Nobody Walks

by Mick Herron

  Driscoll said, “I think it was Ms. Pointer suggested the basketball hoop.”

  “Everyone being free and easy. Let the ideas come swimming out.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Does it help?”

  “If it helps my employees, that’s fine. Personally, I don’t … Why all these questions, Mr. Bettany?”

  “I’m trying to get a handle on my son’s life. Exactly how free and easy does it get round here?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The kids smoke dope on the premises?”

  “Of course not. That would be a sackable offence. And nobody wants to lose their job, not one where they’re paid for doing what they’d do for fun. What do you do, Mr. Bettany? I don’t think you said.”

  “Lately, I’ve worked with meat.”

  “… I’ve no idea what that means.”

  “How well did you know my son?”

  “How well …?”

  “Not a complicated question.”

  “No. It’s just that, well, I didn’t. Not really.”

  “But he worked for you.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Because he was the one first cracked your game.”

  Bettany gestured at the poster on the wall.

  “That not give him special status?”

  “It made him … a good hire.”

  “A good hire.”

  “There was interest. Publicity. Chatter on the web. Things you need in this business.”

  Which sounded to Bettany like something he’d learned by rote.

  “So Liam himself was, what? Neither here nor there?”

  “He was a good hire.”

  “Which anyone in his position would have been.”

  A slight nod allowed the truth of that.

  “Did you ever visit his flat?”

  “Mr. Bettany. He worked for me, that’s all.”

  He made a fluttery gesture with his hands.

  “My team are all good people. I’m sure they are. But …”

  “But you’re not a people person. Are you gay?”

  “You think your son was my boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. Was he?”

  “He was my employee. I didn’t know he was gay.”

  “I didn’t say he was.”

  “You’re obviously trying to trick me into some kind of admission, I have no idea what. I’m sorry about Liam, really I am. But I’d like you to leave now.”

  A slight disturbance told Bettany someone was in the doorway. It would be Driscoll’s driver. Flea had called him some stupid name. Boo?

  “How come your new game won’t make you richer?”

  “That’s … I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

  But he was. Bettany could see it in his eyes.

  Behind him, Boo Berryman coughed.

  “I’ll see you out,” he told Bettany.

  2.7

  Berryman walked Bettany downstairs, where the kids were at their desks, glued to screens, calling to each other in what might have been code.

  The woman who’d touched his elbow half-waved as they headed for the door, a movement she turned into a rearrangement of her hair when Bettany ignored her.

  Outside Berryman said, “Finished now?”

  “Finished?”

  “Coming into Mr. Driscoll’s workplace, upsetting his staff. Asking stupid questions.”

  Bettany guessed he’d been overheard asking Driscoll if he was gay.

  “Making a nuisance of yourself.”

  He said, “Nobody seemed upset.”

  “They were being polite. On account of the situation.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “I’m sorry about your boy. But I have my own responsibilities.”

  “Sure.”

  “Chief among them making sure nobody disturbs Mr. Driscoll.”

  Berryman spoke with assurance. He was usefully built, and the way he stood suggested he knew how to handle himself. Slightly favoured his right leg, though.

  He was probably making his own assessment of Bettany.

  Who said, “My boy wasn’t alone when he fell.”

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “No, it didn’t get much coverage. On account of whoever it was made themselves scarce.”

  Berryman didn’t answer. But he tilted his head to an angle, as if he’d moved on from gauging Bettany’s weight and was now wondering what kind of bullshit he was peddling.

  Bettany said, “Until I find out who that was, I’ll be carrying on doing what you just said. Making a nuisance of myself?”

  “That was it.”

  “Good. A nuisance, then. Count on it.”

  “Mr. Driscoll had nothing to do with your son’s death.”

  “Then Mr. Driscoll has nothing to worry about.”

  Unlikely to find a better line to leave on, he left.

