Torabi feigned mock outrage. ‘I didn’t kill your friend,’ he said. ‘Your friend killed himself. He was dying from the moment you betrayed him in France.’
‘We’ve been over this.’ Kite stayed in character, stung by the accusation and privately conceding that it was at least partly true. Everything that went wrong in Xavier’s life went wrong from that moment onwards. He said: ‘I was amazed by what happened between him and Hana. I told him he was crazy, that it was a stupid risk, but they were just drunk kids looking to have a good time.’
‘But she was so much older than he was,’ Torabi argued. ‘It is Hana who should have been more discreet, no?’
‘I agree.’ Kite was baffled that Torabi was so concerned about the incident. By cuckolding his father, had Xavier somehow humiliated Torabi?
‘Did my father ever find out?’ he asked.
‘Not to my knowledge, no.’
This, too, was true. Kite had never mentioned it to him. There was a knock at the door. Kamran entered holding a piece of paper and a small bottle of Volvic, both of which he passed to Torabi. Torabi read the note, scrunched it up and let it drop to the floor.
‘Where’s my wife?’ Kite demanded. ‘What’s happening out there? Was that message to do with her?’
He was worried that the trail had gone cold. Wherever he was being held, MI5 had not been able to locate him. The Iranian unscrewed the Evian and drank the contents in four long gulps.
‘Never mind about that,’ he said, dropping the bottle at his feet. It landed within a few inches of the balled-up note. He ordered Kamran to leave the room then said: ‘Why did you take me to the attic?’
‘Excuse me?’
It was the single flaw in Kite’s account, the one anomaly in what had otherwise been a watertight version of the afternoon’s events.
‘Why did you want to hide in the attic?’ Torabi shrugged his shoulders and frowned mockingly, as if to suggest that he had finally cornered Kite in a lie from which there was no logical escape. ‘There was the whole house – the ground floor, the upstairs bedrooms. Why did we go to my father’s quarters?’
Kite gambled that Torabi’s memory was not as detailed nor as vivid as his own.
‘Because we were playing hide-and-seek! We wanted to win. Ali – sorry, I mean your father’s – rooms were a mystery to everyone in the house. Martha had never been up there. I wondered if she and Xavier would even think to look in the attic. It felt like it was out of bounds. It seemed the perfect place to hide.’
‘Then why did you leave me alone?’
‘I didn’t leave you alone! You were a nine-year-old boy. I was trying to make sure you had fun. There were two rooms up there so it made sense for us to split up. As I remember, you were excited by the idea of being on your own. Don’t you remember that?’
Torabi ignored this. ‘What did you do in the opposite room?’ he asked. ‘What was in there?’
Kite had to be careful. If Torabi had a memory of the noise of a camera taking pictures, if the young José had come out onto the landing and pressed his ear to the closed door or even looked through the keyhole or a gap in the frame, he was finished.
‘I’ve already told you. It was your father’s office. I had sat with him the previous afternoon telling him about Bijan.’
‘So it was not a mystery to you?’
Kite shook his head, as if to suggest that Torabi was twisting his words. ‘I said the attic was a mystery to Martha and Xavier, not to me. I didn’t think they’d come up and look for us. They’d assume it was out of bounds.’
‘You did not take photographs?’
Kite summoned a look of outrage.
‘What? Photographs? No. Why?’
Kite looked up. Kamran seemed to understand something vital about the nature of the conversation. It felt as though the two men were suddenly going to produce some ghastly rabbit out of a hat which would expose every lie and double-cross Kite had worked so hard to conjure.
‘It is what a spy would do,’ Torabi said quietly.
‘Is it? Take a risk like that while playing a game of hide-and-seek with a little boy? An eighteen-year-old waiting for his A-level results? I don’t think so.’
Kite still did not know with any degree of certainty whether or not José had heard the noise of the camera. Perhaps he had, but now had no recollection of it. Perhaps Xavier had told him something about Kite’s mysterious, emerging passion for photography that summer which had led Torabi to draw the obvious conclusion.
‘So you just hid in the room? Behind the chair? On your own?’
‘No, I was in there with Bono and Meryl Streep. Yes! I was on my own. What else was I supposed to be doing? Making a cup of tea?’
To Kite’s surprise, Torabi appeared to accept this. He nodded at Kamran, issued an order in Farsi and the chauffeur left the room.
‘When did you find out that Eskandarian was your father?’ Kite asked. He wanted to try to regain control of the conversation.
‘You don’t ask the questions. I ask the questions.’
‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘So go ahead and ask.’
‘Was it true, your description of my father’s reaction? When I cut my head? That he embraced me, he embraced my mother?’
Kite finally saw what it was all about. Absent fathers. Absent love. A missing life. Torabi was on a mission of revenge against the people who had betrayed Ali Eskandarian. If Kite could persuade him that he understood that, that he had played no part in what had happened to his father, he might yet survive.
‘It’s all true,’ he said, playing on the Iranian’s sentimentality. ‘He loved you very much, Ramin. Should I call you Ramin or do you prefer José?’
‘You call me Ramin. That is my name now.’
Kite continued, improvising: ‘Knowing what I know about fathers and sons,
