On the other hand, his knife would be inside her head before she’d completed any of them.
“Are you clear on that?”
From the doorway, Marcus said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Neither turned to look at him.
Marcus said, “You. Coe. Put the knife down, okay?”
Coe said nothing.
“If I have to come over there and take it off you, I’m gunna ram it where the sun don’t shine, I’m warning you.”
Coe said, “I’ll put it down.”
“. . . Good.”
“But she has to say it first.”
“Has to say what? Uncle?”
“She knows.”
Something trickled down Shirley’s jaw; might be sweat; might be blood. There was no way to confirm which. If she looked down, she’d impale herself on his blade.
“Shirley?” Marcus said. “You know what he’s on about?” He paused. “Probably best not to nod.”
She licked her lips.
Any normal person, she thought, would at least have glanced Marcus’s way. But Coe’s eyes had never left hers through this whole conversation.
All she’d wanted was to give him a little tap. Teach him some manners.
She swallowed.
Marcus said, “Shirl?”
She said—whispered—“I’m clear.”
Coe nodded, and just like that the knife was gone. He tucked it into the pouch of his hoodie and sat down.
Shirley put her hand to her chin, then looked at her fingers.
Sweat.
Marcus shook his head.
“They’ve been watching me for weeks,” the O.B. said. “Thought I hadn’t noticed. Streetlights blinking on and off. Woman at the post office asking questions. It was obvious what was happening. You’re not writing this down.”
“We have invisible pixies to do that,” Lamb assured him.
“You think that’s helping?” Catherine asked.
By way of answer, he poured himself another drink, or tried to. The bottle didn’t hold much more than a double.
The O.B. sat in the centre of the room. Catherine had placed a chair there, and rearranged Lamb’s lamps so much of the light fell around, rather than directly onto him. It wasn’t an interrogation. That’s what she told herself, though it could easily have been mistaken for one by the casual passer-by.
And what most alarmed her about all this, she thought now, was how she seemed to have slid back into her former role: Slough House’s chatelaine; Lamb’s doorkeeper. Was this what her future held? Another season orbiting Jackson Lamb’s dark star? She was going to see today through—make sure the old man was safe—and then kick the house’s dust from her heels, and launder Lamb’s smoke from her clothes.
For now, though, here she was, and the old man seemed happy to hold forth, and if it was true that his answers bore little direct relevance to the questions, they circled the subject at hand, as if closing in on a slippery truth.
“And you,” he said, addressing Chapman. “They let you indoors now, do they? I thought your job was to wait by the car.”
“Times change,” Bad Sam said softly. “Tell us about the other night.”
“What other night?”
“Somebody came knocking on your door,” Lamb said. “And for some reason, you shot him in the head.”
A cunning light switched on in the O.B.’s eyes. “How do you know about that?”
“Assume we were working the streetlights,” Lamb said. “He was pretending to be your grandson, wasn’t he?”
Cartwright said, “There he was, bold as brass, asking about the heating, wanting me to tell him about my day. All part of the act, you see? Yes, I was supposed to think he was . . . who you said. My grandson. The one with the name.”
Lamb opened his mouth, and Catherine said, “Don’t.”
“Said he’d run me a bath. As if I couldn’t run a bath for myself, if I wanted one.”
And he closed his mouth firmly, as if he’d said enough on that subject.
He hadn’t gathered himself together, Catherine thought; not really. Or if he had, he’d done so somewhere else, and was just poking his head round the door.
Chapman said, “He was an enemy.”
The O.B. stared.
“And you defended yourself.”
“Didn’t know I had a gun, did he? Think twice about playing that trick again.”
Chapman was about to continue, but Lamb cut across him. “We think he came from Les Arbres. That make sense to you?”
“. . . France,” the O.B. said.
“Yeah, France. Hence the funny name. Les Arbres’s where you used to visit your old friend Henry, remember? Way back in the nineties, when you had a working head. But Henry wasn’t really called Henry, was he? And—”
“You’re frightening him, Jackson,” Catherine said.
“And what he was doing was running Project Cuckoo. Remember? Cuckoo, like you’re becoming, or pretending to. Cuckoo, which was all about raising children to be something they’re not—back in the day, we’d have wanted to grow little Soviet Generals, so we’d have a clue what the real ones were thinking. Except we didn’t, in the end, because even by Cold War standards, it was a barking mad idea. But you—”
“Jackson . . . ”
“—didn’t let that stop you, did you? You went ahead and did it anyway.”
His voice had grown louder until it filled the whole room, and when he stopped the air shivered, as if settling back into place. The old man had a frozen expression now, halfway between fear and confusion. Catherine thought: she should bring this to an end. Escort the old man out. He’d be better off taking his chances in the rain, or at Regent’s Park, than sitting here listening to Lamb exorcise whatever demon had seized him.
And maybe that’s what she’d have done, she told herself later, except that Cartwright started to speak again.
Halfway to Pentonville Road, Louisa nearly missed her turn: not missed as in forgot to take it, but missed as in didn’t bother, and kept on in a straight line north; past the shops and churches, the mosques and synagogues, that were fast becoming familiar landmarks; the supermarket she used on her way home; the park that signalled the easing of urban tension. Wipers wiping fit to bust, she could be pulling into the residents’ parking area behind her block in twenty minutes, and running a bath not long later; a glass of wine poured, quiet music playing; the patter of the rain upon the windows promising sleep. But duty got the better of her and she made the turn, and headed towards the crime scene down Pentonville Road.
It was like a circus would be if circuses involved fewer clowns. Cop cars had arrived in droves, and cops were occupying every corner, some talking to huddled groups of civilians; others clustered round a car she knew from the YouTube film was the attack vehicle, itself looking like a mechanised assault victim: its front end folded in, and glasswork from its headlights scattered like frozen tears. The impact car, meanwhile, had been slammed sideways into a set of railings. Always, collision-scenes had an air of inevitability about them, as if the resulting damage had been written into the vehicles’ design specs. The police might have been there to confirm that everything had happened as required, and nothing been left undone.
She was feeling battered herself: torn jeans, hurt legs. But adrenalin was a powerful painkiller. “I think he’s the joker from this afternoon,” she’d heard Marcus saying as she’d hop-skipped down the stairs in Slough House. If she’d needed another trigger, that was it.
Having parked as near as she was able, Louisa showed her Service card to a reasonably experienced-looking cop, by which she meant one who’d found somewhere sheltered to stand. He seemed suitably impressed. One day, she thought, someone at Regent’s Park would notice that the slow horses’ official ID made them seem, to the uninitiated, like genuine Service personnel, and then they’d take them away and replace them with cardboard badges cut from a cereal packet. But until that happened, Louisa was able to get answers to a series of questions: