Nobody Walks

by Mick Herron

  The floor round the bar was carpeted. Fibres clung to his boots.

  Finding a gap he leaned on the metallic counter, earning another double-take, this from a barman with punched ears, polo mint-sized plastic disks allowing a clear view through his lobes. Instead of serving Bettany he turned and called a name. Rowf? Roof? Ralph? No way of telling.

  Rowf or Roof or Ralph was more substantial in terms of years as much as girth. He and Bettany between them had more miles under their belt than the rest of the crowd combined.

  What Ralph or Roof also had was a weary expression on a craggy face and a stubby index finger the size of a sardine tin. He crooked it to make Bettany lean forward, then said low and close, “On your bloody bike. Now.”

  Bettany showed him not Liam’s photo, but another of Liam’s twenties. “Quiet word?”

  Ralph—probably—pursed his lips.

  “Just some information.”

  A hand dropped onto his shoulder, and Bettany knew the door staff had caught up with themselves.

  Ralph plucked the note from his hands.

  “Time to go, Methuselah.”

  He hadn’t been wrong about the bible illustration.

  “I’ll be outside,” Bettany said, but Ralph was gone.

  The door staff weren’t rough with him, which he suspected was because they didn’t want to get too close. It had been a while since he’d stood under a shower.

  On the street they led him to a corner, one on each side.

  “You’re making a nuisance of yourself.”

  “Keep it up, and you’ll attract the wrong attention.”

  “So do yourself a favour and go home.”

  It was like being the straight man in a musical. Maybe they’d break into a tap routine. When they didn’t Bettany shrugged, and made as if taking their advice.

  1.11

  But he didn’t. Instead he waited over the road in the doorway of a vintage clothing company, which had probably once been a secondhand shop. He gave it five minutes, then another five. At length Ralph emerged, lit a cigarette, and shared a laugh with the bouncers before setting off medium pace, a man on a break, no particular place to go.

  On his side of the road Bettany held stride. Between them a hiccuping flow of traffic, mostly black cabs.

  He let Ralph pick his own spot, which turned out to be a widening expanse where the road bled into a roundabout, from the centre of which an office block sprouted. On its side a huge advert, a Premier League name modelling a pair of briefs. Ralph leaned on a railing and lit another cigarette.

  When Bettany reached him, he said, “You’ve got till I finish this.”

  Bettany showed him Liam’s photo.

  “Cop?”

  “No.”

  “Private?”

  “Do I look like a private detective?”

  “Don’t know,” Ralph said. “Never met one.”

  He took the picture. Unlike most others, he studied rather than glanced at it.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I think so. Maybe.”

  He handed it back.

  “Not a regular,” he said. “But now and again.”

  “In a crowd?”

  “That’s how most people come. Unless they’re just out to score.”

  “Score what?”

  This earned him a slow look.

  “What do you think? No one goes clubbing hoping to go home alone.”

  “What about drugs?”

  “You are a cop.”

  Bettany said, “The boy. He’s my son.”

  “Yeah, I figured. No offence, but if he was a pick-up, you’d have made more effort.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Saying the words aloud was like hearing them the first time. Standing there, his boy’s ashes in his hand, it felt as if he were just now getting the news.

  “Sorry, man. Tough break.”

  Quickly said, but it sounded sincere.

  Bettany said, “He was high. When he died.”

  “Damn.”

  “I’m looking for whoever sold him the drugs.”

  Again, saying it made it true.

  A clique of women sallied past, perfume trailing in their wake.

  Ralph ground his cigarette under a boot.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Bettany waited.

  “You’re planning on going Bronson on the streets of N1? Two things wrong with this picture, man. You are nobody’s idea of a vigilante. And you’ve pissed a lot of people off already, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Bettany said, “You think that might have been in your club?”

  Exasperation now. “What might?”

  “Where he bought what he was on.”

  “Christ. Look, you’ve had your twenty quid’s worth, okay? I’m sorry about your son, but seriously. Go home and mourn. You have got a home?”

  “You want to meet him?”

  “What now?”

  Bettany held up the bag.

  “My son.”

  Ralph stared. Then said, “You really are a whackjob, aren’t you?”

  “I hadn’t seen him in a few years. But I figured we’d have time. I thought I’d run out of that before he did.”

  A sixteen-wheeler trundled by, navigating the roundabout the way dinosaurs must have waddled round waterholes.

  Ralph said, “Look, I’m not saying nobody ever snorted a line in the toilets, but we’re talking recreational. People get high to keep dancing. There’s nobody sticking needles in themselves, nobody selling it to them. Not where I work. Wrong demographic.”

  “What about dope?”

  “You’ll need to be more specific.”

  “Cannabis. Weed. Marijuana. Whatever it’s called now.”

  “He was smoking weed? For real?”

  Bettany said nothing.

  “Look, man, no offence. I mean, sorry for your loss, but he was smoking weed?”

  “Muskrat, it’s called.”

  “Yeah, that’s seriously … That’s mellow shit. You know? Look, sorry, but what happened, he fall under a bus or something?”

