by Mick Herron
‘Not especially.’
‘Okay, so what about the downside? Was Moody really on his lonesome when he broke his neck?’ She put her head on one side. ‘Or did he have company?’
Lamb showed his teeth. ‘We’ve covered this. Call in the Dogs. When they’ve finished tearing you apart, they’ll maybe have strength to pick at the rest of us.’ He yawned a cavernous yawn he didn’t bother to conceal. ‘I’m not bothered either way.’
‘No matter who gets swatted.’
‘You said it.’
‘What if it’s Standish?’
Lamb shook his head. ‘You’re tossing darts, seeing what you might hit. Standish isn’t involved. She’s at home, asleep. I guarantee it.’
‘I’m not talking about tonight.’ And this time she had the sense that a dart had landed close. She could tell by Lamb’s body language; a relaxation of the muscles around his mouth, a signal designed to indicate absence of care. ‘Catherine Standish? She came this close to a treason charge. You think that went away?’
His eyes were black in the moonlight. ‘That’s not a can of worms you want to open.’
‘Do I look like I’m keen? You’re right, this evening’s out of control. I want it over, quickly and quietly. With someone I trust at the reins. And like it or not, Slough House is part of this now. You’ll all get turned over. And poor Catherine … Well, she doesn’t even know the trouble she was nearly in, does she?’
Lamb surveyed the canal. Lights swayed on its surface, reflections from stray sources. A few houseboats were shrouded in darkness, their cabin roofs home to potted plants, some trailing green fingers as far as the water, and carefully stacked piles of bicycles. Evidence of an alternative lifestyle, or a hidey-hole for alternative weekends. Who cared?
He said, ‘It was before your time. But you know why I’m at Slough House.’
It wasn’t a question.
Diana Taverner said, ‘I’ve heard three versions.’
‘The bad one? That’s the truth.’
‘I guessed as much.’
He leant forward. ‘You’ve been using Slough House as your personal toybox, and that pisses me off. Are we clear on that?’
She gave the dart another push. ‘You care about them, don’t you?’
‘No, I think they’re a bunch of fucking losers.’ He came closer. ‘But they’re my losers. Not yours. So I’ll do this thing, but with conditions attached. Moody disappears. Baker was a street victim. Anyone who’s with me tonight is fireproof. Oh, and you’re everlastingly in my debt. Which, you’d better believe, will be reflected in expense sheets evermore.’
‘We can all come out of this covered in glory,’ she said, unwisely.
But Lamb rejected the seven or eight probable rejoinders; simply shook his head in mute disbelief, and looked again at the canal’s surface where broken shards of light bobbed in quiet disarray.
‘I have a photograph,’ Hobden said. ‘It shows you throwing a Nazi salute, with your arm round Nicholas Frost. He’s forgotten now, of course, but he was a leading light in the National Front at the time. Stabbed to death at a rally a few years later, which is just as well. He was the sort who gave the right a bad name.’
A long moment later, PJ said, ‘That photograph was destroyed.’
‘I can believe it.’
‘So destroyed it might be said never to have existed.’
‘In which case, you have nothing to worry about.’
The various PJs who’d so far been present—the urbane, the bumbly, the vicious, the cruel—melded into one, and for a moment the real Peter Judd peered out from the overgrown schoolboy, and what he was doing was what he was always doing: weighing up who he was talking to in terms of the threat he posed, and assessing how that threat might cleanly be dealt with. ‘Cleanly’ meant without repercussion. If the photograph still existed, and was in Hobden’s possession, the consequences would be potentially catastrophic. Hobden might be bluffing. But that he even knew of the photo meant PJ’s needle had edged into the red.
First, neutralize the consequences.
Deal with the threat later.
He said, ‘What do you want?’
‘I want you to get the word out.’
‘The word?’
