The hidden man am-2 Read online

  ‘Maybe that’s how he’s learned to deal with hard-ship in the past,’ Jenny suggested confidently, and Ben tried to remember if the girls he had known when he was twenty-one had been half as self-assured and insightful as she was.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  ‘And you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m just the opposite. I don’t want simple answers to complicated questions. I don’t want to welcome Dad back with open arms and say it didn’t matter that he ruined my mother’s life. Mark thinks this is stubborn, that I’m locked in the past. He thinks I should let bygones be bygones.’

  ‘Well, you have to deal with it in your own way.’

  ‘That’s what I keep telling him.’

  Out on the road, the child was making the noise of a machine gun, a sound like a flooded engine swooping up and down the street. Ben’s eyes twitched in annoyance and he stood up to close the window. Jenny renewed her search for a cigarette, rummaging around in a handbag amongst old tissues and bottles of scent. When a pair of sunglasses spilled out on to the wooden floor, he said, ‘Have one of mine,’ and threw her a packet from his shirt pocket.

  Ben was slightly annoyed, as if she was not seeing his point of view, and went through with an idea. Walking across the studio from the window, he withdrew a scrapbook from the drawer of a cupboard and handed it to her, flicking to the second page before returning to his easel.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘Read the cutting.’

  A wedding announcement from The Times had been pasted on the open page.

  The marriage took place on 10 April between Mr Benjamin Graham Keen, youngest son of the late Mrs Carolyn Buchanan, and Alice Lucy McEwan, only daughter of Mr Michael McEwan of Halstead, Essex, and Mrs Susan Mitchell, of Hampstead, London. Mr Mark Keen was best man.

  ‘This is about you and your wife,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Yes, but you notice the omission?’ There was a small note of childish rebellion in Ben’s voice that surprised her. He didn’t seem like the type to hold a grudge.

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s no mention of my father.’

  ‘You just left him out?’

  ‘We just left him out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of what he’s done. Because he’s nobody.’ The words were unconvincing, like something Ben had learned by heart many years before. ‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the day my father walked out on Mum was the day he ceased to exist.’

  3

  Ian Boyle stood in the vast, air-conditioned barn of Terminal One arrivals, waiting for the plane. He was cold and tired and wished he was on his way home. Arsenal were playing Champions League at Highbury against a team of third-rate Austrians: there’d be goals and a hatful of chances, one of those easy nights in Europe when you can just sit back and watch the visitors unravel. He’d wanted to have a shower before kick-off, to cook up a curry and sink a couple of pints down the pub. Now it would be a race to get home after the rush-hour M4 trudge, and no time to chat to his daughter or deal with the piles of post.

  Two young boys — five and eight, Ian guessed — swarmed past him and ducked into a branch of Sunglass Hut, shrieking with energy and excitement. A woman with a voice not dissimilar to his ex-wife’s made a prerecorded security announcement on the public address system, pointless and unheard in the din of the hall. Ian wondered if there were other spooks near by, angels from fifty services waiting for their man in the stark white light of Heathrow. His own people, working other assignments, would most probably have holed up in Immigration, getting a kick out of the two-way mirrors at Passport Control. But Ian had spent four years working Customs and Excise and was anxious to avoid spending time with old colleagues; a lot of them had grown smug and set in their ways, drunk on the secret power of strip search and eviction. He’d go through only when the plane had touched down, not a moment before, and watch Keen as he came into the hall. It was just that he couldn’t stand the looks they gave him, those fat grins over weak cups of tea, the suggestion of pity in their trained, expressionless eyes. When Ian had left for the Service in 1993, he could tell that a lot of his colleagues were pleased. They thought it was a step down; Ian was just about the only one who felt he was moving up.

