by Mick Herron
“And the windows are reinforced. I wouldn’t recommend you attempt an exit.”
“I’m hardly James Bond.”
“No. If you were, we’d shoot you.” Her reaction made Emma regret that a little. “A joke, Ms. Rahman.”
“It probably sounded funnier in your head.”
Couldn’t argue with that.
She locked the door behind her. In the kitchen Dempsey was going through cupboards; had found teabags and a vintage packet of biscuits.
“Call me if she gives trouble.”
Dempsey said, “Trouble? I’m more worried she’ll wet herself.”
Out in the car, Emma sat thinking. Diana Taverner was a slippery lady, and anything with her fingerprints on was likely to be wiped clean before official examination. That the warrant for Giti Rahman’s collection had been signed by Claude Whelan could be discounted. Acquiring other people’s signatures was no doubt among Lady Di’s talents.
Then again, these people were safeguarding national security, and her role was to ease their passage. So Giti Rahman—innocent, guilty, or just in the way—was no longer her concern. David Cartwright, on the other hand, was a task in hand.
She called Devon Welles, whom she’d left in charge at the Cartwright house.
“Anything?”
“. . . Not really.”
“Tell.”
“It was nothing. A car went past, slowed down, as if someone was trying to get a look through the window.”
“Nosy neighbour?”
“Could be. And there’s a woodentop on the door, which is always exciting.”
“But you got a plate anyway,” she said.
She liked Welles. He was another ex-copper, with all the right reactions.
“A partial.”
“Run it. Any ID on the body yet?”
“No. Except who it’s not.”
“Except—?”
“The blood’s not a match for Cartwright’s grandson.”
“Ah.” She thought a bit. “Well, that narrows it down by one, I suppose. And means we have two missing persons. Better start with the grandson’s associates.”
“He’s really called River?”
“So Jackson Lamb assured me. Speaking of whom . . . ”
“He mis-identified the stiff.”
“The body’s a mess,” Emma said. “No face to speak of. Still, though.”
“An ‘I don’t know’ would have done the job,” Welles finished.
“So maybe Lamb’s playing his own game. Christ, don’t you miss the Met sometimes? At least all the crap was honest crap.”
“Graft, drugs and hookers,” Welles agreed. “This lot, you just can’t trust.”
“So if Lamb wanted us to think young Cartwright’s dead, maybe there’s other stuff he’s keeping quiet. Like where Cartwright actually is. Both of them.”
“Lamb’s from that losers’ place, right?”
“Slough House.”
“You think the Cartwrights are there?”
“Too obvious. These are spooks, even if they’re Vauxhall Conference.” She paused. “Do they still have a Vauxhall Conference?”
“You’re asking a cricket fan,” Welles said. “So what do you reckon? Check out his colleagues?”
“Also too obvious.” She thought a moment. “But let’s look at Lamb’s contacts. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Call over, she started the car and pulled away with a squeal of rubber. Not the recommended practice when departing a safe house, but sometimes, chatting to a fellow ex-copper, the old instincts took over.
The rabbit looked unscathed, apart from being dead.
River’s heart started again.
“Good shot,” he said.
The man raised an eyebrow.
“ça, ç’etait formidable,” River improvised.
The man held his free hand flat and wiggled it side to side.
Comme çi, comme ça, thought River, and decided that if he were capable of reading French mime, his language skills weren’t as tragic as he’d been made to feel.
His new companion wore a waterproof jacket with capacious-looking pockets, from one of which he produced a length of string. Leaning his shotgun against a tree, he tied the rabbit’s back legs together, secured the string to his belt, then slung the corpse over his shoulder. Most dead things look smaller, but this remained an impressive piece of meat. With the thought, a hunger pang struck River. The sky growled too, a thundery echo.
“Anglais?” the man asked suddenly, his voice higher, lighter, than River might have expected. He was dark, with rook-black hair and angular features, all of which suggested something guttural. Not this soft cadence.
“Yes,” he said.
“You look for someone?”
“The people here.”
“Gone. All gone.” The man snapped his fingers, pouf, just like that. They were here and then were gone, in a puff of smoke, except the smoke had been a cloud: a thick black mass of it, pouring upwards through the trees.
And downwards through the trees now came the first fat spats of heavier rain.
The man tugged his collar up, and recovered his shotgun. Then looked at River’s inadequate jacket and shoes.
“You’re to be get wet,” he said.
“I am to be that, yes,” River agreed.
“Come.”
And the man led the way through the wood; not along the track River had followed, but set to an invisible course he seemed to know well, avoiding every root that River stumbled over, and every hole in the ground that sought out River’s feet.
Patrice pulled into a layby, and spread a map against the windscreen. He knew precisely where he was—wouldn’t dream of setting foot on hostile land without memorising routes—but it provided an excuse for remaining stationary while he gave thought to what he’d learned.
A police presence round the target’s house.
