‘I want to offer you a business proposal.’

‘OK.’

He liked this reaction: an easy nod, a half-glance at the meter.

‘What are you doing for the next few days?’

‘I work.’

‘Would you like to work for me?’

‘OK.’

Again, an easy nonchalance in the reply. Kell could hear a tractor running in the distance.

‘I’m here on business. I’m going to need a driver on call at the hotel from first thing in the morning to late at night. Do you think you can manage that?’

Sami thought for a fraction of a second and said: ‘OK.’

‘I’ll pay you five hundred dinars a day, first instalment up front.’

It was the equivalent of about two hundred pounds, a vast sum to a Tunisian who wouldn’t expect to earn more than a thousand dinars per month. Kell handed over the money. Still Sami maintained his inscrutable cool.

‘I’ll pay you the other instalments at the end of every second day. I don’t want you telling anybody about our arrangement and I may have to ask you to follow some people if they leave the hotel. Is that going to be a problem?’

‘That will not be a problem.’

‘Good. If I’m happy with your work, I’ll pay you a bonus of a thousand dinars.’

‘I understand.’ Sami nodded gravely; he had absorbed the importance of keeping his mouth shut. The two men shook hands again and finally Sami managed a smile. There was a photograph on the dashboard of two young girls dressed in pink for a special occasion. Kell indicated them with his eyes.

‘Yours?’ he asked.

‘My granddaughters,’ Sami replied and it was as though mention of his bloodline sealed the bond between them. ‘I have a son. In Marseille. In November I go to visit him.’

Kell took out his phone and scrolled through the photographs. He showed Sami the picture of Malot.

‘This is the man I’m interested in. Do you recognize him?’

Sami had to put on a pair of reading glasses in order to bring the picture into focus. When he had done so, he shook his head.

‘He’s staying at the Ramada,’ Kell explained. ‘He may be with this woman. She’s British, he is French.’ He showed Sami the JPEG of Amelia. It was taken from a passport photograph and the quality of the image was not good. ‘If either of them comes out of the hotel looking for a cab, try to get their business. If necessary, strike a deal with the other drivers so that you get to look after them. Let me know where they go and who you see them with. If you have to follow them, do so as discreetly as possible, but call me on this number before you leave. It may be that I can get downstairs in time and come with you or follow in a second vehicle.’

‘You have a hire car?’

Kell shook his head. He didn’t want to confuse him unnecessarily. ‘I meant that I’ll follow in another cab.’

They swapped numbers and Kell gave the Tunisian a basic timetable – seven until midnight. He then stepped out of the car, under the pummelling sun. He could see a path leading to the beach and decided to walk.

‘You go back to the hotel,’ he said. ‘Get in the queue of taxis. If you see them, call me.’

‘Fine,’ Sami replied with a nonchalance that was by now characteristic. It was as though he was asked to undertake clandestine work of this kind all the time.

Half an hour later, Kell was back in his room. The remains of his club sandwich were still on the bedside table, shards of crisps mingled with lettuce and congealed mayonnaise. He opened the door, put the tray in the corridor, had a cold shower, then went outside on to his balcony.

The swimming pool at the Valencia was still busy. There were at least twenty people in the water, families with small children splashing and shouting in the shallows. Directly beneath Kell’s window, a woman wearing a headscarf and a long black dress was seated in a plastic chair reading a magazine. Kell looked at the guests on either side of her, the dying sun casting a shadow across the pool.

That was when he saw her.

Lying on her back on a lounger, wearing a one-piece bathing suit and a wide-brimmed hat. A beautiful woman in her early fifties reading a paperback, sipping from a cup of coffee.

Amelia Levene.

16

On a quiet Friday afternoon two weeks earlier, Amelia Levene had managed to slip away from Vauxhall Cross just after 5 p.m. and to wrestle through weekend traffic to her house in the Chalke Valley. She was all too aware, in the wake of her recent appointment as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, that this would probably be the last weekend that she would be able to enjoy in Wiltshire for many months; the responsibilities of her new position would soon require her to live in London on an almost permanent basis. That would mean making a home in Giles’s house in Chelsea with roadworks for company and a protection officer on the door. Such was the price of success.

Amelia’s house, which she had inherited from her late brother in the mid-1990s, was located along a narrow lane at the western edge of a small village about eight miles south-west of Salisbury. It was dark by the time she pulled up outside, leaving the key in the ignition so that she could hear the end of a piano sonata on Radio 3. Once it was finished, she turned off her mobile phone – there was no reception in the village – picked up her leather overnight bag from the passenger seat and locked the car.

Peace. In the darkness, Amelia stood at the gate of the house and listened to the sounds of the night. Lambs, newborn, were bleating in a field on the opposite side of the valley. She could hear the rushing of the stream that swelled in springtime, sometimes so deep that she had swum in it, borne along by the freezing current from field to field. She could see lights in the second of the three houses that shared this isolated corner of the village. The first, one hundred metres away, was owned by a twice-divorced literary agent who, like Amelia, shuttled between London and Wiltshire as often as she could. Occasionally, the two women would invite one another into their homes to share a glass of wine or whisky, though Amelia had remained discreet about her position, describing herself as little more than ‘a civil servant’. The second house, hidden behind a steep hill, belonged to Charles and Susan Hamilton, an elderly couple whose family had been in the Valley for four generations. In the seventeen years that Amelia had lived in Chalke Bissett, she had exchanged no more than a few words with either of them.

It was cold to be standing outside after the warmth of the car and Amelia took the house keys from the pocket of her coat, switching off the burglar alarm once she had stepped inside. Her weekends usually adhered to a strict routine. She would switch on the Channel Four news, prepare herself a large gin and tonic with a slice of cucumber, find the ingredients to make a simple supper, then run a bath into which she poured oil from one of the three dozen bottles lining the shelves of her bathroom, all of them birthday and Christmas gifts from male colleagues at SIS who routinely gave books and booze to men and overpriced soap products to their female counterparts.

There was plenty of ice in the freezer, lemons in a bowl on the kitchen table. Amelia fixed the gin, sliced the cucumber and drank a silent toast in celebration of her husband’s absence from the house: Giles would be in Scotland for the long weekend, earnestly researching a withered branch of his breathtakingly tedious family tree. Solitude was something almost unknown to her now and she tried to savour it as much as possible. London was a constant merry-go-round of meetings, lunches, cocktail parties, connections: at no point was Amelia alone for more than ten minutes at a time. For the most part she relished this lifestyle, her proximity to power, the buzz of influence, but there had been an increasingly bureaucratic dimension to her work in recent months that had frustrated her. She had stayed with SIS to spy, not to discuss budget cuts over canapés.