The Storytellers by Robert Mercer-Nairne Page A

leather-jacket wearers in the Dog and Whistle that day and the meeting had passed without a hitch and even been an anti-climax. He was invited to attend some evening classes and assessments in Crawley, which had continued for several weeks. Only at the end, when he had presumably cleared some threshold ofacceptability, had it been put to him that he inform on his colleagues at Longbridge.
    For a year now, he had been coming up to London, seeing Stacy and handing over his reports. And if it hadn’t been for her, whom he had met the first time he stayed in Edgware Road, he might have stopped. His reports seemed mundane, often embodying little more than tittle-tattle and a description of his workmates’ daft notions. His clandestine work’s connection to his nation’s security seemed far from obvious. Also he’d been hoping for more excitement and so far, trying to imagine what knickers Stacy would be wearing next time he met her had been about the sum of it. At least his handler said money was being paid into an account he could access when his ‘mission’ was complete. But what was his mission and when would it be?
    * * *
    The man from MI5 walked with a light step. At last, he felt, things were shifting into a higher gear. Even though the brutal winter weather belied it, change was in the air. After over a decade in power, with only one brief interruption, the Labour party was losing its grip on the reins of government. He could sense it. The civil service, of which he supposed he was a part, was beginning to reposition itself for the possibility of new masters, or a new mistress as now seemed likely.
    He and a number of his colleagues and friends outside the service had been watching the disintegration of the United Kingdom with growing alarm. There had even been talk amongst some of an interim authority taking over if democracy failed to deliver a stable government capable of taking firm action. This was uncharted territory. Like him, a majority of those concerned still wanted a democratic solution if at all possible, and he intended to move heaven and earth to bring this about. The alternative hardly bore thinking about.
    Peter Betsworth had been keeping a close watch on his recruit. The handler was now as confident as he could be that the young man was not a plant and was ready for a more active role. Agents were a particular breed. Loners by nature, they appeared to be more detached from their roots than most people. If they had an ideology it was a passion for their own freedom to act, often for a cause but a cause defined in terms of the destruction of a world they had come to hate. As a child of the unions, Marx was now a twenty-five-year-old in revolt, exactly the profile he needed.
    * * *
    â€œSugar?”
    â€œNaa.”
    Marx stirred his coffee anyway. He always felt nervous in the presence of his handler. The man’s nondescript manner could as easily have concealed a killer, he thought, as a favourite uncle. The Serpentine café was congenial and he was relieved not to be outside on a bench, Peter Betsworth’s preferred venue.
    â€œEverything all right at the boarding house?”
    Marx said it was. The place Peter Betsworth had told him to use on his visits to London – ‘We get a good rate’ – had become a home from home. That said, his home in Longbridge, which he shared with flatmate Mad Max, a professional agitator whose convictions stretched no further than his love for a good ‘whack-around’, was a pit compared to the neat room on the Edgware Road, lovingly prepared by Stacy, so it was really the other way around.
    â€œSeeing anyone?”
    Peter Betsworth’s question caught him off guard. But he tried to sound casual. He’d been warned against entanglements.
    â€œNaa, not really.”
    To his relief, his handler didn’t press the point.
    â€œNow we want you to start playing a more active role,” he said