by Mick Herron
Coe grabbed Catherine, pulled her through the open door, and slammed it shut.
Bad Sam Chapman hurled the chair at Patrice just as Patrice raised the gun and fired again.
•••
Frank had been right, or half-right at least: it was Sam Chapman on the landing; Chapman, whom he’d hunted yesterday, and earlier today. Package undelivered. Not any more, thought Patrice, and fired just as a chair came hurtling towards him; one of its slats splintering in flight as the bullet ricocheted off it; the chair itself, a wooden thing, caught him mid-chest. He barely blinked. This was what they fought with, kettles and furniture? A door slammed, then another; they were hiding in their rooms. There was a fairy tale about the houses little pigs built. They were about to find out how it ended.
Patrice kicked the chair aside, and arrived at the kitchen landing.
There was a lock, a bolt like you’d find on a toilet door; something to let outsiders know it was occupied, but not hefty enough to deter assault. Coe used it anyway, then got behind River’s desk and pushed it towards the doorway.
Shirley stepped round him and drew the bolt back.
“What the hell are you—”
“Marcus,” she said.
“He’s either okay or not, but you can’t—”
“Don’t tell me what I—”
There was a crash from the landing. A splintering noise.
“Shirley?” Catherine said. “Lock the door. Or I’ll shoot you.”
“Or,” said Shirley, “you could give me the gun, and I’ll go shoot him.”
Bad Sam didn’t know how this had happened so suddenly, so completely, but it had, and when things went to the wire, you did what you could. This wouldn’t be much. Sonny Jim out there had a gun, and Sam had none; and Sonny Jim, judging by the afternoon’s events, barely needed a weapon. He could take Sam apart with his bare hands if he wanted. And then he’d do the same to the others, including—especially—the old man upstairs, who had been under Sam’s protection once, and was again now, not that this would help him. Sam ought to push something against the door, to slow events down, but there didn’t seem any point, and when he put his hand to his side, he understood why he felt this way. That last shot, as Sam had thrown the chair—well, bullets had to go somewhere. That was a law of physics, or nature; a law, anyway, that Bad Sam Chapman had just found himself on the wrong side of.
He wished he’d had a chance to find Chelsea Barker. He hoped someone else would go looking.
And then the door burst off its hinges, and Sam’s hopes shut down.
The old man said, “Sir Bedivere.”
Moira Tregorian closed her eyes.
“Sir Kay.”
There was more gunfire from downstairs.
When Patrice kicked the door it almost came apart, the wood was so rotten. He stepped over its broken parts, shot Sam Chapman in the head, then checked the room, but it was otherwise unoccupied. The kitchen, too—a galley-space no bigger than a barge’s—was empty, though the other office door was closed. There would be targets behind it. He braced and kicked, the flat of his right foot hitting the door squarely.
This one held against his first assault, but wouldn’t withstand a second.
The door tried to pound its way into the room, and only just changed its mind. He’d kick once more, they knew, and be inside.
“Bullets?” Shirley said.
Catherine shook her head miserably.
JK Coe had blade in hand again, but it looked small and brittle; the wrong weapon for the occasion. He said, “Spread out. He might not get all of us.”
Catherine grabbed the first thing to hand, the keyboard from River’s desk, and yanked it from its cable. She wielded it two-handed, unsure whether she was preparing to hurl it or use it as a racquet, swat back the bullet he’d fire her way—
She thought: I could really do with a drink right now.
The door splintered open.
“Sir Tristan,” the O.B. said. “Sir Bors, Sir Gareth.”
“Shut up!” Moira screamed. “Shut up shut up shut up!”
“They all died, you know,” the old man told her, unperturbed. “They started with such promise, but they all went the same way in the end.”
There was another crash from downstairs as another door bit the dust, and then there was more gunfire—two shots? Three? Enough of them, anyway, to silence the old man.
He looked her way, visions of long-ago knights put to rest.
A short while later, they heard someone climbing the last flight of stairs.
When the door fell Patrice planted himself in the doorway and levelled the gun. There were three targets: a man, two women. Choosing the order in which to drop them took no time—the shorter woman, who held a gun, was the threat; the man, who had a knife, would be next; the older woman, who appeared to be wielding a piece of office equipment, last. David Cartwright was not among their number, but Patrice knew from the earlier commotion that there were more people upstairs. He sensed that the woman’s gun was empty, because there was fear in her eyes, and she did not look like someone who would be scared holding a loaded gun. Microseconds, these thoughts took. Less. It was part of what he’d learned at Les Arbres, in its woods and in its cellars; that you measured a situation in the moment you became part of it, and that what you did next was less action than response—you became part of the inevitable: that was what he had been taught. What would happen next was fixed from the moment he’d kicked the door down. All that remained was for the bodies to hit the floor. He aimed at the young woman and pulled the trigger, and in his mind was already turning to fire at the man, was already aware that the other woman had thrown a keyboard at him, and that he would turn and shoot her too before it reached him; and all of this was inevitable up to the moment that the whisky bottle flung by Jackson Lamb from the stairwell smashed into his temple, throwing his aim off—he fired three times, but his bullets bit air, bit glass, bit plaster. He landed on top of the broken door, and for a moment, all was quiet.