‘That this whole set-up, this supposed execution, is a fake. That the Voice of Albion, who’ve never been more than a bunch of streetfighters, have been infiltrated by the intelligence services. That they’ve been made the vehicle for a PR exercise, and they’re not going to come out of it well.’ Hobden paused. ‘I don’t care what happens to the idiots. But the damage they’re doing to our cause is incalculable.’
PJ let that our slide past. Our cause. ‘And I’m to, what? Announce this in the House?’
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t got contacts. The right word from you, in the right ear, will get a lot further than mine will.’ His voice became urgent. ‘I wouldn’t involve you if I could deal with this myself. But like I said. They’re not my chums.’
‘It’s probably too late already,’ PJ said.
‘We have to try.’ Exhausted suddenly, Hobden wiped a hand across his face. ‘They can say it was a joke that got out of hand. That they never had any intention of spilling blood.’
There was commotion outside; voices calling down the stairs. PJ? Where have you got to, dammit? And also: Darling? Where are you? This last with more than a hint of tetchiness.
‘I’ll be right up,’ PJ called. And then: ‘You’d better go.’
‘You’ll make the call?’
‘I’ll see to it.’
Something in his glare dissuaded Hobden from taking it further.
Lamb left. Taverner watched until his bulky shape merged with the larger shadows, and then for another two minutes before allowing herself to relax. She checked her watch. Two thirty-five.
A quick mental calculation: the deadline—Hassan’s deadline—had about twenty-six hours to run.
Ideally, Diana Taverner would have played that string out longer; waited until every TV screen in the land was running a clock before she set the rescue wheels turning. But tonight would have to do. And anyway, the bright spin she’d put on it—that this was not a last-minute rescue, but a controlled, panic-free operation—would work fine. Never any danger. That’s what the report would conclude; that Five had everything under wraps from the start. So, come morning, Hassan would be safely home; Taverner’s agent would be out from deep cover; and she herself would be accepting congratulations, watching the Service’s cachet skyrocket. And as a bonus, there was no chance of Ingrid Tearney getting back from DC in time to steal her glory.
But it was no great comfort that matters now lay in the hands of Jackson Lamb. Lamb was worse than a Service screw-up; he was a loose cannon, who’d wilfully slipped his moorings. When he’d asked if she knew why he was at Slough House, he’d been threatening her; asking if she knew what he’d once done. If things went screwy tonight, Lamb wouldn’t leave it to the Dogs to clean things up. He’d wipe the slate himself.
In which case, a contingency plan was advisable.
She fished her mobile out of her pocket; called up a number. It rang five times before being answered. ‘Taverner,’ she said. ‘Sorry to disturb. But I’ve just had a very strange conversation with Jackson Lamb.’
Still talking, she set off down the towpath, and pretty soon was swallowed by the shadows.
It was late, it was late, but the dinner party was still going strong. The odd line of coke was helping. PJ had resolved to let this pass, but would be having words with the guilty parties, strong words, before the week was out. There were jinks you could enjoy in opposition, and higher jinks you could get away with in government, but once inside the cabinet, there were guidelines to be observed. None of the puppies partaking were at PJ’s exalted level, of course, but it showed him deep disrespect to imagine that he hadn’t noticed.
But they could wait. In the half-hour since Hobden’s departure, PJ had been assessing the deeps and s
hallows of his story, and had decided it was probably true. Even in the webbed-up world, where conspiracy theories spread faster than a blogger’s acne, PJ had no difficulty believing that elements within MI5 might have concocted this piece of Grand Guignol, and it even impressed him, a bit. A little less cloak-and-dagger and a bit more reality TV: that was the way to catch the public imagination. And you couldn’t get more real than spilling blood.
What he hadn’t decided was what his reaction should be. For all Hobden’s doom-mongering, PJ felt that the electorate could distinguish between the establishment version of right-wing and the kind cooked up on sink estates. Besides, follow Hobden’s reasoning and it made no difference whether the plot succeeded or failed: either way, the far-right came out as murderous bastards. And given that PJ didn’t care if one, at best, second-generation citizen lived or died, and that he intended one day to be in a position where the strength of the intelligence services was of immediate personal concern to him, the deck was weighted against his lifting a finger.
