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Copyright
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperCollinsPublishers
1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road
Dublin 4, Ireland
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Charlotte Philby 2020
Maura Dooley, Mirror, from Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002 (Bloodaxe Books, 2002). Reproduced with permission of Bloodaxe Books.
www.bloodaxebooks.com
Charlotte Philby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008365219
Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008365196
Version: 2021-02-25
Praise for A Double Life:
‘Superbly crafted with heart-stopping twists and chills galore. A new star has arrived in the thriller firmament’
Thriller of the Year, THE TIMES
‘A seriously stylish, hugely compelling mystery: Charlotte Philby redefines a male-dominated genre with her brilliantly complex female characters. I was utterly gripped’
LUCY FOLEY
‘I fell into the vivid, frightening world Charlotte Philby creates so skilfully and didn’t resurface until long after I’d turned the last page. Her characters are so real you genuinely fret over their safety in their jobs and personal lives. Everything about this book feels as plausible as if it might happen tomorrow. She is a hugely original and talented writer’
JANE CASEY
‘A Double Life confirms Charlotte Philby as the master of a sub-genre she basically invented, dealing in the dangerous area where working motherhood and international espionage collide. Heart-breaking, gripping and always beautifully written, I can’t wait to see what she does next’
ERIN KELLY
‘Brilliantly executed and tense’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Terribly compelling … persuasive and absorbing’
OBSERVER
‘Philby is creating her own niche of beautifully observed, fast-paced, multi-layered novels … In Gabriela and Isobel, Philby develops two fascinating characters who have to face challenges that women the world over will recognise, but rarely get to read about on the page. A Double Life is a wonderful novel’
HOLLY WATT
‘A pacy, gripping read that kept us on the edge of our seats’
INDEPENDENT
‘I like a novel where the intrepid investigative journalist and the Foreign Office rising star are both women. And where two separate stories eventually converge around a conspiracy that touches the very top of the establishment and destroys everything’
EVENING STANDARD
‘Dark and compelling’
BELLA
‘As innovative a spy novel as we might expect from the granddaughter of Kim Philby … A gripping account of two complex lives’
IRISH TIMES
Dedication
For Jesse
Epigraph
‘The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men’
Henry David Thoreau
Mirror
In my mother’s house
is the friendly mirror,
the only glass in which I look
and think I see myself,
think, yes, that’s what
I think I’m like,
that’s who I am. The only
glass in which I look and smile.
Just as this baby smiles
at the baby who always
smiles at her, the one in
her mother’s arms, the mother
who looks like me, who
smiles at herself in her
mother’s mirror, the friendly
mirror in her mother’s house.
But if I move to one side
we vanish, the woman I thought
was me, the baby making friends
with herself, we move to one side
and the mirror holds no future, no past,
in its liquid frame, only the corner
of an open window, a bee visiting
the ready flowers of summer.
Maura Dooley
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for A Double Life
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1: Gabriela
Chapter 2: Gabriela
Chapter 3: Isobel
Chapter 4: Gabriela
Chapter 5: Gabriela
Chapter 6: Isobel
Chapter 7: Gabriela
Chapter 8: Gabriela
Chapter 9: Gabriela
Chapter 10: Isobel
Chapter 11: Gabriela
Chapter 12: Isobel
Chapter 13: Gabriela
Chapter 14: Gabriela
Chapter 15: Gabriela
Chapter 16: Isobel
Chapter 17: Gabriela
Chapter 18: Isobel
Chapter 19: Gabriela
Chapter 20: Gabriela
Chapter 21: Isobel
Chapter 22: Gabriela
Chapter 23: Isobel
Chapter 24: Gabriela
Chapter 25: Isobel
Chapter 26: Gabriela
Chapter 27: Gabriela
Chapter 28: Gabriela
Chapter 29: Isobel
Chapter 30: Gabriela
Chapter 31: Gabriela
Chapter 32: Gabriela
Chapter 33: Isobel
Chapter 34: Gabriela
Chapter 35: Isobel
Chapter 36: Gabriela
Chapter 37: Gabriela
