“Just because your face looks like an emoji for despair doesn’t make you wise and all-knowing.”
“Yeah,” said Shirley. “It just makes you basically unemployable.”
She was starting to think Ash might not be as annoying as first and also second through twentieth impressions had suggested. Maybe she’d let her know that talking to Lamb about her kitty money might not be a happy chat.
“So ask her,” Lech said.
“She probably won’t tell us.”
“I can find out,” said Ho.
“Yeah, right. The tattooed wonder boy.”
“I’d rather have a tattoo than a face like a . . .”
“Pissed-on bin fire?” Shirley suggested.
“You’re very free with the insults, for someone the shape of a pedal bin. Anyway, how can he find out?”
“Simps,” said Ash. “He can check her email.”
Lech looked at Roddy.
Roddy said, “Who do you think raided Doctor Desk’s inbox?”
“If you’ve ever even thought about—”
“Yeah, yeah, no one wants to read your emails,” Shirley said. “You have no life.”
From downstairs came the unmistakable sound of Slough House’s back door opening, the aural equivalent of a purple-inked letter of complaint. Then feet on the stairs: a purposeful clatter, someone in a hurry. Two someones.
The door burst open and River was there, Louisa close behind him.
“Oh hi,” said Lech. “Did Sid reach you? She called earlier, I think she’s lost her phone.”
River stared.
“I said—”
River stepped forward, grabbed Lech’s head in both hands and kissed his forehead. “Thank you,” he said. Then released him. “It didn’t fucking occur to you to let me know?”
“It wasn’t me took the call.”
“Where is she?” Louisa asked.
“I’m not your out-of-office bot,” Ash said. “She called, I told Lamb. End of.”
Shirley said, “So what’s this new job you’ve got?”
“How was she? What state was she in?”
“What am I, her therapist? I’ve never even met her.”
“Did she sound hurt? What was she doing in Oxford?”
“Had some ink done.”
“I know. I was here. Remember?”
“’Cause I’d consider a move too, if the money’s right.”
“And where is she now? Anyone?”
“Have you tried texting her?”
“Well, since I’m carrying her actual fucking phone—”
Lamb said, “Boil a bloody frog.”
Sometimes you heard something for the first time and realised you’d always known it, had been waiting for the words to be said. Or, in CC’s case, waiting for them never to be said, because they didn’t need to be made real. They needed to be nailed down out of sight, so you could pretend they’d never happened.
“Don’t get me wrong. Pitchfork was a murderous bastard, and while we’ve spent decades denying we’d have touched him with a railway sleeper, we also wondered whether it wouldn’t be simpler to have him wiped. Only we didn’t need to, because your friends took matters into their own hands.”
Diana Taverner had spoken to him as if he were a remedial class. Probably that’s how she spoke to most people.
“They turned up at his farmhouse one February night, took him out to his barn, and squashed his head with a Land Rover. Probably wanted us to think what you suggested, that his former colleagues had found him and used his own party trick to despatch him. Either way . . .” She had put her hands together, then brought them apart suddenly. Pyow! “His head burst like a melon.”
“And you hushed it up.”
“Well, not personally. Before my time. And ‘hushing it up,’ that smacks of conspiracy. No, as far as I’m aware only one person knew who killed Pitchfork, apart from the killers, and that was your old friend David Cartwright. Nobody else cared. The investigating police force knew he was living under a fake identity, rumours about who he really was got around, and that was that. Case closed. He’d been found by his old mates in the IRA. Good riddance.”
Amen to that.
He wondered where he’d parked his car.
While he walked around looking, trusting that his earlier self, the man he’d been forty minutes earlier, would recognise a landmark—a skateboard decal fixed to a streetlamp; a bollarded section where the ground had shrugged off the pavement—Taverner’s voice ding-donged round his head.
How had Cartwright known?
“Because that’s who he was. A man who thought up endings to stories, and scribbled them in the margins of old files. But don’t worry. I’ve made sure his jottings won’t see the light again. Unless . . .”
She’d had a meeting in that same room not long ago, CC recalled. It went well. This was her territory, not his; a bounded space in which negotiations happened.
Negotiations were like threats. Many began with the word “unless.”
Unless what?
“There’s a new spirit abroad. New government, new broom. And before too many people notice that they’ve scaled the moral high ground wearing designer freebies, they need to prove themselves, show they’re not like the old crowd. By way of a public handwashing perhaps, early enough in their life cycle to be forgiven by the public, or at least be forgotten by the next election, which amounts to the same thing. And if that means acknowledging one of the dirtier little secrets of Britain’s recent past, well, that’ll show what a straight-shooting bunch they are. Besides, it won’t cost the earth. We’re not talking infected blood or nuclear test victims. We’re not talking Post Office. This is limited liability stuff, only a dozen or so dead. No, the more I think about it, the more it might be in everyone’s interest—and when I say ‘everyone,’ I’m using the technical sense, meaning the party currently in power—in everyone’s interest if we let the whole story into the open. Including that fascinating little addendum about your chums being murderers.”
Instead of replying, he had found himself wondering whether speeches like that trotted from her lips box-fresh, or whether she’d arrived before him to rehearse. Whether the room had heard earlier drafts, their words now curling in its corners like dropped petals.
“Funny how it goes. Only this morning, you were planning on holding exposure over the Park, playing your tape to the mob. And suddenly you’re back on the inside, hoping Pitchfork never gets public, because if it does, your colleagues won’t emerge looking like victims, forced to compromise their principles for the good of the state. They’ll be charged with murdering the man they helped commit those crimes. A good prosecutor could make it look like they were covering up their own sins, which would be an entertainment, don’t you think? Nothing tickles the masses like a public crucifixion.”
“What is it you want from me?”
“The same thing you want, CC. I want you to be useful.”
He could feel a pendulum swinging overhead. Time getting ready to crush him. “I’ve been retired for over a decade. And I was out to grass long before then. How could I be of use to you?”
So she had explained.
And here was his car, third time of looking, exactly where he’d parked it.
The keys were in his pocket. While he fumbled around, fishing them out, the gun he’d taken from Al’s case banged against his ribs like an extra heartbeat, arrhythmical and heavy.
“Well, boil a bloody frog,” Lamb said. “Here’s me thinking you’re beavering away like centrefolds, and instead there’s a party in full swing. My invitation’s in the post, I presume?”
He had appeared in the doorway with his customary stealth, which is to say, the stealth he adopted when he wasn’t lumbering like a rheumatic armadillo. Catherine, behind him, raised an eyebrow in River’s direction: welcome, apology, warning, resignation.