‘It’s funny.’ Ben looked relieved. ‘I thought you fancied him. I thought you two had a bit of a crush.’
The sentence died away in his mouth, a moment of frankness that he had not intended.
‘ Fancied him?’ Alice made a face of appalled disgust, like a child swallowing medicine. ‘He’s revolting. How could you think that?’
A great wave of relief, of confidence-boosting pleasure, swept through Ben’s body. He smiled.
‘Just a hunch,’ he said. ‘Just a paranoia.’
Again Alice ran her hand through his hair. They kissed now, the sweet forgiveness, and Ben felt the skin on her back, reaching for the soft exquisite warmth of her stomach. For the first time in days he was at peace.
‘We should do something about Michelle,’ he said, galvanized and relieved. Alice looked taken aback as he rose from the sofa and lit a cigarette.
‘We should,’ she said instinctively. ‘She told me Sudoplatov was using a new passport, issued in the last couple of years. If he was in the KGB, he’d still have contacts in the Russian government, in the mafia, people who could get him passports, lines of credit, information.’
Ben inhaled deeply.
‘Then we should try to get in touch with Bone,’ he said, aware that he was slipping back into a role for which his temperament was ill suited. ‘Would you know how to do that?’
‘Sure,’ Alice said.
‘I haven’t got a contact address for him, and I gave fucking McCreery my only copy of the letter. I don’t remember the number of the PO Box. There’s probably no way of finding him.’
‘Of course there is.’ Alice stood and took his hand in hers. ‘We’ll find him on the Internet. Let me get a glass of wine and we’ll go upstairs.’
Ben was technologically backward; he barely knew how to switch on Alice’s computer. In her study — a small, windowless cupboard on the same floor as their bedroom — he stood behind her as she opened Internet Explorer.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. He had his hand on the back of her neck and was stroking her hair. The prospect of tracking down Bone seemed secondary to the knowledge that they would very soon be in bed together.
‘We just find Google and type in the name of the town. What was it? Where did the letter come from?’
‘What’s Google?’
‘Forget it. Where did the letter come from?’
‘Cornish. New Hampshire,’ Ben said. ‘Somewhere in New England.’
The connection was fast. Within three seconds a screen had appeared, saying: New Hampshire Online. NH City Guides.
‘Now we find the phone number. Then we call the local post office and say that it’s an emergency.’
‘Is that what you do at work? Lie and make stuff up?’
Alice didn’t reply. Ben could feel the light heave of her shoulders, the gradual uncurling of her spine as she breathed.
‘Welcome to New Hampshire,’ she said, reading aloud from the screen in a cod American accent. ‘What do you want to know about? Local restaurants? Ski conditions? Where do you wanna go today? ’
Another screen appeared, a long list of cities and towns. Alice scrolled through them and clicked ‘Cornish’.
‘So we just look here,’ she said, another page loading. ‘Legal services. Libraries. Fire Departments…’
‘Post Offices!’ Ben exclaimed, pointing at the bottom of the screen.
Alice smiled, muttered ‘Bloody artists’ and clicked the icon. There was a single Post Office listed for Cornish. She wrote down the telephone number on the back of a gas bill and shut off the connection.
‘Do you want me to call them?’
‘Yeah, you do it,’ Ben said. ‘You lie better than me. You’re a journalist.’
Alice seemed to take this as a compliment. There was a phone beside the computer and she dialled the number.
‘They’re five hours behind,’ she murmured as the number connected. ‘It’s about two in the afternoon. Hello?’
A woman at the Post Office had picked up. She said, ‘Post Office, good afternoon. How may I help you?’
Alice curled a loop of hair behind her ear and touched Ben’s arm. He pressed his ear close to the phone in order to hear what was being said.
‘I’m trying to get in touch with one of your customers. He has a PO Box registered at this address. A Mr Robert Bone. My name is Alice Keen. I’m calling from London.’
The woman tookan unusually long time to respond. Ben heard her cough and say, ‘Could you repeat that name for me please?’
‘Yes, it’s a Mr Robert Bone. He sent a letter to my husband here in London, but there was no return address.’ Alice made her accent sound polished, more upper class. ‘We need to get in touch with him as a matter of urgency.’
Another pause. Then, ‘May I ask if you’re a family member?’
At first, neither of them understood the significance of the question.
Alice said, ‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s just that we’ve had a lot of enquiries recently about Mr Bone from the United Kingdom.’
‘No, no, I’m not a family member. Neither of us is.’ Ben was frowning. He tookthe telephone from Alice’s hand and said ‘Hello?’
More silence. He wondered if the woman had left her desk to look for more information. Then Ben heard movement on the line, a different voice, a man.
‘Hello, miss?’
‘No, this is Benjamin Keen. You were just talking to my wife…’
‘Yes sir. That’s right. To your wife. I understand that she was looking for Bob?’
‘That’s right. I don’t know if your colleague explained, but we’re calling from London and — ’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir, but we’ve had a shooting here. Almost three weeks ago now. Bob was killed out at his house. You didn’t hear about it? Did nobody think to let you know?’
43
From time to time, Stephen Taploe would lie to his agents, present a more optimistic view of an operation than was realistically the case. He did it to maintain their trust. He did it to keep them onside. Running a joe was a delicate art and he had been taught long ago that it was acceptable to manipulate the truth if an officer had one eye on the long-term gain.
So Taploe had lied to Mark about Timothy Lander. He hadn’t asked SIS to track him down because MI5 had done so themselves two weeks before, using phone records obtained from Divisar. In fact he had never wanted SIS to play any role in the Kukushkin investigation, for fear that he would lose control of the case, and out of a more personally motivated concern that they would discover that Christopher Keen had been an agent for MI5. Keen’s dealings with the Swiss bank had also provided a convenient smokescreen which Taploe had used to lure Mark into co-operation; there was no evidence at all that Kukushkin or any other syndicate had funds lodged in Lausanne. Furthermore, in the cab Taploe had failed to disclose his intention to recruit Juris Duchev; Mark’s suggestion that he try to do so had been merely a coincidence. For seven weeks, Service analysts had been weighing up the risks of running the Latvian. On Sunday, Taploe had made his pitch.
The team had Duchev’s routine down pat. He was up at six every morning, usually switched on the television in the sitting room of his flat, cursed in his native tongue as he tooka shower, then rang his daughter in Jelgava to catch her before she went off to work. Between five past and ten past seven he would walkfifty metres to a greasy spoon down the road and find a seat in the window. It turned out that Duchev had a fondness for British breakfasts. Thelma, who had run the cafe for fifteen years, knew him on sight and knew his order: plenty of black pudding, a heap of baked beans, two sunny-side fried eggs, at least three pork sausages, several rashers of bacon and a pair
