Authors: Alan Judd
‘Didn’t know you were a Bristol owner,’ he called, before Charles was properly out of the car. ‘Are you a member of the owners’ club?’
‘No.’
‘You should be.’ The church clock struck seven. Two cars took the double bend in front of it too fast. Jeremy, red-faced and wide-eyed, stared at Charles as if lost for words for
once. Charles resigned himself to inviting him in.
‘Passing by, just dropped in to see if you were around. Fancy an early supper at the Swan?’
Despair at the thought prevented Charles from coming up with an immediate excuse. Jeremy, like the law, construed silence as assent.
‘Splendid. Just a quick one. Wendy’s out this evening, didn’t fancy cooking. I’ll get up there now and grab a table. Join me as soon as you can.’
The Range Rover’s suspension took the strain as Jeremy got in; what Jeremy considered a quickie meal was unlikely to be light. Irritated with himself and resentful of Jeremy, Charles rang
Sarah, really for no better reason than to complain to someone. But she was still switched off and he didn’t leave a message.
The Swan was not crowded and Jeremy had a window table at the back overlooking the patchwork fields and woods between there and the sea. When Charles arrived he was clasping his near-empty pint
glass in both hands and staring not at the view but at the chair opposite, morose and heavy-featured. As Charles approached, his expression transformed itself into manufactured delight.
‘Well done. What are you having? I recommend the Harveys. Very good and very local.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Good thing about coming all the way out here is that it’s on
the edge of the constituency and I don’t run into too many of my constituents. At least, not that recognise me. Always getting caught out over their bloody names. I know politicians are
supposed to be good on names but I’m not. The venison’s good, so’s the pheasant. Both poached, probably. Lot of that round here. You really should join the Bristol club, makes it
easier to sell when the time comes. 410, isn’t it? Pity. 411s were a better car.’
Jeremy had venison, Charles shepherd’s pie. For a while they talked of the plentiful tedium and few pleasures of constituency work, of how immigration lawyers were getting round the
system, how important it was to keep in with the party whips, how Jeremy couldn’t bear people whose only interest was to climb the greasy pole rather than create a better and more equal
society, how gratified he was to be on the Intelligence Services Committee and how he would never want to be foreign secretary anyway.
‘Dreadful job, being a minister. At everybody’s beck and call the whole time, never a moment to yourself, one headache after another, almost as bad as being prime minister. I
wouldn’t thank you for it, I really wouldn’t. Would you?’
‘They seem to enjoy it. Rarely give it up unless they have to. Perhaps they think they’re there to do something.’
‘Of course, you’re a mate of George Greene, aren’t you? Handy, having the foreign secretary in your pocket when you want to be chief.’
‘His idea, not mine.’ Given Jeremy’s resentment at not having got the job, it seemed once again best to occupy no-man’s-land. ‘But I doubt I’d have been
offered it if we hadn’t known each other.’
‘Jobs for the boys, eh? Nothing changes.’
Charles let him have that one, as it was demonstrably true, and Jeremy, contented, dropped the subject.
‘How’s Sarah?’ Jeremy asked.
‘Well, thanks. Busier than she’d like to be at the moment, with the house move and all that, but okay.’ Busier partly thanks to your secretary who does favours for the Russian
intelligence service and doubtless finds a home for copies of all your ISC papers, he would have added. But there would be time for that later; Michael Dunton would be pleased to throw a scrap to
his diminishing counter-espionage section, who were constantly being plundered for counter-terrorism work. ‘And Wendy?’ he asked.
‘She’s fine.’ Jeremy took a swig of his beer. ‘In fact, I’m thinking we might get divorced.’ He emptied his glass. ‘Well, you know what it’s like,
one thing and another. Except that you don’t, of course, you’ve only been married five minutes. The life went out of our marriage years ago and now that the children are off our hands,
more or less, there’s not much point carrying on for the sake of it. May as well live our own lives.’
‘Sorry to hear that. Does each of you have an own life?’
‘Well, there’s the rub, there’s the rub.’ He nodded. ‘Thing is, I – er – Katya, my secretary – don’t think you’ve met her but Sarah
has, she’s doing some work for her. Anyway, Katya and I thought we might get together – not marry, we can’t, she’s still married to a vegetable in America. Very rich
vegetable, she’s got power of attorney, so that’s all right.’ He grinned. ‘She’s buying a house here now. Sarah knows about it.’
