Charlie’s Apprentice

So what was more important, the security of a service to which he remained genuinely dedicated? Or the security of his ass, to which he was equally if not more devoted? An impossible dilemma, decided Charlie. Which was what he’d decided every time he’d thought about it since watching the silly buggers parade for the benefit of a Russian camera with a long-focus lens.

They were silly buggers, Charlie determined, contemptuous at them and himself and at everything. Deserved whatever happened to them. Which was not really the consideration. What happened to them was immaterial. It was the blackmail danger that existed to the organization they jointly controlled.

The fast dual carriageway from Stockbridge joins the motorway at Basingstoke, and Charlie picked up the dark grey Ford behind him about a mile from the junction, automatically connecting the vehicle with that in which the two Russians had sat that day, taking their photographs. Black then though, not grey. He slowed, concentrating. The following car dropped back, keeping the same distance behind him, about fifty yards, with two other vehicles, a red van and an open sports car, in between. Had the Ford been behind him since he’d left the nursing home? He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure. No cause for an over-reaction, simply because his mind was locked on surveillance conducted from the same make of car. He kept to the inside lane to join the motorway. So did the other vehicle and the intervening van; the sports car burst by in a blast of exhaust noise. Charlie ignored the first turn-off but took the second, without any indication, stopping unnecessarily at the roundabout below. Nothing followed him. He still made the full circle, very slowly, before going back up the link to rejoin the motorway. Far better to have been safe than sorry, he reassured himself.

Would Miller and the woman be destroyed if he reported what he’d seen? Not necessarily: there was an escape. He knew, because he’d seen it. But what proof did he have, of anything; of hanky-panky in a millionaire penthouse or that it was known about by a foreign country whose operatives still appeared to wear the black hats supposedly no longer in fashion? None, he recognized: not a fucking thing. So if they didn’t admit an affair – and Charlie was prepared to bet a pound to a pitch of shit they wouldn’t admit anything – where was he? Figuratively twisting in the wind with piano wire around a very tender part of his anatomy, displayed for the crows to feast, a disgruntled, cast-aside officer making entirely unfounded and libellous accusations about superiors against whom he had a grudge for prematurely ending his career. Justifiably ending his career, if he was prepared to make unsupportable accusations like that.

Not an immediate decision to agonize over any longer, although he knew he would. There was nothing he could do, in any practical sense.

There was another Ford behind him. Grey, like the last one. Or was it the same one? He’d been passing the Fleet service station, concentration on two levels, and become instantly aware of it emerging from the filter road to come in behind him. Had it been waiting? It looked the same as the first car. But then any grey Ford would look the same as the first car, sitting as it was still fifty yards behind him. He should have pulled into a layby before the earlier avoidance, to get the registration number as it went by. Still time. He saw the emergency telephone that would provide the excuse well over two hundred yards in front. He slowed, getting closer, but without using the brakes that would have flared the stop-lights. He only did that at the very last moment, uncaring of the blast of protest from the immediately following car, remembering how it had happened to Gower. There was only one man in the Ford that passed: he was balding and wore a sports shirt and went by apparently quite unaware of Charlie, who had the pencil and paper below the window level to note the number.

He stopped after counting ten grey, black or brown Ford cars on the rest of the journey, although he allowed every one to go by him. Charlie snake-looped into London, turning off at Acton, going sideways to Hammersmith and on into Fulham before switching northwards again, but going right through the centre of London, where the traffic was heaviest and most concealing and where he was able to judge his crossing of two intersections on amber, so all the following traffic had to stop at red. The hire car return was in Wandsworth: Charlie changed subway trains three times to reach his station. He had the Duty Room at Westminster Bridge Road run a trace on the Ford number: it was registered against the car pool of a fish processing plant in Hull. They confirmed the Hull outlet genuinely existed, although an examination of the British Company Register revealed it to be a subsidiary of a Belgian conglomerate headquartered in Bruges. Charlie thanked the Duty Officer and said he didn’t want them to go to the trouble of taking it any further, in Belgium.

Julia cooked pheasant. Charlie was glad he’d taken Margaux. Quite soon into the meal, she said: ‘Whatever it was, I’m glad it’s over.’

‘What?’ frowned Charlie.

‘You’re like your old self tonight. The last couple of times you haven’t been altogether with me, have you?’

‘Something on my mind,’ admitted Charlie.

‘Anything you can talk about?’

It would have been interesting to discuss it with Julia. Except that it would have disclosed how he had used her, in the very beginning. And might do again in the future: forever trapped by his own double standards. ‘Over, like you said.’

‘How was your mother?’

‘Bright enough.’ He smiled. ‘Told me I’d never get a girl-friend.’

‘Won’t you?’ she asked, not smiling.

Charlie was uncomfortable at the seriousness with which she was looking directly across the table at him. Quickly he said: ‘I’m thinking of asking for an interview with the deputy Director.’

She looked away, breaking the awkwardness. ‘Why?’

‘About time I was assigned someone else, don’t you think?’

She turned down the corners of her mouth. ‘I never got the impression they were going to come through on a conveyor belt.’

Charlie was suddenly struck by a thought quite apart but at the same time closely connected with his uncertainty over the past few days. ‘If there was any change at the office … if Miller and Elder left or were transferred … would you expect your rather special situation to stay as it is there?’

Julia frowned. ‘I wouldn’t think so. Why do you ask?’

A further reason for doing nothing, Charlie accepted. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

Her frown deepened. ‘What is going on?’

‘Nothing,’ he repeated. ‘Honestly.’

Patricia Elder had moved her clothes out gradually as their time together came to an end, so there were only her washing things and make-up left by the last day. At breakfast Miller suggested he go on ahead, leaving her to check everything as she normally did at the end of any period they spent together at the penthouse.

Patricia went through the sprawling apartment room by room, although knowing it wasn’t necessary because she’d removed the traces of her having been there as carefully as she’d removed her clothes, over the preceding days.

She went through the master bedroom last. All Lady Ann’s cosmetics were arranged on the expansive dressing-table, laid out with the precision of instruments upon a surgeon’s operating tray: Miller’s wife was an extraordinarily neat and tidy person, as he was.

The Jean Patou Joy, the perfume Lady Ann always wore, was in the middle of the line, its accustomed place. Patricia preferred Chanel, which was not so heavy. She slotted her bottle in alongside the other perfume: it seemed perfectly to fit the symmetry of the orderly arrangement in which Lady Ann delighted.

‘Everything OK?’ asked Miller, when she got to the office.

‘All fixed,’ said Patricia.

The Russian rezidentura at the London embassy justifiably considered it had achieved a remarkable success with its discovery and proof of a relationship between the head of British external intelligence and his deputy, although accepting with some regret that it would not now be considered so usefully important as it once might have been, in the old days of the KGB.

The rezidentura hoped that success would balance the partial failure with the man named as Charles Edward Muffin, the lead to whom had come from Moscow, which might have indicated particular interest.

The apologetic account to Moscow acknowledged that the guidance of a famous salmon river and a unique