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It was a measure of Kell’s self-confidence, as well as his conviction in Barbara’s ability to detain Pierre, that he took the risk of printing out a three-page summary of Amelia’s stay, including details of her room service orders, laundry bills and any phone calls she might have made from the landline in her room. He then returned to the welcome page, took the documents from a printer in the office, folded them into his back pocket and walked outside to the reception desk. There was a Magstripe Encoder beside the keyboard. Kell switched it on, followed the read-out to ‘Check-In’, typed in ‘218’, set an expiration date of six days and pressed ‘Create’. There was a small pile of white plastic cards to the right of the machine. He pushed one of them into the slot, listened as the information was written into the strip, then withdrew the card and placed it in the same pocket into which he had folded Amelia’s bill.
By the time Pierre came back, more than five minutes later, Thomas Kell had removed almost all of the shards of glass that had fallen on to the floor in the lobby and was busy picking petals of potpourri out of the carpet.
‘You should not have worried about this, Monsieur Uniacke.’
‘I just wanted to help,’ Kell told him. ‘I’m so sorry. I feel terrible about what happened.’
11
The second-floor corridor was deserted. Kell walked towards Room 218 with only the hum of the hotel’s air-conditioning for company. He was suddenly extraordinarily tired; the adrenalin of duping Pierre had dissipated from his body, leaving him with the remnants of a late night and a Hackney hangover.
He put the card key in the slot, watching as the light above the handle clicked to green, then passed into Amelia’s room, closing the door quietly behind him. As he did so, he experienced a sudden flash image of her naked body sprawled across the bed, a nightmare of violence and blood, but it passed from his mind as no more than a brief and absurd hallucination.
The bed had been made, Amelia’s clothes and personal effects tidied away by a chambermaid. The layout of the room was identical to his own: a television facing the bed, bolted to the wall above a writing desk; a sash window with a narrow balcony looking down on to Boulevard Dubouchage. Kell went into the bathroom and made a detailed assessment of its contents. No toothbrush or toothpaste, but a plastic contact lens case and a bottle of ReNu cleaning fluid. No hairbrush, no glasses, no trace of Hermès Calèche, Amelia’s preferred perfume. She had known that she was going somewhere specific and packed accordingly.
He looked in the wardrobe. There was a small metal safe on one of the shelves, the door closed. Ordinarily, an officer as experienced as Amelia Levene would never risk securing anything valuable behind a lock that could be opened by a concierge in under thirty seconds, but she would have gambled on zero threat from London. Kell pulled the safe away from the wall and turned it through one hundred and eighty degrees. There was a metal panel on the back with the make and serial number of the safe engraved beneath a film of dust. Kell wiped it clean and called Tech-Ops. He used the clearance code given to him by Marquand and requested a four-digit access pin for a Sentinel II safe, dictating the serial number to a sleepy technician somewhere in the bowels of Vauxhall Cross.
‘SMS all right for response?’ he was asked.
Kell said that would be fine.
Beneath the shelf was a large suitcase, but no sign of the leather carry-on bag that Amelia habitually took with her on most short-haul flights. A suit jacket and skirt were hanging in the next cupboard, but he knew of no woman who would travel to the south of France with fewer than three outfits; Amelia must have been wearing one of them and packed at least one other. He pulled the suitcase out on to the carpet and flipped it open. There were two crumpled shirts, some underwear and a pair of tights. She was using it as a temporary laundry bag. The lid of the case had a zip-up lining inside which Amelia had left a couple of paperback books, a headset, an unopened packet of cigarettes and a copy of Prospect magazine. Kell felt around the edges of the case, probing for anything that might have been concealed in the lining, but there was nothing there. He put the suitcase back in the cupboard and sat down on the bed.
It was 2.47 a.m. Somewhere on the street outside a cat screeched. Kell thought of the Knights: Barbara in her room a few doors down the corridor; Bill on his way back to Menton. They had arranged to meet in Vieux Nice for lunch, an appointment Kell would almost certainly cancel. His work with them was done. He experienced an overwhelming desire to stretch out on the bed and to catch a few hours’ sleep, but knew that such a thing was not yet possible. He checked the drawers on either side of the bed but found only an inevitable copy of the Gideon Bible and a couple of pillow chocolates, still in their silver wrappers. He checked under the bed for a laptop, a file, a mobile phone, lifting the mattress clear of the frame, but found only lint and dust. The drawers of the desk contained writing paper, as well as a guide to Nice et Les Alpes-Maritimes and some basic information about the hotel. Apart from the safe, Kell could think of nowhere else that Amelia might plausibly have hidden anything that would throw up a clue as to her whereabouts. His only other lead was the number of a French mobile phone listed on the printout from her room. He had called Marquand’s contact at GCHQ for a trace on it five minutes after saying goodnight to Pierre in the lobby.
