Nobody Walks

by Mick Herron

  “Everybody wants something, Coe. They didn’t get round to that module yet? In Psych Eval?”

  “What do you want? No—what was her back-up plan?”

  “She sent someone else to kill him. Maybe she planned to hang it on me, I don’t know. But this guy, he’s been in the picture a while, keeping tabs on me. He was at Liam’s funeral.”

  The phone throbbed silently in Coe’s hand.

  “He probably killed my son.”

  Liam. There hadn’t even been a picture of him in Bettany’s file. His death had started this, but he’d become wallpaper. He was like the leaky pipe that caused the flood. Once it started, you forgot about the pipe. You concentrated on the flood.

  It was important to remember that this wasn’t the case for Bettany.

  Coe said, “Did he kill Driscoll?”

  “No. But he got away.”

  “What do you want, Bettany?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “She’s the head of the Service, for Christ’s sake.”

  “She’s the woman who had my son killed so I’d commit a murder.”

  “So you’re going to what, kill her instead? You won’t last five minutes.”

  “And that bothers you?”

  Coe didn’t reply.

  So Tearney had primed Bettany, he thought, and aimed him like a gun, pointing him at Driscoll by having Coe warn him off, which was the kind of backwards-thinking she specialised in. It hadn’t worked, but she’d had a back-up plan—she’d always have a back-up plan, and another one behind that. Wander far enough into her machinations and you’d meet yourself coming back. Just as puzzled, just as lost.

  He said, “What about the other one?”

  “What other one?”

  “The drugs guy. Marten Saar.”

  Now it was Bettany’s turn to say nothing.

  Coe said, “He was the alternative target. Do you really think Tearney plucked him from a hat? If he was the decoy, there was a reason.”

  “He’s responsible for muskrat. Which Liam was smoking when he fell. Was pushed.”

  “That’s what they told you he was smoking. To put Saar in the frame.”

  Hearing himself say the words, he wondered if he even believed them. But it didn’t matter. They might be true.

  He thought of the men watching the flat. Maybe Tom Bettany would never return there—maybe he was already in a flight pattern, one act of vengeance short of heading back for the shadows—but if he did, maybe they’d take him.

  And once he was in that van, it’d be his turn to find out who worked with meat.

  Bettany said, “You might have a point. But that’s not what I’m after.”

  So Coe told him where he could find Dame Ingrid Tearney.

  After ending the call Bettany sat on St. Paul’s steps, thinking. The steps were stone cold, damp rising up through them, but he wasn’t the only one squatting there. Tourists surrounded him, mostly kids in bright-coloured rainwear, sharing lunches from plastic boxes. At any given moment, half of them were filming the others on their phones. The spaces in London where unrecorded life went on were few and far between. Something he needed to keep in mind, now the McGarry crew knew he was back in town.

  His own phone wouldn’t take a picture, let alone a movie, but it would get the job done.

  He rang Bad Sam Chapman once more. Waiting for an answer, he watched an Italian teenager preening for a camera, glowing with health and good looks, and an unironic awareness of both. Then a weary-toned Chapman asked, “What is it this time?”

  “Tell me more about Oskar Kask,” he said.

  5.5

  Late afternoon and, even twenty-two storeys up, light had leached from the sky. Through glass streaked with the residue of dirty rain Marten Saar looked down on Hackney’s many lights, some moving, some stationary, and some the one while seeming the other—streetlights glimpsed through waving branches flickering hither and yon. Saar’s day was just beginning, which meant the West End, deals, meetings, setting in motion the diplomatic machinery to initiate contact with the Cousins’ Circle. That was Oskar Kask’s job, and Oskar had phoned to say he’d meet Marten at the club. Asked where he’d been all day he’d given a wolfish snigger, suggestive of satisfied appetites.

  Which Saar had echoed with one of his own.

  Now he was dressed, alone in the expanse of the L-shaped room. His crew were elsewhere on the floor, supervising the weighing and bagging of product, activities performed in the main by women from the Old Country, or else watching The Sopranos, to which they’d become addicted. Which was fine by Saar. If he needed anyone—

  The door opened and a body fell through it.

