That was it for fiction, though. More prominent was the shelf of almost spineless pamphlets; samizdat material, and fugitive releases from the presses of long-defunct academic institutes, or roneo’d in garages by bearded dissidents—impossible to escape that detaiclass="underline" They all had beards, in River’s experience. He couldn’t swear to this particular rag-tag, dog-eared collection being in the identical order it had been back home, but he couldn’t discern a difference. Perhaps they’d been jammed together so long they’d moulded into place, each pamphlet squeezed against the next so snugly it was all but glued there, the whole shelf-load demanding to be viewed always in the same order, one way and one way only.
She said, “We made good use of your film, as you can see.”
His film, the six-second video he’d shot the night his hand had touched that nearly fatal doorknob. This had been a punctuation mark on a dreamlike passage of time, during which he’d discovered that Sid had come back from the dead—the memory of a bullet still embedded in her brain—and holed up in the O.B.’s house, which had been emptied of belongings, except for his study. She’d made herself a nest, hiding from a homicidal pair of Moscow-centred thugs who planned to kill her a second time, and had been curled up asleep there when River scanned the room with his phone: the O.B.’s shelves, his books and mementoes, the print of The Night Watch above the fire, Sid herself. He’d hacked the last second off the copy he’d sent Erin.
“It’s just a pity the room isn’t more of a match for your grandfather’s.”
“No. No, it looks great. You’ve gone . . . above and beyond.”
Erin looked pleased. She was, he guessed, someone for whom a task wasn’t worth doing if it wasn’t done in such a way that casual bystanders were impressed. She said, “It’s a shame we don’t have any of your grandfather’s objets. They’d have added a touch of authenticity.”
It had been an odd collection of trophies to be sure: a glass globe, a hunk of concrete from the Berlin Wall, a twisted lump of metal that had once been a Luger, and a letter opener which in a previous life had been a stiletto belonging to Beria, and in a more recent one had been used by Sid to terminate one of those thugs she’d been hiding from. Unlike Erin, he was more relieved than otherwise that these items remained out of the picture. Books could form a personal collection, but were not, in themselves, personal. Books belonged to everyone. Blood-stressed knives and furnace-blasted handguns, though, spoke of a more intimate history, and River couldn’t imagine his grandfather being happy about their being placed on show. Or Sid, for that matter.
Anyway, that was moot. In his medically unavoidable absence, his mother had wrested control of the house and what remained of its contents, and allowed her lack of sentimentality about her father to take the reins. It was a wonder she’d deigned to preserve the books, though this might have had to do with her fear of being thought a philistine. Her late-onset respectability came with some advantages.
Because Erin seemed to be awaiting a response, he said, “They mostly wound up in a skip.”
“Oh. Shame.”
That was after the house’s façade had been stripped away, along with every last trace of poison, or so everyone hoped. You couldn’t help but wonder, though. It wasn’t like the nerve agent in question was a known quantity. Its very name meant “the new guy,” making it sound like a stranger in a Western: riding into town, looking for trouble. Hard to deny it had found it.
And River was now dragging his sorry arse from the saloon and getting back on his horse.
“Tell me about this missing book,” he said.
If you were designing a set for a small theatre group—something you could throw in the back of a van, then build in a village hall—you’d arrive at something like this: walls close enough together that two people holding hands could span the room’s width; a window with lace curtains nicotined with age; a two-seater sofa with floral design; and something that might be a drinks cabinet, from the days before anyone noticed that drinks taste better from a fridge. On those too-close walls, actual wallpaper, one strip peeling upwards where it met the skirting board; hanging from the ceiling, a paper globe of a lampshade, its underwire poking through the ruffled surface. And pervading it all, the way a bad smell might, the sense that what you saw was all you’d get; that beyond the room’s only door would lie a cramped hallway, off which lay a mean kitchen; that overhead would be two bedrooms, one small, one tiny, and a bathroom barely big enough to drown a dog, with a shower curtain decorated with Disney characters wielding umbrellas. Sometimes the unseen is contained by the seen; one small corner offering up the whole. But that’s a desirable characteristic in a safe house, its easily assimilated limits part of the security it offers.
Al Hawke, who had already toured the house—big verb, small effort—assumed that the couple he was opening the door to would gauge its dimensions with a single glance. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “But we’ve stayed in worse.”
But Avril just said, “Al.”
“Avril. Daisy.”
They hugged, all three, once the door was closed and the occupants of passing traffic couldn’t bear witness. Then they trooped into the sitting room, where Daisy sat on the sofa and Avril stationed herself by the window, which was barred. Al was left hovering by the door, his status as first arrival elevating him to the role of host. CC had texted him the code for deactivating the alarm. “There’s coffee. But no milk.”
“CC has always been better about remembering his own needs than others’.”
“Not entirely fair.”
“I’m not saying he’s mean, just . . . unimaginative. Have you seen him?”
Al shook his head.
“Since when?”
“Last year. October, I think. How about you?”
“About the same.”
Daisy, from the sofa, said, “He calls.”
Al, who had once been in CC’s company when he made such a call, could guess how that would have gone. A lot of talking on CC’s side—mostly gentle descriptions of what he’d been up to, places he’d been—and a lot of silence on Daisy’s. Al thought those phone calls were like playing the radio for a cat: They calmed her, but the flow of information went one way.
Like a cat, too, Daisy had taken to the sofa partly for the comfort it offered, partly as a defendable redoubt. Not that she had anything to worry about in present company, but habit digs deep roots.
Avril Potts said, “Is this the best the Park runs to these days? Or is the décor born of nostalgia?” She pursed her lips, as if in genuine thought. “I mean, short of a few secret policemen, we could be in the GDR.”
But she said it in a way that sounded like she was okay with it. Anyway, they’d not be here long.
Still, he had to ask. “When were you in the GDR?”
“Don’t get literal with me, Hawke. I’ve toasted bigger pedants for breakfast.”
“Fair enough.” He winked at Daisy, who was watching them as if they were engaged in a tennis rally. “You can take your pick of the bedrooms. Back one’s smaller, but there’s less noise and you won’t get the streetlights.”
“The back one,” said Avril, “will be barely big enough to contain the bed. And there’ll be less traffic at night, so that’s not an issue.” Al held up his hands in surrender, but she was already continuing: “But you need more space. Daisy and I will manage, I’m sure.”
Meaning, he guessed, that the more contained Daisy was, the safer she’d feel, and that Avril would gladly offer up her own comfort for that result.
Traffic might not be an issue later, but there was no shortage of it now. A main road wasn’t the obvious location for a safe house, but if obviousness was the criterion, the houses would be less secure. Besides, along this particular stretch there was little other residential property; on this side, a row of strangely out of place cottages, of which the farthest left adjoined an empty space that had once been a car park attached to what had once been a pub. A little beyond that, before the road curved, a lane led to public tennis courts. Opposite, behind a fence, lay school playing fields, where the sons and daughters of the obscenely rich, the frighteningly wealthy and the merely well-to-do could begin to absorb the lessons their lives would hold, chief among these being that money helped. The school itself was along the road to the right, its stout frontage dominating a hundred yards or so of pavement. Obviously most pupil drop-offs and pick-ups involved SUVs, so there was little pedestrian hustle. No, Al concluded; the site had been well chosen. This was a stretch of road on which nobody lingered.