Chapter 38: Isobel
Chapter 39: Gabriela
Chapter 40: Isobel
Chapter 41: Gabriela
Chapter 42: Isobel
Chapter 43: Gabriela
Chapter 44: Isobel
Chapter 45: Gabriela
Chapter 46: Isobel
Chapter 47: Gabriela
Chapter 48: Gabriela
Chapter 49: Isobel
Chapter 50: Gabriela
Chapter 51: Gabriela
Chapter 52: Isobel
Chapter 53: Gabriela
Chapter 54: Gabriela
Chapter 55: Isobel
Chapter 56: Gabriela
Chapter 57: Gabriela
Chapter 58: Isobel
Chapter 59: Gabriela
Chapter 60: Gabriela
Chapter 61: Isobel
Chapter 62: Gabriela
Chapter 63: Gabriela
Chapter 64: Isobel
Chapter 65: Gabriela
Chapter 66: Isobel
Chapter 67: Gabriela
Chapter 68: Gabriela
Chapter 69: Isobel
Chapter 70: Gabriela
Chapter 71: Isobel
Chapter 72: Isobel
Chapter 73: Gabriela
Chapter 74: Gabriela
Chapter 75: Gabriela
Chapter 76: Gabriela
Chapter 77: Isobel
Chapter 78: Gabriela
Chapter 79: Gabriela
Chapter 80: Isobel
Chapter 81: Gabriela
Chapter 82: Gabriela
Chapter 83: Isobel
Chapter 84: Gabriela
Chapter 85: Isobel
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Charlotte Philby
About the Publisher
Prologue
The woman’s lips were blue, the same shade as the evening sky that shone in through the window, calm and unbroken.
The knot around her neck had been pulled tight. The note, propped against the hallway table, was short.
‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it. I love you both, please forgive me.’
Chapter 1
Gabriela
It is hardly warm enough to warrant an evening in the garden, but something about the house is pushing her out. After all these years, and all the memories she made here in her teens and early twenties before Tom had so much as set foot inside its four walls, their home is already taking his side. So when he goes out for a smoke, savouring the single roll-up he still allows himself each day now that he is staring down the barrel of forty, she follows him into the starless night.
Pulling on a jacket, she brings with her the slightly too warm bottle of Sauvignon she picked up at the off-licence near Dartmouth Park Hill on her way home, partly to calm her nerves, partly for the excuse to partition off this section of her life, to annex it safely away from the day she has just left behind. The beginning of the end.
‘Ten ninety-nine?’ Tom takes a swig of his beer, incredulity written in the lines above the bridge of his nose. She follows his gaze to the bottle she is clutching by the neck and for a moment she feels herself on the cusp of laughter that will mutate into sobs if she is not careful. Screams that will reverberate through the house where their children sleep.
How the hell are they talking about the price of a bottle of wine? But he has no reason to suspect this is anything but an ordinary evening, the end of a day just like any other.
‘How was work?’ he asks as she takes a seat beside him on one of the worn garden chairs. It shifts precariously on cracked paving, the same shoddy stones that have been there since her father first bought the place, more than two decades ago. The memory of those days, however complicated they might have seemed at the time, soothes her briefly.
‘Work?’ she repeats, buying herself time, wondering if Tom notices her bristle as she pictures her desk; the job she fought tooth and nail to get and then to keep.
Before she can answer, he continues, uncharacteristically forthright. ‘I’m worried about you, Gabs. This case. Ever since you came back from Moscow …’
‘Jesus, Tom, it’s not supposed to be easy,’ she snaps, immediately holding out her hands by way of apology. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just tired.’
It is true, she thinks: I am so tired. It is not the whole truth but what more can she tell him? She is bound to secrecy, her lips have been sewn shut. As he watches her from across the lopsided plastic table, she registers the sound of a car moving too fast on the street outside. She imagines the needle pushing through the skin at the edges of her mouth. Instantly, she is transported to the bedroom upstairs, just a few weeks after she and her father had moved in. She and her best friend Saoirse in matching crop-tops, kneeling on the floor, her head level with the mattress, her earlobe flat against the CD case, which Saoirse has placed on the bed.
‘You’ve burnt the needle properly, right?’
