Nobody Walks

by Mick Herron

  On the table in front of Bishop was a photograph, one from that previous life. These days you’d do it on a phone, but not so many phones had cameras back then, and he’d used one of those yellow disposables. The occasion had been a party, everyone drunk, Bishop included, which must have been why he’d thought photos a good idea. Photography was generally frowned on in these circles, photos being not so much keepsakes as evidence.

  The party had been for the Brothers McGarry and Bishop’s picture showed the pair of them, each with an arm round the man in the middle, Martin Boyd, friend, trusted lieutenant, who’d personally sourced a bent quartermaster in Herefordshire, a triumph netting a supply of weaponry officially destined for destruction, so more than deserving of the man-hug he was enjoying. Bishop did a quick mental calculation, and as it was one he’d made before, was reasonably sure his answer was accurate. Four months and seventeen days. The picture had been taken four months and seventeen days before the Brothers McGarry, along with everyone who’d ever so much as passed them the salt, had been arrested.

  Trusted lieutenant. Snake in the grass.

  Bishop himself had gone down for five, been out in three and a half. As for the Brothers McGarry, they were walled up for a sizeable chunk of forever, but that didn’t mean they lacked influence.

  More importantly, it didn’t mean they’d run out of money.

  And they had some very specific ideas about how they’d like it spent.

  With a pair of scissors Bishop carefully cut the photograph into three strips, and held the middle section up for a better look.

  He’d be older now. He’d have a new name. But what was interesting was he didn’t seem to have changed his appearance—hadn’t changed his hair, wasn’t using coloured contacts. Had wandered into Dancer Blaine’s place as if he didn’t give a damn.

  What was even more interesting was that he was out on his own.

  Back in the day, Bishop reckoned, Boyd had been MI5—not an organisation to get messy with. If he was still with them, the Brothers McGarry’s money was likely to remain unspent. Because if you tried to collect on the head of a cop you were looking to get dead, no two ways about it, but do the same with a spook, and dead might look an attractive option. Those guys could disappear you. But if Dancer Blaine was right, Boyd was not only back on the streets but unprotected.

  Bad news for him. The Brothers McGarry had had years to think up what needed doing to Boyd—they hadn’t so much put a price on his head as itemised his body. There were strict instructions about getting it on film. They’d watch it on phones, in their cells. Help pass the time.

  One little strip of photo.

  Bishop would have two thousand copies on the street inside the hour.

  Bettany thought of heading home, but only long enough that the word flared brightly for half a second—home—before burning into darkness, like a filament briefly glanced at, and scorched into the retina. Liam’s home. Not his.

  Not Liam’s either now, though Liam was still in occupation. Bettany had left the urn of ashes on the kitchen table, like an item of shopping waiting to be packed away. Because where did you put something like that? Anywhere you put it, it felt like you carried it still.

  Same weight, different burden.

  He’d ditched the shoebox, and carried the gun in his coat pocket. It gave him the kind of lopsided look policemen were trained to watch for, but that couldn’t be helped. The rain had eased and he was crossing the river again, not because he needed to but because he had to keep moving. That was the current plan. He couldn’t go back to the flat. He didn’t think Coe would have sounded the alarm, but if he had, that was the first place the Dogs would look.

  Lights flickered up and down the Thames. A small boat’s cabin was lit like a candle in the dark.

  He thought, I need to eat. See the evening out—it was barely nine. Then find somewhere to put his head down for a few hours.

  Tomorrow, he’d start putting things straight.

  Hands in pockets, he headed for Waterloo.

  “The railway stations. No, not the stations themselves, the dosshouses round them. Yes, and the hostels. King’s Cross especially. And Paddington, and right, yeah, Liverpool Street. Waterloo. Other than that, you know the score. The usual bars, west and east. Anywhere there’s a good evening crowd, but one with regulars, get me? Don’t bother with the tourist haunts. Round Hoxton way, yeah, course. You going to just run through the bloody A to Z, wait for me to say yeah, no? You’ve done this before, right? … Yes, it’s important. Would I be wasting my time if it wasn’t? Swear to God, I sometimes wonder why I don’t just swap you for a trained … iguana. What? Iguana. It’s a kind of lizard—look, just get it done. I want the city papered, and I want this bleeder traced. And I want it soon. I want you ringing back so fast you’re on call waiting before I’ve hung up. Got it?”

