexed development added to the original colonial hotel. An enterprising tourism company offered donkey rides to the Valley of the Kings that left Luxor at five o’clock in the morning. The Malots had duly signed up, witnessing a dramatic sunrise over the Temple at Hatshepsut just after six a.m. They had then spent what they later agreed had been the best day of their holiday travelling out to the temples at Dendara and Abydos. On their final afternoon in Luxor, Philippe and Jeannine had taken a taxi to the Temple at Karnak and stayed until the evening to witness the famous Sound and Light show. Philippe had fallen asleep within ten minutes.

By Tuesday they were in Sharm-el-Sheikh, on the Sinai Peninsula. Their hotel boasted three swimming pools, a hairdressing salon, two cocktail bars, nine tennis courts and enough security to deter an army of Islamist fanatics. On that first evening, the Malots had decided to go for a short walk along the beach. Though their hotel was at full occupancy, no other tourists were visible in the moonlight as they made their way from the concrete walkway at the perimeter of the hotel down on to the still-warm sand.

It was afterwards estimated that they had been attacked by at least three men, each armed with knives and metal poles. Jeannine’s necklace had been torn away, scattering pearls on to the sand, and her gold wedding ring removed from her finger. Philippe had had a noose placed around his neck and been jerked upright as a second assailant sliced through his throat and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest and legs. He had bled to death within a few minutes. A torn bed sheet that had been stuffed into her mouth had muffled Jeannine’s screams. Her own throat was also slashed, her arms heavily bruised, her stomach and hips struck repeatedly by a metal pole.

A young Canadian couple, honeymooning at a neighbouring hotel, had noticed the commotion and heard Madame Malot’s stifled cries, but could not see what was happening in the light of the waning moon. By the time they got there, the men who had attacked and murdered the elderly French couple had vanished into the night, leaving a scene of devastation that the Egyptian authorities quickly dismissed as a random act of violence, perpetrated by outsiders, which was ‘highly unlikely ever to happen again’.

3

Taking someone in the street is as easy as lighting a cigarette, they had told him, and as Akim Errachidi waited in the van, he knew that he had the balls to pull it off.

It was a Monday night in late July. The target had been given a nickname – HOLST – and its movements monitored for fourteen days. Phone, email, bedroom, car: the team had everything covered. Akim had to hand it to the guys in charge – they were thorough and determined; they had thought through every detail. He was dealing with pros now and, yes, you really could tell the difference.

Beside him, in the driver’s seat of the van, Slimane Nassah was tapping his fingers in time to some R&B on RFM and talking, in vivid detail, about what he wanted to do to Beyoncé Knowles.

‘What an ass, man. Just give me five minutes with that sweet ass.’ He made the shape of it with his hands, brought it down towards his circling groin. Akim laughed.

‘Turn that shit off,’ said the boss, crouched by the side door and ready to spring. Slimane switched off the radio. ‘HOLST in sight. Thirty seconds.’

It was just as they had said it would be. The dark street, a well-known short-cut, most of Paris in bed. Akim saw the target on the opposite side of the street, about to cross at the postbox.

‘Ten seconds.’ The boss at his very best. ‘Remember, nobody is going to hurt anybody.’

The trick, Akim knew, was to move as quickly as possible, making the minimum amount of noise. In the movies, it was always the opposite way: the smash-and-grab of a screaming, adrenalized SWAT team crashing through walls, lobbing stun grenades, shouldering jet-black assault rifles. Not us, said the boss. We do it quiet and we do it slick. We open the door, we get behind HOLST, we make sure nobody sees.

‘Five seconds.’

On the radio, Akim heard the woman saying ‘Clear’ which meant that there were no civilians within sighting distance of the van.

‘OK. We go.’

There was a kind of choreographed beauty to it. As HOLST strolled past Akim’s door, three things happened simultaneously: Slimane started the engine; Akim stepped out into the street; and the boss slid open the side panel of the van. If the target knew what was happening, there was no indication of it. Akim wrapped his left arm around HOLST’s neck, smothered the gaping mouth with his hand and, with his right arm, lifted the body up into the van. The boss did the rest, grabbing at the legs and pulling them inside. Akim then came in behind them, sliding the door shut, just as he had rehearsed a dozen times. They pushed the prisoner to the floor. He heard the boss say: ‘Go’, as calm and controlled as a man buying a ticket for a train, and Slimane pulled the van out into the street.

The whole thing had taken less than twenty seconds.

4

Thomas Kell woke up in a strange bed, in a strange house, in a city with which he was all too familiar. It was eleven o’clock on an August morning in the eighth month of his enforced retirement from the Secret Intelligence Service. He was a forty-two-year-old man, estranged from his forty-three-year-old wife, with a hangover comparable in range and intensity to the reproduction Jackson Pollock hanging on the wall of his temporary bedroom.

Where the hell was he? Kell had unreliable memories of a fortieth birthday party in Kensington, of a crowded cab to a bar in Dean Street, of a nightclub in the wilds of Hackney – after that, everything was a blank.

He pulled back the duvet. He saw that he had fallen asleep in his clothes. Toys and magazines were piled up in one corner of the room. He climbed to his feet, searched in vain for a glass of water and opened the curtains. His mouth was dry, his head tight as a compress as he adjusted to the light.

It was a grey morning, shiftless and damp. He appeared to be on the first floor of a semi-detached house of indeterminate location in a quiet residential street. A small pink bicycle was secured in the drive by a loop of black cable, thick as a python. A hundred metres away, a learner driver with Jackie’s School of Motoring had stalled midway through a three-point turn. Kell closed the curtains and listened for signs of life in the house. Slowly, like a half-remembered anecdote, fragments of the previous evening began to assemble in his mind. There had been trays of shots: absinthe and tequila. There had been dancing in a low-roofed basement. He had met a large group of Czech foreign students and talked at length about Mad Men and Don Draper. Kell was fairly sure that at a certain point he had shared a cab with an enormous man named Zoltan. Alcoholic blackouts had been a regular feature of his youth, but it had been many years since he had woken up with next to no recollection of a night’s events; twenty years in the secret world had taught him the advantage of being the last man standing.

Kell was looking around for his trousers when his mobile phone began to ring. The number had been withheld.

‘Tom?’

At first, through the fog of his hangover, Kell failed to recognize the voice. Then the familiar cadence came back to him.

‘Jimmy? Christ.’

Jimmy Marquand was a former colleague of Kell’s, now one of the high priests of SIS. His was the last hand Kell had shaken before taking his leave of Vauxhall Cross on a crisp December morning eight months earlier.

‘We have a problem.’

‘No small talk?’ Kell said. ‘Don’t want to know how life is treating me in the private sector?’

‘This is serious, Tom. I’ve walked half a mile to a phone box in Lambeth so the call won’t be scooped. I need your help.’

‘Personal or professional?’ Kell located his trousers beneath a blanket on the back of a chair.

‘We’ve lost the Chief.’

That stopped him. Kell reached out and put a hand against a wall in the bedroom. Suddenly he was as sober and clear-headed as a child.

‘You’ve what?’

‘Vanished. Five days ago. Nobody has any workable idea where the hell she’s gone or what’s happened to her.’

‘She?’ The anti-Rimington brigade within MI6 had long been allergic to the notion of a female Chief. It was almost beyond belief that the all-male inmates at Vauxhall Cross had finally allowed a woman to be appointed to the most prestigious position in British Intelligence. ‘When did that happen?’

‘There’s a lot you don’t know,’ Marquand replied. ‘A lot that’s changed. I can’t say any more if we’re talking like this.’

Then why are we talking at all? Kell thought. Do they want me to come back after everything that happened? Have Kabul and Yassin just been brushed under the carpet? ‘I’m not working for George Truscott,’ he said, saving Marquand the effort of asking the question. ‘I’m not coming back if Haynes still has his hands on the tiller.’

‘Just for this,’ Marquand replied.

‘For nothing.’

It was almost the truth. Then Kell found himself saying: ‘I’m beginning to enjoy having nothing to do,’ which was an outright lie. There was a noise on the other end of the line that might have been the extinguishing of Marquand’s hopes.

‘Tom, it’s important. We need a re-tread, somebody who knows the ropes. You’re the only one we can trust.’

Who was ‘we’? The high priests? The same men who had turfed him out over Kabul? The same men who would happily have sacrificed him to the public inquiry currently assembling its tanks on the SIS lawn?

‘Trust?’ he replied, putting on a shoe.

‘Trust,’ said Marquand. It almost sounded as though he meant it.

Kell went to the window and looked outside, at the pink bicycle, at Jackie’s learner driver, moving through the gears. What did the rest of his day hold? Aspirin and daytime TV. Hair-of-the-dog bloody Marys at the Greyhound Inn. He had spent eight months twiddling his thumbs; that was the truth of his new life in the ‘private sector’. Eight months watching black-and-white matinees on TCM and drinking his pay-off in the pub. Eight months struggling to salvage a marriage that would not be saved.

‘There must be somebody else who can do it,’ he said. He hoped that there was nobody else. He hoped that he was getting back in the game.

‘The new Chief isn’t just anybody,’ Marquand replied. ‘Amelia Levene made “C”. She was due to take over in six weeks.’ He had played his ace. Kell sat down on the bed, pitching slowly forwards. Throwing Amelia into the mix changed everything. ‘That’s why it has to be you, Tom. That’s why we need you to find her. You were the only person at the Office who really knew what made her tick.’ He sugared the pill, in case Kell was still wavering. ‘It’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it? A second chance? Get this done and the file on Yassin will be closed. That’s coming from the highest levels. Find her and we can bring you in from the cold.’

5

Kell had returned to his bachelor’s bedsit in a near-derelict Fiat Punto driven by a moonlighting Sudanese cab driver who kept a packet of Lockets and a well-thumbed copy of the Koran on the dashboard. Pulling away from the house – which had indeed belonged to a genial, gym-addicted Pole named Zoltan with whom Kell had shared a drunken cab-ride from Hackney – he had recognized the shabby streets of Finsbury Park from a long-ago joint operation with MI5. He tried to remember the exact details of the job: an Irish Republican; a plot to blow up a department store; the convicted man later released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Amelia Levene had been his boss at the time.

Her disappearance was unquestionably the gravest crisis MI6 had faced since the fiasco of WMD. Officers didn’t vanish, simple as that. They didn’t get kidnapped, they didn’t get murdered, they didn’t defect. In particular, they didn’t make a point of going AWOL six weeks before they were due to take over as Chief. If the news of Amelia’s disappearance leaked to the media – Christ, even if it leaked within the walls of Vauxhall Cross – the blowback would be incendiary.

Kell had showered at home, eaten some leftover take-away Lebanese, levelled off his hangover with two codeine and a lukewarm half-litre of Coke. An hour later he was standing underneath a sycamore tree two hundred metres from the Serpentine Gallery, Jimmy Marquand striding towards him with a look on his face like his pension was on the line. He had come direct from Vauxhall Cross, wearing a suit and tie, but without the briefcase that usually accompanied him on official business. He was a slight man, a rangy weekend cyclist, tanned year-round and with a thick mop of lustrous hair that had earned him the nickname ‘Melvyn’ in the corridors of SIS. Kell had to remind himself that he had every right to refuse what Marquand was going to offer. But, of course, that was never going to happen. If Amelia was missing, he had to be the one to find her.

They exchanged a brief handshake and turned north-west in the direction of Kensington Palace.

‘So how is life in the private sector?’ Marquand asked. Humour didn’t always come easily to him, particularly at times of stress. ‘Keeping busy? Behaving?’

Kell wondered why he was making the effort. ‘Something like that,’ he said.

‘Reading all those nineteenth-century novels you promised yourself?’ Marquand sounded like a man speaking words that had been written for him. ‘Tending your garden? Tapping out the memoirs?’

‘The memoirs are finished,’ Kell said. ‘You come out of them very badly.’

‘No more than I deserve.’ Marquand appeared to run out of things to say. Kell knew that his apparent bonhomie was a mask concealing a grave, institutional panic over Amelia’s disappearance. He put him out of his misery.

‘How the fuck did this happen, Jimmy?’

Marquand tried to circumvent the question.

