Geoffrey Fane stalked into his office on the fifth floor of Vauxhall Cross. The room was flooded with light, shining in through the two large windows overlooking the Thames. He walked across and stared out at the little tourist boat just turning to go back towards Westminster, having completed its tour up river. He knew the boat’s crew would be drawing the passengers’ attention to the building, reminding them how it had featured in a James Bond film and giving them some garbled account of what went on inside. He himself wasn’t at all convinced that they should ever have moved into such an exotic-looking place. Its outlandish appearance just invited people to gawp, and made it more of a target too. Admittedly the previous office block, Century House, where he’d worked when he first joined, was a dreadful hole, with masonry falling off the front and an interior like a squalid tenement. No one would ever have wanted to take tourists to see that or put it in a film. Good thing too.
Fane was feeling thoroughly out of sorts. He’d just been to a meeting in ‘C’’s office upstairs, to discuss the launch of the forthcoming History of MI6. Geoffrey didn’t agree with that scheme at all – what was the point of it? he’d asked. There were other ways they could have celebrated the centenary. A Secret Intelligence Service should be secret. But he’d been unable to prevent it, especially when Five had announced that they were doing one, and the defeat had annoyed him greatly. At least he’d managed to ensure the book stopped at 1949. Over at Five they’d gone almost up to the present day and then found themselves criticised because the last chapters were too thin. What else did people expect?
Perhaps it was time to retire, he thought, before he started to get the reputation of being old-fashioned and dyed in the wool. But retire to what? One of his troubles was that there was no woman in his life. Since Adele had gone off with her Frenchman, various short affairs had come to nothing. The women had all bored him; intellectually negligible, with nothing at all interesting to say. He still lived by himself in the flat in Fulham he’d bought after the divorce, since Adele had got away with – as he saw it – their house in Kensington. Not that she needed it (her new husband was as rich as Croesus), yet now she was pressing Geoffrey to sell the small country house that had been in his family for generations. It wasn’t that he went there very often now, and there was no prospect of grandchildren to enjoy it with. But it was his, damn it, not Adele’s.
His thoughts were interrupted by the buzzing of the phone on his desk. He picked it up. ‘Yes, Daisy?’ he said. A new girl, rather sweet if a little slow. Still, he’d get her up to speed soon enough. He prided himself on having a deft hand with his PAs, though it was annoying that they never seemed to stay with him very long.
‘Liz Carlyle rang, Geoffrey, while you were upstairs.’
‘Oh?’ Fane said, a little tetchily, cross that Daisy hadn’t told him straight away.
‘Yes. She wondered if she could come across. Preferably today, she said.’
‘Hmm,’ said Fane. He would have liked to tell Daisy to ask Elizabeth Carlyle to come over right away, but that wouldn’t do. Though he would like to see her, he couldn’t conquer a need to demonstrate what a very busy man he was; so busy that he might, just might, be able to squeeze her in between more pressing appointments. He said, ‘Tell her I can probably fit her in at the end of the day. Let’s say half-past five.’ Then another thought came into his head. Perhaps he could persuade her to stay for a drink after their meeting.
Because the truth was that Elizabeth Carlyle was the one woman he’d met since Adele went who really aroused his interest. He found her attractive, both physically and intellectually. Her slim figure, brown hair and calm but watchful grey-green eyes fascinated him. She was a woman of real intelligence and he wanted to know what she was thinking about – other than the problem of the moment, which was all they ever found themselves discussing.
But now she’d got herself involved with that DGSE chap, Seurat. What was it with the French? First Adele and now Elizabeth. Anyway, he thought spitefully, he’d embarrassed them both that afternoon in the Athenaeum, telling neither of them that he was inviting the other. He toyed with the top of his pen as he thought of that awkward meeting, and of how Elizabeth’s expression had stayed rigidly business-like while Martin Seurat blithely chatted on, all Gallic charm, assuming Fane did not know they were seeing each other. But Geoffrey Fane was always in the know. He prided himself on that.
By five-thirty the sun was in the west and glancing off the windows. Fane heard Reception ring Daisy to say that Miss Carlyle was in the waiting room. He got up from his desk and pulled a Venetian blind partway down.
‘Liz is here,’ said Daisy a few minutes later, poking her head round the door.
