Secret Asset

44

She couldn’t exactly say why, but she thought someone was there. In a doorway, or in the shadows, or behind a car—but there.

Peggy felt it first just after she left Thames House, as she walked along the river towards the Tube station. She stopped just short of the Tate, thinking she had dropped something from her bag, and would not have thought twice about the dark figure fifty yards or so behind her had it not stopped abruptly too. It was a man—she was somehow certain it was a man—though when she peered at him in the distance he had disappeared.

Don’t get paranoid, Peggy told herself, but she wished she’d been on the counter-surveillance course. The little she knew made it seem virtually a black art—certainly not for amateurs. She’d got to know Dave Armstrong from lunch and the occasional coffee break, and he’d described a surveillance operation where over thirty people had been involved. And not one had been spotted.

She had no confidence in her own ability to spot a tail, but then she wasn’t operational—her job was research and analysis. She’d been told when she joined MI6 that after a few years she might well be posted abroad. That had been part of the attraction for her. It was then she would go on the courses, get the operational training. In a small station abroad they said everyone had to get involved. Researchers, secretaries, even wives got drafted in to fill dead letter boxes, service safe houses, and sometimes meet agents. She looked forward to it, but it was several years away.

Meanwhile, working with Liz Carlyle in MI5, Peggy had discovered an urgency which drew everyone in. She liked the involvement, the recognition that everyone in their different ways had a part to play in what was going on. But she felt ill-prepared for sharp-end operational work.

When the sense of being followed wouldn’t go away, she decided to put it to the test. Turning right onto Vauxhall Bridge Road she stopped under the generous portico of one of the stucco Regency mansions, long ago divided into offices, and waited there. Shielded by a column, she watched for several minutes, but no one came around the corner.

Stop fantasising, she told herself, relieved she had been wrong, embarrassed that she had thought she had been right. She entered Pimlico Underground Station, virtually deserted in the late morning, and took the escalator down without a single person behind her or on the opposite side, coming up. As she waited for the Victoria Line train to arrive, there were just two other people on the platform—a young black woman sitting on a bench in one of the recesses, and further down, an elderly man leaning on a walking stick.

At Victoria she switched to the Circle Line, heading for her first appointment. This shouldn’t take long, thought Peggy; it was her second meeting, the meeting in Kilburn, from which she was anticipating some excitement.

She’d dug further into Patrick Dobson’s extended Irish family, and discovered a lateral branch that had moved to London thirty years before. She wanted to find out if these cousins knew Dobson—he had vociferously denied any contact with the Irish side of his family. Peggy was posing as a sociology student at UCL, writing a dissertation on the Irish in London, a topic she found interesting enough that it shouldn’t be difficult to play the part. As the train stopped at South Kensington, she opened her briefcase and took out the genealogical chart she’d compiled, but then thought she had better check her notes for her first meeting, even if it wasn’t going to last long.

It should be routine. She was going at Liz’s prompting: Tom Dartmouth’s wife had been seen in London not long before, which was unusual, since the woman was supposed to live in Haifa. “She was probably just visiting,” Liz said, “but please check it out all the same.”

Peggy didn’t have a lot to go on from the file:

And Margarita had not been easy to locate. At the Haifa address, now inhabited by rehoused settlers from Gaza whose English on the phone she had found difficult to understand, no one knew or cared who had lived there before them. The Tel Aviv Symphony Orchestra initially denied that Margarita had ever played for them, then after conceding she had, could unearth no forwarding address.

Eventually, a painstaking trawl through online music sites proved more productive. A casual reference in a music student’s blog, a check in the telephone directory, and Peggy found Margarita Levy at last, giving private violin lessons. Though not in Haifa, or anywhere in Israel for that matter.

The flat was in a Victorian mansion block off Kensington High Street. Opening the door, Margarita Levy smiled shyly at Peggy and shook hands. She was a tall, striking woman, with lush black hair neatly swept back. “Come in,” she said and pointed to the sitting room. “Make yourself comfortable. I will be right with you.” And she disappeared into another room from which came the sound of voices.

Peggy went in and stood in the middle of the room, close to a fragile-looking Empire chair covered in worn silk. The room was comfortably furnished, with curtains tied back from the casement windows, a well-worn sofa with pale yellow covers and cushions, and chairs covered in faded chintz. Two antique side tables held an array of bibelots and marble eggs, and the walls were hung with small oil paintings, mainly landscapes, and a large portrait over the mantelpiece that looked to be of Margarita as a teenage girl. All in all, Peggy decided, it was the sitting room of a genteel, cultured woman, from a comfortable background, but now with more taste than cash.

