Hidden Man (5 page)

‘And how long was it before you realized that your eldest son was a senior executive at Libra?’

Keen had known that the question was coming; Taploe had been deliberately withholding it as a tactic to arouse his suspicion. Nevertheless, he felt squeezed by it, cornered into obfuscation. His immediate response was defensive.

‘Now what does that have to do with anything?’

Taploe stopped walking and turned to face him. Keen was a good six inches taller and considerably better built, with narrow blue eyes that he used as tools of concealment, to frighten and charm in equal
measure. Taploe tried as best he could to look through them.

‘Perhaps you could just answer the question,’ he said. ‘We have no wish to pry into your personal life. It is simply our understanding that since Libra’s first approach you have been able to form some sort of a relationship with your eldest son after… how should I put it?… an
absence
of almost thirty years.’

‘You’re clearly very well informed.’

‘Not as well informed as I’d like to be. Did you know that Mark was working at Libra when Divisar tookthem on as clients?’

Keen waited. He could feel frustration, even anger, beginning to undermine his better judgment. All that residual guilt over Carolyn and the boys rising up in him like a sickness.

‘As I recall,’ he said firmly, ‘there were two preliminary meetings between Macklin and one of my colleagues before I was brought on board. During that time Mark found out that I worked for the company and telephoned me with a view to getting together.’

‘And what was your reaction?’

‘Is that relevant? I wasn’t aware that I was talking to a psychiatrist.’

Taploe had pushed too far. He was annoyed with himself and felt the heat of unease flush through his cheeks. He would have to back down, if only for the sake of the pitch.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s not my business. I am simply interested in Mark’s role in all of this.’

‘Then at last we have something in common.’

‘I can tell you that there’s no evidence to suggest your son knows what Macklin is up to,’ Taploe offered. ‘He didn’t accompany him to Russia on his last two visits, nor has he been seen with any of Kukushkin’s representatives in either Moscow or London.’

‘So why am I here this 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 lookat 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 canapes and boy bands for the
Evening Standard
. One of your gorgeous, pouting, twenty something hackettes, arse so firm you could crackan egg on it. Drive up and we might get a lookat her.’

Graham flicked on the headlights, moved back out into the road and tookthe 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 backover 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 drinkand 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 PS450 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 hackgiving me gyp.’

He was wearing a darkblue 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. Marks at 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 clinkin 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.

‘Sorry, I was just mulling something over. Your ability to remember names. I was thinking about it while you were late.’

Mark clumped the menu shut.

‘Trick I was taught by Seb,’ he said frankly, and put his jacket on the back of the chair. ‘Remember someone’s name and it makes them feel special. Tack on a fact or two about their lives and they’ll practically offer themselves up. It’s all vanity, isn’t it, Dad? We all want to feel cherished. Bloke comes to work to fix the sound system and I remember he’s got a ten-year-old kid who supports West Ham, he’s gonna be touched that I brought it up. Good business, isn’t it? How to win friends and influence people.’

Keen nodded and could only agree. At a table near by, a decent-looking woman in a reasonable suit was eating lunch with her husband and giving him the occasional eye. Mutton dressed as lamb, Keen thought, and wished she were ten years younger.

‘Will you order for me?’ Mark said. ‘My brain’s gone numb.’

Lacquer-black walls and a low oppressive ceiling patterned with dimmed halogen bulbs lent the interior
of the restaurant the atmosphere of a mediocre seventies nightclub. Mark was always impressed by his father’s knowledge of the more obscure dishes on a menu - in this case, preserved pork knuckle, fragrant yam duck, a soup of mustard leaf with salted egg and sliced beef. He even ordered them in an accent that sounded authentically Chinese.

‘You spend time in Beijing?’ he asked. ‘In Shanghai, Hong Kong?’

‘Not really.’ Keen refilled Mark’s glass with the new bottle. ‘A fortnight in Taiwan in the seventies. Overnight stop in Kowloon harbour a few years ago. Rather a lovely ketch, if I recall, French owner. Otherwise just homogeneous Chinese restaurants the world over. Anxious-looking fish in outsized tanks, ducks flying anticlockwise around the walls.’

Mark listened intently. He was good at that. Keen wondered if he had an image, in technicolour, of his father calmly going about the Queen’s business, standing on the prow of a luxury yacht wearing a battered Panama hat.

‘Why does everyone insist on calling it “Beijing” nowadays?’ he asked. ‘You don’t say “Roma”, do you? You don’t talkabout “Milano” or “Munchen”?’

‘It’s just the fashion,’ Mark replied.

‘Ah yes, the fashion.’ Keen sighed and let his eyes drift towards the ceiling. He enjoyed playing the fuddy-duddy with Mark, assumed that it was a part of his paternal role. ‘I sometimes thinkthat everything these days is about fashion, about not doing or saying
the wrong thing. Common sense has gone right out of the window.’

‘I guess.’

A smooth-skinned waiter, working in tandem with a pretty Chinese girl wearing a sky-blue silk dress, ferried plates of dim sum and steamed rice to their table. They were on to their third bottle of wine - a characterless Ribera del Duero - by the time Keen got round to Taploe’s business.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he said. ‘I had a call from Thomas Macklin while you were away.’

‘Oh yeah? Tom? What did he want?’

‘Just a couple of routine questions. Divisar business. Tell me about him. How do you two get on?’

Mark was swallowing a mouthful of prawn satay and for some time was able only to nod and raise his eyebrows in response.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked eventually, wiping a napkin over his bottom lip.

‘He intrigued me. As you can imagine, we get a lot of lawyers coming into the firm. He’s still relatively young, highly competent, somebody whom I imagine would be an asset to Libra.’

‘Tom’s all right. A bit flash, bit lippy. Good lawyer, though.’

‘Does your work dove tail?’

Mark could not hear the question over the noise of the restaurant and he cocked his head to one side to encourage his father to repeat it. Keen leaned in.

‘I said, does your work dove tail? How much of
him do you see, apart from when you’re both abroad together?’

‘I was out with him last night, matter of fact. Tom’s a big drinker, likes to whip out the company credit card. If there’s a new secretary in the office he’s always the one who asks her out. Champagne and oysters, loves all that shit. Never has any luckwith the birds, mind, but you’ll have a good time if you tag along.’

Whenever Mark discussed Libra business his voice unconsciously dropped into a mannered sub-Cockney that cloaked its true origins in private education. His workaccent, his music industry drawl, deliberately shaved off consonants and slackened vowels. It was an affectation that irritated Keen, though he had never mentioned it.