The First Time I Saw Your Face Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the Windsors and regular visitor to No. 10. Until his death six months before he’d been seen as the archetypal Establishment gentleman. Except that papers found after his death proved that for all of his fifty years in the public eye he’d been passing defence information to the Russians.
    The country had been apoplectic with rage and the media had thrashed about trying to find someone they could blame for him getting away with it scot-free, but it was beginning to look as though good old Sir Teddy had been acting alone. With his wife long dead and no children, the public couldn’t even lash out at them.
    There was a dangerous vacuum of retribution out there, just waiting for someone to fill it.
    ‘Hey. Quit dreaming,’ O’Dowd said. ‘Turns out that during the summer and autumn of 1982, good old Sir Teddy Montgomery had a hot and heavy affair with a woman and kept quite detailed diaries about it. Called this other woman his soulmate. Said he trusted her with all his secrets. When this woman ended the affair it left him broken-hearted – so broken-hearted that he couldn’t bear to throw the diaries away.’ O’Dowd shook his head. ‘Silly man. Never know where they’re going to end up if you do that.’
    ‘With a scumbag like you.’ Mack swallowed down the disgusting taste that was suddenly in his mouth.
    ‘Correct. And you know what? As I read old Teddy’s diaries, I started to wonder whether he told this soulmate of his about those jolly Russians. That would make her as big a traitor as he was. Her life wouldn’t be worth living if the story got out.’ O’Dowd made a mock-sorry face. ‘Of course, when I say “her”, I mean Phyllida.’
    Mack could feel the edge of the well through the soles of his shoes.
    He tried to make the accusation go away, juggling dates and probabilities in his head to prove to himself that O’Dowd was wrong. But Phyllida was out of the same mould as Montgomery: Home-Counties family, good boarding school, Oxford. Their paths would have crossed.
    ‘You’re lying. You’re a lying, fat, bastard,’ Mack said, more vehemently because he knew he was on shaky ground.
    ‘I’ll admit to the “bastard” and maybe the “fat”, but in this particular case, my old son, I’m not lying and I can prove it.’ O’Dowd paused. ‘There are some lovely intimate bits about his lover in the diaries; old sod waxed quite lyrical about her appendix scar—’
    ‘Lots of women have those.’
    ‘And another quite distinctive scar low down on her back from landing on some corrugated iron when she was a girl.’
    Mack thought of the wavy scar to the left of his mother’s spine.
    ‘Then Teddy, the old goat, gets a bit naughty. Lots of details about how she could never keep quiet when they were—’
    No. No. No .
    When Mack and his sister were young they had giggled over the sounds their mother made in the bedroom with their father. Later, it had become a huge embarrassment; particularly when the noise had been lavished on a succession of ‘uncles’ who had passed through their lives.
    Tess said Phyllida sounded like a particularly leaky lilo and someone was trying to pump her up.
    O’Dowd laughed. ‘Sir Teddy said she sounded like a particularly leaky lilo and someone was trying to pump her up.’
    Mack felt himself falling, could see the fetid water at the bottom of the well.
    ‘You’re a liar,’ he said, louder this time. ‘You’re telling me Phyllida worked alongside the best journalists in the country and nobody noticed this affair?’
    ‘Takes a person who knows all the tricks to be able to play them herself. You know how bright and devious your mum can be. And we know Sir Teddy could keep a secret, sneaky sod, he took his to the grave.’
    What have you done, Phyllida, what have you dragged us into, Tess, Joe, the girls, me?
    ‘Of course, you could ask her about it, but I doubt you’ll get a straight answer, even if you get her on a day when she can talk sense. And