‘Obviously,’ Saoirse says as she clamps Gabriela’s shoulder with one hand and with the other removes the ice cube she has been holding against her skin. Cold water trickles down Gabriela’s neck. As her friend breathes in sharply, Gabriela feels the remaining ice slide to the floor, Saoirse holding her shoulder a little too tight as she pushes the pin through the soft nub of flesh.
More than twenty years later, she touches her earlobe. The memory of her own cries of pain, tinged with defiant euphoria, ricochets around her head as she looks up to the window of that same room, where now stands the goose-shaped lamp that keeps guard on Callum’s windowsill. The lamp which, now that he is five years old, her son claims to have outgrown, though he never pushes the point. Secretly, she knows he is no more keen to grow up than she is to lose him to the girls and then the women or the men who will inevitably step in to claim him. The hands that would have taken him from her even if she hadn’t already made it possible for them to be torn apart.
Sadie is in the kitchen, already dressed in school uniform, fastening the clips on the violin she chose for her most recent birthday, when Gabriela heads downstairs the following morning. Seven years old: how the hell did that happen? Briefly, she wonders what the fall-out will be for Sadie, after all this. Will it send her over the edge? But there is no point trying to second-guess her daughter, whose emotions are always more nuanced, less discernible than her own at the same age. There is an air of pointedness about Sadie’s refusal to cause trouble for them in the way that Gabriela is prepared for that she finds unsettling. No, she reprimands herself, her fists tightening – it is not Sadie whose behaviour she needs fear.
‘Mum, have you seen my sheet music?’
As her daughter speaks, Gabriela’s eye catches the wine glasses from the night before, which stand marooned on the table where she is packing her school bag.
‘This what you’re looking for?’ Tom squeezes past cradling a cup and drops the pristinely kept wad of paper onto her school bag, winking at her as he settles on one of the chairs squeezed up against the kitchen table.
‘Made you a tea,’ he says and Gabriela fixes her jaw into a smile, moving forward to clear away the cereal bowls that will otherwise languish until she comes home, and then she stops. I will not be coming home. She hears the words as a whisper between her temples. There is a brief moment when she is struck by the enormity of it, but then she sees her son walking into the room and instantly everything is as it was. Once again she is Sadie and Callum’s mother and she is preparing for a normal day at the office, for a job that Tom watches her forfeit so much of their life together, without ever making her explain why. The job in which he has watched her rise through the ranks while he takes bit parts as a freelance architect, picking up the pieces without so much as a suppressed sigh.
‘Want me to walk you in?’ he asks Sadie, leaning back in his chair, rustling open yesterday’s copy of the Guardian. Sadie throws him the same look she has been giving him since she was a toddler – something between despair and total adoration. For the past few weeks, Tom has let her make the short journey alone and Gabriela can’t tell him why it makes her so uncomfortable, their child being so far out of their reach.
Enjoying the familiarity of the rapport between himself and Sadie, the reversal of the traditional parent/child roles, he shrugs, widening his eyes as if to say, What? We don’t have to leave for five minutes.
‘Leave the girl alone,’ Gabriela plays along, batting his feet off the table as she passes, sweeping up the trail of cups and bowls and opening the dishwasher.
‘I’ll do that,’ he calls over from his seat, without moving.
Ignoring him, she stacks the crockery in a neat row.
‘Are you out tonight or in?’
‘Jesus, Tom …’
‘I know, I know, I’m messing with you! I hadn’t forgotten. It’s on the calendar, right there, where it always is. So you’ll be back on Thursday?’
‘That’s right.’ She swallows, keeping her eyes trained on the dirty cutlery she is placing in the stand.
‘You’re going away again?’ It is Callum’s voice this time, and her heart strains so that it feels like it might tear.
‘Oi, what’s so bad about hanging out with your old dad? Come on, love, Mum’s got to work, you know that.’
It’s always Tom’s instinct to dive in to protect her from the decisions she has made, and his refusal to let her defend herself grates on her.
‘I’ll make it up to you,’ she says, the lie lingering in her throat. ‘I promise.’
