So all four of them set about looking idle, because looking busy, they’d learned to their cost, meant that as far as Lamb was concerned, they were up to no good.
But it wasn’t Lamb who appeared a minute later, it was River.
The Thames looked low. Years gone by, there were stories of the river freezing; of ice fairs thrown in the shadows of the bridges, and skaters weaving past long-lived landmarks, but Sean Donovan didn’t remember hearing it had ever dried up. When that day came, the stink would surely drive the capital out of its mind.
If that hadn’t already happened. The fury of the pace, the anger of the traffic, had a sociopathic buzz.
And think of the secrets that would come to light, when the cracked, flaking ooze of the riverbed lay exposed to view. Everything the Establishment tried to flush away, to drown in the dark; it would all lie choking in the sunshine. There’d be nowhere to hide anything.
He was standing under a tree on the Embankment. The tree was sad and brown, and offered little in the way of shade; the Embankment was cloaked with CCTV coverage, and offered nothing in the way of privacy. But Donovan had faith in organisational chaos, and knew that while a match would eventually be made between the figure loitering here, early for an appointment, and the hooded man abandoning a van from which a body had been dumped a mile or so distant, this wouldn’t happen for some time yet. He checked his watch as if to verify this, then looked up at the sky. The sun was working on plan B; the one where it cut the crap, and just frazzled everything in reach.
Momentarily dazzled, he didn’t see Ben Traynor until the soldier was upon him.
“Sean.”
Though they’d parted only hours ago, they shook hands.
“All okay?”
“I’m fine,” Donovan said. “The woman?”
“Stop worrying. It’s a rest cure.” Traynor glanced round, a 360-degree sweep. He saw nothing to alarm him. “And Monteith? Not a happy bunny, I presume.”
Not a happy bunny at all, Donovan thought.
He said, “Ben, it went wrong. My fault.”
“How wrong?”
“The worst.”
Traynor nodded. He glanced away again, towards the South Bank, and his eyes clouded over as he mentally adjusted to the new situation. Then he looked back at Donovan.
“Okay,” he said. “So he’s not trussed up in the van, cooking like a chicken. Tell you the truth, Sean, he’s not the biggest loss to humanity.”
“Walk away now,” Donovan said. “Call the kid. Tell him it’s over. He knows the drill.”
“Aye, and what then? We’ve come this far.”
“Kidnapping was bad enough. Murder’s over the line.”
“What did you do, snap his worthless neck?”
“He made a break for it, for Christ’s sake. Have to hand it to the little bugger. I thought he’d fold and whimper.”
“We’d all expect that.”
“I caught him. Hit him. One punch, you know?”
“You don’t know your own strength.”
Donovan probably did, near as damn it. What he hadn’t taken into account was his anger, the constant companion of the last few years, always glowering below the surface. Anger had been at his elbow in the car park, making sure he didn’t pull his punch. He’d hit Monteith as hard as he’d ever hit anything. Even as he’d made contact, he’d known things had tipped over an edge.
A passing siren caught their attention, but it was an ambulance. Some poor sod collapsed in the heat. He waited until its clangour was wrapped inside the city’s other noise, then said, “You’re still here.”
“We can still make it work.”
“Maybe. Maybe. But we won’t walk away from it.”
“Sean,” Traynor said. “We were never going to be able to walk away from it.”
River Cartwright felt as if he’d had his insides scooped out, tossed like a salad, then reinserted any which way. Trying to move naturally, but keep himself from jostling, he looked like he was balancing an invisible egg on his head.
Nick Duffy had known what he was doing.
“Your grandfather won’t be around forever,” he’d told River as he’d escorted him out of the Park.
River was still dazed by the sudden turnaround in his fortunes. “What’s that mean?” He was clutching his phone in one hand; his self-respect in the other. Any unexpected movement, and he’d lose his grip on one or both.
“Someone pulled your nuts out of the fire. And it’s not like you’ve any friends round here.”
“And everyone speaks so highly of you.”
“Take some advice.” Duffy dropped an arm round River’s shoulders in a gesture that might have looked like friendship, from a distance. He squeezed, knowing where to apply pressure. “Don’t bother going back to Slough House. All those forms and pointless reports, they must be doing your head in. So just fucking give up, why don’t you? Try something else, like maybe McDonald’s. Pretend you don’t speak English, they’ll take you like a shot. Because your spook career? It’s deader than your mate Spider.”
“He’s not dead.”
“No, but they hold a mirror to his lips every morning, to check.”
They were out of the door by this time, over the road from the park, in which mothers wheeled prams, and some mad joggers ran, but mostly people slumped in groups in whatever shade they could find. Whether it was torpor or tranquillity, it felt strange to be looking on it while hearing thinly veiled threats.
River said, “My grandfather’s into his eighties. Some days he has difficulty on the stairs, you know? When his joints are troubling him.”
“You’re not gonna be taking them two at a time yourself any time soon.”
“But on his worst day, he’d scrape you from his shoe without a second thought,” said River, and he’d walked off down the road arms swinging freely by his sides, hardly at all like someone who’d recently had a professional going-over. He was round the corner before he’d dropped between parked cars and vomited into the gutter.
And now he was back in Slough House.
“We thought you were Lamb.”
“Thanks.”
Louisa said, “You’ve been at the Park. Why’d they let you go?”
“I don’t know. Catherine still missing?”
Marcus said, “Do you know where she is?”
River showed them his phone.
Louisa took it and moved nearer the window, holding it at an angle to the light. The picture didn’t change—Catherine, handcuffed, gagged, sitting on a bed.
“So that’s why you went haring off to HQ?”
But River was looking at Ho’s monitors. “Who’s that bastard?”
“I don’t like you walking behind me,” Ho said.
“Name’s Sylvester Monteith,” said Louisa. “What makes him a bastard?”
“He’s the one took Catherine. How come you’ve got him onscreen?”
“I don’t like you—”
“Shut up.”
Marcus said, “His body was just dumped in SW1.”
“Someone killed him?”
“They were fly-tipping too. Don’t leave that out.”
River wasn’t in the mood. “He was on the bridge. Earlier. He’s the one sent me to the Park. He wanted a file.”
Marcus remembered a figure on the bridge when he and Shirley went looking for River and found ice creams instead. Probably best not to mention that now, or ever.
Louisa said, “If he took Catherine and he’s dead now, what’s happened to her?”
Shirley took the phone, and studied the picture.
River said, “This bastard wanted the PM’s vetting file.”
“Did you get it?”
“Not hardly.”
“She’s sitting up,” Shirley said.
“What?”
“Catherine. In this photo. She’s sitting up.”