Hidden Man (2 page)

Perhaps the distraction has hurried him, for the Russian listens only briefly now before sliding the key, with extraordinary slowness, into the lock. Aperfect fit. He pushes open the door, just enough to fit through, and winces as it scrapes on linoleum. Immediately there is the smell of good, fresh coffee; the flat is thick with it. His eyes adjust to the total absence of light in the tiny hall. He knows from a plan of the apartment that the bedroom is beyond the closed door on the other side of the living room. The kitchen is directly ahead of him and it is empty. A Post-it note has been stuck on the frame of the door, and he can just make out the scrawl:

Call Taploe re: M.

The yellow paper moves very slightly as, in these first few seconds, he stands quite still, listening for any indication that the Englishman may be awake.

It is only now that he hears the music. Was it playing as he came in? He has been holding the gun in his right hand all this time and his grip now tightens around the butt. Classical music, a piano, very slow and melancholy. The kind of music a man might listen to if he were having trouble getting to sleep.

With his heel the Russian pushes the front door until it is resting against the frame. Then, without needing to look back, he feels for the latch with his hand and closes it very slowly. He waits for the lock to engage and moves one step forward towards the door of the living room, the gun now up and level. If he is awake, so be it. Let him see me coming.

But there is no other noise or movement as he walks into the sitting room, just the music fractionally louder now and the bathroom door ahead of him, leaking light into a narrow passage. Everything in the sitting room is visible because of it and, out of habit, he takes it all in: the two paperback books lying on the carpet; the empty tumbler on a small three-legged antique table; a framed photograph of a young man and woman on their wedding day hanging unevenly near by. The room of an untidy, chaotic mind, devoid of a woman’s touch.

Another two steps and he is across the room, moving as lightly as he can, cheap deck shoes noiseless against the worn carpet. Still he feels no sense of exhilaration, no impending release for his grief: only a specialist’s expertise, an absolute focus on the job in hand. Moving silently between the books on the floor, his eyes fix on the space ahead of him: the narrow, well-lit corridor, the bedroom door to his left. On this he trains the gun, stopping now, his mind a spin of instinct and calculation. For years he has imagined killing the Englishman in his bed, watching him cower and writhe in a corner. It has been planned that way. But he is suddenly uncertain of making that last move into the room, of opening the door into a place where his opponent may hold the upper hand.

The decision is made for him. He hears a single heavy footstep, then the sound of a light switch being pressed and the rattle of the bedroom door handle as it drops through forty-five degrees. Instinctively the Russian takes two steps backwards, hurried now, stripped of control. Light flares briefly into the passage and he blinks rapidly as he looks up, the pale face etched with shock.

The intruder had words to say, a speech prepared, but the first shot punctures the left side of his victim’s chest, spinning him to the ground. Blood and tissue and bone shower against the walls and floor of the corridor, one colour in the pale bathroom light. But he is still conscious, his blue cotton pyjamas blackened and viscous with blood.

In his own language, the Russian says, ‘Do you know who I am?’

And the Englishman, propped up by a pale thick arm, shakes his head as the colour drains from his eyes.

Again, in Russian: ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know why I have come?’

But he sees that he is passing out: his neck is suddenly loose and falling. In the moments before the second shot the Russian tries quickly to summon a sense of fulfilment, a closure to the act. He looks directly into a dying man’s eyes and tries to feel something beyond the basic violence of what he has done.

The effort is hopeless, and as the second bullet rips into his chest, he is already turning, experiencing little more than the basic fear of being discovered. He just wants to be out of this place, to be away from London. And then he will go to the grave in Samarkand and tell Mischa what he has done.

2

‘Don’t move. Hold it right there.’

The girl stopped immediately, her hand on the nape of her neck.

‘Now lookup at me.’

Her eyes met his.

‘Without twisting your head.’

She moved her chin back towards the mattress.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Is that comfortable?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re warm enough?’

‘Yes, Ben, yes.’

He leaned forward, out of sight now. She heard the itch and whisper of the brush as it moved across the canvas. He said, ‘Sorry, Jenny, I interrupted you.’

‘That’s OK.’ She coughed and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. ‘You said you were six when it happened? When your father walked out?’