‘Does Wendy?’
‘Thing is, what I was going to say is, Katya’s half Russian – well, Russian but with a US passport – and what I wanted to ask – what I want to know is –
whether if she and I, you know, got together – if that would compromise my position on the ISC and possibly any future advancement in government, if you see what I mean. No reason why it
should, of course – Cold War’s long gone and all that – and under the last government and the NIA it certainly wouldn’t have. But things seem to have changed since I left
the NIA, what with the reinstatement of the three separate services and now George Greene and his ilk in high office, and I wondered if you’ve got any feel for what attitudes are likely to
be. I mean, given that you know George better than I do, I wondered if you’d be able to put out feelers—’
‘Questions for the boys, eh?’ Charles softened it with a smile. ‘But really, I’ve no idea, I haven’t enquired about current attitudes.’ Literal, but limited,
truth was preferable to honesty. It ought to be a problem and certainly would be once Katya’s allegiances were known. But he couldn’t tell Jeremy that yet. ‘If I were you I
wouldn’t do anything in a hurry, don’t commit yourself. Take time to test the water a bit. How did you come across her and how long’s it been going on?’
Jeremy gave a rambling account of how allegations arising from a misunderstanding with a previous secretary had resulted in a series of temps who proved very temporary and how finally an advert
on the parliamentary website – most people’s first resort but his last because he preferred to work through people he knew – had produced Katya’s application as an American
graduate student and researcher who wanted some practical, hands-on experience of the British political system. They had become close, they understood each other, it had been a revelation. Jeremy
spoke as a man obsessed, from which it was easy to guess that she manipulated him with ease. ‘It’s not just a physical thing, you see, it’s intellectual. She has the finest mind
I’ve ever met.’
Charles’s own mind was focused less on Katya’s intellectual pre-eminence than on Jeremy’s iPad. It had rested unattended on the table throughout dinner until, while Jeremy
described the unsatisfactory secretary who was responsible for the allegations and misunderstandings, it came to life with a message. Jeremy raised his eyebrows at it and said, ‘Ah –
Toast thinks he has me in check. I’ll let him wait till I get home before showing him his error.’ He grinned. ‘His fatal error so far as this game is concerned.’
‘Who is Toast?’
‘One of my chess opponents, the most regular and the best. Toast is his game name. A good player but not quite as good as he thinks. I’ll let him stew, then finish him off
later.’
‘The game is live now?’
‘Resumed just before I came out this evening. He’s taken a couple of hours over that move.’
Later, installed at last in the cottage with the Office camp-bed – a clumsy apparatus marked ‘War Department’, complete with the government arrow – Charles went through
his phone. There were numerous messages from Elaine, some of which he could deal with, others which he put off by saying he would discuss tomorrow. There were also two from DI Steggles and one each
from Tim Corke and Michael Dunton. He had hoped for news of
Beowulf
to give Sarah but there was nothing. He still found it hard to believe it was as serious as it had the potential to be;
if something had gone badly wrong it would surely be evident by now. He rang Sarah but there was no answer on her mobile or the house phone. He rang her office and got the night-guard who said she
had gone home early evening, then returned and gone again. He left a long and sympathetic message on her mobile, made tea, put his radio on the floor by the camp-bed so that the
Today
programme would be within reach, and prepared to read for an hour before sleep. He kept the phone beside him in case she rang.
S
arah’s experience of women considering divorce was that they damned it up for a long time then poured it out in an emotional Niagara of
resentment, regret, anger and – quite often – self-recrimination. But Wendy Wheeler was as cool and precise as the smartly tailored suit she wore.
‘I want to divorce Jeremy because I can’t bear to live with him any more. The mere sight of him makes me sick with distaste and contempt. It doesn’t help that I also think
he’s mad.’
The crypt was busy with the pre-concert crowd. They sat at a small table crammed up against a pillar, each with a glass of Sauvignon. Wendy’s dark fringe was neatly trimmed and her cheeks,
with their prominent bones, were almost wrinkle-free. Sarah would have assumed a face-lift but her complexion had none of the unsmiling frigidity that usually gave the game away. ‘Why
mad?’
