Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Read online

Xavier’s younger sister, Jacqui, was gesturing at him from some distance away. The woman in the long overcoat removed her sunglasses and briefly looked at Kite a second time. He had never seen her face before – mid-twenties, alert and attractive – and wondered what had become of de Paul.

  ‘Communing with the tax collector?’ Jacqui asked.

  She made her way towards him and they embraced. Kite felt the dampness of tears on her cheek as she kissed him.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘St Matthew,’ she said. ‘You’re standing underneath his statue. He was a tax collector. And here they are, the Catholic Church selling candles at fifty pence a pop.’

  Jacqui indicated a box of candles nearby. She was uncharacteristically wired and jumpy. Kite assumed she was running on Valium and beta blockers.

  ‘I’m so sorry about Xav,’ he said, aware that there was nothing he could do or say to make the situation any better. ‘Did you get my letter?’

  ‘I got it,’ she replied. ‘You were very kind to write. Nobody knew Xavier like you did, Lachlan.’

  The remark served only to stir up those same feelings of guilt which had dogged Kite since Martha’s phone call. His friend’s suicide had become a set of nails drawing down the blackboard of his conscience; he wished that he could be free of remorse, but could not shake the idea that what had happened in 1989 had shaped the entire corrupted course of Xavier’s life.

  ‘A better friend would have protected him,’ he said.

  ‘Nobody can save anybody,’ she replied. ‘Xav was the only person who could protect Xav.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  The service was due to start. Jacqui indicated that she should take her seat and they said farewell. Kite moved towards the centre of the church as Jacqui joined her family in the front row. A few seats away from his own sat Richard Duff-Surtees, an old Alfordian of towering arrogance and sadism who had called Kite a ‘pleb’ and spat on him in his first week at the school. Eighteen months later, seven inches taller and almost three stone heavier, the fifteen-year-old Kite had knocked him out cold with a clean right hook on the rugby field and been threatened with expulsion for his efforts. Duff-Surtees caught his eye during ‘Abide with Me’ and looked quickly away. It was the only pleasing moment in an otherwise heartbreaking hour of tears and remembrance. The family had asked for a High Mass and much of the service, to Kite’s frustration, was conducted in Latin. An agnostic from a young age, he loathed the smoke and mirrors voodoo of Catholicism, felt that Xavier would have insisted on something much lighter and more celebratory. Why was it that the upper classes, when confronted by emotional turbulence of any kind, retreated behind ceremony and the stiff upper lip? Kite was all for strength of character, but he had no doubt that Rosamund Bonnard and her waxwork friends would have grieved more openly for a Jack Russell or Labrador than for the death of their own child.

  Singing the final hymn – the inevitable ‘Jerusalem’ – he looked around the church and decided to skip the wake. Better to stick twenty pounds in the collection box and slip away rather than risk another Eastwood quote from Chris Towey or, worse, a face-off with Cosmo de Paul. To that end, Kite waited in his seat until the church was almost empty, then walked out through a door in the south-eastern corner, wondering where he could grab lunch in South Kensington before setting off for the gallery.

  Matt Tomkins told Vosse that Cara had panicked. As the service drew to a close, Kite had remained in his seat. Obliged to stand up to allow the mourners in her row the opportunity to leave, Cara had bottled it and gone with them, fearing that Kite would turn and notice that she was hanging around. Finding herself caught in a tide of Sloane Rangers shunting out of the Oratory, Jannaway had consequently lost sight of the target and been buttonholed by Cosmo de Paul on the steps of the Oratory.

  ‘So where is she now?’ Vosse asked.

  ‘Still talking to the man she was with before. Said his name was Cosmo de Paul. Pinstripe suit. It’s obvious he’s chatting her up, sir. I told you she was too attractive for surveillance work.’

  ‘Don’t talk crap,’ said Vosse, who was sitting in the Acton safe flat. He had high hopes for Cara but was worried that Kite was going to slip away yet again. Three times they had followed BIRD in central London. Three times he had vanished without trace.

  ‘It’s not crap, sir. I just call it as I see it.’

