If you think you are having trouble controlling your gambling, this leaflet contains important information on where to seek help. Chapman lowered the leaflet and looked into Martinellis eyes. Do you need help, Jim? He tilted his head to one side and grinned. Do you want to talk to someone?
Ive got five grand on the table. Upstairs.
Five? Have you? Chapman sniffed loudly, as if he was struggling to clear his sinuses. You and I both know thats not what were talking about, dont we? Youre not being straight, Jim.
Chapman took a step forward. He raised the leaflet and held it in front of him, like a man singing a hymn in church.
Only gamble what you can afford to lose, he said. Set yourself personal limits. Only spend a certain amount of time at the tables. He stared at Martinelli. Time, Jim. Thats what youve run out of, isnt it?
Ive told you, he said. Five grand. Upstairs. Let me play.
Chapman walked towards the basins. He looked at himself in the mirror, admiring what he saw. Then he kicked out his leg behind him and slammed the bathroom door.
I can tell you that youve got a problem, he said. I can tell you that if you dont give me whats owed by tomorrow morning, I wont be how do they say responsible for my actions.
I understand that. Martinelli could feel himself freezing up, his mind going numb.
Oh you understand that, do you?
Can you just let me past? Martinelli pressed away from the wall and moved towards the basins. Can you open the door, please? I want to go upstairs.
Chapman appeared to admire his display of courage. He nodded and opened the door. An ominous smile was playing on his face as he indicated that Martinelli could leave.
Dont let me stop you, he said, stepping to one side with the flourish of a matador. You go and see what you can do, Jim. Be lucky.
Martinelli climbed the stairs two at a time. He needed to be back at the tables in the way that a man who has been held underwater craves to reach the surface and to suck in a deep breath of air. He headed back to his seat and saw that a play was coming to an end. The pop and clatter of the ball, the rapt attention of the gamblers waiting for it to settle.
Six. Black, said the croupier.
Martinelli saw that the Chinese tourist had a split of five grand on five and six. A small fortune. The croupier placed the dolly on the winning square and began to sweep the losing chips from across the table. Then he paid out what he owed more than eighty grand to the Chinese in a stack of twenty, with no discernible reaction from either man.
Martinelli took it as a sign. He waited until the table was clear, then moved his stack of chips on to black. All or nothing. Take it or leave it. The house always wins. Fuck Kyle Chapman.
Then it was just a question of waiting. The bloke from Dubai put his usual spread on eighteen through thirty-six, the other Arab going big on six-way splits along the baize. It worried Martinelli that the Chinese stayed out of the play, wandering over to the bar. It was like a bad omen. Maybe he should take back his chips.
No more bets, please, gentlemen, said the croupier.
Too late. Martinelli could do nothing but stare at the wheel, praying for the chance on black, mesmerized as he had always been by the counterpoint of spokes and ball, the one hypnotically slow, the other a blur as it raced beneath the rim.
Slowing now, the ball about to drop. Nauseous with anxiety, Martinelli took his eyes away from the wheel and saw Kyle Chapman standing in his eyeline. He had come back upstairs. He wasnt looking at the wheel. He wasnt looking at the baize. He was looking directly at the man who owed him thirty thousand pounds.
Martinellis eyes went back to the table. All or nothing. Feast or famine. He heard the rattle and click of the ball, watched it drop and vanish beneath the rim like a magic trick.
The inspector looked down. He would see it first. The croupier leaned over the wheel, preparing to call the number.
Martinelli closed his eyes. It was like an axe falling. He always felt sick at this moment.
I should have put it all on red, he thought. The house always wins.
Five Weeks Later2
Thomas Kell stood on the westbound platform at Bayswater station, one eye on a copy of the Evening Standard, the other on the man standing three metres to his left wearing faded denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket. Kell had seen him first on Praed Street, reflected in the window of a Chinese restaurant, then again twenty minutes later coming out of a branch of Starbucks on Queensway. Average height, average build, average features. Tapping his Oyster card on the reader at Bayswater, Kell had turned to find the man walking into the station a few paces behind him. He had ducked the eye contact, staring at his well-worn shoes. That was when Kell sensed he had a problem.
