Kate laughed, slightly shrilly. ‘He wouldn’t have cared even if he had known,’ she said. ‘That’s the way he is.’
‘I sat next to his wife at dinner. She was a little unusual too.’
‘A nightmare,’ said Kate, then changed the subject. She must have sensed that he’d noticed she hadn’t gone to Belfield; perhaps she’d sensed his unease about it too.
Now, six weeks later, the Gatehouse was still not entirely finished, but was sufficiently complete for them to move books into the bedroom and fill the rooms with cast-off furniture from the vast attics of Belfield. The actual purchase of the Gatehouse and its surrounding fifty acres was still incomplete, remaining in the hands of the solicitors (each side described themselves as the family’s firm). Unhappy with this loose end, Renoir was nonetheless reluctant to nag Kate about it, especially when all seemed right again with their world. This weekend they were in London, staying in town, since Kate had only got back late Friday from a four-day trek through the natural gas fields of Scandinavia. She slept in Saturday morning, and they spent the afternoon touring antiques shops.
This night he cooked while Kate sat at the kitchen table, reading out the interesting bits from the papers. He grilled wild salmon fillets, marinated in lemon and dill, and cooked a mix of wild and long grain rice, with steamed green beans topped by almonds. Kate ate a big plate of it, which pleased him, and they sat at the table in the flat’s little sun porch, with its view of the park in the distance, munching apples and a chunk of sharp cheddar while they finished a bottle of Burgundy.
‘About Tuesday,’ Kate began.
‘Yes,’ he said brightly, for they were supposed to have lunch – they always did on Tuesdays when she was in town. ‘Where do you want to go? The Avenue? Green’s?’
‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘Carlisle wants me to meet a new client. Sorry.’
‘No problem,’ he said more breezily than he felt.
*
Two days later he was in the menswear department of Dunhill’s on Jermyn Street, where he would not have gone of his own accord except that at Christmas Kate had given him a shirt which he had at last got round to exchanging. It was of gorgeous Pima cotton, beautifully made, but it was yellow. Rather than hurt Kate’s feelings or impugn her taste, he simply said it didn’t fit – even though a 16 neck was his size – and he would tell her that they’d run out of the soft lemon version of the shirt she’d given him and he’d had to make do with another colour.
He stood waiting to effect the exchange, looking out at the street in an aimless time-passing fashion when suddenly familiarity intruded. The loping, rangy walk of the woman in the Burberry raincoat across the street – it looked just like Kate, and when the figure turned to watch and wait for the traffic thundering down the narrow lane of Duke Street, he saw it was Kate.
The woman in the queue ahead of him was finished, and the position open. Instinctively he moved forward and put the shirt down, not wanting to lose his place, and, smiling at the woman behind the counter, said, ‘Excuse me one sec,’ and rushed to the window, where he located Kate further up the street, then watched as she entered the side entrance of the Cavendish Hotel.
Which seemed fortunate, as this way he would find her, either in the bar or lounge on the ground floor, and he relaxed slightly, moving back to the counter where the woman stood looking at him curiously, and he began to explain about the shirt.
He came out with a sky blue version a few minutes later, thinking he would look in on Kate in case her meeting hadn’t started, though if she were with a client he would make himself scarce. He reached the corner and waited, as the traffic of black cabs thundered down from Piccadilly. Duke Street, St James’s ran sharply downhill, and not for the first time he realised there were slopes in this city; as a veteran of San Francisco, he usually thought of London as prairie flat. At last the light changed and he started to cross diagonally towards the hotel when he saw another familiar figure walking opposite, headed exactly as Kate had been up Jermyn Street. And bristling at the sight of Conrad Benedict, he waited, having no wish to encounter him, but then saw that Benedict also entered the Jermyn Street entrance of the hotel.
He wanted to believe in coincidence, that Conrad Benedict had gone through the same door but for completely different reasons – a drink with a fellow money man, or lunch with a chum, or even with a client in from the Middle East, staying in the hotel.
