by Mick Herron
He said, ‘The entire country is focused on an alleyway in Slough. Do you really think they’re not going to work out what happened there? Someone will have seen us. Even if there’s no CCTV, someone will have seen us. Ho’s car’ll be on camera entering and leaving town.’
‘Along with hundreds of others,’ said Coe. ‘Besides, there was a genuine bad guy there, remember? We were trying to protect Gimball.’
‘And a damn fine job we did.’
‘Stop bitching. He’ll be on camera too, and he won’t have the advantage of being a member of the Service. We were there to protect Gimball. He was there to hurt him.’
‘He might have his own story to tell though, mightn’t he?’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Coe. ‘That depends on whether he gets to tell it.’
‘… Are you serious?’
‘He looked like a player. Let’s face it, he was giving you trouble. So when a SWAT team comes through his door, what are the odds he’ll put up a fight?’ Coe made a facial shrug, mostly using his eyebrows. It was as much expression as River had ever seen him wearing, and meant, in this instance, Game Over.
‘There’ll be an investigation,’ he said. ‘Even if they arrest tattoo guy’s corpse, they won’t just leave it at that. They’ll piece things together.’
‘How long have you been doing this? There’ll be an official version of events. That’s what happens. And what really went down, if it’s inconvenient, will be buried.’
‘Yeah, but we’re not inconvenient,’ said River. ‘We’re Slough House. We’re pretty much made to measure, if they’re looking to hang someone. Not to mention,’ he added, ‘that you really did kill him. You know? So it’s not even a fit-up.’
‘We’re Service,’ said Coe. ‘Slough House or not. This gets public, it’ll go global in a heartbeat. Half the world will believe we were following orders. The other half’ll know it for a fact.’
‘You keep saying “we”,’ said River.
‘There’s a reason for that.’
River remembered again, second time in as many days, sharing this room with Sid Baker: that was the last time the office had heard this much conversation. Well, argument. He said, ‘We sit here much longer, I’m going to start throwing things through the window.’ Beginning with you, he didn’t say. ‘If you’re so keen on constructing a more favourable narrative, what’s your game plan?’
‘“Constructing a more favourable narrative”?’
‘I read the Guardian,’ said River. ‘Well, sometimes. Well, the cartoons.’
Coe said, ‘What happened today’s part of the Abbotsfield sequence. That’s the narrative. Tattoo guy, Zafar Jaffrey’s man – he’s mixed up in that bigger picture. We were trying to foil him.’
River realised Shirley was in the doorway, her left hand curled into a fist – gripping something – and her right leaning against the door frame.
‘Come up with a plan yet?’ she asked.
‘I was thinking, prayer,’ he said.
‘That’s your best option,’ she agreed. ‘But you’re still fucked.’
‘Yeah. But thanks for the pep talk.’
‘Want a Haribo?’
‘Is this your idea of constructive help? Because I have to tell you—’
‘You need to find Kim,’ she said.
‘Ho’s girlfriend?’
Shirley said, ‘She’s the one he passed the Watering Hole paper to. She’s the one with the connection to the Abbotsfield crew. Find her, you find them. Probably.’
Coe said, ‘Ho’s been at the Park all afternoon. Anything he can tell them about Kim he’ll have told them, in which case they’ll already have her or they can’t find her. Probably because she’s already dead.’
Shirley said, ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘You get a lot perkier after killing someone.’ She tucked whatever she was holding into her jeans pocket. ‘Lamb’ll probably adopt it as office policy.’
Coe ignored her. To River, he said, ‘They tried to kill Ho. Stands to reason they’ll have cut the other loose thread by now.’
‘That’s what you would have done, is it?’ said Shirley.
‘What’s what who would have done?’ Louisa stepped past Shirley and came into the room.
River said, ‘Oh, we’re just discussing the office rota. You know, whose turn it is to wash up. Who Coe’s going to kill next. That sort of thing.’
‘We watched Kim the other night. She’s pretty fly,’ said Shirley.
