Nobody Walks

by Mick Herron

  She called the number.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I have a name. Majeed Ansari.”

  There was a pause, the suggestion of fingers rattling on a keyboard.

  “He’s Priority Scott, Ma’am.”

  Level one—she knew he was. She’d put him there herself before her first conversation with JK Coe. Majeed Ansari was a name that easily lent itself to such a list, readily suggesting that its owner might harbour dangerous, violent ideals.

  As far as Tearney was aware, Majeed Ansari had as many terrorist sympathies as a tortoise, but it was the name that counted.

  “I’m hearing rumours,” she said. “Check him for contact with former Service personnel.”

  She killed the call.

  So where am I now, wondered Bettany?

  Adrift again was where.

  He’d spent the best part of a decade taking the Brothers McGarry off the board only to find that others had filled the gap. The world might technically be a safer place, but you’d need pretty sophisticated measuring equipment to be sure. It was the same with Dame Ingrid. Any vacancy she left would have been sealed within hours, another Dame Ingrid springing up like a skeleton warrior sown from teeth. He’d have gained half a moment’s victory before he was dead too, but there’d be no coming back for him. He’d scattered teeth in his time, but they’d fallen on stony ground.

  Besides, in the moment he’d come closest to violence, he’d seen the fear in her eyes.

  If he’d killed her, and walked away—if she’d been bluffing about her security cover—he’d have had to live with himself afterwards. And she was right, he was no murderer. Witnessing her fear had confirmed that. A monster she might be, scheming away in a labyrinth of her own making, but she was a human being too. Liam wouldn’t have wanted him to kill her. He felt sure of that, on no evidence whatever. Liam would not have wanted the use she’d made of his death to be the reason for her own.

  And a line came to him, he didn’t know from where, about snow falling on everyone, like the descent of their last end. On all the living and the dead.

  Enough. London wasn’t safe, and he needed to leave. But first he had more scattering to deal with.

  Not teeth but ashes.

  Tearney’s phone rang.

  She was back in her own world, where the pedestrians were purposeful and the traffic expensive. Big trees scratched each other overhead. Bare ruined choirs …

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve a positive on your rumour.”

  A positive on your rumour. Once upon a time, everyone who spoke English spoke English.

  “And?”

  “A former agent, Thomas Bettany. Associate, friend and coworker of Majeed Ansari’s in Marseilles, where Ansari’s lived since ’08.”

  Tearney sighed, and allowed the sound to carry through her phone.

  Where late the sweet birds sang.

  A former Service agent, consorting with a suspected terrorist. It didn’t look good for Bettany.

  Of course, it had helped that Ansari had the right sort of ethnic profile, but if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. No one ever accused Dame Ingrid of lacking resource.

  “Bettany’s current whereabouts—”

  “He’s in London,” Dame Ingrid said.

  She gave them Liam Bettany’s address.

  “Take him there. In the flat.”

  “On what footing?”

  She was outside her own building. Regent’s Park. The pinnacle of her professional ambition, and launching pad for her myth. No, she’d never been a field agent, but the thing about joes was, they lived and died in the shadows, where they belonged. Once they were gone, their final identities chiselled on headstones, their sins and victories vanished with them. Whereas Dame Ingrid—never a joe—would forever be part of the recorded history of the Service.

  Obviously she’d be first to honour their memory, but the simple truth was, she was worth more than them. Her name would live in the history books, and theirs, only in the bowels of the building in front of her. It was fitting that her lifestyle reflect this. It wasn’t about greed. It was about what was appropriate.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Waterproof,” she said. “The footing is Code Waterproof.”

  She ended the call, and entered the building, to continue her work.

  Dry-cleaning, they called it. The process by which you made sure you had no tail. So Bettany led nobody a merry dance, because nobody was following him. Perhaps Tearney had shadows for her morning commute, but if so they’d stuck with her when he’d cut loose. So the doubling back along busy streets, and the underground games, nipping across platforms to jump a train heading back in the opposite direction, were all without point, if tradecraft was ever without point. He thought he’d know if he was being followed, but that in itself was dangerous, the confidence in his own senses. Trust but verify. The dry-cleaning had verified.

  In a churchyard near Liam’s he sat on a bench in the cold. A pair of magpies were squabbling among headstones. For a moment he couldn’t remember the rhyme, what two magpies signified, and when he did he wasn’t convinced.

  The descent of their last end …

  He could leave now, and avoid the flat altogether. It would be the sensible thing to do. Forget the ashes, forget Liam. Walk away.

  But nobody walks. He’d tried that before.

  After a while in which nothing happened—no new thoughts startled him, no sudden sounds—he got to his feet. The magpies flew away.

  In the flat, he went straight to the kitchen. The urn containing Liam’s ashes were on the table, and he was reaching for it when something hit him between the shoulderblades. For one brief moment he was a light switch someone was turning on. He had the faintest sensation of causing something to fall but it was too intangible to create a memory. When he woke, nothing remained of it.

  He was on his side in a moving vehicle, wrists and ankles bound, a sack over his head.

  For the first few minutes a slow accretion of detail occupied him. That the vehicle ran smoothly. That it was a van of some sort. That through the sack he could make out no light, so its windows were presumably blanked out …

  That there was at least one other person with him, though for the moment they remained silent.

  About to speak, he changed his mind. Once he spoke, once they answered, a question would be resolved. He would know whether they’d come for Tom Bettany or Martin Boyd, whether it was a team sent by Ingrid Tearney, in which case his future was bleak, or whether the Brothers McGarry’s crew had found him, in which case it was bleaker.

  Some things, he could wait to find out. Soon, he would know who he was at this moment.

  Closing his eyes, he listened to the beating of his heart.

  PART SIX

  6

  It was two days later that Flea Pointer came by the flat, partly because she wondered what had become of Bettany, but partly because she’d left a book there once, and was hoping to retrieve it.

  Life at Lunchbox was changing. Vincent, in the grip of a new idea, had arranged whiteboards around the office, on which everyone had been invited to scribble. The central character would be the target of dark conspiracies, the specific nature of which was left to be determined by the player. It would be less about unleashing the hero within, he said, and more about allowing the inner paranoiac free rein. His eyes had stayed bright while he’d said this.

  The previous version of Shades 3 would be scrapped. The new one would be a serious proposition, maybe a money-maker. Things, Vincent said, would be different.

  Flea had the sense he meant more than just the game.

  The landlord made little fuss about letting her into the flat, seeming resigned to such intrusions. “It all stops Wednesday,” he said, meaning that’s when the rent ran out. But everything had stopped some time ago, where Liam was concerned. Flea was dismayed at how swiftly the place had become abandoned. A faint chemical tang stained the air, but that
apart, there was nothing to suggest Tom Bettany’s recent presence, or not until she went into the kitchen.

  For there, on the floor, she found the urn containing Liam’s ashes, lid askew. And Liam himself … what remained of Liam was a thin drift across the lino, like something you’d get if you dropped a dustpan.

  For a long while Flea stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. It was very quiet. At length, when she could bear it no more, she found a brush in the cupboard beneath the sink, and did what she could to make things right again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For advice, support, encouragement and friendship, I’m more than grateful to:

  Bronwen Hruska and her team at Soho Press, especially Paul Oliver, Rudy Martinez, Amara Hoshijo and the unflappable Juliet Grames;

  Juliet Burton and Micheline Steinberg;

  Cara Black, Jim Benn, Henry Chang and Lisa Brackmann;

  Tony Smith and Christine Delaney;

  Adam, Tom and Kat;

  and Chris, Nick and Jo.