And would he have got this far, if not for that physical similarity, that coincidence of height and colouring? But then, he told himself, how many different colours did pairs of eyes come in? How many shades of fair did hair possess? Besides, the coincidence wasn’t that he looked like Lockhead; it was that Lockhead looked like him. That was the only reason Lockhead had managed to talk himself through the O.B.’s door; was maybe—probably—the reason he’d been chosen for the job in the first place.
The glances the waitress was giving him were gathering force. He’d possibly outstayed a single cup of coffee.
River nodded at her, and she was on him like a flash.
“Madame,” he began, then noticed she wore no wedding ring, but it was too late to back down now. “Je cherche un ami, un gens Anglais?”
She waited.
“Il . . . ” His French dried up. Looks like me? Resembles me? He found he was waving an open palm in front of his own face, illustrating a sentence he couldn’t create. Bond never had this trouble. Bond, though, would have been talking to a waitress twenty years younger, with inviting cleavage.
She was speaking now, words that included “man” and “breakfast,” and might have been a response to his half-arsed enquiries, or just a pithy French saw about the most important meal of the day.
When she paused, he said, “Il habite pres d’ici, je pense.”
His tense was all wrong, but that didn’t matter. Even if his French were perfect, he’d not be getting into Lockhead’s extinct status. But either way, the look on the woman’s face was one of total incomprehension.
A sudden rattle of syllables to his right interrupted the moment.
It was the bearded man, who had laid his paper down and was speaking to the waitress. There are few things more galling than to have one’s efforts at a foreign language require translation into the same, but it seemed to have the desired effect, for the woman simply left a saucer in front of River, on which lay the bill for his coffee, and retreated behind the counter.
“You are looking for a friend, I think,” the man said, in English.
“Yes,” River said, before the possible ambiguity of this approach had sunk in. “He—”
“He looks like you, yes?”
“You know him?”
“An Englishman?”
“Yes.”
The man shook his head. “Not English.”
“You’re sure?”
“He is a local. Bertrand, I think. Bertrand something.”
“And he comes in here?”
“I have seen him in here.” The man pointed to his eyes, then at River’s. “You share . . . You have the same expression. Am I saying that correctly?”
“Uh-huh. I mean yes. Oui. Do you know where he lives?”
“He is a friend? Or a relative?”
“A cousin,” River said.
“But you do not know his name. Or his nationality. Or where he lives.”
“We’re not a close family,” River said.
“Évidemment. I think he was from Les Arbres.”
“Is that another village?”
“A house. A big one. Not so far away.”
“Is it easy to find?”
“Well,” his new friend said. “Yes and no.”
“I remember you, yes,” Molly Doran told Shirley Dander over the phone.
“That’s good.”
“How very confident of you to think so.”
“. . . Sorry?”
“Don’t mention it. What is it you’re after this time, Ms. Dander? Or rather, what is it Jackson’s after? I assume you’re calling on his behalf.”
“I’m more what you’d call using my initiative.”
“What a nice way of putting it. So exploiting my expertise becomes your achievement, is that how it works?”
Shirley suppressed a sigh. Suppressing sighs was actually quite high on the list of personal goals drawn up at her AFM sessions, so it was like she was ticking a box at the same time. “How are things with you?” she asked, remembering another target: be aware of other people’s issues.
This attempt at heightened awareness met with stupefied silence.
Molly Doran wasn’t quite a Service legend, but she was heading that way. Molly ran personnel records at the Park: she trundled round in a bright red wheelchair on account of having lost her legs way back at the dawn of time, and knew everything, which made her a useful source of information. Every year, she gave a lecture on the Service’s research resources to baby spooks: a one-off class which had been known to reduce the intake’s hardest customer to a bubbling jelly. Even Lamb was rumoured to be impressed. Shirley, in fact, had heard a myth that Lamb and Molly shared history, which was kind of mind-numbing.
And now, Shirley’s polite enquiry comprehensively ignored, it was Molly’s turn to speak. “I gather Mr. Coe is now among your number.”
It took Shirley a moment to put the name Coe together with the hooded menace upstairs. “You know him?”
“I seem to recall sending him Jackson’s way once.” She paused. “If I’d known he was to end up there permanently, I might not have done that.”
A semblance of regret, there, or a passable pretence of the same. Shirley decided to treat this as an opening. “You know old David Cartwright?” she asked.
The brief silence that greeted this was precisely the amount of time it took to roll a pair of eyes. “I may have come across the name.”
“Yeah, well, someone tried to whack him last night.”
This next silence was rather more profound.
“Someone . . . ”
“Whack him, yeah. Apparently.” She gave Marcus a thumbs-up. This was going well now.
“And that’s the reason you’re calling.”
“Kind of. See—”
“And might I ask why you insist on conducting your investigation over the phone instead of affording me the basic courtesy of calling round in person?”
“Seriously?”
“I’m accustomed to being taken seriously, yes.”
“Because I don’t have clearance to enter the Park,” Shirley said.
“I know.”
She what?
Shirley said: “Well, if you already know, why—”
“Because I’m trying to make a point, Ms. Dander. And my point is, whatever investigation you’re conducting, I’m far from convinced you’re the one who ought to be conducting it. If you follow my meaning.”
It took Shirley a moment, but yeah, she grasped it.
“Which rather means I’m unlikely to cooperate when you finally get round to drafting your request for information.”
Which was all well and good, it occurred to Shirley, but then why was the cow still hanging on the line, when she could have saved herself several breaths and hung up half a minute ago?