Nobody Walks

by Mick Herron

  So he would fetch them and scatter them on the river. That was his last conscious thought before sleep, that he would scatter his son’s ashes on the Thames, but when he woke in the night it wasn’t from a dream of Liam but of Majeed, with whom he’d worked in Marseilles, and with whom he’d found a peculiar kind of friendship. Peculiar because Bettany had neither sought nor welcomed friendship these past few years. Survival had seemed enough to be getting on with. The dream had concerned betrayal, but the details slipped from meaning even before he opened his eyes.

  He closed them again, but there was no more sleep that night.

  Oskar finished his beer and slipped out for a smoke. When he returned the bottle had been replaced by a fresh one and the girl responsible, he thought her name was Anita, winked to make sure he knew who to tip.

  Anita. Maybe Annette. Something like that.

  Still no Marten.

  He sat with hands flat, fingers spread wide. Even when he raised them they stayed steady. It had been a close-run thing, but history didn’t read match reports, it just gave the result. Oskar had dealt with many problems but this was the first time he’d gone up against a professional—Bettany had been a spy, and spies receive training dope peddlers don’t get. So Oskar could clap himself on the back for being here at the club, a beer in front of him, and not dead on a towpath.

  Halfway through these thoughts two men approached.

  Zac and Karu.

  No Marten.

  Oskar leaned back.

  “You took your time.”

  “There’s been a change of plan,” Zac said.

  “What change?”

  “We’re meeting back at the flat.”

  “Why?”

  Karu said, “Because Marten said so.”

  “Okay, sure,” Oskar said. “Let me just finish my beer.”

  He smiled lazily, reached for the bottle, and broke it on Karu’s forehead, then wiped the remnant across Zac’s face. While Zac wept blood, Oskar walked calmly to the exit. As he stepped outside, the noise behind him was swelling to a roar.

  “What’s happening?” the nearest smoker asked.

  Oskar turned the collar of his jacket up against the cold. “Didn’t see.”

  At the corner he hailed a cab.

  “Where to?”

  “Farringdon Road.”

  Settling back, he wondered how Marten had found out, then dismissed the question as irrelevant. All that mattered was what happened next. And while Marten was supposedly the brains, it didn’t take Oskar more than half a minute to collate a few bullet points.

  Back to the bolt-hole.

  Collect spare gun.

  Find Marten.

  Shoot him.

  After that, everything was back on track.

  The crew wouldn’t be a problem, having worked with Oskar as long as they had with Marten. They wouldn’t be swearing blood oaths, they’d be shrugging shoulders, and by morning they’d have fallen in line.

  Well, maybe not Zac and Karu.

  As for the Driscoll business, Dame Spook would have to find some other way of sealing that deal. Oskar would concentrate on locking down the business with the Cousins’ Circle, enough to keep her happy.

  The taxi pulled over to give a whooping police car, its busy blue light bouncing off nearby windows, room to scrape past.

  Oskar checked his pockets for his wallet, hoping he hadn’t left it behind in his hurry. It was there, though a second check of the same pockets revealed that the blue plastic lighter wasn’t. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t be used to identify him. It wasn’t even his.

  “Here’s fine,” he said, when Farringdon station’s new facade came into view. He paid the driver, and stepped out into damp night air.

  5.7

  When Flea opened her eyes she was assailed by unfamiliar shapes. No—she was assailed by familiar shapes in unfamiliar configurations. There was a wardrobe and a curtained window. There was a door. There was the foot of the bed she was lying on. Nothing unusual, but not her own bedroom.

  Waking in a strange bed wasn’t an entirely new experience, but she didn’t make a habit of it. On this occasion, anyway, she was alone.

  No light penetrated the curtains. It could have been ten at night or two in the morning.

  And then the day’s details returned to her in one big information dump, and she groaned softly. On her breath she could taste the brandy she’d been given “for the shock” when they’d arrived at Vincent’s, and the second she’d drunk largely for the taste, and the third because … well, because. She recalled her knees giving way, as the morning’s tension resolved itself in a moment of utter liquidity. The arm wrapped round her throat was there again, and people were pointing guns at her. She remembered being carried somewhere, presumably to this very bed, but could not remember who by. She pondered that for a moment or two, then groaned again, and pulled herself upright.

  She was fully clothed, thank God, but could not find her shoes. Her bag, too, was presumably downstairs. And it occurred to her that having a violent stranger seize her was perhaps not the most dangerous thing to happen to her today, because here she was after dark, in Vincent’s spare bedroom, and how well did she know him? Boo Berryman too, come to that? Wasn’t there something odd about the pair of them, living together in this half-hidden house? And why hadn’t either of them thought to leave a glass of water on the bedside table?

  Driven by thirst, she padded out of the room as quietly as she could, onto a dark landing. There was a vague illumination from downstairs, a flickering light laid on by the special effects department of whatever spooky film this was. Anyone could be lurking down there. This morning, when Tom Bettany had chased the gunman out onto the towpath—at that moment it had seemed like it was all over, the mad plot she’d fallen into after Liam had died. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

  The stair creaked, and the noise echoed downstairs, as if someone had shifted on hearing her approach.

