by Mick Herron
For the moment, though, he concentrated on doing what he was pretending to do, which was sit in quiet recall of the man he’d said was his brother, but who in reality had been Dickie Bow: too daft to be a workname, but too cute to be real. Dickie and Lamb had been in Berlin at the same time, but from this distance, Lamb had trouble recalling the other man’s face. The image he kept coming up with was sleek and pointy, like a rat, but then that’s what Dickie Bow had been, a street rat; adept at crawling through holes too small for him. That had been his key survival skill. It didn’t appear to have helped him lately.
(A heart attack, the postmortem had said. Not especially surprising in a man who drank as much, and smoked as much, and ate as much fried food as Dickie Bow. Uncomfortable reading for Lamb, whose habits it might have been describing.)
Reaching out, he traced a finger over the back of the seat in front. Its surface was mostly smooth; the one burn mark obviously ancient; the faint tracery in a corner suggesting random scratching rather than an attempt to etch a dying message … It was years since Bow had been in the Service, and even then, he’d been one of that great army who’d never quite been inside the tent. You could always trust a street rat, the wisdom ran, because every time one of them took money from the other side, he’d be on your doorstep next morning, expecting you to match the offer.
There was no brotherhood code. If Dickie Bow had succumbed to a mattress fire, Lamb would have got through the five stages without batting an eye: denial, anger, bargaining, indifference, breakfast. But Bow had died on the back seat of a moving coach, without a ticket in his pocket. Booze, fags and fry-ups aside, the PM couldn’t explain Bow’s being in the sticks when he should have been working his shift at a Soho pornshop.
Standing, Lamb ran a hand along the overhead rack, and found nothing. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have been anything left by Dickie Bow, not after six days. Then he sat again, and studied the rubber lining along the base of the window, looking for scratch marks—ridiculous perhaps, but Moscow Rules meant assuming your mail was read. When you needed to leave a message, you left it by other means. Though in this instance, a thumbnail on a rubber lining wasn’t one of them.
A hesitant, polite cough from the front of the coach.
“I, ah—”
Lamb looked up mournfully.
“I don’t mean to rush you. But are you going to be much longer?”
“One minute,” Lamb said.
Actually, he needed less than that. Even while he was speaking he was sliding his hand down the back of the seat, forcing it between the two cushions, encountering a gobbet of ancient chewing gum hardened to a tumour on the fabric; a welter of biscuit crumbs; a paperclip; a coin too small to be worth pocketing; and the edge of something hard which squirted out of his reach, forcing him to delve deeper, the cuff of his overcoat riding up his arm as he pushed. And there it was again, a smooth plastic shell snuggling into his grip. Lamb scratched his wrist deep enough to draw blood as he pulled his treasure free, but didn’t notice. All his attention was focused on his prize: an old, fat, bottom-of-the-line mobile phone.
“Lamb, well. Lamb’s everything he’s made out to be.”
“Which is?”
“Some kind of fat bastard.”
“Who goes way back.”
“A long-lived fat bastard. The worst kind. He sits upstairs and craps on the rest of us. It’s like he gets pleasure out of running a department full of …”
“Losers.”
“You calling me a loser?”
“We’re both here, aren’t we?”
Work was forgotten. Marcus Longridge, having just called Shirley Dander a loser, gave her a bright smile. She paused, wondering what she was getting into. Trust nobody, she’d decided when she’d first set foot in this place. The buzz-cut was part of that. Trust nobody. And here she was on the verge of opening up to Marcus simply because he was the one she was sharing an office with: And what was he smiling at? Did he think he was being friendly? Take a deep breath, she told herself; but a mental one. Don’t let him see.
This was the crux of Communications: find out all you can, but give nothing away.
She said, “The jury’s still out on that. What do you make of him, anyway?”
“Well, he’s running his own department.”
