A Foreign Country (13 page)

And then, finally, the meeting was upon her, the last hour before arriving at the flat passing as fleetingly as a face in the street. A vandal had scoured a deep scratch in the street door; a Chinese couple walking hand in hand smiled at Amelia as she walked into the lobby. Once inside, she felt as though she was going to be sick. It was as if the hole that had gaped inside her for three long decades was suddenly opening up. She had to steady herself against the door.

‘Would a
man
behave like this?’ she asked herself, a reliable maxim of her entire working career. But of course a man could never have known what it felt like to be in such a situation.

François lived on the third floor. Amelia ignored the lift and walked there, feeling as though she had never met any person in the course of her long life, had never climbed a flight of stairs, had never learned how to breathe. Reaching the landing, she felt that she was about to make a terrible mistake and would have turned and walked away if there had been any other choice.

She knocked on the door.

Kell knocked quietly on the door of 1214, heard nothing back, slipped the card key into the slot and stepped into François Malot’s room.

A smell of shower gel and scorching sea air; a door had been left open on to a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. Kell moved quickly in the heat, noting the open safe, the 35mm camera on a side table, a carton of Silver Lucky Strike, a gold cigarette lighter engraved with the initials ‘P.M.’, presumably for ‘Philippe Malot’. Propped up on a table on the right-hand side of the double bed was a framed photograph of Malot’s parents, smiling for the camera, not a care in the world.

A passport was lying on the bedspread. French, well worn, biometric. Kell opened it up. A nine-digit code was perforated into the bottom of each page; he scribbled the number down on a piece of paper and stuffed it into his back pocket. Kell then turned to the identity page which listed Malot’s second name – Michel – his date of birth, the date of issue of the passport, his height, his eye colour and an address in Paris. On subsequent pages there were stamps for entry at JFK, Cape Town and Sharm-el-Sheikh, the last dated three weeks earlier. Kell photographed everything twice, checking that the flash had not reflected on the plastic seal. He then closed the passport and put it back on the bedspread.

Beside the framed photograph was a
roman policier
– a French translation of
Ratking
– as well as a wristwatch and a Moleskine diary. Kell photographed each page from January to the end of September, again checking the screen to ensure that the entries were legible. Though he knew that Malot was still miles away in La Goulette, this took time and his pulse was up. He wanted to move as quickly as possible. There was always the danger of a chambermaid stopping by to turn down the bed, even of a third-party guest with access to Malot’s room.

Next he went to the bathroom. Shaving products, dental floss, toothpaste. Inside a washbag Kell found several loose strips of pills: aspirin; chlorpheniramine, which he knew to be an antihistamine often used as a sleeping aid; St John’s Wort; a small bottle of Valium; insect repellent; a comb. No condoms.

Next he went through the pockets of Malot’s jeans, careful not to disturb the layout of the room. In a black leather jacket he found loose change, a Paris metro
carnet
and a soft packet of Lucky Strike. It was an identical process to that which he had undertaken in Amelia’s room, only now Kell felt a greater sense of the unknown, because he had no notion of Malot’s character beyond his recent bereavement and the obvious vanity he had displayed beside the pool. Under the bed he discovered a Gideon Bible, open at a page in Deuteronomy, and a small box of matches. Underneath the copy of
Ratking
was an envelope in which Kell found a letter, dated 4 February 1999, written by Malot’s father. Philippe’s handwriting was an illegible scrawl, but Kell photographed both sides of it and replaced the letter carefully in the envelope.

When he was satisfied that he had thoroughly checked the contents of the room, Kell went outside into the corridor, discovered a side staircase leading to an exit adjacent to the swimming pool, and walked back to the Valencia Carthage via the beach. He found the number for Elsa Cassani and called her direct on the Marquand mobile.

To his surprise, Elsa was still in Nice, ‘getting drunk and spending the money you gave me’ at a bar in the old town. Kell could hear rock music thumping in the background and experienced an odd beat of jealousy for the men who were enjoying her company. He assumed that she was talking to him from one of the quiet cobbled streets south of Boulevard Jean Jaurès.

