by Mick Herron
At the desk he showed his Service card, and said he was there to see Diana Taverner. An all-or-nothing play; one she’d go for, he hoped, if only to find out what he thought he was doing, turning up at head office—she might let him in just to have him beaten up.
While the security woman paged Taverner, he looked around.
Thirty-eight minutes.
What struck River, as ever, was the dual nature of the building; the Oxbridge kerb-flash a nod to the best traditions of the Service—its history of civilised thuggery—while the modern aspects were sunk below pavement level, safe from dirty bomb and prying eyes alike. On one of its upper corridors hung a portrait of his grandfather. He’d never been that high. You had to be some sort of mandarin.
His attention was being sought.
“. . . Yes?”
“Ms. Taverner will meet you on the staircase.”
This being handy in case she wanted him thrown down it, he surmised.
The woman handed him a laminate on a lanyard, visitor, and pointed him in the right direction.
They’d settled on an Italian place near Smithfield, and were upstairs eating ice cream out of tin bowls: Marcus strawberry and pistachio, Shirley peach and stracciatella. Cutlery scraping against tin was as much conversation as they made until both were about finished, then Shirley nodded towards Marcus’s bowl and plucked her spoon from her mouth with an audible pop.
“That’s a stupid combination. Strawberry and pistachio don’t go.”
“Go well enough for me.”
“Then your taste buds are wrong. Strawberry needs chocolate or else vanilla. Pistachio’s not even a real flavour. They only invented it in like 1997.”
“You’ve been dumped, haven’t you?”
“What do you mean, dumped? What kind of question’s that? We’re talking about ice cream.”
“Right.”
“And no, I haven’t.”
“Right.”
“And even if I had been, it wouldn’t be any of your business.”
“Right.”
“And anyway, how can you tell?”
“Christ, I don’t know,” Marcus said. “Maybe it’s the way you’re such a bundle of fun.”
“Piss off.”
“What happened, she meet someone else?”
“Piss off. Why do you assume I’m gay?”
“You’re saying you’re not?”
“I’m saying how would you know? Do I bring my private life into work?”
“Shirley, sharing an office with you lately’s like having my own personal thundercloud, so yes, on balance, you bring your private life into work. Which gives me the right to hear the dirt. Did she meet someone else?”
“And again with the ‘she’ . . . ”
Marcus laid his spoon on a napkin and licked away the hint of a strawberry moustache. “It’s like in books,” he said. “Thrillers, whodunnits, you know? You read much?”
“You got a point to make?”
“In thrillers, when the writer says the killer this, the killer that, and never says if it’s a he or a she, it’s always because it’s a she. And you’re like that with your girlfriend. You never say if it’s a he or a she. Which means it’s a she.”
Shirley sneered. “Maybe I’m just messing with your head.”
“You might be, except you’re not. So what happened? She meet someone else?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough. But that means you have to drop the angry victim act. Deal?”
“You really are a hardass, you know that?”
“Yeah, that used to be my job description.”
“Well not any more it’s not,” Shirley said. “Now you’re a desk jockey, like the rest of us. Get used to it.”
“That’s what I was told months back,” Marcus said, picking up his spoon again. “Still got to shoot someone, didn’t I?”
“I doubt you’ll get that lucky twice.”
“Well just in case I do,” Marcus said, “you know what I don’t need? I don’t need a partner pissing and moaning behind me. That shit throws your aim off.”
Shirley picked up her spoon too, but her bowl was empty. Watching her tap the one against the other, causing a high-pitched note to ring around the room, Marcus was struck, not for the first time, by how intense her concentration could be. With her near–buzz cut and her broad shoulders, an idiot might think her mannish, but there was nothing remotely masculine about her skin tone or her deep brown eyes. Still. Crouched over the ruins of her ice cream, she might almost disappear into androgyny. But either way, she had a right hook could knock you off your feet.
She looked up at him. “Is that what we are? Partners?”
“In the absence of a better offer,” he said.
“In that case, I’ll have another one of these, partner. Butterscotch and mint.”
“Seriously?”
She stared at him, unblinking.
Marcus went to fetch more ice cream.
“Cartwright.”
Taverner, as promised, was on the staircase, a feature which fell on the kerb-flash side of the line, being wide enough to dance down, and boasting, on this particular landing, a narrow window which must have been eight foot tall. Dusty sunlight slanted through it, catching Lady Diana’s hair and roasting a chestnut tinge onto its curls, momentarily distracting River. His mind had blanked. What was he supposed to call her? “Ma’am,” his mouth supplied. A glimpse of her wristwatch, as she glanced at it, reminded him: thirty-six minutes.
She said, “You’re not supposed to be here, you do remember that?”
“Yes, but—”
“And you look a mess.”
“It’s hot out,” he said. “Ma’am.”
It was cooler in here, though; air-con and marbled floors.
“. . . Well?”
