by Mick Herron
“I’m accustomed to being taken seriously, yes.”
“Because I don’t have clearance to enter the Park,” Shirley said.
“I know.”
She what?
Shirley said: “Well, if you already know, why—”
“Because I’m trying to make a point, Ms. Dander. And my point is, whatever investigation you’re conducting, I’m far from convinced you’re the one who ought to be conducting it. If you follow my meaning.”
It took Shirley a moment, but yeah, she grasped it.
“Which rather means I’m unlikely to cooperate when you finally get round to drafting your request for information.”
Which was all well and good, it occurred to Shirley, but then why was the cow still hanging on the line, when she could have saved herself several breaths and hung up half a minute ago?
And then came a sudden noise, the like of which she’d never heard before. Terrified, she looked at Marcus, and saw that he, too, had heard it—if he hadn’t, she thought afterwards, she’d have happily sworn off narcotics for good; uncomplainingly attended her Anger Management sessions; might even have gone back to the Church, so forever after, she was grateful that Marcus had heard it too, proving that it was really happening, not a hallucinatory nightmare.
Out on the landing, heading down the staircase, was Jackson Lamb. With him was Moira Tregorian.
And the pair of them were laughing happily.
The sound hovered mockingly once they’d gone; it lingered in the stairwell, fluttered about like a moth in search of a bulb. Marcus looked like someone had just swatted him with a shovel. Shirley’s own expression was equally graceless. But even as she closed her mouth an idea was forming, and the fact that Molly Doran was still on the line made it glimmer all the brighter.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
A faint sigh supplied the answer.
“Guess what I just heard,” she said.
“I’m certainly not going to do that.”
“You should. You should try. I’ll give you three guesses and a major clue.”
“A major clue?”
“Uh-huh.”
Molly Doran said, “And I imagine the forfeit—”
“I know what that means,” Shirley said.
“Very good. And I imagine the forfeit in the event of my failing to guess correctly is that I have to help you with your enquiries.”
“Yep.”
“Forgive me, but I fail to see what I have to gain from this.”
“Well, if you guess right, I hang up and never bother you again.”
“That does sound tempting,” Molly admitted.
Shirley said, “The clue is, it was Jackson Lamb made the noise.”
“Well,” Molly said after another pause. “Given Jackson’s limited repertoire, that sounds like the odds are in my favour, doesn’t it?”
The bus had arrived at a scheduled stop ten minutes previously and had remained there since, engine off, though traffic flowed freely past. None of the passengers made any audible complaint. Either they were regulars and had expected the hiatus, or were new to buses and had lost the will to live. On the top deck, at the back, Diana Taverner was in session with Claude Whelan:
“A cold body,” she said, “is a ready-made identity. Birth certificate, passport, National Security number, bank account, credit rating, the works. Constructed over the course of years, through official channels. This isn’t master forgers at work, this is the wheels of the Civil Service doing what the Civil Service does best. Which is paperwork, Claude. Cradle-to-grave paperwork. That’s what a cold body is. All you do is add flesh and blood, and you’ve got a fully documented life.”
“I thought that was standard practice. Creating false IDs.”
“These aren’t false. That’s the point. They’re real identities awaiting an owner. Don’t get me wrong, we can create fakes. And they’re good. If we fake a driver’s licence, it’ll look real to the last detail, but that last detail is the expiry date. Once we reach that, we’ll need to make a new one. With a cold body ID, that’s not an issue. You simply apply for a renewal. Because the expired one’s real, issued by the DVLA.”
Whelan said, “That must have required full-time maintenance.”
“Of course. Back in the day we had the resources we deserve. But the wardrobe department was closed once the Cold War was declared won, which for all intents and purposes was the day the Wall came down. It was deemed surplus to requirements, but don’t get me started on Treasury myopia. No, these days field identities are strictly off the cuff. Even long-term relocation covers are done on the cheap.”
“So what happened to these . . . cold bodies? When wardrobe was discontinued?”
“Mothballed. Or so it was thought.”
“But Robert Winters . . .”
“Was one of them. Yes.”
“How? How in the hell could he be? According to the passport, he’s twenty-eight. And you’ve just told me the project was closed way back—”
“Claude. You’re not listening. A cold body was a cradle-to-grave service. Identities created from scratch, in real time. The department had been running since the war, so the IDs it rolled out in the sixties were for twenty-year-olds. And so on. Get the picture?”
“A long-term undertaking,” he said faintly.
“You might say. Which means that when the department ceased to exist, they would have had any number of IDs in different states of preparation. Including one for a two-year-old Robert Winters.”
“If all we’re going on is the name—”
“And date and birthplace. Trust me, the Robert Winters who blew himself up in Westacres was a Service creation. There’s no other way he could have had that passport.”
“Jesus Christ.”
The bus lumbered into life, shuddering nose to tail.
“How long have you known?” he asked. “Who brought this to you?”
“One of my kids. A few hours ago.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me then?”
“And if I had? What would you have done?”
