by Mick Herron
With just a few more twitches on these threads.
PART FOUR
4.1
Twenty-two storeys buys a lot of Hackney.
What it bought Marten Saar was an almost uninterrupted view of rooftops, terraced houses and shorter blocks of flats, of pubs and sports centres, shops and office complexes, garages and schools. Trees too, and snatches of water, roads everywhere, and housing estates. The cars and buses he could see were Dinky-sized. The people shuffling around the estates weren’t even that. At this time of morning they were pale grey shadows wafting homewards. Ghosts.
This block, Saar’s, was the easternmost of a row of three, so he got to watch the sun struggle up, little more than a silver disc today, a dying light bulb behind a gauze curtain.
A sky the colour of dishrags.
Stifling, here on the twenty-second floor.
Which was not like the other floors in this block or its neighbours. To arrive was to find the flats’ front doors barred over, steel shutters pulled down, and scraps of tape the wasp-striped colour of crime scenes dangling from handles. Only one door was unobstructed, and it led into this huge room, an L-shape with irregularly spaced windows which had once let light into different flats, and walls which changed colour every few metres, and a mosaic of different carpets, none quite joining up. The inverse L, the space’s interlocking letter, comprised a mish-mash of bedrooms, dormitories and workspace, where product was bagged into saleable quantities. At any given moment, the flat contained upwards of fifty kilos of controlled substances.
A lot of jailtime to keep on a floor with few exits.
That was what Kask said. Oskar Kask, his own right hand.
“We get raided, we’re none of us going anywhere. Unless you’re in the mood for a hard landing.”
Oskar had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him during the lean years, broken legs when legbreaking was needed, but had lately taken to saying things like Sure, boss? when he should have been saying Sure, boss.
He trusted Oskar with his life. But trust needed daily renewal.
Saar wasn’t worried about surprises. You didn’t put a police team together without disturbing the pool, and the ripples would reach him long before the motors arrived—he’d spread enough money around to make sure of that. The product would be in an unoccupied flat downstairs way ahead of any doors being kicked in.
Police aside, the twenty-second floor wasn’t reached easily. While there were pairs of lifts in each corner of the towerblock, seven were piss-stinking boxes of filth, their walls so scarred by burnmarks, so obsessively scribbled on, that stepping inside was like climbing into a stalker’s head. Only the eighth lift moved without squeak or rattle, and this was guarded night and day by one of Saar’s men, on the off-chance someone who didn’t know the rules wandered in, wanting to use it. A visitor from out of town, say. A Martian.
All of which should have made him feel secure, but success carried its own burdens. The trust thing for one. The daily renewal it required. Oskar at his shoulder like he’d always been but dropping questions into his ear now, like Isn’t it time we consolidate our market area? Oskar could see the future falling into place, like a jigsaw completed by an invisible hand.
He claimed it would require only a small war.
That’s why they needed the Cousins’ Circle.
Saar hadn’t slept. A pale rake with a permanent five o’clock shadow and eyes like pocket calculators, he didn’t sleep much. Nights were for business, holding court in a roped-off West End club—the second best use of a velvet rope was to keep losers at bay. Saar did deals, took meetings, explored ways of shifting product. Every ounce of muskrat, the hippest strain of cannabis currently sedating the city, passed through his fingers. This monopoly was down to two things, supply and trend. The source was one Saar had cultivated for years, but he’d got lucky with the second, and everyone knew it. The thing about trends was, the clue was in the name. Blink twice and something else would come along, and muskrat would be history.
This is why we need to consolidate, Oskar said. Now.
Truth to tell, Oskar had a point. They’d never be in a stronger position, and once they got weaker, they could end up being consolidated themselves.
Market pressure. One of the headaches business involved.
Getting in bed with the Cousins’ Circle, though, that made him uneasy. No wonder he was pacing the floor at this hour, flicking through seventy-five channels on a plasma screen, looking for nothing in particular, and not finding it.
Elsewhere on the twenty-second, others had no trouble sleeping. There were seven of his guys in their room and a pair of girls in his own, though he’d mostly watched and smoked. Marlboro, not product. He was lighting one now as a door opened, and he turned to see Oskar Kask, buttoning his shirt, yawning, rubbing his head with the knuckles of his right hand.
You expected sparks when he did that.
Oskar said, “You’re up early.”
“I don’t sleep. You know that.”
“Worried about the meet?”
That was something else Marten Saar had noticed lately. Oskar, others too, but mostly Oskar, saying things like meet when they meant meeting. All that effort put into learning English, so fluent they spoke it among themselves, and for what? So they could start getting it wrong on purpose. Saar blamed the TV.
He switched it off.
“Should I be?”
“Nah, boss. It’ll go like a dream.”
“Because we have such a great history together.”
Oskar Kask beetled, then unbeetled, brows.
“The thing about history, Marten, is it’s over. That’s why they call it history.”
He wasn’t tall, Oskar Kask, but made up for it in energy. Even now, three minutes out of bed, it fizzed in him. He kept his hair short because it grew in tight little corkscrews, but Saar had always seen that as just another way Oskar’s inner electricity escaped. His beard came flecked with grey, like Saar’s own, but Oskar’s was heavier. It looked like he had three days’ worth, and he’d shaved yesterday.
