by Mick Herron
“I’ll do it,” River said again.
“For Christ’s sake, this is MI5, not a kiddies’ playground. Operational decisions don’t turn on who says bagsies. I decide who goes.” Lamb counted them off from the right. “Eenie meenie minie mo.” At mo, his finger rested on River. He moved it back to Shirley. “Meenie. You’re it.”
River said, “I was mo!”
“And I don’t base operational decisions on children’s games. Remember?” He pressed eject, and the CD drawer slid open. He tossed the disc in Shirley’s direction, and it sailed through the open door. “Butterfingers. Pick that up and watch it again. Then go find Mr. B.”
“Now?”
“No, on your own time. Of course now.” He looked round. “I could have sworn the rest of you had jobs to do.”
Catherine arched her eyebrows at River, and left. The others followed, with visible relief, leaving only Ho and River.
Lamb said to Ho, “I might have guessed Cartwright would want to continue the discussion. But it beats me why you’re still here.”
“It’s my office,” Ho explained.
Lamb waited.
Ho sighed, and left.
River said, “You were always going to do that, weren’t you?”
“Do what?”
“All that crap about putting the kettle on, fetching your lunch. It was a wind-up. You need us. Somebody has to do your leg-work.”
“Speaking of legs,” said Jackson Lamb, and raised his so they stuck out horizontally, then farted. “I was always going to do that, too,” he pointed out. He put his feet back on the ground. “Doesn’t make it any less effective.”
Whatever you thought of Lamb’s act, nobody ever accused his farts of lacking authenticity.
“Anyway,” he went on, unperturbed by his toxic gift. “If it hadn’t been for Standish, we wouldn’t have gone all round the houses. Don’t like being out of the loop, for Christ’s sake. Can’t blame it on the rag at her age. Unless pickling herself in booze all those years had a preservative effect. What do you think?”
“I think it’s pretty strange you’re so sure Bow was murdered when the post-mortem said his heart gave out.”
“That doesn’t answer my question, but I’ll let it pass. Here’s another one.” Lamb folded his right leg over his left. “If you wanted to poison someone without anyone finding out, what would you use?”
“I’m not really up on poisons.”
“Hallelujah. Something you’re not an expert in.” Lamb had this magic trick: he could produce a cigarette out of almost nowhere; out of the briefest dip into the nearest pocket. In its opposite number he found a disposable lighter. River would have protested, but smoke could only improve the atmosphere. It was improbable Lamb was unaware of this. “Longridge hasn’t brought my lunch yet. I hope the sorry bastard’s not forgotten.”
“So you do know his name.”
He regretted that as soon as he’d said it.
Lamb said, “Jesus, Cartwright. Which of us does that embarrass more?” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, and the coal glowed orange, half an inch long. “I’ll be in late tomorrow,” he said. “Stuff to do. You know how it is.” A thin cloud of tobacco smoke turned his eyes to slits. “Don’t break your neck down the stairs.”
“Up the stairs,” River said. “Ho’s office, remember?”
“Cartwright?”
River halted in the doorway.
“You don’t want to know how Dickie Bow died?”
“You’re seriously gunna tell me?”
“It’s obvious, when you think about it,” Lamb said. “Whoever killed him used an untraceable poison.”
Untraceable poison, thought River Cartwright.
Jesus wept!
On the tube, an attractive brunette sat next to him, her skirt riding up as she did so. Almost immediately they fell into conversation, and, getting off at the same stop, hesitated by the escalator to exchange numbers. The rest followed like tumbling dice: wine, pizza, bed, a holiday; first flat, first anniversary, first child. Fifty years later, they looked back on a blessed existence. Then they died. River rubbed an eye with a knuckle. The seat opposite became free, and the woman moved into it, and took the hand of the man next to her.
