by Mick Herron
‘Who’s he been talking to?’
‘Thank God you’re here. Would I have thought of that?’ A mobile in each hand, Lamb pressed buttons with each thumb; surprisingly dextrous for a self-proclaimed Luddite. ‘Now that’s strange,’ he said, in a tone indicating that it wasn’t. ‘This one’s barely used. Just one incoming call.’
River wanted to say ‘Ring back,’ and only the cast-iron knowledge that Lamb wanted him to say it too kept his tongue in harness.
Still sitting, Min and Louisa kept their own counsel.
After a moment’s thought, Lamb pressed a few more buttons, and raised the mobile to his ear.
It was answered almost immediately.
Lamb said, ‘I’m afraid he can’t come to the phone right now.’
And then he said, ‘We need to talk.’
Chapter 10
Down a quiet street in Islington—its front doors perched atop flights of stone steps; some with pillars standing sentry; some with Tiffany windows above—Robert Hobden walked, raincoat flapping in the night wind. It was after midnight. Some of the houses were dressed in darkness; from others, light peeped behind thick curtains; and Hobden could imagine the chink of cutlery, and of glasses meeting together in toasts. Halfway down the street, he found the house he was after.
There were lights on. Again, he caught an imaginary murmur from a successful dinner party: by now, they’d be on to the brandy. But that didn’t matter: lights or not, he’d still be ringing the bell—leaning on it, in fact, until the door opened. This took less than a minute.
‘Yes?’
It was a sleek man speaking, dark hair brushed back from a high forehead. He had piercing brown eyes which were focused on Hobden. Dark suit, white shirt. Butler? Perhaps. It didn’t matter.
‘Is Mr Judd in?’
‘It’s very late, sir.’
‘Funnily enough,’ Hobden said, ‘I knew that. Is he in?’
‘Who shall I say, sir?’
‘Hobden. Robert Hobden.’
The door closed.
Hobden turned and faced the street. The houses opposite seemed to tilt towards his gaze; the effect of their height, and the overhead clouds scudding against a velvet backdrop. His heartbeat was curiously steady. Not long ago he’d come as close to death as he’d ever been, and yet a calm had settled upon him. Or maybe he was calm because he’d come close to death, and so was unlikely to do so again tonight. A matter of statistics.
He didn’t know for sure the intruder had meant to kill him. It had been confused—one moment he’d been pacing the room, waiting for a phone call that wouldn’t come; the next there’d been a black-masked stranger demanding his laptop in an urgent whisper. He must have picked his way through the door. It was all noise and fear, the man waving a gun, and then another intrusion, another stranger, and then somehow they were all outside and there was blood on the pavement and—
Hobden had run. He didn’t know who’d been shot, and didn’t care. He’d run. How long since he’d done that? Back when he’d had urgent places to be, he’d have taken a taxi. So before long his lungs felt fit to burst, but still he’d pounded away, feet slapping pavement like wide flat fish, the juddering shock reverberating up to his teeth. Round one corner, then another. He’d been living in London’s armpit for longer than he cared think about: still, he was lost within minutes. Didn’t dare look back. Couldn’t tell where his own footfalls stopped and another’s might start; two loops of sound interlocking like Olympic circles.
At last, heaving, he’d come to a crumpled halt in a shop doorway where the usual city smells lurked: dirt and spoilt fat and cigarette ends, and always, always, the smell of winos’ piss. Only then had he established that nobody was following. There were only the late-night London ghosts, who came out when the citizens were tucked up in bed, and anyone still on the streets was fair game.
‘Got a light, mate?’
He’d surprised himself with the ferocity of his reply: ‘Just fuck off, all right? Just fuck off!’
You could say this for the mad, at night; they recognized the madder. The man had slunk away, and Hobden had recovered his breath—filled his lungs with that obnoxious stew of smells—and moved on.
He couldn’t go back to his flat. Not now; maybe never. This was an oddly cheering thought. Wherever he went, he wasn’t going back there.
And in fact, there weren’t many places he could go. Everyone needs somewhere where the doors will always open. Hobden didn’t have one—the doors in his life had slammed shut when his name appeared on that list; when, for the first time ever, he’d shuddered to see his name in the papers, no longer the smoothly provocative but the rawly unacceptable—but still, still, there were letterboxes he could whisper through. Favours people owed him. Back then, when the storm was raging, Hobden had kept his mouth shut. There were some who thought this meant he valued their survival over his own. None had made the simple connection: that if they’d been made to suffer the same ostracism he endured, their cause would have been set back years.
Nothing to do with racism, whatever the liberal elite pretended. Nothing to do with hate, or repulsion at the sight of difference. Everything to do with character, and the need for national identity to assert itself. Instead of lying down and accepting this unworkable multiculturalism; this recipe for disaster …
But he hadn’t had time to rehearse unanswerable arguments. He’d needed sanctuary. He’d also needed to get his message across: and if Peter Judd wasn’t going to answer his phone calls, then Peter Judd was going to have to answer his door.