  Bishop ended the call and took a deep breath.

  Then he made another one.

  3.9

  There are a lot of threads in the city. Pull enough of them and you can see the pavements twitch.

  In his cubbyhole of an office even Dancer Blaine knew that. Part of it was the still-fizzing energy of having had the actual walking Martin Boyd in his shop, and part of it was knowing that by calling Bishop, he’d set wheels in motion no bugger could halt.

  While another part, only just starting to bite, was the awareness that if Boyd disappeared without trace now, if he sank from view like a stone in the Thames, then he, Dancer, was going to be facing some very awkward questions …

  And Bishop himself could feel it, but then he was doing the pulling—all those copies of that celluloid strip, a phone number printed beneath, had come rolling out of a copier, stacking up in reams that were dispatched as soon as ready, finding their way into the hands of dozens of boys, dozens of girls, rounded up by what was left of the Brothers McGarry’s network. And meanwhile the same image was bouncing through the ether, jumping from iPhone to iPhone, every contact reached for, thread linking to thread, knotting together, forming a net to drop over London’s nightlife.

  The railway stations. King’s Cross especially. And Paddington, and right, yeah, Liverpool Street. Waterloo.

  And the clubs and bars, though nowhere Boyd had ever hung in the old days, nowhere the Brothers McGarry were still mourned or celebrated, which ruled out the further reaches of the East End …

  See? Already the city was growing smaller, as if these threads Bishop was pulling were attached to London’s corners, so everything not nailed down tumbled into one small area where the searchers waited, the searchers being anyone who could look at a photo, recognise a face, and dial a number.

  Next to which Bishop had printed, in bold, ££££.

  In a hard-luck café, one of those linoleum-floored check-table-clothed outfits that were rarer by the year, Tom Bettany had gone to ground. Cup of tea in front of him, empty plate with its sheen of congealing grease pushed to one side.

  He’d had a sudden memory of an evening in a café not unlike this, back in Marseilles. With Majeed and a few others, and there’d been wine and beer of course, not cups of tea, and the food hadn’t come swaddled in grease, and there hadn’t been tomato-shaped plastic bottles on the table … Come to think of it, it had been nothing like this, except inasmuch as it had been near a travellers’ hub, with long-distance coaches growling past the window every few minutes.

  Bettany waited, but nothing more of that memory came back. It was simply a flash from the past, a light switched on and off in another room. And it troubled him that there was no less weight to this random slice of his history than there was to any other memory he had, of Liam, of Hannah, or of edgier times, times when he’d had to suppress his real self … His past was a collage of different identities, none of them realer than any other.

  And none, in the end, walked away from.

  What was real, what had weight, was what he had to do tomorrow.

  A boy walked past the window, bobble hat lopsided
on his head, a sheet of paper scrolled in his hand, his face a brief smudge against a noisy background. Homeless, Bettany could tell. There was always something in the face. He’d seemed in a hurry, headed towards Waterloo. Everyone had a mission. Everyone had somewhere they needed to be, an undercover self, urging them on.

  Bettany paid for his meal and left, had a quick internal debate about heading for the station himself and hopping on a tube, and decided not to. Railway stations were best avoided.

  On foot, he headed for the bridge.

  The weary expression Ralph wore wasn’t exclusive to the small hours, but by the time they rolled around he had an excuse. In old-time songs, bartenders wiped glasses while listening to a man in a hat pour his sorrows out. They’d dispense wisdom in return for a mighty tip. The worst they’d suffer was an out-of-tune piano scoring the heartbreak.

