Dead proud.
Beneath her, Roddy yelled, ‘You stupid cow!’
The internet was full of whispers.
No, River Cartwright thought. Scratch that.
The internet was screaming its head off, as usual.
He was on a Marylebone-bound train, returning to London after having taken the morning off: care leave, he’d claimed it, though Lamb preferred ‘bloody liberty’.
‘We’re not the social services.’
‘We’re not Sports Direct either,’ Catherine Standish had pointed out. ‘If River needs the morning off, he needs it.’
‘And who’s gonna pick up his workload in the meantime?’
River hadn’t done a stroke of work in three weeks, but didn’t think this a viable line of defence. ‘It’ll get done,’ he promised.
And Lamb had grunted, and that was that.
So he’d taken off in the pre-breakfast rush, battling against the commuter tide; heading for Skylarks, the care home where the O.B. now resided; not precisely a Service-run facility – the Service had long since outsourced any such frivolities – but one which placed a higher priority on security than most places of its type.
The Old Bastard, River’s grandfather, had wandered off down the twilit corridors of his own mind, only occasionally emerging into the here and now, whereupon he’d sniff the air like an elderly badger and look pained, though whether this was due to a brief awareness that his grasp on reality had crumbled, or to that grasp’s momentary return, River couldn’t guess. After a lifetime hoarding secrets the old spook had lost himself among them, and no longer knew which truths he was concealing, which lies he was casting abroad. He and his late wife, Rose, had raised River, their only grandchild. Sitting with him in Skylarks’ garden, a blanket covering the old man’s knees, an iron curtain shrouding half his history, River felt adrift. He had followed the O.B.’s footsteps into the Secret Service, and if his own path had been forcibly rerouted, there’d been comfort in the knowledge that the old man had at least mapped the same territory. But now he was orphaned. The footsteps he’d followed were wandering in circles, and when they faltered at last, they’d be nowhere specific. Every spook’s dream was to throw off all pursuers, and know himself unwatched. The O.B. was fast approaching that space: somewhere unknowable, unvisited, untagged by hostile eyes.
It had been a warm morning, bright sunshine casting shadows on the lawn. The house was at the end of a valley, and River could see hills rising in the distance, and tame clouds puffing across a paintbox sky. A train was briefly visible between two stretches of woodland, but its engines were no more than a polite murmur, barely bothering the air. River could smell mown grass, and something else he couldn’t put a name to. If forced to guess, he’d say it was the absence of traffic.
He sat on one of three white plastic chairs arranged around a white plastic table, from the centre of which a parasol jutted upwards. The third chair was vacant. There were two other similar sets of furniture, one unused, the other occupied by an elderly couple. A younger woman was there, addressing them in what River imagined was an efficient tone. He couldn’t actually hear her. His grandfather was talking loudly, blocking out all other conversation.
‘That would have been August fifty-two,’ he was saying. ‘The fifteenth, if I’m not mistaken. A Tuesday. Round about four o’clock in the afternoon.’
The O.B.’s memory was self-sharpening these days. It prided itself on providing minute detail, even if that detail bore only coincidental resemblance to reality.
‘And when the call came in, it was Joe himself on the line.’
‘… Joe?’
‘Stalin, my boy. You’re not dropping off on me, are you?’
River wasn’t dropping off on him.
He thought: this is where life on Spook Street leads. Not long ago the old man’s past had come barking from the shadows and taken large bites out of the present. If this were common knowledge, there would be many howling for retribution. River should be among them, really. But if his own murky beginnings had turned out to be the result of the O.B.’s tampering with the lives of others, they remained his own beginnings. You couldn’t argue yourself out of existence. Besides, there was no way of taking his grandfather to task for past sins now those sins had melted into fictions. The previous week, River had heard a story the old man had never told before, involving more gunfire than usual, and an elaborate series of codenames in notebooks. Ten minutes on Google later revealed that the O.B. had been relaying the plot of Where Eagles Dare.
When the old man’s tale wound itself into silence, River said, ‘Do you have everything you need, Grandad?’
‘Why should I need anything? Eh?’
‘No reason. I just thought you might like something from …’
He tailed off. Something from home. But home was dangerous territory, a subject best avoided. The old man had never been a joe; always a desk man. It had been his job to send agents into the unknown, and run them from what others might think a safe distance. But here he was now, alone in joe country, his cover blown, his home untenable. There was no safe ground. Only this mansion house in a quiet landscape, where the nurses had enough discretion to know that some tales were best ignored.
On the train heading back into London, River shifted in his seat and scrolled down the page of search results. Nice to know that a spook career granted him this privilege: if he wanted to know what was going on, he could surf the web, like any other bastard. And the internet was screaming. The hunt for the Abbotsfield killers continued with no concrete results, though the attack had been claimed by so-called Islamic State. At a late-night session in Parliament the previous evening, Dennis Gimball had lambasted the security services, proclaiming Claude Whelan, Regent’s Park’s First Desk, unfit for purpose; had sailed this close to suggesting that he was, in fact, an IS sympathiser. That this was barking mad was a side issue: recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy, and even the mainstream media had to pretend to take Gimball seriously, just in case. Meanwhile, there were twelve dead in Abbotsfield, and a tiny village had become a geopolitical byword. There’d be a lot more debate, a lot more hand-wringing, before this slipped away from the front pages. Unless something else happened soon, of course.
Nearly there. River closed his laptop. The O.B. would be dozing again by now; enjoying a cat’s afternoon in the sun. Time had rolled round on him, that was all. River was his grandfather’s handler now.
Sooner or later, all the sins of the past fell into the keeping of the present.
‘You stupid cow!’
He’d been thrown sideways and the noise in his head had exploded: manic guitars cut off mid-wail; locomotive drums killed mid-beat. The sudden silence was deafening. It was like he’d been unplugged.
And his prey was nowhere to be seen, obviously. His smartphone was in pieces, its casing a hop-skip-jump away.
It was Shirley Dander who’d leaped on him, evidently unable to control her passion.
She crawled off and pretended to be watching a car disappear along the road. Roddy sat up and brushed at the sleeves of his still new leather jacket. He’d had to deal with workplace harassment before: first Louisa Guy, now this. But at least Louisa remained the right side of her last shaggable day, while Shirley Dander, far as the Rodster was concerned, hadn’t seen her first yet.
‘What the hell was that for?’
‘That was me saving your arse,’ she said, without looking round.
His arse. One-track mind.
‘I nearly had it, you know!’ Pointless explaining the intricacies of a quest to her: the nearest she’d come to appreciating the complexities of gaming was being mistaken for a troll. Still, though, she ought to be made to realise just what a prize she’d cost him, all for the sake of a quick grope. ‘A bulbasaur! You know how rare that is?’