“But—”
“But fuck,” said Lamb. “If you can remember what that’s like.” He stabbed his cigarette to death on the nearest surface. “Whoever did it wants everyone to focus on what Wicinski supposedly did. And not on whatever it was he actually did that made them fit him up in the first place.”
“So not the Park, then.”
“Not the Park,” said Lamb. “Because if they wanted him out of the picture, he’d be gone. No, they sent him here because they thought he did what they told us he did. So whoever fucked him up in the first place must be pretty good. I mean, I’m told those laptops are bastards to hack. They have passwords and everything.”
“So not the Park,” Catherine repeated. “And yet they knew where to come looking for him.”
“I keep forgetting you have a brain. Though in my defence, you don’t use it often.”
“It could have been a colleague. Someone who believed he was looking at child porn.” She’d believed it herself, hadn’t she? “It’s the kind of thing that gets people riled.”
“Villagers with pitchforks. Or sink-estate morons. But a trained professional would have just broken his legs. No, the whole physical graffiti thing’s misdirection.” He drained his teacup. “Feel free to tell him that. Might cheer him up.”
“How come he was here, anyway?”
“He’s been sleeping in the office.”
She should have known that. Time was, nothing happened in Slough House she didn’t have an inkling of.
“Why?”
Lamb said, “Because his girlfriend kicked him out. Turns out she didn’t like sharing her bed with a kiddy fiddler.”
“So she knew too.”
Lamb said, “Yeah, but I can’t see her jumping him in the dark. A woman scorned, and all that. She’d have done it in the High Street with a TV crew watching.”
“And how did she find out? I get the impression Lech’s not one for baring his soul.”
Lamb said, “She had a phone call.”
Catherine stared.
He said, “What?”
“You bastard.”
Another cigarette appeared. Another flame flared.
“You told his fiancée? You couldn’t let him work things out for himself?”
“Not a lot to work out, Standish. I mean, there were only two ways she could go with the information. And the clever money was always gunna be on her flipping her wig.” His cigarette tip burned brightly. “No one’s that broad-minded.”
“But why tell her? Good god, what made it your—”
“Ho traced him. He’s been meeting someone from the Park. Which I assume means he’s been keeping them up to speed with what we’re doing, which, if you’ll recall, I very specifically didn’t want happening. And I don’t like repeating myself.”
“So you screwed him over.”
“No, I reminded him whose side he’s on.”
“By removing his sole support.”
“He doesn’t have to like it,” Lamb said. “He just has to know it’s the way things are.”
Catherine didn’t know what to say. A man downstairs had had his life, now his face, dismantled.
“I’ve got joes in the field,” he said. “If Wicinski was running his mouth off, he was putting them at risk.”
“I think that’s a first,” she said.
“What is?”
“You, justifying your actions.”
“It’s Spook Street, not Sesame Street. If he was scared of getting hurt, he should have stuck with his roots and been a plumber.”
“He’s an analyst. I doubt he knew he was signing up for the front line.”
“That’s why they have small print. So crybabies can’t say they weren’t warned.”
“Jesus wept!” She shook her head. “Every time I think you’ve scraped the barrel . . .”
He opened his desk drawer and found his Talisker.
She said, “You’ve got joes in the field because somebody messed with your stuff. Isn’t that what you said the other night? Frank Harkness stamped dog dirt into your carpets and walked away, and that’s been burning you up ever since.”
“Are you charging for this? Because I never pay for therapy unless it includes a handjob.”
She said, “Just because this is all you’ve got doesn’t make it worth destroying people’s lives for.”
“Then what does?”
“You should call the kids in before someone else gets hurt. As soon as they’ve found Louisa.” She stood. “And not everyone who lives on a council estate is a moron.”
“I deal in broad strokes. From where I’m sitting, everyone’s a moron.”
Before leaving, she turned to look at him once more. He was pouring out whisky, his measure defined by the limits of the teacup. She couldn’t see his eyes. Didn’t want to.
“And think about this, too,” she said. “Lech’s one of yours now. And someone just messed with him. What are you going to do about that?”
She didn’t wait for a reply.
Her own office was shrouded in gloom, its skylight muffled by snow. But she didn’t turn the light on. Instead she sat, much as Lamb always did, in the dark, and wondered what grief was heading their way next.
One of the men said, “Smell that?”
“. . .What?”
“Someone’s been smoking a joint.”
The spliff was a straw-thin corpse in Lucas’s hand, but its odour had drifted out, and sunk to the cobbles below.
“. . . Don’t worry, my friend. We’ll find you one later.”
A girl’s voice next. “Where’s the thing?”
“She wants to see your thing.”
“Show her your thing.”
“Trust me, she’s seen it. Up close and personal, isn’t that right, my darling?”
The girl’s laughter had a brittle edge. “No, the thing.”
“Here we go, darling.”
There were sounds Lucas couldn’t identify, mechanical and clunky.
As carefully as he could, he peeped over the edge of the roof.
The spotlight was on again, illuminating the target, but there were fewer people than before. Something else had changed too—they were drunker, more manic. A coked-up energy floating free.
There was only one girl. She was slight, and despite the cold wore an abbreviated silvery dress, flashing like a glitterball in the headlights. She’d been handed the crossbow, and it looked huge in her arms. How old was she, anyway? His age? The men were far older and uniformly dressed in evening wear. There were five of them, and they watched the girl in a hungry way: fifty, he said, when Louisa asked. Or sixty. Balding men, or grey-templed.
She almost dropped the weapon, but managed to get it level. One of the men stood behind her, a hand on her waist. He was whispering into her ear.
When she loosed the bolt it went wild, careening into the dark.
The men collapsed in laughter.
She stamped her foot, but was laughing too. “I wasn’t ready!”
The crossbow was lifted from her hands, and another bolt fitted.
“Just pretend you’re pointing a finger.”
She wasn’t pretending hard enough. The second bolt, too, was swallowed by the night.
This time, the crossbow wasn’t handed back to her.
Someone had lit a cigar, and its smoke rose skyward.
“Okay, chicken,” another man said. “Your turn . . .”
She was laughing along with them when they took her across to the target.
Again, that whistling . . . The Lone Ranger. No, the William Tell Overture, Lucas remembered.
And then he thought, Shit, no . . .
The same thing must have occurred to the girl, because her laughter stopped as if a tap had been turned off.
“What are you doing?”
“Just a little fun. Nothing to worry about.”