  Flea froze.

  The sound was not repeated.

  How had she ended up here, anyway? It seemed as good a time as any to ask that question.

  Because of Liam, she decided. It was because she had been friends with Liam Bettany, who, for a while—if she were honest with herself—she had thought might be a prospective partner, but who had proved too unfocused, too unsuccessful, too broke. And so she had turned her attention to her boss, Vincent Driscoll. For a while now, she had entertained a fantasy of drawing Vincent out of his shell, dragging him from the hideaway he’d constructed for himself. This would be a challenge. The fact that he was rich didn’t hurt. But right this minute, what she was mostly remembering was how, when Tom Bettany had aimed the gun at him, Vincent had seemed preternaturally calm. Even for a man set at an angle to everyday emotions, wasn’t that a little scary?

  The flickering light, she realised, came from a fire.

  There were only two ways to go, up and down. So she went on down, into the large room that constituted most of the ground floor of Vincent’s bachelor house.

  Her eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom now, but even so it took a moment to locate him. He sat on one end of a wide sofa at the far end of the room, and in the firelight looked otherworldly. His skin wasn’t fair so much as faint, as if she might prod right through him, were she so inclined. His body would ripple round her finger like a reflection.

  The glass of red wine he held had either been filled very full to start with or he’d made no serious inroads yet.

  Her shoes and her bag lay on the floor by an armchair. Next to them, a half-filled brandy glass.

  She approached warily, unsure how this was going to develop, and because he didn’t speak, she found she had to.

  “You’re still up.”

  Mentally, she awarded herself a state-the-bleeding-obvious prize for this.

  “I seem to have been in bed,” she went on.

  He said, “I know. I carried you there.”

  “Oh.” Her mind flapped around for
a fuller response, and possibly her mouth did too, but in the end all she could manage was, “So … What are you doing?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt …”

  “I’d finished.”

  “Oh.”

  She didn’t know how to pick up from this. Thinking, to her mind, was something you did more or less continually. Sitting with a glass of wine, staring at a fire, you were almost certainly deep in thought. Even if the thoughts were shapeless and inexact, they remained thoughts—there was nothing else for them to be.

  He said, “I had an idea.”

  She realised that it wasn’t only the firelight that was making his eyes gleam. The gleaming was coming from within. For the first time she could recall, she was seeing Vincent Driscoll lit by his own being.

  Forgetting her need for water, she sank onto the sofa.

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  Oskar’s Farringdon bolt-hole, the one nobody knew about, was up a flight of stairs, through a dirty front door sandwiched between a dry cleaners and an electrical goods shop that had whitewashed its windows the previous week. He headed up in darkness and went straight for the bedroom where he kept his spare gun in a shoebox on top of the wardrobe.

  The shoebox was there, but the Glock had gone.

  He blinked twice.

  The gun remained absent.

  Then he closed the box thoughtfully, almost mournfully, knowing the time for panicking was over.

  The time for panicking had been back in the club, when Marten was late. Because Marten was never late.

  Oskar stepped into the living room, and turned the light on.

  Marten sat in the armchair, Oskar’s gun in one hand, and a cigarette in the other that he lit as soon as Oskar appeared.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  Blue smoke drifted ceilingwards.

  He waggled the Glock as if it were his finger.

  “Don’t bother getting comfortable. We’re not staying.”

  Oskar asked, “How long have you known?”

  “About this place? Since five minutes after you picked up the keys. About the rest of it, the alliance we make with the Cousins’ Circle so you can inform on their activities to the British secret service? Not so long.”

  “Bettany,” said Oskar.

  “He told me his name was Boyd.”

  Marten tapped ash onto a carpet frayed colourless.

  “And that he was supposed to kill me. And that if he didn’t, you would.”

  “You can’t have believed him.”

  “Can’t I? Why can’t I do that, Oskar?”

  “We’ve been partners forever.”

  “Which means neither of us could ever betray the other, is that right? Please—”

  This in response to Oskar opening his mouth, about to say something.

  “—don’t insult me with a fairytale. If nothing else, we’ve been partners too long for that.”

  Oskar didn’t know what he’d have said, if he’d had the chance to say it. But yes, it would have been a fairytale.

  For half a minute they remained silent. Not far away there was music, the kind whose unrelenting beat is its entire point, and the irritation it causes to anyone over thirty a mere bonus. It came from a club, perhaps, or a pub jukebox, or a nearby flat. It came from somewhere where people listened in the full expectation that this was just another night they were living through, which would give way in turn to another day, and so on. And so on.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs opened.

  Oskar said, “One favour?”

  Marten tilted his head to one side like an interested bird.

  “Do it here. Now. Quickly.”

  Marten shook his head.

  Behind Oskar, more of Marten’s crew arrived.

  “Let’s go home,” said Marten.

