“So much for diplomacy.”
“It’s not always a great idea to state your intentions beforehand. It can have the effect of undermining support.”
“So instead, whatever you’ve done, which I’m sure we’ll discover in due course, you’ve involved River and Roddy in it.”
“Their choice, Standish.”
“You told them it was just a meeting.”
“Yeah. Spies lie. It’s what we do.”
“And when whatever it is you’ve done bounces back on them?”
“Not going to happen.”
“Oh, it will. One way or the other.” She watches while he raises his glass to his lips and drains it, still without meeting her eye, while in the pub she left ten minutes ago, River and Sid have broken apart from the others, and are sharing words in the corner.
Sid says, “What did you do?”
“Do? Nothing. I was a driver.”
River mimes holding a steering wheel, aware as he does so that he’s evading; that the imaginary car he’s driving might be holding true to the road, but that this conversation has already burst a tyre.
He elaborates. “I collected Peter Judd. Took him to Di Taverner’s. Then rescued Roddy, by the way. He was in a state.”
They glance towards the others, and Roddy is clearly still in a state, inasmuch as he is not currently beating his chest or standing on a table. Every so often he rubs his arm, but that’s as grandiose as he’s getting.
Sid says, “And what happened at Taverner’s? What happened to Judd?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t enter the house.” River knows he sounds like he’s entering a defence, but it’s too late to do anything about that. He says, “Sid, whatever it is, it’s over. And Roddy wiped the local cameras. I might as well not have been there.”
“Sure,” she says, “if you take away accidental phone footage. Eyewitnesses. Passing drones. But the bigger point is, why was Lamb so keen on killing the cameras if all he was doing was having a chat? And the even bigger point . . .”
He waits.
“I asked you not to. I asked you not to fall in with whatever Lamb had going on.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But you did it anyway.”
“Yes, for Louisa. And Ash.”
“CC died, by the way.”
“Did he? Oh. I mean . . .”
“This whole thing, this world, Spook Street. I don’t want to be here any more. I don’t want you to be part of it either. It’ll kill us.”
“I was driving, it wasn’t dangerous—”
“It’ll kill us.”
“I’m gone, anyway, aren’t I?” he says. “Not a slow horse any more, remember? Failed the medical.”
But Sid just shakes her head and seems to be looking into a different future. “When did anything like that stop Lamb getting what he wants?”
He reaches for her hand, but she pulls away and heads back to the others, asking, “Where did Catherine go?” but no one knows.
She’s in Lamb’s room, where Lamb is pouring another drink, and as so often has produced a second glass from his desk drawer, rinsed since it last saw action. He places this her side of the desk, and adds a finger of Talisker. Catherine watches without watching; she sees it happen, but pretends she does not. If you gave in, what would he do? Watch you drink? Or slap it out of your hand?
She says, “You got Devon Welles to help you. I thought he was in Emma Flyte’s mould.”
“Well, they changed the colour coding.”
“Straight as an arrow is what I meant. How did you get him to fall in with whatever you just did?”
“We’ve all got buttons. You just have to know which one to press.”
“And you pressed his and used his better nature against him. Because that’s what you do.”
Lamb looks thoughtfully into his glass, and says, “Well, you could say it’s his fault for having a better nature to begin with.”
Though right this moment Devon’s better nature is swamped by Devon’s second thoughts, because noise is starting to happen, and Devon can hear it buzz. He has just received a call from work requesting a status update on Judd—the subject, apparently, of an anonymous call to the Met—and is making a retrospective note about his final call with his former client. PJ indicated that he would be at home the remainder of the night, and had no need of a security detail. This will go on Devon’s client-contact record, and he will go on repeating it until it becomes the truth, or at any rate, obscures what had previously been the truth. As for Lamb’s visit to his office, he has already mentioned to the couple on the front desk what that was about: that Lamb was Louisa Guy’s former employer; Louisa Guy, whom Devon had offered a job, but who was no longer in a position—Lamb had informed him—to accept it.
Emma, he thinks, would not approve.
Emma, though, will never know.
But Devon himself will be a while forgetting.
Catherine says, “I had a wasp in my flat the other day.”
“God,” says Lamb, “I hope this is a metaphor. I bloody love metaphors.”
“And it refused to leave through the open windows, so I rolled up a newspaper and whapped it. Only I didn’t whap it as hard as I should have done, so there I was. In my flat with a wasp, except now it was angry instead of just sleepy.”
Lamb raises his glass, studies it, then licks a finger on his free hand and rubs at a mark on the rim. He says, “That explains your sore arm yesterday morning.”
“I didn’t say I had a sore arm.”
“And what this shit is about, your angry wasp story, it’s your way of asking whether Taverner is a mess on a windowsill, or is she about to get middle-aged on our arses.”
“Medieval.”
“Yeah? I was worried she’ll shower us with leaflets on prostate cancer.” He drinks: a refined sip by his standards, in that he swallows merely half his glass’s contents. “In answer to your question, Taverner currently has more on her mind than who to sting. I didn’t use a rolled-up newspaper, and I didn’t miss.”
It’s certainly true that Taverner has much to occupy her, having arrived home to find two Metropolitan police officers on her doorstep, alerted by an anonymous tip-off to the possibility that a violent event has occurred on the premises; a possibility that recedes as they watch her manage the front door’s security system, and reconfigures when they find the body in her sitting room. Within the hour, the three of them—four if you count Judd—have been joined by a travelling circus of concerned professionals, and a jurisdictional tussle is taking place between the Dogs and the Met, a tussle the latter wins partly through force of numbers, but largely because Diana herself takes no part in it. Instead, she sits in her dark garden and smokes a cigarette donated by a young policewoman, and looks—as one of her Dogs notices—almost unnaturally calm. As if she doesn’t much care what happens next, he reckons. Funny thing is—he also reckons—this makes her look younger.
While she sits and smokes she is also turning over in her hand a small plastic object the Dog decides is a microcassette tape, the kind that sometimes crops up in eighties movies. And when the time comes for a change of location, and Diana Taverner is ushered from her house to a waiting police car, she presumably carries this with her, for all she leaves on the garden table is one cigarette butt, its filter lipstick kissed. He wonders about tidying this away, before sensibly deciding that it’s not his business.
Catherine says, “So whatever you’ve done involved force.”
Lamb shrugs. “You’ve got to be cruel,” he says.
“To be kind,” Catherine completes.
“What you on about?” He opens his desk drawer with his socked foot—just barely socked; his sock is a holy nightmare—then shuts it again. Opens it, shuts it. He’s not looking for anything, Catherine decides; he is merely keeping time to whatever beat occupies his mind.