A Foreign Country Read Online Free

people of Britain are not supposed to know.’
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘You tell me.’
    ‘What, then? Who shot JR? A fifth plane on 9/11? Give me the facts, Jimmy. What did he tell her? Let’s stop fucking around.’
    ‘All right, all right.’ Marquand swept back his hair. ‘Sunday morning she announces that she has to go to Paris, for a funeral. Taking a couple of days off. Then, on Wednesday, we get another message. An email. She’s strung out after the funeral and has decided to take some holiday. South of France. No warning, just using up the rest of her allowance before the top job sucks all of her time. A painting course in Nice, something that she’d “always wanted to crack”.’ Kell thought that he caught a vapour of alcohol on Marquand’s breath. It could equally well have been his own. ‘Told us that she’d be back in two weeks, reachable on such-and-such a number at such-and-such a hotel in the event of any emergency.’
    ‘Then what?’
    Marquand was holding his hair in place against the buffeting London wind. He came to a halt. A blue plastic bag cartwheeled beside him across a patch of unmown grass, snagging in a nearby tree. He lowered his voice, as though ashamed by what he was about to say.
    ‘George sent somebody after her. Off the books.’
    ‘Now why would he do a thing like that?’
    ‘He was suspicious that she’d arranged a holiday so soon after the download with Haynes. It seemed unusual.’
    Kell knew that George Truscott, as Assistant to the Chief, had been the man lined up to succeed Simon Haynes as ‘C’; as far as most observers were concerned, it was merely a question of the PM waving him through. Truscott would have had the suit made, the furniture fitted, the dye-stamped invitations waiting to go out in the post. But Amelia Levene had stolen his prize. A woman. A second-class citizen in the SIS firmament. His resentment towards her would have been toxic.
    ‘What’s unusual about taking a holiday at this time of year?’
    Kell felt that he knew the answer to his own question. Amelia’s story made no sense. It wasn’t like her to attend a painting course; a woman like that didn’t need a
hobby
. In all the years that he had known Amelia, she had used her holidays as opportunities for relaxation. Health spas, detox clinics, five-star lodges with salad bars and wall-to-wall masseurs. She had never spoken of a desire to paint. As Marquand contemplated his answer, Kell walked across the stretch of unmown ground, pulled the plastic bag clear of the tree and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans.
    ‘You’re a model citizen, Tom, a model citizen.’ Marquand looked down at his shoes and gave a heavy sigh, as if he was tired of making excuses for the failings of other men. ‘Of course there’s nothing unusual about taking a holiday this time of year. But usually we have more warning. Usually it goes in the diary several months in advance. This looked like a sudden decision, a reaction to something that Haynes had told her.’
    ‘What was Haynes’s view on that?’
    ‘He agreed with Truscott. So they asked some friends in Nice to keep an eye on her.’
    Again, Kell kept his counsel. Towards the end of his career, he had himself become a victim of the paranoid, near-delusional manoeuvrings of George Truscott, yet he was still privately astonished that the two most senior figures in the Service had green-lit a surveillance operation against one of their own.
    ‘Who are the friends in Nice? Liaison?’
    ‘Christ, no. Avoid the Frog at all costs. Re-treads. Ours. Bill Knight and his wife, Barbara. Retired to Menton in ’98. We got them to sign up for the painting course, they saw Amelia arrive on Wednesday afternoon, enjoyed a bit of a chat. Then Bill reported her missing when she failed to turn up three mornings in a row.’
    ‘What’s unusual about that?’
    Marquand frowned. ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
    ‘Well, couldn’t Amelia have taken a couple of days