by Mick Herron
“I’m not.”
“Because this is one joke’s going to have to last you an awful long time. Couple of years down the road, you might have trouble squeezing any more chuckles from it.” He took a step towards River, who was leaning against the wall, and stood directly in front of him. River could smell the fabric conditioner he’d used on his tracksuit. Duffy had put it on fresh from the wash.
He said, “They have Catherine Standish.”
“Standish.”
“There was a photograph. Came to my phone from hers. It was taken this morning, last night. They wanted the file.”
“Standish,” Duffy said again. “She’s another of your special needs crew, right?”
“Can I be there when you say that to Lamb?”
“You don’t get to be anywhere without somebody’s say-so, Cartwright. Your whole future’s one long yes-sir, no-sir.”
That sounded horribly plausible. And River was scared, because Duffy was good at this, but he was scareder, somehow, of letting it show.
Not letting it show was all he had left right now.
“They’ve got Catherine Standish, and somebody needs to go find her. The picture’s on my phone. Whoever’s behind that mirror needs to take a look at it now.”
“This isn’t about your amateur porn collection, Cartwright. It’s about your attempt to steal the PM’s vetting file. Did you really think you’d get away with that?”
“The guy I spoke to was early fifties, five nine. Grey suit, yellow tie, black shoes. Dark hair going silver at the temples. English, white, upper-class accent—”
Duffy slammed his left hand against the wall, an inch from River’s ear. “And he’s your buyer, right? He’s the man instructed you to break into the Park.”
“I didn’t break in.”
“Well you weren’t fucking invited. Where’d this happen?”
“Over by Barbican.”
“And this toff what, dropped in on Slough House?”
“I told you, he sent—”
Duffy slammed his other hand against the wall, and leaned forward so his forehead was almost touching River’s. “You want to know why I’m having trouble believing this fairy story, Cartwright?”
“Look at my phone.”
“It’s because if any of it even remotely happened, you know where you’d be now? Back at your desk, doing your job. Having reported all these . . . unusual events to your boss, who’d have passed them up the line exactly the way it says in the protocols. Because if you’d done anything different, Cartwright, you’d have knowingly endangered the life of your fellow . . . What is it they call you over there?”
River could smell Duffy’s breath. Could feel the heat of the sweat forming on his brow.
“Can’t hear you.”
“You know what they call us.”
And then he was doubling over in pain, that familiar terrible pain men learn early and never forget. In a minute or two, it would get worse. But for the moment the impact of Duffy’s knee into his testicles wiped out all thought of his future.
Duffy stepped away, and River fell to the floor.
Diana Taverner answered on the third ring and said, “What do you want?”
“No, really,” said Lamb. “The pleasure’s all mine.”
He’d called her mobile, though he knew she’d be at her desk—she had that level of devotion to duty at least partly fired by fear that someone would move into her office if she left it for long.
“Been meaning to call you, actually,” she said. “Finance are querying your latest expense sheet. How come you clock up so much in travel costs when you barely leave your room?”
“How come Finance are passing their queries on to you?”
“Because her high-and-mighty Dameness has decreed that all and any manner of crap be redirected my way.” A pause followed, just long enough for her to be lighting a cigarette if that weren’t a shootable offence at the Park. “She wants to underline how indispensable I am, which means she thinks she’s found a way of dispensing with me.”
Because he wasn’t at the Park, and because nobody got shot at Slough House without his permission, Lamb lit a cigarette. “You sound quite relaxed about it.”
“She’ll have to get up earlier than she thinks she has,” Taverner said, which would have sounded cryptic from anyone else, but was reasonably lucid for her. “So. These expense sheets.”
“Don’t push me, Diana. I have hostages, remember?”
“They’re not your hostages, Jackson. They’re your staff.”
“You say potato,” said Lamb. “Anyway, I don’t have as many as I used to. A birdy tells me you’ve got one of mine in your lock-up.”
“That would be River Cartwright.”
“Yes, but don’t blame me. I think his mother was a hippy.”
“Smoke a lot of dope while he was in the womb, did she? That might explain today’s dipshit behaviour. And I thought he was one of your cleverer boys.”
“Mind like a razor,” Lamb agreed. “Disposable. Anyway, when you’ve finished ticking him off, pack him back this way, would you? I’ve thought of three different ways of making his life hell, and I’m itching to put them into practice.”
That he was itching was beyond doubt. His pencil being out of reach he’d grabbed a plastic ruler, and was sawing away at the gaps between the toes on his right foot, a task made easier now the fabric of his sock had given way.
“Yeah, right.” Taverner gave her throaty chuckle, famous for making the old boys on the Oversight Committee stand to attention. “You might need to practise your latest . . . wheezes on someone else.”
“‘Wheezes’?”
“This isn’t one of your daily misdemeanours, Lamb. Cartwright attempted to steal, or photograph, a Scott-level document, leaking which would have caused serious embarrassment to both the Service and the government. We’re not going to send him back to you with a slapped wrist. Anyway, it’s out of my hands. He’s with the Dogs. And when they’re finished with him, they’ll hand him over to the Met.”
