by Mick Herron
“I note the absence of ‘allegedly’. You starting to believe me, Standish?”
“I never didn’t believe you. I’m just not sure sending River out on his own is the right way to find out what’s going on.”
Lamb said, “Yeah, I could have prepared a report. Presented it to Roger Barrowby, who’s evidently running things these days. He’d have had three other people read it and make recommendations, and if they came up positive, he’d have formed an interim committee to investigate possible avenues of reaction. After which—”
“I get the point.”
“I’m so glad. I was beginning to bore myself. Do I take it you’ve recruited Ho to do your research? Or is he still playing computer games on the firm’s time?”
“I’m sure he’s hard at work on the archive,” Catherine said.
“And I’m sure he’s hard at work on my arse.” Lamb paused. “That didn’t work. Pretend I didn’t say it.”
“Andrei Chernitsky,” Catherine persisted. “Did you recognise him?”
“If I had, don’t you think I’d have mentioned it?”
“Depends on your mood,” she said. “But the reason I ask is, Dickie Bow obviously did. Which suggests Chernitsky did time in Berlin.”
“They didn’t call it the Spooks’ Zoo for nothing,” Lamb said. “Every tuppeny lowlife turned up there one time or another.” He found his cigarettes, and put one in his mouth. “You’ve got a theory, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I—”
“I didn’t say I wanted to hear it.” He lit up. The smell of fresh tobacco filled the room, displacing the smell of stale tobacco. “How’s the day job? Shouldn’t there be reports on my desk?”
She said, “When Dickie Bow was kidnapped—”
“We used to call it ‘bagging’.”
“When Dickie Bow was bagged—”
“I really have no choice but to hear this, do I?”
“—he said there were two of them. One called himself Alexander Popov.” Catherine batted away smoke with her hand. “I think Chernitsky was the other. Popov’s muscle. That’s why Bow dropped everything to follow him. This wasn’t some stray spook from the old days. It was someone Bow had a very specific memory of, someone he might even have wanted revenge on.”
Cigarette notwithstanding, Lamb appeared to be chewing. Maybe it was his tongue. He said, “You realise what that would mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Uh-huh you do, or uh-huh, you’re making a noise so I’ll spell out what it means and you’ll pretend you knew all along?”
“They bagged him. They force-fed him alcohol. They let him go,” Catherine said. “There was no point to it at all, except that he get a look at them. So that one day they could swish a coat in his path, and he’d trot after it like a trained poodle.”
“Jesus.” Lamb breathed out grey air. “I’m not sure what disturbs me more. The thought that someone’s got a twenty-year plan, or the fact that you’d already worked that out.”
“Popov took a British spy off the streets twenty years ago with no motive except to use him as an alarm bell when the time was right.”
“Popov never existed,” Lamb reminded her.
“But whoever made him up did. And apparently this was part of his plan. Along with the cicadas. A sleeper cell.”
Lamb said, “Any plan a Soviet spook came up with two decades back is long past its sell-by date.”
“So maybe it’s not the same plan. Maybe it’s been adapted. But either way, it’s in play. This isn’t you chasing ghosts from your past any more. It’s a ghost from your past jumping up and down, shouting ‘look at me!’ ”
“And why’s that?”
“I haven’t a clue. But it demands a more coherent response than just letting River Cartwright off the leash. Chernitsky went to Upshott for a reason, and the only logical reason is that that’s where this network’s ringleader is. And whoever that is, you can bet your life they already know River’s not who he’s pretending to be.”
Lamb said thoughtfully, “Or I could bet River’s life. Which would be safer for me and more convenient.”
“It’s not a joke. I’ve been checking up on the names in River’s reports. None of them scream ‘Soviet agent’. But then, if any of them did, they’d not have successfully buried themselves all this time.”
“Are you still talking to me, or just thinking aloud?” Lamb took a final drag on his cigarette and dropped the stub into a coffee cup. “Bow was killed, yes. Sad, but shit happens. And the point of killing him was to lay a trail. Whatever that’s about, it’s not to set up River Cartwright. Someone wants one of us there for a reason. Sooner or later, probably sooner, we’ll find out who and why.”