  In real life, the nearest Ralph got to dispensing wisdom was explaining where the toilets were to the same drunk for the third time. And that you couldn’t smoke in here. By two he’d have sold a kidney to hear an accordion, let alone a piano. Anything to put an end to the pitiless club beat, the sound of meat being tenderised. Some mornings, lying in bed, he could feel it in the soles of his feet. It didn’t make him want to dance. It made him want to saw himself off at the ankles.

  There must be easier ways to make a living.

  Tonight there was a healthy crowd, if “healthy” suited a mass of kids so bent on self-destruction. The amount of booze they put away would shame a Catholic priest. Ralph had a headache from the noise and what felt like tendon damage from pouring drinks, the repetitive strain of jamming glass against optic, twisting cap from bottle. No one was telling him sorrows, but everyone was giving him grief. Nearest he’d had to a break tonight was a single smoke round back, resting against the wall.

  Someone was waving something at him down the bar.

  Like any good barman Ralph had the ability to make a queue in his head from the crowd in front of him, so he served three others before he reached that part of the bar, and the waving girl had disappeared by then. Where she’d been standing was a sheet of paper, a flyer it looked like, with a narrow strip of photograph copied onto it.

  Underneath that a phone number, and underneath that ££££.

  Some new form of stealth advertising, he thought. An on-the-fly way of attracting punters. Tell ’em there’s money in it, because that always works. But there was always money in it and the money never materialised, that was the mystery. And even when it did it was gone in the morning, like something from a fairytale.

  Ralph could have told the girl all this if she’d still been there, but because she wasn’t, he had to settle for telling himself.

  He scrunched the paper into a ball and lobbed it at the bin below the bar.

  Bettany found himself back near the Angel, having walked clear up from the Thames, the city’s nightlife flashing past in cabs and cars and buses, or rumbling underground when he crossed one of the thin patches, spaces where the subterranean made itself felt. His hands in his pockets, the right one curled comfortably round the Makarov—comfortably was the word, the handle moulded to fit. Dancer Blaine would have long since spread the word of his reappearance. All that nightlife in cabs and cars and buses, some of it would be responding to texts and emails by now, an equivalent to the police’s be-on-lookout-for. Twitches on threads. Bettany was under no illusions about how badly they’d want him, the Brothers McGarry and their clan, and had a pretty shrewd idea they wouldn’t have a swift exit planned either. But then, Bettany didn’t plan to be around much longer. They’d have to be extraordinarily good, or extraordinarily lucky, to get a fix on his whereabouts within the next twenty-four hours.

  By then, he’d know the truth about what had happened to Liam.

  Rolling over in his mind, like a ball caressed by a bowler, were the names of Vincent Driscoll, Marten Saar.

  It was clearing-out time before Ralph noticed the ball of paper on the floor. Not remembering what it was he unscrewed it, glanced at the photo, and was about to reverse the process, finding the damn bin this time, when something tugged at him, a tremor of recognition.

  The photo showed a sliver of a man flanked by two others, whose images had been excised. It was black and white and looked old—not old old, but old. And the man, his face—it was the man from the other night, he was sure of it. Almost sure. The man who’d been looking for his son. He’d done some miles since the photo was taken, and grown a lot of hair, but if you took away the beard and general shagginess, Ralph thought you could see the same man, the same eyes staring back at you. His eyes had been blue, which a black-and-white couldn’t show of course, but in the same way he knew the photo was old, Ralph knew this man’s eyes were blue.

  Beneath the photo a phone number, and a little row of pound signs, ££££.

  He’d given the man his twenty quid back, he remembered that. A man who looked like he’d been sleeping on park benches, but had money to throw at bartenders who might have served his son. Ralph had returned his money because he looked like he needed it more, and besides, he was carrying his son’s ashes in a bag. That’s what he’d said, anyway. You had to assume he wasn’t entirely there—making a nuisance of himself for streets around, crashing clubs and bars.

  That was the same night two doormen had their kneecaps sorted in an alley. If not for that, this guy would have been the week’s main topic.

