Free The Falklands Intercept by Crispin Black

come to dust.’
    She was a golden girl for sure. At least she wasn’t thinking about coming to dust just now.
    Jacot decided on more Manzanilla, lots more and some Mozart. Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice came through his iPod speakers. It was as if she was in the room. ‘
Ruhe sanft, meine holdes Leben’
. Sleep soundly my beloved. Zaida’s ravishing lullaby for grown ups lifted his melancholy and soothed the long buried guilt re-awakened by his earlier interview with Jones.
    My, young Charlotte Pirbright was a head-turner. It was still not late. Time for a little more sherry. His mobile pinged with a text message. Lady Nevinson’s driver would pick him up at King’s Cross at 2230 – she was working late.

VII
National Security Adviser’s Office,
10 Downing Street, Whitehall, London SW1
    The car drove at top speed from the station and Jacot arrived in Lady Nevinson’s Number 10 office a few minutes before 11 o’clock. He expected her to quiz him urgently about Cambridge. Instead she kicked off with ‘Do you remember in the 1970s those vigilante films starring Charles Bronson?’ Lady Nevinson seemed to be in a beneficent and chatty mood and the whisky would follow soon thought Jacot.
    He replied, ‘Yes, of course. They were a huge hit at school. Michael Winner directed. Bronson was also in those other staples of preparatory school life in the 1960s and 1970s
The Great Escape
and
The Dirty Dozen
.’
    She picked up the decanter, poured two glasses of whisky and slid one across her desk to Jacot. ‘Winner is mainly known as a restaurant critic these days. People forget how powerful his films were in their day. You are younger than me Jacot and so you probably can’t remember the sense of breakdown that the adult, or recently become adult, world experienced in the early and mid 1970s. Bit like today really. People had little faith in the system and so vigilante films of all kinds touched a chord. Shame he never got round to directing a Bond film. It might have been fun.’
    Jacot had known and worked for Lady Nevinson for nearly two years. They shared many attitudes and got on well. But they were not intimates or even friends. Curiously, since the start of the General Verney affair they had grown closer. They were both in on the same secret. Indeed, if in truth she wasn’t sharing Jacot’s findings with anyone else or rather she wasn’t keeping the prime minister in the loop, they were co-conspirators of a sort. He realised that he didn’t know much about her beyond her entry in
Who’s Who
.
    â€˜I don’t know how they went down at your dingy prep school but they went down a storm in diplomatic circles even in far-off lands. I read French at Newnham and spent a year at the Sorbonne as part of my degree and so I spoke and speak it fluently. I passed the Foreign Office exam rather well.’ She looked up at him. ‘As you would expect.’
    Jacot smiled. He wasn’t at all sure that she had been making a joke. Getting to know someone was one thing, understanding their sense of humour quite another. Like many senior civil servants he had met she was proud of academic achievements long ago. The first class honours degree and the high place in the civil service exam still mattered to her in her early 60s.
    Lady Nevinson continued, ‘I spent a few months in London and was looking forward to my first posting which I assumed would be Paris. I had it all worked out. But my first posting was, inevitably looking back, Viet Nam. In the Seventies I spent much of my timein Indo-China. We watched Winner’s films at the embassy. Oh those old film nights with a slightly cranky projector and intervals when the reels were changed. The embassy servants would bring drinks and the most wonderful cocktail eats – small chow we called them. Every time I see Michael Winner on TV or advertising something the films and the memories come right