“Some department. More like a charity shop.” She slapped a hand on her PC. “This should be in a museum for a start. We’re supposed to catch bad guys with this shit? We’d have a better chance standing on Oxford Street with a clipboard. Excuse me, sir, are you a terrorist?”
“Sir or Miss,” Marcus corrected her. Then said, “We’re not expected to catch anyone, we’re supposed to get bored and go join a security firm. But the point is, whatever we’re here for, Lamb’s not being punished. Or if he is, he’s enjoying it.”
“So what’s your point?”
He said, “That he knows where some bodies are buried. Probably buried a few himself.”
“Is that a metaphor?”
“I failed English. Metaphor’s a closed book to me.”
“So you think he’s handy?”
“Well, he’s overweight and drinks and smokes and I doubt he takes much exercise that doesn’t involve picking up a phone and calling out for a curry. But yeah, now you mention it, I think he’s handy.”
“He might’ve been once,” Shirley said. “But there’s not much point in being handy if you’re too slow to be any good at it.”
But Marcus disagreed. Being handy was a state of mind. Lamb could wear you down just standing in front of you, and you wouldn’t know he was a threat until he was walking away, and you were wondering who’d turned the lights out. Just Marcus’s opinion, of course. He’d been wrong before.
“I suppose,” he said, “if we stick around long enough, we might find out.”
Coming back down the coach Lamb rubbed a finger in his eye, which made him look grieving, or at any rate like he had a sore eye. The depot manager seemed uncomfortable, ill at ease with a stranger’s sorrow, or else he’d noticed Lamb with his arm down the back seat, and was wondering whether to address the topic.
To short-circuit any such attempt, Lamb said, “The driver around?”
“What, who was driving when …?”
When my brother kicked off, yes. But he just nodded, and wiped his eye again.
The driver didn’t much want to talk to Lamb about his uncooperative passenger; the only good ones are the ones that walk away being the standard bus-driver take on the general public. But once the depot manager had made a final apology and shuffled back to his office, and Lamb had indicated for the second time that morning that he had a twenty pound note in his possession, the driver opened up.
“What can I say? I’m sorry for your loss.”
Though seemed happy enough about his own possible gain.
Lamb said, “Was he talking to anyone, did you notice?”
“We’re supposed to keep our eyes on the road, mostly.”
“Before you started.”
The driver said, “What can I say?” again. “It was a bleedin’ circus, mate. Couple of thousand stranded, we was just getting them shifted. So no, I didn’t notice, sorry. He was just another punter until …” Realising he was heading up a conversational cul-de-sac, he tailed off with “you know.”
“Until you got to Oxford with a stiff on your back seat,” Lamb supplied helpfully.
“He must have gone peaceful,” the driver said. “I pretty much kept to the limit.”
Lamb looked back at the coach. The company livery was red and blue, its lower half flecked with mud. Just an ordinary vehicle, that Dickie Bow had stepped on and never stepped off again.
“Was there anything unusual about that trip?” he asked.
The driver stared.
“Corpse aside.”
“Sorry, mate. It was just, you know. Pick ’em up at the station, drop ’em off at Oxford. Not like it was the first time.”
“And what happened when
you got there? Oxford?”
“Most of them was off like the clappers. There was a train waiting to take ’em the rest of the way. They must’ve been an hour behind by then. And it was pissing down. So they wasn’t hanging around.”
“But someone found the body.” The driver gave him an odd look, and Lamb surmised the reason. “Richard,” he said. They’d been brothers, hadn’t they? “Dickie. Someone realised he was dead.”
“There was a huddle at the back of the bus, but he was already gone. One of them, a doctor, he stayed behind, but the rest left to catch their train.” He paused. “He looked quite calm, like. Your brother.”
“It’s how he would have wanted to go,” Lamb assured him. “He liked buses. So you what, called an ambulance?”
“He was past help, but yeah. I was stuck there rest of the evening. No offence. Had to give a statement, but you’d know that, right? Being his brother.”
“That’s right,” Lamb said. “Being his brother. Anything else happen?”