‘It might take us a few hours,’ a sprightly voice in Cheltenham had informed him. ‘Gets busy this time of night with AF/PAK waking up.’
Kell wondered who would contact him first. Tech-Ops or GCHQ? It felt like a race to see who could be more indifferent to his circumstances. He returned to the bathroom and checked the toilet cistern as well as the pockets of two dressing-gowns hooked behind the door. On the basis that Amelia might have lifted them in order to conceal a passport or SIM card, he searched for loose tiles and areas of carpeting in both the bathroom and the bedroom. Nothing. He shook out the curtains, he tried to peer behind the television. Finally, he gave up.
Why the hell hadn’t London called? Was it his clearance code? Tech-Ops might have rung it in, creating a dawn shitstorm for Marquand that would land both of them in trouble.
Kell was lying on Amelia’s bed, planning to catch a few hours’ rest, when the SMS finally came through. He climbed off the bed, punched the four-digit code into the safe and heard the satisfying grind of the lock pulling out, the door swinging open on a weighted hinge.
There was a single object inside the safe, positioned dead centre, the cat burglar’s prize. A set of car keys. An Avis sticker on the plastic casing, two remote buttons to activate a central locking system, a metal key that swung out at the push of a button.
Kell locked the safe, put the keys in his pocket and left the room.
12
‘You cannot sleep, Monsieur Uniacke?’
Kell was grateful for the ready-made lie. He braced his hands across the counter at reception, summoned a careworn smile, and explained that insomnia had plagued him for years and that a brisk walk around the block usually cured it.
‘Of course. Let me get the door for you.’
He noted the pristine carpet, cleansed of the remaining glass and potpourri, and again thanked Pierre for clearing it up as he followed him down the short flight of steps towards the entrance of the hotel. Five minutes later he was at the coded gate of his underground car park on Place Marshall, working on the assumption that Amelia would have left her vehicle at the same location.
He was wrong. Descending through four subterranean levels, along a yellow-lit corkscrew of silence and stale air, Kell searched in vain for the winking lights of Amelia’s hire car, pressing repeatedly on the remote-control lock. In the basement of the car park he turned and walked back up to street level, following the same procedure, but again to no avail. A nightwatchman was snoozing in a hutch behind a parking barrier, his feet on the desk, arms folded across a copy of Paris Match. Kell tapped on the window and woke him up.
‘Excusez-moi?’
No part of the nightwatchman’s body moved save for his eyes, which flipped open like a child’s doll.
‘Oui?’
‘I think I parked here this morning, but I can’t find my vehicle. Is there another car park nearby?’
‘Etoile,’ the nightwatchman muttered, closing his eyes.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nice Etoile. Rue Lamartine. Cinq minutes à pied.’
The second underground car park was equidistant from the Hotel Gillespie, five minutes from Place Marshall. Kell walked there in the still of the night, a stranger on deserted French streets. He followed the same routine, going from floor to floor, pressing the infra-red key, looking for Amelia’s car.
Finally he found it. She had parked on the second lower level. Kell was turning through three hundred and sixty degrees, eyes scanning every corner of the garage, when he saw a set of rear lights morsing in the distance. A dark blue Renault Clio squeezed in between a battered white van and a black Seat Altea with Marseilles plates. A film of dust on the windscreen. Kell went straight to the boot. There was an umbrella in the back and a pair of walking boots. He took them out, placed them on the ground, then lifted up the false floor in order to access the spare wheel. It was screwed in and secured by a plastic clip on a cable looped through the centre of the tyre.
Kell pulled the tyre free, let it spin and rock on to the ground, and immediately saw a cloth package concealed in the hollow. Wrapped in a pillow case from the Hotel Gillespie were Amelia Levene’s passport, her driving licence, her credit cards and house keys. She had placed a SIM in a small protective cover, wrapped three hundred pounds sterling in an elastic band and put her BlackBerry, to which she was usually attached like a drip, inside a padded manila envelope.
Kell put the SIM and the BlackBerry in the pocket of his coat and searched the rest of the car. She had barely driven it. There was a nearly crisp sheet of paper, emblazoned with the Avis logo, still protecting the footwell on the driver’s side. He could see mud on the surface, created by the soles of Amelia’s shoes. Kell replaced the spare wheel, put the pillow case, the umbrella and the walking boots back in the boot, and locked the car. He returned to street level, walked three hundred metres east along Boulevard Dubouchage and rang the doorbell of the Gillespie.
