Spook Street

by Mick Herron

  Though it was always possible he was just feeling sorry for himself.

  Diana had had coffee and sandwiches brought: a peace offering, Whelan thought, though again he might be overdramatising. It was, after all, lunchtime. She had been running him through the logistics of the cold body protocol. How it had been mothballed once the wardrobe department was wound up, and how—like everything else to do with the Civil Service—this had not meant that the stalled product was consigned to the furnace; simply that it had been packaged, sealed, labelled, stored.

  “We’ve had problems with storage space,” she said.

  “So I heard.”

  The problems in question had culminated in a shooting war in one of the Service’s off-site facilities out beyond Paddington: “putting the wild into the west” as a wit on the Limitations Committee had phrased it. Like many local unpleasantnesses—the deployment of Service resources to personal ends; the unseemly wrangling over parking-spaces; the decades-long cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by Members of Parliament—this had been quietly swept under the carpet, with the usual result: not so much a tidy floor as an unsightly bulge, which sooner or later someone was going to trip over, and break their career.

  “But ID product has always been kept on-site, in one of the secure rooms.”

  Diana broke off to unwrap a crayfish sandwich, bending its packaging into a nest so that wayward flecks of mayonnaise wouldn’t soil her outfit. Then she removed the plastic lid from her coffee container and scraped the excess froth from it with a wooden paddle. Whelan watched, fascinated. The longer this went on, the less there’d be of the rest of his life, in which he had to cope with the dangerous stuff Diana was revealing.

  But this wouldn’t do. He was in charge—First Desk, Chief Exec, God Albloodymighty.

  “So, then. How, precisely, do we determine who was responsible for stealing these—”

  “Product,” she said.

  “Product?”

  “We can’t keep calling them cold bodies, Claude. Apart from anything else, it might alert people to what we’re talking about.” She raised her cup to her lips and breathed in coffee fumes rather than sipped. “We are spies, remember?”

  “Product, then. Do we have a list of suspects?”

  “Well, there can’t have been many people in a position to walk out of a secure room with several box-files’ worth of high-clearance . . . product, but it was a long time ago. Whoever it was might have retired, moved on or dropped off the perch. Investigation would be a time-consuming business, and we don’t have time, and it would inevitably attract attention, and we don’t want any.”

  “But apart from that,” he said.

  “Apart from that,” she agreed, “we would like to know who was responsible.”

  “To what end?”

  She said, “I’m not sure I take your meaning, Claude.”

  “I’m trying to determine what you regard as the best outcome,” he said. “That we apprehend whoever’s responsible in order to bring them to public justice. Or to make sure that nobody ever discovers the Service’s involvement in the Westacres bombing.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “I—what?”

  “You haven’t eaten your sandwich.”

  He was still clutching it, in its wedge-shaped container. Something with chorizo. He didn’t remember having been asked for a preference, or what he’d replied if he had been, but was pretty sure it wouldn’t have been chorizo, if only because chorizo was one of those foodstuffs whose existence he only recalled when it was actually in his presence. Like yellow peppers. He was hungry, though, so tore the strip off the container, and carefully eased one sandwich out, though not carefully enough to prevent a globule of mustard dripping onto his lapel.

  “Can I fetch you a—”

  “I’m fine,” he snapped.

  “The Service had no involvement in the Westacres bombing,” she said, as if the intervening pantomime had not occurred. “Service product was misappropriated, and that’s regrettable. But the Service itself had no involvement. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page on that one, Claude.”

  Nothing in her tone suggested that this was a subordinate offering counsel to her boss. He glanced at Claire’s photo, and it occurred to him that one of his first acts on taking up Dame Ingrid Tearney’s mantle had been to neutralise—or at least, marginalise—a potential source of danger. He’d thought himself a pretty fine player of the game at the time. But it had been like trapping a mouse and releasing it miles away, then returning home to find a dragon in the kitchen.

  A mouse can cause untold irritation, but there’s nothing like the rain of fire a dragon can bring down.

  Regaining an equable tone, he said, “I think you can trust me to have the Service’s best interests at heart, Diana.”

  “Good.”

  “Alongside those of the nation at large.”

  “God, yes. The nation.”

  He bit into his sandwich. The chorizo was spicy, and bit back. “The missing product, though. You have the details?”

  She was nodding before he’d finished; had the look, Whelan decided, of a satisfied teacher. He didn’t care. Right this moment, he’d take anything he could get.

  “If they’re currently in use, we find them,” he said. “We find them, and with their help, voluntary or otherwise, we discover who provided them with their identities in the first place. And then we draw a curtain over the whole dreadful episode.”

  “Voluntary or otherwise,” she repeated. “Perhaps you have the makings of a First Desk after all, Claude.”

  “What are the names?”

  “Robert Winters we already know. He’s the only one to make a mark on the world so far.”

  “And the others?”

  “Paul Wayne,” she said. “And Adam Lockhead.”

  “Wayne and Lockhead,” he murmured. The names meant nothing to him, and he hoped they never would. Not in the way their brother-in-fiction Robert Winters did.