And God knows, in a world of certain real conspiracies Renoir sought to keep fabricated ones out of consideration, and allow the possible serendipities of life their chance. Although in his military intelligence days it had been different; what odds in thinking a master sergeant, strolling along the Embarcadero on a weekday afternoon, might have run into a major supplier of Oakland’s cocaine habit purely by chance? And even, later, in the world of high tech, if three people from a rival software company suspected of black market dumping happened on a Saturday morning to get on the tourist boat to Alcatraz along with one major black market player, was there any point even imagining they had found each other there by chance?
No.
But that was an earlier life.
He kept his suspicions to himself, and managed by the weekend to decide that he was being oversensitive, even stupid. Then the following week Kate cancelled their lunch again. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘Tuesdays are going to be difficult for a while. Carlisle has a series of client presentations he’s set up. Tuesdays are best for him. It shouldn’t last long.’ She smiled, her infectious grin. ‘I couldn’t really say they were reserved, now could I?’
‘Of course not,’ he said.
‘That won’t do you any good.’ This was Ricky, on a health kick, pointing at Renoir’s steak and chips, seemingly the safest bet on the clubhouse menu, and although the meat was tough it was flavourful, the chips hot and surprisingly good. Ricky’s own plate held a salad of lettuce and grated carrot and sliced hard-boiled egg. But what was salad cream, the enormous dollop of yellow goop Ricky now applied to his plate? Renoir felt unable to ask him or the two other cabbies sitting at the table in the Ealing clubhouse in case they thought, to use their favourite expression, he was ‘taking the piss’.
It was the third consecutive Tuesday of not having lunch with Kate, and for a change Renoir did go and play golf. He needed a formal alternative to sitting home and biting his nails as he wondered where Kate was, or, worse, worried that she was again in the Cavendish Hotel having entirely unprofessional discussions with Conrad Benedict.
The week before he had rung her office at lunch-time and was told she was out at a meeting. Not in a meeting; out at a meeting. That night he asked her, casually as she leafed through the Evening Standard, how her day had been. ‘Okay,’ she said, after a pause. ‘The meetings we’re having with this new potential client are going pretty well. I think we’ll get work out of them.’
‘Do you go see them or do they come to you?’
She turned another page. ‘I go— What am I saying? They’re Indonesian so we can’t very easily go to them. Not for one day at any rate,’ she said with a light laugh. ‘No, they come to us.’
Jealousy was an unprecedented emotion for Renoir. He never understood how people became consumed by the straying of another person; God knows, he’d witnessed it enough, but always without any true empathy. So it took him some time to diagnose the small emotional cancer that was gnawing at him from within – and by the third week metastasising at a rapid rate. I’ve got to do something, he decided. But what? He was in a city without contacts or friends, and the one person he was close to was now the one person he didn’t trust.
He needed disambiguation, not an unfamiliar desire for him, but one which had always taken place in his professional rather than personal life. Then he had people, tools, resources and corporate clout to solve the miseries that came his way. Now he had only himself, and his inner resources seemed feeble. I am in a state, he declared out loud to the mirror, one morning when shaving, for he could
not seem to divert himself from the fearful jealousy that was preoccupying him: he couldn’t read or listen to music or watch television without seeing the image of Kate entering the Cavendish Hotel, followed by Conrad Benedict. He struggled to restrain his imagination – the request for a room, the giggly trip up in the lift, the walk down the corridor to the room . . . Stop! stop! he told himself. Then the sequence would start again, like an unfinished movie run in a loop.
Of all things, it was golf which rescued him, though in an entirely unexpected way.
It was in the army that he’d learned to play the game. Stationed in the Presidio for over five years, he had the benefit of a world-famous eighteen-hole course, cut out of the pine and eucalyptus growth, which he could play for free virtually whenever he wanted to. His handicap became respectable – twelve when he played often; sixteen when he didn’t – and it became his chief hobby. One year he played sixty-five rounds, three of them in an official but undercover capacity with a navy ensign, based on Treasure Island, who was suspected of stealing radar equipment and selling it to private boat owners down in San Diego.
What he liked, curiously for a game invariably played with other people, was the time it gave him for solitary thinking, something guaranteed by playing with strangers. He was the antithesis of the retired brigadier, who came to lunch at Belfield and, divulging a passion for golf, declared, ‘I love the game for the people.’ Renoir loved the game despite the people.
