a man.
‘Well, we haven’t really had much of a chance to talk,’ she told him. ‘Ben’s been so involved with the police, you know? They’ve interviewed him, gone through every last detail of what happened…’
‘And they’re no closer to a suspect?’
‘No closer. A couple in the street remembered seeing a man sitting in a Mercedes about half an hour before the shooting, but they didn’t get a number-plate. There weren’t any security cameras outside the apartment or in the foyer. The police have hairs for DNA, but they could be anyone’s. It’s a lottery.’
‘Yes. Locard’s Principle.’
‘Locard’s Principle?’
Roth looked pleased to have sparked her interest.
‘A technique of forensics,’ he explained. ‘Everything leaves a trace.’
Calmly, he reached out and took hold of the sleeve of Alice’s shirt. She let her arm fall loose, but did not dislike the presumption of being touched. ‘If I come into contact with your clothes — even for a fraction of a second — I leave a mark, a record of myself.’ Roth released her, briefly taking the weight of her arm as it dropped. ‘It’s the same with footprints, or tiny fragments of skin. You can read books about it.’
Alice took a quarter-step backwards.
‘That’s fascinating.’
‘And have Divisar been able to help?’ he continued, as if nothing had passed between them. ‘Do the police thinkit may be connected to his job?’
‘I really don’t know. Ben’s dad was in MI6 before working there. They’re looking into that.’
‘I see.’
Roth appeared to be on the point of asking a further question when his expression stiffened considerably. A guest had caught his eye, someone he had clearly not been expecting to see. For the first time his focus on Alice appeared to waver, like an actor forgetting a line. To trace the source of this sudden change, Alice turned round. A slim, blonde woman — thirty-five going on forty — was approaching from the door, a knowing smile set across her face. She walked with a striding, authoritative self-confidence and Alice scoped her, head to toe: expensive if conservative hair; a decent black suit; striking, intelligent eyes; a handbag three seasons out of date.
‘Isn’t it extraordinary who you bump into at these things?’ the woman said. Alice disliked her on sight.
‘Elizabeth,’ Roth said, still noticeably unsettled. ‘It’s wonderful to see you. I thought you were in Moscow.’
‘Not so, not so,’ she said, and gazed distractedly around the room. She looked at Alice with a short glance that somehow managed to mix civility with a clear and unambiguous contempt.
‘Elizabeth Dulong,’ she said, proferring an iron handshake. She was wearing Chanel No. 19 and her accent bore the faintest trace of a Scottish burr. ‘I’m an old friend of Sebastian’s. And you are…?’
‘Alice,’ Alice replied. ‘Alice Keen…’
‘Christopher’s daughter-in-law,’ Roth explained, tilting his head for emphasis.
‘Oh. Is that so?’
Dulong gave Alice a brief second look but maintained a chill composure.
‘When did you arrive?’ Roth asked her, pushing a hand through his hair. All the easy assertiveness of his manner had disappeared. There was a clear connection between them, yet Alice assumed it was not sexual. Dulong was neither glamorous nor young enough to be Roth’s type, and she was wearing an engagement ring on her left hand.
‘Just arrived,’ she replied. She was exactly the sort of career woman — chippy, contemptuous of prettier girls — with whom Alice routinely fell out at the Standard. ‘I came down from London with Giles.’
‘With Giles.’
It was like a conversation in the bus queue. For several minutes they made stilted small talk until McCreery interrupted to ask where he could find Ben. In that time Alice was able to discover only that Elizabeth Dulong worked for an obscure section of the Ministry of Defence, and that she had met Roth at a cocktail party in Moscow hosted by the Russian Minister of Transport. Drinking sparkling mineral water, Dulong told a dull, clearly third-hand story about Boris Yeltsin before bombarding Alice with curt questions about the Standard, all of which conveyed her obvious contempt for journalists of every persuasion.
