A Colder War

25

They were in a taxi, knees touching, knees not touching, Kell’s heart racing like a gambler waiting on the turn of a card. Rachel looked across at him and said:

‘So who was on the phone earlier?’

This was more than a little icebreaking small talk in the back seat of a midnight cab. He realized that she had been biding her time before asking the question.

‘A colleague in Athens.’

‘Something about Pappa?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What does that mean?’ The same rush of anger that had scalded her cheeks, the same sudden hardening of the eyes as she read the card at the wake, suddenly passed across Rachel’s lovely face and changed its character completely. She was distant from him, brittle and cold.

‘Sorry — instinct,’ Kell said, scrambling for an excuse. ‘We’re not supposed to talk about operational—’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she replied, staring out of the window as the taxi stopped at a set of lights. They were no more than fifty metres from the walls of the British Consulate. ‘Fucking spies.’

She was drunk. Perhaps stress and alcohol and grief played out inside her as rage. Kell took Rachel’s hand. She allowed him to press his fingers against hers, but she did not respond to his touch. He would have preferred it if she had flinched and retracted her hand.

‘It was someone at the Embassy in Athens who’s looking into the crash that killed your father.’

She turned towards him, her dark eyes beginning to forgive him, perhaps realizing that she had overreacted.

‘What’s the person’s name?’

‘Adam.’

‘Adam what?’

‘Haydock.’

The taxi was coming to a halt beside the Hotel Londra. It had started to rain. Kell hoped that Amelia or Elsa weren’t nursing brandies in the bar or he’d have a lot of explaining to do at his ten o’clock.

‘Did you make that up?’

Kell passed a ten-lira note to the driver. ‘You’ll never know,’ he said.

Rachel did not laugh.

‘Jesus, Rachel. His name is Adam Haydock. OK? I didn’t make it up.’

She walked three paces ahead of him, clipping up the steps of the hotel. A man was selling roses in the rain. He offered one to Kell, as though it would help him to make amends with the pretty girl, but Kell ignored him and walked inside. Rachel was already in the lobby. Whatever chemistry had built up between them, whatever promises their bodies had made to one another on the street outside the bar, had evaporated. And yet Rachel was still in his hotel.

Kell watched her walk into the lounge. To his relief, it was empty. No sign of Amelia, nor of Elsa. Just a parrot in a cage, a picture of Atatürk on the wall. The bar at the far end of the room was closed, the lights dimmed.

‘Just like Studio 54 in here.’ Rachel’s voice was deadpan as she turned to face him. Her anger had subsided, she still looked bruised by Kell’s evasiveness, but she was letting him back in.

‘Your father had a meeting on Chios before he died.’ Kell knew that he had to be frank with her. ‘We’re trying to find out who he was talking to. The identity of the man.’

‘Man?’ she said.

‘Yes. Man. Why?’

Rachel puffed out her cheeks and turned away from him, touching the tassels of a velvet-upholstered cushion.

‘You don’t need to finesse me, Tom,’ she said. ‘I know who my father was. I know what he was like. You don’t have to protect me from him.’

How to reply to such a remark? A person can invite you to be forthright and honest, but they will often resent you for that honesty as soon as it shows its face. What Rachel knew about her father’s behaviour with other women, the manner in which he had conducted himself as a husband, would affect every relationship she would make in the future. Kell was in possession of extraordinarily sensitive information about Paul Wallinger’s private life: his relationship with Amelia Levene, his affair with Cecilia Sandor. He should not and could not divulge that information to his daughter.

‘I know I don’t,’ he said. ‘None of us is perfect, Rachel. Your father was a complicated man, but he loved you very much. You and Andrew meant the world to him.’

It was a platitude, and Rachel treated it as such, allowing Kell’s words to evaporate in the gloom of the deserted lounge like a half-heard announcement on a PA system.

‘You don’t know that he loved me. How can you know that?’ Kell thought of Wallinger’s office in Ankara, the photographs only of Andrew, and said nothing. ‘He was with his mistress.’

Though he was not surprised, Kell still felt unnerved. ‘Yes,’ he replied, because there was no point in denying that.

‘Does everybody know? Everyone at MI6?’

‘Would it matter if they did?’

‘It would matter to Mum. She feels humiliated. She’s so ashamed, you know?’

‘And you want to protect her.’

Rachel nodded. Her rage and fury were gone. She was composed and thoughtful, breathtakingly beautiful in the extinguished light of the room.

‘Amelia knows that your father was staying with a woman. Adam Haydock knows about it. Very few other people. The investigation into his death is being handled by a small team. Amelia put me in charge of it.’

Rachel’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Why does there need to be an investigation?’

Kell risked her wrath a second time.

‘Rachel, I don’t want to have to say this to you. Believe me. I would much prefer to be allowed to tell you everything that’s going on. But I would lose my job if I told you why we are investigating the crash. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes, it makes sense,’ she said quietly, and perhaps there was a memory of the day, ten years earlier, when her father had finally sat Andrew and Rachel down and told them that Daddy wasn’t really a diplomat. Daddy was an officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. A spy. Paul — perhaps with Josephine at his side, proudly holding her husband’s hand — would have asked for his children’s absolute discretion, pointing out the legal and security requirements for total secrecy. The privilege of privileged information. Rachel knew the rules.