She took each set of stairs in a single leap; would have broken an ankle, a leg, a neck, if she’d noticed what she was doing. But there was no plan driving her, simply an imperative; an impulse that carried her to the doorway of her office, where it failed her. She had to reach out to its frame for support, and take several breaths before taking her next step.
The room was much as Shirley had left it. Her PC, never the quietest of beasts, was humming to itself, awaiting instructions. The steamed-up windows were weeping; the carpet was rucked. Marcus, though. Marcus was different. Marcus sat behind his desk, but had been thrown back against the wall, his chair balanced on two legs like an animal performing a party trick. His eyes were open. There was a hole in his forehead. There was a mess on the wall behind him.
On the floor, next to him, a gun. He’d got one shot off, but had only killed his desk.
Shirley waited for this scene to change, but it didn’t. When there was a noise at her back she knew it was Ho, emerging from a hiding place.
“You’re alive,” she said, without turning round.
“Uh-huh.”
His voice didn’t sound familiar, but then neither did hers.
He said, “I hung out the window. I nearly fell.”
She didn’t reply.
After a while he said, “What about Marcus?”
“Marcus didn’t make it,” she said, and turned and went back upstairs.
The rain was never going to stop. It had found a loophole in the weather-laws, and henceforth would fall without interruption, soaking the guilty and innocent alike, though mostly the former, a statistical inevitability. From the dazzle ship’s sheltered platform, River could see the neon blur it was making of the South Bank, drawing a grey curtain across the monolithic pile that was Sea Containers House, and dampening the Coca-Cola colouring of the Eye to a d
otted outline.
He said to Frank, “Mission? Me? What are you talking about?”
“You’re wasted where you are.”
“What would you know about it?”
“I’ve made it my business to know. You went into the family business. You know how proud that makes me? I was CIA, back in the day. And still fighting the good fight.”
“No,” said River. “Whatever fight you’re fighting, it’s dirty.”
“You don’t know the full story. What we were trying to do at Les Arbres, it benefits everyone. Everyone.” He waved a hand, taking in the Thames, which meant the whole of London. “Look around. When you went into the Service, it was to protect all this, wasn’t it? You wanted to serve, to defend. And what have you ended up doing? Slough House is a cul de sac. A joke. Everything you might have been, all the promise you showed, and you’re spending your days finding different ways of stapling bits of paper together.”
“Are you about to offer me a job? Because sending someone to kill my grandfather’s a hell of a recruitment strategy. Or did you get your definitions of headhunting confused?”
“Okay, that was an error. I’ve admitted that. But it’s brought us here. You, me. And you now have the opportunity to decide what you want the rest of your life to be. Because if you stay in the Service, River, you’ll be in Slough House forever. And if you leave, what will you do? Get an ordinary job in an ordinary office?”
“I haven’t much thought beyond seeing you charged with conspiracy to murder.”
“Seriously, son, that’s not going to happen.”
Son. River shook his head. He was foggy with disbelief still: his father? His father? It was like the punchline to a failed joke he could already see himself repeating in bars. And then guess what he said? No, go on, guess!
“I get that you’re mad,” he told Frank. “And for all I know, you drag that I’m-your-daddy line out every time you meet someone new. But what I want to hear is what triggered this whole thing. What made you burn your house down, and send your son to kill my grandad? You’ll be coughing all this up at the Park soon. Might as well give me the preview. Think of it as making up for all those missed birthdays.”
“Son—”
“And stop calling me that.”
“Why? It’s who you are.”
River became aware, though they’d been there all the time, of high red lights glowing way up in the dark, marking the tips and joints of the ubiquitous cranes.
Frank had a red tip too: the end of his Gauloise. From behind its brief curtain, he said, “I know it sounds insane, after this past couple of days. But think about it, River. You can carry on at Slough House, which you just know is designed to kill your spirit. Or you can come join me and do some serious good. I promise you. What we’re doing, what we started at Les Arbres—it’s about protecting all those things you hold dear. About making a difference.”
River said, “What do you mean, this past couple of days? For me, this all started last night. What happened before then?”
And as the tip of Frank’s cigarette glowed bright again, he realised he already knew.
“I turn my back for five minutes,” said Lamb.
Catherine had found some plastic ties in a drawer, the kind that tightened onto themselves, and had to be cut loose. With them, Coe had secured Patrice to the radiator, which—if she hadn’t prevailed on Shirley to turn it off—would have scorched his flesh by now, adding burnt meat to the other smells crowding Slough House: the gunpowdery whiff of a discharged firearm, and the leakage from two fatal head wounds. Only Lamb’s voice was a normal sound. Everything else was stunned and reduced, like a recording of its own echo. Even the heating, running down to zero, failed to summon its usual clamour: the bangs and ticks from the ancient pipework were a half-hearted symphony, a weary requiem.
“I said—”
“We heard. Now is not the time.”
Lamb gave her a savage smile. “When’s good for you? If I hadn’t come back, there’d be seven corpses, not two. You’re supposed to be secret service, not sitting ducks.”
