13
Watching this exchange from his car-pool Mondeo, parked on the other side of the apron, James Woolf bit into his cheeseburger without lowering his binoculars and smiled. Even though a fine rain blurred his view, he could tell by the body language how badly the encounter was going. As the two men parted, Ashton in his Range Rover back to the Lines, Buckingham towards the Europcar booth in the terminal, Woolf dropped the remains of the burger into the bag in his lap, screwed it up, threw it into the passenger footwell and speed-dialled Stephen Mandler.
‘Woolf, what a surprise.’
There was a familiar weariness in the boss’s voice that he had learned to ignore.
‘I just wondered if you’d had a chance to read my last briefing.’
There was a muffled exchange while Mandler shooed someone out of his office. ‘I’ve got it here. Give me a minute.’
A soft clicking came down the phone: Mandler’s tongue tapping the roof of his mouth, which he often did when scanning Woolf’s latest missives. There followed a long sigh. ‘You really are rather a cunt, aren’t you, James?’
Woolf said nothing.
‘If I were Buckingham, I think I’d want to punch you very hard in the face. The man’s whole life is the SAS. His part in Eurostar was exemplary. Wouldn’t it have been more decent to just take him aside and make him an offer?’
Mandler had taken Woolf to task before for his over-elaborate schemes, but Woolf had already rehearsed his answer. ‘That would have meant involving his CO — too much of a risk. There can’t be any suspicion. This way the whole world thinks it’s all for real, including Buckingham.’
There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. Woolf knew what was going on. Mandler was more than just his boss: he was his mentor and his protector, but there were limits to how far the old man would go to protect his protégé. Everyone who managed Woolf thought him a handful. Expelled from more than one school, sent down from Oxford and sacked from the BBC, he intimidated some with his intellect, while for others it was his brutal intolerance of inferiors that had dogged his career. Only MI5, his last-chance saloon, had managed to accommodate him, and then only with Mandler’s patronage. And there, as in every job before, his seemingly wilful determination to take the opposite view, which the DG could only describe as pathological, got right up the nose of the staff. That, and his lack of grace, had on more than one occasion brought aggrieved colleagues to Mandler’s door. ‘You’re playing with fire, Woolf, you know that.’
Woolf didn’t respond.
‘Let me spell it out. You are accusing British ex-servicemen of terrorism — on British soil — and you’re proposing to place an SAS sergeant with an exemplary record among them to help you join up the dots.’
Getting it wrong wouldn’t just be Woolf’s undoing: it would be Mandler’s head as well.
‘I think we’re going to have to take some soundings before I let you off the leash. All right?’
14
Mary Buckingham brushed a few crumbs off the ancient oak table as she put his coffee in front of him, black, no sugar. Tom had appeared at the door without any warning. She hadn’t even known he was back in the country. Usually she got a call to say that he was on his way. She touched his shoulder, felt the tension in it, then sat down and tried not to make it too obvious that she was watching him intently.
‘Thanks, Mum.’ He smiled at her, then let his gaze drift back to a vacant space on the kitchen wall.
She was torn. Every homecoming was a cause for celebration, a huge wave of relief that brought the knowledge he was safe and in one piece. But she had learned to keep her joy to herself, just as she hid her tears whenever he left. She used to think that it would get easier, that the heart-aching wrench of seeing her son, so recently a child to her, going off to dangerous places — he could never say where — would diminish over time. In fact, it was the opposite, as if a malign calculator in the back of her mind was totting up the probability that the longer he stayed in the Regiment the more likely it was that the worst would happen. She had accepted that she couldn’t know where he was going or what he was doing, knew that it was probably better that way. But she still tensed when the news came on, or if Hugh paused when answering the phone, even held her breath. So the relief when he reappeared usually made her almost light-headed with joy.
But not today. Something was wrong.
‘How was the flight?’
There were a million other questions she lacked the courage to ask.
‘Fine. Flew back with a young lad from Brum.’
‘Oh, yes? Was that nice?’
Tom said nothing.
She couldn’t remember a time when he had been so distant. When Delphine had lost the baby, he had been full of sorrow, but he’d handled it, talked about it. He wasn’t one to push things down. But something had sucked the energy out of him.
Of course he had grown out of overt displays of emotion at a young age. Seared into her memory was the first time they’d left him at school, aged just seven, trussed up in his stiff new uniform. In the car on the way and again when they’d arrived, he had given her strict orders: Just a quick hug, okay, Mum, and NO TEARS. And the same had applied to school holidays. After a few days he would let his guard down — but then, as if he was preparing her for what was to come, he would terrify the life out of her by climbing the tallest trees and crossing the lake when it froze. Once he’d come back drenched and half frozen, almost hysterical with delight after the ice had cracked. Nothing had fazed him even then. He simply had no sense of fear.
But now that he was sitting at the table with the untouched coffee in front of him, that was what she was seeing in his face: fear.
He scanned the familiar kitchen landscape, the timeless Welsh dresser with the blue and white ‘Old Luxembourg’ Villeroy & Boch dinner service, passed on by his grandmother and, miraculously, still complete, though one of the soup bowls displayed multiple joins from its surgery when, aged four, he used it as a soldier’s helmet. He looked at the clock, a rectangular Dutch antique with a twisted barley-sugar pole on either side of its face, and a soft chime that measured out life at home in reassuring quarter-hours, the parquet floor, pleasantly worn but good for another century, and the black retriever resting its chin on his thigh: Horace, one of a long line of more or less identical animals that had graced the Buckingham kitchen since he’d been in a high chair. Thank God some things never changed. Except that everything just had.
He looked at her. ‘I’m done — it’s over.’ There was something cold in his gaze that Mary didn’t recognize. She was bewildered — she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘The Regiment — I’m out.’
As she took this in, two opposing emotions went into battle inside her. This was the day she had secretly prayed for, that one day he would just outgrow it and there would be life beyond all the anxiety. She had hoped at one point that Delphine would bring it about, but the relationship hadn’t changed anything.
So she was happy — for herself. She knew the Army was his whole world. He’d always made it clear that was where he was headed, that nothing else would do — so if he was quitting, something completely unprecedented must have happened. Unless it was quitting him — in which case he would be devastated.
‘Well, that’s…’ now she had started she had to finish ‘… it’s — I’m sure you know when the right time—’
His face darkened. He brought the mug down hard, sending some of the coffee splashing over the table. The dog yelped, equally confused. ‘There’s nothing right about it.’