‘How did you meet Xavier?’ de Paul asked, accepting an Order of Service from a good-looking man in his twenties who looked as though he’d walked straight off the set of Four Weddings and a Funeral.
‘Out in South Africa,’ she said.
‘I see,’ he replied, absorbing the euphemism.
One of the mourners passed de Paul and touched him on the back, saying only: ‘Cosmo’ in a low murmur before settling into a pew. Cara told de Paul that she would prefer to be alone ‘at this difficult time’ and was glad to see him take the hint.
‘Of course. It was charming to meet you.’
‘Likewise,’ she said, and moved quickly along the nave.
She was staggered by the opulence of the church. Tessa’s research into the Bonnard family had revealed that Xavier’s mother, Rosamund, was the daughter of a duke whose family appeared to have owned, at one time or another, most of the land between Cambridge and Northampton. Perhaps it took that kind of old school clout to secure the entirety of Brompton Oratory for a midweek funeral. Certainly it looked as though the church was going to be three-quarters full. There were already at least four hundred people filling the pews and many more still shuffling in through the entrance. Cara stopped halfway along the aisle and turned to look for Kite. To her astonishment she saw him immediately, standing no more than ten feet away beneath a sculpture of St Matthew. It was the first time that anyone on the team had been that close to BIRD. She was struck by how easily she recognised him from surveillance photographs: the dark hair, greying slightly at the temples; the narrow blue eyes, catching light from a window in the southern facade; a face at rest, giving nothing away, but with the faintest hint of mischief in the lines around his mouth. Not a noticeably handsome man, but striking and undeniably attractive. Cara had a habit of comparing people to animals. If Robert Vosse was a cow, plodding and decent, Matt Tomkins was a vulture, circling for carrion. If Cosmo de Paul was a weasel, sly and opportunistic, Lachlan Kite was not the bird of his codename, but rather a leopard, lean and prowling and solitary.
She sat at the end of a vacant pew, removed the sunglasses and immediately took out her mobile phone.
He’s here, she typed to Vosse, glancing up at Kite as she accidentally pressed ‘Send’ too early on WhatsApp. To her horror, she realised that Kite was looking directly at her. Cara returned to the message, her heart beating so fast that her hand began to shake as she held the phone. Dark grey suit, tailored. Slim. Six foot max. Appears to be alone.
The service was scheduled to begin in five minutes. Cara decided to return Kite’s gaze. If she could forge a connection with him, however briefly, it was more probable that he might talk to her in the aftermath of the funeral. That was the Holy Grail as far as Vosse was concerned: to get alongside BIRD and to cultivate a relationship with him.
She put the phone back in her coat pocket, composing herself. But when she turned and looked back towards the statue of St Matthew, Kite had disappeared.
Walking into the church, Kite was suddenly confronted by the sight of Martha talking with a crowd of university friends. He had not expected her to make the trip from New York. His heart thumped as she turned around – and he realised that he had been mistaken. It was just a trick of the light. The desire to see her, of which Kite had barely been conscious, had momentarily scrambled his senses.
Looking up at the vast, vaulted ceiling, the grandeur of the Oratory reminded him of the great chapel at Alford, religion on a scale Kite had never before experienced as a bewildered thirteen-year-old boy, arriving from the wilds of Scotland in an ill-fitting suit in the late summer of 1984. That first year at his new school had thrust him into a world of privilege and wealth with which at first Kite had struggled to come to terms. More than thirty-five years later, every second face in the Oratory was a pupil from those days or a friend of Xavier’s whom Kite recalled from the 1990s. The intervening years had not been kind to most of them. Kite was blessed with a photographic memory, but some were barely recognisable. The eyes remained constant, but the features, like his own, had been bullied by time. Everywhere he looked Kite saw slackened skin, thin, greying hair, bodies warped by age and fat. To his left, Leander Saltash, once a lean, aggressive opening batsman, now a bald, stooped television director with a BAFTA to his name; to his right, a man he took to be the diminutive, acne-ridden Henry Urlwin, now transformed into a six-foot beanpole with a chalky beard. Even Cosmo de Paul, that creature of the yoga retreat and the dyeing salon, looked washed out and slightly overweight, as if no vitamin supplement or exercise regime could reverse the inevitable decline of middle age.
‘Tell me. Did I fire six shots or only five?’
Kite felt two fingers pressed into his lower back, a hand clamped on his shoulder. It was a voice he hadn’t heard in years, a voice he had
