Spook Street

by Mick Herron

  The old man was asleep, or looked it, only his head visible. His body might have been a fold in the duvet. Lamb regarded him from the doorway, his face expressionless. The fluttery noise was David Cartwright’s breathing: regular, but not deep. The curtains were drawn but thin grey January light seeped in, painting everything it touched in the same lonely colour: the fitted wardrobes each side of the bed, in which Catherine’s many similar outfits doubtless hung, all those long-sleeved, high-necked, mid-calf dresses she favoured, like a governess’s Sunday best; the dressing table on which a few tubs were arranged, moisturising creams and the like, and from a corner of whose mirror a pair of necklaces hung, one of black beads Lamb had never seen before, and the other a slim gold chain she often wore, and probably had sentimental associations; even the pair of scarves draped over a chair, both in dark colours, but one threaded with gold: they were all grey-toned in this light, washed of vitality, though nothing more so than the O.B.’s face, which might have been a death-mask, were it not for that fluttery breathing.

  “Happy now?”

  Lamb said, “You know me. When am I not full of joie de fucking vivre?”

  “So maybe you could leave my bedroom now?”

  “Hey!” he shouted suddenly.

  “Jackson—!”

  The old man’s eyes opened, and any doubt that he’d been genuinely asleep vanished with the frightened yelp he made.

  “Out! Now!” Her voice was taut with fury.

  Lamb watched a moment longer as David Cartwright tried to raise his head from the pillow, his eyes soaking up the frightening unfamiliarity of his surroundings. Fingers crept out from the covers and took what grip they could. He looked like an illustration from a hundred-year-old ghost story.

  And then Catherine Standish was pushing him out of the room, closing the door behind him; remaining inside with the old man. He could hear soothing noises, interrupted by an odd sort of squawking, as if she had a chicken with hiccups in there, rather than a former Service legend.

  Lamb went into her sitting room. When she joined him, he was picking through the postcards on her mantelpiece, checking each for messages, though most were museum-bought.

  “Was that necessary?”

  “I do apologise,” said Lamb. “I was forgetting he was a vulnerable old man.”

  “Yes, well—”

  “I was thinking more of him being a nasty old spook with more blood on his hands than you’ve had gin for breakfast. When did they get here?”

  “‘They’?”

  “This is me you’re talking to. River brought him, right?”

  “I thought you’d identified River’s body.”

  “Wishful thinking,” said Lamb. “Though to be fair, he looked like River might, if you put two bullets in his head. Which could yet happen, the aggravation he’s causing.”

  “They got here about four.”

  “He’s had more sleep than I’ve had, then.” Without warning, Lamb collapsed onto the two-seater sofa, which was stronger than it looked and didn’t buckle. “What was their story?”

  “They didn’t really have one.”

  “And you took them in?”

  “River wouldn’t have come if he’d had anywhere else to go.”

  “The last refuge of the desperate,” said Lamb. “Yeah, I can see how you fill that role.” He was holding a cigarette, of course: it had appeared in his hand by magic. He slotted it into his mouth and sucked it thoughtfully. “And now he’s off on a marvelous adventure.”

  “What’s going on, Jackson?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “He arrived in the middle of the night, asked me to look after his grandfather, and left.”

  “Always mistaking drama for style, that boy. You gunna keep hovering like that? Sit down. Make yourself at home.”

  She simmered, but sat anyway: not on the sofa. She said, “He was in a state. Still is. Confused, not sure what’s happening. He called me Rose. Did he really shoot someone in his bathroom? Or was that just you playing games?”

  “You have a nasty mind, Standish. It’s wasted on this.” He indicated their surroundings: a calm and quiet room, with books on the shelves. “And yes, he did.”

  “Twice?”

  “Good question. Know what? I don’t think so. Old, confused man, like you said, I think once he’s shot someone, first thing he’s gunna do is drop the gun. I hate ageism, as you know, but old people are pretty useless.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I haven’t missed your observations.”

