Rip Tide by Louise Cooper

Author:Louise Cooper [Cooper, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9781903889121
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Published: 2003-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

Geoffrey Fane stalked into his office on the fifth floor of Vauxhall Cross. The room was flooded with light, shining in through the two large windows overlooking the Thames. He walked across and stared out at the little tourist boat just turning to go back towards Westminster, having completed its tour up river. He knew the boat’s crew would be drawing the passengers’ attention to the building, reminding them how it had featured in a James Bond film and giving them some garbled account of what went on inside. He himself wasn’t at all convinced that they should ever have moved into such an exotic-looking place. Its outlandish appearance just invited people to gawp, and made it more of a target too. Admittedly the previous office block, Century House, where he’d worked when he first joined, was a dreadful hole, with masonry falling off the front and an interior like a squalid tenement. No one would ever have wanted to take tourists to see that or put it in a film. Good thing too.

Fane was feeling thoroughly out of sorts. He’d just been to a meeting in ‘C’’s office upstairs, to discuss the launch of the forthcoming History of MI6. Geoffrey didn’t agree with that scheme at all – what was the point of it? he’d asked. There were other ways they could have celebrated the centenary. A Secret Intelligence Service should be secret. But he’d been unable to prevent it, especially when Five had announced that they were doing one, and the defeat had annoyed him greatly. At least he’d managed to ensure the book stopped at 1949. Over at Five they’d gone almost up to the present day and then found themselves criticised because the last chapters were too thin. What else did people expect?

Perhaps it was time to retire, he thought, before he started to get the reputation of being old-fashioned and dyed in the wool. But retire to what? One of his troubles was that there was no woman in his life. Since Adele had gone off with her Frenchman, various short affairs had come to nothing. The women had all bored him; intellectually negligible, with nothing at all interesting to say. He still lived by himself in the flat in Fulham he’d bought after the divorce, since Adele had got away with – as he saw it – their house in Kensington. Not that she needed it (her new husband was as rich as Croesus), yet now she was pressing Geoffrey to sell the small country house that had been in his family for generations. It wasn’t that he went there very often now, and there was no prospect of grandchildren to enjoy it with. But it was his, damn it, not Adele’s.

His thoughts were interrupted by the buzzing of the phone on his desk. He picked it up. ‘Yes, Daisy?’ he said. A new girl, rather sweet if a little slow. Still, he’d get her up to speed soon enough. He prided himself

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