The Hidden Man - Charles Cumming [88]
‘I’m sure you could.’
‘So who did kill my father?’
It was the only question left to ask.
McCreery paused. ‘Between you and me - and again I would askthat this is something we keep strictly entre nous - the Office has been working very closely alongside Scotland Yard to unravel that very question. Right now, we’re looking at one or two irregularities with regard to your father’s relationship with a Swiss bank.’
Ben shook his head. ‘What does that mean?’
McCreery shuffled forward and seemed troubled by his leg.
‘Shortly before he died, Christopher was doing some work for Divisar on behalf of a private bank in Lausanne. There may be a connection there. We’re also looking into a series of telephone calls that he made to a Timothy Lander in the Cayman Islands.’
‘That’s not a name I’ve heard before. How come the police haven’t told us about it?’
‘As I was saying, that part of the investigation is still very much under wraps.’
‘So you’re claiming that almost everything in Bone’s letter is faked-up to deflect attention away from the fact the CIA lost an agent in Afghanistan nearly twenty years ago?’
McCreery wiped away an imaginary speck of dust from the surface of the table and said, ‘To all intents and purposes, yes.’
For the last time, Ben took hold of the letter and began going through it, picking out the facts.
‘So it’s bullshit that Dad worked for British Intelligence for twenty years?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘And he never went to Berlin?’
‘No, he was in Berlin, but declared, and only for eighteen months. That was immediately after he left your mother in the mid-1970s.’
Ben flicked through three more pages until he found what he was looking for.
‘And what about this?’ He stabbed the letter with the end of his thumb. ‘Was he ever assigned to China?’
‘Never went there in his life.’ McCreery finished his whisky. ‘And Bone didn’t quit the Cousins in ‘92, either. He was thrown out after the Kostov cock-up, turned to the drink and became a teacher. Humanities, if I’m not mistaken. Now there’s an irony.’ Taking the letter back from Ben, he added, ‘Just look at the way he phrases certain things as a means of disguising his guilt. It’s bloody amateur hour. Here, on the third page.’ McCreery quoted from the text. ‘I never met Mischa, of course, but I know he was a sweet kid. Don’t you see, Ben? That’s a blatant bloody lie. The sheer nerve of the man. And what does he say later on? That he interrogated a Soviet soldier independently of Christopher and Mischa? Total cock and bull. The Soviet soldier was Mischa. How else do you think Bone knows so much about the Russian military?’
‘All right, all right,’ Ben said quickly. He felt compelled to add: ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you. I just want to get to the bottom of who killed Dad. That’s it. Everything else is irrelevant…’
‘… and I can understand that.’
‘But Bone’s not a sadist. He bears no grudge against me. Why pull me aside at the funeral and then write six pages of bullshit about Kostov and MI6? Why involve me at all?’
‘Alice,’ McCreery replied instantly.
‘Alice?’
‘Think about it. She works for a major newspaper. Bone’s hoping she’ll leak the story to the news desk and embarrass the Brits.’
‘But she would never do that.’ It was a statement that lacked conviction.
‘Bob’s not to know that, is he? This is not a benevolent individual we’re talking about. Bone and Masterson were two of the most unsavoury characters I’ve ever had the misfortune of coming into contact with in over thirty years of intelligence work.’
Ben seized on the mistake.
‘Masterson is the mentor?’ he said. ‘The one who actually recruited Mischa?’
‘Oh dear.’ A pantomime of embarrassment played across McCreery’s face. He touched his mouth with his hand. ‘I shouldn’t have revealed his name. That was an error. I apologize.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Jock. I’m not going to tell anyone.’
‘Good. Good. Well, look, I must catch that train back to Guildford.’ McCreery was standing, fetching his stick. ‘In the meantime, if I could just hang on