The Hidden Man. Charles Cumming

evening?’ Keen asked. ‘What on earth do you need me for?’

      It was a question to which he already knew the answer. Taploe was simply priming himself.

      ‘Just an act of kindness,’ he said quietly, ‘a favour, for want of a better description.’

      ‘A favour.’ Keen paused and then repeated the word under his breath, killing its implications, the nuance. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What is it about people in our business that they can never say exactly what they mean?’

      7

      The dummy London cab that had tailed Mark’s taxi from Heathrow stopped a hundred and fifty metres down Elgin Crescent, engine idling. They had made good time from Terminal One, almost slipstreaming the taxi in the outer M4 lane denied to cars.

      ‘So this is where the brother lives?’ Graham asked.

      Ian Boyle cleared his throat and said, ‘Yeah, house up on the left.’

      They saw Mark Keen step out of the taxi, pay the driver and make his way towards the front door carrying a large overnight holdall and several plastic bags. He was broadly built and did not appear to struggle with the weight.

      ‘Nice fucking place,’ Graham muttered, tilting his head to one side to get a better look at the house. ‘What does the brother do for a living? Stockbroker? Investment banker? Dot com millionaire?’

      ‘None of the above.’ Ian dialled a number in Euston Tower on his mobile phone and held it up to his ear. ‘Our Benjamin’s an artist. Farts around all day in oils and charcoal, struggling with the impossibility of the authentic artistic act.’

      ‘I thought that sort of behaviour was out of fashion?’

      The number wasn’t answering and Ian hung up.

      ‘Not so,’ he said.

      ‘What does the wife do?’ Graham was new on the Kukushkin case and still a bit sketchy on details. He looked upon Ian as a mentor, an older hand he wanted to learn from and impress.

      ‘Journalist,’ Ian said. ‘Writes about canapés and boy bands for the Evening Standard. One of your gorgeous, pouting, twenty-something hackettes, arse so firm you could crack an egg on it. Drive up and we might get a look at her.’

      Graham flicked on the headlights, moved back out into the road and took the cab past the house. They saw Alice open the front door and fling her arms around Mark’s neck, her smile a flash in the darkness.

      ‘Fuckin’ hell,’ Graham muttered. ‘Wouldn’t mind one of them in my Christmas stocking.’ He pulled up another fifty metres further along the street and peered back over his shoulder. ‘How long they been married?’

      ‘Couple of years; three, maybe. Daddy was decent enough to throw eighty grand at the wedding. Nice of him, wouldn’t you say?’

      ‘All things considered.’ Graham couldn’t keep his eyes off her. ‘Does the gaffer have ears in there?’ he asked.

      ‘Not yet. Only at Mark’s place. And the lawyer, Macklin. We don’t reckon young Benjamin’s involved.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘So what time’s Michael taking over?’ Ian scratched his armpit. ‘I wanna get the Arsenal score, find a pub with ITV.’

      ‘Search me,’ Graham replied. ‘Search me. The way I heard it, I thought we was on all night.’

      8

      A man of sixty looks back on his working life and feels, what? A sense of regret at opportunities lost? Shame over badly handled investments, businesses that might have turned sour, a colleague treated with contempt by the board after forty years’ loyal service to the firm? Keen simply did not know. He had lived his life in a separate world of deliberate masquerade, a state servant with carte blanche for deceit. Waiting for Mark in his son’s favourite, if overpriced, Chinese restaurant at the south end of Queensway, Keen had the odd, even amusing sensation that most of his professional life had been comprised of social occasions: Foreign Office dinners, embassy cocktail parties, glasses of stewed tea and mugs of instant coffee shared with journalists, traitors, disgruntled civil servants, ideologues and bankrupts, the long list of contacts and informants that make up a spy’s acquaintance. Indeed it occurred to him – over his second glass of surprisingly decent Sancerre – that he was a scholar of the long, boozy lunch, of lulling strangers into mistaken beliefs, of plying dining companions with drink and sympathy and then sucking them dry of secrets. It was his talent, after all, the knack they had spotted at Oxford, and the reason now, more than thirty years later, that Keen could charge Divisar £450 a day for his old-style flair and expertise. But to use those skills on his own son? To do that, if he looked at it for too long, would seem horrific. But Christopher Keen never looked at anything for too long.

      Mark was late by half an hour, a mirror image of Keen’s own father at thirty-five, coming into the restaurant at a brisk walk mouthing, ‘Sorry, Dad,’ from fifty feet. Keen thought he looked tired and preoccupied, but that might have been his paranoia over Taploe.

       The Service would like your assistance in clearing up Libra’s position, in revealing the exact nature of their relationship with Kukushkin. We just need you to pick your son’s brains, find out what he knows.

      ‘Where the hell have you been?’

      He said it without anger, because Mark looked genuinely contrite.

      ‘I’m really, really sorry.’ He placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘Meetings. All morning. Fucked electrics at the club and a tabloid hack giving me gyp.’

      He was wearing a dark blue corduroy suit and, for want of something better to say, Keen remarked on it.

      ‘Bespoke?’ he asked.

      ‘Thought you might notice that.’ It was a shared passion between them, the luxury of fine clothes. Mark sat down and flapped a napkin into his lap. ‘This here is a Doug Hayward original in navy corduroy, a sympathetic cloth flexible enough to accommodate today’s retro styling.’ He was beginning to relax. ‘The jacket has high lapels, as you can see, with long double vents and three buttons at the front. Furthermore, if I stood up you’d notice an immaculately tailored flat-fronted trouser with straight legs that flare just above the tongue of the shoe.’

      ‘Indeed,’ Keen said. ‘Indeed,’ and enjoyed Mark’s charm. He poured both of them a glass of Sancerre and ordered another bottle from the waiter. ‘What’s in the bag?’

      Mark said, ‘Oh yes,’ and leaned over to retrieve two bottles of vodka from a duty-free bag he had carried into the restaurant. Three litres of Youri Dolgoruki, his father’s favourite brand.

      ‘Present for you,’ he said. ‘Picked them up in Moscow three days ago. Know how you prefer the real thing.’

      ‘That was immensely kind of you.’ Keen put the bottles on the floor beside his chair and wondered if they would clink in his briefcase. ‘You shouldn’t have bought me anything at all.’

      ‘For all the birthdays I missed,’ Mark replied lightly, as if the observation held no resonance. Then he opened his menu.

      Keen had noticed this about Mark before: the way he gave presents to people at Libra and Divisar, little surprises to lighten their day. The cynic in him had decided that this was an unconscious way of keeping colleagues onside, of buying their trust and loyalty. It was the same with his memory: months after meeting them, Mark could recall the names of personal assistants who had brought him cups of coffee during fifteen-minute meetings in downtown Moscow.

      ‘How do you do that?’ he asked.

      ‘Eh?’

      Mark was staring at him and Keen realized he had been thinking aloud.