to the second page before returning to his easel.
‘What’s this?’ she asked.
‘Read the cutting.’
A wedding announcement from The Times had been pasted on the open page.
The marriage took place on 10 April between Mr Benjamin Graham Keen, youngest son of the late Mrs Carolyn Buchanan, and Alice Lucy McEwan, only daughter of Mr Michael McEwan of Halstead, Essex, and Mrs Susan Mitchell, of Hampstead, London. Mr Mark Keen was best man.
‘This is about you and your wife,’ Jenny said.
‘Yes, but you notice the omission?’ There was a small note of childish rebellion in Ben’s voice that surprised her. He didn’t seem like the type to hold a grudge.
‘No.’
‘There’s no mention of my father.’
‘You just left him out?’
‘We just left him out.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what he’s done. Because he’s nobody.’ The words were unconvincing, like something Ben had learned by heart many years before. ‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the day my father walked out on Mum was the day he ceased to exist.’
3
Ian Boyle stood in the vast, air-conditioned barn of Terminal One Arrivals, waiting for the plane. He was cold and tired and wished he was on his way home. Arsenal were playing Champions League at Highbury against a team of third-rate Austrians: there’d be goals and a hatful of chances, one of those easy nights in Europe when you can just sit back and watch the visitors unravel. He’d wanted to have a shower before kick-off, to cook up a curry and sink a couple of pints down the pub. Now it would be a race to get home after the rush-hour M4 trudge, and no time to chat to his daughter or deal with the piles of post.
Two young boys – five and eight, Ian guessed – swarmed past him and ducked into a branch of Sunglass Hut, shrieking with energy and excitement. A woman with a voice not dissimilar to his ex-wife’s made a prerecorded security announcement on the public address system, pointless and unheard in the din of the hall. Ian wondered if there were other spooks near by, angels from fifty services waiting for their man in the stark white light of Heathrow. His own people, working other assignments, would most probably have holed up in Immigration, getting a kick out of the two-way mirrors at Passport Control. But Ian had spent four years working Customs and Excise and was anxious to avoid spending time with old colleagues; a lot of them had grown smug and set in their ways, drunk on the secret power of strip search and eviction. He’d go through only when the plane had touched down, not a moment before, and watch Keen as he came into the hall. It was just that he couldn’t stand the looks they gave him, those fat grins over weak cups of tea, the suggestion of pity in their trained, expressionless eyes. When Ian had left for the Service in 1993, he could tell that a lot of his colleagues were pleased. They thought it was a step down; Ian was just about the only one who felt he was moving up.
Finding a seat opposite a branch of Body Shop, he looked up and checked the flickering arrivals screen for perhaps the ninth or tenth time. The BA flight from Moscow was still delayed by an hour and a half – no extension, thank Christ, but still another twenty-five minutes out of London. Fucking Moscow air-traffic control. Every time they put him on Libra it was the same old story: ice on the runway at Sheremetjevo and the locals too pissed to fix it. He rang Graham outside in the car, told him the bad news, and settled back in his chair with a collapsing sigh. A family of Africans in some kind of traditional dress walked past him weeping, two of them pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes as they pushed trolleys piled six feet high with luggage and bags. Ian couldn’t tell if they were happy or sad. He lit a cigarette and opened the Standard.
4
Christopher Keen had taken the call personally in his private office. It was a routine enquiry, of the sort he handled every day, from a businessman calling himself Bob Randall with ‘a minor difficulty in the former Soviet Union’.
‘I’ve been informed,’ Randall explained, ‘that Russia is your area of expertise.’
Keen did not ask who had recommended him for the job. That was simply the way the business worked: by reputation, by word of mouth. Neither did he enquire about the nature of the problem. That was simply common sense when speaking on an open line. Instead, he said, ‘Yes. I worked in the Eastern Bloc for many years.’
‘Good.’ Randall’s voice was nasal and bureaucratically flat. He suggested a meeting in forty-eight hours at a location on the Shepherd’s Bush Road.
‘It’s a Café Rouge, in the French-style. On the corner of Batoum Gardens.’ Randall spelt out ‘Batoum’ very slowly, saying ‘B for Bertie’ and ‘A for Apple’ in a way that tested Keen’s patience. ‘There are tables there which can’t be seen from the street. We’re not likely to be spotted. Would that be suitable for you, or do you have a specific procedure that you like to follow?’
Keen made a note of the date in his desk diary and smiled: first-time buyers were often like this, jumpy and prone to melodrama, wanting codewords and gadgets and chalk marks on walls.
‘There is no specific procedure,’ he said. ‘I can find the café.’
‘Good. But how will I recognize you?’
As he asked the question, Bob Randall was sitting in Thames House staring at a JPEG of Keen taken in western Afghanistan in 1983, but it was necessary cover.
‘I’m tall,’ Keen said, switching the phone to his other ear. ‘I’ll be wearing a dark blue suit, most probably. My experience is that in circumstances such as these two people who have never met before very quickly come to recognize one another. Call it one of the riddles of the trade.’
‘Of course,’ Randall replied. ‘Of course. And when shall we say? Perhaps six o’clock?’
‘Fine,’ Keen said. He was already hanging up. ‘Six o’clock.’
Two days later, the businessman calling himself Bob Randall arrived at the café on Shepherd’s Bush Road half an hour early and picked out a secluded table, his back facing the busy street. At 17.55, he took a call from Ian Boyle, informing him in a jumble of code and double-speak that the BA flight from Moscow had eventually landed some ninety-five minutes late. The subject had used a public telephone box – not a mobile – after clearing Passport Control, and was now picking up his luggage in the hall. The call had been made to a west London number that was already being traced.
‘Understood,’ he told him. ‘And was there any sign of Duchev?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well keep on it, please. And brief Paul Quinn. I’m going to be walking the dog for the next two hours. Contact me again at eight.’
And at that moment he saw Christopher Keen coming into the café, indeed wearing a dark blue suit, a striking man possessed of a languid self-confidence. Demonstrably public school, he thought, and felt the old prejudice kick in like a habit. The photograph at Thames House had not done justice to Keen’s well-preserved good looks, nor to his travelled,