“And these guys, they’re all business. You know that.”
He knew that, as much as anyone knew anything about the Cousins’ Circle, which was Russian-based, multiethnic, multinational, and enjoyed the double charm of having its existence doubted as much as its reach was feared.
“Besides. Join the Circle and we don’t have to worry about muskrat going out of fashion because we’ll have a lock on whatever the next big thing is too. This is good business, Marten. The Circle, they’re Google. They’re Apple. You don’t want to go head to head with them. You want to stand shoulder to shoulder.”
“And while we are standing shoulder to shoulder,” said Marten Saar, “who will be watching our backs?”
“That’s not how this’ll go. They don’t want us out of the game, they want us to be their team on the ground. Distribution. Goodwill. All that shit. You know?”
“You’re a good friend, Oskar.”
“I try to be.”
“And I know you think this is best.”
“It’s the way forward, Marten.”
“But if I decide they’re playing a double game, looking to ease us out of the picture …”
“We walk away.”
“We do.”
It was almost on his tongue to add drama—And we burn them where they stand, something like that, something else from TV. But it would have been worse than drama, would have been bravado. To utter threats would have been the little boy boasting that he wasn’t scared of wolves, because he wasn’t in a forest. But wolves had a way of bringing the forest with them. It didn’t matter where you were. It was where they were that counted.
You’re a good friend, Oskar. It was true. And it was also true he’d never been an ideas man, more an enforcer—all that energy had to go somewhere. Reliably vicious, but never a thinker. Yet here he was, brokering their common future.
It was a good plan. A dangerous plan, because if
trust needed daily renewal, trusting Russians was a minute-by-minute affair, but still, it was a good plan because if it worked, their future was secure and their competition was dead.
If it worked.
Whether it was the danger or the hope he couldn’t tell, but one or the other lit a thrill inside Marten Saar. He remembered the girls in his bed, asleep but wakeable. Maybe he’d more than watch this time.
He said to Oskar, “I’m going back to bed,” and padded out of the L-shaped room, gown flapping at his knees.
Leaving Oskar Kask lighting a cigarette with a blue plastic lighter, and watching the sun attempt to make an impression on the streets below.
4.2
Morning rose to the surface like trapped gas. At the tube station the crowd dispersed as if expecting random sniper fire. A little behind the first surge, Dame Ingrid Tearney crested the steps and joined the pavement procession.
Lights changed. Traffic snarled.
It was another damp day, vapour clouding every pane of glass, the sky an impenetrable grey bowl upended over the city. Overcoats and umbrellas shielded bodies. Hoods obscured faces.
Dame Ingrid, ash-blonde this morning, paused to adjust her gloves, holding them at the wrist and flexing her fingers one by one. Then continued on her way.
A figure stepped in front of her as a bus swept past.
She might have been expecting him.
“You look a mess.”
He felt one.
JK Coe had spent the night bundling reams of ripped-up black plastic bags into a giant ball he then disposed of via the stairs—the lift was too enclosed a space, too inviting of assault. In the basement by the bins he’d frozen, petrified by a noise he couldn’t identify. Any other night he’d have shrugged it off. Londoners are used to rats. But he’d had his foundations rocked, and everything was a threat.
Once he’d dared move he’d found his clothes in a pile on his bedroom floor, wallet and watch on top, as if abandoned on a beach by a man faking his own death. So today there was a new, reborn JK Coe. This one wore a blue cagoule and jeans ripped at the knee. He’d showered twice but slime still oozed from his pores, coating his body in a paste that was two parts shame, one part fear.
“You’d better walk with me.”
Nobody paid attention because there was nothing to see. It might have been a son joining his mother, or a Samaritan offering a rough-sleeper breakfast.
A street-sweeping lorry bustled past tight to the kerb, rearranging gutter grime with its brushes’ circular motion. They waited until it, and the frustrated queue of cars behind it, was past and half-scuttled across the road, Dame Ingrid somehow making the scuttle dignified, or at least plausible.
Smaller streets awaited, passages between towers of glass and concrete. The traffic noise abated but other sounds took its place, rumblings and groanings, snatches of music, the wasplike buzz of a helicopter. Rounding a corner, they passed the entrance to a car park. A woman with a dog was scooping shit into a small blue bag.
These details tumbled round Coe’s mind. It was like recovering from illness, or slowly becoming less drunk. Everything strange and familiar at once.
“So Bettany came for you?”
Something about the question, the way it dropped from her fully formed, threw a switch in his head.
“… You knew he would.”
“It seemed likely.”
This stated as a matter of fact, as if it were absurd of him to have considered otherwise.
“You should have warned me!”
She halted abruptly, and gave him a look so sharp it ought to have had a handle on one end.
“You’ve had an upsetting experience. But address me in that tone again, Mr. Coe, and there will be repercussions. Do I make myself clear?”
“… Yes.”
“An apology would not go amiss.”
“… I’m sorry.”
She blinked regally. Which evidently qualified as acceptance, for having done so, she resumed their stately progress.