‘Word came through from Number 10 shortly after you left,’ he said. ‘They wanted an Arabist, they wanted a woman. She’d impressed the Prime Minister on the JIC. He finds out we’ve lost her, it’s curtains.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know that’s not what you meant.’ Marquand’s reply was terse and he looked away, as though ashamed that the crisis had happened on his watch. ‘Two weeks ago she had a briefing with Haynes, the traditional one-on-one in which the baton gets passed from one Chief to the next. Secrets exchanged, tall tales told, all the things that you and me and the good people of Britain are not supposed to know.’

‘Such as?’

‘You tell me.’

‘What, then? Who shot JR? A fifth plane on 9/11? Give me the facts, Jimmy. What did he tell her? Let’s stop fucking around.’

‘All right, all right.’ Marquand swept back his hair. ‘Sunday morning she announces that she has to go to Paris, for a funeral. Taking a couple of days off. Then, on Wednesday, we get another message. An email. She’s strung out after the funeral and has decided to take some holiday. South of France. No warning, just using up the rest of her allowance before the top job sucks all of her time. A painting course in Nice, something that she’d “always wanted to crack”.’ Kell thought that he caught a vapour of alcohol on Marquand’s breath. It could equally well have been his own. ‘Told us that she’d be back in two weeks, reachable on such-and-such a number at such-and-such a hotel in the event of any emergency.’

‘Then what?’

Marquand was holding his hair in place against the buffeting London wind. He came to a halt. A blue plastic bag cartwheeled beside him across a patch of unmown grass, snagging in a nearby tree. He lowered his voice, as though ashamed by what he was about to say.

‘George sent somebody after her. Off the books.’

‘Now why would he do a thing like that?’

‘He was suspicious that she’d arranged a holiday so soon after the download with Haynes. It seemed unusual.’

Kell knew that George Truscott, as Assistant to the Chief, had been the man lined up to succeed Simon Haynes as ‘C’; as far as most observers were concerned, it was merely a question of the PM waving him through. Truscott would have had the suit made, the furniture fitted, the dye-stamped invitations waiting to go out in the post. But Amelia Levene had stolen his prize. A woman. A second-class citizen in the SIS firmament. His resentment towards her would have been toxic.

‘What’s unusual about taking a holiday at this time of year?’

Kell felt that he knew the answer to his own question. Amelia’s story made no sense. It wasn’t like her to attend a painting course; a woman like that didn’t need a hobby. In all the years that he had known Amelia, she had used her holidays as opportunities for relaxation. Health spas, detox clinics, five-star lodges with salad bars and wall-to-wall masseurs. She had never spoken of a desire to paint. As Marquand contemplated his answer, Kell walked across the stretch of unmown ground, pulled the plastic bag clear of the tree and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans.

‘You’re a model citizen, Tom, a model citizen.’ Marquand looked down at his shoes and gave a heavy sigh, as if he was tired of making excuses for the failings of other men. ‘Of course there’s nothing unusual about taking a holiday this time of year. But usually we have more warning. Usually it goes in the diary several months in advance. This looked like a sudden decision, a reaction to something that Haynes had told her.’

‘What was Haynes’s view on that?’

‘He agreed with Truscott. So they asked some friends in Nice to keep an eye on her.’

Again, Kell kept his counsel. Towards the end of his career, he had himself become a victim of the paranoid, near-delusional manoeuvrings of George Truscott, yet he was still privately astonished that the two most senior figures in the Service had green-lit a surveillance operation against one of their own.

‘Who are the friends in Nice? Liaison?’

‘Christ, no. Avoid the Frog at all costs. Re-treads. Ours. Bill Knight and his wife, Barbara. Retired to Menton in ’98. We got them to sign up for the painting course, they saw Amelia arrive on Wednesday afternoon, enjoyed a bit of a chat. Then Bill reported her missing when she failed to turn up three mornings in a row.’

‘What’s unusual about that?’

Marquand frowned. ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘Well, couldn’t Amelia have taken a couple of days off? Got sick?’

‘That’s just it. She didn’t call it in. Barbara rang the hotel, there was no sign of her. We telephoned Amelia’s husband –’

‘– Giles,’ said Kell.

‘Giles, yes, but he hasn’t heard from her since she left Wiltshire. Her mobile is switched off, she’s not responding to emails, there’s been no activity on her credit cards. It’s a total blackout.’

‘What about the police?’

Marquand bounced his caterpillar eyebrows and said: ‘Bof ’ in a cod French accent. ‘They haven’t scraped her off a motorway or found her body floating in the Med, if that’s what you mean.’ He saw Kell’s reaction to this and felt compelled to apologize. ‘Sorry, that was tasteless. I didn’t mean to sound glib. This whole thing is a bloody mystery.’

Kell ran through a list of possible explanations, as arbitrary as they were inexhaustible: Russian or Iranian interference in some aspect of Amelia’s personal affairs; a clandestine arrangement with the Yanks relating to Libya and the Arab Spring; a sudden crisis of faith engendered by something in the meeting with Haynes. In the run-up to Kell’s demise at SIS, Amelia had been knee-deep in Francophone West Africa, which might have aroused interest from the French or Chinese. Islamist involvement was a permanent concern.

‘What about known aliases?’ He felt the dryness of his hangover again, the bluntness of three hours’ sleep. ‘Isn’t it possible she’s running an operation, one that Tweedledum and Tweedledee know nothing about?’

Marquand conceded the possibility of this, but wondered what was so secret that it would require Amelia Levene to disappear without at the very least enlisting the technical support of GCHQ.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘The only people who know about this are Haynes, Truscott and the Knights. Paris Station is still in the dark and it needs to stay that way. This leaks out, the Service will be a laughing stock. God knows where it would end. She’s due to meet the PM formally in two weeks’ time. Obviously that meeting can’t be cancelled without creating a gold-tinted Whitehall shitstorm. Washington finds out we’ve lost our most senior spy, they’ll go ballistic. Haynes wants to find her within the next few days and pretend that none of this happened. She’s due back Monday week.’ Marquand looked quickly to his right, as though reacting to a sudden noise. ‘Look, maybe she’ll just show up. It’ll probably be some smoothie from Paris, a Jean-Pierre or a Xavier with a big cock and a gîte in Aix-en-Provence. You know what Amelia’s like with the boys. Madonna could take notes.’

Kell was surprised to hear Marquand talk of Amelia’s reputation so candidly. Philandering, like alcohol, was almost an Office prerequisite, but it was a male sport, jocular and off the books. In all the years that Kell had known her, Amelia had had no more than three lovers, yet she was spoken of as though she had slept her way through seventy-five per cent of the Civil Service.

‘Why Paris?’

Marquand looked up. ‘She stopped there on the way down to Nice.’

‘My question stands. Why Paris?’

‘She went to the funeral on Tuesday.’

‘Whose funeral?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’ For a dyed-in-the-wool careerist, Marquand didn’t seem unduly concerned about admitting to gaps in his knowledge. ‘All this has happened very fast, Tom. We haven’t been able to get a name. Giles thinks she went to a crematorium in the Fourteenth. Montparnasse. An old friend from student days.’

‘He didn’t go with her?’

‘She told him he wasn’t wanted.’

‘And Giles does what Giles is told to do.’ Kell knew all too well the mechanics of the Levene marriage; he had studied it closely, as a cautionary tale. Marquand looked as if he was about to laugh but thought better of it.

‘Precisely. Dennis Thatcher syndrome. Husbands should be seen and not heard.’

‘Sounds to me like you need to find out who the friend was.’ Kell was stating the obvious, but Marquand appeared to have run out of road.

‘Do I take that as an indication that you’ll help?’

Kell looked up. The branches of the tree were obscuring a charcoal sky. It was going to rain. He thought of Afghanistan, of the book he was meant to be writing, of the vapid August nights stretching ahead of him at his bachelor’s bedsit in Kensal Rise. He thought about his wife and he thought about Amelia. He was convinced that she was alive and convinced that Marquand was hiding something. How many other re-treads would be sent on her tail?

‘How much is Her Majesty offering?’

‘How much would you need?’ It was somebody else’s cash, so Jimmy Marquand could afford to splash it about. Kell didn’t care about the money, not at all, but didn’t want to appear sloppy by not asking. He plucked a figure out of the damp afternoon sky. ‘A thousand a day. Plus expenses. I’ll need a laptop, encrypted, ditto a mobile and the Stephen Uniacke alias. Decent car waiting for me at Nice airport. If it’s a Peugeot with two doors and a tape deck, I’m coming home.’

‘Sure.’

‘And George Truscott pays my speeding fines. All of them.’

‘Done.’

6

Kell caught a flight out of Heathrow at eight. As he was switching it to ‘Flight Mode’, a text message came through on his mobile phone:

Don’t forget appointment tomorrow. 2pm Finchley. Meet you at the Tube.

Finchley. The death throes of his marriage. An hour with a grim-faced guidance counsellor who offered up platitudes like biscuits on a plate. It occurred to Kell, clicking his seat belt on the aisle, that this was only the second time that he had left London in the eight months since his departure from SIS. In mid-March, Claire had suggested a ‘romantic weekend’ in Brighton – ‘to see if we can be more than ships passing in the night’ – but the hotel had played host to an all-night wedding party, they had slept for only three hours, and by Sunday were lost in a familiar blizzard of recrimination and argument.

A young mother was seated beside him on the plane, a toddler strapped into the window seat. She had come prepared for the battle ahead, producing a bag stuffed with magazines and stickers, sugar-free biscuits and a bottle of water. Every now and again, when the boy fidgeted too much or screamed too loudly, his mother would offer up a knowing smile that was halfway to an apology. Kell tried to reassure her that he couldn’t care less: it was only an hour and a half to Nice and he liked the company of children.

‘Do you have kids of your own?’ she said, the question that should never be asked.

‘No,’ Kell replied, picking up a green plastic figurine that had fallen on the floor. ‘Sadly not.’

The mother was preoccupied throughout the flight and Kell was able to read the notes he had made from Amelia’s classified file without being concerned about wandering eyes: the man in the seat across the aisle was engrossed in a spreadsheet; the woman behind him, over his left shoulder, asleep on an inflatable neck pillow. He knew most of Amelia’s story already; they had swapped secrets during the strange intimacy of a fifteen-year friendship. Her journey into the secret world had begun at a young age. While working in Tunis as an au pair in the late 1970s Amelia had been talent-spotted by Joan Guttmann, a deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. Guttmann had brought Amelia to the attention of SIS, which had kept an eye on her at Oxford, making an initial move to recruit soon after she had been awarded a starred First in French and Arabic in the summer of 1983. After a year at MECAS, the so-called ‘School for Spies’ in Lebanon, she had been posted to Egypt in ’85 and to Iraq in ’89. Returning to London in the spring of 1993, Amelia Weldon had met and quickly become engaged to Giles Levene, a fifty-two-year-old bond trader with thirty million in the bank and a personality described by one of Kell’s former colleagues as ‘aggressively soporific’. The file noted, with a passive anti-Semitism of the sort Kell believed had largely died out within SIS, that Levene was considered ‘ambivalent’ on Israel, but that his wife’s ‘attitudes in that area’ should ‘nevertheless be monitored for indications of bias’.

In such a context, Amelia’s rise to power made for fascinating reading. There had been an astonishing amount of sexism directed towards her, particularly in the early phase of her career. In Egypt, for example, she had been overlooked for promotion on the grounds that she was unlikely to remain in the Service ‘beyond child-bearing years’. The position had gone instead to a celebrated Cairo alcoholic with two marriages behind him and a record of producing CX reports lifted from the pages of Al-Ahram. Her fortunes began to shift in Iraq, where she worked under non-official cover as an analyst for a French conglomerate. An Irish passport had kept ‘Ann Wilkes’ in Baghdad for the duration of the first Gulf War, and her access to officials in the Ba’ath party, as well as to prominent figures in the Iraqi military structure, had been lauded both in London and in the United States. Since then, her career had gone from strength to strength: there were postings in Washington and to Kabul, where she had operational control of SIS operations throughout Afghanistan for more than two years following the toppling of the Taliban. In an indication of her ambitions for the Service, she had argued for a more robust British influence in Africa, a stance viewed as prescient by Downing Street in the wake of the Arab Spring, but one that had brought her into conflict with George Truscott, a corporatized bureaucrat with a Cold War mindset who was widely despised by the rank and file within SIS.