He struggled to contain his anger. “What do you think? I’d have included it in my presentation to the PM—”
“And what would have happened then? No, don’t bother. I’ll tell you. We’d be in lockdown, Claude. The Park, over the river, even bloody Slough House—every department, every agent. We’d have Special Branch, or worse still Six, going through every desk. It would make the Cambridge spies inquiry look like garden party chit-chat.” She paused. “Which, to be fair, it more or less was.”
“Where’s your . . . kid now?”
“With the Dogs.”
“You’ve used internal security on this? They’re supposed to be upholding the law, damn it, not acting as your praetorian guard!”
Taverner shook her head. “You still don’t get it, do you? If even a hint gets out about this, any credibility the security services have in this country will be over. Every crackpot conspiracy nut in the world will be calling Westacres a black flag op, and even normal people will believe it.”
“That’s hardly—”
She rolled right over him. “Do you know how long it took, after the bomb, before rumours of cover-ups were plastered across the internet? Less than two hours. That’s the level of trust we’re looking at. We are losing this war, Claude, and believe me, it is a war. They said it couldn’t be waged on an abstract, and I’ll leave that to the philosophers and the pedants, because when you’ve got broken kids being carried out of a wrecked shopping centre, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a war. And we need to be on the front line. We do. You and me. Because without our guidance, the Service will be flapping around like a damp sock instead of doing what it was built to do, which is catch these bastards. So let’s make sure we’re on the same page, here a
nd now, before we get off this bus. And in case you’re having difficulty making up your mind, remember this. You signed the C&C.”
“I signed the what?”
“The warrant authorising the Dogs to pick up Giti Rahman—the kid who found this—and hold her.”
“I didn’t—ah.”
Your signature, please, in triplicate, he recalled.
And: Do I need to read all this?
“Which I did,” he said slowly, “before briefing COBRA.”
Thus proving prior knowledge.
It really was surprising, he thought, how slowly buses moved.
“No need to look like that,” she said after a while. “I’m on your side.”
“Good to know. But was it really necessary to make sure my balls were in your pocket before declaring your support?”
“It’s just politics, Claude. You’ll get used to it. And believe me, when the Service is hanging by a thread, the politics get nasty.”
It struck him that Diana Taverner was enjoying this. Or at least looked intensely alert, alive . . . attractive. This was not an observation he wanted to dwell on. Casting it from his mind, he said, “So what do we do now?”
“We find out how our cold body wound up strapping on a Semtex vest. Which means finding out who had access to these IDs, and plugging them into a light socket until they talk.”
“We don’t torture suspects in the UK,” he said automatically.
“Grow up, Claude.”
“And when you say these IDs . . . ?”
“Yes. Plural. As far as I can tell, there are three cold bodies unaccounted for. Which means there are two more out there still upright. And God only knows what they plan to do next.”
The smell was stronger here, more acrid, and stung River’s throat as he walked the narrow road. This was bordered on one side by eight feet of brick with a broken-glass topping, and on the other by a hedgerow beyond which lay fields and then roads, a distant smattering of houses, France. The drizzle persisted, and he was starting to notice that his shoes weren’t as waterproof as they might be; that his left foot was chafing against a damp sock. But he’d spent days on the Black Mountains while training; spent nights in ditches evading capture by squaddies. He could survive wet feet. Just so long as he wasn’t expected to speak convincing French while doing so.
Thin branches bent over the road, lending shade to what was already grey and toneless. He ran a finger along one, and it came away grey with soot.
Les Arbres: the house. Not so easy to find on account of its not being there any more; on account of it having succumbed to a fire three nights previously.
Where the main road met a twin-rutted track, the wall bordering Les Arbres’ grounds turned right, and became a waist-high, moss-covered mound. Heading down the track, River peered over it into a wooded area: largely leafless but on an upward gradient, so visibility remained limited. There was no sound. He was only a quarter mile or so from Angevin, but could have been transported into the heart of a lonelier region. He would barely have been surprised to meet a horse-drawn cart coming up the track to meet him. But he encountered no one, and only once or twice heard a car on the road, heading to or from the village.
“When was the fire?” he had asked his new friend back in the café.
It had been three nights previously.
“Was anyone hurt?”
The house had apparently been empty. At least, no bodies had been found among the wreckage.
“How many people had lived there?”
Nobody had been entirely sure. It had not been a family situation. A commune, rather. If River was familiar with that term.
River was.
“The fire. Was it arson?”
“Deliberate? Yes, it would seem so. There were no vehicles there, yes? Everybody left before the fire started. And the blaze . . . ha. Big black clouds, blacker even than the night.”
Meaning petrol had been used, River surmised. Petrol or something; something to burn fast and hard enough that no evidence would remain.
But evidence of what?
