from Soviet times with a tumbledown dacha in the old artists’ colony of Peredelkino. By the time Florence was ready to attend English boarding school the Service’s talent spotters were keeping an eye on her. When she sat her A-level exams, they dispatched their own Russian linguist to assess her language skills. She was awarded the highest grade available to non-Russians, and approached when she was just nineteen.
At university she continued her studies under the Office’s supervision and spent part of each vacation on low-grade training runs: Belgrade, Petersburg and most recently Tallinn, where once again we might have met had she not been living her cover as a forestry student and I as a diplomat. She loved to run, as I do: I in Battersea Park, she to my surprise on Hampstead Heath. When I pointed out to her that Hampstead was a long way from Pimlico, she replied without hesitation that there was a bus that took her from door to door. In an idle moment I checked, and it was true: the 24 went all the way.
What more did I know of her? That she had a consuming sense of natural justice that put me in mind of Prue. That she loved the spice of operational work, and had a talent for it that went beyond the normal. That the Office frequently exasperated her. That she was reticent, even guarded, about her private life. And there was an evening, after a long day’s work, when I caught sight of her crouched in her cubicle with fists clenched and tears running down her cheeks. One thing I have learned the hard way from Steff: never ask what’s wrong, just give her space. I gave her space, didn’t ask, and the cause of her tears remained her own.
But today she hasn’t a care in the world beyond Operation Rosebud.
*
There is a dreamlike quality to my recollection of that morning’s gathering of the Office’s finest, a sense of what might have been and a remembrance of last things: the top-floor conference room with its sunlit skylights and honey-coloured panelling, the intelligent, listening faces turned to Florence and myself seated shoulder to shoulder at the suitors’ end of the table. Every member of our audience was known to me from past lives, and each in his or her different way deserving of my respect: Ghita Marsden, my former head of Station in Trieste and the first woman of colour to make it to the top floor; Percy Price, head of the Service’s ever-expanding surveillance arm. The list goes on. Guy Brammel, the portly, wily, fifty-five-year-old head of Russian Requirements presently standing in for Bryn Jordan stranded in Washington. Marion, a senior-ranking member of our sister Service, on attachment. Then two of Guy Brammel’s most valued female colleagues, Beth (North Caucasus) and Lizzie (Russian Ukraine). And last and emphatically least, Dom Trench, as head of London General, who makes a point of not entering until everyone else is settled, for fear of being shown to a lesser seat.
‘Florence,’ says Guy Brammel indulgently down the table. ‘Let’s have your pitch, shall we?’
And suddenly there she is, no longer at my side but standing six feet from me in her trouser suit: Florence, my talented if temperamental second-year probationer, speaking wisdom to her elders while our own little Ilya from the Haven squats elf-like in the projection booth with a cue sheet, accompanying her with his slideshow.
There’s no passionate throb to Florence’s voice today, no hint of the inner fires that have been raging in her over the last months, or the special place reserved for Orson in her private inferno. I have warned her to keep her emotions down and language clean. Percy Price, our head watcher, is a keen churchman and no friend of Anglo-Saxon expletives. Neither I suspect is Ghita, tolerant though she is of our infidel ways.
And thus far Florence has stayed on message. In reading out Orson’s charge sheet she is neither indignant nor declamatory – she can be both at the drop of a hat – but as self-composed as Prue on the occasions when I pop into court for ten minutes just for the pleasure of hearing her tear the opposition into courteous shreds.
First she gives us Orson’s unexplained wealth – massive, offshore, administered from Guernsey and the City of London, where else? – then Orson’s other overseas properties, in Madeira, Miami, Zermatt and on the Black Sea, then his unexplained presence at a reception held at