Though when he first came to England, Renoir’s golfing life ground to a halt. Nobody in Kate’s family played, and it didn’t seem any friends of the family did, either. Pukka golf might suit him, Renoir thought wryly, thinking of access to Sunningdale, or the Berkshire (nearby), or even St Andrews, but it seemed Kate’s kind didn’t play the game. They didn’t play any games, preferring their recreation closer to nature and raw – hunting, shooting, fishing. Country pursuits, in other words, rather than the comparatively constrained practice of a game.
So he didn’t play, and might never have again had he not fallen into conversation with a taxi driver one afternoon, stuck in traffic on Wigmore Street. The driver exhaled loudly, then announced, ‘On the whole I’d rather be playing golf.’
And by the time he’d got out, Renoir had learned that you could play golf in England without belonging to a club or wearing a tie. He’d shown up at Ealing golf club the following week, rented clubs and been put in a four ball which included two taxi drivers, one of whom, Ricky, was now sitting across the table from him.
Ricky was telling a story as he picked at his salad. He was under forty, blond as a German, with an athlete’s build but hopeless at golf – except on the greens, where he displayed a snooker champion’s delicacy of touch. He was saying, ‘This geezer picks me up on Oxford Street and says, “Follow that cab.” I said, “That won’t be hard to do,” because we were stuck in traffic – you don’t move much on Oxford Street,’ he added for Renoir’s benefit. ‘Eventually the cab in front turns off and I follow him to the Wallace Collection. A lady gets out of the other cab and my fare says, “Wait here for me,” and hands me fifty quid. I sit tight and then I notice the other driver’s also waiting. And after about ten minutes, his lady comes out, jumps in and off they scoot. Thirty seconds later my bloke runs out, hops in the cab all breathless, and says, “quick, after them.”
‘So I manage to catch up and follow them down to the river. This time they go to the old Tate, and the same thing happens all over again – she gets out and goes in; he follows; she leaves; so does he. Next stop is Tate Modern, and there it’s such a long wait that I decide to hell with it, and go and break the ice with the other driver. It turns out he’s spotted me, though he hasn’t said anything to the lady, and we’re standing there having a good laugh about these two prats, when he says, “Christ!” and I look up and she’s coming out. I run back and get in my cab and sure enough my bloke comes along as well. “Follow that cab,” he says, as if he hasn’t said it once before.
‘This went on for most of the afternoon. And then suddenly, at the V&A, the lady gets out of the cab, only this time her driver pulls out and goes away. And my fare never comes out – I must have waited half an hour. Fortunately, he’d topped me up with another pony, so I made out all right. The thing is, I still would like to know what they were up to.’ He looked at Renoir. ‘That’s the frustration of this business. You get to see something that’s secret, like, and then bang, off the fare goes and you never find out what happens next. It’s like reading a story you never get to finish.’
The other cabbie nodded. And it was then Renoir suddenly had an inspiration. ‘If you’re waiting for somebody, do you ever get moved on? I mean, by the police or a traffic warden.’
Ricky shook his head. ‘Very rarely. Only if there’s a security problem – you know, like an embassy or something to do with the royals. The wardens tend to leave you alone – although you get the odd tosser.’
‘So suppose I wanted to hire you to sit in, say, Berkeley Square for twenty minutes. Would that be a problem?’
‘It wouldn’t be a problem if you hired me for the whole bleeding day. I once spent most of the morning waiting for a bloke in the Saatchi building – it was on account, back when I had them. Piece of cake.’
‘Ricky, I think I’ve got a job for you.’
He was rusty, and felt slightly ridiculous, practising a craft that belonged to younger men – boys really – and to fiction and the world of movies. He had never liked surveillance, since it had always seemed a preposterous activity for a grown-up. So not surprisingly he was having re-entry problems, not least a sense of his own foolishness. But he knew now that this arrival of jealousy in his life was not just unprecedented, but would not go away until he learned the truth about Kate. And there was comfort in readopting the detached pose of his former professional mode.
