River remembered again, second time in as many days, sharing this room with Sid Baker: that was the last time the office had heard this much conversation. Well, argument. He said, ‘We sit here much longer, I’m going to start throwing things through the window.’ Beginning with you, he didn’t say. ‘If you’re so keen on constructing a more favourable narrative, what’s your game plan?’
‘“Constructing a more favourable narrative”?’
‘I read the Guardian,’ said River. ‘Well, sometimes. Well, the cartoons.’
Coe said, ‘What happened today’s part of the Abbotsfield sequence. That’s the narrative. Tattoo guy, Zafar Jaffrey’s man – he’s mixed up in that bigger picture. We were trying to foil him.’
River realised Shirley was in the doorway, her left hand curled into a fist – gripping something – and her right leaning against the door frame.
‘Come up with a plan yet?’ she asked.
‘I was thinking, prayer,’ he said.
‘That’s your best option,’ she agreed. ‘But you’re still fucked.’
‘Yeah. But thanks for the pep talk.’
‘Want a Haribo?’
‘Is this your idea of constructive help? Because I have to tell you—’
‘You need to find Kim,’ she said.
‘Ho’s girlfriend?’
Shirley said, ‘She’s the one he passed the Watering Hole paper to. She’s the one with the connection to the Abbotsfield crew. Find her, you find them. Probably.’
Coe said, ‘Ho’s been at the Park all afternoon. Anything he can tell them about Kim he’ll have told them, in which case they’ll already have her or they can’t find her. Probably because she’s already dead.’
Shirley said, ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘You get a lot perkier after killing someone.’ She tucked whatever she was holding into her jeans pocket. ‘Lamb’ll probably adopt it as office policy.’
Coe ignored her. To River, he said, ‘They tried to kill Ho. Stands to reason they’ll have cut the other loose thread by now.’
‘That’s what you would have done, is it?’ said Shirley.
‘What’s what who would have done?’ Louisa stepped past Shirley and came into the room.
River said, ‘Oh, we’re just discussing the office rota. You know, whose turn it is to wash up. Who Coe’s going to kill next. That sort of thing.’
‘We watched Kim the other night. She’s pretty fly,’ said Shirley.
‘I don’t speak disco.’
‘I mean, they tried to kill Ho, and couldn’t even manage that. And he can barely tie his laces. So I think they’d have had trouble whacking Kim. She seemed pretty … smart.’
Coe was looking something up: woman found dead in her London home. He read the headline out. Then said, ‘Black?’
‘Not Kim then,’ said Shirley.
Louisa said, ‘You’re thinking if we can find her we can trace the Abbotsfield crew.’
‘Or at least get some idea of what they might try next,’ said River.
‘Seize the media,’ said Shirley. ‘That could be anything. You’re basically seizing the media if you buy a newspaper these days.’
And now Catherine was with them. ‘Have you tried checking his phone?’
‘I assume it’s at the Park,’ said River. ‘With Ho.’
‘I think he’s got two.’
Coe gave River a told-you-so look.
Shirley said, ‘Yeah, but one of them might be a bit broken.’
‘If it’s still got its SIM card, we can use it,’ said Louisa.
But Ho’s broken phone – the one Shirley had sent flying the previous day, ‘saving his life,’ as she reminded them – provided no clues, even once they tracked it down to his desk drawer: Kim’s number, listed as ‘Kim (Girlfriend)’, yielded only that empty, echoless silence signalling unequivocal departure.
‘Told you she was fly,’ said Shirley.
‘Or dead,’ added Coe.
‘Either way,’ said Louisa, ‘our chances of finding her are like a one-legged man’s in an arse-kicking contest.’
‘Who organises those events, that’s what I want to know,’ Shirley complained. ‘And when are they gonna tighten up the entry criteria?’
Catherine said, ‘Any other bright ideas?’, and said it with the air of a primary school teacher scraping the barrel but keeping a brave face regardless.
‘They’re in a hurry,’ said River at last. ‘It’s all kicked off very quickly.’
‘Because they have no backup,’ Louisa said.
They looked at her, but Coe was nodding.
She went on, ‘They’re racing the clock so they get to the end before they’re caught. Because if they don’t finish the plan, nobody’s going to finish it for them.’
Catherine said, ‘That explains why they’ve taken shortcuts. The bomb on the train, that fizzled out. Ticking things off the list matters more than doing them right.’
‘So whatever media strike they’re planning, they’re going to implement it as soon as they possibly can.’
‘Which means it’s already been scheduled,’ said J. K. Coe.
‘Hardly narrows things down,’ River said.
But Shirley had brightened again. ‘We found them once,’ she said. ‘We can do it again.’
‘Remind me where we found them?’
‘They were in a van,’ she said stubbornly. ‘In Birmingham.’
‘Are you sure you were in Birmingham? You got back very fast.’
‘Louisa was driving.’
Louisa shrugged modestly.
Catherine said, ‘So let’s work on the assumption Kim’s still alive. She’s discovered she’s expendable, and she’s gone to ground. But she is, as Shirley claims, pretty smart. So where would she hide?’
‘The last place they’d look,’ said Louisa.
‘And where might that be?’
River said, ‘Ho’s place.’
11
THERE WERE STILL GLASS splinters in the gutter, their brief brilliance catching the eye when the angle was right, but the house itself was in darkness. The curtains were undrawn, though the big broken window had been boarded over, the resulting black eye adding to the air of vacancy. Crime scene tape sealed the door. It looked like a property about to succumb to dereliction: give it a week, River thought, it would be festooned with graffiti, and occupied by crusties, dogs and mice.
They’d arrived in the same two cars, Louisa’s and Ho’s. Same pairings, too. ‘Why split up a winning combination?’ Louisa had asked. River had spent the journey working on a comeback; now they were here, his attention was focused on the fact that the spare keys taped beneath Ho’s desk hadn’t included one for his front door. Shirley, though, was already forging ahead. River expected her to kick the door in, or headbutt it into submission. Instead, having ripped away the tape, she produced a set of keys and tried each in turn. The third worked.
‘… You’ve got keys to Ho’s house?’
‘They were Marcus’s.’
‘… Marcus had keys to Ho’s house?’
‘Duh.’ Shirley waggled the key ring. ‘Universals?’
Marcus hadn’t always kicked doors down. Sometimes he’d gone the quiet way.
They trooped into the house, and fell to whispering.
‘The Dogs have been,’ River said. This was obvious: there were traces of official, inquisitive presence – drawers hanging open; spaces where electrical equipment had sat. It was an article of faith that anything you could plug in could transmit data: even toasters weren’t above suspicion. Roderick Ho had had a lot of kit, and now he had a lot of empty shelves.
Louisa said, ‘Well, I damn well hope so. That’s their job.’