A Colder War

18

An hour later, Kell had his answer. At Amelia’s suggestion they left Elsa to work at the hotel and went for a walk through the streets of the city, arm in arm at certain points, at others split by surges of oncoming pedestrians on Istiklal Caddesi. Amelia was wearing a floral-print headscarf and a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows; Kell thought that she looked like a lady-in-waiting attending to the Queen at Sandringham, but wasn’t in the mood to tease her. More casually dressed in jeans and a sweater, he smoked as he walked, pressing Amelia for answers.

‘You didn’t tell me about the SIM they recovered from the wreckage.’

‘There’s a lot I haven’t been able to tell you, Tom.’

Amelia’s reaction was typically inscrutable. An elegantly dressed Turk with a gleaming bald patch and polished brown brogues was sitting on a plastic stool in front of a shop window in which balls of wool of different colours were displayed in small wooden boxes. He was playing a lute and singing a mournful song. Beside him, a boy in a Beşiktaş football shirt was eating a pretzel.

‘How was Ankara?’ Amelia asked, watching them.

Kell could only assume that she had good reason to be so evasive. On Ankara, he hardly knew where to begin: Chater’s conduct at the Embassy had been both a calculated snub to Kell’s uncertain status and an apparent attempt to avoid helping SIS with their enquiries into Wallinger’s death. He didn’t want to start by telling Amelia about that. As far as she was concerned, anything Kell said about Chater would have to be filtered through his own animus against the man who had poleaxed his career. He wanted Chater to be hiding something; Amelia knew that as well as he did.

So he talked about the long hours at SIS Station and was struck by how often Amelia interrupted him to ask supplementary questions, to cross-check a fact, to be certain that Kell had accurately recalled the details of the many files and telegrams he had read in Wallinger’s office. The conversation took them north towards Taksim Square, where they doubled back along Istiklal, stopping briefly to browse in an English-language bookshop where Amelia bought Team of Rivals, ‘because everyone I know is reading it’. When, finally, she had stopped asking questions about HITCHCOCK, Kell returned to the SIM.

‘Who went through the wreckage? Who found the phone?’

‘The Turkish authorities. I had somebody there acting as a liaison for the family. He managed to get hold of the phone and bring it back to London.’

‘And?’

They stopped walking. Amelia adjusted her scarf and turned one hundred and eighty degrees, looking north along the broad street. They were no more than six metres from the entrance to the Russian Consulate. Ordinarily, Kell would have pointed this out, as an amusing curiosity, but did not want to interrupt Amelia’s train of thought.

‘There are some numbers that we’re still trying to trace.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that it’s too early to say.’

Of course. Even with a colleague as trusted as Thomas Kell, Amelia would not disclose anything more than was absolutely required by the demands of the conversation. Kell concealed his anger at being treated like a second-rate gumshoe. ‘Too early to say’ meant that Elsa — or one of her ilk — had dragged something off the SIM which would be useful in the context of a secondary piece of intelligence; without that, there was no point in getting anybody’s hopes up. Amelia would tell him only what he needed to know. As he looked up at the first-floor windows of the Consulate, wondering if somebody inside was having Moscow kittens at the sight of ‘C’ loitering in the road, Kell felt something of the same frustration he had experienced in his meeting with Chater. To be obstructed in his work was one thing; to be finessed, even patronized by his friend, quite another.

‘You might find that one of the numbers was to a former Hungarian intelligence officer named Cecilia Sandor.’

It was a cruel strike, but something in Kell had wanted to wound Amelia.

‘Who?’

He put his arm across Amelia’s back and tried to steer her away down the street. She seemed to flinch at the contact, knowing that Kell was about to break bad news.

‘Paul was on the island with her.’

‘On Chios?’

‘Yes.’

He allowed Amelia to process what he had told her. It took only a couple of seconds, but in that time Amelia seemed to separate herself from the thick crowds on Istiklal, from the laughter of passing couples, the chatter and music of the street.

‘They were seeing one another?’

‘Looks that way. She left flowers and a handwritten note at the funeral. She rented a villa on the island. They stayed there for about a week.’

Amelia began to walk more briskly, as if to surge away from what Kell was telling her. ‘How do you know Sandor was NSA?’

‘You ever come across Tamas Metka?’ Amelia shook her head. ‘Old contact of mine from Budapest. Met him when he was in London about ten years ago. I had him run the name. Sandor is mid-thirties. Quit Hungarian intelligence in 2009 to run a restaurant in Croatia. Before that, according to Metka she did plenty of operational stuff with us, with the grass skirts, too.’ ‘Grass skirts’ was an old in-house euphemism for MI5. ‘It might be worth cross-checking her name with Paul’s operations. That’s probably how they met.’

‘Probably,’ Amelia muttered.

He wanted to tell her about the photograph, to lift her spirits, to say that Paul had kept a picture of her beside his bed until the day he died. But what would be the point? Soon enough Amelia would find a way of suppressing her feelings. He knew how effectively, even cynically, she could disentangle her head from her heart. It was how she had lived for thirty years with the knowledge that she had given up her only child for adoption at birth: by compartmentalizing her feelings, by rationalizing the pain. Yet the thought occurred to him: if Wallinger had kept a ten-year-old photograph of Amelia in a book beside his bed, what had Amelia retained as her own private keepsake?

‘I understand that you’ve asked Adam Haydock to trace the engineer who worked on Paul’s plane?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And to look at some CCTV on Chios? Is that correct?’

Kell explained that Wallinger had been observed talking to a bearded man in a restaurant on the harbour. He wanted to float a theory that the individual in question had been Jim Chater, but didn’t want to give Amelia the opportunity to tell him that he was being absurd.

‘Who saw him?’

‘The woman who rented the villa to Sandor. Marianna Dimitriadis.’

‘Was he American?’

‘No idea,’ Kell replied. ‘She didn’t get an accent.’

They had arrived at the southern end of Istiklal. A small red tram was moving slowly along the boulevard, two young boys hanging off the back running board. Kell dropped the cigarette he had been smoking and suddenly felt hot. He took off his sweater.

‘At first it looked as though Paul had covered his tracks because he didn’t want Josephine to know that he was having an affair.’ Amelia produced a quiet, knowing snort. ‘But did he have other reasons to be there? Operational reasons?’

‘I’ve told you that. He had no business—’

‘My question was rhetorical. What if he was meeting a contact off the books?’ Kell pointed out that Wallinger had shelved his passport, his credit cards and his cell phones after landing on Chios. That was an awful lot of cover for a dirty weekend.

‘Perhaps he didn’t want me to know he was there.’

Kell admired Amelia’s candour, not least because she had saved him from making an identical observation.

‘Oh, come off it,’ he replied. ‘How long is it since you two were an item?’

‘We were never “an item”, Tom.’

That shut him up. Kell watched a stray cat scampering under the wheels of a parked van, tracking its progress downhill along a side street cloaked in scaffolding. There was a strong smell of frying fish; he imagined that the cat was trying to locate the source of it.

‘Hungry?’ Amelia asked. She, too, had reacted to the warmer weather, removing her jacket and looping it over her arm. There was a large, brightly lit restaurant across the street, manned by white-aproned chefs tending to metal containers of food displayed in high windows. The place looked cheap and popular; most of the tables were already occupied.

‘How about that place?’ Kell suggested, as a jackhammer drill started up in the distance.

‘Perfect,’ said Amelia, and they went inside.