A Foreign Country (10 page)

‘You work these hotels on a regular basis?’ he asked. They had switched to Arabic.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What kind of hours?’

The driver shrugged, as though the concept of the nine-to-five was alien to him.

‘Can you take me into La Marsa?’

It was a risk, of course, but Kell needed a driver on call, somebody who could keep tabs on Malot. Usually SIS would have provided a support agent, but with the Amelia operation off the books, Kell was obliged to improvise. It was just a question of whether or not this man could be trusted as a second pair of eyes. Kell climbed into the passenger seat of a well-maintained Peugeot 206 and instructed him to head towards the beach. He introduced himself as ‘Stephen’ and they shook hands over the gearstick.

‘Sami.’

A mile from the hotel, beyond the security roadblock, Kell asked the driver to pull over. Sami kept the engine running for air conditioning and Kell turned square in his seat to face him.

‘I want to offer you a business proposal.’

‘OK.’

He liked this reaction: an easy nod, a half-glance at the meter.

‘What are you doing for the next few days?’

‘I work.’

‘Would you like to work for me?’

‘OK.’

Again, an easy nonchalance in the reply. Kell could hear a tractor running in the distance.

‘I’m here on business. I’m going to need a driver on call at the hotel from first thing in the morning to late at night. Do you think you can manage that?’

Sami thought for a fraction of a second and said: ‘OK.’

‘I’ll pay you five hundred dinars a day, first instalment up front.’

It was the equivalent of about two hundred pounds, a vast sum to a Tunisian who wouldn’t expect to earn more than a thousand dinars per month. Kell handed over the money. Still Sami maintained his inscrutable cool.

‘I’ll pay you the other instalments at the end of every second day. I don’t want you telling anybody about our arrangement and I may have to ask you to follow some people if they leave the hotel. Is that going to be a problem?’

‘That will not be a problem.’

‘Good. If I’m happy with your work, I’ll pay you a bonus of a thousand dinars.’

‘I understand.’ Sami nodded gravely; he had absorbed the importance of keeping his mouth shut. The two men shook hands again and finally Sami managed a smile. There was a photograph on the dashboard of two young girls dressed in pink for a special occasion. Kell indicated them with his eyes.

‘Yours?’ he asked.

‘My granddaughters,’ Sami replied and it was as though mention of his bloodline sealed the bond between them. ‘I have a son. In Marseille. In November I go to visit him.’

Kell took out his phone and scrolled through the photographs. He showed Sami the picture of Malot.

‘This is the man I’m interested in. Do you recognize him?’

Sami had to put on a pair of reading glasses in order to bring the picture into focus. When he had done so, he shook his head.

‘He’s staying at the Ramada,’ Kell explained. ‘He may be with this woman. She’s British, he is French.’ He showed Sami the JPEG of Amelia. It was taken from a passport photograph and the quality of the image was not good. ‘If either of them comes out of the hotel looking for a cab, try to get their business. If necessary, strike a deal with the other drivers so that you get to look after them. Let me know where they go and who you see them with. If you have to follow them, do so as discreetly as possible, but call me on this number before you leave. It may be that I can get downstairs in time and come with you or follow in a second vehicle.’

‘You have a hire car?’

Kell shook his head. He didn’t want to confuse him unnecessarily. ‘I meant that I’ll follow in another cab.’

They swapped numbers and Kell gave the Tunisian a basic timetable – seven until midnight. He then stepped out of the car, under the pummelling sun. He could see a path leading to the beach and decided to walk.

‘You go back to the hotel,’ he said. ‘Get in the queue of taxis. If you see them, call me.’

‘Fine,’ Sami replied with a nonchalance that was by now characteristic. It was as though he was asked to undertake clandestine work of this kind all the time.

Half an hour later, Kell was back in his room. The remains of his club sandwich were still on the bedside table, shards of crisps mingled with lettuce and congealed mayonnaise. He opened the door, put the tray in the corridor, had a cold shower, then went outside on to his balcony.

