After a moment she said, ‘I don’t see JIC reports.’
‘Maybe you don’t, normally, but I’m sure you could if you wanted to.’
‘No, honestly, I couldn’t,’ she said, frustrated by the sceptical expression that spread across Laurenz’s face. ‘It’s all done on a need-to-know basis. And I don’t have any need to know.’ She realised she was sounding plaintive now, but couldn’t help it. She had been completely knocked off balance by his demand. ‘I can’t exactly say, “Hello, I need to see the JIC assessments on Putin’s strategy, to help my boyfriend.”’
‘You’re high-profile, Jasminder. You can ask for anything you want. They wouldn’t dare say no. If you were to leave now, MI6 would look very foolish. Your boss C in particular.’
He spoke with such assurance that she wondered momentarily if he was right. Did she really have that kind of power? Could she simply crook a finger and have all the innermost secrets of the British intelligence services laid out for her scrutiny? For a moment she found the prospect exciting, then she realised its fundamental absurdity. What she’d told Laurenz was correct: information in MI6 was handled on the strict basis of need to know – even the closest of colleagues didn’t discuss their cases with each other unless they were actually working together. If she started asking for highly classified material – like the minutes of JIC meetings, or copies of the papers sent to the Cabinet – alarm bells would go off and she would be questioned right away about why she had made the request. She couldn’t think of any plausible reason at all.
She said now, ‘I’m sorry. There just isn’t any way I can get that kind of information. Not for you, not even for myself. No way at all.’
She wanted to look away from Laurenz’s relentless gaze; she knew that what she was saying was true and wanted him to understand it too. But she forced herself to lock eyes with him until finally he shrugged. ‘I thought you wanted to help,’ he said.
‘I do,’ she protested earnestly. ‘Just not that way – I can’t do it. You must understand that.’ When he didn’t reply, she added, ‘I would if I could.’
‘So you say, but the thing is, I’m sure you could. It just takes a little imagination.’ He saw her mouth tighten, and he sighed again. ‘Let’s leave it for now. We can talk some more about it when we’re in Bermuda.’
Jasminder wondered how that would help, since she thought he wanted the information in time for his meetings. But she said nothing, just hoping the tension between them would pass. Laurenz said, ‘You’ll meet my colleagues then. They can explain the kind of pressure we’re under.’
‘Oh,’ said Jasminder, a little disappointed. The last thing she wanted to talk about in Bermuda was the pressure of work. She had thought she was going there to be with Laurenz and to relax.
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding at her, ‘my friends are very keen to meet you. You’ll find you have lots to talk about with them.’
37
Tim came to see Peggy the day after she was admitted to the Royal Free. She had a private room – not because she was being given special treatment, but because she’d hit her head when she’d fainted, and the doctors at the hospital were concerned about concussion and didn’t want her in a noisy ward.
Her collarbone had been fractured by the blow she’d received, and her left arm was in a sling, which the doctors said she was going to have to wear for six weeks. They’d been concerned too about nerve damage to her shoulder, and had put her through the claustrophobia of an MRI scan. She’d been terrified but had closed her eyes and gritted her teeth for the twenty minutes she’d lain enclosed in the doughnut-shaped machine.
The pain was constant but not acute – and the morphine helped, though the drawback was the dreams it seemed to spawn. She woke sweating and in a panic after one particularly horrible one – this time the man with the phone hadn’t jumped into the car but was chasing her around it. She was trying to run away from him but her legs moved in jelly-like slow motion – only to find Tim standing at the foot of her bed.
‘Hi there,’ he said, a little awkwardly, ‘they don’t let you bring flowers so I bought you some grapes.’ And he plonked a plastic box of green grapes on the bed. They looked rather dry, as if they had seen better days. Tim had always been hopeless at giving her presents and she’d once seen it as a rather charming aspect of his unworldliness, but now she wondered if it simply meant he didn’t care.
A nurse came in behind him and, seeing the grapes, offered to find a dish for them. When she’d left the room Tim sat down. ‘So how are you feeling?’ he asked, perching uneasily on the edge of the high-backed vinyl chair, his hands dangling loosely between his knees.
‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘They’re giving me something for the pain. The doctor says I probably won’t need an operation.’
‘That’s good news. How long will you be in?’
‘Another night or two. I’d come home now if I didn’t feel so woozy.’
‘Have the police been to see you?’
‘Yes – twice, in fact.’ There had been a bright woman constable who’d been sufficiently struck by Peggy’s description of the attack – and by her elliptical description of her job – that she’d asked for a Special Branch detective to come in a few hours later and question Peggy further about her assailants.
‘I bet that’s more than they usually do,’ said Tim cynically. ‘Especially for an ordinary mugging.’
‘They don’t think it was an ordinary mugging.’
‘Really? Why not? The guy was after your handbag, I bet.’
‘Dressed in a suit? With a woman waiting in a car to help him make his getaway? That’s not how most muggers operate.’
‘You’d be surprised. Lots of people are desperate these days. Not just young delinquents either. Besides, if it wasn’t a mugging, what else could it be? Don’t tell me it was terrorists – or Edward Snowden!’
Peggy didn’t have an answer, and if one occurred to her, it wouldn’t be something she would want to discuss with Tim. She was certain the attack on her had been planned, and she assumed it would have something to do with her job; there was nothing in her personal life – no spurned lovers, no stalkers, no arch-enemies – that could make someone want to bash her brains in.
But there was no obvious answer to be found. Working with Liz, Peggy spent most of her time behind the scenes, analysing intelligence, doing research, investigating leads. Occasionally of late she had been operational – almost always interviewing people and always under cover. The last time had been the year before, when she had gone to question an old lady who lived next door to a house in Manchester suspected of sheltering terrorists. For that Peggy had posed as an electoral registration officer; before that she’d played other roles, a pollster, a student looking for a room and once a District Nurse. She’d never disclosed her real name, or where she lived or her real job, so it was hard to see how she could have been identified by someone or why they would want to kill her.
For that, she felt quite sure, was what this attack had been about – there was no mistaking the lethal intentions of the man with the cosh. She shuddered as she remembered the force of the blow that had missed her, but dented the bonnet of the car.
She pulled herself together and looked at Tim. Remembering what had happened to her brought to mind a question.
‘I noticed you’ve got a new phone,’ she said.