by Mick Herron
“Oh, relatively recent. Before your time, but you’re one of our fresher talents, aren’t you?”
Somewhat mesmerised by her gaze, he nodded.
Eleven months. Coe had been with the Service eleven months. A degree in psychiatry had derailed into banking, which had proved both lucrative and unsatisfying. The switch had been a good move.
That’s what he thought so far.
Her eyes still on him, Tearney pushed the folder across the table.
“It doesn’t leave the building. But you’ll be more comfortable in the library. If anyone asks, you’re reviewing this morning’s minutes.”
Bending back the cover, he took a quick glance at the folder’s contents. It was stickered Priority John, the lowest of that year’s five-tier security codes, and had x-s stamped in black on the topsheet, meaning ex-service. A personnel file, one of thousands, relating to someone who was no longer part of the brotherhood, sisterhood, of agents. The photo showed a blond man with an army haircut and serious eyes.
THOMAS BETTANY, the caption read.
Dame Ingrid Tearney was standing so Coe stood too, tucked the folder under his arm, and left the meeting room with enough purpose in his step that anyone watching might imagine he knew precisely where the library was.
2.2
Psych Eval was based over the river. This was the first time Coe had entered the sacred precincts, as they called Regent’s Park that end of town, which was why he’d been the only one at the meeting with a lanyard round his neck, VISITOR in red caps on a laminate. Nothing to say which department he was from. As he stepped back into the lift, having been told at the security desk where the library was, he wondered what made Tearney sure the others would have known who he was, rendering them suitably nervous—apparently—then answered his own question in the same serious tone the voice in his head adopted for work issues. They’d have known because she’d have told them. Sometimes things were that simple.
Even if unexpected.
Coe had colleagues who’d been with the Service ten times as long as him, and never had a phone call like his last night. Dame Ingrid Tearney for JK Coe, spoken as if she were her own PA, though it was the Dame herself on the line.
“I have a task for you.”
A task. Like something Hercules might have been set.
“Be at the Park. Nine sharp.”
The call had come after twelve, and he’d spent the rest of the night wondering if it was a prank, like that time in Uni when he’d received an anonymous note from a secret admirer, begging him to meet her in a nearby pub. Keeping the date was an act of folly which the bastards who’d set him up never allowed him to forget.
This morning, sitting through an interminable meeting, he might have wondered if this weren’t some slightly more grown-up version of the same trick if not for the incontrovertible fact that at the head of the table, never so much as throwing a look his way, sat Dame Ingrid herself.
A Service legend, in her way. Not a bona fide legend like your Jackson Lambs—the plural uncalled for, because there was only one Jackson Lamb, thank God—but definitely a story in the making. Carving the Service into her own image, in spite of all those who queried the value of her initiatives, forever sucking up to Washington, spearheading charm offensives and doing wall-to-wall media. Taking the Intelligence Service “into the community.” And, most sinful of all, not letting the fact that she was nobody’s idea of photogenic—was, as one of those naysayers had put it, a crone in a designer cloak—ever hold her back.
Designer cloaks, he thought. JK Coe didn’t know much about women’s fashion, but Tearney had a reputation for dressing well. She could afford to, having private income, which she’d neither married nor been born into—was something of a whizz on the money markets. Maybe he should ask her for pointers, once he’d read the folder.
The library should have been all wooden shelves and high windows, in keeping with the Service’s Oxbridge image, but was underground, with plain tables more suited to a canteen. Coe identified himself, found a corner, and settled down to read.
Thomas Bettany.
Bettany had been Ops, which was to say he’d seen undercover service, Northern Ireland at first, then in the capital itself. Martin Boyd had been his workname, and as Boyd he’d been a key figure in a syndicate run by the Brothers McGarry, a pair of charmers who’d supplied arms to a wide variety of customers, from armed robbers to at least one budding terrorist group. It had been one of the longest ops the Service had run on home soil, and when it wrapped it claimed fifty-two scalps, including some MoD suits who’d been involved in diverting decommissioned materiel into the McGarrys’ hands. This brought an end to Bettany’s Ops career. After a stint with the Dogs, the Service’s internal police, he’d taken a pay-off and relocated to Lyme Regis with his wife and son, presumably to set about rebuilding a family life his work had left in tatters. This hadn’t lasted. Painfully soon afterwards his wife, Hannah, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour expensive care had done nothing to render otherwise. She’d died within the year.
Once widowed Bettany had drifted abroad, surviving on labouring jobs. Detail was sketchy, but there’d been a covert statuscheck within the past year. He had been in Marseilles then, working in an abattoir, and a contacts list included just one name, a colleague named Majeed Ansari. A faint pencil mark under this surname suggested that someone had lingered there a moment.
Coe didn’t know what to make of any of this. Had Bettany been sucked into the netherworld that often snared X-Ss, turned mercenary or worse? Dame Ingrid had called it welfare. Maybe Bettany was sick, or off the rails. Some huge percentage of homeless people, he didn’t have figures to hand, were ex-military. Perhaps he’d fallen prey to that syndrome. Did Tearney expect Coe to come up with a rehab plan? And why him, only eleven months into the job? Not knowing what he was supposed to be doing he did it again, to be sure, then one more time. Thomas Bettany. By the time he left the library, JK Coe could have taken him as a specialist subject.
