Spook Street

Heat rises, as is commonly known, but not always without effort. In Slough House, its ascent is marked by a series of bangs and gurgles, an audible diary of a forced and painful passage through cranky piping, and if you could magic the plumbing out of the structure and view it as a free-standing exoskeleton, it would be all leaks and dribbles: an arthritic dinosaur, its joints angled awkwardly where fractures have messily healed; its limbs a mis-matched muddle; its extremities stained and rusting, and weakly pumping out warmth. And the boiler, the heart of this beast, wouldn’t so much beat as flutter in a trip-hop rhythm, its occasional bursts of enthusiasm producing explosions of heat in unlikely places; its irregular palpitations a result of pockets of air straining for escape. From doors away you can hear its knocking, this antiquated heating system, and it sounds like a monkey-wrench tapping on an iron railing; like a coded message transmitted from one locked cell to another.

It’s a wasteful, unworkable mess, but then this shabby set of offices—hard by Barbican underground station, on Aldersgate Street, in the borough of Finsbury—isn’t exactly noted for its efficiency, of equipment or personnel. Indeed, its inhabitants might as well be banging on pipes with spanners themselves for all their communication skills are worth, though on this cold January morning, two days after an appalling act at Westacres shopping centre claimed upwards of forty lives, other noises can be heard in Slough House. Not in Jackson Lamb’s room, for once: of all the building’s occupants, he may be the one most obviously in tune with its rackety plumbing, being no stranger to internal gurglings and sudden warm belches himself, but for the moment his office is empty, and his radiator its sole source of clamour. In the room opposite, though—until a few months back, Catherine Standish’s; now Moira Tregorian’s—there is at least some conversation taking place, though of a necessarily one-sided nature, Moira Tregorian currently being the room’s sole occupant: her monologue consists of single, emphatic syllables—a “tchah” here, a “duh” there—interspersed with the odd unfractured phrase, never thought I’d see the day and what on earth’s this when it’s at home? A younger listener might assume Moira to be delivering these fragments down a telephone, but in fact they are directed at the papers on her desk, papers which have accumulated in the absence of Catherine Standish, and have done so in a manner uncontaminated by organisational principle, whether chronological, alphabetical or commonsensical, since they were deposited there by Lamb, whose mania for order has some way to go before it might be classed as neurotic, or even observable. There are many sheets of paper, and each of them has to be somewhere, and discovering which of the many possible somewheres that might be is Moira’s job today, as it was yesterday, and will be tomorrow. Had he done so deliberately, Lamb could hardly have come up with a more apt introduction to life under his command, here in this administrative oubliette of the Intelligence Service, but the truth is, Lamb hasn’t so much consigned the documents to Moira’s care as banished them from his own, out of sight/out of mind being his solution to unwanted paperwork. Moira, whose second day in Slough House this is, and who has yet to meet Jackson Lamb, has already decided she’ll be having a few sharp words with him when that event comes to pass. And while she is nodding vigorously at this thought the radiator growls like a demented cat, startling her so she drops the papers she is holding, and has to scramble to retrieve them before they disarrange themselves again.

Meanwhile, from the landing below, other noise floats up: a murmur from the kitchen, where a kettle has lately boiled, and a recently opened fridge is humming. In the kitchen are River Cartwright and Louisa Guy, both with warm mugs in their hands, and Louisa is maintaining a nearly unbroken commentary on the trials and tribulations accompanying the purchase of her new flat. This is quite some distance away, as London flats tend to be if they’re affordable, but the picture she paints of its size, its comfort, its uncluttered surfaces, is evidence of a new contentment that River would be genuinely glad to witness, were he not brooding about something else. And all the while, behind him, the door to his office creaks on a squeaky hinge, not because anyone is currently using it, but in general protest at the draughts that haunt Slough House, and in a more particular complaint directed at the commotion arising from the next floor down.