He did a recce first, and spotted a sandwich bar, Italian with a zinc counter, which had a perfect vantage point of the entrance to Conrad Benedict’s office building. Renoir knew he was doing this on the cheap: he should have had a minimum of three people to do the job – a spotter, tail and back-up.
But none of this was available to Renoir now, none of the complicated ‘tradecraft’ espoused by writers of spy novels and peddlers of surveillance seminars. He would just have to do the best he could, though he would rather lose his target than be spotted – how could he explain to Kate that he had been following Conrad Benedict?
He walked past the sandwich bar, then turned and went through the park and over to St James’s Square, where he sat upstairs in the London Library for two hours, reading the Times and the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. At noon, he retraced his morning route and twenty minutes later was standing at the window of the sandwich bar with a large espresso and a tuna baguette (lettuce, hold the tomato) which at the rate he was nibbling would take him an hour to consume. A steady queue of local office workers filled the shop, waiting for their sandwiches to be made, but he had a clear view up the street. If Benedict came out and came his way he would move further into the shop, turn his back to the door and drop his plans. But fifteen minutes later, when he saw the now familiar broad shoulders come out and walk the other way, Renoir drained his coffee and left the sandwich bar.
He kept two hundred yards behind the man, and when Benedict turned left towards St James’s Park he waited some time, just in case Benedict slowed for some reason before entering the park. But he didn’t, and Renoir could see him clearly. Renoir waited thirty seconds and made a call on his mobile. When he heard a voice on the other end he said, ‘Where are you?’
‘Duke Street, St James’s,’ said Ricky, easily enlisted when Renoir guaranteed twice his usual take for the two hours or so he expected to need his services. It had been crucial to cover both sides of the surveillance equation. ‘Right outside the hotel. I almost lost her waiting on Piccadilly, but when I turned the corner I saw her going in.’
‘Okay,’ said Renoir. ‘This guy’s just gone int
o the park. He’s wearing an overcoat – dark blue, expensive. Black shoes, and a dark suit underneath. He’s about six foot, maybe a touch over, heavy-set, short dark hair and a moustache. Nice-looking guy – sharp-featured, confident. I’d think he’ll be with you in ten minutes.’
By now Benedict was halfway across the park, crossing the bridge over the small lake. Renoir moved quickly to narrow the gap. As expected, Benedict left the park by St James’s Palace and turned left at the westernmost end of Pall Mall. Renoir came up very quickly, half running, but when he reached Pall Mall he crossed over, moving straight for Hardy’s window, where he looked with intense interest at the fly rod display. There was no sign of Benedict, which meant he had moved up St James’s. Crossing that street to be on its west side, Renoir spotted him well up the street, walking quickly. But instead of walking up as far as Jermyn Street, where he would turn right for the Cavendish Hotel, Benedict stopped lower down, climbed the steps and entered Boodle’s.
His club? It was Alastair Scruton’s as well. Roddy was a member too. Jesus, thought Renoir, the inbreeding of the English. Roddy in particular was keen on clubs, and he liked to expound on their hierarchy: ‘Top drawer is Whites and the Turf, followed by Boodle’s and Brooks’s. Then down to the Athenaeum, Travellers, further down the Reform, and finally, for no hopers, the Oxford and Cambridge Club.’ Who cares? Renoir had thought then. Having spent so much of his life in involuntary association with other men – school, the army, corporate life – he couldn’t understand the urge to seek out such organised company. Besides, he was recognising not only the limits of his ability to assimilate into English life, but English society’s lack of interest in absorbing him.
But the nuances of clubland were forgotten as he was swept by the relief he felt that Benedict was not in the Cavendish Hotel. He waited several minutes to make sure Benedict did not reemerge and that it had been a coincidence after all, his initial sighting of Kate and him entering the same hotel. After all, there was nothing unusual about her being in a hotel. Clients from out of town usually stayed in Mayfair, and if the meetings were not in the small offices of the consultancy (which were on one cramped floor of a townhouse on the west side of Berkeley Square) then they were often held in the suite of the client.
Keeping Secrets Page 24