Claire Kendal - I Spy

‘There is no wrongdoing. Because I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘We know that.’ But still she went on, telling me about the secret channels through which I could contact her to pass information. And I couldn’t help but listen, because the tradecraft she was describing, the basic techniques for surveillance and communications, fascinated me too much to stop her altogether or simply leave. She told me how to speak through classified advertisements, and about a dead letter drop she would set up near the bench where we were sitting. She mentioned a safe house, in case I ever needed to get away quickly.

‘You really have wasted your time and wasted your breath,’ I said, when she finally stopped.

‘We’ll see.’ Without another word, she got up to retrace her steps along the path, vanishing as suddenly as she appeared. She moved silently, and I realised that the rustle she’d made when she first approached was no accident. Nothing Maxine said or did ever was.

My head is filled with the little girl who visited the hospital yesterday. Each time I try to explain away her appearance there, I fail. I look over my shoulder, half-expecting to see Zac.

I am on my morning run. The route is already in my bones. My body moves along it without effort, though I barely slept last night. Hearing Peggy and James’s voices comforted me, but agitated me too. For so long, I have had to hide myself from the few people in the world I love, all the time fearing that Zac would turn up. Now, there is a high probability that he has, as well as the distinct possibility that he dragged a wife and child along with him.

But I am not going to sit around waiting for them to pop out at me again. Or for him to. I added Eliza to my telephone contacts last night. ‘Madam likes to be up early,’ she had said, ‘and my husband’s usually out before the sun, so call any time.’ I grab my phone from the pocket in the waistband of my leggings and use a voice command to do just that.

As we speak, Eliza clatters breakfast things and tries not to sound stressed, while Alice chatters in the background. We arrange to meet in the park for a quick coffee tomorrow morning, before I go into work. ‘Getting Alice out early into fresh air would be good,’ she says. There is a screech from Alice, and a crash of what sounds like glass onto tiles. ‘As you can hear.’ Eliza breaks off, though she hurriedly promises to bring the coffees.

I put the phone away and speed up. The sun is cutting through the pre-dawn mist and the bluebells are out already. Despite the two miles I have already run, and the call, I am not at all out of breath. I had to work hard to get this strong after it happened.

I turn into the disused railway line, going faster still, then enter the first tunnel. The dimness swallows me. The air seems still and dead, and smells of damp. Soon, though, the motion sensors begin, the flashes and sounds activated by my movement – Milly would love this. A circle of blue light surrounded by a white halo blazes at me from a window-shaped cut-out in the wall of stone, then a blast of violin music that is louder than my breathing as I speed up. But the tunnel is filled with ghosts, as if Eliza and Alice brought them along to the hospital and released them to chase after me.

I emerge into fresh, cool air, and the song of birds. There is the magic glimpse of a kingfisher in the gap between the two tunnels, by the river below. After the one that froze here last Christmas, I want so badly to take it as a good sign, but can’t bring myself to.

I enter the second tunnel, leaving the sunshine behind me again. When I come out the other end, I think of a baby’s first breaths, gasped in the midst of all that new brightness and noise. I try to envisage a baby’s birth as it should be, because the bad outcomes are the exceptions and it is important to keep that in mind.

‘Helen.’

I halt as if somebody has jerked me backwards. I know that voice, but I blink several times, as if to be sure of what I am seeing.

There is no doubt. The woman standing before me has stepped straight out of my nightmares.

It’s not the right time yet. Getting you out the right way will take time. We need to set things up properly.

It has been almost two years since I’ve seen her, and Zac is a better candidate for the starring role in my bad dreams. But Maxine is the one who comes to me in the night, just as she did on my last night in hospital, the sheets clinging, cold and damp from my sweat.

Maxine has this way of never seeming to look at anyone or anything, her eyes downcast, her shoulders rounded. She is droopy. That is the word I often think of when I observe her. Your eyes would slide over her as if she were the most uninteresting piece of grey furniture ever made. And that is exactly what she wants your eyes to do.

‘It’s good,’ she says, ‘how readily you respond to Helen. Presumably Graham is natural to you too, now?’

‘Yes.’ I hadn’t been out of breath, but now I am.

Maxine’s blouse is elegant in midnight-blue silk, but untucked and sloppy. Her loose black trousers disguise how slim and dangerously fit she is. She is slouchy, as ever. Only the unfortunate know what it means when she straightens her back, something she does rarely. I am one of that select group.

‘You look different.’ That flat flat flatness of her voice. The pretence of indifference, as if I am a neighbour she sees every day, walking up and down the path to the next-door house.

‘That’s hardly surprising.’

Time seems to spool backwards, speeding past her twilight swoop on me in the hospital almost two years ago – it’s too painful to freeze time there. It rushes further back, past her ambush on the cliffs two and a half years ago. Time stops six years ago, on the day I flunked out, sitting in that white-light room with the exposing glass table between us.

You’re like that puppy who was too friendly to be a police dog, she’d said. We don’t recruit good-looking people. You need to look like Jane Average, but you’re too vain to let yourself look that way.

She has left the rear door of the car open, the engine purring but the driver invisible behind dark windows and hidden by the partition that keeps his section of the car separate. We both know it is no accident that she has crossed my path. Nothing is ever an accident with Maxine.

‘Why are you here?’ I channel her flat indifference, though I am pretty sure I can guess. As repellent as she is to me, it is looking as though I am going to need her help.

‘Have you done anything to give yourself away?’

The question is a confirmation more than a surprise, but the air still puffs out of my stomach. ‘My grandmother …’ My voice trails off. ‘It’s possible, yes.’

She starts towards the car, parked where the road ends and the tunnel opens. ‘Come with me.’ It is as if I’d seen her yesterday, to hear her boss me around.