That knowledge buzzed in Taverner’s background day and night. Like having a neighbour with a floorboard sander, and no boundaries.
Intermittently, though, since a recent email, the buzzing had faltered, as if she were either learning to live with it or starting to glimpse a way of pulling its plug.
The email—delivered to her personal address, known by few—had been anonymous, but not for long: While the principal reason for her being its recipient was that she was First Desk, its sender had evidently overlooked the fact that this gave her certain resources, and his attempts to cover his tracks gave little bother to Taverner’s IT crew. The attachment that came with it, though, she had kept to herself, and listening repeatedly to its scratchy recording of mostly forgotten voices, she had reflected on how often the past could blow a hole through a squeaky-clean future. The new government had set out its stall in what it claimed was a bright fresh marketplace, but the same sad song was on the jukebox. Meet the new gang. Same as the old gang.
On the desk in front of her lay a thin sheaf of papers: personnel files, printed from an unused workstation with a temporary password that expired at midnight, its usage-report deleted. It wouldn’t be impossible to determine that Taverner herself had accessed the material, but it would take active investigation, and it would be a foolhardy underling that attempted anything of that sort. Four of the files were labelled Inactive, but the fifth, though not the slenderest, was relatively recent: River Cartwright, one of Jackson Lamb’s slow horses. Already she was having doubts about this choice, but a new detail, appended since Cartwright’s medical misadventure, offered hope. A lesson of leadership she’d long since absorbed: Always read between the lines. Having done that, she dealt with the paperwork in the time-honoured way. There was constant chatter, in all lines of business, about what was truly the key to success: integrity, foresight, the ability to improvise. What nobody mentioned was a shredder.
Her phone chirruped with upcoming appointments: a meeting with the Limitations Committee, and an afternoon session with the Home Secretary—the daily round continued; she was calm, she was in control. It wasn’t so long since she’d contrived to have her bodyguard carry out an assassination, and she’d maintained that same air then, too. No one could know about the buzzing in her background, or guess the lengths she would go to silence it. And whatever way she found to do so, no trail would lead back to her.
“Paging River Cartwright.”
“. . . Huh?”
“Hate to disturb you. But I was wondering what planet you’re on.”
River blinked. Earth. He was on earth.
Not something he took for granted lately. When he’d put his hand on that toxic-swabbed door handle—how long ago was that?—he’d nearly crossed a graver threshold too, and joined his grandfather in the afterlife; not the one where you sat bathed in heavenly light while a choir hummed ecstasies in the background, but the one where you were buried in cold hard ground and that was that. In earth, rather than on it. A future that had brushed him on its way past, and would one day make good on its promise. This time, though, River’s death had been temporary: an induced coma lasting nine days, during which, he’d been told, his body had been a battleground on which medical science had slugged it out with the mad bastard variety, and thankfully won, though not without cost. He had a lost winter behind him; months off work, and an uphill struggle regaining his strength, not to mention his powers of concentration.
He was here, in the kitchen of the flat he shared with Sid Baker. They were eating breakfast, or that was the theory. An unfinished slice of toast sat on his plate. Some mornings, he had no appetite.
“. . . Sorry.”
“Interesting email?”
His phone was in his hands, true, and that was what had started his spiralling descent. But it took a moment to gather himself. “From that researcher. The one in Oxford?”
“Who’s sorting out your grandfather’s library.” Sid knew all about the O.B.’s library; she’d spent weeks living there, hiding from her own close encounter with death, nesting on cushions like a child in a storybook.
“She’s been looking at that video I made—”
“The one of me sleeping.”
“The one of my grandfather’s study, yeah—”
“Which was mostly me sleeping.”
“Which makes it sound way creepier than it was, which was just me filming my grandfather’s bookshelves, and happening to include a moment of you sleeping. And she’s been using it as a . . . catalogue, to make sure none of the books got lost in transit. And so she can shelve them in the same order he did.”
“That matters?”
“Does to her. Or that’s what she’s doing anyway, in case it mattered to him.”
Which it might have done. True, it was a fantastical notion, straight out of Dan Brown or Scooby-Doo, but on the other hand, the O.B.—who, with his late wife, Rose, had raised River—had been Regent’s Park’s strategist par excellence, and had spent his adult life steering the ship of state security through historically choppy waters. He’d never been First Desk, but he’d stood at the elbow of several who had been, pointing out changes in the weather. Something of a teddy bear, those who didn’t know him had liked to think; a reliable sounding board, but lacking the edge that might have taken him to the highest office. Others, more mathematically inclined, counted instead the years he’d spent as trusted adviser, coming up with a figure far higher than most First Desks managed, First Desks being notoriously vulnerable to the workings of events, not to mention the machinations of their subordinates. Besides, teddy bears weren’t the companionable pushovers they were taken to be. It wasn’t fun and games they planned at their picnics; it was long-term strategies for consolidating positions of influence. Nor were their objectives achieved wearing furry mittens. In recent years River had come to understand that his grandfather’s hands, which he’d first seen tending his flowerbeds, had been soiled by more than garden waste.
Meanwhile, River was still looking at the email from Oxford. “Anyway, apparently there’s a book missing.”
“Stop the bloody clocks! A missing book? Shall I call the Park?”
“You can laugh—”
“Am doing.”
“And I’d join in, if that’s all it was, a missing book. Could have been lost when the study was packed up, or been put in the wrong box and sent into storage with the furniture, or, I dunno, a hundred other things. It was a bit chaotic, I imagine.”
Imagination being all he had to go on, having been comatose at the time.
“So it’s not just missing,” said Sid. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Yeah,” said River. “Apparently this book, which is there on the film I took?”
“It’s a rare and valuable volume?”
“No,” said River. “It doesn’t exist.”
A chapter of accidents, that was the phrase. A series of unfortunate events.
If Shirley were a TV show—which obviously she was not—but if she were, now would be a good moment for a “Previously on Shirley Dander” segment.