‘Do you have any idea who could have done this?’ Ben asked. He had trusted Bone immediately, fallen straight into his decency.
‘Later, son,’ the American replied, ‘Later.’ And finally he took his hand from Ben’s shoulder. A car had pulled up behind them. ‘I better go, not block these people in. Mark gave me your address in London. I’ll be sure to write you both just as soon as I get back home.’
21
‘I know what’s needed, Keeno. We need to get you out, mate. A night on the tiles. Something to relax you.’
Thomas Macklin was hunched forward at his desk, rubbing his hands vigorously together. His cheeks were puffy and flushed red, eyes like sockets of concentrated ambition. Roth’s lawyer, his confidant and right-hand man, was wearing a dark, single-breasted moleskin suit, a blue silk shirt and an off-gold cashmere tie. Enough money invested in designer clothes to make an unattractive man look passably stylish.
‘I don’t mean to sound insensitive, mate, but fuck it, where’s the harm? It’s good to see you backin the office. What’s it been, three weeks? Everyone admires the way you’ve handled this thing. But I wanna see a smile backon Keeno’s face. There’s this new place we’ve been going, lap-dancers that can’t get enough of you. Cocktails, music, stage acts, the lot. Couple of birds there you wouldn’t believe. Tits like freeze-dried mangoes and Happy New Year. We can take one of the Russian crowd along, write it off on expenses. Mr-Sebastian-Roth-does-not-have-to-know. If Seb wants to spend his nights hob-nobbing in art galleries with New Labour while his mates are out having a good time, well that’s his prerogative. You and me are gonna have some fun.’
Mark smiled. There was something touching about Macklin’s fantastic insensitivity. The last time they had been to a lap-dancing club was in New York two years before, while overseeing the opening of the club’s site in Manhattan. Five executives on the company credit card and Mark the only one not drunk and groping girls. One of the dancers, a Costa Rican, had kept giving him the eye; she had asked Mark more than once if he wanted her to dance for him and, even when he had said no, stayed beside him at the table, just talking. Meanwhile Macklin and his friends had stuffed fifty-dollar bills into her G-string and begged her to come back to their hotel. At the end of the night she had slipped Mark her number and they had got together a couple of times before he flew backto London.
‘Sure,’ Mark said. ‘It’s a nice idea.’
‘Fuckin’ right it’s a nice idea.’ Macklin stood up, backing away from his desk. He was heavily built and in the grip of a big idea. ‘Tell you what, we should get your brother along. How does young Benjamin feel about topless birds nibbling his earlobes?’
‘Not really his cuppa tea,’ Mark replied. His accent had assumed the work Cockney.
‘No,’ Macklin muttered quickly, ‘no.’ Against the grey London sky visible through the closed window of his office, he looked colourful, even vibrant. ‘I suppose he wouldn’t go in for that, would he? Can’t imagine his wife being all that chuffed. Tends to make herself heard, doesn’t she? What’s her name again?’
‘Alice,’ Mark said quietly.
‘That’s right. Alice. Lovely looking girl. He’s done well there, your bro. Real ballbreaker, though, isn’t she? They always are, the fit ones.’
Mark nodded awkwardly and looked down on to the street. A Bangkok cycle-taxi was passing below the window, ringing its bell. ‘Yeah, I suppose Alice can be a bit tricky,’ he conceded, talking into the glass so that it steamed up with his breath.
He might have added that he felt Ben had settled for the first girl that had fallen in love with him, out of an understandable desire for the stability of marriage. He might have said that he feared Alice would one day up and leave, lured by the connections and money of a less troubled man. He might have said that Ben had not spoken to him since the reading of the will, in which it had been revealed that Keen had left everything to Mark: the flat, the money, the car. But he was not a person given to discussing family issues at work. Instead he hummed a tune under his breath until Macklin said, ‘What was that?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Right.’ Macklin stretched until a bone cracked in his arm. ‘Anyway, it was just an idea. I’ll give Vladimir a call, see if he wants to join in.’
‘Who’s Vladimir?’
