Which didn’t bode well, thought Catherine. “So there’s more to come,” she said. “More grief, pain and . . .” Her voice tailed away.
“Shit-the-bed clusterfucks.”
“What do you plan to do?”
He looked down at the candle, its flame still dancing in a draught, the shadows it cast warping and weaving across his face. His lips moved briefly, or perhaps he was just showing his teeth.
“Jackson?”
“I’m going to burn her fucking house down,” he said.
She had spent so long in hospitals that there was borderline comfort in being in one again. Between these walls, walls like these, life was the supreme priority, but subject to so many other forces that its clinginess was revealed: Life was needy, demanding constant attention, and it found this in a rackety combination of the high-tech and the out of date, the highly proficient and the undervalued. Here, geography was at the mercy of signage altered so often it resembled fridge-magnet poetry, with the names of departments squeezed into spaces not quite large enough. By such means an unintentional hierarchy was established, with longer names appearing in smaller typeface, in different colours. Alongside these were posters offering chaperones and help-lines and crayon portraits of nurses; there were ID parades of staff on duty; there were happy thank-you cards and sad thank-you cards arrayed on reception desks. There were the details left behind when emergencies were over: cardigans on the backs of chairs, spectacle cases on bedside cabinets, paperbacks bookmarked at midway points. Frightening smells lingered in the corridors. For what felt like years Sid had lain at the centre of all this, like a well-wrapped fly in a well-meant web. Or perhaps a chrysalis. If she hadn’t flown on being released, she had at least managed not to drop to earth.
Why she was here now was less obvious. Her interaction with Charles Stamoran had been brief and from an observer’s viewpoint unpromising: He had kidnapped her, dumped her in a motorway service station and then entangled her in an assassination attempt which had resulted in carnage. His own stroke had, at first instance, proved no more successful than his shot at murder, but it would prevail in the long run. Around his bed, the machinery was pessimistic. The numbers were dropping, a countdown in progress, and lift-off seemed an unlikely result.
Avril said, “Should you even be here?”
“Probably not. Would you rather I went?”
Avril paused, then said, “That might seem impolite. We can’t be sure he’s not aware.”
No, but they could really. CC was halfway through the door. If he were still among them, it was only to check his pockets: Did he have everything? He was going on a journey.
“Your friends—I’m sorry about your friends.”
Sid nodded. One of them she hadn’t known; the other she hadn’t known well. But they were part of River’s world, and River was hurting. She said, “I’m sorry too. I know this wasn’t your fault.”
“Or CC’s. Not really.” Avril paused again. “Well, no. That can’t be true, can it? But it wasn’t as much his fault as it was . . .”
She tailed off.
Sid said, “First Desk. Diana Taverner.”
“Yes.”
“But I’m the one who brought CC her message. So you could say I’m as much to blame.”
“That would be a long road if we started down it.” Avril’s gaze didn’t leave CC while she spoke. CC, a lump on the bed, held the attention. “There was something we did, me and the others. It put him in a difficult place. He was trying to shield us. So there’s that, too. While you’re parcelling blame.”
She was a birdy woman; thin of limb, with a sharp inquisitive face, like a robin’s. Smudged with sadness now. CC would die soon, and there would be consequences. No one knew better than Sid that any manner of mischief could be swept under the Park’s carpets if it so desired, but the sweeping up could be as brutal as the original accident.
After the clown-crash had come chaos. There had been bodies on the ground, CC’s among them, and those still upright had pinballed around with more panic than expertise. She remembered Roddy, phone in hand, staring slack-jawed at Louisa, blood pooling around her like a chalk outline; remembered Shirley and Lech folded over Ash, who had caught the bullet meant for someone else. And a line from the Troubles came to her, a civilian’s line to a journalist on the street. It’s not the bullet with my name on it that frightens me. It’s the one addressed “to whom it may concern.”
Judd was gone, and she had the notion he’d been spirited away; that someone had appeared before the Dogs turned up and made him vanish like a card in a trick. Which meant, she supposed, that he’d turn up again, exactly where you didn’t expect him to.
As for Al Hawke and Daisy Wessex, they were nowhere. It was possible Avril knew where they’d gone—old joes shared secrets: tell her about it—but if so, the chances of her revealing their hiding place were non-existent. Spies lie, spies betray—it’s what they do—but they choose their betrayals carefully.
Without changing the direction of her gaze, Avril said, “Al’s always looked out for Daisy. And she for him.”
“And then some,” Sid said.
“She’s not a bad woman.”
“No?”
“She triggers easily.”
“She’s a bit stabby with it,” Sid said bluntly.
“She did a long-term undercover stint. In Northern Ireland. During the Troubles.” Avril paused. “You’ve heard of Pitchfork?”
Everybody had heard of Pitchfork.
“Is that what it was about? CC blowing the whistle on Pitchfork?”
Avril nodded.
“It’s not the best-kept secret,” Sid said.
“He had proof. That the government of the day, the powers that be, knew well what kind of man Pitchfork was. And granted him amnesty anyway, and cover ID, and a pension.”
Government, thought Sid. That was when the games got rough; when government was covering up dark mischief.
CC fluttered briefly, a memory shifting underneath his eyelids.
The rest of them had been taken to the Park, of course—those who hadn’t been ferried to hospital—but released in a matter of hours. Which also had the stink of cover-up; Diana Taverner was pulling down a shroud, a stage that would last precisely as long as it took her to decide her next move. Once she’d determined how the investigation should end, she’d allow it to begin. Until then, they were in limbo, gathered round hospital beds, quarrelling in offices, or somewhere off-grid, waiting for the hammer to fall.
Or two hammers. Lamb had joes in morgues and hospital beds. He’d be making someone pay, and using others to collect, and she knew River would be entangled in whatever carnival he was summoning up. No matter what River’s status was where the Service was concerned, to Lamb he would always be a slow horse.
She’d said this to him earlier, once the Dogs had released them; in the hospital waiting room, before she’d come to sit with CC. He was waiting for news—they all were—as their colleague lay on the operating table, knives and scalpels flashing above her, doctors striving to stem the flow of blood and preserve life.
“He’ll want revenge.”
“Not now. Please.”
“No, this is important. You know what he’s like—his joes, his rules. He’ll want revenge, and he’ll drag you into it.”
“Maybe that’s what I want too.”
“But it wasn’t their fault. Al and Daisy. They were as much victims—”
“But without bullets in them. Without their throats cut.”
River looked as if he might have suffered one such fate himself: He was whiter than she’d known him, all his grief rising to the surface.
“River, just, please, promise me. Promise me you won’t . . .” It wasn’t that she couldn’t find the words; more that she didn’t want the idea to exist in the open. As if, by saying it, she might make it more likely to happen. “Promise me you won’t let Lamb use you. To take revenge, I mean.”