Headhunters

coordination skills after all. But twenty minutes later the reproduction was finally in position in the frame and the original in the portfolio.

I hung up the picture, closed the door behind me, checked that I had not left any clues and left the kitchen with a sweaty hand round the portfolio handle.

Walking through the middle room, I cast a glance out of the window and caught a glimpse of a semi-stripped crown of a tree. I stopped. The glowing red leaves that remained made the tree look as if it were aflame in the oblique rays of sunlight that leaked out between the clouds. Rubens. The colours. They were his colours.

It was a magical moment. A moment of triumph. A moment of metamorphosis. In such a moment you see everything so clearly that decisions which had seemed fraught with difficulty before suddenly appear as self-evident. I was going to become a father, I had planned to tell her tonight, but I knew now that this was the right moment. Now, here, at the scene of the crime, with Rubens under my arm and this beautiful, majestic tree before me. This was the moment that should be cast in bronze, the eternal memory Diana and I should share and take out on rainy days. The decision that she, unsullied, would believe was taken in a moment of lucidity and for no other reason than love for her and our child-to-be. And only I, the lion, the paterfamilias, would know the dark secret: that the zebra’s throat had been savaged after an ambush, that the ground had been bloodied before the prize had been laid before them, my innocents. Yes, that’s how our love should be consolidated. I took out my phone, removed one glove and selected the number of her Prada phone. I tried to formulate the sentence in my head while waiting to be connected. ‘I want to give you a child, my darling.’ Or: ‘My darling, let me give you…’

John Lennon played his G11sus4 chord.

‘It’s been a hard day’s night…’ So true, so true. Elated, I smiled.

But in a flash I understood.

That I could hear it.

That something was wrong.

I lowered my phone.

And in the distance, but clear enough, I heard the Beatles beginning to play ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Her ringtone.

My feet were cemented to the grey paper on the ground.

Then they began to move in the direction of the sound, my heart like the heavy beat of kettle drums.

The sound came from behind a half-open door to the corridor on the far side of the reception rooms.

I opened the door.

It was a bedroom.

The bed in the middle of the room was made but had obviously been slept in. At the foot lay a suitcase, and beside it was a chair with some clothes draped over the back. A suit hung on a hanger in the open wardrobe. The suit Clas Greve had worn at the interview. From somewhere in the room Lennon and McCartney were singing in unison with an energy they were never to regain on subsequent records. I looked around. And knelt. Bent down. And there it was. The Prada mobile phone. Under the bed. It must have slipped out of her pocket. Presumably as he tore her trousers off. And she had not realised the phone was gone until… until…

I visualised her tempting backside this morning, the furious search through clothes and handbag.

I stood up again. Much too quickly, I suppose, for the room began to whirl around. I stuck out a hand against the wall.

The answerphone cut in, and there was her chirrupy voice.

‘Hi, this is Diana. I haven’t got my phone to hand…’

True enough.

‘But you know what to do…’

Yes, I did. My brain had registered somewhere that I had used the ungloved hand to support myself, and that therefore I would have to remember to wipe the wall.

‘Have a brilliant day!’

That might be difficult, though.

Beep.

PART THREE Second Interview

9 SECOND INTERVIEW

MY FATHER, IAN BROWN, was a keen, though not a very good, chess player. He had been taught to play by his father when he was five, and he read chess manuals and studied classic games. However, he didn’t teach me to play chess until I was fourteen, when my most receptive years were over. I had an aptitude for chess, though, and when I was sixteen I beat him for the first time. He smiled as though he were proud of me, but I know he hated it. He reassembled the pieces and we began a revenge match. I played with the white pieces as usual; he tried to make me believe that he was giving me an advantage. After a few moves he excused himself and went into the kitchen, where I knew he took a swig from a bottle of gin. When he returned I had swapped two pieces, but he didn’t realise. Four moves later he sat gawping at my white queen opposite his black king. And he saw that the next move would be checkmate. He was so funny to look at that I couldn’t restrain myself and started to laugh. And I could see from his expression that he knew what had happened. He stood up and swept all the pieces off the board. Then he hit me. My knees gave way and I fell, more out of terror than the force of the blow. He had never hit me before.

‘You switched some pieces,’ he hissed. ‘My son does not cheat.’

I could taste blood in my mouth. The white queen lay on the floor in front of me. The crown was chipped. Hatred burned like bile through my throat and chest. I picked up the damaged queen and put it back on the board. Then the other pieces. One by one. Replaced them exactly as they had been.

‘Your move, Dad.’

For that is what the player with the most cold-blooded hatred does when he has been on the point of winning and his opponent has unexpectedly hit him in the face, struck somewhere it hurts, found his terror. He doesn’t lose his overview of the board but puts his terror aside and keeps to his plan. Breathes in, reconstructs, continues the game, walks away with the victory. Leaves the scene without any triumphant gestures.

I sat at the end of the table and saw Clas Greve’s mouth moving. Saw his cheeks tensing and relaxing and forming words that were obviously comprehensible to Ferdinand and the two Pathfinder representatives, at any rate they were clearly satisfied, all three of them. How I hated that mouth. Hated the grey-pink gums, the solid tombstone teeth, yes, even the shape of that revolting orifice; a straight cleft between two upward-pointing corners suggesting a smile, the same incised smile with which Bjorn Borg had charmed the world. And with which Clas Greve was now seducing his future employer, Pathfinder. But most of all I hated his lips. The lips that had touched my wife’s lips, my wife’s skin, probably her pale red nipples and for certain her dripping wet, open vagina. I imagined I could see a blonde pubic hair in a crease in the fleshy part of his lower lip.

I had sat silently for almost half an hour while Ferdinand with imbecilic commitment had reeled off idiotic questions from the interview guide as though they were his own.

At the beginning of the interview Greve had exclusively addressed himself to me. But increasingly he realised that I was only there as an unannounced, passive monitor and that his job today was to enlighten the other three with the gospel according to Greve. He had, however, at regular intervals sent me quick questioning looks as though searching for a hint as to my role.

After a while the two representatives from Pathfinder, the company chairman and the public relations manager, had asked their questions, which naturally enough had centred around Greve’s time with HOTE. And Greve had given an account of how he and HOTE had taken a leading role in the development of TRACE, a lacquer containing around a hundred transmitters per millilitre which could be applied to any object. Its advantage was that the varnish was almost invisible and just like normal varnish it adhered so firmly to the object that it was impossible to