Purkiss admitted to himself that it was Fallon’s rottenness that had driven him out rather than the offer that Vale had subsequently made him. It was like refusing to live any longer in a house in which a body had been found walled up and decomposing into the stonework.
Vale had appeared out of nowhere during the trial, turning up every day and sitting in the same spot behind Purkiss. He was obviously Service or retired – the trial wasn’t being conducted in public and the spectators were being vetted carefully – but it wasn’t until Vale fell into step beside him after a long day in the courtroom and suggested they go for a bite to eat that Purkiss had any conversation with him. Purkiss’s instinct was to decline the offer. His social life had dwindled to a minimum since he’d lost Claire, and he wasn’t anxious to change that. But he was curious despite himself about this quiet, gloomy man, his Afro-Caribbean ethnicity unusual in a Service employee of his generation.
In the Italian restaurant, Vale told him he’d taken early retirement from the Service twelve years before, his story a familiar one of a former field agent unable to adjust to life in mothballs. In the seventies, he’d infiltrated Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow under the guise of a Tanzanian postgraduate exchange student, had his cover blown by a KGB agent provocateur and got out hidden in a freight train with a bullet in one lung. After that his deep-cover days were over. He spent the rest of the seventies and the eighties working the diplomatic circuit in southern Africa, in the thick of the proxy Cold War battles between the superpowers. The nineties brought him back to London and, essentially, desk work.
They traded war stories for a while, both aware that this was preamble. Over coffee Vale made his pitch.
‘One searches for a less hackneyed expression than the tip of the iceberg, but that, really, is what Fallon is.’ He shovelled sugar into his cup. Purkiss wondered how he stayed so gaunt, though he’d learn later about the sixty-a-day cigarette habit.
Purkiss stared down at his fists, flashing back to the man in the dock. ‘He hasn’t got a hope.’
‘Oh, they’ll convict him, all right. He’ll get life. But that’s because he got caught in the act. It was a stupid mistake he made, and his punishment isn’t going to deter anybody else, because all it will teach others is that they have to be more careful than he was.’ He steepled gnarled fingers. ‘When an agent goes rogue, the Service would prefer to dispose of the problem quietly. In a case like this, the murder of an agent by a fellow agent witnessed by yet another agent, there’s no question of any cover up. Justice has to be swift and merciless. But if Fallon had stopped short, been caught with nothing more than his fingers in the till… The top brass would have sacked him, yes, but might have bought his silence rather than prosecute him. The Service is still punch drunk after the Iraq inquiries and the catastrophic intelligence failures which were brought to light as a result. It can’t afford any more scandal, least of all the public outing of criminals in its midst. What I’m saying, John – may I? – John, yes, is that if you’re a member of the Service, whereas you might not quite be able to get away with murder, you can get away with pretty much anything short of that.’
‘And you have examples of this happening?’
‘Plenty. I’ve made it my business to seek them out. In effect, I’ve been doing what your fiancee was doing on a smaller scale in her investigation of one man.’
Purkiss studied Vale, trying to prise his way behind the gaze. ‘So why don’t you go public? Blow the lid off the whole thing? They’d threaten you with the Official Secrets Act, but you could find ways around it. Plant rumours, be ambiguous.’
Vale watched him in silence, his eyes and mouth serious. He reached across for the salt and pepper cellars and placed them a few inches apart.
‘You were what, fourteen years old when the Wall came down? Sixteen when the Soviet Union folded. Too young to have had any strong views one way or the other on the nuclear disarmament debate. I was against unilateral disarmament myself. Still am. I believed in like for like, matching the enemy’s destructive power with one’s own. But while