  Back at Liam’s he opened a tin at random, heated its contents and ate them with a spoon. Afterwards he sat by the window. A cat was prowling its territory, coolly observed by a pigeon on the opposite roof. Ordinary small happenings. Liam must have witnessed a hundred such scenes, non-scenes, at this window, events which weren’t eventful but just the inevitable consequence of time passing. Bettany withdrew but left the window open. Fresh air gratefully occupied the flat.

  He was starting to feel he knew this room. The sofa looked less like someone else’s furniture, more a personal invitation. He lay on it, feet hanging over the arm. This, too. How many times had Liam lain like this?

  Bettany breathed in the odour of his son.

  When he opened his eyes again, time had passed.

  He’d spent some of it thinking about Vincent Driscoll. An uptight individual, uncomfortable with strangers, but lots of people were. That whole business of hiring Liam for being the first to crack Shades might be on the level, and Flea’s comment about the new game not making Driscoll richer, that might mean a tax fiddle, a charity wheeze, anything. Not Bettany’s concern.

  Having a minder might be because that’s what rich people did.

  But he was an odd duck.

  As for the kids, whose jobs involved playing games, or talking about playing games, or working out new ways of playing games, they’d not been holding back anything important. In the Service, as a Dog, Bettany had interviewed professionals, people who’d been trained to lie and had a flair for it. He’d learned how to excavate falsehoods, scrape away the truths to find the treacheries beneath.

  All of which had been long ago, and a mild conversation in the workplace didn’t build up the pressure those interrogations had generated. But if there’d been anything to find, he’d have sensed it. Enough to know there was someone he’d need another crack at, somewhere less public. And there’d been nothing. Only Driscoll tripped his wires, and that might just have been personality.

  Tripped his wires … A phrase from days gone by.

  He checked Liam’s phone, found it fully charged, and scrolled through the contact list. Flea, of course. Kyle and Haydn. Eirlys and Luka. And others, forty or more, some first names only, some with reminders attached (“dentist,” “bank”). No way of knowing whether first-name-only indicated a degree of intimacy rendering description otiose, or acquaintance so casual Liam didn’t know their surnames.

  Well, there was one way of finding out. Reclining on the increasingly familiar sofa, he began the tedious process of calling them all.

  Afterwards he lay dry-mouthed, Liam’s phone on his chest. Most of those he’d spoken to had known of Liam’s death, and of those who hadn’t, one or two didn’t have a sure grasp of who he was. And of those who recognised Liam’s name but hadn’t known he was dead, none seemed sure how to respond. It was as if they were being polled on a news item not relevant to their situation.

  All of which confirmed Bettany’s suspicion that his son had had no one truly close, Flea Pointer perhaps excepted. There were other avenues, of course, and might be a whole crew o
f buddies somewhere, boys he hung with, girls he slept with, but if so they’d made little impact on his surroundings. Work life aside, Liam seemed to have been a solitary.

  He turned the phone off and went into the kitchen, where he poured, then drank, a glass of water. Wiping his mouth afterwards, he was struck by the strangeness of an only slightly stubbled chin. But that too would grow familiar. Everything did, in the end.

  A hand on his chin … He experienced a sudden memory, as real as if he were thrown back in time, of his infant son, a few months old, reaching out and grasping him there. Then it ended.

  There weren’t many such memories. Much of Liam’s childhood had taken place in Bettany’s absence, while Bettany himself had been Martin Boyd, acquiring the habits and thought processes of a made-up man. Family life had been a series of snapshots, interrupting the movie. Brief, furtive visits, more like a passing criminal than a father. It wouldn’t be hard to draw a connecting line between that and the life Liam had been leading, apparently successful, but lacking solid relationships. A case of the apple and the tree. Undercover, after all, was what Bettany did when his own life failed him. Undercover meant dropping from sight, leading somebody else’s life in a succession of foreign cities. It meant leaving everything behind.

