by Mick Herron
Coe said, ‘Looking at your future?’
‘Shoot me now,’ said River, before remembering who he was talking to.
‘Don’t worry, you’re not likely to finish up a car park attendant. Current scenario, that would be a happy ending.’
It was nice Coe was finding his voice, but River wished he’d shut the fuck up.
‘Let’s separate,’ he said. ‘Make sure Team Abbotsfield haven’t got the building staked out.’
As if, he thought.
On the other hand, stranger things had happened.
Miles away: a little later, another public meeting.
The library was on a side street, and from a distance could have been any municipal building: health centre, brothel, tax office. A flyer taped to the door announced the evening’s event. ZAFAR JAFFREY WILL BE SPEAKING ON THE IMPORTANT ISSUES FACING THE COMMUNITY, AND ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS CANDIDACY FOR MAYOR. A thumbnail photo confirmed Louisa’s impression that Jaffrey was a looker. There were rows of chairs at the back of the room, beyond sets of free-standing bookshelves; some occupied already, though the event wouldn’t begin for thirty minutes. Returning to the car, she’d clocked the other vehicles lining the road. All were empty. There were vacant parking spaces too. Louisa thought about taking a photo, to show people in London.
Back in the car, Shirley sat with folded arms. Despite the sunglasses, she weirdly resembled a Buddha. ‘All I’ve eaten today is a bunch of Haribo,’ she said.
‘Remind me whose fault that is?’
‘We could have stopped at a service station.’
‘We could have gone for a candlelit supper,’ said Louisa. ‘Only I took an executive decision to get on with the job.’
‘Who put you in charge?’
My wheels, my rules, Louisa thought, but didn’t say. There came a point when squabbling with Shirley reached a brick wall: you could either bang your head against it or walk round.
So she said, ‘Jaffrey’s talk starts in half an hour. It’s scheduled to last forty minutes, with a twenty-minute Q&A. One of us should go inside, the other stay out here, and …’
‘Secure the perimeter?’
‘I was trying not to say that,’ she admitted.
‘That’s not really a one-woman job,’ Shirley said.
‘Yeah, no, I didn’t say it was an ideal plan. But it is a plan.’
‘Are you armed?’
‘No. Are you?’
‘I wish.’
‘There’s a monkey wrench in the boot.’
‘Dibs.’
Shirley with a monkey wrench, Louisa thought: yeah, that was someone you’d want on your side. She might look like a mini-Buddha, but she didn’t share the same attitude to peace and oneness and all that. Though, in her defence, she’d given a few unsuspecting souls a nudge in the direction of reincarnation.
She took her phone out, Google Earthed. ‘There doesn’t seem to be a rear entrance. The building backs onto something else, an office block, I think.’
‘What about the roof?’
‘It looks like, you know, a roof. There’s a skylight.’
‘They don’t seem the subtle sort.’
So descending through a skylight was Shirley’s idea of subtle. Interesting. And what did they think they were doing, Louisa wondered; a question she’d successfully avoided until now. The crew who’d massacred Abbotsfield weren’t taking prisoners, they were spraying bullets. Waving a monkey wrench wasn’t going to put them off. And Shirley and Louisa only had one monkey wrench between them.
But it was the longest of shots that anything would happen, and besides, shying away from risk wasn’t going to win anyone a get-out-of-Slough-House-free card. Sitting at a desk, compiling lists of library users, wasn’t the reason she’d joined the Service. And if most ops involved heavy backup and protective clothing, there were always the off-the-cuff moments when you were expected to rely on your training, and the expertise hammered into you on the mats at the Service schools, or on the plains near Salisbury. Put your hands up, hide in a corner until the worst was over, and you might as well be a civilian. This way, when the score was taken at the end, she’d be able to say she’d been there, and ready. Wasted on a desk job, in other words.
Still, though. Just the one monkey wrench.
But nothing bad was going to happen.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling,’ Shirley said.
… Great.