“There seemed no need to warn you,” she said. “You’re Psych Eval. Junior, granted, but nevertheless. Psych Eval. One would have thought you’d have spared a moment to consider the possible ramifications of your meeting with Bettany.”
“All I was doing was delivering a message!”
The exclamation mark earned him another sharp look.
“And all he was doing was verifying its content.”
And then she sighed, a faint wisp of noise. Wearing Anna Valentine today, not that JK Coe would have recognised it. If he had, he might also have registered that it was neither last year’s collection nor the previous year’s, but the one before that.
“Our Mr. Bettany,” she said, “has played both sides of the field. He’s been undercover, and he’s been a Dog. Which means he has a tendency to treat all unknowns as hostiles and all information as a lie. It was never likely he’d take delivery of a message at face value. You can’t have failed to be aware of that.”
“It didn’t occur to me he’d …”
“Yes?”
He said nothing.
An ambulance rumbled past, in no great hurry.
Dame Ingrid said, “What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Mr. Coe, of one thing I am absolutely certain, and that is that you’d have answered any question he put to you. So, again. What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. I mean, nothing I hadn’t already told him. Because I don’t know anything, do I? All I was doing was repeating what you told me. And that was all true, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was, dear boy.”
He’d come to confront her because he’d been through hell, and no way could he vent that on the one responsible—in his imagination he could take Bettany apart with a chainsaw, but reality wasn’t going to cooperate. So he’d come seeking Dame Ingrid instead, but was no longer sure what he’d expected. An apology? An admission that the message he’d given Bettany had a coded element beyond his understanding? But instead she was calling him dear boy again.
Even that ambulance had made him flinch, and it hadn’t been keening. Was just another vehicle negotiating the streets.
He wondered how long he’d be jumping at shadows.
“I thought he was going to kill me.”
Words he hadn’t known he’d been about to say.
“But he didn’t.”
“And what would you have done if he had?”
“My dear boy, I’d have been most seriously distressed.”
Nothing in her tone suggested otherwise.
“And what would have happened to Bettany?”
Which provoked another sigh.
“Mr. Coe, you do understand the concept of the greater good?”
“You said this wasn’t an op.”
“And it isn’t. But Thomas Bettany remains an ex-member of our Service. Now,” and here she leaned closer to him in the manner of a teacher about to unveil a basic rule, one to stand him in good stead ever after, “we’ve had quite enough bad publicity in recent years as a result of Service boys embroiling themselves in squalid little scrapes. It doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good at all.”
It didn’t. JK Coe wasn’t about to dispute that.
“So if he’d killed you we’d have had to sweep it under the carpet. You’d have been a random victim of city crime, Mr. Coe. But you’d have caused no embarrassment to us, and I’d have been proud of you for that.”
Well, at least that was an honest response.
She said, “As it is, advising Bettany to lay off Vincent Driscoll could only ever have had two possible outcomes. One, that he would lay off Vincent Driscoll. An unlikely outcome, but not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility. Or two, that he would take this as an indication that Vincent Driscoll was in fact responsible for what happened to his son, and act accordingly. Very much not what we wanted. But having paid you his little visit—”
(His little visit. As
if dropping in for a cup of tea.)
“—he now knows there was no stratagem involved, which makes it far more likely that he’ll do what we want him to do. And lay off Vincent Driscoll.”
Coe said, “So torturing me was a necessary part of the process. As you’d planned it.”
A sigh.
“Mr. Coe, why did you join the Service?”
Wrongfooted, he stammered nonsense. Sense of duty, desire to serve.
“In which case, you can be satisfied with last night’s work. You do understand the essential nature of what has happened, don’t you?”
“I—”
“All the same, I’ll spell it out. The essential nature of what has happened is that it remains classified. You do not speak of it. To anyone. And if you ever again accost me in this fashion, you will learn the meaning of power. Is that clear?”
He allowed that it was.
“Good. Now go home, Mr. Coe. You don’t look yourself. We all need a sick day now and then.”
And just like that, dismissed, he was adrift in Central London.
Dame Ingrid carried on alone. Within the minute she’d produced a mobile, and came to a halt near the cobbled entrance to a mews. Whoever she called answered on the first ring.
She said, “I think we can expect Bettany to make a move soon. Keep an eye on him.”
Out of nowhere a sparrow appeared, and began a minute examination of a space between two stones.
“Some kind of low-level torture, apparently. Nothing too serious. The young man was reluctant to go into detail, which I expect means he disgraced himself.”
Finding a crumb, the sparrow speared it with its beak.
“I assume he’ll go home and try to put it behind him. But either way, we can tidy up later.”
She ended the call.
The sparrow flew away.
4.3
From the top deck of the bus, Flea Pointer looked out on the usual chaos.
Once in a while, you find yourself engaged in that pavement dance in which both partners step aside in the same direction, then correct themselves, then do it again … It generally ends with amused apology on both sides. Viewed from above, what was amazing was that you rarely got head-on collisions, that fist-fights weren’t breaking out. Instead, what Flea was watching resembled a physics experiment in which particles rushed around at great speed and in great proximity, only their innate tendency to repel their like ensuring they never touched.