‘I don’t speak disco.’
‘I mean, they tried to kill Ho, and couldn’t even manage that. And he can barely tie his laces. So I think they’d have had trouble whacking Kim. She seemed pretty … smart.’
Coe was looking something up: woman found dead in her London home. He read the headline out. Then said, ‘Black?’
‘Not Kim then,’ said Shirley.
Louisa said, ‘You’re thinking if we can find her we can trace the Abbotsfield crew.’
‘Or at least get some idea of what they might try next,’ said River.
‘Seize the media,’ said Shirley. ‘That could be anything. You’re basically seizing the media if you buy a newspaper these days.’
And now Catherine was with them. ‘Have you tried checking his phone?’
‘I assume it’s at the Park,’ said River. ‘With Ho.’
‘I think he’s got two.’
Coe gave River a told-you-so look.
Shirley said, ‘Yeah, but one of them might be a bit broken.’
‘If it’s still got its SIM card, we can use it,’ said Louisa.
But Ho’s broken phone – the one Shirley had sent flying the previous day, ‘saving his life,’ as she reminded them – provided no clues, even once they tracked it down to his desk drawer: Kim’s number, listed as ‘Kim (Girlfriend)’, yielded only that empty, echoless silence signalling unequivocal departure.
‘Told you she was fly,’ said Shirley.
‘Or dead,’ added Coe.
‘Either way,’ said Louisa, ‘our chances of finding her are like a one-legged man’s in an arse-kicking contest.’
‘Who organises those events, that’s what I want to know,’ Shirley complained. ‘And when are they gonna tighten up the entry criteria?’
Catherine said, ‘Any other bright ideas?’, and said it with the air of a primary school teacher scraping the barrel but keeping a brave face regardless.
‘They’re in a hurry,’ said River at last. ‘It’s all kicked off very quickly.’
‘Because they have no backup,’ Louisa said.
They looked at her, but Coe was nodding.
She went on, ‘They’re racing the clock so they get to the end before they’re caught. Because if they don’t finish the plan, nobody’s going to finish it for them.’
Catherine said, ‘That explains why they’ve taken shortcuts. The bomb on the train, that fizzled out. Ticking things off the list matters more than doing them right.’
‘So whatever media strike they’re planning, they’re going to implement it as soon as they possibly can.’
‘Which means it’s already been scheduled,’ said J. K. Coe.
‘Hardly narrows things down,’ River said.
But Shirley had brightened again. ‘We found them once,’ she said. ‘We can do it again.’
‘Remind me where we found them?’
‘They were in a van,’ she said stubbornly. ‘In Birmingham.’
‘Are you sure you were in Birmingham? You got back very fast.’
‘Louisa was driving.’
Louisa shrugged modestly.
Catherine said, ‘So let’s work on the assumption Kim’s still alive. She’s discovered she’s expendable, and she’s gone to ground. But she is, as Shirley claims, pretty smart. So where would she hide?’
‘The last place they’d look,’ said Louisa.
‘And where might that be?’
River said, ‘Ho’s place.’
<
br /> 11
THERE WERE STILL GLASS splinters in the gutter, their brief brilliance catching the eye when the angle was right, but the house itself was in darkness. The curtains were undrawn, though the big broken window had been boarded over, the resulting black eye adding to the air of vacancy. Crime scene tape sealed the door. It looked like a property about to succumb to dereliction: give it a week, River thought, it would be festooned with graffiti, and occupied by crusties, dogs and mice.
They’d arrived in the same two cars, Louisa’s and Ho’s. Same pairings, too. ‘Why split up a winning combination?’ Louisa had asked. River had spent the journey working on a comeback; now they were here, his attention was focused on the fact that the spare keys taped beneath Ho’s desk hadn’t included one for his front door. Shirley, though, was already forging ahead. River expected her to kick the door in, or headbutt it into submission. Instead, having ripped away the tape, she produced a set of keys and tried each in turn. The third worked.
‘… You’ve got keys to Ho’s house?’