Kell closed the notebook. He looked at the child beside him, now sleeping in his mother’s arms, and tried to relish some sense of being back in the game. Yet he felt nothing. For eight months he had been treading water, pretending to himself and to Claire that he had taken a principled stand against the double-think and mendacity of the secret state. It was nonsense, of course; they had turfed him out in disgrace. And when Marquand had come calling, the bagman for Truscott and Haynes, Kell had jumped back aboard like a child at a fairground, relishing the prospect of another ride. He realized that any determination he had felt to prove them wrong, to proclaim his innocence, even to create a new life for himself, had been built on sand. He had nothing but his past to live on, nothing but his skills as a spy.

Somewhere over the southern Alps the cabin lights dimmed like an eye test. The flight was on time. Kell looked out of the starboard window and searched for the glow of Nice. A stewardess strapped herself into a rear-facing seat, checked her face in a compact mirror and flashed him an air-conditioned smile. Kell nodded back, necked two aspirin and the remains of a bottle of water, then sat back as the plane banked over the Mediterranean. The landing earned the captain a round of applause from three drunken Yorkshiremen seated two rows behind him. Kell had no luggage in the hold and had cleared Immigration, on his own passport, by eleven fifteen.

The Knights were in Arrivals. Jimmy Marquand had told him to look out for ‘a British couple in their mid-sixties’, he ‘a denizen of the tanning salon with a dyed moustache’, she ‘a tiny, rather sympathetic bird who’s quick on her feet but permanently in her husband’s shadow’.

The description was near-perfect. Emerging from the customs hall through a set of automatic doors, Kell was confronted by a languid Englishman with a deep suntan, wearing pressed chinos and a button-down cream shirt. A pistachio cashmere jumper was slung over his shoulders and knotted, in the Mediterranean style, across his chest. The moustache was no longer dyed but it looked as though Bill Knight had dedicated at least fifteen minutes of his evening to combing every strand of his thinning white hair. Here was a man who had never quite forgiven himself for growing old.

‘Tom, I assume,’ he said, the voice too loud, the handshake too firm, full lips rolling under his moustache as though life was a wine he was tasting. Kell toyed with the idea of saying: ‘I’d prefer it if you referred to me at all times as Mr Kell,’ but didn’t have the energy to hurt his feelings.

‘And you must be Barbara.’ Behind Knight, lingering in what Claire called ‘the Rain Man position’, was a small lady with half-moon spectacles and a deteriorated posture. Her shy, sliding eye contact managed both to apologize for her husband’s slightly ludicrous demeanour and to establish an immediate professional chemistry that Kell was glad of. Knight, he knew, would do most of the talking, but he would get the most productive information from his wife.

‘We have your car waiting outside,’ she said, as Knight offered to carry his bag. Kell waved away the offer and experienced the unsettling realization that his own mother, had she lived, would now be the same vintage as this diminutive lady with unkempt grey hair, creased clothes and soft, uncomplicated gestures.

‘It’s a luxury saloon,’ said Knight, as if he disapproved of the expense. His voice had a smug, adenoidal quality that had already become irritating. ‘I think you’ll be quite satisfied.’

They walked towards the exit. Kell caught their reflection in a facing window and felt like a wayward son visiting his parents at a retirement complex on the Costa del Sol. It seemed astonishing to him that all that SIS had placed between the disappearance of Amelia Levene and a national scandal were a superannuated spook with a hangover and two borderline geriatric re-treads who hadn’t been in the game since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps Marquand intended Kell to fail. Was that the plan? Or had the Knights come equipped with a hidden agenda, a plan to thwart Kell before he had even started?

‘It’s this way,’ said Knight, as a young woman, undernourished as a catwalk model, ran through the automatic doors and launched herself into the arms of a leathery lothario only a few years younger than Knight. Kell heard her say: ‘Mon cherie!’ in a Russian accent and noted that she kept her eyes open when she kissed him.

They walked out into the humid French evening across a broad concrete apron that connected the terminal building to a three-storey car park a hundred metres to the east. The airport was gradually shutting down, buses nestled side by side beneath a blackened underpass, one of the drivers asleep at the wheel. A line of late arrivals were queuing for a connection to Monaco, all of them noticeably more chic and composed than the pint-swilling hordes Kell had witnessed at Heathrow airport. Knight paid for the car park, carefully folded the receipt into his wallet for expenses, and led him towards a black Citroën C6 on the upper level.

‘The documents you requested arrived an hour ago and are in an envelope on the passenger seat,’ he said. Kell assumed he was talking about the Uniacke legend, which Marquand had sent ahead by courier so that Kell would not have to carry a false passport through French customs. ‘Be warned,’ Knight continued, tapping his fingers on the back window, as though there was somebody hiding inside. ‘It’s a diesel. I can’t tell you how many friends of ours come out here, rent a car from Hertz or Avis and then ruin their time in France by putting unleaded …’

Barbara put a stop to this.

‘Bill, I’m quite sure Mr Kell is capable of filling up a car at a petrol station.’ In the jaundiced light, it was difficult to see if her husband blushed. Kell remembered a line from Knight’s file, which he had flicked through en route to the airport. ‘Abhors a conversational vacuum. Tendency to talk when he might be wiser keeping his counsel.’

‘That’s OK,’ Kell said. ‘Easy mistake to make.’

The Knights’ vehicle, parked alongside the C6, was a right-hand-drive Mercedes with twenty-year-old British plates and a dent on the front-right panel.

‘An old and somewhat battered Merc,’ Knight explained unnecessarily, as though he was used to the car attracting strange looks. ‘But it does us very well. Once a year Barbara and I are obliged to drive back across the Channel to have an MOT and to update the insurance paperwork, but it’s worth it …’

Kell had heard enough. He slung his bag in the back seat of the Citroën and got down to business.

‘Let’s talk about Amelia Levene,’ he said. The car park was deserted, the ambient noise of occasional planes and passing traffic smothering their conversation. Knight, who had been cut-off mid-sentence, looked suitably attentive. ‘According to London, Mrs Levene went missing several days ago. Did you speak to her during the time she attended the painting course?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Knight, as if Kell was questioning their integrity. ‘Of course.’

‘What can you tell me about Amelia’s mood, her behaviour?’

Barbara made to reply, but Knight interrupted her.

‘Completely normal. Very friendly and enthusiastic. Introduced herself as a retired schoolteacher, widowed. Very little to report at all.’

Kell remembered another line from the Knight file: ‘Not always prepared to go the extra mile. A feeling has developed among colleagues over the years that Bill Knight prefers the quiet life to getting his hands dirty.’

Barbara duly filled in the blanks.

‘Well,’ she said, sensing that Kell wasn’t satisfied by her husband’s answer, ‘Bill and I have disagreed about this. I thought that she looked a little distracted. Didn’t do an awful lot of painting, which seemed odd, given that she was there to learn. Also checked her phone rather a lot for text messages.’ She glanced at Kell and produced a tiny, satisfied smile, like someone who has solved a taxing crossword clue. ‘That struck me as particularly strange. You see, people of her vintage aren’t exactly glued to mobiles in the way that the younger generation are. Wouldn’t you say, Mr Kell?’

‘Call me Tom,’ Kell said. ‘What about friends, acquaintances? Did you see her with anybody? When London asked you to keep an eye on Mrs Levene, did you follow her into Nice? Did she go anywhere in the evenings?’

‘That’s an awful lot of questions all at once,’ said Knight, looking pleased with himself.

‘Answer them one at a time,’ Kell said, and felt an operational adrenalin at last beginning to kick in. There was a sudden gust of wind and Knight did something compensatory with his hair.

‘Well, Barbara and myself aren’t aware that Mrs Levene went anywhere in particular. On Thursday evening, for example, she ate dinner alone at a restaurant on Rue Masséna. I followed her back to her hotel, sat in the Mercedes until midnight, but didn’t see her leave.’

Kell met Knight’s eye. ‘You didn’t think to take a room at the hotel?’

A pause, an awkward back-and-forth glance between husband and wife.

‘What you have to understand, Tom, is that we haven’t had a great deal of time to react to all this.’ Knight, perhaps unconsciously, had taken a step backwards. ‘London asked us simply to sign up for the course, to keep an eye on Mrs Levene, to report anything mysterious. That was all.’

Barbara took over the reins. She was plainly worried that they were giving Kell a poor impression of their abilities.

‘It didn’t sound as though London expected anything to happen,’ she explained. ‘It was almost pitched as though they were asking us to look out for her. And it’s only been – what? – two or three days since we reported Mrs Levene missing.’

‘And you’re convinced that she’s not in Nice, that she’s not simply staying with a friend?’

‘Oh, we’re not convinced of anything,’ Knight replied, which was the most convincing thing he had said since Kell had cleared customs. ‘We did as we were told. Mrs Levene didn’t show her face at the course, we rang it in. Mr Marquand must have smelled a rat and sent for reinforcements.’

Reinforcements. It occurred to Kell that exactly twenty-four hours earlier he was drinking in a crowded bar on Dean Street, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a forty-year-old university friend whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years.

‘London are concerned that there’s been no movement on Amelia’s credit cards,’ he said, ‘no response from her mobile.’

‘Do you think she’s … defected?’ Knight asked, and Kell suppressed a smile. Where to? Moscow? Beijing? Amelia would sooner live in Albania.

‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘Chiefs of the Service are too high profile. The political repercussions would be seismic. But never say never.’

‘Never say never,’ Barbara muttered.

‘What about her room? Has anybody searched it?’

Knight looked at his shoes. Barbara adjusted her half-moon spectacles. Kell realized why they had never progressed beyond Ops Support in Nairobi.

‘We weren’t under instructions to conduct any kind of search,’ Knight replied.

‘And the people running the painting course? Have you talked to them?’

Knight shook his head, still staring at his shoes like a scolded schoolboy. Kell decided to put them out of their misery.

‘OK, tell you what,’ he said, ‘how far is the Hotel Gillespie?’

Barbara looked worried. ‘It’s on Boulevard Dubouchage. About twenty minutes away.’

‘I’m going to go. You’ve booked a room for me under “Stephen Uniacke”, is that right?’

Knight perked up. ‘That is correct. But wouldn’t you like something to eat? Barbara and I thought that we could take you into Nice, to a little place we both enjoy near the port. It stays open well past …’

‘Later,’ Kell replied. There had been a Cajun wrap at Heathrow, a can of Coke to wash it down. That would see him through until morning. ‘But I need you to do something for me.’

‘Of course,’ Barbara replied.

Kell could see how much she wanted to prolong her return to the spotlight and knew that she might still prove useful to him.

‘Call the Gillespie. Tell them you’ve just landed and need a room. Go to the hotel, but wait outside and make sure you speak to me before you check in.’

Knight looked nonplussed.

‘Is that OK?’ Kell asked him pointedly. If Kell was being paid a thousand a day, chances were that the Knights were on at least half that. In final analysis, they were obliged to do whatever he told them. ‘I’ll need to gain access to the hotel’s computer system. I want all the details from Amelia’s room, arrival and departure times, Internet use and so on. In order to do that, I’ll have to distract whoever works the night shift, get them away from the desk for five or ten minutes. You could be very useful in that context – ordering room service, complaining about a broken tap, pulling an emergency cord in the bathroom. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ Knight replied.

‘Do you have a suitcase or something that will pass for an overnight bag?’

Barbara thought for a moment and said: ‘I think so, yes.’

‘Give me half an hour to check in and then make your way to the hotel.’ He was aware of how quickly he was improvising ideas, old tricks coming back to him all the time; it was as though his brain had been sitting in aspic for eight months. ‘It goes without saying that if you see me in the lobby, we don’t know each other.’

Knight produced a blustery laugh. ‘Of course, Tom.’

‘And keep your phone on.’ Kell climbed into the Citroën. ‘Chances are I’ll need to call you within the hour.’

7

The Citroën sat-nav knew how to negotiate the Nice one-way system and had led Kell to Boulevard Dubouchage within twenty minutes. The Hotel Gillespie was exactly the sort of place that Amelia favoured: modest in size but classy; comfortable but not ostentatious. George Truscott would have booked himself a suite at the Negresco and charged the lot to the British taxpayer.

