“He’s okay.” This for the benefit of those nearby. “He gets claustrophobic, that’s all.”
To River: “Maybe put your head between your knees?”
Somebody said, “Are you sure he’s all right? Should we get help?”
“He’ll be fine. I’m always telling him, we should take taxis. But no, he insists on the underground, and here we are again.”
“My boyfriend’s just the same.”
Any other time River might have protested the emphasis on My, but at the moment he was coping with a lot of frazzled nerve ends, as if Patrice had laid into him with a cattle prod rather than his little finger, or whatever it was he’d used to do whatever it was he’d done.
Someone else said, “Anyone got any water?” and everybody laughed.
Don’t mind me. You all enjoy yourselves.
Patrice maintained the fiction established for them by sitting next to River and putting his arm round his shoulders. He leaned close, as if whispering sweet consolation, and reminded River: “That required no effort on my part.”
River said, “Last time someone hurt me like that . . . ”
He paused for breath.
“Yes?”
“I knocked half his brains out with a length of lead pipe.”
Patrice made a show of looking here, there, in front, behind. “Don’t see any lead pipe.”
“You won’t.”
Patrice’s phone chirruped. “Do you mind? I really ought to take this.”
He stood and walked a few paces off. River looked around for a length of lead pipe, but his heart wasn’t in it.
The other travellers had moved on, braving the rain, because there seemed little alternative. He wondered if, later, they’d watch the news and say to each other Do they look like? and Nah, surely not.
Patrice finished his call. River watched him while he stared for a moment at the Thames, as if suddenly struck by its night-time beauty; the lights along the Embankment smeary in the rain. Then he looked at River.
“So,” he said. “What’s the dazzle ship, and where do we find it?”
“His name was Frank,” the O.B. said.
He stopped.
Catherine braced for another Lamb onslaught, but none came. Because he had done all he needed, she thought; he’d thrown the switch, and now all the old man’s memories would come tumbling forth.
She should have hustled him out while the thought was fresh in her mind.
“Came to the Park with his ridiculous plan. Cuckoo by name, cuckoo by nature. Even the Yanks hadn’t gone for it. Well, not a second time. Had tried it back in the sixties, of course, and came a cropper. Hushed up the details. Not that hushing things up ever worked. First law of Spook Street. Secrets don’t stay secret.”
He paused. Catherine could have sworn something shone in his eyes: unshed tears or bottled-up secrets. Something waiting to spill.
“So we told him to pack his wares and move his pitch.”
Again, the pause. This morning, Catherine remembered, he had seemed a man adrift; unmoored by encroaching dementia, and pushed further out to sea by last night’s events. And now he’d washed up somewhere, but it wasn’t quite here and wasn’t quite now, and if his sentences recaptured the brim and snap of his younger self, they were messages from a bottle launched long ago, and she doubted he knew who he was talking to. Memory was doing all the work, blowing through the old man like he was a seashell, and when it was done he would be smooth and empty.
Chapman said, “But you didn’t quite cast him away, did you?”
He spoke gently, to Catherine’s surprise. Her experience of his interrogation technique had been a little different.
David Cartwright blinked, then blinked again. He mumbled something, and she had to replay the sound in her head a few times before she thought she’d caught it: a repetition of what he’d said earlier, First law of Spook Street.
“He came to my house. Weeks later. Living in the city then. Bayswater. It was the fag end of summer, and he was . . . different. He suggested a drink. I suggested he disappear, if he didn’t want to find himself in pokey.”
She remembered River telling her of evenings spent like this, the young man listening to the old one, spinning spook yarns, brandy in hand, and wondered if that was where David Cartwright had retreated in his mind.
He needed River, she thought. But River was out slaying dragons, or looking for dragons to slay.
“Knew what he wanted, of course. Saw it in his eyes when he showed up at the Park. Because he was one of the believers. His Project Cuckoo, it wasn’t just a strategy he favoured. No, he thought it was our only possible direction, that we’d be doomed without it. That was his faith, you see? Why the Agency got shot of him. Nothing more dangerous than a believer.”
Because believers were always on a quest, for one Holy Grail or another. And quests were fuelled by the blood of anyone who happened to get in the way.
“So I thought he was there to make one last plea. If I got on board, he knew I’d carry the Park. More power behind the throne than there ever is sitting on it.” He grew cunning, like a man with a magic ring in his pocket, about to show what it can do. “You’ll have to turn the tape off now.”
Bad Sam said, “There’s no tape. You can speak freely.”
The old man tapped the side of his nose. “Do I look like this is my first time?”
Sighing theatrically, Lamb opened his desk drawer and reached inside it. Something made a clunky noise. It might have been a hole punch. “There,” he said. “Now, your American crusader. What did he want?” He was revolving his glass in his hand, and by the lamp’s yellow glow Catherine could see its sticky surface, its film of smudged fingerprints. “Well, we know what he wanted. But how did he get it? Why did you give it to him?”
“I never . . . ”
“The Park turned him down. We’ve established that. And the Yanks had kicked him out. But the following year there he is, middle of France, running his little colony, raising his children as prototype terrorists. And there you were, checking on his progress. But not officially. Because as far as the records go, you were paying welfare visits on an old spook. So whatever happened, you did it under the bridge. Why?”
She shouldn’t be party to this, she thought again, but it was too late; everything was too late. Jackson Lamb would ebb and flow, and the old man would crumble. Whether there’d be anything left of him once it was over was anybody’s guess. And she had promised River she’d look after his grandfather, but God help her, she wanted to know too. Whatever had happened back then, it had sown the seeds of the Westacres bombing, and she wanted to know what it had been. Because she’d been kidding herself if she’d thought she’d escaped Slough House. It didn’t matter where she was, she was as much a spook as Lamb, and every bit as hungry to learn these secrets.
“He had something on you,” Lamb said. “He turned the screw. What did he know?”
“He’s had enough,” Bad Sam said. “Let’s leave it for now, shall we?”
“He’s had enough when I say he’s had enough. What did Frank have on you, Cartwright? What did he know that you wanted kept hidden?”
“Jackson—”
“You said it yourself. Secrets don’t stay secret, not on Spook Street.”
“Stop now, or I’ll make you stop,” Bad Sam said. “I mean it.”
“Frank had something. What was it?”
“Leave him, Jackson,” Catherine said.
And the old man said, “Isobel,” and started to cry.
“Well,” Louisa said. “I wasn’t expecting this.”