Claire Kendal - I Spy

‘Good book?’ The voice was familiar. I looked up to see the woman remove her sunglasses. There was the same indigo eyeliner, the same thick mascara, the same crimson lipstick. Her hands were gloved, but I was betting the nails were scarlet.

‘Yes.’ It was a present from Zac, a beautiful old edition, given because he knew how much the novel meant to me.

Maxine perched her sunglasses back on her nose, then extracted a clear plastic bag from her backpack, which contained pastries. ‘Croissant?’

I squinted at her. ‘No. Thank you.’

‘Bottle of water?’

‘Again, no. Thank you.’

It had been three and a half years since I crashed out of my final interview for MI5, and her appearance was so unexpected I wondered if I was dreaming. Why on earth was she seeking me out after all that time, and offering me breakfast?

‘I’d like to talk to you.’ She seemed to be answering my unspoken question. She looked out at the sea with her usual indifference and took a bite of a croissant. ‘Stale,’ she said, tossing it behind her without looking.

I stifled a laugh. ‘We had to do a role-play exercise, during that residential assessment. We pretended to be agent handlers making an approach to a potential informant. “Always provide amenities.” That was part of your script for how to recruit an agent. Are you trying to recruit me, Maxine?’

To my astonishment, she said, ‘Yes. I am.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘I’m completely serious. You’re in a position to help us. I’ve come to ask if you will.’

I had fantasised about Maxine seeking me out, Maxine telling me she’d got it wrong, Maxine saying that getting rid of me was the great misjudgement of her career, Maxine confessing that she – that they – needed me.

‘Are you offering me a proper job with the Security Service?’

‘You have access to intelligence that we need, and we know you’re skilful enough to get it for us.’

‘No you don’t. You don’t think that about me at all. I seem to remember that flattery is part of that script for recruiting informants, too.’

‘It is, as a matter of fact. But I do think you’re skilful – there was only that one critical flaw that ended the possibility of your joining us.’

‘Please spare me the flattery. I’d have thought that if you wanted a lab report or a patient’s medical record you could reach right in and grab them.’

‘That isn’t what this is about. But technically speaking, yes, you would be a Covert Human Intelligence Source, or agent – what the cousins call a human asset. I much prefer their term. You already know, Holly, that a human asset collects information for us, then passes it on.’

Her words stabbed away the mad bit of hope I’d somehow conjured. What Maxine wanted – what they wanted – was to use me. I was little more than a drone to them, and would never be properly inside MI5.

‘And you would be my handler?’

‘Yes. I would have responsibility for your security and welfare. Something we take very seriously.’

‘I bet. So you see me the same way you see a drug dealer who gets to stay out of jail if he reports on the bad guys who are above him in the chain. Or a prostitute who you’ll pay if she gives you information about her pimp. Or someone working for a company with trade secrets you’re after.’

‘Those aren’t the only kinds of agents we recruit.’

‘Nice of you to say. I’d be a rubbish informant, and I don’t have access to any intelligence you could possibly be interested in.’ I concentrated on the soft slap of the water as it gently rolled in and out.

‘You have integrity – the qualities that made you want to join us in the first place.’

‘I meant it about skipping the flattery section of your script. You don’t think I have a single atom of integrity. You remember why I bombed my MI5 interview.’

She ignored this unseemly reminder with the tact of a hostess managing an awkward guest. ‘We are authorised to make arrangements of this nature, Holly, in order to detect or prevent a crime, protect national security, or in the interests of the economic well-being of the UK.’

‘Is that some kind of legal document they made you memorise?’

‘Again, you are correct.’

‘What is this really about, Maxine?’

‘Your new boyfriend is Zachary Hunter.’

I was trailing my index finger over the gold lettering on Jane Eyre’s cover, then tracing the edge of the oval portrait of Charlotte between the title and the author’s name. ‘You obviously know that he is.’

‘So you know about his ex-wife?’

‘I know she left him.’ I followed a fishing boat with my eyes, a speck whose ghost-shape outline I could still see, imprinted from when it had been closer to land.

‘Does he know where she is?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘It’s been tried. The experiment was not successful.’

I shrugged. ‘Well why should he know? The fact that she’s not in his life is pretty normal, given the circumstances. That’s how it is with most people after a relationship ends. Not to mention the fact he divorced her on the grounds of desertion.’

If Maxine were given to expressiveness, I couldn’t help but feel that she would be rolling her eyes. ‘She’s classified as a missing person. Did he tell you that the police questioned him about her disappearance?’

There was a trickle of sweat down my spine. ‘The police always question previous partners. There can’t have been any evidence against him or they’d have charged and tried him.’ Then, the obvious thing, the thing I should have asked first, came to me. ‘Why do you care about this?’

‘I care about a missing woman.’

‘No you don’t. Even if you did, it’s not the kind of thing MI5 gets involved in.’

‘Believe what you like. You know it isn’t protocol for us to explain the reasons for what we do to potential informants with no security clearance. Do you know her name?’

‘Jane.’ I didn’t elaborate on my failure to discover her surname. I’d tried a few Internet searches for her under Zac’s but found nothing. I hadn’t wanted to press him to talk about her, when I could see how painful he found it.

‘Jane Miller,’ Maxine said, as if she guessed that my knowledge was limited. ‘Let me give you some facts.’

‘I don’t want your facts.’

‘Hear me out. Okay?’

I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t stop her, either.

‘Born August fourth, 1980, in London. Raised there by a single mother. Father was American – died in 2008 – Jane never knew him, unless seeing him as a baby counts. The father moved back to the US after Jane’s mother divorced him – their relationship ended before Jane’s first birthday. The mother’s been dead since 1998.’

I couldn’t quell my own curiosity, though I tried to sound bored. ‘What was – is – Jane’s profession?’

‘Social worker.’

‘Maybe she pissed somebody off. Maybe you should be looking at that.’

‘She stopped working a few years before she disappeared.’

‘What was her area?’

‘The elderly – not a speciality where she’d be likely to attract a lot of hate.’

‘You didn’t tell me the names of her parents.’ I pulled Jane Eyre closer, across my tummy, as if to shield myself.

‘Jane’s mother was Isabelle Miller. Her father was Philip Veliko. Philip remarried soon after he returned to the US and had a son with his new wife. Frederick.’

‘Would the father’s new family have reason to resent Jane?’

‘Jane inherited some money from her father, but the second wife predeceased him and Frederick didn’t dispute Jane’s inheritance – everything was split equally between Frederick and Jane. No known grievances or hostile behaviour from any of them.’