  5.8

  It had rained hard in the early hours, bringing small branches down from trees, and while it was calmer now, with a hint of brightness in corners of the sky, pavements were still wet, and minor floods pooled at kerbside corners where leaves blocked the drains. At the entrance to the tube station the tiled floors were filthy with tracked-in dirt, and plastic warning triangles emblazoned with exclamation marks provided extra trip hazards. Coming in from the streets, back in Central London, Bettany felt that this almostquaint station, sprouting like a redbrick mushroom in the middle of a constant traffic jam, was a time capsule, with its framed posters of bygone travelling experiences. But the thought didn’t stay. He passed through the barriers and took the stairs to the platform two at a time.

  The LED display suggested an incoming tube. A newspaper on a bench fluttered its pages in confirmation.

  The train piled into the station as if it had no intention of stopping.

  It did, though. Bettany sat on the bench, apparently studying the paper, while passengers disembarked. Ingrid Tearney wasn’t among them, but he hadn’t expected her. He was early.

  Those waiting boarded the train and it creaked, then thundered, into the tunnel again.

  He was alone on the platform.

  Which was monitored, everyone knew this. But unless times had changed, people with nowhere to go haunted the underground, seeking warmth on its platforms, variety on its circuits, charity in its carriages. There was nothing unusual about a man passing time while the trains roared by. He wouldn’t raise alarms.

  The paper was a free handout, its news two cycles old. It didn’t matter. He was scanning his surroundings, not the print.

  If there was anyone else doing the same, they were too good to be spotted.

  He folded the paper, tucked it under an arm, and leaned back into the bench’s alcove. The LED warned of another approaching train.

  The same routine. No Ingrid Tearney.

  “She’s the head of the Intelligence Service,” JK Coe had told him. “You can’t just sandbag her on the underground.”

  “I suspect she’ll be expecting me,” Bettany had said.

  But what difference that would make, he wasn’t sure. Legend suggested that she made her morning commute unaccompanied, but legend would suggest that, wouldn’t it?

  Another train. This time he stood, pursed his lips, looked like a man about to make a decision. It slowed to a halt, then jerked forward another yard and halted again. The doors opened. Passengers spilt onto the platform. Behind them, Dame Ingrid patiently waited her turn.

  He stepped on board before she could depart, earning scowls and passive-aggressive mutterings, and caught her by the arm before the crush had dissipated.

  “A message from Driscoll,” he said, bending to her ear. “He’s calling a shareholders’ meeting.”

  Her arm felt rigid in his grip.

  A young woman leant forward. “Is this man bothering you? Why are you holding her like that?”

  “He’s an old friend,” Ingrid Tearney said as Bettany released her. “But thank you for asking, my dear. Too few people worry about others.”

  The doors closed, and the train pulled away.

  They did not speak for five minutes, during which the train stopped twice more and the young woman—still glowering at Bettany—disembarked. Seats became briefly available, and they sat.

  Sitting on a crowded tube was to become child-sized again, on a level with the hips and stomachs of adults.

  In a conversational tone, Dame Ingrid Tearney said, “Following me?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  Her eyebrows narrowed.

  “This is the carriage nearest your exit.”

  Dame Ingrid Tearney gave the smallest of nods.

  “It’s hard,” she said, “not to fall into habits.”

  “You were never in the field.”

  She patted his knee.

  “But I’m full of admiration for those of you who were.”

  A young man in a grey hoodie sitting opposite was gazing at them through the thicket of swaying bodies. But whatever he was earbudded to was con
suming his attention.

  Bettany said, “You recruited Oskar Kask last year, I’m guessing. After he was arrested for shooting a gangbanger.”

  “We’d been awaiting some such opportunity. Not that we’d had to wait long. You’re aware of how it works. Violent men don’t resort to violence. It’s simply what they do.”

  She spoke quietly, as did he. Here in the middle of the throng, most of whose bodies were willing themselves elsewhere with laptops and iPods and Kindles, their conversation murmured on unheard.

  “But Kask was perfect because he was placed to give you something you wanted. A way into the Cousins’ Circle.”

  “A commendable target, I’m sure you agree.”

  “But too much trouble to actually infiltrate.”

  “Deep undercover? Too expensive. You were one of a dying breed, Mr. Bettany. And no offence, but really. A years-long operation? To take a handful of hoods off the streets? These aren’t the returns we need these days.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “But this was unofficial, wasn’t it?”

  The train began to slow.

  “Are we staying on?” she asked.

  “End of the line.”

  The train stopped, and the doors opened.

  Dame Ingrid said, “I have to tread a careful path. The good of the Service, versus the deniability of my lords and masters. Kask was too good an opportunity to miss. But he was also a murderer. Recruiting him was never going to be a popular move.”

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “As I say. Too good an opportunity to miss.”

  “Which meant when it came to going really off the books,” Bettany said, “you had a ready-made tool to hand.”

  During the night, abandoned by sleep, he had etched patterns of vengeance on the hotel ceiling while his heartbeat became percussive. But now he was here, next to this calm woman who had ordered his son’s death simply to draw him into her machinations, he found that he, too, was calm, as if he’d come through the hurricane’s rage to find an unnatural stillness at its centre.