“You really think Taverner will do a clean-up?” Lech said.
“She’d feed a Girl Guide troop into a sausage machine to get herself off a parking ticket,” said Lamb. “So yeah. The only thing that’d stop her is knowing she’d be sticking her own head in a mincer.”
“And you think you can talk her down.”
“I may come across as being a little brusque at times, but delicate negotiation’s one of my core skills.” He farted, reasonably. “Alongside people management.”
“So what is it you want us to do?” said River.
“That’d make too long a list. Better stick to the practicalities.” Lamb looked at Roddy, who was closing his laptop. “You’re sure you’ve got them all?”
Roddy delivered his trademark pizza-eating grin, though for once, his heart didn’t seem to be in it. “Sure.” He paused, as if aware this wasn’t up to his usual standards, then added, “Fight the power.”
Lamb looked at Shirley. “I hope you’re paying attention. Here’s someone not afraid to let being a dickhead be his umbrella.” He stood. “All right, then. No plan can be said to be flawless when it relies on a bunch of workplace accidents like you lot, but you go with what you’ve got. Never let perfection be the enema of the good, and all that.”
“The enemy,” said Catherine automatically.
“Up your bum.”
“There’s a plan?” said River. “All we’ve heard is a set of vague intentions.”
“I hate to confuse you with details. It’s like trying to explain Denmark to a cat.” He paused. “That needs work. But you get my drift.” With one hand he removed the burning cigarette from his mouth while with the other he retrieved the fresh one from behind his ear. “No big worry, though. You’ll be driving a car, that’s all. Think you can manage?”
“What about me?” said Shirley.
Lamb handed her his smouldering stub. “You can do something with that. The rest of you, avoid your usual hangouts. Once Diana’s got her ducks in a row, you’re target practice. It’ll be a novelty for you, actually being useful, but if I have to start from scratch with a new bunch, it’ll put me right off my afternoon dump.”
“She’s not going to have us killed,” said Catherine. Her voice might have trembled, but her inflection didn’t rise.
“Positive attitude. Good. But bear it in mind that if she does decide to do just that, there’s less effort involved than there would have been last week. Just saying.” He looked at Ho. “You’re sure you can do this?”
Ho nodded.
“Good.” Lamb looked around at the rest of them, might have been about to add something, but didn’t. They watched while he padded along the walkway before disappearing down a stairwell.
Shirley said, “Fuck am I supposed to do with this?”
Lech took the smoking stub from her fingers, ground it out on the wall, then handed it to Catherine, who snorted, rolled her eyes, and pulled a tissue from her sleeve to wrap it in. That went into her bag, next to the greaseproof wodge. Then everyone looked at Ho, who’d put his headphones over his ears again.
It took him a while to register their interest—with his bins on, it would take him a while to register a sasquatch—but when he did he pulled them from his head, his expression half wary, half hostile. “What?”
Catherine said, “What’s Lamb got you doing, Roddy?”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t tell us, we’ll feed you to the ducks,” said Shirley.
“Ducks don’t scare me.”
“These ducks are quite some distance below.”
“Roddy,” said River. “Louisa would want you to tell us.”
“She’s—”
“Yeah. But if she wasn’t.”
Roddy studied the headphones in his hand, as if wondering how they’d got there. Then said, “Cameras. CCTV.”
“Where?”
Before he could reply, Lech said, “Notting Hill.”
“You’re counting how many CCTV cameras there are in Notting Hill?”
Roddy rolled his eyes: well, duh. “Not counting them, no.”
“Roddy,” said Catherine, with a bark none of them thought her capable of. “Why are you accessing CCTV cameras in the region of Notting Hill?”
“To see if I can switch them off.”
“And can you?”
He avoided eyes. “Course.”
Shirley let out a long breath. “You should be a verb. To roddy.”
Lech couldn’t resist. “Meaning what?”
“Haven’t got that far. Something to do with being a dick.”
River said, “Meanwhile, back on track, Notting Hill ring any bells?”
“It bangs a few drums,” Shirley muttered.
“Taverner,” said Lech.
“Yeah. It’s where Taverner lives.”
“Lamb wants a coverage blackout around Taverner’s house,” Catherine spelled out. “Well, that doesn’t sound troubling, does it?”
“Stands to reason, if he’s trying to get those two under the same roof, he doesn’t want anyone knowing about it,” said Shirley. “The whole point of a secret meeting is, it’s secret.”
“Wouldn’t neutral territory be more usual?” said Catherine.
“Yeah, because that worked out nicely last night.”
River said, “This way, he only has to persuade one of them to be somewhere. The other one’s already there.”
Most of them nodded. Roddy went a little cross-eyed.
Catherine said, “You can make anything sound reasonable eventually. But the fact remains, this is Lamb we’re talking about. Taking the reasonable option is not his preferred route.”
“Whereas the rest of us,” said Lech, “are a proper bunch of regular citizens.”
River said, “What he said about Judd. That he doesn’t know what Judd’s got on Taverner. That sound likely to anyone?”
“He can’t know everything.”
“But have you ever heard him admit that?”
Shirley said, “If he knows what it is, what’s to stop him pulling the trigger himself?”
“If what Judd’s got on Taverner’s enough to see her out of her job, it’ll be enough to rock the Service as a whole,” said River. “And I don’t think Lamb would do that.”
“No?” Lech wrinkled his nose. The effect was like someone sneezing under a Halloween mask. “I think he’d set fire to the whole fucking Park if he could get a lighter to work.”
“Not while there are joes in the field,” said River.
“You say stuff like that like it means much,” said Shirley. “I mean, it does to you, we all get that. But it’s the twenty fucking twenties, not nineteen sixty-six. If there was ever honour among spies, it died with James Bond.”
Catherine looked startled. “James Bond died?”
“Well, yes and no,” said Lech. “But let’s focus. Maybe River’s right. Lamb’s old-school. By which I mean Ofsted should have shut him down by now, but he’s not gunna let that change his attitudes. So whatever he says, diplomacy isn’t his first resort. Taverner’s responsible for the loss of his joes. He won’t just ask her nicely not to do it again.”
Catherine said, “Which is why you ought to think carefully about falling in with whatever he’s got in mind. All of you.” She glanced at Roddy, who didn’t notice. “You’re hurting. We all are. But so is he. And nobody makes good plans when they’re in pain.”
“Lamb, hurting?” said Shirley. “Is there a whiskey shortage?”
“I’m only going to say it one more time. The wisest thing to do is walk away. Before anyone else gets hurt.”
“Yeah, anyone else,” said Shirley. “That’s exactly why we can’t walk away. Because we’ve already lost two.”
“Not two.”
“Not yet,” Shirley muttered.
There was a sudden commotion below, and they turned to look. The man on the walkway opposite, who might have been an escapee from a hospital ward, was leaning over the wall, dropping lumps of what was probably bread into the water. From all sides ducks had appeared, loudly laying claim to the bounty. As ever with such displays, it was impossible to determine whether their benefactor was fond of ducks or enjoyed causing them to squabble.