Paul Dark 02 Song of Treason by Jeremy Duns

Author:Jeremy Duns [Duns, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471111143
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XIV

Saturday, 16 June 1951, Istanbul, Turkey

‘Breakfast in Europe and lunch in Asia!’ cried the ambassador’s wife as the motorboat drew up to the landing-stage. ‘I shall never get used to the decadence.’

‘We do our best,’ smiled Joan Templeton, stretching out an arm to help her ashore. She alighted with an unladylike squeal, but swiftly recovered and handed small bouquets of wild flowers to Joan and her daughter, Vanessa. The ambassador made the leap unaided, then turned back and muttered instructions to the crew, half a dozen young men in starched white shirts and matching pantaloons. They swiftly removed the Union Jack from its position by the wheel, folded it away, and seated themselves cross-legged on the cushions on deck – I guessed they would wait here until required for the return journey.

On land, everyone greeted one another with polite pecks on the cheek, and the ambassador asked Vanessa how she was enjoying her final year at Badminton. His wife, meanwhile, had caught sight of me standing to the side and immediately leapt over.

‘I was so sorry to hear about your mother,’ she said, taking my hands in hers and clutching them urgently.

‘It was perhaps for the best,’ I told her. ‘She had suffered long enough.’

She tilted her head and gazed at me for a long moment, her eyes large and liquid with sympathy. I gave a tight smile in return: I knew this was one of many such exchanges I could expect to face in coming weeks. While we spooks were housed in the city’s Consulate-General – the old embassy, a magnificent nineteenth-century palazzo – the regular diplomatic corps were based out in Ankara, an arrangement that suited us rather well. But in summer they descended on Istanbul, their arrival presaged by a flurry of thick crested invitation cards embossed with gold type. My usual existence, in which I saw less than a dozen colleagues regularly, was about to be overturned with two months of cocktail parties and picnics.

Today was the opening of the season, the Templetons’ annual lunch party, which one had to take a ferry to reach as they lived in Beylerbeyi, a pleasant suburb on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. Like many others out here, the ambassador and his wife had known my parents in Cairo. I had spent much of the previous summer, my first in the city, fielding anxious enquiries over Father’s disappearance at the end of the war and my mother’s continuing ill health. But with Mother’s death a couple of months earlier I had become an orphan, so I was braced for an even higher pitch of concern.

Had she known the truth about my parents, the ambassador’s wife would probably have recoiled in horror. My mother had hailed from an old Swedish family that had settled in Finland in the nineteenth century. Father had been introduced to her at a ball in Helsinki in 1923 when she was just nineteen, and they had married soon after and moved to Egypt, where Father had been Head of Station.

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