Very quickly Macklin said, ‘One of the crew from Moscow. Vlad Tamarov. Big fucker. Rolex and leather. He’s handling a few things for Seb on the legal side.’
‘He’s a lawyer?’
‘You could say that, yeah. More of a specialist in our line of work. Helping out with contracts, security, that kind of thing. He’s come over for a few days, see how we operate.’
‘Is he mafia?’
Macklin made a loud snorting noise and dismissed the question with a shrug.
‘Well, who is and who isn’t out there, eh, Keeno? Half the time I don’t even know myself.’
‘So how come you didn’t mention it?’
‘Well, you’ve been out of the loop, haven’t you, mate? Had a shite few weeks. Didn’t think it was necessary to fill you in.’ Macklin had slapped his hand on to Mark’s back and was rubbing it in abrupt circles. ‘Now old Tom wants to help you out, see? Wants to put a smile backon his mate’s face. So are you on for this thing or you after doing something else?’
‘It all sounds fine.’ Mark picked up a copy of GQ from a low, glass-surfaced table at the edge of the room. He began flicking backwards through the pages, male models and sports cars, taking none of it in. ‘There’s just something I have to do beforehand. Some stuff I have to collect from Dad’s flat.’
‘Course you have,’ Macklin told him. ‘Course you gotta do stuff like that. So when will you want to leave?’
‘Just tell me where it is and I’ll meet you there.’ Mark put the magazine down. ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be.’
Macklin wrote down the address. ‘I might bring Philippe along as well,’ he added, apparently as an after thought.
‘Club Philippe?’
‘The very same. Night off from running his beloved ristorante. We’re having a pint after work.’
‘Oh.’
‘So,’ Macklin said, ‘around ten suit you?’
‘Around ten sounds fine.’
It was the last thing he felt like doing. A night out with Macklin, d’Erlanger and a Russian Mr Fixit, characterized by Tom’s gradually deteriorating behaviour, the four of them just another set of suits in early middle-age ogling girls and stinking of booze and fags. Vladimir probably wouldn’t speak much English, so the evening would consist of shouted, stop-start conversations about ‘Manchester United’ and ‘Mr Winston Churchill’. Slowly, Macklin would lose what few moral scruples he possessed and demonstrate the full range of his aggressive sexism, culminating in their inevitable ejection from the club at two or three in the morning. Then one of them - Macklin, most probably - would pass out on the street before Mark had a chance to put him in a cab. Why had he agreed to go? So that Tom wouldn’t thinkhe was boring? It was something to do with the aftermath of his father’s death; Mark just didn’t have time for this kind of thing any more.
He took a taxi to the Paddington flat. The heating was on high in the back of the cab and when Mark stepped out to pay the driver a January wind caught him like a blast of ice in the face. He took out a set of keys - the ones his father had used - and opened the door to the lobby.
Grey, bleak light was leaking in from the street. Ahead of him, Mark could barely make out the stairwell or the entrance to the lift. He pressed the white plastic timer switch on the wall beside the door, blinking as the foyer lights came on. It seemed odd, but he could sense his father’s presence here, his routine of checking the mail, that stubborn habit he had of taking the stairs and not the lift. Got to keep fit at my age, he would say. Got to look after the old lungs. One time they had come backfor a whisky after eating dinner in Islington and Keen had spent five minutes standing at the foot of the stairs talking
to a widower named Max who lived on the first floor. Where was Max now? Maybe Mark should knock on his door and talkto him about what had happened, ask if he had heard or seen anything on the night of the murder. He would rather do that, rather be with someone who had known his father, than spend five hours with Macklin and an anonymous Russian lawyer in a lap-dancing club in the West End. But the police would have already talked to him. No doubt, like everybody else in the building, Max hadn’t seen or heard a thing.
He rode the lift to the fourth floor. The police still weren’t certain whether his father’s killer had reached the flat that way, or via the stairs. There were so few clues, so little evidence around which to base even a theory.
