Louisa approached Roddy’s desk, leaned across it and stage-whispered into his ear. “You’re not supposed to know about that.”
“. . . Okay.”
“Best to pretend you never said it. You with me, Rodster?”
“. . . I’m with you.”
She patted his cheek softly. “Smart boy.”
“. . . Uh, Louisa?”
“What?”
He nodded at the nearest monitor. “Black car.”
Louisa looked at the screen, looked at Roddy, looked back at the screen, and then looked at Roddy again. “Keep up the good work,” she told him, and left the office, followed by Lech.
Home again, Whelan found the landline handset winking at him, but when he checked it was a cold caller, concerned about his financial arrangements. It was nice that someone cared. He pressed delete anyway.
After a protracted vigil in Briefing Two—an antiseptic chamber whose chief feature was the number of available sockets: they studded the walls, and lurked beneath little trapdoors in the floor—he’d been startled by the almost noiseless appearance of, inevitably, Josie-from-the-hub. I tried not to have favourites. It didn’t make for a comfortable working environment. He knew all the horror stories about male bosses and their PAs but it hadn’t been like that; he’d been aware Josie had a soft spot for him, but he’d never acted upon it. He was old enough to be her . . . Not that that mattered. He’d been, still was, married.
“Lord, Josie, my dear, how are you—”
And then that excruciating moment when he’d leaned for a hug, and she’d pulled back to the same degree.
“Of course, no, sorry sorry sorry—”
It would have been better without the apology. That way, they could both have pretended the moment had never happened.
Recovery was achieved in a politely brittle manner: It was good to see him, how had he been, how was retirement? He’d attempted refutation—not retirement, he wasn’t that old, thanks, Josie, not quite yet—but was merely compounding his error. She smiled efficiently and handed him a love token. No she didn’t: she handed him an oddly fun-coloured thing, bright pink. A thumb drive.
“The phone records? A bit raw, I’m afraid, but Diana said you were in a hurry?”
“Oh yes, very much, thanks. I’m sure I’ll make sense of them.”
Whether he would or wouldn’t being beside the point by then. All he wanted was to get out of the building.
He signed for the thumb drive while Josie recited some boilerplate about not copying or transferring the enclosed material, and swore on his neverborn children that it would be returned upon completion of his investigation: a “standard security measure,” though he wondered whether it wasn’t also budget-driven. His visitor’s lanyard, too, she needed back. She walked him up the stairs, and he felt like an inconvenient neighbour, or barely tolerated uncle. One you’d not seat next to your daughter, if you all ended up in the same taxi.
Old, yes, god. Replacing the receiver he said, aloud, “I’m sorry, Claire,” and his wife’s name made itself at home; busied itself in plumping up cushions and straightening the magazines on the coffee table before disappearing into the airy stillness of the house.
He made a pot of tea and a butterless sandwich—he’d forgotten to take a new packet from the fridge. One of a hundred small hurdles to trip over, daily. But the tea was fine. Semi-refreshed, he reached for his laptop and plugged the new drive in to discover that it contained two hundred and seventeen files, a number of them very large. It was impossible not to sigh. Had he really promised Nash he would see this through? Or had he simply agreed to poke around a little, and see if anything stirred?
Nothing was stirring on his laptop, that was for sure. When he opened the largest file, it unrolled a huge column of numbers, dates, times: the length of calls made to separate numbers at the Park, and the numbers from which they had originated. Did he really think studying this was going to provide any solutions? He felt like a patsy in a fairy tale, one who’s just been tasked with matching up a cellarful of odd buttons, and closed the file before the numbers sucked him in. Then poured more tea, and leaned back and closed his eyes.
He thought: Diana thinks, or wants me to think she thinks, that I’m really looking into Waterproof and not de Greer. Which means she either wants me to do that, because she doesn’t want me looking into de Greer, or she doesn’t want me to do that and is only letting me think she thinks that’s what I’m doing in order to make me think she doesn’t care if it is. So she either wants me not to look into Waterproof, or wants me not to look into de Greer.