There was the hub, Regent’s Park’s nerve centre, where the Second Desks oversaw the current emergency (and there was always a current emergency), and then there was Upstairs. Upstairs was where Dame Ingrid sat. Head of Service was informally known as First Desk, and with First Desk came a view.
So Coe, on his first-ever visit to the sacred precincts, had a view of the park opposite, a cool green breathing space—he felt like he’d climbed ten rungs of the ladder since midnight.
Few of his colleagues would have seen this coming.
Because he hadn’t lit bonfires, JK Coe. Wasn’t one of those others kept an eye on, in the expectation of glory to come. He knew that. But he also knew his strengths, which, if unexciting, were valuable enough. He was conscientious. He was thorough. He was careful. When you gave him a task, he’d do it in the time allotted—or at the very least, remain behind until it was done. He nodded now at Dame Ingrid’s greeting, and settled in the chair she’d indicated, the folder on his lap.
Many men, pushed to describe themselves, unconsciously add an inch or two, here or there. Coe’s tendency was to subtract. He felt shorter than his 5 foot 9, and while he recognised this was an esteem issue, nevertheless often found himself shrinking to fit. He’d even cut his forenames down to size—Jason, Kevin. Neither could be taken seriously. It was an unaccustomed twitch, then, that he felt in First Desk’s office. Like a novice dragged from the chorus and thrust into the terrifying spotlight, he was discovering he kind of liked it. If this was a test, he was hoping to pass.
The chair was dependable, high-backed, upholstered. The laminate round his neck hung comfortably against his shirt.
Dame Ingrid said, “You’ve read the file.”
He nodded.
“So tell me what you make of him.” She threaded her fingers together, as if about to show him the church, the steeple. “In one word.”
“Violent,” said Coe.
She raised an eyebrow.
He said, “He
survived years among the worst this city has to offer—gun runners, real gangsters—and he did that by becoming one of them. So convincing, there was no telling him apart.”
She said, “He wouldn’t have lived through it otherwise.”
“I know. I’m not making a moral judgment. He’s a highly trained operative, and violent was part of his job description. But from the redacted passages, it’s pretty clear he overstepped a line somewhere. In the interests of … authenticity.”
“You think he hurt someone.”
“At least. Yes.”
Dame Ingrid refrained from nodding thoughtfully or gazing at him in an assessing sort of way. She simply waited.
“Afterwards, his record as a Dog—I mean—”
“I know what they’re called.”
“He developed a reputation for being strong-arm.”
That part of the file had been sufficiently redacted for Coe to feel secure about drawing this conclusion.
“Not that I’m suggesting he went way out of line. And his resignation seems genuine. I mean, he wasn’t eased out, far as I can tell.”
It hadn’t escaped him that Dame Ingrid had been First Desk when Bettany left the Service. If there’d been anything more to the story, she’d know it.
He said, “When his wife died, there was some kind of bust-up with his son.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because Bettany’s reaction to her death was to walk away. If they’d got on, they’d have mourned together, helped each other through. Instead, Bettany dropped everything and seems to have spent the last four years doing menial jobs in some pretty rough parts of mainland Europe.”
A part of Coe, listening to himself, was dropping his jaw. First thing you learned in Psych Eval was to hedge your bets. That seemed less useful at Regent’s Park.
Or maybe just in Dame Ingrid’s presence.
Who said, “So why the labouring?”
“There weren’t details—”
“You don’t need them. He was highly trained, not uneducated, and he’s just spent four years emptying Spanish bins and lugging French meat. What was that about?”
She didn’t have the air of one who would appreciate waffle.
JK thought about his answer for a moment. Tried not to think about anything else, such as why he’d been plucked from his niche for some off-the-cuff theorising about a one-time spook he’d not heard of till an hour ago. Tearney didn’t seem to mind waiting. It was something she was good at.
He said, “I doubt it was his wife’s death sent him into a spiral. It was probably the bust-up with his son.”
“Why?”
“His wife was sick a long time. He’d have had time to prepare, emotionally.”
Dame Ingrid said, “Lots of parents fall out with their offspring. Fathers with sons. They don’t all emigrate. Fall into a ‘spiral.’ ”
“They don’t all have Bettany’s background. A lot of ex-soldiers become homeless. When the structure they’ve based their lives on is removed, everything else falls apart. Bettany wasn’t a soldier, but he was of the same mindset.”
Coe was in a landing pattern now.
“He’d spent the best part of a decade undercover, pretending to be someone else. In short order he’d quit his job and become a widower, wasn’t a husband any more. Now he wasn’t a father either, or so it must have seemed. It’s not difficult to see why he went the way he did.”
Now the atmosphere shifted. He could tell that new information was on the way, something not included in the folder.
Dame Ingrid said, “His son died last week.”
“Ah,” said Coe.
“He fell from a window.”
“… A high one?”