  “That’s good, because I have more.”

  He paused, and his eyes shifted focus; he was looking at something that wasn’t there. Catherine recognised the signs—as familiar to her as the way he deliberately misheard her comment—and knew he was about to spin a story from whatever fragments he’d so far collected.

  “I think someone came to kill the old man,” he said, “and didn’t realise he’s a dangerous old fuck. So whoever it is ends up dead in the bathroom, and that’s when young Cartwright arrives for one of his cosy at-home evenings with grandpa. Anyone else, anyone sane, you know what they’d have done at this point? They’d have called it in. Not like the old man’s gunna get done for murder, no, what’d happen next is the Dogs arrive, followed by the cleaners, and twenty minutes later, it’s like it never happened. But that’s not what young Cartwright does. Why’s that?”

  “You’re about to tell me.”

  “Well, he’s a dick, obviously. We have to factor that in. But assuming he’s got an actual motive, beyond his tireless desire to play Double-Oh Seven, it’s probably that he thinks calling the Dogs will make things worse.”

  “. . . Seriously?” She was putting it together even as he spoke. “He thinks it was a Service hit?”

  “Well, it was a fuck-up. That’s circumstantial evidence right there. And if the old bastard’s actually gone loopy, the kid might have a point.”

  “What, he was worried the Park has a, what have I heard it called, an enhanced retirement package?” she said. “That never really happened.”

  “Are you asking or telling?”

  “I’m saying I don’t believe it ever did.”

  “And I’m the one gets called a wide-eyed idealist. But what you believe’s neither here nor there, because it’s what River thinks that matters in the circs. And he thinks if he calls the Dogs, they might just finish the job. So he puts another bullet into Mystery Man’s face—”

  “He what?”

  “See? I knew you were interested.” Lamb removed the cigarette from his mouth and tucked it behind his ear. Then he fished another from his pocket and plugged it into his mouth. It was possible that he wasn’t aware of either of these actions. “He does that because while Mystery Man might pass for River, he’s hardly an identical twin.” He pressed a finger to his upper lip. “That mole of his, looks like he’s been eating crap and missed a bit? Mystery Man doesn’t have one, and that’s going to be noticed.”

  “So he’s just muddying the waters.”

  “It’s what a joe would do,” Lamb said grudgingly.

  “It wouldn’t buy him more than twenty minutes.”

  “He got this far, didn’t he? And then further. Where’d he head off to, by the way?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  Lamb said, “See, I get told by HR all the time that I never give you lot training, and you know what I always say?”

  “You tell them to fuck off.”

  “Well, yeah, I tell them to fuck off, but you know what I say after that? I tell them I lead by example. Case in point. If I don’t like a question, I answer a different one. Like you did just there.” He gave a complacent smile, and the cigarette dropped from his mouth. He caught it between two fingers. “I didn’t ask whether River told you where he was going, I just asked where he was going.”


  “What makes you think I know?”

  “Because you’re not a great liar. You’re good, but you’re not great.”

  “Excuse me? When did I lie?”

  “When you pretended to believe me when I told you he was dead.”

  “. . . So?”

  “So you know he’s somewhere far enough away that I couldn’t have got there and back in the time it took me to turn up at your door. Jesus, Standish. It’s not rocket science.”

  “Not for someone with your twisted thought processes,” she conceded.

  They sat in silence and stared at each other, as if this were just another phase of a game they’d both been playing for a long long time.

  At last she said, “He hung his jacket over a chair. I went through his pockets while he was getting his grandfather settled.”

  “That must have brought back memories. Didn’t you use to roll sailors, back in the day?”

  She said, “He had a passport. British. Alex Lockhead, no, Adam. Adam Lockhead. And a Eurostar ticket, and some euros.”

  Lamb groaned. “Oh, great. The idiot’s gone to France.”

