Free Face Me When You Walk Away by Brian Freemantle

said, both disappointed and relieved. Then, much later, she said gratefully, ‘We’re properly man and wife.’
    Josef lay beside her long after she had drifted into a contented, drunken sleep. His head ached, badly. After two hours, he took methalaquone. And then, desperately, more. His headache worsened. Sleep still would not come. He turned towards her and in the shadowy light of the bedroom made out her face, turned towards him, fur-like through a skein of hair. She was smiling, very slightly. Love, he thought, for the second time that night, was an inconvenience. An inconvenience he was uncertain whether he could afford.
    7
    Predictably, Uli Devgeny refused to see him the following morning. The secretary, a pebble-spectacled, never-smiling young man with late-clearing acne, cited pressure of work and previously arranged meetings. Josef reacted immediately and with equal predictability, leaving Devgeny’s Kremlin office with the curt instruction that the Minister should telephone to discuss a mutually convenient appointment. Fighting cocks, thought the secretary, unimpressed as the plump Russian hurried out. Bloody fools, both of them. In the end, probably neither would win.
    Josef decided to go to the dacha to see Nikolai, so that he could justifiably reject Devgeny’s first suggestion for a meeting. The negotiator was permitted to keep a Mercedes in Moscow and he drove with the sun-roof fully retracted, unsuccessfully trying to blow away the previous night’s drunkenness. He was unused to hangovers and felt awful. The night had been completely sleepless, culminating at dawn with a violent spasm of vomiting that had left him aching and sore. His eyes were red-veined and puffed from insomnia and his chin stained from bad shaving. A band of pain kept tightening around his head. There had been rumours, he remembered, that tourniquet headbands had been used for torture in some sections of the camp. He wondered if it had been true. Medev had insisted it was.
    Pamela, in complete contrast, had been almost light-headed in her gaiety, disregarding an admitted headache and chattering without direction, like a bird suddenly freed from captivity, giggling at him, imagining the legacy from drink was the only reason for his moroseness.
    The consummation of their marriage had lifted from her an enormous uncertainty. A person of frequently ill-considered impulses from which, once committed, pride prevented retreat, she had been deeply worried. She believed her decision to turn away from the carefully ordered life of a wealthy M.P.’s daughter in London had been one of the few to which she had devoted the consideration it justified. Russia, from the moment she had stepped ashore in Leningrad, had enthralled her. But no matter how sincere her feelings, for a single girl – particularly the daughter of a Tory Member of Parliament – to quit London for Moscow was a ridiculous hypothesis which even she, in her haphazard way, did not consider. And then she had met Josef at a British embassy reception. She had heard of him, of course. Everyone at the function had and she had been intrigued finally meeting someone about whom she had read so much. She had first thought him an unprepossessing, fat little man with glasses, immaculately dressed to disguise his shortness, but by the time the evening had ended, she was enraptured by him, her interest far exceeding the aphrodisiac of power. She had had a week remaining of her tour and he had seen her every day. She had been flattered by his attention and impressed at his easy access to everything in what she accepted with the myopia of the irrationally committed was a largely closed society. Gradually, beginning with the first and strengthening with the two subsequent visits she made within the year, the idea developed of how she could adopt a life she felt preferable to her own. The opposition from her family had been enormous and sustained. And the publicity in the