by Mick Herron
When he was done, he returned to the sofa. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable sofa, but the bed it unfolded into wasn’t comfortable either, so at least it was consistent. And its lumpy narrowness was only one reason Min wasn’t in the habit of bringing Louisa back here; others being the way cooking smells hung around all night, and the peeling floor in the bathroom down the hall, and the borderline psycho in the room below … Min should move; get his life back on a proper footing. It had been a couple of years since everything went down the pan, a process that had begun when he’d left a classified disk on the tube, and woken next morning to find its contents being discussed on Radio 4. He’d been at Slough House within the month. His domestic life collapsed shortly afterwards. If his marriage had been strong to begin with, he sometimes lectured himself, it would have survived his professional humiliation, but the truth, he’d come to understand, held a tighter focus. If he himself had been strong, he would have ensured that his marriage survived. As it was, his marriage was definitely a thing of the past, what with Louisa being on the scene. He was pretty sure Clare wouldn’t tolerate that particular development, and while he hadn’t told her about it, he wasn’t convinced she didn’t know. Women were born spooks, and could smell betrayal before it happened.
His glass was empty again. Reaching to refill it he had a sudden glimpse of a future in which this never changed; one in which he was always in this soul-destroying room, and never released from the career-ending Slough House. And he knew he couldn’t let that happen. The failures of his past had been atoned for: everyone was allowed one mistake, surely? This olive branch from Regent’s Park, in the shape of Spider Webb’s summit; all he had to do was grab hold of it, and be pulled ashore. If this was a test, he intended to pass it. Nothing at face value, that had to be his mantra. He’d assume everything held a hidden meaning, and keep digging until he found what it was.
And trust nobody. That was the most important thing. Trust nobody.
Except Louisa, of course. He trusted Louisa completely.
Which didn’t necessarily mean keeping her in the loop.
Once River had left, the house grew quiet enough for David Cartwright to replay their conversation.
Fiery damn!
ZT/53235, he’d said, and River had been sharp enough to repeat it back to him. And it wasn’t a name he’d forget, because River had always been able to recite phone numbers, car registrations, Test match scores, months after reading them. It was a gift, Cartwright liked to think, the boy had inherited from him; certainly one he’d encouraged River to cultivate. So sooner or later he’d wonder how come his grandfather had got this particular name digit-perfect, when he’d been making a bit of a performance of losing details here and there.
But you didn’t grow old without becoming accustomed to there being things beyond your capacity to change. So David Cartwright filed that one in a memory drawer and resolved not to let it vex him.
The fire was dying. That woodlouse: it had scuttered about in evident fear, and at the last second had thrown itself into the flames below, as if death were preferable to the moments spent waiting for it. And this was a woodlouse. That human beings in similar straits had reached the same conclusion was a matter of televised fact, and not one David Cartwright cared to dwell upon. His memory was full of drawers he kept shut.
Take Alexander Popov. If he’d never mentioned that name to his grandson, it was for the reason he’d given: that he hadn’t spared the creature a thought in over a decade. And this, too, was for the stated reason: Popov was a legend, and did not exist. As for Dickie Bow, he’d clearly been a drunkard who’d seen his usefulness to the Service drawing to a close. His claim of a kidnapping had been a last-gasp attempt to score a pension. That he’d died on a bus without a valid ticket didn’t strike Cartwright as an out-of-the-way ending. On the contrary, it had been on the cards from the opening credits.
But Jackson Lamb appeared to think otherwise, and the trouble with that old joe wasn’t that he spent his life thinking up ways of tormenting his slow horses. It was that, like most old joes, once he got it in mind to start pulling on a thread, he wouldn’t stop till the whole damn tapestry unravelled. And David Cartwright had seen so many tapestries, it was hard to know where one started and the next one stopped.
