by Mick Herron
“Maybe he plans to make an offer for it,” said Nash. “Diana? That was a joke.”
“Good meeting, Oliver. Thank you.”
There was something forlorn about a house stripped of its furniture, or there was if you were its departing spirit. A stranger might find potential in this wide hallway, but for River—reaching it via the kitchen; he’d used the back door again, as had been his childhood habit—it was like entering a ransacked priory: the wooden chest which had sat under that row of coat hooks was gone, as was the engraving, a Howard Phipps, which had hung on the opposite wall. But these were secondary emotions: he was here for Sid, who was in the study, and to all appearances had not moved since the early hours. Sid was bright, Sid was sharp. Sid now seemed mostly weary, and greeted him the way a long-term patient might a regular visitor, reaching a hand out but remaining seated, her legs tucked under her. The white stripe in her hair looked an affectation: she was a punkish waif in a modernised Dickens.
“Thank you for coming.”
He wasn’t sure how the alternative would have worked. He could have gone home, he supposed, and spent the evening thinking how strange it was, that Sid was in his grandfather’s study in Kent.
They ate in picnic fashion: provisions he’d bought on the way.
“You weren’t followed, were you?”
River shook his head. He’d looped a roundabout twice, and doubled back on himself a couple of miles to make sure.
“Tell me again,” he said. “About the people who came looking.”
“You’re wondering if my story’s going to change.”
“I’m wondering what we can do to find them.”
“I don’t want to find them,” she said. “I want them not to find me.”
“I’ll keep you safe. Describe them.”
“They were a couple. A man and a woman. Dressed like missionaries.”
Black-suited, River learned. White-shirted. The man was dark, clean-shaven; the woman blonde, had her hair tied back, and wore round, plastic-framed spectacles. They’d been going door-to-door round the estate where Sid had been housed, which was made up of small, modern cottages.
“And you’re sure they weren’t . . . well . . . missionaries?”
She gave him a look he remembered well: this was Sid, he’d once shared an office with.
When they’d reached her door, she had watched from a bedroom window. They had hung on the doorstep longer than natural, and she’d had to step back sharply when the woman looked up.
“What time of day?”
“Morning.”
“Where did they go once they’d left?”
“Next door.”
And had carried on up the winding street, then down the other side. Like missionaries would have done.
Sid said, “Maybe it wasn’t just to look less suspicious. Maybe they didn’t know exactly which house I was in.”
“What did you do?”
“I called it in.”
Which was standard. If you had a handler, if you had a milkman, you always called it in.
River said, “It was supposed to be a safe house. How could they know where to find you?”
“They could have known about the farm. Where I spent time in recovery.” A hunk of bread balanced uneaten on her chair’s armrest. “It’s been used for years.”
And a link between the farm and the estate, a few miles down the road, wouldn’t have been hard to establish. They might not have followed Sid’s milkman to Sid’s exact address—the estate was a warren of culs-de-sac and one-way streets; a tail would have burned bright as a beacon—but they could have established her general whereabouts, and then gone door to door.
“And what makes you sure they wanted to kill you?”
She picked up the bread and stared at it, puzzled. Then put it carefully down. “What else would they have planned?”
It pulled at his heart to have her sitting here, both because it was her and because it was here. Sid, whom he’d thought dead. And here, of all places, where that same heart had put down its first roots. He’d been carted place to place by his mother, like a suitcase. Only once she’d abandoned him to his grandparents’ care had he learned what home meant. And thinking that thought, he realised he had no idea what family Sidonie Baker had; what friends she might have left behind. Besides himself, he thought, then caught that: had he been her friend? They’d fought through most of their short relationship. Which was a familiar story when it came to River and women, though in his defence, by no means all of them ended up shot in the head.
And it was impossible not to think about head wounds, their long-term implications. Being shot in the head might leave you fearing being shot in the head again. Most professions this didn’t happen once, let alone twice, but River could see how it might be: once shot, twice shy. Sid was a softer presence now; her colours muted. Maybe her reception in general was fuzzier, and prone to static. Strangers weren’t always dangerous, but those that were were best avoided. Why wouldn’t she imagine them bringing harm to her door?
