‘Well, how about that, darling,’ said the larger man. ‘Isn’t that just our lucky day?’
‘He calls everyone that,’ she said, but she could feel the heat in her cheeks and she knew they could see it. The smaller man produced the camera he had been holding behind his back and something in her snapped. She reached for the closest object she could find, her kitchen fire extinguisher, pressed down the lever and sprayed foam all over both of them.
She propelled them out of her flat, downstairs and through the front door on a wave of sheer fury, then went back up and looked out of her window to see them stopping on the pavement for the larger one to use his mobile phone and the smaller one to take pictures of the front of her house. It was still only half past seven in the morning.
After a long time the phone rang again. In the intervening hour, she hadn’t moved from the kitchen chair where she sat staring at the table and her unopened pile of mail. The room already seemed to belong to a time line which had come to an end.
‘Beth, pick up the phone,’ said a familiar male voice, the voice of authority, of tradition, of the way things are meant to be done in the Civil Service. Sir Robert Greenaway, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, was not somebody you could ever ignore. She picked up the receiver as if it were a landmine.
‘Is that you, Beth?’
‘Yes, Sir Robert.’
He dispensed with courtesies. ‘There’s a story starting to run on the wires. It’s linking you and Livesay.’
‘Two men broke into my flat this morning. They said they were from a news agency.’
‘They were. Be quiet and listen please. I’m not going to ask you if it’s true. That can come later. We have quite enough on our plate here already thanks to your friend the late minister. Now, understand me clearly. I don’t want you anywhere near this place until further notice. I strongly advise that you leave your house in the next ten minutes if not sooner. After that you’ll have the whole of Fleet Street camping on your step. Go away somewhere they can’t find you. My office will call you on your mobile in a day or two. Don’t talk to anybody and get going now. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
‘Officially you are on sick leave. Pack what you need and get going.’
That was that. He had put the phone down.
The first of them arrived as she was leaving. He was very young and, as she came out of the gate, he was running down the street from a taxi stuck behind a truck a hundred yards down the street.
‘Elizabeth Battock?’ he called as he ran towards her.
‘No mate,’ she said in the best Australian accent she could muster. ‘She’s up on the second floor,’ and she left him ringing the bell as she got in her car and drove away.
West seemed the best direction, west out of London by the quickest route. She drove down the M4 for an hour and then the full irony of what she was doing struck her as she realised she had absolutely nowhere to go. Hotels were out of the question. She’d have to pay by credit card and after her New York shopping spree there was a double risk, identification and credit refusal. Friends? She could stay with a friend. No one in London, that wouldn’t do, anyway they were all in the politics business, people to share your triumphs with, not your crises. She wouldn’t trust any of them at a time like this, not when there were useful points to be banked by helping out a journalist or two. There was Maggie. Where did Maggie live now? She hadn’t seen her since graduation. Her address was somewhere, probably on the Christmas card list in her kitchen drawer. Beth could see the list in her mind’s eye. It was just the start of a list really.
Something quite like tiredness came over her then and she pulled over at the next service area. Wiltshire felt like a safe distance away and, after she’d unloaded her bitter-smelling coffee and pallid sandwich on to the most remote table, she rummaged in her bag for an address book just in case it showed she had a forgotten best friend somewhere. Instead, she found the stack of post that she had stuffed in there on the way out of the flat and, for want of anything better to do, she started opening the envelopes.
It was mostly dross, bills, junk mail, one wedding invitation from a colleague she didn’t much like and an invitation to speak at an Institute of Strategic Studies seminar, but there underneath was the other letter she had accidentally swept up with the rest, the letter she had left unopened before she went away to America, waiting for a right moment to open it, a moment which might never arrive.
The envelope was handwritten and postmarked Devon. It bore her old address in Fulham and someone had crossed that out and forwarded it, which, a whole year since she had moved, was the sort of miracle she would prefer not to happen. She stared at it for a long time before using a table knife to open it as if something inside might lunge at her fingers.
‘My dear Beth,’ it said, and she really had almost forgotten how to read his handwriting. ‘I know you are very busy these days, but I wonder if you might be able to come down to see us soon. It seems such an age since we talked and there is a lot to talk about. It is very beautiful down here at the moment. The flowers are out around the Ley. Eliza misses you. She would be glad to see you. She had a postcard, I know. Ring the Turners if you can come. They’ll give me the message. All my love, Dad.’
Tainted sanctuary. An invitation to the one place where nobody would go looking for her, the place nobody knew about. An invitation to the last place she wanted to go. There was no other hiding place in prospect but even then it was the most reluctant of decisions.
The motorway ended at Exeter and the endless stream of traffic heading towards Cornwall and the south-west tip of England clogged both lanes of the A38. Absurdly, she had to stop and check the map to be sure of her way. She had owned her own car for four years now and it was the first time she had driven down this way.
Below the teeming A38, Devon bulges down to the coast and that bulge is known as the South Hams. It is marked at first by miniature rounded hills, wearing clumps of trees as toupees on their very tops to stop the wind blowing the soil away. Further south, towards the coast, a gentle oceanic swell of ridges prepares you for the real waves ahead. Signs of tourism are all too plain on the larger roads that skirt around it, but in the middle of it all, inland from Start Bay, is a less trampled area of fields, lanes and not much else which retains some of the utter remoteness of past centuries.
Beth was not in a mood to be charmed as the hedges crept in on her and slowed her pace. She was a London driver to the depths of her soul, carving others up and expecting to be carved up in her turn, always ready with the quick hand gesture and always reacting in fury if she was given one first. The road from Totnes to Kingsbridge began to test her patience. With blind corner after blind corner, crests and hidden dips, there was nowhere to overtake for miles, The Dartmouth turning took her on to a road which was little better, but when she took the long-forgotten right turn signposted to Slapton, even the white line in the middle of the road disappeared.
It was a warm afternoon and she was driving with the window down, but the scent from the high banks bordering the road only made her feel uncomfortable and out of place. She hated the way the banks pressed in on her as if she were going down an ever-narrowing trap which might not allow her the space to turn around and escape again. After a mile or so she came up behind a small, silver Nissan which was being driven with quite unnatural caution. On the infrequent straight sections the driver, a very old man, would speed up to nearly twenty-five miles per hour, but when confronted by anything approaching a bend, he would slow to fifteen, restrained it seemed by his equally old wife who could be seen waving her hands in the air at any sign of a hazard. Once and only once the road straightened and widened enough for Beth to try overtaking, but the old man had no idea that she was behind him and pulled into the middle of the road as she began to pass. Neither occupant showed any response to her