It was just after three oclock on a Wednesday afternoon in June. Kell counted eleven other people waiting on the platform, two of them standing directly behind him. Drawing on a long-forgotten piece of self-defence, he placed his right leg further forward than his left, shifted his weight back on to his rear heel as the train clattered into the station and waited for the shove in the back.
It never came. No crowding up, no crazed Chechen errand boy trying to push him on to the tracks as a favour to the SVR. Instead the District Line train deposited half a dozen passengers on to the platform and eased away. When Kell looked left, he saw that the man in the faded jeans had gone. The two men who had been standing behind him had also boarded the train. Kell allowed himself a half smile. His occasional outbreaks of paranoia were a kind of madness, a yearning for the old days; the corrupted sixth sense of a forty-six-year-old spy who knew that the game was over.
A second train, moments later. Kell stepped on board, took a fold-down seat and re-opened the Standard. Royal pregnancies. Property prices. Electoral conspiracies. He was just another traveller on the Tube, traceless and nondescript. Nobody knew who he was nor who he had ever been. On the fifth page, a photograph of an aid worker murdered by the maniacs of ISIS; on the seventh, more wretched news from Ukraine. It was of no consolation to Kell that in the twelve months he had spent as a private citizen following the murder of his girlfriend, Rachel Wallinger, the regions on which he had worked for the greater part of his adult life had further disintegrated into violence and criminality. Though Kell had deliberately avoided making contact with anyone in the Service, he had occasionally run into former colleagues in the supermarket or on the street, only to be treated to lengthy discourses on the impossible task facing SIS in Russia, Syria, Yemen and beyond.
The best we can hope for is a kind of stasis, somehow to keep a lid on things, a former colleague had told him when they bumped into one another at a Christmas party. God knows it was easier in the age of the despots. There are some mornings, Tom, when Im as nostalgic for Mubarak and Gaddafi as a Dunkirk Tommy for the white cliffs of Dover. At least Saddam gave us something to aim for.
The train pulled into Notting Hill Gate. In the same conversation, the colleague had offered his sincere condolences over Rachels death and intimated to Kell how devastated the entire Service had been over the circumstances of her assassination in Istanbul. Kell had changed the subject. Rachels memory was his alone to curate; he wanted no part in others recollections of the woman to whom he had lost his heart. Perhaps he had been naive to fall so quickly for a woman he had barely known, yet he guarded the memory of his love as jealously as a starving animal with a scrap of food. Every morning, for months, Kell had thought of Rachel at the moment of waking, then steadily throughout the day, a debilitating punctuation to his solitary, unchanging existence. He had raged at her, he had talked with her, he had drenched himself in memories of the short period in which they had been involved with one another. The loss of the potential that Rachel had possessed to knit together the broken strands of Kells life constituted the most acute suffering he had ever known. Yet he had survived it.
You must be having a mid-life crisis, his ex-wife, Claire, had told him at one of their occasional reunion lunches, commenting on the fact that Kell had given up alcohol, was taking himself off to the gym three times a week and had broken a twenty-year, twenty-a-day smoking habit. No alcohol, no fags. No spying? Next thing youll be buying an open-topped Porsche and taking twenty-two-year-olds to the polo at Windsor Great Park.
Kell had laughed at the joke even as he inwardly acknowledged how little Claire understood him. She knew nothing, of course, about his relationship with Rachel, nothing about the operation that had led to her death. This was just the latest in a lifetime of secrets between them. As far as Claire was concerned, Kell would always be the same man: an intelligence officer through and through, a spy who had spent more than two decades in thrall to the lustre and intrigue of the secret world. She believed that their marriage had failed because he had loved the game more than he had loved her.
Youre wedded to your agents, Tom, Claire had said during one of many similarly unequivocal conversations that had heralded the end of the marriage. Amelia Levene is your family, not me. If you had to choose between us, I have no doubt that you would pick MI6.
