The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [75]
‘Bloody thing’s always getting in the way,’ he said. ‘Good for exercise, though. Keeps me in trim.’
To illustrate his point more vividly, he patted his stomach, leading Mark upstairs past bedrooms with closed doors and a bathroom in the process of being redecorated. Taploe was waiting for them in a bright, yellow-painted sitting room off the top landing, standing by a window which overlooked the street. Dark blue velvet curtains were drawn against the light and he appeared to be chewing gum.
‘Mark.’ Taploe turned quickly, moving forward with his hand outstretched, like an edgy host at a cocktail party. ‘How have you been?’
‘Fine,’ Mark told him. ‘Fine.’
‘Good. Great. Thanks, Ian.’ Taploe’s thin, nasal voice was unusually rushed. ‘We’ll be fine if you just leave us in here.’
‘Right, guv.’
The source of his nervousness, perhaps, was a bulky, shaven-headed man hunched forward uncomfortably in an armchair on the opposite side of the room. Younger than Mark by perhaps five years, he had the look of an electrician or plumber, wearing a green Fred Perry T-shirt, scuffed cream trainers - the laces slackly tied - and dark denim trousers swollen with fat at the thigh. Mark did not recognize him, but assumed he was one of the plumbers who had helped strip the hard drives at Libra.
‘This is a colleague of mine. Paul Quinn. A legal financial expert,’ Taploe explained, speaking in short, abrupt sentences. ‘He’s going to be helping us today. Paul this is Mark Keen.’
Fifteen stone of concentrated indifference half-rose from the armchair to shake Mark’s hand.
‘All right, mate?’ A London accent, low and nebulous. Mark wondered how such a person could know anything at all about the complexities of the financial markets.
‘The journey was no problem?’ Taploe’s head bobbed up and down as if to encourage a positive response from the question. ‘You found us OK?’
‘No problem,’ Mark said. The room was very small and a wide coffee table threatened to strike his shins at any moment. He sat down on a low, two-seater sofa with coathanger springs and said: ‘The journey was fine. No trouble.’
Above Quinn’s head, not incongruously given his youth and appearance, hung a worn, faded poster of Enter the Dragon: Bruce Lee stripped to the waist, three fresh scars torn like cat’s claws across his chest. The bright yellow room was otherwise bare. A row of bookshelves on the facing wall contained nothing but outdated telephone directories and a small vase of dried heather. A 100-watt bulb burning in a lampshade overhead left a blob of blinding colour on the backs of Mark’s eyes whenever he closed them.
‘First things first,’ Taploe said, sitting down and jerking his knee away when it accidentally brushed against Mark’s thigh. ‘The Soho operation was a big success. Really first-rate. Enough information to convict Macklin and put him away for a very long time.’ There was a slight shaving cut on the underside of his chin and he touched it. ‘I wanted to thank you in person for all your help so far. You’ve been invaluable to the operation as a whole. Really turned it around.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Which brings me to explain why Paul is here. I thought it would be better if what has become a somewhat complicated situation was explained to you by somebody with an expert’s grasp of finance. A specialist, so to speak.’
Across the room, Quinn inhaled briskly through his nose, a sound like a rhino bathing. Mark smiled at him, trying to establish a connection, and was met by a look of intense, intelligent concentration that did not preclude the later possibility of empathy or rapport.
‘Paul is a lawyer by trade.’ He was also Taploe’s closest colleague on Kukushkin, the engine of the case. ‘He helps us out from time to time with complex financial cases. When we can’t see the wood for the trees.