But while his door remains unused, River’s office is not empty, for his new colleague—a slow horse for some two months now—sits within, slumped in his chair, the hood of his hoodie pulled over his head. Apart from his fingers he is still, but these move unceasingly, his keyboard pushed aside the better to accommodate this, and while an observer would see nothing more than an advanced case of the fidgets, what JK Coe is describing on the scuffed surface of his desk is a silent replica of what’s coursing through his head via his iPod: Keith Jarrett’s improvised piano recital from Osaka, November 8, 1976, one of the Sun Bear concerts; Coe’s fingers miming the melodies Jarrett discovered on the night, all those miles and all those years away. It’s a soundless echo of another man’s genius, and serves a dual purpose: of tamping down Coe’s thoughts, which are dismal, and of drowning out the noises his mind would otherwise entertain: the sound of wet meat dropping to the floor, for instance, or the buzz of an electric carving knife wielded by a naked intruder. But all this he keeps to himself, and as far as River and the other denizens of Slough House are concerned, JK Coe is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, the whole package then refashioned in the shape of a surly, uncommunicative twat.

Though even if he were yodelling, he’d not be heard over the commotion from the floor below. Not that this racket is emanating from Roderick Ho’s room, or no more of it than usual (the humming of computers; the tinnitus-rattle of Ho’s own iPod, loaded with more aggressive music than Coe’s; his nasal whistling, of which he is unaware; the rubbery squeak his swivel-chair emits when he shifts his buttocks); no, what’s surprising about the atmosphere in Ho’s room—or what would surprise anyone who chose to hang out there, which no one does, because it’s Ho’s room—is that it’s upbeat. Cheerful, even. As if something other than his own sense of superiority is warming Roddy Ho’s cockles these days, which would be handy, given the inability of his radiator to warm anything much, cockles or otherwise; it coughs now, and spits fizzily from its valve, spurting water onto the carpet. Ho doesn’t notice, and nor does he register the following gurgle from deep within the system’s pipes—a noise that would disturb any number of serious beasts: horses, lions, tigers—but this is not so much because Ho is a preternaturally cool character, whatever his own views on that subject, and more because he simply can’t hear it. And the reason for this is that the lapping and gurgling of the radiator’s innards, the banging and clicking of pipes, the splashy rattling of the system’s exoskeleton, are all drowned out by the noise from next door, where Marcus Longridge is waterboarding Shirley Dander.

“Blurgh—bleurgh—off—coff—blargh!”

“Yeah, I didn’t follow any of that.”

“Blearrrgh!”

“Sorry, does that mean—”

“BLARGH!”

“—uncle?”

The chair to which Shirley was tied with belts and scarves was angled against her desk, and nearly crashed to the floor when she arched her back. A loud crack suggested structural damage, at the same moment as the flannel that had covered her face slapped the carpet like a dead sea creature hitting a rock. Shirley herself made similar noises for a while; if you were asked to guess, you might hazard that someone was trying to turn themselves inside out, without using tools.

Marcus, whistling softly, replaced the jug on a filing cabinet. Some water had splashed his sweater, a pale blue Merino V-neck, and he tried to brush it away, with as much success as that usually has. Then he sat and stared at his monitor, which had long defaulted to its screensaver: a black background around which an orange ball careened, bumping against its borders, never getting anywhere. Yeah: Marcus knew how that felt.

After a few minutes Shirley stopped coughing.

After a few minutes more, she said, “It wasn’t as bad as you said.”

“You lasted less than seven seconds.”

“Bollocks. That was about half an hour, and—”

“Seven seconds, first drops to whatever it was you said. Blurgh? Blargh?” He banged his hand on his keyboard, and the screensaver vanished. “Not our agreed safety word, by the way.”

“But you stopped anyway.”

“What can I tell you? Getting soft.”

A spreadsheet opened into view. Marcus couldn’t immediately recall what it represented. Not a lot of work had happened in this office lately.

Shirley freed herself from scarves and belts. “You didn’t time it properly.”

“I timed it immaculately,” he said, drawing the word out: im-mac-u-late-ly. “It’s like I said, no one can cope with that shit. That’s why it’s so popular with the vampires.”