He was holding the bottle he’d brought Patrice down with, his fingers curled around its neck. The way he was caressing it, you might think it was his favourite survivor.
But Catherine shook her head. No. We’re all his joes, and he’s just lost two.
She said, “We need to call the Park.”
“We’ll call the Park when I say so.”
“We’ve got two fatalities, Jackson, and we can’t just—”
“Like I said. When I say so.” He kicked Patrice’s foot. “Show me this video.”
Ho fiddled with his phone, then passed it over. Lamb watched the YouTube moment, sneered, then tossed the phone back. Ho caught it, nearly, then went scrabbling about on the floor.
Lamb kicked Patrice again. “You kill Cartwright too?”
Patrice was conscious, but hadn’t spoken yet. Maybe he couldn’t. Once he’d gone down Lamb had stamped on his face, just to be sure, and he currently had fewer teeth than he’d started the day with. His jaw was a purple mess, his jacket and shirt blood-soaked. Lamb’s shoe hadn’t got off scot-free, come to that, but he wasn’t avidly image-conscious, so didn’t mind.
“You listening?”
“I can make him talk,” Shirley said quietly.
“I don’t doubt it.”
She’d do it the way Marcus had shown her: with a cloth over the face, and a jugful of water.
“Seriously, I can—”
“No.” But Lamb too spoke quietly.
Shirley had Patrice’s gun. It still reeked; something that didn’t get mentioned much in the movies, in the books. Her hands would be stained with its residue. Anyone would think she’d pulled a trigger.
The room seemed curiously empty, given there were five of them. Six if you counted Patrice. But no Marcus. Nobody was going to be counting Marcus again.
Lamb looked at Catherine. “The old man okay?”
She nodded. It was the first thing she’d checked. Moira Tregorian had fainted when Catherine opened the door. She was still upstairs, descent being beyond her yet. Catherine had rescued the bottle of whisky from her drawer—its long-term purpose being to lure Jackson back from a clifftop, or encourage him over one; whichever situation cropped up first—and had poured both David and Moira a hefty slug. As for herself, she’d wavered. For half a second, maybe less, she’d spent a small eternity balanced on the rim of a glass.
Ho had recovered his phone, and was leaning against River’s desk. He looked smaller—diminished—they all did. They really needed to call the Park. The police, even. This was Lamb’s kingdom, but kingship had its limits.
Lamb said, “If he killed River, I doubt he bothered to bury him after. Someone check the news, see if there are bodies on the streets.”
Nobody moved.
“Did I die too, and not notice? Because if I’m a ghost, I’ll tell you this. I go whoo, you fucking jump.”
“I’ll do it,” said Ho.
Catherine thought he sounded about twelve.
On River’s desk were the contents of Patrice’s pockets: a passport in the name of Paul Wayne, a mobile phone, a wallet containing euros and sterling. A ticket for the chunnel train. Did it still get called the chunnel? She hadn’t heard that in years. On his way past the desk, she noticed, Ho lifted the mobile. She didn’t doubt Lamb saw this too, but he said nothing.
JK Coe was against the wall. His head was uncovered, and his hands jammed into his hoodie’s pouch. Catherine could read nothing in his eyes, which were fixed on Patrice, who despite the damage Lamb had wrought was not only conscious but alert, as if the blood and associated liquids pooling from his jaw were a mask, beneath which he was planning his escape.
She shuddered. When he’d kicked through the door, gun in hand, she was sure she was on her last b
reath.
I could really use a drink, she thought; unsure whether it was a memory from that moment, or the same need reaching the surface again.
Lamb dropped to his haunches suddenly; did so without a sound, though there were times he’d audibly creak and groan if he had to do anything strenuous, like reach into a pocket. His face inches from Patrice’s he said, “Are you the last of them? Or is your bossman, Frank, is he around too?”
Patrice’s eyes betrayed no emotion. His lips didn’t move. Catherine didn’t think his lips moved. It was hard to tell, though, messed up as his face was.
She said, “It’s not going to work, Jackson. He’s not going to talk.”
Lamb looked up at her, and for a moment there was something in his eyes she’d never seen before, and then it was gone. She wasn’t sure what it had been.
Roderick Ho appeared. He was holding Patrice’s phone.
“There’s only one number been called from this,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“And if I piggyback on the Service program—”
“You can trace it,” said Lamb. “So what are you hanging about for?”
Louisa had finished her coffee and was having a pee when her phone rang, of course. She’d have ignored it, except it was Lamb.
Knowing him, he’d register the acoustic, and that was all she’d hear about for weeks.
“Yeah,” she said, trying to keep her voice low, so it wouldn’t bounce off the porcelain.
“Where are you?”
“A bar off Pentonville. What’s up?”
Because he didn’t sound normal.
“How soon can you get to the Embankment?”
“What’s happened, Lamb? Who got hurt?”
She didn’t want to say “killed,” but that’s what she meant. Last time she’d heard Lamb sound like this—
“I ask how fast you can get somewhere, I don’t expect you to waste time asking questions. Call me on the way.”
He disconnected.
She finished up, washed her hands, collected Emma on her way out the door.