There was an underground car park three blocks away. Kell looked for a secure place to stow his passport and the contents of his wallet and found a narrow wall cavity in a cracked breeze block about two metres above ground. Marquand had sent ahead full documentation for Stephen Uniacke, including credit cards, a passport, a driving licence, and the general paraphernalia of day-to-day life in England: supermarket loyalty cards; membership of Kew Gardens; breakdown cover for the RAC. There were even faded wallet photographs of Uniacke’s phantom wife and phantom children. Kell discarded the envelope and took a lift up to street level. Uniacke – supposedly a marketing consultant with offices in Reading – had been one of three aliases that Kell had regularly employed during his twenty-two-year career in British Intelligence. Assuming the identity one more time felt as natural to him – indeed, in many ways, as comforting – as putting on an old coat.

The Gillespie was set back from the street by a short, semi-circular access road that allowed vehicles to pull up outside the entrance, depositing passengers and baggage. Kell walked through a pair of automatic doors and climbed a flight of steps into an intimate midnight lobby dotted with black-and-white photographs of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and other musical legends of yesteryear. He had a deep and incurable aversion to jazz but a fondness for sober, low-lit lobbies with rugs on old wooden floors, decent oil paintings and residents’ bars that tinkled with ice and conversation. A young man in a dark jacket with acne and cropped blond hair was organizing a large bowl of potpourri on the reception desk. The night porter. He greeted Kell with an effortful smile and Kell saw that he looked tired to the point of exhaustion.

‘May I help you, sir?’

Kell put his bag on the ground and explained, in French, that he had reserved a room under the name ‘Uniacke’. He was asked for his identification and a credit card, and obliged to fill in a brief registration form. There was a computer terminal at the desk on which the porter called up Uniacke’s details. The keyboard was below the counter, out of sight, so that it was not possible for Kell to follow the keystrokes of any log-in password.

‘I’ve stayed here before,’ he said, scoping the small office at the back of the reception area where a second computer terminal was visible. There was a can of Coke adjacent to the screen and a large paperback book open on the desk. Kell had been looking for evidence of a CCTV system in the lobby but had not yet seen one. ‘Do you have a record of that on your system?’

It was a prepared question to which he already knew the answer. Nevertheless, when the porter responded, he would have the opportunity to lean over the desk and to look directly at the reservation system in feigned astonishment.

‘Let me have a look, sir,’ the porter duly replied. A downy fur covered his pale, washed-out skin, a zit primed to burst on the chin. ‘No, I don’t think we have a record of that here …’

‘You don’t?’ Kell ramped up his surprise and touched the side of the screen, tilting it towards him so that he could identify the booking software operated by the hotel. It was ‘Opera’, the most widely used reservations system in Europe and one with which Kell was reasonably familiar. Uniacke’s details were laid out on a guest folio that itemized his impending expenses in a series of boxes marked ‘Food’, ‘Accommodation’, ‘Drinks’ and ‘Telephone’. As long as the porter left himself logged in, accessing Amelia’s information would be straightforward. Kell knew that she had been staying in Room 218 and that the tabs on Opera would take him to her personal details in two or three clicks of a mouse.

‘Perhaps it’s under my wife’s name,’ he said, moving his hand back behind the counter. A guest emerged from the bar, nodded at the porter and walked out of the lobby towards a bank of lifts. Kell took a few steps backwards, peered into the bar, and spotted a young couple drinking cognacs at a table in the far corner. A wide-hipped barmaid was picking peanuts off the carpet. The room was otherwise deserted. ‘Never mind,’ he said, turning back to the desk. ‘Could I arrange a wake-up call for the morning? Seven o’clock?’

It was a small detail, but would give the porter the useful impression that Monsieur Uniacke intended to go to sleep as soon as he reached his room.

‘Of course, sir.’

Kell was allocated a room on the third floor and walked up the stairs in order to familiarize himself with the layout of the hotel. On the first-floor landing he saw something that gave him an idea: a cupboard, the door ajar, in which a chambermaid had left a Hoover and various cleaning products. He continued along a short passage, entered his room using his card key, and immediately began to unpack. En route to Heathrow, Marquand had given him a laptop. Kell placed an encrypted 3G modem in a USB port and accessed the SIS server through three password-protected firewalls. There were two miniatures of Johnnie Walker in the mini-bar and he drank them, fifty-fifty with Evian, while he checked his email. Marquand had sent a message with an update on Amelia’s disappearance:

Trust you have arrived safely. No sign of our friend. Peripherals still inactive.

‘Peripherals’ was a reference to Amelia’s credit cards and mobile phone.

Funerals at crematoria in the Paris 14th on applicable days. Look for surnames: Chamson, Lilar, de Vilmorin, Tardieu, Radiguet, Malot, Bourget. Investigating further. Should have specifics within 24.

Crematoria. Trust Marquand to be fastidious with the Latin. Kell sprayed some aftershave under his shirt, switched the SIMs on his mobile so that he could check any private messages from London, and wolfed a tube of Pringles from the mini-bar. He then replaced the Uniacke SIM and dialled the Knights’ number. Barbara picked up. It sounded as though her husband was doing the driving.

‘Mr Kell?’

‘Where are you, Barbara?’

‘We’re just parking around the corner from the hotel. We were a little delayed in traffic.’

‘Did you get the room?’

‘Yes. We rang from the airport.’

‘Who made the call?’

‘I did.’

‘And did you say it was for two people?’

Barbara hesitated before replying, as though she suspected Kell was laying a trap for her. ‘Not specifically, but I think he understood that I was with my husband.’

Kell took the risk. ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘I want you to check in alone. I need you to leave Bill on the outside.’

‘I see.’ There was an awkward pause as Barbara absorbed the instruction.

‘I’m going to create a diversion at two o’clock that will require the night porter to go upstairs and fetch a Hoover.’

The line cut out briefly and Barbara said: ‘A what?’

‘A Hoover. A vacuum cleaner. Listen carefully. What I’m going to tell you is important. The Hoover is in a cupboard on the first-floor landing. You’ll be waiting there at two. When the porter comes up, tell him that you’re lost and can’t find your room. Get him to show you where it is. Don’t let him come back to reception. If he insists on doing so, make a fuss. Feign illness, start crying, do whatever you have to do. When you get to the door of your room, ask him to come inside and explain how to work the television. Keep him busy, that’s the main thing. I may need ten minutes if the log-in is down. Ask him questions. You’re a lonely old lady with jet lag. Is that OK? Do you think you can manage that?’

‘It sounds very straightforward,’ Barbara replied, and Kell detected a note of terseness in her voice. He was aware that he was being brusque, and that to describe her as an ‘old lady’ was not, in retrospect, particularly constructive.

‘When you check in, play up the eccentric side of your personality,’ he continued, trying to restore some rapport. ‘Get your papers in a muddle. Ask how to use the card key for your room. Flirt a little bit. The night porter is a young guy, probably speaks English. Try that first before you opt for French. OK?’

It sounded as though Barbara was writing things down. ‘Of course, Tom.’

Kell explained that he would call back at 1.45 a.m. to confirm the plan. In the meantime, she was to check the hotel for any signs of a security guard, maid or member of the kitchen staff who might have remained on the premises. If she saw anybody, she was to alert him immediately.

‘What room are you in?’ Barbara asked him.

‘Three two two. And tell Bill to keep his eye on the entrance. Anybody tries to come in from the street between one fifty-five and two-fifteen, he needs to stall them.’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘Make sure he understands. The last thing I’ll need when I’m sitting in the office is a guest walking through the lobby.’

8

‘I simply don’t understand it. I don’t understand why he doesn’t want me to be involved.’

Bill Knight was slumped over the wheel of the Mercedes, staring down at his beige patent leather shoes, shaking his head as he tried to fathom this latest, and probably final, SIS insult to his operational abilities. A passer-by, gazing through the window, might have assumed that he was weeping.

‘Darling, he does want you to be involved. He just wants you to be on the outside. He needs you to keep an eye on the door.’

‘At two o’clock in the morning? Who comes back to a hotel at two o’clock in the morning? He doesn’t trust me. He doesn’t think I’m up to it. He’s been told that you’re the star. It was ever thus.’

Barbara Knight had mopped and soothed her husband’s fragile ego for almost forty years, through myriad professional humiliations, incessant financial crises, even his own hapless infidelities. She squeezed his clenched fingers as they gripped the handbrake and tried to resolve this latest crisis as best she could.

‘Plenty of people come back to a hotel at two o’clock in the morning, Bill. You’re just too old to remember.’ That was a mistake, reminding him of his age. She tried a different approach. ‘Kell needs to gain control of the reservations system. If somebody comes through the door and sees him behind the desk, they might smell a rat.’

‘Oh balls,’ said Knight. ‘It isn’t possible to get into any half-decent hotel in the world at that hour without first ringing a bell and having someone come down to let you in. Kell is fobbing me off. I’ll be wasting my time out here.’

Right on cue, two guests appeared at the entrance to the Hotel Gillespie, rang the doorbell and waited as the night porter made his way to the bottom of the stairs. It was as though they had been provided by a mischievous god to illustrate Knight’s point. The porter assessed their credentials and allowed them to pass into the lobby. Bill and Barbara Knight, parked fifty metres away, saw the whole thing through the windscreen of their superannuated Mercedes.

‘See?’ he said, with weary triumph.

Barbara was momentarily lost for words.

‘Nevertheless,’ she managed, ‘it’s best if they don’t ring the bell. Why don’t you buy yourself a packet of cigarettes and just loiter outside or something? You could still be very useful, darling.’

Knight felt that he was being hoodwinked. ‘I don’t smoke,’ he said, and Barbara summoned the last of her strength in the face of his petulance.

‘Look, it’s perfectly clear that there’s no role for you in the hotel. Kell wants me to play Miss Marple and make a nuisance of myself. If we go in as husband and wife, I’m automatically less vulnerable. Do you see?’

Knight ignored the question. Barbara finally lost her patience.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it would be better if you simply went home.’

‘Went home?’ Knight reared up from the wheel and Barbara saw that his eyes were stung with resentment; oddly, it was the same wretched expression that he wore after almost every conversation with their errant thirty-six-year-old son. ‘I’m not going to leave you alone in a hotel with a man we don’t know, working all hours of the night on some crackpot scheme to …’

‘Darling, he’s hardly someone we don’t know …’

‘I don’t like the look of him. I don’t like his manner.’

‘Well, I’m sure the feeling is mutual.’

That was a second mistake. Knight inhaled violently through his nose and turned to stare out of the window. Moments later, he had switched on the engine and was beckoning Barbara to leave, purely by force of his body language.

‘Don’t be cross,’ she said, one hand on the door, the other still on the handbrake. She was desperate to get into the hotel and to check into her room, to fulfil the task that had been given to her. Her husband’s constant neediness was pointless and counter-productive. ‘You know it isn’t personal.’ An overweight man wearing a tracksuit and bright white trainers walked past the Gillespie, turned left along Rue Alberti and disappeared. ‘I’ll be perfectly all right. I’ll call you in less than an hour. Just wait in a café if you’re worried. Tom will probably send me home in a couple of hours.’

‘What café? I’m sixty-two years old, for goodness’ sake. I can’t go and sit in a café.’ Knight continued to stare out of the window. He looked like a jilted lover. ‘In any case, don’t be so ridiculous. I can’t abandon my post. He wants me watching the fucking entrance.’

It began to rain. Barbara shook her head and reached for the door. She didn’t like to hear her husband swearing. On the back seat of the Mercedes was a sausage bag in which the Knights usually ferried bottles and cans to a recycling area in Menton. She had stuffed it with a scrunched-up copy of Nice-Matin, an old hat and a pair of Wellington boots. She picked it up. ‘Just remember that we’ve had a lot of fun in the last few days,’ she said. ‘And that we’re being very well paid.’ Her words appeared to have no visible impact. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I get to my room, Bill.’ A gentle kiss on the cheek. ‘Promise.’

9

Kell drained the last of the Johnnie Walker and picked up the landline on the bedside table. He dialled ‘0’ for Reception. The night porter answered on the second ring.

‘Oui, bonsoir, Monsieur Uniacke.’

It was now just a question of spinning the story. The wi-fi in his room wasn’t connecting, Kell said. Could Reception check the system? The porter apologized for the inconvenience, dictated a new network key over the phone, and hoped that Monsieur Uniacke would have better luck second time around.

He didn’t. Ten minutes later, Kell picked up the laptop and took a lift down to the ground floor. The lobby was deserted. The two guests who had been drinking cognacs in the bar had gone to bed, their table wiped clean. The lights had been dimmed and there was no sign of the barmaid.

Kell walked towards the reception desk. He had been standing there for several seconds before the night porter, lost in his textbook in the back office, looked up, jerked out of his seat and apologized for ignoring him.