Some of this might have been written on his face, because she said, “You think I’m paranoid.”
“No.”
“Yes you do.”
“Sid, you had a bad time of it, and I’m sorry. It was my fault.”
Truth was, he could barely remember if that were so. He had been the reason Sid was there that night, on that London street in the rain, but he hadn’t asked her to come.
“You didn’t pull the trigger,” she said.
“No.”
“Well then.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I couldn’t think of anywhere else. And you’re safe.” She raised a hand to the white stripe in her hair. “You’re a slow horse. Whatever’s going on, whatever’s happening, you’re not involved. Slow horses never are.”
Which was partly true, he thought. Slow horses spent a lot of time not being involved. And by the time things turned out otherwise, it was frequently too late.
“Why do you think they’re after you?”
“Maybe I know something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know . . . Maybe I used to know something, and I’ve forgotten what it was. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still know it. Back there.”
She made a vague gesture: the back of her mind, she meant. A part blocked off since the shooting. He imagined the bullet throwing up furrows as it creased her head: creating little earthworks in the brain, behind which memories piled, irretrievable clumps of information.
And that would be just like a slow horse too, he thought. To be in possession of crucial information, and still be the last to know.
“What do you think I should do?”
“You can stay here for a while.”
“That’s not a solution. Just a hiding place.”
“Best I can do right now.” He wanted to move closer to her, offer reassurance, but wasn’t sure that was the way to do so. Instead, he rose and turned on the lamp in the corner, dispelling the gathering gloom. “I can try to find out more about those missionaries.”
“They weren’t missionaries.”
“Whoever they were. I can get Ho to check them out, probably.”
Provided he didn’t mind eating some serious shit.
“Roderick Ho . . . Is he still with you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How is he?”
“Much the same,” said River. “Unfortunately.”
Again, that evening, he didn’t want to leave but couldn’t comfortably stay. He fetched from the boot some odds and ends he’d thought to pack—his kettle, a duvet, a towel—and asked how she was doing for clothes. It was like vaulting over several levels of relationship. When he left he was clutching the list she’d scribbled—underwear, a sweatshirt, shampoo—and try
ing to remember if her handwriting had been so disorganised when he’d first known her. Meanwhile Sid had bedded down in a nest of cushions, and that was how he thought of her all through the night: like someone who’d lost their way in a wood, and covered themselves with leaves, hoping this would keep them safe.
Before the light had left the day, Diana was occupying a bench with her back to the Globe, looking out on the Thames. The bench was an old favourite, smack in the middle of a twelve-yard stretch unmonitored by CCTV, and she’d recently had its USP refreshed, this being a foul splash of birdshit covering most of its length; a plastic transfer, but realistic enough to ensure no one ever sat here. It was also somewhere she would smoke, a habit she rarely indulged in with others present. It was hard to say which of the two, fag or faeces, passing tourists found more offensive.
Sometimes, at moments like this—feeling the day’s first charge of nicotine; watching the endless river heading home—she could allow her mind to empty, and simply feel alive. Today, though, that wasn’t going to happen. She’d been fizzing for hours.
“Ah. A beautiful woman indulging in vice. Is there any more arousing sight?”
If Peter Judd appreciated the specifics of a clandestine meeting, he went out of his way to challenge them.
Diana peeled the transfer away, allowing him space to sit, and as he lowered his carefully tailored bulk onto the bench, he said, “A summons. An urgent summons, no less. Who’s been putting sand in your Vaseline, Diana?”
“Why did Damien Cantor join a visitor group at the Park this morning?”
“Flattering as it is to have you think I’m pulling strings all day, I’m usually as much in the dark as you.”
“I’m not generally in the dark.”
“No. I seem to recall you prefer it with the lights on. May I have one of those?”
