The hidden man am-2

by Charles Cumming

  ‘Yes? Hello?’

  ‘I fucked up.’

  His brother’s voice was so clear he might have been speaking from the next room.

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit there and listen to his bullshit. I didn’t have the patience just to ride it out and let everything take its course.’

  Mark rubbed his face.

  ‘What happened? You went to the dinner?’

  ‘Yeah. Lost my rag. Flew at him. Why d’you give him the photograph, brother? Why d’you do that?’

  Dissembled by fatigue, Mark rubbed his head and said, ‘He told you about that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It was just a present, a way of showing him…’

  He heard Ben sigh deeply, then the noise of passengers going into the station.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Look, don’t worry. It’s not important. I just needed to talkto you. I think I would have walked out whatever.’

  ‘What happened?’ Mark asked again.

  ‘Nothing. Everything. He was confident, tricky. I never felt comfortable. So I got upset, started asking awkward questions, putting him on the spot. I don’t know why I did it, Mark. I never felt comfortable letting Mum down.’

  ‘Sure. Sure.’

  ‘It was like I was just looking for an excuse to lose my temper. You know how I can do that?’

  ‘I know how you can do that,’ Mark said softly.

  ‘I mean, I’m not looking for a fight, but sometimes…’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  Ben stopped talking. He was dimly aware of the piss and grime of Charing Cross Station. He fed the last of his coins into the pay phone and said, ‘Look, I’m almost out of money. How’s Moscow?’

  ‘Don’t worry about Moscow.’ ‘Just go home. Is Alice there? We can talk from your house.’

  ‘No. In the morning.’ A woman walked past Ben with snow on the shoulders of her coat. ‘Call me when we both know what we’re saying. It sounds like you were asleep anyway. I didn’t mean to wake you up.’

  Mark rolled his neck until it clicked.

  ‘You didn’t wake me up,’ he said. ‘I was just lying here. It’s been a long day. Look, I’m sorry it didn’t workout. Maybe we shouldn’t have forced you into it. It just seemed the best thing to do.’

  ‘It was the best thing to do, it was,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’

  16

  Christopher Keen emerged from the Savoy and squeezed a smile at the doorman as snow began twisting into the forecourt. A cab pulled up and he stepped inside, instructing the driver to take him to his flat in Paddington. It was not yet ten o’clock but he felt dejected and worn out.

  The driver said, ‘Enjoyable evening, sir?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Dodgy meal, was it? I have heard, sir, that The Grill is not quite what it used to be. You know, in the old days.’

  ‘It wasn’t the food,’ Keen replied tersely.

  ‘I see.’

  It took more than half an hour to reach Paddington, thirty minutes of regret and silent reflection. The snow began falling more heavily, coating the streets in a thin viscous film of grey slush. Keen was still surprised by how much of the basic geography of London he recalled: short cuts, obscure streets, the facade of a fondly remembered building. Nothing about England ever changes, he thought. There are just more cars on the roads, more people and litter in the streets. He considered stopping off at his club in St James’s, but his mood was too bleak and forlorn. When the driver reached the entrance to his apartment, Keen tipped him three pounds and grimaced at the freezing wind. Tightening his scarf, he walked up the steps to the foyer and rode the lift to the fourth floor.

  Inside the flat he noted the packet of coffee that he had spilt in the kitchen that morning and decided to leave it for another day. He was still hungry from not eating and cut himself a slice of cheese, taking several cubes of ice from the freezer and dropping them into a tumbler of whisky. In the small sitting room next door, he sat down in his favourite armchair and rested the glass on a low antique table. There, on the wall, was the photograph of Ben’s wedding, and Keen thought for a moment about smashing it on the floor, a crude, adolescent gesture against everything that had gone wrong. Instead he would drink his whisky, perhaps watch television, and then try to get some sleep. Mark might even telephone from Moscow to find out how things had gone. Keen did not have the will to call him of his own volition, but the thought reminded him to contact Taploe. Going back into the kitchen he pulled a pad of Post-it notes from a drawer and scrawled Call Taploe re: M across the top copy. Then, having fixed it to the frame of the door, he returned to the sitting room and switched on the television news.

  17

  When the policewoman came to Ben’s house, six hours later, it was after four o’clockin the morning and yet he was still awake, sitting at the kitchen table reading an article Alice had written for that evening’s edition of the Standard.

  She had been asleep since midnight or thereabouts, tired out by work and conversation. For a while Ben had laid beside her, trying to let the day slip past him, but his mind kept turning over events at the Savoy and after an hour he had given up, dressed again and come downstairs.

  His insomnia was not infrequent. Ben and Alice kept different hours and he had begun to feel separated from her when they were in bed together. When the lights went out, all the cuddled intimacy of their first years had been somehow lost; to careers, to age, to some misplaced idea of how a marriage should be. And yet he liked the anonymity afforded by night; so much of his life was given over to the idea of making Alice happy that Ben was glad to have just a few hours to himself. Often he would read a book or watch a film on television, sometimes go for a drive or seek out a late-night bar. It balanced things out: those quiet hours when Alice was asleep belonged to him and to him alone. Ben had no office to go to in the morning, no responsibility to anyone but himself: he could wake up with a hangover at eleven in the morning and still put in a good day’s workin the studio.

