And he really wanted to hear Patrice’s story before the pair of them were cut down in the street.
“Who are you?” Patrice repeated.
“Adam Lockhead,” River said.
The name cut a groove through Patrice’s expression. “No. Where’s Bertrand? And why . . . ”
Sirens nearly here. Though it was the ones you didn’t hear you had to worry about: they’d be flattening themselves behind car cover; sighting on the three of them from somewhere overhead.
The same thought must have struck Patrice. He lowered the gun. “Okay. We’re leaving.”
“We?” the blonde woman said, and at the same moment Patrice—his motion so fluid, he might have been an eel passing through water—jabbed her in the throat with his free hand. She dropped without making a sound. That would come later.
River swung a punch, which for some reason hit Patrice not on the side of the head, which was where he’d been aiming, but in his open palm, which closed round River’s fist and squeezed so hard he felt it in his toes.
Patrice spoke so calmly he might have been choosing fruit. “We. You and me. Or I’ll kill you here.”
Which sounded like he was reserving the option to do this elsewhere later, but River didn’t see he had a choice.
“There,” Patrice said, pointing through the blocked traffic towards a narrow street where a crowd still loitered—though they scattered when Patrice fired a shot over their heads.
Then he found himself running, Patrice on his heels, and behind them the noise grew muted: the keening of sirens, pulsing through the rain; the blaring of the traffic, still trying to work out what had happened; and the gasping of a blonde woman on her knees in the road, learning the hard way how to breathe again.
Some while ago, Shirley had constructed a wall chart based on those signs you see on entrances to building sites: We have gone __ days without an accident. Hers read: We have gone __ days without Ho being a dick, and she’d made a number-card to slot into the empty space. One side of it read “0.” So did the other. It amused her to swap it round occasionally. It was the little things made office life bearable.
She did this now before slumping into her chair. It was past home-time—and the slow horses didn’t so much keep office hours as nurture and cherish them—but today wasn’t ordinary, and no one was ready to leave. There was a reason she had joined the Service, and if much of the original impulse had been smothered under Jackson Lamb’s tutelage, it could yet be sparked into life by the feeling that something big was happening; something that promised action, and excluded her.
Like this, for instance—the Google alerts popping into her inbox.
“Are you seeing this?” she asked.
She was talking to Marcus. Louisa was still there—her feet in a washing-up bowl, like a character in a ’70s sit-com—but her eyes were closed and she didn’t respond. Nor did Marcus, immediately. He was intent on his monitor, and Shirley could tell by his scowl was either regretting a poor judgement call at an online casino or looking at his bank account. Lately, Marcus had been having money troubles—that was putting it mildly. Lately, Marcus and money had been undergoing a trial separation. And things didn’t look good for them. Before long, Shirley guessed, money was going to be heading out the door for good; was going to walk out on Marcus, and leave him all alone in the world, except for his wife and kids.
And he persisted in thinking she was the one with problems.
“Seeing what?” he said, without looking up.
Her alerts included “armed terrorist London.”
“YouTube,” she said. “Holy fuck! Is that River?”
She clicked and played it again. It was a grainy image, made grainier by rainfalclass="underline" someone’s phone had captured it at a junction on Pentonville Road, and it showed the aftermath of a collision. One car had shunted another into a set of railings, and sat sideways, steam pumping from its bonnet. A man was leaning into the impact vehicle: checking they were okay, you’d have thought, except he suddenly raised his hands and backed up as a gun came into view.
“When did this appear?”
Louisa was behind her now, barefoot, watching her screen.
“Couple of minutes.”
The gun was attached to a blonde woman, who emerged from the car still pointing it, followed by—
“There, see? Is that River?”
—a man who didn’t appear to be armed. But it wasn’t clear whose side he was on, because the woman seemed keen to keep him within the ambit of her weapon.
“It might be,” said Marcus, who’d come to join them. “He’s obviously pissed her off.”
But it was too fuzzy to be sure. The characters kept fading in and out of focus, in tune to the excitement of whoever’d been wielding the phone.
And then something happened so quickly, none of them could tell what it was: the first man made a move, and the gun went off. There was a communal scream from an invisible audience, and the image turned first skywards, and then became a collage of pavement and moving feet, while background voices swore, and asked each other what they’d just seen.
The clip ended.
“Play it again,” said Louisa. “Freeze it on River.”
They watched the first twenty seconds again, leaning closer when Shirley hit pause.
The frozen rain blurred the three figures to dark outlines.
Louisa said, “Yes. Yes, I think it is.”
Shirley clicked on play, and there was movement again, and a gunshot, streetlit rain, and pavements, and stampeding feet.
“When did this happen?” Louisa said.
“Not long ago,” Shirley said. “Fifteen minutes?”
“Any text?”
Shirley scrolled down to the helpful caption: “Holy fucking shit!” it read, followed by a screed of expert online thought:
fella with a gun innit
terrorists cant drive strait lol
OMG what is hapening to London!!!
“That was Pentonville Road?” Louisa asked, hobbling to her chair and stooping for her socks.
“You seriously heading out there?”
“I’m bruised, not crippled,” she snapped, but winced as she padded her feet dry with a tissue.
Marcus shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it’s still pouring.”
Shirley was watching the film again. “So he buggered off to France for the day, and soon as he’s back he’s in the middle of this shit? How come he gets all the fun?”
Marcus said, “Can you get this picture any clearer?”
“No. But I’m pretty sure it’s River.”
“It’s the other one I’m looking at.” Marcus tapped a finger against the screen. “I think he’s the joker from this afternoon.”
They both looked up, but Louisa had already left.
“Shall we go with?” Shirley said.
“She’ll be fine. Place’ll be crawling with cops.”
Shirley hadn’t been so much worried about Louisa’s welfare as anxious not to miss anything. But if there were cops, it meant the action was already elsewhere. General rule of thumb was, the police turned up afterwards.
She said, “Coe was just with Lamb, wasn’t he?”
“I think I heard him coming back down.”
“I’m gunna have a word,” she said. “I wanna know what they were talking about.”
Sam Chapman said, “So now what?”
“Another drink?”
“That’s your answer?”
“Do you have a better one?”
Bad Sam sighed, and pushed his glass across the desktop.
JK Coe had left the room at a nod from Lamb. Rain still beat on the windows, its percussive onslaught muffling thought. Elsewhere in the city, in the slowly filling pubs, the weather had become the main topic of conversation, the Westacres bombing fading into the background like a persistent hangover; something that had to be lived with, but didn’t need constant discussion. London always overcame attempts to cow its spirit. Not even 7/7 had brought the city to a standstill. Though, as Lamb liked to point out, the anniversary two-minute silences did slow it down a bit.