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to stop getting drunk,’ he told her. ‘More work to do.’

‘OK,’ she replied. If she was disappointed by this, she did not betray it. ‘What do you need me to do?’

‘Got something to write with?’

He listened as she scrabbled around in her bag, found a pen and a piece of paper and announced that she had discovered ‘a nice step to sit on and to take your dictation, Tom’. Kell began to flick through the images on his camera.

‘I need enhanced traces on François Malot. Has to be off the books, through your famous contacts, not via Cheltenham.’ It was an unusual request, but Kell wanted to avoid raising alarm bells with Marquand. ‘You have ways of checking people in France, right?’

A knowing pause. ‘Of course.’

‘Good. I’m going to need full-spectrum background. Bank accounts, telephone records, tax payments, schooling and diplomas, medical history, whatever you can find.’

‘Is that all?’

Kell wasn’t sure if Elsa’s question was evidence of sarcasm or over-confidence. He found one of the photographs of the passport and read out Malot’s full name, his date of birth, his address in Paris. He took the piece of paper on which he had scrawled the passport number and checked that Elsa had taken it down correctly. ‘He was in New York in January last year, Cape Town six months later, Sharm-el-Sheikh in July. I’m going to email you a series of photographs from his diary. I’ll look at them, too, but you may find something useful there. Telephone numbers, email addresses, appointments …’

‘Of course.’

‘One other thing. It looks as though he’s an IT consultant. Try to find out where he works. London had a JPEG of what looked like the Christmas party. I’ll send that too.’

‘When do you need all this by?’ Elsa asked. It sounded as though she was making a concerted effort not to sound overwhelmed.

‘As soon as possible,’ Kell replied. ‘You think you can pull it off?’

‘This is why people hire me.’

The first thing that François reacted to was Amelia’s beauty. He had not expected to find her so striking. Her remarkable appearance surprised him, because he had deliberately decided never to look at her photograph. Extraordinary dignity and strength of character in her face. She was elegantly dressed. The cut of her jacket brought out the fullness of her breasts and made her waist look slim and flat, as though she had never borne a child. He saw that she was wearing only basic make-up: a pale pink lipstick, light foundation, some definition around the eyes.

At first, because it was what he had decided on as the best course of action, he closed the door behind her and then reached out to shake her hand. Very quickly, however, he was drawing Amelia towards him into an embrace. She resisted this at first, and looked at him as though concerned that he might run off, like a frightened animal. He was touched by this. Her embrace, when it eventually came, was soft and hesitant, but as she reacted to the strength in his arms she squeezed much harder. She was not shaking, but he could sense that she was overwhelmed to be with him and he allowed her to rest her head briefly against his shoulder. François found that his own breathing was quick and lacked control, an irregularity that he put down to nerves.

‘Do you mind if we talk in French?’ he said, the line that he had practised and rehearsed many times.

‘Of course not!’ Amelia replied, and he heard the accuracy of her French, the flawless accent.

‘It’s just that I have never learned to speak English. I heard from the agency that you were fluent.’

‘Well, that was flattering of them. I’m a little rusty.’

He had rehearsed the next part, too. My mother is British, and the British like to drink tea. Offer to make her a cup. It will break the ice and it will give me something to do in the first awkward minutes. To François’ relief, Amelia accepted, and he led her through the small apartment to a kitchen that faced on to the street. He had already set out two cups and saucers and a bowl of brown sugar and could sense her watching him with forensic attention as he poured water into the kettle and retrieved a carton of milk from the fridge.

‘Would you like a biscuit?’

‘Thank you, no,’ she replied, a lovely open smile. She was so impressive to look at; what his grandfather would have called ‘
sophistiquée
’. He could see the euphoria in her eyes; she was trying hard to disguise it. He knew that she wanted to hold him again and to apologize for everything that she had done. Behind a British screen of nods and acknowledging smiles was a woman overwhelmed by the privilege of meeting him.