  When Martin Boyd had been put to rest, and the Brothers McGarry were behind walls, Bettany had thought it possible to continue in the Service. He’d joined the Dogs, but it had been a failure. Something had boiled inside him, kept rising up the back of his throat. Short fuse, Psych Eval said. All those years of being someone else, he hardly knew how to be Tom Bettany any more. And London had become enemy territory, the chances of encountering someone who’d known him as Boyd a constant tremor in the background. Before long he’d taken a severance payment and moved the three of them to Dorset, a coastal town, a new life.

  Bettany poured more water. He didn’t often think about his past, but that too was the undercover mentality. The person you used to be was sealed off, boxed tight, locked shut, and you walked away. But nobody really walked.

  Oddly, it was his stint in the Dogs he’d had trouble shaking off, once they were settled by the sea. Bad things happened in the noughties, and in the wake of attacks in New York, London, Madrid, Mumbai, policing the Service acquired a broader remit, the investigation and interrogation of undesirables. It had been a bad time to be undesirable. While the public records defined the Service’s decade as one long cock-up, a lot of successes never made the papers because they left nothing in their wake. Men disappeared, women too, and those who’d known them were left under no illusions about their own fate if they kicked up fuss. Records were sealed. Names erased. The subjects never saw daylight again. Packed into aeroplanes, shuttled into godforsaken skies, they’d never stand trial or hear a human voice. Next time they opened their eyes, they’d see everything their future held.

  Operation Waterproof. That was the name of the protocol.

  Bettany had never seen these prisons, most of them in former Soviet states, which had no shortage of facilities and accepted all major credit cards. But he’d heard stories. They had no windows, no exercise yards, no visiting rights, no phone privileges. You didn’t have to worry about being raped or knifed in the showers because there were no showers. There were cells, seven foot by five, with a door and a bucket. Once a week the bucket was removed, emptied, put back. The food never varied. For entertainment, you had the clothes you stood up in. After a while, even your memories would taste of stone.

  On bad nights he dreamed of such places. It was every undercover agent’s hell. A place where there was no hiding from yourself.

  It had been a policy used in the worst of times, and he supposed it was used still.

  Not his world any more.

  It was early but dark already, and Bettany had plenty of sleep owing. On the sofa still, he collected on the debt.

  His dreams were small, and tightly enclosed.

  But he slept a long time, and didn’t wake until his phone rang.

  2.8

  A pair of police horses clop-clopped past the following morning, their riders’ heads on a level with JK Coe’s, who sat on the steps of the National Gallery watching crowds throng Trafalgar Square. He waved a vague salute and the nearest cop, a blonde with her hair tied to match her mount’s tail, nodded severely. Thinks I’m a civilian, thought Coe.

  Even cold, damp, 11 A.M., the square was awash, rival groups of tourists kitted like football fans, sporting red cagoules or yellow sweatshirts. Their team leaders had umbrellas or sticks with bright pennants to raise whenever movement was called for or a headcount necessary, but until they were summoned the flocks swarmed at will, painting the air with their chatter.

  “Meet him somewhere public,” Tearney had said.

  “Of course.”

  “And don’t let him walk all over you. We’re doing him a favour.”

  A regal sniff.

  “I don’t expect gratitude, but I do expect him to observe the decencies.”

  This, his second encounter with Dame Ingrid, had taken place earlier that morning. Instead of the office, the view, the mahogany furniture, he’d been instructed to wait near her tube exit, carrying an almond croissant in a Carluccio’s bag. For identification? Surely she’d remember what he looked like? He hadn’t dared ask.

  The rest of yesterday he’d done legwork, or what passed for legwork in the age of Google. Interesting fact number one, a couple of bouncers had been scraped from an alley floor in N1 Tuesday night, kneecaps remodelled. “Slipped while moving a wheelie bin.” But it wasn’t far from where Liam Bettany had lived, and bang in the heartland of where you might go if you were looking for a score.

