“And where is he now?”
“Downstairs. Mr. Duffy’s talking to him.”
It was a frequently regretted state of affairs, being talked to by Mr. Duffy.
She said, “Is there any obvious reason for—what was his name?”
“Cartwright. River Cartwright.”
“Any obvious reason for Cartwright’s presence?”
“He’s Slough House, ma’am.”
“That’s context, certainly. I’m not sure it’s a reason. Okay, let’s let Mr. Duffy deal with it. Have him call me when he’s done.”
Cartwright, she thought. Grandson of, if she wasn’t mistaken.
She shook her head. Probably nothing.
She’d barely picked her pen up before the phone rang again.
Nick Duffy said, “Every morning I wake up and think, who’s going to mess with my karma today? Because there’s always someone. Job like mine, you rarely get the chance to sit back, read the papers and watch the clock till opening time.”
For a moment River had thought Duffy was going to mime the sitting-back part of that, but the older man knew what he was doing. He tilted the chair slightly was all, then let its legs slam back down. River didn’t blink. This was pantomime. So far, Duffy hadn’t said anything he’d not have said a hundred times before.
“No, because there’s always someone got his tit in a wringer, and it’s Muggins here has to pry it free. Left your Service card in the pub? Let’s have Nick sort it out. Unwise conversation with an over-friendly reptile? Let’s see if Nick can’t smooth over the traces. Shagged the wrong bit of spare at the embassy disco? Don’t worry, Nick’ll throw a fright into her minder. You know the type of thing. We have a code for it in the Dogs. We call it the Really Dumb Shit.”
Hoping to short circuit this, River said, “Am I under arrest?”
“So usually, see, I’m just a glorified au pair, making sure everything’s tidied away nicely, no lasting ramifications, no nasty surprises in the tabloids. But what do we have today? Something special. Somebody’s ambled into the Park on my watch, and thinks they can take the Really Dumb Shit onto a whole new level.”
“Because if I am, I get a phone call, right?”
“And this is a serving agent, I’ll grant you, but one with less security clearance than we give the janitors round here. Because the janitors get up close and personal with some nasty crap.” He shifted position suddenly, and River knew he was changing gear. “Whereas you, Mr. Cartwright, of Slough House, Barbican way, the most classified information you’re privy to is whether the fifty-six bus is on time or not. And you’re only allowed to share that if you get written permission from a superior. Which would be just about anybody, yes? Correct me if I’m wrong.”
River said, “So I don’t get a phone call.”
“Of course you don’t get a fucking phone call. You’ll be lucky to get a blindfold.”
“Because it would be handy to have my phone back. There’s something on it you need to see.”
“What I need and what you think I need are likely to be very different things, Cartwright. Let’s see if I’ve got the order of events straight. You waltz into the Park without authorisation. You drag Ms. Taverner out of a meeting, spout crap about Mr. Webb, a colleague who might be incapacitated but, unlike you, remains an officer of good standing—”
“He wasn’t standing last time I saw him.”
Duffy paused. “You’ve been buddying up to Jackson Lamb for too long. That wasn’t funny and doesn’t help.”
River said, “I came here for a reason.”
“I’m sure you did. But I don’t fucking care. You were found in a restricted access area, and according to Molly Doran you were planning on putting your hands on a classified file. A very classified file. You know the penalty for breaches of the Official Secrets Act?”
“I didn’t breach the Act.”
“Attempted breach. You know the penalty? They’re not going to have you picking up litter, Cartwright. This isn’t some ASBO offence. You’re a member of the Service, a fuck-up member right enough but you carry a card and you’re on the books. Which makes what you did not some petty offence; it puts it into the realm of treason. What were you planning on doing with the file? That’s what I need to know. Who were you planning on selling it to?”
Lamb had taken his shoes off and his office smelled of socks, which was the fourth worst thing Louisa remembered it smelling of. She took a breath, stepped across the threshold and told him what Ho had just told her.
“He’s back at the Park?” Lamb considered this for a moment. “That’d make his grandad proud, if he was still alive.”
“He is still alive, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, but finding out Junior’s been arrested’ll probably kill him,” Lamb said reasonably.
“What makes you think he’s been arrested?”
“If his phone’s blocked, it means he’s downstairs. And if he’s downstairs, it’s not because they’ve opened the dungeons to the public.”
Louisa, remembering tales she’d heard of below-stairs interrogations at the Park, wondered what the hell had River done to wind up there. And how he had managed it so quickly. It was only a couple of hours since they’d both been in the kitchen, making coffee. He’d asked her where Catherine was. And Catherine was still nowhere.
She said, “It’s not a coincidence.”
“What, him and Standish both going AWOL? I doubt it.”
“So what do we do?”
“I do what I always do. And you do whatever you were doing yesterday.” With dexterity surprising in one so large, Lamb raised his right foot and rested it on his left knee. He began massaging it roughly. “Census project, right?”
“So we all just carry on as normal.”
“As if you were normal, yes. Nothing like ambition.” He grabbed a pencil from his desk, and began using it as a scratcher, working it between his toes. “Are you still here?”
“What’ll happen to River?”
“When they’ve finished stripping the flesh from his bones, I expect they’ll send him back. He’ll only make the place untidy otherwise.”
“Seriously.”
“That wasn’t serious? Which part of it did you find funny?”
“You’ve got two joes missing, and you’re just going to sit there making holes in your socks?”
“None of you are joes, Guy. You’re just a bunch of fuck-ups who got lucky.”
“This is lucky?”
Lamb’s lip curled. “I didn’t say what kind of luck.”
He tossed the pencil back onto the desk, where it kept on rolling until it dropped off the other side.
Louisa said, “We’re not joes, no. But we’re your joes. You know that.”
“Don’t get carried away. This is Slough House. It isn’t Spooks.”
“You’re telling me. It’s barely Jackanory.” She took a step into the room. “But you think something’s happened to Catherine, or you wouldn’t have sent me round to her flat. And whatever River was up to has to have something to do with that. So no, I’m not going back to the census project. Not until you tell me what you’re going to do about it.”
It was dark in Lamb’s room, as usual; he’d closed the blinds and turned his low-wattage desk lamp on. This sat on a pile of telephone directories, long since rendered obsolete, and the shadows it cast mostly confined themselves to floor level, where they crawled about like spiders. The ceiling sloped and the floorboards creaked, and such things as he’d hung on the walls—a cork notice board on which clipped coupons faded to brittle yellow dustiness, like the corpses of pinned moths, and a smeary-glassed print of a bridge over a foreign-looking river, which had almost certainly come from a charity shop—served to underline the general creepiness. It wasn’t a cosy atmosphere he aimed for, and the look he directed at Louisa now underlined that fact.