‘Fuck,’ he muttered. It was like watching a conjuror trying to learn a new trick. ‘Here you go.’
Kell took the photographs and experienced an extraordinary feeling of exhilaration. He turned to check his background. A chef in stained check trousers was standing three feet behind him, stretching a ball of dough on a small cushion. Kell’s body was cloaked in heat. He craved alcohol.
The first photograph showed Minasian standing alone at the edge of a swimming pool, in bright sunlight. He was wearing Rayban sunglasses and navy blue swimming shorts. Fit for his age, defined musculature, an expressionless mouth. The man who had given the order to kill Rachel. He felt a visceral hatred towards him. There was a woman’s blurred shoulder in the left foreground of the shot, presumably Karen. Mowbray had used her as a decoy.
The next three photographs were all taken by long lens from an elevated position, angled down towards a garden in which Minasian was standing with his lover. When Kell asked, Mowbray confirmed that he had been sitting on the balcony of his room at the back of the hotel and had overheard the two men arguing. In the first shot of the sequence, they were embracing, Minasian topless, the older man wearing a pale pink short-sleeved shirt, white shorts and plimsolls. He was tanned with chalk-white hair that was bald at the crown. In the second shot, the older man appeared to be extremely upset, his eyes stained with tears, Minasian leaning back as if to disengage from what was happening in front of him. In the third shot – Kell assumed that he had looked at the sequence out of chronological order – Minasian was gesticulating with his right arm in a manner deemed threatening enough for the older man to be shielding himself by raising his hand and turning to one side. Was he afraid of being hit? The next photograph, apparently taken with a different lens, from a new angle, showed the older man crouching down in a separate section of the garden, hands covering his face.
‘What was going on?’ Kell asked.
‘They were shouting at each other like a couple of teenagers.’ The waitress removed the bowls of hummus and mashed aubergine. There was a clatter as something fell over in the kitchen. ‘Big fight between two queens about “lying” and “broken promises” and Minasian being a “prick”. I couldn’t make much of it out.’
‘They were always speaking English?’
‘Mostly. Far as I could tell, the old boy didn’t speak Russian. He’s German. From Hamburg.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I’m not an idiot, guv.’
‘Nobody said you were, Harold.’
Kell took a bite of lamb and invited Mowbray to continue. He was about to order a beer when he remembered that the restaurant was dry. A single glimpse of the secret world had been enough to strip him of a seven-month commitment to remain booze free.
‘His name is Bernhard Riedle.’
‘How are you spelling that?’
Mowbray wrote down the name on a piece of paper and passed it to Kell.
‘I got into the hotel email. Piece of piss. Jumped on their wi-fi, hacked into the account used by the reservations manager, read Riedle’s messages.’
‘Undetected?’
Kell felt uneasy. Mowbray wasn’t trained in surveillance. If Minasian had caught even a scent of his interest – the eavesdropped conversations, the clandestine photographs – he might have turned the tables and engineered an investigation of his own into the nosey couple from England.
‘Of course undetected. Did the whole thing from my room. Took fifteen minutes. Anyway, here’s the interesting bit. Minasian stayed under a pseudonym. Riedle called him “my partner Dmitri” in the emails.’
‘Makes sense,’ said Kell. ‘He’s married. Riedle could be covering for him. Did you get a passport? A surname?’
‘No, sir.’
‘But Minasian would have had to show one when he checked in. So either Riedle really does think his boyfriend is called “Dmitri” or he’s conscious that Alexander Minasian works for the SVR and is travelling under alias.’
‘How do you figure that?’
Mowbray looked momentarily confused, as if Kell had identified a flaw in his thesis. For his own part, Kell was surprised that Mowbray had failed to join the dots.
‘If I go on holiday with my girlfriend “Anne Smith” and she travels on a passport calling herself “Betty Jones”, I’m going to ask her how come she has two identities. Unless she’s from the Office.’
‘True,’ said Mowbray. ‘You are.’ There was a sheepish pause while he made a silent calculation. Kell sensed his embarrassment and urged him to continue.
‘Well,’ he said, rubbing the back of his head. ‘We can discount the idea that Riedle is a spook. Once I got home I did some digging around. He’s an architect.’
‘From Hamburg?’
‘Originally, yes. That’s where he has his practice, anyway. Right now, though, he’s spending a lot of time in Brussels.’
‘Reason?’
‘Some kind of office building. Swish headquarters for a Belgian television company. He’s designing it, living in an apartment there while it goes up.’
‘With Minasian paying him the occasional visit?’
‘Negative, Houston.’
‘They broke up?’
‘They broke up,’ Mowbray replied.
Kell immediately saw this not as a setback, but as an opportunity. A man in love is less likely to betray his partner. A man with a broken heart can be manipulated into acts of vengeance.
‘You said Riedle was feeling sorry for himself? That’s what you meant? Minasian dumped him?’
Mowbray squeezed his chafed nose and looked to one side, timing the delivery of a chunk of bad news. The waitress, who had passed their table several times in the preceding minutes, trying to ascertain if the two middle-aged gentlemen intended to finish their meals, finally made her decision and began collecting their plates of half-eaten food.
‘He dumped him,’ said Mowbray. ‘Gigantic lover’s tiff.’
‘After the argument you witnessed? That was it? They separated?’
Mowbray nodded, staring at the table.
‘The photos you saw, then Riedle crying on his own in the garden. That was the last time we saw Minasian. I assume he left that night. There was a twenty-two hundred Air Egypt flight from Hurghada to Cairo. He could have gone anywhere after that.’
‘And Riedle?’
‘Stayed another two days. Had breakfast in his room, ate dinner alone with a look on his face like his life was over.’
‘How do you figure that?’ Kell asked. ‘Just from a look on his face? Maybe he’s that kind of person.’
Mowbray pitched backwards in his seat, as if Kell had been unnecessarily confrontational. Kell apologized with a raised hand and took the opportunity to order two glasses of mint tea. He was aware that his adrenaline was running high, an eagerness to ensnare Minasian clashing against long-practised instincts for caution and context.
‘What I meant was …’
‘Don’t worry, guv.’ Mowbray offered a conciliatory hand of his own. ‘I know what you meant. How did we know he was suffering? Why was he wandering around like a lovestruck adolescent?’
‘Precisely. How did you know?’
Mowbray pulled out a packet of cigarettes and set them on the table. Kell looked at them and resented his own self-discipline.
‘Riedle