Dead Lions

by Mick Herron

  “If my bosses found out I was here—”

  “You mean,” Kyril said slyly, “if they found out you’d botched a shadowing job.”

  Min said, “Well, I tracked you to your lair all right.”

  “And now you’re finding out what happens to Department of Energy guys who get too nosy.”

  They all roared again. Piotr refilled the glasses.

  “To successful outcomes.”

  Min was happy to drink to that. “Pravda,” he said, because it was the only Russian word he knew.

  And everyone roared with laughter again, and another round had to be poured.

  They were on the topmost floor, which was a self-contained flat. This was the kitchen, and there were at least two other rooms. The kitchen was clean, though the window was smeared with the usual city grime. The fridge was full, and not just with vodka. It held cartons of juice and bundles of vegetables, plus little wrapped packets from delis. This pair were used to being away from home, Min suspected, and knew how to take care of themselves in a foreign city without resorting to takeaways. He also suspected that if he drank much more he’d forget where he lived, let alone the ability to cycle there. Last thing he wanted was to finish up under a bus.

  There was a noise from elsewhere, the front door opening and closing, and someone new wandered into the room. Min turned, but whoever it had been was already vanishing back into the hallway.

  Piotr said, “One moment,” and left the kitchen.

  Kyril poured more vodka.

  “Who was that?” Min asked.

  “Nobody. A friend.”

  “Why doesn’t he join us?”

  “He’s not that sort of friend.”

  “Not a drinking man,” Min surmised. His glass flaunted itself in front of him. What had he just decided about alcohol? But it would be rude to leave a full glass, so he echoed whatever toast Kyril had proclaimed, and threw the vodka down his throat.

  Piotr returned, and said something to Kyril that sounded to Min like a pile-up of consonants.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Kyril. “Nothing at all.”

  Paranoia was back, if it had ever been away. Shirley Dander, all in black, fitted like a bathplug on the streets of Hoxton, but still felt out of place, as if her every step left a neon footprint.

  Hardly night-time, really. Half past ten.

  There was a pub she favoured, mostly because she had a contact there. She didn’t like to say ‘dealer’: dealer implied habit; habit implied problem; and Shirley didn’t have a problem, she had a lifestyle. One she had no intention of allowing to die the way her career had. That Slough House was a graveyard, she’d never been in doubt; that the earth was piled on quite so high, she’d just discovered. She’d done what Jackson Lamb had asked—done it well, without missing a beat—and all she’d earned was a back-to-your-desk. And from stories she’d heard, it was a miracle she’d been sent out at all. Slow horses came and slow horses went, and the passage between was spent tethered in their stalls. It was as if her mission had been one of calculated cruelty: give her a glimpse of the sunshine, then close the stable door.

  Screw Lamb anyway, though. He wanted to make her life difficult, he’d find that was a two-way street.

  The pub was crowded three deep at the bar. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t planning on staying. A familiar face raised a hand in greeting, but Shirley feigned abstraction and worried her way through to the toilets, which were round the far side: a sleazy corridor with a smeared mirror, and handbills pasted to the walls for open-mic poetry nights, local bands, the Stop the City rally, transgender cabarets. She didn’t have to wait long. Her contact sidled through from the bar, and precisely seventeen words later Shirley was leaving, three banknotes lighter, a comfortable weight nestling in her pocket.

  Black jacket. Black jeans. She should have been invisible, but felt marked out. Memories of the previous night flashed from car windscreens: that kid she’d scared half to death, raiding DataLok. That was how easy it was to terrorise. You simply had to believe your cause was just; or failing that, simply not care about the people you were doing it to … When she turned, Shirley was convinced there’d be someone in her wake; a face from the pub; one of the wallhuggers whose eyes were always busy, but who never dared approach. Well, stuff them. Shirley was spoken for; and besides, she didn’t dance where she shopped. That’s what she was thinking when she looked back, but the street was empty, or seemed to be empty. Paranoia, that’s all. The comfortable weight in her pocket would take care of it.

  All in black, she carried on her way.

  “Alexander Popov,” said Catherine Standish.

