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

He knew he wasn’t safe yet. Leaning over the side of the train, he grabbed the heavy door and swung it shut. The door clicked closed, but not properly. There was no time to push it flush with the side of the carriage. He started to shuffle back down the roof of the train, towards economy class, keeping his body as flat as he could.

Below him, a posse of policemen entered the carriage from the far end, making their way through the sleeping families, looking for someone. They didn’t disturb passengers unless they couldn’t see their faces. When they reached Kirsty’s and Holly’s cubicle, the policeman in charge deferred to a female colleague, who moved forward. Holly’s face was clearly visible, but Kirsty’s was hidden beneath her blanket.

‘Yes please, wake up madam, we need to see your passport,’ the policewoman said, tugging on Kirsty’s blanket. She then spoke to Holly, whose eyes had opened. ‘Passport, madam? Police check.’

Holly sat up and fumbled sleepily through her rucksack, which was at the end of her bed. ‘Kirsty, wake up,’ she called across to her friend, who was still asleep. ‘Kirsty?’

Kirsty stirred, blinking at the policewoman, whose head was just below the level of her bunk. Instinctively, she turned to where Marchant had been lying, and then looked back at the woman.

‘Lost something?’ she said to Kirsty.

‘Just my bag.’

‘Is this it?’ the policewoman said, tapping the rucksack at Kirsty’s feet.

Kirsty nodded, then pulled out her passport from the money belt around her waist, sweeping back her hair, still half asleep. Where had David gone? She hadn’t heard him leave. As the woman inspected both passports, then passed them to her senior colleague, Holly glanced quizzically at Kirsty, who shrugged.

‘Is there something wrong?’ Kirsty asked.

‘We’re looking for an Irishman, David Marlowe,’ the senior officer said, a bamboo lathi in one hand. ‘He was seen embarking this train in Delhi with two female foreign tourists. Have you seen anyone of this name?’

Kirsty glanced at Holly.

‘Yes, he’s travelling in economy,’ Holly said. ‘We only met him on the platform at Nizamuddin. Bit of a loser.’

Kirsty threw her a reproachful, confused look. She knew she should have stayed in Delhi with Anya.

‘Which place was he heading?’ the policewoman asked, making notes on a small pad.

‘Why don’t you ask her,’ Holly said. ‘She knew him better.’

‘He helped us out in a difficult situation on the platform in Delhi,’ Kirsty said, addressing Holly as much as the policewoman. ‘I think he said he was going as far as Vasai.’

Whatever David might have done wrong, Kirsty thought, he had still gone out of his way to help them in Delhi. Holly seemed to have forgotten that.

‘Vasai? He wasn’t travelling to Goa then?’

‘He didn’t have enough money.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘No.’

‘And he was travelling alone?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Any luggage?’

‘I don’t think so. Why are you asking me so many questions?’

‘Can you recall what was he wearing?’

‘I don’t know.’ Kirsty suddenly felt very tired. ‘Jeans?’

‘He smelt, that’s all I remember,’ Holly said. Kirsty didn’t even bother to look at her this time. She just wanted to go back to sleep, and wake up in her own bed in Britain.

‘A word of advice, madam,’ the policewoman said, handing back both passports to Kirsty. ‘Stay away from ne’er-do-wells like David Marlowe.’

‘What’s he done?’ Holly asked.

‘You’ll read about it soon enough in today’s papers. He’s dangerous, a slippery fellow.’

Fielding had ordered his driver to turn round and head back to the office after dropping Myers in Trafalgar Square, where he said he would pick up a night bus to a friend’s flat in North London. Legoland was reassuringly busy as Fielding took the lift up to his office. It troubled him when the place was quiet. He left a message on Denton’s mobile, asking him to get in early the next day, and then settled back down at his desk to read through Leila’s Developed Vetting report, which he had called up from the night duty manager. At about 3 a.m. he asked for the latest files on the Bahá’í community in Iran, Ali Mousavi, and the London Marathon attack, which needed to be delivered by trolley.

By the time dawn broke, a vivid orange warming the dark Thames beneath his window, Fielding had a better understanding of the threat posed by Leila, and the implications of her unprecedented triple-agent status for the Service, for Stephen Marchant, and for his own career. The Americans would have to make their own assessment, based on a briefing he would give Straker in a few hours. She was their problem now.

The implications for MI6 were still catastrophic, though, if Leila, one of the Service’s star recruits, had been working for VEVAK, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, from the day she arrived at Legoland. Developed Vetting, introduced ten years before, was meant to guarantee the highest level of clearance, far superior to routine counter-terrorism and security checks. Such vetting was more important than ever now that the intelligence services were recruiting from such diverse ethnic backgrounds, but in Leila’s case it appeared to have suffered an unprecedented failure.

A wide-ranging interview had been carried out with Leila shortly after she first applied to the Service, followed by two further interviews before she began training at the Fort, nine months after her initial application. The last of these had been conducted in the presence of a senior vetting officer, and triggered an ‘aftercare’ concern about family ties to Iran.

A more junior vetting officer was dispatched to interview Leila’s mother at her home in Hertfordshire. Widowed two years earlier, she had been a resident of the UK for more than twenty-five years, after fleeing her job as a university lecturer in Tehran at the time of the Revolution. She was a devout Bahá’í, and had continued to follow her religion in England, joining a small local group.

The subsequent DV report raised no security objections, describing Leila’s mother as a fully integrated member of British society. Along with other Bahá’ís who had left Iran to live in Britain, she was vehemently opposed to the current regime in Tehran, but she was a low-key member of the expatriate Bahá’í community. Significantly, she had not been associated with any of the various political campaigns around the world that called for religious freedom in Iran.

Two months before Leila began her training at the Fort, her mother was interviewed for a second time. She was still at the same address, but there was talk of her moving out to a nursing home in Harpenden. The interview came back clean, and a handwritten note had been added to the file suggesting that further interviews should be avoided if they were not strictly necessary. Much of what she said appeared muddled, and it was concluded that she was presenting signs of early onset Alzheimer’s.

What troubled Fielding was the vetters’ complete failure to pick up on the mother’s move back to Iran, which must have taken place shortly after her last interview. As far as the vetters were concerned, she was still residing in Hertfordshire. It would have been Leila’s responsibility to inform MI6 of any change in her family circumstances, particularly given the West’s sensitive relationship with Iran, but she had clearly chosen not to tell a soul. Within Whitehall it was acknowledged that Developed Vetting relied too heavily on the responsibility of the individual to report such changes, but the system’s fundamental flaws had never been so exposed.