The vampires being those whose job it was to draw blood from stones.

Shirley lobbed the wet flannel at him. Without taking his eyes from the screen he caught it one-handed, and scowled as water scattered everywhere: “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She towelled her head dry: a five-second pummel. “Gunna let me do you now?”

“In. Your. Dreams.”

She stuck her tongue out. Then said, “So. You’d be prepared to do that?”

“Just did, didn’t I?”

“For real, I mean. And keep doing it.”

Marcus looked up. “If it’d stop another Westacres, hell, yes. I’d keep doing it until the bastard told me everything. And drown him doing it, wouldn’t bother me none.”

“It would be murder.”

“Blowing up forty-two kids in a shopping centre is murder. Waterboarding a suspected terrorist to death, that’s housekeeping.”

“The philosophy of Marcus Longridge, volume one.”

“Pretty much sums it up. Someone’s got to do this shit. Or would you rather let the terrorist walk, for fear of violating his human rights?”

“He was only a suspect a moment ago.”

“And we both know what being a suspect means.”

“He’s still got rights.”

“Like those kids had? Tell their parents.”

He was getting loud now, which they’d both got into the habit of not worrying about, Lamb not having been around lately. This didn’t mean he couldn’t show up any moment, of course—his large frame creepily silent on the stairs, so the first you knew of his presence was his nicotine breath and sour outlook: Having fun, are we?—but until that happened, Shirley’s view was, they might as well keep on skiving.

She said, “Maybe. I just don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Yeah, things get simple real quick at the sharp end. I thought you’d have worked that out by now. Anyway,” and he indicated the chair she’d been sitting on, “better shift that into Ho’s office.”

“Why?”

“It broke.”

“Oh. Yeah. Think he’ll snitch?”

“Not if he values that bum-fluff he calls a beard,” said Marcus, briefly stroking his own. “He rats us out to Lamb, I’ll rip it from his chin.”

Probably a figure of speech, thought Shirley, but possibly a treat in store.

Marcus being Marcus, it could go either way.

Had he been aware that he was the subject of his colleagues’ violent fantasies, Roderick Ho would have put it down to jealousy.

Fact was, he looked fantastic.

Don’t just take his word for it, either.

He’d arrived, as usual, in a terrific mood: swanned in wearing a brand-new jacket (waist-length black leather—when you’ve got it, flaunt it!) and popped the tab on a Red Bull which he chug-a-lugged while his kit warmed up. Seriously, seriously, this was starting to harsh his mellow: his gear at the Rod-pad ran to higher specs than the Service provided, but what are you gunna do—explain to Jackson Lamb that some heavy duty cap-ex was required if Slough House was to come crawling out of the nineties? . . . He paused for a moment, allowing that scenario to take shape: “Jackson, Jackson, trust me—the suits, man, they’ve got to get this sorted. Asking me to work with that crap is like, well, put it this way. Would you ask Paul Pogba to kick a tin can around?” And Lamb chuckling, throwing his hands up in mock-surrender: “You win, you win. I’ll get the pointy-heads at the Park to loosen the purse-strings . . .”

That struck the right note, he decided.

If Lamb ever showed up, definitely the way to play it.

Meanwhile, he cracked his knuckles, clicked on Amazon, wrote a one-star review of a random book, then checked his beard in the mirror he’d fixed to the anglepoise. Devilishly stylish. The odd red strand among the black, but nothing a little tweezer-work couldn’t handle, and if it wasn’t entirely symmetrical, five minutes with the old kitchen scissors soon had things on track. Looking this good took effort. Not rocket science, but it managed to evade some of the lamebrains round here—naming no River Cartwrights, of course.

Heh heh heh.