The door to the other room opened and a sulky pigtailed girl of about twelve came out, carrying a violin case. She ignored Peggy, and headed straight for the front door, which she slammed behind her. Margarita came into the sitting room, turned to Peggy and raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know why some of them bother. If you hate the violin that much, it is not possible to play it well.” She had the faintest trace of accent. “I blame the parents. If you force a child, what does it do? It rebels.”

She was dressed simply but elegantly in a sleeveless black dress and a single-strand necklace of unadorned gold. Peggy noticed that she did not wear a wedding ring. “I’m going to make some tea,” she announced. “Would you like some?”

“I won’t, thank you very much,” said Peggy. “I don’t need to keep you very long.”

When Margarita moved into the kitchen next door, Peggy followed her as far as the doorway. The kitchen was tiny; opposite it Peggy could see a small bedroom, next to the room used for giving lessons. That seemed to be the extent of the flat, which went some way to explain to Peggy how a violin teacher could live in Kensington.

While the kettle boiled, Margarita took out a china cup and saucer. “How long have you been back in England?” asked Peggy.

“Back?” asked Margarita. She was filling the milk jug. “What do you mean?”

Peggy racked her brains. Had she made a mistake? She’d read Tom’s file for the umpteenth time before setting off that morning. No, she was certain of what it said. “We had you down as living in Israel. Not London. That’s why I’m here.”

“I haven’t lived in Israel for over ten years. Not since I married Tom. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea?”

“Actually,” said Peggy, curious about the discrepancy between Tom’s file and the facts, “I’d love one.”

Margarita put tea things on a tray and carried it into the sitting room, where Peggy sat down carefully on the Empire chair. Margarita poured the tea, then, sipping from her own cup, she sat back on the sofa and looked at Peggy. She hesitated for a moment. “Tell me something, is Tom all right?”

“He’s fine, I believe.”

She looked only slightly reassured. “I was worried when you asked to see me about him. Pakistan is so dangerous these days. I thought perhaps something had happened to him.”

Peggy realised the woman didn’t know Tom was back in London. It must have been an acrimonious divorce, she thought. “When did you last speak to Tom?”

Margarita grimaced and shook her head. “Not since he went to Pakistan.” But then she added, “I did see him, at a concert two or three years ago. I assumed he was back on leave. But we didn’t speak. He had someone with him.” She smiled ruefully and shrugged her shoulders. “So I just waved at him during the interval.”

It wasn’t acrimonious, Peggy now realised. She had come here expecting anything—anger, bitterness, jubilation, or even complete indifference. But not this sense of sad bewilderment.

“You were married in Israel, were you?” asked Peggy.

“No. We married over here and I’ve lived here ever since.”

“That must have been quite a change for you. To leave all your family and friends like that.”

“Of course,” Margarita said simply.

“Though at least there was Tom’s family over here.”

Margarita shook her head. “Not really. His mother died before I even knew Tom. And I only met his stepfather once, when we first came to England. He was perfectly friendly, but Tom didn’t want anything to do with him.”

“Was Tom close to his natural father?”

Margarita shook her head again. “He had died too, when Tom was only a boy. His stepfather raised him, and Tom took his name. He resented that, I know—it was at his mother’s insistence. And it’s true to say Tom idolised his own father, though he never knew him as an adult at all.”

“That’s often the case, isn’t it?” asked Peggy, trying to sound sympathetic. “If a parent dies before a child grows up, they don’t have any objectivity about them.”

“You mean, they don’t get to see the feet of clay?” Margarita said, looking amused by the English expression.

“Yes. Though I’m sure Tom’s real father was entirely admirable.”

“I’m not,” said Margarita dryly, with a hint of acerbity.

“Oh?” said Peggy neutrally, willing the woman to go on.

Margarita stirred her tea with her spoon aimlessly. “You must know he killed himself.”

“Well, yes,” lied Peggy, trying to stifle her astonishment. “How old was Tom then?”

“He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Poor thing,” she added. “He didn’t find out until he was almost grown. That much I do know,” she said, as if established facts were thin on the ground when it came to her ex-husband.

“Why did he kill himself? Was he depressed?” ventured Peggy.

“He had made a mess of things, so possibly.”

