But when to approach him? Outside the Oratory, Kite had been trapped in two conversations: the first with the tall, bearded man who had offered him cigarettes; the second with a good-looking businessman, possibly of Arab descent, wearing thousand-dollar shoes and an expensive suit. After what had happened before the service, Cara reckoned she could bump Kite and take her chances with an open pitch.
‘What’s going on?’
Matt Tomkins was on the phone again, calling for no good reason other than to make her afternoon more difficult than it already was.
‘What’s going on is that you’re making me answer the phone when what I want to be doing is getting on with my job. What do you want?’
‘Just to let you know, Eve and Villanelle are outside Smallbone in the Astra.’
‘Eve’ was the codename for Tessa Swinburn, ‘Villanelle’ was Kieran Dean. Vosse had a penchant for naming team members after characters in television shows. Cara looked across the busy street. There was a branch of Smallbone of Devizes on the corner of Thurloe Place. She couldn’t see the Vauxhall Astra but assumed it was parked nearby.
‘Great. Can I go now?’ she said.
‘I guess,’ Tomkins replied.
‘Thank you, Matthew. Always nice to chat.’
She hung up. Kite was heading back into the church. It was time to make her move.
‘Do you have time to talk?’ Fariba asked.
Kite was keen to learn about Paris. It was obvious that Fariba knew something of Xavier’s state of mind in the hours leading up to his death. He looked at his phone. It was not yet half-past twelve. He wasn’t due at the gallery until four.
‘Or we can do it another time,’ Fariba suggested, misinterpreting Kite’s reaction. ‘You may not feel like talking today. We are all still in shock.’
‘No, it sounds like a good idea. I’d appreciate that. It would be helpful to find out what was going on. I hadn’t seen Xav for at least a year. If you could explain what he was going through …’
‘Of course.’ Fariba adjusted the sleeve of his jacket. His movements were clean and precise, as if life were a martial art he had taken years to perfect. ‘I can try to help as much as I can.’
Kite looked up to see Cosmo de Paul scuttling away from the funeral, hailing a cab which did a U-turn opposite Smallbone of Devizes. Doubtless he had lunch at White’s in the diary or a pressing engagement with a Russian woman half his age charging £300 per hour. Looking back along Brompton Road, Kite saw the woman in the long black coat standing alone outside the enclosure. She was talking on the phone. There was something about her that didn’t sit well. For thirty years Kite had been at risk from surveillance and his antennae were finely tuned. It was possible that a team had been put on him at the funeral.
‘You have a family?’ Fariba asked.
‘One on the way,’ Kite replied.
‘Wonderful. Congratulations.’
‘And you?’
Fariba held up his right hand and showed Kite four splayed fingers.
‘Jesus. You’ve been busy.’
‘Not me. My wife does all the hard work. When is your child due?’
‘Late summer.’
Kite had forgotten to put money in the collection and explained that he was going back inside. While there, he looked quickly at Facebook on his phone and searched for Xavier’s profile. Jahan Fariba’s photograph came up as one of Xavier’s contacts. He put a twenty-pound note in the collection box and went back outside.
To his surprise, the woman in the long black overcoat was waiting for him on the steps.
‘Excuse me. It’s been driving me mad,’ she said. ‘Have we met before?’
She removed her sunglasses. Kite ran her features – soft brown eyes, a button nose, peroxide blonde hair and a wide, singer’s mouth – through a memory palace of names and faces, but turned up nothing.
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘Did we meet through Xav?’
‘No. Definitely not.’ The woman stared at Kite intently. ‘I’m Emma,’ she said, offering a hand to shake. Her skin was soft and cold to the touch. ‘It’s the weirdest thing. Your face is so familiar.’
If she was a friend or colleague of de Paul’s, it was possible she knew of him by reputation, but Kite didn’t want to establish the link.
‘I know!’ she said, suddenly remembering. Her face was overcome with relief. ‘I was working for one of the galleries at Frieze. You came in and chatted to my colleague. I think you were interested in buying something.’
‘Really? What a good memory you have.’
‘Never lets me down,’ she said, tapping the side of her head. ‘I just couldn’t place you.’
She had a sharp south-eastern accent, London or Essex or Kent. The fact that she had made no effort to soften its edges made Kite think that she wasn’t interested in blending into Xavier’s rarefied world. She was dressed like a model or fashion designer but, on closer inspection, the coat and black leather boots were off-the-peg.
‘Which gallery were you working for?’ he asked.
‘Karoo,’ she replied. ‘Based in New York. We were mostly displaying Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Marc Quinn.’
That was all Kite needed to know that ‘Emma’ was not who she was pretending to be. In thirty years of collecting and selling paintings, he had never had a conversation with a New York gallerist about Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk or Marc Quinn. Several collectors he knew had piled into the Cool Britannia crowd in the 1990s and made small fortunes as a result, but to Kite a lot of the work by the Young British Artists of that period was soulless Groucho bullshit. For the second time in less than half an hour he was obliged to set a trap for a stranger.
‘Are you sure that was at Frieze?’ he said as though still searching the recesses of his mind for some distant recollection of the encounter.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Frieze.’
Whoever
