Taverner said, “Have you sent anyone looking for this man? The one on the bridge?”
“There was a man, in London, on a bridge, two hours ago,” Duffy said. “We could cordon the city off, I suppose.”
“Talk to me like that again,” Taverner said, without altering her tone, “and you’d happily swap places with Cartwright. What about the woman—Standish?”
“The photo’s on his phone. Like he said.”
“And it came from where?”
“Her phone.”
“Of course it did . . . Any trace?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“How badly have you hurt him?”
“Hardly at all.”
“By your standards, or anyone’s?”
“He might be a slow horse, but he’s not a civilian. He’ll live.”
“Just as well. Lamb can get . . . tetchy when his crew get damaged.”
“I thought he despised his crew.”
“That doesn’t mean he likes other people messing with them. Okay, let Cartwright sweat for the moment. We’ll get word from on high sooner or later.”
“On high?”
“Oh yes. Dame Ingrid’s been summoned to the Home Office And you know how jolly that makes her.”
Cartwright was doing the thing with the finger again. He couldn’t know Duffy was there, obviously, but it was still starting to get on his wick.
He said, “Look. That crack about cordoning off the city. I—”
“You’d just finished putting the leather to someone. It made you feel cocky. Made you feel invulnerable.”
“I guess . . . ”
“Trust me. You’re not.”
Taverner hung up.
Duffy replaced the receiver and stood by the two-way a while longer. Every so often, River Cartwright repeated the finger gesture, but to Duffy’s eye, it looked a little less convincing each time. What was it they used knackered horses for again?—oh yeah: dog food and glue. Give it a while, he’d pop next door and remind Cartwright of that. Meanwhile, he deserved a cup of coffee.
He left the room quietly so the kid wouldn’t hear. The thought of him standing there, repeatedly offering the finger to an empty room, wasn’t quite enough to wipe away the memory of Lady Di’s parting shot, but it didn’t hurt.
There were many thorns in Ingrid Tearney’s garden—the constant need for vigilance; the ever-present threat of terrorism; Diana Taverner—and here was another: a summons from the Home Secretary. Until recently, such phone calls had been a minor nuisance, requiring her to attend the minister’s office and deliver platitudes while maintaining eye contact, as if soothing a worried puppy. But Peter Judd didn’t look to her for reassurance, he sized her up for weaknesses. In company he claimed they got on like a house on fire, but it was clear which of them provided the petrol.
It was Dame Ingrid’s habit to catch the tube into work, but she used her official ride for everything else. It took her now through streets that were wilting in the heat. When the freak weather had started it had splashed the capital in colour, but as hot days turned into baking weeks, brightness had faded like old paint. Greenery died, turning parks brown and lifeless. People scurried now from shadow to shadow, wearing the caved-in expressions of trauma survivors, and greeted rumours of rain like news of a lottery win. That the weather was not normal was a staple of internet traffic. The streets, meanwhile, were cruel reflections of an unforgiving sky, where everything dazzled and everything hurt.
But inside the car frosted air circulated, and to all outward appearance Ingrid Tearney was unruffled by heatwave or grim thoughts. Her summer outfit was new, the fruit of a recent upturn in her finances, and her mannish features were relaxed into a benevolent-seeming mask. She looked like the friendly grandmother, the one who offers oranges, but behind that mask steam valves hissed. Judd’s telephone summons had come from the man himself instead of the usual lackey, but he’d given no clue as to what it was about. His tone, though, had reeked of triumph. Whatever game he was about to play, he’d been dealt a useful hand.
Still, let the chips fall. Dame Ingrid didn’t negotiate with politicians.
Unless they had her by the throat.
At the minister’s residence, the front door was opened by a pretty young man with the faintest hint of a lisp. Nobody doubted Judd’s heterosexuality, which was as enthusiastic as it was indiscriminate, but his entourage tended towards the fey—Judd hadn’t dubbed them his camp followers for nothing. It was always possible the quip had occurred to him first, and he’d chosen his retinue accordingly.
“Dame Ingrid,” he said now, as she entered his office.
“Home Secretary.”
“I’ve taken the liberty.”
Which sounded like a bullet-point summary of his Home Office tenure to date, but was in fact a reference to the tea tray on a nearby table.
Following his guide, she sat in an armchair. The room, she noted, remained much as it had done during his predecessor’s ministry, which is to say that not only was it still walnut-panelled, book-lined and Turkish-rugged, but that Judd hadn’t even bothered to have the art changed: some drab nature morts, a few sea battles, and a large and politically obsolete globe. Given Judd’s tendency to leave his stamp on things, Tearney took this as a clue that he didn’t expect to remain here long. Which had been true of his predecessor too, but for a diametrically opposite reason.
“Milk? Sugar?”
She shook her head.
Peter Judd poured, placed cup and saucer on a table by her elbow, and lowered himself into the chair opposite.
He was a bulky man, not fat, but large, and though he had turned fifty the previous year, retained the schoolboy looks and fluffy-haired manner that had endeared him to the British public and made him a staple on the less-challenging end of the TV spectrum: interviews conducted on sofas, by scripted comedians. Through persistence, connections and family wealth, he’d established a brand—“a loose cannon with a floppy fringe and a bicycle”—that set him head and shoulders above the rest of his party, and if the occasional colleague had attempted to lop that head off those shoulders in the interests of political unity, they’d yet to find the axe to do the job. Tearney’s own file on him was long on speculation, short on facts. So clean of cobwebs, in fact, that she was sure he’d airbrushed his past of serious sins as carefully as he arranged his haystack of hair.
He was eyeing her now in a manner that suggested he was about to enjoy what followed.
“So, minister,” she said, never keen on being made to sign her own punishment slips. “What seems to be your problem today?”
“Oh, I have no problems. Only a bagful of solutions awaiting opportunities.”
She pretended not to sigh, or at least, pretended she didn’t want him to notice her trying not to. “So this is social? It’s always a pleasure, Minister, but I am somewhat busy.”
“So I gather. Bit of a rumpus over your way this morning, what?”
“Rumpus” was a favourite PJ-word; one he’d employed to describe a recent tabloid splash about his friendship with a lap dancer. It was also a term he’d used in reference to both 9/11 and the global recession.
“What sort of, ah, rumpus would this be?”
“An incursion.”
He meant the Cartwright business, she realised. Which was unimportant and without consequence, which meant there was something to it she wasn’t yet aware of.
“I’d hardly call it an incursion,” she said. “An off-site agent lost his bearings. The Park can be disorienting.”