Snakehead

police were going crazy. And the Museum of East European Folk Art and Antiquities had burned down. Actually, it wasn’t really a museum, but that’s another story. And as I say, your dad was more or less the same age as me and he wasn’t even worried. He didn’t shout at anyone. He never lost his temper. He just got on with it.
    “After that, we became friends. I’m not sure how it happened. We lived near each other—he had an apartment in an old warehouse in Blackfriars, set back from the river. We started playing squash together. In the end we must have played about a hundred games, and you know what? I won at least a couple of them. Sometimes we met for a drink. He liked Black Velvet. Champagne and Guinness. He was away a lot, of course, and he wasn’t allowed to tell me what he’d been doing. Even though we were in the same service, I didn’t have clearance. But you heard things…and I looked in on him a couple of times when he was in the hospital. That was how I met your mother.”
    “She was a nurse.”
    “That’s right. Helen Beckett. That was her maiden name. She was very attractive. Same color hair as you. And maybe the same eyes. I actually asked her out, if you want to know. She turned me down very sweetly. It turned out that she actually knew your dad from Oxford. They’d met a couple of times when she was studying medicine.”
    “Did she know what my dad did?”
    “I don’t know what he told her, but she probably had a pretty good idea. When you’re treating someone with two broken ribs and a bullet wound, you don’t imagine they fell over playing golf. But it didn’t bother her. She looked after him. They started seeing each other. The next thing I knew, she had moved in with him and we weren’t playing squash quite so often.”
    “Did you ever get married, Ash?” Alex asked.
    Ash shook his head. “Never met the right girl…although I had fun with quite a few of the wrong ones. I’m actually quite glad, Alex. I’ll tell you why.
    “You can’t afford to get scared in our business. Fear’s the one thing that will kill you faster than anything, and although it’s true to say that all agents are fearless, generally what that means is that they’re not afraid for themselves. All that changes when you get married, and it’s even worse when you have kids. Alan Blunt didn’t want your dad to marry. He knew that in the end, he’d be losing his best man.”
    “He knew my mother?”
    “He had her investigated.” Alex looked shocked, and Ash smiled. “It was standard procedure. He had to be sure she wasn’t a security risk.”
    So somewhere inside MI6 Special Operations there was a file on his mother. Alex made a mental note of it. Maybe one day it would be something he would dig up.
    “I was quite surprised when John asked me to be his best man,” Ash went on. “I mean, he was such a hotshot and nobody had even noticed I existed. But he didn’t really have much choice. His brother, Ian, was away on an assignment…and there’s something else you might as well know. Spies are pretty solitary. It goes with the territory, and I was the closest thing he had to a best friend. John was still seeing one or two people from the university—he’d told them he was working for an insurance company—but friendship doesn’t really work when you have to lie all the time.”
    Alex knew that was true. It was the same for him at school. Everyone at Brookland believed he had been struck down by a series of illnesses in the past ten months. He’d been back at school a bit, and he’d even joined a school trip to Venice. But he’d felt like an outsider. Somehow his friends knew that something wasn’t adding up and the knowledge made them less good friends than they had once been.
    “Did he have any other family?” he asked.
    “Apart from his brother?” Ash shook his head. “There was no family that I knew of. The wedding was at a registry office in London. There were only half a dozen people there.”
    Alex felt a twinge of sadness. He would have liked his mother to have had a white wedding in a country church with a big party in a tent and speeches and dancing and too much to drink. After all, he already knew, her happiness wasn’t going to last long. But he understood that he was getting a glimpse of a secret agent’s life. Friendless, secretive, and a little empty. The plane trembled briefly in the air, and farther down the aisle, one of the call lights blinked on. Outside