Coe nodded, then turned to Shirley.
“Whatever.”
“Okay. Go back the way we came, then take the first left. You’ll come to a wood. There are buildings just beyond it.”
“Sounds like a farm.”
“Might be.”
“Will there be dogs?”
“Dogs are a bit like fast-food restaurants,” Coe said. “Most maps haven’t got round to including them yet.”
“I thought you didn’t do jokes,” Shirley reminded him. Then she said, “You know what bothers me?”
Though both men, having spent a day in her uninterrupted company, had worked up a comprehensive list of things that bothered Shirley, neither volunteered a probable top ten.
“What bothers me is how come she never called it in. I thought that’s what you did after what you just said. Hostile contact. You call it in before you go dark.”
It had been bothering River too.
If it worried J.K. Coe, he hid it well. “We’re going that way,” he said, pointing down the road. “We split at the next junction.”
River looked at Shirley, who was climbing into Ho’s car. “Be careful.”
“Is that ‘be careful’ as in ‘here, why don’t you take the gun’?”
“No,” said River.
The two men set off down the road on foot, while Shirley executed a four-hundred-point turn. It was snowing again by the time she was headed in the right direction.
So here came Frank, and yes, he made Anton repeat everything he’d just said. And then stood gazing across the landscape: at the little town not far below, blinking into light, and the estuary beyond, on which boats were now bobbing on the rising tide. Earlier, they’d lain on the snow-dusted silt like discarded toys. The whole country, come to that, had the air of a forgotten nursery.
He said, “So they haven’t skipped the area yet.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so because thinking so means you’ve screwed up, and screwing up means you don’t get paid.”
“Hey, we’re here, on the ground. We get paid.”
“Yeah, take it to a fucking tribunal. Two nights they’ve been hiding up a tree. You’re supposed to be good at this.”
“There’s a lot of countryside,” said Lars. “And there are only two of us.”
“Where’s Cyril?”
Cyril was still back at the barn. Concussion or not, he was having a laugh.
Frank shook his head. He’d been up all night too, scouting the woods around Caerwyss Hall, holding to the notion that a spooked kid trying to lose himself would head for familiar territory. His own original plan had been simpler: give the kid the cash, and tag the bag. That way they could pick him up soon as they liked. But the decision hadn’t been his to make. That was the trouble with the rich: they looked to stay that way by keeping both hands on their money. Or maybe they just didn’t trust Frank to bring it back afterwards.
It was snowing again. If you stared directly up at the sky, it was like watching a cathedral collapse very slowly.
He said, “Well, if they’d gone to the cops, we’d know about it by now. There’d have been activity. So they’re staying dark, and back-up’s not in a hurry to get here. I haven’t heard any choppers, have you?” They hadn’t. “Like I said, this is Slough House. Maybe the Park figures it’s cheaper to cut ’em loose, save the cost of a pension down the line. But if the cavalry don’t turn up soon they’re gonna figure that out for themselves. That’s when they’ll make their run.”
Anton glanced at Lars, but Lars was paying close attention.
Frank went on, “You lost them in the town last night. They’re not gonna try and head out of town on a footpath, not in this weather. The road only goes two ways. It heads towards the coast, which is basically a dead end, or it heads back towards civilisation. They’ll figure we’ve got that one blocked.”
“The three of us?”
“Oh, pardon me, did you fill in a questionnaire? Because how else would they know how many of us there are?”
Anton didn’t answer.
Frank said, “So let’s try being methodical. You’re on the lam, there’s snow everywhere, you’re up to your fucking eyeballs. Where you gonna hide?”
“Find an empty house.”
“But you get spotted breaking in, that’s like sending up a flare. And you clearly don’t want the cops out, or else that’s where you’d have gone in the first place.”
“Needle in a fuckin’ haystack,” Anton said.
“And you know how to find one of those?”
“Burn the haystack,” Anton muttered.
Frank said, “There’s boats on the estuary. And boats mean boathouses. And there are barns. You found one, right? How hard can it be? They’ve spent last night holed up in a handy barn, and once the roads loosen up, and traffic starts moving, they’ll make tracks. We need to find them before that happens.”
“We need more men.”
“Yeah, and who’s gonna pay them? So stop whining and look at barns and boats. Start from the pickup point and work inland. I’ll do the same, heading towards the coast. Lars, do the estuary. Call in every hour. And call Cyril, tell him to get off his fucking sickbed. That all okay with you?” He was looking at Anton. “Or you got a better plan?”
Anton said, “Let’s just do it, shall we?”
They got back into their cars, Frank waiting a moment until the others had headed off down the road. He could do without Anton’s bitching, but it wasn’t like he wasn’t used to it. In his previous life—an independent—he’d worked with the same guys for years, guys whose thinking he’d known as well as his own. That was then. Now, he was hired to do jobs and given the men to go with them; men with military backgrounds for the most part, and prison history often as not; and men like Anton, who’d done covert work too, on the blunter side. Doorkickers, not strategists, but that didn’t stop them thinking they should be the ones giving orders. And sooner or later he’d meet one who’d do more than just shake his tree, but it wasn’t going to be Anton. They both knew that.
Still, it would be best not to turn his back too often. Spooks, when you got down to it, couldn’t be trusted. Frank should know.
He drove slowly down the lane, past fields that were white, and growing whiter.
“There’s stables out back of the Hall,” Lucas had told them. This had been in the shed the night before. Cobwebbed patchy dark, with every movement magnified in the gloom, becoming a nest of spiders, or an inquisitive rat. “I went there for a smoke sometimes.”
“A doobie?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if you’re like sixty.”
Sitting on the roof; legs dangling down. Not an approved Health and Safety seating posture, but then again, smoking dope in general didn’t make many H&S lists.
It had been just before New Year; a party at Caerwyss Hall. A corporate event catered by Paul’s Pantry, the outfit run by a friend of Lucas’s mother’s—both women caught the inverted commas round friend. The corporate client was a PR firm called Bullingdon Fopp, whose CEO was one Peter Judd, a bigtime political player once, and still regarded by some as a Lost Leader. Fair enough in Louisa’s view, if where you wanted to be led was a mash-up of The Handmaid’s Tale and It’s a Knockout.
“We were supposed to be off the premises, but I didn’t want to go back to the cottage. There was just mum and Andrew. It was boring.”
This was before the snow rolled in, and the cold was the damp, bronchial kind, where everything seems to be breathing out: plant life, telegraph poles, garden furniture. The moon was a well-kept secret. The single bulb above the door of the kit-room opposite was the only illumination, and it cast everything as an etching from a storybook: all the detail Lucas could see, shapes and curves and corners, became wavy grey lines the harder he looked at them.