Hidden Man (24 page)

Mark frowned.

‘So what was the point of it?’

‘Evidence gathering. Building a picture.’ Taploe arranged his hair. ‘We need hard evidence against Kukushkin and Tamarov, not just against Macklin and the Belgian. And we’re still trying to find out whether Roth had prior knowledge. Perhaps Paul didn’t make it clear, but Roth’s name is all over the documents. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that he’s been using Macklin to cover his own tracks. Roth could be double dipping Kukushkin, he could be a secret co-signatory on the Pentagon account, a director with the power to change the banking mandate. It’s just too early to tell. The one thing we’re trying to avoid is scaring off the Russians. I don’t want simply to arrest a Thomas Macklin when six others just like him could grow overnight in his place. That’s part of the reason I’ve never tried to recruit him. He might agree, but then tip off Tamarov or Duchev, even Kukushkin or Roth. And then what do we have? Probably Macklin in a body bag within forty-eight hours and an entire network of organized crime evaporated overnight. You
know
Sebastian, Mark. An oper
ator as clever and capable as that would surely know what was going on in his own backyard.’

‘I suppose.’ Mark shrugged his shoulders. He felt like a child being sent out to play in the road.

‘The trickis to let them do the talking,’ Taploe said, priming him for the task a head. ‘Nurture any awkward silences. That forces people to open up. Agree with what Tamarov says, match his opinions with your own. If he feels that he can trust you then anything is possible.’

‘I’d also need you to find out whatever you can about a bloke called Timothy Lander,’ Quinn said.

‘Lander?’

‘He’s a banker, we think, based in the Caymans. Not, as far as we can tell, associated directly with Pentagon, but it’s a tight community out there and there’s a possibility a connection will be made. Your father made a series of telephone calls to his office in Grand Cayman in the weeks leading up to his death. There’s no record that they’ve met, but the coincidence seems strange.’

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Mark admitted.

‘Well, I’ve asked our SIS station out there to look into it.’ Taploe suddenly looked pleased with himself. ‘The UK police are also interested in some workyour father was doing for Divisar on behalf of a Swiss bank. Not Geneva based, but an investment house in Lausanne. Macklin or the Russians may have interests registered there which your father stumbled upon.’

‘Yes.’

‘So it’s a big taskwe’re facing,’ he said. ‘Much as we appreciate what you’ve achieved so far, there’s still a great deal of workto be done.’

34

A brilliant mid-winter afternoon, clean white light pouring into the Great Court of the British Museum. Ben felt bathed in limestone. He walked a circuit of the Reading Room and was revived.
Let Alice have lunch with whoever she likes. At least she has nothing to hide. At least there are no secrets between us
.

Long, chrome-legged tables with plastic tops were set out in rows perpendicular to the north-western edge of the Great Court. After half an hour Ben bought himself a cup of tea and sat down beside a young American student with bug eyes and a sprout of goatee beard. He was talking to a Japanese girl.

‘You wanna know what really
amazes
me about the Kennedy assassination?’ he was saying. ‘It’s that the guy who shot him is most probably still out there.’

‘Unless the CIA already killed him,’ the girl replied. She had a faultless English accent and wore blue-rimmed glasses that were too big for her face.

‘Sure,’ said Goatee. ‘But if they didn’t, I mean, if he’s still at large, just imagine what goes through that guy’s mind, like last thing at night. He’d be - what? - like
seventy
now?’

‘I guess.’

‘Ben?’

A man was standing beside the table holding a guide to the museum in one hand and a walking stick in the other. McCreery.

‘Jock.’ Ben stood up so quickly that his thighs knocked on the underside of the table, spilling a splash of tea on to the white surface. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’

‘Ditto. Are you on your own? Not with Alice?’

‘Not with Alice,’ Ben said, and left it at that. ‘I thought you lived in Guildford.’

It was a pointless remark, but he had been stuck for something to say. McCreery was Mark’s friend, a stranger to Ben, a background figure in the chaos of death. Shorter and more overweight in the lower part of his body than Ben remembered, McCreery was wearing a bright green windcheater, hiking boots, and denim trousers with that pale fade particular to jeans worn by men in late middle-age. He looked suitably dressed for a long walk on the Downs.

‘I do live in Guildford, yes,’ he explained, leaning on the stick. ‘But I’m in town for the weekend. Haven’t been here since Foster stuck the roof on. Appalling, isn’t it?’

‘I think it’s incredible,’ Ben told him, and wondered if McCreery would respect his honesty.