‘So, you feel ready to sleep now?’ Pierre asked him, looking at his watch like a bad actor.
‘Ready to sleep,’ Kell replied, and thought about yawning for effect. ‘Do me a favour, will you?’
‘Of course, Monsieur Uniacke.’
‘Cancel that alarm call. I’m going to need more than three hours’ sleep.’
13
Yet sleep never came.
Thomas Kell took a shower, climbed into bed and tried to shut out the day’s events, even as they replayed continuously in his mind. He had called Marquand for an update on the French mobile and requested tech support on the BlackBerry SIM. It was already past 4 a.m. He knew that Marquand would call back before seven and that Cheltenham would have a fix on the French mobile within a few hours. There hardly seemed any point even in closing his eyes.
The room then became strange to him, the quietness of it, the half-light. Kell felt his own solitude as intensely as he had known it at any stage since his departure from Vauxhall Cross. It occurred to him, as it often did in the depths of the night, that he knew only one way of being – a path that was separate to all others. Sometimes it felt as though his entire personality had grown out of a talent for the clandestine; he could not remember who he had been before the tap on the shoulder at twenty.
What had become of the life he had dreamed of, the life he had promised himself on the other side of the river? Kell had told anyone prepared to listen that he was planning to write a book. He had convinced himself that he was going to study to become an architect. Both were notions that now seemed so absurd that he actually laughed against the silence of the room. He had tried, day after day in the grey winter months of a new year, to behave like an ordinary citizen, to become the sort of man who socialized and watched the football, who made small talk with strangers in pubs. He was determined to re-educate himself – to watch the films and the HBO box sets, to read the novels and the memoirs that had passed him by – but all he knew was the calling of the secret world. He had even believed, against all evidence, that he might finally become a father. But that particular dream was now as far away from him, as transient, as the whereabouts of Amelia Levene.
He thought then of George Truscott, the man who surely stood to gain the most from Amelia’s continued absence. In the restlessness of his insomnia, Kell even wondered if Truscott himself had arranged for Amelia to disappear. Why else have her followed in Nice? Why else send Thomas Kell, of all people, to track her down? He opened his eyes to the blackened room and could make out only the faint yellow glow of a streetlamp in the window. He despised Truscott, not for his ambition, not for his cunning and trickery, but because he represented all that Kell loathed about the increasingly corporatized atmosphere within SIS; what mattered to Truscott was not the Service, not the defence of the realm, but his own personal advancement. With a lower IQ and a fractionally smaller ego, Truscott would likely have worked in some parallel career as a traffic warden or council inspector, dreaming at night of punching parking tickets and issuing directives against noise pollution. Kell would have laughed at the thought, but was too depressed by the prospect of Truscott ascending to ‘C’, bringing with him yet more apparatchiks, yet more corporate lawyers, while simultaneously sacrificing talented officers on the altar of his fastidiousness. Amelia Levene was almost certainly the last roadblock preventing SIS from turning into a branch of the Health and Safety Executive.
In the end, it was the hotel that rang. Pierre had forgotten to cancel the wake-up call. Kell’s phone lurched him out of bed at exactly seven o’clock. He reckoned that he had been asleep for no more than half an hour. Ten minutes later, back in the shower, he heard the familiar ring of the mobile. His head swathed in shampoo, Kell swore under his breath, switched off the water and stepped out of the bath.
It was Marquand, sounding chipper.
‘Bonjour, Thomas. Comment allez-vous?’
Rule One of SIS was never to moan, never to show weakness. So Kell mirrored Marquand’s supercilious tone and said: ‘Je suis très bien merci, monsieur,’ as though he was addressing a French teacher at a primary school.
‘You found her BlackBerry?’
‘In the boot of a hire car. It was parked a quarter of a mile from the hotel.’
‘How did you get the keys?’
‘She left them in the safe in her room.’
Marquand smelled a rat.
‘Reason for that?’ he asked.
‘Search me. Maybe she didn’t bank on George Truscott sending a team after her.’ He let that one sink in and pictured Marquand nervously adjusting his hair. ‘But she had time to pack, she wasn’t in a rush. There was no toothbrush in the bathroom, no perfume. Most of her clothes have gone AWOL as well. She’s travelling on an alias, probably wearing her glasses and carrying a leather overnight bag. It’s possible she left the key because she wanted me to find her, but that’s a long shot. Her passport and credit cards were wrapped up with the BlackBerry, her house keys, SIM card, the lot. All in a hire car that she obviously wasn’t worried might get nicked.’
