by Mick Herron
After a while, Louisa said, “Another happy day in the office.”
“You really think Judd’s involved in whatever’s going on?”
“No, I just wanted to wind Shirley up.”
“Not exactly a challenge.” Marcus fished a handful of CDs from the bin. Casually as he could, he said, “You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You seem a bit—”
“I’m fine.”
“Lighten up, girl. I saved your life, remember?”
“Didn’t I thank you? At the time?”
“. . . I guess.”
“Well then.”
“Okay.” Marcus’s focus shifted. “Fact is, I’d have shot him anyway.”
“I know.”
“He got on my tits.”
“I can imagine how you felt.”
“Shirley’s a little uptight right now.”
“Shirley’s a loose fucking cannon.”
“She’s just split with her girlfriend. Boyfriend. Whichever.”
“I want an update on her status, I’ll check Facebook. But if she keeps annoying me, I’ll clean her clock. And Marcus? Call me ‘girl’ again, it’s your own life’ll need saving.”
“What was that about?” Shirley asked, coming back into the room as Louisa left.
“Office banter.”
“You could repurpose that woman. Use her as a fire blanket. She can kill an atmosphere stone dead.”
“Were you in the loo just now?”
“Yeah. I’d give it five minutes.”
“You weren’t . . . ”
“Weren’t what?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh Christ, not you too.” She stomped back to her chair. “I’m not a junkie, all right? I like the odd recreational high, that’s all.”
“That shit fucks with your reactions.”
“Yeah, that’s a real danger in this job.” Shirley manhandled her keyboard, coaxing a satisfactory yelp out of it. “I get a rogue paper clip, I’m toast.”
“You need to take things more seriously.”
“And you need to lighten up.”
“Yeah, well. You owe me a quid,” he said, but she pretended not to hear him.
Outside, sunlight was a shock. Lamb found a patch of shadow overlooking a channel of water that was still and green and pasted with a layer of thick round leaves the size of dinner plates. The occasional bloom was a defiant gesture, a doily the pink and white of a conjunctivitis-riddled eye. In a nearby flowerbed a scatter of feathers betrayed where a fox had caught a pigeon, unless the pigeon had simply exploded. He lit his cigarette at last. His phone had fallen silent before he’d left the church, but it would ring again soon. When it did, he raised it to his ear without looking at the screen and said, “Diana.”
“What are you up to, Lamb?”
“Church visit,” he said. “Have you let Jesus into your life? He does house calls, but it’s nice to pop round his place.”
“Tearney’s just signed a release on your boy Cartwright.”
“I doubt that.”
“I’ve just had Nick Duffy on the line. He walked Cartwright out of the building himself. Not happily, I might add.”
“I doubt Tearney signed anything.”
Pause.
“Yeah, okay, she didn’t do that.”
Lamb watched as the smoke from his cigarette struggled upwards into the heavy, heat-struck air. “What’s on your mind, Diana?”
“Judd’s planning on overhauling the command structure,” Diana Taverner said. “Apparently he thinks Second-Desk level would be better served by ministerial appointees.”
“You can see his point,” Lamb said. “I mean, if the current system works, how come you’re senior to me?”
“If it goes ahead, you’ll be answering to some party hack whose sole aim in life is inching up the greasy pole. Well, I say answering. But the first thing any politico would do on taking the Slough House brief would be to shut it down.”
“And you’re telling me all this because . . . ?”
“I have your best interests at heart. You know that.”
“It’s never occurred to you I might welcome retirement?”
He spent the silence that followed this question easing his underwear from the crack of his arse.
At length Taverner said, “If you’re not going to take this seriously, there’s no point my trying to warn you.”
“Just lightening the moment.”
“Because the image of you in retirement, leafing through the Angling Times or whatever—”
“I appreciate your input. But if I’m going to get a cake baked before young River gets home, I’d best be on my way.”
“Jackson . . . ”
“Diana.”
“You know what I’ve spent the past few months overseeing? Reshelving paperwork. I’m serious. Off-site storage for the whackjob files, for black-ribboned folders, for anything deemed no longer necessary for, and I quote, quotidian objectives. That’s daily business, in case you were wondering.”
“I can’t stress how much I wasn’t.”
“Carry on finding it funny. But I’m Second Desk Ops, Jackson, and I’m doing an intern’s job. They won’t just close down Slough House. They’ll turn the Service into a work experience factory for Foreign Office wannabes.” She paused for effect. “If you’re asked to choose sides, I hope you pick the right one.”
“For your sake or mine?” Lamb asked, and rang off.
Ho said, “His name’s Sylvester Monteith. He ran a security outfit, Black Arrow?”
“Never heard of it,” Louisa said.
Marcus said, “They’re not top level, but they’ve picked up a couple of government contracts . . . ”
He tailed off, trying to dredge up a detail.
“And now he’s a stiff,” said Shirley. “Who whacked him?”
Ho said, “You know what? His CV doesn’t say.”
