Legacy by Alan Judd Page B

reached home.
    ‘It’s unlike you to run early in the morning,’ she said.
    He was brimful with his achievement and would have enjoyed describing it to her. He was already persuaded that it had the potential to be a great case. Russian penetrations – real,
long-term, heart-of-the-bureaucracy penetrations, not peripheral pinpricks – were notoriously hard to come by. He lingered with Mary for an hour after breakfast, by the end of which he was
also persuaded he remembered James.
    That afternoon he walked with his mother down through the woods of Pheasant’s Hill to Hambleden and back up the valley through Skirmett and Turville to Fingest. ‘The essence of
England walk,’ his father used to call it, invariably adding that it was sad that the essence was now so untypical. The skies had cleared and for Charles, that late autumn afternoon,
combining the rural and domestic idyll with excitements in London made him feel he was at last breaking through to the sort of life he had long imagined himself living.

 
4
    T he telephone was answered, as before, by a woman whose English was a parody of deliberation. ‘Please . . . wait.’
    The wait was at least as long as that during his first vain attempt to ring Viktor. He was in Hookey’s office, seated at the side of the cleared desk and using a telephone with a Foreign
Office number. Hookey was slumped in his high-backed, swivel armchair, his head and nose barely above his desk, smoke curling gently from his pipe. He stared expressionlessly at Hugo, who sat with
papers and clipboard on his crossed legs, frowning and making lists with his fat Mont Blanc pen.
    Eventually the woman returned. ‘Please, your name again.’ There was another long pause. ‘Mr Koslov is not available.’
    ‘Would you please tell him I rang?’
    ‘Who is ringing, please?’
    He spelt his name for the third time. For the third time, she repeated it back to him, then the line went dead.
    Hugo scribbled a final note to himself and looked up. ‘That’s clear, then. Either he’s reported it and the security narks have warned him off or he hasn’t and he’s
hiding from you. Question is, whether we try one more time or whether that would look too much like the pursuit it is. Don’t want to provoke a protest from the ambassador or get him into
trouble.’
    Charles was disappointed. The case seemed to be slipping through his fingers, yet he still believed in his impression that Viktor was willing to meet.
    ‘Not necessarily.’ Hookey spoke with his pipe in his mouth, causing it to jerk up and down and turn the rising smoke into irregular puffs of morse code. ‘They often take time
to decide. They could be asking Moscow for traces of Charles, to see what’s known about him. They dislike being bounced into decisions. We’ll try one more time, and once only. More
would be suspicious. But leave it a week.’
    ‘Exactly,’ said Hugo. ‘They’re bound to trace. Give it a week.’ He straightened one leg and pulled carefully on his trouser crease.
    ‘Meanwhile,’ Hookey continued, ‘see the tart again. Ask her more about what he feels for her, what the relationship is so far as he’s concerned. We’ve no real idea
of that and it could be crucial to the case. Also, make sure she goes on being nice to him. We don’t want her to drop him now she knows he’s not rich. And, Hugo, make sure MI5 are kept
informed.’
    ‘No, but they are, very much so. They’re in the loop. In the loop.’ Hugo nodded as if the phrase pleased him. ‘It’s in the middle of their patch, you see, the
Soviet Embassy here. We have to. And I think we should.’
    ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Hookey quietly.
    Charles returned to the typing room on the first floor where a dozen or so young men and women, all unknown to him, were picking their way through a training programme under the sharp-eyed
supervision of a large, bejewelled woman who moved ceremonially amongst them. The students were of a mixture of