“Business as normal, mate. Once he’d been, you know, taken away, and I’d tidied the bus and everything, I came back here.”
“Tidied the bus?”
“Not cleaning it or anything. Just check the seats for anything left behind, you know? Wallets and that.”
“And did you find anything?”
“Not that evening, mate. Well, just a hat.”
“A hat?”
“On the overhead rack. Near where your brother was.”
“What sort of hat?”
“Black one.”
“Black one what? Bowler? Fedora? What?”
He shrugged. “Just a hat. With a brim, you know?”
“Where’s it now?”
“Lost property, ’less it’s been picked up. It was just a hat. People leave hats on buses all the time.”
Not when it’s pissing down they don’t, thought Lamb.
A moment’s reflection told him this wasn’t true. When it was raining, more people wore hats, so more people left them on buses. It stood to reason. A matter of statistics.
But the thing about statistics, Lamb reasoned, was statistics could take a flying hump at the moon.
“So where’s your lost property?” He waved in the vague direction of the depot office. “Over there?”
“Nah, mate. Back in Oxford, innit?”
Of bloody course it is, thought Lamb.
“So what about Ho?”
“Ho’s a dweeb.”
“Newsflash. All webheads are dweebs.”
“Ho’s dweebness goes deeper. You want to know the first thing he said to me?”
“What?”
“The very first thing, right? I mean, I haven’t even got my coat off,” Marcus said. “First morning here, thinking I’ve just been shipped to the spooks’ equivalent of Devil’s Island, and I’m wondering what happens next, and Ho picks up his coffee mug and shows it to me—it’s got a picture of Clint Eastwood on it—and he says, ‘This is my mug, okay? And I don’t like other people using my mug’.”
Shirley said, “Okay. That’s bad.”
“It’s way past anal. I bet his socks are tagged left and right.”
“What about Guy?”
“She’s doing Harper.”
“Harper?”
“He’s doing Guy.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that hardly amounts to a character portrait.”
He shrugged. “They’ve not been doing each other long, so right now, that’s the only significant thing about them.”
Shirley said, “That must have been them going out earlier. I wonder where they went?”
“We’re still persona non grata at the Park then.”
Which was an odd thing for Min Harper to say, given that they were in a park, but Louisa Guy knew what he meant.
“Do you know,” she said, “I’m not entirely sure that’s the reason.”
The park they were in was St James’s, and the park they weren’t in was Regent’s. They were heading for the palace end and a woman in a pink velvety tracksuit was approaching them along the footpath at about two miles an hour. At her ankles waddled a small hairy dog with a matching pink ribbon round its neck. They waited until she’d passed before continuing.
“Explain?”
So Louisa did. It was to do with Leonard Bradley. Until recently Bradley had been Chair of the Limitations Committee, which effectively controlled the Service purse strings. Every op planned by Ingrid Tearney, First Desk at Regent’s Park, had to be cleared by Limitations if she didn’t want budgeting issues, which was what running out of money was now called. Except Bradley—Sir Leonard, if the title hadn’t been repossessed yet—had lately been caught with his fingers in the till: a Shropshire “safe house,” fully staffed for the recuperation of officers suffering Service-related stress, had turned out to be a beachfront property on the Maldives, though to be fair, it was fully staffed. And the result of Bradley’s peccadilloes—
“How do you know all this?” Harper interrupted. “I thought he’d just retired.”
“Ah, that’s sweet. But you’ve got to keep an ear to the ground in this business.”
“Don’t tell me. Catherine.”
She nodded.
“Girls’ talk? Quick confab in the ladies’?”
He kept it light, but there was an edge. Something he was excluded from.
She said, “Catherine’s hardly likely to call a press conference. When I told her we’d been summoned, she told me this was going on. She called it an audit.”
“How does she know about it?”
Louisa said, “She’s got a connection. One of the Queens.”
The Queens of the Database were who you went to when you needed information, which made them useful friends, and even more useful connections.
