‘Kostov is dead?’
‘Yes. As is Mischa, though in rather more violent circumstances. Exactly as Bone attests, he was shot in Samark and by order of court martial sometime in the late 1980s.’
‘So my father never had anything to do with him?’
‘Nothing at all. The Yanks lost him. He was their joe.’ McCreery picked the letter up from the table. ‘Which makes Bone’s suggestion that Mischa was like a son to Christopher particularly unpleasant in the circumstances.’
‘Yeah, I could have done without that,’ Ben admitted, eating a crisp.
‘I’m sure you could.’
‘So who did kill my father?’
It was the only question left to ask.
McCreery paused. ‘Between you and me — and again I would ask that this is something we keep strictly entre nous — the Office has been working very closely alongside Scotland Yard to unravel that very question. Right now, we’re looking at one or two irregularities with regard to your father’s relationship with a Swiss bank.’
Ben shook his head. ‘What does that mean?’
McCreery shuffled forward and seemed troubled by his leg.
‘Shortly before he died, Christopher was doing some work for Divisar on behalf of a private bank in Lausanne. There may be a connection there. We’re also looking into a series of telephone calls that he made to a Timothy Lander in the Cayman Islands.’
‘That’s not a name I’ve heard before. How come the police haven’t told us about it?’
‘As I was saying, that part of the investigation is still very much under wraps.’
‘So you’re claiming that almost everything in Bone’s letter is faked-up to deflect attention away from the fact the CIA lost an agent in Afghanistan nearly twenty years ago?’
McCreery wiped away an imaginary speck of dust from the surface of the table and said, ‘To all intents and purposes, yes.’
For the last time, Ben took hold of the letter and began going through it, picking out the facts.
‘So it’s bullshit that Dad worked for British Intelligence for twenty years?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘And he never went to Berlin?’
‘No, he was in Berlin, but declared, and only for eighteen months. That was immediately after he left your mother in the mid-1970s.’
Ben flicked through three more pages until he found what he was looking for.
‘And what about this?’ He stabbed the letter with the end of his thumb. ‘Was he ever assigned to China?’
‘Never went there in his life.’ McCreery finished his whisky. ‘And Bone didn’t quit the Cousins in ’92, either. He was thrown out after the Kostov cock-up, turned to the drink and became a teacher. Humanities, if I’m not mistaken. Now there’s an irony.’ Taking the letter back from Ben, he added, ‘Just look at the way he phrases certain things as a means of disguising his guilt. It’s bloody amateur hour. Here, on the third page.’ McCreery quoted from the text. ‘ I never met Mischa, of course, but I know he was a sweet kid. Don’t you see, Ben? That’s a blatant bloody lie. The sheer nerve of the man. And what does he say later on? That he interrogated a Soviet soldier independently of Christopher and Mischa? Total cock and bull. The Soviet soldier was Mischa. How else do you think Bone knows so much about the Russian military?’
‘All right, all right,’ Ben said quickly. He felt compelled to add: ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you. I just want to get to the bottom of who killed Dad. That’s it. Everything else is irrelevant…’
‘… and I can understand that.’
‘But Bone’s not a sadist. He bears no grudge against me. Why pull me aside at the funeral and then write six pages of bullshit about Kostov and MI6? Why involve me at all?’
‘Alice,’ McCreery replied instantly.
‘Alice?’
‘Think about it. She works for a major newspaper. Bone’s hoping she’ll leak the story to the news desk and embarrass the Brits.’
‘But she would never do that.’ It was a statement that lacked conviction.
‘Bob’s not to know that, is he? This is not a benevolent individual we’re talking about. Bone and Masterson were two of the most unsavoury characters I’ve ever had the misfortune of coming into contact with in over thirty years of intelligence work.’
Ben seized on the mistake.
‘Masterson is the mentor?’ he said. ‘The one who actually recruited Mischa?’
‘Oh dear.’ A pantomime of embarrassment played across McCreery’s face. He touched his mouth with his hand. ‘I shouldn’t have revealed his name. That was an error. I apologize.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Jock. I’m not going to tell anyone.’
‘Good. Good. Well, look, I must catch that train back to Guildford.’ McCreery was standing, fetching his stick. ‘In the meantime, if I could just hang on to the letter and take a longer look at it, that would be most helpful. We’ve already lost one and you can imagine that we don’t want this sort of thing lying around…’
Ben hesitated. To refuse would seem odd. He made a mental note of Kostov’s aliases for the benefit of Alice’s contact in Customs and Excise and said, ‘Of course. Be my guest.’
McCreery looked pleased. He pocketed the letter, saying, ‘Your other one’s bound to turn up.’
‘Sure it is.’
‘And look, I don’t need to tell you again that the fewer people that know about this, the better.’
‘I understand that.’
Ben was also on his feet, watching McCreery pull a windcheater over his head. He had the sudden but irrefutable feeling that he was being palmed off. The mood of their conversation had changed markedly.
‘Have you spoken to Bone since you received it?’ McCreery asked.
‘No,’ Ben said, falling in behind him as they walked to the door. ‘He didn’t leave a number. Just a PO Box address in New Hampshire.’
‘I see.’
It was as if McCreery was more than just late for a train. He seemed hurried, his job done. Out on the street they turned to one another.
‘Well it was super to see you, it really was.’ The charm in his eyes, all the warmth and friendliness engendered in the course of the afternoon, had evaporated. Now McCreery looked distant and removed.
‘Yeah, it was good to see you too, Jock.’
‘And good luck with your art,’ he said, employing a term that Ben detested. ‘Don’t worry, old boy, don’t worry,’ he called out, hobbling around the corner. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this thing, you’ll see. It’s all just a question of time.’
37
‘Something’s not right, brother. Something is not right.’
Ben was pacing in the kitchen at Elgin Crescent, sections of Wednesday’s Guardian scattered across the floor.
‘The letter goes missing from my studio, your version never even shows up. Jock says it’s crap from start to finish, then insists I keep the contents to myself. Somebody, somewhere, knows something that we don’t. Somebody, somewhere is covering something up.’
Seated calmly at the kitchen table, Mark smiled to himself and invited Ben to sit down.
‘I’d prefer standing,’ he said.
‘Fine. Then why don’t you begin at the beginning? Why don’t you just tell me what this Yank actually said.’
It took Ben fifteen minutes to describe the contents of Bone’s letter in microscopic detail. He was flustered but remained concise. He told Mark about Mischa, he told him about Kostov. His brother listened carefully, but in the manner of a card player who knows he holds the ace.
When he had finished, Ben said, ‘You don’t look like this is making any impact on you at all.’
‘I don’t?’
‘No. You don’t.’
‘Well, where did the letter come from?’ Mark asked. Ben looked at him.
‘That’s all you have to ask? That’s the one thing you want to know? Where it came from?’
‘Well it’s a start.’ Mark was aware that he sounded smug, that he was playing the old hand and professional spook, but it was fun watching Ben flounder around in a misconception.
‘You’re not interested in Sudoplatov?’ his brother asked. ‘You don’t want to know about Kalugin?’