than the first. He flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the street and took out his iPhone. The green ‘Messages’ icon was empty; the ‘Mail’ envelope identically blank. He had finished The Times crossword half an hour earlier and had left the novel he was reading – Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending – on the kitchen table in his flat. There seemed little to do but drink the pint and look out at the listless street. Occasionally a car would roll down the road or a local resident drag past with a dog, but London was otherwise uncharacteristically silent; it was like listening to the city through the muffle of headphones. The eerie quiet only added to Kell’s sense of restlessness. He was not a man prone to self-pity, but nor did he want to spend too many more nights drinking alone on the terrace of an upmarket gastro pub in West London, waiting to see if Amelia Levene would give him his job back. The public inquiry into Witness X was dragging its heels; Kell had been hanging on almost two years to find out whether he would be cleared of all charges or laid out as a sacrificial lamb. With the exception of the three-week operation to rescue Amelia’s son, François, the previous summer, and a one-month contract working due diligence for a corporate espionage firm in Mayfair, that was too long out of the game. He wanted to get back to work. He wanted to spy again.
Then – a miracle. The iPhone lit up. ‘Amelia L3’ appeared on the screen. It was like a sign from the God in whom Kell still occasionally believed. He picked up before the first ring was through.
‘Speak of the devil.’
‘Tom?’
He could tell immediately that something was wrong. Amelia’s customarily authoritative voice was shaky and uncertain. She had called him from her private number, not a landline or encrypted Service phone. It had to be personal. Kell thought at first that something must have happened to François, or that Amelia’s husband, Giles, had been killed in an accident.
‘It’s Paul.’
That winded him. Kell knew that she could only be talking about Paul Wallinger.
‘What’s happened? Is he all right?’
‘He’s been killed.’
Kell hailed a cab on Holland Park Avenue and was outside Amelia’s house in Chelsea within twenty minutes. He was about to ring the bell when he felt the loss of Wallinger like something pulling apart inside him and had to take a moment to compose himself. They had joined SIS in the same intake. They had risen through the ranks together, fast-track brothers winning the pick of overseas postings across the post-Cold War constellation. Wallinger, an Arabist, nine years older, had served in Cairo, Riyadh, Tehran and Damascus, before Amelia had handed him the top job in Turkey. In what he had often thought of as a parallel, shadow career, Kell, the younger brother, had worked in Nairobi, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Kabul, tracking Wallinger’s rise as the years rolled by. Staring down the length of Markham Street, he remembered the thirty-four-year-old wunderkind he had first encountered on the IONEC training course in the autumn of 1990, Wallinger’s scores, his intellect, his ambition just that much sharper than his own.
But Kell wasn’t here because of work. He hadn’t rushed to Amelia’s side in order to offer dry advice on the political and strategic fallout from Wallinger’s untimely death. He was here as her friend. Thomas Kell was one of very few people within SIS who knew the truth about the relationship between Amelia Levene and Paul Wallinger. The pair had been lovers for many years, a stop-start, on-off affair which had begun in London in the late 1990s and continued, with both parties married, right up until Amelia’s selection as Chief.
He rang the bell, swiped a wave at the security camera, heard the lock buzzing open. There was no guard in the atrium, no protection officer on duty. Amelia had probably persuaded him to take the night off. As ‘C’, she was entitled to a grace-and-favour Service apartment, but the house belonged to her husband. Kell did not expect to find Giles Levene at home. For some time the couple had been estranged, Giles spending most of his time at Amelia’s house in the Chalke Valley, or tracing the ever-lengthening branches of his family tree as far afield as Cape Town, New England, the Ukraine.
‘You stink of cigarettes,’ she said as she opened the door into the hall, offering up a taut, pale cheek for Kell to kiss. She was wearing jeans and a loose cashmere sweater, socks but no shoes. Her eyes looked clear and bright, though he suspected that she had been crying; her skin had the sheen of recent tears.
‘Giles home?’
Amelia caught Kell’s eyes quickly, skipping on the question, as though wondering whether or not to answer it truthfully.
‘We’ve decided to try for separation.’
‘Oh Christ, I’m so sorry.’
The news acted on him in conflicting ways. He was sorry that Amelia was about to experience the singular agony of divorce, but glad that she would finally be free of Giles, a man so boring he was dubbed ‘The Coma’ in the corridors of Vauxhall Cross. They had married one another largely for convenience – Amelia had wanted a steadfast, back-seat man with plenty of money who would not block her path to the top; Giles had wanted Amelia as his prize, for her access to the great and the good of London society. Like Claire and Kell, they had never been able to have children. Kell suspected that the sudden appearance of Amelia’s son, François, eighteen months earlier, had been the relationship’s last straw.
‘It’s a great shame, yes,’ she said. ‘But the best thing for both of us. Drink?’
This was how she moved things on. We’re not going to dwell on this, Tom. My marriage is my private business. Kell stole a glance at her left hand as she led him into the sitting room. Her wedding ring was still in place, doubtless to silence the rumour mill in Whitehall.
‘Whisky, please,’ he said.
Amelia had reached the cabinet and turned around, an empty glass in hand. She gave a nod and a half-smile, like somebody recognizing the melody of a favourite song. Kell heard the clunk and rattle of a single ice cube spinning into the glass, then the throaty glug of malt. She knew how he liked it: three fingers, then just a splash of water to open it up.
‘And how are you?’ she asked, handing him the drink. She meant Claire, she meant his own divorce. They were both in the same club now.
‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he said. He felt like a man at the end of a date who had been invited in for coffee and was struggling for conversation. ‘Claire’s with Dick the Wonder Schlong. I’m house-sitting a place in Holland Park.’
‘Holland Park?’ she said, with an escalating tone of surprise. It was as though Kell had moved up a couple of rungs on the social ladder. A part of him was dismayed that she did not already know where he was living. ‘And you think—’
He interrupted her. The news about Wallinger was hanging in the space between them. He did not want to ignore it much longer.
‘Look, I’m sorry about Paul.’
‘Don’t be. You were kind to rush over.’
He knew that she would have spent the previous hours picking over every moment she had shared with Wallinger. What do lovers eventually remember about one another? Their eyes? Their touch? A favourite poem or song? Amelia had almost word-perfect recall for conversations, a photographic memory for faces, images, contexts. Their affair would now be a palace
