Sight Unseen Page 4

  Pavel has taken my hand. He wants me to shut my eyes, to let the long brush strokes speak for themselves, to trust my imagination.

  ‘But I’ve seen it already,’ I say. ‘I know what it looks like.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘How can you?’

  ‘She told me about it. She started with a mood. Then came the weather. It’s Porthleven, down in Cornwall. She went down there for a week and I went with her …’ he taps his head, ‘… in here, where it matters. She has perfect recall and she knows how to use language as well as paint. In a different time we’d call that the gift of tongues.’

  I nod, still letting my fingers stray across the painting. At first it’s a bit like waking up in the middle of the night and not finding whatever you’re after on the bedside table, but after a while I think I begin to understand. My fingertips have found the figure on the harbour wall.

  ‘So is this you? Is that what this picture’s about? Fortitude? Courage in the face of the elements?’

  Pavel’s fingers track, unerringly, across the harbour wall until they touch mine.

  ‘It’s about getting bloody wet,’ he murmurs. ‘I liked the picture so much she took me down there for real. September gales. High tide. You could taste the sea, standing on that harbour wall. Fortitude’s a wonderful word but it doesn’t keep you dry.’

  Pavel has the face of a child when he laughs. I give his hand a squeeze. It appears that the pictures have been hung by his artist friend. Has she done a good job? What do I think?

  I give the question some thought. There are seven paintings, all different sizes. The lighting is subtle, spots on the wall and recessed downlights in the ceiling, but it doesn’t, I tell Pavel, feel like a gallery.

  ‘So how would you describe it? The room as a whole?’

  ‘A cave. Your cave. A trillion years ago I’d have been looking at finger sketches of buffalo. Instead, your clever friend has been more ambitious. What does she think?’

  ‘She loves it but she thinks we’re running out of space.’

  ‘She’s right. You are. You need to move. You need a bigger cave.’

  He laughs again, delighted by the thought of a cave, and when I change the subject and ask about the grand piano he limps across and settles on the stool. The dog sprawls on the rug, looking up, giving a tiny wag of her tail.

  ‘You play for Milost?’

  ‘I play for me.’

  He reaches for the keyboard, his long, spare frame slightly bent, and begins to play. I recognize the piece at once: Schubert’s Impromptu in G. My lawyer and good friend Carlos also happens to be a fine pianist and this is one of his favourites. Pavel’s touch at the piano is extraordinary: deft, sensitive, totally sure of itself. At once, from the opening notes, he captures the inexpressible sadness of this piece. It has to be about loss, and perhaps regret, but as the music begins to swell it’s also about turning those moments of tristesse into something beyond sublime. Never give up, it tells you. Porthleven figured for two hands and a wet night in Chiswick.

  At the end of the piece I find myself clapping. It’s a spontaneous act of admiration, totally unforced.

  Pavel raises a hand in admonishment. ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘You’ll upset the dog.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘No. Just flattered.’

  ‘You play beautifully. More than beautifully.’ I’m looking at one of those sleek, minimal Bose audio set-ups in the corner. ‘You listen to lots of music?’

  ‘All the time.’ He gets to his feet. ‘A favour? Do you mind?’

  He’s off again, crossing the open spaces of the room. A TV remote is lying on the sofa. He gives it to me. When I ask him why a blind man needs a TV, he smiles.

  ‘Netflix?’ he queries.

  ‘You mean drama? Movies?’

  ‘Of course. In my game – our game – it pays to keep up with the opposition. Dialogue is everything. Who needs eyes?’

  I nod. So obvious, I think.

  Pavel’s bony hand closes on mine. I stare down at it. All that music, all those notes, stored in those dancing fingertips.

  ‘BBC iPlayer,’ he says. ‘The button in the middle.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Tonight’s Proms.’

  I find the programme he’s after. Grieg’s piano concerto with an Estonian orchestra and a Georgian pianist called Khatia Buniatishvili. Khatia is beyond striking: young looking with flawless skin, a tumble of lustrous black hair and full lips layered in scarlet gloss. She has a body most forties’ screen actresses would have died for and the low-cut black dress, with its twinkle of sequins, showcases what my Breton mother calls, with some delicacy, her embonpoint.

