Uncommon Enemy Read Online Free PDF

his hand over one ear.
    ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ said the girl.
    ‘Sarah Bourne – that’s the one.’
    ‘Sorry, could you speak up, please?’
    He repeated it twice more, then had to do the same with his own name. The prisoner who was shouting was the pale young man he had seen brought in that morning. Still handcuffed, he was
undergoing more processing and tried to kick one of the officers holding him. A policeman shouted at him to pack it in, and he shut up. The silence that followed was broken only by the woman
snuffling, until Charles was put through.
    ‘Charles?’
    She had always had a slight catch in her voice when she began to speak on the phone. It was so intimately reminiscent that it was a moment before he replied.
    ‘Yes, I’m here. It’s me. Sorry to surprise you.’
    ‘That’s all right. No need to be.’
    ‘I was wondering if I could use your professional services.’ He explained as briefly as he could. The woman stopped snuffling and listened. He wished the pale young prisoner would
resume his protests.
    When he finished she said: ‘I’d no idea you were in the SIA. Nigel hasn’t mentioned it. Does he know?’
    ‘Yes. Can you come?’
    ‘Of course, of course I’ll come.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t do criminal work any more, so I’ll have to clear my lines here with the people who do. But I will
come, Charles, I promise. As soon as I can.’
    Back in his cell, sitting on the green plastic mattress with Jane Eyre again open and unread before him, he was filled with the sense of approaching completion, of a circle about to be
made whole. It seemed irresponsible to be pleased with this fusion of the public and private, but it felt like a summation.
    Decades before, when they were undergraduates together, Sarah had said: ‘I know what you should do, you should join MI6. You should be a spy.’
    He was kneeling before the gas fire in his room, trying to toast a slice of bread on the end of his father’s old army jack-knife and changing hands because of the heat.
‘Why?’
    ‘You’d enjoy it. It would be fun, all that subterfuge, secret inks and following people. You don’t want a proper job. You don’t want to work. You want fun.’
    ‘I have fun. I have you.’
    She knelt and put her arms round him, causing the bread to drop off the knife. ‘I’m not your bit of fun, Charles Thoroughgood. I’m much more serious than that. You may not
realise it, but you’ve got me for life.’
    She proved prescient, though not in the way either might have thought. By the time they’d left Oxford they were already estranged and he had joined the army, not MI6. The army offered a
decisive break, a dramatic gesture, albeit one addressed more to himself than to her, because she was no longer around to witness it. It was on leaving the army that he found he knew someone who
knew someone and was offered an introduction to MI6. He remembered her words when he accepted; but by then she had married Nigel Measures, and he thought he would never see her again.
    He and Nigel had lived on different staircases in the same college. Their subjects overlapped and they’d shared tutorials for two or three terms. Nigel was short and assertive, with black
hair, restless dark eyes, a quick intelligence and a fondness for innuendo. He invented apt, sometimes cruel, nicknames for people. He and Charles had never been close but there was sufficient
mutual respect and wariness for each to take care to get on with the other. Only once had they approached hostility and only once greater intimacy, both occasioned by Sarah.
    It was true that Nigel had met her first but Charles had got to know her himself, without knowing that. A collision in the door of the Pusey Library while she struggled with books and folders
led to apologies, embarrassed smiles and the explosion of an enormous Yes. Charles made frequent needless visits to the library, which in turn had led to further sightings, brief