The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [46]
‘Isn’t it extraordinary who you bump into at these things?’ the woman said. Alice disliked her on sight.
‘Elizabeth,’ Roth said, still noticeably unsettled. ‘It’s wonderful to see you. I thought you were in Moscow.’
‘Not so, not so,’ she said, and gazed distractedly around the room. She looked at Alice with a short glance that somehow managed to mix civility with a clear and unambiguous contempt.
‘Elizabeth Dulong,’ she said, proferring an iron handshake. She was wearing Chanel No. 19 and her accent bore the faintest trace of a Scottish burr. ‘I’m an old friend of Sebastian’s. And you are…?’
‘Alice,’ Alice replied. ‘Alice Keen…’
‘Christopher’s daughter-in-law,’ Roth explained, tilting his head for emphasis.
‘Oh. Is that so?’
Dulong gave Alice a brief second look but maintained a chill composure.
‘When did you arrive?’ Roth asked her, pushing a hand through his hair. All the easy assertiveness of his manner had disappeared. There was a clear connection between them, yet Alice assumed it was not sexual. Dulong was neither glamorous nor young enough to be Roth’s type, and she was wearing an engagement ring on her left hand.
‘Just arrived,’ she replied. She was exactly the sort of career woman - chippy, contemptuous of prettier girls - with whom Alice routinely fell out at the Standard. ‘I came down from London with Giles.’
‘With Giles.’
It was like a conversation in the bus queue. For several minutes they made stilted small talk until McCreery interrupted to ask where he could find Ben. In that time Alice was able to discover only that Elizabeth Dulong worked for an obscure section of the Ministry of Defence, and that she had met Roth at a cocktail party in Moscow hosted by the Russian Minister of Transport. Drinking sparkling mineral water, Dulong told a dull, clearly third-hand story about Boris Yeltsin before bombarding Alice with curt questions about the Standard, all of which conveyed her obvious contempt for journalists of every persuasion.
‘I’ll go and get him for you,’ she told McCreery, pleased to have an excuse to leave, and with a deliberately seductive glance at Roth, Alice slipped outside.
Ben was wearing a pair of polished, hundred-pound brogues that he had owned for a decade but barely worn. Shoes for weddings, funeral shoes. McCreery’s garden was soaked with rain, the lawn a catastrophe of molehills and weeds, and to avoid ruining them Ben had been forced to smoke his cigarette while walking up and down the drive. He began to feel self-conscious as cars left the wake and headed down the road. There he was, right in front of them, the bereaved younger son smoking alone in the gloom. When they saw Ben, one or two guests braked to a crawl and waved tentative goodbyes, but the majority were too embarrassed to stop, and accelerated towards Guildford evidently hoping that he hadn’t seen them. He wished that he had gone out of the back of the house, where there might have been a shed or shelter of some kind. Just to be alone for five minutes, away from the prying eyes of strangers.
He was taking a final drag on his second cigarette when a Mercedes pulled up beside him on the road. Through a misted window he recognized the American who had read from Keats at the funeral. His name had been printed on the service sheet. Something literal, he remembered. Something like Kite or Judge.
‘It’s Benjamin, isn’t it?’ the American said. He had switched off his engine. ‘My name is Robert Bone. We haven’t met. This is my wife Silvia.’
Ben ducked down and saw a pale-looking woman wearing a headscarf poring over a map in the passenger seat. Post-chemotherapy, he thought; she had the same exhausted features that had characterized his mother