Cartwright was upstairs in the kitchen, chatting to Louisa. There’d been a time, not long back, when Roddy had had to play it cool with Louisa. It had been clear she’d taken a shine to him: embarrassing, but there it was—it wasn’t like she was a total dog; in the right light, she cast a nice shadow, but she was old, mid-thirties, and when women got to that age, a taint of desperation clung to them. Weaken for a moment, and they’d be picking out curtains and suggesting quiet nights in. Which was not how Roderick Ho played the game: so sayonara, babes. Being a tactful kind of guy, he’d managed to convey to her without having to put it into actual words that the Rod was off-limits—that Rod’s rod was not in her future—and give her her due, she’d managed to accept that without too much fuss, the odd wistful, what-might-have-been glance excepted. In other circumstances, he thought, there’d have been no harm in it—throwing a single woman the occasional boner was an act of charity—but a regular ram-Rodding was not on the agenda, and it would have been cruel to get her hopes up.

Besides, if the chick caught him providing consolation to another woman, he’d be in serious trouble.

Dig that singular.

Chick, not “chicks.”

Roddy Ho has got himself a girlfriend.

Still humming, still in a terrific mood, and still looking fantastic, Ho returned to his screen, metaphorically rolled his sleeves up, and splash-dived into the Dark Web, deaf to the continual gurgling of his radiator, and the sloshing in the pipes connecting his room to everyone else’s.

What was that blessed noise?

Only she didn’t need telling what it was, thank you very much, because it was the radiator again, sounding like a sick cat doing its business. Putting the most recently sorted stack of papers down—not that “sorted” was the right word, their category being “documents without a date”—Moira Tregorian paused in her efforts and surveyed her new domain.

Her office was on the top floor; it was the one vacated by her predecessor, and nearest Mr. Lamb’s. The personal possessions Catherine Standish had left behind (her departure had been abrupt) were in a cardboard box, sealed with packing tape: her non-official-issue pens, a glass paperweight; a full bottle of whisky, wrapped in tissue paper—the woman had had a drink problem, but then, that was Slough House. Everyone here had problems, or what you now had to call “issues.” Moira supposed that was why she’d been assigned here, to provide overdue backbone.

Dust everywhere, of course. The whole building felt neglected; seemed to revel in the condition, as if the appearance of a duster might cause structural conniptions. And condensation fogged the windows, and had pooled in puddles on the frame, where it was blossoming into mould, and much more of this and the whole place would be falling around your ears . . . Well. Someone needed to take a firm hand. This had clearly been beyond poor Catherine Standish, but once you let the bottle be your friend, you were letting yourself in for sorry times indeed.

It had not escaped her that among the forms awaiting attention were Standish’s discharge papers, needing only Jackson Lamb’s signature.

And it had long been Moira Tregorian’s credo that paperwork was what kept battleships afloat: you could have all your admirals out on deck in their fancy get-up, but without the right paperwork, you’d never get out of the harbour. She had always been a force for order, and didn’t care who knew it. In Regent’s Park, she’d kept the Queens of the Database in trim, ensuring that their timekeeping was precise and their equipment regularly serviced; that the plants they insisted on were disposed of once they died; that the stationery they got through at a rate of knots was replenished weekly, and a log kept of who was taking what, because Moira Tregorian wasn’t born blind and she wasn’t born stupid. Post-it notes might be made of paper, but they didn’t grow on trees. And every so often, just to show there wasn’t much she couldn’t turn her hand to, she’d taken a shift as duty-officer: fielding emergency calls and what-not. None of it terribly complicated, if you asked her—but then, she was an office manager, and proud of it. Things needed managing. You only had to cast an eye around to get an inkling of what happened otherwise. And chaos was a breeding ground for evil.

Another thump from downstairs suggested that chaos was winning the battle for Slough House. In the absence of any other champion, Moira gave a long-suffering sigh, and headed down to investigate.

“How old would you say she was?”

“Fifties, mid,” Louisa said. “So . . . ”

“’Bout the same as Catherine,” River said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Almost like a replacement,” River said. “You know. One in, one out.”

“. . . You been talking to Shirley?”

