And trust nobody. That was the most important thing. Trust nobody.
Except Louisa, of course. He trusted Louisa completely.
Which didn’t necessarily mean keeping her in the loop.
Once River had left, the house grew quiet enough for David Cartwright to replay their conversation.
Fiery damn!
ZT/53235, he’d said, and River had been sharp enough to repeat it back to him. And it wasn’t a name he’d forget, because River had always been able to recite phone numbers, car registrations, Test match scores, months after reading them. It was a gift, Cartwright liked to think, the boy had inherited from him; certainly one he’d encouraged River to cultivate. So sooner or later he’d wonder how come his grandfather had got this particular name digit-perfect, when he’d been making a bit of a performance of losing details here and there.
But you didn’t grow old without becoming accustomed to there being things beyond your capacity to change. So David Cartwright filed that one in a memory drawer and resolved not to let it vex him.
The fire was dying. That woodlouse: it had scuttered about in evident fear, and at the last second had thrown itself into the flames below, as if death were preferable to the moments spent waiting for it. And this was a woodlouse. That human beings in similar straits had reached the same conclusion was a matter of televised fact, and not one David Cartwright cared to dwell upon. His memory was full of drawers he kept shut.
Take Alexander Popov. If he’d never mentioned that name to his grandson, it was for the reason he’d given: that he hadn’t spared the creature a thought in over a decade. And this, too, was for the stated reason: Popov was a legend, and did not exist. As for Dickie Bow, he’d clearly been a drunkard who’d seen his usefulness to the Service drawing to a close. His claim of a kidnapping had been a last-gasp attempt to score a pension. That he’d died on a bus without a valid ticket didn’t strike Cartwright as an out-of-the-way ending. On the contrary, it had been on the cards from the opening credits.
But Jackson Lamb appeared to think otherwise, and the trouble with that old joe wasn’t that he spent his life thinking up ways of tormenting his slow horses. It was that, like most old joes, once he got it in mind to start pulling on a thread, he wouldn’t stop till the whole damn tapestry unravelled. And David Cartwright had seen so many tapestries, it was hard to know where one started and the next one stopped.
He picked up his glass again, but set it down on finding it empty. Another drink now and he’d sleep like the dead for an hour, then lie wide-eyed until morning. If there was anything he missed about being young, it was that careless ability to fall into oblivion like a bucket dropped down a well, then pulled up slowly, replenished. One of those gifts you didn’t know you possessed until it was taken away.
But in addition to growing accustomed to there being things beyond your capacity to change, the old also learned that some things changed without your knowing.
Alexander Popov had been a legend, Cartwright thought. Alexander Popov hadn’t existed.
He wondered if that were still the case.
He continued to stare into the dying fire for some while. But in the way of things that were dying, it didn’t reveal anything he didn’t already know.
The Wentworth Academy of the English Language maintained two premises. The primary site, as featured in its glossy brochure, was a handsome country house, subliminally familiar to anyone who’d watched the BBC on a Sunday evening: a four-storey, crenellated wonder boasting thirty-six rooms, sweeping lawns, a carp pond, tennis courts, a croquet lawn, and a deer park. The second, whose only advantage over the first was that it was the actual academy, was a pair of third-floor offices above a stationer’s off High Holborn, and any accompanying paperwork would have had to own up to a damp-stained ceiling, cracked windows, an electric bar-heater whose highest setting scorched the surrounding plaster, and a sleeping Russian.
The fire was off when Lamb appeared in the doorway. Silently, he took the scene in: bookshelves filled with dozens of copies of that same brochure; three framed diplomas on the wall above the mantelpiece; a view of a brick wall through the cracked windows; and two telephones on the desk at which the sleeping Russian slumped, both rotary, one black, the other cream. They were only just visible under piles of what might politely be called paperwork, but more reasonably described as litter. Bills and flyers for local pizza parlours, and minicab firms, and one for someone who appeared to be new in town, and in need of a firm hand. Pushed under the desk, but not entirely hidden from view, lurked a folded camp-bed and a grubby pillow.
Once he was sure the man wasn’t faking, Lamb swept a pile of brochures onto the floor.
“Fcrah!”
He came out of the chair like a man who’s known bad dreams. Nikolai Katinsky, his name was. Jumping, he grasped something from the desktop, but it was only a glasses case; a minor prop to anchor him to waking reality. Halfway to his feet he stopped, and slumped back. The chair creaked dangerously. He put the glasses case down and coughed for a while. Then said, “And you are?”
“I’ve come about the money,” Lamb said.
It was a reasonably safe bet that Katinsky owed money, and that someone would be round to collect it soon.
Katinsky nodded thoughtfully. He was bald, or mostly bald—a crop of white stubble gilded his ears—and gave off an air of pent-up energy, of emotions kept in check; the same sense Lamb had had watching the video of him, shot eighteen years ago, through a two-way mirror in one of Regent’s Park’s luxury suites. Joke. These were underground, and were where the Service’s more serious debriefings took place; those which it might later prove politic to deny had happened. But that man had diminished in the years since, as if he’d recently undergone a crash diet without updating his wardrobe. Flesh had tightened across his jawline, and gave the impression of sagging elsewhere. When he’d finished nodding, he said: “Jamal’s money? Or Demetrio’s money?”
Tossing a mental coin, Lamb said, “Demetrio’s.”
“Figures. Tell the dirty Greek bastard to go fuck himself for his money. The first of the month, that was the arrangement.”
Lamb found his cigarettes. “I might not mention the bit about fucking himself,” he said. Moving into the room, he hooked an ankle round a chair and tipped its burden of hat, gloves and Guardians onto the floor. Lowering himself into it, he undid his overcoat buttons, and foraged for his lighter. “This school set-up fool anyone?”
“So now we’re having a conversation?”
“I need to stay long enough that Demetrio’s convinced we talked the ins and outs of fiscal propriety.”
“He’s outside?”
“In the car. Between you and me, he might go for the first of the month.” He found his lighter, and applied it. “You weren’t on today’s list. We just happened to be passing.”
He was surprising himself, how easily it came back: firing up a legend on the spot. Ten minutes from now, Katinsky’s current life would be spread out between them like a takeaway. And once Lamb had picked the bones out of that, he could get to the meat of the matter.