Charles Cumming - A Colder War

On his third afternoon in Ankara, Kell took a taxi to Wallinger’s suburban villa in Incek, a property owned by the Foreign Office and occupied by successive Heads of Station for most of the previous two decades. Turning the key in the front door, Kell reflected that he had searched many homes, many hotel rooms, many offices in his career, but had only had cause to snoop on a friend once before – when searching for Amelia two years earlier. It was one of the healthier house rules at SIS and MI5: staff were required to sign a document pledging not to investigate the behaviour of friends or relatives on Service computers. Those caught doing so – running background checks on a new girlfriend, for example, or looking for personal information about a colleague – would quickly be shown the door.

The villa was starkly furnished in the modern Turkish style with very little of Wallinger’s taste apparent in the décor. Kell suspected that his yali in Istanbul would be quite different in atmosphere: more cluttered, more scholarly. It appeared as though a cleaner had recently been to the property, because the kitchen surfaces were as polished as a showroom, the toilets blue with detergent, the beds made, the rugs straightened, not a speck of dust on any shelf or table. In the cupboards, Kell found only what he would have expected to find: clothes and shoes and boxes; in the bathroom, toiletries, towels and a dressing-gown. Beside Wallinger’s bed there was a biography of Lyndon Johnson; beneath the television downstairs, box sets of all five series of The Wire . The villa, as soulless as a serviced apartment, revealed very little about the personality of the occupant. Even Wallinger’s study had a feeling of impermanence: a single photograph of Josephine on the desk, another of Andrew and Rachel as children hanging on the wall. There were various magazines, Turkish and English, paperback thrillers on a shelf, a reproduction poster of the 1974 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. Kell read through a few scribbled notes in a foolscap pad, found an out-of-date diary in the desk, but no hidden documents, no letters concealed behind pictures, no false passports or suicide note. Wallinger had kept a tennis racket and a set of golf clubs in a cupboard under the stairs. Feeling somewhat foolish, Kell checked for a hidden compartment in the handle of the racket and for a false bottom in the golf bag. He discovered nothing but some old tees and two hardened sticks of prehistoric chewing gum. It was the same story upstairs. Checking behind drawers, unscrewing lampshades, looking under cupboards – Wallinger had hidden nothing in the house. Kell moved from room to room, listening to the intermittent sounds of birdsong and passing cars in the suburban street outside, and concluded that there was nothing to find. Tremayne had been right – Wallinger’s heart had been in Istanbul.

Kell was in a bathroom adjacent to the smaller of two spare bedrooms when he heard the front door opening and then slamming shut. The sound of a set of keys falling on to the surface of a glass table. Not an intruder; it had to be someone who had legitimate access to the villa. A cleaner? The landlord?

Kell left the bathroom and walked out on to the landing. He called out: ‘ Merhaba ?’

No reply. Kell began to walk downstairs, calling out a second time: ‘ Merhaba ? Hello?’

He could see down into the hall. A faint shadow moved across the polished floor. Whoever had come in was now in Wallinger’s office. As he reached the mid-point of the stairs, Kell heard a reply in a sing-song accent he recognized instantly.

‘Hello? Somebody is there, please?’

A woman came out of the office. She was wearing blue leggings and a black leather jacket and her hair was grown out and tied at the back. Kell hadn’t seen her since the operation to save François Malot, in which she had played such a crucial role. When she saw him, her face broke into a wide smile and she swore excitedly in Italian.

‘ Minchia !’

‘Elsa,’ Kell said. ‘I wondered when I’d run into you.’

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