Lamb took a long drag on his cigarette, noisily enough that Taverner knew what he was doing. He said, “Scott-level? You’re still playing Thunderbirds over there?”
“Yes, but don’t blame me. Unquote. Tearney thinks they’re astronauts.” Her chuckle floated into Lamb’s room once more, mixing with the cloud he’d just breathed out. “And if you think I don’t know when you’re processing, you’re sadly wrong. You’ve no idea what your boy was up to, have you?”
“Well, I’ve got a birthday this year. Perhaps he was looking for that special gift.”
“I’ll get those expense details emailed over. You might want to give them some more thought.”
“Diana?”
This time, it was more than a chuckle. This time it was an outright laugh. “Oh dear. Sounds like you’re about to make a plea.”
Lamb said, “Cartwright’s not my only joe gone walkabout. If there’s anything happening I need to know about, you’d best email those details too. Save me having to come over there and ask you myself.”
He hung up, and gave his foot one last vicious tweak with the ruler, which split in half with a noise like a gunshot.
This being Slough House, and Lamb being Lamb, nobody came to find out if that’s what it had been.
When he could see again, all he could see was the floor. He spat, and then he could see the floor and some spit, and then his vision went wavy again, and then it came back.
So now you know, a small voice in the back of his head told him, what it’s like to be kneed in the balls by an expert.
It’s surprising how even the most basic of skills can become, in the hands of an artist, a minor masterpiece.
“I’m waiting,” another voice said. This one wasn’t in his head; it existed in the rest of the world too.
River hauled himself into a squatting position where the pain didn’t exactly subside, but allowed him to think that it might one day do so, and took a deep breath, half-scared that doing so would rupture something important. He looked for his voice, and found it a little farther away than usual. “Slow. Horses. They call us. The slow. Horses.” Even to himself, he sounded like a nonagenarian refugee. “And you know. What they call. You?”
“Everyone knows what they call us,” Duffy said. “They call us the Dogs.”
“No. They call the Dogs. The Dogs. They call you. A useless prick.”
“And yet you’re the one lying on the floor.”
“You ever. Try that. Outside your own backyard,” River said. “We’ll see who ends up. On the floor.”
It was getting easier again, this old talent of his: making words come out of his mouth. He looked up, and found Duffy looking straight back down at him.
“Maybe we can check that out,” he said. “But not anytime soon. You’re going to be busy for a while yet.”
“Standish,” said River. “They have Catherine Standish.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not like we were doing anything with her. And you’re going to have one hell of a job persuading anyone she’s worth the PM’s vetting file.” Duffy ran his left index finger over the knuckles of his right hand. “Now get to your feet, and let’s try again.”
Queasily, River managed to stand.
Duffy said, “Who were you planning on selling it to?”
River said, “They have Catherine Standish. Check my phone, you moron.”
This time, Duffy hit him in the stomach.
•••
“Sorry about this,” the soldier began.
He didn’t look sorry.
“But we’re out of milk.”
He put the mug of tea he was carrying on the bedside table.
“Room service?” Catherine said.
“Well, we can hardly let you wander down to the kitchen at will. Security issues.”
“This is the weirdest kidnapping I’ve ever heard of,” she told him. “Not that I’m an expert. But seriously? Is this your first time?”
The soldier pursed a lip, as if giving it thought. “We’ve taken prisoners before. But the circumstances were different.”
“You’re not going to kill me, then.”
“We’re not animals.”
“Can I have that in writing?” She’d hoped for a chuckle, and when she didn’t get one asked, “Where’s Donovan?”
“Downstairs.”
No he wasn’t. He’d left earlier, in the van. But it didn’t hurt to pretend to believe him.
She said, “I could do with a change of clothing.”
“I said we weren’t animals. I didn’t say we were Marks and Spencer’s.”
He turned to leave, and Catherine reached for a hook to hold him. She found it just as he was closing the door.
“Does he talk about her much?”
“. . . About who?”
“The girl who died.”
He paused. Then said, “She wasn’t a girl. She was a captain in the armed forces.”
“My apologies. But she’s still dead, right? Does he talk about her at all? I’m sure I would.”
Catherine could hear her own voice rising as she spoke—she rarely lost control of her tone, but she was desperate for him to stay, say more, cast light on why she was here, and what was happening elsewhere.
“If I’d been drunk-driving the car that killed her, I mean,” she finished.
He shook his head, sadly it seemed to her, and left the room, padlocking the door behind him.
After a while, Catherine reached for the tea.
Nick Duffy splashed water onto his face, then gazed hard into the bathroom mirror, finding nothing out of the ordinary there. A morning’s work. They weren’t all like this—well, they couldn’t be. It wasn’t a police state.
After he’d dried himself on a paper towel, he checked on Cartwright through the two-way. He’d have expected the kid—not entirely a kid, but Duffy felt entitled—to have parked himself on the chair, which Duffy had left for that specific purpose, to make taking it away from him the next gambit. Cartwright, though, had remained upright. He was leaning against the wall, and if he didn’t look happy—looked pale as a fish with stomach pains—he hadn’t, Duffy noted, positioned himself out of view of the mirror. In fact, he raised a middle finger towards it at that moment, as if he knew Duffy was watching.
