Real Tigers

by Mick Herron

  The files were cross-referenced, hyperlinked, so it was a moment’s work to run down Donovan’s connections.

  And this, Shirley discovered, was a moment Cartwright obviously hadn’t taken, because if he had, the information he’d have found would have been upfront and centre when he laid out Donovan’s CV.

  Marcus was still arguing with the cop. The cop was still visibly wondering whether, if he Tasered Marcus, the paperwork would take all week. Shirley watched them for a moment, glanced down at the smartphone again, and decided enough was enough.

  She leaned on the horn.

  Obedient to his satnav’s demands, Roderick Ho left the motorway at the next exit, and immediately the world became darker, quieter, the ambient hum of the mindless traffic fading to a mosquito buzz. The exit inclined towards a roundabout from which Ho peeled off onto a minor road, its edges potholed and broken, and over which trees dangled foliage like fishermen hoping for a bite. Theoretically trees were a good thing, lungs of the planet, and Ho didn’t mind them in parks, but out here they loomed too large, the way unleashed dogs acquired extra menace. They cast their shadows as if it were only by their permission that traffic was allowed to pass beneath, and Roddy Ho felt what he’d have called a threat to his sense of self, were such terms available to him. Instead, he simply noted that they were fucking creepy, and constituted a hazard. He made a mental note to do something about them, saved it in the folder When I’m King, and checked satnav again. Their target location was half a mile ahead.

  “Slow down,” Lamb said.

  “I am slowing down.”

  “Well slow down faster.”

  Ho came to a stop in what passed for a lay-by.

  “Kill the engine.”

  Silence followed, though it was only silence if you were used to city noise. The car ticked, and nature rustled. Through Ho’s open window, warm sticky air trickled in.

  He couldn’t see the farmhouse they were heading for. Half a mile: Ho didn’t really have a sense of what half a mile meant. The trees lining one side of the road were just that, a line of trees. On the other, they were a wood; trees hiding behind other trees, so all he could see was darkness getting darker. He glanced in the mirror. Lamb’s face was immobile; his eyes somehow absent. Ho wanted to ask what they did next, but didn’t dare, so just sat gazing at the empty road, which turned a bend a short distance ahead, leaving him looking at even more trees.

  Do something, Marcus Longridge had said.

  Well, here he was, doing something. It was just that he didn’t precisely know what. But if Catherine Standish was being held prisoner in the house up ahead, however far away it was, then the something was going to involve getting out of the car, and Ho wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.

  Lamb was foraging about in the footwell, and when he straightened was holding the polystyrene cup. He’d been using it as an ashtray, which at least meant some of his filth had been contained, but even as Ho watched he dumped its contents onto the seat next to him.

  “Got any change?” he asked.

  “. . . Change?”

  “Loose coins. Any kind’ll do.”

  Ho found some silver in his wallet.

  Lamb put it in the cup and jiggled it, so the coins splashed against each other. Then he opened the door. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, do something.”

  “. . . Like what?”

  “Well I don’t fucking know, do I? Google ‘cunning plan,’ see what the internet suggests.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. But it’ll involve fetching Standish back. I’d forgotten what it was like not having a buffer between me and you lot, and I’m not enjoying it one bit.”

  “Have you got a gun?”

  “No.”

  “What if they have?”

  “Your concern is touching. I’ll be all right.”

  “But what if . . . ?”

  Lamb leaned through Ho’s open window. “What if they come after you? With guns?”

  “. . . Yes.”

  “You’ll be fine. Getting shot’s like falling off a log. It doesn’t take practice.”

  He walked off down the road and melted into the twilight as if it owned him; as if country shadows were no more foreign to him than any other kind. And Lamb, Ho reflected, belonged in the shadows—not a thought he’d formed himself, but one he remembered Catherine Standish articulating. Lamb was a creature of the half-light. The notion made Ho shudder. He checked the clock so he’d know when his twenty minutes were up, and when he looked back at the road, Lamb was gone.