From London Bridge River went on to Tonbridge, which his grandfather inhabited as if it were a territory annexed after a lifetime’s battle. The O.B. could wander to the shops; pick up paper, milk and groceries; twinkle at butcher, baker, and post office lady, and none of them would come within a mile of guessing that hundreds of lives had passed through his hands; that he’d made decisions and given orders that sometimes had altered the course of events, and at other times—more crucially, he’d have said—ensured that everything remained the same. He was generally thought to have been something in the Ministry of Transport. Good naturedly, he took the blame for deficiencies in the local bus service.
What enormous things must have happened, River sometimes thought, to make sure that nothing ever changed.
After eating they sat in the study, with whisky. A fire blazed in the grate. Over the years, the old man’s chair had moulded itself to hold him like a hammock; the second chair was getting the hang of River. As far as he knew, nobody else ever used it.
“You’ve something on your mind,” he was told.
“That’s not the only reason I come to see you.”
This was dismissed for the irrelevance it was.
“It’s Lamb.”
“Jackson Lamb. What about him?”
“I think he’s lost his mind.”
The O.B. liked that, River could tell. Liked anything that offered the opportunity for psychological spelunking. And especially liked it when River bowled him a full toss: “An insight based on your rigorous medical training.”
“He’s turning paranoid.”
“If he’s only just done that, he’d not have survived this long. But you’re saying he’s surpassed himself. How’s this particular paranoia manifesting?”
“He seems to think there’s a KGB wet squad at large.”
The O.B. said, “Well, on the one hand, the KGB doesn’t exist any more. And the Cold War’s over. We won, if you’re keeping score.”
“I know. I Googled it.”
“But on the other, Russia’s President used to run the KGB, who are now the FSB by the way, and they may have changed the letterheads but they wear the same old boots. As for untraceable poisons, that’s what the KGB’s ‘Special Office’ was all about. The poison factory. Back in the ’30s a goon called Mairovsky, Mairanovsky, something like that, spent his whole career dreaming up untraceable poisons. Got so good at it they had to kill him.”
River looked down at his glass. He only ever drank whisky with his grandfather. Maybe that made it a ritual. “You’re saying it’s possible.”
“I’m saying that any time Jackson Lamb’s worried about an old-time-Moscow-style op being run in our back yard, I’d pay attention. The name Litvinenko not ring bells?”
“Not for being untraceably poisoned.”
“Quite. Because that was a black flag operation. You think they couldn’t have made it look an accident if they’d wanted?” This was a favourite O.B. trick; turning your argument against you. Another was not giving you a chance to regroup. “Who’s the victim?”
“Name of Bough. Richard Bough.”
“Good Lord. Dickie Bow was still alive?”
“You knew him.”
“Of him. Berlin hand.” Putting his drink down, the O.B. adopted his sage pose: elbows on the armrests, fingertips pressed together as if holding an invisible ball. “How’d he die?” And when River had given him the details said, “He was never what you’d call fast track,” as if the late Dickie Bow’s sluggishness preordained him for death on a bus. “Never first division.”
“Premier league,” River suggested.
His grandfather waved away such modern abominations. “One of life’s streetwalkers. And I think he had an interest in a nightclub.
Or worked in one. Anyway, he used to come up with titbits. Which minor official was stepping out on his wife or his boyfriend. You know the kind of thing.”
“And all of it was fed into the files.”
The O.B. said: “That old saw about laws and sausages, about how you never want to see either being made? The same applies to intelligence work.” Dropping his invisible ball, he picked up his glass instead and swirled it thoughtfully, so the amber liquid washed round the tumbler’s edge. “And then he went AWOL. That was Dickie Bow’s claim to fame. Went for a walk on the wild side, and had switchboards lit up from Berlin to bloody … Battersea. Sorry. Alliteration. Bad habit. Berlin to Whitehall, because he might have been small fry but the last thing anyone wanted right then was a British agent turning up on Red TV, claiming god knew what.”
“This was when?” River asked.
“September eighty-nine.”
“Ah.”
“Too bloody right, ah. Everyone in the game, all the Berlin hands anyway, knew damn well something was about to happen, and while nobody said it aloud for fear of jinx, everyone looked at the Wall while they thought it. And nobody, nobody, wanted anything that might throw history off course.” His swirling became agitated, and whisky sprayed from his glass. Setting it on the table next to him, the old man raised his hand to his mouth and licked the drops away.
