Anyway: her part was done. Cartwright could haul up the paperwork and say whether it was daddy. And then—if she’d read the signs aright—Lamb might just let them off the leash, which would make for a late Christmas present. Harkness had killed Marcus, or primed the hand that did so. Thinking that thought had Shirley clenching her own hand: making a fist, letting it go. Making a fist. She’d shared this office with Marcus once. They’d had their moments, but never come to blows. And in the end, they’d been partners.
She had to avert her eyes from the wall, remembering this. The wall against which Marcus’s life had ended; his final thoughts sprayed upon it like illegible graffiti.
Making a fist, letting it go. Making a fist again. Letting it go.
Shirley had attended court-mandated anger management sessions not long back, and the sessions had been successful in the sense that she didn’t have to go to them anymore, but unsuccessful in the sense that she’d punched someone in a nightclub earlier in the week, and while this had, as it happened, been the manager, that probably didn’t count. The whole thing had been a misunderstanding—he had thought she was accusing his staff of selling drugs; in fact she’d been complaining that they weren’t—but she had to be honest with herself: not resorting to violence during misunderstandings had been a key feature of the anger management course. And if, in her defence, it had been a hell of a punch—straight uppercut, no tell—that wasn’t really, when you got down to it, an actual defence. Punching someone who didn’t see it coming lost you points for self-control. Whether or not they were a dick didn’t enter into it, apparently.
Then again, the course hadn’t been an entire waste of time. At least she knew what bullshit she was expected to spout next time someone got to ask her: And how did that make you feel?
Buoyed by this positive thinking, she checked her emaiclass="underline" yep, Cartwright had requested a copy of the relevant paperwork from the car hire firm, a ‘request’ phrased as delicately as a grip on the company’s lapels. There weren’t many advantages to Slough House, but the fact that nobody knew its status as Service pariah was one, making it possible to play the national security card with civilians. Just don’t get tweeted about while doing it. Cartwright had been promised a response within thirty minutes, which in most offices translated as an hour and a half; time to grab some food, Shirley thought, a Pavlovian reaction to a glimpse of J.K. Coe passing her door, carrying something wrapped in greaseproof paper. He took it up to the office he shared with River Cartwright, who as usual offered no greeting. They’d reached this kind of détente, Coe supposed you could call it; a working arrangement whereby either might as well have been alone for all the rapport in evidence. Which suited Coe.
He sat, took a bite from his sandwich, and set the face recognition program running again. He’d have left it on while fetching lunch—that was what computers were for; to do stuff for you while you did other stuff—but experience had taught him that the program froze every twenty minutes, unless you paused it. The footage it was currently trawling through was of yesterday’s ferry arrivals at Southampton: the foot passengers. Until confirmation came that the man who’d hired the car there was the same man driving it in Hampstead—Frank Harkness—this could be a waste of time, but if you were after a working definition of life as a slow horse, that would do. Which, again, suited Coe. His was a precarious balance. His own trauma lay far in the past, or so the calendar said; it didn’t feel like ancient history though, not when memory woke him in the small hours. And the glimpses he’d had since of what he was capable of himself didn’t make for comfortable contemplation either: he was, it seemed, the sort of person who would shoot an unarmed, manacled man, an action you only had to perform once for it to become a defining characteristic. Not the person he’d assumed he was. Another, more recent outing had suggested him capable of heroism too, at least in the eyes of others, though Coe knew that when he’d shot an armed terrorist dead in Derbyshire, he’d been in the grip of something—call it a manic curiosity—over which he’d had little control; the overwhelming urge to see what a dead terrorist looked like, close up. Given all that, wasting time was as good a way of getting through it as any.
The picture on his screen juddered, halted, and the dialogue box conjured a message: Refer to Annex C. This referred to a database of known mercenaries—legit, grey area and downright nasty—and the highlighted face belonged to a man with the pitted skin of an acne survivor, and eyes that revealed nothing. They didn’t usually, in Coe’s experience. Those with something to hide knew not to put it in their windows. The man’s hair was short enough to qualify as military; his gear—a black polo-neck under a thigh-length winter coat, combat trousers, boots; a dufflebag over one shoulder—ticked the same boxes. Way too young to be Harkness so not on Coe’s agenda, and besides, he couldn’t find the match on Annex C while running face recog; not on hardware that was creaky when scooters were hip. Coe put his sandwich down, scribbled a reminder on its wrapper, then hit return, allowing the program to re-start. The way it trip-hopped face to face, superimposing geometric shapes upon each, was as mesmerising as a screensaver, and about as productive. What would the program make of him, he wondered? He barely recognised himself anymore, that was for sure. And then the program stalled again, and he thought he’d over-pushed it, but no; after a quivery moment, another dialogue box appeared. Refer to Annex A.
Thinning fair hair, noticeable cheekbones. A middle-aged face on a capable-looking body.
“Cartwright?” he said.
Cartwright grunted.
“This him?”
Cartwright looked up, came over, squatted by Coe’s desk. After a while he said, “Where’s this?”
“Southampton. Ferry arrivals. Yesterday.”
“It’s him.” He tapped the screen. “Annex A?”
Coe said, “Big and bad.”
“Well don’t access it. No need to let the Park know we’re looking.”
Three bags full, thought Coe.
“Almost certainly Jay Featherstone, then,” said River Cartwright, even as his own computer pinged incoming paperwork from the car hire firm.
From upstairs came a familiar explosion: a Jackson Lamb coughing fit, though by the noise, you’d be forgiven for assuming he was giving birth. The two men shared an uneasy moment, one broken by a voice from the doorway: Louisa Guy, delivering a farewell.
“You’re away?”
“Leave.”
“With this going on?” said River.
But Louisa was already halfway down the stairs.
Coe glanced to the window. It was dark outside, the pavements bracing themselves for overnight frost. Soon there’d be snow, and the country in the grip of its annual pantomime: cancelled trains, motionless airports, unnavigable roads. He hit return on his keyboard and the program chuntered back to life, sorting through the rest of Southampton’s arrivals: the weary, the footsore. It had already found what Coe was looking for, had pinned Frank Harkness to its memory-board, but why stop there? He was dimly aware that the coughing upstairs had subsided; that Cartwright had returned to his desk. Other aural irritations continued: the burping of radiators, the passive-aggressive grumbling of the fridge. A slamming door would be Shirley Dander; the scraping of a chair, Roddy Ho. He had grown used to this, both the discordant soundtrack and the occasional harmonies it hid; had learned to find comfort in continuity, though knew full well that the only reliable constant was fracture, that eventually everything broke. Which might happen as easily in the snow as at any other time.