“Was this in London?” Peggy asked, thinking she should be able to track down the details quickly enough. The real father’s name would be on Tom’s original application form.

“London? No. He’d gone to New York. He was a journalist there. I can’t remember exactly; I believe he got into trouble writing about Ireland. Tom didn’t talk about it. He only mentioned it once, when we first started seeing each other.”

At the memory, her melancholy seemed to return. She looked at Peggy. “It is odd, isn’t it,” she said, “how sometimes people talk less, not more as the years pass.” It struck Peggy that she wasn’t expecting an answer. Margarita reached for the teapot. “Another cup?”

This time, when Peggy said no she didn’t change her mind.

As she left the flat, she rang the Dobson relations in Kilburn and postponed her visit. She needed to see Liz Carlyle right away. It was one thing to find Tom had misled the Service about his wife’s whereabouts—you could argue Judith Spratt had done the same thing. It was another to find for the first time a possible link between Tom and Liam O’Phelan.

It’s the American connection, thought Peggy, thinking of the talk the don had given that night at the Old Fire Station. “From Boston to Belfast: Britain’s Dirty War in Northern Ireland and Abroad.”

She left the mansion block and walked quickly up to Kensington High Street. Turning into the Underground, she was surprised to find the eastbound platform unusually crowded for this hour. A muffled voice over the loudspeaker announced that due to an incident at Paddington Station, Circle Line trains were subject to delay. She saw from the overhead signal board that the next one wasn’t expected for another twelve minutes. She waited impatiently as more and more lunchtime passengers gradually filled the platform.

At last, the board signalled one minute before the train arrived, and Peggy moved towards the front of the platform, determined to get onto it, since a time for the next train had not even been posted. Gradually working her way through the crowd, she ended up close to the yellow line. Too close, she decided, and tried to take a step back, but the crowd was simply too dense for her to move.

Thank God the train’s coming, she thought, as the board read NEXT TRAIN APPROACHING. She tried again to step back as she saw its yellow headlight in the tunnel, but there seemed to be no free space behind her. She was blocked from moving sideways by a builder holding a toolbox to her left; on her right, a stout woman stood clutching two MS shopping bags to her chest.

Suddenly as the train broke out of the tunnel Peggy felt a pressure in the small of her back, nudging at first, then more insistent, and pushing. Her feet started to inch towards the track and she instinctively tried to dig her heels in. “Stop,” she shouted, but the noise of the onrushing carriages drowned the sound. She felt both her feet move again, well over the yellow line, moving irresistibly towards the platform’s edge. Panic seized her, and suddenly she screamed, involuntarily, the noise like the drawn-out pitch of a locomotive’s whistle. Then all went dark.

The man seemed to be wearing a uniform, and on her face she felt something wet and cold. The blur in her eyes suddenly resolved itself and she saw with snapshot clarity a station attendant in front of her, extending an arm as he dabbed at her cheeks with a wet tissue. She was sitting on a plastic chair in what looked to be a large broom cupboard under the stairs of the Underground station.

“What happened?” she asked, though she had a fair idea she was still alive. If there were an afterlife, she decided, it would not look like this.

“You fainted, Miss.” The man stopped dabbing with his tissue. “It was a bit of a crush.” He got up and looked down solicitously at Peggy. “Take some deep breaths.”

“I don’t remember,” said Peggy, feeling puzzled. Then she recalled the insistent pressure on her back, the propelling firmness that was carrying her steadily towards…

The stationmaster was saying, “Lucky for you the woman next to you saw you starting to drop. She said she thought you were going to topple over right in front of the train. But she managed to grab you in time—there was a builder bloke who helped her haul you back. The only casualty was a pair of trousers she’d just bought for her husband.”

“I am sorry,” said Peggy, trying to pull herself together. “Did she leave her name?”

“No, once I arrived on the scene she took the next train. Said she was late as it was.”

And Peggy suddenly remembered her own sense of urgency. She stood up, a little wobbly, but the dizziness soon receded. The man looked at her anxiously. “Are you sure you’re fit to travel?”

“I’m all right now,” she declared, then smiled at the attendant. “I’m very grateful for your help.”

He stepped out from the room onto the platform and looked at the board. “You’re in luck. The next train’s due in two minutes.”

“Thank you,” said Peggy, but she was already moving towards the escalator. She’d decided that in the circumstances, she deserved a taxi, but she would certainly not claim it on her expenses. No one except Liz was going to be told how she’d given in to panic.