“In a manner of speaking. He was smoking cannabis at the time.”
Dame Ingrid brought her chin to rest on her fingers.
“Now,” she said. “What would you expect a man like Bettany to do under those circumstances?”
It felt to JK Coe like this was the point of the exercise.
“Well,” he said. “Liam’s death makes their estrangement permanent. However it must have felt before, there was always the possibility there’d be … reconciliation. He’d feel robbed of that.”
“Robbed,” said Tearney.
“Yes. And he’s a man with a certain skill set. If he feels he’s been robbed, he’ll do something about it.”
“Something?”
“He’ll kill them,” Coe said. “He’ll go after whoever he decides is responsible, and he’ll kill them.”
2.3
Getting ready for work, dressed but still a mess, Flea Pointer had a meltdown. A small one, but. She was removing all trace of a minimal breakfast, a glass of fruit juice, a cup of coffee, and was standing by the sink when she was overwhelmed by pointlessness. Not just of rinsing the cup and glass but of everything. Her friend was dead and she was trying to pretend he wasn’t, because how else could you interpret this attempt at normality? Getting up, getting dressed, getting breakfast, was all part of making ordinary life carry on, of tarmacking over Liam’s ineradicable absence, as if his death were a pothole which might in time be fixed.
Worst of all, there were no tears. There was just sadness, and a weary knowledge that even though she had these feelings today, there would come another morning when she would not, and the tarmacking-over would have begun in earnest.
The lobby buzzer rang.
It was a rule of hers not to speak when the buzzer went—the world was full of stalkers—so she lifted the receiver and waited.
“Ms. Pointer?”
It took her a moment.
“… Mr. Bettany?”
She pressed the button to let him into the building.
It didn’t take him long to reach her floor, but long enough for her to wonder if she’d done the right thing. She was already running late. What did he want now?
But when she opened the door, all that was replaced by a more immediate response.
“What happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your face—your head …”
“It’s just a cut.”
“Just?”
Bettany said, “Never seen a man with a haircut before?”
He’d lost the beard too. It made him ten years younger.
“Can I come in?”
They were standing in her doorway.
“Of course. Yes. I mean …”
She stepped back, and Bettany entered her flat.
He looked fresher too, in new clothes, which with a pang she recognised. The collarless white shirt, the black V-neck, they’d been Liam’s.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
Bettany paused, looking round her sitting room, making swift inventory. Then he turned to her.
“Liam didn’t fall,” he said.
“I …”
The word tailed away. This could turn out worse than she’d feared.
He said, “Can I smell coffee?”
“Just instant,” she said mechanically.
“Mind if I …”
Flea shook her head and he followed her into the kitchen, a nook off the sitting room. She flipped the switch on the kettle, found coffee, and shook granules into a cup. Questions about milk and sugar seemed too normal. She’d pour it black, and deal with complaints as and when.
He looked more like he ought to look now, she decided, not entirely sure what she meant. Blonder, certainly. Unbearded, his jawline was pale. He looked like he’d been through some stuff, but hadn’t been battered into submission by it.
Handing him his coffee, she said, “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.”
“But that makes no sense. Of course he fell. That’s how he died.”
She was thinking, he never saw the body. Had he persuaded himself Liam was still alive? That some gruesome misidentification had occurred? It would be a good way of making everything right again.
Bu
t would involve ignoring reality.
He sipped the coffee, not seeming to mind it black, or very hot, and said, “He hit the road. That’s how he died. But it wasn’t a fall.”
And now she could see where he was coming from.
He said, “He was getting high, right? Like he’d done with you those times you talked about.”
“Only twice. Maybe three—”
“However many. What did he do, roll up on the balcony?”
“No,” Flea said, then paused, remembering. “He’d roll up inside, a pair, which was usually enough. And then he, we, he’d go outside and light up there. He was kind of finicky about getting smoke in the room.”
“What did he light up with?”
“A lighter. He was always losing them.”
“Well, he lost the one he used that night too. Because it wasn’t on the balcony, and it wasn’t in his pocket. The policeman gave me his effects. No lighter, no matches.”
She waited for more, but that seemed to be it.
He read this in her face.
“Doesn’t seem like much, does it? But it’s enough. He had no lighter, no matches. Nowhere in the flat. He could have lit up from the electric ring on his stove, but not without leaving traces, and there aren’t any. And he hardly went back and cleaned up afterwards.”
“Did you look on the balcony?”
“I looked on the balcony.”
“Maybe he dropped it.”
“In which case it would have been on the street below. And the police would have collected it. That’s what they do. They collect evidence.”
“Maybe he used a match.”
“Just the one?”
“Yes. And it blew away.”
“One match. Not a safety match, but a single red-top he could have struck off the wall.”
“Yes.”
“How likely is that?”
“Odd things happen.”
“All the time. But this wouldn’t just be an odd thing. It would be an odd thing happening moments before Liam died. Which is beyond odd. Which is suspicious.”
Saying all this, Bettany remained calm. Those blue eyes, striking enough when he was unkempt and straggle-haired, looked ready to drill holes through walls, but he wasn’t manic or excited.