I Spy

‘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.’

‘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

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

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.’

‘Where you are.’ Peggy was fingering the cross that dangled from a silvery chain around her neck. ‘To rid the town of contagion.’ She glanced up at the smoky-blue sky, as if for heavenly support. ‘The pit is on the land behind your farmhouse. Your back garden, as a matter of fact. Nobody wants to live there. It’s supposed to be unlucky.’

‘Sounds like a load of superstitious …’ Zac paused to find a more polite term than whatever he’d been about to say. ‘It’s as likely as mermaids.’

Peggy’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared. To Peggy, an accusation of superstition was as bad as one of devil worship.

‘You know that mermaids are real.’ I was trying to tease the tension away. ‘I told you. You can’t live in St Ives and not believe in mermaids.’

‘True.’ He pulled my head against his chest. We were both thinking of the rough-hewn and time-scarred Mermaid Bench, the two of us holding hands as we knelt by the Mermaid in a kind of pledge to each other and to her.

‘Holly’s our little Ariel,’ Peggy said.

Zac gave me some serious side-eye at this Disneyfication. I squeezed his hand, trying to communicate silent understanding as well as a plea for him not to start on a critique of the ‘sugary sentimentalism’ that he detested.

I smiled at Peggy. I knew that she was picturing me and Milly, still tiny girls in pink nightdresses, snuggled against her during one of our countless sleepovers, the three of us eating popcorn and watching the Disney video.

There was room in the world for all kinds of mermaids.

Milly was gesturing for me to join her near the open church door, where she was standing by Gaston, whose hair was slicked into a ponytail. He broke up with her a few months ago, but Milly couldn’t get over it. She continued to sleep with him, and whenever they had sex it gave her false hope that he’d changed his mind.

As I looked at Gaston, I was again struck by how strongly he resembled the character from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, which was another of the films that Milly and I watched with Peggy when we were children. That one was our favourite, because Belle was a passionate reader, like me and Milly.

Again Milly was beckoning me, this time even more frantically, but I shook my head no, not wanting to leave Zac when he was so palpably uncomfortable.

‘Milly needs you, sweetheart.’ Peggy was tugging at my arm. I looked helplessly at Zac as Peggy prised my hand out of his, deliberately ignoring the don’t-you-dare-leave-me-with-them look he was shooting at me. She gave me a push towards Milly that practically sent me flying.

Milly was in tight jeans and sheepskin boots, a cream beanie hat covering her bright hair, seeming to know everyone, kissing old and young alike but making sure all the time that she kept within a metre of Gaston.