which was as smart and effective as anything he might have mustered in his counter-life as a spy.
“You don’t any more.”
And that sealed it. A stream of smoke emerged from Isabella’s lips like a last breath and she smiled with the pleasure of his reply. It had conviction. It had style. Right now that was all she was looking for.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. But of course it was. It was simply a question of breaking another man’s heart. “We’ve been together for two years. It’s not something I can just throw away. He needs me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about him before.”
“That’s OK,” Joe said. I have lied to you, so it’s only fair that you should have lied to me. “What’s his name?”
“Anthony.”
“Is he married?”
This was just a shot in the dark, but by coincidence he had stumbled on the truth. Isabella looked amazed.
“How did you know?”
“Instinct,” he said.
“Yes, he is married. Or was.” Involuntarily she touched her face, covering her mouth as if ashamed by the role she had played in this. “He’s separated now. With two teenage children…”
“… who hate you.”
She laughed. “Who hate me.”
In the wake of this, a look passed between them which told Joe everything that he needed to know. So much of life happens in the space between words. She will leave London, he thought. She’s going to follow me to the East. He ran his fingers across Isabella’s wrists and she closed her eyes.
That night, drunk and wrapped in each other’s bodies in the Christmas chill of Kentish Town, she whispered: “I want to be with you, Joe. I want to come with you to Hong Kong,” and it was all he could do to say, “Then be with me, then come with me,” before the gift of her skin silenced him. Then he thought of Anthony and imagined what she would say to him, how things would end between them, and Joe was surprised because he felt pity for a man he had never known. Perhaps he realized, even then, that to lose a woman like Isabella Aubert, to be cast aside by her, would be something from which a man might never recover.
5
Waterfield wasn’t happy about it.
Closing the door of his office, eight floors above Joe’s in Jardine House, he turned to Kenneth Lenan and began to shout.
“Who the fuck is Isabella Aubert and what the fuck is she doing flying eight thousand miles to play house with RUN?”
“RUN” was the cryptonym the Office used for Joe to safeguard against Chinese eyes and ears. The House of a Thousand Arseholes was swept every fourteen days, but in a crowded little colony of over six million people you never knew who might be listening in.
“The surname is French,” Lenan replied, “but the passport is British.”
“Is that right? Well, my mother had a cat once. Siamese, but it looked like Clive James. I want her checked out. I want to make sure one of our best men in Hong Kong isn’t about to chuck in his entire career because some agent of the DGSE flashed her knickers at him.”
The ever-dependable Lenan had anticipated such a reaction. As a young SIS officer in the sixties, David Waterfield had seen careers crippled by Blake and Philby. His point of vulnerability was the mole at the heart of the Service. Lenan consoled him.
“I’ve already taken care of it.”
“What do you mean, you’ve already taken care of it?” He frowned. “Is she not coming? Have they split up?”
“No, she’s coming, sir. But London have vetted. Not to the level of EPV, but the girl looks fine.”
Lenan removed a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, unfolded it and began to improvise from the text: “Isabella Aubert. Born Marseilles, February 1973. Roman Catholic. Father Eduard Aubert, French national, insurance broker in Kensington for most of his working life. Womanizer, inherited wealth, died of cancer ten years ago, aged sixty-eight. Mother English, Antonia Chapman. ‘Good stock,’ I think they call it. Worked as a model before marrying Aubert in 1971. Part-time artist now, never remarried, lives in Dorset, large house, two Labradors, Aga, etcetera. Isabella has a brother, Gavin, both of them privately educated, Gavin at Radley, Isabella at Downe House. The former lives in Seattle, gay, works in computer technology. Isabella spent a year between school and university volunteering at a Romanian orphanage. According to one friend the experience ‘completely changed her.’ We don’t exactly know how or why at this stage. She didn’t adopt one of the children, if that’s the point the friend was getting at. Then she matriculates at Trinity Dublin in the autumn of ‘92, hates it, drops out after six weeks. According to the same friend she now goes ‘off the rails for a bit,’ heads out to Ibiza, works on the door at a nightclub for two summers, then meets Anthony Charles Ellroy, advertising creative, at a dinner party in London. Ellroy is forty-two, mid-life crisis, married with two kids. Leaves his wife for Isabella, who by now is working for a friend of her mother’s at an art gallery in Green Park. Would you like me to keep going?”
“Ibiza,” Waterfield muttered. “What’s that? Ecstasy? Rave scene? Have you checked if she’s run up a criminal record with the Guardia Civil?”
“Clean as a whistle. A few parking tickets. Overdraft. That’s it.”
“Nothing at all suspicious?” Waterfield looked out of the window at the half-finished shell of IFC, the vast skyscraper, almost twice the height of the Bank of China, which would soon dominate the Hong Kong skyline. He held a particular affection for Joe and was concerned that, for all his undoubted qualities, he was still a young man possibly prone to making a young man’s mistakes. “No contact with liaison during this stint in Romania, for instance?” he said. “No particular reason why she chucks in the degree?”
“I could certainly have those things looked at in greater detail.”
“Fine. Good.” Waterfield waved a hand in the air. “And I’ll have a word with him when the dust has settled. Arrange to meet her in person. What does she look like?”
“Pretty,” Lenan said, with his typical gift for understatement. “Dark, French looks, splash of the English countryside. Good skin. Bit of mystery there, bit of poise. Pretty.”
6
It wasn’t a bad description, although it didn’t capture Isabella’s smile, which was often wry and mischievous, as if she had set herself from a young age to enjoy life, for fear that any alternative approach would leave her contemplating the source of the melancholy that ebbed in her soul like a tide. Nor did it suggest the enthusiasm with which she embraced life in those first few weeks in Hong Kong, aware that she could captivate both men and women as much with her personality as with her remarkable physical beauty. For such a young woman, Isabella was very sure of herself, perhaps overly so, and I certainly heard enough catty remarks down the years to suggest that her particular brand of self-confidence wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Lenan, for example, came to feel that she was “vain” and “colossally pleased with herself,” although, like most of the stitched-up Brits in the colony, given half a chance he would have happily whisked her off to Thailand for a dirty weekend in Phuket.
At the restaurant that night I thought she looked a little tired and Joe and I did most of the talking until Miles arrived at about half-past eight. He was wearing chinos and flip-flops and carrying an umbrella; from a distance it
