Secret Asset

32

“Still sceptical?” asked Charles Wetherby, looking up from the menu. He was wearing his horn-rimmed reading glasses, which Liz thought made him look slightly professorial, though the smart light grey suit and polished shoes would have been out of place in a Common Room.

“About the mole? No,” said Liz crisply, giving a hint of a smile to acknowledge that her views had changed. “I think we may have a problem after all.”

“Let’s order first,” said Wetherby, signalling to a waitress. “Then we won’t be interrupted while you tell me about it.”

Keyed up as she was, it was frustrating to have to wait to tell him her news, but Liz was used to momentous events occurring within a framework of otherwise trivial life. She knew the impact even the most banal detail could have: the missed train, the child’s cold, the mobile phone that lost its charge. In her last year at school, taking A level English, she had become addicted to W. H. Auden’s poems, and she remembered one of her favourite lines describing how even the most dramatic event “takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

They were lunching well away from Thames House and casual observation, at Café Bagatelle, a chic restaurant with a dramatic glass roof in the enclosed sculpture garden of the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. Liz had asked to see Wetherby that morning, immediately after the phone call from Ireland. He had suggested lunch, which struck Liz as unusual, since previously they had only ever shared tables in the Thames House canteen, and most recently a sandwich at an RAF airfield in Norfolk.

The waitress came up at last. They ordered from the set menu. “I’m going to have a glass of wine,” said Wetherby, and Liz followed suit gratefully. He seemed relatively relaxed today. Though he was by natural disposition reserved, his sense of humour kept him from taciturnity, and sometimes quite unexpectedly he could be positively voluble, suddenly enthusiastic in a way Liz still found surprising, though she warmed to it. Overall, though, his attitude was one of benign, mildly ironic detachment. He was a cool customer in the nicest possible way, Liz had concluded, and she often wondered if he thought the same of her.

She looked around the airy dining room. It was Wednesday and the restaurant was comparatively quiet—a few businessmen, two or three tables of “ladies who lunch,” and some American visitors to the galleries. Even if it had been more crowded, the round tables and wicker chairs were spaced far enough apart to talk freely without fear of being overheard. Wetherby had chosen it mainly for its privacy.

When the waitress finally left them, Wetherby unfolded his napkin and turned to Liz. “So what have you found out?”

“I had a call this morning from James Maguire.”

Wetherby looked surprised. “I thought he wasn’t speaking to us.”

“So did I,” said Liz.

Wetherby looked at her and gave a wry smile. “You must have got to him after all, Liz. Well done.”

Liz shrugged. She remembered her tense, argumentative meeting with Maguire in Rotterdam. “I’m not sure I had anything to do with it. His conscience woke up, that’s all.”

“Will he help us?”

“He has already. He went to see Sean Keaney’s daughter in Dublin. It turns out that one of her great pals at university was an acolyte of her father’s. An IRA sympathiser named Kirsty Brien.” Liz paused, and lowered her voice, though there was no one at the two tables nearest them. “Kirsty had a male friend who in turn became an academic. First at Oxford, now at Queen’s Belfast. What’s more, she told Maddie Keaney that she was only seeing the man for Keaney’s sake.”

Wetherby’s eyebrows raised, the sole sign of his surprise. “So you’ve closed the circle,” he said. “Well done. I was sure you were right to have misgivings about O’Phelan—you don’t often get it wrong—but I thought it just possible he knew someone on the list, without it having anything to do with the IRA. It could have been any sort of connection.”

He clasped both hands together and inspected them thoughtfully. “But now that you’ve linked him to Keaney, it makes it far more likely he was the recruiter.” Liz noticed his cufflink—gold worked into the shape of a cricket bat. Wetherby said, “But who is it? And what’s your next step?”

“I had been planning to interview O’Phelan again anyway, but I was waiting to see what Peggy Kinsolving came up with. I wanted some ammunition this time.”

“You’ve got that now,” said Wetherby.

Liz nodded. “I know. I think I’ll go early next week. I don’t want to alarm him by making it sound too urgent. We still can’t prove anything.”

“No, that sounds right to me.”