  Interesting fact number two … Actually, fact one was as far as he’d got. The rest was static, the white noise you heard when you were looking for something but didn’t know what it was. Coe wanted a bone to drop at Tearney’s feet. Show her his quality. But bouncers aside, all he really knew was that Bettany was active, had spoken to a policeman, and was staying in his dead son’s flat.

  Tearney had emerged from the tube station a pulse behind a commuter surge.

  “Walk with me,” she said.

  The morning traffic did what morning traffic did. Rain threatened, but kept changing its mind.

  Dame Ingrid said, “What news of our friend?”

  This was a test. If Tearney wanted to know what Bettany had been up to, she’d have had a three-inch thick dossier waiting on her desk. 10:03:02 P.M., Subject blew his nose. 10:03:04 P.M., Subject returned handkerchief to left trouser pocket.

  He said, “He’s doing what I said he would. Well, he’d already started doing it by then.”

  “Elaborate.”

  Coe told her about the bouncers.

  “So he’s looking for the drug connection.”

  “… Yes.”

  Tearney halted by the pedestrian lights. She was wearing a different outfit this morning. Coe himself changed his shirt more or less daily, his trousers twice a week, his jacket seasonally, but First Desk had to make an effort. Her raincoat was black, belted and reached to her knees, and Coe had no hope in hell of identifying it by label, but it looked expensive. Beneath it she wore a pale suit and neat black boots with a red buckle. That her hair today was a tight crown of black curls, Coe knew enough not to comment on. On her raincoat’s collar a seam had pulled loose. He’d have pointed this out, but valued his prospects.

  She said, “That didn’t sound convinced.”

  The lights changed, and the green man beckoned. They crossed the road in step.

  Coe said, “He didn’t kill them.”

  “You’re unhappy about that?”

  “It strikes me as strange.”

  “Explain.”

  “Maybe they sold Bettany’s son his dope, and maybe they didn’t. I don’t see that it matters either way. They were probably selling somebody dope, and that’s all Bettany needed. This was never a job for Hercule Poirot. He went looking for pushers
and he found a pair. So given who he is, what he can do, I don’t see what kept him from killing them.”

  They weren’t far from Regent’s Park. Tearney wasn’t leading them that way, though. Whatever this meeting’s about, thought Coe, it’ll be over before she heads for her desk.

  Now she said, “Perhaps you’re doing him an injustice. He might be more targeted than you suggest. More focused. Less inclined to settle for a token victim.”

  “If he wants to find the actual dealer who sold Liam the actual dope he was smoking, he’s going to have to dig around in his son’s life.”

  Tearney said, “That does present a slight problem.”

  And Coe sensed they were arriving at the point.

  The horses were past him now, leaving JK Coe with a view of their fine hindquarters. Animals built for dumping from a great height. Not for being dumped on.

  A bus backfired and a clatter of pigeons took flight. Coe followed their progress into the grey mid-air, where they wheeled figure eights before settling back on the square and resuming their mindless milling.

  And just like that he wasn’t alone any more. Tom Bettany sat next to him, calmly watching pigeons and tourists, as if he’d been occupying that same spot for half an hour.

  Coe said, “I don’t need to ask who you are.”

  “I don’t expect you do.”

  But then, he’d seen Bettany’s Service photo. Bettany had put on a few miles, but fundamentally he looked the same.

  His eyes were unnaturally bright, though. Coe wondered if he were on anything, and immediately answered himself, No. He was high on the task in hand, that was all. The same energy pulsing through him as in that alley, when he took apart the bouncers.

  The thought unnerved him, bringing to mind Dame Ingrid’s instruction. Meet him somewhere public.

  He noticed Bettany’s crooked smile.

  “What?”

  “You’re thinking I’d better behave. Given how public we are. All the good little tourists, mobiles at the ready. We’re already on a hundred holiday movies.”

  “I’ve no reason for thinking you’re a threat.”