Dirty Little Secret. Jon Stock

he moved up the stairs, thinking back to those times when, after a night out as a teenager, he had tried to reach his room without waking his father. He had always heard him. Marchant liked to think the reason was his father’s training, but he knew now that it was his own unsteady legs. Sebbie had died when he was eight, in a car crash in Delhi. They’d never got to share the teenage years, the parties, the dope, the girls. Sometimes Marchant wondered if that was why he had consumed so much alcohol in his life: he was always drinking for two.

      He reached the landing, and listened again. To his right: the guest room, the bathroom, his father’s bedroom. He preferred to call it that, even though he had shared it for a while with his mother. She had played only a small part in his childhood, retreating into herself with depression, and was dead by the time he was seventeen. His father’s brief affair in Delhi with Dhar’s mother can’t have helped. Or perhaps it was a reaction to his wife’s illness. He had never found out.

      His and Sebbie’s bedrooms were on the top floor, where the voice was coming from. He knew what it was now, even though it was still muffled. It was the first record his father had ever bought him: Sinbad the Sailor and Other Stories. Dhar must be playing it on the old wooden-cased HMV player in his room. The door was shut, but he could see that Sebbie’s was open. It hadn’t been a conscious intention to turn it into a shrine, but he and his father had decided to leave it as it was when he had died.

      Marchant crept up the last flight of stairs, stopping to look at a photo of his father, Sebbie and himself. They were standing in front of the Taj Mahal. As he passed the leaded window, he thought he saw a flash of light over by the chapel, on the far side of the garden. It was a tiny Norman chapel of rest, where the hamlet gathered for services on special occasions. His father’s funeral had been at the bigger church in Rodmarton, down the road, but he was buried here.

      He waited to see if the light appeared again, but there was nothing. Dawn had broken but it was still difficult to see clearly. He carried on up the stairs, thinking of Sebbie and how they used to race down them, bouncing on their bottoms. At the door he paused, listening to the story of Sinbad, and glanced behind him. He could see Sebbie’s bed, a toy tiger propped up on the pillow. Taking a deep breath, he turned and opened his own bedroom door.

      Dhar was sitting on a pile of brightly coloured Indian cushions, his back to the wall. He had an unusually shaped bottle in one hand, a gun in the other. An empty bottle of vodka was lying on the carpet beside him.

      ‘You took your time,’ he said, pointing the gun at him.

      30

      Denton was touching 100mph in the outside lane of a deserted M4 when he took the call from Spiro on the hands-free. He had been weighing up when to ring the Americans, but Spiro had made the decision for him.

      ‘I’ve just had word from Lakshmi Meena at the Fort,’ Spiro said. ‘Don’t suppose you know where Daniel Marchant likes to call home? And don’t say Tora Bora.’

      Denton breathed in and slowed to 90mph. He was already looking forward to a time when he would be driven by someone else. He needed time to think.

      ‘We’re on it,’ he said. It was important to keep Spiro sweet, but he didn’t want his heavy-handed men messing things up.

      ‘Meaning?’

      ‘We’ve worked out where Dhar was calling from. We’ll have him for you by daybreak.’

      ‘Good of you to share that, Ian. In case you hadn’t noticed, the whole of the goddamn Western world’s looking for Dhar. I thought you and I had an understanding.’

      ‘He’s yours, just let us bring him in. He’s half-British, remember, caused us a lot of problems. We’ve got a reputation to restore.’

      ‘Too damn right you have. Just make sure it’s you and not Fielding who gets the knighthood. And don’t go claiming that reward either. We haven’t got $25 million to spare. I guess you know Marchant’s with Dhar, too?’

      Denton didn’t know, and slowed up some more, his hands tensing on the steering wheel as he glanced in the rear-view mirror. He had assured the PM that Marchant was under lock and key at the Fort. It wouldn’t look good if he had escaped. He couldn’t afford to put a foot wrong if he was to become Chief.

      ‘I thought he was at Fort Monckton.’

      ‘So did we. My men just took a look. Seems he left a while ago.’

      ‘We’ll hand him over with Dhar.’

      ‘I’d appreciate it. And where might this handover be?’

      ‘How does RAF Fairford sound?’

      ‘I like the symmetry.’

      Denton knew it would appeal. Fairford was not only where Dhar had wounded American pride by shooting down one of the USAF’s most prized jets; it was from there that Marchant had been renditioned after the London Marathon fifteen months earlier.

      ‘Put a plane on standby,’ he said. ‘I’ll call within the hour. And when you’ve got Dhar –’

      ‘We’ll pull out of Vauxhall. We’re two peas in a pod, Ian.’

      Denton could think of nothing worse, but he knew many such compromises lay ahead. Finding a way to get on with Spiro would be the least of them. His relationship with the military had never been straightforward. ‘There’s a need in this family to make amends,’ Denton’s father, a sergeant major with the Green Howards, used to bark at him when he was growing up in Hull. No one ever talked openly about it, but his grandfather had been a conscientious objector. Denton chose grammar school and Oxford instead of the military, before signing up to MI6. His father had not hidden his disappointment, but it was the closest Denton could get to making amends. He had liked his grandfather, whose objections had been more to the officer class than to war itself.

      He glanced at his watch and accelerated again, choosing Miles Davis on the CD player. It suited night-time driving. Before leaving London he had called the SAS headquarters at Hereford and spoken to the MI6 liaison officer. Denton had worked with him once in Basra, and had been present when he had taken the previous year’s IONEC recruits through their special forces training at the Fort. His mantra had been borrowed from the US Seals, whom he revered: ‘The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you’ll bleed in war.’ They hadn’t got on. The officer, public-school educated, now had overall responsibility for the Increment, a covert unit of special forces that MI6 could call upon at any time.

      The unit was already heavily deployed in Afghanistan and Yemen, providing MI6 field officers with protection. Its members were drawn mainly from the SAS, but it also recruited from other special forces, including the SBS and the SRR, who provided reconnaissance, and 8 Flight Army Air Corps. After Denton’s phone call, two of its Eurocopter Dauphin helicopters had scrambled and were now making their way to Kemble, each one ferrying ten men.

      The plan was for one team to proceed on foot from Kemble to Tarlton, where they would isolate the hamlet, surround Stephen Marchant’s house and carry out as much surveillance as they could. Once they had confirmed Dhar’s presence, they would call in the second team, who would come in low by helicopter. As they fast-roped onto the roof of the house, the first team would enter by the ground floor. Denton would be waiting a mile down the road, ready to accompany Dhar to Fairford once the operation was complete.

      He dialled through to the liaison officer at Hereford again.

      ‘It’s Ian,’ he said. ‘Daniel Marchant might be with the target.’

      ‘One of yours, isn’t he?’

      Denton heard the contempt in his voice, and told himself it was mutual. Neither side appreciated the other’s skills. Just as MI5 didn’t enjoy working with the police, so MI6 resented being increasingly asked to share operations with the military.

      ‘He was.’

      ‘Expendable?’

      Denton