‘Thanks for understanding.’ Kell put his hand on her shoulder, an awkward, hapless rekindling of touch. Behind him, the parrot in the lounge was woken from a slumber and squawked loudly, saying something in Turkish that broke the silence. Rachel looked across at the cage, shrugged and produced a brittle laugh.

‘How do we get a drink?’ she said, walking out into the lobby and looking around for a member of staff. Kell assumed that the duty manager was making his rounds of the hotel.

‘I think they’re closed for the night,’ he replied.

‘A statement of the obvious, Thomas Kell.’ His physical desire for her was once again as intense as it had been on the street, the memory of her waist, the smell of her perfume.

‘I’ve got a bottle of vodka in my room,’ he said. He didn’t want to spend an hour in the lobby of the hotel dancing around the subject. He wanted Rachel in his bed. He wanted either to restore the charge between them or for Rachel to go home to the yali.

‘Have you now?’ she said, all of the glint and mischief returning to her face.

‘I have. Only got one glass, though.’

‘Only one glass? That’s a shame.’

And with that, Rachel turned around, leaned over the bar, plucked a highball from below the counter, straightened up and breezed past him, holding the glass aloft like a trophy.

‘Now you have two.’

There was a moment, as soon as they were in the room, when Rachel walked away from Kell, towards the window, as though building up her courage. He waited for her, for the right moment. When she turned to look at him, he moved towards her and took her face in his hands and kissed her for the first time. And soon they were tearing at each other, desire and pleasure flooding through Kell like an opiate. Every doubt and moment of loneliness and pain he had felt in the past months and years was leaving him. For so long, in the aftermath of his marriage, he had felt a kind of deadness at the centre of himself, his emotional existence completely stalled, incapable of finding other women attractive, and increasingly convinced that whatever passion and carnality he had once possessed had been extinguished by his divorce, by the gradual realization that more than half of his life was now done and visible only in the wing-mirror of regret and bad choices. Kell had no children to show for himself, no legacy save for the fiasco of Witness X. That was to be his monument. And yet, in the space of a few hours, he had met a woman who had somehow swept away his fury and his impotence as decisively as she had flung aside the flowers at the funeral, igniting something within Kell which felt like life again.

‘I thought you only invited me up here because you wanted a drink?’ she said, curling into the nook of his neck and shoulder an hour later. Kell was breathing in the smell of her skin, wanting her again.

‘Very rude of me,’ he said.

‘Something about vodka.’

The bottle and the glass were where he had left them before leaving to meet her, the chaperone taking a shot for his nerves. Kell reached for the bottle and, with an extended, unsteady hand, poured six inches into the glass.

‘Sorry. Slightly overdid it,’ he said, encouraging Rachel to sit up and take a drink.

‘Jesus! Who do you think I am? Amy Winehouse?’

He looked at her arms and her breasts, at the very slight swell of her belly, nothing perfect or airbrushed about her body, just the raw femininity of her, smells of sex and perfume and alcohol mingling in the night. For a time they sat up in silence, sharing the vodka, touching thighs and stomachs and hands, until Rachel eventually rose from the bed and walked into the bathroom, absolutely devoid of self-consciousness or vanity in every movement of her body. Of all things, Kell wanted to check the messages on his phone and was about to scramble around on the floor looking for his trousers when he told himself to relax, to get back into bed and to forget about Iannis Christidis and Ryan Kleckner for five minutes and just to enjoy himself. How many times did a man get to do this in his life? Candour and tenderness and the soul connection of a beautiful woman? He heard the toilet flushing next door, the whine of Rachel running a rusty tap, the mundane and commonplace sounds made by couples in the moments following intense intimacy. He had forgotten all about them.

The bathroom door swung open. Rachel came out wearing a towel. She smiled at Kell and picked up their clothes from the floor, throwing them together in a cluttered pile on the ottoman beneath the window.

‘So you were at the funeral?’ she said. ‘Funny I didn’t notice you.’

‘Insulting, even,’ Kell replied. ‘I noticed you.’

‘You did? Well I suppose of course you did …’ They were both aware of the sadness at the edge of what had begun as a playful exchange.

‘I saw you reading a note on a bunch of flowers. I saw you throw the flowers at the wall.’

Rachel had been in the process of removing the towel and climbing back into bed. She tightened it around her and stared at Kell, as though he had glimpsed something far more private than the naked body momentarily exposed to him.

‘You saw that?’

He nodded. He reached for her and unhooked the towel, making space in which she could lie down beside him. Then, without thinking, Kell lied.

‘What was that about? Why did you throw the flowers away?’

Rachel turned over on to her stomach, pulling a loose white sheet over her back. He helped her, freeing the sheet as it caught on her foot. He could see the marks on her skin where he had scratched and bitten her. Rachel was staring down at the mattress, and for a long time said nothing. Eventually she moved off the bed and walked across the room towards the pile of clothes. From beneath her crumpled black dress she retrieved her handbag. She popped the catch on the bag, reached inside and removed a crumpled blue envelope which she passed to him. The envelope had been stamped in France and was addressed to Cecilia Sandor. The handwriting belonged to Paul Wallinger.

‘What is this?’ Kell asked.

But he already knew.