Liz Carlyle - 05 - Present Danger Read Free Page A

here nor there among the dozens of people certain to be found at the Wetherbys.
    Saying goodbye to her mother and Edward, she left, having decided to drive straight back to Thames House and get on with her work. She’d see Charles there soon enough. If he needed someone to talk to today, Liz sensed that his neighbour Alison would be happy to stand in.

3
     
    Something was holding them up. Their driver tapped his fingers impatiently on the wheel and Beth Davis looked out of the window at the patchy woods that lined the A307 south of Richmond. She had two meetings planned for that afternoon and was wondering if she’d be back in time for either of them.
     
    She glanced at DG sitting next to her. He looked the soul of patience. Typical of him, thought Beth. God knows how many meetings he must have scheduled, yet at the gathering after the service at Charles’s house, he had been a model of tact: solicitous of Charles, polite to the array of friends and relatives he’d been introduced to, never giving any indication that he had pressing business elsewhere.
    The car inched forward, tyres churning the slushy piles of leaves in the gutter of the road. ‘Lovely service,’ DG said with a small sigh.
    ‘The boys read beautifully,’ said Beth, and DG nodded. She went on, ‘It must be awfully hard on them, especially now that they’re boarding.’
    ‘I think only the eldest is boarding yet. And boarding may be a good thing. They’re kept busy, lots of distractions, all their friends around them. Being at home might be much harder. Too many ghosts; too many reminders.’
    ‘I suppose you’re right. Still, it will make it more difficult for Charles when they’re both away. Wandering around that house all alone.’
    DG gave a small grunt. After a moment he said, ‘Our lot made a good show of it, I thought.’
    ‘Yes. Thames House must have been seriously undermanned for a few hours.’
    ‘I didn’t see anyone leaving the service, so let’s hope there were no crises.’ DG smiled, then grew serious. ‘I didn’t see Liz Carlyle.’
    ‘I did; she was at the church, with her mother. She didn’t go on to the house though. She must have had to get straight back.’
    DG nodded and looked thoughtful. Beth sensed what he was thinking – it was no secret that Liz and Charles were close, though no doubt the two of them believed no one else had noticed. But how could you fail to observe their obvious mutual attraction? The way Charles’s face would light up when Liz joined a meeting he was chairing. The rapt look on Liz’s face when Charles was speaking. You would have been blind to miss it.
    The couple’s feelings for each other would not have been a problem if Liz had worked for anyone else. But now she was reporting to Charles again, since he had taken over the counter espionage branch, and that’s where matters grew complicated.
    It was not an unknown, or even uncommon situation. It was understood within the service that the secrecy of the job made it hard to forge relationships with anyone ‘outside’, and that therefore office romances were inevitable. Joanne Wetherby herself had worked for Charles, Beth remembered, though once Joanne and Charles had started seeing each other she’d been posted – to work for DG in fact, when he had still been a director.
    What was expected, however, was that the participants in office romances declare themselves at once, and understand that one of the pair would have to be moved. The power of love might be accepted, but its inevitable impact on working relations couldn’t be.
    As far as Beth knew, Liz and Charles had nothing to declare. If anyone had told her that the pair of them sloped off quietly at lunchtime to the City Inn Hotel on John Islip Street, or rendezvoused at the weekend in a West Country B&B, she would not have believed them. Charles was far too upright, too devoted to his wife to do anything like that. And Beth simply couldn’t see Liz in the role of mistress,