‘Thanks for that. You’re having an intuition?’
‘No, I’m having a stomach cramp. I really need to eat.’
‘Shirley—’
‘There’s a takeaway back there. We passed it just before we turned.’
There were people arriving; little groups of the civic-minded, come to take the political temperature. An elderly couple, walking with sticks; another pair who might be students, one carrying a stack of leaflets.
‘There’s no time. You’ll survive.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
‘It’s an op, Shirley. Not an awayday.’
‘I’m pretty sure Lamb would say yes.’
‘Lamb’s not here. Which means I get to say no.’
‘You don’t give me orders.’
‘No, but I can let you walk home.’
‘There are trains,’ snarled Shirley.
Trains! You had to laugh.
‘As of now,’ Louisa said, ‘we’re live. One of us needs to be in there, to check out the audience. If anything’s gonna happen, we stand a better chance of stopping it if we spot the bad guys before they make their move. So. Are you gonna keep grousing, or get with the programme?’
Shirley mumbled something. Louisa assumed it was assent.
‘You want to be inside or out?’
‘I want the monkey wrench,’ Shirley said.
‘It’s in the boot,’ Louisa told her, and left to join the crowd in the library.
‘I need a cigarette,’ Gimball told his wife.
‘No you don’t.’
‘I’m not going to get through this without one.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘You gave up. Publicly. Very publicly. If I’m seen with a cigarette between my lips again, don’t vote for me. Your words.’
‘Well, yes, but I didn’t mean them. It wasn’t an electoral promise.’
Actually, he reflected, he’d have been better off saying it had been an electoral promise. Only infants and idiots expected you to keep those.
‘You’ve done this a thousand times. What are you so worried about?’
He could tell her, he thought. Explain that he was about to get up on stage and ask for acceptance for who he really was. That done, he could probably let slip he was still smoking too, and get away with it. It wasn’t going to be what his audience focused on.
But if he came clean now, and she expressed doubt – which she would – he’d crumble like a cupcake in the rain. He needed her support, and to get that he’d have to present her with a fait accompli. Following which there’d be some bad moments to get through in private, but in public she’d back him to the hilt, having little choice. Unless – but no. He couldn’t believe she’d abandon him. There’d be mileage in that – the deceived wife – but standing by her man would guarantee acres of coverage, with material for a year’s worth of columns. And also she loved him. So this was the way to go.
‘It’s a crunch moment,’ he said. ‘For both of us.’
No word of a lie.
‘We’re keeping our powder dry,’ she told him. ‘That’s all. Doing as Whelan said isn’t the end of anything, Dennis. It’s an interruption.’
He still needed a cigarette.
‘If you get caught,’ she said, ‘you’re never borrowing my Manolos again.’
Which was her way of giving assent. He’d never fit into her Manolos in a million years.
He checked, with a tap of a finger, that fags and lighter were in his breast pocket, then retreated from their commandeered room to find one of the volunteers staggering past und
er a ziggurat of plastic chairs.
‘Is there a back door? Need to gather my thoughts.’
There was.
River walked the block, and the neighbouring one, to get his bearings. At one point he saw J. K. Coe crossing a junction up ahead, a mobile slouch, and shook his head. Even now, when he could halfway kid himself he was doing something that mattered – was on an op – the reality of life among the slow horses kept asserting itself. His colleagues were mostly useless, so bowed down by issues they might have been in art school rather than the Secret Service. Louisa excepted, maybe. And himself, of course. Always important to remember that: there was nothing wrong with River himself.