She took packet and lighter from her bag and handed them to him. He shuddered at his first inhalation, a parody of pleasure. “Thank you. Look, Cantor’s an investor. He wants to kick the skirting boards, check for damp. And he probably thinks he was being subtle, or even funny, joining a tour group, but you can put that down to his age. And being mega-rich. The mega-rich always think they’re the dog’s bollocks.”
“My understanding of dogs’ bollocks,” said Diana, “is that you can lop them off and chuck them away, and the dog will still operate.”
She finished her cigarette and ground it underfoot. A nearby gull watched with hungry interest.
“It’s a little soon,” said Judd, “to contemplate altering the composition of, what shall we call it, our caucus? Besides which, as I think I mentioned, Cantor is a major contributor. Sidelining him now would be like dropping Beckham before the semi-final.”
“I see you’re letting your sporting references lapse. Now you no longer depend on the goodwill of the electorate.”
“Fuck the electorate.”
“Cantor might be a big noise in his world, but this is mine,” she said. “And his role in my world is to offer his backing and accept my gratitude, or remove himself entirely.”
“I do love it when you draw lines,” Judd said smoothly. “It brings out the feminist in me. I’ll have a word with our Damien, all right? And all shall be well, and all manner of thing and so on. Now. Crisis over, moving on. Your meeting with Nash went well, I trust?”
“. . . Passably.”
“Don’t tell me. You invented a project that’s no longer fit for purpose, and claimed you could make a saving by closing it down and redirecting the funds to your preferred use. And all you need the committee to do is rubberstamp the process.”
“It’s in hand.”
“And you’re confident Nash won’t, ah, put two and two together?”
“Two and two? He’d have trouble adding one and one.”
Which was unfair, and both knew it, but politics was the art of cutting absent parties down to size.
“Excellent. I’m glad your qualms of yesterday have settled. This work we’re doing, this path we’re on—it’s of enormous benefit to the nation. I feel stirrings of heroism.” He glanced at his crotch. “There is one other small thing. I’ve been talking with our, ah, angels, and there’s general agreement that we’d like you to ease off on your infiltration of the Yellow Vest movement.”
The river still flowed, the breeze still blew. The evening light was still leaking away from the sky.
She eased another cigarette from the packet. The lighter wouldn’t spark first time.
“I probably didn’t hear you correctly. For a moment, I thought you were daring to dictate Service policy.”
“Hardly policy. I don’t wish to engage in semantic quibbles, but we’re talking about one minor line of surveillance. Nothing more.”
She didn’t need to look his way to know the pout was in place, the rhetoric forthcoming.
“Look, I understand your concern about the unwashed getting jiggy on the streets, but it’s a minor blip. The disturbances will die down—they always do—and on the smoke-blown landscape left behind, we’ll see one or two figures emerge who it’s wise to pay attention to. Look at You-Know-What. A minor figure, a local joke, never even managed to get elected, somehow positions himself as head of a party everyone wrote off as a bunch of small-minded xenophobes, and ten years later he’s changed history. This, these Yellow Jackets, who knows? Maybe they’re the start of something similar. Just another stage in our political evolution. Democracy is all very well, Diana, but nobody’s ever suggested it’s the be-all and end-all. Especially not the end-all. Harks back to Ancient Greece, thank you, but where’s Greece now? Knocking on the back door, asking for scraps. That’s where its big idea got it.”
“Thanks for the history lesson,” Diana said. “But the big picture isn’t the only thing worrying me. No, what I find concerning is you telling me that this decision has apparently been made, and I’m here to take instruction. And that’s not how this works.”
“You’ve been over-bureaucratised for too long. All those sub-committees and oversight boards, all that middle-fucking-management whose only purpose is to assert its own importance, because if anyone took a good hard look they’d see it doesn’t have any. Like it or not, that’s the world you’re coming from. Where the only decisions you’re allowed to make are either so piddlesome nobody else can be bothered with the paperwork, or so incendiary nobody wants to be caught near the fire. Sound familiar?”