They spent the next four hours deep in conversation. To his surprise, Amelia told him almost immediately that she worked for SIS.

‘I can’t bear the idea of any lies coming between us,’ she explained. ‘Obviously it’s not something that I speak about very much.’

‘Of course.’ He was so surprised by her candour that he made a joke about it. ‘I guess it’s kind of cool to have a mother who’s like Jason Bourne.’

She had laughed at this, but he realized that he had acknowledged her biological role as his mother before he had meant to. It was not a mistake, but it was not how he had wanted the afternoon to proceed. He suspected that the secret Amelia had shared with him had been intended, from her point of view, as a bond between them, something that even François’ adopted parents had not known about her. And so it proved. Thereafter, he was surprised by how easy it was to talk to her. There were no awkward silences, no moments when he wished that she would leave so that he could be alone again in the apartment. They spoke about his career in I.T., they discussed the horror of the attacks in Egypt. Amelia appeared to be deeply sensitive to his loss, but she was not sentimental about it. He liked that. It showed that she had character.

In due course, he asked about Jean-Marc Daumal, but it transpired that Amelia knew very little about him.
The last time I saw him
, she said,
was the night that I left the house
. She confessed that in the face of near-constant temptation, particularly at the outset of her career, she had never run a trace on him, nor asked a colleague in Paris to peek into the French tax records.

‘They would
do
that?’ he asked.

‘They would do that,’ she told him.

Only once did he feel that she overstepped the mark, suggesting that their own reunion might be a precursor to François tracing his biological father, if indeed Jean-Marc was still alive.

‘More than anything,’ she said, ‘I want you to feel that you have people in your life who care very deeply for you, despite what has happened.’

He had felt that this was crass and pushy, but disguised his reaction.

‘Thank you,’ he said. They had been standing, so he had allowed her to embrace him again. He could not place her perfume; he had a vague recollection that one of the girls in his high school class had worn it to a party at which they had kissed.

‘I would very much like you to come to the funeral tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I would be honoured,’ Amelia had replied.

Later, after she had gone, despite the remarkable success of their first meeting, François’ overwhelming feeling had been one of exhaustion. This was only to be expected, he told himself. They were at the beginning of what he hoped would be a deep and rewarding relationship. In order to achieve that, he would be called upon to dig into reserves of strength and mental fortitude that were perhaps, at this stage, unknown even to him. It was part of the deal he had struck with himself. They were getting to know one another.

It was half-past eleven by the time Sami called again. Kell had eaten another club sandwich in his room and read a centimetre of Thomas Pakenham’s
The Scramble for Africa
. There was that same cacophony of Arabic music on the line when he picked up, like a roomful of belly dancers having the time of their lives. Then Sami said:

‘I have just let them out.’ He still sounded tense, as though he had been confronted by the limits of his own decency. It was often the way with embryonic agents; the guilt and the adrenalin worked through them like poison and its antidote. ‘François took her to the Valencia to make sure she was safely home. He said he was going to have a cognac in your hotel bar. Maybe I can meet you somewhere and tell you what happened between them. His mother, she is an interesting woman.’

Kell almost asked Sami to repeat what he had said, but the logic of it was suddenly as clear to him as the trajectory of a setting sun. Malot was Amelia’s child, born to her in Tunis more than thirty years earlier. Was this
possible
? Kell thought back to Amelia’s file. The dates matched precisely. Malot had been born in 1979, only months after Amelia had finished working as an au pair in Tunis. How could he have missed the connection? Philippe and Jeannine must have adopted him at birth, with no trace of Amelia Weldon’s name on the adoption papers or birth certificate. He marvelled at her ability to have kept the child a secret; SIS vetting was forensic, yet somehow François had slipped through the net. But who was the father? Somebody from the ex-pat community in Tunis? There had been no record in the pre-recruitment file of a boyfriend from that period of her life. Had Amelia been raped?

Kell looked up at the bare whitewashed walls of his room, down at the worn beige carpet, and rubbed his eyes. ‘Come to my room,’ he said quietly. ‘We can talk here.’