Stella Rimington: Dead Line

Later, when the meeting broke up, Liz looked out of the corner of her eye at Bruno, who was lounging back in his chair, looking immensely self-satisfied. It wasn’t hard to guess why. How typical, she thought, feeding intelligence in at the top for maximum dramatic impact, rather than briefing colleagues in the normal way.

Making her way downstairs, through the familiar glass security doors and out into Whitehall, Liz found herself in the company of the younger of the two CIA men, the Ivy Leaguer with the horn-rimmed glasses and the striped tie. It had been raining and there were puddles on the ground. He was wearing a Burberry raincoat that looked absurdly new.

Smiling, he held his hand out. ‘Miles Brookhaven,’ he said in a soft voice, his accent mid-Atlantic. The afternoon traffic was light and they had the wide pavement to themselves. ‘Going this way?’ he said, indicating the gates of the Horse Guards building, twenty yards up Whitehall.

She hadn’t intended to, but found herself reflecting that she could just as well get back to Thames House by walking across Horseguards Parade as by going down Whitehall and getting involved with the complicated crossings around Parliament. They turned into the gates together, passed the sentries in their boxes and emerged through the dark archway into the sunshine reflected off the red gravel of the parade ground.

‘Your Sir Nicholas,’ Brookhaven said appreciatively. ‘Is that what they mean by a mandarin?’

Liz laughed. ‘Strictly speaking, a mandarin is a civil servant. He was a mandarin once, but now he’s got himself a profile – these days he’s a politico.’

Brookhaven was walking quickly. A shade under six feet, he was lean and athletic-looking. He seemed to glide effortlessly over the pavement and though Liz was hardly a dawdler, she found it hard to keep up. Out of the corner of her eye, as they crossed the gravel, she saw Bruno Mackay climbing into the driving seat of a flashy-looking car. How on earth had he got one of the special passes that entitled him to park there? In fact, how had he got out there so quickly?

‘What do you make of what he said?’

‘Sir Nicholas?’ Liz shrugged. ‘Oh, I think we have to take him at his word, for the time being anyway. No doubt Six will pass on the intelligence when it’s been assessed. There’s nothing we or anyone can do until we know more.’

She changed the subject. ‘How long have you been stationed here?’

‘Just two months,’ he said, before adding quickly, ‘but I know England well. My school had an exchange programme with a school here. I had a lovely time and I’ve often been back.’

Lovely – not usually a favourite word of the American male. Brookhaven was an Anglophile, thought Liz, and keen to show it. They were always quick to tell you that they knew the place.

‘Which school?’ she asked.

They had reached the corner of Birdcage Walk and Parliament Square. Brookhaven pointed almost directly ahead of them.

‘Right here. Westminster,’ he said. They stopped. ‘I’m off that way,’ he added, gesturing up Birdcage Walk.

‘Right. I’ll see more of you, no doubt.’

‘I hope so.’ He smiled quickly and walked off.

Liz had intended to skirt Queen Elizabeth Hall and then set off diagonally towards the far corner of the square, but on an impulse she continued straight ahead, passed the front of Westminster Abbey and walked through the arch into the great courtyard of Westminster School. On the green in front of her a group of uniformed fifteen-year-olds was casually throwing a ball around. To her mind there was something maddeningly upper-class about the scene, something that she knew she could never quite understand or like.

Feeling somehow out of place, out of time, she crossed the court, out through the tiny gate at the far end and into the sunlit maze of eighteenth-century houses that led her out opposite the House of Lords and the long, tapering wedge of a little park, convenient for peers of the realm and members of parliament to take the air. She remembered the fateful afternoon when she’d sat on one of its benches with Charles Wetherby, and tried calmly to relate to him her discovery that the thing he had feared most – a traitor working in their midst – was true. He’d taken the news with an outward show of calm, but she’d known how shaken he must have been.

She was thinking of that now when a car pulled up abruptly on the street right next to her. It was the Mercedes 450 cabriolet – a low-slung sports model, silver with an amazingly loud ketchup-coloured top – that she’d seen Bruno Mackay getting into on Horseguards Parade.

Her heart sank as she watched the front passenger window slide down. The driver leaned over.

‘Want a lift?’ he shouted out.

‘No thanks,’ she said, as cheerily as she could. The only way to deal with the man, she had learned before, was to make it clear that nothing he said mattered at all.

‘Come on, Liz, lighten up. I’m going right by your building.’

‘I’m going to walk, Bruno,’ she said firmly, as a van started to hoot its horn in protest at the hold-up. ‘You go on. If you stay there much longer you’ll get arrested.’

He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. But don’t think I didn’t see you back there consorting with the enemy.’ He said this with the mock-reproof of a headmaster.

‘Nonsense,’ said Liz, tempted to use a stronger word. ‘Miles Brookhaven isn’t the enemy. He and I have a “special relationship”.’ And she walked on, certain that for once she had left Bruno at a loss for words.

That morning the Reverend Thomas Willoughby hoped for rain. Earlier in the year, during the flooding in May, he had wanted never to see rain again. But now in late summer the grass had curled and died, yellowed from the heat and drought, and the gnarled old apple tree in the front of the churchyard looked pained, its carpet of wizened windfall fruit picked at by hovering wasps.

When he had first moved from his Norfolk village parish to St Barnabas, on the edge of the City of London, Willoughby had feared the worst – endless traffic and noise, vagrants, a secular culture that would have no time for his religion. Yet St Barnabas had been a surprise. It had turned out to be a refuge from the fast-paced urban world. Built by an anonymous student of Hawksmoor, the church had the baroque grace of the master, and a characteristic towering spire. It was just a stone’s throw from the bustle of the old Smithfield meat market and the thrusting steel and glass of the world’s greatest financial marketplace.

But the church figured on no tourist map and was visited only by the occasional aficionados , working their way through a weighty architectural guidebook. It was almost wilfully obscure, tucked away at the end of a small side street of eighteenth-century terraced houses, not yet gentrified. ‘Bit of a backwater, really,’ the previous incumbent had said on Willoughby’s first visit, then pointed at the small graveyard in one corner of the churchyard. ‘It’s been full up since Victorian times. That’s one service you won’t have to conduct.’

Like any city church, St Barnabas was locked overnight. Approaching the vestry door, the Reverend Willoughby was just reaching for his keys when he noticed that the door was already open. Not again, he thought, his heart sinking. The church had been burgled the autumn before – the collection box stolen, along with a silver jug that had been left in the vestry. Worse, though, had been the vandalism: two brass rubbings that hung on the chancel wall had been hurled to the floor, their frames smashed to smithereens; one of the ornate family memorial plaques had been badly chipped by a hammer blow; and – he shuddered at the indignity of it – human excrement deposited on a pew.