  Tomkins had been sitting at the patisserie watching the traffic go by when Cara texted, telling him to get to the Oratory as fast as possible to help in the search for Kite. He had requested the bill – an eye-watering £18.75 for two cappuccinos and a slice of chocolate cake – and strolled across Brompton Road as the mourners continued to pour out of the church. He knew from Cara’s texts that Kite was wearing a tailored grey suit and black wool tie, but so were at least fifty of the other middle-aged men standing in clumps outside the church.

  ‘Head to HTB,’ Vosse told him on the phone.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Tomkins. He knew the answer to his own question the instant that he asked it; for the past hour he had been staring across the street at two signs next door to the Oratory bearing the letters ‘HTB’. But it was too late.

  ‘Holy Trinity Brompton,’ Vosse replied impatiently. ‘Pay attention. Protestant church round the back of the Oratory. Brainwashed evangelical Christians claiming to be possessed by the Holy Spirit. Posters advertising the Alpha Course and a better life with Bear Grylls and Jesus. You can’t miss it.’

  Vosse had obviously done his homework, walking the ground the night before. Tomkins looked for a side door into the Oratory but couldn’t spot one. There was no sign of Kite. Black cabs were pulling up outside the church all the time. BIRD could easily have ducked into one and driven off while Cara was looking the other way.

  ‘Hello?’

  She was on the phone again.

  ‘Yes?’ Tomkins replied.

  ‘Any luck?’

  He looked over and saw Cara standing beside de Paul. She might as well have been holding a placard above her head emblazoned with the words: Have YOU seen Lachlan Kite? Vosse would have a field day when he found out.

  ‘Not yet, no,’ Tomkins replied. ‘I’m not really dressed for a funeral. If I come any closer, I’ll stick out as much as you do.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Cara, looking up at the sky in dismay. ‘Just walk past or sit in a fucking bus stop. There are more people in Knightsbridge who look like you than there are people who look like me. Wait—’

  Tomkins could tell by the note-change in her voice that she’d spotted Kite.

  ‘My days,’ she said. ‘I’ve got eyes on BIRD. He’s over by the wall.’

  ‘Another smoke?’ said the American, offering Kite a cigarette as the forecourt in front of the church slowly began to empty. The congregation was heading for a residential square to the west of the Oratory where drinks and snacks had been laid on in a hall reserved for mourners. Kite had stopped to check a message on his phone and liked the idea of a quick cigarette before lunch.

  ‘Would love one,’ he replied, wondering if the American had been targeted against him. ‘I never got your name.’

  ‘John,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Lachlan.’

  Alcoholics Anonymous was decent cover for a phoney relationship with Xavier: most people wouldn’t pry into a stranger’s struggles with addiction, nor would anyone at the funeral know very much about Xavier’s experiences in the programme. Kite decided to probe a little deeper.

  ‘What did you make of Xav?’ he asked. ‘When he was down, could you bring him out of it? Did you ever have any success talking to him about his depression?’

  It was a trick question. Xavier had been wild and unpredictable, but had consistently hidden his gloom from even his closest friends. Kite had never known him to complain, to cry on a shoulder, to lament the path his life had taken nor to despair over his addictions. He was, in his own particular way, every bit as stoic and uncomplaining as his mother. Outward display
s of failure or self-pity were not in the gene pool.

  ‘Funny,’ John replied without hesitation. ‘I never knew him to be like that. Even in meetings he was always upbeat, always trying to find a way to make people laugh, to think more deeply when it came to their own situations.’ John appeared to have passed the test. ‘A lot of us were pretty down a lot of the time, present company included. Xav didn’t go in for that stuff. That’s why I can’t believe he did what they say he did. Had to be an accident, sex game or something.’

  Xavier had been found in the bathroom of a Paris Airbnb, hanged by the neck. Unless somebody had staged the killing, it was suicide, pure and simple.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Kite replied.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss, man.’ John put his hand on Kite’s shoulder, his long, thick beard and the bright sunlight on his back momentarily giving him the look of an Old Testament prophet.

  ‘Yours too,’ Kite replied. ‘The world was a better place for having Xavier in it. We’re going to miss him.’

  ‘Lachlan?’