  ‘What can you see?’

  ‘The pianist. Young Khatia.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She has a very large chest.’

  ‘Ahhh …’ That smile again.

  ‘You’ve heard her playing?’

  ‘I have. Last night. All you have to do is listen. All the clues are there.’

  I press play and we settle down on the sofa. The conductor mounts the podium and calls the orchestra to attention. The opening bars belong to the pianist. Khatia attacks the keyboard in a sudden flurry of violence, hair everywhere, before the orchestra restores a little order, exploring this first theme, but the camera only has eyes for the pianist. With nothing to do for a moment or two, she sways slowly at the keyboard, head tilted up, eyes half-closed, before taking the conductor’s cue again. Her playing, I tell Pavel, is chiaroscuro, light and dark, sunshine and rain. He nods, slightly impatient. He can hear that. He knows that already. What he badly wants is the rest of it. What does she look like? What is she doing?

  I do my best to oblige. Every physical movement, I tell him, is mannered, thought-out, plotted for maximum screen effect. She takes deep breaths. She seems to sigh a lot. She’s the first-class passenger on a ride of her own invention and she loves the fact that she can share it.

  ‘You don’t like her.’ Statement, not a question.

  ‘I think she’s beyond excessive. Most directors I know would throw her off the set.’

  We’ve reached a sudden swoop in the music, a descent into near silence. Khatia, it seems to me, now has the audience exactly where she wants them. Control – essentially timing – is solely hers, and she milks it with a glossy ruthlessness which I find slightly repellent. By now the orchestra has slowed to walking speed to accommodate her vanity. A single chord from her right hand. Silence. Anticipation. Then a note picked up and discarded with a slow toss of the head.

  I’m looking at Pavel. He’s lying back, his eyes closed. He seems to be enjoying the ride.

  ‘More,’ he says. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘There is no more. She’s arch. She’s way out of line. She belongs in a rock concert. Grieg would have a fit.’

  ‘You think so? You really think so?’

  ‘I do.’ I take his hand. ‘She plays like a porn queen.’

  Pavel’s bedroom is upstairs at the back of the house. Rain drums lightly at the window and in the smallest hours, after we’ve made love, Pavel empties his glass, kisses me lightly on the forehead and slips out of bed. Naked, he leaves the room and I follow the soft padding of his footsteps as he goes downstairs. Then comes a moment of silence before I hear the opening bars of the piano entry in the second movement of the Grieg concerto. Oddly enough, this is one passage that Khatia seemed to respect, but Pavel, says little me, absolutely nails it. Not a trace of self-regard, of showing off, of hogging the spotlight. Blindness, it occurs to me, is a shortcut to humility. And thus to grace.

  ‘Well …?’ Pavel’s back at the open door.

  ‘Wonderful.’ I extend a hand in the half-darkness. ‘Come here.’

  EIGHT

  Saturday. Hangovers are something I generally try to avoid, especially since my pas de deux with the Grim Reaper. Once you’ve lived with a brain tumour – acknowledged its presence on the scan, understood the impa
ct it makes on more or less everything – a headache of any kind carries the grimmest of warnings. This one is compounded by guilt. My only child’s lovely girlfriend is very definitely in harm’s way. What was I doing getting drunk?

  While Pavel whips up an omelette in his kitchen, reaching for cupboards, rummaging in the fridge, stooping to consign the eggshells to his bin, defying blindness, I unlock the back door and let myself into his courtyard garden. Even out here the walls are painted white, a lovely contrast to the ribbed grey of the slates under my bare feet.

  In one corner, facing south, is a reclining deckchair with a built-in foot rest. Here, I think, is where he enjoys the sunshine. Last month, a frequently brutal heatwave descended on London, temperatures soaring into the mid-thirties, but Pavel has often talked about his addiction to this simplest of pleasures. At first I played stern, telling him how dangerous UV light can be, but he waved all my warnings away. ‘Sunshine is the mother of light,’ he told me. And left it at that.

