Free Spy Out the Land by Jeremy Duns Page A

penance there was some small comfort in seeing gratitude in the face of a hungry stranger. And it was there that he’d met Claire, the beautiful Zambian woman who now sat on the blanket beside
him. Her passion for life had snapped him out of his limbo, and he’d been smitten. The city had thawed under her guidance, and life had begun for him again.
    That summer he had moved into her flat in the suburbs, and soon after she had raised the topic of children. The thought had terrified him: he was already anxious enough at the possibility of her
being used as leverage if anyone were to discover him, and had transferred his emergency cache from the cemetery to below the floorboards of her building’s basement as a result. Sometimes it
was her face he saw in his nightmares, the gun placed to the back of her head instead of Sarah’s.
    He had known that he owed her an explanation of his past so she could make her own choice about whether to stay, but he’d reasoned that simply telling her might itself put her at greater
risk. And so he had said nothing, and then she had become pregnant and it had been too late. The whole world had changed, and sometimes he hardly recognised himself. Now he woke in the night,
panicking that Ben might have unaccountably stopped breathing, only to pad over to look at him and see his soft pudgy cheeks squished up against the pillow, the gentle rise and fall of his chest,
the tiny curled fingers, the sheer immense wonder of him – and the fact that he had brought this wonder into the world.
    He turned his face to the sky. A cloud had moved across the sun, throwing a shadow over their section of the park, and he suddenly felt very old and out of place, the winter feeling creeping
over him again. Yes, he had survived, he had outlived Father, he had fallen in love and started a family. But he was still a man on the run, and he always would be. He had no right to smoke
cigarettes in the sunshine, watching a boy who called him ‘Pappa’ and giggled when he rustled his head against his stomach. He should be dead, or rotting in a cell, or at the very least
pissing his days away in a frozen little flat in Moscow. He remembered Donald Maclean’s sad long face, the expression of bitterness he’d had in his eyes . . .
    ‘Are you okay, darling?’
    He took Claire’s hand in his, intertwining their fingers. ‘Yes, fine. I was just thinking.’
    ‘About how decrepit you are, no doubt.
Du gamla, du fria
.’ He smiled. It was the opening line of the national anthem – ‘You ancient, you free’ – and
she often used it to tease him. ‘Are you having a nice day?’
    ‘Lovely.’
    He took off the sunglasses, tossing them on the blanket, and glanced down at his wristwatch. It was five o’clock – soon time to start heading home. He looked over at Ben, who was now
pretending to be a charging bull, and as he did he noticed a man on one of the benches a few yards away, holding up a camera in their direction. A thought hit him:
Was he taking photographs of
them?
And then another followed:
Or of Ben?
    Dark leaped to his feet, dropping his cigarette and stamping it out on the grass. The man was middle-aged: sturdy, with a reddish nose and sandy-coloured moustache, wearing a checked shirt,
denim shorts and a large sunhat. He didn’t flinch when Dark approached, just kept pointing his zoom lens at Ben. Dark hovered over him.
    ‘Vad gör du?’
    The man looked up, a puzzled expression crossing his face. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand Swedish.’
    Dark couldn’t place the accent – Dutch, perhaps. ‘What are you doing? Why are you taking photographs of my son?’
    Puzzled turned to startled. ‘What do you mean? I was just trying to get a picture of the willow warblers.’ He pointed towards a group of tiny birds pecking at food a few yards from
Ben. Dark glanced down at the bench: on it sat a rucksack and a small hardcover book bearing the title
Birds of Europe.
    He nodded curtly,