Closer, page 3
By the time I reached him, I wished I had a coat of my own, too. The breeze coming up from the loch was stiff and cold, cutting through the sparse warmth from the afternoon sun.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Napier said as I approached, a sweep of the arm indicating the purple haze of heather cast across the hillside, and the tumble of rocky scree down to the water.
I’d spent many an hour up here with him, sitting in the shelter of the picturesque stone building, watching merlins and eagles and taking the occasional sip from a hip flask.
I tried to ignore the looming silhouette of one of his security men standing nearby, even though the presence seemed more intrusive than usual today.
Natural, I suppose, given that an undercover armed operative of some sort had been staying at the Haw until last night.
I still felt a surge of shock to think of Cassie in such terms.
“You done for the day?” I asked. Earlier, Napier had made his excuses and retreated to an office for the first of several video conferences. I rarely knew what these things involved, and understood better than to ask.
It was only now that I wondered if I should have tried to know more of my friend’s activities, and if that would have helped me understand Cassie’s role in all this.
“Aye, yes, Mattie. Done for now. Although I’m afraid I have some calls to take later.”
He said it as if he didn’t enjoy being in the thick of everything.
“You okay, Mattie? You look drawn.”
“My girlfriend’s not who I thought she was, and she’s vanished, leaving behind a gun and a false identity. I reckon I’m about par for a man in that situation.”
I didn’t intend my words to sound as harsh as they did, but I saw my friend recoil as I spoke.
I turned away.
“It’s all an illusion, isn’t it?” I said. He waited for me to go on. “You always say I give my heart cheaply, but it’s not cheap: the price is always heavy.” That wasn’t quite what I meant. I hadn’t given my heart cheaply to Cassie, I’d been careful every step of the way, but that had only emphasized the value of what we had, and made the ultimate price so very great.
“Here,” Napier said, handing me a pair of compact binoculars. “Down by the loch. Just to the left of the lone pine tree.”
I looked, took a second or two for my eyes to adjust, and then I saw an otter. Two... and two small cubs.
“Probably only ten or so weeks old, I’d say. This might be their first venture out into the world.”
I watched for a short time in silence.
“You think Cassie’s dead?” I asked, referring to a comment he’d made earlier. “Why would that be? Who was she? What was she doing here?”
“I can only think of two reasons to infiltrate my household,” said Napier. “To damage me in some way, or to protect me. I like to think I know who MI5 and the police have put in place around me for my protection, and I was not aware of her in that regard, which suggests to me she did not have my best interests at heart. But whichever side of the game she was on, it’s a deadly game, so yes, maybe she’s paid the price of that. I may appear to make light of some of the things I do, Mattie, but I never take them anywhere less than a hundred percent seriously.”
I was shaking my head. Napier was my oldest friend, but this was not my world.
“You want to get away?” he asked me. “Take a break somewhere a wee bit warmer than this? I could get you on a flight in no time.”
“I want to know what happened.”
He nodded. “I figured you would. If it helps, so do I.”
I handed the binoculars back to Napier, and he took a minute or two watching the otter family down by the loch.
“You really had no inkling she had ulterior motives?” he asked, finally.
I shook my head.
“She was the sweetest thing,” I said, realizing that even I was using the past tense now. “She hiked the hills with me. She sat and knitted while I read a book. She laughed at my jokes, and even put up with my taste in music.”
“And that didn’t make you suspicious?” Napier asked, before laughing. He’d never understood my fondness for traditional jazz and American roots music.
“We connected. We were easy with each other.” I wasn’t portraying our relationship as the heady, passionate thing that it had been, but even if I had managed to find the words I don’t think Napier would have understood. It was the connection that mattered, the sense of kindred souls. It had been there from that first evening at the charity function in London.
Now Napier nodded in the direction of his guard. “You do know I don’t just have these boys around me for eye candy, don’t you, Mattie?”
“I did wonder.”
He laughed again. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been briefed and vetted?”
I shrugged. I didn’t like talking about these things. Somehow it made them all the more real, which I didn’t need right now.
Yes, Macpherson had briefed me on occasions – enough that I understood that my old friend was under protection from the state’s security services as well as his own hired security team. I wasn’t a complete innocent.
But also... I had my own guilty secret. A reason not to want to talk of such matters.
So instead, I took the binoculars from Napier and feigned interest in the otters again, even though my mind was elsewhere entirely.
§
Louise Palmer-Layne’s approach to me had been open and direct, in complete contrast to what I now saw as Cassie’s covert seduction.
It had taken place the previous month at another London bar. I’d gone to meet a financial contact – who may or may not have been in on the arrangement, as he never showed up – but instead of a swarthy fifty-year-old man, a tall, glamorous woman eased herself into the seat beside me at the bar.
“Matt Scullery?” She extended a hand for me to shake. “My name is Louise Palmer-Layne and I’m a spy.”
