The Catch

by Mick Herron

  Books by Mick Herron

  The Oxford Series

  Down Cemetery Road

  The Last Voice You Hear

  Why We Die

  Smoke & Whispers

  The Slough House Series

  Slow Horses

  Dead Lions

  The List (A Novella)

  Real Tigers

  Spook Street

  London Rules

  The Marylebone Drop (A Novella)

  Joe Country

  The Catch (A Novella)

  Other Novels

  Reconstruction

  Nobody Walks

  This Is What Happened

  Copyright © 2020 by Mick Herron

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952884

  ISBN 978-1-64129-234-4

  eISBN 978-1-64129-235-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THE CATCH

  They came for him at dawn, just as he’d feared they would. But instead of using the Big Red Key so beloved of SWAT teams—the miniature battering ram that reduces a front door to matchsticks—they entered in civilised fashion, and when he opened his eyes they were in his bedroom, one regarding him as if he were a carving on a tomb, and the other examining a photograph on the dressing table that showed Solomon Dortmund when young, a mere fifty or so, holding hands with a woman the same age, and whose quiet smile for the camera could pull a drowning man ashore. Surrounding this photograph were a pair of beloved relics: a hairbrush and a small velvet drawstring bag, an inch square, containing three baby teeth and an adult molar. This was disturbing, but when you appropriate a man’s life without his blessing, you leave his family treasures where you find them.

  “Two minutes, John. You’ll be on the pavement in two minutes.”

  “Could you make it five?” His voice was scratchy, and badly dubbed. “I could do with—”

  “Two minutes. Richard here will keep you company.”

  And then it was just John Bachelor and this man Richard, a large, shaven-headed thirtysomething with thick-framed spectacles, who gazed at him unsmiling. It seemed unlikely that they would arrive at an odd-couple friendship in the time allowed.

  When he shifted, a sour smell escaped from the blankets.

  “You couldn’t pass me my trousers?”

  Richard patently regarded this as either rhetorical enquiry or statement of fact.

  There is a peculiar humiliation in dressing in front of a hostile stranger, particularly when one’s body is an increasingly rackety collection of limbs attached to a soft, baggy frame, and one’s clothing a medley of items purchased at bargain prices. Bachelor’s corduroy trousers were shiny at the knee, and his shirt had a faint spray of blood on the collar. His own, it’s important to note. Even so, it was a relief not to be standing in his briefs in front of someone whose own physical decline, if already etched in outline beneath his dark blue suit, had yet to be framed and hung for all to see.

  Squeezing his feet into socks produced the kind of hyperventilation that running up stairs once triggered.

  He stood up. “I need to, ah . . .”

  Richard affected incomprehension.

  “To piss, man. I need to piss.”

  John could see him thinking about it—actually thinking about it. When did we grow so hard? He was too young to be former-Stasi.

  “It’s your two minutes,” he said at last. “But leave the door open.”

  Of course. In case John used the precious moments to retrieve the handgun from the toilet cistern, or assemble the miniature helicopter secreted beneath the floorboards.

  It was an old man’s bathroom, with an old man’s shaving gear on a shelf, an old man’s mirror on the wall, and an old man’s reflection residing there, so Bachelor ignored it, raised the toilet lid and pissed. Lately, he had been dosing himself with Solly Dortmund’s sleeping tablets, a large number of which he had found in the medicine cabinet housing that same mirror. Solly Solly Solly. Old men have trouble sleeping, and medication was an obvious recourse. But if he had been prescribed pills, why were they still here? Solly had been a hoarder, but to collect sleeping pills spoke of building himself an escape hatch, equivalent to a handgun in a cistern, or a miniature helicopter. In the end, of course, he had needed neither, which meant that his trove remained intact for John to plunder. Which, in turn, meant side effects: John’s urine had acquired a metallic odour, and he wondered now if it were drifting out through the open door, assaulting Richard’s nostrils. He hoped not, and at the same time tried to convince himself of the upside to the worst happening: that he need no longer await its appearance.