The swimming pool at the Valencia was still busy. There were at least twenty people in the water, families with small children splashing and shouting in the shallows. Directly beneath Kell’s window, a woman wearing a headscarf and a long black dress was seated in a plastic chair reading a magazine. Kell looked at the guests on either side of her, the dying sun casting a shadow across the pool.

That was when he saw her.

Lying on her back on a lounger, wearing a one-piece bathing suit and a wide-brimmed hat. A beautiful woman in her early fifties reading a paperback, sipping from a cup of coffee.

Amelia Levene.

On a quiet Friday afternoon two weeks earlier, Amelia Levene had managed to slip away from Vauxhall Cross just after 5 p.m. and to wrestle through weekend traffic to her house in the Chalke Valley. She was all too aware, in the wake of her recent appointment as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, that this would probably be the last weekend that she would be able to enjoy in Wiltshire for many months; the responsibilities of her new position would soon require her to live in London on an almost permanent basis. That would mean making a home in Giles’s house in Chelsea with roadworks for company and a protection officer on the door. Such was the price of success.

Amelia’s house, which she had inherited from her late brother in the mid-1990s, was located along a narrow lane at the western edge of a small village about eight miles south-west of Salisbury. It was dark by the time she pulled up outside, leaving the key in the ignition so that she could hear the end of a piano sonata on Radio 3. Once it was finished, she turned off her mobile phone – there was no reception in the village – picked up her leather overnight bag from the passenger seat and locked the car.

Peace. In the darkness, Amelia stood at the gate of the house and listened to the sounds of the night. Lambs, newborn, were bleating in a field on the opposite side of the valley. She could hear the rushing of the stream that swelled in springtime, sometimes so deep that she had swum in it, borne along by the freezing current from field to field. She could see lights in the second of the three houses that shared this isolated corner of the village. The first, one hundred metres away, was owned by a twice-divorced literary agent who, like Amelia, shuttled between London and Wiltshire as often as she could. Occasionally, the two women would invite one another into their homes to share a glass of wine or whisky, though Amelia had remained discreet about her position, describing herself as little more than ‘a civil servant’. The second house, hidden behind a steep hill, belonged to Charles and Susan Hamilton, an elderly couple whose family had been in the Valley for four generations. In the seventeen years that Amelia had lived in Chalke Bissett, she had exchanged no more than a few words with either of them.

It was cold to be standing outside after the warmth of the car and Amelia took the house keys from the pocket of her coat, switching off the burglar alarm once she had stepped inside. Her weekends usually adhered to a strict routine. She would switch on the Channel Four news, prepare herself a large gin and tonic with a slice of cucumber, find the ingredients to make a simple supper, then run a bath into which she poured oil from one of the three dozen bottles lining the shelves of her bathroom, all of them birthday and Christmas gifts from male colleagues at SIS who routinely gave books and booze to men and overpriced soap products to their female counterparts.

There was plenty of ice in the freezer, lemons in a bowl on the kitchen table. Amelia fixed the gin, sliced the cucumber and drank a silent toast in celebration of her husband’s absence from the house: Giles would be in Scotland for the long weekend, earnestly researching a withered branch of his breathtakingly tedious family tree. Solitude was something almost unknown to her now and she tried to savour it as much as possible. London was a constant merry-go-round of meetings, lunches, cocktail parties,
connections
: at no point was Amelia alone for more than ten minutes at a time. For the most part she relished this lifestyle, her proximity to power, the buzz of influence, but there had been an increasingly bureaucratic dimension to her work in recent months that had frustrated her. She had stayed with SIS to
spy
, not to discuss budget cuts over canapés.

She lit a fire, went upstairs to run the bath and took a tub of homemade pesto from the freezer, setting it to defrost in the microwave. There was a pile of post beside the cooker and she flicked through it with one ear on the television news. Amid the bills and postcards were two copies of the Chalke Bissett magazine and three stiff-backed ‘At Home’ invitations to drinks parties in the county that she immediately co-opted as kindling for the fire. By eight o’clock, Amelia had changed into a dressing-gown, checked her emails, poured a second gin and tonic and found a packet of spaghetti in the larder.

