Dead Spy Running

10

Leila headed back to London that night, leaving Marchant to dwell on Fielding’s visit over a bottle of malt she had smuggled in with her. He knew he was drinking too much. The training runs with Leila, the impulsive decision to run the marathon, had been an attempt to impose some routine on his life, which had lost all shape since his father’s death. He had never been fitter than when he was working for MI6. The drinking dulled the pain of loss, but it also dragged him back to another life, to dissolute, carefree days at the Nairobi Press Club.

The first weeks of his suspension had been the toughest. In his sober hours, Marchant had thought only of the mole who had supposedly penetrated MI6. It was his way of grieving, channelling his anger. Rising at dawn, head bursting, he had paced the empty streets of Pimlico, holding the rumours about his father up to the early-morning light, looking at them from every possible angle. He would stand on Vauxhall Bridge, watching the barges pass below before turning to look up at Legoland and the buttressed windows of the Chief’s office. Had the whole thing been cooked up as a Machiavellian way of removing his father, or was there a genuine possibility that Al Qaeda had infiltrated MI6?

The terms of his suspension meant that he wasn’t allowed to step inside Legoland, or to talk with colleagues about work, or to travel overseas. All his cover passports had been seized. His mornings had been spent in internet cafés around Victoria station (he didn’t trust the computer at his flat on Denbigh Street), going over each of the attacks again and again, looking for something that might link a cell based in South India to anyone in MI6, a Legoland colleague with connections to the subcontinent.

Now, at last, he had that link, but it was between his own father and Salim Dhar. Never once had it crossed Marchant’s mind that his father had brought suspicion upon himself. Fielding was right: meeting Dhar privately was an irregular thing to have done. And Marchant knew, as Leila’s whisky burnt his throat, that he too would have to meet him, wherever he was. It was the only way to clear his father’s name. He needed to ask Dhar why the Chief of MI6 had run the risk of meeting with him. The consequences of such an encounter could prove equally disastrous for him, but the reality was that he didn’t have much to lose.

As he gazed out across the Wiltshire countryside towards the woods beyond the canal, a grey heron lifted itself heavily from the water and rose into the air. His father used to say that they were like B-52s, but then he had always had a thing about bombers. During the Cuban Missile Crisis he had driven down to Fairford and watched them standing on the end of the runway, engines running, waiting for the order.

Marchant remembered the morning his father had called him with the news that he was to step down as Chief. The power and authority had gone from his voice, as if he had been using a mega-phone all his life and someone had suddenly switched it off. Marchant had taken the call at Heathrow airport, on his way back from Mogadishu to London for Christmas.

‘Have you cleared immigration?’ his father had asked, almost absent-mindedly.

‘I’m waiting for a taxi. Why? Is everything all right, Dad?’

‘Take the Underground as far as Hammersmith, then a minicab from that place on Fulham Palace Road we used to use. Ask for Tarlton. They’ll know.’

‘Dad, what is this? Is everything OK?’

‘I’ve been put out to pasture. Watch yourself.’

Marchant had immediately gone on his guard again, as if in a foreign airport. He moved swiftly down to the Underground, trying to work out the implications of their conversation, for his father, for him. He knew pressure had been building in recent weeks. There had been questions in the House about the incompetence of Britain’s intelligence services, aggressive newspaper leaders about the wave of attacks and what more should have been done to prevent them.

His father paid off the minicab in cash, and insisted on taking his son’s two bags. It was a cold December day, and the apple and cherry trees at the front of the house were laced with frozen cobwebs. A thin twist of smoke rose from the chimney. The house was in effect two Cotswold cottages knocked together, surrounded by lawns and a meandering drystone wall. It was a private location, half a mile out of Tarlton, a small hamlet near Cirencester. Marchant always felt strange when he was here. The house had been the only constant in his shifting childhood, a place where they came for brief respites from foreign postings, a home he had once shared with his brother. Its Englishness was overwhelming, not just because of its Cotswold prettiness, but because it had come to represent all that he missed about home: new-mown grass, autumn bonfires, orchards. And, of course, it had always disappointed, unable to live up to childhood dreams of Albion.

