Authors: Alan Judd
There were two men and three women, plus a couple of children, all standing by the pub, away from the torrent. There were unfinished layers of sandbags by the pub door and the adjacent cottage.
The catering van was still there.
‘Doing sixty if he was doing anything,’ one of the men was saying. ‘Christ knows what he was on. Came round that corner like a bat out of hell, skidded all over the place, hit
the side of the bridge there and bounced off into the water. All four wheels in the air at one point, just before he tipped over. He was flung about all over the place, couldn’t have had his
belt on, but I saw his face. He was that bloke what bought old Mrs Hillier’s house. Then he went into it on his side, with the current turning him over and over.’
The rear of the Fiat was jammed against the underside of the arch. They’d rung 999 but it would take hours for emergency services to get there; they were flooded out with calls, they said
– one of the men laughed – and they’d have to go the long way round. There was no hope for him anyway – he never got out of the car. Dead before he hit the water, most
likely, the way he was thrown about. Married, wasn’t he, but no children so far as anyone knew? Wasn’t he that secret man, head of MI5 or something?
Charles went to the water’s edge. ‘You sure we can’t get him out?’
The man who had laughed shook his head. ‘Forget about him, mate. It’s all over for him. It’s you what won’t get out if you put a foot in that current. Nor will the car
till the level drops. Look how it’s wedged. Poor bugger.’
He was right. The car was wedged like a crushed cigarette-packet against the bridge, its roof flattened almost level with its doors. Nothing of the interior was visible. In no hurry now, Charles
walked back up the hill in the rain.
N
igel had no religious beliefs that anyone knew of. He was cremated on an oppressive grey day that was like so many Oxford days, a speciality of
the Thames valley. During the service Charles distracted himself from the effort of more appropriate reflections by trying to work out why this should be, but his thoughts kept returning to Nigel
himself. Despite it all, he had found it hard to dislike him until the end. In fact, he had respected him for his love for Sarah. He may even have been a faithful husband. And, he had never seemed
to resent the fact that Sarah had had Charles’s baby but not his. Not openly, at least. Thinking this made everything that had happened seem so profoundly unnecessary. Nigel could have lived
a fulfilled and successful life without doing anything of what he had done. But the devil alone knoweth the heart of man, as the old judge had said. And, anyway, life itself was as profoundly
unnecessary as anything that happened in it.
Such thoughts led nowhere, Charles well knew. He looked around. All the seats were taken, which he hoped might please Sarah, if she were in a state to notice. She wore a sharp-edged, shapely
black coat with a black hat and half-veil. She and her sister were the only women wearing hats and he could not help musing on what a hat could do for a woman, the right hat anyway; nor, as he
looked at her, on how from his early youth smartly dressed women in church had aroused in him the most unchurchly thoughts. He hoped they would never cease. He thought too of Martin’s
still-unburied body, chilled in the mortuary, pending the inquest. He would attend that funeral, too, come what may.
Nigel’s friend Valerie Hubbard, the junior security minister, delivered an elaborate and meandering oration. Hymns were sung, the clergyman led prayers and Nigel’s brother – of
whom Charles had never heard – read the first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel. Sarah did not participate.
Charles kept to the back as they filed out, at the cost of having to talk to Jeremy Wheeler. There was a queue to shake Sarah’s hand.
‘Tragic, absolutely tragic,’ said Jeremy, adopting a stage-whisper undertone. ‘Very personal for all of us. Real cat-fight over the succession now. The smart money’s on
Morley, the outsider, the thinking general. Surprised you’re here.’
‘Why?’
‘You were an Abrahams man. Suppose you went to his, too? I was busy, unfortunately. But you knew Nigel at Oxford, of course. Poor Sarah, she’s taken it very well, very dignified. You
were rivals over her, weren’t you, you and Nigel? He pinched her off you or something?’
‘It was more complicated than that.’
Jeremy grinned and lowered his voice further, which somehow made it louder. ‘Now I see why you’re here. Don’t blame you. Attractive woman still.’
