All around them rainwater dripped off the leaves, resonating like polite applause through the trees. Marchant glanced back to where the Land Rover was parked. Two men from the safe house stood quietly at the foot of a monument to George III which rose out of a clearing in the woods.
‘It was quite a show you put on,’ Fielding continued. ‘Saved a lot of lives. The Prime Minister asked me to pass on his personal thanks. Turner Munroe will be in touch, too.’
‘He probably just wants his watch back. MI5 weren’t quite so appreciative.’
‘No, I’m sure they weren’t.’
They walked on together for a while through the ancient wood, watched by its sentinel oaks. Fielding was lean and tall, professorial in appearance, with a high, balding forehead and hair swept back at the sides. His face was oddly childish, almost cherubic. To compensate, he wore steel-rimmed glasses, which added to his donnish air and broke up the expanse of forehead. Colleagues had been quick to dub him the Vicar. He had been a choral scholar at Eton, and it was easy to imagine him still in a cassock and collar. He didn’t drink, nor was he married. Prayer, though, had played little part in his rise to the top.
‘I’m sorry about Sunday,’ he continued. ‘We tried to get you out of Thames House as soon as we could, but, well, you’re not strictly our man at the moment. MI5 insisted you were their guest.’
‘You would have thought I was the one wearing the belt.’
‘Nothing too unpleasant, I hope?’
‘Six hours of amateur Q and A. First they suggested I was helping the bomber, then they thought it was a set-up by MI6 to get my job back. No wonder they didn’t see it coming.’
‘That’s just it, I’m afraid. The whole incident doesn’t reflect well on them. Or on us, to be honest. Everyone had assumed that last year’s attacks were over. No one saw it coming. You’re certain he was from South India?’
‘Kerala, born and bred.’
‘We were all hoping that threat was over. The one person to come out of this with any credit is you, and you shouldn’t have been there.’
‘Can’t it be spun as a general intelligence-led operation?’
‘The media’s not the problem. It’s the PM. He can’t understand why a suspended officer was all that stood between a marathon and carnage. I’m not sure I fully understand either.’
That had always been Fielding’s way: his subjects rarely realised that they were being interrogated, such was his seeming politeness. But just when you had dropped your guard, he hit you hard with a disguised uppercut of meticulous accuracy.
‘Leila signed us up at the last minute. A friend of hers works for one of the sponsors. It was stupid, we hadn’t done enough training. On race day, I saw a dodgy belt and did something about it. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.’
‘And you had no warning? You’ve heard that Cheltenham picked up some chatter on the Saturday?’
‘No warning, no.’ There was little point in mentioning Leila, he thought. It would sound wrong, as if she had said more than she had, when in fact she had barely told him anything. It had been a passing remark, no hard information. It worried him, though, that Fielding also doubted that it had been an entirely chance encounter.
‘I couldn’t have done it without Leila,’ Marchant added. ‘You know that?’
‘She did very well. A bright future should lie ahead of her. Ahead of you, too, if that’s what you want.’
Marchant knew Fielding was referring to his behaviour of the past few months, when old demons had broken free again, unchecked by the discipline of intelligence work. Fielding stopped at one of the Savernake’s oldest oaks. Storms had removed the upper boughs, leaving only the trunk, strained and contorted, as if in pain. He bent down to look at the base of the tree, putting one hand to the small of his back. Sometimes his pain was so severe that he would take to lying down in his office, conducting meetings supine.
‘Spring morels,’ he said, pulling aside some brambles to get a better look. Marchant stooped to study them more closely. ‘Exquisite fried in butter.’ Everyone in Legoland knew how seriously Fielding took his food. An invitation to one of his gourmet dinners at his flat in Dolphin Square was better than a pay rise. He stood up again, both hands now pressed against his back, as if he was about to address his congregation. They both stared out across the woods, the sun streaming through gaps in the canopy, forming spotlit pools of limelight on the forest floor.
‘Tell me, are you still committed to pursuing your own inquiries into your father’s case?’
Marchant didn’t like his tone. In a quiet moment at his father’s funeral, two months earlier, Fielding had told him to let his office know if he turned up anything. All he had asked was that he went about his inquiries quietly. Become another whistleblower like Tomlinson or Shayler and he would throw the book at him. His father would have said the same: he despised renegades too. Only once had Marchant lost it, at a pub near Victoria, when an evening had ended in a brawl. A junior desk officer had been dispatched to the police station to release him and smooth things over.
‘Wouldn’t you want to know what happened?’ Marchant replied.
‘I have a pretty good idea already. Tony Bancroft has almost finished his report.’
‘But he’s not going to clear my father, is he?’
‘None of us wanted him to go, you know that? He was a much-loved Chief.’
‘So why did we let MI5 get one over us? There was never any evidence, no proof against him.’
‘I know you’re still angry, Daniel, but the quickest way to get you working again is for you to keep your head down and let Tony finish his job. MI5 don’t want you back, but I do. Once Bancroft is on record saying you pose no threat, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.’
‘But Bancroft won’t clear my father’s name, will he?’ Marchant repeated.
They walked on, Fielding a few yards ahead of him. Marchant had met with Lord Bancroft and his team, answered their questions, and knew that he had no case to answer. He knew his father was innocent, too, but the Prime Minister had needed someone to blame. Mainland Britain had been subjected to an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks during the past year. Nothing spectacular, but there was enough public fear to keep MI5 on a critical state of alert: electricity sub-stations, railway depots, multi-storey car parks. The evidence soon pointed to a terrorist cell based in South India, drawn from workers who had taken poorly-paid jobs in the Gulf.
The pressure to nullify the threat had grown, but the terrorists always seemed to be one step ahead. Soon the talk was of a mole, high up in MI6, helping the hunted. Daniel’s father had become obsessed with the theory, but he had never managed to prove it, or to halt the bombings. Suspicion had finally fallen on him. When his position as Chief became untenable, the Joint Intelligence Committee, guided by Harriet Armstrong, MI5’s Director General, recommended that he be retired early. The attacks had stopped.
Fielding paused at the point where their path met another. As Marchant joined him, they instinctively looked both ways before crossing, even though the forest was empty. A muntjac deer barked in the distance.
‘Are you still drinking?’ Fielding asked.
‘When I can,’ Marchant said.
‘I’m not sure we can bail you out a second time.’
‘How long will I be kept at the safe house?’
‘It’s for your own security. Someone out there’s not