River felt the ground shift beneath his feet. “What do you mean?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wanted them recalled; wanted nothing more to do with this conversation. He could walk away, unpark his car, perform the morning in reverse. Fold the landscape behind him as he tootled back to London, to Sid, pretending nothing had happened; that the book was a book, that it had turned up again. But it was too late for any of that, even the parts of it that were possible.
“He was a good man, your grandfather, even a great one. He achieved a lot. That the Park is still standing, that we have an intelligence service esteemed the world over—that’s down to him. Don’t forget that.”
“What was in the box?”
“But he was still just a man.”
“What was in the box?”
“The safe,” Stam corrected. And then repeated himself: “Just a man, with a man’s ordinary wants. I found nothing that would make you think better of him, but that doesn’t mean you should think him any the worse.”
He thought: I could hold this old man down on the ground and pound the truth out of him until it bleeds. I need to know everything. I need to know now. But the breeze was still pushing its way round the quad, ruffling the grass and setting leaves to trembling, and the day was just too ordinary—too civilised—to shatter.
Instead, he took refuge in the obvious. “You found pornography,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You found pornography.” It didn’t sound any better, second time round. “Was it illegal?”
“It wasn’t—it wasn’t desperate.”
The very hedging, the prevarication, made it all so much, so much worse.
“River,” said Stam, and his voice was gentle. “I destroyed it. All right? I destroyed what I found, the safe too.”
“Why the safe?” Irrelevance is a shelter; stops you thinking about anything else. “Why not just put it back?”
“I should have done. I’m sorry. You need never have known about any of this. But I wasn’t thinking. I burned what it contained, and I threw the safe, the box, in the fire too. It’s all gone. You don’t ever need to think about it.”
“Easy to say. I mean—”
But he didn’t know what he meant. His grandfather had raised him, he and Rose. When he thought about being an adult, living a proper life, it was David and Rose he was thinking about. That his grandfather had a secret life was a given. That the secrets it held might be so banaclass="underline" This threatened to unmoor him.
“We all have things we’d like to hide in boxes,” Stam was saying. “That we wouldn’t want exposed. It doesn’t undo all the good in our lives.”
Or augment it, either. The uplit mood he’d been in earlier, the tunes waiting to be whistled, were all gone. They walked another circuit in silence, Stam evidently knowing he’d said enough, that River didn’t want to hear words of comfort. All spies’ lives end in failure: That was something else the O.B. had once said. And this was what failure looked like; the last of your secrets taken out of their box and exposed to the daylight. And what shabby, paltry things they were after all.
In the safe house, the trio were playing cards.
. . . There should be rain lashing windows, power cuts and candles; a bottle of vodka and a hunk of bread. Instead they were drinking tea, sharing a plate of special biscuits from a deli three minutes’ walk away, and—so far successfully—making a collective effort not to use the words Do you remember? But remembering, anyway, the days of cold passes and brush-bys, of synchronised watches and dead-letter drops—methods already antiquated when the three of them were operational, but in joe country you clung to the old ways, because the new ways gave themselves away: a phone you weren’t supposed to have, a bugging device that might as well have been Mickey Mouse ears. Things you weren’t supposed to have became the treasures you’d be buried with: When you were dug up, you’d still be clutching—or have been made to swallow—the emblems of your trade; the toys Regent’s Park had supplied you with, to keep you safe. That this had not happened to any of them did not require saying; that it had happened to others was unforgettable. Even here, in this throwback of a safe house, eating special biscuits, drinking tea.
“Two aces.”
“Cheat.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because you can change your—”
“Cheat.”
Al displayed two aces. Avril sighed, and collected the pile.
Daisy said, “Is there anything to drink?”
“You want some more tea, love?”
“To drink.”
“Best not,” said Al. “Safe house rules.”
Daisy pursed her lips. Picked up her empty cup and studied its lack of contents: The tea had been made with bags. There was no future to be read. And the past was not to be discussed.
Avril watched her replace the cup in the exact spot she’d raised it from, thinking Daisy, Daisy. Of them all, Daisy was the one who had suffered most, the one who’d picked up the tab. And still paying it, all these years on.
Some debts you never settled. The interest crippled you; you never got close.
One of the things Avril had learned in the Park was that your joes were yours forever. This wasn’t in the handbook, but it was what your mentors taught you, what CC had told her, Love them or hate them, they’re yours for good. You’re bound to them by barbed wire, and no point trying to escape it. He’d said all this more than once. Their sins are yours, because you mould them. Give them their first communion. Confirm them in their saint’s name. Sometimes you bury them too. But you never let go of them, on the ground or in it. Best you know that from the start.
But CC was old-school, and the new school was being built before he’d vacated the premises.
Avril was old-school too, of course, recruited in this city, between Bodleian stack and lecture theatre. The fabled tap on the shoulder . . . And CC had been her mentor; his lamp had lit her way, and in his company she was always the acolyte. Come to Oxford. I’ve a plan. Which, from anyone else, might have meant a night serenading past triumphs. It’ll put you back on track. If there was one thing CC was sure of, it was that they’d all been thrown off track, but he didn’t know the half of it. They’d kept the worst hidden from him. And where was he, anyway?
Daisy picked up on her thoughts, or drew them from the air in the room. “When’ll CC get here?”
Which was the moment in the fairy tale when a name summons its owner, because here was his key in the door.
The restaurant was off Brewer Street, and thankfully wasn’t trying too hard. Devon Welles was there before her, which Louisa had expected, and had done her best to guarantee by being precisely seven minutes late: There might not be actual rules, but there were tried and tested guidelines. He was wearing an immaculately tended goatee these days, which like all goatees was a bit of a shame, and also a suit, which fitted well enough that she was probably supposed to recognise the designer. The best she could manage was clocking the price range: four figures. Whatever Devon was doing for money, he’d either climbed a ladder or crossed a line. What she remembered of him—specifically, that he’d been close to Emma Flyte—probably ruled the latter out, but like everyone else, she’d been fooled before.
She wondered if he’d opt for the hug or the kiss on the cheek, but it was a surprisingly formal handshake he offered. “Louisa. Thanks for coming.”