  It was followed by a tall blond man Saar had never laid eyes on before.

  The man stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  Saar said, “Is this a joke?”

  His voice was commendably calm in the circumstances, though he knew his accent sounded thicker than usual.

  “Depends,” said the stranger. “Is this your best man?”

  He meant Lepik, who until recently had been on lobby duty, an undemanding task involving making sure nobody used Saar’s lift.

  Looking big was usually as much as this took.

  Saar said, “Not really.”

  The man looked round. “How many others?”

  Saar shook his head.

  “Five? Six?”

  “Seven,” Saar said.

  “More than I can handle.”

  Saar shrugged. “I can’t tell yet. Are you armed?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then I expect you’ll account for a few of them.”

  “Automatic weapons?”

  “This will make you laugh,” Saar said. “One of my boys? He has an anti-tank gun.”

  “That’s got to come in handy,” the man said.

  “That’s what he tells me.”

  “In Hackney.”

  Saar laughed without making a noise, and mimed a bazookashape at the intruder. “Boom,” he said. Then he wafted the air, as if walking through mist, before laughing silently again and dropping his hands to his trouser pockets.

  “Where I can see them?”

  “Ah, yes. Because you are … armed.”

  The man opened his coat, showing Saar the handle of a gun.

  Marten Saar took his hands from his pockets.

  He said, “I raise my voice and out they come.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Ever vigilant.”

  “Like this guy.”

  Saar said, “Him, I’ll have to have words with.”

  “Maybe later.”

  Saar wondered whether to try for his phone again, nestled in his trouser pocket, but the intruder gave a slight shake of his head, and he decided not to. If this man had come to kill him, Saar knew he would be dead already. But there was no sense pushing his luck.

  He said, “We haven’t been introduced.”

  “I’m guessing you’re Marten Saar.”

  “Which gives you—what’s the phrase?—the advantage.”

  The man laughed. “I have a gun. You haven’t. Yes, I’d call that having the advantage. But just to even things up, you can call me Boyd.”

  “And what is it you want, Mr. Boyd?”

  “We need to talk about Oskar,” Tom Bettany said.

  The club was one they used often, as was Marten’s line about the VIP enclosure, and the second-best application of a velvet rope. Oskar Kask usually made the effort to smile when he delivered it. One of the burdens of non-leadership.

  But Marten was late tonight. Oskar was on his own, bottle of beer in front of him. Earlier he’d put away half a pint of vodka, but that had been an emergency. In his flat near Farringdon station, his secret bolt-hole, he’d swallowed a three-ounce measure without blinking before showering away the morning’s sweat, not all of it due to exertion. He could smell fear on his skin, its sheen glazing his neck. Twenty minutes under thundering water, the last five min
utes freezing cold, was almost enough to wash it away. Draining the rest of the bottle almost finished the job.

  Oskar’s instructions had been clear enough. If Bettany didn’t waste Driscoll, he was to step in and do it himself—you didn’t have to spend much time with Dame Ingrid to learn that she never made a plan without wrapping it round a smaller one. Bettany, she’d assured him, would wind up in the frame anyway, not that that mattered to Oskar.

  But then Bettany had appeared out of nowhere, and come within an ace of taking him down.

  He took a pull on his beer, the bottle’s neck cold on his teeth. Being late wasn’t one of Marten’s usual faults, the worst of which was a tendency to cast himself as romantic visionary. Not long ago it had just been the pair of them, squeezing a living from a fraction of a postcode, Marten not the brain he thought he was, but with a knack of convincing others there was more to him than a thug on the make. His self-belief had pulled them out of the shallow end, and Oskar had loved him for that. But once muskrat took off, complications arose. One of these took the shape of Clem Baker, a wannabe lord of the universe—or that section of it currently occupied by Marten Saar and Oskar Kask—and it had become necessary for Oskar to put a bullet in his head, which was doubly unfortunate. Unfortunate for Baker, of course, but a pain in the arse for Oskar too, because he’d forgotten the cardinal rule of shooting people during peacetime, which was not to get caught afterwards.

