by Mick Herron
As for the voice of support, Louisa recalled that Jaffrey was famous for recruiting his staff from the ranks of ex-offenders, which meant, if this were a movie, that he’d turn out to be running a crime syndicate under cover of a political campaign. Then again, if this were a movie, Louisa’s shades wouldn’t be six years out of style.
Shirley said, ‘What are the chances Coe’s right about this?’
‘Not high.’
‘How not high?’
‘Really not high.’ Louisa pulled out to overtake some middle-lane hog who was dawdling along at seventy-five. ‘I mean, okay, the whole watering hole thing, maybe he’s on to something. But if you mean, is a terror gang about to try and whack Zafar Jaffrey, I can’t really see that happening, no.’
‘So why are we here?’
‘Gets us out of the office.’
Shirley turned to give a little wave to the overtaken driver, then blew a bubble with the gum and let it pop. ‘If he’s as clever as everyone says he is, how come he’s a fucking idiot?’
‘Who, Coe? I don’t think he is a fucking idiot.’
‘He barely ever says a word.’
‘Not a sign of idiocy,’ Louisa said pointedly, though that barb didn’t land.
‘Plus he’s a psycho.’
‘Well, yeah. He is that.’
‘I bet his phone’s smarter than he is.’
‘Everyone’s phone is smarter than they are.’
‘I bet his has a more exciting sex life.’
‘Is he gay, do you reckon?’
‘I don’t want to think about Coe’s dick.’
‘I’m not asking you to think about—’
‘Yeah, you’re asking me to speculate where he likes putting it. And I don’t want to think about that.’
Louisa said, ‘You’re the one who brought it up.’ She raised a finger from the wheel and pointed it at the opposite lane of traffic. ‘Yellow car.’
‘I don’t want to play that any more.’
Like an eight-year-old, Louisa mentally amended. It was like being trapped with an eight-year-old.
Maybe she’d have been better off partnering with Coe – she’d certainly have had a quieter journey – but, yes, he was kind of psycho. This didn’t mean his overall analysis of the situation was off. The whole destabilising project sounded barking enough to ring true to Louisa, and that was enough to make this journey worthwhile – she hadn’t been kidding about getting out of the office. Because sooner or later, Ho was going to tell the boys and girls at Regent’s Park that he’d handed over a Service document to some bad actors, who were using it as a blueprint to a murder spree, and then hellfire was going to rain down. Best to be elsewhere when that happened: let Lamb soak it up on his own.
And even if nothing happened in Birmingham, this didn’t make the journey a waste of time. She’d screwed up last night. Ho could have been killed, and, whatever anyone felt about Ho, Slough House had seen enough death. Besides, if Ho had been whacked, what would that say about her own abilities? She’d been there to protect him. So today she was going the extra mile: call it penance. Also, she’d closed River down when he’d suggested Shirley was missing Marcus, and she felt bad about that too. Maybe it was time to start probing. Maybe, instead of bouncing off each other like spinning tops, she and Shirley could do each other some good.
So she said, ‘You never talk about Marcus.’
Shirley proved her point by not replying.
‘I know what it’s like to lose someone close.’
‘And when you talk about them, do they come back?’
It was Louisa’s turn not to say anything.
Shirley said, ‘How long has this gum been in there anyway?’
‘Longer than the sunglasses.’
Shirley spat it into her hand. Then her face brightened. ‘Yellow car.’
‘I thought you didn’t want to play any more.’
‘No,’ said Shirley. ‘I just didn’t want to lose.’
Are we nearly there yet? wondered Louisa.
A sign told her: fifteen miles.
See? We are on the same page after all.
When a police officer, Emma Flyte had never fallen into the trap of thinking cops and villains two sides of a coin, closer in outlook than a civilian could understand. She preferred to hold to a more fundamental verity: that villains were arseholes who needed locking up, and cops were the folk to do it.
Here on Spook Street, the option of arresting the bad guys wasn’t open to her.
If it had been, Jackson Lamb would have been on her list. She didn’t care that he used to be a joe – didn’t buy into that whole romantic notion of the bruised survivor of an undercover war – and wasn’t impressed by his apparent determination to bully or alienate everyone around him. She simply thought him a bastard, and the best way of dealing with bastards was to cut them off at the knees. And even Lamb himself, deluded ringmaster that he was, would have to agree that over the last hour or so, he’d provided her with a sharp enough axe to do just that.
Emma pulled back her hair, tied it with an elastic band. Anything less utilitarian – even the most basic of scrunchies – and she’d get sideways looks from male colleagues, who seemed to think any hint of decoration meant she was playing the gender card. That these same men wore ear studs and sleeve tattoos didn’t figure in their calculations … She was in her car, though hadn’t yet turned the key. Hadn’t yet figured out her next move.
She hoped it hadn’t showed, back in Slough House, but rage was sluicing through her body. Being cuffed like a prisoner; fed tea from a cup in someone else’s hands – what she really wanted was to bang heads together; corral the slow horses and have each of them hobbled. Boiled down into glue.
But …
But she didn’t much care for the bigger picture either.