  Malo doesn’t answer my call – not at first. I hang up and wait for a minute or two, imagining him beginning to surface with a hangover of his own, then try again. This time I get through. He says he’s OK. He says nothing’s happened since last night. I know my son very well. He always lies when he’s done something he knows will upset me.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ I ask. ‘Just tell me.’

  He won’t. It’s a flat no, disguised as a grunt that becomes an extended yawn. He’s knackered. He hasn’t slept for most of the night and now I’ve woken him up. Isn’t there someone else I can call at half past eight on a Saturday morning?

  ‘Clem’s been kidnapped,’ I remind him. ‘I just need to be sure we’re doing everything to get her back.’

  This bid to shame him comes to nothing. There appears to be no sense of urgency, let alone panic. For the latter I’m grateful, but after we’ve said our goodbyes something is beginning to disturb me. It’s Pavel who puts this first flicker of suspicion into words.

  ‘You don’t trust him,’ he says.

  We’re finishing his omelette, which he served with lightly grilled tomatoes. With typical precision, he’s using a finger of toast to mop up the last of the juices. I resist the temptation to guide him to a pool of neglected leftovers beside his fork, and thank God I did because he’s left this mouthful until last.

  ‘Trust’s a funny thing,’ I say lightly. ‘In many ways I trust him completely, but sometimes circumstances can get the better of us all.’

  ‘And that’s what’s happening?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think he’s not being straight with you? You think he might be hiding something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you sense it?’

  ‘I do. And that worries me.’

  Pavel looks briefly sympathetic. Magically, he seems to know exactly where my hand is.

  ‘Trust is absolute,’ he says. ‘No excuses. No exceptions. D’accord?’

  You agree? This question throws me for a second, then I realize he’s talking about us, not my precious son. To date Pavel and I have met perhaps a dozen times, sometimes professionally, sometimes simply for a meal or a drink, but after last night and the night before we’re in new territory. He’s pushed his plate to one side. I swear he’s looking me in the eye. Trust on both sides? Unconditional? Regardless of circumstances?

  I mutter assent. Poor Malo, I think.

  I get home by lunchtime. Most of the morning I’ve spent with Pavel. He wants to help with Malo and Clem but for that to happen, he says, he needs to know everything about my marriage, about Berndt, and about anything else that might have shaped my precious son. He wants to be sure of every last detail, year after year, and when I pause to ask why, he bats the enquiry away with a shrug of his shoulders.

  Professionally, he says, he wouldn’t dream of trusting a story to his characters without knowing them with a deep intimacy. ‘Deep intimacy’ is a beguiling phrase and I settle down to another blizzard of questions because something similar happens in my own trade. You don’t get to make a character live on stage or on-screen without knowing every trait, every wrinkle. First you kid yourself you’re someone else. Then you kid the audience.

  By noon, exhausted, I make my excuses and leave. Neither of us asks when we might next meet, but I put this down to trust. We both know it will happen very soon. Exactly when doesn’t matter.

  H is waiting for me outside the apartment block. I recognize his Range Rover the moment I turn the corner. Malo, I think. Has to be.

  I’m wrong. H has been to see Mateo again and he has some news he thinks he ought to share. But first he’s eyeing me with something close to suspicion.

  ‘Been shopping?’ Obviously not. No bag.

  ‘Out,’ I say. ‘I’ve been out. It’s a girlie thing. Men are the lucky ones. Cabin fever doesn’t bother them.’

  ‘An all-nighter?’

  ‘Yes. And before you ask, it’s my business, not yours.’ I open the passenger door. I don’t want him in the apartment.

  H eyes me for a moment and then slips the paddle into drive. A second later he’s hauling the Range Rover into a tight U-turn and gunning the engine.

  ‘Is this it, then?’ I enquire. ‘You’re kidnapping me?’

  He doesn’t answer, not even a smile. Only when we get to the first set of traffic lights on Bayswater Road does he volunteer any kind of clue.

  ‘Mateo,’ he mutters. ‘You two need to meet.’

