A Colder War (19 page)

“Does everybody know? Everyone at MI6?”

“Would it matter if they did?”

“It would matter to Mum. She feels humiliated. She’s so ashamed, you know?”

“And you want to protect her.”

Rachel nodded. Her rage and fury were gone. She was composed and thoughtful, breathtakingly beautiful in the extinguished light of the room.

“Amelia knows that your father was staying with a woman. Adam Haydock knows about it. Very few other people. The investigation into his death is being handled by a small team. Amelia put me in charge of it.”

Rachel’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Why does there need to be an investigation?”

Kell risked her wrath a second time.

“Rachel, I don’t want to have to say this to you. Believe me. I would much prefer to be allowed to tell you everything that’s going on. But I would lose my job if I told you why we are investigating the crash. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, it makes sense,” she said quietly, and perhaps there was a memory of the day, ten years earlier, when her father had finally sat Andrew and Rachel down and told them that Daddy wasn’t really a diplomat. Daddy was an officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. A spy. Paul, perhaps with Josephine at his side, proudly holding her husband’s hand, would have asked for his children’s absolute discretion, pointing out the legal and security requirements for total secrecy. The privilege of privileged information. Rachel knew the rules.

“Thanks for understanding.” Kell put his hand on her shoulder, an awkward, hapless rekindling of touch. Behind him, the parrot in the lounge was woken from a slumber and squawked loudly, saying something in Turkish that broke the silence. Rachel looked across at the cage, shrugged, and produced a brittle laugh.

“How do we get a drink?” she said, walking out into the lobby and looking around for a member of staff. Kell assumed that the duty manager was making his rounds of the hotel.

“I think they’re closed for the night,” he replied.

“A statement of the obvious, Thomas Kell.” His physical desire for her was once again as intense as it had been on the street, the memory of her waist, the smell of her perfume.

“I’ve got a bottle of vodka in my room,” he said. He didn’t want to spend an hour in the lobby of the hotel dancing around the subject. He wanted Rachel in his bed. He wanted either to restore the charge between them or for Rachel to go home to the
yali
.

“Have you now?” she said, all of the glint and mischief returning to her face.

“I have. Only got one glass, though.”

“Only one glass? That’s a shame.”

And with that, Rachel turned around, leaned over the bar, plucked a highball from below the counter, straightened up, and breezed past him, holding the glass aloft like a trophy.

“Now you have two.”

*   *   *

There was a moment, as soon as they were in the room, when Rachel walked away from Kell, toward the window, as though building up her courage. He waited for her, for the right moment. When she turned to look at him, he moved toward her and took her face in his hands and kissed her for the first time. And soon they were tearing at each other, desire and pleasure flooding through Kell like an opiate. Every doubt and moment of loneliness and pain he had felt in the past months and years were leaving him. For so long, in the aftermath of his marriage, he had felt a kind of deadness at the center of himself, his emotional existence completely stalled, incapable of finding other women attractive, and increasingly convinced that whatever passion and carnality he had once possessed had been extinguished by his divorce, by the gradual realization that more than half of his life was now done and visible only in the rearview mirror of regret and bad choices. Kell had no children to show for himself, no legacy save for the fiasco of Witness X. That was to be his monument. And yet, in the space of a few hours, he had met a woman who had somehow swept away his fury and his impotence as decisively as she had flung aside the flowers at the funeral, igniting something within Kell which felt like
life
again.

“I thought you only invited me up here because you wanted a drink?” she said, curling into the nook of his neck and shoulder an hour later. Kell was breathing in the smell of her skin, wanting her again.

“Very rude of me,” he said.

“Something about vodka.”

The bottle and the glass were where he had left them before leaving to meet her, the chaperone taking a shot for his nerves. Kell reached for the bottle and, with an extended, unsteady hand, poured six inches into the glass.

“Sorry. Slightly overdid it,” he said, encouraging Rachel to sit up and take a drink.

