Breaking Cover

37

Tim came to see Peggy the day after she was admitted to the Royal Free. She had a private room – not because she was being given special treatment, but because she’d hit her head when she’d fainted, and the doctors at the hospital were concerned about concussion and didn’t want her in a noisy ward.

Her collarbone had been fractured by the blow she’d received, and her left arm was in a sling, which the doctors said she was going to have to wear for six weeks. They’d been concerned too about nerve damage to her shoulder, and had put her through the claustrophobia of an MRI scan. She’d been terrified but had closed her eyes and gritted her teeth for the twenty minutes she’d lain enclosed in the doughnut-shaped machine.

The pain was constant but not acute – and the morphine helped, though the drawback was the dreams it seemed to spawn. She woke sweating and in a panic after one particularly horrible one – this time the man with the phone hadn’t jumped into the car but was chasing her around it. She was trying to run away from him but her legs moved in jelly-like slow motion – only to find Tim standing at the foot of her bed.

‘Hi there,’ he said, a little awkwardly, ‘they don’t let you bring flowers so I bought you some grapes.’ And he plonked a plastic box of green grapes on the bed. They looked rather dry, as if they had seen better days. Tim had always been hopeless at giving her presents and she’d once seen it as a rather charming aspect of his unworldliness, but now she wondered if it simply meant he didn’t care.

A nurse came in behind him and, seeing the grapes, offered to find a dish for them. When she’d left the room Tim sat down. ‘So how are you feeling?’ he asked, perching uneasily on the edge of the high-backed vinyl chair, his hands dangling loosely between his knees.

‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘They’re giving me something for the pain. The doctor says I probably won’t need an operation.’

‘That’s good news. How long will you be in?’

‘Another night or two. I’d come home now if I didn’t feel so woozy.’

‘Have the police been to see you?’

‘Yes – twice, in fact.’ There had been a bright woman constable who’d been sufficiently struck by Peggy’s description of the attack – and by her elliptical description of her job – that she’d asked for a Special Branch detective to come in a few hours later and question Peggy further about her assailants.

‘I bet that’s more than they usually do,’ said Tim cynically. ‘Especially for an ordinary mugging.’

‘They don’t think it was an ordinary mugging.’

‘Really? Why not? The guy was after your handbag, I bet.’

‘Dressed in a suit? With a woman waiting in a car to help him make his getaway? That’s not how most muggers operate.’

‘You’d be surprised. Lots of people are desperate these days. Not just young delinquents either. Besides, if it wasn’t a mugging, what else could it be? Don’t tell me it was terrorists – or Edward Snowden!’

Peggy didn’t have an answer, and if one occurred to her, it wouldn’t be something she would want to discuss with Tim. She was certain the attack on her had been planned, and she assumed it would have something to do with her job; there was nothing in her personal life – no spurned lovers, no stalkers, no arch-enemies – that could make someone want to bash her brains in.

But there was no obvious answer to be found. Working with Liz, Peggy spent most of her time behind the scenes, analysing intelligence, doing research, investigating leads. Occasionally of late she had been operational – almost always interviewing people and always under cover. The last time had been the year before, when she had gone to question an old lady who lived next door to a house in Manchester suspected of sheltering terrorists. For that Peggy had posed as an electoral registration officer; before that she’d played other roles, a pollster, a student looking for a room and once a District Nurse. She’d never disclosed her real name, or where she lived or her real job, so it was hard to see how she could have been identified by someone or why they would want to kill her.

For that, she felt quite sure, was what this attack had been about – there was no mistaking the lethal intentions of the man with the cosh. She shuddered as she remembered the force of the blow that had missed her, but dented the bonnet of the car.

She pulled herself together and looked at Tim. Remembering what had happened to her brought to mind a question.

‘I noticed you’ve got a new phone,’ she said.

Tim shifted suddenly on his seat. ‘Yes. Why?’

‘I was just wondering when you got it.’

He shrugged his shoulders, but looked uncomfortable. ‘A couple of weeks ago.’

‘Did you buy it? It’s very smart. It must have cost the earth.’ She knew he didn’t have the £500 or so that iPhones like his went for. Some months he didn’t even have his share of the rent.

‘Not really,’ Tim said reluctantly.

‘Well, have you signed a new contract or something?’

‘No. But what does it matter?’

‘Well, of course it matters. If you’ve taken out an expensive phone contract, how are you going to pay your share of the household bills?’

‘Well, I haven’t.’

‘So where did you come by such a fancy phone?’

‘From someone I met.’ He spoke jerkily. ‘Through a group.’

‘A group?’

‘Online,’ he snapped. ‘An online group. People who think like me about civil liberties. But they think of their own free will, unlike the clones you work with.’

‘So you made a friend online and they gave you an iPhone?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ He looked embarrassed, but said angrily, ‘I met the person actually, since you ask. And we share the same views.’

‘About what?’

‘The internet. The need for freedom of speech. Thanks to your lot, no one can be sure that communications are confidential. Snowden showed that governments can look at anything – and they do.’

‘It would take at least a couple of million people to look at everybody’s email. Frankly, we have better things to do.’

‘That’s not the point. You can’t feel safe on the internet. You never know for sure that Big Brother isn’t snooping on everything you do. Phones are much safer.’ He looked at her defiantly. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong. The state is. I don’t want them poking about in my business.’

Peggy shook her head, partly to clear the cobwebs induced by the sedative, partly in disbelief. She had heard most of this before from Tim, but it was still utter codswallop. How on earth could an intelligent man think that accessing the internet on a phone was any different from doing so on a computer, or safer if it came to that? Someone had been filling his head with rubbish. She said, ‘This “friend” of yours, is female?’

‘As a matter of fact, she is. But that’s nothing to do with it.’

‘Oh, really? She admires your ideas, I suppose; so much that she gives you expensive unsolicited gifts. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.’ Peggy found herself growing angry, if only because Tim was being so unforthcoming. If he were having an affair, if he had found someone else, it would hurt, yes, and it would mean their relationship was over. But then why couldn’t he say so?

‘I promise you, it’s not like that. Marina – that’s the woman’s name – isn’t interested in me that way.’

So maybe this woman was taking him for a mug. Though that didn’t explain why she’d given him an expensive phone. Peggy said angrily, ‘And what about you? Is your interest purely intellectual?’

‘I barely know what the woman looks like. I only met her for the first time at that talk we went to. You know, the one Jasminder gave before she joined the Spooks.’

‘Spooks? Is that what you call us now?’

‘It’s just a name, Peggy,’ said Tim, but he looked ashamed of himself.

She frowned. ‘I still don’t understand – especially if this Marina woman is only interested in your mind – why she gave you a phone. It doesn’t make any sense. It would be like my giving some casual friend a laptop for Christmas. Over the top, inappropriate, and actually downright weird.’

‘I explained – it’s to keep our exchanges confidential. And anyway, it’s not what you think. Marina has a friend who beta-tests phones for Apple and had a few spare. She asked if I would like one. I said, of course. So she gave me one. It may look weird,’ he acknowledged, sounding defensive, ‘but that’s the truth.’

Peggy didn’t know what to say. Fortunately the nurse came in just then, to take her temperature and blood pressure, while another woman brought supper on a tray. By the time she’d set it down and filled the water jug, Tim had left. Peggy didn’t mind that he hadn’t even said goodbye.