“Where was the café?” she said.
“God knows. Well, him and River.” Lamb pushed his chair back, and with surprising dexterity swung first one then the other foot onto River’s desktop. Some unimportant, to Lamb, devastation ensued. “So. We have what I believe our American chums call a sit-u-a-tion. An assassin with a UK passport, but apparently based across the channel, arrives to take a pop at David Cartwright, but trips over his dick in the process. River’s gone haring off like the half-cocked idiot he is, taking the only clue with him, and the old bastard himself doesn’t know what time of day it is, let alone why anyone might want to punch his ticket. Leaving us here, now. Any bright ideas? Don’t be shy.”
“What do the Dogs say?” Marcus asked.
“The dogs say bow wow,” said Lamb. “Ask me a harder one.”
“You know what I meant.”
“They’re currently scouring Kent for a bewildered pensioner, so I imagine they’ll have their hands full. But any moment now, if they haven’t done already, they’re going to work out that it’s not River who’s dead, and alter the course of their investigation. Actually,” he said, “that might involve asking why I identified the body as River’s. So don’t be alarmed if we have unexpected company.”
“Why did you identify the body as River’s?” Louisa said.
“Because, bizarre as it sounds, he’s now a joe in the field. And you don’t blow a joe’s cover.” For a moment, it looked as if Lamb were about to say more, but he clamped his mouth shut instead. And then opened it again to repeat, more softly. “You don’t blow a joe’s cover.”
“You could have told us.”
“Well, I could. But that would have involved trusting you not to do something dickheaded, like blog about it, or hire a skywriter.” He smiled kindly. “I know you think of me as a father figure, and want to do well to impress me. But if you weren’t all useless fuck-ups, you’d not be here in the first place.”
“You’re telling us now,” Shirley pointed out.
“And that’s because, like I just said, by now they’ll have established that the body isn’t River’s. So it’s become a little moot, see?” He paused. “I said ‘a little moot,’ not a little toot. Don’t go getting ideas.”
“Where’s David Cartwright now?” Louisa asked.
Lamb hesitated, then said, “He’s safe.”
“There’s something you’re not telling us.”
He gave her a pitying look. “If I were to tell you everything I know,” he said, “you’d grow old and die before I was halfway done.” He shifted his feet suddenly, and a handleless mug that had sat on River’s desk, seeing service as a penholder, fell to the floor and completed its useful life. He looked at Ho. “You’re very quiet.”
“What about—”
“No, don’t spoil it.”
JK Coe spoke. “We have two fixed points.”
A short silence followed, then Lamb said, “Did someone fart? Only I heard a squeak, but I’m not smelling anything.”
“What’s that mean?” Shirley said. “Two fixed points?”
“Intended victim. Source of plot.” Coe was snapping his phrases off as soon as they were done, as if they were costing him pain.
Louisa said, “Triangulation requires three points.”
“Clue’s in the name,” Marcus pointed out.
Coe said, “The old man must have a French connection. He can’t tell us but someone will know.” The fingers on his right hand twitched. “There’ll be records.”
“I was wondering about returning him to the shop,” Lamb said. “But it seems he has a working brain.” He paused. “He’s gunna fit in round here like a monkey at a dog show, but we’ll worry about that later. You heard him—find the connection. What ties the old man to France? That’ll be our third reference point. Any questions? Good. Off you fuck.”
“Just one,” Shirley said, when safely back in her own office. “What’s all this triangulation shit?”
The bus spat him out mid-morning in what would have been called the village square in England, though it wasn’t square. More of a large junction, whose adjoining roads didn’t quite meet, leaving this haphazard space of which a low wall carved off one corner, and the stacked tables of a café claimed another. A pair of trees swayed one side of the wall, and there were cars parked underneath, cars the bus was even now missing by inches as it swung away from the bus stop, which was marked as such only by a dog-eared timetable stapled to one of the tree trunks. It was raining softly, else those tables might have been in use, and the air had an edge to it, the unmistakable tang of a recent fire: not leaves or barbecue, something larger. This falsely lent the idea of warmth to the morning, and River tugged his jacket’s zip higher before checking again the café receipt he’d taken from Adam Lockhead’s pocket. Le Ciel Bleu, Angevin. And there it was, as advertised, behind those stacked tables; lights on, windows misted. Dim shapes moving about inside. The rectangular piece of card on the front door’s frosted glass clearly said Open, or Ouvert, or would when he got close enough to read it.
But River stayed where he was for the moment, sheltering under the awning of the nearest shop, in whose window a gallimaufry of objects was on display: kitchen gadgets, children’s toys, radios, watches, toiletries, brushes, packets of seed, boxes of cat litter, as if the idea was to just chuck a lot of bait around and see what the net dragged in. It reminded him of the market-stalls on a street near Slough House, most of which had vanished when the foodies moved in. Random thoughts like this were the product of weariness. He surveyed the goods on offer while he accustomed himself to being here, middle of France, with only half a clue as to what he was doing.
It felt earlier than it was, or perhaps later—the light, anyway, seemed wrong, as if filtered through gauze—but then, his body clock was still set to yesterday. River hadn’t had much sleep last night, and didn’t have much money. Adam Lockhead’s euros had paid for a train ticket from Paris to Poitiers and the bus ticket here from there, but weren’t going to get him much further. They didn’t have to, though. By lunchtime at the outside, the body at his grandfather’s would have been, if not identified as Lockhead, at least unidentified as River Cartwright, which meant using his credit card wouldn’t be giving away anything that wasn’t already known, other than his location. They’d be looking at his known associates by then, trying to find the old man. With luck, by the time they got to Catherine, he’d have discovered what had brought an assassin from this quiet-seeming town on the river Anglin all the way to his grandfather’s house in Kent. Because the last thing he wanted was for the O.B. to be in anyone’s custody—not the Park’s; not the police’s—until he knew where the danger was coming from. Until then it was all joe country, and everyone a potential enemy.
Nobody had left or entered the café while he’d been standing here, and even if they had, what would he have done about it? It was time to take the next step. Collar up against the rain, he left the shelter of the awning, and made for Le Ciel Bleu.
She favoured park benches for off-the-books meetings—park benches or shady riverside stretches she was confident were unmonitored, but it was good to mix it up. So she’d told Claude to get out of the car and walk, to wait on the north-east corner of Oxford Circus. There were always crowds there, a good spot to check him for back-up. Maybe she didn’t have field savvy—running Ops was a desk job—but you didn’t have to know how to strip an engine to drive a car, and Claude Whelan had no clue how near she was until she put a hand on his elbow—almost.
He turned at the last moment. “Diana.”