Back when he’d first arrived in Slough House, he’d shared with Sid Baker: Sid for Sidonie, very definitely female, though River hadn’t got to know her as well as he might have done, on account of her being shot in the head not long afterwards. Head wounds were tricky: lots of blood, and a general expectation that even if you pulled through you were going to be straw-fed thereafter, but bubbling alongside that was an awareness of all the many exceptions. River had read the same stories as everyone else about gunshot survivors living for decades with bullets lodged in their craniums. But whether Sid would have turned out one of these lucky ones, River didn’t know. The Service had dropped a fire blanket over the incident, and whether that meant they’d cremated the body after slapping a natural causes sticker on it or had her nursed back to health in a lakeside sanatorium was anybody’s guess. He tried not to think about her often. If she was dead, which she probably was, he hoped they’d spread her ashes somewhere nice.
But the past was his daily passenger at the moment: right there next to him wherever he went. And it wasn’t what he thought it had been, either; not so much a passenger as a hitchhiker; one who gets weird a few miles down the road. River had met his father for the first time earlier that year. This was not a meeting he had ever expected to happen. His father, he’d always assumed, had been a drive-by from his mother’s wayward youth, and this explained the scant information she’d ever released as to his identity. This had long ceased to matter to River, or at least, had become something he was prepared to bury under the psychological debris of the everyday: the actual father figure in his life was the O.B., under whose guidance he had grown to be the man he was. So his had been an unplanned birth: so what? The same could be said about a fair proportion of the world’s population, not many of whom had enjoyed his safe upbringing. But now it turned out this picture was askew; that far from having been a vague figure who had emerged from bar or nightclub to enjoy an overnight fling with Isobel Cartwright, his father had lived on Spook Street, same as his grandfather; that far from being unplanned, River’s birth had been plotted, his very existence a counter in a bigger game. And now his father was out there in the world, and while this had been true before River had ever laid eyes on him, its continued truth now carried a different weight.
He thought he might kill his father next time their paths crossed.
And he also thought that Slough House was no longer enough for him; that the tenuous promise it offered of future redemption, a return to the shining fold of Regent’s Park, could sustain him no longer. Weeks of playing computer games rather than fulfilling another of Lamb’s Sisyphean tasks; wasn’t that his psyche telling him he was ready to quit? At the very least, he was asking to be fired. And no coincidence that this was happening while he was waiting for the O.B. to die.
The thought blurred his vision momentarily, and he had to slow down. Because that would be a great way to go: checking out in a borrowed car with a surly companion, just as he was starting to make decisions about his future.
They were about half an hour from Slough; traffic a little sludgy, but not too bad – the fag end of rush hour, not its evil heart – and the sky starting to think about changing for the evening. The car was nice to drive – it was an electric-blue Ford Kia: its very name enough to generate outraged emails – but only in the sense that River wasn’t worried about pranging it. Ho, presumably, had chosen this car because he felt it suited him. River could only agree.
He glanced across at Coe, and was surprised to find he had his eyes open.
‘How sure are you this is gonna happen?’ he asked.
Coe didn’t react.
iPod. Of course.
River tapped him on the knee and made a take-your-fucking-earbuds-out gesture, which Coe reluctantly did.
‘How sure are you this is gonna happen?’ River repeated.
Coe stared ahead for a while, watching the road being swallowed up by the car’s front wheels, then shrugged and started putting his buds back in.
‘In the interests of a healthy working relationship,’ River said, ‘I should warn you that if you do that, I’m gonna pull onto the hard shoulder and beat the snot out of you.’
Coe paused and then nodded. ‘You could try,’ he said, and carried on inserting the earbuds.
That went well, thought River.
But a minute later, Coe pulled them out again. He said, ‘On a scale of one to ten? Maybe three.’
River nodded. That’s about what he’d figured.
He said, ‘But you felt it worth raising.’
There was another pause, then Coe said, ‘I’m right about the bigger picture. The template they’re using. The chances of us guessing right which pol they’ll try to hit, and it happening tonight, that’s a stretch.’
He didn’t look at River while saying this, but stayed focused on the road ahead of them.
Just for fun, River said, ‘But supposing we guessed right, and they’ll go for Gimball. Tonight. How’d you rate our chances of stopping it? On the same scale?’
J. K. Coe raised his earbuds again, but before slotting them into place he said, ‘Less than zero.’
‘Yellow car,’ said Shirley.
‘Yeah, not really.’
‘Yes really.’
‘Not really,’ said Louisa. ‘On account of one, it’s a van, not a car, and two, it’s orange, not yellow. So orange van, not yellow car.’
‘Same difference.’
Louisa suppressed a sigh. Until ten minutes ago, the rules of Yellow Car had seemed pretty straightforward: when you saw a yellow car, you said, ‘Yellow car’. There wasn’t much room for controversy. But that was before she’d introduced Shirley to the game.
Nor had the game stopped Shirley fidgeting. She’d already been rooting about in the glove compartment, and had found a pair of sunglasses she was now wearing, and also some gum. ‘Can I have this?’
‘Jesus. It’s like being trapped with a ten-year-old.’
‘I get bored on long car journeys.’
Louisa said, ‘I can drop you at the next services. Just say the word.’
Shirley admired herself in the mirror on the sunshield. ‘These shades are about six years out of fashion.’
‘That’s why they’re in the glove compartment,’ Louisa said. ‘And not, for instance, on my face.’
‘Are we nearly there yet?’
Not nearly enough, thought Louisa.
‘There’ was the east side of Birmingham: a phone call having determined that Zafar Jaffrey was in his home city that evening, delivering a talk in a library. The woman who’d given Louisa this information had added a gloss or two, emphasising Jaffrey’s manifold qualities which, Louisa suspected, might have included walking on water if she’d prolonged the call long enough. Nice to know he had his supporters, though when a politician seemed too good to be true, that usually meant he was. Still, if you had to pick one you’d rather not see assassinated, Jaffrey had the edge on Dennis Gimball, which was why she’d left Gimball to River. Faced with the task of keeping Gimball alive, she couldn’t put her hand on her heart and say she’d do her damnedest; there was a strong argument that knocking Gimball off his perch would be doing the nation a favour. Or at any rate, not doing it so much harm it would need therapy.