He walked to the door, then added: The work you bring is always
Challenging. I like that. I won't keep you long—" Fraser watched his large frame disappear from the doorway. The early-evening sunlight spilt innocently into the kitchen, haloing the cat's fur as it followed Strickland towards a large converted barn behind the house.
"Shall I be mother?" Fraser asked, waggling the kettle at Roussillon.
"Merci, mon ami." Roussillon stretched luxuriously.
"I feel so comfortable here," he observed, yawning and linking his hands together at arm's-length above his head.
"As if the place belonged to my grandmother."
"Instead of a psychopath with a genius for sabotage? I know what you mean—" The kettle began to steam.
"It was the good fortune of the private sector that the CIA could never prove he blew up his own Head of Station with a car bomb. I wonder what the guy had done to annoy him?"
"Probably the man did not like cats?"
"It would be enough," Fraser agreed.
"I always feel around Strickland that I'm around a polite cobra." He laughed.
"D'you think he'd be offended if we checked under the car when we leave?" He handed Roussillon his coffee, sipped at his own.
"Cheers. Here's to him and to us. And to the private sector. Free enterprise."
"Ah, Fraser how could I join such a toast? I am a servant of the state."
"First, last and always?"
"Of course."
"If I'd worked for a service like the DST, I think I might have stayed in and waited for the pension." He sipped again at his coffee.
"It's so much easier when defence of the realm the territoire-and the national interest coincide exactly with what every businessman wants.
When the security service can do anything it likes, just so long as another Froggie benefits!" Roussillon scowled.
"We had Protestantism, though," Fraser continued.
"Puritanism, conscience, guilt. And however much you try to keep them out of intelligence work, they always turn up to spoil the party… unlike your lot. If you want to blow up the Greenpeace boat, you just go ahead and do it, for example—" That was the DGSE, not DST.
Intelligence, not Security."
"Sorry," Fraser mocked. Then he asked: "D'you think Strick-land's a good cook?
Worth staying for dinner, would it be?"
She paused in the Close and looked up at the three spires of the small market town's cathedral. The darkening air above seemed filled with wheeling swallows. Marian breathed deeply, unaffected by the meaning of the building, touched only by the swallows. One skimmed near her head. The choirmaster, whom she recognised, smiled in her direction as he hurried towards the west door. She walked on after a few moments, hands thrust into the deep pockets of her flared yellow skirt, her head bent as if to study her flat slippers or the uneven cobbles.
She left the Close and walked beside the minster pool. Children were being encouraged to feed ducks; the sullen, empty noises of early drunks echoed across the water. A winding street of medieval houses, mostly craft shops and cramped coffee houses, meandered towards the market square containing the banks, building societies, the cheap shoe shops and the church that had become a craft and visitor centre. She turned beside the pool, beneath darkening trees, her mood almost tranquil. Michael Lloyd's funeral was the middle of the following week and she could not attend. It had been awkward and guilty, the act of telling the aunt in Crewkerne that she would not be there.
The market town that was also a cathedral city in a polite, impoverished imitation of one of the cathedral cities of southern England was on the eastern edge of the constituency. Recently bloated by a small industrial estate and new executive housing — street upon street of declamatory triple garages and barbecue patios it had become a commuter suburb for the raw, sprawling industrial conurbation to its west and south. Some of the poorer council estates and tower block encampments of the conurbation fell within the boundaries of her constituency, as did rural pockets of north Warwickshire.
Marian had won the constituency during a general election, inheriting it from a knight of the shire who had succumbed — they said either to complete inertia or to an apoplectic fit brought on by the thought of the sheer physical and mental effort of continuing the Thatcherite revolution. She smiled at the recollected joke, first relayed to her by her party agent, Bill.
She had spoken to Bill before leaving the small flat she rented, in a building that clung like ivy to the cathedral close but which a local builder had bought up, knocked about and recreated as three executive apartments… that word again. She was on her way to meet that builder at one of the town's new, anonymous wine bars which catered for the influx of executives to the town's new estates.
The man had left a message on her answer phone He seemed both angry and hesitant, secretive and outraged. She had agreed that, since he could not possibly, under any circumstances, be in the town the following morning and attend her regular surgery, she would give him an hour that evening. After all, she quite liked the flat and the rent was not exploitative. His workmen came quickly to effect minor repairs. She only vaguely wondered whether, since he was a minor contractor on the Urban Regeneration Project, it was something to do with that Venice of the Midlands grandiosity.
Gnats rose in slow, smoky columns above the still water of the pool. A duck followed her desultorily for a few yards along the bank on the other side of the low iron railings that fenced the water. Then she mounted steps and turned into a pedestrianised street of narrow, tall houses whose upper storeys seemed to rest uncertainly on a video hire shop, restaurants, an electrical retailer and the wine bar.
Ray Banks waved to her from a window seat, climbing immediately to his feet, his stomach brushing the table, his florid tie almost draping itself into his glass of house white. He seemed eager and dubious as he took her hand.
"A glass of white would be fine," she murmured, seating herself.
There's only a trace of antifreeze in the bouquet." Her smile was not returned. Banks seemed inordinately mortified, as if he had committed some serious social gaffe.
"Cheers," she offered when he returned with the glass.
"Cheers," he replied gloomily. There was the self-consciousness of a man seeking her good offices, even influence, about him.
Marian lit a cigarette and considerately waved the smoke away from Banks.
Empty laughter from the street outside and the bark of a dog.
"Your phone call sounded urgent," she prompted.
"Sorry I couldn't make it tomorrow didn't want to put you out…
Marian." He always approached the familiarity of her name as he might have done an explosive device. His hobby was war-gaming; her father's military career rendered him deferential towards her together with his lack of assurance when in the company of successful women. His wife and two teenage daughters seemed to Marian to have remained, mentally, in the back-to-back where the Bankses' married life had begun, when Ray had been a jobbing building with one workman, a decrepit truck and an overdraft. 'I — er…"
"Yes?" She tried to sound casually interested. Now, Ray had a dozen vans and small trucks, a building supply business, a successful industrial contracting company.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" She was reluctant to make the offer, but intrigued by his hesitancy.
"Dunno I, well… I'm in trouble. The company, that is. I just don't know what's going on…"
Marian was careful to exclude all expression from her features. A youth stared at her through the window, then, probably assessing her age beneath her good looks, passed on with a shrug. The conversation of the wine bar revolved around money, football, barbecues, sun beds step aerobics and sex. Ray Banks wanted her intercession in some matter; a favour.