The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [49]
‘It all sounds fine.’ Mark picked up a copy of GQ from a low, glass-surfaced table at the edge of the room. He began flicking backwards through the pages, male models and sports cars, taking none of it in. ‘There’s just something I have to do beforehand. Some stuff I have to collect from Dad’s flat.’
‘Course you have,’ Macklin told him. ‘Course you gotta do stuff like that. So when will you want to leave?’
‘Just tell me where it is and I’ll meet you there.’ Mark put the magazine down. ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be.’
Macklin wrote down the address. ‘I might bring Philippe along as well,’ he added, apparently as an after thought.
‘Club Philippe?’
‘The very same. Night off from running his beloved ristorante. We’re having a pint after work.’
‘Oh.’
‘So,’ Macklin said, ‘around ten suit you?’
‘Around ten sounds fine.’
It was the last thing he felt like doing. A night out with Macklin, d’Erlanger and a Russian Mr Fixit, characterized by Tom’s gradually deteriorating behaviour, the four of them just another set of suits in early middle-age ogling girls and stinking of booze and fags. Vladimir probably wouldn’t speak much English, so the evening would consist of shouted, stop-start conversations about ‘Manchester United’ and ‘Mr Winston Churchill’. Slowly, Macklin would lose what few moral scruples he possessed and demonstrate the full range of his aggressive sexism, culminating in their inevitable ejection from the club at two or three in the morning. Then one of them - Macklin, most probably - would pass out on the street before Mark had a chance to put him in a cab. Why had he agreed to go? So that Tom wouldn’t thinkhe was boring? It was something to do with the aftermath of his father’s death; Mark just didn’t have time for this kind of thing any more.
He took a taxi to the Paddington flat. The heating was on high in the back of the cab and when Mark stepped out to pay the driver a January wind caught him like a blast of ice in the face. He took out a set of keys - the ones his father had used - and opened the door to the lobby.
Grey, bleak light was leaking in from the street. Ahead of him, Mark could barely make out the stairwell or the entrance to the lift. He pressed the white plastic timer switch on the wall beside the door, blinking as the foyer lights came on. It seemed odd, but he could sense his father’s presence here, his routine of checking the mail, that stubborn habit he had of taking the stairs and not the lift. Got to keep fit at my age, he would say. Got to look after the old lungs. One time they had come backfor a whisky after eating dinner in Islington and Keen had spent five minutes standing at the foot of the stairs talking to a widower named Max who lived on the first floor. Where was Max now? Maybe Mark should knock on his door and talkto him about what had happened, ask if he had heard or seen anything on the night of the murder. He would rather do that, rather be with someone who had known his father, than spend five hours with Macklin and an anonymous Russian lawyer in a lap-dancing club in the West End. But the police would have already talked to him. No doubt, like everybody else in the building, Max hadn’t seen or heard a thing.
He rode the lift to the fourth floor. The police still weren’t certain whether his father’s killer had reached the flat that way, or via the stairs. There were so few clues, so little evidence around which to base even a theory.
A teenager wearing baggy denims and a black puffa jacket passed him in the corridor as he came out of the lift and made his way to Apartment 462. Mark was just a few metres away from the door when he saw that it was already open. There were lights on inside and he stopped in his tracks. A faint shadow fell slowly across the floor, and then the door abruptly closed. There were no voices, no clues as to the identity of the intruder. Kathy, the Family Liaison Officer, had told Mark that the police had long ago finished their investigation. He moved forward, inhaled deeply and pressed his ear to the door.
Nothing.