London Rules

by Mick Herron

  She said to Emma, ‘Tea?’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘I wasn’t, actually. I’m having some. But it’s up to you.’

  ‘Do you have the key to these things?’

  ‘There used to be one somewhere. I hope Shirley didn’t lose it.’

  Catherine went and made tea, and when she came back Emma didn’t appear to have moved at all; hadn’t hopped around the room on the chair, battering it against the walls, hoping to break it in pieces. That wasn’t a great sign. Situations like these, you were probably better off if your hostage wasn’t calm, cool and calculating.

  She had to hold the cup to Emma’s lips so the woman could sip her tea. It was a potential Hannibal Lecter scenario, but passed without dental assault. When Emma had had enough, Catherine put her mug on the desk, sat down too and smiled gently. ‘When he’s in a specially grim mood, Lamb likes us to come up with mission statements,’ she said. ‘I’ve always thought “Apologies for the inconvenience” had a ring to it.’

  ‘How about “Fucking up the parts other fuck-ups can’t reach”?’

  ‘I’ll add it to the list.’

  ‘Are you really happy to see your career flatline because your lord and master had a rush of blood to the brain?’

  Catherine said, ‘I really don’t know where to start with that. Career, lord and master, or brain.’

  ‘Even if you’re right, even if Coe’s onto something, how can you stop it by yourselves? Those four … I mean, seriously? Louisa’s got her head screwed on I’ll grant you, but the other three are dangerous. And not in a good way.’

  ‘River’s better than that. It’s not his fault he was assigned here.’

  ‘That’s what makes him dangerous. He’s got too much to prove.’

  ‘Maybe we could just agree to differ.’

  ‘Let me go. We’ll take your theories to the Park. The worst that could happen, you’re proved wrong. And if you’re proved right instead, well. It could turn all your careers round. But not if you go about it like this.’

  Catherine said, ‘This is Slough House. We could produce a signed affidavit from whoever’s running Daesh today, outlining their plans for the next twelve months, and Di Taverner would screw it up and bin it before she’d act on it.’

  ‘People might die,’ Emma Flyte said.

  ‘People already have,’ Catherine said. ‘And whatever you think of Jackson, take it from me. If he can stop another Abbotsfield happening, he will.’

  I’m very nearly positive about that, she thought.

  Flyte opened her mouth to reply but before she could do so, he was back in the room: their supposed lord and master.

  ‘I didn’t hear a flush,’ Catherine said suspiciously.

  ‘No,’ said Lamb. ‘The Guinness Book of Records people might want a look first. I feel about two stone lighter.’

  ‘And you thought being handcuffed was cruel and unusual,’ she said to Emma.

  Lamb scooped up the bag of Haribo Shirley had abandoned and collapsed onto a chair: his usual challenge to the office furniture. Which sooner or later would surely rise up and smite him, but this didn’t happen today. ‘So. Has she confessed yet?’

  ‘… Confessed?’

  ‘Sorry. Flashback. I meant, has she had a cup of tea? Don’t want anyone thinking I don’t know how to treat a guest.’

  Emma Flyte said, ‘We were just discussing how much shit you’re in.’

  ‘You could hear it from here?’

  ‘That’s even without whatever happens once your crew start playing Mission Impossible. If either of those pols are actually at risk, they should be under Protection Orders. Not being surreptitiously babysat by the Teletubbies.’

  Lamb said, ‘I feel like I should warn you at this point – last guy we used those handcuffs on, it didn’t end well.’

  ‘For you or for him?’

  ‘I’m still here,’ Lamb pointed out.

  ‘How long have you been getting away with this?’

  ‘This?’

  She jerked her head, a gesture meant to include everything. ‘This. Slough House. Your crew. The whole making-it-up-as-you-go-along schtick.’

  Lamb said, ‘I’ve been here since the start.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘It was my idea, in fact.’

  ‘What, you took a long hard look at your career and decided to franchise it?’

  Catherine said, ‘He was a joe.’

  Emma turned her way. ‘What?’

  ‘He worked undercover.’

  ‘I know what it means. I’m wondering why you’re defending him.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m warning you not to underestimate him.’