  Finding a seat opposite a branch of Body Shop, he looked up and checked the flickering arrivals screen for perhaps the ninth or tenth time. The BA flight from Moscow was still delayed by an hour and a half — no extension, thank Christ, but still another twenty-five minutes out of London. Fucking Moscow air traffic control. Every time they put him on Libra it was the same old story: ice on the runway at Sheremetjevo and the locals too pissed to fix it. He rang Graham outside in the car, told him the bad news, and settled back in his chair with a collapsing sigh. A family of Africans in some kind of traditional dress walked past him weeping, two of them pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes as they pushed trolleys piled six feet high with luggage and bags. Ian couldn’t tell if they were happy or sad. He lit a cigarette and opened the Standard.

  4

  Christopher Keen had taken the call personally in his private office. It was a routine enquiry, of the sort he handled every day, from a businessman calling himself Bob Randall with ‘a minor difficulty in the former Soviet Union’.

  ‘I’ve been informed,’ Randall explained, ‘that Russia is your area of expertise.’

  Keen did not askwho had recommended him for the job. That was simply the way the business worked: by reputation, by word of mouth. Neither did he enquire about the nature of the problem. That was simply common sense when speaking on an open line. Instead, he said, ‘Yes. I worked in the eastern bloc for many years.’

  ‘Good.’ Randall’s voice was nasal and bureau-cratically flat. He suggested a meeting in forty-eight hours at a location on the Shepherd’s Bush Road.

  ‘It’s a Cafe Rouge, in the French-style. On the corner of Batoum Gardens.’ Randall spelt out ‘Batoum’ very slowly, saying ‘B for Bertie’ and ‘A for Apple’ in a way that tested Keen’s patience. ‘There are tables there which can’t be seen from the street. We’re not likely to be spotted. Would that be suitable for you, or do you have a specific procedure that you like to follow?’

  Keen made a note of the date in his desk diary and smiled: first-time buyers were often like this, jumpy and prone to melodrama, wanting codewords and gadgets and chalkmarks on walls.

  ‘There is no specific procedure,’ he said. ‘I can find the cafe’.

  ‘Good. But how will I recognize you?’

  As he asked the question Bob Randall was sitting in Thames House staring at a JPEG of Keen taken in western Afghanistan in 1983, but it was necessary cover.

  ‘I’m tall,’ Keen said, switching the phone to his other ear. ‘I’ll be wearing a darkblue suit, most probably. My experience is that in circumstances such as these two people who have never met before very quickly come to recognize one another. Call it one of the riddles of the trade.’

  ‘Of course,’ Randall replied. ‘Of course. And when shall we say? Perhaps six o’clock?’

  ‘Fine,’ Keen said. He was already hanging up. ‘Six o’clock.’

  Two days later, the businessman calling himself Bob Randall arrived at the cafe on Shepherd’s Bush Road half an hour early and picked out a secluded table, his backfacing the busy street. At 17.55 he tooka call from Ian Boyle, informing him in a jumble of code and double-speakthat the BA flight from Moscow had eventually landed some ninety-five minutes late. The subject had used a public telephone box — not a mobile — after clearing passport control, and was now picking up his luggage in the hall. The call had been made to a west London number that was already being traced.

  ‘Understood,’ he told him. ‘And was there any sign of Duchev?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well keep on it, please. And brief Paul Quinn. I’m going to be walking the dog for the next two hours. Contact me again at eight.’

  And at that moment he saw
Christopher Keen coming into the cafe, indeed wearing a darkblue suit, a striking man possessed of a languid self-confidence. Demonstrably public school, he thought, and felt the old prejudice kick in like a habit. The photograph at Thames House had not done justice to Keen’s well-preserved good looks, nor to his travelled, evidently disdainful manner. The two men made eye contact and Randall gave a thin smile, his moustache lifting slightly to reveal stained yellow teeth.

  Keen sensed immediately that there was something unconvincing about his prospective client. The suit was off the peg, and the shirt, bought as white but now greyed by repeated launderings, looked cheap and untailored. This was not a businessman with ‘minor difficulties in the former Soviet Union’, far less someone who could afford to employ the services of Divisar Corporate Intelligence.

  ‘Mr Randall,’ he said, with a handshake that deliberately crushed his knuckles. Keen looked quickly at the ground and registered his shoes. Grey-possibly fake-patent leather, tasselled and scuffed. Further evidence. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’ Randall was trying to release his hand. ‘Let me start by getting you a drink.’

