Widgett carried himself like a sultan. He strode through the gridlocked streets of St. James’s, elegant in a long cashmere overcoat, meeting anyone who crossed his path with a stare which was either hawklike or fond, depending on the subject. Olivia thought how dazzling he must have been at forty. She could imagine rushing through the same streets with him in evening dress to dinner and dancing at the Café de Paris.
“Where are we going?” she asked, beginning to fear that Widgett was not MI6 at all, but just mad.
“The river, darling.” He led her on a complicated route through the back streets of Whitehall until they emerged onto the Embankment. A police launch was waiting. At the sight of Widgett, the officers, rather than loading him into an ambulance in a straitjacket, stood to attention. This was reassuring.
“Handsome fellows, aren’t they?” he said, handing her into the launch.
“Where is the safe house?” she said.
“No need to know,” he said. “Get some dinner and a good night’s sleep. I’ll be with you in the morning.” He gave them an elegant wave and disappeared into the crowd.
Immediately, the launch swung out from the bank and into the central flow of the Thames, picking up speed and bouncing against the current. As they powered upstream, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament were silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Olivia stood at the prow, heart leaping with excitement, the James Bond theme playing in her mind. She was a spy! She formed her fingers into a gun shape and whispered, “Kpow! Kpow!” Then the boat banged down hard against a wave, and a spray of thick brown river water hit her in the face. She decided to spend the rest of the journey in the cabin.
There was a plainclothes officer inside. “Paul McKeown,” he said. “I’m Scotland Yard’s liaison with the security services. So, what do you make of Widgett?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Who is he?”
“Come on. You know who Absalom Widgett is.”
“I know he works for MI6 and that he’s a well-known Arabist,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Absalom Widgett? He was a devil, he was. He seduced everybody’s wives and daughters all over the Middle East and Arabia. He had a chair at Oxford and a rug shop on the Portobello Road. He used to pretend to be a gay oriental carpet specialist.”
“Is he the head of something?”
“He was. He was pretty high up. But he grew disenchanted in the seventies. It was never clear what happened in the end, whether it was someone’s wife, or drink, or opium, or an ideological row. He was very much of the old school: chaps on the ground, native-lingo-speakers, trusting to instinct—that sort of thing. He thought all the new technology was the worst possible thing to happen to Intelligence. Anyway, whatever happened, it was a mistake on someone’s part. The Arabic section was never the same, and they pulled him out of retirement on the twelfth of September 2001.”
Olivia nodded thoughtfully. “Would you tell me where I’m going?”
“Not allowed to say. Don’t worry. I think you’ll find it’s pretty comfortable.”
At Hampton Court she was ushered from the boat to a helicopter and, after a short journey, into a car with darkened windows, which purred through the country lanes of Berkshire and the Chilterns. They crossed the M40 and she recognized the Oxford ring road, then they plunged deep into the Cotswold countryside, glimpsing flickering fires and cozy-looking scenes through the windows of pubs and cottages. Then they were following the high walls of a country estate, and Olivia heard the crunch of gravel beneath the wheels as wrought-iron gates swung slowly open, the headlights beaming up a long drive. It was the sort of journey which she imagined would end with a uniformed butler opening the door holding a silver tray of Bloody Marys, or a bald midget in a wheelchair, a cat on his knee being stroked with a metal claw.
She was, indeed, met by a butler, an excessively courteous man in uniform, who informed her that her bags had already arrived and ushered her up stone steps into a magnificent hallway. Oil paintings covered the paneled walls, and a wide staircase of dark wood led on to the upper floor.
He asked if she wanted dinner or a “hot tray” in her room. She wasn’t sure what a “hot tray” was, but the image it conjured was so beguiling—potted shrimps, Welsh rarebit, Gentleman’s Relish, sherry trifle—that she decided she would like one, thank you very much.
At the sight of the bed, she lost all interest in her surroundings and sank, exhausted, between the crisp white sheets, noticing to her intense joy that there was a hot-water bottle with a quilted cover in exactly the right position for her feet.
Olivia never discovered the constituents of the hot tray. The next thing she knew it was morning and she had the traveler’s syndrome of not remembering where she was. She fumbled for the bedside lamp. The room was in darkness, but bright sunlight was flaring around the edges of the thick curtains. She was in a four-poster bed with heavy chintz drapes. She could hear sheep. It didn’t seem to be Honduras.
She swung her legs around and sat on the edge of the bed. She ached all over. She felt dehydrated and vile. She padded over to the window, pulled the curtains aside and found herself looking at a splendid English country-house garden: lawns, manicured hedges in ordered lines, a honey-colored stone terrace directly below her. Moss-covered steps, with a mock-Grecian urn on either side, led down to the lawn, on which there were croquet hoops. Beyond the lawn were chestnut trees, wintry and bare, and beyond that soft gray-green hills, dry-stone walls and smoke rising from the chimneys of gray rooftops clustered around a church spire.
She turned back to the room. Miraculously, her tan and olive case was there, containing the items from her flat she’d requested from Professor Widgett. There was an envelope under her door. It contained a map of the premises, a number to call when she was ready for breakfast and a note which said, Report to Tech Op Room as soon as you have eaten.