A Foreign Country

29

There was only one passenger ferry scheduled to leave for Marseille the following day. Kell went back to the Valencia, reserved an interior cabin via the SNCM website, cancelled his return flight to Nice and grabbed a few hours’ sleep before ordering breakfast to his room. Sami called at eight to say that he was en route to the Ramada to pick up both Amelia and François.

‘They want me to take Mrs Farrell to the airport. Then I drop François at the ferry terminal. They are close to each other.’

Kell assumed he was talking about the proximity of the airport to La Goulette, rather than offering an opinion on the status of Amelia’s relationship with her son. He didn’t trust Sami’s sense of humour sufficiently to make a joke about it.

‘Any idea why François isn’t flying as well?’

‘He said he likes to go by sea when he has a choice. Amy is going to Nice.’

Back to her painting course, Kell thought, and wondered if the Knights were still dutifully attending classes, day after day, in the vain hope of catching sight of their mark. Chances were she would clear out her room at the Gillespie and be back in London by Sunday night.

‘Call me when you’ve dropped François at the terminal,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave your final payment in an envelope at reception. Fifteen hundred dinars. Is that OK?’

‘This is very generous, Stephen.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

The port was a thousand concrete acres of cranes and trucks, seagulls twisting in the wind, ramps on to ferries banked with cars. Kell took a cab to the SNCM terminal and queued on an elevated walkway in the full glare of the sun behind a shuffling family of Tunisians who looked to have made their way in from the desert. A stooped old man cast Kell a slow, disdainful look before ordering a young boy — perhaps his great-grandson — to fasten a blue plastic bag stuffed with clothes and shoes that was threatening to slip free of its mooring on a rattling metal trolley. The old man’s hands were long and dark, thick-boned through decades of manual labour. Kell wondered at the family’s circumstances; were they emigrating to France? It looked as though their every possession was packed into three veteran suitcases and crammed into the soft cardboard boxes that drooped on the metal trolley like stomachs.

The queue moved quickly. Before long Kell found himself in an indoor waiting area, a high-ceilinged cube bordered on three sides by ticket desks, souvenir kiosks and a café selling pizza and pancakes. He collected his ticket from an SNCM official of Sami’s vintage who looked as smart and urbane as any London spymaster. His was the sort of job Kell had always dreaded: the confinement in one room; the day-after-day repetition of mundane tasks. He bought himself a coffee and sat at a window table overlooking the harbour, everything strangely damp to the touch, as if the morning sea had swept through the hall on a sudden, cleansing tide.

After five minutes, through the crowds of foot passengers gathered in the hall, he saw François standing at the security check fifty metres away. He was showing his ticket to a guard. Headphones were looped around his neck and he was holding a little leather clutch bag of the sort favoured by fashionable southern European men. Passport control indicated the expensive pair of designer sunglasses concealing François’ eyes and Kell saw him pull them up over his head with what looked like an almost haughty disdain; perhaps a week spent in the company of the Chief-designate of the Secret Intelligence Service had fortified him in the presence of low-level power. He then turned left, out of sight, and Kell finished his coffee with no sense of rush or panic. He had twenty-two hours on the ship ahead of him: that was plenty of time to make the acquaintance of Monsieur François Malot.

The ferry was identical to many Kell had taken as a child across the English Channel on family holidays to the Normandy coast; a roll-on, roll-off passenger ship with stacked decks, open walkways on the port and starboard sides, a sun deck beneath the funnel. He located his cabin in the bowels of the ship, a tiny room squeezed among a hundred others along identical, criss-cross corridors in which he quickly lost any sense of direction. He could hear the voice of his father — ‘No bloody cat small enough to swing’ — as he pulled the bed down from the wall of his cabin, immediately reducing the available floor space by fifty per cent. He slid his luggage underneath. There was a small moulded shelf next to the pillow, beneath a scratched mirror; to the right of the door, a bathroom only fractionally larger than a telephone box. Kell sat on the bed, put the half-finished bottle of duty-free Macallan on the shelf, removed the memory card from the camera, then took out The Scramble for Africa and headed back upstairs to look around.

No sign of François. He went from deck to deck, from salon to salon, mapping out the territory. Two veiled women were already camped out in a reception lobby on Level 6; they had laid out sponge mats and were fast asleep on the floor. A door connected the lobby to a seating area where roughly fifty North Africans had secured rows of leather armchairs in a sunlit lounge. It was lunchtime and they were eating picnics of boiled eggs, lettuce and bread. One man was slicing a tomato with a penknife and spreading a baguette with what appeared to be homemade harissa paste. The eggs were peeled white and Kell watched as he swept the broken shells carefully into a small plastic tub on the floor. He felt a pang of hunger and went looking for something to eat. Two floors up there was a restaurant, closed, and he was told by a genial French waiter that food would be served once the ship had left dock. So Kell went out on to the port deck, braced his hands on a chipped-paint railing, and watched as the last of the cars made their way into the stern of the ferry. It was a brilliant summer day, sun-glinting and clean, the salt light blinding to the eyes. Kell breathed the air deeply to clear what felt like days of indoor living. Beside him, an Algerian man with a moustache was taking photographs of the port; another was waving at a small family group clustered in a car park. He looked close to tears.