Part 1 (2/2)

”Yes. A salary is a salary.”

He led her into the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. ”And your husband?” He had only met her husband a few times and could not remember his name. Rick?

”d.i.c.k and I are divorced,” said Angelica. ”Utterly amicably. And we're still very good friends.”

”It's so much better that way,” said William. ”It's ghastly when people fight. And they so often do, don't they?”

Angelica nodded. ”We just decided that we were friends but not lovers. It was as simple as that. He remarried - a German doctor, a radiologist, who's charming - and it's worked out very well for everybody.” She paused. ”You would have thought that a radiologist would see through him, but there we are. And you? I was sorry to hear ...”

”Yes,” said William. ”It was very sudden. Poor Barb.”

He wondered how she had heard about it. He was not aware of their having any mutual friends, but London was a village in spite of its size - people could humanise even the largest of cities.

”And your son?” Angelica asked.

”Eddie.”

”Yes, of course.”

She waited for him to answer. ”Eddie's fine,” he said. ”He stayed here until about six months ago. He was one of those offspring who find the parental home so comfortable that they're disinclined to leave.”

Angelica nodded sympathetically. ”I gather that it happens.”

”Eddie found somebody,” William went on. ”A rather nice woman, in fact. They're together. She has a place in the Windward Islands and they spend half the year there.”

”What a dream,” said Angelica. ”Six months in the Windward Islands. How very fortunate.”

William nodded. Eddie did not deserve his good fortune, he felt; if Fate was going to allocate either of them a place in the Windward Islands, surely it should be to him, rather than to Eddie? But he knew that this was not the way Fate operated; she handed out her benefits according to a scheme that was beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Perhaps the Greeks, he decided, had a better understanding of the world in predicating the existence of entirely arbitrary, capricious G.o.ds; such G.o.ds would take no account of hard work or public service when allocating places in the Windward Islands.

William switched on the kettle and took two cups out of the cupboard above the sink. ”And you?” he asked. ”What are you up to these days?”

He hoped that the answer to the question might reveal the reason for this unexpected, though welcome, call. She could hardly just have dropped in, particularly after fifteen years; people rarely did that in London - not any more.

”I'm working for the government,” said Angelica. ”After I closed the bookshop, I answered an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the papers. A job in information processing.”

William wondered what information processing was. The trouble with job descriptions like that was that they frequently disguised something much more mundane. There used to be clerks, until they were abolished and became ... what had clerks become? Perhaps they had disappeared altogether.

”It was at GCHQ,” Angelica continued. ”You must know the place.”

William did. Government Communications Headquarters was a vast building outside Cheltenham, a place that bristled with aerials, even if mainly metaphorical ones, and hummed with electronic activity. So information processing in ordinary English was eavesdropping.

”How interesting,” he said. ”Monitoring radio traffic.”

Angelica smiled. ”Yes. Or the equivalent. I hadn't intended to get into that line of things, but it was a regular job and I wanted to get out of London for a while. And I found I really enjoyed it.”

William agreed that it must be interesting. But what qualifications, he wondered, did Angelica have for the job? Or was a job at GCHQ like a place in the Windward Islands - allocated with no regard to desert?

”They took me because of my degree in Russian,” Angelica said. ”I don't know if you were aware that I studied Russian at university.”

William was not.

”Well, I did,” said Angelica. ”I went to St Andrews. Russian was quite a popular subject in those days. I didn't use it very much, of course - not when I was running the bookshop. But then it came in very handy when I went to GCHQ.”

”It would,” said William, picturing Angelica at a desk, in headphones, in front of a crystal radio, a frown of concentration on her brow.

”And then I was transferred,” Angelica continued. ”Back to London. To MI6.”

William thought that he had misheard her. ”MI6?”

”Yes,” said Angelica calmly. ”Intelligence work. But of a different sort.”

Chapter 4: The Dangers of Boeuf Stroganoff.

For a few moments after Angelica's revelation, William said nothing. He had read of MI6, of course, and had pa.s.sed its building near Vauxhall Bridge on numerous occasions. For an organisation whose business was secrets, the building seemed hardly appropriate, being, as it was, quite open-looking, and apparently not at all suitable for shady work of the sort that MI6 - and presumably Angelica herself - engaged in.

He knew, as everybody did, that it was MI6 headquarters and had speculated on what went on within. He had seen people going in and out of the front door - quite openly - and they had seemed to him to be no different from the people who went in and out of any building in the City, for example. And perhaps their jobs were not all that different from the jobs of any others among the legions of civil servants who worked in London. They attended meetings, no doubt, wrote memos, and strove, he imagined, to meet targets. At the end of the day they probably went home in much the same mood as everybody else, leaving behind the cares of the office. He wondered if they had a clear-desk policy, as other organisations had, whereby there would be no papers left un-filed by the time work finished at five o'clock. He thought that they probably did; the sort of papers these people dealt with certainly could not be left lying about for the prying eyes of cleaners who might have been recruited by the other side. And it would be very easy, he reckoned, to recruit a cleaner; their weakness was tea, and they could doubtless be tempted by a large cup of Darjeeling ...

He smiled at Angelica. ”Well, I must say that I'm somewhat surprised. I've never met anybody who actually works there.”

Angelica returned his smile. There was nothing guarded about her manner; she seemed completely open and unembarra.s.sed. ”I know that it takes many people by surprise, but it's essentially an ordinary job. I don't really think about it, you know.”

”A daily grind like everything else?”

Angelica thought for a moment. ”To an extent. A lot of what I do is pretty mundane, but there are times when things ... well, when things hot up.”

William was intrigued. Did Angelica ever find herself in danger? He decided to ask her outright, and she shook her head. ”I've never been in physical danger myself - as far as I know. But some of my colleagues have.”

William wanted to know more. ”I suppose you can't say too much,” he said. ”But can you give me an idea of what happened to these colleagues of yours?”

For a few moments Angelica appeared to be weighing the merits of saying more. ”I have to be careful,” she said. ”We're not meant to talk about our work, but ...”

”I'm very discreet,” said William, putting a finger to his lips. ”I really am.”

The tea was now ready, and William poured a cup for Angelica.

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