They had history, River and Diana Taverner. Not the kind of history people usually meant when they said history, but not far off: treachery, double-dealing and stabbing in the back—more like a marriage than a love affair. And most of it at a remove, so their actual face-to-face encounters hadn’t been frequent. Here and now, on this landing, his shirt clinging to his back, River was remembering how distracting her presence could be. It wasn’t just her physical attractions; it was the way she visibly weighed up every situation she was in, calibrating the moment to maximise her own advantage.
He said, “It’s about James. James Webb.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve been . . . visiting him.”
Spider had been Taverner’s protégé once, though he’d split what he’d have no doubt called his loyalties fairly evenly between her and Dame Ingrid. At the precise moment he’d been shot by a Russian hood it was hard to tell whose side he was on, though as he’d been mostly on his own back ever since, it probably didn’t matter in the long run.
She said, “You were still friendly? I didn’t realise.”
“We trained together.”
“Not what I asked.”
River said, “We weren’t that friendly in the end, no, but we were close at one time. And he’s got nobody else. No family, I mean.”
He had no idea whether Spider had family or not, but he was busking here. And banking on Taverner not knowing Spider’s family situation either.
“I didn’t realise,” she said. “So . . . what’s his current condition? Any change?”
“Not really.”
Just for an instant, he saw something in her eyes that might have been unfeigned concern. And then he mentally kicked himself—why wouldn’t there have been? She’d worked with him. And here was River, using his former friend’s condition to bluff his way back into the very place Spider had had him exiled from . . . It occurred to him that Spider might have seen the funny side of this. That this small act of treachery
was more tribute than revenge.
Thoughts for later.
Thirty-five minutes.
He said, “None at all, in fact. And no real chance of any occurring.”
Taverner glanced away. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the reports,” she said vaguely.
“Then you’ll know. It’s a vegetative state, his brain activity’s almost entirely dormant. A flicker here and there, but . . . And his organs, they’re not functioning on their own. Take him off the machines, and he’ll die in the time it takes a heart to stop beating.”
“You obviously have a point to make.”
“We talked about it once, the two of us. On one of those endurance courses, up on the Black Mountains?”
She gave a brief nod.
“Long story short—” River said.
“Good idea.”
“—if he ever wound up plugged into a wall-socket, if that was all that was keeping him alive, he’d want to be switched off. That’s what he told me.”
“Then that information will be on his personal file.”
“I doubt he ever got round to making an official declaration. He was, what, twenty-four at the time? It wasn’t something he was planning for. But it was something he’d given thought to.”
“If he’d given it a little more thought, he might have noticed planning doesn’t come into it.” Thirty-four minutes. “What exactly are you asking me to do?”
“I just wanted to speak to someone about it. How long is he going to be lying there before a decision is made?”
She said, “You’re talking about letting him die.”
“I’m not sure what the alternative is.”
But a Lamb-like crack came to mind: They could re-skill him. Use him as a speed bump.
She said, “Look, I don’t have time for this right now. Are you sure there’s no family? Weren’t there cousins?”
“Don’t think so.”
“But anyway—it’s hardly a decision we can make standing on a bloody staircase.” She fixed him with a glare, but let it soften. “But I’ll look into it. You’re right. If there’s nobody else to take decisions, the Park will have to do it. Though I’d have thought the medical staff . . . ”
“They’re probably terrified of liability.”
“God. They’re not the only ones.” She looked at her watch again. “Is that it?”
“. . . Yes.”
“You’re not going to explain why you should be back on the hub? Why Slough House is a waste of your talents?”
“Not right now.”
“Good.” She paused. “You’ll be informed. About Webb, I mean. James. Whatever’s decided.”
“Thank you.”
“But don’t do this again. Turn up unannounced. Or you’ll end up downstairs.”
This time there was no softening in her expression.
Thirty-two minutes.
“Off you toddle.”
“Thank you.”
River walked back down the stairs, sure she was watching him every step of the way. But when he reached the bottom and looked back up, she’d gone.
Thirty-one minutes.
Now came the tricky bit.
The man from the bridge was elsewhere now; in Postman’s Park, whose neat little garden was a popular lunch spot for local workers, mostly because of its shelter, the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. The tiles on its walls were dedicated to those who’d given their lives in the attempt, sometimes futile, to rescue others, and recalled Leigh Pitt, who “saved a drowning boy from the canal . . . but sadly was unable to save himself,” and Mary Rogers, who “self-sacrificed by giving up her lifebelt and voluntarily going down in the sinking ship.” Thomas Griffin was fatally scalded in a boiler explosion at a Battersea sugar refinery, returning to search for his mate, while George Elliott and Robert Underhill “successively went down a well to rescue comrades and were poisoned by gas” . . . Sylvester Monteith—“Sly” to those who knew him, or simply suspected his true nature—was drinking iced tea from a polystyrene cup, and wondering why self-sacrifice was deemed so honourable. Every age calls forth its heroes, he supposed. For his own part, he’d come to manhood in the eighties, and his response to any of these emergencies would have been one of pragmatic withdrawal. Later, he would have been among the first to deplore the inadequacy of the equipment at fault, and to enquire about the possibility of furnishing much-improved replacements, at a price that could only be deemed reasonable from the point of view of all future miners, sugar-refinery workers, ship-goers, and foolhardy passers-by. All would be safer, some would get richer, and the world would turn. So it goes.