  ‘If you’re going to wrestle,’ said Lamb, ‘I may have to film it for later study.’ He looked at Catherine. ‘Do we have any jelly?’

  ‘Let me go now. It’s not too late to straighten this out.’

  ‘By informing the Park? That’s not really going to help.’

  ‘Because the Park won’t pay attention, I know.’

  ‘And because Coe was right.’ Lamb watched her reaction, multitasking by shovelling Haribo into his mouth and washing them down with a swallow from the bottle of red. ‘He opens his trap maybe once a month. When he actually says something, he’s usually sure of his ground.’

  ‘He looks like a disaster victim.’

  ‘And you look like a catwalk model. Does that mean we shouldn’t take you seriously?’

  She said, ‘So let’s say he’s right. Even if the Park don’t listen, tell them about it and you’ve covered your back.’

  ‘Yeah, not really. Because if these guys are laying waste to the country using a script the Service wrote, there are few lengths the Park won’t go to to cover it up. And anyone who knows about it will be in the firing line. Which includes you, if you’d lost count. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll be safe when they start playing London Rules. Because you’re not a suit, Flyte. You’re a joe. And joes are expendable.’

  ‘I’m a cop.’

  ‘There’s less difference than you might think.’

  ‘If this is an attempt to get me on board by appealing to our common heritage, we’re in for a long evening.’

  Lamb shrugged. ‘I’m in no hurry to be elsewhere. But what I’m appealing to is your survival instincts. How far would you trust Diana Taverner?’

  ‘Not much further than I trust you.’

  ‘So if you head back to the Park now, tell Lady Di that my crew, far from being locked down, are out on the streets with their Batcapes on, how do you think she’ll react? Pat on the back? Or kick up the arse?’

  ‘I’d like to see her try,’ Flyte muttered.

  ‘There’s the cop talking.’ Whatever Lamb had just put in his mouth was the wrong flavour, and he paused to spit it back into the bag. ‘But I’m betting your job won’t survive her discovering you’ve fucked up again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘When David Cartwright went walkabout,’ he said. ‘You didn’t exactly emerge from that one covered in glory.’

  Flyte said, ‘Look who’s talking. But why would I take it to Lady Di? I already know she doesn’t like me. I’d go straight to Whelan.’

  ‘Claude Whelan has a lot on his plate right now,’ Catherine said. ‘If he can’t trust you to do your job efficiently, what use are you to him?’

  ‘However good you look in the attempt,’ Lamb said.

  He tipped the bottle into his mouth again but it was empty, so he dropped it on the floor.

  ‘We’re gonna let you go now,’ he said. ‘But before you make your next move, consider your options. Either Coe’s right and there’s a gang of killers out there poised for a high-level hit. Or he’s wrong, and your career’s fucked anyway, because you let my crew loose when you were supposed to have ’em wrapped up. If you can’t handle a simple job like that, you’ve been promoted beyond your abilities.’

  ‘Let’s not forget that you’re fucked
too,’ said Flyte. ‘On account of Slough House being the source of the leak. If it happened.’

  Catherine produced the handcuff key from a pocket in her dress, and went round the back of Emma’s chair to uncuff her. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s just the usual story. If we weren’t fucked, as you so graphically put it, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.’

  Freed from the handcuffs, Emma rubbed her wrists. ‘And what do you expect me to do now? Just keep my fingers crossed everything works out okay?’

  ‘See?’ said Lamb. ‘We are on the same page after all.’

  River hadn’t asked Coe if he wanted to drive, and Coe hadn’t indicated a preference, but the way he was slumped in the passenger seat, eyes closed, suggested he was happy being driven. Except you couldn’t really use ‘happy’, River amended. Actually, a brief scroll through his mental thesaurus, and the best he could come up with for Coe was ‘alive’. Even then he’d have to keep checking every half-hour. There was no question: he’d rather have been with Louisa, who he knew he could trust, or even Shirley, who was at least a known quantity; a lit firework, but not an unfamiliar one. J. K. Coe, though – River couldn’t even remember what the initials stood for without putting work into it – had been sharing his office for the best part of a year, and River couldn’t have told you where he ate lunch. Nine to five he occupied his desk, almost constantly plugged into his iPod: quiet music, you had to give him that – none of the tinny leakage that warned you Ho was near – but you could tell he was using it as a barrier; a way of minimising contact with his fellow humans. Plus, of course, he’d murdered that guy not long ago: three bullets to the chest of an unarmed, manacled man. That was always going to weigh in the balance when you were alone in a car with him.