  NINE

  Mateo, to my surprise, isn’t the man I’ve been expecting. He lives in a very grand house in Eaton Place. CCTV cameras watch us emerging from the Range Rover and the big, panelled front door opens before we’ve reached the top step. Mateo is wearing tan slacks and an open-collar white shirt. His handshake is firm but somehow comforting. There’s just a hint of Inca blood in the sallowness of his skin and the broadness of his nose but his English is perfect.

  He stands aside and invites us into the house, gesturing us up the broad, carpeted staircase to a lounge on the first floor. Unlike most rich men I know he’s neither guarded nor boastful. On the contrary, he has exquisite manners and over a truly excellent cup of coffee he quietly congratulates me for a couple of decent parts I had before the Reaper barged into my life. He says he especially liked a role I played in a movie called Arpeggio. The fact that this film only appeared in arthouses across Europe simply confirms that H, bless him, has found an ally of real substance in his battle to restore some kind of order to his son’s world.

  We spend a little time discussing the kind of company Clem and Malo might have been keeping. When Mateo wants to know whether Malo has friends on the drugs scene, I can only shrug. He’s certainly been as curious and experimental as every other teenager but after his experience with Spice I’m fairly certain he’s cleaned up.

  H nods in agreement and Mateo seems to take this assurance at face value. He mentions a text he received early this morning. It was timed at 04.35 and addressed to the same mobile phone of Mateo’s the kidnappers have already contacted. The fact that only a tiny handful of Mateo’s family and friends are aware of this number he regards as significant.

  ‘The number has to come from Clemenza,’ he says gravely. ‘There can be no other explanation.’

  ‘And what did it say?’

  Mateo exchanges glances with H. H shrugs. Your call, your information, not mine.

  ‘They want confirmation that we have the money. They also intend to have a text conversation later today.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The exchange.’

  ‘Your daughter for a million pounds?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what did you say?’

  ‘I texted back. I said I wanted proof of life. Ideally a video conversation. Failing that I wanted the name of our pet dog.’

  ‘And?’


  ‘Nothing. So far.’ He holds my gaze for a long moment. ‘There’s something else you ought to know. I carry insurance. It’s called K&R. Kidnapping and ransom. In Bogotá it’s routine, something everyone who might become a target does.’ He checks his watch, a chunky Rolex. ‘The insurance company retains a firm of response consultants. These are experts in the field. They negotiate all over the world. To be frank this doesn’t happen in London very often. That makes us unlucky as well as …’ he risks a smile, ‘… a little nervous. The consultancy is called Lockdown. I happen to know the person they’ve assigned to Clemenza. His name is Frank. Frank O’Keefe. He should be here any minute.’ He nods at the tray on the low table between myself and H. ‘More coffee?’

  O’Keefe arrives shortly afterwards. He’s a slight man, not tall. I guess his age at late forties, maybe a year or two older. He’s wearing a nicely cut suit and a pair of black Guccis and when he extends a hand I briefly glimpse a hint of vanity in a pair of monogrammed cuff links.

  Mateo has done the introductions. The two men are obviously friends.

  ‘Ms Andressen?’ O’Keefe offers a courtly little nod. ‘I understand Clemenza and your son …’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Then you have my sympathies. Everything is resolvable. All we need is time and patience.’

  I blink. Somehow I thought we were already in the final reel, expecting Clem back by nightfall. Time? Patience? Christ.

  O’Keefe parks his briefcase beside the spare chair, accepts a cup of coffee, unbuttons his jacket and sits down. His air of quiet command is palpable. He has no interest in small talk or breaking the ice. In less than a minute he’s taken charge of this impromptu meeting.

  It appears that Mateo has already told him about the latest text. Now our visitor wants us to know exactly how the next few days, or perhaps weeks, will unfold.

  ‘Number one, Mateo is right. We need proof of life. We need to know she’s alive, that she’s well, and that she’s under their control. Next we never, never, meet their first demand. A million US, to be frank, is absurd and our assumption has to be that they’re aware of that.’