  ‘That would be very kind, thank you.’

  ‘Did you find the cafe OK?’

  ‘Easily.’

  Keen placed a black Psion Organiser and a mobile telephone on the table in front of him and sat down. Freeing the trapped vents of his suit jacket, he looked out of the window and tried to ascertain if he was being watched. It was an instinct, no more than that, but something was out of place. A crowd of office workers had gathered at a table on the other side of the window and an elderly man with a limp was walking into the cafe alone. The traffic heading north towards Shepherd’s Bush Green had been slowed by a van double-parked outside a mini-supermarket. Its rear doors were flung open and two young Asian men were unloading boxes from the back.

  ‘It’s part of a chain, I believe,’ Randall said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The cafe. Part of a chain.’.

  ‘I know.’

  A waitress came and tooktheir order for two beers. Keen wondered if he would have to stay long.

  ‘So, I very much appreciate your meeting me at such short notice.’ The businessman had a laboured, slightly self-satisfied way of strangling words, an accent located somewhere near Bracknell. ‘Had you far to come?’

  ‘Not at all. I had a meeting in Chelsea. Caught a fast black.’

  Randall’s eyes dropped out of character, as if Keen had made a racist remark. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘A fast black,’ he explained. ‘A taxi.’

  ‘Oh.’ In the uneasy silence that followed the waitress returned and poured lager into his glass.

  ‘So, how long have you worked in your particular field?’

  ‘About seven or eight years.’

  ‘And in Russia before that?’

  ‘Among other places, yes.’ Keen thanked the waitress with a patrician smile and picked up his glass. ‘I take it you’ve been there?’

  ‘Not exactly, no.’

  ‘And yet you told me on the telephone that you have a problem in the former Soviet Union. Tell me, Mr Randall, what is it that you think I can do for you?’

  Leaning back in his seat, Randall nodded and swallowed a mouthful of lager. He blinked repeatedly and a small amount of foam evaporated into his moustache. After a momentary pause he said, ‘Forgive me. It was necessary to employ a little subterfuge to prevent your employers becoming suspicious. My name is not Bob Randall, as perhaps you may have guessed. It is Stephen Taploe. I workacross the river from your former Friends.’

  Keen folded his arms and muttered, ‘You don’t say,’ as Taploe pushed his tongue into the side of his cheek, his feet moving involuntarily under the table. ‘And you thinkthat I can help you with something…’

  ‘Well, it’s a good deal more complicated than that,’ he said. ‘To come straight to the point, Mr Keen, this has become something of a family matter.’

  5

  ‘It’s possible, Jenny, that one day you’ll walkinto a public art gallery and lookat nothing at all. A total absence. Something with no texture, no shape, no solidity. No materials will have been used up in its construction, not even light or sound. Just a room full of nothing. That will be the exhibit, the gimmick, the thing you’re encouraged to look at and talk about over cranberry juice at Soho House. Emptiness. Actually the opposite of art.’

  Jenny was glad that Ben wasn’t talking about his father any more. She preferred it when his mood was less anxious and abrasive. It was another side to him, more relaxed and quick-witted; she wondered if it was even flirtatious. But Ben looked like the faithful type: he was only thirty-two, after all, and there were pictures of his wife all over the studio walls, nudes and portraits of a quality that had persuaded her to sit for him in the first place.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ she asked, and began gathering up her clothes. Ben was cleaning his brushes at the sink, wrapping the bristles in a rubber band and covering any exposed paint with small wraps of cling film.

  ‘Since we got engaged,’ he said. ‘About three years.’

  ‘It’s such a great house.’ Jenny’s stomach flattened out as she stretched into a thick woollen polo neck, her head disappearing in the struggle to find sleeves.

  ‘Alice’s father bought it cheap in the late seventies. Thought it would make a good investment.’

  The head popped out, like somebody breaking free of a straitjacket.

  ‘Well he thought right,’ she said, shaking out her hair. ‘And it’s useful for you to be able to work from home.’

