Dead Spy Running

14

Leila turned the key in the front door and slipped into Marchant’s basement flat in Pimlico, across the river from Legoland. She was shocked by its untidiness, the unmade bed, clothes strewn across the floor, bottles spilling out of the wastepaper basket under his desk. Had the place been searched? She used to be a regular visitor here, and it had always been kept immaculate, almost too tidy. When he was suspended they had stopped staying over at each other’s places, except for the night before the marathon, when she had insisted he stayed. Marchant was determined to limit the fallout from his father’s departure to himself and no one else. They had stolen the occasional night away in the country, but Marchant had found it hard to relax. Until he had cleared his father’s name, he couldn’t be himself.

That self she had fallen for in those early days smiled up at her now from the photo of their final day at the Fort, propped up on his desk in the corner of the room. A group of them were in the SOE memorial room, posing in front of the wall where previous members of the Service had been honoured. Marchant’s arm was slung casually around her shoulders, like a college friend, giving no clue that they had slept together for the first time the night before. Already they were learning to deceive in love, mixing up their jobs with their private lives, just as Marchant had feared.

Next to the group photo was a picture of his father up a ladder in the orchard at Tarlton, in happier, idyllic Cotswold days. An eight-year-old Marchant in shorts was lying in a hammock strung between two apple trees, grinning confidently up at the camera. His twin brother, Sebastian, was lying next to him. They weren’t identical, but they shared the same smile. Sebastian’s face was turned towards his mother, who was standing at the bottom of the ladder, a basket of fruit in her arms. She was strikingly beautiful, confident, at ease with motherhood.

Marchant had only talked about the crash once, after they had both nearly drowned during survival training at the Fort. Sebbie, as Marchant sometimes called him, must have died a few weeks after the photo had been taken, in a traffic accident when they had returned to Delhi at the end of the English summer. Marchant had been in the jeep too when it collided head-on with a government bus, but he and his mother had survived unscathed.

Marchant’s family had stayed on in Delhi until the end of his father’s tour, which surprised colleagues. Later, he told Marchant that he hadn’t wanted to return home immediately because his family would have spent the rest of their lives hating India, and he couldn’t countenance that.

Marchant’s seemingly easy manner, Leila knew, dated back to those Delhi days. Everyone who met him now thought he was relaxed, charming, sociable (his ayah had described him as ‘easy go happy’), but it was his way of protecting a place he wasn’t prepared to go with anyone: a place where he was still an eight-year-old child, staring at his brother beside the wreckage of the car, watching the bus driver flee from the scene; a place she knew he had revisited when his father had died. His father’s death had meant that Marchant was the only one left of his family. She sometimes felt like that too, her mother as good as dead to her, her father no longer alive. He had never been a happy presence in her childhood, either away on work or distant when he was at home, drinking too much at night and showing her mother too little respect.

Leila went over to Marchant’s unmade bed and lay on it, turning her head to one side and inhaling his faint aroma on the pillow. He would try to make contact, let her know he was all right. The confinement of a safe house would drive him crazy, but he was better off there than in the outside world. He was now a marked man, wanted not just by MI5 but by whoever had sent Pradeep.

Sometimes, when they lay side by side after making love, in those brief moments before they headed back to the airport and their separate lives, they had talked about where in the world they would most like to be. Marchant always spoke first, about dreams of the Thar Desert, the African savannah — rangy, open spaces, wide skies — or sometimes the shady apple orchards of Tarlton in a Cotswold summer. When it was her turn, she would fall quiet, the memory of her one, all too brief visit to Iran silencing her with its beauty, before she began to speak of the bare mountains that circled Ghamsar’s fertile plains, the scent of rose water, the village workers with cloth bags full of fragrant petals hanging from their necks.

Her mother had painted other pictures of Iran when she was younger, keen to keep the country alive for her daughter. She told her bedtime stories of Isfahan, homilies from the poems of Hafez, and, when she was older, tales of drinking Turkish tea in Tehran’s cafés with elderly academics in berets and black suits. But it was always to Ghamsar’s rose gardens that Leila’s thoughts returned, an aching glimpse of what might have been.

Leila must have been asleep for at least an hour when her phone woke her. For a moment she expected it to be her mother, but it was Paul Myers, on an encrypted call from his mobile.

‘The Americans have got Daniel,’ he said.

‘What?’ Leila sat up on Marchant’s bed, barely awake, confused by her surroundings and now by the sound of Myers’s voice.

‘I can’t say any more,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. Even on an encrypted call, he knew key words might alert someone. ‘Seems he left on a flight to Poland.’

‘When?’ Fielding must have given in to the Americans, been persuaded of a link between the Marchant family and Dhar.

‘Hard to say. Last couple of days?’ Myers paused. ‘It’s not exactly a sight-seeing trip.’

‘No.’

‘He’ll cope, right?’ Myers said, surprising Leila with his sudden, urgent concern. ‘He’s tough as they come, doesn’t everyone say that?’

Leila thought back to that night at the Fort when he sat beside her in the pub, still shaking, barely able to talk after his waterboarding training.

‘I’ll call you.’ She paused. ‘Paul?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thanks.’

Leila hung up and looked around the messed-up room. Her eyes rested on the picture of her and Marchant at the Fort. She walked over to the desk, knowing that she might never see him again. If Fielding had let him go, the Americans could hold him for years. She felt her eyes moisten. Leaning forward, she placed the photograph face down on the desk and slipped quietly out of the flat.