by Mick Herron
“Until his buddy came to rescue him.”
Louisa laughed.
“What?”
“River having buddies. Never mind. You don’t know who it was, then?”
“I know he’s called Patrice. Like I say, a buddy.”
“Yeah, well. Either way, he left you in the dust.” Louisa was remembering something she’d heard about the Dogs, about who was in charge now. She said, “You’re Emma Flyte, aren’t you? You’re new to this.”
“So I keep being told.”
“Your fifteen seconds of fame is up on YouTube, they tell you that? This Patrice, he’s quite . . . disarming.”
“Are we trying to be funny, Agent Guy?”
“A real charmer, is all I meant. He do that to your face?” Louisa indicated her own feet. “He took a crowbar to my ankles earlier. I’m betting River didn’t go with him voluntarily.”
“Exactly what,” Emma Flyte said slowly, “is going on here?”
“Wish I knew,” Louisa said. “But I’ll tell you this much. Patrice—you’re sure about that?”
“Patrice,” Flyte said.
“Patrice tried to kill a former spook today. So whatever you’re doing to find him, do it faster. Before he kills Cartwright too.”
Flyte turned away, looking back towards King’s Cross, where a lot of angry traffic was building up. “Uh-huh,” she said. “It didn’t look to me like that was his plan.”
“Where are we going?” River asked.
Patrice looked at him, his face expressionless.
“Okay. Just thought it was worth asking.”
It was thirty minutes since they’d left the scene on Pentonville Road, and they’d crossed half the city since: had doubled back to King’s Cross and caught a taxi to Great Portland Street.
“Been a bit of bother back there,” the driver informed them, pulling away. “Some lemon going mental with a shooter. Roads’ll be closed any minute.”
“I wondered what the police cars were doing,” Patrice had answered, texting as he spoke.
Another shot past; unmarked, its blue light looping through its back window as it bullied through a queue of traffic.
“The weather brings them out,” the cabbie said, with the air of one delivering a universal truth: that whenever it rained, there was gunfire in the city.
When the taxi dropped them, they walked to Baker Street. Patrice still had the gun, though where he’d secreted it, River couldn’t tell. If down the back of his waistband, as River suspected, he must have spent hours practising how to walk, sit, move, without looking like his haemorrhoids were flaring.
And if I make a break for it, he wondered, will he shoot me in the back?
It didn’t matter. Well, it mattered, but it wasn’t an issue. Last thing he was doing was leaving Patrice’s side; not until he’d had a chance to question him about Les Arbres, about the commune, and about why Patrice’s comrade-in-arms had come to kill the O.B. Though, ideally, he’d remove the gun from Patrice’s possession before the discussion turned to precisely what had happened to Bertrand.
Not quite a prisoner, then, though hardly an accomplice, he stayed by Patrice’s side as they headed into Baker Street station, and descended into the tube once again.
A manhunt would have kicked off by now. There’d be footage from Pentonville Road; someone would have been aiming a phone as Patrice waved the gun around. The tube was a good place to be, then. With no WiFi, at least no one was downloading their images while they bucketed from one station to the next. Patrice stayed close; one hand on River’s shoulder, as if for balance. So yes, River thought; they were in it together. Whatever “it” was. And however it turned out.
As they approached Embankment, Patrice’s hand squeezed. Okay, okay, I get it. River led the way off the train, up the escalator; turned towards the river entrance. Still raining, of course. He’d no sooner dried off from today’s French rain before being drenched in the English variety. Still, it was nice to be home.
They stood at the top of the steps, looking at wet traffic, a wet bridge; the wet South Bank across the wet Thames.
“Do you have a plan?” River asked.
“There is always a plan,” Patrice said.
“That’s good. Is that Sartre?” Not expecting a reply, he didn’t wait for one. “Who were you texting in the taxi?”
“You like to talk,” Patrice said. “Maybe you should talk about Bertrand. What happened to him. And why you have his passport.”
“That was Bertrand’s? Because it didn’t have his name on it. And, you know, a passport, you kind of expect—”
“You know I have a gun.” He turned and looked River in the eyes. “And the only reason you’re still alive is that I need answers from you.”
“Yeah, see, that’s not a great interrogative technique. Because it implies that once I’ve given you your answers—”
Patrice hit him so quickly that nobody saw: not the passers by, hurrying through the rain; not the fellow travellers still sheltering from the downpour. Certainly not River. First he knew about it was, Patrice was lowering him into a sitting position, murmuring calm words.
“He’s okay.” This for the benefit of those nearby. “He gets claustrophobic, that’s all.”
To River: “Maybe put your head between your knees?”
Somebody said, “Are you sure he’s all right? Should we get help?”
“He’ll be fine. I’m always telling him, we should take taxis. But no, he insists on the underground, and here we are again.”
“My boyfriend’s just the same.”
Any other time River might have protested the emphasis on My, but at the moment he was coping with a lot of frazzled nerve ends, as if Patrice had laid into him with a cattle prod rather than his little finger, or whatever it was he’d used to do whatever it was he’d done.
Someone else said, “Anyone got any water?” and everybody laughed.