  Do something.

  Roderick Ho hadn’t the faintest clue what.

  He hoped Lamb returned before it became an issue.

  Douglas said, “You’re bastards, you know that?”

  River partly agreed, but sometimes being a bastard was the best way of getting things done. Even slow horses know that. Douglas hadn’t wanted to cooperate, and neither of them had wanted to hurt him, but in the end it didn’t take more than a minute to work out how to open the hatchway, because the switches on Douglas’s console were neatly labelled, one reading hatch. Douglas had watched the monitors with a bitter expression as Donovan and Traynor dropped into the chamber beneath the factory floor; had snorted with disgust when they descended the ladder into the facility itself.

  “This’ll all be reported,” he told them.

  “Even the part where you groped my tits?” Louisa asked.

  “I never—I wasn’t—”

  River said, “Douglas. Keep your cool, don’t be an idiot, and you might come out of this with your job intact.”

  Reaching the floor, Donovan and Traynor scanned the facility like they were used to such places.

  “Is he all there is?” Traynor asked.

  “Yes,” Louisa said.

  “And is he going to be a good boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well make sure he sits somewhere quietly and touches nothing.”

  “They want you to sit somewhere quietly,” Louisa began, but Douglas snorted again.

  “I heard.”

  River said, “The files are that way.” He indicated the doors Douglas had pointed to earlier: swing doors with glass portholes, through which only darkness could be made out.

  Traynor said, “Thanks. Now go sit with Igor.”

  Douglas said, “Igor?”

  “I’m not sitting anywhere,” River said.

  “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” Louisa muttered.

  River ignored her. “The deal is, we let you have the Grey Books, then everybody leaves. Nobody said anything about letting you wander round—”

  “If he doesn’t shut up, can I pop him?” Traynor asked Donovan.

  River, being River, took a step forward at this, a move Traynor seemed to be expecting. They were an inch off bumping chests when Louisa laughed. “Why don’t you just get them both out? I expect Douglas has a tape measure.”

  Donovan said, “Okay, pack it in. That includes you.” This to Louisa. Then to Traynor: “Wait here. Don’t shoot anyone unless you have to.”

  Traynor nodded, and dropped his hand to his belt, brushing his shirt tail aside. The movement revealed, as it was intended to, the handle of a gun.

  River rolled his eyes, making sure Traynor noticed.

  Donovan said, “I’m not going to say it again. Behave yourself or he’ll put a bullet in your knee.”

  Then he strode to the swing doors, pushed through, and disappeared into the corridor beyond.

  “Marcus.”

  “Fucking moron copper. That light was amber. I had ample time.”

  “Marcus.”

  “He’s lucky I didn’t—”

  “Marcus.”

  “What?”

  Asking the question but no
t in a way that suggested he wanted an answer: it was one of those whats that mean I’m still talking. But as he asked it he registered the expression on her face, so he said it again, “What?” and this time meant it.

  “There were two soldiers, right?” she said. “Donovan and Traynor.”

  “Yeah, they joined Black Arrow at the same time.” He started the car, and glanced bitterly into the mirror, where he could see the policeman at the kerb, studying Marcus’s departure as if willing some further infraction to be made: a failed indicator, mirror-neglect, state treason.

  “Benjamin Traynor served with Donovan,” Shirley said. “He was honourably discharged about the time Donovan came out of the clink.”

  “So? They were mates. Soldier buddies, they’re not gonna let a thing like a little jail time come between them.”

  “Yeah, right. Except. Alison Dunn? The woman who was killed in Donovan’s car that night?”

  “What about her?”

  “She was Traynor’s fiancée,” Shirley said.