“So we do nothing? That’s your plan?”
“Oh, don’t worry. There’s plenty to chew on in the meantime. The name Rebecca Mitchell ring a bell?”
“She’s the driver who ran down Min.”
“Yeah. Well, him being drunk and her a woman, it’s no surprise the Dogs signed off on it. But they shouldn’t have.” Pulling Bad Sam’s envelope from his pocket, he tossed it onto the desk. “They looked at her last ten years, during which she’s been a squeaky clean lady, if you leave aside her killing one of my team. Which they shouldn’t have done. What they should have done was to take her entire life and shake it in a high wind.”
“And find what?”
“And find she used to be a different kind of squeaky altogether. Back in the nineties she was bumping uglies with all sorts, and had a particular yen for your romantic Slav. Spent six months sharing a flat with a pair of charmers from Vladivostok, who set her up in her catering business before they buggered off. Though of course,” he added, “that’s just circumstantial, and she might be Snow White. What do you think?”
Catherine, who rarely stooped to profanity, swore.
“Indeed. Me also.” Lamb picked up the coffee cup, raised it to his lips, then noticed it was an ashtray. “As if I didn’t have enough to be getting on with, it turns out whatever these shady Russian bastards of Spider Webb’s are up to, it’s dodgy enough to get Harper killed.” He put the cup back down. “Just one thing after another, isn’t it?”
They returned the Russians to the hotel, then headed for the tube. Marcus suggested cabbing it; Louisa gestured at the traffic, which was sclerotic. She had a hidden agenda: in a taxi, she’d have little choice but to suffer Marcus’s conversation. On the tube, he’d be more likely to give it a rest. That was the theory. But as they headed into the underground he said, “What do you make of him?”
“Pashkin?”
“Who else?”
She said, “He’s the job,” and slapped her Oyster card on the platen. The gates opened and she slipped through.
One step behind her, Marcus said, “He’s a gangster.”
Webb had said as much. One-time Mafia. But these days he was establishment, or rich enough to pass, and she didn’t know how it worked in Russia, but in London, once you were rich, being a gangster was a minor offence, on a par with wearing a tie for a club you didn’t belong to.
“Nice suit, nice manners, and his English is better than mine. And he owns an oil company. But he’s a gangster.”
At the top of the escalators a poster warned of disruption to services during tomorrow’s rally. Being anti-bank, chances were the rally would be well attended and turn ugly.
She said, “Maybe. But Webb says we treat him like royalty, so that’s what we do.”
“Meaning what, we pimp him an underage masseuse? Or suck his dick for a wrap of coke?”
“Those probably weren’t the royals Webb was thinking of,” she said.
On the train Louisa closed her eyes. Part of her brain was juggling logistics: the rally would be a factor. You couldn’t dump a quarter million pissed-off citizens into the mix without complicating things. But these thoughts were an alibi, parading through her consciousness just in case anyone had developed a mind-reading machine. By tomorrow, details lik
e their route to the Needle were going to be as useful as Christmas crackers.
Marcus Longridge was talking again. “Louisa?”
She opened her eyes.
“Our stop.”
“I know,” she told him, but he was giving her a quizzical look anyway. All the way up from platform to street, he was a step or two behind her. His attention took the form of a heat spot, back of her neck.
Forget about that. Forget about tomorrow. Tomorrow wasn’t going to happen.
Tonight was.
When River stepped into the pub, it was to greetings from two separate tables. He thought: you could spend years propping up the bar at your London local, and they wouldn’t know what name to put on the wreath. But maybe that was just him. Maybe the River who made friends easily was the one pretending to be someone else. He returned all greetings, and stopped at the Butterfields’ table: Stephen and Meg. Neither needed a drink. Kelly was at the bar, polishing a glass on a teatowel.
“How nice to see you,” she said.
Playing with him, definitely, but that was okay.
