Alice was writing a sequence of notes in shorthand. She said:
‘December the twelfth?’
‘That’s right. That’s about all I’ve got.’
A seagull squawked in Portsmouth.
‘I really, really appreciate it.’
It was a godsend. She thought that Ben would be pleased when she told him. She thought that this was exactly what she needed in order to make things up to him.
42
She told Ben as soon as she walked in the door. He was slumped on the sofa reading Archangel. They no longer kissed when they saw one another; merely an eye contact, a sort of shrug.
‘Listen, I talked to Michelle Peterson.’
Nothing.
‘My friend from university. You remember? The one who works for Customs and Excise.’
Ben turned a page.
‘A man calling himself Leonid Sudoplatov arrived in London on December the first last year. That’s eight days before your father was killed. He left from Heathrow on the morning of the twelfth. And he was Russian. Sixty-three years old.’
Now Ben rose from the sofa with the sluggishness of genuine surprise. The novel dropped to the floor. He might have said that it was impossible, that McCreery and Mark had disproved Bone’s theory. He might have told Alice to mind her own business and suggested with a lookthat things had moved on. But Kostov was alive, and his existence made perfect sense.
‘Did you tell Mark about this?’ Embarrassed by his behaviour in the club, Ben was wary of upsetting his brother, of making further mistakes.
‘He’s not answering his phone,’ Alice said.
‘I always knew that fucker was lying to me.’
‘Who? Mark?’
‘No. Not Mark. McCreery. Jock McCreery. I always knew he was hiding something.’
To Ben’s surprise, Alice came over and kissed him on the forehead. They both sat down.
‘McCreery said the letter was disinformation,’ she said.
‘I know. I know. And I sat in the pub and I listened to him smooth things over and I bought what he was saying, but in the back of my mind I always had this element of doubt. And then, when…’
‘… when what?’
‘Nothing.’ Ben had to check himself. He was about to mention Mark’s work for MI5. ‘McCreery is definitely covering for SIS,’ he said. ‘There’s something going on.’
‘Maybe somebody else is using Sudoplatov’s identity,’ Alice suggested, running her hand through his hair. ‘Is that a possibility?’
‘It’s a possibility.’ Ben wondered why she was being so affectionate towards him, so helpful and understanding.
‘You don’t think that’s what’s happened?’
‘Well, Kostov had his own false identities. Sudoplatov would have belonged to him. Unless somebody was trying to frame a dead man for murder, why would they bother using his passport?’
Alice nodded and looked at the floor. Was she hoping for a reconciliation, for an end to all the silences and the ill feeling? Ben wondered if talking to Michelle had been her way of making things up between them. He wondered if she was tired of his moods and anxiety. He wondered if she had spent the entire afternoon fucking Sebastian Roth.
‘How’s your piece going?’ he asked. ‘The one about the restaurant?’
Without a flicker, Alice said, ‘It got spiked.’
‘Spiked?’
‘Yeah. Seb just pulled out all of a sudden and Features said it was a bad idea. Anyway, I hadn’t heard from him in ages.’
There was a beat of distrust between them, nothing more. Then Alice said, ‘It was probably a good thing, anyway. I’d looked into Seb’s file at work. He’s not a particularly pleasant man.’
‘How’s that?’ Ben was jealous of Roth and any criticism of him — particularly coming from Alice — was music to his ears.
‘When Libra was first starting out,’ she said, ‘Seb employed dealers to go into rival clubs and sell pills and trips to customers. Did you know about that? Does Mark know about that?’ Ben frowned and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Then he would tip off the police and get the club closed down. And when journalists have questioned him about this, he’s disguised what happened as a moral crusade, denied that he had any part in it.’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘You notice that about corrupt people. Always the ones pointing the finger. Always someone else to blame.’
‘That’s right.’ Alice nodded and appeared to warm to her theme. ‘Roth’s so tight, so money conscious, that he won’t even have people pouring themselves a glass of water in the toilets at Libra. You go in there with an empty bottle of Evian, security have instructions to confiscate. You’ve got to buy water at the bar, just like everything else. No matter that there are dealers authorized by Libra on the sly selling pills to dehydrated punters who are already forty quid out of pocket just for coming in. The only thing Seb really cares about is the Libra share price. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable writing a piece about someone like that.’
‘Exactly,’ Ben said. ‘And you think a guy like Roth, a man with his contacts, his leverage, doesn’t know a thousand journalists who could have written a puff piece about a restaurant opening? It was all a game. He was trying to get you into bed.’
Alice managed to make her embarrassment resemble modesty.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.
‘I’m serious. I’ve talked to Mark about it. The concept of adultery, of stealing someone’s wife, it’s meaningless to him. He sees it as competition.’
Alice tooka cigarette out of her bag and was pleased that her hand did not shake as she lit it.
‘Well, I don’t know…’
‘It’s funny.’ Ben looked relieved. ‘I thought you fancied him. I thought you two had a bit of a crush.’
The sentence died away in his mouth, a moment of frankness that he had not intended.
‘ Fancied him?’ Alice made a face of appalled disgust, like a child swallowing medicine. ‘He’s revolting. How could you think that?’
A great wave of relief, of confidence-boosting pleasure, swept through Ben’s body. He smiled.
‘Just a hunch,’ he said. ‘Just a paranoia.’
Again Alice ran her hand through his hair. They kissed now, the sweet forgiveness, and Ben felt the skin on her back, reaching for the soft exquisite warmth of her stomach. For the first time in days he was at peace.
‘We should do something about Michelle,’ he said, galvanized and relieved. Alice looked taken aback as he rose from the sofa and lit a cigarette.
‘We should,’ she said instinctively. ‘She told me Sudoplatov was using a new passport, issued in the last couple of years. If he was in the KGB, he’d still have contacts in the Russian government, in the mafia, people who could get him passports, lines of credit, information.’
Ben inhaled deeply.
‘Then we should try to get in touch with Bone,’ he said, aware that he was slipping back into a role for which his temperament was ill suited. ‘Would you know how to do that?’
‘Sure,’ Alice said.
‘I haven’t got a contact address for him, and I gave fucking McCreery my only copy of the letter. I don’t remember the number of the PO Box. There’s probably no way of finding him.’
‘Of course there is.’ Alice stood and took his hand in hers. ‘We’ll find him on the Internet. Let me get a glass of wine and we’ll go upstairs.’
Ben was technologically backward; he barely knew how to switch on Alice’s computer. In her study — a small, windowless cupboard on the same floor as their bedroom — he stood behind her as she opened Internet Explorer.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. He had his hand on the back of her neck and was stroking her hair. The prospect of tracking down Bone seemed secondary to the knowledge that they would very soon be in bed together.
‘We just find Google and type in the name of the town. What was it? Where did the letter come from?’
‘What’s Google?’
‘Forget it. Where did the letter come from?’
‘Cornish. New Hampshire,’ Ben said. ‘Somewhere in New England.’
The connection was fast. Within three seconds a screen had appeared, saying: New Hampshire Online. NH City Guides.