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‘You might still stumble on something. We’d like to know of any communications Zac makes, especially if they are connected in any way to Jane. Who are his contacts? How does he get in touch with them? Email? Text? Phone? Laptop? Does he have any social media accounts? Maybe under a user name that people wouldn’t link to him? What trips does he make? If he ever happens to leave a device powered on you might be able to look. See if you can guess his password. Pay attention to where he’s going, who he’s meeting, if anyone ever visits him at work …’
‘Those are disgusting things to do to someone you care about, someone who’s trusted you and let you into their life.’
‘Do what you are comfortable with, then. What you can. You understand Zac. You’re intimate with him. You see the ins and outs of how he operates in ways we can’t.’
‘The answer’s no.’
‘It won’t kill you to think about it, and to be gently watchful while you do.’
‘Again … no.’
‘Let me ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘Did you ever tell Zac you tried to join us?’
‘No. Why would I?’ My voice cracked. ‘It was humiliating. Do you ever consider what it means to someone to work so hard to try to join you, to want to devote herself to that, to protecting her country, and then to discover she’s not good enough?’ I was surprised by my own honesty, by my nakedness and exposure.
‘I do. And it was wise of you to keep it to yourself. Did you tell anyone else?’
‘Only Milly and James and Peggy. As I disclosed when I applied.’
‘Again wise – I suggest you keep it that way. But just in case you change your mind about doing this for us, let me explain a bit more about how it can work.’
‘I’m not going to change my mind. I’ve said no so many times in the last few minutes I’ve lost count. No means no these days.’
‘I know that. I respect that. But it won’t hurt you to hear me out. It doesn’t obligate you to do anything. I’ve come a long way to see you – you can at least listen.’
‘I don’t remember guilt and emotional blackmail as part of the recruitment script.’
‘Well they are. Can you give me a few more minutes?’
All I gave her was a shrug, but she seized on it with a pleased nod.
‘Good,’ she said, and though I punctuated her sentences with shakes of my head, she told me that my identity would be protected, and that any written records would not be available except to a small number of those who needed access, and that any information about my own wrongdoing would not be acted upon.
‘There is no wrongdoing. Because I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘We know that.’ But still she went on, telling me about the secret channels through which I could contact her to pass information. And I couldn’t help but listen, because the tradecraft she was describing, the basic techniques for surveillance and communications, fascinated me too much to stop her altogether or simply leave. She told me how to speak through classified advertisements, and about a dead letter drop she would set up near the bench where we were sitting. She mentioned a safe house, in case I ever needed to get away quickly.
‘You really have wasted your time and wasted your breath,’ I said, when she finally stopped.
‘We’ll see.’ Without another word, she got up to retrace her steps along the path, vanishing as suddenly as she appeared. She moved silently, and I realised that the rustle she’d made when she first approached was no accident. Nothing Maxine said or did ever was.
Now The Two Tunnels (#ulink_3a00187c-bf53-56db-8d29-39e566219c83)
Two and a half years later
Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
My head is filled with the little girl who visited the hospital yesterday. Each time I try to explain away her appearance there, I fail. I look over my shoulder, half-expecting to see Zac.
I am on my morning run. The route is already in my bones. My body moves along it without effort, though I barely slept last night. Hearing Peggy and James’s voices comforted me, but agitated me too. For so long, I have had to hide myself from the few people in the world I love, all the time fearing that Zac would turn up. Now, there is a high probability that he has, as well as the distinct possibility that he dragged a wife and child along with him.
But I am not going to sit around waiting for them to pop out at me again. Or for him to. I added Eliza to my telephone contacts last night. ‘Madam likes to be up early,’ she had said, ‘and my husband’s usually out before the sun, so call any time.’ I grab my phone from the pocket in the waistband of my leggings and use a voice command to do just that.
As we speak, Eliza clatters breakfast things and tries not to sound stressed, while Alice chatters in the background. We arrange to meet in the park for a quick coffee tomorrow morning, before I go into work. ‘Getting Alice out early into fresh air would be good,’ she says. There is a screech from Alice, and a crash of what sounds like glass onto tiles. ‘As you can hear.’ Eliza breaks off, though she hurriedly promises to bring the coffees.
I put the phone away and speed up. The sun is cutting through the pre-dawn mist and the bluebells are out already. Despite the two miles I have already run, and the call, I am not at all out of breath. I had to work hard to get this strong after it happened.
I turn into the disused railway line, going faster still, then enter the first tunnel. The dimness swallows me. The air seems still and dead, and smells of damp. Soon, though, the motion sensors begin, the flashes and sounds activated by my movement – Milly would love this. A circle of blue light surrounded by a white halo blazes at me from a window-shaped cut-out in the wall of stone, then a blast of violin music that is louder than my breathing as I speed up. But the tunnel is filled with ghosts, as if Eliza and Alice brought them along to the hospital and released them to chase after me.
