Uncommon Enemy (3 page)

‘You’re sure you didn’t discuss anything else about the job?’ asked Corduroy.

Charles genuinely struggled to recall. Jeremy had complained that it was difficult to get hold of Charles, taking it almost as a personal affront that there was no mobile phone signal in that
part of Scotland. What made it worse was that the computer system introduced with the merger had created an electronic black hole into which many of the records of former staff had disappeared.

‘Inevitable when you get amateurs meddling with IT,’ Jeremy had said. ‘Last twitch of the old office. We’re much more up to date now – management, IT,
everything.’

‘Spying?’

Jeremy sighed. ‘You mustn’t take it amiss if I call you a Cold Warrior. I know you did other things as well but you’ll find it very different now – if I may say so,
somewhat improved. In fact, beyond recognition from what you’re used to, all that endless diplomatic pussyfooting and faffing about with natural cover cases. You know we’ve got Nigel
Measures in charge now, don’t you?’

‘I thought he was deputy chief.’

‘CEO, deputy CEO. We’ve got rid of all that chief nonsense. He’ll take over when Matthew Abrahams goes, which won’t be long now. He’s not been well. You know him of
old, of course. D’you know NM?’

‘We go back a long way. I haven’t seen him for years.’

‘Moderniser to his fingertips. He’ll make big changes. Has done everywhere he’s been. Brilliant career, you have to admit, whichever side you’re on: Foreign Office,
European Parliament. Wouldn’t surprise me if he went back to politics one day. How d’you know him? Didn’t serve with him when he was in the Foreign Office, did you?’

‘We knew each other at Oxford.’

Jeremy had always disliked hearing that people had been to Oxford or Cambridge. ‘Might have guessed. Would he remember you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come to the front door at eight on Thursday morning. We start earlier than in your day. Got to keep up with the modern world. None of the old gentlemanly ten-till-six stuff that
you’re used to.’

‘Ten o’clock. I’ll be there at ten.’

‘Too old office, Charles. You’re going to have to change.’

The head of a seal had broken through the ruffled waters around the headland. It was still tempting to say he wouldn’t be there at all, that they could come to him if they wanted; but he
knew he would go. ‘Ten o’clock,’ he repeated firmly. ‘Ten o’clock Friday. Not a minute before.’

Charles realised he had been silent for a while and that the policemen were waiting. ‘No, I don’t think we discussed anything else about the job. We talked
arrangements, he warned that I’d find much changed. He mentioned the change in leadership.’

‘Which hasn’t happened yet, has it? The old one hasn’t resigned, has he – Sir Matthew Abrahams? But he’s still unwell. He doesn’t come into the office
now?’

Charles smiled. ‘You’re well briefed.’

They smiled back without comment. Freckles put down his pen and leaned back. ‘When did you first know that Gladiator going missing was the reason for your recall?’

‘I was briefed when I got down here by Nigel Measures.’ Again, it was true but not the whole truth, and thus a lie by omission. He recalled his late father’s dictum: the essence of a lie is the intent to deceive. There was no more to be said
about that.

‘You’re well in with the SIA leadership, aren’t you, despite having left MI6 some years ago? You used to work for Sir Matthew?’

‘He was my boss, more than once.’

‘When you were running the Gladiator case.’

It was a statement, not a question. ‘Yes.’

‘And you also used to know Nigel Measures?’

‘Yes, though we’ve not been in regular contact since he went to Washington. After that he left the Foreign Office for Brussels. We’ve come across each other a few times
since.’

DS Westfield frowned. ‘But you knew him before that, didn’t you? At Oxford University, through his wife?’

‘I knew him and his wife, yes.’

Corduroy nodded. ‘What about coffee before we get on to your visit to Durham?’

After recording that they were having a break, they switched off the apparatus, stood and stretched. Freckles went for the coffees.

‘Lucky to get you in here, in Belgravia,’ said Corduroy. ‘Much better than the bloody pandemonium in somewhere like Wandsworth where we could have gone.’

‘I’m glad you did. There are a lot of formalities, aren’t there? As well as recording who comes and goes, all this sort of thing. ‘

‘We have to. PACE – Police and Criminal Evidence Act – lays it all down. If we don’t follow it to the letter it doesn’t count, gets thrown out.’

