It got to them all in the end, the curse of the slow horses. It sapped them of energy, and left them to wilt.
Her order arrived. Armed with a plastic fork, still chewing the last of her hot dog, she left the shop thinking about Marcus, and what he’d have made of her self-imposed clean stretch. He’d have said little. He’d have nodded, though, or something; made one of those macho gestures of his, to remind her that he might be behind a desk same as she was but he’d kicked down doors in his time, and she’d have felt good, seeing that nod; felt she was on the right track. But on the other hand: fuck off, Marcus; what’s it to do with you? Not as if he’d waltzed through life unaccompanied by demons. Towards the end there, the back half of last year, he’d been pouring money into slot machines like he’d found the secret to eternal life.
The chips were good, though.
When she reached the car she was relieved, despite herself, to find that Louisa hadn’t reappeared, and decided to eat standing up, using the car roof as a table. Stink the inside out, she’d never hear the end of it. She attacked the cod with the two-inch fork – a weapon unsuited to the task – and managed to convey a reasonable chunk into her mouth before remembering she was supposed to be ‘securing the perimeter’: yeah, right. Still chewing, she stepped round the car and into the quiet road, giving the parked vehicles a quick once-over. Everything as it had been.
Except, she thought, before stepping back to her al fresco dinner – except: that van, a hundred yards away. Had that been there five minutes ago?
It hadn’t.
When Coe saw Cartwright heading for the hall, he stepped inside a shop doorway and hid. He didn’t feel needed. I think we’re in trouble he’d said, and meant it, but he didn’t think trouble was going to happen here. The odds were on a par with aliens landing on that scaffolding, or America’s comedy president forswearing Twitter.
But as far as the bigger picture went, he knew he was right.
He slipped his radio’s earbuds in and listened to the headlines: an update on the surviving penguins; a woman found dead in her London home. Not long ago, he wouldn’t have been able to do this: the most he’d been able to bear was long stretches of unscored piano music; improvised melody that had him drifting like a leaf in a rowing boat’s wake. But that was fading; had begun to do so once he’d fired three bullets into a killer’s chest. Strange, the things that eased tension. This one wasn’t likely to crop up in self-help books, but you couldn’t argue with results.
And whatever else was going on, whatever static buzzed in his background, his brain worked fine, so yes, he knew he was right. He’d always had an ability to retrieve written information: to recall the shape of words on a page, the arrangement of paragraphs, at what depth of a book a sentence lay. ‘The watering hole’ was a Kiplingesque phrase that lingered. Whoever had tossed the bomb into the penguin enclosure at Dobsey Park had been following instructions that Coe had seen written down, and beneath that plan a bigger one was shifting. The point of all this was to whip the curtain away, and show the machinery behind. Expose the plan as one the nation had written itself, or its secret sharers had. And a nation’s secret sharers were the keepers of its soul.
He left the doorway and headed down the street, then into an alley between the worked-on building and the next. At the end of the alley wheelie bins jostled, but there was no way through, and he was about to head back when he noticed a ladder fixed to the scaffolding. Okay, he thought. From up high, he could watch the street. Cartwright was bound to call and ask what he was doing; ‘maintaining surveillance’ might shut him up. And he’d be out of harm’s reach. He scaled the ladder, and then another, which took him up to a walkway thirty feet above the street. The wooden boards had give in them, but not enough to feel unsafe. Just a slight swaying motion. Panic attacks, Lamb had accused him of having. Okay, but it was people who triggered them. He was fine with heights. Was fine with most things, provided they didn’t come with people attached.
By the top of this second ladder was a sealed paint tin, which probably shouldn’t have been left there. Coe stepped round it, leaned on a horizontal metal pole, and looked down on the street below.
‘The watering hole’. At Regent’s Park he’d have had to back his assertions with hard evidence or statistical probability. In Slough House, all he’d had to do was convince Jackson Lamb. But then, Lamb had done his time behind the Wall, and could still read the writing on it. People talked about Spook Street – life in the covert world – but Lamb had served down the dismal end, where your instincts stayed sharp or you suffered, and he recognised the truth when he heard it. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t a fat bastard, just that he was a fat bastard you dismissed at your peril.
None of which indicated that Coe would be proved correct here and now, or that Guy and Dander would strike lucky in Birmingham. Zafar Jaffrey and Dennis Gimball were just examples of the kind of target the template advocated: there’d be others, the deaths of whom would cause a tremor through the body politic, and various levels of grief, stress and rejoicing. There’d be angry mobs on streets, and bottles uncorked in dining rooms. It would all go on for days, and the headlines would stoke up outrage, and when the time came for these clowns to reveal whose strategy they’d been applying, the house of cards would be ready to collapse.
It didn’t matter who they were, he thought. Russians, Chinese, Cornish secessionists. Their identity barely mattered against the point they were making: that the target nation, always so eager to squat the moral high ground, had designed its own destruction.
And then he wondered what Dennis Gimball was doing down below; weaving round the scaffolding; scurrying along the alley to where the wheelie bins were gathered.
There was a decent number of people in attendance: fifty-two, more than she’d have expected. Then again, the last time Louisa had attended a public forum on local issues was never. Jaffrey was talking, outlining what might be challenges, might be opportunities – he was big on proclaiming that it all came down to attitude – and she had to admit he had something. Call it charisma, because people usually did. Whatever it was, it was striking that he could be bothered to turn it on in a local library, uncovered by media; and that he seemed to genuinely care about what he was saying, and so far hadn’t dodged any questions, which ranged from residents’ parking issues to the possible fate of the library itself, which was looking at closure. Louisa should feel worse about that, but she was already mentally ticking it off her spreadsheet: at least she’d be spared having to study the lending stats for its terrorism section.
As for the crowd, she wasn’t expecting a killer to erupt from its midst. It would include a police officer: plain-clothes, probably not armed – the country might have been in a heightened state of tension since Abbotsfield, but that had been indiscriminate violence, and there was nothing to suggest politicians were in greater danger than at any time in the recent past. But Jaffrey had a national profile, and he was a Muslim: there were always going to be those who saw either as inflammatory. A police force with one eye on its reputation would keep the other on its local heroes, so the crowd included a police officer, which she guessed was either the Asian woman in the front row – petite but handy-looking, if you knew the signs – or the bulky man doing his best not to look bored a few seats to her left. There was also a pair who might be from Jaffrey’s own team among the audience: young, male and female, very watchful, very engaged. At first sight, Louisa pegged them as the two most likely, and her heart had accelerated. But when the male half got up to help an elderly woman with her bag, she’d relaxed. Terrorists came in all shapes and sizes, but helping the aged wasn’t the standard package.