The Hidden Man
Taploe did not smile.
‘The impression I was given,’ Keen continued, ‘is that our lawyer friend is somewhat overwhelmed by the glamour of the way things work over there, the influence those boys wield. Unchecked power and unlimited violence. Excessive privilege for the select few. Free access to money, girls, narcotics, fast cars, restaurants; he’s in thrall to it all. The adrenalin, you see? Nothing like it over here, back in the old country.’
‘Yes,’ was all that Taploe managed to say, though everything that Keen was telling him fitted the emerging profile of Thomas Macklin. London surveillance had revealed nothing out of the ordinary: an on–off girlfriend (a receptionist in the City), the occasional escort, no tendency to gamble, a mild, recreational cocaine habit. He had an enthusiasm for lap-dancing and expensive clothes, few close friends, and a tendency to become aggressive when drunk. Macklin paid his bills regularly, but at any one time his major credit card – Visa – was never less than two or three thousand pounds in the red. He had sufficient funds in other bank accounts to pay the debt off, but for some reason failed to do so; Paul Quinn, Taploe’s closest associate on the case, had put this down to little more than negligence. There was nothing unusual about Macklin’s phone records, either at work, from home or on his mobile, save for the fact that he always called his Kukushkin contact in London from public telephone boxes, from which the calls were harder to trace. That, at the very least, hinted at a degree of concealment. The Internet, thus far, had revealed little that Quinn and Taploe did not already know: Macklin used email frequently, but only to stay in touch with developments within Libra worldwide. There had been nothing of any consequence to the ongoing investigation in the analysis of his Internet traffic, only incidents that coloured the psychological profile.
‘And Mark? That sort of lifestyle doesn’t appeal to him?’ Taploe asked.
Keen swallowed his espresso in a single controlled gulp.
‘I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘He’s more sensible, more down to earth. Like his father.’
Taploe did not acknowledge the joke. He thought that this would help him to make up some ground.
‘But you’ve spent a lot of time in that part of the world,’ he said, deciding to take a risk. ‘You can understand why Thomas might be tempted by the high life?’
Keen looked at him very quickly. His eyes appeared to blacken at the implication.
‘Thomas is a very different animal, Stephen, I can assure you. The lawyer’s a barrow boy, a bright entrepreneur out for whatever he can get. His sort usually run into trouble.’
A braver part of Taploe wanted to embarrass Keen into an explanation of the term ‘barrow boy’, but he let it go.
‘And the boss?’ he said. ‘How does Sebastian fit into the picture? How does he benefit from the Russian organization?’
Keen shifted slowly in his chair.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s absolutely no point in asking me about Roth.’ The use of his surname was a slip. ‘I should have thought that these were the sort of questions to which you might already have answers. As I told you at our previous meeting, my organization doesn’t tend to meet the chaps at the top of the tree. They send their underlings, their lawyers. Mr Ro –’ This time he checked himself. ‘Sebastian is a man about whom I know very little. I take it as read that he is greedy. I take it as read that he is unscrupulous. So many of us are, Stephen. But why would he be stupid enough to get involved with the Thieves? He must understand the power they exert in Russia? He’d be in over his head, could very quickly lose control of all his investments. It simply doesn’t make sense.’
‘And did Divisar warn him about that?’
‘Of course we did. Unfortunately, Thomas ignored our advice to get a Russian partner on board whose contacts would have facilitated the company’s expansion. Nor were they interested in franchising the name to local entrepreneurs. I advised them to become active in establishing relationships with senior government officials in the Ministry of Interior, men who might have offered them protection from organized crime, even if that meant paying off government bureaucrats instead. But Sebastian wanted total control. Apparently that was how he had built up the company and that was how he knew how to operate.’
The schoolgirls, gathered in a chattering huddle around one of the larger sofas, began giggling at a photograph in a magazine. Taploe looked across at them, absorbing Keen’s remarks and then running them through his mind like a filter. Eventually he said, ‘Does your son trust Thomas?’
Keen did not know how to answer the question beyond a simple, one-word response.
‘No.’
‘But they’re friends? They rely on each other.’