  But for the time being, Coe was asleep, or as good as, and River had something to occupy his mind, after weeks of staring at digital wallpaper. What had he been tasked with? Oh yeah: cross-checking electoral rolls against properties on which council tax and utilities were regularly paid and up to date, to determine whether apparently occupied properties were in fact standing empty. This, Lamb had suggested – with the enthusiasm of one to whom the idea had occurred after a lunchtime which had started early, finished late, and been mostly liquid – being a foolproof method of compiling a list of possible terrorist safe houses, though River suspected that a more accurate approach might involve wandering round the British Isles knocking on random doors.

  ‘You want me to do this for everywhere in the country?’ he’d asked, a vision of hell yawning before him.

  ‘Christ, no,’ said Lamb. ‘You think I’m some kind of monster?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘You can skip Sunderland. And also Crewe. But yeah, do everywhere else.’

  So River had now been playing Spider Solitaire for a record-breaking three weeks straight. Every couple of days, a random cut-and-paste job produced a list of properties which, if they fulfilled Lamb’s criteria, did so purely by chance: he passed these on to Catherine, who, he suspected, knew damn well he was flying kites. Probably Lamb did too, and was waiting for the right moment to dump on him. Well, okay, River thought. Roll the damn dice. There was only so much punishment he could take. Rooming with Coe might turn out the last straw.

  Back when he’d first arrived in Slough House, he’d shared with Sid Baker: Sid for Sidonie, very definitely female, though River hadn’t got to know her as well as he might have done, on account of her being shot in the head not long afterwards. Head wounds were tricky: lots of blood, and a general expectation that even if you pulled through you were going to be straw-fed thereafter, but bubbling alongside that was an awareness of all the many exceptions. River had read the same stories as everyone else about gunshot survivors living for decades with bullets lodged in their craniums. But whether Sid would have turned out one of these lucky ones, River didn’t know. The Service had dropped a fire blanket over the incident, and whether that meant they’d cremated the body after slapping a natural causes sticker on it or had her nursed back to health in a lakeside sanatorium was anybody’s guess. He tried not to think about her often. If she was dead, which she probably was, he hoped they’d spread her ashes somewhere nice.

  But the past was his daily passenger at the moment: right there next to him wherever he went. And it wasn’t what he thought it had been, either; not so much a passenger as a hitchhiker; one who gets weird a few miles down the road. River had met his father for the first time earlier that year. This was not a meeting he had ever expected to happen. His father, he’d always assumed, had been a drive-by from his mother’s wayward youth, and this explained the scant information she’d ever released as to his identity. This had long ceased to matter to River, or at least, had become something he was prepared to bury under the psychological debris of the everyday: the actual father figure in his life was the O.B., under whose guidance he had grown to be the man he was. So his had been an unplanned birth: so what? The same could be said about a fair proportion of the world’s population, not many of whom had enjoyed his safe upbringing. But now it turned out this picture was askew; that far from having been a vague figure who had emerged from bar or nightclub to enjoy an overnight fling with Isobel Cartwright, his father had lived on Spook Street, same as his grandfather; that far from being unplanned, River’s birth had been plotted, his very existence a counter in a bigger game. And now his father was out there in the world, and while this had been true before River had ever laid eyes on him, its continued truth now carried a different weight.

  He thought he might kill his father next time their paths crossed.

  And he also thought that Slough House was no longer enough for him; that the tenuous promise it offered of future redemption, a return to the shining fold of Regent’s Park, could sustain him no longer. Weeks of playing computer games rather than fulfilling another of Lamb’s Sisyphean tasks; wasn’t that his psyche telling him he was ready to quit? At the very least, he was asking to be fired. And no coincidence that this was happening while he was waiting for the O.B. to die.