He picked up his glass again, but set it down on finding it empty. Another drink now and he’d sleep like the dead for an hour, then lie wide-eyed until morning. If there was anything he missed about being young, it was that careless ability to fall into oblivion like a bucket dropped down a well, then pulled up slowly, replenished. One of those gifts you didn’t know you possessed until it was taken away.
But in addition to growing accustomed to there being things beyond your capacity to change, the old also learned that some things changed without your knowing.
Alexander Popov had been a legend, Cartwright thought. Alexander Popov hadn’t existed.
He wondered if that were still the case.
He continued to stare into the dying fire for some while. But in the way of things that were dying, it didn’t reveal anything he didn’t already know.
The Wentworth Academy of the English Language maintained two premises. The primary site, as featured in its glossy brochure, was a handsome country house, subliminally familiar to anyone who’d watched the BBC on a Sunday evening: a four-storey, crenellated wonder boasting thirty-six rooms, sweeping lawns, a carp pond, tennis courts, a croquet lawn, and a deer park. The second, whose only advantage over the first was that it was the actual academy, was a pair of third-floor offices above a stationer’s off High Holborn, and any accompanying paperwork would have had to own up to a damp-stained ceiling, cracked windows, an electric bar-heater whose highest setting scorched the surrounding plaster, and a sleeping Russian.
The fire was off when Lamb appeared in the doorway. Silently, he took the scene in: bookshelves filled with dozens of copies of that same brochure; three framed diplomas on the wall above the mantelpiece; a view of a brick wall through the cracked windows; and two telephones on the desk at which the sleeping Russian slumped, both rotary, one black, the other cream. They were only just visible under piles of what might politely be called paperwork, but more reasonably described as litter. Bills and flyers for local pizza parlours, and minicab firms, and one for someone who appeared to be new in town, and in need of a firm hand. Pushed under the desk, but not entirely hidden from view, lurked a folded camp-bed and a grubby pillow.
Once he was sure the man wasn’t faking, Lamb swept a pile of brochures onto the floor.
“Fcrah!”
He came out of the chair like a man who’s known bad dreams. Nikolai Katinsky, his name was. Jumping, he grasped something from the desktop, but it was only a glasses case; a minor prop to anchor him to waking reality. Halfway to his feet he stopped, and slumped back. The chair creaked dangerously. He put the glasses case down and coughed for a while. Then said, “And you are?”
“I’ve come about the money,” Lamb said.
It was a reasonably safe bet that Katinsky owed money, and that someone would be round to collect it soon.
Katinsky nodded thoughtfully. He was bald, or mostly bald—a crop of white stubble gilded his ears—and gave off an air of pent-up energy, of emotions kept in check; the same sense Lamb had had watching the video of him, shot eighteen years ago, through a two-way mirror in one of Regent’s Park’s luxury suites. Joke. These were underground, and were where the Service’s more serious debriefings took place; those which it might later prove politic to deny had happened. But that man had diminished in the years since, as if he’d recently undergone a crash diet without updating his wardrobe. Flesh had tightened across his jawline, and gave the impression of sagging elsewhere. When he’d finished nodding, he said: “Jamal’s money? Or Demetrio’s money?”
Tossing a mental coin, Lamb said, “Demetrio’s.”
“Figures. Tell the dirty Greek bastard to go fuck himself for his money. The first of the month, tha
t was the arrangement.”
Lamb found his cigarettes. “I might not mention the bit about fucking himself,” he said. Moving into the room, he hooked an ankle round a chair and tipped its burden of hat, gloves and Guardians onto the floor. Lowering himself into it, he undid his overcoat buttons, and foraged for his lighter. “This school set-up fool anyone?”
“So now we’re having a conversation?”
“I need to stay long enough that Demetrio’s convinced we talked the ins and outs of fiscal propriety.”
“He’s outside?”
“In the car. Between you and me, he might go for the first of the month.” He found his lighter, and applied it. “You weren’t on today’s list. We just happened to be passing.”
