the words, shifted the conversation on to safer ground, and felt a sharp stab of guilt at her silent disloyalty.
Jake, she suspected, was treading equally warily, though she could detect no obvious signs of caution in his relaxed demeanour. He talked cheerfully about his work in Kerridge’s empire, but gave no hint that their activities were anything other than entirely legitimate.
‘What’s his main business, then?’ she’d asked at one point, taking the risk of at least a gentle prod into the machinations of Jake’s working life.
‘Like I say, import-export stuff, mainly,’ Jake said, pouring them both another inch or two of wine.
‘All a mystery to me,’ she said. ‘What sort of import-export? I mean, what sort of goods?’
He shrugged. ‘If there’s a market for it, Jeff’ll try to get his finger in the pie. He’s the ultimate middleman, really. Does his bit to facilitate the trade, and creams off a nice slice for himself in the process.’
This sounded like a prepared line, she thought. Jake’s skilful way of deflecting further enquiry.
‘What sort of stuff is it, though? Typically, I mean,’ she prompted.
He regarded her for a moment, as if even this kind of query might be too intrusive. Then he smiled.
‘Oh, God knows. Anything and everything. Brings in a lot of cheap plastic crap from China. Stuff they give away at funfairs or that you see market traders trying to offload on an unsuspecting public. Can be surprisingly lucrative, that stuff. And then there’s electrical goods – again, especially the stuff from China that can undercut the big brands . . .’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘Christ, Marie, I’m even beginning to bore myself now. Under Jeff ’s tutelage, I can talk about this stuff till the cows come home. But you really don’t want to hear it.’
‘So what about you, then, Mr Morton? How come a fine figure of a man like you’s still unattached?’
Even as she’d spoken the words, she’d half-regretted them. She didn’t even know for sure that Jake really was unattached, though he’d certainly gone out of his way to give that impression. Mind you, she was acutely conscious that she’d done the same. And even if he really was, she wasn’t sure that she’d really wanted to send out quite such an obvious signal. Not quite so soon, anyway.
Jake seemed unfazed by the question. ‘Just the way it is,’ he said. ‘There’ve been a couple of serious relationships. One of them I’d really thought was – well, the one. But it wasn’t. Just fizzled out. My fault, probably. Bit too ambitious in those days. Couldn’t think of anything but work.’
‘And now you’re different?’
‘Feels like it to me,’ he said. ‘But I’m not the one to judge.’ He left the comment hanging in the air, suggesting that perhaps before long she might have the chance to decide for herself.
As it happened, that evening had ended innocently enough as well. An early finish for a school night, and separate taxis home for the two of them. Another chaste kiss on the cheek, perhaps lingering just a little longer this time. She found herself feeling both relieved and yet disappointed. She wanted to keep this just as it was, she told herself. A friendship with Morton, and no more. But she no longer knew whether that was true.
There was a third date, another dinner, this time just a little more upmarket, a restaurant named after a chef-proprietor whose name she was presumably supposed to recognize. Jake had been in a good mood. Kerridge had just paid all his senior managers a hefty bonus based on the previous year’s business performance.
‘Let’s push the boat out,’ Jake had said. ‘Spend some of the old bugger’s money. It’s not often he gives much away.’
To Marie, the evening felt as if everything had been pushed up a notch or two. Not just in expense, but also in significance. Almost without her noticing, Jake had started to behave as if they were an item. That little bit closer. That little bit more intimate.
They’d duly indulged themselves. Cocktails, a better than usual bottle of wine, brandies. A meal with much greater ambitions than anything they’d enjoyed previously. Then, at the end of the evening, he’d invited her back to his flat for coffee. She’d almost laughed at the cliche, feeling that Jake ought to have been able to come up with something more original. But despite that – despite everything – she knew that she would say yes. And she knew that, from there, it was inevitable that she would stay the night.
