“So how’s life in the secrets business?” he asked.
“Well, I could answer that …”
“But then you’d have to kill me,” Chapman finished.
“But it’d bore your tits off. Got anything?”
Bad Sam passed him an envelope. By its thickness, it contained maybe two folded sheets of paper.
“This took you three weeks?”
“Not like I have your resources, Jackson.”
“The agency not got pull?”
“The agency charges. Any special reason you couldn’t do this in-house?”
“Yeah, I don’t trust the bastards.” He paused. “Well, maybe a couple of the bastards. But not to actually do a proper job.”
“Oh, that’s right. Your crew’s special needs.” With his index finger, Chapman flicked the envelope in Lamb’s hand. “Someone was ahead of me on this.”
“I’d hope so. The cow killed a spook.”
“But not all the way,” Sam continued.
Down the bench one of the youngsters abruptly stood, and Sam paused. It was the boy, or possibly the girl—or possibly they were both boys, or both girls—but whatever, they fed the nearest drier with a clatter of coins so it came grunting back to life, then sat and wrapped themselves round their other half again.
Lamb waited.
Chapman said, “Someone ran the numbers on her, and I expect they gave her a clean bill of health.”
“Because she’s clean?”
“Because they did a half-arsed job. She looks clean now, but go far enough back and it’s a whole other story.”
“Which you did.”
“But my successor didn’t. Or whichever minion he assigned.” Chapman slapped the newspaper on the bench without warning. The thwock stopped the old woman rocking for a moment, though the kids didn’t react. “Christ,” he said. “Me, they sack just to balance the books. If I’d been incompetent, I’d still have a job.”
“Yeah, but it’d probably be round my gaff.” Lamb tucked the envelope into a pocket. “Owe you one.”
“There’s another possibility,” Bad Sam said. “Maybe they didn’t do a proper job on her because they already knew what they’d find.”
Jackson Lamb said, “Like I say, I don’t trust the bastards.” He rose. “Don’t be a stranger.”
“You’ve forgotten your shirt,” Sam called.
Lamb looked at the canoodling couple as he passed. “I’ll never forget that shirt,” he told them kindly.
On the whirling metal circus of the road, it took him five minutes to find a taxi.
Ambling down the road to The Downside Man, River pondered the task in hand. A contact—Mr. B had come to Upshott to make contact: with his handler or his joe. And who that might be, River still had no idea.
It hadn’t taken long to embed himself into the village. He’d been half-expecting a Wicker Man scenario, with locals in sinister masks, but turning up at the pub every night and attending evensong at St Johnno’s was all he’d had to do. Everyone was friendly, and nobody had tried to set fire to him yet.
His cover as a writer helped. On the outside, Upshott had less going for it than other Cotswold villages; it wasn’t as picturesque; it had no galleries, no cafés, no bookshop; nowhere the culturally-minded could gather to discuss their artistic leanings. But it remained as much a middle-class haven as its neighbours: a poster for a recent county-wide Arts Week indicated four local venues, and one of the fake barns along the main road housed a pottery, whose prices were comfortably ridiculous. An author fitted in hand in glove.
As for the locals he’d met, they were largely retired, or tele-workers, their livelihood independent of the village itself. Those who’d been employed at the USAF base had moved on long ago, but there remained a smattering of agricultural workers, and a handful who ran trades from vans or garages—carpenter, electrician; two plumbers—but even among the artisans, there was an air of quality craftsmanship, and bills to match.
And few of them were Upshott born-and-bred. The twentysomethings in evidence were the offspring of incomers, Kelly among them; her father, a solicitor, practised nearby. Kelly had a politics degree, and her job in the pub wasn’t a life-choice; more a treading of water while she decided what to do next. It appeared that a politics degree was about as useful as it sounded. But she seemed happy enough: was the centre of a group of friends who worked as estate agents or graphic designers or architects as far afield as Worcester, but returned to Upshott each evening and colonised the pub, when they weren’t in their clubhouse by the MoD range, piloting and taking care of Ray Hadley’s little aeroplane. Which, River thought, was the real umbilical cord: if they wanted the freedom of the skies, they had to keep returning to the village. River, not much older, reckoned they were still young enough to find that a price worth paying.
On the other hand, it didn’t explain what had attracted Mr. B. Maybe Lamb was right, and the old American base was at the heart of it. That was what had put Upshott on the map, even if the base itself hadn’t appeared on maps at the time. It was why he’d placed it at the heart of his cover; the setting for his supposed novel. And now it was gone, and in its place was the Ministry of Defence artillery range, which rendered even more unlikely the chances of anything secreted there having survived fifteen years … But still, it needed looking at, if only because River was running out of ideas. And he needed to see it the way Mr. B had, if that’s what Mr. B had done: after dark and over the fence. Which was what he planned to do later.
And because he was a stranger here, and had no desire to end up in a ditch or under arrest, he wasn’t going alone.
Like Marcus had said, the Needle was called the Needle on account of its mast, but everything about it looked sharp. All 320 metres of it burst into daylight out of a shallow crater, which was paved in red brick, laid in tiers and studded with huge bronze pots, each boasting a tree as yet too spindly to cast shade, though the size of the pots suggested they’d grow tall and leafy. Stone benches were set here and there, around which small graveyards of cigarette stubs had been flattened, and spotlights were trained at intervals on the Needle’s sides. At night, it was lit like a carnival. In daylight, from this angle, it looked dark, vaguely monstrous, and out of place—like it was asking for trouble.
Of its eighty storeys, the first thirty-two belonged to a hotel which hadn’t opened yet, or Pashkin would doubtless have booked a suite there. The rest were privately leased, and not yet fully occupied. But security was tight, and had lately risen several notches with the arrival of Rumble, the out-of-nowhere Apple-rivals who were preparing to launch a new version of their world-conquering e-reader; plus the diamond merchants de Koenig, and BiffordJenningsWhale, the Chinese-owned market traders. Here, along with all the other banks, insurers, inter-dealer brokers and risk-management consultants, were the wealthy embassies of offshore havens, drawn by the bright lights and big views. Quite the little United Nations, though without the avowed intent of doing any good except unto themselves.
On her first visit, Min in tow, Louisa had taken the stairs to the next landing down, but had been unable to access the floor. The stairwell doors were one-way, unlocking only in the event of fire or other emergency, while the business lifts—separate from the hotel’s—were restricted access. Cameras monitored every lobby. As for the suite Spider Webb had finagled, she didn’t know who owned that. A deliberate omission from the paperwork. Whoever it was, they were evidently open to persuasion, but then, Webb was a collector of other people’s secrets. Min had found him laughable, but Spider Webb was the kind of joke you laughed at then looked behind you, in case he’d heard.