The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [43]
You got something else you’d rather be doing? Ben was on the point of erupting, but checked his temper and glanced at Mark. His brother looked suddenly buckled by grief, his back slumped like an old man. McCreery appeared beside him.
‘You all right, fella?’ he asked, a consoling arm on Mark’s shoulder.
‘Oh, sure,’ Mark told him, straightening up. He could put on a good show when he needed to. ‘Sorry, Jock,’ he said. ‘I just wandered off there for a second.’
‘No problem,’ McCreery said. ‘No problem,’ and they moved towards the chapel.
Two undertakers were handing out service sheets on the door, their heads deferentially bowed. Ahead of them, to one side of the altar and resting on a raised platform at the mouth of what Ben took to be an incinerator, lay Keen’s coffin. Mark had picked it out, without asking for Ben’s approval, but he saw that he had made a good choice. Simple pale wood with a single bouquet of flowers resting on the lid. Yet the sight of it appalled him, bringing home all the finality of the act. His father’s contradictions, all the pain that he had caused, an unknown life just lying sealed up in a box.
‘You OK?’ Alice whispered, and he was grateful for her, for the simple beauty of her face and the comfort that it gave.
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘We should just keep an eye on brother.’
And they took their seats in the front row. Everything was moving smoothly. Ben heard the door closing quietly behind them, sealing in the chapel’s disinfectant smell, then he leaned forward at the pew and pretended to pray.
20
Jock McCreery’s house was situated fifteen miles south of the crematorium along a narrow country lane. A faint drizzle had begun falling by the time Ben and Alice arrived. The gravel drive leading up to the house was already packed with cars, some banked up on to the edges of a damp lawn churned with mud and leaves, others parked in a small courtyard at the back of the property. Mark had offered to go in a separate car with three of Keen’s colleagues from Divisar, in order to show them the way.
Sandwiches cut into white, crustless triangles had been laid out on a table in the sitting room alongside bottles of wine, malt whisky and mineral water. McCreery’s wife, Gillian, a rotund woman in her late fifties wearing a baggy skirt and a necklace of fat, artificial pearls, made a point of introducing Ben, Mark and Alice to a constant stream of guests whose names they instantly forgot. The atmosphere in the house was one of nervous civility: guests were crammed into every room, even gathering on the stairs, but their conversations seemed muffled out of respect for Keen. Smoking was forbidden inside the house (‘We just find that the smell gets into everything,’ Gillian explained, ‘the curtains, one’s clothes, you understand’) and Ben longed for a cigarette. He was relieved to be free of the oppressive mood of the crematorium and had become quickly drunk on cheap red wine, but his attempts to go outside were blocked at every turn by guests approaching to offer their sympathy.
Sebastian Roth arrived just before two o’clock. Alice noticed him first, like the scent of a good story, holding himself at the edge of the room in a manner characteristic of someone who was used to being noticed. She felt, from a distance, that Roth was interesting to lookat rather than handsome, exuding a sense of power worn comfortably. Only his carefully tended hair, thickand lustrous, betrayed a probable vanity. Ben was standing beside her, watching McCreery’s black Labrador flickits wet tail against a Colefax & Fowler sofa as he drankwine from a plastic cup.
‘Look who’s here,’ she whispered, touching his arm. Alice had waited more than three years for a chance to meet Roth; that the opportunity should arise at her father-in-law’s funeral was merely an inconvenience.
Ben raised his eyebrows, glancing in Roth’s direction.
‘The boss,’ he murmured.
‘He doesn’t looklike someone who runs a nightclub.’
‘What were you expecting?’
‘I don’t know. More glamour. Not such a nice suit. He’s so…’ She reached