by Mick Herron
Watching him refill Chapman’s glass, Catherine said, “Very bonding, I’m sure, but not helpful. Do we really think a project David Cartwright set up more than twenty years ago was responsible for Westacres?”
“Put like that,” said Lamb, “it does sound like something only an alcoholic, a has-been and a post-traumatic headcase could come up with.”
“I’ve worked out which one I am,” she said. “I’m having trouble with you.”
“I left myself out. I’m just facilitating blue-sky thinking.”
“Either way,” Chapman said, “shouldn’t we be passing this on? Is Diana Taverner still Ops?”
“Oh yes,” said Lamb.
“I take it you’re not the best of friends.”
“We speak on the phone, we sometimes meet up. Every now and then she tries to have me killed.” He shifted a buttock. “I can’t remember if I’ve ever been married, but it sounds like that’s what it’s like.”
Chapman said to Catherine, “He’s not kidding, is he?”
“No.”
“What about the new guy, then. Whelan?”
Lamb tortured his chair further by leaning back: if a living thing had made the resulting noise, you’d have called a vet. Or the police. “I can just picture how that’ll go,” he said. “Hi, Claude. You know this bomb? Well, it turns out your Service built it, wound it up and let it go. Do you want to call a press conference, or should I?”
“Nobody’s saying they’ll be happy to hear it,” said Chapman. “But they’ve got to be told.”
“Maybe they already have been,” Lamb said. “Whoever came after the old man came from France, fine, but what about this afternoon’s joker? Was he from the same place? Or are the Park in on the act, and cleaning up the mess? Because that would be standard practice for the old guard, and all I know about the new guy is, he sent us Grendel’s mother through there. So he hasn’t made my Christmas list yet.”
“And this is how you make operational decisions?”
“When I don’t have a coin handy.”
“This place is as messed up as it looks, isn’t it?”
“You know me,” said Lamb. “I always demand the highest professional standards.”
He farted, though whether as illustration or punctuation wasn’t clear.
Bad Sam wafted a hand and said, “Jesus, Lamb, did something die inside of you?”
“I used to wonder that myself,” Catherine said quietly. “But I’m pretty sure he’s always been like this.”
“Thanks for your support,” Lamb said. “Now why not make yourself useful and go fetch the old bastard?”
From his lips, River’s term of affection soured into abuse.
Catherine said, “Seriously? You’re going to interrogate him?”
“You make it sound so brutal,” Lamb said. “I’m not going to hurt him.” He paused. “I’m probably not going to hurt him.”
“You’re not going to lay a finger on him.”
He said to Bad Sam, “She has this thing about older men. Her last boss blew his brains out, but that’s probably a coincidence.”
“You were Charles Partner’s Girl Friday,” Sam Chapman said. “I knew I recognised you.”
“‘Girl Friday’?”
“We had a chat after he died, didn’t we?”
“It’s nice that you think it was a chat,” Catherine said.
It had lasted for hours, was her memory. In the paranoia that had followed Partner’s death, everyone was suspected of knowing more than they should have. Catherine, who had known significantly less, had borne the brunt of the Dogs’ investigation, and, newly sober, had become instantly nostalgic for those alcoholic blackouts that had been a feature of her recent past.
There were those who would have assured her that they had only been doing their job. Chapman, wisely, wasn’t one of them.
Lamb said, “Either he knows more than he’s pretending or less than he should. Either way, let’s probe those gaps in his history, shall we?” He shifted his bulk, and the chair complained again. “If you don’t fetch him, I will.”
She shook her head, but only for her own benefit, and that was as far as her resistance went. Because it was true, they had to know what David Cartwright knew, so she rose and left the gloomy office to collect him.
River’s room—or River and Coe’s room, as Shirley supposed she ought to be calling it—was in semi-darkness, the only light Coe’s anglepoise, spilling a thick yellow cone over his desk. For once he wasn’t plugged into his iPod, and while his hands were splayed on the desktop, he didn’t seem to be indulging in his fake-piano bullshit either. For a moment, Shirley considered turning away; leaving him to his thoughts, which were probably dark enough that you wouldn’t want to spill them on anything delicate. All men were dickheads until proven otherwise, that was a given. But what Coe had said to Marcus, You gunna tie me to a chair and shave my toes off with a carving knife?, was way too specific to be voiced at random. So yeah, dark thoughts. But on the other hand, there was a time for quiet brooding, and that time wasn’t when Shirley was in need of information. So, “You were summoned,” she said.
He watched as she came into the room, halting by his desk.
“Hello? Your secret’s out, Mr. Piano Man. We all know you can talk.”
His eyes shone like wet dark stones from the recess of his hood.
“You were summoned by Lamb. Whatever you had to tell him, you need to tell Marcus and me. Because more shit is going down by the minute, which means that anything we can use as a shovel, we want to know about.”
She was quite proud of that remark, but it didn’t get her anywhere. Which was annoying, and would annoy anyone, right? His absence of reaction.
