He had been the strong one, keeping her going through all these years of illness, chivvying her, teasing her, making her laugh, always there whenever she’d been tempted to succumb to despair. Now she had to be strong for him.
‘I wanted you to know that I know now, too. I wanted to feel neither of us had to pretend. Are you all right?’ she asked gently.
He nodded with his eyes down. She could see he was struggling to keep control. At last he raised his head and looked at her. ‘Is there anything you want? Anything I can get you? Somebody you’d like to see, perhaps. Your sister?’
She chuckled. ‘Ruth will be around whether I like it or not. But no, what I’d really like most of all is to have you here, and the boys. Just the family.’ She hesitated. ‘And if it’s possible, I’d like to be here, at home, when… it ends. I’ve seen enough of hospitals to last a lifetime.’ She smiled at the unintended play on words.
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘There’s something else. It’s to do with… after. I want you to promise me that you’ll have a life.’ He looked surprised and seemed about to speak, but she pre-empted him. ‘I mean it. I want to feel confident that you won’t go to ground – I know you, Charles. Given half a chance you’ll be working eighteen-hour days and sleeping at your ghastly club. But that’s no good. You must promise me you won’t do that. The boys need you, for one thing, so you mustn’t hide away. This has always been a happy home for them; I don’t want that to end simply because I’m no longer here. I want you here for them, Charles, and I don’t want you living on your own for ever. You’re still young, you know.’
‘Hardly,’ he said, with a rasp in his throat.
Undeterred, she kept speaking. ‘I like to think you’ll have happy memories of our time together, and of all the fun we’ve had. But life’s here to be lived; if I’ve learned one thing from all this, it’s exactly that. I don’t want you living with a ghost, Charles.’ She leaned over, though it hurt her back so much she had to struggle not to wince. Looking into his eyes, she said, ‘Promise me that?’
He looked back at her now, sensing she needed him to. She noticed his eyes were moist, and he blinked once, then twice, in an effort to subdue his tears. ‘It’s all right,’ he whispered at last, ‘I promise.’
She sat back, and shivered slightly. ‘I’m feeling cold. Do you mind awfully if we go in now?’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Thank God she’d finally gone. He’d just about managed to keep the woman at bay, but her visit had left him very, very frightened. She had made it clear that she knew something. Had MI5 discovered what he’d managed to keep secret for ten years? But why did she keep asking about Syrian intelligence, or was that just a blind?
Ever since that day in Jerusalem when those two men had come to his hotel room, he’d lived in fear of being found out. It was long before he’d ‘come out’ and admitted he was gay. He was still married then – Hope, his girlfriend at Cambridge. She’d long gone; he’d been on his own for years. The men had had photographs of him on the bed, with a boy he’d met in a club. He knew now of course that the boy had been working for them and the whole thing was a set-up. They were Israeli intelligence and they’d said if he didn’t co-operate they’d publicise the photographs and make sure he could never work again in the Middle East. He would have lost his job and his marriage. Now of course that kind of photograph wouldn’t matter much, but they had him well on the hook and too much else had happened for him to get off it. At the time, he’d been working in Syria as a correspondent. The Israelis had wanted to know everything, particularly personal information about high-up Syrian officials – weaknesses, sexual proclivities, all that sort of stuff – no doubt so they could try on them what they’d done to him.
Now MI5 had found out something, but that woman hadn’t said what they knew. If she was telling him that the Syrians knew what he’d done, then his life expectancy had diminished dramatically. She’d left him worried sick, but in the dark.
Since she’d left, he’d taken precautions. He’d double-locked the front and back doors, made sure the windows were shut tight and locked. He’d stayed in, hadn’t answered the phone, and had kept the curtains drawn. But he couldn’t live like this for ever and this morning he’d been forced to venture down the hill to Hampstead village. The cupboard was bare, and that was not a metaphor – there wasn’t even a packet of dried pasta left.
Not that he’d bought much in the way of groceries, for he had decided he would have to leave his house until the immediate danger had passed. Though how would he know when it was safe to return? he wondered anxiously, as he walked slowly back along the edge of the heath, dotted at this time of the morning with dog walkers, and East European nannies pushing babies in buggies.
Where should he go? It would probably be possible to secure another assignment, provided MI5 didn’t scupper him. What he needed was something that would take him abroad. The
But
He thought some more about where he should go, as he walked circuitously back to his house, ensuring that the people behind him on one street were not the same ones he noticed when he turned around casually on the next. There was always Ireland, where young Symonds, a church-going friend he’d made through Alex Ledingham ironically enough, had a cottage outside Cork he’d always said Marcham was welcome to use. If he went there for a month, things might calm down. Should he tell anyone where he was going? No, he’d just say he was away. He could always check emails at an internet cafe in Cork; he couldn’t be traced doing that – he hoped.
But there was one person he wasn’t going to tell about his departure, and he shuddered at the reaction of the man if he did. He called himself Aleppo, which Marcham knew as one of the most peaceful and beautiful cities in Syria. It seemed such an inept name for the man; there was something ruthlessly clinical about him, an air of controlled menace that didn’t seem entirely human.
On his own street he saw no one, but was careful nonetheless as he approached the house, stopping on the paved path once he’d gone through the gate in the hedge, looking and listening for signs that anyone was waiting outside. Nothing.
He carefully unlocked his front door, then with equal care double-locked the door behind him. He walked straight through to the kitchen and made sure the back door had not been disturbed. He unpacked his two bags of groceries, boiled the kettle and made himself a strong cup of tea, which he took into the sitting room. It was only as he sat down with a sigh that he saw the man in the wing chair by the unused fireplace. It was Aleppo.
‘God, you scared me!’ he exclaimed, leaping to his feet and spilling his tea on the coffee table.
‘You’ll recover,’ the man said. He wore a black leather jacket and a black pullover and black jeans. The effect was European rather than English; he might have been a lecturer at the Sorbonne, though equally, the dark hair and swarthy countenance could be Middle Eastern as easily as French.
‘How did you get in?’ asked Marcham, his heart beating frantically. He wanted to be angry at the intrusion, but he was too frightened to protest.
‘I’m paid to get in,’ said Aleppo. ‘Relax. Sit down.’
Marcham did as he was told, starting to feel a prisoner in his own house.
‘So have you had any other visitors lately?’
Marcham hesitated. He didn’t want to say anything about Jane Falconer’s visit, but he sensed it would be a great mistake to be caught lying and Aleppo always seemed to know more than he let on. ‘Actually, I have. A woman came from MI5. She wanted to talk to me about a friend of mine who died.’
‘Anything else?’
He hesitated for a split second. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘That was the strange thing. She wanted to know if I’d had
