Stone Barrington 27 - Doing Hard Time

man’s hand, then sat down again. “A fine young man,” he said to Barnett.
    “That is certainly my impression of him,” Teddy replied.
    “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Barnett,” Mike said.
    “Please call me Billy—everybody does.”
    “Thank you, Billy. I’ve been hearing about you from Peter and Stone.”
    “Oh?” Teddy asked, frowning.
    “Only favorable things,” Mike said. “Billy, may I tell you a story you might find interesting?”
    “Please do,” Teddy said. “I like a good story.”
    “Many years ago,” Mike said, “my name was not Michael Freeman, it was Stanley Whitehouse.” Mike thought he saw a flicker of recognition on Barnett’s face at the mention of the name. “I was an intelligence officer with MI-6, which you probably know is the British foreign intelligence service.”
    “I’ve heard of it,” Teddy said. His lunch arrived, and he began eating. “Please go on.”
    “I was having a good career,” Mike said, “and had been earmarked for promotion, perhaps to a high office, by my superiors. Then one day, my direct superior, a man named Palmer, invited me to his country house for the weekend, so that we could discuss an intelligence operation without being interrupted by office business.”
    Mike waved over the waitress and ordered another glass of iced tea. “Not a very British beverage, really,” he said. “They prefer it hot.”
    “I’ve heard,” Teddy said.
    “So I went down for the weekend, and I was introduced to Palmer’s daughter, Penelope, who was a doctoral candidate at Cambridge. She was considerably younger than I, but we really hit it off. By the end of the weekend I was in love with her, and she, with me. It can happen very quickly.”
    “I’m acquainted with the syndrome,” Teddy said.
    “We agreed to meet in London for dinner, and by the time a few more dinners had passed, we were living together at my flat. It was early summer, and she would not return to Cambridge until the fall. Before much time had passed, she became pregnant—an oversight on both our parts. I was married and in the throes of a divorce, which in Britain at the time, with the best will in the world on the part of both participants, could take a couple of years, so this was very inconvenient for both of us. She told me that she wished to have the child. I asked her to marry me, and she accepted, understanding that she would be a single mother for a while.
    “The following day, I was dispatched to the Middle East on an assignment, and not until I returned some three weeks later did I discover that much had happened in my absence. She had told her father of her pregnancy and the name of the child’s father. He did not react well and pressed her to abort the pregnancy. She refused, there was a fight, and she left her father’s house and went to my flat. Over a weekend, she reconsidered the desirability of carrying the fetus to term, and she asked a close friend who was a medical student to help her. He was the son of a man named Prior, who was the parliamentary private secretary to the foreign minister.
    “The boy had seen an abortion performed but had not conducted one himself. Nevertheless, he thought he could handle it, and he brought the necessary implements for the procedure to a friend’s country cottage, where he met Penelope. The procedure seemed to go well, and he spent the night with her to be sure she was all right, then he returned to London to see his boyfriend—he was gay. Later that day she became ill, and he had not left her with an antibiotic. By the time he returned the following day, she was in extremis, and he called an ambulance. It turned out that he had perforated her uterus during the abortion, and infection had ensued. In spite of heroic efforts to save her life, she died in the hospital.”
    “I’m very sorry,” Teddy said.
    “I, of course, had gained the enmity of her father, who blamed me entirely, so my position at MI-6 was untenable. I had to leave the service and make my way in the world by other means. Fortunately, I had made the acquaintance of an important businessman who found the skills and languages I had gained in MI-6 useful to him. I was sent to Egypt to work there. In the meantime, the Prior boy, who had performed the abortion, was arrested and sent to prison for two years. While there, he was raped and murdered.”
    “Good God!” Teddy said. “Your story gets worse and worse.”
    “There’s more,” Mike said.