Kell was suddenly aware – too late, perhaps – of a threat from visual surveillance. A basic, low-light camera might have been fitted in his cabin. He was still lying on the narrow bed, arms propped behind his head, and tried quickly to recall how he had behaved since entering the room. He had been into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. He had poured himself a whisky, opened and then closed the laptop. He had looked – too long and too hard, perhaps – at the book of poems. How would his behaviour have seemed to Luc, watching on a blurred surveillance screen in Cabin 4571? Suspicious? Kell doubted it. Any agitation he might have shown could more plausibly have been interpreted as regret for not following Madeleine to her cabin. Nevertheless, he set about going to bed, knowing, of course, that if there was a camera concealed in a light fitting, or hidden behind the mirror, that he could not go looking for it. Instead, he must behave naturally. Rising from the bed, as though he had been briefly distracted by an unsettling thought, Kell keyed the ten-digit password into the laptop and typed a random sequence of letters into the computer for several minutes, to give the appearance of writing up a report or filling in the pages of a journal. Next, he turned to The Spirit Level, studying a couple of poems intently, as though his earlier behaviour had been some indication of scholarly angst. He then stripped to his underpants, took a T-shirt from his suitcase, and climbed into bed.

It was a relief to turn out the light and to lie in the darkness unseen, a taste of whisky and toothpaste in his mouth. Kell’s beating heart kept time to the thrumming of the engine and he felt enclosed by the womb of the ship. As soon as the ferry came within signal range of the European coast, Kell knew that he would be obliged to call London with an update. He had three options. He could tell Jimmy Marquand that Amelia Levene, the Chief-designate of the Secret Intelligence Service, had an illegitimate son. This was the truth of the situation and would fulfil Kell’s formal obligation to SIS. He could also reveal his suspicion that French Intelligence had discovered Malot’s identity, followed him to Tunisia and perhaps even attempted to recruit him en route to Marseille. Of course, these revelations would be catastrophic for Amelia and lead to her immediate dismissal from the Service. As a consequence, the revival of his own career would be stillborn; with Truscott in charge, Kell would remain persona non grata.

There was a second option. Kell could tell Marquand that François Malot was a fraud, that he was masquerading as Amelia’s son and had returned to France by ship in the company of at least two French Intelligence officers. But was there any evidence for this? Kell had spent an hour talking to Malot in the bar and at no point felt that he was speaking to an impostor. Amelia’s son bore a striking physical resemblance to his mother and his legend was watertight: a thorough search of his hotel room in Gammarth had failed to turn up anything suspicious. The purpose of the DGSE mounting such an operation – so fraught with risk, so difficult to carry off – was also not clear, but neither was it beyond the realms of possibility. Furthermore, the implications it entailed – that Malot’s adoptive parents had been murdered and their funeral faked – were too wretched to consider. For this reason, Kell set them to the back of his mind and concluded that he had no proof of such a conspiracy.

He settled, with no great fanfare or embattled conscience, on a third course of action. Let London continue to think that Amelia Levene is having an affair. Let Truscott and Haynes assume that she merely slipped her moorings for a few days in order to enjoy a dirty weekend with a French lothario in Gammarth. It was what they wanted to believe, after all; it was what they deserved to believe. To lie to Marquand in this way was not something Kell would have considered twelve months earlier, but his loyalty to the newly minted high priests of SIS was close to non-existent. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,’ he thought, remembering the words of E.M. Forster, ‘I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’

For the first time in his life, that notion made sense to him.

35

The safe house was located on the summit of a hill overlooking the southern expanse of the Ariège, about three kilometres east of the village of Salles-sur-l’Hers in Languedoc-Roussillon. It was approached from the south by a single-track road leading off the D625. The track passed the house in a tight loop and turned sharply downhill past a ruined windmill before rejoining the main road to Castelnaudary about two kilometres to the south-east.

There were usually only two guards at the house: Akim and Slimane. That was more than enough to keep an eye on HOLST. Each man had his own bedroom on the first floor with a shelf of pirated DVDs and a laptop computer. In the downstairs living room there was a large television equipped with a Nintendo Wii, and the two men spent as many as four or five hours every day playing rounds of golf in St Andrews, games of tennis at Roland Garros or fighting al-Qaeda insurgents in the backstreets and caves of a cartoon Afghanistan. They were forbidden to bring women to the house and lived off a steady diet of roast chicken, couscous and frozen pizzas.

HOLST himself was locked in a small room between the entrance hall and a large ground-floor bedroom at the southern end of the house. There were two doors leading into his makeshift cell. The main door, linked to the entrance hall, was secured by a padlock. The second, which connected the cell to the bedroom at the back, was held in place by two metal bars mounted on hooks. The boss had built a sight-glass into both doors to monitor HOLST’s movements and behaviour day and night. HOLST received three meals per day and was allowed to exercise for twenty minutes every afternoon on a small patch of grass behind the house. The exercise area was bordered on three sides by a twelve-foot hedge so that HOLST could not be seen by passers-by. He had never refused food and made no complaint about the conditions in which he was kept. If he needed to go to the bathroom, there was a bucket in his cell which Akim and Slimane emptied at meal times. From time to time, Slimane would grow bored and agitated and do things that Akim didn’t think he should do. On one occasion, for example, Slimane took his knife and put a gag in HOLST’s mouth, then heated the blade on the gas stove and got a kick out of watching HOLST wince and moan as he drew circles round his eyes. They never hurt him, though. They never touched a hair on his head. The worst thing, maybe, was when Slimane got drunk and told HOLST about a girl he had raped. That was a really bad story and Akim had gone in and got him to cool down. But generally Akim believed that the prisoner was being treated with dignity and respect.

After a week, on the instructions of the boss, HOLST had been allowed a television and some DVDs in his room, which he watched for up to sixteen hours every day. As a further gesture of goodwill, and against all protocol, Akim had let HOLST sit with him in the living room one evening – albeit while handcuffed to a chair – to watch a football match between Marseille and a team from England. He had given him a beer and explained that it would not be long before he was allowed to go back to Paris.

Akim’s only moment of real concern arose in the middle of the second week when a neighbour happened to pass by the house and enquire if the owners would be returning in the autumn. The sight of a shaven-headed Arabe in the rural Languedoc had evidently surprised the man, who had quite literally taken a step backwards when Akim had opened the door. Only a few metres away, Slimane had stuffed a dishcloth into HOLST’s mouth and was leaning a gun into his groin to prevent him from shouting for help. Akim had said that the owner was a friend from Paris who would be arriving within the next few days. Thankfully, the boss himself did indeed turn up the following afternoon and any concerned neighbours with binoculars trained on the house would have been gladdened by the sight of a bearded white man mowing the grass in his shorts and later diving into the outdoor pool.