and engineered an investigation of his own into the nosey couple from England.
‘Of course undetected. Did the whole thing from my room. Took fifteen minutes. Anyway, here’s the interesting bit. Minasian stayed under a pseudonym. Riedle called him “my partner Dmitri” in the emails.’
‘Makes sense,’ said Kell. ‘He’s married. Riedle could be covering for him. Did you get a passport? A surname?’
‘No, sir.’
‘But Minasian would have had to show one when he checked in. So either Riedle really does think his boyfriend is called “Dmitri” or he’s conscious that Alexander Minasian works for the SVR and is travelling under alias.’
‘How do you figure that?’
Mowbray looked momentarily confused, as if Kell had identified a flaw in his thesis. For his own part, Kell was surprised that Mowbray had failed to join the dots.
‘If I go on holiday with my girlfriend “Anne Smith” and she travels on a passport calling herself “Betty Jones”, I’m going to ask her how come she has two identities. Unless she’s from the Office.’
‘True,’ said Mowbray. ‘You are.’ There was a sheepish pause while he made a silent calculation. Kell sensed his embarrassment and urged him to continue.
‘Well,’ he said, rubbing the back of his head. ‘We can discount the idea that Riedle is a spook. Once I got home I did some digging around. He’s an architect.’
‘From Hamburg?’
‘Originally, yes. That’s where he has his practice, anyway. Right now, though, he’s spending a lot of time in Brussels.’
‘Reason?’
‘Some kind of office building. Swish headquarters for a Belgian television company. He’s designing it, living in an apartment there while it goes up.’
‘With Minasian paying him the occasional visit?’
‘Negative, Houston.’
‘They broke up?’
‘They broke up,’ Mowbray replied.
Kell immediately saw this not as a setback, but as an opportunity. A man in love is less likely to betray his partner. A man with a broken heart can be manipulated into acts of vengeance.
‘You said Riedle was feeling sorry for himself? That’s what you meant? Minasian dumped him?’
Mowbray squeezed his chafed nose and looked to one side, timing the delivery of a chunk of bad news. The waitress, who had passed their table several times in the preceding minutes, trying to ascertain if the two middle-aged gentlemen intended to finish their meals, finally made her decision and began collecting their plates of half-eaten food.
‘He dumped him,’ said Mowbray. ‘Gigantic lover’s tiff.’
‘After the argument you witnessed? That was it? They separated?’
Mowbray nodded, staring at the table.
‘The photos you saw, then Riedle crying on his own in the garden. That was the last time we saw Minasian. I assume he left that night. There was a twenty-two hundred Air Egypt flight from Hurghada to Cairo. He could have gone anywhere after that.’
‘And Riedle?’
‘Stayed another two days. Had breakfast in his room, ate dinner alone with a look on his face like his life was over.’
‘How do you figure that?’ Kell asked. ‘Just from a look on his face? Maybe he’s that kind of person.’
Mowbray pitched backwards in his seat, as if Kell had been unnecessarily confrontational. Kell apologized with a raised hand and took the opportunity to order two glasses of mint tea. He was aware that his adrenaline was running high, an eagerness to ensnare Minasian clashing against long-practised instincts for caution and context.
‘What I meant was …’
‘Don’t worry, guv.’ Mowbray offered a conciliatory hand of his own. ‘I know what you meant. How did we know he was suffering? Why was he wandering around like a lovestruck adolescent?’
‘Precisely. How did you know?’
Mowbray pulled out a packet of cigarettes and set them on the table. Kell looked at them and resented his own self-discipline.
‘Riedle spent a lot of time at the pool, reading off an iPad. Struck up a friendship with one of the boys down there. Egyptian kid, good-looking.’
‘Gay?’
Mowbray realized what he had said and shook his head vigorously, chasing off the inference.
‘No. Nothing like that. Married, wife and kid in Luxor. Early thirties. Laid out our sunbeds in the morning. Brought us drinks. Put up the umbrellas when the sun got too hot. You know the kind of thing.’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, I got talking to him and he said how Riedle was unhappy. He’d broken up with his boyfriend. They’d been seeing each other for over three years, had the latest in a long line of nasty rows. “Dmitri” had left the hotel, gone off with a new man.’
‘He told all that to a pool boy?’
Mowbray seemed to be aware that the interaction sounded far-fetched.
‘Bernhard struck me as the confessional sort. Needy, artistic, you know? Any sympathetic ear will do for a type like that. “I’m in pain, come and listen to me. I’ve built a new house, come and look at it. I’m miserable, make me feel better.” And we tell strangers our secrets, don’t we? He’s never going to see the pool boy again, never going to build him a house in Luxor. He was a convenient shoulder to cry on for a couple of miserable days in paradise.’
Kell felt a strange and disorienting sense of kinship with Riedle, the empathy of the broken-hearted man. He remembered his own dismay at Rachel’s treachery, then the long months of grieving that followed her death. He accepted the mint tea from the waitress, who smiled at Mowbray as she placed a glass on the table in front of him. Kell was surprised when Mowbray asked for the bill. What was the hurry?
‘You’ve told nobody about this?’ he asked.
‘Nobody, guv. Just you. I knew what it would mean to you, after everything that happened. Wanted to give you the opportunity.’
Kell found himself saying ‘Thank you’ in a way that caused Mowbray to produce a conspiratorial nod. A small burden of complicity had been established between them. Yet it was disconcerting to consider that choice of word: ‘opportunity’. An opportunity for what? Kell knew that nothing would ever erase the pain he had suffered over the loss of Rachel. Vengeance would not bring her back to life, nor alter the dynamics of his relationship with Amelia. Recruiting Minasian would bring Kell a modicum of respect from colleagues at SIS for whom he felt little but contempt. So why do it? Why not stand up, shake Mowbray’s hand, put fifty quid on the table to cover the bill and walk out of the restaurant? His better future lay outside SIS –
