They went through to the sitting room, where there was a bottle of water and two tumblers. Elliot poured them both a glass, then sat back in one of the chairs. She watched him, how relaxed and confident he was, and thought how utterly bonkers it was her being here. She had known him barely two weeks and here they were in a city that quite clearly had romantic connotations. Even if it was for work.
‘So who have you spoken to?’
‘I met Jonathon Soames for lunch yesterday.’ She said it as casually as she could, but she still couldn’t believe she had pulled it off, even though Elliot himself had greased the wheels, getting his father to secure the meeting through his contacts at the House of Lords.
‘How was it?’
‘I was nervous as hell. I’ve never interviewed anyone before, but I just told myself to see it as two people having a chat.’
‘Good,’ smiled Elliot with approval. Abby felt herself blushing. She sipped her water as she told him about the events of the previous day, part of her not wanting to relive the minutiae of the encounter, wondering if she would reveal some terrible faux pas. Yet another part of her felt a bubble of pride that she was desperate to share.
She had almost laughed as she arrived at the entrance of Wiltons restaurant on Jermyn Street, amusing herself with the thought that she’d waited thirty-one years to meet a lord, and now two of them had come along in one week.
Knowing that her lunch date was Lord Soames, she probably shouldn’t have called him Sir Jonathon for the first twenty minutes of the conversation, after which he was gracious enough to insist that she call him Jonny.
She had liked him immediately. Unlike the po-faced portraits of world leaders and military dignitaries that lined the walls of the restaurant, Jonathon Soames was good-natured, putting her at immediate ease with the skill of someone who’d had a long career in the upper echelons of government.
They’d discussed the history of the restaurant, the subject matter of his latest non-fiction book – a biography of the explorer Ferdinand Magellan – and Abby’s work at the RCI. He confirmed he had been a good friend of Dominic Blake’s and had been particularly interested, intrigued, to learn of Abby’s recent acquaintance with Rosamund Bailey, asking all sorts of questions about her welfare and whereabouts that she could barely answer.
He was a little more sombre when the subject turned to Dominic, but still spoke of him with warm, if slightly sad nostalgia.
It had taken her the best part of the lunch to ask him the question that really mattered, and her heart had been thumping so hard she’d thought the maître d’ was going to pull her to one side and ask her to quieten down. In the end she had decided there was no easy way to broach it and had
just blurted it out.
Jonathon hadn’t denied arranging the media blackout to stop coverage of the Soveyemka spy story. ‘Not just for Dominic, but for our country,’ he had noted quite passionately.
Nor did he deny the rumours that Dominic could have been spying for the Russians. She remembered what he’d said almost word for word, remembered the sadness on his face as he discussed it with her.
‘To this day, no one knows with any certainty who was and who was not spying for the Russians,’ he’d told her. ‘One thing’s for sure, the sixties was a very volatile time. Everyone was an idealist and the KGB were masters of recruitment. You only have to look at the Cambridge spies: Kim Philby was hands-down the most successful spy in history. He was head of MI6’s counter-espionage division, privy to the secrets known by the Secret Service, the CIA and the FBI, yet all the time he was passing everything on to Moscow. Do you really think he was the only one?’
‘What did Soames say about the specific allegation about Dominic?’ asked Elliot in a natural pause in her recollections.
‘He said he thought it was possible, but highly unlikely. He said he’d known Dominic since Dom’s first day at university and they were as close as brothers. Not only did he never see anything to suggest that Dominic was working for the Russians, but he just wasn’t the sort.’
‘Who knows who has it in them to be a traitor?’ replied Elliot cynically.
‘I think he meant that Dominic wasn’t that sort of political idealist.’
‘Capital was a political magazine.’
‘Jonathon said that Dominic was interested in politics insofar as it got people talking about his magazine. But he just didn’t have the political zeal of someone like Ros. Apparently he was a terrible gossip, couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. That’s why people loved talking to him: he always had a story – usually a filthy one – about someone or other.’
She looked up at Elliot, who was staring out of the window thoughtfully.
‘One thing Lord Soames did say, which puts paid to your theory about the drug-running, was that it was his dad who funded the start-up money for Capital.’
‘We couldn’t have expected Soames to admit to anything, even if he did know Dominic was a spy,’ said Elliot, as if he were thinking out loud. ‘It’s not James Bond we’re talking about. There’s a certain glamour about espionage, but this is out-and-out betrayal of one’s country, one’s friends, colleagues. Take Philby: he was responsible for the deaths of dozens of Western agents.’
She told him about a phone call she’d had with Robert Webb, a former editor of Capital magazine, and an email conversation with another journalist associate of Dominic’s, both of which Elliot said he would follow up, even though the communication had been fairly fruitless.
‘So what about you?’ she asked, sipping her water.
‘Most of the Soveyemka press team from the period are now dead. But the list of spy names is fairly well documented if you know where to look, and I had it backed up by a member of the news team who was a junior reporter at the time.’
‘It’s hardly conclusive, though,’ said Abby.
‘I agree. The person I really wanted to track down was Dominic’s handler.’