The Service is the intermediary, everything under discussion is theoretical, nothing is written in stone. Shannon by his own testimony saw one piddling section of a fifty-four-page document, memorized it, probably inaccurately, and drew his own misguided conclusions, which he then conveyed to Moscow. We have no idea which piddling section. He has been caught in flagrante – thanks, one may add, to your endeavours, even if that was not your aim. You have no need to engage him in any sort of dialectic. You show him the whip. You tell him you won’t use it unless you have to.’
‘And that’s all I can know?’
‘And more than you need. For a moment I allowed sentiment to get the better of me. Take this. It’s one-to-one only. I’m shuttling back and forth to DC, so you won’t get me while I’m airborne.’
The abrupt ‘take this’ is accompanied by the clatter of a metallic object tossed on to the drinks table between us. It is a silver-grey smartphone, the self-same model I used to give my agents. I look at it, then at Bryn, then again at the smartphone. With a show of reluctance I pick it up and, with Bryn’s eyes still upon me, consign it to my jacket pocket. His face softens and his voice resumes its geniality.
‘You’ll be Shannon’s saviour, Nat,’ he tells me for my consolation. ‘Nobody else is going to be half as gentle with him as you are. If you find yourself havering, think of the alternatives. Want me to hand him over to Guy Brammel?’
I think of the alternatives, if not quite the ones he has in mind. He stands, I stand with him. He takes my arm. He often did. He prides himself on being touchy-feely. We embark on the long march back along the railway carriage, past portraits of ancestral Jordans in lace.
‘Family all well otherwise?’
I tell him that Steff is engaged to be married.
‘My goodness, Nat, she’s only about nine!’
Mutual chuckles.
‘And Ah Chan has taken up painting in a big way,’ he informs me. ‘Mega exhibition coming up in Cork Street, no less. No more bloody pastel. No more bloody watercolour. No more bloody gouache. It’s oils or bust. Your Prue used to be quite complimentary about her work, as I remember.’
‘And still is,’ I reply loyally, although this is news to me.
We stand facing each other on the doorstep. Perhaps we share a premonition that we shan’t see each other again. I ransack my mind for an extraneous topic. Bryn as usual is ahead of me:
‘And don’t you worry your head about Dom,’ he urges me with a chuckle. ‘The man’s fucked up everything he’s touched in life, so he’ll be in great demand. Probably got a safe parliamentary seat waiting for him right now.’
We laugh wisely at the world’s wicked ways. As we shake hands, he pats me on the shoulder American-style, and follows me the statutory halfway down the steps. The Mondeo pulls up in front of me. Arthur drives me home.
*
Prue is sitting at her laptop. One glance at my face, she rises and without a word unlocks the conservatory door to the garden.
‘Bryn wants me to recruit Ed,’ I tell her under the apple tree. ‘The boy I told you about. My regular badminton date. The big talker.’
‘Recruit him for what on earth?’
‘As a double agent.’
‘Directed against whom or what?’
‘The Russia target.’
‘Well, doesn’t he have to be a single agent first?’
‘Technically, that’s what he already is. He’s an upscale clerical assistant in our sister Service. He’s been caught red-handed passing secrets to the Russians, but he doesn’t know yet.’
A long silence before she takes refuge in her professionalism: ‘In that case the Office must collect all the evidence, for and against, hand it over to the Crown Prosecution Service and see him fairly tried by his peers in open court. And not go preying on his friends to bully and blackmail him. You told Bryn no, I trust.’
‘I told him I’d do it.’
‘Because?’
‘I think Ed pressed the wrong bell.’
18
Renate was always an early riser.
It’s seven on a Sunday morning, the sun is up and the heatwave shows no sign of relenting as I stride northward over the burned tundra of Regent’s Park to Primrose village. According to my researches – conducted on Prue’s laptop not my own, with Prue looking on in a state of half-enlightenment, since a residual loyalty to my Service coupled with a pardonable reticence about my past transgressions forbids me to indoctrinate her