Provided she didn’t get many unexpected moments.
She said, ‘What shape did this op take?’
‘Someone I thought at the time was a bloke, but—’
‘Sidonie Baker,’ Taverner said. Her voice could have cut glass. ‘Jackson Lamb sicced her on a journalist. Robert Hobden.’
Nick Duffy nodded, but she’d put a hole in his morning. It was one thing to bring a bone to the boss. Another to find she’d buried it in the first place. He said, ‘Right. Sure. It was just—’
She gave him a steely look, but give him credit: he didn’t back down.
‘Well, you said yourself. They don’t run ops from Slough House.’
‘It wasn’t an op. It was an errand.’
Which was so nearly what Duffy had told Jed Moody that it startled him for a moment.
Taverner said: ‘Our slow horses, they push pens, when they’re not folding paper. But they can be trusted with petty theft. We’re stretched, Duffy. These are difficult times.’
‘All hands on deck,’ he found himself saying.
‘That would cover it, yes. Anything else?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry to bother you.’
‘Not a bother. Everyone has to be on the ball.’
Duffy turned to go. He was at the door when she spoke again.
‘Oh, and Nick?’
He turned.
‘There are those who’d take it badly if they knew I’d been sub-contracting. They might think it shows lack of faith.’
‘Sure, boss.’
‘Whereas it’s simply a sensible use of resources.’
‘My ears only, boss,’ he said. And left.
Diana Taverner wasn’t one to make marks on paper when she could avoid it. Jed Moody: that wasn’t much to remember.
On the wall-mounted TV, coverage continued: the orange-clad, hooded boy. For tens of thousands around the globe, he’d be the object of pity and prayer by now, and of massive speculation. For Diana Taverner, he was a figure on a board. Had to be. She couldn’t do what she needed to do, the end result of which would be his safe return home, if she allowed herself to be distracted by emotional considerations. She would do her job. Her team would do theirs. The kid would live. End of story.
She rose, gathered her paperwork, and got halfway to the door before returning to her desk, opening a drawer, and locking inside it the memory stick James Webb had given her the previous afternoon. A copy of Hobden’s own memory stick, he’d told her, made by Sid Baker. Safely delivered. Unlooked at. The interim laptop wiped. She’d believed him. If she’d thought he’d look at it, she’d have had a higher opinion of him, but wouldn’t have set him this task.
On the TV, the hooded boy sat in silence, newspaper fluttering. He’d live, she told herself.
Though even Diana Taverner had to admit, he must be scared.
Fear lives in the guts. That’s where it makes its home. It moves in, shifts stuff around; empties a space for itself—it likes the echoes its wingbeats make. It likes the smell of its own farts.
His bravado had lasted about ten minutes by his reckoning, and less than three in reality. Once that was done, his fear rearranged the furniture. He’d voided his bowels into the bucket in the corner; had clenched and unclenched until his guts ached, and long before he’d finished he’d known this wasn’t rag week. Didn’t matter how edgy these bastards thought they were, this was way past playtime. This was where policemen became involved. We were only kidding didn’t play in court.
He didn’t know whether it was day or night. How long had he been in the van? The filming might have been yesterday, or might have been two hours ago. Hell, it might have been tomorrow, and that newspaper a fake, crammed with news that hadn’t happened yet …
Concentrate. Keep a grip. Don’t let Larry, Moe and Curly smash his mind to pieces.
Which was what he was calling them: Larry, Moe and Curly. Because there were three of them, and that’s what his dad called customers who came in threes. When they came in pairs, they were Laurel and Hardy.
That had once been so lame: the names, and the fact that his dad used them two or three times a week. Larry, Moe and Curly this; Laurel and Hardy that. Get a fresh script, dad. But now his father’s words were a comfort. He could even hear the voice. Right bunch of comedians you’ve got yourself mixed up with. Not my fault, dad. Not my fault. He’d simply been walking down a lane at the wrong time.
But walking and daydreaming, he reminded himself. His mind playing its usual games, working up a piece of shtick; a comedy riff which distracted him long enough for these goons to get the drop on him … Except that was a laugh too, wasn’t it? A trio of twelve-year-olds could have ‘got the drop on him’. He wasn’t Action Man.
But they’d taken him, and doped him, and stripped him to his shorts and dumped him in this cellar; had left him for an hour or two, or three, or a fortnight, until he’d grown so used to the dark that the sudden light was like the sky ripping open.
Larry, Moe and Curly. Rough hands, big loud voices.
God, you dirty bastard—
The stink in here—
And then they were thrusting his new uniform at him, an orange jumpsuit and a hood for his head. Gloves for his hands.
‘Why are you—?’
‘Shut up.’
‘I’m nobody. I’m just—’
‘You think we give a toss who you are?’
They’d slapped him down on the chair. Thrust a newspaper into his hands. From noises they made, words they said, he suspected they were setting up a camera. He was crying, he realized. He hadn’t known this could happen to adults: that they could cry without knowing they’d started.
‘Stop moving.’
Impossible advice. Like stop itching.
‘Keep still.’
Keep still …
He kept still, tears rolling under his hood. Nobody spoke, but there was a hum that might have been their camera; a scratching it took a while to identify: it was the newspaper’s pages, rustling as he shook. And he thought: that’s not enough noise. He should scream. He should swear his head off, let these bastards know he wasn’t scared, not of lowlife chickenshits like them; he should shout, scream and swear, but didn’t. Because there was part of him saying If you swear they might not like you. They’ll think you’re a bad person. And if they think that, who knows what they’ll do? Advice this little voice kept squeaking while newspaper rustled and camera hummed, until at last one of the comedians said, ‘Okay,’ and the humming stopped. The newspaper was snatched from his hands. He was pushed from the chair.
On landing he bit through his lip, and that might have been the moment he let fly. But before he could make a sound there was a heavy head next to his, breathing a filthy message into his ear that arrived with the hot stink of onions, blasting its meaning deep inside his brain, and then the men were gone and he was swallowed by the dark. And the little voice in his head breathed its last, for it had arrived at a true understanding of what was happening, and that it didn’t matter what kind of person they thought he was, or whether he swore or meekly followed orders, because everything that he could be to them had slotted into place long ago. The colour of his skin was enough. That he didn’t share their religion. That they resented his presence, his very existence; that he was an affront to them—he could swear, or get down on his knees and give each of them a blow job: it didn’t matter. His crime was who he was. His punishment was what they’d already decided it would be.