She smiled, the white of her teeth flashing between the dark red of her lips, and it took several seconds for her words to sink in.
“A... spy?” I asked.
“Don’t look so shocked. It’s okay. I’m one of the good ones. I’m on your side.”
I looked her up and down, and could easily have started to fall, if my heart was not already committed elsewhere. Dark hair tumbled down across her bare shoulders, her dark blue dress did little to conceal the fullness of her breasts, and you could tell simply from the way she held herself in that seat that she was some kind of athlete or dancer. Her eyes were big and wide and dark and she rarely blinked.
Maybe Napier was right. I give my heart easily. Or at least I would admit that I default to shallowness when I encounter a beautiful woman.
But Cassie had given me new depths. I realized I had no interest in this glamorous woman, other than the mystery of her very forthright introduction.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t resist the melodrama, and I rarely get the chance to employ it.” She held out a business card that contained only her name, a telephone number, and an email address.
She watched me study the card without moving to take it from her. “The bit it doesn’t say is Security Service,” she told me. “And that’s also the bit we never say out loud, except I know you’ve been vetted and cleared by Peter Macpherson so in your case it’s okay to be a little more open.”
The mention of Macpherson made it real. If she knew him, then she knew of his role in Napier’s organization, and so suddenly her rather wild introduction had a ring of truth.
I quite liked the idea of a spy who so rarely got the chance to say out loud what she did that when the opportunity arose she would do so with a flourish, as Louise Palmer-Layne had done just now.
“You’re MI5? This is about Stewart Napier?” I asked. “Is he okay?”
“Oh yes, he’s fine. Drink?”
My glass was nearly empty, and without waiting for an answer she caught the barman’s eye and nodded at my glass for a refill. “I’ll have the same,” she said. A single-malt-drinking glamorous female spy! I felt as if I’d stepped onto a movie set.
“This is a joke, right?”
“If you like.”
I didn’t mind. She was beautiful and entertaining and it passed the time. There was nothing to feel guilty about, either: later, when I saw Cassie I would tell the story in full detail and we would laugh about it. And I knew that Cassie would understand the significance to me that I could have such an encounter and be so secure in my relationship with her that it would be no more than a passing amusement.
“So tell me, what does a spy want with me this evening?”
“A little insight and wisdom.”
“Are you sure you’ve come to the right person?”
“You tell me.”
I took a sip of my whisky and waited for her to go on.
“You’re Stewart Napier’s closest and oldest friend,” she said, telling me nothing I didn’t already know. “Has anything happened recently in his life to cause concern? A new relationship? A new level of secrecy?”
I smiled.
She could be anyone, but my guess at this point was that she was actually some kind of journalist.
“I don’t discuss my friends’ lives without their say-so.”
She nodded. She’d clearly expected such a response.
“We think he may be in danger.”
“Napier is surrounded by security,” I told her.
“Sometimes that’s not enough.”
“Then you should talk to him direct.”
“We have. We are. But we like to use every available channel.”
“Is that what I am? An available channel?”
“Perhaps.”
The way she said that, the way she held my look and toyed with her glass... Another time, another place, I’d have responded very differently. But just then, I was most definitely not an available channel.
“Are we done?” I asked her.
“I hope not,” she said. “I’m serious, Matt.” She’d put her hand on my wrist, and I looked down at it, and waited until she moved the hand away again. “We’re trying to protect your friend. I know you want that, too.”
I did, but this whole encounter struck me as surreal, and I still didn’t quite trust that she was who she claimed.
“I think I’d like to go now,” I told her, starting to rise from my bar stool.
She made no effort to stop me.
“Look out for your friend,” she said. “You know him better than anyone. You’ll see the risks better than anyone, too, I think. That’s all I wanted to say.”
She still had that business card between the first and second fingers of her right hand. Now she held it out. “Take this,” she said. “And if you have any questions, or if anything happens out of the ordinary – any turn of events you think might be of concern – call me. Any time of the day or night.”
I took the card, turned, and left.
At the door I paused to look back, but she had already gone by some other route, and all I had to convince myself the encounter had even taken place was the card tucked into my cellphone case.
§
Napier had left me with the binoculars at the bothy. I think he’d known I needed some time out on my own, the chance to breathe.
By the time I got back to Auldbrigg Haw, Napier had already departed. I’d heard the helicopter as I headed down the trail and had guessed as much. An evening meeting at the Foreign Office.
“He said to tell you he’d be back for breakfast,” the head of security, Pete Macpherson, told me.
That was typical of Napier. He’d think nothing of flying the length of the country for a meeting before returning to his beloved estate.
“I don’t suppose...” I started, then faltered under Macpherson’s intense scrutiny. “Ms Deane. I don’t suppose there’s been any word from Cassie?”
His expression didn’t falter. “Nothing,” he said. “Are you expecting anything?”
“There should be a search,” I persisted. “She could be lying hurt somewhere.”
