“But not by himself. He called in favours to get it done, which was a breach of BND protocols. So when Wicinski looked like he was starting to pull at loose threads, Kreutzmer hit him again, hard. To cover his own arse, not just to protect his joe.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Well, Molly Doran told me Kreutzmer was involved. But Kreutzmer himself told me the rest.”
“Because you can be persuasive.”
“And because I had him over a fucking barrel. He wasn’t worried about the Park putting him on a plane. He was worried about being fired once it landed.”
Catherine was still standing. She lowered herself into a chair. The only light crawled in through the open office door, and Lamb’s face looked like a candleless pumpkin: its holes and hollows lacking any internal flame.
She said, “And he shot Harkness? Assuming that’s who got shot.”
“Harkness was playing with hired talent. And a thing about hired talent? There’s always someone’ll pay better.”
“You bought them.”
“Not with money. One of his crew, a rat called Anton Moser, remember? Coe identified him.”
She nodded.
Lamb said, “The mad monk had his moments. It turns out Moser used to bang heads for the BND. Molly has a file. They got rid of him when the heads he banged got too scrambled to debrief. There’s such a thing as being too good at your job.”
“Apparently.”
“So he went freelance, and you know what they say about freelance work. There’s nobody handing out gold clocks at the end of it.” Lamb ground his cigarette out on his battle-scarred desk. “So I had Kreutzmer send Moser a message. Let him know there’d be a welcome in the homeland if he did this little favour. A return to the fold.”
“So he murdered Harkness for the chance of a pension?”
“Wait’ll you’re down to your last tin of sardines, see how you feel about it then. Plus, Harkness was a legend, don’t forget. If you’re in the business of collecting scalps, that’s a nice one to have. Front and centre of the old CV.”
She looked at the paragraph again, and filled in its blanks. A final debrief after the aborted contract in Wales. Payday, even: would they still have been paid, despite the way things had gone? Another bugbear of the freelance life. Whatever the reason, Harkness and Moser in a car, and Moser pulling the trigger; a trigger Lamb had primed, here in London. She had to remind herself, maybe for the millionth time, that this was the world she lived in; that Spook Street wasn’t all boring reports in manila folders. That joe country lay just around the corner.
“And what did you promise Kreutzmer for this?” she asked.
“A free pass.”
“He’s running an agent in London, and you gave him a free pass?”
“I said I promised him one. I never said I gave him one.” He’d found another cigarette somewhere. “And once he’d done his bit”—he gestured towards the newspaper—“I called Taverner, let her know there’s a mole within spitting distance of Number Ten. Bet that went down well with the Oversights.”
“Not to mention Kreutzmer.”
“Fuck him. He branded my cattle. That used to be a hanging offence.”
He lit his cigarette.
“He’ll be back in Munich by now. His joe’ll be at the Park. And whoever they had handling her this end, well, if we’re really unlucky, he’ll end up downstairs. Maybe I’ll make him share a room with Wicinski. What do you reckon?”
“I reckon,” said Catherine, laying a quiet stress on the word, “that we lost someone. Emma Flyte too. And she was a good woman.”
She still had River’s report tucked under her arm, and she laid it on the desk now and left the office, closing the door behind her, leaving Lamb cloistered in his dark.
And meanwhile, on the floor below, River Cartwright is on the phone—unaccountably, uncharacteristically, he wants to hear his mother’s voice; wants to hear her talk about his grandfather, whom he is missing. But whatever he wants her to say, he wants her to say it unprompted, and this does not happen. Instead, he suffers the usual flow of self-involved detail—of lunches enjoyed and conversations won—and all the while his gaze remains on the empty desk by the window, where J.K. Coe once sat. The window has been newly bespattered by birdshit, and he wonders briefly whether Coe would have done anything about this—opened the window and cleaned it off with a rag—before realising how obvious the answer is. Later, River will drop into Louisa’s Guy’s office on some pretext or other, and will ask “You okay?” to which Louisa will reply “Yeah, sure,” not without meaning it exactly; more without addressing the question’s undertones. She too has been working the phone; has spoken to Lucas Harper, to Lucas’s mother, to Devon Welles, who worked closely with Emma. All these conversations were numb, it seems to her now; an odd adjective for a spoken exchange, but one that fits. And she feels a blank space in her life, where a friendship might have been. She and River will chat a little longer, and they will either agree to have a drink after work or not, depending. If they do, it will not go well. But for the moment, River listens to his mother on the phone, his gaze on the empty desk by the window, where J.K. Coe once sat.
Directly underneath which, on the floor below, sits Shirley Dander, who is currently waiting for her screen to unfreeze, an outcome she knows will remain deferred until she unplugs her computer altogether, then replugs it, and boots up. But for the time being she can sit doing nothing with an alibi for inactivity in front of her, and will continue to do this for as long as humanly possible: through the rest of the morning, for sure; the afternoon too, if possible; the rest of the week, the whole grey year, forever. Something Lamb once said keeps coming to mind—You lot keep your heads down, do what you’re told, and quietly die of boredom, and everyone’s happy as an Oxfam worker at a sex party. But start making waves and there are shitstorms waiting to happen—and she now appreciates its wisdom. For a few moments, behind a barn on a snowy Welsh hillside, she had thought she was ready to make a brilliant departure from life; to avenge Marcus, or die trying. But in reality, it was just another moment in an ongoing series. She isn’t ready to die. Wasn’t really ready then. And she misses J.K. Coe, because this is something she might have been able to talk to him about, something he might have listened to. But at least her frozen screen isn’t going anywhere, and provides a kind of constancy as she sits; her thoughts a flickering menace; her monitor a ponderous slab of light.
Which would invoke in Roderick Ho amused contempt: frozen screen, shit. Freeze a screen in front of the HotRod, you’d see serious melt going on. But then, Roderick Ho is a professional surrounded by amateurs, whose inability to perform the most mundane of tasks—cruise the web, drop hot beats, remain alive—would be a constant downer, were he the type to nurse disappointments. As it is, he has even risen above the callous disregard with which the others treated his car, though this, it’s true, is largely because he might as easily have sunk beneath it for all the notice anyone would take. But while they sit in their various bruised moods, reflecting on their latest failures, Roddy is delving once more into Service records. His researches into Lech Wicinski have yet to be completed: the mysterious wiping of his Service history remains unexplained. Wicinski himself, it has to be said, has also been heavily redacted. This morning he arrived unbandaged, and for the first time Roddy saw that his cheeks are now a furious cross-hatching of fresh cuts, new razorings, that have served to obliterate the word carved underneath them. How this happened, and who might be responsible, is a profound mystery to Roddy, but not one he plans to lose sleep over. Instead, he continues quarrying for evidence of Wicinski’s past sins, and while he’s about it, takes another peek at the dismal records of some of his colleagues. And this is what he’s doing when he makes his discovery.