“Jesus! Who do you think I am? Amy Winehouse?”

He looked at her arms and her breasts, at the very slight swell of her belly, nothing perfect or airbrushed about her body, just the raw femininity of her, smells of sex and perfume and alcohol mingling in the night. For a time they sat up in silence, sharing the vodka, touching thighs and stomachs and hands, until Rachel eventually rose from the bed and walked into the bathroom, absolutely devoid of self-consciousness or vanity in every movement of her body. Of all things, Kell wanted to check the messages on his phone and was about to scramble around on the floor looking for his trousers when he told himself to relax, to get back into bed and to forget about Iannis Christidis and Ryan Kleckner for five minutes and just to enjoy himself. How many times did a man get to do this in his life? Candor and tenderness and the soul connection of an exquisite woman? He heard the toilet flushing next door, the whine of Rachel running a rusty tap, the mundane and commonplace sounds made by couples in the moments following intense intimacy. He had forgotten all about them.

The bathroom door swung open. Rachel came out wearing a towel. She smiled at Kell and picked up their clothes from the floor, throwing them together in a cluttered pile on the ottoman beneath the window.

“So you were at the funeral?” she said. “Funny I didn’t notice you.”

“Insulting, even,” Kell replied. “I noticed
you
.”

“You did? Well I suppose of course you did…” They were both aware of the sadness at the edge of what had begun as a playful exchange.

“I saw you reading a note on a bunch of flowers. I saw you throw the flowers at the wall.”

Rachel had been in the process of removing the towel and climbing back into bed. She tightened it around her and stared at Kell, as though he had glimpsed something far more private than the naked body momentarily exposed to him.

“You
saw
that?”

He nodded. He reached for her and unhooked the towel, making space in which she could lie down beside him. Then, without thinking, Kell lied.

“What was that about? Why did you throw the flowers away?”

Rachel turned over onto her stomach, pulling a loose white sheet over her back. He helped her, freeing the sheet as it caught on her foot. He could see the marks on her skin where he had scratched and bitten her. Rachel was staring down at the mattress, and for a long time said nothing. Eventually she moved off the bed and walked across the room toward the pile of clothes. From beneath her crumpled black dress she retrieved her handbag. She popped the catch on the bag, reached inside, and removed a crumpled blue envelope, which she passed to him. The envelope had been stamped in France and was addressed to Cecilia Sandor. The handwriting belonged to Paul Wallinger.

“What is this?” Kell asked.

But he already knew.

26

“Read it,” said Rachel.

Hotel Le Grand Coeur et Spa

Chemin du Grand Coeur

73550 Meribel

Savoie

France

December 28th

My darling Cecilia,

As promised, a letter to you on the Grand Coeur stationery, because I know how you love a nice hotel—and hate and distrust e-mail!

I’m sitting in the bar of the hotel, pretending to work, but only thinking about you and how much I miss you and wishing it was you that was here, just the two of us, skiing and talking and making love and walking in these glorious mountains.

Kell felt an odd surge of sympathy for Wallinger, the adulterer who fancied himself in love and whose shabby secret had been exposed. At the same time, he was horrified that Rachel had come into possession of the letter. He could not imagine what effect the contents would have had on her.

I wonder where you are now, at this moment? What you’re doing? Are you finding enough to do with the restaurant closed? Cecilia, I want to tell you that there is not five minutes that go by when I am not thinking of you. I was skiing with Andrew this afternoon and you were in my head and in my heart all the time, I felt filled up by your love and by the love that I feel for you. All my married life—all my
adult
life, in fact—I feel that I have been searching for you, for a woman with whom I feel absolutely free to be
who I am
, to say what I want to say, to act without reprimand or guilt or falsity of any kind. At forty-six years old! It’s ridiculous.

