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The description was near-perfect. Emerging from the customs hall through a set of automatic doors, Kell was confronted by a languid Englishman with a deep suntan, wearing pressed chinos and a button-down cream shirt. A pistachio cashmere jumper was slung over his shoulders and knotted, in the Mediterranean style, across his chest. The moustache was no longer dyed but it looked as though Bill Knight had dedicated at least fifteen minutes of his evening to combing every strand of his thinning white hair. Here was a man who had never quite forgiven himself for growing old.
‘Tom, I assume,’ he said, the voice too loud, the handshake too firm, full lips rolling under his moustache as though life was a wine he was tasting. Kell toyed with the idea of saying: ‘I’d prefer it if you referred to me at all times as Mr Kell,’ but didn’t have the energy to hurt his feelings.
‘And you must be Barbara.’ Behind Knight, lingering in what Claire called ‘the Rain Man position’, was a small lady with half-moon spectacles and a deteriorated posture. Her shy, sliding eye contact managed both to apologize for her husband’s slightly ludicrous demeanour and to establish an immediate professional chemistry that Kell was glad of. Knight, he knew, would do most of the talking, but he would get the most productive information from his wife.
‘We have your car waiting outside,’ she said, as Knight offered to carry his bag. Kell waved away the offer and experienced the unsettling realization that his own mother, had she lived, would now be the same vintage as this diminutive lady with unkempt grey hair, creased clothes and soft, uncomplicated gestures.
‘It’s a luxury saloon,’ said Knight, as if he disapproved of the expense. His voice had a smug, adenoidal quality that had already become irritating. ‘I think you’ll be quite satisfied.’
They walked towards the exit. Kell caught their reflection in a facing window and felt like a wayward son visiting his parents at a retirement complex on the Costa del Sol. It seemed astonishing to him that all that SIS had placed between the disappearance of Amelia Levene and a national scandal were a superannuated spook with a hangover and two borderline geriatric re-treads who hadn’t been in the game since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps Marquand intended Kell to fail. Was that the plan? Or had the Knights come equipped with a hidden agenda, a plan to thwart Kell before he had even started?
‘It’s this way,’ said Knight, as a young woman, undernourished as a catwalk model, ran through the automatic doors and launched herself into the arms of a leathery lothario only a few years younger than Knight. Kell heard her say: ‘Mon cherie!’ in a Russian accent and noted that she kept her eyes open when she kissed him.
They walked out into the humid French evening across a broad concrete apron that connected the terminal building to a three-storey car park a hundred metres to the east. The airport was gradually shutting down, buses nestled side by side beneath a blackened underpass, one of the drivers asleep at the wheel. A line of late arrivals were queuing for a connection to Monaco, all of them noticeably more chic and composed than the pint-swilling hordes Kell had witnessed at Heathrow airport. Knight paid for the car park, carefully folded the receipt into his wallet for expenses, and led him towards a black Citroën C6 on the upper level.
‘The documents you requested arrived an hour ago and are in an envelope on the passenger seat,’ he said. Kell assumed he was talking about the Uniacke legend, which Marquand had sent ahead by courier so that Kell would not have to carry a false passport through French customs. ‘Be warned,’ Knight continued, tapping his fingers on the back window, as though there was somebody hiding inside. ‘It’s a diesel. I can’t tell you how many friends of ours come out here, rent a car from Hertz or Avis and then ruin their time in France by putting unleaded …’
Barbara put a stop to this.
‘Bill, I’m quite sure Mr Kell is capable of filling up a car at a petrol station.’ In the jaundiced light, it was difficult to see if her husband blushed. Kell remembered a line from Knight’s file, which he had flicked through en route to the airport. ‘Abhors a conversational vacuum. Tendency to talk when he might be wiser keeping his counsel.’
‘That’s OK,’ Kell said. ‘Easy mistake to make.’
The Knights’ vehicle, parked alongside the C6, was a right-hand-drive Mercedes with twenty-year-old British plates and a dent on the front-right panel.
‘An old and somewhat battered Merc,’ Knight explained unnecessarily, as though he was used to the car attracting strange looks. ‘But it does us very well. Once a year Barbara and I are obliged to drive back across the Channel to have an MOT and to update the insurance paperwork, but it’s worth it …’
Kell had heard enough. He slung his bag in the back seat of the Citroën and got down to business.
‘Let’s talk about Amelia Levene,’ he said. The car park was deserted, the ambient noise of occasional planes and passing traffic smothering their conversation. Knight, who had been cut-off mid-sentence, looked suitably attentive. ‘According to London, Mrs Levene went missing several days ago. Did you speak to her during the time she attended the painting course?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Knight, as if Kell was questioning their integrity. ‘Of course.’