Charles kept him going with questions but his mind was on the one they had asked – asked as if merely in confirmation – about his having known Nigel Measures at Oxford through
Nigel’s wife. It was slightly but tellingly inaccurate. He knew Nigel because they had been in the same college, not through Sarah, whom they had each met independently. But ever since he had
married Sarah, Nigel had given the impression to others that he had introduced Charles to her; that they had been rivals and that Charles had been worsted. Charles’s guilt in relation to
Sarah meant that he rarely corrected the impression.

‘So did Mr Measures show signs of future greatness when you first knew him?’ continued Corduroy. ‘Was he destined for the top?’

Charles shrugged. ‘Not obviously. But then nobody was.’

If Nigel had briefed the police on him and Gladiator, there was certainly more to his arrest than its ostensible reason. And if the real reason was what Charles thought it must be, it was
equally certain Nigel would not have briefed the police on it.

Freckles returned with three plastic cups of coffee on a tin tray. ‘Okay with milk? Had to add it, couldn’t bring it. There’s sugar here, though.’

‘Milk’s fine, thanks.’

‘Not that it is milk. Continental muck, never been near a cow.’

Charles stood to stretch his legs while drinking.

‘Sit down, please,’ said Corduroy, more tersely than before.

Charles sat. Corduroy leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands clasped. He had small, hard brown eyes. ‘You knew Rebecca Ashdown, with whom you stayed the night in Durham, from your time
together in the old MI6, where she was a secretary? And she is married to or partner of the journalist, David Michael Horam, with whom she has a son?’

‘I don’t think they’re married. Her son is by her former husband, whom I never knew.’

‘When you knew her in MI6 she was single?’ Corduroy waited for Charles to answer in the affirmative, then spoke with obvious deliberation. ‘Would that relationship have been
one that you would have described as having been, at any time, close?’

Charles had noticed before that questions they thought important or delicate were more convoluted and were often phrased in the passive voice, as if it conferred greater precision. ‘She
was secretary to the instructors on my training course,’ he said. ‘We all got to know her well. She and I were then involved in a case together, which brought us personally
close.’ Clandestinity breeds intimacy, he was tempted to add to spare them the trouble of asking, but he was curious to see how they would do it.

Freckles took over, looking as if he were reluctantly intruding upon private grief. ‘Would it be true to say that it would not be incorrect to describe your relationship, at that moment in
time, as an affair?’

What constitutes an affair?
he wanted to ask, but it was important to appear helpful, not to play clever-clogs, as Rebecca herself might have put it. ‘Yes, at one period it was an
affair. It began in Southwold, in Suffolk.’ An unnecessary detail, which he thought they would like. ‘Then it evolved into a friendship, which has continued ever since.’

‘Are you intimate with her now?’

‘No. We have been occasionally. The last time was three or four years ago, after her marriage broke up and before she was involved with David Horam. Before she was living with him,
anyway.’

‘Has she any other contacts within the SIA?’

‘I don’t think so. Most of the people she and I knew left before the merger. She works for a local radio station.’

They wanted every detail of his visit to Durham – how it came about, why, how he got there, times of arrival and departure, who said what. They treated it as a crime scene – which,
in their eyes, perhaps it was. He spared them a lyrical description of powering the old Bristol through the fast bends and swooping hills of the A832 highland road. Telling them he had reached
Durham at about eight conveyed nothing of the wet and fretful rush-hour around Glasgow, worsened by inadequate wipers, a misted windscreen and a smell of petrol, which reinforced his prejudice that
things got worse as you went south. A southerner by birth and upbringing, he now preferred the bigger country, farther horizons and fewer people of the north; so long as he could have his regular
shot of London.

‘So you arrived, chatted over a drink or two, had dinner, chatted and drank a bit more, went to bed,’ said Corduroy. ‘What did you chat about? How did they greet
you?’

If they want detail, they can have it, he thought, as much as they want. It was still raining when he reached Durham and it was hard to find a parking space on the steep terraced street. Two of
the street lights weren’t working and Rebecca had taken a long time to answer his knock.

‘God, you look young, you rat,’ she’d said. They kissed on the cheeks.

‘Not as young as you. Sorry I’m late.’