  He was nearing the end of the article when the doorbell rang, the sound of it shaking him out of an almost hypnotic concentration. Ben stood up and the newspaper fell to the floor. He assumed that it was one of his friends leaving drunk from a club, coked up to the eyeballs and coming round for a nightcap. As long as they didn’t ring the bell again, there was a chance that Alice would not wake up.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked as he reached the door, keeping his voice deliberately low. It occurred to him that somebody might have simply pressed the bell as a prank and then run away.

  ‘The police, sir.’ It was a woman’s voice, measured and serious. ‘Could I come in?’

  Ben’s first thought was that something had happened to Mark. A car accident in Moscow. A mugging. And, as he quickly unhooked the chain, he saw that the face of the woman on the other side of the door had prepared itself for delivering bad news. Her hair was tied up under a flat hat and her eyes seemed robbed of colour.

  She said, ‘I’m sorry to come round so late, sir.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  Please. Not Mark. Just tell me that Mark’s OK.

  ‘I have to ask, sir. Does a Mr Benjamin Keen live here?’

  ‘I’m Benjamin Keen,’ Ben said quickly. ‘Is it Mark? Has something happened to my brother?’

  ‘No. It’s not your brother, sir. We couldn’t find him.’

  He felt a wave of relief that was short lived. Couldn’t find him? So was it a friend, somebody close to the family who had been hurt, even killed? Ben ran through a checklist of names: Alice’s parents; Joe or Natalie; his oldest friend, Alex, who was on holiday in Spain. At no point did it occur to him that something might have happened to his father.

  The policewoman asked again if she could come in and they went inside to the kitchen. She was wearing a fluorescent waterproof jacket that rustled as she sat down. Away from the flared light of t
he doorstep her face looked darker, prettier, but no less disconcerted. Ben saw that she was younger than he was by at least four years and that whatever it was she had been asked to tell him, she had never had to do it before.

  ‘You said that you couldn’t find Mark.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Her voice was very quiet and she could barely lookat him.

  Ben began to ask another question, as if that would hold off the bad news, but she interrupted him.

  ‘There’s no easy way for me to tell you this, so I’m just going to come out and say it…’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s some news about your father, Benjamin.’ When she used his first name he felt that he was going to be sick. ‘He’s been involved in an incident. He was found dead at his flat two hours ago.’

  The news was simply a freak, a sick joke. Ben took several seconds to clear his head of what seemed like a wall of noise.

  ‘My father? But I had dinner with him tonight.’

  For a moment the policewoman did not respond, but in time she said simply, ‘I am so sorry.’

  Six months before, three weeks even, she could have walked in here and given him this news and his reaction would have been quite different. Not dismissive exactly, not unfeeling, but certainly less traumatized. Anything she might have told Ben would have been prior to his new experience: the reunion, the first failed steps towards reconciliation. But he was now locked into a new set of feelings towards his father, forever altered by the events of just a few hours before.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ he said, and felt foolish for asking. ‘I just don’t understand. I had dinner with him tonight for the first time in twenty-five years. At the Savoy. Tonight.’

  ‘You hadn’t seen your father for that long?’

  ‘For the first time, yes. This is just ridiculous…’

  ‘I can understand how difficult it must be for you…’

  ‘You said you couldn’t find Mark? I spoke to him after dinner on the phone. He’s in Moscow. What happened? You said there was an “incident”. What does that mean?’

  They were the first questions that had come into his mind, panicked sentences emerging from an absolute confusion. Ben had a sense that he had been robbed at a critical moment. When his mother was dying, in his early twenties, his whole life had seemed scarred by absurd bad luck; that feeling was suddenly apparent all over again.

  ‘We’re not very sure at this juncture, Benjamin.’ She kept using his first name. Was that what they were trained to do? ‘There appears to have been an intruder at your father’s flat.’

  ‘He was killed?’

  The policewoman brought the sleeve of the waterproof jacket close to her face. That sound again. The whistle of the material. Then she was nodding slowly, eyes shuttling from one corner of the room to the other.

  ‘I have to tell you that he was shot.’

  Ben appeared to freeze. The policewoman could think of nothing to say. He merely repeated the word ‘Shot?’ as his mouth slackened with dismay.

  ‘What I can do is arrange to come and pick you up in the morning and we can…’

  But Ben was not hearing her. He had some basic sense of how hard it must have been to come to his house, to break news of this kind, a thing she would have to live with for the rest of her career. But he was now completely alone with his brother, orphaned, and that sudden realization consumed him.

  ‘… One of the things we do is to appoint a Family Liaison Officer who can provide a designated point of contact with — ’

  Ben raised his hand. He was shaking his head. He looked across the table. The policewoman’s lips were pushed out and creased and she was speaking as if from a handbook. Yet her sympathetic expression was more than mere professional courtesy: she seemed genuinely upset.