The Standish woman was right: Claude Whelan had his hands full, and wouldn’t appreciate the mess she’d made of locking down Slough House. And Taverner would be less than no help: she’d happily accept any ammunition that could be used against Lamb, but she wasn’t the type to waste ammo, and if she could bring down Emma with the same round, she’d do precisely that. Emma had disappointed Taverner by failing to nail her colours to Taverner’s mast, and Diana had a robust approach to alliances, one which refused to accept the notion of a neutral. If you weren’t for her, you were fair game.
Besides. There was always the possibility Lamb was right. And whatever she’d said back there about Waterproof, about how the old ways no longer applied in Regent’s Park, she had the feeling that if the Abbotsfield killings turned out part of a cataclysmic self-inflicted wound, then anyone who knew about it would soon wish they didn’t.
She drummed her thumbs on the steering wheel. The day was packing its bags and tidying up; would be drawing the curtains before long. Whatever she was going to do, she’d better get on with it.
There was a phrase she’d heard bandied about: London Rules. Rule one was cover your arse …
What she really hated about reaching this conclusion was knowing Lamb would expect her to do just that.
Thank God she had at least one ally in this dog-eat-dog universe. Before starting the car, she reached for her phone, and called Devon.
Catherine said, ‘Happy now?’
‘You know me. Like Pollyeffinganna on Christmas morning.’
‘I’m guessing Santa brought you mostly coal,’ she said.
They were in his office. Outside, the afternoon was dying; in here, it could have been any time from 1972 onwards. Lamb had poured himself a medium-huge glass of whisky; had poured one for Catherine, too, which he did sometimes. Perhaps he wanted her to drink from it. Perhaps he just wanted to watch her resisting. So much of his life seemed to consist of testing other people’s limits. Presumably he’d grown bored testing his own.
‘You do know,’ she said, ‘that Flyte’s probably rounding up her Dogs even now. And that wherever they’re keeping Roddy, there’ll be a space next to him just
for you.’
He looked indignant. ‘What did I do?’
‘… You want a list?’
‘She’s not going to go crying all the way home,’ Lamb said. ‘She did that every time a nasty man handcuffed her, she’d never have any fun.’
‘You know, I’d think twice about offering that in mitigation.’
Lamb waved her objection away, unless he was chasing off a fly. ‘She’s a cop,’ he said. ‘She knows damn well that if there’s even the slightest chance what Coe said is true, then it needs chasing down. And stopping to file a complaint about what happened here’s just gonna clog the wheels.’ He paused to raise his glass to his mouth. He’s already drained a bottle of wine, Catherine thought. She could almost taste it, if she tried hard enough. But that was a door she wasn’t walking through: not today. He was talking again. ‘Besides, she’s not gonna want everyone knowing what a crap job she made of it. Dander went out for sweeties, for Christ’s sake. I’m pretty sure that’s outside the lockdown guidelines.’
‘I don’t think they were drawn up with you in mind.’
He nodded seriously at that. Guidelines never were.
Catherine said, ‘You sent our crew out after a bunch of killers.’
‘I’d have gone with them, but—’
‘But you couldn’t be arsed, yes. That wasn’t my point. Coe’s carrying a knife if you believe Shirley, but other than that they’re unarmed. Just supposing a pair of them do run into this gang. How’s that likely to turn out?’
‘Well, I’m an incurable optimist, as you know,’ he said. ‘But I expect it’ll all go to shit, as usual.’
‘That’s reassuring.’
‘Oh, grow a pair. Actually, on second thoughts, don’t.’ He stared at his glass a moment, as if trying to work out what it was, and where it went, and then solved that puzzle in the usual way. When he’d done, he said, ‘These killers aren’t up to much. Slaughtering a bunch of pedestrians is one thing. But they failed to whack Ho twice, and let’s face it, he’s a walking wicket. Nah, they’re amateurs. I’d back Guy and Dander against them most days.’
‘What about River and Coe?’
‘Okay, you’ve made your point. But at least we’ll have a spare room.’
‘Jackson—’
‘The targets, both of them, ’ll have a police presence. Armed police, more than likely. If our crew spot anything, all they have to do is raise the alarm. It’s not like I’m expecting them to lay their lives down.’
‘… All right.’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if they weren’t fuck-ups, they wouldn’t be here in the first place.’
‘You’re wasted on us,’ she told him. ‘You should be writing greetings cards.’
A shattered sneer pasted across his face; he reached for her glass.
There were five of them, and one was dead.
They’d wrapped him, tight as they could, in what came to hand, which was cling film. This lent a horror film sheen to the corpse, and every time Danny looked at him – it – he had the feeling it was about to move; to extend its mummy-like arms and shuffle to its feet. Just yesterday, he’d been among the living. Joon, he’d been called then. Now Joon was an it, and cling film-wrapped, as if sheets of skin-thin plastic could keep him fresh.
They all knew that wasn’t going to happen.
‘Bad fall,’ Shin had said.
Apparently, there were good ones. In Joon’s case, this would have involved not landing neck first, after falling through a big window. And pretty clearly, even before his meeting with the pavement, Joon had not been having a successful evening: if he’d completed the task in hand, there’d have been no need to take such a dramatic short cut. He could have padded down the stairs and let himself out through the door. No, the target was still upright, that was clear.