“So what’s this audit?”
—and the result of Bradley’s peccadilloes was what was being termed an audit, but might more accurately be called an Inquisition. Limitations’s new Chair, Roger Barrowby, was taking the opportunity to clean the stables: this involved in-depth interviews with all staff, covering their financial, operational, emotional, psychological, sexual and medical histories; just to make sure everything was squeaky clean. Nobody wanted further embarrassments.
“Bit of a cheek,” Min said. “I mean, Bradley was the one stealing cookies. Any embarrassment should be the Committee’s, not the Park’s.”
“Welcome to the world, baby boy,” Louisa explained.
There was a bright side, though. “I bet Taverner’s going spare,” he mused.
But there wasn’t time to explore what Taverner might be going, because here came James Webb, who’d summoned them to this al fresco meeting.
Webb was a suit. He wasn’t actually wearing a suit today—he wore fawn chinos and a dark blue roll-neck under a black raincoat—but he wasn’t fooling anyone: he was a suit, and if you cut him open he’d bleed in pinstripes. Today’s outfit he probably thought was tradecraft: what you wore for a leafy stroll. But the impression he gave was that he’d popped along to his man in Jermyn Street, explained he was going for a walk in the park, and wanted to dress accordingly. He was as much a man in casuals as the pink lady was a jogger.
Still, he was Regent’s Park to their Slough House. Getting the call at all was a jawdropper. When he nodded they nodded back, and fell into step either side of him. “Any trouble getting away?”
He might have been asking how traffic had been.
Louisa said, “The back door jams. You have to kick it and lean on the handle at the same time. Once we were through that, it was a breeze.”
Webb said, “I meant with Lamb.”
“Lamb wasn’t around,” Min told him. “Is he not supposed to know about this?”
“Oh, he’ll find out eventually. It’s no big deal anyway. I’m seconding you, that’s all. Not for long. Three weeks or so.”
I’m seconding you. Like he was a big wheel. Over at the Park, when Ingrid Tearney was i
n DC, which was about half the time, Lady Di Taverner took the hot seat: she was one of several Second Desks, but top of most people’s list whenever there were rumours of a palace coup. As for Spider Webb, his desk didn’t have a number. He was basically HR, Min and Louisa had heard, and had this connection with River Cartwright neither of them knew the details of, beyond that they’d been through training together, and that Webb had screwed River over, which was how come River was a slow horse.
Maybe some of this leaked out from Min and Louisa’s silence, because Webb said: “So you’ll be reporting to me.”
“On what sort of job?”
“Babysitting. Maybe a bit of vetting.”
“Vetting?” Vetting was mostly clerical, which was the slow horses’ lot, but demanded resources Slough House didn’t run to. And anyway, usually fell to Background, Regent’s Park’s skeleton-rattling department, with the Dogs—the internal security mob—providing back-up as and when.
But Webb affected to believe Min was unfamiliar with the term. “Yes. Personal checks, identity confirmation, location cleansing. That sort of thing.”
“Oh, vetting,” said Min. “Thought you said petting. I wondered if things were getting heavy.”
“It’s not complicated,” Webb said, “because if it was, I wouldn’t be asking a smartarse to do it. But if you’re not up to it, just say the word.” He came to a halt, and Min and Louisa each took an extra step before realising. They turned to face him. He said, “And then you can piss off back to Slough House. And whatever important tasks you’re busy with this week.”
Min’s mouth began responding before his brain was in gear, but Louisa got in first. “We’ve nothing much on,” she said. “We’d be up for it.”
She shot Min a glance.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sounds like a blast.”
“A blast?”
“Within our sphere of competence, he means,” Louisa said. “We’re just a little … nonplussed by your choice of venue.”
Webb looked around, as if only just noticing they were outside: water, trees, birds. Traffic, aware of the Palace, hummed politely beyond the railings. “Yes,” he said. “Well. Always nice to get out.”