The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [37]
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 the 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