They were sitting in a café off Fleet Street, she reminded herself. This bizarre conversation was taking place in the real world. This morning she’d had a brusque reminder that her position was subject to the oversight and control of others; reminded, too, that allies were also rivals, and trust in as short a supply as money. But this wasn’t the answer. She repeated this internally, in case she hadn’t heard it the first time: This. Wasn’t. The answer.
She said, “You’re not an elected MP. You’re a former Home Secretary. In the public view, that’s a little below being a former Blue Peter presenter.”
“The public aren’t involved, except inasmuch as they’d be beneficiaries. We’re talking about a higher good here, Diana.”
“And you’re the one who defines what that higher good is?”
“I’m sure we can find common ground. The higher good’s a plateau, not a peak.”
It was insane. It couldn’t work.
She’d need to hear a lot more detail before she could be persuaded that it was even worth laughing at.
Diana Taverner said, “It’s always interesting chatting with you, Peter. I never know whether to send a thank you note or a SWAT team afterwards.”
“You’ll think about this.”
It wasn’t a question.
She left the café without another word. The pavements were damp, the air swimmy with exhaust. Through a gap in the buildings she could see St. Paul’s, its elegant bulb a reminder that some things endured.
You’ll think about this.
She walked back to Regent’s Park more slowly than usual.
No more snow had fallen. A thin grey rain, instead, swept the city, and the drains swam with excess run-off, and mains burst with dull predictability. One of these was not far from Slough House, and made a lagoon of a junction, in lieu of fixing which a team of council-liveried characters had erected a roadblock of sandbags and bollards, ensuring that traffic was reduced to a single-lane nightmare, before going off on their summer holidays.
Catherine Standish avoided getting her feet wet by taking the long way round: up the Barbican ramp and over the footbridge. She wore sensible shoes, because who but a fool would wear otherwise on a Monday morning, but had no desire to dampen them unnecessarily. There were inches you could give which, once surrendered, were never won back. Over the weekend, she had emptied each and every one of her bottles into her bath; had kept the shower running while pinkened water swirled round the plughole and was sucked into oblivion, like a memory disappearing inside its own fading details. There were reasons why her sobriety had nearly ended, but those reasons, in the end, were inches best held onto. Her life was not what she might have wanted it to be, but that was no reason for destroying what it was. Or at least, that was how the measurement currently stood, and for this she was grateful.
In her room she raised the blind, and allowed the new week’s watery light to filter in. J.K. Coe had been dead for nine days, and life in Slough House was adjusting to its new mean; his absence did not make things quieter, since he’d often gone days without saying a word, but new ghosts cast pale shadows, and now and again she caught stray glimpses at the corners of her vision. She had not known him well, and it wasn’t so much that she missed him as that she wished she’d never known him at all. Loss is easier to bear when it’s truly felt. When it’s a kneejerk reaction, it reflects badly on all concerned.
Still, though, she caught glimpses.
Roderick Ho arrived, and Louisa, and River; separately, noisily, unhappily. Louisa, she knew, blamed herself for the recent deaths; River was angry that Frank Harkness had slipped away. Ho was pissed off about his car. The fourth arrival was Lech Wicinski: Catherine was not yet attuned to his movements, but she heard him enter Ho’s office, heard their lack of greeting. Shirley was last to turn up. And now we are full. Well, except for the obvious. Catherine was reformatting River’s latest report on potential hostile safe-house locations, because in addition to being of no obvious worth, it was presented in a variety of fonts, sizes, even colours, a dead giveaway of the cut-and-paste methodology of its compilation. Next time, she thought. Next time. Probably. But for now she gave it a professional veneer, printed it out, slipped it inside a manila folder, and when she passed into Lamb’s room to leave it on his desk nearly dropped it in fright: he was sitting in the dark, a toad-shape in shadow, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. His eyes were dark wet stones.
She said, “I didn’t hear you come in,” and heard her own heartbeat in her voice.
He grunted.
There was an empty bottle in front of him, but not his usual Talisker, nor even his usual spirit of choice: it was vodka, or so she assumed. Clear glass, anyway, with Cyrillic script on a red and white label. Yes, vodka. Probably his version of detoxing. By all appearances he’d spent the interval since she’d last seen him drinking: he was oily-faced, red-eyed, and now she was through the door, she could smell the stale days hanging off him. A scrunched pyramid of used tissues on the floor suggested he’d endured one of his coughing fits. He’d been here all night.
She said, “Come to inspire the troops?”
“Someone’s got to be the counterweight. They look to you for guidance, they’ll end up hanging round off-licences dressed like Looby Loo.”
A match appeared in his hand, and flared. When he dipped his head to meet it, the light riffed off his hair, briefly haloing him.
“We lost someone,” she said. “Emma Flyte, too. She was a good woman. They’d still be alive if you hadn’t gone after Harkness.”
“Which you warned me against.”
“Don’t imagine I wasn’t about to remind you.”
“No, you’re good at that. Others do the dirty work, you just shoulder the burden.”
“You sent them out against a bunch of professionals. We’re lucky any of them came back.”
“Louisa was on her own. On her fucking holidays. You think I should have let her deal with Harkness herself?”
“You weren’t thinking about her, you were thinking about settling a score. How did that work out?”
“Well, he’s dead,” said Lamb. “I consider that a result.”
His smoke drifted towards her, and she wafted it away as if it were another bad idea.
She said, “That’s not what Louisa said. And she was last to see him.”
Lamb pushed a newspaper across his desk, The Times, folded open to foreign news.
Poitiers. Body found. Driving seat, parked car.
Single bullet wound to head.
It was barely a paragraph. Associated Press. She imagined, ridiculously, a journo in a raincoat, a press card tucked into his hatband. A camera with a bowl-shaped flash.
She said, “You’ve been to Poitiers?”
“Do I fucking look like I’ve been to Poitiers?”
He looked like he’d been down a well.
“So . . .”
Lamb said, “I pulled a trigger.”
“Whose trigger?”
“Man named Martin Kreutzmer.” He breathed smoke. “He’s a BND player. Semi-retired, he says, but running an agent here in the Brexit office, would you believe? Almost like they don’t believe we can fuck that one up by ourselves.”
“Imagine.”
“The Park thought she was ours, and that we had a warm body inside the BND. Reality was the other way round. And when Kreutzmer’s cover name turned up on a search Wicinski ran, Kreutzmer got to hear because the mole’s Park handler told her about it.” He paused. “Do you want to hear that again? It’s not that complicated, but it’s so fucking comical it bears repetition.”
Catherine said, “And Kreutzmer planted the porn on Lech’s laptop. To discredit him.”