Hidden Man Read Free

of the bedroom door handle as it drops through forty-five degrees. Instinctively the Russian takes two steps backwards, hurried now, stripped of control. Light flares briefly into the passage and he blinks rapidly as he looks up, the pale face etched with shock.
    The intruder had words to say, a speech prepared, but the first shot punctures the left side of his victim’s chest, spinning him to the ground. Blood and tissue and bone shower against the walls and floor of the corridor, one colour in the pale bathroom light. But he is still conscious, his blue cotton pyjamas blackened and viscous with blood.
    In his own language, the Russian says, ‘Do you know who I am?’
    And the Englishman, propped up by a pale thick arm, shakes his head as the colour drains from his eyes.
    Again, in Russian: ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know why I have come?’
    But he sees that he is passing out: his neck is suddenly loose and falling. In the moments before the second shot the Russian tries quickly to summon a sense of fulfilment, a closure to the act. He looks directly into a dying man’s eyes and tries to feel something beyond the basic violence of what he has done.
    The effort is hopeless, and as the second bullet rips into his chest, he is already turning, experiencing little more than the basic fear of being discovered. He just wants to be out of this place, to be away from London. And then he will go to the grave in Samarkand and tell Mischa what he has done.

2
    ‘Don’t move. Hold it right there.’
    The girl stopped immediately, her hand on the nape of her neck.
    ‘Now lookup at me.’
    Her eyes met his.
    ‘Without twisting your head.’
    She moved her chin back towards the mattress.
    ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Is that comfortable?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And you’re warm enough?’
    ‘Yes, Ben, yes.’
    He leaned forward, out of sight now. She heard the itch and whisper of the brush as it moved across the canvas. He said, ‘Sorry, Jenny, I interrupted you.’
    ‘That’s OK.’ She coughed and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. ‘You said you were six when it happened? When your father walked out?’
    Ben took a long drag on his cigarette and said, ‘Six, yes.’
    ‘And your brother?’
    ‘Mark was eight.’
    ‘And you haven’t seen your father since?’
    ‘No.’
    Outside on the street, three floors down, a distantchild was imitating the sound of a diving aeroplane.
    ‘Why did he leave?’
    When Ben did not answer immediately, Jenny thought that she might have offended him. That could happen sometimes, with sudden intimacy. When a model is lying naked in an artist’s studio with only a thin white sheet for company, conversation tends towards the candid.
    ‘My father was offered a position in the Foreign Office, in 1976,’ he said finally. The voice betrayed a controlled resentment, the glimpse, perhaps, of a quicktemper. ‘The idea of it went to his head. The work meant more to him than his family did. So he took off.’
    Jenny managed a compassionate smile, although there was nothing in her own experience to compare with the concept of a parent abandoning his own child. The thought appalled her. Ben continued to paint, his face very still and concentrated.
    ‘That must have been awful,’ she said, just to fill the silence. The remark sounded like a platitude and she regretted it. ‘I mean, it’s difficult to recover from something like that. You must find it so hard to trust anyone.’
    Ben looked up.
    ‘Well, you have to be careful with that one, don’t you?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Blaming everything on the past, Jenny. We’re the therapy generation. An explanation for everyantisocial act in our damaged adolescence. Make a mistake and you can always write it off against a shitty childhood.’
    She smiled. She liked the way he said things like that, the smile that suddenly cracked across his face.
    ‘Is that what you believe?’ she asked.
    ‘Not exactly.’ He stubbed out the