“No.”
“Me neither. So don’t fuck it up.”
The ideal response to this was somewhere out in the ether, and River was still trying to access it when he crossed the river at Hammersmith, Lamb having hung up. Following that, he tried Sid again, and got her voicemail, again. Where she was now, he had no clue. Pulling up at last outside what satnav assured him was Judd’s house, light leeching from the sky, he put his phone in his pocket. You know why I chose you for this bit? Me neither.
He checked his watch. It was 7:20.
Getting out of the car, he went to ring the bell.
“How’s your mouth?”
Lech ran his tongue around his teeth again. He might have been imagining the wobble. He wasn’t, though. “It fucking hurts.”
“Yeah, well. You know why that is?”
He said, “Okay, okay. You weren’t coked up. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I was gunna say because when you feinted left, you might as well have sent an engraved invitation. But I accept your apology. And yes, I will have another of these.”
This being an unspeakable combination of Pernod and blackcurrant. Sometimes, Shirley drank like she was a sixth-former, aiming at sophistication while heading for oblivion.
They were in a pub on Whitecross Street—where Shirley was familiar enough that service was attentive but avoided eye contact—having arrived without conferring, but definitely needing drinks. Lamb had a plan, and it was even now rolling into motion, but they weren’t part of it. When even the slow horses didn’t need you, that’s when you knew you were surplus.
Their first round, they’d chinked glasses. Louisa. Ash. When you added up the empty spaces, all the desks at Slough House that had seen different riders, you stopped looking for words; you just let the pictures form in your head, then break and drift away like smoke. And while you were waiting for that to happen, you took yourself to the nearest drink, whether it was Pernod and bloody blackcurrant or neat vodka, a slice of lime hanging from the rim like a body slung on a battlement. It wasn’t the wisest response to a traumatic event, but they weren’t saints. Not even Lamb had ever accused them of that, thought Lech, paying for the drinks, looking across the bar, seeing Catherine raising a gin and tonic to her lips.
Ah shit, he thought, and for no special reason checked his watch. It was 7:25.
Thirty-seven.
Just another number.
And if there was one thing Roddy Ho knew loads of, it was numbers.
Most of them were putty in his hands. He wasn’t one to brag—what you’d get if you google-imaged “the Rodmeister” would be a cross between Steve Rogers and Peter Parker; your boyish, modest, less swaggering superhero—but facts and stats: He could make numbers turn cartwheels, line up in pairs, then lie down and spread their legs. It was one of the less trumpeted aspects of being a king of the keyboard. You didn’t hack the unhackable, you didn’t soar unsinged over mile-high firewalls like a flame-retardant acrobat, if you couldn’t do the maths. So Roddy could juggle three sets of numbers at once; he could pull up square roots with his bare hands, and do long division in his head—well, on his phone anyway, and he was as likely to go round without his phone as he was his head. He could, in a nutshell, add up. The other slow horses, throw a bunch of numbers at them, they’d all be at sixes and sevens. Roddy would catch them, crunch them, and toss them back neatly packaged; a sudoku master, a numerate ninja, forever in his prime.
So what the fuck was going on here, that’s what he wanted to know.
The deal was, there were thirty-seven CCTV cameras in the area he’d been tasked with rendering blind. Thirty-five of them were his for the taking—he was three keystrokes away from owning a sizeable chunk of Notting Hill. It was all so supercool, it wasn’t even funny; Roddy might not have the whole world in his hands, but he could pull the plug on a major chunk of real estate while ordering a pizza. Yippee-ki-yay, dumbchuckers. Except two of them—count them: two—two of them remained impervious to his charms. If numbers could be lesbians, he’d just met some.
Closed systems, that was the issue. These cameras, hanging over retail premises and focused on their own pavement aprons, weren’t part of larger networks—he only knew they were there because they showed up on other feeds. And chances were they posed no threat, unless you were actually waltzing past on foot, gurning up at the lenses. But Lamb wanted total blackout, which two stray cameras meant this wasn’t. Two stray cameras meant that whatever happened might show up on a screen somewhere, and that could be bad news. And if there was one kind of news Roddy knew Lamb didn’t like, it was the bad kind.
Roddy checked his watch. It was 7:30.
He could keep banging away at this gate for another half hour, but it wouldn’t make a difference—when the hummingbird knows it knows, and dude? The hummingbird knows.
Shut them down by eight. You can do that?
Yeah, he can do that . . .
He had driven west for this final assault, as if being nearer would make a difference, and was parked on a meter off Ladbroke Grove, studying his laptop in the driving seat of his faithful steed, the Rodster roadster; a Ford Kia, that rare beauty. Light was starting to die, and the street music entering its evening phase, its pulse quickening, reaching that sweet spot where it matches the beating of a human heart. On the pavements, Londoners swept past—tourists too—arm-in-arm or hand in hand, while Roddy sat alone. But that was okay. The kind of cat he was was the kind that walks by itself. And knows where it has to walk, and what it has to do once it’s walked there.
Roddy folded his laptop, tucked it under his seat. Sometimes, when something needs doing, it needs doing by hand. Sometimes—hot girl summer or not—you do it by yourself. You didn’t have to tell him this.
Dude, the hummingbird knows.
Rows of spirits behind the bar, hanging upside down like it was their natural position. It reminded Avril of—no, she didn’t want to think about that. But she thought about it anyway: It reminded Avril of a body she’d seen once, hanging upside down from a pylon. The means by which people were murdered, by which their fellow people murdered them, was a well that would never run dry. Did anyone else in this pub have memories like hers? Thankfully not. Probably.
CC had, but didn’t now. CC’s memories had been snuffed out when he breathed his last: That was how the world operated, else it would have more than bad air and melting ice caps to worry about. The atmosphere would be choked with unshriven sins and unforgotten nightmares, and half the population would be begging for extreme weather events to wash them away.
She paid for a scotch, and went to sit at a corner table. A moment later she was joined by Sid Baker, bearing a similar drink.
Avril said, “You’re nowhere near as good at that as you think you are.”
“I scored high at shadowing, in my trainee year. But I’ve been shot in the head since then.”
“We’ve all got excuses. The trick is not to trot them out so readily. It gets tiresome.” She raised her glass. “To CC.”
“CC.”
They drank, then Avril said, “He had a foolish final act, but don’t judge him by that. He was a good friend and he served the country well.”
“Was he shot in the head?”
Avril inclined her own, acknowledging Sid’s point.
“Where are Al and Daisy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. You were a team. A unit. You had procedures and fallbacks and emergency protocols. Not just the ones the Park organised. You’d have had your own, because that’s what joes do. They build their own defences because they don’t trust anyone else. Not in the long run.”