A teenager wearing baggy denims and a black puffa jacket passed him in the corridor as he came out of the lift and made his way to Apartment 462. Mark was just a few metres away from the door when he saw that it was already open. There were lights on inside and he stopped in his tracks. A faint shadow fell slowly across the floor, and then the door abruptly closed. There were no voices, no clues as to the identity of the intruder. Kathy, the Family Liaison Officer, had told Mark that the police had long ago finished their investigation. He moved forward, inhaled deeply and pressed his ear to the door.
Nothing. Not a sound. Whoever was inside was alone and remaining deliberately quiet. The wild thought occurred to him that the killer had returned to the scene of the crime. Again Mark breathed deeply and slid his key into the lock, banking on an element of surprise. Then, with great speed and no thought to his own safety, he opened the door.
Ben was standing in the kitchen, looking out of the window.
‘Brother. Jesus. What are you doing here?’
Ben turned round. He looked to be in a trance.
‘Hi,’ he said very quietly, unfazed by the sudden intrusion. He looked back at the window. ‘You took most of his stuff.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ Mark said, breathing quickly. ‘To get the rest of it. How did you get in?’
‘Spare set of keys. Kathy gave them to me. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Why would I mind? You can come here whenever you like.’
‘It’s just that I wanted to see the place for myself.’
‘Sure you did.’
Mark looked towards the sitting room. He had not expected to feel this, but his brother’s presence was an intrusion, an unnecessary complication he could do without. To make matters worse, Ben was clearly adrift in self-pity, one of the least attractive elements of his personality. For three weeks Mark had wanted to shake him free of gloom, to move him on.
‘So what’s left to take?’
There was an almost combative tone to Ben’s question.
‘Clothes, mostly,’ Mark told him. ‘Some suits. A couple of pictures…’
‘Yeah, I saw those.’
‘And there’s a box of papers underneath his desk. Bank statements. Insurance records mostly. Dad didn’t keep a diary or anything, so none of it’s any good to the police. I was going to take them home.’
‘Fine.’
There was a prolonged silence. Mark scuffed his shoes against the kitchen’s linoleum and thought about moving next door. When Ben spoke, his voice was removed, almost hypnotic.
‘They say that when your father dies, it’s actually quite liberating. The intercessionary figure has been taken out of the picture. There’s supposed to be this feeling of transcendence.’
‘So is that what you feel? Liberated by what’s happened? Transcendent?’
I don’t have time for this, Mark thought. Not now. Not tonight.
‘It’s funny,’ Ben went on, ignoring the question. ‘I remember when we were children, when Dad first left, I had these feelings of guilt about it that went on for so long… It was as if everything was my fault, you know? We used to talk about this, you and me, don’t you remember?’
Mark nodded. Ben was still looking out of the window, waiting for the moment to turn. It might almost have been a performance, a stage picture. From the fourth floor there was nothing to see but swathes of grey sky and a clutter of roofs.
Ben carried on: ‘It got to be ridiculous. I started to think that if I’d behaved better, eaten what was put in front of me, not cried so much as a child, that Dad wouldn’t have left like he did. But what kind of shit is that to be thinking? It was his fault, not mine. It tookme a long time to realize that.’
‘Me too,’ Mark said instinctively, as if it would help.
‘I had a kind of fantasy of reunion right up until my late teens. Like he would just suddenly reappear and beg our forgiveness. Turn up at school and say everything was going to be all right and then take us out for lunch at Garfunkel’s. Did you ever have that?’
Mark shook his head.
‘Maybe it would have been easier if Mum had had a boyfriend, someone that could have replaced him. I always felt that her life was structured to avoid pain after that, you know? I think that’s why she never remarried.’
Mark made a gesture of understanding, something with his face that he hoped would seem empathetic. In his experience, this kind of talk went nowhere. It was just the theorizing of the artist, the amateur psychologist enjoying his private confession. He thought for a moment that Ben might have been drinking.
‘You getting much work done?’ he asked, trying to steer him off the subject. ‘How’s the picture of that girl going, the good-looking one? What’s the deal on the exhibition?’