‘He doesn’t see the world as other people do. He lives in a world of his own – I know we all do to an extent but his doesn’t so much overlap with other people’s as
collide with them. I don’t think he understands other people at all. Nor himself. Something happens and it sparks off fantasies. He never judges by what he sees or hears at all, only by what
he already thinks or wants.’
She didn’t want a messy divorce, just a quiet and complete separation that left her and the boys adequately provided for. She didn’t want to sabotage his career or milk him of every
penny. The boys were at university now, one in his first and the other his third year. They would be ‘all right’ about it.
‘But will Jeremy be all right about it? It’s bound to be messy if he isn’t.’
‘He could be. I just never know which way he’s going to bounce. It could suit him quite well if he’s sensible about it. On the other hand, we all know what hurt pride can
do.’
‘Is there anyone else involved?’
‘Not directly.’ She smiled. ‘There was but he’s dead.’
Sarah waited.
‘Dr Klein, Viktor Klein. The man everyone was talking about the other night.’ Her lips were still formed in a smile.
‘Does Jeremy know?’
‘No, not properly. But he’s come to suspect.’ She looked around. ‘I wish one could smoke in these places.’
‘We could go outside.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘So why—’ Sarah hesitated. She wasn’t going to take on the case, didn’t need to know the ins and outs of it all and had a couple of good names to recommend to
Wendy. But she was puzzled and Charles would be interested. ‘So why – if you don’t mind my asking – why didn’t you get divorced while Dr Klein was alive? Why now, when
he’s dead?’
‘You never met Viktor, did you? He was a lover, not a husband. He’d been married, of course, but he could never have stayed married. It would be a nightmare to be his wife.
He’d lose interest the moment the knot was tied and you’d be forever looking over your shoulder at every woman he met. It was all I could do to – to keep him, as it
was.’
‘But why bother now he’s dead? Divorce is costly, you’ll both be the poorer for it for evermore. Couldn’t you just rub along, leading separate lives? Wouldn’t
Jeremy accept that?’
‘Would he notice?’ She shrugged. ‘We could, yes, of course we could, like many people. In some ways it would suit him, he could spend more time with his floozie, that Russian
tart who works for him.’
‘Katya? He’s having an affair with Katya?’
‘I don’t know whether it’s an affair or quite what it is and frankly I don’t much care. He’s certainly having an obsession. She’s got him so twisted round her
little finger she doesn’t have to jump into bed with him. Unless she wants to, of course, which is hard to imagine. No, but I think he might have killed Viktor, you see, that’s the
thing. And I can’t bring myself to stay with him as long as I think that.’
Sarah put down her glass. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘I just do. I look at him sometimes, I look at the back of his head and his fat neck and I can tell, I can just tell. He’s hiding something. I do see things sometimes, not all the
time but sometimes I can tell things about people. I’m a bit psychic.’
‘So you’ve no actual evidence? He hasn’t got a gun hidden away or anything like that?’
‘No evidence and he doesn’t have a gun but I know, I just know. Just as I knew he was becoming suspicious from the way he kept mentioning Viktor and started wanting to know where I
was every afternoon. Then I found he’d been checking my car mileage. Now he’s suddenly much more cheerful. That’s why I can’t bear the idea of spending the rest of my life
with him.’
‘You haven’t thought of going to the police with your suspicions?’
‘Oh no, I don’t want to get him into trouble. Anyway, there’s no evidence, is there?’ Her eyes widened.
Sarah stared back, unsure of which of the Wheelers was madder.
‘There’s also this.’ Wendy took a folded paper from her handbag.
It was a will, the sort downloaded from the Internet, not drawn up by a solicitor. Dated almost a year ago, it was signed by Viktor Klein and witnessed by Jean Goodsell. He had bequeathed all
his worldly goods to Wendy Wheeler.
‘That’s his housekeeper, Mrs Goodsell. There’s another copy with his solicitors here in London, but I don’t know who they are.’
‘And Jeremy knows nothing of this?’
‘Of course not.’ She took the will and clipped her handbag shut. ‘Nor shall he until after the divorce.’