I emerge into fresh, cool air, and the song of birds. There is the magic glimpse of a kingfisher in the gap between the two tunnels, by the river below. After the one that froze here last Christmas, I want so badly to take it as a good sign, but can’t bring myself to.
I enter the second tunnel, leaving the sunshine behind me again. When I come out the other end, I think of a baby’s first breaths, gasped in the midst of all that new brightness and noise. I try to envisage a baby’s birth as it should be, because the bad outcomes are the exceptions and it is important to keep that in mind.
‘Helen.’
I halt as if somebody has jerked me backwards. I know that voice, but I blink several times, as if to be sure of what I am seeing.
There is no doubt. The woman standing before me has stepped straight out of my nightmares.
It’s not the right time yet. Getting you out the right way will take time. We need to set things up properly.
It has been almost two years since I’ve seen her, and Zac is a better candidate for the starring role in my bad dreams. But Maxine is the one who comes to me in the night, just as she did on my last night in hospital, the sheets clinging, cold and damp from my sweat.
Maxine has this way of never seeming to look at anyone or anything, her eyes downcast, her shoulders rounded. She is droopy. That is the word I often think of when I observe her. Your eyes would slide over her as if she were the most uninteresting piece of grey furniture ever made. And that is exactly what she wants your eyes to do.
‘It’s good,’ she says, ‘how readily you respond to Helen. Presumably Graham is natural to you too, now?’
‘Yes.’ I hadn’t been out of breath, but now I am.
Maxine’s blouse is elegant in midnight-blue silk, but untucked and sloppy. Her loose black trousers disguise how slim and dangerously fit she is. She is slouchy, as ever. Only the unfortunate know what it means when she straightens her back, something she does rarely. I am one of that select group.
‘You look different.’ That flat flat flatness of her voice. The pretence of indifference, as if I am a neighbour she sees every day, walking up and down the path to the next-door house.
‘That’s hardly surprising.’
Time seems to spool backwards, speeding past her twilight swoop on me in the hospital almost two years ago – it’s too painful to freeze time there. It rushes further back, past her ambush on the cliffs two and a half years ago. Time stops six years ago, on the day I flunked out, sitting in that white-light room with the exposing glass table between us.
You’re like that puppy who was too friendly to be a police dog, she’d said. We don’t recruit good-looking people. You need to look like Jane Average, but you’re too vain to let yourself look that way.
She has left the rear door of the car open, the engine purring but the driver invisible behind dark windows and hidden by the partition that keeps his section of the car separate. We both know it is no accident that she has crossed my path. Nothing is ever an accident with Maxine.
‘Why are you here?’ I channel her flat indifference, though I am pretty sure I can guess. As repellent as she is to me, it is looking as though I am going to need her help.
‘Have you done anything to give yourself away?’
The question is a confirmation more than a surprise, but the air still puffs out of my stomach. ‘My grandmother …’ My voice trails off. ‘It’s possible, yes.’
She starts towards the car, parked where the road ends and the tunnel opens. ‘Come with me.’ It is as if I’d seen her yesterday, to hear her boss me around.
‘Are you having me watched? Is that how you found me this morning?’
‘Not necessary. You seem to have forgotten that I already knew where you were.’ Do I imagine that there is a flash of something behind her eyes? Maxine opens the car door. ‘There’s something I need you to see. It’s for your protection.’
‘Excuse me if my confidence in your ability to protect me isn’t great.’
‘It’s not as if you have anywhere important to go. Or anyone to go to.’
I say nothing. I keep my face indifferent, channelling Maxine herself. But she is right. Other than my grandmother, there is nobody.
‘Trust me,’ Maxine says.
‘I’ve tried that before. It didn’t work out great.’
‘As far as I can tell, it still hasn’t.’
‘Do you have children, Maxine?’
She pretends not to hear.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘If I answer, will you come?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have children.’
‘How many?’
‘I agreed to answer your first question, not a series of them.’
‘How many?’ I say again.
‘Two.’ She looks so sorry for me. ‘I have two.’
Then The Plague Pit (#ulink_dc36fb12-be2e-58aa-8365-b4b474d2963b)
Two years and five months earlier
Cornwall, 13 November 2016
Since Maxine’s failed attempt to recruit me four weeks ago, I’d plugged Jane’s name, and her mother’s and father’s and brother’s, into every Internet search engine I could think of. There was no social media for any of them, though I found a record of Jane’s birth in London on 4 August 1980 and her marriage to Zac in September 2006.