  Though as things turned out, that had turned out to be an opportunity too. Thank you, Dame Ingrid, he said silently, clinking his bottle against the edge of the table before draining it.

  Still no sign of Marten.

  He raised a finger, and another bottle was brought.

  And right there in a nutshell, that was what he liked. The crook of a finger that brought results. The knowledge that someone within bottleshot was waiting to satisfy his needs, simply because he was Oskar Kask. A long way from the lucky hustler working corners. Not so important yet he didn’t have to laugh at other people’s jokes, but time wrought changes. Nothing stayed the same forever.

  He realised that the object he was turning over in his left hand was the blue plastic lighter. He raised it up and clicked the ignition a time or two, but it wouldn’t spark. He slipped it out of sight.

  Oskar loved Marten, but time wrought changes, and Oskar wasn’t going to be laughing at the same unfunny lines forever. There’d still be somebody tugging his strings, but at least Dame Ingrid was a silent partner. She wouldn’t expect him to laugh at her jokes.

  From the same pocket he’d produced the lighter, Oskar fished out his phone.

  Time to find out where Marten had got to.

  His visitor had gone.

  Through the window a southbound jumbo winked in and out of vision, defined by the lights on its tail and wings, and heading for somewhere distant.

  Marten Saar would have liked to be on that plane.

  Burdens of leadership, though. You stood your ground and made tough decisions.

  He remembered Oskar telling him that, as recently as last week. (Oskar, whom he trusted with his life. But trust needed daily renewal.) Oskar had been prepping him, if that was the word he meant—Oskar had been priming him on this alliance business, drip drip dripping like a tap. You didn’t even notice it at the time. But that was what it was like, a dripping effect, water on stone. Sooner or later, the stone crumbled. Always, water won.

  … Oskar, who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him during the lean years, but had lately taken to saying Sure, boss? when he should have been saying Sure, boss.

  The visitor had called himself Martin Boyd, and it didn’t matter if that was his real name or one he’d pulled on for the occasion. What mattered was, he’d been telling the truth.

  If Oskar was here, he’d lay some grief on Marten for that.

  “A stranger shows, you lap up every word? Because what, he has an honest face?”

  Well, yes, no. Maybe. Marten had seen honester faces, if you wanted to get particular.

  No, what had convinced him was the familiarity of the information, as if Boyd had been reminding him of something he’d already known, but had decided not to pay attention to. Like a domestic inconvenience. A squeaky hinge that you never got round to oiling, because ninety-nine hundredths of the time, it didn’t matter. Ninety-nine hundredths of the time, you weren’t using the hinge, so it wasn’t squeaking.

  Until somebody points out that you’ve got a problem, everything’s fine.

  Another question was, why was he still alone? His crew should be here, ready to take him to the club. Instead they were all watching The Sopranos, while for all they knew he was out here having his throat cut.

  Well, not quite alone.

  Lepik, breathing fitfully, still lay where Boyd had dropped him.

  There was a large glass ashtray on a windowsill and Marten tapped his Marlboro into it thoughtfully.

  Then he hurled it at the wall.

  A moment later the boys came tumbling in, alert as a pack of spaniels, and equally effective.

  “Boss—?”

  “Shut up!”

  The L-shaped space shivered with the echo as it bounced off windows and walls. And then everything was quiet, and then his phone rang.

  This he also hurled against a wall, and watched it shatter.

  “Things have been getting slack,” he told his crew, speaking slowly, and in their own language.

  He crossed the room, and stood over the recumbent Lepik.

  “They’ve been getting lax.”

  He kicked Lepik in the stomach, as hard as he could.

  “I pay you well, I raise your status, and what happens?”

  He kicked Lepik in the crotch, as hard as he could.

  “You become a bunch of lazy cretins. You dishonour me and you dishonour yourselves.”