“Peter—”
“No one’s trying to strongarm you, Diana. It’s simply a matter of encouraging you to see things from a wider perspective, now you’re heading up a team with more diversified interests.” He shook his head solemnly. “If I thought anyone was trying to hold you over a barrel, I’d be the first to stand in their way.”
This was a familiar trope. Theoretically, Judd was always ready to lie down in front of bulldozers for a principle, even if, in practice, he tended to be out of the room when the short straw was pulled.
“Well you can let our angels know that their desires will not be considered. Not when I’m making operational decisions, or any other kind. And if any of them want to withdraw their support in light of that, they’re free to do so. Are we clear?”
“As crystal. But bear in mind that if they do decide to withdraw their support, you’ll be back where you started from, rattling your cup in front of a panel of thwarted pygmies.” He touched the knot of his tie with an index finger. “Always supposing you weather any bad publicity arising.”
“Say that again?”
“I’m simply pointing out that when you disappoint rich and powerful men, they let their displeasure be known. But I’m sure it won’t come to that. One small favour, Diana. Allow the Yellow Vest campaign to reach its natural end without attempting to discredit those spearheading it. Where could be the harm?”
“Have a good evening, Peter.”
She was halfway
across the Millennium Bridge before she remembered she’d failed to re-affix the bird-shit transfer. But then, that was the thing about shit, real or fake: once you’d begun spreading it about, it never ended up precisely where you wanted it.
Most great ideas, or a lot of them anyway, were thought at the time to be rubbish, and you were reckoned an idiot for having them.
This was true of stupid ideas too.
Telling them apart was the tricky bit.
So a couple of years ago, when Struan Loy had his brainwave, there’d been no shortage of naysayers telling him he was dipshit crazy. But he’d had the strength of character to rise above that, to recognise the brilliance of his own invention, and to refuse to kowtow to the carping of mediocrities, so here he was, living in a shipping container, cooking past-their-sell-by sausages on a camping stove, and wondering whether that scrabbling he could hear was another rat or a Madagascan spider. These containers had been all over the world, so exotic spiders couldn’t be ruled out.
At the time, though, it had been a great idea.
Back then, things had been looking handy. Momentarily between employments, he’d been a sleeping partner at a fitness centre. Well, sleeping partner—he’d been sleeping with one of the partners. This was a divorcée named Shelley, who, to piss off her ex—the other half of the operation—had given Struan a deal on hiring the hall for evening classes: self-defence. Struan, as he sometimes let drop, had been in the security services in an earlier life; not to go into detail but there’d been training, there’d been combat. Put it like this: do not sneak up behind him. Which added frisson to his “Do It To Them First” session, a fairly lively class that, with hindsight, wasn’t ideal for the over-fifties. Anyway, once the paramedics were off the premises, Shelley had said something about this being the last straw, which came as a surprise to Struan, who hadn’t been counting straws. But it seemed they built up without you knowing.
Anyway, give Shelley her due, she’d been generous while it lasted, and the winter before they’d gone on a South African jaunt, safari included. All top job, but it was during a two-day stopover in Johannesburg that he’d had his eureka moment, and that moment was this: shipping containers. There were whole apartment blocks made out of them in Jo’burg: brightly coloured huge great building blocks stacked on top of each other like kids’ toys, only with people living in them. It was like, on one hand you had a housing crisis, which everyone knew about, and on the other was this solution, which some smart guys in Johannesburg had stumbled upon, but it was up to Struan Loy to carry the message home. Shipping containers. A lot cheaper than actual buildings. This, definitely, was worth putting every penny he had into, along with a lot of pennies he didn’t have but was able to borrow at rates which would seem cheap in the long run, so, post-Shelley, he bought a dozen containers from a shipping company gone liquid, these particular assets being stacked behind an industrial park on the outskirts of Leicester. Struan Loy, entrepreneur. All he needed now was to recruit some of the architectural nous, design nous, which the bright lads back in S.A. had on tap, and his future was up and running.