‘Good of you to come,’ his father said, walking through the back door in front of Marchant. ‘Mind if we go for a drive?’

Ten minutes later, they were speeding through the cold open countryside in his 1931 Lagonda, barely able to hear each other above the roar of the two-litre engine. Frost had sharpened the hedgerows, and the road was black with hidden ice. But Stephen Marchant didn’t seem to mind, wrapped up in a thick woollen scarf and gloves. Daniel sat next to him. He had forgotten how cold a car could feel.

‘Can’t trust the house,’ his father said, changing down the gears as they approached a junction. Home, Marchant knew, had been wired to a level of protection befitting the Chief’s weekend retreat. Now that security was working against him.

‘MI5?’ Marchant asked, the smell of musty canvas and hot oil taking him back to another distant part of his childhood. He and his father had always been close, both of them at ease in each other’s company, seldom needing to explain or open up. Even when Marchant had been expelled from school, his father hadn’t been angry, just annoyed that he had been caught.

‘I’m becoming a threat to national security,’ he shouted, releasing the brake lever on the side of the car and accelerating away towards Avening. Marchant hoped he would age as well as his father, whose silver hair was blowing about in the strong breeze. He had thick, fair eyebrows and a compact, square face, like a barn owl, Marchant always thought. And then there were those famous family ears, which had only got longer, more distinguished, with age. Tribal lobes, his father had once called them.

After twenty minutes, Stephen Marchant pulled the Lagonda up in a lay-by at the top of Minchinhampton Common, on the brow of a hill looking west towards Bristol. He switched off the engine and they sat there for a few minutes in silence, absorbing the timeless landscape as steam rose off the bonnet. Below them the Cotswolds stretched out in a necklace of icy hamlets, threaded with quiet country lanes, each with its handsome manor house, enduring church, frosted green. Thin drifts of snow covered the shaded corners of fields.

‘I look at this and wonder out of which pore of our beautiful country it’s seeping from,’ Stephen Marchant began. A bead of moisture had gathered on the end of his cold nose. ‘Do you know what they said?’

‘Tell me,’ Marchant replied, noticing the emotion that had slipped into his father’s voice.

‘That they can no longer be sure my interests coincide with the country’s.’ He paused, struggling to keep control. ‘Thirty years’ service and I have to listen to a group of jumped-up pricks in shorts telling me that.’

‘And it’s all coming from the DG?’ Daniel asked.

‘Of course. Apparently I’m obsessed with the enemy within, and have taken my eye off the greater threat.’

‘Dinner at the Travellers didn’t do the trick, then.’

‘God, no. Total disaster. She’s not like the women you and I know, Daniel. This one’s got balls, and I’ve been shafted, well and truly. They don’t want me back in the office after Christmas. I’m afraid they’re also talking about suspending you. Sins of the father. I’m so sorry.’ Marchant turned away, his mind racing instinctively to calculate the threat, assess the damage. He hadn’t expected it to affect him. Then he stopped, guilty that he had thought of himself rather than his father, whose career was in tatters after half a lifetime of service.

‘Don’t worry about me. You know I’ve never asked for help. I can look after myself.’

‘The Service can’t. If MI5 gets its way, Legoland will be sold off to the Japanese tomorrow and turned into a Thameside hotel. Come on, the idiots have arrived.’

Marchant looked behind them, and saw a white saloon car driving slowly up the hill.

‘Do you know the best way to shake off a tail?’ his father asked, firing up the Lagonda again in a plume of blue smoke. ‘Better than anything they might have taught you at the Fort?’

‘What?’ Marchant said, watching the car in the mirror as it slowed to a crawl four hundred yards behind them, its exhaust loitering in the cold air.

‘Drive faster than them.’