by Mick Herron
“Old man Cartwright made a number of trips to France in the early nineties,” she announced. “Before there was a tunnel. Apparently they used something called a ferry? Anyway, he went three or four times, always to the same place. Somewhere near Poitiers, which is about in the middle. Middle of France, I mean.”
Lamb said, “You know, if I shut my eyes, it’s like listening to one of the Reith lectures.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what that means.”
“You amaze me.” Lamb paused to belch. Instead of spending the hour or so after lunch formulating department strategy, which he did with his eyes closed and his feet on his desk, he was holding court in Ho’s room. The slow horses were there, Moira Tregorian excepted—her, he’d invited to go through the stack of memos that had arrived from the Park since September, and arrange them in order of urgency—and were relaying the fruits of their research, which, until Shirley piped up, had been non-existent. “These trips, they were official?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So there’s a mission report?”
“There are expenses claims,” Shirley said, “and a series of status updates on a retired agent, codenamed Henry. But all the updates say is ‘stable,’ or ‘no action necessary.’”
Lamb sniffed suspiciously. “And Molly Doran volunteered this?”
“I dropped your name,” Shirley said.
Probably not worth going into the bet Molly lost.
“So whoever Henry was,” Marcus said, “he’s not as stable as he used to be.”
Ho lowered the bottle, and said, “Yeah, because it looks like he tried to kill the old man.”
“Such perception,” said Lamb. “No wonder I think of you as my number two.”
Ho smiled happily.
“What are you smirking at? You do know what a number two is?”
Louisa said, “But whoever came to kill David Cartwright, it wasn’t this mysterious Henry. Not unless he was about three when Cartwright was paying him visits.”
“Why was he doing that?”
As on the previous occasions when JK Coe had opened his mouth, this caused a brief silence: not so much people wondering about what he’d said as registering that he’d actually said something.
Ho said, “I think you missed the bit about the status updates,” and glanced at Lamb for approval.
Who said, “Listen and learn, grasshopper.”
Coe said, “He was First Desk in all but name. Why would he be trotting off to the continent to check up on a retired spook?”
“Maybe it was the other way round,” said Lamb. “Maybe checking up on a retired spook was the excuse he needed to go trotting off to the continent.”
“So this Henry, who we first heard of fifteen seconds ago, might just be a smokescreen?” said Marcus. “He didn’t last long.”
“Are you suggesting Cartwright invented an agent just so he’d get his travel expenses paid?” Louisa said.
“Those ferries weren’t cheap,” said Lamb. “But no. If Henry’s an invention, it was to give Cartwright the freedom to go to France in the first place. Like the mad monk said, he was First Desk in all but name. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t make trips abroad. It just meant he had to have a better reason for making them than ‘felt like it.’”
“So he had some kind of secret mission going on in France in the nineties,” said Louisa. “And whatever it was, it’s come back to bite him.”
“Have I triangulated yet?” said Shirley. “Because there’s more.”
“Did someone start an employee of the month competition?” Lamb asked. “Because I’ve got to tell you, I wish I’d thought of that myself. And I can’t believe Dander’s ahead of the pack.”
“Is there a prize?”
“Yeah, Ho will explain how he got a girlfriend. You can take notes.”
“I assume it involved cash,” Shirley said. “Anyway, when Cartwright travelled, he didn’t travel alone. On account of—”
“Being First Desk in all but name,” said Marcus.
“And thus requiring a body-watcher,” said Louisa.
“Yeah yeah yeah,” said Shirley. “So you want to hear who it was, or not?”
Lamb said, “It was Bad Sam, wasn’t it?”
“Bad Sam Chapman,” Shirley said. “That’s exactly who it was.”
“So my name is Natasha, Natasha Reverde, and I grew up here, in this village. I moved away for a long time, but now I am back. This is something I have found, that as we get older, we need to return to our beginnings. This is not original, I think. But it is true.”
The house, like Victor’s, was small, but there the resemblance ended. This was not only neat and clean; it was a loved space, and simply by being there, River was invited into Natasha’s confidence. It felt a sudden promotion, from stranger to confidante, but he knew his resemblance to Bertrand was the trigger. It was as if he had become part of a family whose existence he hadn’t been aware of. The fact of Bertrand’s death he held to himself like a long-sworn promise or an imminent betrayal.
“So one evening, long ago, I met a man in a bar, and his name is Yevgeny, and one thing moves on to another. Yevgeny lives with his friends in a big house called Les Arbres, and when he takes me there I see that it is a very different way of life. They do not have jobs, but they are always very busy, very serious. Yevgeny is Russian of course, but others are English and some German and Czech and a Frenchman too, he is called Jean. All Frenchmen are called Jean, but he really is.”
Her eyes grew darker.
“Yevgeny said they are all friends, all equal, but I think this is not so. One of them is not so equal, and he is the one they listen to. He gived, gave, not orders, but he makes suggestions, yes? And the suggestions he makes are the things that happen.”
“Were they all men?”