  Kite turned. A striking man of Middle Eastern appearance had approached him from the western edge of the enclosure. He was wearing a dark grey lounge suit with a black tie and a crisp white shirt. A navy blue handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket of his jacket. Kite did not recognise him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Excuse me.’ The man acknowledged the American, tipping his head apologetically. An expensive-looking watch caught the sun on his left wrist. ‘I don’t think you will remember me. I was at Alford, several years after you. My name is Jahan Fariba.’

  Kite immediately recognised the name. Xavier had spoken about Fariba on one of the last occasions they had met. He was a businessman, British-born, his parents having fled Iran shortly after the revolution. Xavier had done business with him in a context Kite could not recall. He remembered that his friend had spoken fondly of him, on both a professional as well as personal basis.

  ‘Jahan. Yes. Xav talked about you. How did you recognise me?’

  ‘I’ll leave you guys to talk,’ John interjected, shaking Kite’s hand and moving off. Kite thanked him for the cigarettes. Fariba tipped his head respectfully at the American’s departure.

  ‘Jacqui told me who you were,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the church. ‘She pointed you out. I wanted to introduce myself.’

  ‘I’m glad you did.’

  Fariba was in his late thirties. Fit and tanned, he resembled a recently retired professional athlete who still worked out twice a day, eschewed alcohol and went to bed at sunset six nights a week. It was late February and rare to see someone looking so vibrantly healthy.

  ‘Xav spoke of you, too. He was always going on about his old friend Lachlan.’

  ‘He was?’

  Kite never liked hearing that. Xavier had known too much about his life in the secret world. The wrong word to the wrong person was an existential threat to his cover. He preferred to be anonymous: at worst the enigma at the back of the room; at best unnoticed and forgotten.

  ‘Yes. He was a great admirer of yours. I always wanted to meet you. I thought this would be a good opportunity. Are you going to the drinks now?’

  Fariba’s accent was located somewhere between Tehran and Harvard Business School: an Americanised English characteristic of the international jet-set. He gestured towards the square.

  ‘Sadly not,’ Kite replied, indicating that he was short of time.

  ‘Me neither. I don’t feel like it. I didn’t know many of Xavier’s friends. What’s happened is awful. Just a terrible day.’

  ‘It really is.’ Beneath the slick, executive exterior Kite glimpsed a softness in Fariba. ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘This is what I wanted to talk to you about.’ Fariba lowered his voice to a confessional whisper which was almost drowned out by the noise of a passing bus. ‘I was with him less than two weeks ago, in Paris, the night before he died.’

  Cara had worked up a possible pitch with Vosse. The drug addict friend from South Africa was too risky to play on Kite, who had known Xavier well and would quickly smell a rat. Instead she would play the art card. They knew from the MI6 whistle-blower that Kite had an interest in collecting paintings. He’d been seen at the Frieze fair back in October and had exchanged emails with several dealers. Cara had briefly studied Fine Art at university before switching to Politics and knew how to talk shit about painters and paintings. She could say she’d had a temp job at one of the galleries exhibiting at Frieze and had recognised Kite as a prospective buyer. That would be enough to start a conversation, perhaps even to lead to an exchange of numbers. Vosse had joked that he wanted Cara to get to know Kite so well that he would ask her to be the au pair for Isobel’s baby when it was born in the summer. Cara preferred to think that Kite would try to recruit her into BOX 88.

  But when to approach him? Outside the Oratory, Kite had been trapped in two conversations: the first with the tall, bearded man who had offered him cigarettes; the second with a good-looking businessman, possibly of Arab descent, wearing thousand-dollar shoes and an expensive suit. After what had happened before the service, Cara reckoned she could bump Kite and take her chances with an open pitch.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Matt Tomkins was on the phone again, calling for no good reason other than to make her afternoon more difficult than it already was.

  ‘What’s going on is that you’re making me answer the phone when what I want to be doing is getting on with my job. What do you want?’

  ‘Just to let you know, Eve and Villanelle are outside Smallbone in the Astra.’

  ‘Eve’ was the codename for Tessa Swinburn, ‘Villanelle’ was Kieran Dean. Vosse had a penchant for naming team members after characters in television shows. Cara looked across the busy street. There was a branch of Smallbone of Devizes on the corner of Thurloe Place. She couldn’t see the Vauxhall Astra but assumed it was parked nearby.