  Lights through windows leaked a pallid yellow into the evening sky; an hour from now they’d be beacons, but for the moment seemed an admission of weakness. The farmhouse was stone, with a brick addition on one wing, and the front door had a small porch arrangement, a wooden afterthought which one big storm or one bad wolf might easily render kindling. And there was a bus on the forecourt, a London familiar made strange by dislocation; an open-topped tour bus, its upper deck swaddled in canvas to keep the rain off, a gesture that embraced both caution and optimism, given the heatwave.

  If it had been a working farm, Lamb noted, there’d have been dogs barking. The only sound he could make out was an insect-like chirping.

  He studied the house again. It would have an attic and cellar, and any hostage would be in one or the other. Himself, he’d have opted for the cellar. But there was something off about this whole affair—it had been tainted with unreality since the Grey Books were thrown into the mix—so chances were Standish was in the kitchen, brewing up a cuppa for whomever Donovan had left in charge. Probably happier than she was in Slough House.

  But she was one of his, and you messed with Lamb’s stuff at your peril. Besides, the joes you didn’t bring home were the ones who never let you go.

  He rattled the polystyrene cup, and was rewarded with a silvery tinkle. If you were going to storm an enemy citadel, you might as well do it with flair—he kept a gun at Slough House, illegal, unofficial, and it might have been a useful piece of kit right now, but Lamb hadn’t survived this far by getting into firefights with soldiers. Well, maybe just the once—and memory tugged at him again: the burning church, and gunfire in the snow. He shrugged it away.

  In the porch he found a doorbell but used the rapper instead, pounding it as loudly as he could—a steady, unforgiving thunder that rattled the door on its hinges and travelled every inch of the building, swarming along its boards and beams as fluidly as a family of mice. Bam bam bam bam bam, and if it wouldn’t raise the dead it might at least disturb the worms enjoying their corpses.

  Without warning the door flew open, and the knocker was wrenched from his grip. “What do you want?” the answerer snarled. He was younger than Lamb might have expected: stocky, in an off-white short-sleeved shirt; his arms writhing with black-and-blue designs; his head hairless; his expression halfway between anger and alarm. Which was fine, thought Lamb, this was an audience he could work with, and without further warning he began to sing:

  “We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.”

  Not the most musical rendering ever, but, all things considered, not a bad stab at the melody.

  Then he rattled the cup in his hand.

  “It’s for the kiddies and orphans,” he explained. “Early, I know, but I like to beat the rush.”

  The man said, “What the fuck?”

  Catherine Standish admired the empty bottle.

  They were undervalued objects, empty bottles. In her time, she’d wasted fond glances on full ones, regarding the empties as little more than markers on a journey to oblivion: either the dark, dreamless cellar of sleep, or the labyrinth of alcoholic blackout, where hours were peeled invisibly away. Afterwards, you could examine yourself for clues to where you’d been and what you’d done there, but there was no retracing your steps through that maze. And empty bottles held no messages. Spin them any way you liked, they always pointed in the same direction: back into the darkness, to the discarded hours.

  But this one she held now had a peculiar beauty of form. She knew it had rolled off a production line somewhere, that no glassworker had ever cradled its new-crafted shape in his hands; but still, looking at it, feeling it, enjoying its lightness in her grasp, she thought that of all the bottles she’d emptied in her life, she’d never encountered one with quite this much amiability—that was the word she’d been hunting. Amiability. Through all the afternoon’s struggles, ever since Bailey had appeared with the tray, she had been thinking of this bottle as her enemy; something to be overcome, the way you would a snake in your garden. She hadn’t appreciated that they were on the same side; that it had desired emptiness the same way she had wanted to empty it. Desire lies at the heart of all that’s made of glass, she decided; glass is simply need given substance. You blow into it, and it assumes new shapes. Strike it in the wrong place, it shatters.

  Well, she had fulfilled this one’s secret desire, she thought. Its contents were now history.

  A moment ago, she had thought she’d heard singing—you could almost call it singing; it had sounded like a Yuletide brawl—and wondered if this heralded the return of the voices. But all in all, Catherine decided, it didn’t seem likely: a single day spent locked in an attic wasn’t enough to send her spiralling back into the depths she’d spent years emerging from. And she had, after all, just poured the fucking Pinot down the sink. After a triumph like that, she was due a victory parade, not a relapse.