I also found her father’s obituary, which confirmed what Maxine said about his wife pre-deceasing him and his son Frederick surviving him. Two other things struck me when I read it. First, that Philip Veliko had been a property developer, and second, that the obituary didn’t mention Jane at all.
The Remembrance Sunday ceremony always started at the outdoor war memorial in the square, then moved into the church. I was getting ready to leave for this, twisting up the front of my hair and fastening it with a jade comb, when Zac slipped his hands beneath my knitted dress. Before I knew it, he was tipping me back onto the bed and I was pulling him on top of me and there was a pile of sea-green wool on the floor.
Afterwards, when I stood in front of the looking glass to try again with my hair, he pressed against me from behind, wrapped his arms around me, and rested his hands on my belly. He whispered that he knew my period was two weeks late and my breasts were bigger, which he loved. I wondered that he could know these things, that he could be watching my body that carefully.
I had loved my brief time of hugging the secret of a pregnancy close and just for me. My breasts had been tingling for the past few days. Little electric sparks shot through them. I’d planned to share the news with him tomorrow, on his birthday.
So I said my period had a tendency to skip around, and my breasts were the same as ever, and it was too early to tell, and he smiled at our reflections and said, ‘Then we will see.’
When Zac and I arrived at the war memorial, we found Peggy and James waiting for us close to the Cross of Sacrifice. Peggy invariably got there early on Remembrance Sunday, because she liked to have a good view of the ceremony. She was resplendent in a white fur Cossack hat and scarlet coat.
Zac put his mouth by my ear. ‘She looks like a giant poppy,’ he said, and I nearly sprayed the mouthful of the takeaway coffee I’d just sipped.
James stood beside Peggy, his silver hair sticking up, straight-backed as ever in his black greatcoat and red scarf. He was his usual quiet self, and gave me his usual kiss on the cheek with his usual near-smile, and made his usual half-joke that he was still waiting for me to come back to the pharmacy to work for him again. Peggy put on a display of exaggerated patience as she allowed James to finish, then threw her arms around me.
Zac reached into his coat pocket and produced a wooden cross. Two names were already written on it, in his precise, perfectly controlled lettering. Edward Lawrence, RAF. Matilda Lawrence.
‘You are lovely.’ I put a hand to his cheek. ‘Thank you.’
‘That was thoughtful.’ Peggy tried to smile at Zac but managed only a stiff movement of the upper corners of her mouth. She beamed warmth democratically on everyone – waiters, people behind supermarket tills, neighbours. Zac was the one person for whom she could muster nothing more than cold politeness.
Zac guided me to the Cross of Sacrifice, and I knelt to place the small cross at its base, among the others, before I rose and stepped backwards.
‘What was his rank?’ Zac asked.
‘Squadron Leader. He was a commissioned officer, but he wasn’t born into it. He grew up on my grandparents’ dairy farm. He was young when he died. Thirty-three. They both were. Did I tell you he flew search and rescue helicopters?’
‘You did. You should be very proud.’
As I honoured my military father and civilian mother, I thought of my grandmother, and what she constantly said about my parents’ deaths. She, of course, had a conspiracy theory, and believed that the car accident that killed them wasn’t an accident at all but made to look like one because my father knew something he shouldn’t. Whenever she dropped her dark hints I tried to quiz her, only for her to clam up. Sometimes, I thought my obsession with joining the Security Service was driven by my wish to get access to whatever hidden information there might be about this. I remembered Maxine’s seemingly innocuous questions about their deaths during that awful interview.
Zac put an arm around me, and we slowly walked the few metres to join Peggy and James. Peggy said, ‘So you’re living above the plague pit, Zac?’
He looked bewildered, which was not a look Zac often wore.
‘Didn’t Holly tell you?’ Peggy said.
‘No.’ He managed a joke. ‘I ought to ask for a discount on the rent.’ He turned to me, as if for help. ‘Holly?’
‘It’s just a story,’ I said.
‘You know it isn’t,’ Peggy said.
‘Are you going to tell me?’ Zac’s eyes were glittering at mine.
‘Hmm. I’m thinking I have to say yes to that.’ So I began. ‘In the mid-fifteenth century, five hundred people from the town were lost to the plague. The burial records for that period don’t survive, and the plague victims aren’t in the graveyard.’ A paper poppy petal, torn away from the body of the flower, floated above us, lifted by the wind. ‘So here is the question. Where were the poor souls put?’
‘Souls?’ Zac raised an eyebrow.
‘The thinking is that the bodies were loaded onto carts and taken along the coffin path. Then they were dumped into a pit. This was three kilometres along the coast, but slightly inland.’