‘They were Marcus’s.’
‘… Marcus had keys to Ho’s house?’
‘Duh.’ Shirley waggled the key ring. ‘Universals?’
Marcus hadn’t always kicked doors down. Sometimes he’d gone the quiet way.
They trooped into the house, and fell to whispering.
‘The Dogs have been,’ River said. This was obvious: there were traces of official, inquisitive presence – drawers hanging open; spaces where electrical equipment had sat. It was an article of faith that anything you could plug in could transmit data: even toasters weren’t above suspicion. Roderick Ho had had a lot of kit, and now he had a lot of empty shelves.
Louisa said, ‘Well, I damn well hope so. That’s their job.’
‘So if Kim was hiding here they’ll have her.’
‘Unless she waited until they’d been and gone.’
She’s a kid, River wanted to say, a club hustler, scamming idiots like Ho: what would she know about tradecraft? But he could feel his chest constricting again. His organs felt like they’d been wrenched a notch tighter. But he managed to say, ‘I’ll do upstairs.’
Louisa said, ‘Yeah, me too. Shirley, you clear down here. Coe – watch the door.’
It was halfway through River’s mind to ask how come Louisa was giving instructions, but his wiser angels hushed him. There were recent, compelling reasons why neither River nor Coe should be allowed unsupervised charge of a tin opener, and the idea of Shirley taking command: well. His wiser angels had better things to do than finish that sentence.
Louisa led the way, and they parted company on the landing; Louisa taking the door into Ho’s bedroom – which accounted for the appalled look she was wearing – and River heading into the sitting room with the big, now broken, window.
Someone had entered the room, so she made herself stiller than ever. She was a coat on a hanger, a folded-up sweatshirt; something you’d expect in a wardrobe: one glance, you’d turn away and close the door. And then she’d be alone in the dark, and before long could start to breathe once more.
The trick was to occupy a space just slightly smaller than yourself, and then to keep doing that, over and over. Once you were done you’d vanished, and nobody would find you ever again.
The floorboard creaked. Something opened and closed. There were only so many places a hider could hide; so many a searcher could search. The time left to her was measured in seconds, and she could feel them dropping away, slipping through the gap beneath the door. They were noisy seconds, and made fluttering noises; they would give her away.
It had been an unwise choice, Roddy Ho’s house. She’d have been better off risking the streets.
Kim clenched her fist, around which she’d wrapped a wire coat hanger, and waited.
In Ho’s kitchen, Shirley was thinking: This doesn’t get used much.
By the back door was a tower made of pizza boxes; next to it, an overflowing bag of plastic bottles: energy drinks, coke, some brand names she didn’t recognise. The fridge was huge but underused, though its freezer section contained more pizzas and two bags of oven chips, putting Shirley in mind of a corner shop on a Sunday evening. Mind you, her own fridge was nothing to boast about; its only hint of green was bottled beer. But it was a relief Ho lived down to her expectations. If he’d turned out a secret gourmet, with a stash of white truffle oil and unrecognisable vegetables, she’d have had trouble with it.
She’d already checked the people-sized hiding places, the cupboards and under-table areas. No sign of Kim. It was a long shot anyway. Sooner or later she’d be found in a bin bag, just as misshapen as the one full of bottles, but squashier, and starting to stink.
Shirley hoped not, but hoping was one thing and brutal truth another. You didn’t have to be a slow horse to pick that much up.
She opened a cupboard, expecting mugs or plates, spices or flour. It contained a lot of tins of beans. A lot.
In her pocket, Marcus’s keyring felt heavy. It was the first time she’d used his universal key set, a trophy she’d snatched from his desk drawer. She’d been hoping for his gun, but Lamb didn’t hang around when it came to snaffling dead men’s trifles. She’d thought at first that he’d left the keys because he hadn’t realised they were a housebreaking kit, had assumed they were Marcus’s spares, but it hadn’t been long before a more credible explanation occurred: Lamb hadn’t taken Marcus’s keys because he already had a set of his own. Fine by her. She still wished she’d been first to the gun, though.
