“I’m sure he does. But you know what Christmas is like. It always ends in tears.”
“He’s going to the Cotswolds, Standish. Not Helmand Province.”
“There’s something Charles Partner used to say about ops. The friendlier the territory, the scarier the natives.”
“Was that before or after he blew his brains out?”
Catherine didn’t answer.
Lamb said, “What everyone seems to forget is that even if Alexander Popov never existed, whoever invented him did. And if the same smartarse is making a mousetrap in our back yard, we need to find out why.” He belched. “If that means making Cartwright our designated cheese-eater, so be it. He’s a trained professional, remember. Being a fuck-up is only his hobby.”
“He’s your white whale isn’t he? Popov?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Something else Charles once said. That it’s dangerous personalising an enemy. Because when that happens, you’re chasing a white whale.” Catherine paused. “It’s a Moby-Dick reference. It probably works better if you don’t need that explained. River doesn’t know he’s taking bait, does he?”
“No,” said Lamb. “And he’s not going to find out. Or your confidence about your unassailable role here might turn out to be misplaced.”
She said, “I’ll not tell him.”
“Good. You planning on drinking that?”
Catherine poured her glass’s contents into Lamb’s. “Unless I decide he’s in danger,” she went on. “It’s your whale, after all. No reason anyone else should die trying to stick a harpoon in it.”
“Nobody’s going to die,” said Lamb. Inaccurately, as it turned out.
The phone rang.
Because the body carried a Service card, red flags went up. This meant attending police officers were demoted to traffic duty, while Nick Duffy—the Park’s Head Dog—became scene boss, and his underdogs measured angles and took witness statements.
Most of the witnesses had arrived after the event, though not the car’s driver, obviously. The car’s driver had turned up at precisely the moment the event took place.
“Came out of nowhere,” she repeated.
She was blonde and appeared sober; an impression borne out by a breathalyser borrowed from a disgruntled cop.
“I didn’t stand a chance.”
A voice tremor, but that was understandable: mash into someone with your car, blameless or not, and you were bound to feel shaky.
It wasn’t the busiest junction, this time of night, but you wouldn’t want to cross it blind. Though of course, if you were drugged up or drunk, the Green Cross Code might not be top of your agenda.
“I mean, I hit the brake but—”
The shakes took her again.
Nick Duffy heard himself saying, “Look, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.” Christ, he sounded like a Special Constable.
But she was blonde and reasonably fit, and the corpse had a Service card but was from Slough House, which was every bit as special as a Constable; the same way some kids were special, and had special needs. When a spook died under a car, you had to poke around carefully, in case the car—metaphorically speaking—had dodgy plates, but when you found out the spook was a slow horse, you refigured the odds. Maybe they’d just been looking the wrong way. Left/right. It could be a confusing issue.
And she was blonde and reasonably fit …
“But I need to take a look at your licence.”
Which told him she was one Rebecca Mitchell, 38, British citizen; nothing on the face of any of that suggesting she’d just carried out a hit. Though of course, the best hits were carried out by the least likely hitters.
Nick Duffy scanned the junction again. His Dogs were checking kerbs and shop doorways: last time a car took out a spook a gun had gone missing, and Bad Sam Chapman, his immediate predecessor, had wound up on the short end of an internal inquiry. Last heard of, he was working for some private outfit. Not a fate Duffy was ready for, thanks. As he handed the licence back, a taxi arrived, and out climbed Jackson Lamb. A woman was with him, and it only took Duffy a moment to collect the name: Catherine Standish, who’d been a fixture at the Park back when Duffy was a pup, but went into exile after Charles Partner’s suicide. The pair ignored him. They went straight for the body.
He said to Rebecca Mitchell, “You’ll need to make a statement. There’ll be someone along shortly.”
She nodded mutely.
Leaving her, Duffy approached the new arrivals, about to tell them to back away from the body, but before he could speak Lamb turned, and the expression on his face persuaded Duffy to keep his mouth shut. Then Lamb looked down at the body again, and then up the street. Duffy couldn’t tell what he was focusing on: the cross traffic at distant junctions; the lights jewelling the highway. Always, in the city, there were strings of pearls at night; sometimes fairy lights strung for a wedding; sometimes glassand-paste baubles, hung for a funeral.
Standish spoke to Jackson Lamb.
“Who’s going to tell Louisa?” she said.
PART TWO
WHITE WHALES
To begin with what it hasn’t got, Upshott has no high street, not like those in nearby villages, with their parades of mock-Tudor frontages gracefully declining riverwards, clotted with antique shops and garden-furniture showrooms; whose grocery stores offer stem-ginger biscuits and seven kinds of pesto, and whose pubs’ menus wouldn’t be out of place in Hampstead. It doesn’t have cafés with the day’s specials chalked on pavement blackboards, or independent bookshops boasting local-author events; nor are its back lanes lined with neatly coiffed hedges guarding houses of soft yellow stone. Because Upshott doesn’t invite the epithet “chocolate boxy,” so often delivered through gritted teeth. If it resembles any kind of chocolate box, it’s the kind found on the shelf at its only supermarket: coated with dust, its cellophane crackly and yellowing.
Take that high street, which Upshott doesn’t have. What it has, instead, is a main road that curves once upon entering the village, to avoid the church, and then again three hundred yards later as it threads between the pub on its left and the semicircular green on its right. Then it climbs past the new-build housing; past the small primary school and the village hall, a modern prefab visitors need directions to find. But then, the hall isn’t Upshott’s heartbeat; that would be the trinity of post box, pub and village shop. The first of these sits on the side of the green furthest from the road, which is inconvenient, unless you live in one of the houses lining that stretch. Arranged in a curve, they are Upshott’s oldest dwellings—three-storey eighteenth-century townhouses peculiarly resituated here, making strange near-neighbours for those bungalows on the rise, most of which stand empty, having once been homes for service-staff on the nearby USAF base: cleaners and janitors, cooks and washers-up, mechanics and drivers. When the base pulled the plug in the mid-nineties, a lot of life drained out of Upshott. What’s left mostly lives in those townhouses, or further along the main road, and sooner or later all of it turns up at the pub.
Which is called The Downside Man, and faces the green, with a small car park to its left and a tiered patio round back, overlooking the woods’ curving treeline a mile distant. The Downside Man has whitewashed walls and a wooden pub-sign which once flapped in the breeze, but also came loose in high winds, so has now been fixed to its post by Tommy Moult, the village’s honorary odd-job man. Tommy’s rumoured to have a secret life, as he’s only ever seen at weekends, when he can reliably be found outside the village shop, red woollen cap pulled over his ears, selling packets of seeds from his bicycle, which he parks next to the racks of vegetables. He evidently regards this as the linchpin of his commercial enterprise, because every Saturday morning, winter or summer, there he is; networking more than selling, perhaps, because few locals pass without exchanging words.