Emma stared.
Catherine said, “I may have skipped the odd f-word. He thinks swearing’s big and clever.”
“What’s he up to, Ms. Standish?”
“He has a joe in the wind, Ms. Flyte. He’ll be up to whatever he thinks necessary.”
“Having one of your team kill someone isn’t the same as having an agent in peril.”
“Well, you’ve met Lamb. He deals in broad strokes.”
Emma kept staring, and Catherine unflinchingly returned her gaze. On the mantelpiece, a carriage clock struck the hour with a tinkly series of notes.
At length, Emma said, “When I find the Cartwrights—and I will—I hope it doesn’t turn out you knew where they were all along.”
Catherine nodded thoughtfully.
In the hallway, by the open front door, Emma Flyte paused. “What’s that noise?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Catherine said.
“It came from through there. I assume that’s your bedroom.”
“I left my radio on.”
“It didn’t sound like a radio.”
“I promise you it is.”
“So you left the radio on in your bedroom, behind a closed door.”
“It seems that way, doesn’t it?”
“Do you mind if I take a look?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’ve had more than enough of your company.”
“That’s too bad. Because we already covered the ground rules.”
Closing the front door, Emma stepped across the hallway and into Catherine’s bedroom.
It was dark inside—the curtains still drawn—and a muffled noise was emerging from the shape under the duvet. Emma looked back at Catherine.
Catherine shrugged.
Emma reached out and grasped the hem of the duvet; whipcracked it like a magician removing a tablecloth and let it fall to the floor.
On the bed, Catherine’s radio muttered to itself on its throne of pillows.
“You wouldn’t think so, but it gets great reception that way,” she said.
Two minutes later, she was watching by the window again as Emma Flyte left the building, climbed into her car and drove away.
A minute after that, she was knocking on her neighbour’s door.
“Thanks so much, Deirdre,” she said. “Such short notice, too.”
“Oh, he was no trouble,” Deirdre assured her. “Your colleague gone, has she?”
“Just me again,” said Catherine. “Come on, David. Time to go.”
“I used to live here, didn’t I?” said the O.B.
He was limping badly by the time he arrived, his soaking sock chafing his left foot: he was starting to imagine gangrene. The downpour had once more receded to a steady drizzle. Few cars had passed him, and none had stopped to offer a lift. The tea at Victor’s was a distant memory, and hunger had become a dull ache.
The scrap of paper on which Victor had scribbled an address was his most treasured possession. He barely dared fish it out to check directions, for fear it would dissolve in the wet air.
But River had a memory for figures, for facts, for details, and didn’t need them verified. Eighty minutes after leaving the poacher’s cottage he was in the next village, which had arranged itself along the banks of the same river as Angevin, and boasted similar amenities: a narrow bridge, a sombre church, a ruin perched on a mound. The narrow streets probably allowed for little sunlight even when there was any to speak of, and there were alleyways, harbouring flights of stone steps, every dozen yards or so. Seen from above it no doubt made sense; at ground level it was a confusion of ups and downs, of different ways of getting lost. He navigated through it, though. Ignoring the side streets, he followed the main road over the bridge, took the left fork when it divided, and passed a garage on his right. Beyond its forecourt was a row of cottages whose stone faÇades, darkened by rainfall, were a stern grimace only partly belied by their prettily painted doors: red, white, blue. The blue was Natasha’s. River pounded its heavy brass knocker.
He didn’t know what he was expecting. A nice lady. A prostitute, yes, a whore, but a nice lady. So what he was doing now, he supposed, was visiting a prostitute, a phrase with a definite subtext. The nice lady opened the door a long fifteen seconds after he’d knocked. Whatever she’d been about to say short-circuited at the sight of him: instead, she said “Bertrand? Mais non . . . ”
“Non,” River agreed. “Excusez, vous etes Natasha?”
He did not, he realised, have a surname for her.
After a moment, she said, “You are not French.”
“Non,” he agreed again.
“English?”
To admit this in French would be absurd. “Yes,” he said.
“What can I do for you?”
She was, he supposed, in her forties; a handsome, strong-featured woman with dark hair falling loosely around her shoulders, and eyes that seemed black to River. She wore jeans, a man’s blue shirt, and a thick cardigan with a belt whose ends dangled to her thighs. From her expression, he couldn’t tell if she were surprised to see him or simply resigned; as if this were an outcome long in the making.
He said, “I need to know about Les Arbres.”
“It is burned down. It is no more.”
“I know that. But the people there . . . I need to know about them.”
“Who sent you?”
“A man called Victor.”
A gust of wind pushed at his back; slunk between his legs like an unruly dog.
She said, “It is bad here. You should come in.”
So River came out of the cold and the wet, and limped into her story.
Roderick Ho was drinking from a bottle that claimed to hold “smart water,” and Shirley couldn’t work out which annoyed her more: who he was, or what he was drinking. Smart phones, okay, she could see that. Smart cars. Smart water, though, someone was taking the piss.
But she wasn’t going to let him spoil her moment of triumph.
“Old man Cartwright made a number of trips to France in the early nineties,” she announced. “Before there was a tunnel. Apparently they used something called a ferry? Anyway, he went three or four times, always to the same place. Somewhere near Poitiers, which is about in the middle. Middle of France, I mean.”
Lamb said, “You know, if I shut my eyes, it’s like listening to one of the Reith lectures.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what that means.”
“You amaze me.” Lamb paused to belch. Instead of spending the hour or so after lunch formulating department strategy, which he did with his eyes closed and his feet on his desk, he was holding court in Ho’s room. The slow horses were there, Moira Tregorian excepted—her, he’d invited to go through the stack of memos that had arrived from the Park since September, and arrange them in order of urgency—and were relaying the fruits of their research, which, until Shirley piped up, had been non-existent. “These trips, they were official?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So there’s a mission report?”
“There are expenses claims,” Shirley said, “and a series of status updates on a retired agent, codenamed Henry. But all the updates say is ‘stable,’ or ‘no action necessary.’”
Lamb sniffed suspiciously. “And Molly Doran volunteered this?”
“I dropped your name,” Shirley said.
Probably not worth going into the bet Molly lost.
“So whoever Henry was,” Marcus said, “he’s not as stable as he used to be.”
Ho lowered the bottle, and said, “Yeah, because it looks like he tried to kill the old man.”
“Such perception,” said Lamb. “No wonder I think of you as my number two.”
Ho smiled happily.
“What are you smirking at? You do know what a number two is?”