In fact, Charles had kept to the back precisely to avoid meeting her. He didn’t want to force her to smile, shake hands, make conversation. He had thought constantly over the past three
weeks about how he had affected her life, and could see nothing good. Everything bad that had happened to her – except perhaps for her inability to have more children, though possibly even
that, somehow – had been as a result of knowing him. He kept returning to the remark she had once made about his lack of joy, which still hurt and puzzled him. Perhaps she was right, if not
quite accurate, mistaking it for the baleful consequences of knowing him.
The wake was at the Studley Priory hotel, where he had taken Sarah on their first date. Jeremy said he would go, to see who was there. There was talk of a memorial service in London.
‘Should be settled by then, the succession. I’ve decided not to allow my name to go forward, by the way.’
‘Why?’
‘D’you think I should?’
The idea was preposterous. But perhaps no more so than Nigel’s brief tenure. ‘Most definitely.’
Jeremy’s round face filled with emotion. ‘Thank you for your endorsement, Charles. I wasn’t going to say anything but if you really think I should—’
‘I do.’
He solemnly shook Charles’s hand, then looked over his shoulder. ‘There’s Morley. Better go and make my number with him. See how the land lies.’
Jeremy’s eager departure enabled Charles to slip away from the queue before Sarah. Outside in the car park mourners for the next funeral were arriving. Many of Nigel’s had already
gone. Charles walked about for a while, reluctant to drive straight home but equally reluctant to do anything else. He didn’t want to go to the wake and be sociable and force himself upon
Sarah, yet he felt the need to mark the occasion, not simply to leave it. If Sonia had been there he would have talked to her. He hoped there would always be Sonia to talk to.
He noticed Nigel’s official Jaguar and saw Sarah now walking slowly towards it, talking to Roger, the driver. Decent of the SIA, he thought, to chauffeur her on the last day of her
semi-official life. He had no idea what a wholly private, single existence would hold for her, where she would live, how good her friends were, whether her work was something she could throw
herself into. Whatever her future, there was no room for him in it. He could hardly complain.
He was parked not far from the Jaguar, so he stepped through a gap in the hedge into another section of the car park and walked three times around that to give her time to get away. They had
spoken only twice since Nigel’s death, the first time when he rang to see if there was anything he could do. She thanked him but said no, the arrangements seemed to be proceeding normally,
there would be an inquest of course but the office was being helpful with the official side of things, it was kind of him to ask. A couple of days later she rang and left a message saying she had
told no-one about what she called ‘Nigel’s scene in the house’ and hoped he hadn’t either. He left a message saying he hadn’t and wouldn’t and again offered
help, but heard no more.
The sounds of departing cars faded. He stepped back through the gap in the hedge. The Jaguar and the remaining mourners were gone, but standing by the Bristol was Sarah. She had her back to him
and was looking the other way across the car park. For the first time in his life Charles felt something approaching an epiphany. It was some seconds before he spoke.
The Single Intelligence Agency, the combined intelligence service described in this book, is an imagined institution. Neither it nor the fictional characters portrayed are
intended in any way to represent the three separate British intelligence services. In particular, the invented character, Nigel Measures, has no connection whatever with any head of any British
intelligence agency, past or present.
The story of Measures’s espionage on behalf of the French is, however, based on what is reportedly a real case. On pages 118–119 of his book,
Friendly Spies
(Atlantic Monthly
Press, 1993, ISBN 0–87113–497–7), Peter Schweizer quotes a retired French intelligence official as describing how a ‘junior aide’ on the British Foreign Office
European Community negotiating team spied for the French between about September 1985 and the June 1987 EC Brussels summit. During this period, which included the Single Market negotiations, the
official allegedly passed ‘invaluable’ intelligence to the French on the British negotiating positions. He also, like Measures in this book, reportedly had his photograph secretly taken
with the EC president, Jacques Delors.
I have no idea how true this story is or what happened to the alleged spy – whether he was discovered, whether he is still serving or whether he lives in honourable or dishonourable
retirement – but I can say that Measures and what he does in this book bears no relation to any official whom I have known or heard of.