plane was late.’
‘It’s normal.’
The line is clear, no echo, although I can hear the thrum of baggage carousels revolving in the background.
‘Our suitcases are coming out now,’ he says. ‘Shouldn’t be long. Is it easy getting a cab?’
‘Sure. Just say “Calle Princesa”, like “Ki-yay”, then “Numero dee-ethy-sais”. That means sixteen.’
‘I know what it means. I did Spanish O level.’
‘You got a D.’
‘How much does it cost to get to your flat?’
‘Shouldn’t be more than thirty euros. If it is, I’ll come down to the street and tell the driver to go fuck himself. Just act like you live here and he won’t rip you off.’
‘Great.’
‘Hey, Saul?’
‘Yes?’
‘How come you’ve got a Spanish mobile? What happened to your normal one?’
It is the extent of my paranoia that I have spent three days wondering if he has been sent here by MI5; if John Lithiby and Michael Hawkes, the controllers of my former life, have equipped him with bugs and a destructive agenda. Can I sense him hesitating over his reply?
‘Trust you to notice that. Philip fucking Marlowe. Look, a mate of mine used to live in Barcelona. He had an old Spanish SIM that he no longer used. It has sixty euros of credit on it and I bought it off him for ten. So chill your boots. I’ll be there in about an hour.’
An inauspicious start. The line goes dead and I stand in the middle of my apartment, breathing too quickly, ripped out by nerves. Relax, Alec. Tranquilo. Saul hasn’t been sent here by Five. Your friend is on the brink of getting divorced. He needed to get out of London and he needed somebody to talk to. He has been betrayed by the woman he loves. He stands to lose his house and half of everything he owns. In times of crisis we turn to our oldest friends and, in spite of everything that has happened, Saul has turned to you. That tells you something. That tells you that this is your chance to pay him back for everything that he has ever done for you.
Ten minutes later Sofía calls and whispers sweet nothings down the phone and says how much she enjoyed our night at the hotel, but I can’t concentrate on the conversation and make an excuse to cut it short. I have never had a guest in this apartment and I check Saul’s room one last time: there’s soap in the spare bathroom, a clean towel on the rail, bottled water if he needs it, magazines beside the bed. Saul likes to read comics and crime fiction, thrillers by Elmore Leonard and graphic novels from Japan, but all I have are spook biographies–Philby, Tomlinson–and a Time Out guide to Madrid. Still, he might like those, and I arrange them in a tidy pile on the floor.
A drink now. Vodka with tonic to the brim of the glass. It’s gone inside three minutes so I pour another which is mostly ice by half past seven. How do I do this? How do I greet a friend whose life I placed in danger? MI5 used Saul to get to Katharine and Fortner. The four of us went to the movies together. Saul cooked dinner for them at his flat. At an oil-industry function in Piccadilly he unwittingly facilitated our initial introduction. And all without the slightest idea of what he was doing; just a decent, ordinary guy involved in something catastrophic, an eventually botched operation that cost people their careers, their lives. How do I arrange my face to greet him, given that he is aware of that?
FOUR
The Keeper of the Secrets
At first it’s all nervous silences and small talk. There’s no big reunion speech, no hug or handshake. I fetch him from the taxi and we step into the narrow, cramped lift in my building and Saul says, ‘So this is where you live?’ and I reply, ‘Yeah,’ and then we don’t say anything for three floors. Once inside, there’s twenty minutes of ‘Nice place, man,’ and ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ and ‘It’s really good of you to put me up, Alec,’ and then he sits there awkwardly on the sofa like a potential buyer who has come round to view the flat. I want to rip out all the decorum and the anxiety and say how sorry I am, face to face, for the pain that I have caused him, but we must first endure the initiation rite of British politesse.
‘You’ve got a lot of DVDs.’
‘Yeah. Spanish TV sucks and I don’t have satellite.’
I am astonished by the weight he has put on, puffy fat slung round his neck and stomach. He looks worn out, barely the man I remember. At twenty-five, Saul Ricken was lean and lively, the friend everyone wanted to have. He had money in the bank, enough for him to write and to travel, and a medley of gorgeous, jealousy-inducing girlfriends. Everything seemed possible in his future. And then what happened? His adulterous French wife? His best friend? Did Alec Milius happen to him? The man facing me is a burnt-out case, an early mid-life crisis of exhaustion and excess fat. And it shames me that there is still a mean, competitive part of my nature that is glad about this; Saul is deeply troubled, and I am not the only one of us in decline.
‘Anybody else been to stay?’ he asks.
‘Not here,’ I tell him. ‘Mum came to a different place. A flat I was renting in Chamberí. About three years ago.’
‘Does she know about everything?’
This is the first moment of frankness between us, an acknowledgement of our black secret. Saul looks at the floor as he asks the question.
‘She knows nothing,’ I tell him.
‘Right.’
Maybe I should give him something else here, try to be a little more forthcoming.
‘It’s just that I didn’t have the guts, you know? I didn’t want to burst her bubble. She still thinks her son is a success story, a demographic miracle earning eighty grand a year. I’m not even sure she’d understand.’
Saul is nodding slowly. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s like having the drugs conversation with your parents. You think they’ll empathize when you tell them that you’ve taken E. You think they’ll be fascinated to learn that lines of charlie are regularly hoovered up in the bathrooms of every designer restaurant in London. You think that bringing up the subject of smoking hash at university is in some way going to bring you closer together. But the truth is they’ll never get it; in a fundamental way you always remain a child in your parents’ eyes. You tell your mum that you worked for MI5 and MI6 and that Kate and Will were murdered as a direct result of that, she’s not going to take it all that well.’
To hear him talk of Kate’s death like this is buckling. I had thought for some reason that Saul would let me off the hook. But that is not his style. He is direct and unambiguous and if you’re guilty of something he will call you on it. The awful shiver of guilt, the fever, washes through me as we sit facing one another across the room. Saul is looking at me with a terrible, isolating indifference; I cannot tell if he is upset or merely laying down the facts. There was certainly no suggestion of anger in the way that he broached the subject; perhaps he just wants to let me know that he has not forgotten.
‘You’re right,’ I manage to tell him. ‘Of course you’re right.’
He stands now, opens the window and