  “I’ve fed them into the system,” Diana said. “On a low priority.”

  Whelan raised an eyebrow.

  “Because the only high priority right now is Westacres,” she said. “And we can’t have anyone drawing a connection between those names and that event. Not until we’ve had a chance to . . . ensure the correct outcome.”

  A safe pair of hands, he thought, nostalgically. That was supposed to be him. And almost without pause, his feet barely under First Desk, here he was: involved in what some—even Claire, he supposed—might consider a conspiracy. Almost unconsciously he reached out and adjusted his wife’s photo. Little moments of contact, that was all he asked.

  “Well then,” he said. “Let’s make sure that the correct outcome is what we achieve.”

  Part Two

  Nothing like the Rain

  Bad Sam Chapman put no trust in itchy feelings.

  Bad Sam, though, didn’t have a lot of time for nicknames either, and his own had followed him like a hopeful puppy for years, its origins obscured by the passage of time, but probably something to do with an occasional irritability. He didn’t himself think he was that bad. Everyone had their moments.

  Itchy feelings, though, were superstitious nonsense, conjured into being by an overly greased diet, or too much cheese. Nothing to do with a sixth sense—geese didn’t walk on your grave. You could step on all the cracks you wanted, and your mother’s back remained her own concern.

  Which was why he had an irritable moment coming on, because he had a bucketload of itchy feelings, every last one of them screaming at him to avoid the cracks, to watch his back.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d had them lately. He’d spent the previous morning trawling amusement arcades in Brixton, alert for one Chelsea Barker, the latest of the hundreds of teenage runaways he’d searched for these past years, ex
cept that Chelsea, God help us all, wasn’t a teenager; Chelsea was twelve years old. It was like looking for a goldfish in a piranha tank—you had to be quick. So when the itchy feelings overtook him, he’d thought they were on her account. Twelve years old, and she could be anywhere. She could be right behind him. So more than once he’d turned to check, as if that were the way things worked, and runaway kids came looking for him instead of the other way round, but there was never anyone there, except that there always was—there was always someone there, in London. And in the course of checking, he’d seen the same face twice.

  Only twice, and just for an instant. A random stranger, one of the thousands on the streets every day.

  But once upon a time Bad Sam had been a spook, which meant he could never rule out the possibility that one of those random strangers might be looking to tick his name off a list. So superstitious nonsense or not, he paid attention when the itchy feelings started.

  Yesterday, this had involved a complicated ride to a tube station three lines away, and a twenty-minute loiter on an unfamiliar platform, while he satisfied himself his tail was clean. The random stranger had been a young man with dark, serious eyebrows and two days’ stubble, wearing a black leather jacket over a light-blue polo neck, jeans and trainers. Something European about him. Stone cold awake at three in the morning, Sam had run the face through his mental files, and hadn’t found a match. There was a niggle, though—a loose thread at the hem of his memory. The stranger had been young, and Bad Sam had been out of the game for years. Maybe it was a family resemblance, but that made no sense. He’d been Secret Service, not mafia. Grudges weren’t handed down father to son. At four he’d fallen asleep, but had dreamed of foreign travel, and its attendant irritations: the documents that were never in the right pocket; the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car.

  This afternoon the itchy feelings were back, but the random stranger was nowhere to be seen.

  It was another day of grey drizzle, London a cold wet misery, and Bad Sam was heading back to the office after his third morning of looking for, not finding, Chelsea Barker. His plan was to hit the phones again, and squeeze what leads he could from untapped contacts. London the cold wet misery was also a wolfpack world, and twelve-year-olds who were the hardest articles their schools had ever seen snapped like peppermint sticks on its streets. Finding the child was the most important thing in Bad Sam’s life right now, but still—those itchy feelings. Older, sterner creatures were snappable too. And who would go looking for Chelsea Barker then?

  This junction here, tube station, church and building site: you had to be careful crossing. You had to look all ways. Lurking in the shelter of the station, bracing himself to face the waiting weather, Bad Sam Chapman turned his collar up against grey London’s worst.

  Oh yes, grey London.

  London was a class-A city, of course, constantly topping those lists which explained the world in bullet points. It had the best clubs, the best restaurants, the best hotels; it threw the best parties, and cobbled together the best Olympics ever. It had the best royal family, the best annual dog show and the best police force, and was basically brilliant except for the parts that weren’t, which were like someone had taken all the worst bits of everywhere else and shored them up against each other. And the traffic was a fucking nightmare.

  None of which was news to Patrice.

  Who wasn’t Patrice today, but that was hardly news either. His passport proclaimed him Paul Wayne, and this required no mental adjustment: Patrice had been Paul Wayne for as long as he could remember. And Paul Wayne was as much at home in London, even the bad parts, as anywhere in France; could order a drink either side of the river, and nobody would bat an eye. Because Paul Wayne didn’t just speak English, he spoke English English, the same way he spoke French French. He’d have tied Henry Higgins in knots, and if that wasn’t enough to piss Higgins off, Paul Wayne could have gone on to kill him with his bare hands in about fourteen different ways, because that, too, had been part of the training that had been taking place every moment of Patrice’s life. Patrice’s life was about being Paul Wayne. And today Paul Wayne was taking one Sam Chapman off the board.

