Games Traitors Play

31

The next time Marchant woke, it was to the sound of a Russian voice, talking on a mobile phone on the terrace outside his room. Marchant’s Russian was rusty, but good enough to understand what was being said.

‘Yes, he’s here.’ A woman’s voice, not Meena’s. ‘Still sleeping.’ He could see her outline through the net curtain, turning towards him, holding something in her hand, a photo perhaps. ‘The American woman’s gone, left yesterday…He’s a little under the weather, but it’s incredible, he looks just like his father.’

Marchant tried to rouse himself, but he couldn’t even turn over. It was as if he was lying in thick treacle, the sort his father used to pour over sponge puddings on those rare occasions when they spent Christmas in Britain, at the family home in the Cotswolds. It was his father’s only contribution in the kitchen. He stared at the lace curtain, billowing gently in the breeze, and tried to work out where he was, who the woman might be, why he didn’t care. His mouth wasn’t hurting any more, but he couldn’t distinguish one part of his body from another. A numbness had cocooned him. He looks just like his father — the words floated around his medicated head until he drifted back to sleep again.

‘Marchant’s got a babysitter,’ Prentice said, grinding a cigarette into the dusty ground outside the roadside bar with his heel. The pine trees were shading him from the hot Sardinian sun, their roots pushing up through the dry soil, moulding it like a plasticine map of mountainous terrain. He had taken a walk out of the resort’s gates and down to a collection of shops eight hundred yards along the straight main road. The only shop that was open was a deserted supermarket, where he had bought two bottles of chilled Prosecco, a packet of Marlboro cigarettes and too many Lotto tickets. Next door was a closed fishmongers and an empty bar, run by a woman in a short skirt whose red-lined eyes and swollen stomach suggested she drank more beer than she served.

‘She’s called Lakshmi Meena,’ Fielding said, getting up from his desk in Legoland.

‘Not unless she’s dyed her fanny hair.’

Fielding knew Prentice was trying to shock him. He had a habit of being crude at inappropriate moments. Perhaps it was a reaction against his own proper background, or frustration at never having taken to the stage. Like so many agents Fielding knew, Prentice was a natural actor, the office joker who could mimic everyone in authority. (Fielding had once overheard Prentice’s impression of his own voice: a combination of camp archbishop and repressed Eton housemaster.) Give or take a few venial sins, he was also one of the best agents he had in the field.

‘Oh yes, and she’s speaking Russian.’ Prentice winked at a small boy who had appeared at the end of the bar, legs crossed, one hand in his mouth, the other tugging at his mother’s nylon skirt. Prentice turned his back and walked away from the bar, cutting across the scrubland that lay between the shops and the main highway to Cagliari. He stepped carefully over the pine roots as he went. Despite the dust, his polished yard boots glistened in the high sun.

‘Is she on her own?’ Fielding asked, surprised at the speed of events in Sardinia.

‘She checked in to a double room, near Marchant’s. On the beach. Two sets of flip-flops outside the door, couple of towels. Husband-and-wife cover.’

‘But you haven’t seen the husband yet?’

‘I only reached here last night. What do you want me to do? Get him out of here? She’s a swallow, sent to seduce him.’

‘And Meena’s definitely gone?’

‘Checked out yesterday.’

‘A little too hasty, no?’

‘We met at the airport. She was embarrassed. Told me Marchant’s room number, the medication he was on, then buggered off. Marchant’s a sitting duck if the Russians want to compromise him.’

‘They probably have already.’