‘Do you really? For me it’s highly derivative of Pei, you know, the Oriental chap who messed up the Louvre.’

The Japanese girl appeared to swallow hard as Ben said, ‘Right. Look, do you want to sit down?’

‘If that would be all right. Are you sure? Thankyou.’

Goatee shuffled along and McCreery squeezed in, laying his walking stick at an angle across the table.

‘What did you do to your leg?’

‘Rheumatism.’ McCreery gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘Runs in the family, I’m afraid. My late father suffered from it, his father before him. There’s been a long line of McCreerys hobbling about in their fifties.’

Ben made a small noise in the back of his throat that came off as a grunt and wondered how long McCreery would stick around. Already he could feel the afternoon slipping from his grasp. They had only one subject in common and he was not in the mood to discuss his father.

Sure enough, McCreery soon embarked on a conversation about the funeral.

‘So who did you talk to at the wake?’ he asked.

‘Oh, everybody and nobody. A lot of my father’s colleagues. People from Divisar and…’ Ben searched for the appropriate euphemism ‘… your company.’ McCreery smiled in an effort to acknowledge his tact. ‘To be honest, I found it hard going. Alice was great. You and your wife were both very kind. But I just couldn’t get my head round the whole thing, you know? Sort of took the wind out of me.’

‘Of course,’ McCreery said. ‘Of course. I must say that both Gillian and I were rather concerned about you.’

‘About
me
?’

‘Yes. Conscious that you didn’t want to be there,
that you’d rather have been somewhere else. I went upstairs to my bedroom at one point and saw you standing alone on the drive. Felt for you, old chap. Bloody awful thing. I’m so sorry.’

Ben didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or grateful.

‘Well, I just went out for a smoke,’ he said. ‘Just to grab some air, that was all.’

‘Of course.’

McCreery bobbed his head gently and looked up at the roof. He appeared to be giving it a second chance, but then frowned and finally settled his gaze on a nearby Egyptian sculpture. Changing the subject, he asked after Alice and then briefly discussed an article she had written in the
Standard
a few days earlier. Ben began to warm to him, if only because McCreery appeared to be showing a genuine interest in his family’s welfare. He asked thoughtful, intelligent questions about the police enquiry, and seemed acutely sensitive to the unique psychological predicament in which Ben and Mark had found themselves. McCreery’s concern was all the more touching when Ben considered that he too had lost a friend, a man he had worked alongside at MI6 for almost twenty years. The idea of losing one of his own close friends was one of Ben’s deepest fears.

‘I guess it’s been difficult for you, too,’ he said. ‘Dad was your best mate. It can’t have been easy.’ McCreery sighed.

‘Well, it’s funny,’ he said. ‘One gets older, one has
to adjust to sudden loss. The booze, accidents of one kind or another, bloody cancer. But there was something very special about Christopher. I think it’s a great tragedy that you never had the opportunity to know him as well as we all did. A very great tragedy indeed.’

Ben remembered the conversation on the drive at McCreery’s house, Robert Bone saying something very similar about Keen. He thought of Bone’s letter and wondered if McCreery could be trusted with its contents.

‘You know, when people die, everybody writes, don’t they?’ he said. McCreery looked slightly confused. ‘I mean, the husband, the wife, they always get a letter. Then you write to the children, to the parents if they had any, to all the close relatives of the person who’s died. But the friends just get left behind. Nobody thinks of them. They’ve maybe just lost the one person in the world that they could confide in, someone where the roots might have gone even deeper than a marriage. A friend from school. A friend from childhood. But nobody thinks of them. They just get forgotten.’

McCreery produced a wonderful smile that broke up the general blandness of his features, the pale, puffy cheeks, the thinning grey hair. His eyes seemed to congratulate Ben for the observation.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I must say I didn’t receive a single letter of condolence about your father. Not a single one.’ Making a joke of it, he added, ‘And you?’

‘Fifty-three at the last count,’ Ben said, and they both started to laugh.

‘Including mine?’ McCreery asked.

‘Including yours.’

It was a lovely moment, rueful and sustained. Goatee and the Japanese girl were long gone, and they were now alone at the table.

‘Makes me think of my own son,’ McCreery said. ‘My eldest, Dan.’

‘You have children?’

‘Two, yes. We’ve just had the most almighty bloody row, as a matter of fact.’

‘What about?’

‘Well, I can’t really stand Dan’s wife,’ McCreery replied, matter-of-factly. ‘And I’m absolutely certain that she can’t stand me.’