Kell wanted to have both the BlackBerry and the SIM analysed by someone who could break their SIS encryptions. Marquand, despite the early hour, had already been in touch with a source in Genoa and explained that she would reach Nice at around midday.
‘Elsa Cassani. Used to work for us in Rome. Freelance now. Worked out she can make a lot more money that way. Can do tech-ops, background checks, more contacts in more agencies than I care to think about. Feisty, smart, hyper-efficient. You’ll like her. Comes highly recommended.’
‘Tell her to call me when she gets into town.’ Kell reckoned he could grab a few hours’ sleep if Elsa left him undisturbed until twelve. ‘What else have you got?’
‘Cheltenham has been in touch. They’ve analysed the numbers you sent through. One of them was Amelia’s house in Wiltshire. She rang it three times over the course of two days. Must have spoken to Giles on each occasion because he’s been down there for the last week. As far as we know, he hadn’t heard from her since she vanished. Each conversation lasted less than five minutes.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Giles probably bored her into a persistent vegetative coma.’ Kell was looping a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the handle of his room and was too strung out to acknowledge the joke. ‘The French mobile isn’t known to us. It’s a new number, purchased in Paris four months ago. Registered to a François Malot. Amelia may have only left a message because the call lasted less than thirty seconds.’
Kell made the connection. ‘Malot was one of the funerals in the Fourteenth.’ He put the security chain on the door and remembered how Marquand had always been a beat behind the rest.
‘Right, yes. Very good, Tom. I knew we’d hired the right man. I’ll take a closer look. Watch this space.’
14
Elsa Cassani had the washed-out complexion of a young woman who had spent the bulk of her twenty-seven years sitting behind computer monitors in darkened rooms. A full-figured, lively Italian with stud ear-rings and a steady smile, she had called Kell’s mobile shortly after twelve o’clock and arranged to pick up the SIM and BlackBerry from a café on the Rue de l’Hôtel des Postes.
The handover was straightforward. As instructed, Elsa had put on a hat, found herself a table and ordered a Campari and soda. (‘Ah,’ she had said, enjoying the trick. ‘Because it’s red.’) Within a few minutes, Kell had strolled in, spotted the hat and the drink, handed over the hardware and told her that he needed the results ‘by sunset’. He had then walked off in the general direction of the Mediterranean leaving Elsa alone at the table. Nobody had batted an eyelid. No need for the discipline of a formal brush contact. No need for Moscow Rules.
Kell had forgotten how much he disliked Nice. The city had none of the character that he associated with France: it felt like a place with no history, a city that had never suffered. The too-clean streets, the incongruous palm trees, the poseurs on the boardwalks and the girls who weren’t quite pretty: Nice was an antiseptic playground for rich foreigners who didn’t have the imagination to spend their money properly. ‘The place,’ he muttered to himself, remembering the old joke, ‘where suntans go to die.’ Kell recalled his last visit to the city, an overnight stay in 1997, tracking a Real IRA commander who had struck up a friendship with an unsavoury Chechen money launderer with a villa in Villefranche. Kell had flown down on a soggy May morning to find a ghostly and sterile city, the cloistered cafés surrounding the old port deserted, the Café de Turin serving half a dozen oysters to half a dozen customers. It was different now, a tornado of summer tourists in the city, taking up every inch of sand on the beach, every changing room in the smart boutiques on Rues Paradis and Alphonse Karr. Kell began to wish that he had simply stayed in his hotel, lived off room service and watched pay-per-view movies and BBC World. Instead, he found a brasserie two blocks back from the Med, ordered inedible steak frites from a pretty Parisian waitress who smouldered for tips, and began to work his way through the copy of Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level that he had packed at the last minute in London. Behind the bar, a fifty-something proprietor who appeared to have modelled his appearance on Johnny Hallyday was killing time on an iPhone, trying to catch his reflection in a nearby mirror. Kell had long ago concluded that all restaurants in the south of France were run by the same middle-aged proprietor on his thirty-fourth wife with the same paunch, the same tan and the same bombshell waitress whom he was inevitably trying to fuck. This one kept scratching an itch in the crack of his bum, like Rafael Nadal preparing to serve. When it was time to settle the bill, Kell decided to have some fun with him.
‘The steak was tough,’ he said in English.
‘Comment?’
The proprietor was looking past his shoulder, as though it was beneath his dignity to make eye contact with a Brit. ‘I said the steak was tough.’ Kell gestured towards the kitchen. ‘The food in this place is only marginally better than the stuff they served up in Papillon.’
‘Quoi?’
‘You think it’s OK to charge tourists eighteen euros for medium-rare chewing gum?’
‘Il y a un problème, monsieur?’
