If Min hadn’t died, they’d have lasted—sitting here at someone else’s postscript, this felt like a truth. They could have shared a life together, once they’d swallowed the bitter pill about their careers, and jumped ship—happy-ever-afters weren’t much of a thing around Slough House: you couldn’t have the one within the other. Too late now. And Louisa could feel herself getting into the funeral vibe; tears ready to flow, though misattributed tears; nothing to do with the deceased . . .
River walked past, arm in arm with his mother, and the music grew louder, and the service was ready to begin.
He’d seen the face he had come to collect, he was ninety percent sure of that. Had taken a photo. So what he should do now was leave, but something was holding him in place; the sense of unfinished business. That was always the way with funerals, except in those rare cases where you were burying someone you’d killed yourself. That was less of a joke than it might have been if someone else had made it but he thrust the thought aside as he turned his hazard lights off, put his phone away, climbed out of the car.
The Dog who’d checked him out earlier watched as he approached but didn’t challenge him; nodded, rather, from his sentry position by the hedge. Jesus, mate. Do your job. An organ was droning. They’d be lined up in pews now; heads bowed, attention elsewhere. Instead of joining them, he skirted the building and found the graveyard, in the far corner of which a hole was waiting. He lit a cigarette, thinking about those he’d seen heading into St. Len’s earlier. River, of course, and his mother. Isobel had aged gracefully, presumably at the same speed as himself, though she’d taken care to slow down on the curves, or had some first-class mechanics hammering the dings out every other lap. As for River, he was still young enough to take the knocks and stay standing, or get back on his feet afterwards. A nice trick, soon lost. River would learn.
He inhaled, breathed out; the smoke torn apart on the wind. He should leave, he reminded himself, but approached the graveside anyway.
Some of the others, he could put a name to. The fat, badly dressed man: that would be Jackson Lamb. Fat didn’t mean soft, if the stories were true. He’d worn a sly smile, as if finding grim humour in the surroundings, and not only because it was a boneyard. No, Lamb looked the type who’d find grim humour in a kindergarten; who’d find most things blackly funny because of who he was, and what he’d been through; because otherwise he’d sit up at night wondering whether to put a bullet through his brain. He’d had a woman with him, one of his crew. They called them the slow horses. Slough House/slow horse; it was clever, in that very English way; the kind that expressed itself in word play and crossword clues, and was fuck-all use. Look at the Dog out front. Though to be fair, David Cartwright would have had that slacker on a charge.
David Cartwright, though, was beyond any such measures, as the waiting grave underlined. There was no stone yet, of course. Names, dates, came later. The first order of business was planting the dead. Any moment now the chapel’s back door would open, and the bearers would carry him out, and that would be the last touch of daylight he’d know. Comes to us all in the end.
But at least I outlived you, you old bastard, thought Frank Harkness, as he tossed his still burning cigarette into the grave.
The funeral was the usual mess: litany and music interrupting a stream of disconnected memories. River felt actively present one minute out of two. The music had been chosen by Rose Cartwright, long ago. Her husband might have the nation’s security in his keeping, she’d once confided in River, but anything more important fell into her domain. River had retrieved the instructions from the drawer where she’d filed them and emailed them to the funeral director, but had no memory of the titles; no idea what he’d been listening to. Throughout, he’d kept glancing at his mother. Widowhood had bestowed respectability, but the role of grieving daughter seemed beyond her, at least where her father was concerned. At Rose’s interment there had been feeling. But here and now, she seemed wooden; almost bored. As if this final duty were a chore.
And now they were outside, and the coffin being lowered into the ground. There was a good crowd, thirty or more; many of them unknown to him. He expected their names would strike bells though; among them some who had figured in the O.B.’s tales; stories of labyrinthine deviousness; of actions carried out to convince others that certain knowledge was in our possession, or not in our possession; that certain facts held sway, or never had. A wilderness of mirrors, the land of spooks. Nothing you saw meant what it seemed, apart from those times when it did. Telling the two apart was the tricky bit. Knowing which was real, which the reflection.
Ashes to ashes.
Diana Taverner had nodded at him; had switched her phone to silent as a mark of respect, and hadn’t sent more than three emails since the service began. Jackson, too, was uncharacteristically restrained, meaning he hadn’t started a brawl yet. He’d subjected Isobel to one of his visual audits, though: a frank appraisal which in some men might have indicated sexual interest, but with Lamb, thank God, was transgressive in a different way: he was measuring her like a joe does a contact, wondering if she could be trusted. River could have saved him the effort. The coffin touched earth, and the world blurred. That was it, then. He raised his eyes skyward to a mass of cloud, then turned to his mother again, who didn’t look back; he blinked twice, then saw in the far corner of the graveyard a leafless tree sheltering a bench, and a figure upon it, watching him.
He blinked a third time, but the figure didn’t disappear.
It was Frank Harkness.
“Okay, so he didn’t jump in the grave,” Lamb said later. “But, you know. Next best thing.”
Which was that River had leaped over it, scattering those on the other side, who included Lady Di, Oliver Nash, the vicar, and an elderly woman who, it turned out, had been one of the O.B.’s neighbours, and under the impression that David Cartwright had been a big wheel in the Department of Transport. Given that, she handled it rather well; better, anyway, than Nash, who windmilled backwards before falling over a headstone. River was history by then; had vanished round the far side of St. Len’s, giving chase.
“Dear God,” Catherine said.
Louisa appeared at her side. “Was that who I think it was?”
“I didn’t get a good look. You’re not going to follow?”
“In these heels?”
Lamb said, “Well, supercalifragilisticfuckmealadocious. And people say funerals are glum affairs.” He slotted a cigarette into his mouth.
Alone among the company, Isobel Cartwright seemed unaffected. She remained standing by the grave with her head bowed, her eyes closed. Those around her shifted away a little. This specific situation might not be covered in etiquette manuals, but common sense suggested breathing space.
With Diana Taverner conducting operations, and a fresh-faced Dog taking an arm apiece, Oliver Nash rose from the grave. Not his own, but even a resurrection by proxy must feel like a second chance. “I thought mourners were supposed to rend their own garments,” he snapped. He freed his arms from his helpers’ grip and bent to check a split seam. “Not bystanders.’”
Taverner came to join Lamb. When she spoke, her lips hardly moved. “Why do I sense your hand in this?”
Lamb saw no reason to adjust his volume. “Because you have a nasty fucking mind?”
“One of your crew just made a circus out of a Service funeral. Why would he do that?”
“I wouldn’t rule out instructions in the will.” Lamb lit his cigarette: decorum had clearly sailed. “The old bastard had a sense of humour, after all.”