The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [62]
Look behind pictures, Randall had told him, below carpets and underneath chairs. There may be documents hidden there, sequences of numbers or letters which we can make sense of in the context of other intelligence. Search for evidence of private financial accounts, correspondence from unusual sources, particularly the Cayman Islands, Jersey and Isle of Man, Turks and Caicos and other offshore territories. Make copies of bank statements, insurance records, anything and everything not immediately recognizable as Libra’s characteristic business. It’s possible Kukushkin are using Libra as a front for buying assets vital in regard to the facilitation of money laundering. Check Macklin’s records in particular. In the first instance, the legal end of transactions of this kind would almost certainly originate with him.
Finally, at 1 a.m., Mark switched on the computers in both offices and trawled them for information. It quickly became apparent that this was a hopeless task, too vast for one man alone at night with no idea of what he was looking for. Thousands of emails and documents relating to every aspect of Libra’s business: it would take a team of a dozen experts hundreds of hours to analyse them. Instead, acting on a separate request from Randall, Mark made hard copies of Roth’s and Macklin’s appointments diaries and placed them in a sports hold all now three-quarters full with documents.
It was almost 2.30 by the time he left the building, punching in a four-digit code to activate the security alarm. Shouldering the hold all he walked north and flagged down a taxi in Soho Square. Giving the address of his flat in Kentish Town, Mark zipped open the bag and glanced through Roth’s appointments: dinner with EMI in ten days’ time; two meetings scheduled for the end of the week with American representatives of a major Los Angeles record label; a haircut the day before that. Nothing unusual, in other words. Nothing encoded or obscure. Just another fortnight in the life of Sebastian Roth.
But then he saw it, two days back, an appointment that had been scheduled just hours before Roth was due to leave for the Alps. In his neat, looping script was written: Lunch 1 p.m. - Alice K.
28
‘I’ll tell you one thing. Seb wants to fuck my sister-in-law.’
‘Come again?’ said Taploe.
‘They had lunch a week ago. I saw the appointment in his diary.’
‘Yes, we noticed that. Did you say anything?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not to him. To her.’
‘No. She’d only lie about it, say it was for a story or something.’
Taploe took a Kleenex out of a small Cellophane packet, blew his nose into it and said, ‘Has she been unfaithful to Ben before?’
Mark paused, wondering if the question was relevant to their investigation or simply an invasion of his family’s privacy.
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ he said eventually. ‘I imagine so, yes. It’s not something I like to think about. Besides, they may only have had lunch. There is that possibility.’
Taploe scrunched the Kleenex into a tight ball and dropped it on the floor beside the accelerator. They were sitting in a Security Service Astra in the basement car park of a Hammersmith hotel. It was an excessive precaution: Taploe might just as well have met Mark in the broad daylight of a London park, but he felt it useful to create an atmosphere of suspense.
‘Is Ben faithful to her?’ he asked.
‘What,brother? Screw around behind Alice’s back? Christ no. She’d cut his dickoff. Ben hasn’t looked at another woman since 1993. He once copped off with a girl on a stag weekend - long time before they were married - and Alice didn’t let him forget it for years. Constant nagging, guilt trips, endless fucking about. You would have thought he’d got the girl pregnant, the way she carried on.’
Taploe sniffed.
‘Sorry,’ Mark said, sensing that he wanted to get back to business. ‘You were saying about the stuff I got from Kennington.’
‘Yes,