who shot him is most probably still out there.’
‘Unless the CIA already killed him,’ the girl replied. She had a faultless English accent and wore blue-rimmed glasses that were too big for her face.
‘Sure,’ said Goatee. ‘But if they didn’t, I mean, if he’s still at large, just imagine what goes through that guy’s mind, like last thing at night. He’d be — what? — like seventy now?’
‘I guess.’
‘Ben?’
A man was standing beside the table holding a guide to the museum in one hand and a walking stick in the other. McCreery.
‘Jock.’ Ben stood up so quickly that his thighs knocked on the underside of the table, spilling a splash of tea on to the white surface. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’
‘Ditto. Are you on your own? Not with Alice?’
‘Not with Alice,’ Ben said, and left it at that. ‘I thought you lived in Guildford.’
It was a pointless remark, but he had been stuck for something to say. McCreery was Mark’s friend, a stranger to Ben, a background figure in the chaos of death. Shorter and more overweight in the lower part of his body than Ben remembered, McCreery was wearing a bright green wind cheater, hiking boots, and denim trousers with that pale fade particular to jeans worn by men in late middle-age. He looked suitably dressed for a long walk on the Downs.
‘I do live in Guildford, yes,’ he explained, leaning on the stick. ‘But I’m in town for the weekend. Haven’t been here since Foster stuck the roof on. Appalling, isn’t it?’
‘I think it’s incredible,’ Ben told him, and wondered if McCreery would respect his honesty.
‘Do you really? For me it’s highly derivative of Pei, you know, the Oriental chap who messed up the Louvre.’
The Japanese girl appeared to swallow hard as Ben said, ‘Right. Look, do you want to sit down?’
‘If that would be all right. Are you sure? Thankyou.’
Goatee shuffled along and McCreery squeezed in, laying his walking stick at an angle across the table.
‘What did you do to your leg?’
‘Rheumatism.’ McCreery gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘Runs in the family, I’m afraid. My late father suffered from it, his father before him. There’s been a long line of McCreerys hobbling about in their fifties.’
Ben made a small noise in the back of his throat that came off as a grunt and wondered how long McCreery would stick around. Already he could feel the afternoon slipping from his grasp. They had only one subject in common and he was not in the mood to discuss his father.
Sure enough, McCreery soon embarked on a conversation about the funeral.
‘So who did you talk to at the wake?’ he asked.
‘Oh, everybody and nobody. A lot of my father’s colleagues. People from Divisar and…’ Ben searched for the appropriate euphemism ‘… your company.’ McCreery smiled in an effort to acknowledge his tact. ‘To be honest, I found it hard going. Alice was great. You and your wife were both very kind. But I just couldn’t get my head round the whole thing, you know? Sort of took the wind out of me.’
‘Of course,’ McCreery said. ‘Of course. I must say that both Gillian and I were rather concerned about you.’
‘About me?’
‘Yes. Conscious that you didn’t want to be there, that you’d rather have been somewhere else. I went upstairs to my bedroom at one point and saw you standing alone on the drive. Felt for you, old chap. Bloody awful thing. I’m so sorry.’
Ben didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or grateful.
‘Well, I just went out for a smoke,’ he said. ‘Just to grab some air, that was all.’
‘Of course.’
McCreery bobbed his head gently and looked up at the roof. He appeared to be giving it a second chance, but then frowned and finally settled his gaze on a nearby Egyptian sculpture. Changing the subject, he asked after Alice and then briefly discussed an article she had written in the Standard a few days earlier. Ben began to warm to him, if only because McCreery appeared to be showing a genuine interest in his family’s welfare. He asked thoughtful, intelligent questions about the police enquiry, and seemed acutely sensitive to the unique psychological predicament in which Ben and Mark had found themselves. McCreery’s concern was all the more touching when Ben considered that he too had lost a friend, a man he had worked alongside at MI6 for almost twenty years. The idea of losing one of his own close friends was one of Ben’s deepest fears.
‘I guess it’s been difficult for you, too,’ he said. ‘Dad was your best mate. It can’t have been easy.’ McCreery sighed.
‘Well, it’s funny,’ he said. ‘One gets older, one has to adjust to sudden loss. The booze, accidents of one kind or another, bloody cancer. But there was something very special about Christopher. I think it’s a great tragedy that you never had the opportunity to know him as well as we all did. A very great tragedy indeed.’
Ben remembered the conversation on the drive at McCreery’s house, Robert Bone saying something very similar about Keen. He thought of Bone’s letter and wondered if McCreery could be trusted with its contents.
‘You know, when people die, everybody writes, don’t they?’ he said. McCreery looked slightly confused. ‘I mean, the husband, the wife, they always get a letter. Then you write to the children, to the parents if they had any, to all the close relatives of the person who’s died. But the friends just get left behind. Nobody thinks of them. They’ve maybe just lost the one person in the world that they could confide in, someone where the roots might have gone even deeper than a marriage. A friend from school. A friend from childhood. But nobody thinks of them. They just get forgotten.’
McCreery produced a wonderful smile that broke up the general blandness of his features, the pale, puffy cheeks, the thinning grey hair. His eyes seemed to congratulate Ben for the observation.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I must say I didn’t receive a single letter of condolence about your father. Not a single one.’ Making a joke of it, he added, ‘And you?’
‘Fifty-three at the last count,’ Ben said, and they both started to laugh.
‘Including mine?’ McCreery asked.
‘Including yours.’
It was a lovely moment, rueful and sustained. Goatee and the Japanese girl were long gone, and they were now alone at the table.
‘Makes me think of my own son,’ McCreery said. ‘My eldest, Dan.’
‘You have children?’
‘Two, yes. We’ve just had the most almighty bloody row, as a matter of fact.’
‘What about?’
‘Well, I can’t really stand Dan’s wife,’ McCreery replied, matter-of-factly. ‘And I’m absolutely certain that she can’t stand me.’
‘That’s not easy.’
‘No, no it’s not. How do you get on with Alice’s parents?’
‘So-so,’ Ben said. ‘Her mother drinks too much, does a lot of charity work and Chardonnay. Dad’s a self-made millionaire. Wants to play golf with me the whole time and calls Alice his “princess”. Still, they’re decent people.’ McCreery smiled as Ben repeated his earlier question. ‘What did you argue about?’
And it took him several seconds to compose his thoughts. The Great Court was now very crowded and there was a long queue at the cafe.
‘Well, I think Bella — that’s my daughter-in-law — is of the opinion that Gillian and I rather ruined Dan’s life,’ he said.
‘How’s that?’
‘Oh, the usual Foreign Office whinge. Winging him around the world as a small boy. Germany, London, Moscow. She thinks he never settled, never put down any roots.’
‘Is that important?’
‘Well, apparently.’ McCreery squeezed his eyes shut and blinked rapidly. ‘She’s done a bit of a job on him, actually, convinced Dan that we were somehow unsuitable as parents. Let’s see, at the last count I was an imperialist snob, a racist, and — let me get this right — a typical Tory homophobe.’