“Oh, there’s been a search, all right.”
It was clear that in Macpherson’s view, Cassie had migrated from house guest to enemy. And I wondered just how far down that conversion I’d gone, too, as I was the one who had brought her into Napier’s inner circle.
“What if you’re wrong about her?”
Macpherson let the silence stretch before answering. “If I’m wrong about someone who’s infiltrated my security cordon with weaponry and a fake ID then I promise you, I’ll be the first to hold my hand up, but until then... my primary concern is not for Ms Deane’s safety.”
I turned away.
As I threaded my way through the building to the guest suite, I found myself thinking back to that encounter with Louise Palmer-Layne in London the previous month. Was that what the MI5 agent had meant when she’d asked about new relationships in Napier’s life? I’d assumed she was talking about lovers, but Cassie would qualify as a new relationship. Had Cassie been the threat to Napier’s safety that the agent had been referring to?
If so, then perhaps Macpherson’s assessment was right: that I was as responsible as anyone for putting my old friend at risk.
When I reached the suite it was immediately clear that Cassie’s things were no longer here. The clothes and shoes, the bags... all gone. For a moment I allowed myself to cling to the hope that she might have been back, but no. Of course they’d taken her things. Macpherson’s team would want the gun and the cellphones, but I was sure they would also go through all her possessions for clues as to her intentions and true identity.
I should complain about the intrusion, but just then I lacked the fight.
I went to sit in the wide window seat, looking out over the gardens.
I realized I was seeing everything anew, reassessing all the things I’d taken for granted.
My relationship with Cassie had been as unlikely as Napier had always joked. She was ten years my junior, attractive and interesting, funny and sharp. From the start I had wondered what she ever saw in me, and only now did I understand: she saw Stewart Napier.
I considered then how I must look through the eyes of Peter Macpherson. A hanger-on, a parasite, perhaps, riding the shirt-tails of an old friend’s success. One who actively avoided getting too involved in Napier’s activities, to the extent that I had always blinded myself to the real dynamics and risks.
I thought of Louise Palmer-Layne again, another who saw me only as a route to Napier. I wondered how carefully planned that encounter with the MI5 agent had been. She certainly ticked all my boxes: a glamorous beauty who made the running, the quirky directness of her approach – so much more memorable than anything more subtle and circumspect.
And... my guilty secret.
I’d told no one about that encounter.
At the time I’d been sure I would tell Cassie all about it when I saw her later. That we would joke about it, and that I would share my own realization that somehow my response signified the deepness of my attachment to Cassie.
But by the time I saw Cassie later I was distracted again, and then the moment had passed and I had never mentioned the encounter.
And earlier today... When Napier had asked me whether I’d been briefed and vetted I had almost said something, but then held back. An approach from MI5 was clearly relevant, but to raise it had felt to be a complication too far.
Yet by keeping this secret, had I merely drawn myself deeper into the web? Had I inadvertently chosen sides between Napier and the security agencies circling around him?
This was no good. I hated people thinking badly of me. Hated that the judgment of people like Peter Macpherson might influence someone as dear to me as Napier.
I needed to get this off my chest, be done with the secrecy and suspicion.
I reached into my pocket for my phone, pulled it out and flipped open the leather cover so I could call my old friend.
But instead... I saw that white business card where I’d tucked it the previous month.
I paused for a moment, then thumbed the number into the keypad.
She answered on the second ring. “Matt?”
She must already have had my number programmed into her cellphone for it to identify who was calling.
“Louise Palmer-Layne? I wondered if I might have a word.”
“You want my wisdom and insight?” she asked, and I could hear the teasing smile in her voice. “Or do you have some to share?”
“Perhaps both.”
“I’d hoped you might. I’m in Glasgow – I could be with you in a little over an hour.”
I didn’t ask how she knew where I was, or why she just happened to be so nearby. Instead, I simply said, “That would be good,” and desperately hoped I was doing the right thing.
3. Cassie
It was a mistake to leave them drinking. Matthew, Napier, Macpherson, and Nelson. If she’d only stayed with them then maybe things would have been okay.
But it was getting late and she was, for many reasons, the odd one out and... well, it was just so good to see Matthew letting his guard down a bit, relaxing with friends. And Cassie never minded the quiet option – she still didn’t feel that she was fully accepted here at Auldbrigg Haw.
She leaned over and kissed Matthew before leaving. Once on the jaw, then holding onto him for a second or two longer, cheeks pressing. A promise for later.
By the time she reached the doorway, only Matthew was still paying her attention.
She paused, then continued on her way, knowing his eyes would follow her until she was out of sight. She loved that she had that effect on him, even though she’d never planned for it.
How had things ended up like this?
Complicated.
She was breaking so many rules. Crossing so many lines.
And god it was good!
Up until now she’d led a simple life. She knew who she was, and what she was doing. She kept herself to herself. But since meeting Matthew things had become... complicated.
