Sid woke alone, late morning, and spoke his name. No reply. She was about to call louder, but thought better of it. All was quiet, and as broken memories of yesterday assembled themselves in her mind – driving a knife into the man’s chin; drowning the woman in the lake – it seemed better to leave it that way. He was upstairs. Or had gone to the village for food. She was ravenous, she noticed. Food would be good.
But he wasn’t in the bathroom, as she ascertained quite swiftly; nor did he reappear in the study during her absence. Next thing she did was draw the curtains, and let the day in. It was like charging a battery – rooms left dark become crabbed and pokey. They need light to remember what they are. This was a simple formula to apply to herself, and hard not to touch a hand to the groove in her head while doing so. Her muttering bullet was gone; no Hercule Poirot voice in her head. It might return, but for now she was on her own.
On her own, back in the world, and with decisions to make.
She’d already made some. She would not be returning to Cumbria, for a start; nor resuming the identity she’d been assigned during her recovery. That had been a non-person; a shell she’d never filled. Nor had she been Sid Baker, or not so anyone would notice. She’d been a character absent from the stage, her dialogue mere gaps in the conversation. Action had been elsewhere. After yesterday, she didn’t want to see action again. But she thought she was ready to be Sid Baker once more.
Last night, she’d talked with Shirley Dander while River and Lech Wicinski had returned to the scene of the slaughter.
‘You’ve been living here?’
‘Staying here.’
‘But it’s full of books.’
Said as if this precluded anything Shirley might think of as living. Or perhaps even just staying.
‘Think of it as being well insulated,’ Sid suggested.
‘Did you kill them both?’
‘No.’
‘Did River?’
‘We got lucky.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ said Shirley. ‘Except they were professionals, know what I mean? The number of people who got lucky before you is zero.’
Which, as far as Sid was concerned, made her very lucky indeed. Though Shirley had seemed impressed.
Jane and Jim had been dispatched on a vengeance tour, titting the Park’s tat, as Shirley had put it with a Lamb-like leer; the Park’s crime having been to assassinate one of those responsible for last year’s outrage, a ham-fisted episode Sid had followed in the press during her Cumbrian interlude. The target then had been a pair of Russian ex-pats, but two British civilians had wandered into the line of fire, one of whom had died. The murder method had created headlines worldwide: the smearing of a toxic substance – Novichok – on a doorknob.
Well, if she was back in the world, this was the world she was in.
Shirley Dander had been jittery, and possibly high. Lech Wicinski’s scars were plain to see, but he was hiding behind them all the same. Min Harper was dead, as were others who’d come along after, but Louisa Guy was still a slow horse; Roderick Ho remained Roddy Ho, and Catherine Standish still carried the keys. As for Lamb, Sid could only assume he was unchanged, self-damage notwithstanding, because without Jackson Lamb there’d be no Slough House. Slough House was the stage and those were the actors, and all the time she’d been emerging from her head wound River had been living among them, mostly bound to the same old beat – the paperwork, the pointless chores, the soul-killing drudgery – but occasionally, just occasionally, finding himself on the sharp end too.
Which was an end Sid knew about. She’d found her own on a rainy pavement in London, years ago; had nearly found it again last night, hiding in this very room while the couple she and River later killed had rattled the doorknob at the front, tapped the glass round back, like evil figures in an adult fairy tale. Then spirited Sid away. We could finish it here in the car. Which will be messier, but we can do that if you prefer. Making an invitation of a death sentence …
She uncurled from the O.B.’s chair and stretched. A gust of wind shook the windowpane, and she startled at the interruption, an echo of last night’s haunting. The bell had rung, and then once more. And the flap on the letterbox had jangled, and Sid had imagined the pair taking it in turns to drop to one knee and peer into the hallway.
Life went quiet again, the only disturbance the faint rattling of a doorknob.
The thought broke the morning in two.
Rattling the doorknob …
Where was River?
There was a traffic jam, because there were always traffic jams, because this was London; a thought so familiar that someone might already have had it this morning. Cantor was lying flat on the back seat, being driven by the nameless man whose cheeks were ribboned with scars, a walking indication that bad choices produce bad outcomes.
A hooting horn provoked more hooting horns. This too was London: everyone wanting to be heard, even when they had nothing to say.
‘Are we being followed?’ he asked. The man made a foreign noise in reply, so he said it again. ‘Are we being followed?’
‘… Nyet.’
‘Who was she?’
He knew the answer, but needed to hear it anyway.
‘From Regent’s Park.’
So Taverner had sent someone to collect him.
Taverner wants you toasted both sides …
It was possible he’d made a tactical error.
The woman at the Needle couldn’t cross the road for traffic, and the scarred man had used the delay to hustle Cantor round the corner and push him into this car. Things could happen so quickly, they felt like a good idea. And now they were on the move again, albeit in a jerky, arrhythmical manner, Cantor’s head banging against the seat while he tried to reconstruct his earlier frame of mind: Taverner was throwing a scare, hoping he’d jump at shadows. But the shadows seemed solider now, and here he was, jumping at them.
A sharp corner, and a guttural apology from the front: ‘Excuse.’
Cantor said, ‘Where are you taking me?’
An audible shrug from the front seat. ‘Somewhere safe.’
‘Why?’
‘You help us. We help you.’
But I didn’t mean to help you, thought Cantor. I was just trading favours. I didn’t mean to end up hiding in a car, evading capture by the British Secret Service.
Bad choices produce bad outcomes …
The man spoke again. ‘There are no worries. My people and your people, they’ll iron out their difficulties. And then you’ll go back to making your news programmes, and helping my people too, yes? No harm done.’
‘I’m not … I don’t work for your people. I was doing a favour for a contact, that’s all.’
‘So you do more favours.’
‘No, that’s not … This has all been a misunderstanding. I’m not going to be doing any favours.’
There was silence. Then: ‘It’s not a good time to be telling me this. Not when I’m helping you.’
The car jerked to a halt. When Cantor peeped through the window a young Chinese man was hopping onto the pavement, as if he’d been safeguarding a parking space. ‘We’re here,’ the driver said. Here was Soho, a familiar street whose name evaded Cantor right that moment, his mind still reeling. He clambered out. There were people everywhere – London, London – but nobody was paying attention, or if they were, were doing so in a successfully covert way. There was an open door, leading into an apparently abandoned shop. ‘Quickly.’ So quickly it was: through the door, into an empty retail space. The young Chinese man had disappeared, but in front of Cantor stood a short, wide woman. ‘Upstairs,’ she said, in what sounded to Cantor like a bad-movie German accent.