‘He wants me to do a feature,’ she said. ‘A big interview for the paper.’
‘I didn’t know Libra were opening a restaurant.’
‘Well, there you go. That’s why we need journalists in the world, Ben, to keep people like you informed. Anyway, it’s not Libra officially. It’s just him and his lawyer.’
‘Tom Macklin?’
‘Right.’
‘How come Mark never said anything?’
‘Well, maybe because he doesn’t know anything about it.’ Alice threw back the duvet. Her legs looked supple and warm and Ben suddenly wanted to touch them. Her pale naked body breezed past him as she said, ‘Maybe he would have said something if you two ever spoke,’ and went into the bathroom.
‘Did you mention anything to Roth about Bone’s letter?’
‘Christ no.’ She was coming back into the room. ‘You told me to keep quiet about that. I haven’t told a soul.’
He scanned her face for the lie as he said, ‘Good.’ For all Ben knew, Alice and Roth could have skipped lunch, booked themselves into the Charlotte Street Hotel and fucked from noon till six. That was the extent of the trust he held for his wife. He heard the lock click on the bathroom door and sat down on the bed. There were shards of satsuma skin hidden in the white folds of the duvet.
‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ he said, shouting through the door.
‘Fine,’ Alice called back.
And then he heard the hot blast of water pouring into the bath and assumed that the conversation was over.
33
For Mark, this was the spy’s life. Secret codes, surreptitious phone calls, meetings in underground car parks, the total concealment of everyday life. Joking with Macklin, smiling at Seb, and nobody at work with the slightest idea that genial, approachable Keeno was a source feeding privileged information to an officer in MI5. It was just as he had imagined it. Just as his father had described. Mark had an aptitude for spying, a talent for secrecy and sleight of hand. It ran in the family. The Keen inheritance.
And now safe houses. Randall had made contact via email insisting on a meeting on Saturday morning. Something important had come up, something vital to the operation. Mark was given exact directions from Kentish Town to an MI5 property west of the Kilburn High Road and set out shortly after breakfast. For security, Watchers posted along the route tracked him all the way to the front door. He arrived at 10 a.m.
The flat was located on the first floor of a converted, semi-detached house in Priory Park Road. When Mark rang the bell, Ian Boyle opened the door and smiled warmly. Only twice before in his career had Ian had the opportunity to meet the target of his own surveillance at first hand, and he was intrigued to witness Mark close-up, the full weight and presence of the man unseparated by lens or windscreen.
‘All right there?’ he said, waving him inside. ‘You find us OK?’
‘No problem,’ Mark replied.
There were flyers littering the narrow hall and a citrus smell of carpet cleaner and detergents. Directly ahead, a steep staircase led up to the flat with a bicycle partly blocking the way. Ian had to push it to one side and said ‘Sorry’ as oil from the chain rubbed up against the wall.
‘Bloody thing’s always getting in the way,’ he said. ‘Good for exercise, though. Keeps me in trim.’
To illustrate his point more vividly, he patted his stomach, leading Mark upstairs past bedrooms with closed doors and a bathroom in the process of being redecorated. Taploe was waiting for them in a bright, yellow-painted sitting room off the top landing, standing by a window which overlooked the street. Dark blue velvet curtains were drawn against the light and he appeared to be chewing gum.
‘Mark.’ Taploe turned quickly, moving forward with his hand outstretched, like an edgy host at a cocktail party. ‘How have you been?’
‘Fine,’ Mark told him. ‘Fine.’
‘Good. Great. Thanks, Ian.’ Taploe’s thin, nasal voice was unusually rushed. ‘We’ll be fine if you just leave us in here.’
‘Right, guv.’
The source of his nervousness, perhaps, was a bulky, shaven-headed man hunched forward uncomfortably in an armchair on the opposite side of the room. Younger than Mark by perhaps five years, he had the look of an electrician or plumber, wearing a green Fred Perry T-shirt, scuffed cream trainers — the laces slackly tied — and dark denim trousers swollen with fat at the thigh. Mark did not recognize him, but assumed he was one of the plumbers who had helped strip the hard drives at Libra.
‘This is a colleague of mine. Paul Quinn. A legal financial expert,’ Taploe explained, speaking in short, abrupt sentences. ‘He’s going to be helping us today. Paul this is Mark Keen.’
Fifteen stone of concentrated indifference half-rose from the armchair to shake Mark’s hand.
‘All right, mate?’ A London accent, low and nebulous. Mark wondered how such a person could know anything at all about the complexities of the financial markets.
‘The journey was no problem?’ Taploe’s head bobbed up and down as if to encourage a positive response from the question. ‘You found us OK?"
‘No problem,’ Mark said. The room was very small and a wide coffee table threatened to strike his shins at any moment. He sat down on a low, two-seater sofa with coathanger springs and said: ‘The journey was fine. No trouble.’
Above Quinn’s head, not incongruously given his youth and appearance, hung a worn, faded poster of Enter the Dragon: Bruce Lee stripped to the waist, three fresh scars torn like cat’s claws across his chest. The bright yellow room was otherwise bare. A row of bookshelves on the facing wall contained nothing but outdated telephone directories and a small vase of dried heather. A 100-watt bulb burning in a lampshade overhead left a blob of blinding colour on the backs of Mark’s eyes whenever he closed them.
‘First things first,’ Taploe said, sitting down and jerking his knee away when it accidentally brushed against Mark’s thigh. ‘The Soho operation was a big success. Really first-rate. Enough information to convict Macklin and put him away for a very long time.’ There was a slight shaving cut on the underside of his chin and he touched it. ‘I wanted to thank you in person for all your help so far. You’ve been invaluable to the operation as a whole. Really turned it around.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Which brings me to explain why Paul is here. I thought it would be better if what has become a somewhat complicated situation was explained to you by somebody with an expert’s grasp of finance. A specialist, so to speak.’
Across the room, Quinn inhaled briskly through his nose, a sound like a rhino bathing. Mark smiled at him, trying to establish a connection, and was met by a look of intense, intelligent concentration that did not preclude the later possibility of empathy or rapport.
‘Paul is a lawyer by trade.’ He was also Taploe’s closest colleague on Kukushkin, the engine of the case. ‘He helps us out from time to time with complex financial cases. When we can’t see the wood for the trees.’
‘I see.’ Mark suspected that this last remark had cost Randall something in terms of his own pride and smiled at Quinn to flatter him.
‘What we’ve been able to establish from the hard drives and safe is a highly sophisticated money-laundering operation with Thomas Macklin at its core.’
‘Seb’s not involved?’ Mark asked immediately, a question that caused Taploe to grimace nervously.
‘Not in the first instance, no,’ he replied, and then passed the buck. ‘I’m going to let Paul take it from here. Otherwise there’s a danger we could repeat ourselves.’
‘Sure,’ Mark said.
They were down to business now. Quinn, who was focused and alert right from the start, moved forward to retrieve a thickred folder from the floor beside his chair. Loose papers bulged from within, secured uncertainly by strained elastic bands. The history of the case, all the raked-up dirt and bad news. Laying the file on the coffee table in front of him, he coughed damply and said, ‘Right. Let’s kick this thing off.’ There were no preliminaries, no small talk. ‘Tell me what you know about the way Libra is set up, your actual holding companies and so on.’