Yes, a gun had been fired.
No, nobody had been hurt.
There was nobody in custody.
The area was being searched.
Couple of your people in the car that was struck . . .
“My people?”
“Funny buggers,” said the policeman.
She looked up and down the road. Streetlights were on, and shop windows spilt yellow and gold squares onto the pavements, but visibility was poor, rain blurring pedestrians into fuzzy cartoon shapes. She’d been wondering how two men could have vanished so easily in the middle of the city, but the question answered itself. It was dark, and the rain washed away colour and difference, turning everyone into somebody else. There were witnesses, but most would contradict each other in that special way witnesses had, repainting the same event a dozen different shades of grey, and there’d be CCTV too, but she knew the work involved in tracking a quarry by camera, and it produced the kind of evidence useful in court, months after the event. For on-the-spot discovery, you’d be better off sticking notices to lamp posts.
Now she was here, it was clear she’d made the wrong call at that junction. She should have gone straight home. Damn River—all it would have taken was a swift phone call, and he’d have saved her untold grief . . . Untold grief was what had happened when Min died; untold because she’d had nobody to talk to. Thinking the same thing had happened to River had threatened to shatter the recovery she’d made: the new home, the new life, the evenings watching trees swaying in the darkness. So damn him for all that, but where was he, and what was happening?
One of the group clustered round the attack vehicle peeled away and approached. She was a wet blonde woman, her suit looking like it was halfway through a rinse-cycle; one side of her face turning over-ripe from a recent collision. She’d been in the impact car, thought Louisa; had been holding the gun. The gun the trickster had snatched with a movement so smooth it might have come from a dance routine.
Funny bugger, definitely.
A judgment confirmed by the first word out of her mouth:
“Service?”
Louisa showed her card again.
“You’re one of Lamb’s crew. The slow horses.”
“We get called that,” Louisa said.
“And Cartwright’s another.”
“It was him with you? In the car?”
“Do you all act dumb all the time? Or is it not an act?”
“We take it in turns,” said Louisa. “It was him in the car, wasn’t it?”
“Until his buddy came to rescue him.”
Louisa laughed.
“What?”
“River having buddies. Never mind. You don’t know who it was, then?”
“I know he’s called Patrice. Like I say, a buddy.”
“Yeah, well. Either way, he left you in the dust.” Louisa was remembering something she’d heard about the Dogs, about who was in charge now. She said, “You’re Emma Flyte, aren’t you? You’re new to this.”
“So I keep being told.”
“Your fifteen seconds of fame is up on YouTube, they tell you that? This Patrice, he’s quite . . . disarming.”
“Are we trying to be funny, Agent Guy?”
“A real charmer, is all I meant. He do that to your face?” Louisa indicated her own feet. “He took a crowbar to my ankles earlier. I’m betting River didn’t go with him voluntarily.”
“Exactly what,” Emma Flyte said slowly, “is going on here?”
“Wish I knew,” Louisa said. “But I’ll tell you this much. Patrice—you’re sure about that?”
“Patrice,” Flyte said.
“Patrice tried to kill a former spook today. So whatever you’re doing to find him, do it faster. Before he kills Cartwright too.”
Flyte turned away, looking back towards King’s Cross, where a lot of angry traffic was building up. “Uh-huh,” she said. “It didn’t look to me like that was his plan.”
“Where are we going?” River asked.
Patrice looked at him, his face expressionless.
“Okay. Just thought it was worth asking.”
It was thirty minutes since they’d left the scene on Pentonville Road, and they’d crossed half the city since: had doubled back to King’s Cross and caught a taxi to Great Portland Street.
“Been a bit of bother back there,” the driver informed them, pulling away. “Some lemon going mental with a shooter. Roads’ll be closed any minute.”
“I wondered what the police cars were doing,” Patrice had answered, texting as he spoke.
Another shot past; unmarked, its blue light looping through its back window as it bullied through a queue of traffic.
“The weather brings them out,” the cabbie said, with the air of one delivering a universal truth: that whenever it rained, there was gunfire in the city.
When the taxi dropped them, they walked to Baker Street. Patrice still had the gun, though where he’d secreted it, River couldn’t tell. If down the back of his waistband, as River suspected, he must have spent hours practising how to walk, sit, move, without looking like his haemorrhoids were flaring.
And if I make a break for it, he wondered, will he shoot me in the back?
It didn’t matter. Well, it mattered, but it wasn’t an issue. Last thing he was doing was leaving Patrice’s side; not until he’d had a chance to question him about Les Arbres, about the commune, and about why Patrice’s comrade-in-arms had come to kill the O.B. Though, ideally, he’d remove the gun from Patrice’s possession before the discussion turned to precisely what had happened to Bertrand.
Not quite a prisoner, then, though hardly an accomplice, he stayed by Patrice’s side as they headed into Baker Street station, and descended into the tube once again.
A manhunt would have kicked off by now. There’d be footage from Pentonville Road; someone would have been aiming a phone as Patrice waved the gun around. The tube was a good place to be, then. With no WiFi, at least no one was downloading their images while they bucketed from one station to the next. Patrice stayed close; one hand on River’s shoulder, as if for balance. So yes, River thought; they were in it together. Whatever “it” was. And however it turned out.
As they approached Embankment, Patrice’s hand squeezed. Okay, okay, I get it. River led the way off the train, up the escalator; turned towards the river entrance. Still raining, of course. He’d no sooner dried off from today’s French rain before being drenched in the English variety. Still, it was nice to be home.
They stood at the top of the steps, looking at wet traffic, a wet bridge; the wet South Bank across the wet Thames.
“Do you have a plan?” River asked.
“There is always a plan,” Patrice said.
“That’s good. Is that Sartre?” Not expecting a reply, he didn’t wait for one. “Who were you texting in the taxi?”
“You like to talk,” Patrice said. “Maybe you should talk about Bertrand. What happened to him. And why you have his passport.”
“That was Bertrand’s? Because it didn’t have his name on it. And, you know, a passport, you kind of expect—”
“You know I have a gun.” He turned and looked River in the eyes. “And the only reason you’re still alive is that I need answers from you.”
“Yeah, see, that’s not a great interrogative technique. Because it implies that once I’ve given you your answers—”
Patrice hit him so quickly that nobody saw: not the passers by, hurrying through the rain; not the fellow travellers still sheltering from the downpour. Certainly not River. First he knew about it was, Patrice was lowering him into a sitting position, murmuring calm words.