‘Eat,’ Elsa said.

And for a long time neither of them said anything.

51

Seated at an outdoor table at the Coach and Horses, a well-regarded pub on the Salisbury road at the eastern edge of Chalke Bissett, Kevin Vigors looked up from his second pint of Old Speckled Hen to see a navy-blue Renault Espace, number plate X164 AEO, coming around the corner. He stood up from the table, crossed the road to a telephone box and rang Amelia’s landline.

‘285?’

‘CUCKOO just turned into the village. Should be with you in three minutes.’

‘Thank you,’ Amelia said.

She replaced the receiver and looked at Kell, who was standing beside the Aga.

‘That was Kevin,’ she said. ‘Time for you to be going. He’ll be here in two minutes.’

Kell wished her good luck and walked to the back door, leaving the garden via the gate that connected Amelia’s house to the Shand property. Within moments he was standing with Elsa, Harold and Barbara Knight in the library, staring at the banks of surveillance screens, like traders anticipating a crash.

‘We should see him any second now,’ Kell said, taking off his coat and throwing it on a chair. Elsa looked up and caught his eye, smiling a private smile.

‘Here he comes,’ she said, returning her gaze to the screen in the upper left-hand corner.

A camera, high on a pylon with clear sight of the dark lane ahead, had picked out the approaching taxi. The twin headlights bumped along the road until the vehicle came to a halt. Kell watched as CUCKOO opened the rear door and stepped out on to the road, stretching his back after the long journey. He was wearing the same black leather jacket that Kell had searched in the hotel room in Tunis.

‘Wanker,’ Harold muttered, and everybody tried not to laugh.

Right on cue, entering the frame in the lower left-hand corner, came Amelia, her head and body in silhouette against the glare of the headlights. Though the reunion was taking place less than a hundred metres away on the lane, the team could hear no sound as she stretched out her arms and enveloped CUCKOO in a mother’s bone-crushing hug.

‘God, I hope she is all right,’ Elsa said, but Kell ignored the sentiment, because he knew that Amelia Levene would be just fine.

52

She buried her hate, tamped it down, hid it somewhere inside herself where it couldn’t get out.

She’d always been good at that. Compartmentalizing. Adjusting. Surviving. Ever since Tunis.

When she saw CUCKOO climb out of the cab, for a split second Amelia experienced the same untrammelled joy she had felt in Paris at seeing her beautiful son for the first time. Then it passed and the man she had known as François was an affront to her, a malign presence in her home. Yet she showed none of this with her eyes. Instead she reached out to hug him and found that she could easily say her lines.

‘Darling! You made it! I can’t believe you’re here.’

Even the smell of him was a betrayal, the aftershave he had worn at the hotels, his oils beside the pool. At times Amelia had felt an almost sexual desire to hold this man, to touch his skin, the sweet ache of a mother’s love for her child. She had thought of him as so handsome and sophisticated; she had marvelled at the job Philippe and Jeannine had done in raising such an interesting young man. And now this. An agent of French Intelligence in her own home, seeping into every crevice of her privacy and self-esteem. The days since Kell had broken the news to her in London had been, without question, the most wretched of her adult life; worse than the months following François’ adoption; worse than the death of her brother. She had only two consolations: the knowledge that she was a better liar than Luc Javeau, the snake Paris had sent to deceive her; and the real possibility that François was alive and that Kell could get to him in his captivity.

‘Come inside and unpack,’ she said, the taxi driver heading further down the narrow lane in order to find space outside the Shand house in which to turn around and set off on the long journey back to London. ‘We have the whole weekend ahead of us. Nothing in the world to worry about. What will you have to drink?’

At first, Kell did not recognize the voice; it was almost as though he had been speaking to a different man in the ferry disco. But then the cadences, the slick phrasing, the bizarre self-confidence of the CUCKOO personality came back to him, and he realized that he was listening to a master liar, a man who had all but absorbed another personality and embodied that which he had been instructed to impersonate. It was one of the quiet, shaming secrets of their secret trade; how quickly the spy wanted to set his own character aside and to inhabit a separate self. Why was that? Kell had no answer to it. He remembered how much his dissembling, the layers of his persona, had distressed Claire. He thought of her in America, far away among vineyards and Californians, and had to force off a surge of jealousy.

Elsa was beside him at the table, staring at the live feed from Amelia’s sitting room, listening to CUCKOO’s conversation through the speakers that Harold had set up in the library.

‘Who’s hungry?’ Harold asked, standing in the doorway holding a stack of ready-made pizzas.

‘This is not pizza,’ Elsa replied, looking at the boxes and making a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘This food is a disgrace. Wherever you get this, Tom, the supermarket should be closed down.’

‘Hang on a minute …’

One of the screens had caught Kell’s eye. Two white lights were flickering along the lane in what might have been a replay of the final stages of CUCKOO’s journey.

‘Who the fuck is that?’ Kell said. The car was moving steadily towards them, about thirty seconds from the parking area above Amelia’s garden. ‘Get Kevin on the phone.’

‘No reception,’ Harold said.

‘He’s got a radio, hasn’t he?’ Kell felt his temper rising, the threat of the operation going wrong almost before it had begun. ‘Elsa, check the radio.’

She scraped away from the table, found the radio in the kitchen, came back into the room.

‘Switched off,’ she said.

Kell couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He swore at Harold, because the link to Vigors had been a Tech-Ops responsibility. Harold was still holding the pizzas, like a delivery man waiting for a tip. ‘Put the fucking food down, Harold. Find out who this is.’

He pointed at the screen, the car now moving past Amelia’s house, beyond the scope of CCTV. Kell could hear the low growl of the engine as it approached.

‘It could just be people coming to supper next door,’ Barbara suggested. ‘Might even be the taxi. CUCKOO may have left something in the cab.’

‘It could be anybody,’ Kell replied, and ran outside.

53

He was just in time to find a burgundy Mercedes turning around in the lane. He closed the gate to the Shand house and stood in the road, holding a hand up to catch the driver’s eye. Kell knew who it was. He recognized the hunched figure at the wheel, the Blair-era sticker in the rear windscreen: ‘Keep Your Bullshit in Westminster’. The Mercedes came to a halt, mid-turn, and Kell heard the noise of an electric window sliding down.

‘Yes?’ came a voice. ‘Can I help you?’

He walked around to the driver’s window and leaned in.

‘Giles. Fancy seeing you here.’

Giles Levene was not a man noted for his ebullient personality, nor for a particularly wide range of facial expression. He greeted Kell with the same bland inconsequence that he might have reserved for an electrician who had come to read the meter.