As she opens the front door, she watches Sadie disappear around the corner of their street. Part of her wants to run after her daughter, to throw her to the ground and to hold them both there – to stop time, her face buried in Sadie’s neck, and somehow to go back and unravel the knot. Not back, she scolds herself as she loses sight of her daughter, for the last time on this street. How could she think that?
The walk to Tufnell Park tube station helps clear her head, gently easing her mindset from the domestic world to her other life. The trees lining Dartmouth Park Hill radiate new energy, their shoots a reminder that whatever happens, the world will go on.
Preparing to cross at the traffic lights, she starts to think through everything she has to do, and only now does it strike her that she has failed to buy credit ahead of time for the second SIM card she keeps tucked in the lining of her handbag. She swears under her breath as the green man fades to red, cursing herself for allowing such a pivotal element to fall through the net. But it’s pointless berating herself for it now – it is not an option, at this stage, to let things fall apart.
Heading into the newsagent’s diagonally opposite the station, she skims the headlines of the newspapers to distract herself from the fear that pummels at her stomach as she makes her way through the aisles, making sure there is no one here she recognises, no one to pull her up on why she is using a burner, probing her with their hilarious quips about her being not a civil servant after all but a spy, or maybe a drug dealer.
It was the kind of joke Tom had made when she was seconded to Russia, her first posting after joining the FCO. And her last.
‘What are you, some sort of double agent? Working for the FSB now, Gabs?’
But the jokes had stopped by the time she returned. In the days leading up to her most recent stint in Moscow, Tom had long since ceased laughing. By the time she got back he looked at her as though he didn’t know her at all – and he was completely right.
‘Seven months?’ His look had been disbelieving at first, as if he had been waiting for her to remind him it was April Fool’s Day.
‘I know, it seems like a long time.’ She felt sick but she couldn’t let him understand how wrong this was. The situation had to be presented as non-negotiable – a necessary but surmountable task.
‘What about the kids?’ His face changed then. ‘We could come with you. It could be an adventure. You always said you wanted one of those.’
Her cheeks burn as she remembers how quickly she had snapped her reply.
No.
It must have been impossible for him not to notice the change in her since she came back, but he has worked so hard not to push her on it. He does not comment on the physical shifts, which she can’t avoid when she looks at her reflection. Nothing about her body is unscarred, though it is her mind that will truly never be the same.
Leaving the newsagent with her phone topped up, she crosses towards the tube station. The carriage is unusually empty as she settles onto a seat, taking out the Burberry trench coat she bought to match the boots she denied to Tom when he asked if they were new.
Holding her bag tightly on her lap as if holding on for her life, she feels the outline of the car keys press reassuringly against her fingers, through the leather. Distracting herself, she looks up at the map of the Northern Line. For a moment, she pictures herself walking through the arch at King Charles Street, greeting the security guards who know her name and those of her children by now. She imagines familiar faces as she makes her way towards the main entrance, collecting her bag as it emerges from the scanner, nodding to the receptionists before heading through the turnstiles, the sound of metal grating closed behind her.
Except today this is not her route. Now, as the train stops at Embankment, she stands back to let an older lady off the train first, before stepping out onto the platform, walking past the exit sign, following the arrows indicating the District Line. There is a chance she will see someone she knows from the FCO but they will not question it; the sight of her heading away from the office in the direction of the Westbound District Line will not cause them any concern.
Taking a seat a few metres along the platform, she listens to the wind whistling through the tunnel. It is both warm and cold, and as the train approaches she stands, registering the air brushing against her face. Breathing deeply, taking a moment to gather herself, she steps forward towards the yellow line, looking to her right, watching the carriages tearing towards the crowd. For a moment, she meets the driver’s eye and sees a hint of dread, and then he is gone and the train has stopped and her legs shake as the doors open and she steps inside.
It is fifteen stops until it’s her turn to get off. There is too much time to think and so she closes her eyes, concentrating instead on the gentle rhythm until she hears the announcement: Kew Gardens. Opening them again, she is met by daylight as the train pulls into the outdoor station.
On the platform, she follows the familiar path towards the exit. The sun presses against her cheeks as she steps out onto the pavement, holding her head down, her hair falling in front of her face, reaching into her bag and pulling out a pair of sunglasses.