  “Time’s up.”

  I know, John thought.

  He’d known it for a while.

  They took him not to Regent’s Park, the home of the Service, but to Marylebone High Street. Richard drove. The other man sat in the back with John. He looked to be in his fifties, a man with some years’ secret experience behind him, and not unused to collecting the wayward and conveying them somewhere like this: an empty office above London’s favourite bookshop, its white walls newly decorated, its carpet squares not yet bedded in, so that the joins could be seen crisscrossing the floor, as if marking out a board game. For the players, there were two chairs, dining-room variety. There were no blinds, and light streamed through the windows while the city yawned. It was all very—John strained, momentarily, for the precise word. It was all very alarming. If they’d been thugs, he’d have known he was in for a kicking. But they were suits, which suggested a more vicious outcome. In other circumstances, he’d have been wondering what he’d done to deserve this. As it was, he knew full well.

  “Sit there.”

  Not an invitation.

  He took the chair indicated, and the older man sat in the other, a clean metre or so between them. The younger man took station by the door. There could be no mistaking this for anything but what it was: the interrogation of a wrongdoer. It would be sweeter, quicker, if he simply confessed and saved everyone time. Whatever it is you think I’ve done, I’ve done it. Can we go home now? Though he had, of course, no home to go to. A fact which lay at the heart of what it was he’d done.

  “So, John. John Bachelor.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Yes, John. We know it’s you, John. Otherwise we’d look a right pair of nanas, wouldn’t we, collecting someone who isn’t John Bachelor this bright summer morning. So you’re who you are, and we’re us. Richard there, you already know his name. And I’m Edward. Eddie to my friends. Very much Edward to you.”

  “Edward it is.”

  Edward sighed. “I recognise that you’re eager to cooperate, John, and that’s going to save a lot of inconvenience. But don’t waste breath on things that don’t need saying. Which is a polite way, John, of telling you not to speak except to answer questions.” He clasped his hands. “If you want to hear a less polite way of being told that, go ahead with the irrelevant interruptions. Clear enough?”

  John nodded.

  “Nods aren’t going to cut it, John. When I ask a direct question, I’m going to need to hear words coming out of your mouth. So once again, was that clear enough?”

  “It was.”

  “That’s better.” Edward smiled, though not in a realistic way. Edward, thought John, was less of a suit than he appeared. Edward might have put on jacket and tie at some ungodly hour this morning, but that was as far as it
went.

  Edward unclasped his hands. Even at this distance, John was getting a hint of a fragrance he’d first detected in the car; a robust, peppery smell, from a soap that doubtless came in masculine packaging. He imagined waxed paper wrapping a weighty disc, its surface embossed with an heraldic design. All of this was offset by his awareness of his own body odour, never alluring first thing in the morning, and worsened by fear and interrupted sleep. His stomach churned repeatedly. His chin felt rubbery. His whole body, when you got down to it, was a sad disappointment. But Edward was speaking again:

  “Before we start, there’s something you should know. When an action like the one we are currently undertaking is mandated, a certain amount of administration occurs. Acceptable limits are signed off on. Mission parameters defined. What I’m saying, John, is that the worst-case scenario has been budgeted for, so I’m not looking at reputational damage if things turn sour this morning. Nor is Richard. I thought it might help if you were in possession of that information. There’s no need to acknowledge your understanding. You don’t get to sign a waiver or anything. What happens, happens.”

  John thought, All this, really? He’d been expecting some kind of bureaucratic retribution, but this melodrama? An empty office, a sinister warning? And yet it was working, because he was scared.

  Edward nodded, confident his words had hit home. He tugged at his lapels, straightening his suit jacket. “So let’s get down to business, shall we? Benny Manors, John. What can you tell me about Benny Manors?”

  Well, okay. He hadn’t been expecting that.

