“Where’s Cartwright gone?” Lamb said suspiciously.
“Bathroom?” said Shirley.
“That’s your answer for everything this morning. Something you want to share with us?”
“I’ll go look.”
“Stay bloody there! Another member of staff goes missing, I’ll lose my deposit.” He bellowed again, this time for River, but River didn’t appear either.
In the quiet that followed, Louisa thought she could hear the windowpanes ringing.
“Jesus wept,” said Lamb at last. “It’s not like I’m not glad to see the back of you, but we’re supposed to be a functioning department.”
Marcus snorted, but it might have been hay fever.
“Right,” said Lamb. “Enough of this. You”—he indicated Louisa—“go find Standish. And if she’s face down in a pool of sick, I want photos. And you two”—this was Marcus and Shirley—“find out where Cartwright’s got to and bring him back.”
“By force?”
“Shoot him if you have to. I’ll sign off on it.”
Leaving Roderick Ho.
“I’ll go with Louisa,” he said.
“No you won’t. She can screw up on her own. With you to help, it’ll just take longer.”
The others were already heading downstairs, but Ho lingered at the door and looked back.
“What?”
Ho said, “That’s because an idiot wouldn’t have checked as carefully as I did.”
“Well, you’ve saved yourself a stamp. Feeling better?”
Ho nodded.
“Good,” said Lamb. “Now fuck off.”
The incoming message had been from Catherine’s phone, and River had opened it heading down the stairs, still congratulating himself on a neat escape. He was expecting a brief explanation for absence: late-running tube, sudden illness, alien invasion. What he read instead was an even briefer summons—
Pedestrian bridge. Now.
Which didn’t sound like the Catherine Standish he knew.
An attachment came with it and he paused on the landing while it effortfully opened—it took half a second to work out what he was looking at: a woman, handcuffed, gagged, like a come-on for an amateur porn site except she was fully clothed and, Jesus, it was Catherine . . .
Why the hell would anyone take Catherine?
Pedestrian bridge.
Now.
There was only one pedestrian bridge it could be; not a dozen yards away, spanning the road between the tube station and the Barbican. And before checking it out there were alarm bells to ring: slow horse or not Catherine was an agent of the security service, and Regent’s Park ran a full-court press when one of their own came under threat . . . As for Lamb, he’d hang River out to dry if he took another step without putting him in the picture. That was something to think about, so River thought about it as he stuffed the phone away, and took the rest of the stairs three at a time.
It was already stifling outside, the heat much worse in the mouldy backyard. Round the alley and out on the street, and there was a man on the bridge, looking down on the traffic like all this activity amused him . . . Too far away to make out his face, but that was the impression River gained, as he ran up the road, through the station entrance, up the stairs and onto the bridge.
One hand on its railing, the man was waiting for him, and River had been right: he did look kind of amused. He was fiftyish, lean, in a suit the colour of early mist; his dark hair tinged with silver. His yellow tie might have come from a club; his superior smirk, he’d have had drummed into him about halfway through Eton or wherever. And he wore rings on both little fingers, confirming one of River’s deepest prejudices.
At River’s approach, he removed his hand from the railing. Extended it, as if expecting a handshake.
Instead, River took him by the lapels. “Where’s Catherine?”
“She’s perfectly safe.”
“Not what I asked you.” River drew him closer. “Answer carefully. Speak slowly.”
“She’s. Perfectly. Safe.”
Making a joke of it; in vowels, if not cut glass, at least precision-tooled.
River shook him like a stick. “The photo showed her handcuffed. With a rag in her mouth.”
“To get your attention. You’re here, aren’t you?”
“On a bridge above a busy road, yes. You want to go over that railing?”
That earned a broader smirk. “You’re not going to tell me you don’t know how this works, are you? Ms. Standish is safe and will continue to be so provided I make a phone call within the next thirty seconds. So I rather think you’d better stand back, don’t you?”
Over grey-suit’s shoulder, River saw a couple on the street below pause, and one of them point their way.
He loosened his grip.
“That’s better. Much more civilised.”
“Don’t push it.”
The man produced a phone and exchanged a few brief words with someone. That done, he put the phone away and said, “So you’re River Cartwright. Unusual name.”
“It means someone who makes carts.”
“Ms. Standish said she trusted you. With her life, as it happens.”
“Where is she?”
A mock-sad shake of the head. “Let’s move on to how you get her back, shall we?”
He was enjoying this too much, River thought. As if whatever it was he wanted was secondary to the method of acquiring it.
“What are you after?”
“Information.”
“About what?”
“You don’t need to know about what. You simply have to steal it.”
“Or?”
“Do you really want me to go into details? Very well . . . ”
He paused and River knew, without turning, that someone was behind him. It turned out to be the couple who’d pointed up at them a minute ago. They walked past, trying not to appear curious; maybe civic-minded types who wanted to be sure a violent assault wasn’t underway; maybe locals who were hoping one was. When they reached the Barbican side they looked back, but only once, and then were gone.
“The men holding her have . . . poor impulse control.”
“Impulse control,” River repeated.
“Poor impulse control, yes. I’d say about eighty minutes short of going critical, in fact. If you wanted to put a figure on it.”
River reached out and smoothed down the man’s lapels where his two-fisted grip had crumpled them. “You might want to remember this later,” he said. “That you once found all this funny.”
“Can’t wait. Meanwhile, you have an errand to run. And,” and he looked at his watch, “seventy-nine minutes before those men I mentioned start loosening their belts. Do you want to waste any more of them threatening me?”
“What do you want?” River said.
The man told him.
Two minutes after River left the bridge at a run, Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander emerged from the alley onto Aldersgate Street. Marcus looked one way and Shirley the other. Pedestrians, freshly released from the underground, were trooping across the road at the lights, and more were clustered round the entrance to the gym on the corner. There were buses heading in both directions, and a cyclist who, judging by his disregard for other vehicles, had an organ donor card and was in a hurry to use it; there was a woman in Council livery pushing a dustcart their way, and a man in a grey suit observing all this from the pedestrian bridge into the Barbican. But there was no sign of River Cartwright.
“See him?” Marcus asked.
“Nope,” said Shirley. “You?”
“Nope.” He paused, allowing River one last opportunity to reveal himself, then said, “Fancy an ice cream?”
“Yeah, all right,” Shirley said.
They headed off towards Smithfield, where they were less likely to be spotted.