She couldn’t fool herself now that she was just doing her job. This was really stepping over the line. She was going well beyond anything the Agency – beyond anything even Welsby, for Christ’s sake – would expect of her. It wasn’t just that she was attracted to Jake. It wasn’t even that she was looking for someone, something, different from Liam. As the weeks went by, her life with Liam was feeling increasingly remote, already slipping into history. Life up here, life with Jake, simply seemed more real.
A couple of weeks after she’d first spent the night with Jake, she’d had another of her regular liaison meetings with Salter. Salter had been his usual self – bumptious, cynical, clearly keen to get the meeting over and done with. But there had been something in his manner that told her he’d detected something, perhaps some change in her manner, some hesitation in the way she responded to his questions. She could feel him verbally prodding her, a covert bully searching for his victim’s vulnerability.
‘What about Morton?’ he’d said. ‘You getting anywhere?’
She tried to detect any edge in his tone, but there was no way to be sure.
‘Maybe,’ she said. She was standing by the window, staring out at the rainy morning, trying to avoid any need to catch Salter’s eye. It was another anonymous suburban hotel, with a panoramic view of the M60 and a retail park beyond.
‘Like you, does he?’ This time, there was a definite leer in Salter’s voice. But that was hardly unusual.
‘I suppose so. We’ve been for a drink a couple of times.’
‘Well done,’ Salter said. ‘Morton keen to . . . make your acquaintance, I imagine.’
She suspected that Salter had bitten back some lewder phrase. ‘I wouldn’t know, Hugh. I lack your masculine insight. He seems to enjoy my company.’
‘And you his?’
She moved from the window and sat down opposite Salter, determined to look him directly in the eye. ‘Well, it’s probably more fun than this, Hugh. I’m just doing a job. Like you asked me to. Remember?’
It helped that, in fact, she was making some progress in that direction. As far as she could tell, Jake had no suspicions about her. He’d begun to acknowledge openly that she was in pretty much the same line of business as he was, running a legit front for a series of criminal services. Quite quickly, once his initial caution had faded, he’d begun to speak to her with surprising openness. It was as if, she thought, he’d been looking for some way of telling the truth, of coming clean about who he was and what he was doing. Well, she could empathize with that. More than once, as Jake had been talking to her, she’d found herself having actively to resist the temptation to respond in the same terms.
She knew that Jake’s account of Kerridge’s business was still heavily sanitized, presumably because Jake thought he was protecting her own interests. He’d begun to talk openly about Kerridge’s dodgy accounting practices – and his own complicity in them – and about the ways in which Kerridge fiddled duty and VAT. He’d even talked about Kerridge’s smuggling operations – the apparently legitimate containers that came in through various British ports full of undeclared goods. But he hadn’t yet touched on any of the seedier aspects of Kerridge’s business. The drugs, the porn. The illegal immigrants. Maybe that was just as well, she’d thought, as she wrestled with her own conscience. She knew these things were part of Kerridge’s business, and she couldn’t believe that Jake wasn’t aware of them. But as long as he said nothing, she could salve her own conscience by giving Jake the benefit of her limited doubt.
Even so, she’d already got some good material from Jake. Not evidence in itself, but at least material that confirmed some of their suspicions or provided them with other channels to explore. She’d passed whatever she had on to Salter, with more than a twinge of guilt. She wondered quite how, with all her good intentions, she’d managed to get herself into this position. Stuck in the middle. Betraying both sides.
Most importantly, as she spent more time with Jake, her initial suspicions were increasingly confirmed. It probably wasn’t so surprising that he’d confided in her so readily. She could tell that he’d had enough. He’d had enough of Kerridge, of Boyle, of that whole world. He’d had enough of being the clean-up man, keeping things in order, maintaining the boundary between the legitimate business and everything that went on behind it.
She never heard him explicitly criticize Kerridge or Kerridge’s business. It was all in his tone, an edge in the way he described his activities. And the way he talked about the future.
‘I’m a chartered fucking accountant,’ he said once, when talking about some delegated task that had