‘Pas de problème,’ Kell replied. It was always advisable to speak to the French in their mother tongue; you earned their confidence and respect that much more quickly. He flipped open the laptop, pointed to the screen and explained that he was still having difficulty connecting. ‘Is there anybody in the hotel who might be able to help?’

‘I’m afraid not, sir. I’m here alone until five o’clock. But you may find that the signal is stronger in the lobby. I can suggest that you take a seat in the bar and try to connect from there.’

Kell looked across at the darkened lounge. The porter seemed to read his mind.

‘It will be easy to turn up the lights. Perhaps you would also like to take something from the bar?’

‘That would be very kind.’

Moments later, the porter had opened a low connecting door into the lobby and disappeared behind the bar. Kell picked up the laptop, quickly moved the bowl of potpourri on the counter six inches to the left, and followed him.

‘What are you reading?’ he called out, selecting a table with a partial view of the lobby. The porter was flicking a panel of lights beside a sign saying FIRE EXIT. Kell had still not been able to find any evidence of CCTV.

‘It’s for my college,’ he replied, raising his voice to be heard. ‘I’m taking a course in quantum theory.’

It was a subject about which Kell knew very little: a few half-remembered book reviews; the odd chat on Start the Week. Nevertheless, he was able to hold a brief conversation about black holes and Stephen Hawking while the porter fetched him a glass of mineral water. He introduced himself as ‘Pierre’. Within a few minutes, the two men had developed that particular rapport which is characteristic of strangers who find themselves alone at night while the world around them sleeps. Kell could sense that Pierre perceived him as easygoing and without threat. It probably suited him to have a guest to talk to; it made the time pass more quickly.

‘Looks like I’ve got a signal,’ he announced.

Pierre, tucking in a loose section of shirt, smiled in relief. Kell navigated to a moribund SIS email account and began to read the messages. ‘I’ll be out of your way as soon as possible.’

‘Take your time, Monsieur Uniacke, take your time. There’s no hurry. If you need anything more, just let me know.’

Moments later, the bell rang at the entrance to the hotel. Pierre walked across the lobby, skipped down the stairs and briefly disappeared from view. Kell could hear a woman talking in flustered and apologetic English about the ‘blasted weather’ and how sorry she was for ‘disturbing the hotel so late at night’.

Barbara.

‘This way, madame.’

Pierre shouldered the sausage bag and led her up into the lobby with practised charm, passing behind the reception desk in order to process her details.

She checked in like a pro.

‘Oh the flight was terrible. I’m not sure that the captain quite knew what he was doing. One moment we were in the air, the next he was bumping us down on the tarmac like a tractor. Do excuse me for not speaking French. I lived in the Loire as a young woman and used to be able to get by quite well, but at my age these things seem to disappear from one’s brain, don’t you find?’

‘Is it just yourself staying with us, madame?’

‘Just myself, yes. My husband, poor lamb, died three years ago.’ Kell almost spat out his Badoit. ‘Cancer got him in the end. You’re so kind to have found me a room at such short notice. I am a nuisance, aren’t I? There were several people at the airport with no idea at all where they were going to stay. I ought to have shared a taxi with them, but it was all so confusing. I must say this hotel seems awfully nice. My passport? Of course. And I suspect a credit card is required as well? They always are these days. So many PIN numbers. How is one supposed to remember them all?’

Kell grinned behind the laptop, screened from Barbara’s gaze by a wall on which the management had hung a monochrome portrait of Nina Simone. Every now and again he would tap random letters on the keyboard to give an impression of honest endeavour. In due course, Pierre handed Barbara the card key for room 232, explained the timetable for breakfast and sent her on her way.

‘Please push the button for the second floor, madame,’ he said, as she walked towards the lifts. ‘I wish you to pass a good night.’

Kell checked his watch. 1.35 a.m. He gave Barbara another ten minutes to settle in and to familiarize herself with the hotel, then sent a text message initiating the final part of their plan.

Time check 1.45. Lobby green. You?

Barbara responded immediately.

Yes. Will be in position from 2. Good luck.

Kell was putting the phone back in his pocket when Pierre emerged from reception and asked if Monsieur Uniacke needed anything further from the bar.

‘Thank you, no,’ Kell replied. ‘I’m fine.’

‘And how is the wi-fi? Still working to your satisfaction?’

‘Completely.’

He waited until Pierre had returned to the office before texting Bill Knight.

Clear?

Nothing came back. Kell watched the clock on the laptop tick through to 1.57 and knew that Barbara would already be in position. He tried again.

Clear outside?

Still no reply. There was nothing for it but to proceed as planned and to hope that Knight had the situation under control. Kell disconnected the laptop from the socket in the wall, tucked it under his arm, took his now empty glass of mineral water to the reception desk and placed it on the right-hand side of the counter beside a plastic box filled with tourist brochures. Pierre was back in his chair in the office, drinking Coke, wallowing in astro-physics.

‘Could I check something?’ Kell asked him.

‘Of course, sir.’

‘What rate am I paying on my room? There’s a confirmation email from my office that seems lower than I remember.’

Pierre frowned, approached the desk, logged into Opera and clicked into the Uniacke account. As he did so, Kell lifted the laptop on to the counter and placed it approximately two inches from the bowl of potpourri.

‘Let me see.’ Pierre was muttering, squinting at the screen. ‘We have you on …’

Kell put an elbow on to the laptop, let it slide along the counter, and sent the bowl of potpourri plummeting towards the floor.

‘Fuck!’ he exclaimed in English as it exploded in a cluster bomb of petals and glass. Pierre reared back from the counter with a matching ‘Merde!’ of his own as Kell surveyed the delightful chaos of his creation.

‘I am so, so sorry,’ he said, first in English and then, repeating the apology, in French.

‘It doesn’t matter, sir, really it doesn’t matter. These things happen. It can easily be cleaned up.’

Kell, bending to the floor in pursuit of the larger chunks of glass, searched for the French phrase for ‘dustpan and brush’, but found that he could only say: ‘Do you have a vacuum cleaner?’

Pierre had now made his way out into the lobby and was standing over him, hands on hips, trying to calculate the best course of action.

‘Yes, I think that’s probably a good idea. We have a Hoover. I will clean everything up. Please do not worry, Monsieur Uniacke.’

‘But you must let me help you.’

Pierre dropped to the floor beside him. To Kell’s surprise, he even placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. ‘No, no. Please, you are a guest. Relax. I will fetch something.’

‘I think I saw one on the stairs on the way up to my room. Is that where you keep them? I can get it for you. Please, I’d like to help …’

It was the only risk in his strategy; that the night porter would be so concerned about the security of the front desk that he would accept a paying guest’s offer of help. But Kell had read his personality correctly.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I can fetch it. I know the cupboard. It’s not far. If you wait here …’

The phone pulsed in Kell’s pocket. He took it out as Pierre walked away. Knight had finally deigned to reply.

All clear out here Commander. Over and out.

‘Prat,’ Kell muttered, checked that Pierre had gone upstairs, and slipped behind the reception desk.

10

Barbara Knight had closed the door of her room, put the sausage bag on the floor outside the bathroom, poured a cognac from the mini-bar and telephoned her husband.

The conversation had gone better than she had expected. It transpired that Bill had begged a cigarette from a passer-by, found himself a seat at a bus stop thirty feet from the entrance to the hotel, and was busy killing time trying to remember the details of a love affair between the French Consul in Lagos and the daughter of an Angolan oil speculator which had been the talk of their three-year residency in Nigeria more than twenty years earlier.

‘Didn’t he eventually have a hand cut off or something?’ Knight asked.

‘Darling, I don’t have time for this now.’ Barbara closed the curtains and switched on one of the bedside lights. ‘I think it was a finger. And I think it was an accident. Look, I’ll have to call you later.’

She had then replied to a Kell text message – Yes. Will be in position from 2. Good luck – removed her blouse and skirt and, wearing only a pair of tights and a white Hotel Gillespie dressing-gown, walked out into the corridor. Less than a minute later, Barbara Knight was standing on a step halfway between the first- and second-floor landings, holding her shoes and listening out for the footsteps of the blond-haired porter with wretched acne who had only recently checked her in.

Pierre duly appeared at 2.04 a.m., jerking back in fright at the white apparition bearing down on him with a mop of wild hair, clutching a pair of shoes.

‘Madame? Are you all right?’

‘Oh, thank goodness you’re here.’ Barbara was shuddering in mock-frustration and had to remind herself not to overcook the act. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather lost. I was on my way downstairs to see you. I was trying to leave my shoes outside to be polished, you see, but I’ve only gone and locked myself out of my room …’

‘Please, madame, do not worry, we can …’

She interrupted him.

‘And now I can’t remember for the life of me which floor I’m supposed to be on. I think you kindly put me in 232, but I can’t seem to find …’

Pierre guided Madame Knight to a safe landing on the first floor. It was to the unanticipated advantage of the Secret Intelligence Service that the night porter’s own grandmother was in the early stages of dementia. Recognizing a kindred spirit, he had put a kindly hand in the small of Barbara’s back and informed her that he would be only too happy to escort Madame Knight to her room.

‘Oh, you’re so kind, such a nice young man,’ said Barbara, brandishing a keycard from the pocket of her dressing-gown. ‘I have the damned thing right here, you see? But of course nowhere does it tell you the number of one’s wretched room.

Kell had worked quickly. The reservations software was open at a welcome page on the desktop; Pierre was still logged in. With the porter attending to Barbara’s needs, he clicked ‘Current’ and was taken to a grid that gave him access to information on every guest in the hotel. The room numbers appeared in a vertical column on the left-hand side of the grid, the dates of occupancy on a horizontal line at the top of the screen. He found the matching dates for Amelia’s stay, clicked on ‘218’ and was taken to the details for her room.

It was a measure of Kell’s self-confidence, as well as his conviction in Barbara’s ability to detain Pierre, that he took the risk of printing out a three-page summary of Amelia’s stay, including details of her room service orders, laundry bills and any phone calls she might have made from the landline in her room. He then returned to the welcome page, took the documents from a printer in the office, folded them into his back pocket and walked outside to the reception desk. There was a Magstripe Encoder beside the keyboard. Kell switched it on, followed the read-out to ‘Check-In’, typed in ‘218’, set an expiration date of six days and pressed ‘Create’. There was a small pile of white plastic cards to the right of the machine. He pushed one of them into the slot, listened as the information was written into the strip, then withdrew the card and placed it in the same pocket into which he had folded Amelia’s bill.

By the time Pierre came back, more than five minutes later, Thomas Kell had removed almost all of the shards of glass that had fallen on to the floor in the lobby and was busy picking petals of potpourri out of the carpet.

‘You should not have worried about this, Monsieur Uniacke.’

‘I just wanted to help,’ Kell told him. ‘I’m so sorry. I feel terrible about what happened.’

11

The second-floor corridor was deserted. Kell walked towards Room 218 with only the hum of the hotel’s air-conditioning for company. He was suddenly extraordinarily tired; the adrenalin of duping Pierre had dissipated from his body, leaving him with the remnants of a late night and a Hackney hangover.

He put the card key in the slot, watching as the light above the handle clicked to green, then passed into Amelia’s room, closing the door quietly behind him. As he did so, he experienced a sudden flash image of her naked body sprawled across the bed, a nightmare of violence and blood, but it passed from his mind as no more than a brief and absurd hallucination.

The bed had been made, Amelia’s clothes and personal effects tidied away by a chambermaid. The layout of the room was identical to his own: a television facing the bed, bolted to the wall above a writing desk; a sash window with a narrow balcony looking down on to Boulevard Dubouchage. Kell went into the bathroom and made a detailed assessment of its contents. No toothbrush or toothpaste, but a plastic contact lens case and a bottle of ReNu cleaning fluid. No hairbrush, no glasses, no trace of Hermès Calèche, Amelia’s preferred perfume. She had known that she was going somewhere specific and packed accordingly.

He looked in the wardrobe. There was a small metal safe on one of the shelves, the door closed. Ordinarily, an officer as experienced as Amelia Levene would never risk securing anything valuable behind a lock that could be opened by a concierge in under thirty seconds, but she would have gambled on zero threat from London. Kell pulled the safe away from the wall and turned it through one hundred and eighty degrees. There was a metal panel on the back with the make and serial number of the safe engraved beneath a film of dust. Kell wiped it clean and called Tech-Ops. He used the clearance code given to him by Marquand and requested a four-digit access pin for a Sentinel II safe, dictating the serial number to a sleepy technician somewhere in the bowels of Vauxhall Cross.

