At Risk by Stella Rimington Read Free Book Online Page A

figure—would happen along.
    Liz was by no means wholly resistant to this idea. The dream of returning home, of waking up in the bedroom in which she had slept as a child and of spending her days surrounded by the mellowed brick and greenery of Bowerbridge, was a seductive one. And she had no objection to handsome knights on white chargers. But in reality she knew that earning a living in the countryside was grindingly hard work, and involved a deliberate narrowing of horizons. As things stood her tastes and friends and opinions were all metropolitan, and she didn’t think she had the metabolism to deal with the countryside on a full-time basis. All that rain, all those bossy women with their petty snobberies and their four-wheel drives, all those local newspapers full of non-news and advertisements for agricultural machinery. Much as she loved her mother, Liz knew, she just wouldn’t have the patience for it all.
    And then that morning the letter had arrived. To say that Susan Carlyle had decided to buy. That she was investing her savings, along with the money that she had earned from the nursery and the life insurance payout after her husband’s death, in the Bowerbridge gatehouse.
    “Do you think she’s trying to draw you back there?” asked Wetherby quietly.
    “At some level, yes,” said Liz. “At the same time it’s a very generous decision. I mean, she can live there for nothing for the rest of her life, so it’s me she’s thinking of. The trouble is, I think she’s hoping for a . . .” she put her glass down and shrugged despairingly, “a corresponding gesture. And right now I just can’t think in those terms.”
    “There’s something about the place one grew up in,” said Wetherby. “You can never quite return there. Not until you’ve changed, and can see the place through different eyes. And sometimes not even then.”
    A spasm of knocking seized the radiator behind his desk, and there was a faint smell of heated dust. Outside the windows the skyline was vague against the winter sky.
    “I’m sorry,” Liz said. “I didn’t mean to burden you with my not very important troubles.”
    “It’s anything but a burden.” His gaze, touched with melancholy, played about her. “You’re very much valued here.”
    She sat unmoving for a moment, conscious of things unsaid, and then rose briskly to her feet.
     
    “A—you’ve been promoted,” hazarded Dave Armstrong a couple of minutes later, as she arrived back at her desk. “B—you’ve been sacked. C—despite heavy-handed official disapproval you’re publishing your memoirs. D—none of the above.”
    “Actually,” said Liz, “I’m defecting to North Korea. Pyongyang’s heaven at this time of year.” She swivelled thoughtfully in her chair. “Have you ever talked to Wetherby about anything except work?”
    “I don’t think so,” said Dave, stabbing pensively at his keyboard. “He once asked me if I knew the test match score, but I think that’s as personal as it’s ever got. Why?”
    “No reason. But Wetherby’s sort of a shadowy figure, even for this place, wouldn’t you say?”
    “You think perhaps he should appear on Celebrity Big Brother ? As part of the new accountability?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “I guess.” He frowned at his screen. “Do the words Miladun Nabi mean anything to you?”
    “Yes, Miladun Nabi is the Prophet’s birthday. Sometime at the end of May, I think.”
    “Cheers.”
    She turned her attention to the flashing message light on her land-line. To her surprise, there was an invitation to lunch from Bruno Mackay.
    “I know it’s hideously short notice,” came the languid voice, “and I’m sure you’re already booked, but there’s something I’d like to . . . mull over with you, if I may.”
    She shook her head in disbelief. That was so Six, the suggestion that the day—and the business of counter-terrorism—was really one long cocktail party. Mull? She never mulled. She