‘Now we find the phone number. Then we call the local post office and say that it’s an emergency.’
‘Is that what you do at work? Lie and make stuff up?’
Alice didn’t reply. Ben could feel the light heave of her shoulders, the gradual uncurling of her spine as she breathed.
‘Welcome to New Hampshire,’ she said, reading aloud from the screen in a cod American accent. ‘What do you want to know about? Local restaurants? Ski conditions? Where do you wanna go today? ’
Another screen appeared, a long list of cities and towns. Alice scrolled through them and clicked ‘Cornish’.
‘So we just look here,’ she said, another page loading. ‘Legal services. Libraries. Fire Departments…’
‘Post Offices!’ Ben exclaimed, pointing at the bottom of the screen.
Alice smiled, muttered ‘Bloody artists’ and clicked the icon. There was a single Post Office listed for Cornish. She wrote down the telephone number on the back of a gas bill and shut off the connection.
‘Do you want me to call them?’
‘Yeah, you do it,’ Ben said. ‘You lie better than me. You’re a journalist.’
Alice seemed to take this as a compliment. There was a phone beside the computer and she dialled the number.
‘They’re five hours behind,’ she murmured as the number connected. ‘It’s about two in the afternoon. Hello?’
A woman at the Post Office had picked up. She said, ‘Post Office, good afternoon. How may I help you?’
Alice curled a loop of hair behind her ear and touched Ben’s arm. He pressed his ear close to the phone in order to hear what was being said.
‘I’m trying to get in touch with one of your customers. He has a PO Box registered at this address. A Mr Robert Bone. My name is Alice Keen. I’m calling from London.’
The woman tookan unusually long time to respond. Ben heard her cough and say, ‘Could you repeat that name for me please?’
‘Yes, it’s a Mr Robert Bone. He sent a letter to my husband here in London, but there was no return address.’ Alice made her accent sound polished, more upper class. ‘We need to get in touch with him as a matter of urgency.’
Another pause. Then, ‘May I ask if you’re a family member?’
At first, neither of them understood the significance of the question.
Alice said, ‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s just that we’ve had a lot of enquiries recently about Mr Bone from the United Kingdom.’
‘No, no, I’m not a family member. Neither of us is.’ Ben was frowning. He tookthe telephone from Alice’s hand and said ‘Hello?’
More silence. He wondered if the woman had left her desk to look for more information. Then Ben heard movement on the line, a different voice, a man.
‘Hello, miss?’
‘No, this is Benjamin Keen. You were just talking to my wife…’
‘Yes sir. That’s right. To your wife. I understand that she was looking for Bob?’
‘That’s right. I don’t know if your colleague explained, but we’re calling from London and — ’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir, but we’ve had a shooting here. Almost three weeks ago now. Bob was killed out at his house. You didn’t hear about it? Did nobody think to let you know?’
43
From time to time, Stephen Taploe would lie to his agents, present a more optimistic view of an operation than was realistically the case. He did it to maintain their trust. He did it to keep them onside. Running a joe was a delicate art and he had been taught long ago that it was acceptable to manipulate the truth if an officer had one eye on the long-term gain.
So Taploe had lied to Mark about Timothy Lander. He hadn’t asked SIS to track him down because MI5 had done so themselves two weeks before, using phone records obtained from Divisar. In fact he had never wanted SIS to play any role in the Kukushkin investigation, for fear that he would lose control of the case, and out of a more personally motivated concern that they would discover that Christopher Keen had been an agent for MI5. Keen’s dealings with the Swiss bank had also provided a convenient smokescreen which Taploe had used to lure Mark into co-operation; there was no evidence at all that Kukushkin or any other syndicate had funds lodged in Lausanne. Furthermore, in the cab Taploe had failed to disclose his intention to recruit Juris Duchev; Mark’s suggestion that he try to do so had been merely a coincidence. For seven weeks, Service analysts had been weighing up the risks of running the Latvian. On Sunday, Taploe had made his pitch.
The team had Duchev’s routine down pat. He was up at six every morning, usually switched on the television in the sitting room of his flat, cursed in his native tongue as he tooka shower, then rang his daughter in Jelgava to catch her before she went off to work. Between five past and ten past seven he would walkfifty metres to a greasy spoon down the road and find a seat in the window. It turned out that Duchev had a fondness for British breakfasts. Thelma, who had run the cafe for fifteen years, knew him on sight and knew his order: plenty of black pudding, a heap of baked beans, two sunny-side fried eggs, at least three pork sausages, several rashers of bacon and a pair of pip-oozing fried tomatoes. Duchev ate it all up, wiping his plate clean day after day with margarine-smeared pieces of toast. ‘You better get to him quick, boss,’ Ian had joked. ‘We’re not careful, he’ll be dead from a heart attack before he’s any use to us.’
Taploe had waited in the cafe from six forty-five on Sunday morning, flicking through the dreck and betrayals of the News of the World. Duchev appeared half an hour later, washing his breakfast down with three cups of Thelma’s indifferent and scalding coffee. Ian had the van outside — just for observation — but it had proved surprisingly easy to strike up conversation and to take Duchev for a walk around Shepherd’s Bush and to let him know that he was being watched around the clock and that he would find himself doing time unless he gave Her Majesty’s Government his full co-operation. Taploe knew all about the land in Andalucia, you see — a last-minute bonus from Mark- and all about the Bosnian prostitute in ParkWest Place that Duchev was banging and beating up behind Tamarov’s back. Taploe didn’t let on about Macklin, of course, nor profess any knowledge of the Libra conspiracy. It was enough to imply that his days as a criminal underling were numbered. He was offered a generous cash sum in return for his co-operation — and advised to keep his mouth shut.
Forty-eight hours later, the timing of Taploe’s pitch would form the subject of intense discussions at both Thames House and Vauxhall Cross. Why, for instance, had Taploe risked alerting a senior figure in the Kukushkin organization to a law enforcement presence without a cast-iron guarantee that Duchev would turn? Why, furthermore, had he attempted to recruit the Latvian just as Mark was cementing his relationship with Tamarov on Monday night? Hauled before a grey-faced committee of his superiors, Taploe would later be asked to account for every minute of the weekend, beginning with the journey by cab he had taken with Mark and Ian on Saturday morning, and ending with the events of Monday night. Time and again he insisted that every precaution had been taken. Tamarov had confirmed the venue for the dinner as the St Martin’s Lane Hotel on no fewer than three separate occasions. The position of his reserved table had been established and steps taken to secure that specific area of the restaurant for sound. A separate table, occupied by Service personnel, had also been reserved for observation. Mark had agreed to travel to the meeting by car and to have his own vehicle wired on the understanding that he would offer the Russian a lift at the end of the evening and attempt to start a conversation about Macklin. Ian Boyle had been assigned to tail the vehicle from Mark’s flat in Torriano Avenue.
Little of this made any impression on the members of the panel, who sensed blood and seemed determined to bring Taploe down. Something of an i-dotting, t-crossing bureaucrat himself, it nevertheless occurred to Taploe that something reductive in human nature emerged within the context of institutions. Normally sympathetic, sound-minded colleagues appeared suddenly to revel in his misfortune.