‘SMS all right for response?’ he was asked.

Kell said that would be fine.

Beneath the shelf was a large suitcase, but no sign of the leather carry-on bag that Amelia habitually took with her on most short-haul flights. A suit jacket and skirt were hanging in the next cupboard, but he knew of no woman who would travel to the south of France with fewer than three outfits; Amelia must have been wearing one of them and packed at least one other. He pulled the suitcase out on to the carpet and flipped it open. There were two crumpled shirts, some underwear and a pair of tights. She was using it as a temporary laundry bag. The lid of the case had a zip-up lining inside which Amelia had left a couple of paperback books, a headset, an unopened packet of cigarettes and a copy of Prospect magazine. Kell felt around the edges of the case, probing for anything that might have been concealed in the lining, but there was nothing there. He put the suitcase back in the cupboard and sat down on the bed.

It was 2.47 a.m. Somewhere on the street outside a cat screeched. Kell thought of the Knights: Barbara in her room a few doors down the corridor; Bill on his way back to Menton. They had arranged to meet in Vieux Nice for lunch, an appointment Kell would almost certainly cancel. His work with them was done. He experienced an overwhelming desire to stretch out on the bed and to catch a few hours’ sleep, but knew that such a thing was not yet possible. He checked the drawers on either side of the bed but found only an inevitable copy of the Gideon Bible and a couple of pillow chocolates, still in their silver wrappers. He checked under the bed for a laptop, a file, a mobile phone, lifting the mattress clear of the frame, but found only lint and dust. The drawers of the desk contained writing paper, as well as a guide to Nice et Les Alpes-Maritimes and some basic information about the hotel. Apart from the safe, Kell could think of nowhere else that Amelia might plausibly have hidden anything that would throw up a clue as to her whereabouts. His only other lead was the number of a French mobile phone listed on the printout from her room. He had called Marquand’s contact at GCHQ for a trace on it five minutes after saying goodnight to Pierre in the lobby.

‘It might take us a few hours,’ a sprightly voice in Cheltenham had informed him. ‘Gets busy this time of night with AF/PAK waking up.’

Kell wondered who would contact him first. Tech-Ops or GCHQ? It felt like a race to see who could be more indifferent to his circumstances. He returned to the bathroom and checked the toilet cistern as well as the pockets of two dressing-gowns hooked behind the door. On the basis that Amelia might have lifted them in order to conceal a passport or SIM card, he searched for loose tiles and areas of carpeting in both the bathroom and the bedroom. Nothing. He shook out the curtains, he tried to peer behind the television. Finally, he gave up.

Why the hell hadn’t London called? Was it his clearance code? Tech-Ops might have rung it in, creating a dawn shitstorm for Marquand that would land both of them in trouble.

Kell was lying on Amelia’s bed, planning to catch a few hours’ rest, when the SMS finally came through. He climbed off the bed, punched the four-digit code into the safe and heard the satisfying grind of the lock pulling out, the door swinging open on a weighted hinge.

There was a single object inside the safe, positioned dead centre, the cat burglar’s prize. A set of car keys. An Avis sticker on the plastic casing, two remote buttons to activate a central locking system, a metal key that swung out at the push of a button.

Kell locked the safe, put the keys in his pocket and left the room.

12

‘You cannot sleep, Monsieur Uniacke?’

Kell was grateful for the ready-made lie. He braced his hands across the counter at reception, summoned a careworn smile, and explained that insomnia had plagued him for years and that a brisk walk around the block usually cured it.

‘Of course. Let me get the door for you.’

He noted the pristine carpet, cleansed of the remaining glass and potpourri, and again thanked Pierre for clearing it up as he followed him down the short flight of steps towards the entrance of the hotel. Five minutes later he was at the coded gate of his underground car park on Place Marshall, working on the assumption that Amelia would have left her vehicle at the same location.

He was wrong. Descending through four subterranean levels, along a yellow-lit corkscrew of silence and stale air, Kell searched in vain for the winking lights of Amelia’s hire car, pressing repeatedly on the remote-control lock. In the basement of the car park he turned and walked back up to street level, following the same procedure, but again to no avail. A nightwatchman was snoozing in a hutch behind a parking barrier, his feet on the desk, arms folded across a copy of Paris Match. Kell tapped on the window and woke him up.

‘Excusez-moi?’

No part of the nightwatchman’s body moved save for his eyes, which flipped open like a child’s doll.

‘Oui?’

‘I think I parked here this morning, but I can’t find my vehicle. Is there another car park nearby?’

‘Etoile,’ the nightwatchman muttered, closing his eyes.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nice Etoile. Rue Lamartine. Cinq minutes à pied.’

The second underground car park was equidistant from the Hotel Gillespie, five minutes from Place Marshall. Kell walked there in the still of the night, a stranger on deserted French streets. He followed the same routine, going from floor to floor, pressing the infra-red key, looking for Amelia’s car.

Finally he found it. She had parked on the second lower level. Kell was turning through three hundred and sixty degrees, eyes scanning every corner of the garage, when he saw a set of rear lights morsing in the distance. A dark blue Renault Clio squeezed in between a battered white van and a black Seat Altea with Marseilles plates. A film of dust on the windscreen. Kell went straight to the boot. There was an umbrella in the back and a pair of walking boots. He took them out, placed them on the ground, then lifted up the false floor in order to access the spare wheel. It was screwed in and secured by a plastic clip on a cable looped through the centre of the tyre.

Kell pulled the tyre free, let it spin and rock on to the ground, and immediately saw a cloth package concealed in the hollow. Wrapped in a pillow case from the Hotel Gillespie were Amelia Levene’s passport, her driving licence, her credit cards and house keys. She had placed a SIM in a small protective cover, wrapped three hundred pounds sterling in an elastic band and put her BlackBerry, to which she was usually attached like a drip, inside a padded manila envelope.

Kell put the SIM and the BlackBerry in the pocket of his coat and searched the rest of the car. She had barely driven it. There was a nearly crisp sheet of paper, emblazoned with the Avis logo, still protecting the footwell on the driver’s side. He could see mud on the surface, created by the soles of Amelia’s shoes. Kell replaced the spare wheel, put the pillow case, the umbrella and the walking boots back in the boot, and locked the car. He returned to street level, walked three hundred metres east along Boulevard Dubouchage and rang the doorbell of the Gillespie.

‘So, you feel ready to sleep now?’ Pierre asked him, looking at his watch like a bad actor.

‘Ready to sleep,’ Kell replied, and thought about yawning for effect. ‘Do me a favour, will you?’

‘Of course, Monsieur Uniacke.’

‘Cancel that alarm call. I’m going to need more than three hours’ sleep.’

13

Yet sleep never came.

Thomas Kell took a shower, climbed into bed and tried to shut out the day’s events, even as they replayed continuously in his mind. He had called Marquand for an update on the French mobile and requested tech support on the BlackBerry SIM. It was already past 4 a.m. He knew that Marquand would call back before seven and that Cheltenham would have a fix on the French mobile within a few hours. There hardly seemed any point even in closing his eyes.

The room then became strange to him, the quietness of it, the half-light. Kell felt his own solitude as intensely as he had known it at any stage since his departure from Vauxhall Cross. It occurred to him, as it often did in the depths of the night, that he knew only one way of being – a path that was separate to all others. Sometimes it felt as though his entire personality had grown out of a talent for the clandestine; he could not remember who he had been before the tap on the shoulder at twenty.

What had become of the life he had dreamed of, the life he had promised himself on the other side of the river? Kell had told anyone prepared to listen that he was planning to write a book. He had convinced himself that he was going to study to become an architect. Both were notions that now seemed so absurd that he actually laughed against the silence of the room. He had tried, day after day in the grey winter months of a new year, to behave like an ordinary citizen, to become the sort of man who socialized and watched the football, who made small talk with strangers in pubs. He was determined to re-educate himself – to watch the films and the HBO box sets, to read the novels and the memoirs that had passed him by – but all he knew was the calling of the secret world. He had even believed, against all evidence, that he might finally become a father. But that particular dream was now as far away from him, as transient, as the whereabouts of Amelia Levene.

He thought then of George Truscott, the man who surely stood to gain the most from Amelia’s continued absence. In the restlessness of his insomnia, Kell even wondered if Truscott himself had arranged for Amelia to disappear. Why else have her followed in Nice? Why else send Thomas Kell, of all people, to track her down? He opened his eyes to the blackened room and could make out only the faint yellow glow of a streetlamp in the window. He despised Truscott, not for his ambition, not for his cunning and trickery, but because he represented all that Kell loathed about the increasingly corporatized atmosphere within SIS; what mattered to Truscott was not the Service, not the defence of the realm, but his own personal advancement. With a lower IQ and a fractionally smaller ego, Truscott would likely have worked in some parallel career as a traffic warden or council inspector, dreaming at night of punching parking tickets and issuing directives against noise pollution. Kell would have laughed at the thought, but was too depressed by the prospect of Truscott ascending to ‘C’, bringing with him yet more apparatchiks, yet more corporate lawyers, while simultaneously sacrificing talented officers on the altar of his fastidiousness. Amelia Levene was almost certainly the last roadblock preventing SIS from turning into a branch of the Health and Safety Executive.

In the end, it was the hotel that rang. Pierre had forgotten to cancel the wake-up call. Kell’s phone lurched him out of bed at exactly seven o’clock. He reckoned that he had been asleep for no more than half an hour. Ten minutes later, back in the shower, he heard the familiar ring of the mobile. His head swathed in shampoo, Kell swore under his breath, switched off the water and stepped out of the bath.

It was Marquand, sounding chipper.

‘Bonjour, Thomas. Comment allez-vous?’

Rule One of SIS was never to moan, never to show weakness. So Kell mirrored Marquand’s supercilious tone and said: ‘Je suis très bien merci, monsieur,’ as though he was addressing a French teacher at a primary school.

‘You found her BlackBerry?’

‘In the boot of a hire car. It was parked a quarter of a mile from the hotel.’

‘How did you get the keys?’

‘She left them in the safe in her room.’

Marquand smelled a rat.

‘Reason for that?’ he asked.

‘Search me. Maybe she didn’t bank on George Truscott sending a team after her.’ He let that one sink in and pictured Marquand nervously adjusting his hair. ‘But she had time to pack, she wasn’t in a rush. There was no toothbrush in the bathroom, no perfume. Most of her clothes have gone AWOL as well. She’s travelling on an alias, probably wearing her glasses and carrying a leather overnight bag. It’s possible she left the key because she wanted me to find her, but that’s a long shot. Her passport and credit cards were wrapped up with the BlackBerry, her house keys, SIM card, the lot. All in a hire car that she obviously wasn’t worried might get nicked.’

Kell wanted to have both the BlackBerry and the SIM analysed by someone who could break their SIS encryptions. Marquand, despite the early hour, had already been in touch with a source in Genoa and explained that she would reach Nice at around midday.

‘Elsa Cassani. Used to work for us in Rome. Freelance now. Worked out she can make a lot more money that way. Can do tech-ops, background checks, more contacts in more agencies than I care to think about. Feisty, smart, hyper-efficient. You’ll like her. Comes highly recommended.’

‘Tell her to call me when she gets into town.’ Kell reckoned he could grab a few hours’ sleep if Elsa left him undisturbed until twelve. ‘What else have you got?’

‘Cheltenham has been in touch. They’ve analysed the numbers you sent through. One of them was Amelia’s house in Wiltshire. She rang it three times over the course of two days. Must have spoken to Giles on each occasion because he’s been down there for the last week. As far as we know, he hadn’t heard from her since she vanished. Each conversation lasted less than five minutes.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Giles probably bored her into a persistent vegetative coma.’ Kell was looping a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the handle of his room and was too strung out to acknowledge the joke. ‘The French mobile isn’t known to us. It’s a new number, purchased in Paris four months ago. Registered to a François Malot. Amelia may have only left a message because the call lasted less than thirty seconds.’

Kell made the connection. ‘Malot was one of the funerals in the Fourteenth.’ He put the security chain on the door and remembered how Marquand had always been a beat behind the rest.