  “On someone else’s passport.” Catherine shook her head. “I didn’t think he’d get past border control.”

  “Inside Europe? If the passport’s not on a watch-list, he could waltz through wearing falsies and a tutu. Though mind you, having a photo that actually resembles him might raise suspicion.” He sniffed. “Mine makes me look fat.”

  “Imagine.”

  “So he’s over the channel. But France is a big place. What’s he plan to do, stomp up and down the Champs Élysées, waving his arms in the air?”

  “There was a café receipt.”

  “Of course there was,” said Lamb.

  There was a hold-up somewhere: a faulty traffic light, an accident, or—probably—a stretch of road being dug up, with a knock-on effect spreading ever outward. He’d seen a sign near some roadworks not long ago: two hundred yards of plastic mesh and bollards, not a workman in sight, and a notice reading: “We are currently examining the waterpipes in this area. At times, it will look like no work is being done.” Nothing like getting your alibi in first.

  Claude Whelan chuckled, then abruptly stopped. Three days after the Westacres bomb, last thing he needed was a tabloid headline, Intelligence Chief enjoying a private joke. And you never knew when a lens was trained on you, even in the back seat of your smoke-screened official limousine.

  He was being driven back from Downing Street. The COBRA session had been long, and last night sleepless; he had ended up in the spare bed, to avoid disturbing Claire. His first COBRA: no wonder he’d been nervous. Nobody had to tell Whelan his elevation had been unexpected. Dame Ingrid Tearney had cast a long shadow, and there were nooks and crannies of the Service still in darkness; after her—as he’d heard it called—over-managed tenure, there’d been an expectation that the mantle would pass back to Ops. After all, Charles Partner, the last head of the Service to have hailed from Operations, had overseen a successful, invigorating era that was looked on as a golden age. Had it been more widely known that he’d spent much of his career in the pay of the Soviets, this afterglow might have been tarnished somewhat; as it was, only his apparent suicide cast a retrospective taint of unreliability over his administration, and since this was ascribed by those not in the know to hidden trauma from his days as an Active, it had subsequently been decided that hands-on experience was a drawback, and Partner’s successors to date had achieved office mostly by dint of managerial cunning. But following Tearney there’d been rumours of impending “reform,” and while the word had long lost any association with notions of improvement, attaching itself instead to cost-cutting, it had nevertheless been mooted that a new direction might be in the offing, and Ops in the ascendancy once more. Diana Taverner would have been the obvious choice. But Tearney, when she went, had gone with the grace of a scuttled supertanker: it had taken ages, it had been very messy, and it left few onlookers with clean feathers. Reform had thus subsided into the usual face-saving reshuffle, and Whelan, recently gonged after twenty years’ service, and very much not associated with the Dame’s doings, had been helicoptered in from across the river: a safe pair of hands.

  And any secret doubts he harboured about this he’d kept in check this morning. Having laid out the facts rehearsed with Diana Taverner, he’d forged on into the territory that was Robert Winters—the man caught on camera detonating himself in a crowded shopping centre; a made-in-Britain version of all those headlines, which had shrunk over the years to a page-seven sidebar, about events in distant marketplaces. Nothing brought the meaning of “suicide bomber” home quite so hard as familiar logos glimpsed through the rubble. So there he was—now you see him, now you don’t—and they owed his name to the brilliant work of the boys and girls of Regent’s Park, who had traced his passage backwards through the streets of London, courtesy of all that CCTV coverage the liberal tendency decried; as if putting a smashed clock together, they had reconstructed the minutes that had ticked down to zero, each stage of the journey rooting Robert Winters more fixedly into the life he had emerged from, and loosening him from the explosive manner in which he had ended it. Here he was in the underground, among crowds of the ignorantly blissful; here he was changing lines at Edgware Road, his blurry features by now more familiar to his watchers than those of their own children. And so it went, step after step, fragments of footage spliced together in reverse order, and if he was still a cipher at this point, assigned a random codename nobody paid attention to, because he was always he—him—they had known long before they pinned him down that this was the inevitable end of their quest. Nobody so hunted could remain uncaught. We will have him was the common refrain, and it became almost irrelevant that he was unhavable, that what was left of him could be weighed on a set of kitchen scales; no, they would have him—they would bring him back to life through digital magic, interrogate his spirit, undo his evil. And in the end they achieved this much: one final flicker of footage showing him emerging from a backpackers’ hotel in Earls Court, eighty-one minutes before the detonation in Westacres—stepping from a cheap and nasty dive into a grey damp January London; the skies barely distinguishable from the pavements; the pavements wet and littered; the litter pulped and mushy.