  ‘It is,’ Ben said. ‘It is. It’s a great space. I’m very lucky.’

  ‘A lot of artists have to rent studios.’

  ‘I know that.’

  She was oblivious to it, but talking about the house always made Ben feel edgy. Three storeys of prime Notting Hill real estate and not a brick of it his. When Carolyn, his mother, had died seven years before, she had left her two sons a few hundred pounds and a small flat in Clapham that they rented out to unreliable tenants. Alice’s father, by contrast, was wealthy: on top of her basic salary as a journalist she had access to a substantial trust, and the house was bought in her name.

  ‘So what are you cooking for your brother?’

  Ben was glad of the change of subject. Turning round, he said: ‘Something Thai, maybe a green curry.’

  ‘Oh. Bit of a dab hand in the kitchen, are we?’

  ‘Well, not bad. I find it relaxing after a day in the studio. And Alice can’t boil an egg. So it’s either that or we eat out every night.’

  ‘What about Mark? What about your brother? Can he cook?’

  Ben laughed, as if she had asked a stupid question.

  ‘Mark doesn’t know one end of a kitchen from the other. Anyway, he’s always out at night, with clients or away at the club. Spends a lot of his time travelling overseas. He doesn’t get much chance to be at home.’

  ‘Really?’ Jenny was putting on her shoes. ‘What time’s he due back?’

  She’s interested, he thought. They always are. They see photos of Mark in the hall and they want a chance to meet him.

  ‘I’m not sure. He just called on the phone from Heathrow.’

  ‘Right.’

  From her reaction, it was clear that Jenny would not have time to stay. Picking up her bag, she soon made for the stairs and it remained only to pay her. Ben had thirty pounds in his wallet, six five-pound notes which he pressed into her hand. They were walking towards the front door when he heard the scratch of a key in the lock. The door opened and Alice walked in, talking rapidly into her mobile phone. She did a double-take when she saw Ben standing at the foot of the staircase beside a tall, slightly flushed pretty girl and he raised his eyebrows as a way of saying hello. Jenny took a step back inside.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Alice was saying. Her voice was raised to a pitch just below outright aggression. ‘I told her s
he’d have a chance to read through the piece. To check it. That was a promise I made.’ Jenny found herself standing awkwardly between them, like an actor waiting to go onstage. ‘So if you go ahead and print it, her whole family, who I’ve known since I was six fucking years old, are going to go…’

  Ben smiled uneasily and felt the dread of the phone call’s aftermath, another work crisis the dutiful husband would have to resolve. ‘Thanks, then,’ Jenny whispered to him, moving towards the door. ‘Same time tomorrow?’

  ‘Same time,’ he said.

  ‘About midday?’

  ‘Midday.’

  ‘Your wife’s lovely,’ she mouthed, standing below him on the threshold. ‘Really pretty.’

  Ben merely nodded and watched as Jenny turned towards Ladbroke Grove. Only when she was out of sight did he close the door.

  ‘But that’s exactly what I’m saying, Andy.’ Alice had kicked off her shoes and was now stretched out on the sofa. A great part of her lived for arguments of this kind, for the adrenalin surge of conflict. ‘If the article appears as it is…’ She pulled the phone away from her ear. ‘ Fuck, I got cut off.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Ben came over and sat beside her. Her cheek as he kissed it was cold and smelled of moisturizer and cigarettes.

  ‘You remember that piece I wrote about my friend from school, the girl who was arrested for drug smuggling?’ Alice was redialling Andy’s number as she spoke. Ben vaguely remembered the story. ‘It was supposed to be a feature but the news desk got hold of it. Now they’ve gone and made the girl out to be some kind of wild child who should have known better, exactly what I promised Jane we wouldn’t do.’ She stared at the read-out on her mobile phone. ‘Great. And now Andy’s switched his phone off.’

  ‘Her name is Jane?’ The observation was a non sequitur, but Alice didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘She came to me because she knew the press would be on to her sooner or later. She thought she could trust me to tell her side of the story. I’m the only journalist her family knows.’