“When you say nobody …”
“Well, I don’t mean nobody, obviously. I mean nobody on our side.” He examined his hand, as if he’d forgotten what it was for, then let it drop to his lap. “And it wouldn’t have taken much. Dickie Bow might have been just the grit of sand on the tracks to throw the locomotive. So we were keen on recovering him, as you might imagine.”
“And evidently you did.”
“Oh, we found him all right. Or he turned up, rather. Waltzed back into town just as we were ready to slap black ribbons on every operation he’d ever had a sniff at. Well, I say waltzed. He could barely walk was the truth.”
“He’d been tortured?”
The O.B. snorted. “He was blind drunk. Though the way he told it, not of his own volition. Held him down and poured the stuff down his throat, he said. Thought they meant to drown him, he said. Of course, why wouldn’t they? Drown a man like Dickie Bow in booze, you’re merely speeding things up.”
“And who were ‘they,’ in this scenario? The East Germans?”
“Oh, nothing so parochial. No, Dickie Bow’s story was, he’d been snatched by actual hoods. The Moscow variety. And not your everyday foot soldier, either.”
He paused, milking the moment. River sometimes wondered how the old man stood it, doing his daily rounds—butcher, baker, post office lady—without succumbing to the temptation to perform for the whole sorry bunch of them. Because if there was one thing the O.B. liked these days, it was an audience.
“No,” said the old man. “Dickie Bow claimed to have been kidnapped by Alexander Popov himself.”
A revelation which might have carried more impact if the name had meant anything to River.
Drive a saint to suicide, thought Catherine Standish.
Lord above!
I’m channelling my mother.
They were words she’d used earlier, about Jackson Lamb: that he’d drive a saint to suicide. Not a phrase she’d ever expected to hear herself say, but this was what happened: you turned into your mother, unless you turned into your father. That, anyway, was what happened if you let life smooth you down, plane away the edges that made you different.
Catherine had had edges once, but for years had lived a life whose borders were marked by furriness, and mornings when she wasn’t sure what had happened the night before. Traces of sex and vomit were clues; bruises on arms and thighs. The sense of having been spat out. Her relationship with alcohol had been the most enduring of her life, but like any abusive partner it had shown its true colours in the end. So now Catherine’s edges had been planed away, and alone in the kitchen of her North London flat she made a cup of peppermint tea, and thought about bald men.
There were no bald men in her life. There were no men in her life, or none that counted: there were male presences at work, and she’d grown fond of River Cartwright, but there were no actual men in her life, and that went double for Jackson Lamb. Nevertheless, she was thinking about bald men; about one in particular, giving a swift glance up at the camera before pacing into the driving rain of a railway platform, instead of boarding under shelter. And about the hat he wasn’t wearing because he’d left it on a bus two minutes earlier.
And she was also thinking, because she often did, how easy it would be to slip out for a bottle of wine, and have one small drink to prove she didn’t need one. One glass, and the rest down the sink. A Chablis. Nicely chilled. Or room temperature, if the off-licence didn’t keep it fridged; and if they didn’t have Chablis a Sauvignon Blanc would do, or a Chardonnay, or triple strength lager, or a two-litre bottle of cider.
Deep breath. My name is Catherine, and I’m an alcoholic. A copy of the Blue Book stood between a dictionary and a collected Sylvia Plath in the sitting room, and there was nothing to stop her settling down with it, peppermint tea at her elbow, until the wobble passed. The wobble: that was another one of her mother’s. Code for a hot flush. A lot of code words, her mother had used. Which was almost funny, given what Catherine did for a living.
So what would her mother make of her now, if she were alive? If she could see Slough House, its flaky paintwork, its flakier denizens … Catherine didn’t need to ask, because the answer was blindingly clear: her mother would take one look at the worn-out furniture, the peeling walls, the dusty bulbs, the cobwebs that hung from the corners, and recognise it as somewhere her daughter belonged, somewhere safe from aspiration. It was better to build your life’s ceiling low. Better not to put on airs.
