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I’d come to my special place to consider all this. It was where I liked to read and think and scribble hospital stories in my secret journal, which I kept hidden from Zac. I was wearing his parka, hugging it around myself, and sipping from the thermos of coffee I brought with me. The bench that I was sitting on was erected by the town soon after my parents died. The tarnished plaque behind my back was engraved with the words, In Remembrance of Squadron Leader Edward Lawrence and His Wife, Matilda Lawrence.
The bench sat on a section of the coastal path my parents had often walked together, above a gorge in the cliff that made a kind of waterfall down to the rocks below. Usually the waterfall sounded like thunder, and the sea churned and heaved its foam. On that October day, though, the waterfall was a trickle of gentle music, and the sea was so calm I could see the rocks below its glassy surface. Already it was past the high season. There were few other walkers despite the unseasonally mild autumn morning.
It was a short walk to that isolated stretch of the coastal path and I made it whenever I could, as if in my parents’ footsteps. Zac’s rented house was a few hundred metres inland. I thought of my bright charity shop clothes, stuffed in his drawers and wardrobe, mixed with the sleek designer wear he organised with military precision. The tall, narrow house I grew up in next door to Milly and James and Peggy was virtually abandoned, but I understood Zac’s reluctance to live so close to them.
I pictured my childhood bed in the attic, and its bright pink quilt dotted with red poppies. That bed seemed to fade. Instead, I saw the new one I shared with Zac, the white sheets thrown on the floor, and the two of us in it the night before.
My clothes were off, and Zac’s hands seemed to be everywhere, and I reached towards the drawer in the bedside table where I kept my diaphragm, and he caught my arm before I could get to it and pinned my wrists above my head and held me down and kissed any words away, and it was impossible to make him wait any longer, though I was uncertain about whether I wanted him to, and in a haze of confusion over what had just happened, my head foggy from too much wine, and my body seeming not to be my own.
There was a noise, coming from the coastal path, and my replay of the night before blew away. A figure was striding towards me, dressed in baggy walking trousers and a sweatshirt, wearing a small backpack. Her hair was hidden beneath a khaki bush hat, her eyes shielded by dark sunglasses.
I aimed a polite ‘Morning’ vaguely in her direction, hoping that she would walk on and leave me with my thoughts. Instead, she lowered herself onto the bench beside me. Because I had arranged myself in the middle, she seemed too close. I slid over, until my right side was pressed against the wooden arm. I studied the copy of Jane Eyre in my lap, trying to signal that I wasn’t interested in talking.
‘Good book?’ The voice was familiar. I looked up to see the woman remove her sunglasses. There was the same indigo eyeliner, the same thick mascara, the same crimson lipstick. Her hands were gloved, but I was betting the nails were scarlet.
‘Yes.’ It was a present from Zac, a beautiful old edition, given because he knew how much the novel meant to me.
Maxine perched her sunglasses back on her nose, then extracted a clear plastic bag from her backpack, which contained pastries. ‘Croissant?’
I squinted at her. ‘No. Thank you.’
‘Bottle of water?’
‘Again, no. Thank you.’
It had been three and a half years since I crashed out of my final interview for MI5, and her appearance was so unexpected I wondered if I was dreaming. Why on earth was she seeking me out after all that time, and offering me breakfast?
‘I’d like to talk to you.’ She seemed to be answering my unspoken question. She looked out at the sea with her usual indifference and took a bite of a croissant. ‘Stale,’ she said, tossing it behind her without looking.
I stifled a laugh. ‘We had to do a role-play exercise, during that residential assessment. We pretended to be agent handlers making an approach to a potential informant. “Always provide amenities.” That was part of your script for how to recruit an agent. Are you trying to recruit me, Maxine?’
To my astonishment, she said, ‘Yes. I am.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m completely serious. You’re in a position to help us. I’ve come to ask if you will.’
I had fantasised about Maxine seeking me out, Maxine telling me she’d got it wrong, Maxine saying that getting rid of me was the great misjudgement of her career, Maxine confessing that she – that they – needed me.
‘Are you offering me a proper job with the Security Service?’
‘You have access to intelligence that we need, and we know you’re skilful enough to get it for us.’
‘No you don’t. You don’t think that about me at all. I seem to remember that flattery is part of that script for recruiting informants, too.’
‘It is, as a matter of fact. But I do think you’re skilful – there was only that one critical flaw that ended the possibility of your joining us.’
‘Please spare me the flattery. I’d have thought that if you wanted a lab report or a patient’s medical record you could reach right in and grab them.’