‘What can you tell me about Amelia’s mood, her behaviour?’
Barbara made to reply, but Knight interrupted her.
‘Completely normal. Very friendly and enthusiastic. Introduced herself as a retired schoolteacher, widowed. Very little to report at all.’
Kell remembered another line from the Knight file: ‘Not always prepared to go the extra mile. A feeling has developed among colleagues over the years that Bill Knight prefers the quiet life to getting his hands dirty.’
Barbara duly filled in the blanks.
‘Well,’ she said, sensing that Kell wasn’t satisfied by her husband’s answer, ‘Bill and I have disagreed about this. I thought that she looked a little distracted. Didn’t do an awful lot of painting, which seemed odd, given that she was there to learn. Also checked her phone rather a lot for text messages.’ She glanced at Kell and produced a tiny, satisfied smile, like someone who has solved a taxing crossword clue. ‘That struck me as particularly strange. You see, people of her vintage aren’t exactly glued to mobiles in the way that the younger generation are. Wouldn’t you say, Mr Kell?’
‘Call me Tom,’ Kell said. ‘What about friends, acquaintances? Did you see her with anybody? When London asked you to keep an eye on Mrs Levene, did you follow her into Nice? Did she go anywhere in the evenings?’
‘That’s an awful lot of questions all at once,’ said Knight, looking pleased with himself.
‘Answer them one at a time,’ Kell said, and felt an operational adrenalin at last beginning to kick in. There was a sudden gust of wind and Knight did something compensatory with his hair.
‘Well, Barbara and myself aren’t aware that Mrs Levene went anywhere in particular. On Thursday evening, for example, she ate dinner alone at a restaurant on Rue Masséna. I followed her back to her hotel, sat in the Mercedes until midnight, but didn’t see her leave.’
Kell met Knight’s eye. ‘You didn’t think to take a room at the hotel?’
A pause, an awkward back-and-forth glance between husband and wife.
‘What you have to understand, Tom, is that we haven’t had a great deal of time to react to all this.’ Knight, perhaps unconsciously, had taken a step backwards. ‘London asked us simply to sign up for the course, to keep an eye on Mrs Levene, to report anything mysterious. That was all.’
Barbara took over the reins. She was plainly worried that they were giving Kell a poor impression of their abilities.
‘It didn’t sound as though London expected anything to happen,’ she explained. ‘It was almost pitched as though they were asking us to look out for her. And it’s only been – what? – two or three days since we reported Mrs Levene missing.’
‘And you’re convinced that she’s not in Nice, that she’s not simply staying with a friend?’
‘Oh, we’re not convinced of anything,’ Knight replied, which was the most convincing thing he had said since Kell had cleared customs. ‘We did as we were told. Mrs Levene didn’t show her face at the course, we rang it in. Mr Marquand must have smelled a rat and sent for reinforcements.’
Reinforcements. It occurred to Kell that exactly twenty-four hours earlier he was drinking in a crowded bar on Dean Street, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a forty-year-old university friend whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years.
‘London are concerned that there’s been no movement on Amelia’s credit cards,’ he said, ‘no response from her mobile.’
‘Do you think she’s … defected?’ Knight asked, and Kell suppressed a smile. Where to? Moscow? Beijing? Amelia would sooner live in Albania.
‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘Chiefs of the Service are too high profile. The political repercussions would be seismic. But never say never.’
‘Never say never,’ Barbara muttered.
‘What about her room? Has anybody searched it?’
Knight looked at his shoes. Barbara adjusted her half-moon spectacles. Kell realized why they had never progressed beyond Ops Support in Nairobi.
‘We weren’t under instructions to conduct any kind of search,’ Knight replied.
‘And the people running the painting course? Have you talked to them?’
Knight shook his head, still staring at his shoes like a scolded schoolboy. Kell decided to put them out of their misery.
‘OK, tell you what,’ he said, ‘how far is the Hotel Gillespie?’
Barbara looked worried. ‘It’s on Boulevard Dubouchage. About twenty minutes away.’
‘I’m going to go. You’ve booked a room for me under “Stephen Uniacke”, is that right?’
Knight perked up. ‘That is correct. But wouldn’t you like something to eat? Barbara and I thought that we could take you into Nice, to a little place we both enjoy near the port. It stays open well past …’
‘Later,’ Kell replied. There had been a Cajun wrap at Heathrow, a can of Coke to wash it down. That would see him through until morning. ‘But I need you to do something for me.’
‘Of course,’ Barbara replied.
Kell could see how much she wanted to prolong her return to the spotlight and knew that she might still prove useful to him.