Which was to be expected. Bertrand would have made it look like an old-man accident, but even an old-man accident would require official scrutiny given the old man in question. Except that there had been no confirmation, parcel delivered, nor even its obverse, nobody at home. Will attempt redelivery.
So. Absence of message plus police presence meant Bertrand’s parcel hadn’t just not been delivered, it had likely blown up in his face.
This was not out of the question. Patrice loved Bertrand like a brother, but facts were facts: Bertrand had been known to falter at critical moments.
He refolded the map and took out his mobile at the precise moment that a passing bird, a seagull for Christ’s sake—he was miles from the sea—shat on his windscreen. There were omens, and then there were your basic illustrations. The phone was answered on its second ring, but he heard only silence. To fill it, he delivered three swift sentences, in French.
More silence.
Then: “And your parcel?”
“Still undelivered.”
“Try again.”
He ended the call.
Squirting cleanser onto the windscreen, he watched as the wipers smeared the seagull’s mess into a grey film. Another clean-up job that made things worse. Then he cried, very briefly, for Bertrand, who was probably dead; squirted more cleanser, and ran the wipers again. Then he drove back to London.
The restaurant was near enough to be within Jackson Lamb’s compass, new enough for him not to have tried it yet, and canny enough to recognise an awkward customer. Or that was one possible reason for the waiter’s nervousness as he showed Lamb and Moira Tregorian to a table he first described as “nice” before instantly upgrading to “very good.”
“Do you treat all your new staff to lunch?” Moira asked.
“I treat all my staff the way they deserve,” Lamb said, as the waiter began rattling off that day’s specia
ls: something something pulled pork, something medallions, something vinaigrette. Lamb politely let him finish before saying, “I’ll have the beef.”
“Sir, beef’s not actually—”
“Rare.”
Moira ordered the Caesar salad.
“And a bottle of the house red,” said Lamb.
“Oh, I don’t think I’d better drink anything.”
“Just the bottle of house red then,” said Lamb.
When the waiter had escaped, Lamb scooped up both bread rolls from the basket and split them open with a practised thumb. While he levered the contents of the butter dish into the cavities thus made, he said, his voice at its plummiest, “So, how are you settling in?”
“It’s been a mite discombobulating, I don’t mind telling you,” she said, tearing her eyes away from his evisceration of the bread. “What with everyone thinking Mr. Cartwright was dead for some reason.”
“It’s a herd mentality,” Lamb said sadly. “Someone gets hold of the wrong idea, and suddenly everyone believes it. I think that’s how the internet works.”
The waiter returned with the wine. He opened it grandly, as if performing a magic trick, poured a splash into Lamb’s glass and stood back, the way one might from a lit firework.
“If I cared what it tasted like, I’d have ordered from the bottom of the list,” Lamb said. “Just fill it up.”
The waiter did as instructed, then fled.
Lamb beamed at Moira suddenly, an expression which would have had the slow horses, with the possible exception of Catherine Standish, covering their heads. “Tell me,” he said. “Why do you think you were assigned to Slough House?”
“Well. It’s very clear that . . . does everyone call it Slough House?”
“They do.”
“It doesn’t have an official name?”
“Trust me, if it did, you wouldn’t want to know it.”
“I see,” said Moira, who didn’t. “Well, be that as it may, it’s very clear that Slough House needs me, or someone like me.”
“What an original thought.”
“Because everything’s such a mess. I don’t just mean the offices, though they’re bad enough, and as for the lavatories—well. I’ll say no more on that subject over lunch. But it’s the paperwork, it’s the lax standards when it comes to desk management, and as for general behaviour—well. There’ve been shenanigans. I’ll put it no higher than that.”
“Abuse of office equipment?” Lamb suggested.
“Abuse would be a mild term. Very mild.”
Lamb nodded, as if mildness were as much as he could usually bear, and then appeared to notice the glass of wine in front of him. It was a large glass, and currently held about a third of the bottle’s contents, so he drained it in two swallows and poured another. “Sometimes it’s self-evident,” he said.
“I . . . what is?”
“The reason why folk end up in Slough House,” Lamb said. He took a bite of the bread roll and chewed hugely for a moment or two. Then said, “Take young Cartwright. The not-so-dear departed. He arrived a couple of days after an incident at King’s Cross which quite literally made headlines all over the world. Not too difficult to work out what his misdemeanour was.”
“Rather more than a misdemeanour, I’d have thought.”
“There were mitigating circumstances,” Lamb allowed.
“What were they?”
“He was being dicked about,” Lamb said. “Apologies for the language. Your predecessor was a bad influence.”
“I gather she had . . . issues.”
“Some, yes. And also, she drank like a fish.”
“Oh dear.”
“All behind her now, she claims, but you know what they say.” Lamb reached for his glass. “Once a lush, always a lush.”
The waiter arrived with their food, and Lamb paused while plates were arranged in front of them, though he didn’t take his eyes off Moira Tregorian.
