The hidden man

41

In the beginning, Roth had telephoned Alice at least once every two days. After their first lunch together, he had called three times in a single afternoon and sent flowers that raised eyebrows at the Evening Standard. Each time he found a fresh reason for getting in touch: to chat about Ben or Mark; to discuss the latest developments on the new restaurant in Kensington; to give Alice the telephone number of a friend whose first novel might make the subject of a decent piece on the features page. All in all, she had met him for lunch three times and for dinner twice before they had slept together for the first time at his house in Pimlico. There had also been cocktails at The Hempel with some of his political contacts in the government, one of whom had later furnished Alice with a decent diary story.

She had always flirted with men of consequence, had done so since her teens. There was something about the buzz of flattery, the empowering thrill of constant male attention. But only once before — in the very earliest stages of her relationship with Ben — had Alice toyed with the idea of an infidelity, and succumbed to a one-night stand. Usually the moral justification for her behaviour lay in keeping men at arm’s length: sex, after all, changed everything. It was best just to keep them ticking over, best just to enjoy them as a game. And then Roth had come along and ruined everything. Roth had come along and humiliated her.

That afternoon at the hotel, just a few minutes before she was due to leave, he had told Alice how uncomfortable he was with ‘the concept of adultery’, how bad he felt for ‘cuckolding Ben’. Maybe it was best if they just ‘cooled off’ for a little while; maybe it was best if it just ended. At that moment — less than an hour after Roth had been inside her — Alice had seen him for what he was, and glimpsed her own stupidity. An argument had ensued in which she had accused him of using her, of treating her like a whore. What made it worse was that Roth had refused to retaliate: he understood why she was so upset, he understood that the timing was bad. But in a few days she would come to realize that this was the best decision for everyone. ‘This is a time when you should be with Ben,’ he had told her, and Alice had even wondered if he was hinting at blackmail.

Work was harder now. She thought that people knew about what had happened. Roth’s friends, the contacts he had so willingly given up and whom she had so gleefully cultivated, stopped calling. She was certain her reputation had been permanently damaged by their association. And for what? The sex hadn’t even been all that good. All the way through it Alice had been comparing Roth with Ben and wondering what the hell she was doing. But there had been such excitement in the seduction, such novelty, and the affair had provided the perfect distraction to all Ben’s grief and torpor.

She was terrified now of losing the marriage. Ben’s life was her entire structure: his loyalty, his friends, his love. Without that, Alice was nothing, a hack with no friends, and single on the wrong side of thirty. She started to worry about her looks, about her career. In those first days, the insecurity was like an illness.

She called Ben all the time, wasn’t even aware that she was doing it. Just to talk to him, just to hear his voice. Alice needed to know that there was still somebody out there who found her attractive, somebody whom she could still rely on as a friend.

She missed the call to her mobile from Michelle Peterson at Customs and Excise. It was three o’clock on Monday afternoon. A bustle of male subs and journalists had gathered near her desk, discussing layout and trying to catch her eye. Were they laughing at her, or had nothing really changed? That was one of the things she had liked about Sebastian: there was nothing sleazy about him, nothing furtive or sly. He had been predatory in a way that most men would never understand.

Michelle left a text message and when Alice connected to the switchboard in Portsmouth she made a point of saying: ‘Customs and Excise?’ in a voice loud enough to be heard by the news editor, who was standing just five or six feet away from her desk. She wanted him to thinkthat she was engaged on a story more edifying than hemlines or hairstyles.

‘I’ve just had a message from Michelle Peterson,’ she told the receptionist. ‘Could I speak to her please?’

She had to wait while the call was connected. To her delight, the news editor honoured her with a smile, the first good thing to happen in days. Then she heard Michelle’s voice on the line, anxious and close to a whisper.

‘Als?’

‘Shell?’

‘Call my mobile, will you? But give me a minute to get outside.’

Alice waited and dialled back, the news editor now replaced by a young work-experience boy from public school looking ineffectual near the water cooler.

‘Hello?’

Michelle was outdoors. Alice could hear cars, sky noise.

‘Can you hear me?’ she asked.

‘Just about. How’s it going?’

‘Fine. Fine.’

‘Listen, I’m talking from the car park. Can’t really chat.’ Alice heard what sounded like the clunk of a van door, a metal sound. ‘I found out about Leonid Sudoplatov. Somebody using that name entered the UK on the first of December last year. Is that any help to you?’

‘I think so.’ Alice scribbled Sud. Dec 1st on a pad. ‘I’d have to check the dates.’

‘We have him as a Russian national. Sixty-three years old. Birthday sixth of December 1939. Records say it was a new passport, all the right channels issued eighteen months before. He stayed in the UK for eleven days and then caught a Heathrow flight back to Moscow on the morning of the twelfth. British Airways.’

Alice was writing a sequence of notes in shorthand. She said:

‘December the twelfth?’

‘That’s right. That’s about all I’ve got.’

A seagull squawked in Portsmouth.

‘I really, really appreciate it.’

It was a godsend. She thought that Ben would be pleased when she told him. She thought that this was exactly what she needed in order to make things up to him.