  John Bachelor was Service, had been all his adult life. So by any fair calculation, he ought to have been comfortably settled by now: not a Desk, obviously—reaching Desk level required drive, ambition, contacts, dress sense and at least a glimmer of sociopathy—but enjoying cubicle status and a pension. Instead, he was on the margin; downgraded last year to “irregular,” which meant part-time, with an accompanying reduction in salary. When he’d complained to HR, the rebuff had been comprehensive. If the Service operated a zero-hours contract, it ran, that’s the level he’d have been pegged at, so he might as well stop trying to make waves. Even making ripples was above his pay grade. They were barely aware, to be frank, that he was in the pool at all. Putting the phone down after this illuminating chat, he’d felt as if everything had become a little looser: the buttons on his cuffs, his shoelaces, his sense of self. What made it worse was its inevitability. His life trajectory resembled one of those puzzles in the Saturday papers: What is the next number in this sequence? He’d been counting down to zero for years.

  And it was salutary how a few poor choices could scuttle you, information it would have been useful to have had at the outset. There had been a house once, he remembered that much, and he was pretty sure it was still standing, and that his ex-wife still enjoyed the breakfast bar, the bedroom extension and the patio that had been intended to both improve their quality of life and increase the property’s value. The latter had almost certainly happened—he’d never heard of a property in London losing value, short of it burning down—but was no longer of direct relevance to him, a matter that, for the avoidance of doubt, had been clarified in a courtroom. There’d been a pension too, until he’d taken advantage of the drawdown opportunity to bury a huge chunk of it in his former brother-in-law’s foolproof investment opportunity, a mirage of such IMAX proportions that he genuinely couldn’t recall the details of the product at its heart. Skateboards for mermaids? Feline Zimmer frames? Some such fucking thing. And meanwhile here he was, wrong side of sixty, catering to the Service’s has-beens. A milkman.

  “Milkman” was a term of contempt, of course. Agents were joes; desk jockeys were suits. They were different ways of fighting the same battles, and while each had been known to look down on the other, like characters inhabiting the same Escher staircase, they shared a commonality neither would deny; a sense of purpose. A milkman, though, had failed to make a mark in either endeavour, and could be trusted to do no more than his weekly round: touching base with the pensioners and the walking wounded; those who’d served behind whatever lines had been drawn in their day, and now required support in their evening. Not that all were elderly, or, if the truth mattered, entirely honourable. Solomon Dortmund, though, had been a jewel. Had it ever occurred to Solly to view John Bachelor with disdain, it was a thought he’d have smothered in its cradle.

  And so, in the way these things have of occurring, John had been living for the last eight months in Solomon Dortmund’s apartment, two flights up in a proud brick building off the Edgware Road. It wasn’t large, but it was comfortable. Solly’s choice of pictures hung on the walls, and Solly’s umbrella lived in a stand by the front door. And Solomon had died of a heart attack in the bedroom, and John had done right by him, he was morally certain of that—arranged the funeral, invited the old man’s comrades, put money behind the bar. Had spent an evening in the company of strangers, all of whom remembered Solly fondly, and all of whom had wondered who he, Bachelor, was, precisely? Not a relative, surely. That “surely” contained a wealth of ethnic certainties. So no, John wasn’t a relative; was, rather, the son of a man with whom Solly had done business in the long-ago. The nature of this business was left vague, and those who had known that Solly, for all his gentle manners and kind habits, had once performed certain services for a certain Service, had nodded wisely, and left it at that. And afterwards John had returned to the flat, Solly’s keys in his pocket, Solly’s umbrella in his hand.

