A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [152]
‘You’d better come with me,’ he says, when I open the front door. ‘No need to pack.’
His expression is one of worn distaste: most probably Lithiby summoned him from home just as he was preparing to go to bed. He betrays no sign of pleasure at my failure; there is just a weary contempt on his neat, tanned face. He never liked me. He never thought I was up to the job. They should have given it to him and then none of this would have happened.
I go back upstairs and put on my jacket like a condemned man. I have a few cigarettes in the inside pocket, also my wallet and an old pack of chewing-gum to see me through the night. Then I lock up and go outside to the car.
We say very little to one another on the journey. Sinclair will not reveal where we are going, though I suspect that it will be a safe house and not Vauxhall Cross or Five. I cannot tell how much or how little he knows about the conversation with Katharine. Lithiby would have given him only a sketchy outline on the phone, just enough to make him realize that JUSTIFY is blown.
Sorting through the debris of what Katharine has said occupies my mind for the whole journey. There is no order to this. I experience an acute sense of self-hatred and embarrassment, but also an immense anger. I thought that I had experienced the last of failure, seen it off for good, but to have messed up like this is catastrophic; it is a personal defeat of a different order to anything that has happened to me in the past. There is also concern: for Mum’s safety, for Saul’s, and for Kate’s. She knows everything about JUSTIFY, but I cannot think that Katharine’s words were anything more than scaremongering. Kate poses no threat to them: why should they harm her? And I feel a curious sense of annoyance with her, too. Though none of this is Kate’s fault, she was the source of my failure: were it not for the hold that she exerted over me, I would never have gone to see her, far less lied to Fortner about the two of us still being lovers. And there is consternation that he even bothered to install a microphone in her house in the first place. Fortner actually believed me when I told him we were still sleeping together: he saw that as a genuine possibility. And I realize that the Americans never really knew me at all.
On just one occasion, about five minutes into the journey, I attempt to make conversation with Sinclair. A cool night wind is drumming into the car through an open window and I think I detect the sour vapour of alcohol on his breath.
‘It’s funny, you know,’ I say, turning towards him as he comes off the Westway, heading north towards Willesden. ‘After everything that’s happened in the last few -‘
But he stops me short.
‘Listen, Alec. I’ve been instructed to keep my mouth shut. So unless you wanna talk about New Labour or somethin’, we’d better just wait ‘til we get there.’
The street is narrow, poorly lit, suburban. Of the dozen or so houses lining both sides of the road only two or three have lights on downstairs. It’s late, and most people have gone to bed. Sinclair pulls the car over to the right-hand side of the road, scraping the hubcaps against the kerb as he attempts to park. ‘Shit,’ he mutters under his breath, and I unbuckle my seatbelt.
A man is walking a dog on the opposite side of the street and Sinclair tells me to stay where I am until he is out of sight. Then we both get out of the car and make our way up a short driveway to the front door of a detached house with curtains drawn in all of the front windows. He taps once on the foggy glass of the door and I am surprised to see that it is Barbara who opens it from the other side. She greets Sinclair with a tired smile, but shoots me a sour look which breaks from her face like a snake. No more pleasantries. That is not required of her now.
The hall is covered in a dirty brown carpet which continues upstairs to the first floor. There are two umbrellas and a walking stick in a stand beside the door, and a bright oil painting of a mountain hanging to our right as we come in. Magnolia paint covers all the