Jon Stock - The Daniel Marchant Spy Trilogy - Dead Spy Running, Games Traitors Play, Dirty Little Secret

The MI5 document which had crossed his desk at lunchtime made it clear that, much as he had suspected, Dhar’s role in the attempted marathon bombing was far from certain. There was a South Indian element on the ground, as there had been in the previous year’s attacks, but there was no direct evidence to link the planning of the bombing to Dhar, and there were any number of other suspects in the frame.

Reports coming in from Arabic specialists at GCHQ’s sub-station in Scarborough were throwing up possible links to the wider Gulf region. In short, there was still not enough to nail the attack on Dhar, despite the South Indian connection and Dhar’s anti-American crusade. Harriet Armstrong had been flying a kite, hoping to please the Americans. Fielding had no intention of sharing this information with anyone, not yet. It made him feel better about Daniel Marchant, but guilty that he had handed him over so casually to Spiro.

Staff knew not to disturb their Chief during his swim, taken without exception at 3 p.m. every afternoon, when the pool was clear of the workers who used it during their lunch break. (Fielding didn’t realise it was actually empty because nobody wanted to be in the pool while the Chief was steaming up and down the fast lane.) Now, though, his phone was ringing with an internal tone. He headed for the steps and took the call, trusting that it was important. It was from Fielding’s deputy, Ian Denton, a former head of the East European Controllerate and one of his closest allies. He wanted an urgent meeting. Dripping with water, Fielding told him to come up to his office and wait. He knew Denton tried to deal with as much of the Chief’s day-to-day business as he could, never bothering him unless there was a serious problem.

‘We’ve picked up an undeclared flight into Szymany, northeastern Poland,’ Denton said ten minutes later, as Fielding looked out of his window at a solitary sandpiper bobbing in the Thames mud. Denton had spent much of his early career behind the Iron Curtain, where the fear of being overheard had become an obsession for Western case officers. As a result, his voice was so quiet that it was a struggle for anyone to hear him. But Fielding’s ear was fine-tuned, and he prided himself on never once having asked Denton to speak up.

‘Cheltenham’s analysed the data strings,’ Denton continued in a whisper. ‘ADEP was Fairford, and multiple onward dummy flight plans were filed. It was operating under special status.’

‘There’s a surprise,’ Fielding said, his back still to Denton, who was wrong-footed by the Chief’s apparent lack of concern. Denton–northern grammar school, Oxford, keen on carp fishing–began to regret his request for a meeting. All undeclared CIA flights anywhere in Europe had become a priority for MI6, following a personal request from the Prime Minister, who wasn’t as relaxed about them as his predecessor.

‘What’s strange is that it wasn’t picked up here,’ Denton continued. ‘Usually MI5…’

‘I know.’ Fielding turned and fixed Denton with a wry smile. ‘Leave it with me, Ian. Thanks.’

Denton was so thorough, Fielding thought, as he left the office. He liked that in an officer. His big break had come in the 1980s in Bucharest where, as a junior officer working under diplomatic cover, he had spent every weekend fishing for carp and bream at a lake on the edge of the capital. Nobody knew why until, nine months later, he hooked the head of Romania’s secret police, a fellow carper.

Fielding smiled. Maybe that was why Denton whispered: he didn’t want to scare the fish. Below him a yellow London Duck emerged out of the Thames, water pouring off it, and drove up the slipway that ran alongside Legoland’s outer perimeter wall. It was the only place the Second World War amphibious vehicle could get in and out of the water. Fielding had always wondered what the captain told the tourists as they passed by Legoland. One day he would take a ride and find out. Denton could come along too, with his rod.

Harriet Armstrong took Fielding’s call in her official Range Rover, on her way to spend the weekend at Chequers. Fielding had heard about the invitation, one which had yet to be extended to him.

‘Hope I haven’t disturbed you,’ Fielding began, failing to sound sincere.

‘If you’re calling about Marchant, I can’t help you,’ she said brusquely. ‘We passed him on to Spiro.’

‘I know. And I thought you should know, given you’re seeing him this weekend, that we’ll be filing a report to the PM on an undeclared CIA flight which left Fairford for Poland this morning. I seem to remember he was quite keen to know about such flights.’

‘So keen, he signed this one off himself,’ Armstrong said. ‘I’ll tell him you called.’

Fielding briefly considered phoning Sir David Chadwick, to remind him of their agreement at the Travellers that Marchant wasn’t to leave the country, but other measures were now needed. Armstrong’s increasingly close relationships with Spiro and the PM were beginning to irritate him. She might have removed Stephen Marchant from his post, but he had no intention of giving her the same satisfaction as far as he himself was concerned.

He called through to his secretary. ‘Get me Brigadier Borowski of the AW in Warsaw on the line.’

Leila turned the key in the front door and slipped into Marchant’s basement flat in Pimlico, across the river from Legoland. She was shocked by its untidiness, the unmade bed, clothes strewn across the floor, bottles spilling out of the wastepaper basket under his desk. Had the place been searched? She used to be a regular visitor here, and it had always been kept immaculate, almost too tidy. When he was suspended they had stopped staying over at each other’s places, except for the night before the marathon, when she had insisted he stayed. Marchant was determined to limit the fallout from his father’s departure to himself and no one else. They had stolen the occasional night away in the country, but Marchant had found it hard to relax. Until he had cleared his father’s name, he couldn’t be himself.

That self she had fallen for in those early days smiled up at her now from the photo of their final day at the Fort, propped up on his desk in the corner of the room. A group of them were in the SOE memorial room, posing in front of the wall where previous members of the Service had been honoured. Marchant’s arm was slung casually around her shoulders, like a college friend, giving no clue that they had slept together for the first time the night before. Already they were learning to deceive in love, mixing up their jobs with their private lives, just as Marchant had feared.

Next to the group photo was a picture of his father up a ladder in the orchard at Tarlton, in happier, idyllic Cotswold days. An eight-year-old Marchant in shorts was lying in a hammock strung between two apple trees, grinning confidently up at the camera. His twin brother, Sebastian, was lying next to him. They weren’t identical, but they shared the same smile. Sebastian’s face was turned towards his mother, who was standing at the bottom of the ladder, a basket of fruit in her arms. She was strikingly beautiful, confident, at ease with motherhood.

Marchant had only talked about the crash once, after they had both nearly drowned during survival training at the Fort. Sebbie, as Marchant sometimes called him, must have died a few weeks after the photo had been taken, in a traffic accident when they had returned to Delhi at the end of the English summer. Marchant had been in the jeep too when it collided head-on with a government bus, but he and his mother had survived unscathed.

Marchant’s family had stayed on in Delhi until the end of his father’s tour, which surprised colleagues. Later, he told Marchant that he hadn’t wanted to return home immediately because his family would have spent the rest of their lives hating India, and he couldn’t countenance that.