But then there was the photo. If it existed. Here in the privacy of PJ’s head, there was little point pretending it had never done so, but whether it could still be described in such terms was a different matter, one which a serious amount of money, a fair few promises, and one act of violence had theoretically resolved. At this distance there was little chance that a copy survived, but allowing for the possibility that it did, there were few more likely candidates for finding it than Robert Hobden. Even leaving aside his far-right connections, Hobden’s career had been as remarkable for its uncovering of political sins as it had been for its smug pomposity, and before his fall from grace, those in power trod round him with care. And the fact that he obviously didn’t know everything made it more likely that he wasn’t bluffing—if he’d had even an inkling that Nicholas Frost’s death at a National Front rally had been other than it seemed, he’d have raised the matter. So assume, PJ thought, that the photo existed; assume Hobden had a copy. Where did that leave matters? Matters meaning PJ?
It left him plastering the cracks. He pushed his chair back, waved an apologetic hand in his wife’s direction; mouthed ‘Telephone’ at her. She’d think this was to do with the hostage situation, and it was, of course. It was.
He found Sebastian on the upstairs landing, where he sat looking out at the quiet street. Factotum was one of the words used to describe Sebastian; PJ had also heard majordomo and even batman. That last one was quite good, in fact. Caped crusader. Dark deeds, in the cause of righteousness. Righteousness also meaning PJ.
If the photo existed: well. There were guidelines to be observed at cabinet level, of course, but one of those was the bottom line itself, which simply stated that you did not allow others to hold a blade at your throat.
Those in power had once trod round Robert Hobden with care. These days, rolling right over him was an option. But first, he’d plaster those cracks; get the word out, as Hobden had wanted. PJ did not maintain personal relations with those who dwelt so far beyond the pale, but then, he didn’t need to. What’s a batman for?
‘Seb,’ he said. ‘I need you to make some calls.’
Chapter 11
Jed Moody’s body was still on the landing, bleakly lit by a naked bulb. Lamb paid little attention to it on his way up to his office, where he lifted the corkboard from the floor and rehung it on the wall. Then he unlocked a desk drawer and drew out a shoebox. Inside, swaddled in cloth, was a Heckler & Koch. After examining it briefly by the light of the Anglepoise, he slipped it into his overcoat pocket, causing the coat to hang awkwardly. Leaving the shoebox on the desk, and the low lamp burning, he returned downstairs.
‘What happened to the gun?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got it,’ River told him.
Lamb held out a meaty hand, and River surrendered the weapon, which promptly disappeared inside Lamb’s pocket. Curiously, to River’s eye, it seemed to even him up a little.
Lamb glanced down at Moody. ‘Keep an eye on the place, eh?’
The dead man didn’t answer.
Lamb led the way down, lighting a cigarette before they’d reached the street. Outside, its plume of smoke was almost white. ‘Anyone else got a car here?’
Louisa Guy did.
‘Either of you in a state to drive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then follow me.’
‘Where to?’ River asked.
‘You’re with me.’ To the other two, Lamb said, ‘Roupell Street. Know it?’
‘South of the river.’
‘This time of night?’
Lamb said, ‘That supposed to be funny?’
‘What do we do when we get there?’ River asked.
‘We rescue Hassan Ahmed,’ Lamb said. ‘And we all get to be heroes.’
River, Min and Louisa shared a glance.
Lamb said, ‘Is that all right with you? Or did you have other plans?’
They had no other plans.
Larry, Moe and Curly.
Curly, Larry and Moe.
Who were these people, and why had they taken him?
You think we give a toss who you are?
