Thank God she’d finally gone. He’d just about managed to keep the woman at bay, but her visit had left him very, very frightened. She had made it clear that she knew something. Had MI5 discovered what he’d managed to keep secret for ten years? But why did she keep asking about Syrian intelligence, or was that just a blind?
Ever since that day in Jerusalem when those two men had come to his hotel room, he’d lived in fear of being found out. It was long before he’d ‘come out’ and admitted he was gay. He was still married then – Hope, his girlfriend at Cambridge. She’d long gone; he’d been on his own for years. The men had had photographs of him on the bed, with a boy he’d met in a club. He knew now of course that the boy had been working for them and the whole thing was a set-up. They were Israeli intelligence and they’d said if he didn’t co-operate they’d publicise the photographs and make sure he could never work again in the Middle East. He would have lost his job and his marriage. Now of course that kind of photograph wouldn’t matter much, but they had him well on the hook and too much else had happened for him to get off it. At the time, he’d been working in Syria as a correspondent. The Israelis had wanted to know everything, particularly personal information about high-up Syrian officials – weaknesses, sexual proclivities, all that sort of stuff – no doubt so they could try on them what they’d done to him.
Now MI5 had found out something, but that woman hadn’t said what they knew. If she was telling him that the Syrians knew what he’d done, then his life expectancy had diminished dramatically. She’d left him worried sick, but in the dark.
Since she’d left, he’d taken precautions. He’d double-locked the front and back doors, made sure the windows were shut tight and locked. He’d stayed in, hadn’t answered the phone, and had kept the curtains drawn. But he couldn’t live like this for ever and this morning he’d been forced to venture down the hill to Hampstead village. The cupboard was bare, and that was not a metaphor – there wasn’t even a packet of dried pasta left.
Not that he’d bought much in the way of groceries, for he had decided he would have to leave his house until the immediate danger had passed. Though how would he know when it was safe to return? he wondered anxiously, as he walked slowly back along the edge of the heath, dotted at this time of the morning with dog walkers, and East European nannies pushing babies in buggies.
Where should he go? It would probably be possible to secure another assignment, provided MI5 didn’t scupper him. What he needed was something that would take him abroad. The Sunday Times people had liked his Assad profile and had suggested further assignments – Merkel in Germany was high on their list. But it would be impossible to keep a low profile working on that, not when he’d need to be in Berlin making appointments to see the Chancellor, interviewing her friends and colleagues, digging into her background in East Germany. Anyone who wanted to find him could do so within days.
But was there a threat? The rational, experienced side of Marcham struggled to convince himself there wasn’t. After all, he had only just come from Syria, and there’d been no sign anyone knew anything about his covert activities. If they’d known, they could have killed him there. He could have been easily dealt with in Damascus -discovered dead in a hotel room, a fatality declared an accident by a compliant doctor, under orders from the country’s authorities.
He thought some more about where he should go, as he walked circuitously back to his house, ensuring that the people behind him on one street were not the same ones he noticed when he turned around casually on the next. There was always Ireland, where young Symonds, a church-going friend he’d made through Alex Ledingham ironically enough, had a cottage outside Cork he’d always said Marcham was welcome to use. If he went there for a month, things might calm down. Should he tell anyone where he was going? No, he’d just say he was away. He could always check emails at an internet cafe in Cork; he couldn’t be traced doing that – he hoped.
But there was one person he wasn’t going to tell about his departure, and he shuddered at the reaction of the man if he did. He called himself Aleppo, which Marcham knew as one of the most peaceful and beautiful cities in Syria. It seemed such an inept name for the man; there was something ruthlessly clinical about him, an air of controlled menace that didn’t seem entirely human.
On his own street he saw no one, but was careful nonetheless as he approached the house, stopping on the paved path once he’d gone through the gate in the hedge, looking and listening for signs that anyone was waiting outside. Nothing.
He carefully unlocked his front door, then with equal care double-locked the door behind him. He walked straight through to the kitchen and made sure the back door had not been disturbed. He unpacked his two bags of groceries, boiled the kettle and made himself a strong cup of tea, which he took into the sitting room. It was only as he sat down with a sigh that he saw the man in the wing chair by the unused fireplace. It was Aleppo.
‘God, you scared me!’ he exclaimed, leaping to his feet and spilling his tea on the coffee table.
‘You’ll recover,’ the man said. He wore a black leather jacket and a black pullover and black jeans. The effect was European rather than English; he might have been a lecturer at the Sorbonne, though equally, the dark hair and swarthy countenance could be Middle Eastern as easily as French.
‘How did you get in?’ asked Marcham, his heart beating frantically. He wanted to be angry at the intrusion, but he was too frightened to protest.
‘I’m paid to get in,’ said Aleppo. ‘Relax. Sit down.’
Marcham did as he was told, starting to feel a prisoner in his own house.
‘So have you had any other visitors lately?’
Marcham hesitated. He didn’t want to say anything about Jane Falconer’s visit, but he sensed it would be a great mistake to be caught lying and Aleppo always seemed to know more than he let on. ‘Actually, I have. A woman came from MI5. She wanted to talk to me about a friend of mine who died.’
‘Anything else?’
He hesitated for a split second. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘That was the strange thing. She wanted to know if I’d had any contact with Syrian intelligence.’
‘Syrian?’ Aleppo looked up sharply. ‘What did you tell her?’
‘Nothing,’ he said hastily. ‘Nothing that matters. I told her about the profile I wrote on Assad.’
‘And did you tell her what else you’d done in Syria?’ They both knew what he meant.
There was a chill in the room now, and Marcham realised his answer was going to be crucial. Crucial to what? He didn’t like to think. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said forcefully.
Aleppo looked at him thoughtfully. ‘She didn’t want to know anything about your history there?’
‘I’m sure she did. But I diverted her. My friend Ledingham died in rather bizarre circumstances. You may have read about it in the paper. They called him “The Man in the Box”.’
He was glad to see that Aleppo’s eyes widened. Marcham continued, ‘What the papers didn’t say is that I was the one who found his body. I put him in the box.
‘So, when this woman started pressing me about Syria, I got upset. I think she thought I was breaking down. I told her it was over Ledingham. I said that we’d been close – lovers, in fact. I told her I’d been hiding that. As well as the fact I hid his body.’
‘She swallowed this?’
‘Absolutely. She didn’t ask me anything more about Syria.’ He looked intently at Aleppo. ‘I give you my word.’
To his immense relief, Aleppo nodded. He believes me, thought Marcham, feeling almost grateful. He sensed that if he’d given a different answer, something awful might have happened.
Aleppo said, ‘This woman’s been in the house before. Is there anything she might have seen she shouldn’t have?’
‘No. There’s nothing secret here at all.’
Aleppo stood up. ‘Let’s just make sure, shall we? Let’s do a quick tour.’
‘Of course.’ Marcham led the way down the short hall to the kitchen, feeling calmer now, his worries largely dispelled. He’d told Aleppo the truth, and the truth seemed to have been accepted.
Marcham walked into the bedroom and switched the central light on. Aleppo paused in the doorway, surveying the room. Then he pointed past Marcham, to the small painting of Jesus on the cross that hung on the far wall. ‘I like that. Where did you find it?’ he asked, with a voice full of curiosity.
‘Funnily enough, I found it in Damascus,’ Marcham began, moving closer to the painting. ‘There’s an interesting story associated with the shop where I first saw it,’ he added, preparing to tell Aleppo the tale – it should amuse even this dour, dark man. As he started on his story, he didn’t notice Aleppo quietly close the bedroom door.