That was when the telephone rang.

The envelope had borne a Parisian postmark and was addressed to
Mrs Joan Guttmann, c/o The Century Club, 7 West 43rd St, New York, New York
.

It had been forwarded by the club to Guttmann’s apartment on the Upper West Side and brought up to the fourteenth floor by Vito, the doorman on whom Joan relied for everything from weather reports to grocery deliveries.

The letter had been written in English.

Agence Père Blancs

Rue la Quintinie, 147

Paris 75015

France

Dear Mrs Guttmann

It is with the deepest regret that I must inform you of the deaths of Mr Philippe Malot and Mrs Jeannine Malot, who have passed away while on vacation in Egypt.

The next of kin has recently made contact with our agency, as a result of a clause inserted in the Last Will & Testament of his late father. In accordance with the terms of our arrangement, the agency has therefore taken the decision to contact you.

Should you wish to take this matter further, I suggest that you either write to me at our Paris address or telephone me at a time convenient to you. Allow me to say that, according to the terms of French law, you are under no obligation to do so.

Yours, cordially

Pierre Barenton (Secretary)

Joan Guttmann had dialled the number.

The Stone Age answering machine picked up. Amelia heard her own voice, faded and scratched through repeated playbacks. The caller did not hang up, but remained on the line, and Amelia was startled to recognize the voice of Joan Guttmann, now surely in her early eighties, leaving a croaky smoker’s message:

Amelia, honey. It’s your old friend from New York. I have some news. You wanna give me a call sometime? I’d love to hear your voice.

Her first thought was to pick up the receiver, but she knew that a call from Joan Guttmann meant Moscow Rules: no names on an open line; no talking about the past. That was why she hadn’t identified herself. In case anybody was listening in. In case anybody ever found out about Tunis.

Amelia was out of her dressing-gown and into a pair of jeans and a sweater within two minutes. She grabbed a Barbour from the utility room, put on some Wellington boots, locked the house and went back to the car. She turned it around in the lane, drove into the village and parked a hundred metres from the pub on the Salisbury road. There was a telephone box on the corner, mercifully un-vandalized and still accepting coins. Amelia turned on her mobile and found Joan’s number buried in the contacts. Then the long, drawn-out ring of an American telephone, the click of somebody picking up.

‘Joan?’

The two women had not spoken for almost ten years. Their last encounter had been both brief and distressing: the funeral service of Joan’s husband, David Guttmann, who had suffered a heart attack while working at his office in Manhattan. Amelia had made the journey across the Atlantic, expressed her condolences all too briefly at a service on Madison Avenue, then returned to the UK on a red-eye from Newark three hours later. Since then, there had been no contact between them, save for the occasional email or hastily scribbled Christmas card.

‘Amelia, how are you? You’re so clever to call back so soon.’

‘It sounded important.’

It hadn’t sounded important, of course. The message had been as deliberately mundane as any Amelia had ever heard. But ‘news’ from Joan Guttmann meant only one thing. Something had happened to François.

‘It
is
important, honey, it really is. Are you OK to talk?’

‘As long as you are.’

Joan cleared her throat, buying time. It was difficult to tell whether she was apprehensive about what she had to say, or merely searching for the right words. ‘Did you happen to see the French newspapers at all this week?’

Amelia didn’t know how best to answer. She kept abreast of events in France, but no particular developments had been flagged up in the previous few days. She began to respond but was interrupted.

‘Something really quite terrible has happened. It’s Philippe and Jeannine. They were on vacation in Egypt. They were mugged, attacked on a beach. They’ve been murdered.’ Amelia leaned against the freezing glass of the phone booth, a hammer blow. ‘The thing is, your boy has been in touch. He must have somehow traced me through the system at Père Blancs. I’ve had a contact at Langley look into it, run some background. He checks out. It’s François. I guess he’s reaching out or something. He’s lost his parents and he’s hurting. I couldn’t keep it from you, honey. I’m so sorry. I really need to know what it is that you want me to do.’