A secretary was just bringing him coffee. ‘This might pass for coffee in London – but we can do better than this dishwater here.’
Laura sat down on the high-backed chair that she was motioned to. Outside long windows, she could hear children playing in the Parc Beaulieu.
The secretary went out, and came back in with something that she obviously thought would be more to Valance’s taste. Laura saw how nervous she was around him; saw his pleasure in bullying even this clumsy woman. When they were alone, he spoke.
‘You’ve kept your side of the bargain.’
Surely it was wrong of him to start by talking of bargains, she thought; surely that was too open a move.
‘But now you are asking about moving to America. We have evidence … you know what I’m talking about. We didn’t want to take you in when your baby was so small – but now … You seem to assume you are free, that we have lost interest.’
Laura had not prepared herself for this kind of blatant attack, this talk of evidence and arrest, and she simply spoke as she had so often: with a statement of ignorance. Edward was not a traitor; she had no idea where he was going that May evening. Valance did not react to her statement, but asked whether, if she did know, she would tell him. This time she had to do better in her acting, but her voice seemed forced even to herself as she told him that of course she would.
‘I need you to do a job for me, which will bring us both closer to the truth.’
Now she did not trust herself to speak. She kept very still, pulling her eyebrows together as though puzzled, and he began to speak about her network. He wanted more of it. He wanted more of what she knew.
‘I don’t even know what you mean,’ Laura said. Her voice came out childish, almost petulant, rather than innocent.
‘Tell me about your cousin Giles.’
The box. The key. The diagrams. Sweaty hands slipping on the camera; the anti-aircraft guns booming around her. That was not poor Giles’s fault. Laura said something about how she was sure that Giles had been such a tireless worker in air defence, and then she backtracked and said she knew nothing about what he did in the war. It was all so confusing now; what should she say?
‘All that depravity,’ Valance was saying, ‘but maybe you don’t mind that sort of thing. Your husband’s friend Alistair says you were free to go your own way; you knew Mr Blanchard in the war, didn’t you?’
Now Laura felt as though her body, with its banging heart and short breaths, was not under control. She was no good in a crisis. How could she ever have done the work she did when she was like this; it was pointless, impossible, she might as well give up now and tell them everything. Valance was getting up and for a moment she thought that he was going to touch her, to force her; when he stood up, she realised how tall he was, and she was weak with panic. But he was getting a file from another desk. ‘Whatever you knew yourself, you will have to help us find something now. What about Peter Gillett? Was he the one who discovered your husband had to leave?’
What was this? Peter? That was nonsense. ‘He was in Geneva then,’ Laura said. ‘I met him here for the first time last year.’
‘I’m getting tired of all these lies. He would drink with Mr Last at the Reform whenever he was in London. You must have met him on occasion. You know his political sympathies.’
‘Peter? But he – he’s my cousin’s boyfriend …’ This was wrong. Peter had never even talked about Edward. He had never mentioned politics. His job with the Permanent Representative to the United Nations was dull, bureaucratic. What would he be doing there if Valance was right?
Valance was still talking, saying that Laura knew well enough what he was talking about – ‘his father, Cuba, all that’ – and then asking about the messages he used to run. ‘We know he was involved, but we just need a little thing to clinch it and bring him in. He’s not much in himself. Why don’t you find out who else he was working with? That will be enough to keep you safe for now. One name. Who tipped off the network about Mr Last’s impending interrogation. Just the name.’