‘If that is your impression, then yes,’ he replied unhelpfully. He recalled asking Mark a similar question in the Chinese restaurant.
‘But what’s your impression?’ Taploe had begun to feel hemmed in by the crowded basement, the black coffee working through him to a flushed sweat. It was not even a question to which he required an answer, but he had been flustered from the moment he walked into the coffee house.
‘My impression?’ Keen ran the dark blue silk of his tie between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, smoothing it before letting it come to rest on the soft folds of his cream shirt. ‘My impression is merely common sense. That they may rely on one another, but that there is a world of difference between reliance and trust. If there wasn’t, after all, men like you and me would be out of a job. Loyalty within the world of business is a fiction. When push comes to shove, Thomas will no more look after my son’s interests than he would cut off his own hand.’
‘And vice versa?’
Keen moved forward.
‘You appear to be labouring under a misconception. Mark may have made several trips with Thomas, but they spent a lot of that time apart. What he gets up to in my son’s absence remains a mystery. You seem to think they’re some sort of double act, Libra’s answer to Morecambe and Wise.’
Taploe frowned, angered that Keen had mentioned the company by name.
‘You can understand that he’s our best lead,’ he said.
‘Well, what about the French chap?’ Keen asked. ‘If you want someone on the inside, why don’t you run him?’
‘French chap?’ Taploe said.
‘Philippe, I think his name is.’
‘D’Erlanger? He’s Belgian,’ Taploe corrected. ‘Anyway, he left the company to run a restaurant.’
‘Well, I was merely trying to help.’
‘Of course.’
‘So call Mark yourself,’ Keen suggested. ‘It’s obviously the next step.’ He felt no ordinary moral reason why he should not hand his son over to MI5. He was anxious to leave for dinner, and Mark would at least be able to help with the investigation. ‘To be honest, I’ve become bored playing the middleman,’ he said. ‘There’s something rather demeaning about it.’
12
Why had he bothered coming?
The pub in Edwardes Square stank generally of sweat and spilled pints, and specifically of stale sick in the area where Ben was sitting. He was halfway through a pint of Guinness, talking to an earnest financial journalist from the Evening Standard who wanted to know how he found the motivation to get up every morning and paint in his studio and, ‘Wasn’t there a temptation when you’re working from home just to fuck off and spend the whole afternoon in the cinema?’
‘Sometimes,’ Ben told him.
‘Well, I really admire you, man,’ he said. ‘No, I really do.’
Alice was at the bar, surrounded by five drooling male colleagues making wisecracks and pulling rank. She had phoned at the last moment and all but demanded that Ben join her for a drink. Come on. We never see each other. You never want to meet my friends. He had been forced to abandon work on the picture of Jenny, but now that he was here Alice was scarcely giving him the time of day. Ben was thinking about leaving as soon as he had finished his pint and going back to work in the studio.
‘So how much do you charge for a portrait?’ the journalist was asking.
‘What’s that?’ Ben had heard the question, but wanted to suggest with his eyes that he thought it was none of his business.
‘I said how much do you –’
‘It depends.’
‘Oh, right. What on, man? I mean, how do you rate it? By the hour?’
The conversation went on like this for fifteen minutes. But can you make any real money as a painter? Don’t you get bored and lonely? Ben couldn’t get away. The constant opening and closing of the street door fed muffled traffic noise into the pub. Ben found himself explaining why he hated the cocktail-party circuit of art exhibitions and gallery openings, all that air-kissing and people with too much money buying paintings just to match a sofa. The journalist was laughing, agreeing with everything Ben said, even offering to buy him a pint and introduce him to a City financier who was collecting art and ‘really knew what was right and wrong’.
‘You know, man. Not shark tanks and elephant shit. Paintings. He really likes oils and watercolours. Give me your number and I’ll text you his details.’
That was when Mark walked into the pub.
He was stopped by Alice almost immediately among the jam of bodies at the bar. She squealed and put her arms around his waist, looking over in Ben’s direction. Was this more than coincidence? Ben was so pleased to see him that he dismissed the thought immediately. He stood up, said, ‘Back in a moment,’ and walked towards the bar.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
‘Hello, brother. Had a meeting next door. Just popped in for a pint.’
‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Alice was saying, putting her hand on Mark’s back. ‘Of all the places.’
There were introductions, rounds of drinks. For half an hour they talked at the bar, Mark telling stories about Libra and Moscow, Alice involving everybody in the conversation and making sure to laugh at the news editor’s jokes. A frustrating evening became suddenly enjoyable for Ben, the easy slip of Guinness and close family. And as Alice’s colleagues left the pub one by one, it was easy for Mark to pull him away into a private huddle and to deal with the task in hand.
‘Listen,’ he said, putting a grip on Ben’s arm. ‘It’s good we’ve run into each other. I need to have a chat with you about something. Something important.’
Ben was smoking and pointed to the fourth finger of Mark’s right hand with his cigarette.
‘Is it about that?’ he asked.
Mark looked down.
‘What? The ring?’
‘The ring.’
A bad start.
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘Something else, then?’ Ben said, and sat down at a free table.
Mark was slow to follow, as if assembling his thoughts. He was always apprehensive when it came to talking to Ben. Coupled with a desire to protect and assist his younger brother existed an older insecurity, rooted in childhood squabbles and fights, a feeling that Ben could outsmart him. At Libra, Mark was super-efficient, the man Roth relied on to charm and cajole, an executive ten years in the business and never a foot put wrong. But when it came to Ben those talents were compromised by sheer familiarity. He hooked his suit jacket on the back of a beer-stained tartan chair and wondered how he was ever going to bring him round.
‘You OK?’ Ben asked.
‘Oh, sure.’
Mark must have looked tired and distracted, some sort of apology already evident in his eyes, because right away Ben said, ‘It’s about Christopher, isn’t it?’
And Mark nodded, hunching forward with an awkward smile.
‘’Fraid so,’ he said. ‘’Fraid so. Had lunch with him last week, before I went back to Moscow. That was when he gave me the signet ring. It belonged to …’
Ben immediately raised his hand and a column of ash fell free of the cigarette, drifting in scatters towards the carpet.
‘Forget it,’ he said. His attitude was not aggressive or unfeeling, merely a relaxed, clear assessment of his position. ‘I don’t care where it came from, why he gave it to you or which one of the Keen great-great-grandfathers wore it during the Crimean War. That stuff is between you and him. I don’t want any part of it.’
At the bar a soft drinks gun coughed.
‘Fair do’s,’ Mark muttered. ‘Fair do’s. I just wanted to let you know, so there was no big mystery or anything.’
‘Well, I appreciate it.’
There was hefty silence. Mark instinctively felt that the timing was all wrong; both of them a little drunk, Alice only ten feet away and their father on the other side of London. Why had he agreed to do Keen’s dirty work? What was in it for him?
‘But it’s connected to what I wanted to talk about,’ he said.
‘What’s connected to what you wanted to talk about?’
‘The ring. The dinner,’ Mark replied.
‘Oh. Right.’
Ben actually looked quite bored.
‘The other night, when I came round for dinner and you and Alice were going at it …’
This seemed to galvanize Ben briefly. He looked up and gave a quick response.
‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Alice has been a bit stressed lately. Both of us, in fact. Work stuff, marriage. We haven’t been getting on and it’s just been one argument after another …’
‘No, that’s not what I mean.’
Ben cocked his head to one side. They were talking at cross-purposes.
‘What then?’
‘Look, why don’t I just spell it out?’ Mark moved uneasily in his chair. It was like breaking bad news, waiting for the right moment. ‘I think things have changed between me and you, brother. Not as easy as they were. You follow?’
Ben shook his head. On the way to the pub Mark had sketched out the basics of a speech in his mind, but he was moving on to it too quickly.
‘It’s like this. The last six months, however long it’s been since Dad and I started meeting up, it’s as if you’ve gone into yourself, moved away.’
To illustrate his point, Mark spread his arms outwards like a cross and nearly knocked half a pint of cider out of the hand of a passing customer. Across the pub, a man was slamming his fist against the hard plastic casing of a fruit machine, spitting the single word ‘Fuck’.
