‘I’d also need you to find out whatever you can about a bloke called Timothy Lander,’ Quinn said.
‘Lander?’
‘He’s a banker, we think, based in the Caymans. Not, as far as we can tell, associated directly with Pentagon, but it’s a tight community out there and there’s a possibility a connection will be made. Your father made a series of telephone calls to his office in Grand Cayman in the weeks leading up to his death. There’s no record that they’ve met, but the coincidence seems strange.’
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Mark admitted.
‘Well, I’ve asked our SIS station out there to look into it.’ Taploe suddenly looked pleased with himself. ‘The UK police are also interested in some work your father was doing for Divisar on behalf of a Swiss bank. Not Geneva based, but an investment house in Lausanne. Macklin or the Russians may have interests registered there which your father stumbled upon.’
‘Yes.’
‘So it’s a big task we’re facing,’ he said. ‘Much as we appreciate what you’ve achieved so far, there’s still a great deal of work to be done.’
34
A brilliant mid-winter afternoon, clean white light pouring into the Great Court of the British Museum. Ben felt bathed in limestone. He walked a circuit of the Reading Room and was revived. Let Alice have lunch with whoever she likes. At least she has nothing to hide. At least there are no secrets between us.
Long, chrome-legged tables with plastic tops were set out in rows perpendicular to the north-western edge of the Great Court. After half an hour Ben bought himself a cup of tea and sat down beside a young American student with bug eyes and a sprout of goatee beard. He was talking to a Japanese girl.
‘You wanna know what really amazes me about the Kennedy assassination?’ he was saying. ‘It’s that the guy who shot him is most probably still out there.’
‘Unless the CIA already killed him,’ the girl replied. She had a faultless English accent and wore blue-rimmed glasses that were too big for her face.
‘Sure,’ said Goatee. ‘But if they didn’t, I mean, if he’s still at large, just imagine what goes through that guy’s mind, like last thing at night. He’d be — what? — like seventy now?’
‘I guess.’
‘Ben?’
A man was standing beside the table holding a guide to the museum in one hand and a walking stick in the other. McCreery.
‘Jock.’ Ben stood up so quickly that his thighs knocked on the underside of the table, spilling a splash of tea on to the white surface. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’
‘Ditto. Are you on your own? Not with Alice?’
‘Not with Alice,’ Ben said, and left it at that. ‘I thought you lived in Guildford.’
It was a pointless remark, but he had been stuck for something to say. McCreery was Mark’s friend, a stranger to Ben, a background figure in the chaos of death. Shorter and more overweight in the lower part of his body than Ben remembered, McCreery was wearing a bright green wind cheater, hiking boots, and denim trousers with that pale fade particular to jeans worn by men in late middle-age. He looked suitably dressed for a long walk on the Downs.
‘I do live in Guildford, yes,’ he explained, leaning on the stick. ‘But I’m in town for the weekend. Haven’t been here since Foster stuck the roof on. Appalling, isn’t it?’
‘I think it’s incredible,’ Ben told him, and wondered if McCreery would respect his honesty.
‘Do you really? For me it’s highly derivative of Pei, you know, the Oriental chap who messed up the Louvre.’
The Japanese girl appeared to swallow hard as Ben said, ‘Right. Look, do you want to sit down?’
‘If that would be all right. Are you sure? Thankyou.’
Goatee shuffled along and McCreery squeezed in, laying his walking stick at an angle across the table.
‘What did you do to your leg?’
‘Rheumatism.’ McCreery gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘Runs in the family, I’m afraid. My late father suffered from it, his father before him. There’s been a long line of McCreerys hobbling about in their fifties.’
Ben made a small noise in the back of his throat that came off as a grunt and wondered how long McCreery would stick around. Already he could feel the afternoon slipping from his grasp. They had only one subject in common and he was not in the mood to discuss his father.
Sure enough, McCreery soon embarked on a conversation about the funeral.
‘So who did you talk to at the wake?’ he asked.
‘Oh, everybody and nobody. A lot of my father’s colleagues. People from Divisar and…’ Ben searched for the appropriate euphemism ‘… your company.’ McCreery smiled in an effort to acknowledge his tact. ‘To be honest, I found it hard going. Alice was great. You and your wife were both very kind. But I just couldn’t get my head round the whole thing, you know? Sort of took the wind out of me.’
‘Of course,’ McCreery said. ‘Of course. I must say that both Gillian and I were rather concerned about you.’
‘About me?’
‘Yes. Conscious that you didn’t want to be there, that you’d rather have been somewhere else. I went upstairs to my bedroom at one point and saw you standing alone on the drive. Felt for you, old chap. Bloody awful thing. I’m so sorry.’
Ben didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or grateful.
‘Well, I just went out for a smoke,’ he said. ‘Just to grab some air, that was all.’
‘Of course.’
McCreery bobbed his head gently and looked up at the roof. He appeared to be giving it a second chance, but then frowned and finally settled his gaze on a nearby Egyptian sculpture. Changing the subject, he asked after Alice and then briefly discussed an article she had written in the Standard a few days earlier. Ben began to warm to him, if only because McCreery appeared to be showing a genuine interest in his family’s welfare. He asked thoughtful, intelligent questions about the police enquiry, and seemed acutely sensitive to the unique psychological predicament in which Ben and Mark had found themselves. McCreery’s concern was all the more touching when Ben considered that he too had lost a friend, a man he had worked alongside at MI6 for almost twenty years. The idea of losing one of his own close friends was one of Ben’s deepest fears.
‘I guess it’s been difficult for you, too,’ he said. ‘Dad was your best mate. It can’t have been easy.’ McCreery sighed.
‘Well, it’s funny,’ he said. ‘One gets older, one has to adjust to sudden loss. The booze, accidents of one kind or another, bloody cancer. But there was something very special about Christopher. I think it’s a great tragedy that you never had the opportunity to know him as well as we all did. A very great tragedy indeed.’
Ben remembered the conversation on the drive at McCreery’s house, Robert Bone saying something very similar about Keen. He thought of Bone’s letter and wondered if McCreery could be trusted with its contents.
‘You know, when people die, everybody writes, don’t they?’ he said. McCreery looked slightly confused. ‘I mean, the husband, the wife, they always get a letter. Then you write to the children, to the parents if they had any, to all the close relatives of the person who’s died. But the friends just get left behind. Nobody thinks of them. They’ve maybe just lost the one person in the world that they could confide in, someone where the roots might have gone even deeper than a marriage. A friend from school. A friend from childhood. But nobody thinks of them. They just get forgotten.’
McCreery produced a wonderful smile that broke up the general blandness of his features, the pale, puffy cheeks, the thinning grey hair. His eyes seemed to congratulate Ben for the observation.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I must say I didn’t receive a single letter of condolence about your father. Not a single one.’ Making a joke of it, he added, ‘And you?’
‘Fifty-three at the last count,’ Ben said, and they both started to laugh.
‘Including mine?’ McCreery asked.
‘Including yours.’
It was a lovely moment, rueful and sustained. Goatee and the Japanese girl were long gone, and they were now alone at the table.