But Ben just ignored him.
‘It never occurred to me until the other day that Mum might still have been in love with Dad.’ He lit a cigarette and exhaled very slowly. ‘Do you think that’s possible? Do you think, even after everything that happened, that a woman could still love a man after being treated that way? It’s not beyond the realms of possibility…’
But this was a step too far. The question actually embarrassed Mark. He hid his discomfort by opening up a nearby cupboard and pretending to rearrange the rusty tins and damp packets inside. ‘No,’ he replied eventually, ‘it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. Listen, I’m in a hurry. Was there something that you wanted?’
And this gave Ben the opportunity that he had been seeking. Turning from the window, he said, ‘No, the will’s straight forward. Everything to you. We’ve been through it.’
So that’s what this is about.
‘Look, I’ve already told you. We can halve everything. The flat. The money. All his stuff. You just have to say the word.’
‘Forget it. I don’t want to do that thing with Mum where we went through every room, dividing everything up…’
‘He only left it to me because he didn’t know you. He probably thought you would give it away or something.’
‘Probably thought?’ Ben picked on the phrase as if it carried some sort of significance. It was now obvious to Mark that he was looking for a fight.
‘Sorry, am I supposed to know what he was thinking? Tell me, brother, and let’s be honest about this. If things hadn’t worked out the way they had, if Dad had just been run over by a bus six months ago, what would you have done with forty-five grand in cash and a tiny fucking flat in Paddington?’
He waited for an answer. Ben remained silent.
‘Well, there you go. You would have given it to me, or to Alice to pay her backfor whatever you owe her.’
He should not have said that. A mistake. Ben’s face tightened into retaliation.
‘I don’t owe Alice anything, OK? I make money out of my work. Whatever her dad gives her is between them. It has nothing to do with me or with anybody else.’
‘Sure. Right. I’m sorry.’
Ben moved past him, his shoulder brushing Mark’s chest. They went into the sitting room.
‘That’s obviously what he was thinking, though.’
Following him, Mark said, ‘What was that?’
‘He knew that kind of money could really help me out. He knew all about Alice’s family, the imbalance between us. It was j
ust spite.’
Now Mark raised his voice.
‘Oh get off it, will you? You and I both know that’s a lot of shit. The will was altered for the last time over a year ago. He didn’t know anything about Alice’s family. He wasn’t striking out at you from beyond the grave, or whatever kind of conspiracy theory you’re trying to cookup.’
Ben’s eyes conceded the truth of this, but he said nothing.
‘Listen,’ Mark tried to end the argument. ‘Dad was proud of the fact that you were making a living doing the thing you loved. He told me that. Please just take his money. Buy yourself a couple of suits, take Alice on holiday and sort out whatever it is you two are fighting about. Seb pays me eighty grand a year. I have my own flat. I’ve got equity, a company car, all the clothes and gadgets a bloke could need. You’re a married man. You might have kids soon. Think about that.’
‘Always so organized,’ Ben muttered.
‘Eh?’
‘Always thinking about the future. Always an answer for everything.’
‘Well, at least one of us has his head out of the clouds.’
‘And that’s you, is it, Mark? Tell me, has this thing got to you at all?’
They might have been teenagers again, bickering in the school holidays. The exchange was a graphic illustration of their relationship: Mark doing his best to push forward out of the past while justifying his more practical nature to an incessantly analytical brother who preferred blame and self-pity.
‘What? Are we competing about Dad now? Who’s more fucked up? Who’s losing most sleep? You think I have to stand in a window looking moody and smoking a cigarette or I’m not grieving properly?’
It wasn’t a bad comeback. Mark was quite pleased with it. For a moment Ben was silenced, although the respite did not last long.
‘I’m just saying it’s weird the way a guy like Jock McCreery, or that Yank Robert Bone, or any one of the stiff-backed suits from MI6 seemed more affected by what’s happened than you do. You forgive and forget so easily. Nothing gets to you. Nothing makes you feel.’
The Hidden Man (2003) Page 12