  Two minutes later a net had dropped over it so thinly meshed an anorexic flea couldn’t have slipped through.

  The Earls Court hostel was their crime scene, and it was here, in one of its grubby rooms, that he acquired an identity at last, for not only had Robert Winters registered under that name, he had left his passport under his pillow for them to find, alongside the pay-as-you-go he had used to text Lucas Fairweather; and—naturally—as much DNA as the boys and girls could wish for. An amateur error? Pointless to ask: when it comes to suicide bombers, everyone’s a first-timer. No, this was a cock being snooked from the other side of death; Robert Winters nailing down his place in history before setting off to create his own sunset. It would be a far far better thing if they buried the passport with his victims and claimed never to have found it. Cheat the bastard of posthumous fame, and in doing so reveal his true nature: that whatever blaze of infamy he’d sought to depart the planet in, he had been at heart a nobody, a nothing; not worth the moment it took to learn his name.

  Which, philosophically, might have been appealing, but wasn’t an acceptable approach to take in a COBRA briefing.

  “Robert Winters.”

  “Yes, PM.”

  (He liked to be addressed as “PM.” Presumably because he still couldn’t believe it himself.)

  “A British citizen.”

  “That’s right, PM.”

  “Not a convert . . . ?”

  Because that would have helped: if the Westacres bomber had been radicalised by conversion. But—

  “There’s nothing among his possessions to suggest that, no.”


  “Pity.”

  Claude Whelan couldn’t, in good conscience, respond to this.

  The PM, though, hadn’t finished: “And no evidence yet of any other extremist affiliation—animals, veggies, climate change?”

  “Nothing. But it’s early days. We’ll have a full working dossier by noon, see what happens when we shake the tree.”

  But the PM, for all his faults—and there was an actual list of these in circulation, courtesy of a cadre of his own backbenchers—wasn’t always slow on the uptake. “But if you have to look for it, it’s not much of a cause, is it? Terrorists hang their flags out. No point perpetrating a massacre anonymously.”

  This had troubled Whelan, too. Leaving a passport in open view was one thing, but he’d have expected a terrorist’s bible, a video message, a wonderwall. Look on my works and tremble sort of thing. But for the moment, he wanted to emphasise progress.

  “The hostel’s a staging post. When we have his . . . lair, we’ll find motive.”

  He regretted lair as soon as it was out of his mouth.

  Somebody asked, “What about the bomb? Progress?”

  “The HE element, the high explosive, we already knew was Semtex,” Whelan said. “We’ve since determined it came from a batch stolen during a raid on a police armoury in Wakefield.”

  “The police have Semtex now? When did that start?”

  There was a slight ripple of laughter: not as much as if it had been the PM’s quip.

  Whelan said, “It was part of a haul seized by HMRC, along with a quantity of firearms, off the Cumbrian coast in ’92. Believed at the time to be intended for an IRA splinter group. But there was no proof of that, and no arrests made.”

  “Ninety-two?” This was the Defence minister. “That’s ancient history.”

  Whelan suspected he was trying to remember who’d been in government then; whether this was something that could be passed off on the other party. He said, “The raid on the armoury took place three years later.”