‘I’ll go and get him for you,’ she told McCreery, pleased to have an excuse to leave, and with a deliberately seductive glance at Roth, Alice slipped outside.
Ben was wearing a pair of polished, hundred-pound brogues that he had owned for a decade but barely worn. Shoes for weddings, funeral shoes. McCreery’s garden was soaked with rain, the lawn a catastrophe of molehills and weeds, and to avoid ruining them Ben had been forced to smoke his cigarette while walking up and down the drive. He began to feel self-conscious as cars left the wake and headed down the road. There he was, right in front of them, the bereaved younger son smoking alone in the gloom. When they saw Ben, one or two guests braked to a crawl and waved tentative goodbyes, but the majority were too embarrassed to stop, and accelerated towards Guildford evidently hoping that he hadn’t seen them. He wished that he had gone out of the back of the house, where there might have been a shed or shelter of some kind. Just to be alone for five minutes, away from the prying eyes of strangers.
He was taking a final drag on his second cigarette when a Mercedes pulled up beside him on the road. Through a misted window he recognized the American who had read from Keats at the funeral. His name had been printed on the service sheet. Something literal, he remembered. Something like Kite or Judge.
‘It’s Benjamin, isn’t it?’ the American said. He had switched off his engine. ‘My name is Robert Bone. We haven’t met. This is my wife Silvia.’
Ben ducked down and saw a pale-looking woman wearing a headscarf poring over a map in the passenger seat. Post-chemotherapy, he thought; she had the same exhausted features that had characterized his mother’s face in the final months of her life. Unlike Bone, she was not stepping out of the car.
The American was six foot four with a handshake as firm and sympathetic as any Ben had known all week. Compassionate, judicious eyes glowed beneath a dishevelled mop of white hair. It was a face Ben would have liked to paint: wearied by experience yet possessed of a certain benevolence. For the first time, against his expectations, he instinctively felt that he had come into contact with somebody who had been deeply affected by his father’s death, a friend for whom the loss of Keen would mean more than simply a twenty-minute funeral service and a glass of lukewarm wine. At first he put this feeling down to sheer melancholia.
‘You read at the service,’ he said. ‘ Endymion, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right. A beautiful piece. One of your dad’s favourites. But I guess you wouldn’t know that?’ Bone settled a hand on Ben’s shoulder. ‘It’s too bad, son. Really, it’s just too bad.’
A bird flew low over their heads and Ben followed it across the sky.
‘How did you know my father?’ he asked.
The American paused momentarily and seemed quickly to sweep aside considerations of tact or secrecy.
‘I used to work for the Central Intelligence Agency,’ he said. ‘Your father and I did time together in Afghanistan. I’m just sorry I didn’t catch up with you back there.’ He nodded towards McCreery’s house, the light winter drizzle now obliterating all colour in the garden. ‘I spoke to your brother quite a bit, and to your wife, Alice, about her journalism career and so forth. She seems a fine, ambitious person. She’s obviously gonna be very successful. But every time I looked over towards you, you seemed busy talking to somebody else.’
‘Yeah, it was hard getting away.’
‘No problem. Listen, I got a plane to catch back to the States. My wife hasn’t been well and…’
‘I’m sorry to hear that…’
‘But I’m gonna write you…’
Ben shook his head. ‘Please, there’s no need.’
‘No, not that kind of letter.’ Bone’s hand was still resting on his shoulder, as if by leaving it there he was fulfilling a promise to Keen. ‘There are things I need to tell you. Things your dad would have wanted you and Mark and Alice to know. He talked about you kids the whole time. I know that’s gotta be hard for you to hear right now, but Christopher always had a hard time’ — he paused — ‘ communicating. He was a stubborn sonofabitch, a goddam snob, too. But your old man was my best friend, Benjamin, and I wanna make sure you boys are OK.’
The American’s plain-speaking, unironic good-naturedness appealed to Ben in his despondent mood. Bone