‘Call the Gillespie. Tell them you’ve just landed and need a room. Go to the hotel, but wait outside and make sure you speak to me before you check in.’
Knight looked nonplussed.
‘Is that OK?’ Kell asked him pointedly. If Kell was being paid a thousand a day, chances were that the Knights were on at least half that. In final analysis, they were obliged to do whatever he told them. ‘I’ll need to gain access to the hotel’s computer system. I want all the details from Amelia’s room, arrival and departure times, Internet use and so on. In order to do that, I’ll have to distract whoever works the night shift, get them away from the desk for five or ten minutes. You could be very useful in that context – ordering room service, complaining about a broken tap, pulling an emergency cord in the bathroom. Understood?’
‘Understood,’ Knight replied.
‘Do you have a suitcase or something that will pass for an overnight bag?’
Barbara thought for a moment and said: ‘I think so, yes.’
‘Give me half an hour to check in and then make your way to the hotel.’ He was aware of how quickly he was improvising ideas, old tricks coming back to him all the time; it was as though his brain had been sitting in aspic for eight months. ‘It goes without saying that if you see me in the lobby, we don’t know each other.’
Knight produced a blustery laugh. ‘Of course, Tom.’
‘And keep your phone on.’ Kell climbed into the Citroën. ‘Chances are I’ll need to call you within the hour.’
7
The Citroën sat-nav knew how to negotiate the Nice one-way system and had led Kell to Boulevard Dubouchage within twenty minutes. The Hotel Gillespie was exactly the sort of place that Amelia favoured: modest in size but classy; comfortable but not ostentatious. George Truscott would have booked himself a suite at the Negresco and charged the lot to the British taxpayer.
There was an underground car park three blocks away. Kell looked for a secure place to stow his passport and the contents of his wallet and found a narrow wall cavity in a cracked breeze block about two metres above ground. Marquand had sent ahead full documentation for Stephen Uniacke, including credit cards, a passport, a driving licence, and the general paraphernalia of day-to-day life in England: supermarket loyalty cards; membership of Kew Gardens; breakdown cover for the RAC. There were even faded wallet photographs of Uniacke’s phantom wife and phantom children. Kell discarded the envelope and took a lift up to street level. Uniacke – supposedly a marketing consultant with offices in Reading – had been one of three aliases that Kell had regularly employed during his twenty-two-year career in British Intelligence. Assuming the identity one more time felt as natural to him – indeed, in many ways, as comforting – as putting on an old coat.
The Gillespie was set back from the street by a short, semi-circular access road that allowed vehicles to pull up outside the entrance, depositing passengers and baggage. Kell walked through a pair of automatic doors and climbed a flight of steps into an intimate midnight lobby dotted with black-and-white photographs of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and other musical legends of yesteryear. He had a deep and incurable aversion to jazz but a fondness for sober, low-lit lobbies with rugs on old wooden floors, decent oil paintings and residents’ bars that tinkled with ice and conversation. A young man in a dark jacket with acne and cropped blond hair was organizing a large bowl of potpourri on the reception desk. The night porter. He greeted Kell with an effortful smile and Kell saw that he looked tired to the point of exhaustion.
‘May I help you, sir?’
Kell put his bag on the ground and explained, in French, that he had reserved a room under the name ‘Uniacke’. He was asked for his identification and a credit card, and obliged to fill in a brief registration form. There was a computer terminal at the desk on which the porter called up Uniacke’s details. The keyboard was below the counter, out of sight, so that it was not possible for Kell to follow the keystrokes of any log-in password.
‘I’ve stayed here before,’ he said, scoping the small office at the back of the reception area where a second computer terminal was visible. There was a can of Coke adjacent to the screen and a large paperback book open on the desk. Kell had been looking for evidence of a CCTV system in the lobby but had not yet seen one. ‘Do you have a record of that on your system?’
It was a prepared question to which he already knew the answer. Nevertheless, when the porter responded, he would have the opportunity to lean over the desk and to look directly at the reservation system in feigned astonishment.
‘Let me have a look, sir,’ the porter duly replied. A downy fur covered his pale, washed-out skin, a zit primed to burst on the chin. ‘No, I don’t think we have a record of that here …’
‘You don’t?’ Kell ramped up his surprise and touched the side of the screen, tilting it towards him so that he could identify the booking software operated by the hotel. It was ‘Opera’, the most widely used reservations system in Europe and one with which Kell was reasonably familiar. Uniacke’s details were laid out on a guest folio that itemized his impending expenses in a series of boxes marked ‘Food’, ‘Accommodation’, ‘Drinks’ and ‘Telephone’. As long as the porter left himself logged in, accessing Amelia’s information would be straightforward. Kell knew that she had been staying in Room 218 and that the tabs on Opera would take him to her personal details in two or three clicks of a mouse.