Meanwhile, to ensure that the world was in fact still turning, Monteith checked his watch. It was some twenty minutes since he’d dispatched River Cartwright on a mission which was as much an act of self-sacrifice as any of those memorialised on the walls of Postman’s Park. That was one of the things they didn’t tell you when you signed up for duty, Monteith thought. That there was a huge divide between those who lit the cannon, and those who flung themselves in front of it. Lighting the cannon was the path to a long, happy life. The one he’d lit for Cartwright was unlikely to prove fatal, but it would make exile at Slough House seem like an extended vacation.
Even fast horses finish at the knacker’s yard. That slow horses get there first was one of life’s little ironies.
He finished his tea and reached for his phone.
Sean Donovan answered on the first ring. It sounded like he was driving.
“You’re on your way?”
“Yes,” said Donovan.
Monteith paused to admire a passing jogger: her hair damp, her T-shirt tight, her head bobbing in rhythm to whatever was pulsing through her earphones.
“How’s our guest?”
“How do you think? She’s unharmed, a little nervous and very pissed off.”
“Well, she won’t have to endure it much longer,” Monteith said. “Not that there’s any harm in giving her a little scare in the meantime.”
Donovan was silent for a moment, then said, “That’s what you want?”
“It is.” The jogger had gone, but the feeling she’d provoked still lingered: a wish to hear a woman squeal. The fact that Monteith wouldn’t hear it mattered less than that he’d have caused it.
He said, “What’s your ETA?”
“Thirty.”
“Don’t be late,” Monteith said, and ended the call.
Collecting his empty cup, he dropped it into a bin, and paused to look once more at the tiles affixed to the shelter’s walls; their fragments of story, each highlighting an ending, because there was nothing to the beginnings and middles that anyone would want to hear about. He shook his head. Then he left the little park and hailed a taxi.
River walked back up the stairs. Behind him, the woman at the security desk called out.
He turned. “I forgot, I need Ms. Taverner’s signature.” He mimed a scribble in the air. “I’ll be one minute.”
“Come back down. I’ll page her again.”
“She’s just there.” He pointed towards the next landing, then waggled his laminated visitor badge. “One minute.” He reached the landing, and was out of sight of the desk.
Thirty minutes.
Maybe a little more, maybe a little less.
Truth to tell, Catherine Standish was no longer at the front of his mind. The op was the op. This was enemy territory, and the fact that it was also headquarters simply gave it an extra edge.
He pushed through a pair of swing doors. River was coasting on memory, an imperfect blueprint in his head, but there ought to be lifts here. Unclipping the laminate from his shirt, he stuffed it into a pocket, and yes, here they were, in a thankfully unpeopled lobby. What he’d have done had Lady Di been waiting was a question for another life.
Pressing
the button, he fished his mobile out. Regent’s Park’s front desk was still in his contact list: unused for years, but still stored because . . .
Because you always hung onto the numbers, in case your old life was given back.
It was answered on the second ring.
“Security.”
“Possible threat,” he said, pitching his voice low.
“Who is this?”
“There’s a couple in a car out front, twenty yards down the road. Making like a lovers’ quarrel, but the male is armed. I repeat, the male is armed. Suggest immediate response.”
“Could I have your—”
“Immediate response,” River repeated, and ended the call.
That might keep everyone occupied for a little while.
The lift arrived and he stepped into it.
Sean Donovan was entering London from the west. The van’s air-con was unreliable, so until Monteith’s call he’d been driving with the windows open, the twin blasts nearly cooling the interior. But now he closed them to ring Traynor, who answered in his usual way:
“Here.”
He didn’t ask Traynor if everything was okay. Benjamin Traynor had served with him in hot places; crouched with him behind walls being pounded to dust above their heads. If Traynor couldn’t handle one middle-aged woman in an attic, they should both reconsider their futures. Especially the next twenty-four hours.
He said, “I’m in the city. Everything’s on schedule.”
“I’ll pull out soon. Spoken to the . . . boss?”
Donovan said, “He’d like you to put a scare into the lady.”
“Put a scare into her.”
“His exact words. ‘No harm in giving her a little scare.’”
Traynor said, “Well, he’s in charge.”
“Where’s the kid?”
The kid, whom Catherine had dubbed “Bailey” for some reason.
“Out front. Just in case.”
“He’s a tryer, isn’t he?”
“Doesn’t hurt to stay alert,” Traynor recited. All those hot places, all those pulverised walls, and he still kept an eye out for the newbies. Of course, he hadn’t spent five years counting the bricks in a series of small rooms. “He’s a good kid.”
“Like his sister,” Donovan said.