He ordered a mineral water, and she raised a mild eyebrow. “Celebrating?” While she fetched it, he felt a twinge he hoped wasn’t his conscience. If he’d met Kelly anywhere, he’d have done his best to end up exactly where he’d been that afternoon. So why was he certain that if she discovered he wasn’t who he claimed to be, she’d chop off his—
“Pickled eggs?”
“… Sorry?”
“Would you like a pickled egg with that? They’re a popular local delicacy.”
Carefully enunciated, as if inviting comparison with other local delicacies he might have recently enjoyed.
“Tempting, but I’ll give it a miss,” he said. “Flying club not in tonight?”
“Greg popped in earlier. Were you hoping to grab anyone in particular?”
“No one I haven’t already grabbed,” he said quietly.
“Walls have ears.”
“My lips are sealed.”
“That’s good,” she said. “We’ll make a spy of you yet.”
With that ringing in his ears, he made his way back to the Butterfields.
Stephen and Meg Butterfield. Parents of Damien, another member of the flying club. He was retired from publishing; she part-owned a boutique in Moreton-in-Marsh. In the country but not of the country, as Stephen put it; in the country, but happy to pop up to London twice a month to eat, visit friends, catch a play, “remember what civilisation feels like.” But happy too to wear a tweed cap, a green V-neck, and carry a silver-topped stick. In the country and blending in nicely, more like. He asked River:
“How goes the writing business?”
“Oh, you know. Early days.”
“Still researching?” said Meg. Though her eyes were on River, her long, nervous fingers toyed with the smoking equipment in front of her: packet of tobacco, Rizla papers, throwaway lighter. Her graying blonde hair was under wraps tonight, coiled beneath a black silk headscarf; and this too, and the wrinkles at her eyes, and even her clothes marked her out a smoker—the ankle-length skirt glittering with silver threads, and the black cardigan with deep pockets, and the red-fringed shawl she wore like a displaced Bedouin. In London, he’d have dismissed her as a superannuated hippie; here, she seemed more like an off-duty witch. He could see her knocking up a remedy for lovesick swains, if that was still a word. Probably was round here. Not much call for it in the city.
The couple sat next to each other on the bench, which River thought sweet. “Ninety per cent of the job,” he said. Funny how simple it was to be an expert on writing. “Getting it down on paper’s the easy part.”
“We were talking about you with Ray. You met Ray yet?”
River hadn’t, though the name was all too familiar. Ray Hadley was the maypole around which the village danced: he was on the Parish Council, on the school’s board of governors; on everything that required a name on a dotted line. He was the eminence grise of the flying club, too: a retired pilot, and the owner of the small plane housed near the MoD land. And yet he remained elusive.
“I haven’t, no.”
Because Hadley always seemed to have just left, or was expected any moment but didn’t turn up. There weren’t many places in Upshott that weren’t the pub, but Hadley had contrived to find most of them these past few weeks.
“Ray was great mates with the brass at the base,” Meg went on. “Always in and out of there. Wasn’t he, darling?”
“Give him half a chance, he’d have joined up. Still would. The chance to fly one of those Yank jets? He’d have given his right bollock.”
“I can’t believe your paths haven’t crossed yet,” Meg said. “He must be hiding from you.”
“Actually, I might have seen him this morning, heading for the shop. Tall bald man, yes?”
Meg’s phone rang: Ave Satani. “Son and heir,” she said. “Excuse me. Damien, darling. Yes. No. I don’t know. Ask your father.” She handed the phone to Stephen, then said to River, “Sorry, dear. Busting for a fag,” and collected her paraphernalia and headed for the door.
Stephen Butterfield began a lengthy explanation of what it sounded like was wrong with Damien’s car, waggling an apologetic eyebrow at River, who made a no-matter gesture and returned to the bar.
