Stella Rimington - Rip Tide

She was now just a minute or two from the safety of her flat, but the footsteps were still echoing hers. Was the noise drawing any closer? She couldn’t tell. What should she do? She turned the final corner on to her own street, then quickly reached down and took off her sandals.

Then she ran, holding the shoes in one hand, barefoot along the pavement. At last she reached her building and stopped, breathless, at the front door to tap in the entry code. As she did so her back crawled and she tried to listen for the sounds of someone else on the street, but all she could hear was the drum-like thumping of her heart.

Inside the building at last, she closed the outside door firmly behind her. The light to the stairwell was on, which comforted her as she climbed the flight of stairs. She opened her door slowly, still listening.

Her flat felt stuffy and warm, and she remembered she had closed the windows and the blinds earlier. She went to the fridge to get some cold water, feeling rather silly about the fear she’d felt in the street, now that she was safe. Whoever had been behind her was probably sitting in their own flat around the corner now, blissfully unaware of the scare they’d given her.

Crossing the sitting room, she went to run a bath. When she flicked the switch just inside the bathroom door, the bulb popped and the room stayed dark. She turned to get another bulb from the kitchen, but the light in the sitting room had gone out as well, leaving the entire flat in darkness. Damn, Maria thought, the fuse must have blown. She edged back out of the bathroom to get the torch she kept in the sitting-room cupboard.

It was then that she heard a noise behind her. ‘Who’s there?’ she demanded, her stomach suddenly contracting with ice-cold fear.

Something moved in the darkness. She felt an arm encircling her throat. She choked, and found she couldn’t scream.

Or breathe.

After five years, Peggy Kinsolving felt so much a part of Thames House that she often forgot she had begun her career in the other Service. She had applied for a transfer after being seconded to MI5 to work with Liz Carlyle on an investigation into a mole in one of the intelligence services. Peggy admired Liz; she liked her straightforward manner, which was such a contrast to the deviousness of some of the people she had worked with in the other Service. She’d felt from the start of working with Liz that they were a team: that Liz would take Peggy into her confidence, and give her credit for what she did.

And Peggy enjoyed her work. She was never happier than when she was following a paper trail, supporting Liz as she made her investigations. Peggy had started her working life as a librarian and loved the cataloguing, classification and retrieval of facts. That was her métier. She could sniff out information and make sense of what others saw as a meaningless jumble of unrelated facts.

Every three months or so, she was reminded of her original employers when she had lunch with her one remaining link to Vauxhall Cross, Millie Warmington. After Peggy’s secondment to MI5 and subsequent decision to join for good, the two women had kept in touch. They had been young trainees together and had got along from the start. Millie had a sweet nature and was a loyal friend. But she was also one of life’s complainers; Peggy privately called her ‘Millie the Moaner’. Today Peggy could have done without their long-standing lunch date, because she was busy trying to find out more about the Aristides and her crew while also investigating Amir Khan’s past in Birmingham. There was the further drawback that Millie liked to take her time over lunch. However simple the meal – they usually met in an Italian pasta place on the South Bank – she always managed to spin it out for at least an hour. Peggy’s efforts to move things along were never successful.

Today proved no exception. At first, they chatted for a while about their social lives. Millie had no steady boyfriend but seemed genuinely pleased that Peggy’s Tim, a lecturer in English, was still very much in the picture. Then the conversation moved on to work and their respective jobs. Peggy was always fairly discreet since she knew that Millie was a bit of a gossip. She also knew that her boss, Liz Carlyle, was the object of much interest on the other side of the river, and that plenty of MI6 officers would love to know more about her – both what she was working on and, in particular, her private life. Peggy was fiercely loyal to Liz and so diverted Millie’s probing remarks by asking her about her own work.

This gave Millie just the opening she wanted and there followed the usual litany of complaint, especially about her boss. When they had joined up, both Peggy and Millie had worked under Henry Boswell, an old-fashioned but thoroughly decent man. Then Millie had switched departments and now worked for a female tyrant she called The Dragon. After ten minutes ranting about The Dragon’s latest misdemeanours, Millie had barely hit her stride, but by then Peggy had tuned out, her thoughts turning to the work she needed to do that afternoon.

It was only when they finally left the restaurant and walked towards Vauxhall Bridge for Millie to go back to Vauxhall Cross and Peggy to cross the river to Thames House, that something her friend was saying caused Peggy to tune in again. Afterwards, she was very glad that she had.

‘Good lunch?’ asked Liz. She was in her office, the remains of a salad from the canteen in a take-out container on her desk.

‘I saw my friend from Six.’

‘“Moaning Millie?”’ asked Liz with a laugh. Peggy had described her friend’s habitual complaining often enough

‘The same,’ said Peggy. ‘And still moaning. But she did tell me one thing I thought you’d want to know. Bruno Mackay’s been moved from Paris.’

‘Fane mentioned it but he didn’t say where.’

‘Athens. He’s been made Head of Station there.’

‘Golly. Good for old Bruno,’ said Liz, which seemed a generous thing for her to say. Peggy knew there was no love lost there.

‘Yes, but he’s come a bit of a cropper, I’m afraid. One of his agents has been killed. Murdered actually – she was strangled.’

Liz’s face showed her astonishment. ‘How dreadful. What happened?’

‘They’re not sure. She was found dead in her flat.’

‘Do they know who did it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Was it connected with work?’

Peggy shrugged. ‘I don’t think they know that either. She was a long-standing asset of Six, doing some undercover investigation for the Athens Station. I gather Bruno selected her himself.’ Which made it even worse for him, thought Peggy. Hard though it was – because he was so insufferable – you nonetheless had to feel sorry for Bruno Mackay. One month in his new job and an agent dead.

Liz seemed to share her feelings. She asked, almost as an afterthought, ‘What was the undercover investigation?’

Peggy looked expressionlessly at her as she said, ‘Working in some charity, I believe.’

‘Not UCSO?’

Peggy nodded.

Liz was shaking her head angrily. ‘They say a leopard doesn’t change its spots… but I thought, just for a moment, Geoffrey Fane might have changed his and gone straight. I see I was wrong.’

Liz was sitting at her desk, still fuming that Geoffrey Fane had put an agent into UCSO without telling her, when the phone rang. It was Fane’s secretary.

‘Hello, Liz. You wanted to see Geoffrey. He’s suggesting lunch. Can you do tomorrow?’

Liz groaned to herself. She’d originally wanted a short meeting in his office, so they could bring each other up to date. Now she wanted to make a formal complaint about his duplicity. She certainly didn’t want to sit exchanging pleasantries in a public place. But, in typical Fane fashion, he had forestalled her.