Could have been a lucky guess.
He moved away and released the phone from its hook on the wall. A three-digit extension got him Diana Taverner.
“He’s not changing his story.”
“Remind me what his story was.”
Duffy ran through it: the photograph of Standish, the brief instruction. The man on the bridge who’d worn a suit and had a toff’s accent.
“Sounded like he got up Cartwright’s nose.”
“You believe him then?” Taverner asked.
Duffy looked at his free hand. Nothing about it suggested he’d done anything rougher that morning than carrying a hot coffee.
“I think he’d have changed his story if it wasn’t true,” he said.
He was used to Lady Di’s silences, which generally meant she was assimilating information, dividing it into pros and cons. This one, though, felt different, as if she already had a handle on what was going on.
In the room next door, Cartwright made the middle-finger gesture again. He was on a loop, Duffy decided. A cycle of defiance, because despite all that had happened to him in the past twenty minutes, he hadn’t yet grasped the nature or the depth of the shit into which he’d stepped.
Taverner said, “Have you sent anyone looking for this man? The one on the bridge?”
“There was a man, in London, on a bridge, two hours ago,” Duffy said. “We could cordon the city off, I suppose.”
“Talk to me like that again,” Taverner said, without altering her tone, “and you’d happily swap places with Cartwright. What about the woman—Standish?”
“The photo’s on his phone. Like he said.”
“And it came from where?”
“Her phone.”
“Of course it did . . . Any trace?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“How badly have you hurt him?”
“Hardly at all.”
“By your standards, or anyone’s?”
“He might be a slow horse, but he’s not a civilian. He’ll live.”
“Just as well. Lamb can get . . . tetchy when his crew get damaged.”
“I thought he despised his crew.”
“That doesn’t mean he likes other people messing with them. Okay, let Cartwright sweat for the moment. We’ll get word from on high sooner or later.”
“On high?”
“Oh yes. Dame Ingrid’s been summoned to the Home Office And you know how jolly that makes her.”
Cartwright was doing the thing with the finger again. He couldn’t know Duffy was there, obviously, but it was still starting to get on his wick.
He said, “Look. That crack about cordoning off the city. I—”
“You’d just finished putting the leather to someone. It made you feel cocky. Made you feel invulnerable.”
“I guess . . . ”
“Trust me. You’re not.”
Taverner hung up.
Duffy replaced the receiver and stood by the two-way a while longer. Every so often, River Cartwright repeated the finger gesture, but to Duffy’s eye, it looked a little less convincing each time. What was it they used knackered horses for again?—oh yeah: dog food and glue. Give it a while, he’d pop next door and remind Cartwright of that. Meanwhile, he deserved a cup of coffee.
He left the ro
om quietly so the kid wouldn’t hear. The thought of him standing there, repeatedly offering the finger to an empty room, wasn’t quite enough to wipe away the memory of Lady Di’s parting shot, but it didn’t hurt.
There were many thorns in Ingrid Tearney’s garden—the constant need for vigilance; the ever-present threat of terrorism; Diana Taverner—and here was another: a summons from the Home Secretary. Until recently, such phone calls had been a minor nuisance, requiring her to attend the minister’s office and deliver platitudes while maintaining eye contact, as if soothing a worried puppy. But Peter Judd didn’t look to her for reassurance, he sized her up for weaknesses. In company he claimed they got on like a house on fire, but it was clear which of them provided the petrol.
It was Dame Ingrid’s habit to catch the tube into work, but she used her official ride for everything else. It took her now through streets that were wilting in the heat. When the freak weather had started it had splashed the capital in colour, but as hot days turned into baking weeks, brightness had faded like old paint. Greenery died, turning parks brown and lifeless. People scurried now from shadow to shadow, wearing the caved-in expressions of trauma survivors, and greeted rumours of rain like news of a lottery win. That the weather was not normal was a staple of internet traffic. The streets, meanwhile, were cruel reflections of an unforgiving sky, where everything dazzled and everything hurt.
But inside the car frosted air circulated, and to all outward appearance Ingrid Tearney was unruffled by heatwave or grim thoughts. Her summer outfit was new, the fruit of a recent upturn in her finances, and her mannish features were relaxed into a benevolent-seeming mask. She looked like the friendly grandmother, the one who offers oranges, but behind that mask steam valves hissed. Judd’s telephone summons had come from the man himself instead of the usual lackey, but he’d given no clue as to what it was about. His tone, though, had reeked of triumph. Whatever game he was about to play, he’d been dealt a useful hand.
Still, let the chips fall. Dame Ingrid didn’t negotiate with politicians.
Unless they had her by the throat.
At the minister’s residence, the front door was opened by a pretty young man with the faintest hint of a lisp. Nobody doubted Judd’s heterosexuality, which was as enthusiastic as it was indiscriminate, but his entourage tended towards the fey—Judd hadn’t dubbed them his camp followers for nothing. It was always possible the quip had occurred to him first, and he’d chosen his retinue accordingly.