“Why? What did she say?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Louisa said. She shook her head, not in self-contradiction but to remove her hair from her eyes; it was longer now, and she had to pin it back when actually doing anything: reading, working, driving. She’d let the highlights grow out and it had reverted to its natural brown, a little darker during these winter months. It would fade up once the spring arrived, if the spring brought sunshine; and if it didn’t, hell, she could always cheat, and squeeze a little sunlight from a bottle.

Right now, spring felt a long way distant.

River said, “Ought to get some work done, I suppose,” but sounded like he had things on his mind, tiptoeing around a different conversation entirely.

Louisa wondered if he was going to ask her for a date, and what she’d say if he did.

Almost certainly no. She’d got to know him this past half year, and his virtues stacked up well against the other locals: he wasn’t married like Marcus, a creep like Ho, or a possible psychopath like his new room-mate. On the other hand, he wasn’t Min Harper, either. Min had been dead now for longer than they’d been a couple, and there was no sense in which she was seeking a replacement for him, but still: date a colleague, and comparisons would be made. That could only get ugly. So the occasional drink after work was fine, but anything more serious was out of bounds.

That was almost certainly what she thought, she thought. But she also thought it might be best to head him off if it looked like he was going to say anything.

“Doing anything later?” he asked.

“Yeah, no, what? Later?”

“’Cause there’s something I want to talk to you about, only here’s maybe not the best place.”

Oh fuck, she thought. Here we go.

“I’m sorry, is this a private conversation?”

And here was Moira Tregorian, a name Louisa had spent much of yesterday trying to get her head round. Tregorian kept splitting into separate syllables, and rearranging itself: what was it, Cornish? She didn’t want to ask in case the answer bored her rigid. People could get funny about their ancestry.

“No, we were just talking,” River said.

“Hmmm,” said Moira Tregorian, and the younger pair exchanged a glance. Neither had spoken much to Moira yet, and Hmmm wasn’t a promising start.

She was in her fifties, sure, but that was where her resemblance to Catherine Standish ended. Catherine had had something of the spectral about her, and a resilience too, an inner strength that had allowed her to conquer her alcoholism, or at any rate, enabled her to continue the daily struggle. Neither River nor Louisa could remember her complaining about anything, which, given her daily exposure to Jackson Lamb, indicated Mandela-like patience. Moira Tregorian might turn out to be many things, but spectral wasn’t going to be one of them, and patient didn’t look promising. Her lips were pursed, and her jowls trembled slightly with pent-up something or other. All that aside, she was five-three or so, with dusty-coloured hair arranged like a mop, and wore a red cardigan Lamb would have something to say about, if he ever showed up. Lamb wasn’t a fan of bright colours, and claimed they made him nauseous, and also violent.

“Because it seems to me,” Moira said, “that two days after a major terrorist incident on British soil, there might be more useful things you could be doing. This is still an arm of the Intelligence Service, isn’t it?”

Well, it was and it wasn’t.

Slough House was a branch of the Service, certainly, but “arm” was pitching it strong. As was “finger,” come to that; fingers could be on the button or on the pulse. Fingernails, now: those, you clipped, discarded, and never wanted to see again. So Slough House was a fingernail of the Service: a fair step from Regent’s Park geographically, and on another planet in most other ways. Slough House was where you ended up when all the bright avenues were closed to you. It was where they sent you when they wanted you to go away, but didn’t want to sack you in case you got litigious about it.

And while it was true that national security had been stepped up to the highest notch, things hadn’t yet reached the pass where anyone was screaming down a telephone: “Get me the slow horses!”

Louisa said, “If there was something we could do, we’d be doing it. But we don’t have the resources or the information to do anything useful here in the office. And in case you haven’t noticed yet, they don’t put us out on the streets.”

“No, well. That’s as may be.”

“Which is why Marcus and Shirley are blowing off steam. I can’t speak for Coe, but my guess is he’s zoning out at his desk. And Ho’ll be grooming his beard. I think that’s all of us accounted for.”

“Is Mr. Lamb not expected?” Moira asked.

“Lamb?”

“Mr. Lamb, yes.”