Amelia. The woman whose career Kell had saved and whose reputation he had salvaged. The Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, appointed three years earlier, now approaching the end of her tenure, with the Middle East on fire, Russia in political and economic turmoil and Africa ravaged by Islamist terror. Kell had neither seen nor heard from her since the afternoon of Rachels funeral, an occasion at which they had deliberately ignored one another. By recruiting Rachel to work for SIS behind his back, Amelia had effectively signed her death warrant.
Earls Court. Kell stepped off the train and registered the familiar acid taste of his implacable resentment. It was the one thing he had been unable to control. He had come to terms with the end of his marriage, he had mastered his grief, reasoned that his professional future lay beyond the walls of Vauxhall Cross. Yet he could not still a yearning for vengeance. Kell wanted to seek out those in Moscow who had given the order for Rachels assassination. He wanted justice.
The Richmond service was due in a few minutes. A pigeon swooped in low from the Warwick Road, flapped towards the opposite platform and settled beside a bench. There was a District Line train standing empty behind it. The pigeon hopped on board. As if on cue, the doors slid shut and the train moved out of the station.
Kell turned and joined the huddle of passengers on platform 4, heads ducked down in text messages, Twitter feeds, games of Angry Birds. A huge bearded man with a Baby on Board badge attached to the lapel of his jacket stood beside him. Kell half-expected to spot his old friend from Bayswater: faded denim jeans and a brown tweed jacket. A woman behind him was talking in Polish on a mobile phone; another, shrouded in a black niqab, was scolding a small child in Arabic. These were the citizens of the new London, the international masses whom Amelia Levene was charged to protect. More than twenty years earlier, Kell had joined SIS in a spirit of undiluted patriotism. To save lives, to defend and protect the kingdom, had seemed to him both a noble and an exhilarating pursuit for a young man with adventure in his blood. Now that London was a city of Africans and Americans, of Hollande-fleeing French, of Eastern Europeans too young to have known the impediments of Communism, he felt no different. The landscape had changed, yet Kell still felt wedded to an idea of England, even as that idea shifted and slipped beneath his feet. There were days when he longed to return to active duty, to stand once again at Amelias side, but Rachels death had pushed him into exile. He had allowed the personal to overcome the political.
The train pulled into the platform. Carriages as empty as his days flickered in the afternoon light. Kell stepped aside to allow an elderly woman to board the train, then took his seat, and waited.
3
Kell was at his flat in Sinclair Road within twenty minutes. He had been inside for less than five when his phone rang, a rare landline call that Kell assumed would be from Claire. The number was otherwise known only to SIS Personnel.
Guv?
It didnt take long for Kell to pick the voice. Born and raised in Elephant and Castle, then two decades in Tech-Ops at MI5.
Harold?
The one and only.
How did you get this number?
Nice to hear from you, too.
How? Kell asked again.
Do we have to do this?
It was a fair question. With half a dozen clicks of a mouse, Harold Mowbray could have found out Kells blood type and credit rating. Now private sector, he had worked closely with Amelia on two occasions in the previous three years: Kells home number might even have come directly from C.
OK. So how have you been?
Good, guv. Good.
Arsenal doing all right?
Nah. Gave them up for Lent. Too many pretty boys in midfield.
Kell found himself reaching for a cigarette that wasnt there. He thought back to the previous summer, sitting with Mowbray in a Bayswater safe house killing time waiting for a mole. Harold had known that Kell was in love with Rachel. He had come to the funeral, paid his respects. Kell trusted him insomuch as he had always been efficient and reliable, but knew that theirs was a professional relationship that would never transcend Mowbrays loyalty to whoever was paying his bills.
So whats up? he asked. You selling something? Want me to buy your season ticket to Highbury?
Keep up. Arsenal moved out of Highbury years ago. Been playing at the Emirates since 2006. It occurred to Kell that, save for a perfunctory exchange in Pret A Manger, this was the first conversation he had held with another human being in over twenty-four hours. The night before he had cooked spaghetti bolognese at home and watched back-to-back episodes of House of Cards. In the morning he had gone to the gym, then wandered alone around an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Sometimes he would go for days without any meaningful interaction whatsoever.