The Dying Light by Henry Porter

December.’

    ‘So there was nothing to connect you with him?’

    ‘I don’t think so. Why do you ask?’

    ‘Then you’ve got little to worry about. Nobody knows about the will. Nobody has troubled you about these documents. Nobody has shown the slightest interest in your professional dealings with David Eyam. If you’ve read something by accident, well, that’s between you and me. I’m a lawyer: I understand how it goes. Look, I’ll come to your office now if that helps.’

    He gave her a stressed look. ‘No, no. That’s the point - I won’t be there. I forgot that I have something on until about five thirty - a meeting outside the office. Come after that.’

    ‘That’s fine. I want to see one or two people here.’

    Russell departed and she threaded her way to the Pineapple House in search of Darsh. But he had left his spot in the garden and was nowhere in sight. She was making her way back towards a group of people from Oxford days she hadn’t seen for twenty years when she turned slap into the path of Kilmartin.

    ‘Again!’ he said with a little ironic smile.

    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s Mr Kilmartin, isn’t it? The inquest.’

    ‘But we’ve met before.’

    ‘Really? I’m sorry I don’t . . .’

    ‘That’s the trouble with our trade - our former trade, I should say. To be successful you must be forgettable. Southsea - about a dozen years ago, maybe a touch more, Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course. I was one of the course lecturers, though I wouldn’t expect you to remember. I never enjoyed doing them much, which showed, I expect.’

    ‘Emile!’

    ‘Yes, the name made me sound like some leftover from the Free French - it really is my middle name. My mother was French.’ He put his hand out. ‘Peter Emile Kilmartin.’

    ‘Targeting, recruiting and running agents - was that it?’

    ‘No, communications in the field, though God knows why. I was always rather bad at that.’

    ‘Yes, of course I remember you.’

    ‘And you were from Jakarta, recruited there by McBride, and you did quite a bit of work before you actually came back to the office for indoctrination. Very unusual. And they really wanted you to stay. A big future for you but then . . .’

    ‘My husband died and I took another direction. He was in the Foreign Office.’

    ‘But you enjoyed the work?’

    She nodded. ‘Christ, yes. It was such a bloody relief to find something to do. An embassy wife is like being a geisha without the money.’

    There was a silence, which he didn’t seem to mind. He looked around the room, she into the garden.

    ‘Were you trying to find someone?’ he asked at length.

    ‘Yes, Darsh - the Indian. I wanted to see he was OK. I guess everyone thought he was completely mad.’

    ‘He seemed fine when I talked to him.’

    ‘You know him?’

    ‘Yes, David introduced us and he helped me with a rather arcane mathematics problem for a paper I was writing.’ He paused and looked round. ‘Anyway, it’s been a good turnout.’

    ‘It’s not a village fete,’ she said.

    Kilmartin did not miss the quiet vehemence. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. A stupid thing to say.’

    ‘You know, someone said exactly the same thing at my father’s funeral. I suppose there was nothing else to say. He killed himself, you know, and that leaves the average emotionally retarded Brit rather stuck for things to chat about at a funeral.’

    ‘You talk as if you no longer think of yourself as belonging here.’ He examined her through his large, round, steel-rimmed glasses. His blue and white spotted tie was a couple of centimetres adrift from the top button and his dark-blue suit was made of a heavy serviceable material, which had become shiny at certain points but was in no danger of wearing out: the all-purpose suit tailored - or rather built - for a lifetime. He would probably be buried in that suit wearing that same expression of tight-lipped craftiness.

    ‘I’ve been away a