He was surprising himself, how easily it came back: firing up a legend on the spot. Ten minutes from now, Katinsky’s current life would be spread out between them like a takeaway. And once Lamb had picked the bones out of that, he could get to the meat of the matter.
Katinsky’s debriefing hadn’t actually been serious. Katinsky had been among the sweepings; the exodus of minor hoods triggered by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, all desperate to convert scraps of intelligence into a harder form of currency. They were hardly Grade-A candidates. But all had to be processed, and kicked out the other side, and some even sent back, to prove there was no such thing as a free ride.
Those allowed to stay were given a small lump sum and a three-year passport they sweated over each time the renewal date came round. It was always handy, as Lamb’s mentor Charles Partner once remarked, to have a supply of expendable Russians on the books. Apart from anything else, you never knew when the wheel would spin again, bringing the world back where it started. “Where it started” was a phrase neither questioned. The Cold War was the natural state of affairs.
Katinsky, anyway, had been among the lucky. And look at him now: the once-minor hood, running his own “school” … Late sixties, Lamb supposed. His arms twitched under various sleeves: charity shop tweed jacket, holey grey V-neck, scruffy white collarless shirt. And there was something off about him, even leaving aside the secondhand clothing, the stained walls, the desperate address. Something off; like that gap between the use-by date, and the moment the milk turns.
“We’re busier than we look,” he said, answering Lamb’s question about the school. “We get a lot of enquiries. Web traffic. Foreign students. You’d be surprised.”
“You’d be surprised how little surprises me. Who’s we?”
“It’s a useful plural.” Katinsky smiled thinly, showing grey teeth. “The school has a full complement of pupils at present, but happily we are able to offer places on our subsidiary teaching scheme. A distance-learning arrangement.”
Lamb ran a thumb down a ream of stiff paper stacked on the nearest shelf, then slid the topmost sheet off the pile. A diploma: Advanced Studies, it read, specialising in, with three rows of dotted lines underneath. Board-certified, a little rosette-shaped logo promised, without going into detail about which board, or how certified.
Katinsky said, “We get the odd dissatisfied pupil, sure. But you consider the source, yes? The other day there’s a letter, the stupid bastard can’t spell bastard, that’s how stupid the bastard is. I’m supposed to care what he thinks?”
“I’d have thought teaching the bastards to spell would come within your remit,” Lamb said.
“So long as they sign the cheques,” Katinsky said. “Won’t Demetrio be wondering where you are?”
“He’ll be reading the paper. Picking his nose. You know Demetrio.”
“But not as well as you.”
“Probably not.”
“Which is strange, as I’m the one who made him up. Have you finished playing games yet, Jackson Lamb? And if you have, would you mind telling me what you want?
Much earlier the pale-blue sky had been cross-hatched by contrails, and Shirley Dander was deep in unreclaimed countryside; sheep, fields, and an unignorable smell of shit. There were occasional rows of roadside cottages; one with a peacock strutting outside, for Christ’s sake. Shirley stared as it swept across the road and round a hedge. Chickens, maybe, but a peacock? It was like a Richard Curtis movie.
None of which got her there faster, but at least she knew where she was going. Mr. B—Jackson Lamb’s bald man—had stepped off the delayed Worcester train at Moreton-in-Marsh, which turned out larger than its name suggested. It had a reasonably substantial shopping drag, at any rate, including some outlets Shirley wouldn’t have minded browsing. They weren’t open, though. It wasn’t long past seven. Shirley had been up all night.
The station boasted a car park and a space for taxis, currently vacant. Shirley sat under an awning while morning activity unfolded: citygoers were dropped off by tracksuited spouses, looking ever-so-harassed behind the wheels of their 4x4s; bolder types arrived on bikes which they locked to the nearby rack, or folded into complicated quadrilaterals. Some saddoes even turned up on foot. A taxi arrived, and disgorged a significant blonde. Shirley watched as she smiled and paid and tipped and smiled and left, then slipped into the back seat before the driver knew she was there.
“Miss your train?”