Don’t mind me. You all enjoy yourselves.
Patrice maintained the fiction established for them by sitting next to River and putting his arm round his shoulders. He leaned close, as if whispering sweet consolation, and reminded River: “That required no effort on my part.”
River said, “Last time someone hurt me like that . . . ”
He paused for breath.
“Yes?”
“I knocked half his brains out with a length of lead pipe.”
Patrice made a show of looking here, there, in front, behind. “Don’t see any lead pipe.”
“You won’t.”
Patrice’s phone chirruped. “Do you mind? I really ought to take this.”
He stood and walked a few paces off. River looked around for a length of lead pipe, but his heart wasn’t in it.
The other travellers had moved on, braving the rain, because there seemed little alternative. He wondered if, later, they’d watch the news and say to each other Do they look like? and Nah, surely not.
Patrice finished his call. River watched him while he stared for a moment at the Thames, as if suddenly struck by its night-time beauty; the lights along the Embankment smeary in the rain. Then he looked at River.
“So,” he said. “What’s the dazzle ship, and where do we find it?”
“His name was Frank,” the O.B. said.
He stopped.
Catherine braced for another Lamb onslaught, but none came. Because he had done all he needed, she thought; he’d thrown the switch, and now all the old man’s memories would come tumbling forth.
She should have hustled him out while the thought was fresh in her mind.
“Came to the Park with his ridiculous plan. Cuckoo by name, cuckoo by nature. Even the Yanks hadn’t gone for it. Well, not a second time. Had tried it back in the sixties, of course, and came a cropper. Hushed up the details. Not that hushing thin
gs up ever worked. First law of Spook Street. Secrets don’t stay secret.”
He paused. Catherine could have sworn something shone in his eyes: unshed tears or bottled-up secrets. Something waiting to spill.
“So we told him to pack his wares and move his pitch.”
Again, the pause. This morning, Catherine remembered, he had seemed a man adrift; unmoored by encroaching dementia, and pushed further out to sea by last night’s events. And now he’d washed up somewhere, but it wasn’t quite here and wasn’t quite now, and if his sentences recaptured the brim and snap of his younger self, they were messages from a bottle launched long ago, and she doubted he knew who he was talking to. Memory was doing all the work, blowing through the old man like he was a seashell, and when it was done he would be smooth and empty.
Chapman said, “But you didn’t quite cast him away, did you?”
He spoke gently, to Catherine’s surprise. Her experience of his interrogation technique had been a little different.
David Cartwright blinked, then blinked again. He mumbled something, and she had to replay the sound in her head a few times before she thought she’d caught it: a repetition of what he’d said earlier, First law of Spook Street.
“He came to my house. Weeks later. Living in the city then. Bayswater. It was the fag end of summer, and he was . . . different. He suggested a drink. I suggested he disappear, if he didn’t want to find himself in pokey.”
She remembered River telling her of evenings spent like this, the young man listening to the old one, spinning spook yarns, brandy in hand, and wondered if that was where David Cartwright had retreated in his mind.
He needed River, she thought. But River was out slaying dragons, or looking for dragons to slay.
“Knew what he wanted, of course. Saw it in his eyes when he showed up at the Park. Because he was one of the believers. His Project Cuckoo, it wasn’t just a strategy he favoured. No, he thought it was our only possible direction, that we’d be doomed without it. That was his faith, you see? Why the Agency got shot of him. Nothing more dangerous than a believer.”
Because believers were always on a quest, for one Holy Grail or another. And quests were fuelled by the blood of anyone who happened to get in the way.
“So I thought he was there to make one last plea. If I got on board, he knew I’d carry the Park. More power behind the throne than there ever is sitting on it.” He grew cunning, like a man with a magic ring in his pocket, about to show what it can do. “You’ll have to turn the tape off now.”
Bad Sam said, “There’s no tape. You can speak freely.”
The old man tapped the side of his nose. “Do I look like this is my first time?”
Sighing theatrically, Lamb opened his desk drawer and reached inside it. Something made a clunky noise. It might have been a hole punch. “There,” he said. “Now, your American crusader. What did he want?” He was revolving his glass in his hand, and by the lamp’s yellow glow Catherine could see its sticky surface, its film of smudged fingerprints. “Well, we know what he wanted. But how did he get it? Why did you give it to him?”
“I never . . . ”
“The Park turned him down. We’ve established that. And the Yanks had kicked him out. But the following year there he is, middle of France, running his little colony, raising his children as prototype terrorists. And there you were, checking on his progress. But not officially. Because as far as the records go, you were paying welfare visits on an old spook. So whatever happened, you did it under the bridge. Why?”
She shouldn’t be party to this, she thought again, but it was too late; everything was too late. Jackson Lamb would ebb and flow, and the old man would crumble. Whether there’d be anything left of him once it was over was anybody’s guess. And she had promised River she’d look after his grandfather, but God help her, she wanted to know too. Whatever had happened back then, it had sown the seeds of the Westacres bombing, and she wanted to know what it had been. Because she’d been kidding herself if she’d thought she’d escaped Slough House. It didn’t matter where she was, she was as much a spook as Lamb, and every bit as hungry to learn these secrets.
