At Risk by Stella Rimington Read Free Book Online

also one of our key assets—or promises to be—which is why I gave him to you. You debrief him, say nothing, and let me see the product—I don’t want him declared for the time being.”
    Liz nodded. “I don’t think he’s registered on Fane’s radar yet.”
    “Let’s keep it that way. We have to play a long game with this young man, and that means no pressure from this end whatsoever. Just concentrate on getting him solidly dug in. If he’s as good as you say he is, the product will follow.”
    “As long as you’re prepared to wait.”
    “For as long as it takes. Does he still think he’s going to university next year?”
    “No. Whether he’s told his parents or not I don’t know.”
    Wetherby nodded sympathetically, stood up, and walked to the window. Stared out over the river for a moment before turning back to face her. “Tell me. What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t working here?”
    Liz looked at him. “It’s funny you should ask that,” she said eventually. Because I was asking myself more or less the same question only this morning.”
    “Why this morning in particular?”
    “I got a letter.”
    He waited. There was a reflective, unforced quality to his silence, as if the two of them had all the time in the world.
    Hesitantly at first, uncertain of how much he already knew, Liz began to sketch the outlines of her life. Her fluency surprised her; it was as if she was rehearsing a well-learned cover story. Plausible—verifiable even—but at the same time not quite real.
    For more than thirty years her father had been manager of the Bowerbridge estate, in the valley of the river Nadder near Salisbury. He and Liz’s mother had lived in the estate’s gatehouse, and Liz had grown up there. Five years earlier, however, Jack Carlyle had died, and shortly afterwards Bowerbridge’s owner had sold up. The woods and coppices which comprised the sporting estate had been sold to a local farmer, and the main house, with its topiary, greenhouses and walled garden, had been bought by the owner of a chain of garden centres.
    The outgoing owner, a generous man, had made it a condition of the sale that his former manager’s widow should occupy the gatehouse rent-free for the remainder of her days, and retain the right to buy it if she wished. With Liz working in London, her mother had lived in the octagonal lodge alone, and when the estate’s new owner converted Bowerbridge House and its gardens into a specialist plantsman’s nursery, she had taken on part-time work there.
    Knowing and loving the estate as she did, the job could not have suited Susan Carlyle better. Within the year she was working full-time for the nursery and eighteen months later she was running it. When Liz came up to stay with her at weekends they would go for long walks along the stone-paved avenues and the grassy allées and her mother would explain her hopes and plans for the nursery. Passing the lilacs, rank after cream and purple rank of them, the air heavy with their scent, she would murmur their names like a litany— Masséna, Decaisne, Belle de Nancy, Persica, Congo . . . There were entire acres of white and red camellias, too, and rhododendrons—yellow, mauve, scarlet, pink—and orchards of waxily fragrant magnolia. In high summer, every corner turned was a new and dizzying revelation.
    At other times, as the rain beat against the glass and the damp green plant odours rose about them, they would pace the iron walkways of the Edwardian greenhouses, and Susan would explain the various propagation techniques as the lines of cuttings and seedlings extended before them to perspective infinity.
    Her hope, clearly, was that at some not-too-far-distant point Liz would decide to leave London and involve herself in the management of the nursery. Mother and daughter would then live in happy companionship in the gatehouse, and in the course of time “the right man”—a dimly imagined Sir Lancelot–like