  Yesterday Chapman had spotted him and taken evasive action: ducking into the underground and adopting a sentry post at the end of a platform. Patrice hadn’t enjoyed the two-second report he’d had to make—Nobody at home. Will attempt redelivery—but at least it had given him a clue as to the target. Sam Chapman looked like most other people tramping the streets in lousy weather: pissed off, down-at-heel, in need of a better raincoat. But Chapman was also a pro, or had been, and that stayed in your blood. Responses slowed, but they didn’t disappear. When someone dropped a tray in a crowded restaurant, you looked every which way except towards the noise, hunting down the action it was meant to distract you from. And when you thought someone was tailing you you took evasive action, even if the thought was a secondhand murmur, a butterfly wing. If you felt a fool afterwards, at least you were alive to feel foolish. So Sam Chapman was that kind of target, which meant Patrice knew to prepare the ground this time; to check for escape routes and probable hideaways. A pro never went home with tingles running down his spine. A pro spooked on home territory took wing, and didn’t look back.

  So this was today’s plan: spook him deliberately. Spook him, and watch him take flight.

  Then bring him down.

  Marcus had parked where he’d almost certainly get a ticket.

  “Put a note in the window,” Louisa suggested. “Secret agent on call.”

  He muttered something, a grumble about being designated driver. His fault for driving an urban tank, though; the only one with a car big enough to carry an unhappy passenger.

  They were south of the river, half a mile from the Thames, near one of those busy junctions which rely on the self-preservation instincts of the drivers using it; either a shining example of new-age civic theory, or an old-fashioned failure of town planning. On one of its corners sat a church; on another, earth-moving monsters re-enacted the Battle of the Bulge behind hoardings which shivered with each impact. A tube station squatted on a third, its familiar brick-and-tile façade more than usually grubby in the drizzle. There was a lot of construction work nearby, buildings wrapped in plastic sheeting, some of it gaudily muralled with visions of a bright new future: the gleaming glass, the pristine paving, the straight white lines of premises yet-to-be. Meanwhile, the surviving shops were the usual array of bookmakers, convenience stores and coffee bars, many of them crouching behind scaffolding, and some of them book-ending alleyways which would be either dead-ends where wheelie-bins congregated, or short-cuts to the labyrinth of darker streets beyond. Once upon a time Charles Dickens wandered this area, doubtless taking notes. Nowadays the local citizenry’s stories were recorded by closed-circuit TV, which had less time for sentimental endings.

  Up one of those alleys was Elite Enquiries; the private detective agency whose staff of three included Bad Sam Chapman, once of Regent’s Park.

  Chapman had been Head Dog, long before Louisa’s time, and he’d left under a cloud whose rain had washed him up here: a third-rate agency specialising in evicting troublesome tenants, serving unwanted papers, and—Bad Sam’s own forte—finding runaways. The image on the web was of a shabby office resembling a minicab operation, but she supposed its low-rent appearance might play in its favour: if someone was lost among the rackety arcades, threadbare hostels and thrift-shop doorways of the city, this was the right sort of place to start looking. But anyway, they weren’t here to evaluate Elite Enquiries’ market position. They were here for Bad Sam.

  “Okay,” Lamb had said. “Let’s bring him in.”

  “On whose authority?” Louisa asked.

  “I wasn’t suggesting you stuff him in the back of a van,” Lamb said. “Just ask him nicely.”

  “And if he refuses?”

  “Stuff him in the back of a
van,” said Lamb.

  “We haven’t got a van,” Shirley pointed out.

  Lamb looked at Marcus.

  “What? It’s not a van.”

  But mere statement of fact wilted in the face of Lamb’s indifference.

  So here they were, round the side of the church in Marcus’s suburban-warrior vehicle, the pair of them rendered featureless by its smoked glass windscreen. Marcus wore an earpiece, waiting for word from Slough House while they monitored the tube station entrance, its irregular heartbeat skew-whiffed by the drizzle: dribs and drabs of passengers scurrying in; larger groups reluctantly leaving every three minutes or so.

  The pattering on the car roof sounded like mice changing places.

  “I hope Ho doesn’t fuck up,” Marcus said at last.

  “It’s computer stuff. He knows what he’s doing,” Louisa said.

  “Maybe so, but he’s a little prick. And I hate relying on a little prick to get the job done.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” said Louisa.

  They didn’t know Chapman would be coming from the tube. They knew he was out because they’d called his office, but that was the extent of their knowledge: that he wasn’t in his office. It was, as neither had yet said out loud, a pretty half-arsed basis on which to start a surveillance, but it was all they had to go on until Ho came up with the goods. Meanwhile, Chapman might appear from the tube station; he might swoosh past in a taxi; he might be wandering up the road from the other direction. But there were only two of them, and neither of them wanted to get wet, so here they were.

  Marcus said, “You’re pissed off with him, aren’t you?”

  “With who?” Louisa said, though she knew who he meant.