“Not even a bit,” she told him. “Do you just do mornings, or do you take the evening shift too?”
And because a suffering look was now unfolding across his wide country features, she snapped her fingers, propelling a ten pound note from its hiding place in her watch’s wristband; a trick she pulled on waiters, when they were worth the bother.
“Last week, for instance. Were you picking up in the evenings last week?”
“Boyfriend trouble, is it?” he asked.
“Do I look like boyfriends give me trouble?”
He reached a hand out and she dropped the note into it. Then he drove them away from the neat little station just as another taxi arrived to take his place, and gave Shirley Dander a quick tour of the village while she pumped him for info on local taxi services.
A large, very large, woman lumbered past: she didn’t look more than early twenties, but had amassed at least a stone for each year. She snagged Louisa’s attention. Gravitational pull, probably. “What must that be like?”
They were sitting on a stone plinth wrapped round a column, takeaway coffees in hand. Around them was a constant stream of people: heading into or out of Liverpool Street Station; disappearing round corners, or into shops and office blocks.
“Not just the effort of moving,” she went on. “The whole shebang. How’d you get a man when you’re shaped like that?”
“You know what they say,” Min said. “Anyone with one of those can always lay their hands on one of these.”
His head movement indicated the corresponding parts of their bodies he meant.
“I wouldn’t be too sure. I know some pretty lonely women.”
“Oh, well, if you’re gunna have standards …”
Of the people heading by, none showed interest in them. Somebody would, sooner or later: Spider Webb had set a meeting up.
“There’s two of them,” he’d said. “Kyril and Piotr, they’re called.”
“Are they Russian?” Min had asked.
“How will we know them?” Louisa said hurriedly.
“Oh, you’ll know them,” Webb said. “Pashkin doesn’t get here for another couple of weeks. You can talk through the itinerary with this pair. They’ve been told you’re from the Department of Energy, for what that’s worth. Let them know to keep their feet off the furniture, but don’t go putting collars on them. Never wise to stir up the gorillas.”
“Gorillas?” Min had asked.
“They’re on the big side,” Webb admitted. “They’re goons, what did you think? He’d have a pair of mini-mes?”
“How come they’re here already?” Louisa had wanted to know.
But Webb had no information. “He’s rich. Not Rolls Royce rich—moonshot rich. If he wants his cushions plumped up weeks in advance, that’s his privilege
.”
Gorillas, then, was already in Min’s mind, but it would have popped up anyway, because they approached now like a pair of silverbacks. Both were broad-shouldered, and walked in a way that suggested their suits were chafing. One, who would turn out to be Piotr, had a tennis-ball fuzz of grey across his scalp. Kyril was darker and shaggier.
“This will be them,” Louisa said.
Really? You think? Not stupid enough to say that out loud, Min stood, sucked his gut in and waited.
The pair reached them and the one who was Piotr said, “You’re with Mr. Webb, right?” His voice was low and unmistakably eastern European, but he spoke fluently. Introductions made, the pair sat. Louisa waved for more coffee from the nearby booth. It might have been pleasant; four people sitting down to business in a capital city, mid-morning; coffee on the way, and the possibility of sandwiches later. You couldn’t throw a stone from here without hitting someone on their way to such a meeting; but it would have been trickier, Min hoped, to target one where half those convened were carrying guns.
“Mr. Pashkin gets here week after next?” Louisa asked.
“He’s flying in,” Piotr agreed. “He’s in Moscow right now.”
Kyril, it seemed, didn’t talk much.
“Well, maybe we should run through some ground rules before he gets here. Just so we all know where we stand.”
Piotr gave her a serious look. “We’re professionals,” he said. “Your turf, sure. There’s no problem. You tell us the rules. We keep to them as best we can.”
After a brief moment in which he wondered whether he’d ever speak another language well enough to say fuck you quite so politely in it, Min said, “Yeah, well, any rules you’re not sure about, let us know. I’ll have someone translate.”