‘That isn’t what this is about. But technically speaking, yes, you would be a Covert Human Intelligence Source, or agent – what the cousins call a human asset. I much prefer their term. You already know, Holly, that a human asset collects information for us, then passes it on.’
Her words stabbed away the mad bit of hope I’d somehow conjured. What Maxine wanted – what they wanted – was to use me. I was little more than a drone to them, and would never be properly inside MI5.
‘And you would be my handler?’
‘Yes. I would have responsibility for your security and welfare. Something we take very seriously.’
‘I bet. So you see me the same way you see a drug dealer who gets to stay out of jail if he reports on the bad guys who are above him in the chain. Or a prostitute who you’ll pay if she gives you information about her pimp. Or someone working for a company with trade secrets you’re after.’
‘Those aren’t the only kinds of agents we recruit.’
‘Nice of you to say. I’d be a rubbish informant, and I don’t have access to any intelligence you could possibly be interested in.’ I concentrated on the soft slap of the water as it gently rolled in and out.
‘You have integrity – the qualities that made you want to join us in the first place.’
‘I meant it about skipping the flattery section of your script. You don’t think I have a single atom of integrity. You remember why I bombed my MI5 interview.’
She ignored this unseemly reminder with the tact of a hostess managing an awkward guest. ‘We are authorised to make arrangements of this nature, Holly, in order to detect or prevent a crime, protect national security, or in the interests of the economic well-being of the UK.’
‘Is that some kind of legal document they made you memorise?’
‘Again, you are correct.’
‘What is this really about, Maxine?’
‘Your new boyfriend is Zachary Hunter.’
I was trailing my index finger over the gold lettering on Jane Eyre’s cover, then tracing the edge of the oval portrait of Charlotte between the title and the author’s name. ‘You obviously know that he is.’
‘So you know about his ex-wife?’
‘I know she left him.’ I followed a fishing boat with my eyes, a speck whose ghost-shape outline I could still see, imprinted from when it had been closer to land.
‘Does he know where she is?’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘It’s been tried. The experiment was not successful.’
I shrugged. ‘Well why should he know? The fact that she’s not in his life is pretty normal, given the circumstances. That’s how it is with most people after a relationship ends. Not to mention the fact he divorced her on the grounds of desertion.’
If Maxine were given to expressiveness, I couldn’t help but feel that she would be rolling her eyes. ‘She’s classified as a missing person. Did he tell you that the police questioned him about her disappearance?’
There was a trickle of sweat down my spine. ‘The police always question previous partners. There can’t have been any evidence against him or they’d have charged and tried him.’ Then, the obvious thing, the thing I should have asked first, came to me. ‘Why do you care about this?’
‘I care about a missing woman.’
‘No you don’t. Even if you did, it’s not the kind of thing MI5 gets involved in.’
‘Believe what you like. You know it isn’t protocol for us to explain the reasons for what we do to potential informants with no security clearance. Do you know her name?’
‘Jane.’ I didn’t elaborate on my failure to discover her surname. I’d tried a few Internet searches for her under Zac’s but found nothing. I hadn’t wanted to press him to talk about her, when I could see how painful he found it.
‘Jane Miller,’ Maxine said, as if she guessed that my knowledge was limited. ‘Let me give you some facts.’
‘I don’t want your facts.’
‘Hear me out. Okay?’
I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t stop her, either.
‘Born August fourth, 1980, in London. Raised there by a single mother. Father was American – died in 2008 – Jane never knew him, unless seeing him as a baby counts. The father moved back to the US after Jane’s mother divorced him – their relationship ended before Jane’s first birthday. The mother’s been dead since 1998.’
I couldn’t quell my own curiosity, though I tried to sound bored. ‘What was – is – Jane’s profession?’
‘Social worker.’
‘Maybe she pissed somebody off. Maybe you should be looking at that.’
‘She stopped working a few years before she disappeared.’
‘What was her area?’
‘The elderly – not a speciality where she’d be likely to attract a lot of hate.’
‘You didn’t tell me the names of her parents.’ I pulled Jane Eyre closer, across my tummy, as if to shield myself.
‘Jane’s mother was Isabelle Miller. Her father was Philip Veliko. Philip remarried soon after he returned to the US and had a son with his new wife. Frederick.’
‘Would the father’s new family have reason to resent Jane?’
‘Jane inherited some money from her father, but the second wife predeceased him and Frederick didn’t dispute Jane’s inheritance – everything was split equally between Frederick and Jane. No known grievances or hostile behaviour from any of them.’
