Charles Cumming - A spy by nature

“Whatever.”

Two miles later, I spot a glowing yellow M hanging low over an off-ramp encased in black trees. Saul comes off the motorway. The passenger-side mirror is not aligned, so I turn around sharply in my seat and look out through the back windshield.

Three vehicles follow us up the exit.

In the car park, Saul swings into a space alongside a gray BMW. The Capri gives a growling cough as he shuts off the engine. Two of the vehicles behind us went straight on to get petrol. The third, a hatchback Volkswagen, has parked seventy feet away, disgorging young children who run gleefully into the building. An Indian woman wearing a sari is stretching nearby, rolling her neck in a slow clockwise loop.

The restaurant is as bright and sterile as the Abnex offices. There are no shadows. People drift about in the white light, fetching straws and napkins. They queue up four deep at the tills, munch Big Macs at clean-wiped tables. Kids are greedy for plastic figurines and pots of ice cream threaded with furls of chocolate sauce. There’s a constant noise of demand.

A middle-aged man standing near me is looking around the place with a flinching bewilderment, as if he has been deposited here by accident from another era. The queue moves quickly. We are flanked by young couples and boys in shell suits, overweight salesmen, and girls in bright pink, too young to be wearing makeup.

At the counter, an acne-soaked teenager in a purple hat takes our order for food. I pass Saul a five-pound note, but he wants to pick up the tab.

“I’ll get it,” he says, pushing my hand away.

Twenty minutes later we are back inside the car, my mood flatly resigned to a long, dark journey with no end until well after midnight. Saul has a polystyrene cup of Coke wedged between his thighs and a postburger cigarette hanging from his mouth. It’s my turn to drive. The Capri feels heavy as I reverse out, as if it, too, has eaten too much, too quickly. Saul clicks in The Bends again and sits back in the passenger seat with a deep sigh. Within ten minutes he is asleep and I just listen to the songs.

And if I could be who you wanted,

If I could be who you wanted

All the time.

The rain starts coming down at around eleven fifteen and doesn’t stop all night. I worry that the heavy car will skid on the road surface and it’s a job to keep my concentration. The motor driving the windshield wipers is sluggish, and as a consequence my vision is constantly blurred by the glare of oncoming headlights refracting through the water-covered glass. Saul naps through all this with heavy catarrh snores and an occasional groan.

The traffic gradually evaporates the closer we come to Bodmin. Now and then a vast, speeding lorry will roar past in the wet, throwing up spray and mud, but otherwise I have the road to myself. There’s just a feeling now of wanting to get there, of the quest for sleep. For fifteen minutes on the Dorchester road, I was tailed by a black Rover, the same make of car that Sinclair was driving when I first met Lithiby. But I am past caring. Let them waste their time. They know where I’m going. They know where to find me.

I wake Saul when we enter Little Petherick, the last village before the turnoff to Padstow. He makes a show of being disturbed, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles like a sleepy child.

“Where are we?”

“London.”

“Seriously.”

“Nearly there. I need you to show me the way.”

“Fucking rain,” he says.

I have pulled the Capri over to the side of the road, the wipers flapping irregularly, left to right, right to left. The tired old engine turns over. Across the street there is a man loitering alone in a bus stop, trapped by the weather. He stares at us from under the peak of his baseball cap, colorless eyes in the wet gloom.

“Take the second left after this village. Sign saying Trevose.”

“Then what?”

He starts imitating Katharine’s voice.

“Road forks, so go real slow,” he says. “Flirt with me awhile, turn right at the traffic lights, and then I’ll leave my husband and elope with you.”

I wheeze a fake laugh.

“It’s easy from here,” he says. “Just head down to the sea. I’ll show you.”

Saul makes coffee when we arrive and I smoke a cigarette in the kitchen as he busies himself finding blankets and towels. The house feels damp. In the distance I can hear steel halyards pinging in the wind against masts. Otherwise, it is utterly quiet.

I like it down here. London makes you forget the simpler pleasures of being away from a city. The loose give of the warming sand after weeks of walking on pavements and hard floors. In the summer that brilliant clean light, and the feeling of salt drying against the skin. Then evening sunsets blink off the surface of the water, like flashbulbs in a floodlit stadium.

Saul comes back into the kitchen.

“I’m not actually all that tired,” he says.

“Me neither.”

“You want a drink? I think there’s a bottle of wine here somewhere.”

He finds it and sits down with two tumblers, a radio on in the background playing country music. I pour the wine and we toast the weekend, glasses clinking over the table. A car drives past outside, close to the house at a crawl, and I think that it might be about to stop on the drive when it suddenly moves away.

We talk for perhaps an hour, and it surprises me how easily I disguise my apprehension from him. I am thinking always of the consequences of telling Saul about JUSTIFY, of asking him to release details to the press and on the Internet should anything happen to me. But I can stay focused on what he is saying. Any thoughts I might have about the timing of a confession exist only as an undercurrent to the conversation.

Saul is preoccupied by his work, thinking of chucking his job and going into finance. He says, “After university, we all went into television for the glamour. I thought TV would provide some outlet for self-expression, but a lot of the time it’s just tedious and vain, full of guys with goatee beards wearing Armani suits. I need to make some money. ”

I don’t try to sway him one way or the other. I simply hear him out. It is the longest and most fulfilling conversation we have had in over eighteen months, just the two of us talking into the night. All the time I am conscious of a thawing in Saul’s attitude toward me, the gradual reconciliation of a ten-year friendship that had been allowed to fester and grow stale. The old-established ties were always there: they simply needed to be rekindled.

When both of us are slightly drunk and, although not tired, starting to think about going to bed, Saul’s mobile phone goes off. It is still packed inside his overnight bag on the kitchen floor, the ring muffled by clothes.

“Who the fuck’s that?” I ask, looking at the clock on the wall. It is half past three in the morning.

“Probably Mia,” he says, getting up out of his chair and struggling to retrieve the phone. “She always calls late. Doesn’t sleep.”

But it is not Mia.

The signal is bad, and Saul has to go outside to take the call. When he comes back into the kitchen, he tells me that Kate and her boyfriend have been killed in a car accident. He tells me quickly and without inflection, the news of her death first, then the place where the crash took place, and the name of the boyfriend. William.

He says that he is so sorry.

I cannot stay in the room with him. I do not even ask a question. I am outside, through the open door, and stumbling on gravel, his voice behind me just a single word: “Alec.”

There is no feeling in me but rage. No sadness or pain, just a sense of powerless anger, like punching air. I turn and am conscious of Saul, standing in the doorway, his head absolutely dropped, not knowing what to do or say. She was his friend, too.