Though Peter Judd, of course, didn’t answer his own door. Certainly not at this time of night, and probably not at any other.
The door opened, and the sleek character reappeared. ‘Mr Judd is not available.’
The absence of sir carried its own echo.
But Hobden had no qualms about blocking the door with his foot. ‘In that case, tell Mr Judd he might have to make himself available first thing in the morning. The red-tops like their front pages laid out by lunchtime. Gives them time to organize the important stuff. You know, girly shots. Gossip columns.’
His foot withdrew, and the door closed.
He thought: Who do these people think I am? Do they think I’ll lie on my back, waggle all four legs in the air, while they pretend I’m some stray they never invited home?
Maybe two minutes; maybe three. He didn’t count. Again, he studied the clouds whipping elsewhere, and the looming roofs opposite threatening to come crashing down.
Next time the door opened, no words were spoken. Mr Sleek simply stepped to one side, his demeanour suggesting he’d drawn the word grudging in a post-dinner game of Charades.
Hobden was shown downstairs, past the drawing room, from behind whose closed door came the soft murmur of happiness. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d attended a dinner party, though he’d probably been discussed at a few since.
Downstairs was the kitchen, which was about the size of Hobden’s flat, and more carefully outfitted: wood and gleaming enamel, with a marble block forming a coffinsized island in its centre. Pitiless overhead lighting would have shown up streaks of grease or splashes of sauce, but there were none, even now: the dishwasher hummed, and glasses were assembled along one surface, but it all looked like a tidy representation of a party’s aftermath in a catalogue dedicated to polite living. From stainless steel hooks on a rail hung shiny pans, each with their sole purpose; one for boiling eggs, another for scrambling them, and so on. A row of olive oil bottles, ordered by region, occupied a shelf. He still had a journalist’s eye, Robert Hobden. Depending on who he was profiling, he’d take these things as evidence of middle-class certainty, or mail-ordered props intended to buffer up just such an image. On the other hand, he wasn’t writing profiles any more. And if he was, no one would print them.
Sleek stood by the door, pointedly not leaving Hobden alone.
Hobden drifted to the far side of the room; leant against the sink.
>
He wasn’t writing profiles any more, but if he were, and if his current host were his target, he’d be bound to start with the name. Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations—Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!!—Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the GBP, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the tax-man blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle. And here he was now, bursting through the kitchen door with an alacrity that had Mr Sleek making a sharp sideways step to avoid being flattened.
‘Robert Hobden!’ he cried.
‘PJ.’
‘Robert. Rob—Rob! How are you?’
‘I’m not so bad, PJ. Yourself?’
‘Oh, of course. Seb, take Robert’s coat, would you?’
‘I won’t stay long—’
‘But long enough to remove your coat! That’s just dandy, that’s just fine.’ This to Seb, if that was Sleek’s name. ‘You can leave us now.’ The kitchen door swung closed. PJ’s tone didn’t alter. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, you stupid fucking cunt?’ It reminded him of darker days; of missions you might not come back from. He’d always come back from them, obviously, but there were others who hadn’t. Whether the difference lay in the mission or the men, there was no way of knowing.
Tonight, he expected to come back. But he already had one body on the floor and another in a hospital bed, a pretty high casualty rate when he wasn’t even running an op.
The meet was by the canal, near where the towpath came to an end and the water disappeared inside a long tunnel. Lamb had chosen it because it cut down on directions of approach, and he didn’t trust Diana Taverner. For the same reason, he got there first. It was approaching two. A quarter moon was blotted now and then by passing clouds. A house across the water was lit, all three storeys, and he could hear chatter and occasional laughter from smokers in the garden. Some people threw parties midweek. Jackson Lamb kept tabs on his department’s body count.
She came from the Angel end, her approach signalled by the tapping of her heels on the path.
‘Are you alone?’ she asked.
He spread his arms as if to measure the stupidity of her question. As he did so his shirt came untucked, and night air scratched his belly.
She looked beyond him, at the treed slope leading up to the road. Then back at him. ‘What do you think you’re playing at?’
‘I lent you an agent,’ he said. ‘She’s in hospital.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘Lloyd Webber-grade, you said. One step up from sharpening pencils. But now she’s got a bullet in her head.’
‘Lamb,’ she said. ‘The job was the other day. Whatever’s happened to her since, that’s hardly—’
‘Don’t even bother. She was shot outside Hobden’s place. By Jed Moody, intentionally or otherwise. When you’re not co-opting my team, you’re subverting them. You gave Moody a mobile phone. What else did you give him? An earful of promises? A ticket to his future?’
Taverner said, ‘Check the rulebook, Lamb. You run Slough House, and God knows, nobody’s looking to take that away. But I’m head of ops, which means directing personnel. All personnel. Yours or anyone else’s.’
Jackson Lamb farted.
‘God, you’re a vile specimen.’
‘So I’m told,’ he said. ‘Okay, say you’re right, and this is none of my business. What do I do about the body on my staircase? Call in the Dogs?’
If he hadn’t had it before, he had her attention now.
‘Moody?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘The proverbial dodo.’