‘Was Jane in contact with her brother?’ Jane Eyre rose and fell as I breathed.
‘As far as we can tell, only after their father’s death, not before.’
‘Well, you should still look at the brother. Most people would be pretty pissed off if some sibling they didn’t even know swanned in and took half their inheritance.’
‘Listen to me, Holly. Jane Miller is like you. And like your friend in the book.’ Briefly, lightly, she tapped Jane Eyre with a gloved finger. ‘She found herself living with a man whose closets were filled with skeletons. And she found, in the end, that she had to look in them. You are already living the perfect cover story. You don’t need to change a thing.’
Round and round my finger went. ‘My life isn’t a cover story. My life is my life. My life is real.’ I shook my head. ‘Normally, you ask someone inside a government organisation to betray their country in some way. In my case, you want me to betray my boyfriend, be an informant on my boyfriend. No way. Not happening.’
‘There are countless kinds of intelligence targets. You know that. We want any information that can help us find Jane and make sure she’s safe.’
‘Zac doesn’t make women unsafe. Zac saves people’s lives. Besides which, making sure women are safe is not your core business.’
‘Our core business is complicated.’
‘Then perhaps you should try explaining it in more detail to your potential agents. You might find they’d cooperate more enthusiastically.’
‘You’re a little different than most, more informed than is typical, given your history with us. I’m telling you everything I can. More than usual.’
‘Flattering and confiding all in one move – you’re a master of that recruitment script, but it’s not working. Zac wouldn’t hurt anybody. He’s the most loving, protective, generous man I’ve ever known.’
‘That’s a lot of adjectives.’
‘I don’t need you to critique my language. I finished my English degree.’
‘If you’re right about him, then looking more closely can only show that.’
I put Jane Eyre in my bag, out of her sight and reach. ‘Why on earth would I do this for you? What are you even trying to buy me with? I know you normally think of incentives when you’re recruiting an agent. What possible incentive would I have?’
She allowed herself a smile. ‘Ideological, in your case. I won’t patronise you by not admitting that. It’s your value system. You’d be protecting other women. Helping Jane. As I said, you’d be helping Zac, too.’
‘He wouldn’t see it that way. This is a wasted journey for you. There is no way I will do this.’
‘Look. Here’s another incentive for you, but maybe one that isn’t so easy for you to admit. I’m talking about your curiosity. You are Pandora, Holly. It’s in your blood, that impulse to look where you shouldn’t. My guess is that you’ve continued to do it, even without the legitimacy that the job would have given you.’
She was right, but I wasn’t about to admit it to her. ‘I’m not going to spy on Zac. Not for anybody and certainly not for you.’
‘If he’s telling you the truth, you’ve nothing to lose. You’d be helping him, removing him from suspicion. If you’re wrong, wouldn’t it be better for you to know it? Because if you are wrong, you may be living with a modern-day Bluebeard.’
I shook my head, trying to use reason to fight the tightening in my stomach. ‘It doesn’t make sense. This isn’t the kind of thing the Security Service involves itself in. We aren’t talking about national security, here. What aren’t you telling me?’
‘We work extremely closely with the police on many operations and investigations.’
‘That’s empty rhetoric and you know it.’
‘Do you know what Jane looks like?’
I thought again of the photograph I found of her on the first night I slept with Zac. I’d searched for it several times since, without luck. ‘Yes.’
‘Then you know you resemble her. Same height and build – you’re a couple of centimetres taller, but not much. Same colouring, that unusual strawberry blonde hair you both have. Doesn’t that disturb you?’
‘Having a preferred type isn’t a sign that a man’s a psychopath and a murderer.’
‘Holly. I need to ask if Zac has ever done anything to hurt you.’
‘Of course not.’ I tugged Zac’s parka down at the wrists. They were slightly red and swollen, from where he’d pinned them above my head the previous night, one of those fine lines that you sometimes crossed during sex, when you were carried away. ‘But despite the fact you obviously disagree, rather than rescue me from him you want to send me back in.’
‘I’m confident there’s nothing I can say or do right now to keep you away from him. You don’t want to be rescued. So, given that this is where we find ourselves, it would help us a great deal if you would keep an eye out.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t need to do much. We can start small. If you come across any objects of Jane’s, tell us about them in as much detail as you can. Give them to us, if at all possible.’
‘It’s pointless. Not just because I said no and I mean it. Zac doesn’t even have any of her things.’
