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so,’ he said.
    ‘What does the wife do?’ Graham was new on the Kukushkin case and still a bit sketchy on details. He looked upon Ian as a mentor, an older hand he wanted to learn from and impress.
    ‘Journalist,’ Ian said. ‘Writes about canapes and boy bands for the Evening Standard . One of your gorgeous, pouting, twenty something hackettes, arse so firm you could crackan egg on it. Drive up and we might get a lookat her.’
    Graham flicked on the headlights, moved back out into the road and tookthe cab past the house. They saw Alice open the front door and fling her arms around Mark’s neck, her smile a flash in the darkness.
    ‘Fuckin’ hell,’ Graham muttered. ‘Wouldn’t mind one of them in my Christmas stocking.’ He pulled up another fifty metres further along the street and peered backover his shoulder. ‘How long they been married?’
    ‘Couple of years; three, maybe. Daddy was decent enough to throw eighty grand at the wedding. Nice of him, wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘All things considered.’ Graham couldn’t keep his eyes off her. ‘Does the gaffer have ears in there?’ he asked.
    ‘Not yet. Only at Mark’s place. And the lawyer, Macklin. We don’t reckon young Benjamin’s involved.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘So what time’s Michael taking over?’ Ian scratchedhis armpit. ‘I wanna get the Arsenal score, find a pub with ITV.’
    ‘Search me,’ Graham replied. ‘Search me. The way I heard it, I thought we was on all night.’

8
    A man of sixty looks back on his working life and feels, what? A sense of regret at opportunities lost? Shame over badly handled investments, businesses that might have turned sour, a colleague treated with contempt by the board after forty years’ loyal service to the firm? Keen simply did not know. He had lived his life in a separate world of deliberate masquerade, a state servant with carte blanche for deceit. Waiting for Mark in his son’s favourite, if overpriced, Chinese restaurant at the south end of Queensway, Keen had the odd, even amusing sensation that most of his professional life had been comprised of social occasions : Foreign Office dinners, embassy cocktail parties, glasses of stewed tea and mugs of instant coffee shared with journalists, traitors, disgruntled civil servants, ideologues and bankrupts, the long list of contacts and informants that make up a spy’s acquaintance. Indeed it occurred to him - over his second glass of surprisingly decent Sancerre - that he was a scholar of the long, boozy lunch, of lulling strangers into mistaken beliefs, of plying dining companions with drinkand sympathy and then sucking them dry of secrets. It was his talent, after all, the knack they had spotted at Oxford, and the reason now, more thanthirty years later, that Keen could charge Divisar PS450 a day for his old-style flair and expertise. But to use those skills on his own son? To do that, if he looked at it for too long, would seem horrific. But Christopher Keen never looked at anything for too long.
    Mark was late by half an hour, a mirror image of Keen’s own father at thirty-five, coming into the restaurant at a brisk walk mouthing, ‘Sorry, Dad,’ from fifty feet. Keen thought he looked tired and preoccupied, but that might have been his paranoia over Taploe.
    The Service would like your assistance in clearing up Libra’s position, in revealing the exact nature of their relationship with Kukushkin. We just need you to pick your son’s brains, find out what he knows .
    ‘Where the hell have you been?’
    He said it without anger, because Mark looked genuinely contrite.
    ‘I’m really, really sorry.’ He placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘Meetings. All morning. Fucked electrics at the club and a tabloid hackgiving me gyp.’
    He was wearing a darkblue corduroy suit and, for want of something better to say, Keen remarked on it.
    ‘Bespoke?’ he asked.
    ‘Thought you might notice that.’ It was a shared passion between them, the