Shirley had said, “Yeah, but don’t they get taught to blend in? At terrorist school?”
“Oh, good. A volunteer.”
“No, I was just—”
“See, what I’m suggesting, by which I mean what you will henceforth dedicate your life to until I say stop, is what I’m going to call . . . Operation Scofflaw.”
Meaning Shirley’s daylight hours were now taken up by cross-referencing a register of TV licence defaulters against lists of those who’d failed to pay parking fines, child support and a million other minor offences . . .
(“Wouldn’t it be quicker to just take the population of Liverpool and start from there?”
“And they say I teach you nothing.”)
. . . the whole shebang then, for want of a less inflammatory description, ethnically profiled. It was, essentially, classic Lamb: pointless, time-wasting and tit-blisteringly boring, with a dash of offensiveness chucked in. If it was happening to anyone else, it would be funny.
She wondered what task Lamb would find for the new guy.
And she wondered what the new guy had done to wind up in Slough House.
And then she wondered how come River was nowhere to be seen, the jammy skiver.
Good job some of us have a work ethic, she decided, making sure her office door was shut before she closed her eyes.
His grandfather was fading with the day.
River had been at his bedside since the early hours, summoned by a kind voice on his mobile: It would be wise to get here soon. For minutes afterwards he’d lain unhearing the words, running back the clock. He was twelve, and helping in the garden; watching worms at their incomprehensible work. On his head, the O.B.’s hat. Don’t want you catching sunstroke. Your grandmother’d have my guts. Or twice that age and sitting in the study, rain lashing the windows, the O.B. talking him through the dark days of the Cold War. Over the years, the old man’s chair had moulded itself to hold him like a hammock. River’s chair was a work in progress . . . On their own darkest day, none colder, they’d buried his grandmother, Rose, and it had been the first and only time he’d seen the O.B. cry.
You built a life the way you’d build a wall, one brick on top of the other, but sooner or later, those first bricks were taken away.
He had thought about calling his mother, but for no longer than it took to shake his head. Then he’d willed himself up and into yesterday’s clothes, arriving at Skylarks, the nursing home, before the sun. His grandfather had been moved into a room that was purpose-built to die in, though nobody actually said so. The lighting was gentle, and the view through the window of winter hills, their treeline a skeleton chorus. The bed the O.B. would never leave was a clinical, robust device, with upright panels to prevent him from rolling off, and various machines monitoring his progress. On one, his pulse echoed, a signal tapped out from a wavering source. A last border crossing, thought River. His grandfather was entering joe country.
Twice he took his phone out, to ring his mother. Twice he didn’t. He texted Louisa, though; let her know where he was. She texted back: So sorry. He’d have called Catherine, but Catherine had changed lately, reverting to how she’d been in his early days at Slough House: a pale ghost, who moved through the rooms leaving no trace behind her. The previous day, alone with her in the kitchen, he’d stood close by her, reaching for milk from the fridge, and breathed in deeply: could he smell alcohol? But he caught only the herbal mix of the soap she favoured, the scent she wore.
Besides, if she’d fallen off the wagon, they’d all know about it, surely? A crash like that. Unless Catherine had done what Catherine would do, which was fall so slowly, fall so deep, that no one would notice and no one would hear.
From the bed, calm breathing.
He stood and paced the room, to keep his blood flowing. That’s the kind of thought you have in a hospital room. The O.B.’s gentle exhalations, his secret murmuring, didn’t waver, and seemed no different from anyone else asleep. But those familiar with death had picked up on signs River couldn’t decrypt. When life was entering the final straight there were signals to read, codes to break. It was a language he didn’t know yet. All the deaths he’d witnessed had happened suddenly, to healthy people.
Every fifteen minutes a nurse came in and assessed the situation. She brought River a cup of tea and a sandwich, patted his shoulder. Are you the only family? How long have you got? There was a mother, Isobel Dunstable, née Cartwright, who had given the Old Bastard his name, and meant it; and a father, the renegade American spook Frank Harkness, who had seduced Isobel not for love, nor even for pleasure, but to bend the O.B. to his will, perhaps the only time in his life the O.B. had been outfoxed. And never spoken a word of it, either. By the time River came to learn the truth, the old man had been lost in the twilight, unable to tell the difference between trees and shadows.
Meanwhile, Frank was in the wind, and his mother hadn’t spoken to her father in years.
I just want him to be unhappy, she’d told River once. Behind the brittle levity, he’d sensed a wound still pulsing.
He dozed, so that when at last it happened, it happened without his knowing. His eyes had closed, and the images that scampered through his mind were a confused welter of loss and unhappiness. It was a noise from the corridor that brought him back, a jostled trolley, and he started at the sound, his heart hammering. It was another moment or two before he realised that the machines had changed their tune, and instead of charting progress, were transmitting the news from the other side. His grandfather had crossed the border.
River rose and kissed the old man’s forehead moments before the nurse arrived.
Emma said, “You’re kidding, right?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“No offence, but it’s hard to tell.”
This was true. It wasn’t that Lady Di was a stoneface, and if she ever took to pulling the legs of her subordinates it would likely be in controlled conditions, with the subject fixed to a rack, but in the time Emma Flyte had been running the Dogs, she’d heard a lot of instructions that might easily have been a piss-take. It turned out that in the governance of a nation’s security, many absurd situations had to be worked around: a toxic clown in the Foreign Office, a state visit by a narcissistic bed-wetter, the tendency of the electorate to jump off the occasional cliff. So sometimes a First Desk would outline an agenda and your first thought would be Yeah, as if.
But not this time.
“I’d have thought Slough House was on your list,” she said.
“I have a list?”
“Oh, I think we both know you have a list. And Slough House has been a thorn in your side for years, right? So here you are at last, top of the monkey puzzle tree, I’d have thought your first move would be to raze that place to the ground.”
And sow salt where it had stood. You couldn’t be too careful, where Jackson Lamb was concerned.
“And instead, you’re embracing its potential—oh, don’t tell me. You made a deal with Lamb.”
“I’m First Desk, Ms. Flyte. I don’t have to make deals with anyone.”
“And I used to be a copper, Ms. Taverner, and I recognise bullshit when I hear it. That’s how you got rid of Whelan, isn’t it? You had Lamb’s help, and in return Slough House is off the hook.”
She only had to say the words aloud to recognise their truth. Backroom politics was Diana Taverner’s natural habitat, and as for Lamb, he’d deal with the devil if circumstances required. Whether the devil would shake hands with Lamb was a different question. Even Satan has standards.