Across the water, the smokers fell upon a joke of unusual hilarity. The canal’s surface was ruffled by the wind.
Lamb said, ‘You wanted to subcontract, you could have chosen more carefully. Jesus, I mean, Jed Moody? Even when he was any good he wasn’t any good. And it’s a long time since he was any good.’
‘Who killed him?’
‘You want to hear something funny? He tripped over his own feet.’
‘That’ll sound good before Limitations. Though you might want to leave out the bit about it being funny.’
Lamb threw back his head and laughed a silent laugh, while leaves’ shadows flickered across his wobbling face. He looked like someone Goya might have painted. ‘Good. Very good. Limitations, yes. So we call in the Dogs? Hell, it’s a death. Why don’t I call the plod? As it happens, I’ve a mobile with me.’ He grinned at her. His teeth, mostly different shapes, shone wet.
‘Okay.’
‘The coroner. His turf, right?’
‘You’ve made your point, Lamb.’
He went fumbling in his pockets, and for a horrified moment she thought he was unzipping himself, but he produced a packet of Marlboro instead. He drew one with his teeth, and as an afterthought waved the pack in her direction.
Taverner took one. Always accept hospitality. It forms a bond. Makes you allies.
Of course, whoever had taught her that hadn’t been thinking of Jackson Lamb.
He said, ‘Talk.’
‘It’s good to see you too, PJ.’
‘Have you lost your cocking mind?’
‘You’ve not been taking my calls.’
‘Of course I haven’t, you’re fucking toxic. Did anyone see you arrive?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What kind of prick answer is that?’
‘The only prick answer I’ve got!’ Hobden shouted.
The pitch of his voice caused something metallic to ring.
It gave PJ pause, or caused him to appear that it did. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Well. Crikey. I suppose you’ve got a reason.’
‘Someone tried to kill me,’ Hobden said.
‘To kill you? Yes, well. Lots of fanatics about. I mean, you’re not the most popular—’
‘This wasn’t a fanatic, PJ. It was a spook.’
‘A spook.’
‘We’re talking assassination.’
Judd’s lapse into his public persona didn’t survive the word. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. What was it, a close encounter on a zebra crossing? I’ve got guests, Hobden. The fucking Minister for Culture’s upstairs, and he’s got the attention span of a gnat, so I need to—’
‘He was a spook. They’ve been following me. He broke into my flat and waved a gun around and—somebody got shot. If you don’t believe me, turn the news on. Or on second thoughts, don’t—there’ll be a D. But call the Home Secretary, he’ll know. Blood on the pavement. Outside my flat.’
PJ weighed it up: the likelihood of any of this having happened, as against Hobden’s appearance in his kitchen. ‘Okay,’ he said at length. ‘But you live at the arse end of nowhere, Robert. I mean, home invasions, they must be weekly events. What makes this different?’
Hobden shook his head. ‘You’re not listening.’ Then shook his head again: he hadn’t laid out the whole story. That business at Max’s the other morning; the spilt coffee. Nothing to it at the time, but since the gunman’s appearance Hobden had replayed recent history, and concluded that this evening had been a culmination, not a one-off. When he’d picked up his keys to leave the café, his memory stick had fallen loose and bounced on to the table. It had never done that before. Why hadn’t a warning bell rung?
‘They tried to
take my files. They want to see how much I know.’
And now PJ took on a new seriousness; a side the public never got to see. ‘Your files?’
‘They didn’t get them. They copied my memory stick, but—’
‘What the fuck do your files contain, Hobden?’
‘—it’s a dummy. Just numbers. With any luck they’ll think it’s a code, waste their time trying to—’
‘What. Exactly. Do your files contain?’
Hobden raised his hands to eye-level; examined them a moment or two. They shook. ‘See that? I could have died. They could have killed me.’
‘Give me strength.’ And now Peter Judd started ransacking his kitchen, morally certain there’d be alcohol somewhere, or what was the point of it? A bottle of vodka appeared. Cooking vodka, would that be? Did people cook with vodka? Was PJ muttering any of this aloud, or did his body language shout it while he located a glass and splashed out a generous measure?
‘So.’ Handing the glass to Hobden. ‘What do your files contain? Names?’ He barked the sudden laugh TV audiences liked. ‘My name wouldn’t be there anywhere.’ Underneath the bark, the hint of bite. ‘Would it?’
‘No names. Nothing like that.’
This was good news, but prompted a follow-up. ‘So what are you on about?’
Hobden said, ‘Five’s running an op. I’ve known about it for a while. Or not known about it, exactly—known something was going to happen, but not precisely what.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Start making sense.’
‘I was at the Frontline. One night last year.’
‘They still let you in?’
A flash of anger. ‘I’ve paid my subs.’ He finished his vodka, held the glass out for more. ‘Diana Taverner was there, with one of her leftie journalist pals.’
‘I’ve never been sure what disturbs me more,’ Peter Judd said, filling Hobden’s glass. ‘The fact that MI5 is run by women, or the fact that everybody seems to know this. I mean, didn’t it used to be called the secret service?’