“He had something on you,” Lamb said. “He turned the screw. What did he know?”
“He’s had enough,” Bad Sam said. “Let’s leave it for now, shall we?”
“He’s had enough when I say he’s had enough. What did Frank have on you, Cartwright? What did he know that you wanted kept hidden?”
“Jackson—”
“You said it yourself. Secrets don’t stay secret, not on Spook Street.”
“Stop now, or I’ll make you stop,” Bad Sam said. “I mean it.”
“Frank had something. What was it?”
“Leave him, Jackson,” Catherine said.
And the old man said, “Isobel,” and started to cry.
“Well,” Louisa said. “I wasn’t expecting this.”
Her companion said, “I’ve been up for eighteen hours. I’ve spent most of them in my car, and the rest looking at bodies, being lied to, locking up innocent people, and letting a French whackjob steal my gun. Oh, and having what feels like my cheekbone broken by the very hard head of that colleague of yours. Who, when my day started, was dead. I deserve a drink or seven after that.”
“No argument,” Louisa said, who hadn’t been fazed by being in a bar; just by Flyte’s invitation. She was drinking fizzy water: her car was down the road. But Emma Flyte was putting away tequila shots, one either side of a Mexican beer, and nothing about the way she was doing this suggested amateur status.
“Met your boss this morning,” Emma said.
Ah, Louisa thought. It was rare you got the chance to hear first impressions of Lamb. “And how did you get along?”
“He gave me about a dozen good reasons for bringing disciplinary charges against him.”
Louisa nodded seriously. “If you decide to do that, I very much want to be there when it happens.”
“I’m not going to,” Emma said. Her beer bottle had a piece of fruit lodged on its rim for some reason, and she pushed it inside with her thumb. It fizzed. “I mean, he’s a pig. And he lied about whose body he was looking at, which might come back and bite him yet. But I’d sooner have him telling me lies than Diana Taverner. When that lady plays hide-the-soap, she does it for keeps.”
Louisa let that image sparkle and die before saying, “Maybe you and Lamb have more in common than you think.”
Emma’s phone buzzed, and she glanced at it. “The Park.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They probably want to know what happened out there,” Emma said, nodding towards the door, the outside world, Pentonville Road. “And how come Adam Lockhead has, ah, evaded custody.”
“I thought you said his name was Patrice.”
“It’s Cartwright I’m talking about.” Despite the booze, her voice was steady. “That’s the passport he was using. Adam Lockhead. News to you?”
“I’m about three laps behind everyone at the moment,” Louisa said. “All I know is, this Patrice? He’s a pro. And as we’ve established, armed. In fact, his becoming armed is doubtless clocking up views on YouTube as we chat. So all in all, it might be an idea to be out there looking for him instead of in here self-medicating.”
“When we find him, it won’t be because I’m outside getting wet,” Emma said. “It’ll be phoned in by some beat-cop who listened to his radio chatter.”
“D’you think that’ll be before or after he kills Cartwright?” Louisa said. “I realise you’re not that bothered either way.”
“He didn’t look to me like he wanted to kill Cartwright. He looked—startled, I thought. Startled to see him.”
“River can be a pain in the neck,” Louisa agreed. “But he’s not actually alarming. Not at first glance.”
“Where’d he been?”
“I gather he’s spent the day in France.”
“Why?”
“When I see him, I’ll ask. You used to be with the Met, right?”
“Yes.”
Louisa grinned. “Missing it yet?”
The phone buzzed again, angrier this time, the way phones get. Emma sighed, and moved a few steps away. “Flyte.”
“Tell me that’s not you I’m watching. Along with half the population of the western world.”
“I doubt it’s that many,” Emma said. “Most of them’ll be viewing it twice. You have to factor that in.”
Diana Taverner said, “Are you drunk?”
“Not yet.”
“How did this happen? How did any of it happen?”
“It happened because I wasn’t given enough information,” Emma said. “So when we were sideswiped by a professional hitman, we weren’t expecting it. In the circumstances, we got off lightly. Unwelcome publicity notwithstanding.”
“You call that lightly? What would heavy look like?”
“It would involve my body lying in the street. Who was Adam Lockhead supposed to be?”
“That’s way outside your need to know.”
“Fine. So do you want me to forget who he really is? Because another couple of tequilas might do the trick.”
Taverner said, “What are you talking about?”
“The man you sent me to collect, the one whose passport said Adam Lockhead, he’s River Cartwright. Who for a while last night we thought was dead. Stop me if I start making sense. It would be a good note to end my day on.”
In the pause that followed, the usual bar clatter seemed to increase, as if anxious to fill any void in its jurisdiction. Emma wondered if Taverner was running the video again, to check what she’d just said.
Maybe so, because when she next spoke she said, “It does look like Cartwright. Did he say anything?”
“He knew the hitman.”
“Why do you keep calling him that?”
“He hit us with a car. It’s the shortest version of that I can think of.” Emma was missing her drink, so she wandered back to the table. The way things had come undone, it didn’t seem to matter who heard what. “Cartwright called him by name. Patrice.”
