style="font-size:15px;"> 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
