“Let’s join him.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“It’ll look weird if you don’t. But maybe leave before I do?”
He liked her. Because she’d worked at the Park, they shared common ground he’d never find with civilians. Not that he’d be mentioning this to Sid. She led him past tables occupied by serious-looking young folk and towards a window under which a man sat alone, tucking in to the moussaka.
“Stam? Have you met River Cartwright?”
He looked up. “Grandson of?”
“That’s right.”
“A pleasure.”
They shook hands, and Stam invited both to sit, sit.
He was a bullish man. River couldn’t gauge his height while he was seated, but he was still broad-shouldered, still muscular, into his seventies. Bald on top with a white trim of hair around the ears, meeting in a well-tended beard and moustache, and a nose that begged for classical adjectives: Roman, aquiline, something like that. His colour was high, suggesting blood pressure issues. He wore a blue shirt under a light brown corduroy jacket, and spectacles hung on a chain around his neck. As if he were the host, and a duty fell upon him, he began to talk, first asking River if he’d visited the college before, and then embarking on a potted history. River ate his lasagna, not so much absorbing the information as studying the man delivering it, who had worked with his grandfather.
This was a broad church. Cartwright senior had worked in elevated circles but he’d reached low too, claiming the allegiance of joes and handlers alike—of course he had. Holmes had his irregulars; Smiley had his people. Naturally the O.B. had had a crew. Spying is networks; the young River had learned that at his grandfather’s knee. You didn’t run an intelligence service without calling on local talent. Spying is other people. Hell, the clue was in the vocabulary. They called it Spook Street, and a street without inhabitants wasn’t worth the name. Besides, any time you found yourself alone, you’d know you were the one being watched . . . Watching Charles Stamoran, River wondered how close he’d been to the O.B., and whether they’d shared secrets. And whether Stam had stolen some the O.B. had tried to keep.
“Great to see you, Stam, but would you mind excusing me? I’ve emails I need to get round to.”
“Of course. See you later.”
Both men watched Erin leave, neither speaking, both recognising that the conversation had just shifted onto another playing field. River had finished his lunch, or finished eating it, anyway. He was toying with the rest, pushing it around his plate with his fork. Stam was watching him do so. He laid his cutlery down and dabbed his lips with a napkin. “I like to walk a circuit after lunch. Helps with the digestion. Care to join me?”
Couldn’t be better.
They left the dining room, Stam collecting a scarf from a hook by the door and knotting it round his neck. The weather hardly called for it, but River was well short of seventy, so made no comment. Others were leaving the hall at the same time but had places to go, and the quad soon emptied. Stam walked briskly, whether a further aid to digestion or his natural habit wasn’t clear.
“I knew your grandfather,” he said, halfway round their first circuit.
He had one of those I, Claudius voices: not especially loud, but you could make out every syllable. “I know,” River answered.
“In fact, we met once. I doubt you’ll remember.”
“Really?”
“You’d have been eight or nine. I was delivering a file to your house. I knocked at the door and you answered. I asked if your grandfather was in, and you said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to ask him.’ I found that funny, though I was careful not to let you see.”
“Did he take you into his study?”
“He did. So yes, I saw his books in their, what would you call it, original habitat. Didn’t help when it came to arranging them.” He delivered a sly sideways glance. “Live long enough, and you stop believing in coincidence. Things happen, that’s all. Naturally there are echoes.”
“Grandfather used to say everything happens in one of two kinds of pattern. The kind you see straight away, and the kind you have to work at.”
“Well, that’s how you get a reputation for being wise. By issuing cryptic little jewels like that.” He tugged at his scarf. “That came out wrong. I admired David Cartwright. He was far higher up the tree than I was, but that didn’t matter to me. I was never Desk material.”
“What did you do?” River had never met a spook whose life story he didn’t want to hear, or one who’d been happy to share it, his grandfather being the notable exception to that latter point.
“Field work. Mostly field work.”
Which evidently included delivering files, a task some might have thought entry-level. But there were files and files; there were people you trusted to deliver them, and people you didn’t.
River said, “There’s a book missing.”
“Yes.”
“Erin’s mentioned it?”
“She didn’t need to. And yes, before you ask, it wasn’t actually a book. I know that too.”
“A box of some sort.”
“We used to call them safes.”
River had known that: Of course he had. But the word had got lost, or at any rate, hadn’t sprung to mind when he and Erin had been discussing it. This fazed him: What else had he forgotten lately? Was there a whole page of vocabulary torn from his mind, scattering in his wake? Like the O.B. in his final days; that bright shining intelligence grown rusty, and its owner barely aware of the fact. Except for occasional moments, the memory of which River suppressed; moments in which his grandfather’s eyes had turned black with horror in the knowledge of what was happening to him.
“How did you know?”
“Well.” Stam came to a halt, the better to fix his eyes on River. “I could say it was obvious. That I’ve studied the film you sent us, and it became apparent something was missing. That that was always likely to happen, don’t you think? Items going missing in the . . . kerfuffle of books being transported?”
Kerfuffle was one way of putting it. The façade of the O.B.’s house had been removed, to ensure that any lingering toxicity had been dealt with. This wasn’t a state secret. There’d been a photograph in The Times.
“But this wasn’t a book, it was a safe,” said River. “So what are the chances this particular volume would be the one to vanish?”
“I’m not a statistician. But that would be unlikely.”
“And isn’t what happened.”
“No, of course not. I took it, as you’ve guessed. Erin too, probably.”
“Yes.”
“And you want to know why.”
In fact, the why seemed obvious to River: because it was there. You were unloading a spook’s library, and came across a treasure chest. Why wouldn’t you steal it? But what he said was, “As long as we’re here.”
Stam started walking again. They were on their second circuit, and a light breeze was blowing. It chased sunbeams around, or that was the effect beneath the quad’s largest tree, its branches’ shadows rearranging themselves as they passed. Stam said, “I wish I could tell you the box contained state secrets. We might both feel better about that. Well, you might.”