He reached a pair of gates; large iron ones with a circular sign attached, propriete privee defense d’entrer, in red. They were chained together, but this was as good a place as any to make entrance. River scrambled over the wall, smearing his hands green in the process, and followed a track the width of a car through the melancholy trees. The smell grew stronger. He was reminded of clearing the grate at his grandfather’s house the morning after a late-night session, one in which they’d sat by a dying fire while the O.B. poured out stories, his clarity growing dimmer with the light. But River had always wanted to listen, had always wanted to hear. Never wanted his grandfather’s voice silenced. It was unlikely they’d share another such evening, he thought, as he made his way closer to the heart of the now-dead fire.
His first sight of the house was unexpected, as he crested a rise he hadn’t noticed he was approaching, but in that same first moment it was there, it was gone again too. For the house was no more. What must once have been an impressive structure, three or four storeys high, seven or eight rooms to a floor, was now a ragged outline of walls, with charred lumps of timber piled between. Anything the house had once held had melted to barely recognisable pyramids of scorched and blackened sculpture: window frames and furniture, snakes of cable, lengths of staircase. An enamel sink hovered three feet above the ground, or did at first sight: it was suspended there, in fact, by upright piping. Around it sat the squat lumpy shapes of its former colleagues: a stove, a washing machine, a dishwasher, a fridge. White goods rendered black, half-melted. There was a bath, too, embedded in a mess of rubble, the tap-end reaching out of the ruins like the prow of a dying ship.
And though all of this was still wet, it seemed to retain the memory of heat, as if the recent inferno had been too intense an experience to dissipate entirely. The house was gone, but the ghost of what destroyed it lingered, and all around its ruin the ground was churned up, with heavy tyre tracks moulded in mud, and oily pools in the deeper craters. It must have been deeply violent; not only the fire, but the mission to quell it. The damage done to prevent further harm from spreading—his grandfather would have had a story to illustrate that. But it would have grown confused in the telling, and wound round itself without reaching a conclusion, and River wondered for the first time if he were here investigating the attempt on his grandfather’s life, or simply putting distance between himself and the old man, so as not to have to witness his deterioration.
He crouched and laid a palm flat to the ground, but felt no stored warmth: wet flattened grass was all. He wiped his hand on his jeans. This was where Adam Lockhead’s journey had started, the one that ended on the O.B.’s bathroom floor. It couldn’t be chance that the house had burned so soon before that. But what was the chain that bound the events together?
Something rustled in the woods, but when he scanned the area, nothing caught his eye. The wind, or a small animal. Gossiping trees.
River gazed at the ruined house. If he closed his eyes, he could see it happening: the flames massively orange against the black sky, and sirens ripping the night apart. It must have been visible for miles; a beacon thrilling the countryside. He didn’t know what colour French fire engines were: were they red? They might be yellow. It didn’t matter. They had arrived too late, but had doused what was left of the house to prevent the fire spreading. That much had worked. A pair of outhouses two hundred metres or so from the ruins were still standing, and something like a dovecote too, further away, but visible through the trees. And the trees themselves had survived, of course, though looked thin and bony in the grey afternoon, like a memorial to a holocaust.
And anything that might have been a clue had been reduced to ashes, blown about the fields, and smeared on damp surfaces.
The grey was giving way to something bleaker, something darker. Ov
erhead, the clouds grew heavy, preparing to release more rain, and River’s feet had grown no drier, plodding around in mud and filth. He would take shelter back in Angevin, he decided. There would be a local paper, or a local centre of gossip—a church, a bar—where he might discover a name; a piece of thread to tug on. Bertrand Something. That was the name Adam Lockhead had gone under. Or perhaps Adam Lockhead was the name Bertrand Something went under: either way, this ruin shed no light. Another noise emerged from the wood, the cracking of a branch, but again he saw nothing.
A drive led down to the main road. There was another gate there, set between a handsome pair of stone posts, and looking at it was like gazing down a tunnel, the way the trees composed an arch, and he thought that during the summer it must make an impressive sight, the trees in leaf, the drive washed clean of mud. But it wouldn’t any longer look like much from the opposite end: the big gates, the trees, the drive, and all of it ending in wrack and ruin. He wondered how long the house had been here, and whether its loss would cut a hole in the village’s life the way the bomb in Westacres had in London. And then he turned to make his way back through the wood, and a man stepped out of the trees holding a long single-barrelled gun which he brought to his shoulder in one smooth movement, and then fired, and River’s heart stopped.
Emma Flyte said, “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s a routine precaution.”
“But I haven’t done anything—”
“No one’s suggesting that you have.”
They were in what appeared to be an ordinary sitting room: a sofa, chairs, shelving, a TV. But any room you’re taken to, rather than enter of your own free will, carries the whiff of the cell. They were not far from Brixton market, a fifteen-minute journey, but that quarter of an hour had rattled Giti Rahman’s world.
“In that case, what am I doing here?”
“Awaiting instructions,” Emma said flatly. “If you need anything, there’s an intercom. I’d advise you not to overuse it. Mr. Dempsey’s patience is not infinite.”
Anyone who knew Mr. Dempsey, the Dog assigned to this particular chore, would have agreed that patience was not his forte.