  It had been a hard winter, with inches of snow even in London, and it had been a relief to find himself behind a closed door, the weather locked out in the cold. Relief has a way of becoming habit. The tasks John performed after Solly’s departure had not included informing his department that Mr. Dortmund was no longer on the planet, and it was surprising how easy it was for a bureaucracy to overlook such trivia. Left to its own devices the Civil Service is a perpetuum mobile, and accordingly the arrangements for Solly’s well-being remained in place: his bills paid, his pension gathering dust in his bank account. John never laid a finger on Solly’s money, obviously. That would have been wrong, and difficult. But John laid his head on Solly’s pillows, and laid his body down on Solly’s bed; he rested his feet on Solly’s coffee table while planting his arse on Solly’s sofa, and he cleaned out Solly’s fridge and pantry without his conscience uttering one chirp. He was doing no harm. It was this or sleep in his car: who could afford London rents on a three-day-week salary? And he’d run out of friends among the living. So it was Solly’s generosity he relied on, and Solly’s roof that sheltered him through the rest of that hard winter, and a wet spring, and a record-breaking summer. If there was a downside, it was the anxiety that fizzed in the background like white noise. Unbroken luck was an unknown factor in John’s life, and waiting for the fracture to happen wore at his nerves. Hence his use of Solly’s sleeping pills.

  This, or most of it, provided a wealth of explanations for his current situation: sitting on this chair in this room, with Edward being fierce at him.

  Benny Manors, though, had never entered his mental picture.

  “Benny Manors, John. What can you tell me about Benny Manors?”

  Bringing him back to the present.

  “Benny, well, Benny,” he said. “What can I say? Benny’s one of mine.”

  “We know, John. Sole purpose of visit, as they say at passport control. Little more detail, eh?”

  John searched what others might refer to as their mental database, or perhaps Rolodex, if they were of a certain generation. For John, it was more akin to opening an ancient filing cabinet he’d long stopped keeping in alphabetical order. Some of the papers were scribbles on envelopes. Benny Manors. That was a name he’d shoved to the back, in the hope he’d not have to deal with it again.

  “Because I’ve been looking through your Ts and Cs, John. That an abbreviation you’re familiar with? Doesn’
t mean tits and cooze, if you were wondering. No, it means terms and conditions. As in, of employment. You remember that, John, the job you do? The one you’re paid for? Remind me what they call you?”

  “I’m a retirement needs evaluation counsellor—”

  “You’re a milkman, John.”

  John nodded.

  “And what your Ts and Cs very eloquently state is that, in that role, you make contact with your clients, bare minimum, once a month. Which is handy for me, as I’m keen on having a word with one of those clients, the aforementioned Benny Manors, and on account of the terms and conditions of your employment, I’m in the happy position of knowing I’m talking to someone who’s had contact with Benny in the last four weeks. Bare minimum. Meaning that within the next two minutes I’m going to have a much clearer picture of our Benny’s current whereabouts than I do now. So that’s nice for me, isn’t it, John? Nice knowing I have you to paint that picture for me.”

  It must indeed have been nice for him, living in that state of certainty, though it was a little less comfortable for John Bachelor. Because John hadn’t laid eyes on Benny Manors in well over two years.

  It was one of those things, one of those moments. You meet someone and right there, in the first flush of new acquaintance—forget about taking time to be sure; sometimes you can feel it in your marrow, no hesitation—right there, in that first moment, you think: well, this isn’t going to fucking work, is it?

  He’d already had Benny Manors’s history down pat. Say what you like about John Bachelor, but he did his job, or at least, turned up prepared to do his job. It was only after that preliminary stage that things might go wrong, as with, for example, Benny Manors. So yes, he had Benny’s number, and it wasn’t what you’d call prime. Because Benny was a louse and Benny was a chancer. One of those who definitely fell within the category “not entirely honourable.” What Benny had been, when you got down to it, was a crook. Breaking and entering, though he’d discovered a sideline when a venture into a likely looking property had yielded an interesting collection of Polaroids among the loose cash and petty jewellery, Polaroids Benny had amused himself with a time or two before it occurred to him that while the starring role of Old Man in a Nappy had evidently been taken by the gentleman occupier of the recently burgled house, the two young women supporting his act were definitely not his wife. And thus Benny had learned that some stolen property enjoys a cash value above and beyond what it might reach down the local, because the elderly gentleman proved expensively keen to reacquire possession of his souvenirs rather than have them, say, appear on the internet. It was Benny’s pleasure to make the old man’s dream come true. Well, his latest dream. Going by the evidence, earlier versions had already been taken care of.