‘You’re not. We all are. Dave’s only just got in and I was worried I wouldn’t be back in time. Bloody meetings.’ She closed the door and squeezed his hand. ‘A
wet rat, too. Bet you’ve been up and down to Sctoland a dozen times without dropping in.’

‘No, I’ve been in Scotland a while, reading and writing.’

‘With some handy highland lass within reach?’

‘Not at all. A silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, as someone else put it.’

‘Tell that to the marines.’ She pointed upstairs. ‘You’re in John’s room. He’s at Winchester. Final year, would you believe. I can’t. Take your things
up and come and have a drink. And stop staring at me. I know I’m coming out of my jeans. You haven’t put on an ounce, have you? Rats don’t, I s’pose.’

Her dyed brown hair was cut short, making her face rounder, but despite what she said she had kept her figure, more or less. Unlike David, whom Charles found on the sofa with a laptop and a good
deal more fat and less hair than when they last met. Formerly a thick-set, energetic man, he now struggled to get up.

Charles held up a hand to stop him. ‘Don’t.’

‘I need another drink. Anyway, we’ve got to hang around Rebecca in the kitchen and get in her way and irritate her, otherwise I’ll be in trouble for having blokes’ talk
with you and leaving her out.’

Corduroy picked up his pen again. ‘So you’re all three in the kitchen with drinks and talking. What about?’

‘About the book I’m writing – supposedly finishing – and about Rebecca’s job, people we’d known, why I was going back to the office—’

‘What did you say about that?’

‘That I didn’t know yet; but that it was temporary; and involved looking at some old case files.’

‘What did Dave Horam say about that?’

‘Nothing. But it was at that point that he asked me about the cinema bomb in Birmingham, which had happened that day. I didn’t know about it. I’d turned the car radio off
because the rain gets into the aerial connection and it becomes very crackly. So he told me about it.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He just described what was on the news. He assumed it was someone in al-Qaeda wanting revenge for the death of Usama bin Laden. He also assumed that I’d know all about al-Qaeda,
which I don’t. He was angry about the bomb.’

‘It’s still an open question, the AQ angle,’ said DS Westfield. ‘Could be a self-starter, an autonomous AQ sympathiser who’s taken it upon himself to put the world
to rights, or a lone fruitcake. Still no identification of the body.’

‘But definitely a suicide bomber?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Corduroy. ‘Crude device, unstable. Could’ve gone off accidentally.’ He held his pen upright. ‘So your friend Mr Horam was angry about
it, was he?’

‘He’s not my friend, he’s Rebecca’s. But yes, he was. Anger fuelled by alcohol.’

He described how David kept returning to the television in the sitting-room, channel-hopping for more of the story, demanding to know why the bombers couldn’t be stopped. ‘Why
aren’t they under surveillance, these al-Qaeda fruitcakes? Enough bloody cameras everywhere.’

‘It may not be them at all,’ Charles remembered saying.

‘Fat lot of difference if you’re blown to pieces,’ David shot back.

What most interested the two policemen was whether Charles had said anything about how many people it took to keep someone under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He remembered David asking but
couldn’t remember what he’d answered; the figure in David’s article of thirty to forty, including foot followers, mobile followers, interception and transcribing, was familiar. It
could have come from him, or it could have been put to him by David, or it could have been a figure he’d seen in the newspapers. If he had suggested it, he told them, it would have been based
on guesswork rather than knowledge. He had spent most of his operational career as one of the hunted, not a hunter, apart from a couple of periods with an MI5 surveillance team in London and a week
with the FBI on a joint operation in Hawaii.

‘Anyway, it’s not a secret figure, is it?’ he concluded. ‘Not a breach of the OSA?’

‘It’s very authoritative, the way it’s put. The article says it’s from a spokesman.’

‘Does it? I don’t remember. I only skimmed it when it came out.’

They looked surprised. Freckles produced a photocopy from a blue folder. ‘Take your time, don’t hurry.’

Charles re-read the article. The sentences about surveillance were underlined in red. They were nothing exceptional. He had read them, or similar sentences, dozens of times. He took his time
over reading. The police were treating him decently, but they had arrested him, they were the enemy, he owed them no favours despite the mutual civility of their exchanges. They could wait. Time,
he thought again, was on his side.