‘It’s just that we’ve never really chatted about any of it.’ Mark was rubbing his jaw, words coming out before he had time to contemplate their impact. ‘It’s just been swept under the carpet. I’m abroad a lot, you’re with Alice, it’s not easy finding the time. But we need to clear the air. Your opinion matters to me. Now talk to me about what’s going on.’
Ben looked completely taken aback.
‘Where’s this coming from?’ he said.
‘It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Just seeing you tonight made me want to talk about it.’
Ben’s hand went up to his forehead, almost pulling the skin back from his eyes. He looked bloodshot and tense.
‘So OK, we’ll talk about it.’ He tipped his face up to the light and exhaled in a gasp. ‘It’s like this.’ Mark was listening very carefully. ‘I don’t allow myself to think about him. There are hard certainties in my life. There’s you. There’s Alice. I have my painting and my good friends. That’s how things stay under control. That’s how I manage to get by.’
The answer was so characteristic of his brother that Mark felt there was almost no point in going on. When Ben got an idea into his head it was impossible to change his mind. Only a basic desire not to let his father down led him to say, ‘Is that good for you?’
‘Is what good for me?’
‘Thinking about things in that way? Breaking them down?’
‘It’s just how I’ve learned to cope.’ Across the room, somebody had paid fifty pence to hear a bad cover version of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ on the jukebox. The song was forced and loud and Ben had to speak up. ‘And now that Alice and I are married I have to deal with that. She needs my support. I want to look after her, to make things right. You know all this. Why the fuck are you bringing it up now? Let’s get back to the bar and relax.’
Yeah, let’s, Mark thought, and hated what he was doing. He genuinely believed that the stand off between his brother and Keen was unhealthy, a running sore in the family, yet there was nothing, surely, that could be done about it. He was manipulating Ben for his father’s benefit, pure and simple. They had set a trap for him, pushing Ben towards something that he wanted no part of. And where was Alice? Laughing at the bar, oblivious to what was going on, facilitating her career while Mark was risking everything. Why didn’t she come over, why didn’t she think of someone else for a change? He felt heavy with sweat and drink. A woman at the bar was hanging her arm around the neck of a fat, bald Irishman mouthing the lyrics ‘How does it feel?’ over and over again.
‘What does Alice think about it?’ Mark found himself asking. ‘What does she reckon you should do?’
‘We haven’t talked about it much,’ Ben replied. ‘Why? Has she said anything?’
And suddenly Mark had a chance to force the issue. He remembered that Keen had asked an almost identical question as they were leaving the restaurant in Queensway.
‘What’s Alice’s view?’ his father had said. ‘Does she think Ben’s right about this? Right not to want to meet me?’
Mark had hesitated briefly, but the wine at lunch had led him to betray a confidence.
‘She’s just got used to the idea. Ever since she’s known Ben, she’s known about you and your situation. And if you want my honest opinion I reckon she thinks Ben’s being narrow-minded. In fact, she’s told me as much.’
If Mark could have retracted that statement, he would have done so in an instant. Keen’s eyes had lit up.
‘You could use that,’ he said, and the inference was appalling.
‘Use that? What do you mean?’
‘Tell Ben that you and Alice are in agreement. Tell him that it’s time he reconsidered. It’s the truth, isn’t it?’
‘… Mark?’
Ben was trying to attract his attention.
‘Yeah. Sorry. I wandered off.’
‘I asked you a question. I said, has Alice said anything about this?’
‘Well, maybe you should ask her.’ Mark had not intended to sound mysterious.
‘What’s that supposed to mean? Does she know about this? Does she know that we’re having this conversation?’
And at that moment Alice looked over, sensing the note-change in the tenor of her husband’s voice. Ben saw the set-up instantly.
‘Jesus. You’re not here by coincidence, are you?’
Mark wasn’t sure whether Ben was touched or angry; his face was momentarily unreadable. As a consequence he did not bother to lie in response. Shaking his head and even smiling at the stupidity of Keen’s plan, Mark said, ‘I’m not here by coincidence, no.’
And Ben was out of the pub in seconds.
13
Ben knew that it was not a good idea for a man of thirty-two to walk out of a crowded London pub after telling his older brother to fuck off. Not in Kensington and Chelsea, at any rate. And not in front of half a dozen of his wife’s colleagues, most of whom would now be on their mobile phones telling anyone from the Standard not fortunate enough to have been there in person just exactly what happened in the lounge bar of the Scarsdale at 8.28 p.m.