  Bettany didn’t answer.

  “He did, didn’t he?”

  “He fell.”

  “Yeah. Look, I’m sorry. Really. But if he’d been drunk, would you be picking a fight with Smirnoff? It doesn’t make sense, that’s all I’m saying.”

  He turned to go, then turned back.

  “Here. I don’t need this.”

  This was the twenty-pound note Bettany had given him. He pressed it into Bettany’s hand.

  “Go home, yeah?”

  He headed back to his job.

  Bettany stood while traffic blasted round the junction, filing off in separate directions, the city, westward, further east. Way overhead an aeroplane silently circled. Eventually he stuffed the money into his pocket.

  He left the main drag. He was not far from the playground where he’d encountered the kids smoking dope, which was not far from the pub where this odyssey had begun. A wave of exhaustion almost flattened him. He’d been awake a long time.

  Carrying Liam’s ashes had become central to his being. As if the bag’s handles had fused with his fingers, the pair of them holding hands again across an unbridgeable gap.

  Passing another bar he hesitated, unsure whether he’d tried this one. Through its fuzzy-glassed window elongated shapes shimmered, and even on the pavement Bettany could feel music’s dull thump, like a blunt-skulled creature repeatedly butting its head against a door. Not unlike his own evening’s activity. This was enough of an insight to persuade him to walk on by.

  A dog trotted past and disappeared up a lane. He followed it, thinking to cut off a corner, but the lane right-angled then deadended in a blank expanse of wall. Three wheelie bins stood sentry, each lid tilted by a bulging load of refuse. He turned. He wasn’t alone. Blocking the way were a pair of large shapes, the streetlight behind them rendering their outlines harsh.

  It wasn’t a big surprise. The bouncers, Tweedl
edum and his shadow. He’d been warned off and it hadn’t taken. They’d told him to go away, but here he was.

  He said, “I was just going.”

  Neither replied.

  “So no harm done.”

  Tweedledumber shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “Okay then.”

  A car passed by out of sight, its throaty progress a reminder that he could have kept walking. Should have kept walking.

  Tweedledum said, “Thought he’d been told.”

  “Definitely. He was told.”

  “We told him, didn’t we?”

  “We did.”

  “I distinctly remember that.”

  Bettany understood they were a comedy act, if only in their own minds. That this was the part they really enjoyed, or enjoyed nearly as much.

  “But he’s back.”

  “So he is.”

  “Bothering everybody.”

  “I get it,” Bettany said. “I really do. I’ll go now.”

  “Oh, now he’s talking.”

  “Telling us he’s off.”

  “Which is what he already told us.”

  “Except here he is.”

  A tapping noise had been going on for some moments. It came from the baseball bat in Tweedledum’s right hand. He was gently bouncing it off the ground, testing its springiness.

  Bettany said, “You’re not seriously planning on using that.”

  “Seriously? We thought we’d already been serious. But apparently we weren’t serious enough. Were we?”

  “Not enough,” Tweedledumber agreed.

  “But what we find is, a little lovetap on the kneecaps, everything gets clearer. Says more than words ever can.”

  There was a rasping sound as Tweedledumber struck a match against the alley wall. When he applied it to the cigarette in his mouth, his face became an October pumpkin.

  He dropped the match in the gutter.

  Tweedledum hoisted the bat, slapped its thick end into his left hand.

  “I’ve made a mistake,” said Bettany.

  “That you have, sunshine. That you have.”

  They stepped forward, and the punishment began.

  PART TWO

  2.1

  In the morning London exhaled, and its breath was foul. It swam upwards from drains and gutters. It formed pockets of gas in corners, and burst in noxious clouds from cars’ rear ends.

  By eight the first swell of workers had flooded the city and the second was gathering force. The underground, arteries hardening, was a wheezing queue of trains in which passengers, squeezed into awkward shapes, counted down the stations of the cross. Bad things could happen on the tube, though few entertained the possibility that disaster would happen to them. They feared, instead, small acts of rudeness and aggression, their own as well as others’, because in the daily anonymous crush it was easy for a grip on the ordinary decencies to loosen. The underground birthed a creature that might turn on itself. There was little need of outside agency.

  Among their number this morning, as usual, was a woman whom even the kinder passengers would have difficulty not finding ugly. She was five foot tall and bottle-shaped, not classic Coke but pale ale, straight up-and-down to the neck, with, today, iron-grey hair whose colour matched the aspirin-sized growth that bloomed on one side of her nose. But her eyes were piercingly bright, and she was expensively dressed—Caroline Charles, the discerning might have recognised, before wondering why someone wearing Caroline Charles chose to ride the tube at rush-hour. On closer inspection, they might have decided she resembled the more benevolent kind of witch, the type to dish out helpful potions when love let you down.