There was an outside broadcasting truck at the hall, and this would be a good disguise for a bunch of armed maniacs, but the more River looked the more like a real TV truck it seemed. Most disguises would have maxed out with a logo on the sides and a few peaked caps and clipboards; here, two men were unreeling a marathon’s length of cabling through a propped-open fire door, and there was still enough equipment left over to shoot a Harry Potter movie. Of course, if you were going to carry out a successful assault on a political gathering, this might be the way to do it – rig out transport, stack it with authentic-looking kit, then park near the target and take your time. But River didn’t think so. Unleashing gunfire on a village street, or leaving a home-made bomb on a train; lobbing a pipe bomb into a penguin enclosure – it all smacked of a bunch of fanatics slipping through the cracks. Any move they made, he thought, would be more a headlong dash for victory than a minutely planned assault. Passing themselves off as media professionals, with all the fake credentials required, was surely out of their league.
He watched a while longer, waiting for some sign that all was not as it appeared, then left them to it.
Not far off was a building wrapped in scaffolding: its upper half freshly painted, the lower grimy and road-splashed, years of urban living etched into its facade. Alongside it ran a narrow alley along which the scaffolding continued, making passage difficult, and which dead-ended in an area occupied by wheelie bins. The building was in use – lights shone in the upper storeys – but a sheet of tarpaulin flapping overhead gave it a forlorn, abandoned air. River walked to the end of the alley, found no human presence, and returned to the main road.
When he looked back, the building reminded him of Slough House. No special reason. Just that it was a little dismal, a little so-what?; the kind of place, if you worked there, you’d find yourself reaching for a drink the moment you got home. Difference was, somebody was going to the trouble and expense of having it repainted: if not a bright new future, at least a fresh coat to cover the past. And he felt a familiar internal slump. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep this pretence up, where he was nominally one of the nation’s protectors but actually an irrelevant drone. He could count on his fingers the number of times he’d been dispatched from Slough House on a mission. Not including fetching takeaways for Lamb. It wasn’t what he’d wanted from life. Not what his grandfather had wanted for him, either.
So if something didn’t happen soon, he’d quit. Anything was better than this. Standing by scaffolding as the evening descended, this was the decision River came to, but if he’d expected his heart to lighten with the moment, he was disappointed. It felt as if something had deflated instead.
Ach, he thought. And then: shit. And then he made his way round the metal poles obstructing the pavement and walked back to the hall, outside whose doors a queue had formed.
He wondered where Coe had got to.
Shirley waited until Louisa had been in the library for ten minutes before going to fetch some chips, and then waited another ten, because if she’d been Louisa, hoping to catch Shirley in the act, that was the time frame she’d have adopted. If she’d been Louisa, she’d definitely have caught Shirley in the act. As it was, being Shirley, she’d be back with her chips before the gathering dispersed.
She was halfway to the takeaway before she remembered the wrap of coke in her pocket.
Sixty-three days she was on, and the sky was gloomy; the evening gathering pace. Not long now, and she’d have sixty-four. What then? Sitting back and watching the numbers grow held no pleasure for her, but still: there was a nagging concern at the back of her mind that there’d be a tint of … failure in setting the calendar to zero. As if she’d set out to do something, and given up before getting there. As if she were unable to carry it further.
But there was no reason why anyone would think that; no reason anyone would know. She was on her own. She could get off her tits on a nightly basis, and provided she rocked up to Slough House every morning, life would crawl on as usual. Because she wasn’t an addict. A user, sure, but for recreation only. And it was nobody’s business how recreational she got.
If she had a problem, how come she had sixty-three days straight?
A fresh batch of cod had just been put into the deep fryer, so Shirley ordered a hot dog while waiting, and ate it watching fat spit and sizzle. She remembered once sitting in an all-night laundrette, studying the tumblers as their loads rose and fell, rose and fell, like dolphins. It might have been hours she sat there, lost in fascination. That was the sort of thing that happened then, but didn’t now. Now life was set to normal, was a long string of grey moments, as if the mood in Slough House were leaking through its walls, and infecting everything, everywhere.
It got to them all in the end, the curse of the slow horses. It sapped them of energy, and left them to wilt.