The words “adult” and “who I am” were underlined twice, as though Wallinger had finally abandoned any pretense at gravitas and was writing in the mode of an adolescent.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve wasted so much of my life in lies and in living in a way that was profoundly unhealthy, not just for me, but for my family and even for friends that I have let down and betrayed with this double life of the heart and the mind that I have been living for too long now. I want it all to stop. I just want to be with you and to draw a line under everything, to stop working in this bloody job and to commit myself to you and to our love. I have met the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. I want us to build something together.

Rachel was standing at the window, the towel again wrapped around her body, looking out onto the city through a tiny gap in the shutters. Kell did not know what to make of the letter. If Paul had been deeply in love with Cecilia, why had he kept a photograph of Amelia in a book beside his bed? Had he been giving serious consideration to quitting, or was that the philanderer’s way of keeping a mistress keen and tenterhooked? And who were the “friends” he was referring to? Amelia, certainly. But who else had Paul trampled on? Had there been other adulteries with Service wives?

Cecilia, I am craving you. I cannot stop thinking about you. I think about the summer, how you left the keys for me outside your house. I let myself in and you were waiting for me. I don’t think I had ever seen you looking so beautiful as you did that day. Your skin was tanned, your mouth waiting for me. I wanted to take my time with you. I was so desperate for you because we’d been talking all week and I was craving you. I remember what you tasted like—suntan lotion and saltwater and the sweetness of you. I remember you coming, the ecstasy of it, and I was glad that I had given you that, because every second I was with you was a paradise.

Kell put the letter down. He had read enough. It felt as though this was now all that he would remember of Paul. He would no longer be a spy or a friend or a father; he would just be the man who had lost himself to a mistress in an oblivion of infatuated sex. To Kell’s relief, Rachel turned around and made a joke.

“I’ve seen her photograph. She looks like a fucking Na’vi.”

“What’s a Na’vi?” Kell asked. He wanted to match her arch mood.

“You know.
Avatar
. Six-foot-six blue gimp from another planet. She’s so fucking tall she looks like a kind of plant. Fake tits, too.”

Kell folded the letter and placed it on the table beside the bed.

“You know I can remember the afternoon when he wrote that,” she said. “He told me he had a report to write. He couldn’t go into Meribel with me. I was looking forward to spending time with him, because he’d been skiing with Mum and Andrew in the morning.” Kell doubted this. He felt that Rachel was lying to herself in order to pile further blame onto her father. “But, no, work had to come first. The whole week I really thought he and Mum were finally happy. She did too. They’d had problems in the past, you know?” Kell nodded. “I remember them kissing and holding hands as they walked down the street. Something as simple as that. Something old-fashioned between a husband and wife.” Rachel shook her head and smiled. “But of course my father was the sort of person who could act like the family man with his wife and his son and his daughter, then write that shit in the afternoon to a Hungarian whore half his fucking age.”

“Rachel…”

“It’s okay. I’m not angry. I sound angrier than I am. Believe me, I’ve had enough time to get to know who my father was. It’s just upsetting that that week now means nothing, because he was thinking about fucking the Na’avi all the time. Composing this shit in his head. Getting it all down in the bar while he was pretending to write a report on spies. I found lots more letters. Maybe ten of them. That’s the only one from him though. You notice the neat, controlled handwriting—no mistakes, no crossings out? Typical controlling Pappa. The other letters are all from the Na’avi. She can hardly spell, ignorant cow.”

“So the card at your father’s funeral. The flowers. They were from her? She was sending him a private message, one that your mother wouldn’t be able to understand, but you recognized her handwriting?”

“Yes.”

For some time they said nothing. Kell eventually went to the bathroom. When he came back into the room, Rachel was still standing by the window.

“Come back to bed,” he said.

She did so, wordlessly, and curled into him again. He knew that there would be no more talk. Kell set an alarm for eight, and closed his eyes, his hand stroking Rachel’s back as she drifted off to sleep. He was listening to her breathe when she whispered: “You are lovely.”

He kissed her forehead.

“You are too,” he replied, wondering how long it had been since he had said those words, how long it had been since he had heard them.