A Foreign Country

80

They waited on a bench in the centre of the square, a woman of fifty-three wearing a pretty skirt and a cream blouse, a man of forty-three in a linen suit that had seen better days, and a young French I.T. consultant wearing jeans and smoking a cigarette. He might have been their nephew, their son.

‘He’ll be here in a minute,’ Amelia said.

It was a Saturday morning, just before eleven o’clock, young children playing in a small park at the centre of the square under the dutiful, exhausted stares of fathers who had promised their wives and girlfriends a few hours’ respite from childcare. One of the children, a girl of about three or four, had a miniature pushchair in which she had placed a naked doll. She rattled it forward and back on the narrow path in front of the bench, falling once but immediately rising to her feet without fuss or tears, and without noticing that François had stood up from his seat to try to help her.

‘Brave girl,’ he said in French, sitting back down, but she did not appear to hear him.

Clockwise cars were circling the park, waiters at a brasserie on the far side of the square ferrying Perriers and cafés au lait to customers basking in the late summer sun. Kell turned and looked down Rue Carnot, glancing at his watch.

‘In a minute,’ Amelia replied and placed a hand on her son’s knee.

Kell watched them, still not tired of their delight in one another’s company, and reflected on how skilfully Amelia had played her hand. Jimmy Marquand promoted and sent to Washington, with school fees paid, salary boosted, and a five-bedroom Georgetown mansion to help convince him that SIS really had been left in good hands, despite one or two misgivings he might have had about a woman running the Service. Simon Haynes too busy thanking the Prime Minister for his knighthood to wonder how long Amelia had been keeping her illegitimate son a secret. And George Truscott eased offshore to the top SIS job in Germany before he could start asking any awkward questions about the sudden appearance in London of Monsieur François Malot.

At Amelia’s instigation, Kell, Elsa and Drummond had spent two weeks looking into the possibility of a connection between Truscott and the elements in the DGSE who had carried out Malot’s abduction, but they had found nothing, not even evidence that Truscott had known about DENEUVE. On the other hand, their investigation suggested that Kell had been correct in his assumption that the operation was linked to waning French influence in North Africa. Elsa had obtained copies of two cables, originating in Paris, which confirmed that senior figures in the DGSE had been ‘extremely concerned’ about Amelia’s appointment as ‘C’. Their misgivings proved well founded: within days of taking over from Haynes, Amelia had shut down nineteen separate operations in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe and re-directed more than forty officers to burgeoning SIS Stations in Tripoli, Cairo, Tunis and Algiers. As Head of Station in Turkey, Paul Wallinger was given carte blanche to amplify SIS influence from Istanbul to Tehran, from Ankara to Jordan. In London, other Levene allies, on both sides of the river, were instructed to sell this regional re-shuffle to a Downing Street already keen to reap the economic and security benefits of the post-Arab Spring era. By the time elections were being called in Egypt, the French government was reported to be ‘paranoid’ about aggressive SIS recruitment of sources within the Muslim Brotherhood and ‘gravely concerned’ about Libyan oil resources slipping beyond the control of Total S.A.

Paris itself had also embarked on a shame-faced internal investigation into the behaviour of Luc Javeau, details of which were leaked to Vauxhall Cross by Amelia’s source in the DCRI. It was confirmed that Javeau had indeed been the officer tasked with cleaning up the mess left by DENEUVE’s treachery. The scandal had stalled his career, a setback he blamed squarely on Levene and which his superiors were only too happy to avenge by waving through Javeau’s plans for the Malot operation. In the aftermath of François’ release, more formal channels saw the DGSE distancing itself from the ‘unpredictable rogue elements’ that had threatened to break the ‘formidable and lasting intelligence relationship between our two countries’. Amelia’s opposite number in Paris also stressed the importance of keeping what had happened in Salles-sur-l’Hers a secret, both to protect Mrs Levene’s privacy but also ‘to avoid any complications with our respective governments’. It was taken for granted that Paris was outraged by the assassination of serving DGSE personnel on French soil by an unaccountable unit of British ex-Special Forces.

Information on Valerie de Serres was harder to come by, but it was demonstrated that she was a former GIPN officer, born in Montreal, who had met Luc while their respective agencies had been working on a joint counter-terrorism oper-ation. Amelia characterized her baleful influence over Luc as ‘Lady Macbeth stuff’, and it was generally accepted that Valerie had managed to convince Javeau to quit the DGSE and to ransom François for private gain.

As for Kell himself, his forty-third birthday brought no great change in his circumstances. With the Yassin trial scheduled for the new year, Amelia had made it clear that she could not be seen to bring him back into the Service without the good name of ‘Witness X’ being cleared in court and the incident wiped from Kell’s record. There had been no word from Claire since her return from California, so he continued to rent his bachelor bedsit in Kensal Rise, eating take-aways and watching old black-and-white movies on TCM. Amelia had arranged for Kell’s salary and pension to be reinstated, yet her gratitude towards him for facilitating the release of her son had not been as fulsome as perhaps Kell had anticipated. He felt like a man who had spent a fortune on a present for a close friend, only to see them tuck it away, unopened, in a cupboard, embarrassed by such an act of generosity. In this atmosphere, Kell occasionally began to resent the risks he had taken on Amelia’s behalf, the secrets he had consented to keep, but his affection and respect for her was such that he was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. Amelia’s behaviour was bound to have been affected by what had happened in France, as well as by the demands — and status — of her new position as Chief. In time, he told himself, she would bring him back into the fold and give him the pick of any overseas job that caught his eye. Kell looked forward to that day, not least because it might offer him some respite from London and from the collapse of his marriage to Claire.

It was Kell who saw the old man first, shuffling along the road in a grey flannel suit. He knew his face because he had watched him, from this same spot, three days earlier.

‘Here he comes,’ he whispered.

François leapt up from the bench but Amelia remained seated, as though Kell and François were acolytes, her guardian angels. She heard François say: ‘Where?’ and looked up to see him squinting in the direction in which Kell was facing.

‘He’s coming across the street,’ Kell replied quietly. ‘The man with white hair in the grey suit. Do you see him?’

‘I see him.’ François stepped away from them, as if to give himself more time to take in what he was witnessing. Only now did Amelia turn. Kell would later tell himself that he had heard her gasp, but it may simply have been a trick of his imagination.

Jean-Marc Daumal seemed instantly to sense the presence of Amelia Weldon and stopped at the edge of the square, as though tapped on the shoulder by a ghost. He looked directly at the three figures on the bench but appeared to be having difficulty bringing them into focus. He took two paces forward. Kell and François remained where they were, but Amelia moved towards him.

His head began to shake as he saw her, everything that he had recalled of her beauty still present in her face. Soon he was only metres away from the bench.

‘Amelia?’

‘C’est moi, Jean-Marc.’ They came together and kissed one another lightly on both cheeks.

‘What are you doing here?’

He looked beyond her and scanned Kell’s face, perhaps assuming that he was the man who had finally won Amelia’s heart. Then he looked to Kell’s left, at the young man, and frowned, gazing at him as though trying to remember if they had met before.

‘I knew you would be here,’ Amelia told him, resting her hand on Daumal’s wrist. She was shocked by how much he had changed, and yet the years had not extinguished all of her love for him. A person is lucky to know even one person in their life who understands and cares for them so completely. ‘You look well,’ she said.

Amelia caught Kell’s eye in a moment of deep affection for him, a sudden reward for all that he had done for her. Then she turned so that she was facing her son.

‘Jean-Marc, there is somebody I would like you to meet.’