“Someone tried to whack Chapman,” she said. “And River’s just been caught on camera staging a gunfight for the tourists. And all of this, whatever it is, involves Slough House, which means it involves me. So start talking, buddy boy, or I’ll make you. Are you clear on what that’ll be like?”
He had to be—everyone knew Shirley had collected a bagful of scalps out near Hayes last year. But whatever Mr. Piano Man thought, he was keeping to himself. And just to underline the point, he reached into his hoodie’s pouch and retrieved his iPod.
You are not gunna do this, she thought.
He did, though. He set it on the desk in front of him, and slotted the earbuds into place.
So she did the only reasonable thing in the circumstances, which was rip them from his head.
What happened next was weird. Her plan, if you could call it that—her expectation—had been to give him a slap. Open palmed, nothing serious: even HR would agree he deserved that much. But before her hand had made contact, something sharp was under her chin, pushing upwards: he was on his feet, and the dark wet stones of his eyes were black with anger. Shirley found herself on tiptoe, clutching the desk for balance. He leaned close, the blade at her chin forcing her upwards.
“You don’t touch me,” he said.
She blinked.
“Ever,” he said.
There were ways and means, she thought. Push his hand aside, then a blow to the jaw or the stomach, or just reach out and detach his testicles with one rough twist: any or all of these were no more than a heartbeat away.
On the other hand, his knife would be inside her head before she’d completed any of them.
“Are you clear on that?”
From the doorway, Marcus said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Neither turned to look at him.
Marcus said, “You. Coe. Put the knife down, okay?”
Coe said nothing.
“If I have to come over there and take it off you, I’m gunna ram it where the sun don’t shine, I’m warning you.”
Coe said, “I’ll put it down.”
“. . . Good.”
<
br /> “But she has to say it first.”
“Has to say what? Uncle?”
“She knows.”
Something trickled down Shirley’s jaw; might be sweat; might be blood. There was no way to confirm which. If she looked down, she’d impale herself on his blade.
“Shirley?” Marcus said. “You know what he’s on about?” He paused. “Probably best not to nod.”
She licked her lips.
Any normal person, she thought, would at least have glanced Marcus’s way. But Coe’s eyes had never left hers through this whole conversation.
All she’d wanted was to give him a little tap. Teach him some manners.
She swallowed.
Marcus said, “Shirl?”
She said—whispered—“I’m clear.”
Coe nodded, and just like that the knife was gone. He tucked it into the pouch of his hoodie and sat down.
Shirley put her hand to her chin, then looked at her fingers.
Sweat.
Marcus shook his head.
“They’ve been watching me for weeks,” the O.B. said. “Thought I hadn’t noticed. Streetlights blinking on and off. Woman at the post office asking questions. It was obvious what was happening. You’re not writing this down.”
“We have invisible pixies to do that,” Lamb assured him.
“You think that’s helping?” Catherine asked.
By way of answer, he poured himself another drink, or tried to. The bottle didn’t hold much more than a double.
The O.B. sat in the centre of the room. Catherine had placed a chair there, and rearranged Lamb’s lamps so much of the light fell around, rather than directly onto him. It wasn’t an interrogation. That’s what she told herself, though it could easily have been mistaken for one by the casual passer-by.
And what most alarmed her about all this, she thought now, was how she seemed to have slid back into her former role: Slough House’s chatelaine; Lamb’s doorkeeper. Was this what her future held? Another season orbiting Jackson Lamb’s dark star? She was going to see today through—make sure the old man was safe—and then kick the house’s dust from her heels, and launder Lamb’s smoke from her clothes.
For now, though, here she was, and the old man seemed happy to hold forth, and if it was true that his answers bore little direct relevance to the questions, they circled the subject at hand, as if closing in on a slippery truth.
“And you,” he said, addressing Chapman. “They let you indoors now, do they? I thought your job was to wait by the car.”
“Times change,” Bad Sam said softly. “Tell us about the other night.”
“What other night?”
“Somebody came knocking on your door,” Lamb said. “And for some reason, you shot him in the head.”
A cunning light switched on in the O.B.’s eyes. “How do you know about that?”
“Assume we were working the streetlights,” Lamb said. “He was pretending to be your grandson, wasn’t he?”
Cartwright said, “There he was, bold as brass, asking about the heating, wanting me to tell him about my day. All part of the act, you see? Yes, I was supposed to think he was . . . who you said. My grandson. The one with the name.”
Lamb opened his mouth, and Catherine said, “Don’t.”
“Said he’d run me a bath. As if I couldn’t run a bath for myself, if I wanted one.”
And he closed his mouth firmly, as if he’d said enough on that subject.
He hadn’t gathered himself together, Catherine thought; not really. Or if he had, he’d done so somewhere else, and was just poking his head round the door.
Chapman said, “He was an enemy.”
The O.B. stared.
“And you defended yourself.”
“Didn’t know I had a gun, did he? Think twice about playing that trick again.”
Chapman was about to continue, but Lamb cut across him. “We think he came from Les Arbres. That make sense to you?”
“. . . France,” the O.B. said.