‘Perhaps it’s under my wife’s name,’ he said, moving his hand back behind the counter. A guest emerged from the bar, nodded at the porter and walked out of the lobby towards a bank of lifts. Kell took a few steps backwards, peered into the bar, and spotted a young couple drinking cognacs at a table in the far corner. A wide-hipped barmaid was picking peanuts off the carpet. The room was otherwise deserted. ‘Never mind,’ he said, turning back to the desk. ‘Could I arrange a wake-up call for the morning? Seven o’clock?’
It was a small detail, but would give the porter the useful impression that Monsieur Uniacke intended to go to sleep as soon as he reached his room.
‘Of course, sir.’
Kell was allocated a room on the third floor and walked up the stairs in order to familiarize himself with the layout of the hotel. On the first-floor landing he saw something that gave him an idea: a cupboard, the door ajar, in which a chambermaid had left a Hoover and various cleaning products. He continued along a short passage, entered his room using his card key, and immediately began to unpack. En route to Heathrow, Marquand had given him a laptop. Kell placed an encrypted 3G modem in a USB port and accessed the SIS server through three password-protected firewalls. There were two miniatures of Johnnie Walker in the mini-bar and he drank them, fifty-fifty with Evian, while he checked his email. Marquand had sent a message with an update on Amelia’s disappearance:
Trust you have arrived safely. No sign of our friend. Peripherals still inactive.
‘Peripherals’ was a reference to Amelia’s credit cards and mobile phone.
Funerals at crematoria in the Paris 14th on applicable days. Look for surnames: Chamson, Lilar, de Vilmorin, Tardieu, Radiguet, Malot, Bourget. Investigating further. Should have specifics within 24.
Crematoria. Trust Marquand to be fastidious with the Latin. Kell sprayed some aftershave under his shirt, switched the SIMs on his mobile so that he could check any private messages from London, and wolfed a tube of Pringles from the mini-bar. He then replaced the Uniacke SIM and dialled the Knights’ number. Barbara picked up. It sounded as though her husband was doing the driving.
‘Mr Kell?’
‘Where are you, Barbara?’
‘We’re just parking around the corner from the hotel. We were a little delayed in traffic.’
‘Did you get the room?’
‘Yes. We rang from the airport.’
‘Who made the call?’
‘I did.’
‘And did you say it was for two people?’
Barbara hesitated before replying, as though she suspected Kell was laying a trap for her. ‘Not specifically, but I think he understood that I was with my husband.’
Kell took the risk. ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘I want you to check in alone. I need you to leave Bill on the outside.’
‘I see.’ There was an awkward pause as Barbara absorbed the instruction.
‘I’m going to create a diversion at two o’clock that will require the night porter to go upstairs and fetch a Hoover.’
The line cut out briefly and Barbara said: ‘A what?’
‘A Hoover. A vacuum cleaner. Listen carefully. What I’m going to tell you is important. The Hoover is in a cupboard on the first-floor landing. You’ll be waiting there at two. When the porter comes up, tell him that you’re lost and can’t find your room. Get him to show you where it is. Don’t let him come back to reception. If he insists on doing so, make a fuss. Feign illness, start crying, do whatever you have to do. When you get to the door of your room, ask him to come inside and explain how to work the television. Keep him busy, that’s the main thing. I may need ten minutes if the log-in is down. Ask him questions. You’re a lonely old lady with jet lag. Is that OK? Do you think you can manage that?’
‘It sounds very straightforward,’ Barbara replied, and Kell detected a note of terseness in her voice. He was aware that he was being brusque, and that to describe her as an ‘old lady’ was not, in retrospect, particularly constructive.
‘When you check in, play up the eccentric side of your personality,’ he continued, trying to restore some rapport. ‘Get your papers in a muddle. Ask how to use the card key for your room. Flirt a little bit. The night porter is a young guy, probably speaks English. Try that first before you opt for French. OK?’
It sounded as though Barbara was writing things down. ‘Of course, Tom.’
Kell explained that he would call back at 1.45 a.m. to confirm the plan. In the meantime, she was to check the hotel for any signs of a security guard, maid or member of the kitchen staff who might have remained on the premises. If she saw anybody, she was to alert him immediately.
‘What room are you in?’ Barbara asked him.
‘Three two two. And tell Bill to keep his eye on the entrance. Anybody tries to come in from the street between one fifty-five and two-fifteen, he needs to stall them.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘Make sure he understands. The last thing I’ll need when I’m sitting in the office is a guest walking through the lobby.’
