Paris itself had also embarked on a shame-faced internal investigation into the behaviour of Luc Javeau, details of which were leaked to Vauxhall Cross by Amelia’s source in the DCRI. It was confirmed that Javeau had indeed been the officer tasked with cleaning up the mess left by DENEUVE’s treachery. The scandal had stalled his career, a setback he blamed squarely on Levene and which his superiors were only too happy to avenge by waving through Javeau’s plans for the Malot operation. In the aftermath of François’ release, more formal channels saw the DGSE distancing itself from the ‘unpredictable rogue elements’ that had threatened to break the ‘formidable and lasting intelligence relationship between our two countries’. Amelia’s opposite number in Paris also stressed the importance of keeping what had happened in Salles-sur-l’Hers a secret, both to protect Mrs Levene’s privacy but also ‘to avoid any complications with our respective governments’. It was taken for granted that Paris was outraged by the assassination of serving DGSE personnel on French soil by an unaccountable unit of British ex-Special Forces.

Information on Valerie de Serres was harder to come by, but it was demonstrated that she was a former GIPN officer, born in Montreal, who had met Luc while their respective agencies had been working on a joint counter-terrorism oper-ation. Amelia characterized her baleful influence over Luc as ‘Lady Macbeth stuff’, and it was generally accepted that Valerie had managed to convince Javeau to quit the DGSE and to ransom François for private gain.

As for Kell himself, his forty-third birthday brought no great change in his circumstances. With the Yassin trial scheduled for the new year, Amelia had made it clear that she could not be seen to bring him back into the Service without the good name of ‘Witness X’ being cleared in court and the incident wiped from Kell’s record. There had been no word from Claire since her return from California, so he continued to rent his bachelor bedsit in Kensal Rise, eating take-aways and watching old black-and-white movies on TCM. Amelia had arranged for Kell’s salary and pension to be reinstated, yet her gratitude towards him for facilitating the release of her son had not been as fulsome as perhaps Kell had anticipated. He felt like a man who had spent a fortune on a present for a close friend, only to see them tuck it away, unopened, in a cupboard, embarrassed by such an act of generosity. In this atmosphere, Kell occasionally began to resent the risks he had taken on Amelia’s behalf, the secrets he had consented to keep, but his affection and respect for her was such that he was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. Amelia’s behaviour was bound to have been affected by what had happened in France, as well as by the demands – and status – of her new position as Chief. In time, he told himself, she would bring him back into the fold and give him the pick of any overseas job that caught his eye. Kell looked forward to that day, not least because it might offer him some respite from London and from the collapse of his marriage to Claire.

It was Kell who saw the old man first, shuffling along the road in a grey flannel suit. He knew his face because he had watched him, from this same spot, three days earlier.

‘Here he comes,’ he whispered.

François leapt up from the bench but Amelia remained seated, as though Kell and François were acolytes, her guardian angels. She heard François say: ‘Where?’ and looked up to see him squinting in the direction in which Kell was facing.

‘He’s coming across the street,’ Kell replied quietly. ‘The man with white hair in the grey suit. Do you see him?’

‘I see him.’ François stepped away from them, as if to give himself more time to take in what he was witnessing. Only now did Amelia turn. Kell would later tell himself that he had heard her gasp, but it may simply have been a trick of his imagination.

Jean-Marc Daumal seemed instantly to sense the presence of Amelia Weldon and stopped at the edge of the square, as though tapped on the shoulder by a ghost. He looked directly at the three figures on the bench but appeared to be having difficulty bringing them into focus. He took two paces forward. Kell and François remained where they were, but Amelia moved towards him.

His head began to shake as he saw her, everything that he had recalled of her beauty still present in her face. Soon he was only metres away from the bench.

‘Amelia?’

‘C’est moi, Jean-Marc.’ They came together and kissed one another lightly on both cheeks.

‘What are you doing here?’

He looked beyond her and scanned Kell’s face, perhaps assuming that he was the man who had finally won Amelia’s heart. Then he looked to Kell’s left, at the young man, and frowned, gazing at him as though trying to remember if they had met before.

‘I knew you would be here,’ Amelia told him, resting her hand on Daumal’s wrist. She was shocked by how much he had changed, and yet the years had not extinguished all of her love for him. A person is lucky to know even one person in their life who understands and cares for them so completely. ‘You look well,’ she said.

Amelia caught Kell’s eye in a moment of deep affection for him, a sudden reward for all that he had done for her. Then she turned so that she was facing her son.

‘Jean-Marc, there is somebody I would like you to meet.’

The Background to

A Foreign Country

In July 2001, Binyam Mohamed, a 23-year-old Ethiopian national who had been living in the UK for seven years while awaiting political asylum, traveled to Afghanistan from his home in west London. The reason for his journey is still disputed. Mohamed insists that he went to Afghanistan to experience Muslim culture at first-hand and to conquer an addiction to heroin. The American government argues that he received paramilitary instruction at al Farouq, an al-Qaeda training camp near Kandahar.

By April 2002, several months after the attacks of September 11^th, Binyam Mohamed had made his way to Pakistan. When he attempted to leave the country on a false passport (his own Ethiopian passport had been stolen and he was using a document belonging to a friend), he was arrested by immigration authorities in Karachi and imprisoned. This is where his nightmare began. Over the course of the next several years he was rendered to CIA ‘black’ prisons in Afghanistan and Morocco, subjected to brutal torture, and sent to Guantanamo in 2005. Binyam Mohamed was charged with collaborating in an al-Qaeda plot to detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the United States (a plot that later turned out to be non-existent) and was finally released from custody in 2009. Thanks to the efforts of his lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith at Reprieve, Mohamed was eventually cleared of all charges. He returned to the UK and was given an undisclosed compensation settlement by the British government, thought to be in the region of £800,000.

Mohamed’s grim story is of specific interest to me because of the role played by Britain’s intelligence services in the early stages of his capture. Almost as soon as he was arrested, Mohamed was interviewed by an MI5 officer, now known by the codename ‘Witness B’. Witness B is alleged to have provided American officials with questions that were used during Mohamed’s subsequent torture. MI5 was to find itself at the centre of a legal action in which one of its officers stood accused of colluding in the torture of an innocent man.

The central character in A Foreign Country, Thomas Kell, is an MI6 officer who has been kicked out of the Service for his part in the ‘aggressive interrogation’ of a British national named Yassin Gharani. Unlike Mohamed, Gharani is a fully-fledged ‘jihadi tourist’ who has been picked up in Kabul by the Americans in the wake of 9/11. Kell is present at a joint CIA/MI6 interrogation of Gharani, and is aware that his rendition and ill-treatment are imminent. Kell advises Gharani to come clean and to co-operate with MI6 and the British government. ‘If he decided to keep quiet and keep playing the innocent, then I couldn’t be responsible for what the Americans would do with him. We felt that Yassin knew things that would be useful to us and we ran out of patience with him when he wouldn’t talk.’