  Lamb regarded her thoughtfully. “Now, where’d you come across that name?” he asked.

  She let him wonder.

  “I sometimes worry you’re going over to the enemy.”

  She looked askance. “Regent’s Park?”

  “I meant GCHQ. You got me bugged, Standish?”

  She said, “You’re sending River undercover—”

  “Oh god, I might have guessed,” Lamb sighed.

  “—into something you already know is a trap?”

  “I only told him a couple of hours ago. Did he change his Facebook status already?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. Did gramps not teach that kid anything except how to tell stories?” Raising his glass to his mouth again, his eyes remained fixed on the one he’d poured for Catherine. It sat like a challenge, or a carefully worded insult. “Besides, trap or not, he wouldn’t care. An op’s an op. He probably thinks all his Christmases just came at once.”

  “I’m sure he does. But you know what Christmas is like. It always ends in tears.”

  “He’s going to the Cotswolds, Standish. Not Helmand Province.”

  “There’s something Charles Partner used to say about ops. The friendlier the territory, the scarier the natives.”

  “Was that before or after he blew his brains out?”

  Catherine didn’t answer.

  Lamb said, “What everyone seems to forget is that even if Alexander Popov never existed, whoever invented him did. And if the same smartarse is making a mousetrap in our back yard, we need to find out why.” He belched. “If that means making Cartwright our designated cheese-eater, so be it. He’s a trained professional, remember. Being a fuck-up is only his hobby.”

  “He’s your white whale isn’t he? Popov?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Something else Charles once said. That it’s dangerous personalising an enemy. Because when that happens, you’re chasing a white whale.” Catherine paused. “It’s a Moby-Dick reference. It probably works better if you don’t need that explained. River doesn’t know he’s taking bait, does he?”

  “No,” said Lamb. “And he’s not going to find out. Or your confidence about your unassailable role here might turn out to be misplaced.”

  She said, “I’ll not tell him.”

  “Good. You planning on drinking that?”

  Catherine poured her glass’s contents into Lamb’s. “Unless I decide he’s in danger,” she went on. “It’s your whale, after all. No reason anyone else should die trying to stick a harpoon in it.”

  “Nobody’s going to die,” said Lamb. Inaccurately, as it turned out.

  The phone rang.

  Because the body carried a Service card, red flags went up. This meant attending police officers were demoted to traffic duty, while Nick Duffy—the Park’s Head Dog—became scene boss, and his underdogs measured angles and took witness statements.

  Most of the witnesses had arrived after the event, though not the car’s driver, obviously. The car’s driver had turned up at precisely the moment the event took place.

  “Came out of nowhere,” she repeated.

  She was blonde and appeared sober; an impression borne out by a breathalyser borrowed from a disgruntled cop.

  “I didn’t stand a chance.”

 
A voice tremor, but that was understandable: mash into someone with your car, blameless or not, and you were bound to feel shaky.

  It wasn’t the busiest junction, this time of night, but you wouldn’t want to cross it blind. Though of course, if you were drugged up or drunk, the Green Cross Code might not be top of your agenda.

  “I mean, I hit the brake but—”

  The shakes took her again.

  Nick Duffy heard himself saying, “Look, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.” Christ, he sounded like a Special Constable.

  But she was blonde and reasonably fit, and the corpse had a Service card but was from Slough House, which was every bit as special as a Constable; the same way some kids were special, and had special needs. When a spook died under a car, you had to poke around carefully, in case the car—metaphorically speaking—had dodgy plates, but when you found out the spook was a slow horse, you refigured the odds. Maybe they’d just been looking the wrong way. Left/right. It could be a confusing issue.

  And she was blonde and reasonably fit …

  “But I need to take a look at your licence.”

  Which told him she was one Rebecca Mitchell, 38, British citizen; nothing on the face of any of that suggesting she’d just carried out a hit. Though of course, the best hits were carried out by the least likely hitters.