Her order arrived. Armed with a plastic fork, still chewing the last of her hot dog, she left the shop thinking about Marcus, and what he’d have made of her self-imposed clean stretch. He’d have said little. He’d have nodded, though, or something; made one of those macho gestures of his, to remind her that he might be behind a desk same as she was but he’d kicked down doors in his time, and she’d have felt good, seeing that nod; felt she was on the right track. But on the other hand: fuck off, Marcus; what’s it to do with you? Not as if he’d waltzed through life unaccompanied by demons. Towards the end there, the back half of last year, he’d been pouring money into slot machines like he’d found the secret to eternal life.
The chips were good, though.
When she reached the car she was relieved, despite herself, to find that Louisa hadn’t reappeared, and decided to eat standing up, using the car roof as a table. Stink the inside out, she’d never hear the end of it. She attacked the cod with the two-inch fork – a weapon unsuited to the task – and managed to convey a reasonable chunk into her mouth before remembering she was supposed to be ‘securing the perimeter’: yeah, right. Still chewing, she stepped round the car and into the quiet road, giving the parked vehicles a quick once-over. Everything as it had been.
Except, she thought, before stepping back to her al fresco dinner – except: that van, a hundred yards away. Had that been there five minutes ago?
It hadn’t.
When Coe saw Cartwright heading for the hall, he stepped inside a shop doorway and hid. He didn’t feel needed. I think we’re in trouble he’d said, and meant it, but he didn’t think trouble was going to happen here. The odds were on a par with aliens landing on that scaffolding, or America’s comedy president forswearing Twitter.
But as far as the bigger picture went, he knew he was right.
He slipped his radio’s earbuds in and listened to the headlines: an update on the surviving penguins; a woman found dead in her London home. Not long ago, he wouldn’t have been able to do this: the most he’d been able to bear was long stretches of unscored piano music; improvised melody that had him drifting like a leaf in a rowing boat’s wake. But that was fading; had begun to do so once he’d fired three bullets into a killer’s chest. Strange, the things that eased tension. This one wasn’t likely to crop up in self-help books, but you couldn’t argue with results.
And whatever else was going on, whatever static buzzed in his background, his brain worked fine, so yes, he knew
he was right. He’d always had an ability to retrieve written information: to recall the shape of words on a page, the arrangement of paragraphs, at what depth of a book a sentence lay. ‘The watering hole’ was a Kiplingesque phrase that lingered. Whoever had tossed the bomb into the penguin enclosure at Dobsey Park had been following instructions that Coe had seen written down, and beneath that plan a bigger one was shifting. The point of all this was to whip the curtain away, and show the machinery behind. Expose the plan as one the nation had written itself, or its secret sharers had. And a nation’s secret sharers were the keepers of its soul.
He left the doorway and headed down the street, then into an alley between the worked-on building and the next. At the end of the alley wheelie bins jostled, but there was no way through, and he was about to head back when he noticed a ladder fixed to the scaffolding. Okay, he thought. From up high, he could watch the street. Cartwright was bound to call and ask what he was doing; ‘maintaining surveillance’ might shut him up. And he’d be out of harm’s reach. He scaled the ladder, and then another, which took him up to a walkway thirty feet above the street. The wooden boards had give in them, but not enough to feel unsafe. Just a slight swaying motion. Panic attacks, Lamb had accused him of having. Okay, but it was people who triggered them. He was fine with heights. Was fine with most things, provided they didn’t come with people attached.
By the top of this second ladder was a sealed paint tin, which probably shouldn’t have been left there. Coe stepped round it, leaned on a horizontal metal pole, and looked down on the street below.
‘The watering hole’. At Regent’s Park he’d have had to back his assertions with hard evidence or statistical probability. In Slough House, all he’d had to do was convince Jackson Lamb. But then, Lamb had done his time behind the Wall, and could still read the writing on it. People talked about Spook Street – life in the covert world – but Lamb had served down the dismal end, where your instincts stayed sharp or you suffered, and he recognised the truth when he heard it. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t a fat bastard, just that he was a fat bastard you dismissed at your peril.