  So she refilled the bottle with water and screwed its cap on tight. It balanced nicely in her hand, felt reasonably weighty. Bailey was young and fit, but Catherine Standish had wielded bottles before, and knew that an unexpected tap with even a small one could stop a fight before it started.

  And next time he came through that door, gracious host or not, she’d show him what a journey into oblivion felt like.

  Heading west, free of city traffic but snarled up among the heading-out-of-town kind, Marcus had slowed to a crawl. Another hold-up ahead. When they reached it, it would turn out to be nothing—a grease-spot on the tarmac; a balloon tied to a railing—but until then they’d shunt and curse like everybody else, which at least gave them time to argue about the significance of Shirley’s discovery.

  Marcus said, “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “You reckon?”

  “They’d known each other a long time. They’re soldier buddies. That’s not the kind you break with easily, not after you’ve been in combat.”

  “Donovan killed Traynor’s wife-to-be, Marcus. That’s hardly the same league as, I dunno, crashing his car.”

  “Some men get very attached to their cars. But either way, she died in an accident. Maybe Traynor’s got a forgiving nature.”

  “He fought in Afghanistan,” Shirley said. “I don’t think turning the other cheek was a big part of their training.” She was still looking at her smartphone, tracking Alison Dunn through Service records. “She sat on that UN committee with Donovan,” she went on.

  “Do they even let soldiers marry each other?” Marcus wondered.

  “There’s a redacted bit here.”

  “Saying what?”

  “It’s redacted, stupid.”

  “I heard you the first time, dummy. But which bit precisely is redacted?”

  Shirley said, “Right after she got back to the UK, after the UN
thing I mean, she filed some kind of report. Whatever it said got stamped on from on high.”

  “Huh,” said Marcus.

  “Huh,” Shirley repeated. “Very illuminating. What does ‘huh’ mean exactly?”

  “In this context,” Marcus said, “‘huh’ means, sounds like political bullshit. And a good kind of bullshit not to get mixed up in is the political kind.”

  For no obvious reason, the traffic started to move more freely.

  Shirley said, “So what’s the new plan, you gonna turn around and drive us home?”

  “No, I figure we’d better catch up with Louisa and Cartwright fast as we can.”

  “Why so?” Shirley asked, looking up from her screen.

  “Because you see that black van up ahead?”

  Shirley did.

  “It says Black Arrow on the side,” said Marcus. “And it looks like it’s heading for the same place we are.”

  •••

  “Fuck off,” said the man.

  That was all, but he seemed to think it enough. He moved back, the better to slam the door in Lamb’s face, but Lamb could move fast when he wanted, and a scuffed leather brogue, battle-hardened by years of contact with Lamb’s foot, wedged itself into the gap before the wood hit the jamb.

  “Not even a thruppeny bit?” he said. “It’s in a good cause.”

  “Move your feet, old man.”

  “Sorry. Dancing’s extra.” Lamb pushed, his opponent stumbled backwards, and Lamb was inside, kicking the door shut behind him. In the same movement, he tossed the polystyrene cup at the man’s face, relying on an instinctive reaction, and was rewarded by the man catching it neatly, leaving his stomach wide open . . . Lamb had no desire to embroil himself in hand-to-hand combat. Make it quick, then. Swinging his fist sideways, like he was ringing a bell, Lamb buried it in the man’s midriff, and when he folded in half Lamb slapped both palms against his ears, almost hearing the explosion that must have caused inside his head. And there was always the possibility, he reminded himself as he brought his knee up into the waiting face, that he had the wrong house, so he went easier than he ought to have done; kept his hands on the man’s ears and lowered him to the floor reasonably gently, then stepped back sharpish as blood poured from a broken face.