‘Giles home?’
Amelia caught Kell’s eyes quickly, skipping on the question, as though wondering whether or not to answer it truthfully.
‘We’ve decided to try for separation.’
‘Oh Christ, I’m so sorry.’
The news acted on him in conflicting ways. He was sorry that Amelia was about to experience the singular agony of divorce, but glad that she would finally be free of Giles, a man so boring he was dubbed ‘The Coma’ in the corridors of Vauxhall Cross. They had married one another largely for convenience – Amelia had wanted a steadfast, back-seat man with plenty of money who would not block her path to the top; Giles had wanted Amelia as his prize, for her access to the great and the good of London society. Like Claire and Kell, they had never been able to have children. Kell suspected that the sudden appearance of Amelia’s son, François, eighteen months earlier, had been the relationship’s last straw.
‘It’s a great shame, yes,’ she said. ‘But the best thing for both of us. Drink?’
This was how she moved things on. We’re not going to dwell on this, Tom. My marriage is my private business. Kell stole a glance at her left hand as she led him into the sitting room. Her wedding ring was still in place, doubtless to silence the rumour mill in Whitehall.
‘Whisky, please,’ he said.
Amelia had reached the cabinet and turned around, an empty glass in hand. She gave a nod and a half-smile, like somebody recognizing the melody of a favourite song. Kell heard the clunk and rattle of a single ice cube spinning into the glass, then the throaty glug of malt. She knew how he liked it: three fingers, then just a splash of water to open it up.
‘And how are you?’ she asked, handing him the drink. She meant Claire, she meant his own divorce. They were both in the same club now.
‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he said. He felt like a man at the end of a date who had been invited in for coffee and was struggling for conversation. ‘Claire’s with Dick the Wonder Schlong. I’m house-sitting a place in Holland Park.’
‘Holland Park?’ she said, with an escalating tone of surprise. It was as though Kell had moved up a couple of rungs on the social ladder. A part of him was dismayed that she did not already know where he was living. ‘And you think—’
He interrupted her. The news about Wallinger was hanging in the space between them. He did not want to ignore it much longer.
‘Look, I’m sorry about Paul.’
‘Don’t be. You were kind to rush over.’
He knew that she would have spent the previous hours picking over every moment she had shared with Wallinger. What do lovers eventually remember about one another? Their eyes? Their touch? A favourite poem or song? Amelia had almost word-perfect recall for conversations, a photographic memory for faces, images, contexts. Their affair would now be a palace of memories through which she could stroll and recollect. The relationship had been about much more than the thrill of adultery; Kell knew that. At one point, in a moment of rare candour, Amelia had told Kell that she was in love with Paul and was thinking of leaving Giles. He had warned her off; not out of jealousy, but because he knew of Wallinger’s reputation as a womanizer and feared that the relationship, if it became public knowledge, would skewer Amelia’s career, as well as her happiness. He wondered now if she regretted taking his advice.
‘He was in Greece,’ she began. ‘Chios. An island there. I don’t really know why. Josephine wasn’t with him.’
Josephine was Wallinger’s wife. When she wasn’t visiting her husband in Ankara, or staying on the family farm in Cumbria, she lived less than a mile away, in a small flat off Gloucester Road.
‘Holiday?’ Kell asked.
‘I suppose.’ Amelia had a whisky of her own and drank from it. ‘He hired a plane. You know how he loved to fly. Attended a Directorate meeting at the Station in Athens, stopped off on Chios on the way home. He was taking the Cessna back to Ankara. There must have been something wrong with the aircraft. Mechanical fault. They found debris about a hundred miles north-east of Izmir.’
‘No body?’
Kell saw Amelia flinch and winced at his own insensitivity. That body was her body. Not just the body of a colleague; the body of a lover.
‘Something was found,’ she replied, and he felt sick at the image.
‘I’m so sorry.’
She came towards him and they embraced, glasses held awkwardly to one side, like the start of a dance with no rhythm. Kell wondered if she was going to cry, but as she pulled away he saw that she was entirely composed.
‘The funeral is on Wednesday,’ she said. ‘Cumbria. I wondered if you would come with me?’
The agent known to SVR officer Alexander Minasian by the cryptonym ‘KODAK’ had near-perfect conversational recall and a photographic memory once described by an admiring colleague as ‘pixel sharp’. As winter turned to spring in Istanbul, his signals to Minasian were becoming more frequent. KODAK recalled their conversation at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London almost three years earlier:
Every day, between nine o’clock and nine thirty in the morning, and between seven o’clock and seven thirty in the evening, we will have a person in the tea house. Somebody who knows your face, somebody who knows the signal. This is easy for us to arrange. I will arrange it. When you find yourself working in Ankara, the routine will be the same.
KODAK would typically leave his apartment between seven and eight o’clock in the morning, undertake no discernible counter-surveillance, drive his car or – more usually – take a taxi to Istiklal Caddesi, walk down the narrow passage opposite the Russian Consulate, enter the tea house and sit down. Alternatively, he would leave work at the usual time, take a train into the city, browse in some of the bookshops and clothing stores on Istiklal, then stop for a glass of tea at the appointed time.
Whenever you have documents for me, you only need to go to the tea house at these times and to present yourself to us. You will not need to know who is watching for you. You will not need to look around for faces. Just wear the signal that we have agreed, take a cup of tea or take a coffee, and we will see you. You can sit inside the café or you can sit outside the café. It does not matter. There will always be somebody there.
Of course KODAK did not wish to establish a pattern. Whenever he was in the area around Taksim, day or night, he would try to go to the tea house, ostensibly to practise his Turkish with the pretty young waitress, to play backgammon, or simply to read a book. He frequented other tea houses in the area, other restaurants and bars, often purposefully wearing near-identical clothing.
If it suits you, bring a friend. Bring somebody who does not know the significance of the occasion! If you see somebody leaving while you are there, do not follow them. Of course not. This would be dangerous. You will not know who I have sent to look for you. You will not know who might be watching them, just as you will not know who might be watching you. This is why we do not leave a trace. No more chalk marks on walls. No more stickers. I have always preferred the static system, something that cannot be noticed, except by the eye which has been trained to see it. The movement of a vase of flowers in a room. The appearance of a bicycle on a balcony. Even the colour of a pair of socks! All these things can be used to communicate a signal.
KODAK liked Minasian. He admired his courage, his instincts, his professionalism. Together they had been able to do significant work; together they might bring about extraordinary change. But he felt that the Russian, from time to time, could be somewhat melodramatic.