‘How did you find the food in Tunisia?’ Stephen was asking.

He could tell that the Englishman was struggling for conversation, but this was a subject about which François was enthused. He replied that he had enjoyed an evening with his mother at an open-air fish restaurant in La Goulette, but that they had both been disappointed by the couscous at an undeservedly famous Tunisian restaurant in Sidi Bou-Said.

‘I had a disastrous time with the food,’ Stephen revealed. ‘Ordered “merguez” in one place thinking it was fish, but ended up with a sausage. Tried to play it safe the next night by ordering “tajine”, but that turned out to be some kind of omelette. Hadn’t been within a thousand miles of Morocco. You said your mother lives in Tunis?’

Now François was trapped. He would have to say something about Amelia or it would seem rude.

‘It’s a long story.’

Stephen looked at his drink, looked at the disco ball, looked at François. ‘I’ve got all night.’

So he told him. The whole thing. The murder in Egypt. Trying to contact Amelia through the adoption agency. Their reunion in Paris. Then he described the week they had spent together in Gammarth. It was like telling a favourite anecdote; he embellished certain elements, skipped over the parts that no longer interested him, tried to depict Amelia in the best possible light. Stephen, as François had anticipated, was by turns appalled at the tragedy in Sharm-el-Sheikh and delighted that mother and son had been brought together so quickly in its aftermath. Yet François soon began to tire of his sympathy and questions. By eleven o’clock he had reached the bottom of a second drink, the one he had been obliged to buy for Stephen in thanks for the first, and wanted desperately to be free of him so that he could return to his cabin. It was just a question of finding a way to escape. Thankfully, a woman on the opposite side of the bar had been staring at them for some time. At first, François could not tell with whom she was flirting. She was an attractive, if severe woman in her late thirties; he had seen her on the ship in the afternoon, reading a newspaper in the lobby. Usually, he would have assumed that any available woman on board would have preferred his company to that of the Englishman, yet increasingly she seemed to be directing her attention towards Stephen.

‘Looks like someone likes you,’ he said, flicking his eyes in her direction.

‘Who?’ It appeared that Stephen had not even noticed the woman.

‘Across the bar. The lady with the dyed blonde hair. You want me to invite her over?’

Stephen looked across, startled. François noted a flush of embarrassment in his cheeks as he caught her eye. She looked away.

‘I think she’ll almost certainly be more interested in you,’ Stephen replied.

It was a flattering observation but it was also the opportunity François had been waiting for. His glass was empty. There was a long day ahead. He had every excuse to leave.

‘No,’ he said, rising from his stool. ‘I will leave you to her.’ He shook the Englishman’s hand. ‘It was interesting to meet you. I enjoyed our conversation very much. Perhaps we will see one another again in the morning.’

‘I hope so,’ Stephen replied, and with that the two men parted.

33

It had been a long time since any woman had given Thomas Kell the eye and he was suspicious immediately. Why now? Why on the boat? As soon as Malot left, the woman went full throttle with her disco seduction: a comely smile, an eyelash enticement, even a smothered, schoolgirl laugh when the middle-aged disc jockey in his sparkly booth started playing ‘Billie Jean’ at top volume. The approach was so gauche that Kell began to think she could only be a run-of-the-mill civilian: surely no intelligence officer – state-sponsored or private sector – would ever make such an obvious and direct approach?

As soon as François had left she was coming over, slipping off her stool, walking around the bar. Kell looked away in the direction of the portside windows, but there was soon a slice of dyed blonde hair in his peripheral vision, then the bottom of a skirt, a slash of thigh. She was standing beside him. Late thirties, slim, no wedding ring. Their eyes met and she produced a knowing smile.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

He didn’t. The accent was scrambled, originally French, but with long periods of exposure to North America. He had no idea where or when they might have met. Did she know him as ‘Thomas Kell’, or as another man, one of the myriad pseudonyms he had adopted down the years? Was he a spy to this woman, or a consultant? Was he a lawyer or a civil engineer? Had he met her when he was ‘attached to the Ministry of Defence’ in London or was she a student from his long-ago days at Exeter University? He could not remember anything about her, and was usually expert at such things. Perhaps she was connected to him via Claire: Kell had always had a blind spot for his wife’s colleagues, her cousins, her friends.

‘I’m afraid I don’t …’

‘It’s Madeleine. You remember? DC?’

Kell tried to keep his composure as his memory ran a showreel of highlights from numerous visits to the American capital: interminable meetings at the Pentagon; a rainy afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial; guided tours of the National Museum of American History; the firing range at Langley, where an over-excited training officer on the Farm had tried to instigate a shooting competition between SIS and the CIA. At no point could Kell recall a slim, bottle-blonde French woman with a scrambled accent playing any part in these proceedings.

‘DC?’ he repeated, buying time.

Had he met her at a dinner, in a bar, in a nightclub? Kell knew the names and faces of the eleven women he had been to bed with in the course of his life and this lady wasn’t one of them.

‘It’s Michael, isn’t it?’ she said.

He knew then that she had made a mistake. He had never used the legend ‘Michael’. Stephen, yes. Tim, Patrick, Paul. Never Michael.

‘I think you may have confused me with somebody else,’ he said. ‘I’m Stephen. Stephen Uniacke. From England. Good to meet you.’ Kell extended a friendly hand, because he did not want to embarrass her. It was perfectly plausible that she had invented an entire phantom story simply to break the ice.

‘How strange,’ she replied. ‘Are you sure?’ Her neck flushed red and the thump of ‘Rolling in the Deep’, the energy in the bar, seemed to isolate her. ‘I was certain it was you. I’m so sorry …’

She began to back away, heading towards her seat, as though she had asked a boy to dance and he had refused her. The barmaid seemed to be enjoying the atmosphere of embarrassment and was staring at the woman, probably storing up an anecdote for the later amusement of the crew. Kell was aware that any number of possibilities was still in play: ‘Madeleine’ could be part of a surveillance team watching François. If French Intelligence had found out about Malot’s relationship with Amelia, they would almost certainly have sent people to track him. Kell’s lengthy conversation with François at the bar would have been noted. Madeleine, on post in the entertainment lounge, would have known that she had a responsibility to find out more about him. Hence her ridiculous story about Washington: she had not had the time, nor perhaps the expertise, to think up a better cover.

‘Please, let me buy you a drink,’ he said, because it was now important for him to ascertain precisely who she was. He could not remember seeing Madeleine at either of the hotels in Tunisia, but that was of little consequence. Even a half-decent DGSE team would have remained under the radar.

‘I don’t want to bother you,’ she said, with an expression of neediness on her face that precisely contradicted that statement. ‘Are you sure?’