that there was something unconvincing about his prospective client. The suit was off the peg, and the shirt, bought as white but now greyed by repeated launderings, looked cheap and untailored. This was not a businessman, with ‘minor difficulties in the former Soviet Union’, far less someone who could afford to employ the services of Divisar Corporate Intelligence.
‘Mr Randall,’ he said, with a handshake that deliberately crushed his knuckles. Keen looked quickly at the ground and registered his shoes. Grey – possibly fake – patent leather, tasselled and scuffed. Further evidence. ‘How can I help?’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’ Randall was trying to release his hand. ‘Let me start by getting you a drink.’
‘That would be very kind, thank you.’
‘Did you find the café OK?’
‘Easily.’
Keen placed a black Psion Organiser and a mobile telephone on the table in front of him and sat down. Freeing the trapped vents of his suit jacket, he looked out of the window and tried to ascertain if he was being watched. It was an instinct, no more than that, but something was out of place. A crowd of office workers had gathered at a table on the other side of the window and an elderly man with a limp was walking into the café alone. The traffic heading north towards Shepherd’s Bush Green had been slowed by a van double-parked outside a mini-supermarket. Its rear doors were flung open and two young Asian men were unloading boxes from the back.
‘It’s part of a chain, I believe,’ Randall said.
‘What’s that?’
‘The café. Part of a chain.’
‘I know.’
A waitress came and took their order for two beers. Keen wondered if he would have to stay long.
‘So, I very much appreciate your meeting me at such short notice.’ The businessman had a laboured, slightly self-satisfied way of strangling words, an accent located somewhere near Bracknell. ‘Had you far to come?’
‘Not at all. I had a meeting in Chelsea. Caught a fast black.’
Randall’s eyes dropped out of character, as if Keen had made a racist remark. ‘Excuse me?’
‘A fast black,’ he explained. ‘A taxi.’
‘Oh.’ In the uneasy silence that followed, the waitress returned and poured lager into his glass.
‘So, how long have you worked in your particular field?’
‘About seven or eight years.’
‘And in Russia before that?’
‘Among other places, yes.’ Keen thanked the waitress with a patrician smile and picked up his glass. ‘I take it you’ve been there?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘And yet you told me on the telephone that you have a problem in the former Soviet Union. Tell me, Mr Randall, what is it that you think I can do for you?’
Leaning back in his seat, Randall nodded and swallowed a mouthful of lager. He blinked repeatedly and a small amount of foam evaporated into his moustache. After a momentary pause he said, ‘Forgive me. It was necessary to employ a little subterfuge to prevent your employers becoming suspicious. My name is not Bob Randall, as perhaps you may have guessed. It is Stephen Taploe. I work across the river from your former Friends.’
Keen folded his arms and muttered, ‘You don’t say,’ as Taploe pushed his tongue into the side of his cheek, his feet moving involuntarily under the table. ‘And you think that I can help you with something …’
‘Well, it’s a good deal more complicated than that,’ he said. ‘To come straight to the point, Mr Keen, this has become something of a family matter.’
5
‘It’s possible, Jenny, that one day you’ll walk into a public art gallery and look at nothing at all. A total absence. Something with no texture, no shape, no solidity. No materials will have been used up in its construction, not even light or sound. Just a room full of nothing. That will be the exhibit, the gimmick, the thing you’re encouraged to look at and talk about over cranberry juice at Soho House. Emptiness. Actually, the opposite of art.’
Jenny was glad that Ben wasn’t talking about his father any more. She preferred it when his mood was less anxious and abrasive. It was another side to him, more relaxed and quick-witted; she wondered if it was even flirtatious. But Ben looked like the faithful type: he was only thirty-two, after all, and there were pictures of his wife all over the studio walls, nudes and portraits of a quality that had persuaded her to sit for him in the first place.
‘Have you lived here long?’ she asked, and began gathering up her clothes. Ben was cleaning his brushes at the sink, wrapping the bristles in a rubber band and covering any exposed paint with small wraps of cling film.
‘Since we got engaged,’ he said. ‘About three years.’
‘It’s such a great house.’ Jenny’s stomach flattened out as she stretched into a thick woollen polo neck, her head disappearing in the struggle to find sleeves.
‘Alice’s father bought it cheap in the late seventies. Thought it would make a good investment.’
The head popped out, like somebody breaking free of a straitjacket.
‘Well he thought right,’ she said, shaking out her hair. ‘And it’s useful for you to be able to work from home.’
‘It is,’ Ben said. ‘It is. It’s a great space. I’m very lucky.’
‘A lot of artists have to rent studios.’
‘I know that.’
She was oblivious to it, but talking about the house always made Ben feel edgy. Three storeys of prime Notting Hill real estate and not a brick of it his. When Carolyn, his mother, had died seven years before, she had left her two sons a few hundred pounds and a small flat in Clapham that they rented out to unreliable tenants. Alice’s father, by contrast, was wealthy: on top of her basic salary as a journalist she had access to a substantial trust, and the house was bought in her name.
‘So what are you cooking for your brother?’
Ben was glad of the change of subject. Turning round, he said: ‘Something Thai, maybe a green curry.’
‘Oh. Bit of a dab hand in the kitchen, are we?’
‘Well, not bad. I find it relaxing after a day in the studio. And Alice can’t boil an egg. So it’s either that or we eat out every night.’
‘What about Mark? What about your brother? Can he cook?’
Ben laughed, as if she had asked a stupid question.
‘Mark doesn’t know one end of a kitchen from the other. Anyway, he’s always out at night, with clients or away at the club. Spends a lot of his time travelling