  ‘Great. Can I go now?’ she said.

  ‘I guess,’ Tomkins replied.

  ‘Thank you, Matthew. Always nice to chat.’

  She hung up. Kite was heading back into the church. It was time to make her move.

  ‘Do you have time to talk?’ Fariba asked.

  Kite was keen to learn about Paris. It was obvious that Fariba knew something of Xavier’s state of mind in the hours leading up to his death. He looked at his phone. It was not yet half-past twelve. He wasn’t due at the gallery until four.

  ‘Or we can do it another time,’ Fariba suggested, misinterpreting Kite’s reaction. ‘You may not feel like talking today. We are all still in shock.’

  ‘No, it sounds like a good idea. I’d appreciate that. It would be helpful to find out what was going on. I hadn’t seen Xav for at least a year. If you could explain what he was going through …’

  ‘Of course.’ Fariba adjusted the sleeve of his jacket. His movements were clean and precise, as if life were a martial art he had taken years to perfect. ‘I can try to help as much as I can.’

  Kite looked up to see Cosmo de Paul scuttling away from the funeral, hailing a cab which did a U-turn opposite Smallbone of Devizes. Doubtless he had lunch at White’s in the diary or a pressing engagement with a Russian woman half his age charging £300 per hour. Looking back along Brompton Road, Kite saw the woman in the long black coat standing alone outside the enclosure. She was talking on the phone. There was something about her that didn’t sit well. For thirty years Kite had been at risk from surveillance and his antennae were finely tuned. It was possible that a team had been put on him at the funeral.

  ‘You have a family?’ Fariba asked.

  ‘One on the way,’ Kite replied.

  ‘Wonderful. Congratulations.’

  ‘And you?’

  Fariba held up his right hand and showed Kite four splayed fingers.

  ‘Jesus. You’ve been busy.’

  ‘Not me. My wife does all the hard work. When is your child due?’<
br />
  ‘Late summer.’

  Kite had forgotten to put money in the collection and explained that he was going back inside. While there, he looked quickly at Facebook on his phone and searched for Xavier’s profile. Jahan Fariba’s photograph came up as one of Xavier’s contacts. He put a twenty-pound note in the collection box and went back outside.

  To his surprise, the woman in the long black overcoat was waiting for him on the steps.

  ‘Excuse me. It’s been driving me mad,’ she said. ‘Have we met before?’

  She removed her sunglasses. Kite ran her features – soft brown eyes, a button nose, peroxide blonde hair and a wide, singer’s mouth – through a memory palace of names and faces, but turned up nothing.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘Did we meet through Xav?’

  ‘No. Definitely not.’ The woman stared at Kite intently. ‘I’m Emma,’ she said, offering a hand to shake. Her skin was soft and cold to the touch. ‘It’s the weirdest thing. Your face is so familiar.’

  If she was a friend or colleague of de Paul’s, it was possible she knew of him by reputation, but Kite didn’t want to establish the link.

  ‘I know!’ she said, suddenly remembering. Her face was overcome with relief. ‘I was working for one of the galleries at Frieze. You came in and chatted to my colleague. I think you were interested in buying something.’

  ‘Really? What a good memory you have.’

  ‘Never lets me down,’ she said, tapping the side of her head. ‘I just couldn’t place you.’

  She had a sharp south-eastern accent, London or Essex or Kent. The fact that she had made no effort to soften its edges made Kite think that she wasn’t interested in blending into Xavier’s rarefied world. She was dressed like a model or fashion designer but, on closer inspection, the coat and black leather boots were off-the-peg.

  ‘Which gallery were you working for?’ he asked.

  ‘Karoo,’ she replied. ‘Based in New York. We were mostly displaying Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Marc Quinn.’

  That was all Kite needed to know that ‘Emma’ was not who she was pretending to be. In thirty years of collecting and selling paintings, he had never had a conversation with a New York gallerist about Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk or Marc Quinn. Several collectors he knew had piled into the Cool Britannia crowd in the 1990s and made small fortunes as a result, but to Kite a lot of the work by the Young British Artists of that period was soulless Groucho bullshit. For the second time in less than half an hour he was obliged to set a trap for a stranger.