‘Right, yes. Very good, Tom. I knew we’d hired the right man. I’ll take a closer look. Watch this space.’

14

Elsa Cassani had the washed-out complexion of a young woman who had spent the bulk of her twenty-seven years sitting behind computer monitors in darkened rooms. A full-figured, lively Italian with stud ear-rings and a steady smile, she had called Kell’s mobile shortly after twelve o’clock and arranged to pick up the SIM and BlackBerry from a café on the Rue de l’Hôtel des Postes.

The handover was straightforward. As instructed, Elsa had put on a hat, found herself a table and ordered a Campari and soda. (‘Ah,’ she had said, enjoying the trick. ‘Because it’s red.’) Within a few minutes, Kell had strolled in, spotted the hat and the drink, handed over the hardware and told her that he needed the results ‘by sunset’. He had then walked off in the general direction of the Mediterranean leaving Elsa alone at the table. Nobody had batted an eyelid. No need for the discipline of a formal brush contact. No need for Moscow Rules.

Kell had forgotten how much he disliked Nice. The city had none of the character that he associated with France: it felt like a place with no history, a city that had never suffered. The too-clean streets, the incongruous palm trees, the poseurs on the boardwalks and the girls who weren’t quite pretty: Nice was an antiseptic playground for rich foreigners who didn’t have the imagination to spend their money properly. ‘The place,’ he muttered to himself, remembering the old joke, ‘where suntans go to die.’ Kell recalled his last visit to the city, an overnight stay in 1997, tracking a Real IRA commander who had struck up a friendship with an unsavoury Chechen money launderer with a villa in Villefranche. Kell had flown down on a soggy May morning to find a ghostly and sterile city, the cloistered cafés surrounding the old port deserted, the Café de Turin serving half a dozen oysters to half a dozen customers. It was different now, a tornado of summer tourists in the city, taking up every inch of sand on the beach, every changing room in the smart boutiques on Rues Paradis and Alphonse Karr. Kell began to wish that he had simply stayed in his hotel, lived off room service and watched pay-per-view movies and BBC World. Instead, he found a brasserie two blocks back from the Med, ordered inedible steak frites from a pretty Parisian waitress who smouldered for tips, and began to work his way through the copy of Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level that he had packed at the last minute in London. Behind the bar, a fifty-something proprietor who appeared to have modelled his appearance on Johnny Hallyday was killing time on an iPhone, trying to catch his reflection in a nearby mirror. Kell had long ago concluded that all restaurants in the south of France were run by the same middle-aged proprietor on his thirty-fourth wife with the same paunch, the same tan and the same bombshell waitress whom he was inevitably trying to fuck. This one kept scratching an itch in the crack of his bum, like Rafael Nadal preparing to serve. When it was time to settle the bill, Kell decided to have some fun with him.

‘The steak was tough,’ he said in English.

‘Comment?’

The proprietor was looking past his shoulder, as though it was beneath his dignity to make eye contact with a Brit. ‘I said the steak was tough.’ Kell gestured towards the kitchen. ‘The food in this place is only marginally better than the stuff they served up in Papillon.’

‘Quoi?’

‘You think it’s OK to charge tourists eighteen euros for medium-rare chewing gum?’

‘Il y a un problème, monsieur?’

Kell turned around. ‘Never mind,’ he said. It had been enough to see Hallyday stirred from his complacency. The waitress appeared to have overheard their conversation and honoured Kell with a flirtatious smile. He left fifty euros of Truscott’s money for her on the table and walked out into the afternoon sunshine.

A wise man once said that spying is waiting. Waiting for a joe. Waiting for a break. Kell killed time by wandering the streets of Vieux Nice and the Yves Klein galleries at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. On a steel bench in the mezzanine he checked the messages on his London phone. Claire had left a series of increasingly irate texts from the waiting room of their marriage guidance counsellor. He had completely forgotten the appointment.

Thanks a lot. Total fucking waste of my fucking time.

He did not want to explain himself, to confess that Marquand had brought him in from the cold. Instead, texting quickly, he wrote:

Sorry. Totally forgot. Crazy 24 hrs. I am Nice.

It was only when she responded with a string of three bewildered question marks that he checked the outgoing message and saw his mistake. He called Claire to explain, but the line went direct to voicemail.

Sorry. I realize that I am not particularly nice. I meant to say that I am in Nice. As in France. Had to come here on business at the last minute. I completely forgot about the appointment. Will you apologize to …

But Kell could not remember the name of the marriage guidance counsellor; he could only picture her hair, a bob, her biscuits, the clock that ticked on the mantelpiece. He fudged it:

… the good doctor. Just say that I’m too busy. Call me back if you get the chance. I’m hanging around waiting for a meeting.

He knew that Claire would join the dots. She was too well versed in the euphemisms of the secret world not to read between the lines: ‘last-minute business’; ‘waiting for a meeting’; ‘had to go to France’. Thomas Kell was a disgraced spook; he no longer had any business; he didn’t need to go to any meetings. What possible reason would he have for flying to Nice at the last minute if not to run some errand for SIS? One of the features of his long career had been the necessity to lie to Claire about the nature of his work. Kell had enjoyed the brief respite from such fabrications, but was now back in the same cycle of concealment that he had spun for twenty years; back in the habit, so natural to him and so easily acquired, of keeping anybody who came close to him at arm’s length. In this context, he wondered why Claire was keen on seeing a shrink. There was no ‘structural flaw’ in their marriage – a phrase the counsellor had used, time and again, with apparent relish. Neither was there any ‘hard-wired animosity’ between them. On the rare occasions that they met to discuss their future, Mr and Mrs Thomas Kell inevitably ended up in bed together, waking in the morning to wonder why on earth they were living apart. But the reason for that was clear. The reason for that was unequivocal. Without children, they were finished.

Elsa eventually rang at five and they arranged to meet outside the Negresco Hotel.

It was like meeting a different person. In the five hours that she had been analysing the hardware, Elsa appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. Her pale skin was suddenly ruddy with health, as though she had returned from a long walk along the beach, and her eyes, so lifeless in the café, sparkled in the dazzling summer light. Earlier, she had seemed nervous and closed-off; now she was animated and full of warmth. So easy was the rapport between them that Kell toyed with the idea that she had been ordered by Marquand to win his trust.

‘How was your afternoon?’ she asked as they walked in the direction of a dazzling sun.

‘Great,’ Kell lied, because he was glad of her company after the long afternoon and did not want to appear negative by complaining. ‘I had some lunch, went to a gallery, read a book …’

‘I really do not like Nice at all,’ Elsa declared, her English precise and musical.

‘Me neither.’ She looked across at him and smiled at the sudden fracturing in Kell’s composure. ‘It’s inexplicable. I love everything about France. The great cities – Paris, Marseille – the food, the wine, the movies …’

‘Blah blah blah …’ said Elsa.

‘… but Nice is like a theme park.’

‘It has no soul,’ she offered quickly.

Kell contemplated this and said: ‘Precisely, yes. No soul.’

A long line of rush-hour traffic was held at a set of lights and they crossed the Promenade des Anglais, pushed together by two teenage boys running in the opposite direction. A hooker in stilettos and a black leather skirt was climbing out of a car on the nearside lane of the central reservation.

‘There is nothing unusual on the SIM card,’ Elsa said, picking her way through a flock of mopeds. ‘I double-checked with Cheltenham.’

‘And the BlackBerry?’

‘It has been used to Skype.’

Of course. In the absence of a secure line, Skype was the spy’s first port of call: near-impossible to bug, tricky to trace. A BlackBerry in this context was no different to an ordinary computer: all Amelia would have needed was a cheap plastic headset. She had probably borrowed one from reception.

‘Do you know who she spoke to?’

‘Yes. Always to the same account, always the same number. Three different conversations. The Skype address is registered to a French email.’

‘Is there a name associated with it?’

‘It’s to the same person. The name is François Malot.’

‘Who is this guy?’ Kell asked aloud, coming to a halt. He had assumed that the question was rhetorical, but Elsa had other ideas.

‘I think I may have the answer,’ she said, looking like a student who has solved a particularly knotty problem. She reached into her bag, rummaging around for the prize. ‘You speak French, yes?’ she asked, passing Kell a printout of a newspaper report.

‘I speak French,’ he replied.

They were leaning on a balustrade, looking out over the beach, rollerbladers grinding past in the heat. The story, from Le Monde, reproduced the grisly facts of an attack in Sharm-el-Sheikh. Middle-class couple. Dream holiday. Married for thirty-five years. Brutally assaulted with knives and metal bars on a beach in Sinai.

‘Not such a nice way to die,’ she said, with graphic understatement. She took out a cigarette and lit it with her back to the wind.

‘Can I have one?’ Kell asked. She touched his hand and caught his eye in the flame of the lighter. Theirs was the sudden intimacy of strangers who find themselves in the same city, on the same job, sharing the same secrets. Kell knew the signs. He had been there many times before.

‘François Malot was their son,’ she said. ‘He lives in Paris. He has no brothers or sisters, no wife or girlfriend.’

‘Cheltenham told you this?’

Elsa reacted haughtily. ‘I do not need Cheltenham,’ she said, exhaling a blast of smoke. ‘I can do this kind of research on my own.’

He was surprised by the sudden flash of petulance but understood that she was probably keen to impress him. A good report back to London was always useful to a stringer.

‘So where did you get the information? Facebook? Myspace?’

Elsa turned and faced the beach. A man in a white shirt was making his way towards the sea, walking briskly in a straight line as though he intended to stop only when he reached Algeria. ‘From sources in France. Myspace is not so popular any more,’ she said, as if Kell was the last person in Europe not to know this. ‘In France they use the Facebook or the Twitter. As far as I can see, François does not have a social networking account of any kind. Either he is too private or he is too …’ She could not find the English word for ‘cool’ and used an Italian substitute: ‘Figo.’

An ambulance approached from the east, yellow lights strobing soundlessly through the fronds of the palm trees. Kell, since childhood, had felt an almost superstitious despair at the passing of an ambulance, and watched it accelerate out of sight with a feeling of dread in his gut.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked. ‘Anything unusual on the BlackBerry?’

‘Of course.’ Elsa’s reply hinted at a bottomless reservoir of secret activity. ‘The user accessed the websites of two airlines. Air France and Tunisair.’

Kell remembered Amelia’s file, but could make no meaningful connection between her year as an au pair in Tunis and her sudden disappearance more than thirty years later. Was SIS secretly working on a leverage operation, possibly in conjunction with the Americans? Post-Ben Ali, Tunisia was ripe for picking. ‘Did she buy a flight?’

‘This is hard to say.’ Elsa frowned and ground out the cigarette, as if Marlboro was to blame. ‘It’s not precise, but there was a credit-card transaction of some kind with Tunisair.’

‘What was the name on the credit card?’

‘I do not know. No amount in the transaction, either. When there is encryption by a bank, everything is much more difficult. But I have passed all of the details that I have found to my contacts and I am sure that they will be able to track the identity.’

Kell tried to fit together the remaining pieces of the puzzle. The fact that Amelia had left her hire car in Nice indicated that she had almost certainly flown overseas. It seemed logical, given the footprints on her BlackBerry, that she had gone to Tunisia. But why? And where to? Long ago, SIS had kept a small station in Monastir. Or was she in Tunis itself? Elsa provided him with the answer.

‘There is one other thing that is vital,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘The mobile telephone of François Malot. My contacts have tracked it. It would seem that he is no longer in Paris. It would seem that he is taking a holiday in Tunisia. The signal has been triangulated to Carthage.’

15

Kell took Amelia’s BlackBerry and SIM back to the underground car park, replaced them in the boot of her hire car and returned to the Hotel Gillespie. He put the car keys back in the safe, ensured that the rest of the room remained as he had first found it, then booked a flight to Tunis on the Marquand laptop. By seven o’clock the following morning he was en route to Nice airport, dumping the Citroën at Hertz.

A French baggage handlers’ strike was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., but Kell’s flight took off shortly after ten o’clock and he had landed in the white heat of Tunis-Carthage less than an hour later. GCHQ were certain that François Malot was staying in Gammarth, an upmarket seaside suburb popular with package tourists, financiers and diplomats looking to escape the bustle of downtown Tunis. The signal from Malot’s mobile had been fixed to a short stretch of the Mediterranean coast in which two five-star hotels wrestled for space in an area adjacent to a nine-hole golf course. Malot could have been staying in either hotel. The first of them – the Valencia Carthage – had no record of a guest of that name in the register, but the second, the Ramada Plaza, which Kell called from a phone booth at Nice airport, was only too happy to connect him to Mr Malot’s room. Kell got the number of the room – 1214 – but hung up before the call was put through. He then rang back three minutes later, spoke to a different receptionist, and attempted to book a room of his own.