It was good to have clarity.
He pondered for some moments, and then checked the material Nash had forwarded. The details included Dr. Sophie de Greer’s mobile number; the phone she hadn’t used since she’d disappeared, and from which she’d removed the battery, or otherwise rendered untraceable. This he keyed into a search box he then applied to the fun-coloured memory stick. It took little more than two seconds.
One result.
Whelan hadn’t been expecting this. Taverner’s lack of resistance to his having these records had strongly suggested they would contain nothing of interest; did that mean she had a particular desire that he see the one hit they contained? She must know it was there; she’d never have approved handover of the files without first ascertaining what they’d tell him. Unless—and here was a novel idea—unless she’d been telling the truth, and had no interest in de Greer and no involvement in her disappearance. Whelan could feel his skull tightening. This was what Spook Street did to you. You stepped onto its pavements and the world instantly became unsure of itself; its depths an illusion, its shallows treacherous. All of it set dressing, apart from the bits that weren’t, designed to make you think yourself in circles and never stand straight again.
The files had come with no key attached; no explanation of which number dialled sat on which desk. All he had was the number de Greer had called: a landline, out of sequence with most others on the list. More significant was the timing. The call had been placed on the afternoon of the day de Greer disappeared, which meant that any possibility that the two events were unconnected faded like a forgotten flavour, because the Park was the Park, and coincidence was outlawed within its precincts. The Park was where plots were hatched and nurtured and set loose from their cages, and no one knew this better than him.
He had the sense of standing by a long-grassed meadow, aware that some of the rippling on its surface was made by the wind; the rest by small creatures scurrying about out of sight.
The clock’s ticking had grown louder, as good an indication as any of time passing. He attempted to put an end to this by arriving at a decision: the best way of finding whose phone de Greer had rung was calling it, so he called it. It took an unconscionable time to be answered, but when it was Whelan found himself holding his breath, and once he’d disconnected without speaking, he remained motionless for some while. It was as if he had just stepped into that long-grassed meadow. It was as if the rippling were heading in his direction, and he would soon feel either a soft breeze whispering past him, or some sharp-toothed rodents sawing at his legs.
In this last brief heatwave of the year, which faded every evening with the dimming of the day, London had dragged itself back to normal, setting the memory of two miserable years aside, and letting its age-old hallmarks reappear. So the river slowed to a crawl as the day departed, just as it always had, and the skies purpled in the distance, soothing the edges of office buildings. Sounds seemed softer: the sighs and exhalations of weary cars, and the buzzing of swarms of bicycles steered by skintight black-and-yellow riders, mere whispers compared to the frantic careering of rush hour, though the helicopters shredding the air overhead, ferrying important people to important places, were as angry as ever. Lower down, in the green spaces, trees soughed and whistled, and runners tapped to the pavements’ beat in brutally expensive footwear; prams trundled on boardwalks by the lakes, wheelchairs rattled over paving stones, and music was everywhere, like mist; leaking from doorways, broadcast from speakers strapped to couriers’ handlebars, and performed with huge sincerity and varying degrees of talent by buskers: someone, somewhere, was playing a cello while coins splashed into its case. Underneath this music, the liquid lub-dub that was London’s heartbeat could be heard once more: the pouring of pints and glasses of wine; the sloshing of water in the bottles everyone carried; the streaming of piss into toilets and urinals, followed by the flushings of cisterns that sent it cascading into sewers, their pipes laid along the beds of forgotten rivers, which once lapped to the same tidal pull that amplifies the Thames. And most constant of all, visible everywhere if you knew where to look—in the building sites, in the long black cars, in the designer suits and jewelled throats, in wristwatches and cufflinks, tattoo parlours and nailbars, in a million glittering windows and a billion slot machines—the tumbling wet slap of money being laundered, over and over again.