Kell turned around. ‘Never mind,’ he said. It had been enough to see Hallyday stirred from his complacency. The waitress appeared to have overheard their conversation and honoured Kell with a flirtatious smile. He left fifty euros of Truscott’s money for her on the table and walked out into the afternoon sunshine.
A wise man once said that spying is waiting. Waiting for a joe. Waiting for a break. Kell killed time by wandering the streets of Vieux Nice and the Yves Klein galleries at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. On a steel bench in the mezzanine he checked the messages on his London phone. Claire had left a series of increasingly irate texts from the waiting room of their marriage guidance counsellor. He had completely forgotten the appointment.
Thanks a lot. Total fucking waste of my fucking time.
He did not want to explain himself, to confess that Marquand had brought him in from the cold. Instead, texting quickly, he wrote:
Sorry. Totally forgot. Crazy 24 hrs. I am Nice.
It was only when she responded with a string of three bewildered question marks that he checked the outgoing message and saw his mistake. He called Claire to explain, but the line went direct to voicemail.
Sorry. I realize that I am not particularly nice. I meant to say that I am in Nice. As in France. Had to come here on business at the last minute. I completely forgot about the appointment. Will you apologize to …
But Kell could not remember the name of the marriage guidance counsellor; he could only picture her hair, a bob, her biscuits, the clock that ticked on the mantelpiece. He fudged it:
… the good doctor. Just say that I’m too busy. Call me back if you get the chance. I’m hanging around waiting for a meeting.
He knew that Claire would join the dots. She was too well versed in the euphemisms of the secret world not to read between the lines: ‘last-minute business’; ‘waiting for a meeting’; ‘had to go to France’. Thomas Kell was a disgraced spook; he no longer had any business; he didn’t need to go to any meetings. What possible reason would he have for flying to Nice at the last minute if not to run some errand for SIS? One of the features of his long career had been the necessity to lie to Claire about the nature of his work. Kell had enjoyed the brief respite from such fabrications, but was now back in the same cycle of concealment that he had spun for twenty years; back in the habit, so natural to him and so easily acquired, of keeping anybody who came close to him at arm’s length. In this context, he wondered why Claire was keen on seeing a shrink. There was no ‘structural flaw’ in their marriage – a phrase the counsellor had used, time and again, with apparent relish. Neither was there any ‘hard-wired animosity’ between them. On the rare occasions that they met to discuss their future, Mr and Mrs Thomas Kell inevitably ended up in bed together, waking in the morning to wonder why on earth they were living apart. But the reason for that was clear. The reason for that was unequivocal. Without children, they were finished.
Elsa eventually rang at five and they arranged to meet outside the Negresco Hotel.
It was like meeting a different person. In the five hours that she had been analysing the hardware, Elsa appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. Her pale skin was suddenly ruddy with health, as though she had returned from a long walk along the beach, and her eyes, so lifeless in the café, sparkled in the dazzling summer light. Earlier, she had seemed nervous and closed-off; now she was animated and full of warmth. So easy was the rapport between them that Kell toyed with the idea that she had been ordered by Marquand to win his trust.
‘How was your afternoon?’ she asked as they walked in the direction of a dazzling sun.
‘Great,’ Kell lied, because he was glad of her company after the long afternoon and did not want to appear negative by complaining. ‘I had some lunch, went to a gallery, read a book …’
‘I really do not like Nice at all,’ Elsa declared, her English precise and musical.
‘Me neither.’ She looked across at him and smiled at the sudden fracturing in Kell’s composure. ‘It’s inexplicable. I love everything about France. The great cities – Paris, Marseille – the food, the wine, the movies …’
‘Blah blah blah …’ said Elsa.
‘… but Nice is like a theme park.’
‘It has no soul,’ she offered quickly.
Kell contemplated this and said: ‘Precisely, yes. No soul.’
A long line of rush-hour traffic was held at a set of lights and they crossed the Promenade des Anglais, pushed together by two teenage boys running in the opposite direction. A hooker in stilettos and a black leather skirt was climbing out of a car on the nearside lane of the central reservation.
‘There is nothing unusual on the SIM card,’ Elsa said, picking her way through a flock of mopeds. ‘I double-checked with Cheltenham.’
‘And the BlackBerry?’
‘It has been used to Skype.’
Of course. In the absence of a secure line, Skype was the spy’s first port of call: near-impossible to bug, tricky to trace. A BlackBerry in this context was no different to an ordinary computer: all Amelia would have needed was a cheap plastic headset. She had probably borrowed one from reception.
‘Do you know who she spoke to?’
‘Yes. Always to the same account, always the same number. Three different conversations. The Skype address is registered to a French email.’