There was just one problem. It was high summer and the Ramada was full. At Tunis airport, Kell tried again, calling from the tourism desk in Arrivals in the hope that there had been a cancellation while he was in the air. The receptionist was adamant; no rooms would be free for at least four days. Might she suggest trying the Valencia Carthage hotel, just along the beach? Kell thanked her for the tip-off, called the Valencia a second time, and booked six nights full board on a Uniacke credit card.

The Valencia should have been half an hour by car from the airport but Kell’s taxi became congealed in thick traffic heading north-east towards the coast. Vehicles on the two-lane highway spilled out on to the hard shoulder, mounted the central reservation and even faced down oncoming traffic in an effort to escape the jams. Africa, Kell thought, and sat back to enjoy the show. His driver, an old man with a split windscreen and a taste for mid-period George Michael, weaved and shunted as best he could, views on either side of the cab of tilled fields bordered by the breeze-block shells of half-forgotten construction projects. Men, young and old, wandered at the sides of the road to no discernible purpose, the din of over-revved engines and horns, predictable and ceaseless.

Eventually they escaped the worst of the tailbacks and arrived on the outskirts of La Marsa, Kell’s taxi gliding along a coastal road dotted with diplomatic residences. Access to both the Ramada Plaza and Valencia Carthage was controlled by a roadblock at a roundabout on the highway. Three soldiers wearing khaki uniforms, each carrying an automatic weapon, had been ordered to check any vehicle approaching the complex of hotels and nightclubs that lined the beach; the last thing Tunisia needed in the wake of the Arab Spring was an Islamist fanatic setting off a suicide bomb in the car park of a seaside hotel. The youngest of the soldiers peered into the back seat and made studious eye contact with Kell. Kell nodded back, managed half a smile, and was duly waved on his way.

The Valencia was located on a forty-acre lot directly adjacent to the Ramada. Marquand had arranged for a Renault Megane to be left in the car park. Kell knew the colour and number plate and found it quickly, the keys nestled, as agreed with London, inside the exhaust pipe. A porter with closely cropped black hair, wearing dark trousers and a burgundy waistcoat, saw Kell coming towards the hotel and greeted him like a long-lost brother. Despite Kell’s objections, his bag was placed on a trolley for the short journey up a ramp to the entrance of the hotel. Once inside, in the blessed relief of air conditioning, he tipped the porter, left the bag on the trolley and took a stroll around before checking in.

The lobby was vast: three storeys high and finished in custard yellow. To Kell’s eyes it resembled a Mexican restaurant in a suburban shopping mall blown up to the size of an aircraft hangar. There were two dining areas on the ground floor, as well as a jazz-themed piano bar and a small, mocked-up Moorish café. Kell peered inside. A couple of baseball-capped tourists were drinking glasses of mint tea and smoking fruit tobacco from a shisha pipe, apparently under the illusion that they were experiencing the authentic Tunisian souk. Next door, Kell found a gift shop selling camels on key rings and overpriced bottles of suntan lotion. He bought a copy of the Herald Tribune then joined the queue checking in and out of the hotel. To the left of the reception desk, accessed through a second internal lobby, was a vast spa complex offering hammams, massage rooms and a saltwater plunge pool. More guests, most in white hotel dressing-gowns, were funnelling past. One of them had a bandage applied across her nose, as did a middle-aged Italian woman waiting in the check-in queue ahead of Kell. The bags beneath her eyes were black and bruised, as though she had been punched in a jealous rage. At the front desk, Kell asked what was going on.

‘Why is everybody walking around with facial injuries?’

‘Excuse me, sir?’

‘The bandages,’ he said, indicating his face. ‘The guests with broken noses. It’s like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. What’s the story?’

The receptionist, a young Tunisian woman wearing a blue headscarf, spoke good English and smiled as she replied:

‘The hotel has a relationship with a plastic surgery clinic in Italy, Mr Uniacke. Their clients often come here in order to recuperate after an operation.’

Kell nodded, trying to remember the architecture of the Amelia Levene nose and concluding that it was beyond all possibility that the Chief-designate of the Secret Intelligence Service was hiding out in North Africa in the wake of a nose job.

His room was located towards the end of a three-hundred-metre-long corridor on the western flank of the hotel overlooking an outdoor swimming pool that boasted its own bar and restaurant and at least seventy sun loungers. Kell ordered a room service club sandwich and called Jimmy Marquand, updating him on the progress of the search. A database trawl at SIS had turned up just one photograph of François Malot, which Marquand sent as a JPEG to Kell’s laptop and mobile.

‘Good-looking bastard,’ he said as he clicked on the attachment. The photograph showed Malot in a group of four other men, all wearing business suits; they were captioned as IT consultants. Malot was in his early thirties, with a full head of dark hair, parted to one side, five o’clock shadow on a strong jaw and the ghost of a self-satisfied smile playing at the edge of his mouth. Just Amelia’s type, Kell thought and Marquand seemed to read his mind.

‘You suspect an affair?’

‘I don’t know what I suspect.’ Kell picked at a loose strand of fabric on the chair beside his desk. ‘She may not even be here. Malot could be a wild-goose chase.’

‘You don’t think there’s anything sinister in the murder of his parents, a connection of some kind?’

‘Isn’t that what I’m here to find out?’

The sandwich arrived and Kell rang off. Why was London so convinced that Amelia’s disappearance had a sexual element? As far as Kell was aware, in her long career Amelia had been involved in serious relationships with only two men other than her husband: an American businessman, recently settled in Oregon, and a close friend of Kell’s at SIS, Paul Wallinger, now Head of Station in Ankara. Yet that had been enough to earn her a reputation among the all-male inmates of the SIS asylum as a brazen seductress. Besides, how had she found time, on her schedule, to begin an affair with a Frenchman at least twenty years her junior?

There were other possibilities, of course: that Malot was a colleague in French Intelligence – either DGSE or DCRI – with whom she was running an operation. That would explain why there was so little information about Malot on the SIS database. But why comfort him in the aftermath of his parents’ murder? There had to be some kind of emotional connection between them, something more than mere business.

His bags unpacked, his sandwich eaten, Kell decided to spend the late afternoon walking around the hotel, to familiarize himself with the layout, and to look for Malot at the Ramada Plaza. Wearing a sunhat bought from the gift shop, he took a path from the swimming pool down to the beach, where hotel staff were serving drinks to guests assembled on deckchairs and loungers set out in rows on the sand. Donkeys and emaciated camels were available for hire. A bikini-clad model with long black hair and bright red lipstick was having her photograph taken in the shallows; kite surfers were ripping past on broken waves in vain attempts to impress her. Kell took off his shoes and walked along the hot sand, a warm westerly wind against his back. Within two hundred metres he came across a similar scene, this time at the entrance to the Ramada: more guests sunbathing in dazed rows, staff preparing drinks and snacks in a wooden cabin erected on stilts, more donkeys, more camels, all of them touting for business. He thought of Philippe and Jeannine Malot, attacked on a stretch of beach similar to this one, murdered within a stone’s throw of the sanctuary of a five-star hotel, beaten and robbed for a few pieces of silver.

The Ramada was visible from the beach as a white outcrop above a line of palm trees. Kell found himself on a narrow path bordered by dune grasses and clumps of bamboo. An elderly lady wearing a white headscarf, walking in the opposite direction, greeted him with a cheery ‘Hello there’ as if they were on Camber Sands. To his left, Kell could hear the slow, regularly interrupted thock of tennis being played badly, almost certainly by overheated geriatrics. Eventually the path opened up at the edge of a crowded figure-of-eight swimming pool considerably larger than the one visible from his room at the Valencia. There were more plastic loungers and tables arranged around the perimeter, the great mass of the hotel surrounding it on three sides. As a man walking alone, neither dressed for the beach nor the pool, Kell was aware that he was conspicuous, particularly in such an open environment. He stopped at a small hut at the side of the swimming area and took a seat at the counter. It was fiercely hot. An Italian-made coffee machine and some soft drink bottles were visible on a shelf at the back, ceramic ashtrays piled up beside a small sink. He scanned as many of the loungers as he could see, looking for Amelia, looking for a man resembling Malot. But it was almost impossible to pick out faces. At least half of the guests were tanning their backs or asleep on their sides; of the rest, many had heads obscured by novels or newspapers. Kell stood up and decided to keep moving, taking a side door into the main body of the hotel.

The lobby was an altogether more sober affair than the Valencia, akin to a business hotel in the centre of a large city. A couple in the reception area were arguing in Russian. The woman, bottle blonde and upholstered in white leather, was far younger than her partner and wore the spoiled-milk look of a mistress growing tired of her role. The other clientele appeared to be mostly retired couples from the United Kingdom; five of them were perched on an L-shaped sofa in the centre of the lobby, surrounded by wheeled suitcases and plastic bags stuffed with booze and Tunisian bric-a-brac. Kell walked past them towards the automatic doors at the entrance of the hotel and found himself in a car park overlooking the southern façade of the Valencia Carthage. He walked towards the road dividing the two hotels, past a lone official in a whitewashed security booth operating a traffic barrier. Then he saw what he was looking for. Seven yellow taxis lined up in the street beyond him, waiting for guests to emerge from either hotel. Kell fell among the drivers, talking in French to the nearest of them about nothing more pressing than the length of time it would take to reach central Tunis by car.

‘You are looking for a taxi, sir?’

The driver who had asked the question was in his late twenties and wore a Barcelona football shirt, a pair of white Adidas trainers and stonewashed jeans. Probably a veteran of the Jasmine Revolution, but certainly too young and excitable for the task Kell had in mind.

‘Not right now. I’m just interested in how long it would take.’

His appearance had drawn the attention of an older man, bald and squat, wearing a collared shirt and pressed trousers. Kell nodded him over. Quick, intelligent eyes, a lazy smile and an ill-concealed pot belly attested to the sort of personality Kell was looking for. He needed somebody with experience of the world, somebody who wasn’t going to go talking to his friends about all the money he was about to make.

‘Bonjour.’

‘Bonjour,’ the man replied.

In the late afternoon sun, beneath the scarlet dazzle of a bougainvillea in full bloom, the three men had a brief conversation about tourist attractions in Tunis. In due course, the younger of the two drivers was distracted by a call on his mobile and Kell was left alone with the older man.

‘You work these hotels on a regular basis?’ he asked. They had switched to Arabic.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What kind of hours?’

The driver shrugged, as though the concept of the nine-to-five was alien to him.

‘Can you take me into La Marsa?’

It was a risk, of course, but Kell needed a driver on call, somebody who could keep tabs on Malot. Usually SIS would have provided a support agent, but with the Amelia operation off the books, Kell was obliged to improvise. It was just a question of whether or not this man could be trusted as a second pair of eyes. Kell climbed into the passenger seat of a well-maintained Peugeot 206 and instructed him to head towards the beach. He introduced himself as ‘Stephen’ and they shook hands over the gearstick.

‘Sami.’

A mile from the hotel, beyond the security roadblock, Kell asked the driver to pull over. Sami kept the engine running for air conditioning and Kell turned square in his seat to face him.

‘I want to offer you a business proposal.’

‘OK.’

He liked this reaction: an easy nod, a half-glance at the meter.

‘What are you doing for the next few days?’

‘I work.’

‘Would you like to work for me?’

‘OK.’

Again, an easy nonchalance in the reply. Kell could hear a tractor running in the distance.

‘I’m here on business. I’m going to need a driver on call at the hotel from first thing in the morning to late at night. Do you think you can manage that?’

Sami thought for a fraction of a second and said: ‘OK.’

‘I’ll pay you five hundred dinars a day, first instalment up front.’

It was the equivalent of about two hundred pounds, a vast sum to a Tunisian who wouldn’t expect to earn more than a thousand dinars per month. Kell handed over the money. Still Sami maintained his inscrutable cool.

‘I’ll pay you the other instalments at the end of every second day. I don’t want you telling anybody about our arrangement and I may have to ask you to follow some people if they leave the hotel. Is that going to be a problem?’

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