“Yeah, France. Hence the funny name. Les Arbres’s where you used to visit your old friend Henry, remember? Way back in the nineties, when you had a working head. But Henry wasn’t really called Henry, was he? And—”
“You’re frightening him, Jackson,” Catherine said.
“And what he was doing was running Project Cuckoo. Remember? Cuckoo, like you’re becoming, or pretending to. Cuckoo, which was all about raising children to be something they’re not—back in the day, we’d have wanted to grow little Soviet Generals, so we’d have a clue what the real ones were thinking. Except we didn’t, in the end, because even by Cold War standards, it was a barking mad idea. But you—”
“Jackson . . . ”
“—didn’t let that stop you, did you? You went ahead and did it anyway.”
His voice had grown louder until it filled the whole room, and when he stopped the air shivered, as if settling back into place. The old man had a frozen expression now, halfway between fear and confusion. Catherine thought: she should bring this to an end. Escort the old man out. He’d be better off taking his chances in the rain, or at Regent’s Park, than sitting here listening to Lamb exorcise whatever demon had seized him.
And maybe that’s what she’d have done, she told herself later, except that Cartwright started to speak again.
Halfway to Pentonville Road, Louisa nearly missed her turn: not missed as in forgot to take it, but missed as in didn’t bother, and kept on in a straight line north; past the shops and churches, the mosques and synagogues, that were fast becoming familiar landmarks; the supermarket she used on her way home; the park that signalled the easing of urban tension. Wipers wiping fit to bust, she could be pulling into the residents’ parking area behind her block in twenty minutes, and running a bath not long later; a glass of wine poured, quiet music playing; the patter of the rain upon the windows promising sleep. But duty got the better of her and she made the turn, and headed towards the crime scene down Pentonville Road.
It was like a circus would be if circuses involved fewer clowns. Cop cars had arrived in droves, and cops were occupying every corner, some talking to huddled groups of civilians; others clustered round a car she knew from the YouTube film was the attack vehicle, itself looking like a mechanised assault victim: its front end folded in, and glasswork from its headlights scattered like frozen tears. The impact car, meanwhile, had been slammed sideways into a set of railings. Always, collision-scenes had an air of inevitability about them, as if the resulting damage had been written into the vehicles’ design specs. The police might have been there to confirm that everything had happened as required, and nothing been left undone.
She was feeling battered herself: torn jeans, hurt legs. But adrenalin was a powerful painkiller. “I think he’s the joker from this afternoon,” she’d heard Marcus saying as she’d hop-skipped down the stairs in Slough House. If she’d needed another trigger, that was it.
Having parked as near as she was able, Louisa showed her Service card to a reasonably experienced-looking cop, by which she meant one who’d found somewhere sheltered to stand. He seemed suitably impressed. One day, she thought, someone at Regent’s Park would notice that the slow horses’ official ID made them seem, to the uninitiated, like genuine Service personnel, and then they’d take them away and replace them with cardboard badges cut from a cereal packet. But until that happened, Louisa was able to get answers to a series of questions:
Yes, a gun had been fired.
No, nobody had been hurt.
There was nobody in custody.
The area was being searched.
Couple of your people in the car that was struck . . .
“My people?”
“Funny buggers,” said the policeman.
She looked up and down the road. Streetlights were on, and shop windo
ws spilt yellow and gold squares onto the pavements, but visibility was poor, rain blurring pedestrians into fuzzy cartoon shapes. She’d been wondering how two men could have vanished so easily in the middle of the city, but the question answered itself. It was dark, and the rain washed away colour and difference, turning everyone into somebody else. There were witnesses, but most would contradict each other in that special way witnesses had, repainting the same event a dozen different shades of grey, and there’d be CCTV too, but she knew the work involved in tracking a quarry by camera, and it produced the kind of evidence useful in court, months after the event. For on-the-spot discovery, you’d be better off sticking notices to lamp posts.
Now she was here, it was clear she’d made the wrong call at that junction. She should have gone straight home. Damn River—all it would have taken was a swift phone call, and he’d have saved her untold grief . . . Untold grief was what had happened when Min died; untold because she’d had nobody to talk to. Thinking the same thing had happened to River had threatened to shatter the recovery she’d made: the new home, the new life, the evenings watching trees swaying in the darkness. So damn him for all that, but where was he, and what was happening?
One of the group clustered round the attack vehicle peeled away and approached. She was a wet blonde woman, her suit looking like it was halfway through a rinse-cycle; one side of her face turning over-ripe from a recent collision. She’d been in the impact car, thought Louisa; had been holding the gun. The gun the trickster had snatched with a movement so smooth it might have come from a dance routine.
Funny bugger, definitely.
A judgment confirmed by the first word out of her mouth:
“Service?”
Louisa showed her card again.
“You’re one of Lamb’s crew. The slow horses.”
“We get called that,” Louisa said.
“And Cartwright’s another.”
“It was him with you? In the car?”
“Do you all act dumb all the time? Or is it not an act?”
“We take it in turns,” said Louisa. “It was him in the car, wasn’t it?”