Better, in the long run, not to think about what lay behind you.
So picking up her peppermint tea Catherine carried it into her sitting room, and for the many hundredth time didn’t go out for a bottle. Nor did she browse the Blue Book—let alone Sylvia bloody Plath—but instead sat and thought about bald men, and their actions on rainy railway platforms. And she tried not to think about her mother, or about life’s edges being planed away until you could see clear past them into whatever came next.
Because whatever came next, it was best to assume the worst.
From the seventy-seventh floor to this, thought Louisa Guy.
Holy crap!
A broadsheet’s Beautiful Homes column had lately informed her that a little imagination and a small amount of cash could transform even the tiniest apartment into a compact, space-efficient dream-dwelling. Unfortunately, that “small amount” was large enough that if she’d laid her hands on it, she’d have moved somewhere bigger instead.
As ever, damp washing was tonight’s motif. A clothes horse, designed to be folded out of sight when not in use, was always in use, and anyway, there was nowhere to put it when it wasn’t. So it leaned against a bookshelf, draped with underwear, her collection of which had undergone significant upgrading since Min Harper had entered her life. Elsewhere, blouses hung on wire hangers from anywhere they could be hooked, and a still-damp sweater reshaped itself on the table, its arms dangling heavily over the sides. And Louisa perched on a kitchen chair, laptop on her knees.
It was a fairly basic research technique, but Googling the day of Spider Webb’s mini-summit was the first port of call. This revealed an International Symposium on Advanced Metallurgical Processes at the LSE, and a conference on Asiatic Studies at SOAS. Tickets went on sale for an ABBA reunion gig, and were expected to sell out inside two minutes, while Central London would be more of a lunatics’ day out than usual, because there was a Stop the City rally marching down Oxford Street: a quarter million demonstrators were expected. Traffic, tube and normal life would doubtless come to a halt.
None of which had any obvious connection with the Russian visit. It was background, but background was
important, and after the last time the slow horses had become embroiled in Regent’s Park business, she wasn’t relying on info supplied by Webb. But it was hard to concentrate. Louisa kept remembering that huge floorspace in the Needle. She’d rarely been anywhere so roomy without being outside, a thought that inevitably dragged her home, a rented studio flat on the wrong side of the river.
And now two, sometimes three nights a week, Min was here too, and while this was still a good thing, it wasn’t without its downside. Min wasn’t messy, but he took up room. He liked to be clean and fresh when he came to her bed, which meant yielding precious inches of her bathroom shelf; he needed a clean shirt in the morning, so required wardrobe space too. DVDs had appeared, and books and CDs, which meant more physical objects in a space that was getting no larger. And then there was Min himself, of course. Who didn’t lumber about, but didn’t have to: the mere fact of his presence brought the walls nearer. It was nice to be close to him, but it would have been nicer to be close somewhere spacious enough to be further apart.
Elsewhere in the building a door slammed shut. The resulting draught whistled along the hallways and whispered under doors until, with a noise like snow sliding off a roof, a blouse fell from its hanger to the floor. Louisa studied it a moment or two, as if the situation might rectify itself without her intervention, and when this didn’t happen she closed her eyes and willed herself elsewhere, and when she opened them again that hadn’t happened either.
A draughty rented studio flat. With one extra terrible characteristic: that for all its faults, it was several steps up from Min’s bedsit.
If they wanted to find somewhere nice together, they were going to need money.
Eleven thirty. Six and a half hours to go.
Frigging hell!
If he’d been asked to draw a picture of what he’d expected from private security work, Cal Fenton would have drawn it big. There’d have been manual combat training; utility belts, Kevlar vests, Tasers. And driving, too: rubber-shredding take-offs and sharp cornering. He’d have had one of those earpieces with a hands-free mic attached, a necessity in the adrenalin-rich world of the security consultant, where you never knew what the next second might bring. That was what Cal Fenton had had in mind. Danger. Excitement. A grim reliance on his own physical competence.