David Trevellyan 03 -More Harm Than Good (7 page)

       
“It’s me, Suzanne,” the
nurse said. “And you have a visitor, I see.”

       
“Don’t mind me,” the
agent said. “I can’t hang around, anyway.
Just one more
question for you, though, David, before I go.
Your
boots.
If you got them back, would you hang around?”

       
“Are you joking?” I
said. “You wouldn’t see me for dust.”

Chapter Six

The new nurse held the door for the agent until she’d negotiated her
way back into the corridor, then strode over to the bed and started her routine
mauling. She was alarmingly enthusiastic.

       
“Your temperature’s OK,”
she said, making a note on my chart. “Blood pressure’s a little low, but
nothing to worry about.
Same for heart rate.
Now let’s
talk about what really matters.
Your head.
How is it?
Have you had any pain?”

       
“I had a pretty bad
headache last night,” I said, thinking back to the conversation I’d had with my
control once Nurse Smith had left me alone. They appreciated the heads-up, I
suppose, but that didn’t outweigh their irritation at having to mend fences
with MI5. “It’s a little better now, but it hasn’t quite gone away completely.”

       
“That’s understandable.
And what about nausea? Have you been feeling sick at all?”

       
“I had one pretty bad
episode,” I said, picturing myself surrounded by Jackson’s display of
management-speak posters.

       
“And did you actually
throw up?”

       
“Not quite. I managed to
restrain myself.”

       
“You shouldn’t do that,
you know. If you feel like vomiting, your body’s telling you something. You
shouldn’t hold back. If there’s something bad in there, it needs to come out.”

       
“I’ll remember that,
next time,” I said, suppressing a smile as I pictured how that would go down
with Jackson’s prim secretary.

       
“Any memory loss, while
you’ve been here?”

       
“Not that I’m aware of.”

       
“That’s a difficult
question to answer, isn’t it? How do you know you’ve forgotten something, until
you’ve remembered it again? Or someone reminds you? But still, it’s important,
so anything like that, we need to know.
Now, concentration.
How are you finding that?”

       
“Sorry, what was the
question?”

       
“Concentration. Have you
- oh. I see. Never mind. So, what’s next?
Your sight.
Any problems with
focussing
, field of vision,
anything like that?”

       
“I feel like I’ve maybe
had a bit of tunnel vision since I’ve been here,” I said, thinking about my
missing boots. Then the MI5 agent’s intense, worried face floated into my mind.
“Although, that might be easing a little, now.”

       
“Good.
Now, one last thing.
And don’t take offence at this, but
you’re a man, so I want you to take a moment and think before you answer. I
want you to be honest. It’s about your emotions. Don’t deny having any. I know
you do. So just think, and tell me if you’ve had any mood swings in the last
twenty-four hours.
Or if you’ve felt angry.
Or frustrated.
Or even just a little bit cranky.”

       
The truth was I had been
pretty irritable since I’d got there - with the betrayal over my boots, and
having to deal with the unhelpful Jackson and obstructive Lydia. And the way I
felt had suddenly changed, as well - since this morning’s encounter with the
MI5 agent. So this time when I answered, I wasn’t just angling to be kept in
the hospital.

       
“Yes,” I said, after a
suitable delay. “I think so. All of the above.”

       
Suzanne scribbled
deliberately on the chart for another couple of minutes,
then
hung the clipboard back in its place. But instead of leaving like the other
nurses had done at that stage, she crossed to the window and gazed out across
the square. Thirty seconds passed in silence, then she started talking. About
the storm, and the damage it had caused.
About her children.
Her husband.
Their
neighbourhood
.
The TV shows she liked. Where she’d been on holiday.
On and
on, until a quarter of an hour had dragged by.
I was beginning to wonder
if it was some kind of technique to assess my mental state - seeing how long I
could stand her babble before strangling her and hiding the body in a laundry
cart - when someone tapped on the door, breaking her off mid sentence.

       
“Who is it?” I said,
before she could get back into her stride.

       
The door opened and a
man stepped into the room. I’d guess he was probably in his late sixties. He
was tall - around six foot three - with immaculately combed silver hair, an
elegant, plain grey three piece suit, and black Oxford shoes that were polished
like crystal. If someone had told me he was an ex-Guards officer I wouldn’t
have been surprised. He paused to gently close the door, and when he turned
back to face me I saw he was holding a green plastic bag in his right hand, low
down by his side.

       
“Would you by any chance
be Lieutenant-Commander
Trevellyan
, sir?” he said,
looking straight ahead.

       
“I would,” I said,
glancing at Suzanne to see if she reacted to the way he’d addressed me.

       
“In that case, I have a delivery
for you,” he said, handing me the bag.

       
“Thank you,” I said,
relieved that she was just staring out of the window again, not paying much
attention. “Who’s it from?”

       
“I have no idea, sir.
Perhaps there’s a note inside the package? Such an arrangement is customary, I
believe.”

       
“Very kind of you to
point that out. That’s the first place I’ll check.”

       
“Very good, sir,” he
said, reaching back for the door handle. “Now if there’s nothing else, I really
must excuse myself.”

