Stella Rimington - Illegal Action

“I’ve been trying to reach her too. You know that we’ve been in touch with the Danes and the Germans to try to identify the Illegal that they thought might have come here. I’ve just had a message.”

Peggy took a piece of paper from the folder she was carrying and put it on the desk under Brian Ackers’ nose. He gazed abstractedly at its few terse sentences and at the name.

“Has this woman surfaced here in any way? Do we know anything about her whereabouts?”

“She is close to Brunovsky.”

“My God!” said Brian excitedly. “This could be our first sight of Victor Adler’s plot.”

Then suddenly the implications of Peggy’s statement struck him like a thunderbolt. Liz Carlyle could be in real danger after all. Trying not to look as shaken as he felt, he began issuing rapid-fire orders. “I want you to go to the Brunovsky house and find Liz. Pretend you’re an old friend, or her sister—I don’t care, just make sure you find her. Tell her I want her to get out of there at once—she can think up any excuse she likes but she must leave immediately. Is that understood?”

“I can’t, Brian,” Peggy said, looking at her feet.

Jesus, he thought angrily. What’s wrong with these women? “Nonsense,” he said harshly. “Do as you’re told.” If DG could talk to him like that, then he could act the same way with his subordinates. “This is your immediate priority. Is that clear?”

“I’m sorry, Brian,” said Peggy, but she was not apologising. “Liz isn’t there. She’s gone to Ireland with Brunovsky. She left a message for me about an hour ago from Northolt. They’re taking his private jet.”

“Oh God,” Brian groaned. “What is she doing there?”

“She said they’ve gone to try and buy this picture from some old lady west of Cork.”

“Will this… woman… be with them?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right,” said Brian. He knew now how wrong he had been, but he found himself almost eerily calm. There was no point in self-recrimination. “Get me Michael Fane,” he said to Peggy. “I’m going to send him over there as quick as we can manage. I want you to get on to the Garda right away. Tell them we’re urgently trying to find a colleague. Get them to meet Michael when he lands at Cork.”

“All right,” said Peggy. “Shall I tell them the whole story?”

“No, for goodness’ sake,” said Brian. “Just tell them what they need to know.” He waved a bony hand to indicate she’d better get a move on. So why wasn’t this girl going? She was looking at him in a way he found unsettling. It was a look he’d never seen before in one of his staff—contemptuous but pitying at the same time.

“Don’t you think, Brian, you’d better speak to Geoffrey Fane and the Foreign Office? We don’t know how this is going to turn out. And I think I’d better try and find out who’s gone to Ireland with Brunovsky and Liz.”

The view of the lake had not changed for a hundred years (when the last of the woodland had been felled), and Letitia Cottingham had been alive for eighty-six of them. This morning as she took her small constitutional around the box hedge of the terrace, she wondered vaguely who all these people were flitting in and out of her house.

Perhaps they would have a party. That would be nice, like her childhood again, those days before the war when Thomas, her brother, would bring friends all the way from Cambridge to stay. The house was filled with laughing voices then, and they played lawn tennis and swam just down there, next to the boathouse. In the evenings there was dancing, and she was allowed to stay up and watch from the stairs.

But it had all ended with the war. The locals had been unhappy when Thomas had enlisted in the British Army—some of their mutterings had been positively pro-German. But even they had shown sympathy after that bleak morning when the postman had cycled up the drive, carrying the telegram announcing Thomas’s death at El Alamein.

Her parents had never recovered; both were dead within five years. And so the place had come down to her—plain Letitia Cottingham, whom nobody had wanted to marry until she had inherited the estate. She’d had her revenge, saying no to half a dozen suitors after that, and though she had never made a success of the place—selling off parcels of land every few years—she was still here. The roof leaked so badly there were buckets in the attic; the sash windows were rotten to the core; woodworm and rot in the floorboards meant that half the bedrooms were uninhabitable; but the fact was, the house was still Letitia’s. They would have to carry her out with her boots on.

The new carer was nice. Better than the last one who’d come from Dublin and seemed to hate the countryside. What was this girl’s name? Svetlana? Something like that. From one of those countries in Eastern Europe everyone used to complain about. She was such a gentle girl, even if her English wasn’t very good. Her friends were nice as well, though those foreign men who’d been the week before were rather brusque. And that unpleasant woman. Still, it was good to have life in the old place again.

Brunovsky was in love with his aeroplane. He sat in one of the vanilla leather-padded chairs, wearing a fawn cashmere blazer and Gucci loafers that looked as soft as slippers, talking to Liz in loving and monotonous detail about the attributes of the Embraer Legacy 600: its range of 3,400 nautical miles, wingspan of 68 feet, approach capability of 5.5 degrees (whatever that meant), and last but not least, its $23.6 million price tag.

The engines revved and the jet accelerated down the short Northolt runway until they were pushed back against their seats. It cleared the outer perimeter fence with what looked to Liz no more than twenty feet to spare; for a moment she wondered if the pilot was planning to join the cars heading west on the M40.

A friend of her father’s had once flown in the Concorde back from New York, and said that its interior was like a padded cigar tube, but Brunovsky’s jet was remarkably spacious. It could seat fourteen passengers, but on board now were only Liz, the oligarch and Jerry Simmons, sitting by himself on a two-seater sofa near the galley in the rear. As soon as they were airborne a slim young blonde stewardess in a smart navy blue suit with the shortest skirt Liz had ever seen on a uniform offered them smoked salmon and cold Sancerre. This is the life, thought Liz, settling back in her chair, realising without any feeling of guilt that she was the only one to accept the wine.

Sitting up front, alone with Brunovsky, she was wondering how much if anything she should tell him about Peggy’s recent discoveries. But she hesitated. She didn’t see it as any part of her job to tell Brunovsky that all his pals were crooks. He might well be aware of it already and he wouldn’t thank her for pointing it out. Tutti, for example. It was remarkable that Brunovsky had not even mentioned his supposed suicide. He might well know more about Harry Forbes than she did, and if that club was where he had met Monica, he must have a pretty good idea already of what sort of a girl she was.

As for Greta Darnshof, Liz determined to find out how much Brunovsky knew about her mysteriously funded magazine. She was about to raise the topic when Brunovsky finished his lunch, unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. He pointed towards the cockpit. “Excuse me, Jane, I must leave you for a little while. Monica hates flying, and when we travel together I have to sit and hold her hand. Now I have the rare opportunity to keep my pilot skills sharp. Hopefully, you won’t know if it’s me or the regular pilot who lands the plane.” He laughed and moved towards the nose of the plane.