For long stretches at a time, Hassan believed that he had stopped thinking. That he was all feeling, no thought. But that was wrong: it was more that his thoughts had become feelings, and were now tumbling round his head like butterflies. His thoughts were fluttering things, impossible to pin down. They led to one thing, then to another, and then to a third, which might be the first thing over again, though it was hard to be sure, as by then he’d forgotten what the first thing had been. Whether the root cause of this was fear or hunger or loneliness, he didn’t know. What was interesting—and this interested him in the same way he might once have been interested in the activities of an ant—was that he had discovered a talent for time travel. For fractions of a second, he was able to cast himself out of this cellar and into a past in which none of this would ever happen.
For instance, he remembered the first time he’d asked his mother about the man in the photo on her bedside table; this obvious soldier, with fine firm features, and a look in his eye suggesting that he too knew the secret of time travel, and was seeing through the camera and into the future itself; a future in which children yet unborn would gaze at his photograph, and wonder who he was.
‘That is your uncle Mahmud,’ he was told.
Hassan had been five or so at the time.
‘Where is he?’ he’d asked.
‘He’s back home. In Pakistan.’
But home didn’t mean Pakistan to Hassan. Home meant where he lived; it meant the house in which he woke up every day with his parents and brothers and sisters, and also the street on which that house was set, and the town that street was part of, and so on. It confused him that for his mother, the word might mean something else. If words meant different things to different people, how could they be trusted?
And if this man was his uncle, why had Hassan never met him?
‘Why doesn’t he visit us?’
Because his uncle was a very busy and important man, who had duties that kept him on the other side of the world.
Information supplied early enough becomes hardwired into the brain, and this nugget had not only satisfied Hassan, but seemed to be the only thing worth saying on the subject. When, years later, he had glimpsed what looked like the same man on the BBC news, a figure in a line of men being introduced to the US President, who’d been on one of his welcome-to-my-world tours, it was simply confirmation of what his mother had told him: that his uncle was a very busy and important man.
And then the flicker of history was gone, and Hassan was back in his cellar.
His uncle was a very busy and important man. Too busy and important ever to visit England; that was the story his younger self had been told. The truth, as his father had told him much later, cast a somewhat different light: his uncle had never visited because he did not approve of his sister’s marriage; did not approve of their secular life. Though
the matter of his busyness and importance remained true: his uncle was a high-ranking officer in the Pakistan military.
Was that busy and important enough, he wondered now? Was that important enough for Larry, Curly and Moe?
You think we give a toss who you are?
That was what they had said, but perhaps they had lied. After all, they had assaulted, drugged and kidnapped him; imprisoned him in a damp cellar; coldly informed him they were going to cut his head off. They had given him a bottle of water and a banana, and nothing else. They were bad people. That they were liars was not beyond possibility. And since busyness and importance easily equated with wealth, maybe this was in reality a kidnapping of the garden variety; that for all their threats and bluster, Moe, Curly and Larry’s aim was to screw money from his busy, important uncle, no more. Which made more sense than that they might demand a ransom from his parents, who were busy but not important; comfortable, but not rich. Hassan was almost certain, then, that this must be the case.
You fucking Paki.
Yeah, sure, they said that, but only to keep him scared.
We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web.
But what they meant was: unless your uncle pays the ransom.
Hassan had seen enough movies to know what this meant; the opportunities the police would have to follow the money; the helicopter surveillance. The low-key tracking, followed by a burst of action: shouting and flashing lights. And then the cellar door would open, and a torch-beam light the way down the stairs …
He thought: No. Give up. That’s not going to happen.
And then thought: But what’s the harm in thinking it? How else should he pass the time while waiting for the axe to fall?
And even as these thoughts fought like butterflies in his crowded head, something thumped on the ceiling above him, and voices cried out in anger or surprise—was that violence he heard? He thought it was violence. A brief outburst ending with another thump, while in his head new pictures painted themselves—
A SWAT team had come crashing in
Armed police had stormed the house