The pub had oak rafters onto which paper currency had been pasted, and whitewashed walls on which farm implements hung. In a corner were photographs of Upshott through the years. Most had been taken on the green, and showed groups of people metamorphosing through black-and-white austerity to the Hair-Bear Bunch fashions of the ’70s. The most recent was of nine young adults, more at ease with their youth and good looks than earlier generations had been. They stood on a strip of tarmac, three of them women; Kelly Tropper at their centre. In the background was a small aeroplane.
He’d been looking at this photo on his first evening there, and had recognised the woman who’d just served him a pint, when a man approached. He was about River’s age though broader, and with a head like a bowling ball: hair trimmed to the skull, an equally sparse fuzz prickling chin and upper lip, and eyes sharp with cunning or suspicion. River had seen similar eyes in other pubs. They didn’t always spell trouble, but when trouble broke out anyway, they were usually right near the middle.
“And who might you be?”
Let’s be polite, thought River. “The name’s Walker.”
“Is it now.”
“Jonathan Walker.”
“Jonathan Walker,” the man repeated in a sing-song voice, to underline the effeminate nature of anyone limp-wristed enough to be called Jonathan Walker.
“And you are?”
“What makes that your business?”
And now a third voice chimed in, and here was the bartender, offering a brisk “Behave, you.” To River she said, “His name’s Griff Yates.”
“Griff Yates,” River said. “Should I repeat that in a stupid voice? I’m not sure I’ve grasped the local customs yet.”
“Oh, we’ve got a clever one,” Yates had said. He put his pint down, and River had a sudden glimpse of what his grandfather would have made of this. You’ve been under cover five minutes, and you’re about the same distance away from a public brawl. Which part of covert is giving you trouble? “Last clever one we had in here would have been that city twerp who took the James’s place for a summer. And you know what happened to him?”
River had little option. “No,” he said. “What happened to him?”
“He fucked off back where he came from, didn’t he?” Griff Yates paused a beat, then roared with laughter. “Fucked off back where he came from,” he repeated, and kept laughing until River joined in, then bought him a pint.
Which had been River’s first Upshott encounter, and a little bumpier than those that followed, but then Griff Yates was the odd one out; Griff Yates was local stock. A little older than the crew known as the flying club, he existed at a tangent to them: part envy, part blunt antagonism.
<
br /> He wasn’t here now, though. Andy Barnett—who was known as Red Andy, having voted Labour in ’97—was at the bar instead, or technically was, his unfinished pint and Sudoku puzzle claiming the area for the duration. Andy himself was temporarily elsewhere.
With no immediate audience, Kelly smiled a welcome. “Hello again, you.”
He could still taste her. “I haven’t bought you a drink yet.”
“Next time I’m your side of the bar.” She nodded at his glass. “And it won’t be mineral water, I can tell you.”
“You working tomorrow?”
“And the night after.”
“What about tomorrow afternoon?”
“Habit-forming, is it?” There was a look women could give you once you’d slept with them, and Kelly bestowed this upon him now. “I told you. I’m flying tomorrow.”
“Of course. Going anywhere nice?”
The question seemed to amuse her. “It’s all nice, up there.”
“So it’s a secret.”
“Oh, you’ll find out.” She leaned forward. “But I’m finished here at eleven thirty. If you want to pick up where we left off?”
“Ah. Wish I could. Kind of busy.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Kind of busy? What kind of busy can you be after closing time round here?”
“Not the kind you’re thinking of. It’s—”
“Hello, young man. Chatting up our lovely bar staff?”
And this was Red Andy, back from having a smoke, if the fumes clinging to his jacket were any guide.
“Andy,” said River.
“Just been chatting with Meg Butterfield out there.” He paused to drain his pint. “Another one of these, Kelly dear. And one for our visitor. Meg tells me you’re well on with your book.”
“Nothing for me, thanks. I’m about to leave.”
“Pity. I was hoping to hear about your progress.” Andy Barnett was everybody’s nightmare: a genuine local author, whose self-published memoir had been quite the succès d’estime, don’t you know. Which anyone who’d met Andy Barnett did two minutes later. “Be more than happy to look at anything you’re ready to show.”