  ‘Would you like someone to stay with you?’ she asked.

  ‘I have my wife upstairs,’ Ben said, and for the first time felt that he was on the verge of tears.

  ‘I see.’

  She hesitated. There was something else she was obliged to add.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid we will need somebody to identify the body. As soon as possible. In your brother’s absence, Benjamin, it’s my understanding that you would be the next of kin. Do you think…?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to come now?’

  Again she paused. Edging round his confusion.

  ‘It would probably be better if you stayed away from the scene for the time being…’

  ‘I don’t even know where he lives.’

  She looked astonished by this.

  ‘Mark knows. I hadn’t met my father until…’

  ‘Yes.’ The policewoman’s voice was quiet. She told him that he had lived near Paddington Station and wrote down the address.

  ‘So why don’t you try to get some sleep?’ she suggested. ‘Or perhaps let your wife know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She began to stand up. He could sense her relief at leaving.

  ‘I think it’s best that I go,’ she said. ‘Will you be all right?’

  And Ben nodded.

  ‘We can send a car for both of you in the morning.’

  ‘That sounds fine.’ His mind was adrift with consequence. He was thinking about breaking the news to Mark, to Alice, and heard the policewoman say ‘Sorry’ as she walked down the steps. When she was no longer visible on the road he closed the front door and then climbed the stairs.

  Their bedroom was stuffy, a smell of stale air and cigarette smoke woven into fabrics. He picked up the hot, sweet drift of Alice asleep, a curious blend of perfumes and sweat. Ben crossed the room and opened a window on to the street. Birdsong. Behind him, he heard Alice moan, an impatient sound. She turned over on to her side, exhaling heavily, and he felt reprimanded even from the depths of her sleep. He had been on the point of shaking her awake but something about her impatience made him hesitate. Why do it? Instinctively he did not want Alice to have any part in this. If he woke her, she would complain; as he told her, she would become confused. To involve her now would only complicate matters. He would have to take her feelings into account and, for once, he wanted to act without interference. Ben felt that she might even appropriate the grief for herself, that his father’s murder might become something that he would have to comfort her over, rather than the other way round. She had a habit of doing that, of switching things around, of giving them a cynical emphasis. It was a part of her selfishness.

  The room was much cooler now, fresh air from the open window. Ben went back out on to the landing, closed the door, and felt for the car key in his pocket.

  18

  He should not have driven.

  At the Savoy Ben had drunk the better part of a bottle of wine and a double vodka and tonic. Back home, he had finished off a can of lager and then poured himself a whisky when he couldn’t get to sleep. There had been wine with Alice at eleven and that shot of vodka at eight. As he turned the key in the ignition, he wondered if the police would let him off if they stopped him on the way to Paddington.

  The journey touched on the absurd: four times he took wrong turnings, four times he had to pull over and consult an A to Z. Slush fizzed under the tyres of his car. Ben became lost in one-way systems, pulled down side streets which led him further and further from the flat. With the heating on and the chill air outside, the interior of the car quickly fogged up and he was constantly having to wipe the windscreen with the sleeve of his coat. At times he had to crouch close to the wheel and try to peer through the steamed-up glass; then his eyes would be dazzled by lights catching on the slick surface of the road and he feared losing control altogether. As his mind became numbed by the thick, drumming heat in the car, only the sure conviction that he wanted to witness the crime scene for himself, to get as close to his father as he could, drove Ben on.

  He parked just after five thirty and had to walk two blocks towards the building where Keen had lived.
An entire stretch of street had been cordoned off by the police with lengths of blue and white tape slung across the road. Three men wearing boiler suits and heavy overshoes were coming out of the entrance to the apartment building. Ben thought that he heard one of them laugh. A single light flashed blue in the road, strobing against London brick.

  It was as if he was being controlled by forces outside of himself, a bank of instincts making decisions on his behalf. Ben ducked under the police tape and made his way towards a uniformed officer standing near the entrance. The presence of a stranger had unsettled them: Ben could hear the fractious static of voices breaking up on a radio concealed somewhere on the policeman’s uniform.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, you can’t go into the building.’

  He put a hand on Ben’s shoulder and it felt heavy, capable. The two men looked at one another.

  ‘I’m Benjamin Keen,’ Ben said. ‘I was his son.’

  The policeman withdrew his arm like a static shock and took a step back towards the door.

  ‘The son,’ he replied, as if in the presence of something cursed. ‘I understood that one of my colleagues visited you at your house this evening.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We didn’t anticipate that you would come here.’

  The policeman — Ben saw that his name was Marchant — stared across the street as if in need of assistance. Without looking directly at Ben he added, ‘Can I just say, sir, on behalf of all of us how very sorry I am…’

  ‘That’s kind. Thank you. Look…’ Ben’s voice was impatient as he asked: ‘Is there any way that I could just go up? I need to see my father. I need to find out what happened.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t allow ordinary members of the public…’ Marchant checked himself ‘… even close relatives such as yourself, access to the scene until the forensic examination has been completed. I’m sure you understand.’