Lamb had found a lighter somewhere, and lit his cigarette at last. ‘So I got Ho – and I have to tell you, he might be a twat, but he’s a talented twat. I keep expecting him to start firing ping-pong balls – so anyway, I got Ho to look at who else might have been having lunch there same days as you, and guess whose credit card he found?’ He exhaled smoke, making sure it blew in her direction. ‘Bullingdon Fopp. Bespoke PR services to rich tossers everywhere, in the shape of one Peter Judd. Now, why was I not surprised at his name cropping up? UK politics’ hardy perineum.’
Taverner winced. ‘I assume you mean perennial.’
‘You can assume all you like. I’m saying he’s somewhere between an arsehole and a—’
‘Jesus, Lamb!’ She shook her head. ‘He’s a member of the club. Him being there means nothing.’
‘Yeah, shut up. So here’s what I’m thinking. Peter Judd bankrolled the Kazan operation, presumably for reasons of his own. Nothing to do with the hit itself. More to do with the power and influence that come with buying First Desk.’
‘He hasn’t bought me.’
‘Oh believe me, Diana, he owns every last fucking inch of you.’
There was a waterborne scuffle a hundred yards down the canaclass="underline" some ducks seeing to business. She let the noise distract her, as if its very irrelevance were an escape hatch; as if this reminder that the world contained a million other moments, all of them happening right this second, rendered her own situation no more meaningful than anyone else’s. But it was difficult to maintain that illusion with Jackson Lamb next to her. More than bones might soon be broken. And she recognised, out of nowhere, that looping prayer that had earlier leaked from a houseboat. ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’. It was music, that was all. Music folded so carefully into the dark that it might have been just another city noise; the misplaced optimism of a terminal case.
Lamb said, ‘You invited him in and now he’ll sell everything that’s not nailed down, the way his kind always do. And Slough House isn’t nailed down. So do you want to forget about those fucking ducks for a minute and concentrate on the big issue? You pissed off the GRU when you took out one of their agents, and they’re looking to even the blood count. And thanks to Peter Judd, or someone like him, they’ve decided Slough House fits the bill.’ He flicked his cigarette in the direction of the canal, and for a moment it was a tiny rocket, leaving stars in its wake. Then it was only a hiss. ‘So this is where we are. And because I’m a people person, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you one chance to decide whose side you’re on. And before you do that, here’s a tip. Whatever rules this wet-job crew are playing by? So am I.’
Firing that cigarette into the dark might have been a mistake; he hadn’t anywhere near finished it. But another had appeared in his fist already, and he aimed it at her as if staring down its barrel.
‘Start talking.’
And Diana did just that.
When his phone buzzed with Catherine’s text, Blake’s grave. Now, River switched it off and removed the battery one-handed; left the parts on the passenger seat. Gone dark. It seemed to fit.
There are states in which all moods become possible at once: fear and fury, grief and excitement, dread, bewilderment, and a sudden deep attachment to something which might already have slipped away. River had spent these last years missing Sid, though he hadn’t known how much until now; the knowledge had arrived hand in hand with the awareness that she might have been taken away again. So he was driving too fast through darkness, the sky having deepened from blue to near-black, and the lane ahead, narrowed by his headlights’ focus, was a constantly swirling channel hedged on both sides by a blurry green mass. He was tensed to brake, but desperate not to. They were minutes ahead of him, in a possibly white car. XTH??? The number plate hardly mattered. The first car to swim into his vision would be the one he was chasing. There’d been nowhere to turn off, not without plunging into an unlit field.
They looked surprised when I said she was in there. They thought the house was empty.
Two of them, ‘from the hospital’. They’d come looking, the same way they had come looking in Cumbria, though this time they hadn’t expected to find Sid, which must mean they’d been looking for River. That bore thinking about, but not right this minute; for now, all he had to do was catch up, before they did whatever it was that missionaries did. Which River doubted involved saving souls, though it might include liberating them from the flesh.
Fear and fury, grief and excitement. Because he could not deny there was exhilaration in this; the pleasure of hot pursuit, a live mission. River’s brief tenure at the Park seemed a decade ago, and the long days at Slough House since must have seen slow poison feeding into him, because even now, with Sid’s life at stake, there was part of him that was glad this was happening. He tried to banish the thought, but couldn’t. He was glad this was happening, because the life he’d led since exile from the Park was not the life intended for him, not the one his grandfather had prepared him for. The O.B. had never wanted First Desk for himself, preferring to be the power behind the swivel chair, but he’d wanted it for River. That was the unspoken dream, present in the silences between the stories he’d told, but he’d never realised that it was the stories themselves River craved to be part of – that it was the danger he yearned for, not the satisfaction of moving pieces around the board. River didn’t want to be the storyteller. He wanted to be living in the tale. And if he’d had flashes, these last few years, of the ice in the soul required to plot an enemy’s destruction, he was just now learning the corruption that action demanded, the addictive joy in abandoning scruple and surrendering to the chase, even when someone you loved was in danger.
Which was the thought he was having when he took the corner way too fast and met the oncoming car.
The ducks concluded their meeting with some acrimony and adjourned, all parties seething. As Diana finished her account of her dealings with Peter Judd and the angels, their noise was being enfolded within the evening’s other disturbances: the traffic in the near-distance, and the aimless chatter of pedestrians on the road above, muffled by trees, so their language had no more clarity than that of the ducks.
When the girl had come to her – Ashley Khan; in her sixth month of training, and no guarantee she’d reach her seventh, not after tonight’s encounter – Diana had considered sending the Dogs out, to bring Lamb in under heavy manners. And then reality kicked in: if Lamb was breaking bones just to show her he was serious, then he was monumentally pissed off. Which meant he knew that his former team was being hunted down, and was looking for someone to blame. And given his talent for mayhem, and the tightrope she was currently walking, it would be safer to have him hear the facts from her than find them out for himself.
The ducks’ departure had left the canal as ruffled as an unmade bed, which now quietly made itself before her eyes.
‘Not just Judd, then,’ said Lamb after a while. ‘You’ve got a whole coven of the fuckers.’
‘Businessmen. Entrepreneurs. Concerned about our national security.’
Even as she was saying the words, she could feel their hollowness. Lamb possibly noticed this too, as his immediate response was another fart.
‘Judd’s no fan of Slough House,’ he said. ‘Last time we locked horns, I seem to remember he ended up a butler short.’