Ben took a long drag on his cigarette and said, ‘Six, yes.’

‘And your brother?’

‘Mark was eight.’

‘And you haven’t seen your father since?’

‘No.’

Outside on the street, three floors down, a distant
child was imitating the sound of a diving aeroplane.

‘Why did he leave?’

When Ben did not answer immediately, Jenny thought that she might have offended him. That could happen sometimes, with sudden intimacy. When a model is lying naked in an artist’s studio with only a thin white sheet for company, conversation tends towards the candid.

‘My father was offered a position in the Foreign Office, in 1976,’ he said finally. The voice betrayed a controlled resentment, the glimpse, perhaps, of a quicktemper. ‘The idea of it went to his head. The work meant more to him than his family did. So he took off.’

Jenny managed a compassionate smile, although there was nothing in her own experience to compare with the concept of a parent abandoning his own child. The thought appalled her. Ben continued to paint, his face very still and concentrated.

‘That must have been awful,’ she said, just to fill the silence. The remark sounded like a platitude and she regretted it. ‘I mean, it’s difficult to recover from something like that. You must find it so hard to trust anyone.’

Ben looked up.

‘Well, you have to be careful with that one, don’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Blaming everything on the past, Jenny. We’re the therapy generation. An explanation for every
antisocial act in our damaged adolescence. Make a mistake and you can always write it off against a shitty childhood.’

She smiled. She liked the way he said things like that, the smile that suddenly cracked across his face.

‘Is that what you believe?’ she asked.

‘Not exactly.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. He was trying to capture the play of light on her body, the darkening hollows of skin. ‘It’s what my brother thinks.’

‘Mark?’

Ben nodded. ‘He’s a lot more forgiving than I am. Actually works with my father now. Doesn’t see it as a problem at all.’

‘He
works
with him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How did that happen?’

‘Freak coincidence.’ Ben blew hard on the canvas to free it of dust. He didn’t feel much like opening up and telling Jenny all about big brother’s dream job; running a top London nightclub and flying business class around the world. She was a student, just twenty-one, and would only want to know if he could get her into Libra for free or source her some cheap CDs. ‘Mark and my dad go on business trips together,’ he said vaguely. ‘Have dinners, that kind of thing.’

‘And you don’t mind?’

Ben rubbed his neck.

‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘Come on.’ She rolled over and drew her knees up
tight against her chest. A very faint tremor of cellulite appeared on her upper thigh. ‘Yesterday you told me you guys were close. Hasn’t it affected your relationship?’

Ben decided to kill the subject.

‘Are you bored, Jenny?’ he asked. ‘How come you’ve moved position?’

She sensed his annoyance, but pressed on, using her body as a decoy. With her legs in the air, cycling for balance as she leaned over the bed, she began looking for a cigarette.

‘I just need a break,’ she said. ‘Come on. Don’t be so mysterious. Tell me.’

He was looking at the naked base of her spine.

‘Tell you what?’

‘About your brother. About the way you feel about him.’

‘The way I feel about him.’ Ben repeated the phrase quietly under his breath.

‘Yes.’ She was sitting up again now, still without a cigarette. ‘Tell me how this thing between Mark and your father has affected you.’

‘This
thing
?’

He was picking at words, escaping her. She knew that he was being clever and shrugged her shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of mock surrender. ‘Just tell me if you’re still as close as you were before.’

‘Closer,’ he lied, and looked her right in the eye.

‘Good.’

Then he paused, adding, ‘I’m just angry with him.’

She seized on this like a piece of gossip.

‘Angry? About what?’

‘For forgiving our father so quickly. For welcoming him back into his life.’ Ben found that he was sweating and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. ‘Mark gives the appearance of being streetwise and cool, but the truth is he’s a diplomat, the guy who smooths things over. He hates confrontation or ill-feeling of any kind. So Dad comes back after an absence of twenty-five years and his attitude is conciliatory. Anything for a quiet life. For some reason Mark needs to keep everything on an even keel or he gets unsettled.’

‘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 backand watch the visitors unravel. He’d wanted to have a shower before kick-off, to cookup a curry and sinka 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 starkwhite 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, drunkon 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 weakcups 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.