Charles Cumming - The Man Between

‘Robert,’ he said, raising his voice slightly as a second bus applied air brakes on the opposite side of the road. ‘You go by “Kit” in the real world, is that correct?’

‘That’s right,’ Carradine replied, shaking his hand.

‘Tell you what. Take my card.’

Somewhat unexpectedly, the man lifted up his briefcase, balanced it precariously on a raised knee, rolled his thumb over the three-digit combination locks and opened it. As he reached inside, lowering his head and searching for a card, Carradine caught sight of a pair of swimming goggles. By force of habit he took notes with his eyes: flecks of grey hair in the beard; bitten fingernails; the suit jacket slightly frayed at the neck. It was hard to get a sense of Robert’s personality; he was like a foreigner’s idea of an eccentric Englishman.

‘Here you are,’ he said, withdrawing his hand with the flourish of an amateur magician. The card, like the man, was slightly creased and worn, but the authenticity of the die-stamped government logo unmistakable:

FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE

ROBERT MANTIS

OPERATIONAL CONTROL CENTRE SPECIALIST

A mobile phone number and email address were printed in the bottom left-hand corner. Carradine knew better than to ask how an ‘Operational Control Centre Specialist’ passed his time; it was obviously a cover job. As, surely, was the surname: ‘Mantis’ sounded like a pseudonym.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’d offer you one of my own but I’m afraid writers don’t carry business cards.’

‘They should,’ said Mantis quickly, slamming the briefcase shut. Carradine caught a sudden glimpse of impatience in his character.

‘You’re right,’ he said. He made a private vow to go to Ryman’s and have five hundred cards printed up. ‘So how did you come across my books?’

The question appeared to catch Mantis off guard.

‘Oh, those.’ He set the briefcase down on the pavement. ‘I can’t remember. My wife, possibly? She may have recommended you. Are you married?’

‘No.’ Carradine had lived with two women in his life – one a little older, one a little younger – but the relationships hadn’t worked out. He wondered why Mantis was enquiring about his personal life but added ‘I haven’t met the right person yet’ because it seemed necessary to elaborate on his answer.

‘Oh, you will,’ said Mantis wistfully. ‘You will.’

They had reached a natural break in the conversation. Carradine looked along the street in the direction of Notting Hill Gate, trying to suggest with his body language that he was running late for an important meeting. Mantis, sensing this, picked up the briefcase.

‘Well, it was very nice to meet the famous author,’ he gushed. ‘I really am a huge fan.’ Something in the way he said this caused Carradine suddenly to doubt that Mantis was telling the truth. ‘Do stay in touch,’ he added. ‘You have my details.’

Carradine touched the pocket where he had placed the business card. ‘Why don’t I phone you?’ he suggested. ‘That way you’ll have my number.’

Mantis snuffed the idea out as quickly and as efficiently as he had snapped shut his briefcase.

‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Do you use WhatsApp?’

‘I do.’

Of course. End-to-end encryption. No prying eyes at the Service establishing a link between an active intelligence officer and a spy novelist hungry for ideas.

‘Then let’s do it that way.’ A family of jabbering Spanish tourists bustled past pulling a huge number of wheeled suitcases. ‘I’d love to carry on our conversation. Perhaps we can have a pint one of these days?’

‘I’d like that,’ Carradine replied.

Mantis was already several feet away when he turned around.

‘You must tell me how you do it,’ he called out.

‘Do what?’

‘Make it all up. Out of thin air. You must tell me the secret.’

Writers have a lot of time on their hands. Time to brood. Time to ponder. Time to waste. In the years since he had given up his job at the BBC, Carradine had become a master of procrastination. Faced with a blank page at nine o’clock in the morning, he could find half a dozen ways of deferring the moment at which he had to start work. A quick game of FIFA on the Xbox; a run in the park; a couple of sets of darts on Sky Sports 3. These were the standard – and, as far as Carradine was concerned, entirely legitimate – tactics he employed in order to avoid his desk. There wasn’t an Emmy award-winning box set or classic movie on Netflix that he hadn’t watched when he should have been trying to reach his target of a thousand words per day.

‘It’s a miracle you get any work done,’ his father had said when Carradine unwisely confessed to the techniques he had mastered for circumventing deadlines. ‘Are you bored or something? Sounds as though you’re going out of your tree.’

He wasn’t bored, exactly. He had tried to explain to his father that the feeling was more akin to restlessness, to curiosity, a sense that he had unfinished business with the world.

‘I’m stalled,’ he said. ‘I’ve been very lucky with the books so far, but it turns out being a writer is a strange business. We’re outliers. Solitude is forced on us. If I was a book, I’d be stuck at the halfway stage.’

‘It’s perfectly normal,’ his father had replied. ‘You’re still young. There are bits of you that have not yet been written. What you need is an adventure, something to get you out of the office.’

He was right. Although Carradine managed to work quickly and effectively when he put his mind to it, he had come to realise that each day of his professional life was almost exactly the same as the last. He was often nostalgic for Istanbul and the slightly chaotic life of his twenties, for the possibility that something surprising could happen at any given moment. He missed his old colleagues at the BBC: the camaraderie, the feuds, the gossip. Although writing had been good to him, he had not expected it to become his full-time career at such a comparatively early stage in his life. In his twenties Carradine had worked in a vast, monolithic corporation with thousands of employees, frequently travelling overseas to make programmes and documentaries. In his thirties, he had lived and worked mostly alone, existing for the most part within a five-hundred-metre radius of his flat in Lancaster Gate. He had yet fully to adjust to the change or to accept that the rest of his professional life would likely be spent in the company of a keyboard, a mouse and a Dell Inspiron 3000. To the outside world, the life of a writer was romantic and liberating; to Carradine it sometimes resembled a gilded cage.

All of which made the encounter with Mantis that much more intriguing. Their conversation had been a welcome distraction from the established rhythms and responsibilities of his day-to-day life. At frequent moments over the next twenty-four hours, Carradine found himself thinking about their chat on Bayswater Road. Had it been pre-arranged? Did the ‘Foreign and Commonwealth Office’ – surely a euphemism for the Service – know that C.K. Carradine lived and worked in the area? Had Mantis been sent to feel him out about something? Had the plot of one of his books come too close to a real-world operation? Or was he acting in a private capacity, looking for a writer who might tell a sensitive story using the screen of fiction? An aficionado of conspiracy thrillers, Carradine didn’t want to believe that their meeting had been merely a chance encounter. He wondered why Mantis had declared himself an avid fan of his books without being able to say where or how he had come across them. And surely he was aware of his father’s career in the Service?

He wanted to know the truth about the man from the FCO. To that end he took out Mantis’s business card, tapped the number into his phone and sent a message on WhatsApp.