“Yes. Some of the men had girlfriends, local girls like me, but none of them are living there. And there is an older woman, a nursemaid, who calls in daily.”
“There were children?”
“Two small boys. Later, there were more.”
River waited, and again her eyes seemed to take on a deeper colour, as if the memories she was sinking into were staining her from the inside.
He said, “Who was the man in charge?”
“His name was Frank. An American. Frank.”
“Did he have a surname?”
“I never hear it.” Natasha paused, listening to rain drumming on the windows. She had turned on two small lamps, whose glow didn’t reach the corners, and the surrounding colours—the deep red of the throw upon the sofa; the cream and gold of the hanging on the wall—had grown richer in the half-light. River was reminded of Lamb, who also disliked overhead lighting, not for the unsubtle mood it threw upon a room’s fixtures, but because he preferred the shadows.
“But he was American.”
“Yes. And he had an English woman, I remember. I saw her once, or more than once. Perhaps these occasions have melted into one.”
“Time plays tricks,” River said.
“She was very beautiful, and very cross, the time I saw her, and they have big argument, big row, and Frank tells everyone to leave. Yevgeny, he laughs, but we go for drive anyway. And when we come back, she is gone.”
“How long did you . . . know Yevgeny?”
“This was one summer only. 1990.”
Which seemed a long time ago, to River.
“What happened?”
“Well, I fall pregnant. My parents are very angry with me, and with Yevgeny too. He was much older than me. In his thirties.”
“And how did he react?”
Her eyes became faraway again. “He is happy. He say he will be good father, and we will live happily ever after. It is every young girl’s dream, no?”
“Maybe not everyone’s,” River said.
&nbs
p; “No, this is true. Because if that happens, if I live happily ever after, it will mean being here for the rest of my life, in the next village along the river, and that is how far I will travel. And that is not what I want, you see? I want to go to Paris, to other cities, other countries. I want to see more of the world than the space between these two bridges.” She held her hands a few inches apart. “For Yevgeny to take me away. Not keep me here.”
“Did you have the baby?”
“Yes. A boy, Patrice. And he does what babies do, which is cry a lot, and I was just eighteen.”
“I’m sorry, Natasha,” he said, without knowing why.
“So one night,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken, “I leave the house with some money I have saved and I catch a train to Paris, which is how I get to see parts of the world which are not between these two bridges. And it is big and exciting and glamorous, and what happens to me there is what happens to lots of young girls who run away to the big city. I think you know what I mean.”
River, with Victor’s words in mind, nodded briefly.
Natasha said, “You are a young man, and you are English, and these things are great obstacles, but I will tell you this, that yes, I became a prostitute, and that is not something I feel shame for. There are things you do in life to be able to eat, yes?”
River said, “We all do things to eat.”
“And this is one of them. I have worked in shops, also, and now I have a house-cleaning business, with three girls working for me, but once upon a time, a long way from here, I was a whore, and to some people that is always what I am. To Victor, for instance. Who is nice enough person, but does not understand that people are not always the same.”
He decided he didn’t want to know how Victor had discovered her previous profession. “When did you come back here?”
“After some years. Ten, eleven? Things become bad in the city, and I decide it is better to return with what you call it, a tail between the legs, than stay there. But it is only because my father is dead that I am able to come back.”
River nodded. “And Patrice?”
“All that time Yevgeny has him, at Les Arbres. My parents never see him, my father because he does not want to, and my mother because my father. But Yevgeny sends her photographs. I have these pictures still. I will show them to you.”
But she made no move to rise. Instead, she said:
“I went there, of course. To Les Arbres. But they do not let me in. Yevgeny, he comes out. He tells me I am not welcome, that I am no longer Patrice’s mother. That he has a family, and does not need me.”
“I’m sorry,” River said.
“I too. Because I know he is right, I am not Patrice’s mother. I give him birth, that is all. But still, I want to see him, I demand to see him, and then Frank comes, and Frank, he is very clear, very direct. He tells me that unless I leave, he will have police arrest me. He will tell them that not only am I a prostitute but a drug addict also, and other things like that. Threats.”
River knew better than to ask if she had been a drug addict.
For a while, Natasha sat gazing into her past, and then she rose and crossed the room, opened a drawer, retrieved something and returned. It was an envelope, unsealed. When she tilted it, several photographs slithered out; more than several. They seemed to be in order already, the topmost one the earliest. It showed a man with dark Russian looks, holding an infant.
“Yevgeny,” Natasha said. “With Patrice.”
More followed. The child grew older, learned to stand on his own feet; sometimes in the company of other children.
“Who are these?”
“The eldest two, they were at Les Arbres from the beginning. I do not remember their names. And here,” and she plucked a photo from the pile of her son at five or so, with another boy, slightly younger, “this is Patrice with Bertrand. Bertrand is Frank’s son.”
“Where did he come from?”
“I think the usual place,” Natasha said.
“I meant—”
“I am teasing. There are six or seven children in the end. All boys. The first two, and then Patrice and Bertrand and two or three more. All I know is what I hear, and what I see from photographs.”
