Many a tear has to fall, thought Claude Whelan obscurely; a lyric from a forgotten song, a moment from his past. Long-stemmed glasses on a starched tablecloth. A dining room with a view of the sea; the windowpanes spattered with rain. If he asked, Claire would know the precise holiday, month and year, the name of the hotel. He was hopeless with such details, his ability to memorise facts being reserved for his working life. Outside of that, he simply had the long view, like the one offered by those hotel windows, and the generic details that might have come from anywhere: the long-stemmed glasses, the pristine tablecloth.
He was in a stairwell, taking a moment away from the Hub. A brief opportunity to ring Claire, let her know he’d be late. She understood: of course she did. He was First Desk. The country was shaking at the knees, the tremors from Westacres still rocking the capital. She had fierce notions of loyalty. She would have been shocked had he suggested he’d be leaving soon.
“As long as it takes,” she’d said.
“Thank you, darling.”
“I’ll make up the spare bed.”
And now he was watching raindrops coursing down the windows, miles away from that holiday hotel, and brooding on loyalty, and how it pulled you in different directions. His first COBRA session this morning, and his Second Desk had made a liar of him. Her reasons had been oddly persuasive, but treachery always had its convincing side. And there was a way out of this, of course: do his job, catch the bad people, and the problem would disappear. And this was what he intended to do anyway, so really, where was the difficulty?
But he knew that Claire, with her damn-the-torpedoes approach to ethics, would take a different view: she’d expect him to be on the phone to the PM by now, offering his resignation—the Service had dropped the ball; hell, the Service had polished the ball with an oily rag, pumped it up and handed it to the opposition.
And Whelan knew that this was not only the honourable course, it was probably the safest, but . . . but damn it,
So, not only the shortest-lived First Desk ever, but one whose microscopic tenure had seen the Service hobbled and chained; an onlooker at its own court martial.
He removed his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of his jacket. At moments of weakness, he liked to recall the codename he’d gone by over the river: Galahad. All the weasels—yes, that’s what they were called—all the intelligence weasels were assigned codenames, largely so they’d reflect a little of the glamour of actual spooks. So: Galahad, and Claire had loved that. My knight in shining armour, she’d said. Had there really been such knights, or were they just a bunch of talented ruffians? It didn’t matter; remembering that he’d been Galahad buoyed him. He’d been made to change it on his elevation: he was RP1 now; functional, yes, but boring. And now he was no longer alone; one last polish of his glasses, and back on they went.
Diana Taverner had found him. “News,” she said.
He waited.
“Adam Lockhead. One of the . . . ”
“Properties,” he said.
Cold bodies.
“He’s turned up.”
A wave of relief flushed through Whelan. “Where?”
“On the Eurostar. His passport lit up coming through border control. His train arrives in five minutes.”
“You’ll have him arrested?”
“I’ve sent Flyte.” She paused. “It would be best if there were no . . . official chain of custody. Just in case.”
Whelan looked towards the windows again: at them, rather than through them. The raindrops were choosing zig-zaggy routes to the sill, as if this were the safest way of navigating glass.
Catch the bad people, he thought, and the problem goes away.
“Well,” he said at last. “Keep me in the picture.”
Coming through passport control before boarding the train, he’d had the sense of triggering a silent alarm.
Which might just mean they wanted him back in England with as little fuss as possible.