  He circled the unconscious man as he spoke, without looking down at him. He was looking at the lazy cretins instead, who were busy avoiding his gaze, studying their feet or a patch of ceiling, or anything, though also not Lepik.

  Whom Marten kicked in the back now, as hard as he could.

  “But from tonight, things are going to be different. From tonight, you earn your keep. You understand?”

  He kicked Lepik in the head, as hard as he could.

  “I said, do you understand?”

  They understood. They all understood, except Lepik, who was losing whatever capacity for independent thought he’d ever possessed.

  “Good.”

  He kicked Lepik in the face, as hard as he could.

  A phone rang, but it wasn’t Marten Saar’s.

  “Answer it, moron.”

  A phone was produced, answered, handed to Saar.

  “It’s Oskar.”

  “Oskar,” said Marten. “No, I’ve had it switched off. I’m fine. A few press-ups, that’s all. You’re at the club? I’ll be there. Ten minutes.”

  He ended the call and threw the phone at its owner. “Go fetch Oskar,” he told him. “Bring him back here. You too.”

  “Boss.”

  The nominated pair left, and Marten kicked Lepik in the head again. Then he swore loudly in several languages and kicked Lepik again, then again, and kept kicking him until the sweat soaked through to his jacket. Only then did he stop.

  He was damp and panting.

  His shoes were a mess.

  The rest of his crew were studiedly not watching, their gazes fixed anywhere but on their boss, and what used to be their colleague.

  Marten jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Get rid of that,” he said.

  He went to get changed.

  Behind him his men began prising up a section of carpet, folding it carefully so its contents didn’t spill.

  5.6

  Bettany had gone to earth, avoiding the obvious places—transport hubs and cheap flophouses. Instead he’d taken the Metropolitan line to the suburbs and found a Travelodge. Back in the city, the Brothers McGarry’s crew would be flexing its fin
gers by now, poking them into all the local holes. The brothers themselves wouldn’t be seeing unwalled daylight for years, but their business would be trundling on, their old gangboss, Bishop, calling the shots. He’d be keen on meeting Martin Boyd again too. Boyd had robbed him of years of his life.

  All that time in the shadows, hiding from himself as much as from anyone else, and here he was back again, stirring up old enemies and making new ones too. Nobody walks away, though. Everyone comes home in the end, one way or another.

  He’d bought a takeaway which he ate sitting on the bed, watching the news. A minor story, relegated to local events, was a police action in N1 after a witness claimed to have seen an armed man. A Met spokesman explained that all such reports were treated with the utmost seriousness. If anyone saw a man with a gun, they should call the police immediately.

  Bettany turned it off.

  Oskar Kask had got away, but wouldn’t be on the loose long. He too would have to go home sometime, and Bettany had poisoned the well for him there. If his undercover years had taught him anything, it was that everyone expects to be betrayed. Marten Saar had bought his story as if he’d long since paid the deposit. Kask could look over his shoulder all he wanted, but Bettany had arranged for him to be flattened from the front.

  He disposed of the food cartons, rinsed his mouth, undressed and got under the covers. But lying in the dark, the nearby traffic strangely comforting, Bettany found himself thinking about Martin Boyd again, the man he’d been for almost a decade. It was a strange trick, being someone else. Undercover was only half about remembering who you were supposed to be, it was mostly about forgetting who you were. Boyd came back to him in dreams even now, dreams freighted with memories of betrayal and grief, and when he woke he was never sure who these emotions were for, those into whose friendship Boyd had crept like a lizard, and who doubtless still cursed him from their cells, or for Hannah, for Liam, the loved ones from the life he lived when he was pretending to be Thomas Bettany. It was too late to know the difference any more, and neither Hannah nor Liam were there to tell him …

  A jolt pulled him back from sleep, like a misstep from a pavement. Liam’s ashes. For a whole night Bettany had carried them round Hoxton, and their absence caused him to stumble now. They were back in the flat. Even as he had the thought, the disjunction struck him, that the ashes were they rather than he. They, Liam, were back in the flat.