‘That’s not easy.’

‘No, no it’s not. How do you get on with Alice’s parents?’

‘So-so,’ Ben said. ‘Her mother drinks too much, does a lot of charity work and Chardonnay. Dad’s a self-made millionaire. Wants to play golf with me the whole time and calls Alice his “princess”. Still, they’re decent people.’ McCreery smiled as Ben repeated his earlier question. ‘What did you argue about?’

And it took him several seconds to compose his thoughts. The Great Court was now very crowded and there was a long queue at the cafe.

‘Well, I think Bella - that’s my daughter-in-law - is
of the opinion that Gillian and I rather ruined Dan’s life,’ he said.

‘How’s that?’

‘Oh, the usual Foreign Office whinge. Winging him around the world as a small boy. Germany, London, Moscow. She thinks he never settled, never put down any roots.’

‘Is that important?’

‘Well, apparently.’ McCreery squeezed his eyes shut and blinked rapidly. ‘She’s done a bit of a job on him, actually, convinced Dan that we were somehow unsuitable as parents. Let’s see, at the last count I was an imperialist snob, a racist, and - let me get this right - a typical Tory homophobe.’

‘Jesus.’ Ben looked taken aback but tried to keep the mood light. ‘She really doesn’t like you.’

‘Yes, I’d made the mistake of voicing my disapproval of the FCO’s current willingness to allow gay ambassadors to cohabit with their - dreadful word - “partners” overseas. Bella, quite rightly I suppose, thought this was an appallingly reactionary stance and encouraged Dan to leave the restaurant.’

‘You were in a restaurant?’

‘We were in a restaurant.’

Four German tourists bearing trays of tea and sandwiches approached the table and sat down. McCreery acknowledged them with a nod.

‘There’s actually a rather sobering thought behind all this,’ he said. ‘We are terribly possessive as a species, Ben, particularly women, I think. It has something to
do with insecurity, with the human need to establish territory. Bella perceives Gillian and I as a threat and has very systematically gone about the process of pushing us away.’

‘It sounds like it.’

‘Yes, she’s a bloody fool. I have no designs on my son, no wish to prevent him from living the kind of life he wants to lead. But she wants him for herself, you see. She feels threatened. One or two of his friends have told me that it’s much the same thing for them. She’s turned him against them and they never see Dan any more. She simply won’t allow it.’

Ben secretly felt that Dan sounded ineffectual, but he was nevertheless sympathetic to McCreery’s dilemma. His father had been lucky to have him as a friend. McCreery did not appear to take himself too seriously, yet he possessed a serious, analytical mind and an appealing honesty. He wondered if he had been unfairly critical of intelligence men, and felt guilty for having prejudged McCreery, even if some of his opinions were wildly out of date. He was on the point of going to the car and fetching the copy of Bone’s letter when McCreery announced that he wanted to move.

‘Do you mind if we walk around a bit?’ he said, picking up his stick. ‘It’s just that my leg’s a bit sore.’

‘Of course,’ Ben replied. ‘Of course.’

‘You don’t have to be off anywhere?’

‘No, nowhere at all.’

‘Well, good then. I must say, I’m enjoying our little conversation.’

McCreery stood up and moved back from the table. He sought his balance on the stick and put a hand on Ben’s back.

‘It’s bloody good to have run into you, actually,’ he said. ‘Really made my afternoon. Now let’s go and feel smug about the Elgin Marbles or something, shall we? That always gives me a kick.’

35

You see things as a Watcher. You see the private lives of public men, the lies and the cop-outs of power. You witness acts of violence, acts of greed. Above all, there is the interminable tedium of nothing going on. Ian Boyle had seen it all. This was not his first adultery.

He was assigned to Roth from 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, taking over from Graham who had done the overnight shift in the Southern Electric van. He had to wait a couple of hours while Roth preened himself inside and then left the house at 11.16, looking tanned and spruce, the innocent ease of the guilty man. His 6-series BMW was parked on the corner and Ian followed it at a three or four-car distance as Roth drove north via Chelsea towards the bustle of Notting Hill. He had a pretty good idea where he was going: the rumours had been rife all week. Sure enough, Roth pulled up outside the house on Elgin Crescent, then checked his hair for a long time in the rear-view mirror before making a call on his mobile phone. To her. Inside. Ian saw it all. When he had finished speaking, Roth put the hazard lights on and started the engine. He wasn’t staying.