That explains the unmarked cigarettes, Kite thought. Bought by the carton in Cape Town or Phoenix duty-free.
‘Had you seen him recently?’ he asked.
The American shook his head. ‘Not for a year or so. I met a girl, moved back home. Xav kind of vanished, like he always did. No way he took his own life though. Not a guy with that much spirit. Must have been accidental. You?’
‘I hadn’t seen him for a long time.’
Kite looked out among the gathering crowds, the stiff-backed grandees and the poleaxed mourners. He was sure that his friend had taken his own life but didn’t want to explore that theory with a stranger who knew things about Xavier from therapy that Kite himself had never been privy to. One day he would get to the truth of what had happened, but not today. A tall woman in a long black overcoat was walking towards the church beside a short, bullish man in a pinstriped suit. With a thud of irritation, Kite recognised him as Cosmo de Paul. From Alford to Edinburgh, from MI6 to Royal Dutch Shell, de Paul had been a malign presence in Kite’s life and a consistent thorn in the side of BOX 88. Kite doubted that de Paul had spent more than fifteen minutes in Xavier’s company since the turn of the century. That he should attend his funeral merely demonstrated that he valued the opportunity to network more than he valued his friendship with the deceased.
‘Who’s the girl?’ asked the American, indicating the tall woman in the long black overcoat. She was wearing a pair of oversized Jackie O sunglasses, drawing attention to her own grief while at the same time challenging anyone to speak to her. If she was de Paul’s latest wife or mistress, Kite sent his condolences. If she was a friend of Xavier’s, it was the first time he had set eyes on her.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Time to go in. Thanks for the cigarette.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Cara’s basic cover, agreed with Vosse, was to role-play a friend from Cape Town who had got to know ‘Xav’ while he was drying out at a clinic in Plettenberg Bay. Research carried out by Tessa Swinburn had shown that Bonnard had enjoyed two separate stints at rehabilitation centres in South Africa, most recently in Mpumalanga. It was plausible that he had befriended ‘Emma’, an English teacher from East London, while passing through Cape Town. Cara hoped that by referring obliquely to Bonnard’s struggles with narcotics and alcohol, she would prevent anyone she happened to speak to from testing her legend too closely.
She was aware, of course, that Xavier had been to Alford College, a place she knew only as the school which had produced at least three of the Conservative politicians who had done so much to damage British public life in the previous decade. Looking around, she saw men in their mid-to-late forties whom she assumed were Bonnard’s contemporaries. Some of them, with their signet rings and their Thomas Pink shirts, looked like dyed-in-the-wool Tory whack jobs pining for the halcyon days of Agincourt and Joan Hunter Dunn; others seemed no different to the bland, blameless middle-aged men who haunted the corridors and conference rooms of Thames House and Vauxhall Cross. Cara had never fully understood the widespread British prejudice against public schoolboys. It wasn’t exactly their fault that at the age of eight, their parents had seen fit to pack them off to boarding school with not much more than a tuck box and a thermal vest. To Cara, who had grown up in a happy two-parent, two-sibling house in Ipswich, attending the local grammar and partying on weekends like Gianluca Vacchi, spending five years at Alford sounded like a prison sentence.
‘Hello there.’
She looked down. A squat, vain-looking man with a cut-glass accent was introducing himself.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘You look a bit lost.’
If there was one thing designed to instil in Cara Jannaway a prejudice against posh, entitled ex-public schoolboys, it was being told by this silver-spooned creep that she looked ‘lost’.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I was just about to go in.’
‘Me too,’ the man replied. ‘I’m Cosmo. Cosmo de Paul.’
‘Emma.’
They shook hands. Was it a set-up? Had Lachlan Kite become suspicious and sent him over to check her out?
‘Are you a friend? Family?’
‘Friend,’ Cara replied, grateful for her sunglasses as she looked around for BIRD. She hadn’t been able to spot him among the dense crowds moving into the Oratory and wondered if he was ahead of her, in all senses. ‘You?’
‘Xavier and I were at school together.’
‘And where was that, Alford?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Ah. Good for you.’
Cara found herself walking alongside de Paul, making halting small talk about London and the weather. She was glad to be free of the miserable, drip-drip inertia of the Acton safe flat but didn’t like it that a stranger had latched onto her in this way. She had heard that a certain type of man preyed on a certain type of woman at funerals, hoping to usher hysteria and grief into the bedroom; if this little runt with his snub-nose and Rees-Mogg pinstripe tried it on, she’d push his face into the baptism font.
‘Are you here alone?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. I don’t know anybody here. Just came to pay my respects.’
All around her, middle-aged men and women in scarves and overcoats were embracing one another, recognising faces from yesteryear and nodding respectfully. It was as if the funeral of Xavier Bonnard was not merely an occasion of great solemnity, but also a reunion of sorts for a generation of men and women, schooled at St Paul’s and Roedean and Oxbridge, whose paths had diverged some thirty years earlier, only to be brought back together by the sudden, tragic death of a mutual friend. Like the posh weddings Cara had occasionally attended, impeccably mannered ushers in morning coats were handing out the Order