  But few would spare the time to frame the thoughts. All were focused on being first off the train when it stopped. The woman seemed less anxious than most, allowing those around her to disembark before she did. On the stairs she kept an unhurried pace, not minding when less-controlled individuals rushed past, their disorganised limbs brushing against her. Once outside the commuters rediscovered their individual selves, and the temporary monster they’d assembled broke into parts and scattered. Her own course took her across the junction where traffic had argued itself to a standstill and onto a quieter road by the park, where a gracious terrace faced a row of full-grown sycamores, their branches leafless but no less soothing for that—bare ruined choirs her first thought on seeing them. Where late the sweet birds sang.

  She ascended the steps to one of the grand buildings, and its door opened before she reached it.

  “Good morning, Graham. All well?”

  She slipped her gloves off as she spoke.

  “Everything fine up topside, ma’am.”

  “All we can ask.” Removing her scarf, she folded it over one arm as she crossed the hall with its wide staircase and the monumental Landseer on the wall. “You take care of things up here, and I’ll do my best with everything else.”

  “Then we’re all in safe hands,” Graham said, as he did most mornings.

  Dame Ingrid Tearney smiled, and stepped through the door to the left of the staircase.

  Since 7/7 she’d used the underground at least once a day, always during rush hour, and made no secret of it. Every profile written about her, every interview she gave, the fact was tripped out. And she always gave the same reason, which, first time she delivered it, appeared in a round-up of that year’s soundbites.

  “My job is to keep our citizens safe. There’s no risk they face that I won’t gladly meet myself.”

  Do you think it’s wise, she’d been asked, describing your average Londoner’s journey to work as a risk?

  I think it’s wise that no one takes safety for granted, she’d said.

  Despite the publicity she was never recognised, of this she was certain. She’d never been an agent—her route to head of the Intelligence Service had been largely via committee—but she had her smarts, and few illusions about herself. She sometimes drew a second glance, and knew full well why. But if she ever drew a third it would be someone realising who she was, and that never happened.

  It helped, of course, that her hair alternated between the iron grey, a much curlier black and a really quite buttery blonde. Her wigs were expensive, age-appropriate, and functional. From the age of fifteen, Ingrid Tearney had been completely bald.

  And now she was heading down again, the lift carrying her three floors below the street to the bi-monthly inter-departmental catch-up labelled W&N on everyone’s calendar for Wants & Needs, but called by her Whines & Niggles. Not usually a meeting she’d chair, for the good reason that it made her want to murder her staff, but every other blue moon she’d turn up to demonstrate how hands-on she was, and spend two hours listening to departmental rivalries disguised as strategic planning. Why Comms needed extra space Intel should be made to surrender. Why Surveillance required a budget hike that could come out of Ops’ surplus. Et cetera. They could type it all up in January and circulate it at intervals, the effect would be the same.

  Which was what she found herself saying out loud to the assembled company—twelve department reps, a minute-taker and one extra—ninety minutes later.

  “We have increasing demands placed on capped resources, yes. Explain why this always comes as a surprise? If you wanted free rein and unlimited funds, you should have gone into the City. Next time let’s have less squabbling and more constructive thinking, shall we?” She removed her glasses, a sign that the meeting was over. “And let’s not forget, when we drop the ball, lives are lost. There’s no excuse for losing focus. Mr. Coe, would you stay behind?”

  JK Coe was the extra.

  After the others, seven men, six women, had trooped out of the meeting room, Dame Ingrid reached under the desk and disengaged the recording device. She then regarded Coe, a slight man in his early thirties, hairline receding already, wearing what she’d have to call a reserved expression.

  “For all the backbiting, that was actually more muted than usual,” she said. “Care to guess
why?”

  “Because I was here, Dame Ingrid?”

  She waved away the title. “Every last one of them was watching what they said, for fear of hearing it quoted back at them in their annual appraisal.”

  JK Coe was from Psych Eval.

  “Which means that if anyone wonders what you were doing here, that’s the answer they’ll come up with.”

  He said, “So that’s not the actual reason you wanted me here.”

  “No. And I’d apologise for making you sit through that, but time spent working up a cover is never wasted.”

  Cover.

  “This is an op?” he asked.

  “Ops need approval from the Limelight Committee. I don’t know where they get these names.”

  “They’re selected randomly from—”

  “This doesn’t need approval because if it did it would be an op, and if it were an op it would require a budget ticket, and I’ve just spent an hour and a half repeating that this year’s budget’s stretched as far as it’ll go. Does that answer your question?”

  It wasn’t an op.

  Which was both a relief and a disappointment. JK Coe had never been involved in an operation. He was backroom, evaluating deskbound staff for their likely responses under extreme stress. Bio-attack stress. Terror event.

  “No. Think of it more as a welfare assignment, one that nobody else need know about. Because if they did …”

  “It would require a budget ticket.”

  “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

  Ingrid Tearney laid her palm flat on the buff-coloured folder in front of her.

  “You know, the Service used to take pride in the fact that we looked after our own. Something else that’s fallen prey to budget considerations. These days, once you’re out the door you’re history. But I’ve always had a soft spot for history.”

  When she paused, he assumed he was being invited to speak.

  “How ancient a history are we talking?”