The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [81]
Goatee shuffled along and McCreery squeezed in, laying his walking stick at an angle across the table.
‘What did you do to your leg?’
‘Rheumatism.’ McCreery gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘Runs in the family, I’m afraid. My late father suffered from it, his father before him. There’s been a long line of McCreerys hobbling about in their fifties.’
Ben made a small noise in the back of his throat that came off as a grunt and wondered how long McCreery would stick around. Already he could feel the afternoon slipping from his grasp. They had only one subject in common and he was not in the mood to discuss his father.
Sure enough, McCreery soon embarked on a conversation about the funeral.
‘So who did you talk to at the wake?’ he asked.
‘Oh, everybody and nobody. A lot of my father’s colleagues. People from Divisar and…’ Ben searched for the appropriate euphemism ‘… your company.’ McCreery smiled in an effort to acknowledge his tact. ‘To be honest, I found it hard going. Alice was great. You and your wife were both very kind. But I just couldn’t get my head round the whole thing, you know? Sort of took the wind out of me.’
‘Of course,’ McCreery said. ‘Of course. I must say that both Gillian and I were rather concerned about you.’
‘About me?’
‘Yes. Conscious that you didn’t want to be there, that you’d rather have been somewhere else. I went upstairs to my bedroom at one point and saw you standing alone on the drive. Felt for you, old chap. Bloody awful thing. I’m so sorry.’
Ben didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or grateful.
‘Well, I just went out for a smoke,’ he said. ‘Just to grab some air, that was all.’
‘Of course.’
McCreery bobbed his head gently and looked up at the roof. He appeared to be giving it a second chance, but then frowned and finally settled his gaze on a nearby Egyptian sculpture. Changing the subject, he asked after Alice and then briefly discussed an article she had written in the Standard a few days earlier. Ben began to warm to him, if only because McCreery appeared to be showing a genuine interest in his family’s welfare. He asked thoughtful, intelligent questions about the police enquiry, and seemed acutely sensitive to the unique psychological predicament in which Ben and Mark had found themselves. McCreery’s concern was all the more touching when Ben considered that he too had lost a friend, a man he had worked alongside at MI6 for almost twenty years. The idea of losing one of his own close friends was one of Ben’s deepest fears.
‘I guess it’s been difficult for you, too,’ he said. ‘Dad was your best mate. It can’t have been easy.’ McCreery sighed.
‘Well, it’s funny,’ he said. ‘One gets older, one has to adjust to sudden loss. The booze, accidents of one kind or another, bloody cancer. But there was something very special about Christopher. I think it’s a great tragedy that you never had the opportunity to know him as well as we all did. A very great tragedy indeed.’
Ben remembered the conversation on the drive at McCreery’s house, Robert Bone saying something very similar about Keen. He thought of Bone’s letter and wondered if McCreery could be trusted with its contents.
‘You know, when people die, everybody writes, don’t they?’ he said. McCreery looked slightly confused. ‘I mean, the husband, the wife, they always get a letter. Then you write to the children, to the parents if they had any, to all the close relatives of the person who’s died. But the friends just get left behind. Nobody thinks of them. They’ve maybe just lost the one person in the world that they could confide in, someone where the roots might have gone even deeper than a marriage. A friend from school. A friend from childhood. But nobody thinks of them. They just get forgotten.’
McCreery produced a wonderful smile that broke up the general blandness of his features, the pale, puffy cheeks, the thinning grey hair. His eyes seemed to congratulate Ben for the observation.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I must say I didn’t receive a single letter of condolence about your father. Not a single one.’ Making