  The thought blurred his vision momentarily, and he had to slow down. Because that would be a great way to go: checking out in a borrowed car with a surly companion, just as he was starting to make decisions about his future.

  They were about half an hour from Slough; traffic a little sludgy, but not too bad – the fag end of rush hour, not its evil heart – and the sky starting to think about changing for the evening. The car was nice to drive – it was an electric-blue Ford Kia: its very name enough to generate outraged emails – but only in the sense that River wasn’t worried about pranging it. Ho, presumably, had chosen this car because he felt it suited him. River could only agree.

  He glanced across at Coe, and was surprised to find he had his eyes open.

  ‘How sure are you this is gonna happen?’ he asked.

  Coe didn’t react.

  iPod. Of course.

  River tapped him on the knee and made a take-your-fucking-earbuds-out gesture, which Coe reluctantly did.

  ‘How sure are you this is gonna happen?’ River repeated.

  Coe stared ahead for a while, watching the road being swallowed up by the car’s front wheels, then shrugged and started putting his buds back in.

  ‘In the interests of a healthy working relationship,’ River said, ‘I should warn you that if you do that, I’m gonna pull onto the hard shoulder and beat the snot out of you.’

  Coe paused and then nodded. ‘You could try,’ he said, and carried on inserting the earbuds.

  That went well, thought River.

  But a minute later, Coe pulled them out again. He said, ‘On a scale of one to ten? Maybe three.’

  River nodded. That’s about what he’d figured.

  He said, ‘But you felt it worth raising.’

  There was another pause, then Coe said, ‘I’m right about the bigger picture. The template they’re using. The chances of us guessing right which pol they’ll try to hit, and it happening ton
ight, that’s a stretch.’

  He didn’t look at River while saying this, but stayed focused on the road ahead of them.

  Just for fun, River said, ‘But supposing we guessed right, and they’ll go for Gimball. Tonight. How’d you rate our chances of stopping it? On the same scale?’

  J. K. Coe raised his earbuds again, but before slotting them into place he said, ‘Less than zero.’

  ‘Yellow car,’ said Shirley.

  ‘Yeah, not really.’

  ‘Yes really.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Louisa. ‘On account of one, it’s a van, not a car, and two, it’s orange, not yellow. So orange van, not yellow car.’

  ‘Same difference.’

  Louisa suppressed a sigh. Until ten minutes ago, the rules of Yellow Car had seemed pretty straightforward: when you saw a yellow car, you said, ‘Yellow car’. There wasn’t much room for controversy. But that was before she’d introduced Shirley to the game.

  Nor had the game stopped Shirley fidgeting. She’d already been rooting about in the glove compartment, and had found a pair of sunglasses she was now wearing, and also some gum. ‘Can I have this?’

  ‘Jesus. It’s like being trapped with a ten-year-old.’

  ‘I get bored on long car journeys.’

  Louisa said, ‘I can drop you at the next services. Just say the word.’

  Shirley admired herself in the mirror on the sunshield. ‘These shades are about six years out of fashion.’

  ‘That’s why they’re in the glove compartment,’ Louisa said. ‘And not, for instance, on my face.’

  ‘Are we nearly there yet?’

  Not nearly enough, thought Louisa.

  ‘There’ was the east side of Birmingham: a phone call having determined that Zafar Jaffrey was in his home city that evening, delivering a talk in a library. The woman who’d given Louisa this information had added a gloss or two, emphasising Jaffrey’s manifold qualities which, Louisa suspected, might have included walking on water if she’d prolonged the call long enough. Nice to know he had his supporters, though when a politician seemed too good to be true, that usually meant he was. Still, if you had to pick one you’d rather not see assassinated, Jaffrey had the edge on Dennis Gimball, which was why she’d left Gimball to River. Faced with the task of keeping Gimball alive, she couldn’t put her hand on her heart and say she’d do her damnedest; there was a strong argument that knocking Gimball off his perch would be doing the nation a favour. Or at any rate, not doing it so much harm it would need therapy.