It was ten minutes since the blow-up in Marcus and Shirley’s office, and now, without arrangement, they’d gathered in Ho’s room to find out what he’d discovered. Sometimes, it happened like this. It didn’t always augur well.
“Whoever it was,” Louisa said, “they weren’t trying to keep it a secret. Dumping a body from the back of a van, the middle of London. That’s gang behaviour.”
“The van didn’t get far,” Ho said. “It was abandoned three streets away.”
“Any CCTV?”
“Middle of London? Let me think.”
“Thank you, smartarse. Have you got the feed?”
“Not yet,” Ho admitted.
“Peter Judd,” Marcus said.
“What about him?”
“Monteith’s firm picked up government contracts because he had a handy mate somewhere. That’s how the story went.”
“And the mate was Peter Judd?”
“Be interesting if it was, wouldn’t it? Given he was a bystander.”
Ho’s upper lip had curled. It was the face he usually wore when he was wading into the web, and accounted for a large proportion, though not the whole, of his unpopularity.
Not many keystrokes later he said, “They were at school together.”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t the local comp,” Shirley said.
“God bless the Establishment,” said Marcus. “But what’s any of this got to do with Catherine’s disappearance?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Louisa, tension in her voice. Marcus made a mental note to stand well back. The recoil from a woman’s stress could have a finger off, you weren’t careful. “Let’s find out more about Black Arrow.”
“You mean, you want me to,” said Ho.
“There’s no I in ‘team,’” Louisa reminded him.
“But there’s a U in ‘cun
t,’” Shirley muttered.
Ho rubbed his bruised cheek with one finger.
Marcus opened a window, and for a brief moment enjoyed the fantasy that a cool breeze would rush in, dispersing the general funk of sweat and stale energy that hung around Ho’s office. Then a blast of air and hot noise put him right. He closed it again, and made a mental note to badger Catherine about getting fans that worked. Except Catherine wasn’t here . . . A figure peeled out of the bookies a few doors down the road, paused by a bin, and dropped something into it, or nearly did. The bundle of paper slips bounced off the rim and fell into the gutter. Someone having a bad day, thought Marcus. He’d had a few himself, but one lucky afternoon was all he needed. And then he’d walk away from it all: the cards, the horses, the damn roulette machines.
“Did you say something?”
“We need some working fans,” Marcus said.
Ho recited what he could find on Black Arrow. Founded twenty years previously, it wasn’t what you’d call a blinding success, except that anything that hadn’t actually gone tits up in the last five years was a hymn of praise to the free market. Currently employing just over two hundred ‘officers,’ it held a few smallish government contracts, and provided security to a second-tier supermarket chain. This probably involved ferrying takings and salaries around more than keeping an eye on stock, though it might mean that too.
“Employee records?” Louisa asked.
“Why?” said Shirley.
“Intelligence gathering. I haven’t time to explain the concept, but—”
“Oh, any time you want start explaining concepts—”
Marcus said, “That was the door. Lamb’s back.”
So all four of them set about looking idle, because looking busy, they’d learned to their cost, meant that as far as Lamb was concerned, they were up to no good.
But it wasn’t Lamb who appeared a minute later, it was River.
The Thames looked low. Years gone by, there were stories of the river freezing; of ice fairs thrown in the shadows of the bridges, and skaters weaving past long-lived landmarks, but Sean Donovan didn’t remember hearing it had ever dried up. When that day came, the stink would surely drive the capital out of its mind.
If that hadn’t already happened. The fury of the pace, the anger of the traffic, had a sociopathic buzz.
And think of the secrets that would come to light, when the cracked, flaking ooze of the riverbed lay exposed to view. Everything the Establishment tried to flush away, to drown in the dark; it would all lie choking in the sunshine. There’d be nowhere to hide anything.
He was standing under a tree on the Embankment. The tree was sad and brown, and offered little in the way of shade; the Embankment was cloaked with CCTV coverage, and offered nothing in the way of privacy. But Donovan had faith in organisational chaos, and knew that while a match would eventually be made between the figure loitering here, early for an appointment, and the hooded man abandoning a van from which a body had been dumped a mile or so distant, this wouldn’t happen for some time yet. He checked his watch as if to verify this, then looked up at the sky. The sun was working on plan B; the one where it cut the crap, and just frazzled everything in reach.
Momentarily dazzled, he didn’t see Ben Traynor until the soldier was upon him.
“Sean.”
Though they’d parted only hours ago, they shook hands.
“All okay?”
“I’m fine,” Donovan said. “The woman?”
“Stop worrying. It’s a rest cure.” Traynor glanced round, a 360-degree sweep. He saw nothing to alarm him. “And Monteith? Not a happy bunny, I presume.”
Not a happy bunny at all, Donovan thought.
He said, “Ben, it went wrong. My fault.”
“How wrong?”
“The worst.”
Traynor nodded. He glanced away again, towards the South Bank, and his eyes clouded over as he mentally adjusted to the new situation. Then he looked back at Donovan.