  Nick Duffy scanned the junction again. His Dogs were checking kerbs and shop doorways: last time a car took out a spook a gun had gone missing, and Bad Sam Chapman, his immediate predecessor, had wound up on the short end of an internal inquiry. Last heard of, he was working for some private outfit. Not a fate Duffy was ready for, thanks. As he handed the licence back, a taxi arrived, and out climbed Jackson Lamb. A woman was with him, and it only took Duffy a moment to collect the name: Catherine Standish, who’d been a fixture at the Park back when Duffy was a pup, but went into exile after Charles Partner’s suicide. The pair ignored him. They went straight for the body.

  He said to Rebecca Mitchell, “You’ll need to make a statement. There’ll be someone along shortly.”

  She nodded mutely.

  Leaving her, Duffy approached the new arrivals, about to tell them to back away from the body, but before he could speak Lamb turned, and the expression on his face persuaded Duffy to keep his mouth shut. Then Lamb looked down at the body again, and then up the street. Duffy couldn’t tell what he was focusing on: the cross traffic at distant junctions; the lights jewelling the highway. Always, in the city, there were strings of pearls at night; sometimes fairy lights strung for a wedding; sometimes glassand-paste baubles, hung for a funeral.

  Standish spoke to Jackson Lamb.

  “Who’s going to tell Louisa?” she said.

  PART TWO

  WHITE WHALES

  To begin with what it hasn’t got, Upshott has no high street, not like those in nearby villages, with their parades of mock-Tudor frontages gracefully declining riverwards, clotted with antique shops and garden-furniture showrooms; whose grocery stores offer stem-ginger biscuits and seven kinds of pesto, and whose pubs’ menus wouldn’t be out of place in Hampstead. It doesn’t have cafés with the day’s specials chalked on pavement blackboards, or independent bookshops boasting local-author events; nor are its back lanes lined with neatly coiffed hedges guarding houses of soft yellow stone. Because Upshott doesn’t invite the epithet “chocolate boxy,” so often delivered through gritted teeth. If it resembles any kind of chocolate box, it’s the kind found on the shelf at its only supermarket: coated with dust, its cellophane crackly and yellowing.

  Take that high street, which Upshott doesn’t have. What it has, instead, is a main road that curves once upon entering the village, to avoid the church, and then again three hundred yards later as it threads between the pub on its left and the semicircular green on its right. Then it climbs past the new-build housing; past the small primary school and the village hall, a modern prefab visitors need directions to find. But then, the hall isn’t Upshott’s heartbeat; that would be the trinity of post box, pub and village shop. The first of these sits on the side of the green furthest from the road, which is inconvenient, unless you live in one of the houses lining that stretch. Arranged in a curve, they are Upshott’s oldest dwellings—three-storey eighteenth-century townhouses peculiarly resituated here, making strange near-neighbours for those bungalows on the rise, most of which stand empty, having once been homes for service-staff on the nearby USAF base: cleaners and janitors, cooks and washers-up, mechanics and drivers. When the base pulled the plug in the mid-nineties, a lot of life drained out of Upshott. What’s left mostly lives in those townhouses, or further along the main road, and sooner or later all of it turns up at the pub.

  Which is called The Downside Man, and faces the green, with a small car park to its left and a tiered patio round back, overlooking the woods’ curving treeline a mile distant. The Downside Man has whitewashed walls and a wooden pub-sign which once flapped in the breeze, but also came loose in high winds, so has now been fixed to its post by Tommy Moult, the village’s honorary odd-job man. Tommy’s rumoured to have a secret life, as he’s only ever seen at weekends, when he can reliably be found outside the village shop, red woollen cap pulled over his ears, selling packets of seeds from his bicycle, which he parks next to the racks of vegetables. He evidently regards this as the linchpin of his commercial enterprise, because every Saturday morning, winter or summer, there he is; networking more than selling, perhaps, because few locals pass without exchanging words.