Which was Shin’s fault, and while it was not Danny’s place to offer criticism, it was becoming harder to hold his tongue. He had been in the country three years, and still the flabbiness of life in Britain startled him on a daily basis. There was no direction. No leadership. The newspapers – the media – delivered a chaotic medley of constant opinion: contradictory, mindless noise that was affecting them all. Since Abbotsfield, they had had more failures than successes; and of the latter, the Watering Hole bomb had been down to Danny alone: a simple, beautiful physical action, after which he had ghosted himself away, invisible to the shocked crowds around. But the target, Ho, had escaped unharmed twice, and the bomb on the train had been a humiliating debacle. There were two reasons for this that Danny could see. The first was Shin himself, who appeared to have no stomach for a leadership role. The second was the absence of uniform. Having shed their uniforms, they had let the chaos in.
Shin was looking at his phone now, his back against the side of the van they’d been living in for the past week, scrolling through Twitter feeds, through news headlines, as if consulting an oracle. Danny felt contempt worming through him: if Shin were to lead he should lead, not look for answers in the rubble of the internet. His resolve was weakening by the hour. He thought the best way of getting results was letting them know the plan they were working to, whereas a true commander would expect obedience to be blind, and deal with infraction severely. He had not even punished An when An failed to run the target over the previous morning. Was even now unable to draw a line between these two events: because An had failed yesterday, Joon was dead today.
He closed his eyes and tried to find the calm space. Their mission had stumbled, but had not been compromised. As for Shin, Danny would report him once it was over. There could be no other way. His leadership was a mistake, a disgrace, and he would understand that for himself had his head not been turned by the chaos. As for the rest of them – who had been four and now were three – they would keep their cool and see the plan through. That was the phrase he was after: keep their cool. It wasn’t, after all, the details that mattered; it was the simple fact of the plan’s implementation. This was the oldest of all stratagems, the lesson you delivered to your enemies: that the stronger they built their citadels, the more securely they sealed the instruments of their own destruction within.
All that Danny and his comrades needed was to remain … cool.
That was the phrase.
Cool cats.
Part Two
Hot Dogs
8
RIVER PARKED IN A metered space, and was fumbling for change when he remembered – duh – that it was Ho’s car, so stopped. He looked around. Dusk was smudging distant outlines. Next to him, Coe was still plugged in. His eyes were open, but had an unfocused, glazed expression which in anyone else River would have taken to mean high.
Coe, he suspected, didn’t get high. Just reaching a level would be a stretch.
He made the get-your-earbuds-out gesture again, a necessary piece of sign language when dealing with Coe, and said, ‘It’s kind of funny, being in actual Slough.’
Coe stared.
‘I’ll explain later. You okay with this?’
‘No.’
‘Which part especially?’
Coe thought, then said, ‘All of it.’
‘Well, just so long as you don’t shoot anyone this time.’
‘I don’t have a gun.’
‘Yeah, I was hoping for commitment. Not just lack of means.’
It wasn’t that River thought it likely there’d be gunfire, violence, blood, but he figured at least one of them ought to raise the possibility, since they were, at least nominally, here to prevent a possible assassination. Or perhaps just interrupt one. But now the journey was over, that possibility had receded into the realms of the far-fetched. Nothing exciting ever happened to the slow horses. Well, okay, there’d been that gun battle a while back, and the psycho who shot up Slough House, but mostly it was just the daily grind. And that they were currently in the actual Slough only rubbed that in, somehow. The actual Slough wasn’t somewhere he’d been before, and all he knew about it was that it had managed to crawl
this near to London and then given up. No ambition. There was also a poem about bombs, but he wasn’t reading too much into that.
‘We should check the place out,’ he said. ‘See what’s what.’
‘In case there’s a group wearing Team Abbotsfield Tshirts?’
River looked at him.
‘Or sitting in McDonald’s, enjoying a Happy Terrorist Meal?’
Well, it was better than nothing. ‘Yeah, something like that.’
‘Where’s the meeting?’
It was a couple of streets away, two minutes’ walk. Coe kept his hands in his pockets, and had the look of an adolescent on a forced excursion, except – River noticed – his eyes never stayed still: he checked out everything, traffic and pedestrians alike. River had the feeling he expected the worst on a continuous basis. What he’d do when and if it showed up, River didn’t know, but Shirley was always banging on about him carrying a knife. Handy that at least one of them was tooled up, but how a blade was going to help if a bunch of paramilitary maniacs made an appearance was a question best unasked. Not that that was going to happen, River reminded himself – even Coe had said as much, and it was his fault they were here in the first place.
The meeting hall looked like a primary school: red-brick, with green windows and pipework. It sat behind a low wall into which iron railings had been set, and with a gateway big enough for cars. This was manned by private security guards, their uniforms official-looking at a distance, but their belts weighed down by so much fussy nonsense – radios, torches, puncture repair kits – that you couldn’t take them seriously. But maybe he was just jealous. A fully fledged member of the security services, River carried about as much weight as a supermarket trolley wrangler.