Their starters arrived, and Liz cut into her goat’s cheese galette. “Charles, have you thought about what you’re going to do if we do find a mole? I mean, especially if he or she was never activated?”

“I’ll do whatever it takes to get him or her out of the Service.” He laid down his fork. “Anything else I’ll happily leave to the Attorney General. That assumes of course that they weren’t activated—Keaney may not have told the truth about that.”

Remembering her own musings in her bedroom at the Culloden Hotel, Liz pressed on. “But just supposing the IRA didn’t activate the mole, I wonder how they would have felt about that. Badly let down, I would think.”

Charles paused as the waitress cleared the table for their main courses. “So you’ve had that thought too. It’s been haunting me. I was thinking about something my father once told me. Yours was too young to be in the War, wasn’t he?”

Liz nodded.

“Well, my father was commissioned just before the Normandy landings. His regiment was in the first wave of troops, but two days before they were set to sail, my grandmother died, and my father was allowed home on compassionate leave. When he returned to duty, for some reason he was transferred to the Ministry of Defence in London. He never saw combat.”

The waitress put down their plates. Wetherby went on, “I once asked him about it. I said, ‘Weren’t you relieved you didn’t have to fight?’ I’ll never forget the look on his face. He told me that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.”

He looked speculatively at Liz. “So think about this mole. They’ve made a momentous decision to work for the IRA, managed to be recruited to the Service, all set to go. And then somebody back in Belfast pulls the plug and the whole raison d’être is gone. Can you imagine how a person would feel about that?”

“Is that what’s worrying you?”

“Yes.” Wetherby’s usual air of diffidence was now replaced by obvious concern. “I must admit, that at first I was thinking we’ve got to find this mole, because they’re disloyal, but I was also thinking it’s unlikely an IRA plant is going to do us active harm at present, so this may not be top priority. But now I’m not so sure about that.”

He hesitated and for a moment Liz thought he was about to say something else. But the waitress came to fill their water glasses and the moment lapsed. “I’ll be leaving work early on Friday,” Liz said. “I have to go and see my mother.”

“Is she all right?” asked Wetherby. He managed to make his interest sound genuine without being intrusive. It was the kind of tactful concern for which Liz was grateful just then.

“I’m not sure that she is,” admitted Liz. “They’ve found a growth, and she has to go into hospital for a biopsy. I want to go down and take her in.”

“Of course,” said Wetherby. He sighed, looking pensive and fingering the knot in his tie.

“I’m sure it will be fine,” said Liz, putting on a brave front she didn’t really feel.

Wetherby must have sensed this, for he looked at Liz with the fixed gaze she had come to know so well. At first, Liz, like Dave, had found the “X-ray stare” unnerving—she couldn’t tell if he were amused by her, or slightly doubtful, even accusatory. But she had grown to understand that this look was a sign of concentration rather than some mind-reading exercise.

“Anyway,” she said before the silence became too prolonged, “how are those boys of yours?”

He smiled with real pleasure. “They’re fine. Cricket and girls—that’s their life, and in that order.”

“And Joanne?” she asked more cautiously.

Wetherby shrugged. “It’s been a difficult few months,” he admitted. “She had a blood transfusion last week which the consultant was very hopeful about.” His face seemed to sag. “I’m not sure it’s been a success.”

Liz wasn’t sure what to say. Wetherby had lived with his wife’s chronic illness for as long as Liz had known him. For the most part, Liz tried not to venture too far into the topic she mentally labelled Wetherby’s Wife. From his rather embarrassed reactions when she did ask after Joanne, she judged that was how he preferred it.

“I am sorry,” she said with feeling. She added, “It must be very hard on the boys.”

He grimaced slightly, as the waitress took away their plates. Both he and Liz declined dessert, and Wetherby asked for the bill. He looked pensive, Liz thought, rather sad, as they sat waiting for the return of his credit card. Suddenly he reached across the table, and gave Liz’s arm an affectionate squeeze. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to burden you with my problems. I know how badly the whole Marzipan business hit you. It was terrible for us all, but much worse for you. I thought you behaved superbly—but I knew you would. I do hope your mother’s news is good.”

And then, looking stern, after this unusual display of emotion, he pushed back his chair and stood up.