  The shop where he stands is back the way we came, on the corner facing St Johnno’s. To get there from the pub is to pass, on the left, a row of stone cottages, interrupted by the old manor house, now converted into flats. On the right are larger, newer houses, yet to bed down into the landscape; they’re too clean, too neatly brushed. In the gaps between them, though, views of the mile-distant treeline can still be enjoyed, and if the occasional presence of a cement mixer indicates that some of those gaps were intended to sprout houses of their own, there’s little other sign of building activity. That all came to a halt years back. It might start up again once things improve, but the financial crisis remains as ill-defined as an unbuilt house; you can sketch its possible shape on the air, but there’s no touching its walls to know its limits. And then the road bends again, between shop and church, St John of the Cross: thirteenth century and pretty as a postcard, it has a lych-gate and a well-tended graveyard, whose oldest occupants once inhabited the manor house, and who presumably rolled over when its conversion into flats took place. But services at St Johnno’s are now on a fortnightly basis; far more reliable is the village shop, open eight till ten daily, though this bears no resemblance to the upmarket boutiques of the prettier villages, its shelves stacked high with stuff people need rather than want: tinned foods, dairy foods, frozen foods; sacks of charcoal, bags of kitty litter, breezeblocks of toilet rolls; shampoos, soaps and toothpastes; fridgefulls of lager and wine; cartons of juice and bottles of milk.

  For many locals, the shop is as far as they need to go on any pedestrian expedition; the road, though, pootles on, passing a few more raggle-taggle cottages before dwindling into a minor country highway, hedged either side and badly potholed. A mile further on, it reaches the MoD range—when the American base upped sticks the Ministry of Defence stepped in, and land once leased to friendly aircraft is now home to friendly fire. When red flags fly, there’s no rambling across the fields south-east of Upshott; and sometimes, after dark, great balls of light drop from the sky, illuminating the ranges for night practice. Adjoining the road, separated from it by an eight-foot wire mesh fence, lies the last remaining airstrip, at one end of which sit, like properties on a Monopoly board, a hangar and a clubhouse. These see civilian activity several evenings a week, and most weekend mornings during spring and summer are the launchpad for a single-engined plane, which putters over Upshott before disappearing into the open skies, though so far, it’s always returned.

  A quiet place, then—that gu
nfire notwithstanding. Sleepy, even, though in fact it wakes early by and large, as most of those who live there work elsewhere, and tend to be on the road by eight. So perhaps a better word would be harmless—as Jackson Lamb pointed out, it’s hardly Helmand Province.

  Though even harmless villages suffer screams in the afternoon.

  “Jesus!” River screamed—too late. Full-body armour wouldn’t have helped him. Prayer was all he had, and then not even that: just prayer’s echo, bouncing around his thoughtless skull as his body went into spasm, and then again, and then stopped, or seemed to stop, and his eyes relaxed behind their tight-shut lids, and the darkness he was locked in became softer.

  After a while, his companion said, “Blimey,” but it didn’t sound like a good blimey. Rolling off him, she pulled the sheet up to her shoulders. River lay still, heartbeat returning to normal, skin damp—he’d lasted long enough to work up a sweat.

  But doubted he’d be raising that in mitigation.

  It was mid-afternoon, a Tuesday, River’s third week in Upshott, and he lay in the curtain-darkened bedroom of one of the new-builds on the northern rise, a house rented under his cover name, Jonathan Walker. Jonathan Walker was a writer. Why else would anyone come to Upshott, out of season? Even if Upshott had a season. So Jonathan Walker wrote thrillers, and had an Amazon entry to prove it, Critical Mass, whose non-existence hadn’t saved it from a one-star review. He was currently working on a novel set on a US military base in the eighties. Hence Upshott, out of season.

  His companion said, “I used to have a T-shirt. Boys wanted—no experience necessary. Careful what you wish for, eh?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  “Yeah, I read your body language.”

  Her name was Kelly Tropper, and she tended bar at The Downside Man: she was early twenties, petite, flat-chested, with crow-coloured hair; a string of adjectives River would have found dispiritingly inadequate if he really were a writer. She also had creamy, unfreckled skin, a curiously flattened nose, which gave her the appearance of pressing up against a pane of glass, and had described herself in his hearing as a cynic. She wrapped her leg round his. “Not falling asleep now, are you?” Her hand explored him. “Hmm. Not totally lifeless. Still need a few minutes, though.”