       
“What are you waiting
for?” Suzanne said
,
the moment the door had shut
behind him. I guess she had been listening after all, but if she was more
interested in the parcel than me, then I was happy. “Open it. Open it. What’s
inside? Let me see.”

       
The bag contained a
white cardboard box, five inches by eleven by fourteen. Three quarters of the
lid was covered by a logo - a
stylised
Tudor rose
with a capital ‘G’ in the
centre
- and on both long
sides the words ‘
Grenson
, England 1866’ were printed
in bold red ink. I opened it and unfolded a double layer of tissue paper. There
was a brand new pair of boots nestling beneath it. They were black leather.
Lace up.
With a classic brogue pattern.

       
“Oh, they’re lovely,”
Suzanne
said. “Are they like the ones you lost?”

       
“Almost identical,” I
said, checking to see if the design had changed much over the years. “Only mine
were stolen, not lost.”

       
“I bet they were
expensive. Does it say who they’re from?”

       
By now I had a pretty
good idea, but I fished out a little card that had slipped down between the tissue
and the side of the box, just to be sure.

I hope these help you get back on your feet. Best wishes, M.

PS - check your phone.

       
“Who’s M?” Suzanne said.

       
That was a good
question, I thought. How should I answer? Assuming I was right, I could tell her
it was the woman she’d just seen in the wheelchair. Hint that she was an MI5
agent. Or just say it was someone trying to do a difficult job, which I’d
inadvertently made worse.

It took another five minutes of grunted ‘yes’s and ‘no’s before
Suzanne finally left and I could get to the drawer and retrieve my phone. A
single text icon was bouncing around the screen. The message was from my
control. It said he wanted to talk. Immediately.

       
The signal in my room
was weak so it actually took three attempts to reach him.

       
“
Trevellyan
?”
he said with only a trace of last night’s annoyance in his voice when we were
finally connected. “How’s the head?”

       
“Not too bad,” I said.
“Not quite one hundred percent, yet, but it’s getting there. Thank you.”

       
“Wrong answer.”

       
“I beg your pardon?”

       
“Your head isn’t
improving. It’s getting worse. You’ll have to stay in the hospital. And the
medics can’t put their finger on the problem, so you could be there for a
while.”

       
Had he somehow heard
about my boots? Normally the prospect of open-ended incarceration would fill me
with gloom, but this sounded like excellent news.

       
“Worse?” I said. “OK. I
can do that. Only, what’s the real story?”

       
“Remember the girl from
Box, from last night?” he said.

       
Box is inter-service slang
for MI5, based on their wartime address – PO Box 500, London.

       
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

       
“Well, after your
inadvertent introduction, our two head-sheds have been talking,” he said. “And
the long and short is - they want to borrow you.”

       
“What if I don’t want to
be borrowed?”

       
“Let me rephrase.
They’re borrowing you.”

       
“I see. It’s like that.
OK.
But why?
And how long for?”

       
“For as long as they
want you. They think one of their people might have been to Cambridge, so they
want some eyes they can trust from the outside.”

       
Going to Cambridge is
MI5 slang for turning traitor after Anthony Blunt, Kim
Philby
and co. were recruited by the NKVD – the forerunner of the KGB –
when they were students there in the 1930s.

       
“And they’re putting me
in the middle of it?” I said.

       
“It makes sense,” he
said. “You’re on the scene. You’ve got a reason to stay there. They’re a body
down, thanks to you. And infiltration’s your specialty.”

       
“It is my specialty.
Which is why this makes no sense at all. You can only infiltrate a group if
everyone in it takes you at face value. This girl knows exactly who I am. She’s
no fool. There’s no way she’ll confide in me, and she’ll not incriminate
herself with me watching. Even assuming her hands are dirty, which they might
not be. No. What they need here is Internal Investigations.”

       
“They want you.”

       
“This won’t work. It’s a
mistake. I’m the wrong man for the job.”

       
“Why are you talking as
if you have a choice?”

       
I didn’t reply.

       
“Look, I know this isn’t
ideal,” he said. “It’ll no doubt be awkward. You’ll have to improvise. But
since you set foot in that hospital, you’ve done more harm than good. This is
your chance to atone. And given what you did to their man, frankly, you’re
getting off lightly.”

       
“OK,” I said, after a
moment. “I’ll bow to the inevitable. So what happens from here? What’s the rest
of the story?”

       
“I’ve got no idea. It’s
not my department. You’re to liaise with their girl. She’ll fill you in.”

       
“OK. I’ll talk to her.”

       
“Good.
Only, David - one last thing.
You’re probably right about
this girl. She probably won’t open up to you, but we don’t know anything about
her. I’m trying to dig up some background, and in the meantime, watch your
back. Their brass is ready to ask for help, remember. What does that tell you?”

       
“Someone’s closet is
about to burst open.”

       
“Exactly. So just make
sure the skeletons don’t land on you.
Whoever
they
belong to.”

I hung up, and bundled the boots back into their box, ready to leave
the room. They still looked nice. But after that phone conversation, I wouldn’t
be able to look at the agent in the same way. Not now that I had to work with
her. Watch her, to see if she was a traitor. Maybe end her career. Or even her
life.