As Marcus himself would have pointed out, there were times when a gun came in handy.
Bad as things were – her heart pumping so hard, the wardrobe was probably pulsing in time – they could have been worse. The wardrobe could have been a coffin. When she’d stood by the window in her own house, too late to launch herself through it, there had been no sensation like this, of time leaking away; instead, everything had come to a stop. It was Shin who came through the door, holding a gun. Kim’s bladder had given, a little, and in that moment she learned that a getaway bag was not enough. What she needed was a second life, in which none of this had happened … She was not a good person, but she blamed this on circumstances: she was surrounded by victims, and whose fault was that? There were two kinds of men, she had long ago determined; the kind you could use as money-pumps, and they’d chalk it off to experience; and those who spat blood and came looking. One or two had found her. She’d not survive many encounters like that.
But Shin and his crew had been different. They’d known who she was, what she did, and it was clear their information came from some higher agency. There’d always been rumours about girls being recruited by the intelligence services: honeytraps were a popular device, and girls like Kim were honey. But she’d put it down to urban myth, generated by the girls themselves, to whom it lent mystery: they weren’t just mattress ornaments but players in a high-stakes game. The last thing she’d expected was to discover that she’d crossed paths with an actual spook. Even more gobsmacking was that this was Roddy Ho, whom she’d been fleecing for months without breaking a sweat. It might even have been funny, if Shin’s group hadn’t made clear the consequences of rejecting their advances. There was family in North Korea; aunts and uncles she’d never seen. A cousin with two infants – they’d shown her photos. These people could have been anyone, and blood relations, well – Kim’s life had not been made happier by the blood relations she knew. She thought she could live with the discomforts suffered by strangers.
Then they had shown her a mirror; her own face, its many small perfections.
If it had been easy persuading Ho to steal from credit card companies, it was a cakewalk having him plunder secrets. By the time she’d given him the code number of the file she wanted, he was convinced that poaching it was his own idea.
She had known, of course, that delivering the file to Shin would not be the end of the story; that once honeytraps were sprung, someone came to wipe away the h
oney. So her timing was off, getting caught at the window; she should have disappeared already, and be lying low elsewhere. But she was a London girl. Any other city, and she’d be game rather than huntress. And besides, there were only two kinds of men, and Kim never played one end when she could be playing both.
She had stood by the window, her getaway bag a lump on the lawn below, and made her mouth the right shape to greet Shin, who had come through the door holding a gun.
‘Thank God it’s you!’ she had said, and reached for him.
A car moved down the street at average speed, and though Coe took a tighter grip on the blade in his pouch, he gave no outward reaction. The driver studied him anyway, by the glow of the nearest streetlight. The neighbourhood would have been well aware that something had been going on in Ho’s house. Last night a body hurled through a window, and shots fired; today, black vans removing most of Ho’s possessions. But anyone curious enough to have approached the Dogs would have had their fingers nipped. That kind of word got round fast.
And even if it hadn’t, thought Coe, I am a bad man. Approach at your peril.
Oh shit had been his reaction when he saw the paint can hit Gimball. It hadn’t been pretty. But what he mostly thought now was how swiftly he’d got his act together; nearly as quickly as tattoo guy, who’d been away faster than a cat could blink. Even having to climb down two ladders, Coe hadn’t been far behind; collecting Cartwright, who was cartoon-stunned; propelling them both to the car. He was pretty sure nobody had seen them emerge from the alley. Which didn’t mean they were in the clear, but at least he’d won some breathing space.
And Cartwright thought they were on borrowed time, but Coe knew that one thing the Service liked tightly wrapped was a fuck-up. London Rules meant build your walls high, and the order in which you chucked your people over them was in inverse proportion to their usefulness. So as long as he was more useful than Cartwright, he’d not be first in line to be pitched over the wall. Coe didn’t feel great about thinking this way, but he did feel alive, and that was the first priority. You were all in this together until you weren’t. That was also London Rules.