“Enjoy your meal,” the waiter said, with the air of one who wouldn’t mind much if Lamb choked to death instead.
Ignoring him, Lamb said to Moira, “But you know what’s interesting about your assignment?”
She paused, her fork hovering over her salad. For the first time, she seemed unsure of her role in this conversation: was she still the new confidante, replacing a sadly inadequate predecessor? Or was Jackson Lamb playing a game of his own, whose rules he hadn’t bothered to share?
He said, “Claude Whelan sent you here. One of his first acts on taking charge. Don’t you think that’s interesting? Because I do.”
And he smiled in a way that would have had the slow horses—Catherine Standish included—running for shelter, before pouring the rest of the wine into his glass, then waggling the bottle at the waiter.
The O.B. blinked in an owlish way, as if about to turn his head all the way round. “I used to live here, didn’t I?”
“No,” Catherine assured him. “You’ve never lived here.”
He’d woken an hour ago and clambered out of bed, and getting dressed had caused him no problems, because he hadn’t undressed in the first place. She’d felt bad about this—it had been an act of cruelty, allowing him to crawl under the covers fully clothed, only his shoes discarded—but in the end, not bad enough to attempt to undress him. And they were her covers. And it hadn’t been her idea to start with.
“I need somewhere he’ll be safe,” River had said. “With someone I trust.”
Which was a nice touch, but then he’d had an entire journey to rehearse his case; she had about three minutes to put up her defences.
“River—I’m happy you trust me. Really. But you can’t just leave him here!”
What does he eat? she wanted to ask. Do I need to walk him? Impossible to construct a coherent counter-argument with idiot questions forming in her mind.
“Someone tried to kill him, Catherine.”
“That’s supposed to motivate me? What if the killer comes here? River—”
“Don’t worry. That won’t be happening.”
Something in the way he said this precluded her asking the obvious.
But what was worst about this conversation, what had been really horrible, was the way it was conducted: in furious whispers with the old man in the room, confused fear on his face. She didn’t need this. Not today. Not on a bleak January morning with the whole city mired in shocked grief; a beautiful excuse for drowning her own and everyone else’s sorrows.
“Please, Catherine.”
“Who wanted him dead?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.”
“Why don’t you take him to the Park?”
River didn’t answer.
“Oh God,” she said, joining his dots.
So now here she was, and here was the O.B. too, and already the integrity of the safe house was compromised because it had taken Lamb all of five minutes to work out where to find him, and while Lamb was smarter than most people, his wasn’t the only brain on Spook Street.
Though not all spook brains worked the way they used to.
“Where’s he gone?”
“Where’s who gone, David?”
Because she couldn’t call him Mr. Cartwright: not in these circumstances.
“That boy, that young man.”
“. . . River?”
“What sort of a name is that?”
She’d often wondered . . . “He’s not here. But he’ll be back. I promise.” I hope.
“I think he might be up to something,” David Cartwright said.
She had poached him two eggs, and arranged them on toast, and he had eaten hungrily and then drunk three cups of tea, though he’d spilt the third. Now he was in her sitting room, straight-backed on a comfy chair, as if allowing himself to sink into it would compromise his principl
es. He was still struggling with his grandson: both his name, and the fact of his existence.
“He’s not up to anything, David. He’s just had to run an errand.”
“Used to know someone called River. About so high.”
The old man placed a palm level with his chest, though as he remained sitting, it was difficult to judge precisely what height he was remembering River to be.
Either way, it was a while ago. “That’s the same River,” Catherine said gently. “He grew up.”
“Used to know his mother.”
These weren’t waters Catherine wanted to swim in. “Do you have everything you need? Would you like more to eat?”
Listen to yourself, she admonished. She sounded like her own mother: deflecting the threat of emotion with offers of sustenance.
She said, “His mother, River’s mother—that was your daughter. She was called Isobel.” Too late, she realised she’d slipped into the wrong tense. “That’s what she’s called, I mean. She’s called Isobel.”
A tear was rolling down the old man’s cheek. “I don’t have a daughter.”
“You do, you know.”
“No. She told me so. I’m no longer your daughter. She told me that.”
And this was why you offered food, she thought. This was why you deflected emotion: because there was no helping this level of hurt. There was nowhere either of them could go in this conversation.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked again. “Or are you quite happy?”
A ridiculous question in the circumstances, but it lit something in his eyes. “Happy,” he said.
“. . . Yes?”
“Grumpy. Sneezy. Doc.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake, she thought.
“Dopey. Bashful. Grumpy. And that’s all seven.” He tapped his temple. “Nothing wrong with the old memory banks.”
She didn’t point out his error. She didn’t do anything. It was like taking a glimpse down a set of cellar stairs, she thought, and becoming suddenly aware of the steep darkness awaiting you. It didn’t really matter how careful you were in your descent.
“Where’s River?” he asked again.
“He went to France,” she said, invention momentarily beyond her. She was sure that’s where he’d gone: she’d found the rail ticket in his pocket.