“Yevgeny kept sending them, then.”
“While my mother lived. When she died, he stops. The last picture I have of my son is ten years old.”
This was said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“And the mothers, they were living there too?”
“Never for long. There were some Russian women, and a French girl, I think. An Englishwoman too, a different one. But they never stay long. Only the children stay.”
“Why do you think they left?”
“Once there was a rumour that bad things had happened, that the women were . . . killed or murdered or something, but the police, they make enquiries, and afterwards the rumours stop. The women, they move away because they are not happy there. They return to Moscow or London or wherever, and they leave their children behind, because this is how they like things to be. But I think it is how Frank likes things to be. Like with my own father, he says how he feels about things, and that is how the things become. They are the law. I think, at Les Arbres, Frank makes the law.”
River looked through the remaining photographs. Patrice grew older, Bertrand did the same, and in one shot the latter stood under a tree, the expression on his face familiar to River, though he couldn’t think why. And again the thought struck him that this boy was dead now, and whatever future he might have had when this was taken was now an irretrievable mess on a bathroom floor. And even that presumably cleaned away by now; nothing more than a stain, an afterthought.
Another photo showed Patrice and another boy with two adult males.
“Who are they?” he asked, certain he already knew half the answer.
“That is Frank. The other, that is Jean. The Frenchman.”
Frank was tall, fairish, though not enough to be called blond; broad-shouldered and—here, at least—unshaven. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, and his arms looked strong and capable. He wasn’t smiling. Rather, he seemed to be questioning the value of having his picture taken at all; as if he felt little need to have his presence confirmed by outside agency.
“Who’s the other child here?”
Natasha said, “That is Yves. He is called Yves.”
He looked younger than Patrice, and to River’s eyes an ordinary boy; his features a little blank; a canvas waiting to be scribbled on. Was he five years old? He might have been about that: River couldn’t tell. But Natasha’s tone had shifted, mentioning Yves’s name. There was the same note of distaste as when she’d spoken of Frank. Distaste, unless it was fear.
But who would be frightened of a five-year-old, wondered River? And then remembered: five-year-olds grow up.
“You don’t like this one,” he said.
“I do not know him.”
“But you know him enough not to like him.”
She was quiet for a while, then said, “Sometimes you see him at the market, in the café. He looks at people like they are a different species.”
“In what way?”
“Like they are insects, or worse. Lower than insects.”
Growing up at Les Arbres, surrounded by men. River wondered what the boys had been taught.
He said, “What did they live on, do you know?”
“Money?”
“Yes.”
“I do not know. Some of the villagers call them hippies at first, but even then it was late for hippies. And besides, they do not have guitars or take drugs, and there are not enough girls. So I think they have made their money somewhere and decide this is where they want to live, that is all. Somewhere remote, but not impossible. Somewhere . . . their own.”
“Did the children go to school?”
“No. Jean, he is a teacher, or he has qualifications. It is enough. They are educated at Les Arbres.”
“Which has now burned down.”
“Yes.” Natasha leaned forward. “And that is why you are here, yes?”
“No. I didn’t know that had happened. I didn’t know about Les Arbres at all before today.”
And I don’t know much more now, he thought. Or understand, anyway. But still, he had a grinding feeling in his stomach, as if he had ingested more knowledge than he was yet aware of, and it was trying to claw its way out.
Either that, or his hunger was becoming violent.
“Thank you,” he said at last. “Thank you for speaking to me.”
“You don’t know where they are,” she said.
“No.”
“But you are going to find out.”
“I’m going to try,” he said.
“If you find my son,” she said, “you will tell me, yes? You will tell me where he is?”
River lied to her, as sincerely as he knew how.
Limping through the rain again, he made his way to the centre of the village and found a bank, with a cash-machine embedded in its wall. As he fed his credit card into its slot, he had the sensation of reappearing on the map; an awareness that he could now be tracked. His brief holiday among the dead was over. When emerging from the underworld, he vaguely recalled, it was best not to look over your shoulder; you could lose everything you thought you’d recovered. Even so, he took a moment to glance at the photograph he’d stolen from sad Natasha: her son, Patrice, and the other boy, Yves, their teacher, Jean, and the man Frank, who stared out from the celluloid as if already regretting the moment of contact it would produce, years later, here in the rain; the house that was the photo’s backdrop a sodden ruin, and his own son a corpse in another country.
He had time to buy a bread roll, packed with cheese, before the bus arrived. And then he was on his way to Poitiers, thence to Paris, and from there London: a journey he mostly slept through, though his dreams were of constant movement, and always with something swelling behind him; ready to pounce, ready to smother, ready to wash him away.
Back in the Park, on the hub, unfamiliarity had reimposed itself. Claude Whelan had been starting to feel he was settling in, but the conversation on the bus had thrust him back into the cold. He was the stranger again, the interloper, and no title he bore—First Desk, Chief Exec, God Albloodymighty—could bring him within the embrace of this chamber. And the glass wall of his office mocked the moment more.