“Okay,” he said. “So he’s not trussed up in the van, cooking like a chicken. Tell you the truth, Sean, he’s not the biggest loss to humanity.”
“Walk away now,” Donovan said. “Call the kid. Tell him it’s over. He knows the drill.”
“Aye, and what then? We’ve come this far.”
“Kidnapping was bad enough. Murder’s over the line.”
“What did you do, snap his worthless neck?”
“He made a break for it, for Christ’s sake. Have to hand it to the little bugger. I thought he’d fold and whimper.”
“We’d all expect that.”
“I caught him. Hit him. One punch, you know?”
“You don’t know your own strength.”
Donovan probably did, near as damn it. What he hadn’t taken into account was his anger, the constant companion of the last few years, always glowering below the surface. Anger had been at his elbow in the car park, making sure he didn’t pull his punch. He’d hit Monteith as hard as he’d ever hit anything. Even as he’d made contact, he’d known things had tipped over an edge.
A passing siren caught their attention, but it was an ambulance. Some poor sod collapsed in the heat. He waited until its clangour was wrapped inside the city’s other noise, then said, “You’re still here.”
“We can still make it work.”
“Maybe. Maybe. But we won’t walk away from it.”
“Sean,” Traynor said. “We were never going to be able to walk away from it.”
River Cartwright felt as if he’d had his insides scooped out, tossed like a salad, then reinserted any which way. Trying to move naturally, but keep himself from jostling, he looked like he was balancing an invisible egg on his head.
Nick Duffy had known what he was doing.
“Your grandfather won’t be around forever,” he’d told River as he’d escorted him out of the Park.
River was still dazed by the sudden turnaround in his fortunes. “What’s that mean?” He was clutching his phone in one hand; his self-respect in the other. Any unexpected movement, and he’d lose his grip on one or both.
“Someone pulled your nuts out of the fire. And it’s not like you’ve any friends round here.”
“And everyone speaks so highly of you.”
“Take some advice.” Duffy dropped an arm round River’s shoulders in a gesture that might have looked like friendship, from a distance. He squeezed, knowing where to apply pressure. “Don’t bother going back to Slough House. All those forms and pointless reports, they must be doing your head in. So just fucking give up, why don’t you? Try something else, like maybe McDonald’s. Pretend you don’t speak English, they’ll take you like a shot. Because your spook career? It’s deader than your mate Spider.”
“He’s not dead.”
“No, but they hold a mirror to his lips every morning, to check.”
They were out of the door by this time, over the road from the park, in which mothers wheeled prams, and some mad joggers ran, but mostly people slumped in groups in whatever shade they could find. Whether it was torpor or tranquillity, it felt strange to be looking on it while hearing thinly veiled threats.
River said, “My grandfather’s into his eighties. Some days he has difficulty on the stairs, you know? When his joints are troubling him.”
“You’re not gonna be taking them two at a time yourself any time soon.”
“But on his worst day, he’d scrape you from his shoe without a second thought,” said River, and he’d walked off down the road arms swinging freely by his sides, hardly at all like someone who’d recently had a professional going-over. He was round the corner before he’d dropped between parked cars and vomited into the gutter.
And now he was back in Slough House.
“We thought you were Lamb.”
“Thanks.”
Lo
uisa said, “You’ve been at the Park. Why’d they let you go?”
“I don’t know. Catherine still missing?”
Marcus said, “Do you know where she is?”
River showed them his phone.
Louisa took it and moved nearer the window, holding it at an angle to the light. The picture didn’t change—Catherine, handcuffed, gagged, sitting on a bed.
“So that’s why you went haring off to HQ?”
But River was looking at Ho’s monitors. “Who’s that bastard?”
“I don’t like you walking behind me,” Ho said.
“Name’s Sylvester Monteith,” said Louisa. “What makes him a bastard?”
“He’s the one took Catherine. How come you’ve got him onscreen?”
“I don’t like you—”
“Shut up.”
Marcus said, “His body was just dumped in SW1.”
“Someone killed him?”
“They were fly-tipping too. Don’t leave that out.”
River wasn’t in the mood. “He was on the bridge. Earlier. He’s the one sent me to the Park. He wanted a file.”
Marcus remembered a figure on the bridge when he and Shirley went looking for River and found ice creams instead. Probably best not to mention that now, or ever.
Louisa said, “If he took Catherine and he’s dead now, what’s happened to her?”
Shirley took the phone, and studied the picture.
River said, “This bastard wanted the PM’s vetting file.”
“Did you get it?”
“Not hardly.”
“She’s sitting up,” Shirley said.
“What?”
“Catherine. In this photo. She’s sitting up.”
“So?”
“Usually, victim photos, they’re lying down.”
River stared at her. “Is that a fact?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. This looks unusual, that’s all. Staged.”
“You think it’s faked?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t look . . . desperate.”
River shook his head.
Marcus said, “In what way?”
Shirley handed him the phone. “She doesn’t look frightened.”
“She’s handcuffed, for Christ’s sake,” River said.