Mark had followed him outside, and Ben had heard Alice calling his name as he turned on to Kensington High Street, but they had both decided to let him go and were probably still waiting back in the pub. There was no sense, after all, in going after Ben when the red mist descended. They both would have known that from long experience.
He walked in the direction of Hyde Park, turning back on himself at the gates to Kensington Palace and returning along the opposite side of the street. Alice tried calling him on his mobile phone but he switched it off. It took about ten minutes for Ben to calm down and another five for embarrassment to set in. So much of his anger, he knew, was just a pose, a melodramatized statement of his long-term refusal to change. Whatever arrangement, whatever trap had been set by Alice and Mark, angered him only because he had been kept out of the loop, treated like a child by his wife and brother, and finally cornered in a place from which there was no realistic escape. It had occurred to him many times that he was clinging to old ideas simply because they shielded him from facing harder choices; in a very dangerous sense, Ben was defined by an attitude towards his father which he had formed as a teenager. To abandon that principled stand would mean the dismantling of an entire way of thinking. How would people react to him? How would he square it with what had happened to Mum? Ben wished to honour her memory, and yet that was the easy position. Far more difficult, surely, to do what Mark had done, to let bygones be bygones and to open himself up to chance.
He was heading back to the pub via a street at the western end of Edwardes Square when he heard a voice behind him.
‘Ben?’
He turned and saw that Mark was following him. He looked shattered. With the club opening in Moscow, he was probably only sleeping five hours a night and this was the last thing he needed.
‘Look, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. Don’t blame Alice. I asked her to help me out and she was just being loyal.’
Ben said nothing.
‘I’m sorry if I took you by surprise. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. We just …’ Mark stalled on the words. He had obviously rehearsed something and was determined to get it right. ‘All I was trying to say was this. More and more I’ve been thinking about the future, you know? Where are we gonna be ten years down the line? You and Alice have kids, Dad’s their grandfather, but because of all this shit that’s thirty years in the past his name can’t be mentioned at the dinner table. Meanwhile, he and I are getting on better than ever, but we’re still having to creep around behind your back. How long’s it gonna last?’
‘So you want me to meet him just so that you can have a better time of it when you’re fifty-five?’
Ben regretted saying that, but for the sake of fraternal pride did not want to concede too early.
‘I’m just saying that you should think about giving him a chance. Not tonight. Tonight is fucked into a hat. But soon, Ben, soon. Otherwise, he’s just going to be this barrier between us, a bridge we can’t cross.’
Ben smirked and looked up at the night sky.
‘I knew this was going to happen,’ he said. ‘Something like tonight.’
‘It was inevitable,’ Mark said.
‘Yes it was. And you know why? Because he’s talked you into it. You’re too soft on him, brother. You always want to do what’s right so that no one gets upset. Well, I’m upset. I got very upset in there. I embarrassed myself, I embarrassed you and I embarrassed my wife in front of everybody she works for. How does that feel?’
Mark did not respond. It looked as if he wanted to, but was holding back for fear of making things worse.
‘You want my truthful opinion?’ Ben was not surprised to feel that there was still resentment inside him. Most of it was a desire not to lose face, and he knew that he was prepared to make a later concession. ‘I think the relationship Dad has with you gives him what he wants – an opportunity to absolve himself of guilt.’ From his jacket pocket he took out a packet of cigarettes and watched his brother’s face for a register of annoyance. ‘Now he wants to complete that process, supposedly to convince me of his worth as a father. But that’s not motivated by a genuine concern for my welfare, or Alice’s, or anyone else. It’s just a selfish desire to convince himself of his blamelessness in respect of the past. He’s a spy, for Christ’s sake. All his relationships are games, little intrigues and power struggles. Look how he’s manipulated you. For most of his adult life Christopher Keen has been making a living out of an ability to convince people that he is something other than the person he appears to be. Think about it, Mark. If he could do it to Mum when they were married, if he could to it to us when we were kids, what’s to stop him doing it now?’