“I swear to God,” said Marcus, “this is like being trapped in a special school. Ho? Read him the fucking text.”
Ho sighed theatrically and produced his Smartphone. He’d just finished tapping the code in when Shirley snatched it from his hands.
“Hey, you can’t—”
“Just did.”
Ho reached for her, but had a wise moment and refrained. She might be shorter than him but they both knew—everybody knew—she could rip him up like confetti if she wanted, and scatter him like rice.
She found his messages, and read the one from Lamb. “Will be late in. Up all night identifying Cartwright’s body.”
“Will be late?” Moira repeated. “Well. That’s a little . . . ”
“You haven’t met him yet, have you?”
Louisa said, “‘Cartwright’s’? He said ‘Cartwright’s’?”
“Louisa—”
“He doesn’t say the body’s River’s.”
“Who else could he mean?”
“River’s grandfather. Maybe he means the O.B.’s body.”
“Why would Lamb be identifying the O.B.’s—”
“Because this is not fucking happening!”
“Louisa,” Marcus said gently. “If he didn’t mean River, then where is River? He’d be here by now if . . . ”
“He was alive,” Moira blurted.
“Yeah, thanks,” Shirley muttered.
But JK Coe said, “I think he probably is.”
Leafless trees on the skyline resembled plumes of smoke, and the sky itself was a grey dome, holding the world in place. Every so often dark flecks scarred its surface, which he thought were probably geese: maybe swans, but probably geese. It was doubtful that it mattered, but he’d slipped his moorings now, and even the most Lilliputian detail might help anchor him to solid ground.
River Cartwright, unobserved—he hoped—took the passport from his jacket pocket, and examined it again by the light from the train window.
“I knew he wasn’t you,” his grandfather had said.
This would have seemed a small triumph, most days: that the O.B. knew who was and who wasn’t his grandson. But the photo in the passport would have fooled a casual acquaintance, and given pause to some who knew him well. It wasn’t just the physical similarity; it was the light in the eye, the tilt of the jaw. You look at a camera like you don’t trust it, a girlfriend had told him once. As if you’re not saying ‘Cheese’ but ‘Fancy your chances?’ This character had that same attitude.
Of course, the light in his eye was well and truly out now.
Adam Lockhead.
A name that meant nothing to River.
Who had gone through Adam Lockhead’s pockets, there in the bathroom. The passport; a wallet holding a hundred or so euros; the return half of a Eurostar ticket. Some loose change, a pocket-sized packet of tissues, a chocolate bar wrapper and a crumpled café receipt. Nothing to indicate what he’d been after; nothing to explain why he had planned to kill David Cartwright, if that’s what he’d intended.
To think otherwise was to allow the possibility that an innocent visitor had turned up to be shot in the head for his pains.
I’m worried someone’ll come to the door and he’ll shoot them.
In the city, when you heard something that sounded like a gunshot, you waited to hear it a second time, and when you didn’t, you put it down to a backfiring car. River wasn’t sure the same held true of the country. At any moment the quiet of the evening might be sawn in two by approaching sirens, and once that happened, they’d be sucked into the maw of Regent’s Park: a security blanket dropped over them like a cover on a parrot’s cage. No more talking, or not to each other.
“You’re sure you’ve not seen him before?” he asked.
“I knew he wasn’t you,” his grandfather repeated.
On the kitchen table lay the panic button the O.B. had been issued with, back when he could be trusted with such things. Lately, he’d activated it at least once that River was aware of; “False alarm, false alarm,” he’d asserted, though River suspected he’d simply forgotten what it was for. Pressing it was a way of finding out. And since pressing it in these circumstances was pretty much exactly what it was designed for, River, crouching over the body of Adam Lockhead, had wondered whether it wasn’t better to go with the flow . . . The Dogs would soon arrive. This kind of mess was what they were for: they cleaned, they disinfected, they made the bad stuff go away. But other words from earlier in the evening were haunting him: the possibility, the breath of an ancient rumour, that Regent’s Park might have a habit of lowering a curtain over its former glories.
“Yeah, I wasn’t actually suggesting they’d have him murdered,” Louisa had said. “Though I can see you’ve put some thought into that.”
He put some more into it now.
A stranger, upstairs in his grandfather’s house.
A stranger who looked enough like River to at least get through the door.
A stranger apparently running a bath.
A quick tug on an old man’s heels . . .
“We have to go.”
“River?”
“Grandfather, it’s not safe here.”
“Stoats?” his grandfather said, perking up.
“That’s right. Stoats.”
“I’ll need my wellingtons.”
He would, too, because they’d be leaving on foot. There was a car in the garage, a museum-quality Morris Minor, but River couldn’t remember when it had last been on the road, and besides, it was best not to make your escape in the first vehicle they’d look for. This was one of the stupid roundabout thoughts he allowed to occupy his mind, throwing dust in the way of what needed to be done, while his grandfather clumped downstairs and rooted about for his boots . . . Don’t think about it. Just do it.
He fired his grandfather’s gun into what was left of Adam Lockhead’s face.
Then he left his ID and phone in Lockhead’s pocket, taking the passport, the wallet, the tickets, the litter.
Sitting on the train now, his heartbeat echoing the clatter of its wheels, he knew that that had been the moment when it happened—not sneaking away from the house; not leaving his grandfather in the empty bus shelter while he scouted the road for a stealable car; not the journey into London along dark roads, with every approaching headlight a threat, and one stomach-flipping episode when a police car had screamed up behind him, lights ablaze, only to go pelting past; not abandoning the car behind a West End supermarket and hopping on a night bus; not turning up at Catherine’s door, because it was the only safe place he could think of—all of these had been stages on the journey, but putting the bullet into Adam Lockhead’s corpse was when he had crossed the threshold. The point at which he’d stepped outside.
Spook Street was the phrase his grandfather used. When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret. But there were other territories. Beyond Spook Street it was all joe country—even here, with the friendly French landscape pelting past at a hundred miles an hour, he was in joe country, and there was no telling what came next.
He had only the vaguest idea of where he was going; simply that he was walking back the cat, retracing a dead man’s journey. But he knew this much: he wasn’t sitting in Slough House, his energies being sucked away with every tick of the clock. He was alive, and alert to the game . . . The leafless trees on the skyline were plumes of smoke, and the sky itself a grey dome, holding the world in place. This was what joe country looked like. He tucked the passport out of sight and closed his eyes, but didn’t sleep.
The old man was asleep, or looked it, only his head visible. His body might have been a fold in the duvet. Lamb regarded him from the doorway, his face expressionless. The fluttery noise was David Cartwright’s breathing: regular, but not deep. The curtains were drawn but thin grey January light seeped in, painting everything it touched in the same lonely colour: the fitted wardrobes each side of the bed, in which Catherine’s many similar outfits doubtless hung, all those long-sleeved, high-necked, mid-calf dresses she favoured, like a governess’s Sunday best; the dressing table on which a few tubs were arranged, moisturising creams and the like, and from a corner of whose mirror a pair of necklaces hung, one of black beads Lamb had never seen before, and the other a slim gold chain she often wore, and probably had sentimental associations; even the pair of scarves draped over a chair, both in dark colours, but one threaded with gold: they were all grey-toned in this light, washed of vitality, though nothing more so than the O.B.’s face, which might have been a death-mask, were it not for that fluttery breathing.