  Everyone had seen him. Everyone would be seeing this, too, the flyer left on Ralph’s bar. And if he’d spotted the resemblance, so would someone else—it was just a matter of waiting for the pennies to drop—and then the number would be rung, and questions asked and answered.

  ££££

  He’d felt sorry for the guy, sure. But somebody was going to collect, and Ralph had already turned money down once.

  He checked the place was empty, then reached for the phone.

  3.10

  “So you’d be Ralph.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ralphie. What’ve you got for me, Ralphie?”

  “It’s like I just said to your man there—”

  “Yeah, but you’re talking to me now. Just tell me what you have to say.”

  Pause.

  “I don’t even know who I’m talking to.”

  “You can call me Bishop.”

  Pause.

  “Name rings a bell, does it?”

  “I’ve heard of you, yeah. I reckon.”

  “You reckon. That’s good. You just keep on reckoning that, Ralphie. And meanwhile, tell me what you know.”

  “I serve bar.”

  Pause.

  “Nothing to be ashamed of there, Ralphie, but let’s cut to the chase, shall we? You serve bar where.”

  “Place called Kings of Cool.”

  “Hoxton way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you serve bar in Hoxton and you’re calling me because you saw my number on a flyer. Do you know the man, Ralphie?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve seen him around.”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “When?”

  “He had more hair, though. A beard and that. Looked like he’d been sleeping rough.”

  “When?”

  “Couple of nights ago?”

  “You asking or telling?”

  “Couple of nights ago.”

  “Rough sleeper, how come he’s finding his way into a bar round N1?”

  “He slipped past the doormen.”

  “He slipped past the doormen. You wouldn’t be pulling my chain, would you, Ralphie?”

  “It’s what happened.”

  “What name’d he give?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Course not, rough sleeper, finessing his way past a couple of Hoxton’s finest. What’d he drink?”

  “He didn’t get a drink.”

  “So he was what, just checking out the décor, Ralphie?”

  “He had a photo. He was trying to find
out …”

  Pause.

  “Getting bored here, Ralphie.”

  “He had a bag with him. A cloth bag. And an urn in it … He said it was his son. His son’s ashes.”

  Pause.

  “You’re pulling my chain.”

  “He had a photo too. Wanted to know if I recognised his son. If he was a regular. He’d been up and down the road, asking in all the clubs. Made himself well unpopular.”

  “I bet he did an’ all, Ralphie. I bet he did.”

  Pause.

  “Okay, Ralphie. Your place doesn’t do cabaret, does it?”

  “… Once in a blue moon.”

  “Because if you’re making that lot up, you really should be on a stage. Son’s ashes in a bag. That is …”

  Pause.

  “Pinteresque.”

  Pause.

  “He wrote plays. Never mind. Kings of Cool. This pans out, there’ll be someone popping in, Ralphie, see you right.”

  Bishop hung up.

  Afterwards Ralph washed his hands, aware he didn’t really need to. He’d washed them once already, and nobody got dirty hands just using the phone.

  Still.

  He washed them anyway.

  Bishop didn’t know what that was about, the stuff with the ashes in the bag, but it didn’t matter, not at four o’clock in the morning. So Martin Boyd was having some sort of meltdown, but who cared? Meltdowns made you careless. Boyd must have known getting hold of a gun was going to light up the switchboard of his old acquaintance. He had to be off his nut going to Dancer Blaine to get tooled up.

  Though maybe, he thought, Boyd was on some kind of quest. A dead boy in one hand, a gun in the other, yeah, some kind of quest. That would be where the gun came in.

  But it didn’t matter. Made no difference to what Bishop was going to do next, which was summon up some muscle and put it on the streets of N1. Maybe Boyd would get lucky, and see his quest through before they picked him up. If not, unfinished business would be the least of his worries. He’d be starring in his very own snuff movie, scripted by the Brothers McGarry. All Bishop had to do was set it up.