River and Louisa exchanged a glance. “He’s not been around much lately,” Louisa said.

“Hence,” said River, and waved a vague hand. Hence people talking in kitchens and torturing each other in offices. When the cat was away, Lamb had been known to remark, the mice started farting about with notions of democratic freedom. Then the cat returned in a tank.

(“Remind me,” River had once asked him, “back in the Cold War—whose side were you on?”)

“Only he’s invited me to lunch.”

In the silence that followed, the radiator on the landing belched in an oddly familiar way, as if it were working up an impression.

“I think I may have just had a small stroke,” Louisa said at last. “You can’t possibly have said what I thought I just heard.”

River said, “Have you met Jackson?”

“He sent me an email.”

“Is that a no?”

“We haven’t met in person.”

“Have you heard about him?”

Moira Tregorian said, “I’m told he’s a bit of a character.”

“Did nobody tell you which bit?”

“There’s no need for—”

Louisa said, “Seriously, you haven’t met him, but he sent you an email asking you to lunch? When?”

“He just said ‘soon.’”

“Which might mean today.”

“Well . . . Yes, I thought it might.”

“Action stations,” murmured River.

They escaped, but before they disappeared into their separate rooms River said, “So, you okay for later?”

“Yeah, no, what? Later?”

“Quick drink,” said River. “Thing is—”

Here it comes, thought Louisa.

“—I’m worried about my grandfather.”

Though the rain had stopped, it still shook from the trees when the wind blew, spattering the windows, and still dripped from the guttering over the porch, which was thick with leaves. A lagoon had appeared in the lane, drowning the grassy verge, and in the village a burst main had closed the road for a day and a half, water pumping through the tarmac in its familiar, implacable way. Fire you could fight, and even half-way tame; water went where it chose, taking a hundred years to wear away a rock, or a minute and a half to pick the same rock up and carry it two miles distant. It altered the landscape too, so that when he looked from his window at first light he might have been transported elsewhere in his sleep; the whole house shipped off to a realm where trees groped upwards from the depths, and a tracery of hedgework scraped the surfaces of lakes. Bewildered by difference, you could lose your bearings. Which was the last thing you wanted to happen to you, because one day it would be the last thing that did.

It was important to keep track of where you were.

Knowing when you were was equally critical.

A good job, thought David Cartwright—River’s grandfather; the O.B.—that he had a head for dates.

January 4th. The year, as ever, the current one.

His house was in Kent; old house, big garden, not that he did as much of that since Rose had died. Winter provided an alibi: Can’t wait to be back out there, my boy. Life’s better with a trowel in your hand. Gardening, come to that, was what he’d been doing first time he’d laid eyes on River. Funny way to meet your grandson, already seven years old. River’s mother’s fault, he’d thought then, but such straightforward judgments seemed less clear now. He was tying his tie, as he had these thoughts; watching his hands in the mirror as they made complicated movements beyond the reach of his conscious brain. Some things were best done without thinking. Raising a daughter, it had turned out, not one of them.

Tie seemed straight enough, though. Important to maintain standards. You read about these old chaps in their pee-stained corduroys, with their vests on backwards, and dribble on their chins.

“That ever happens to me,” he’d instructed River more than once, “shoot me like a horse.”

“Exactly like a horse,” River would reply drily.

Dammit, that was the name they gave them, there at Slough House. The slow horses. Treading on a young man’s toes, that was; reminding him of the balls-up he’d made of things.

Not that his own copybook was free of blot. If they’d had a Slough House in his day, who knew? He might have whiled his own career away in terminal frustration; forced to sit it out on the bench, watching others carried shoulder-high round the boundary. Laps of honour and whatnot. That was what the boy thought, of course; that it was all about guts and glory—truth was, it was all about flesh and blood. Medals weren’t won in the sunshine. Backs were stabbed in the dark. It was a messy business, and maybe the boy was better off out of it, though there was no telling him that, of course. Wouldn’t be a Cartwright otherwise. Just like his mother, whom David Cartwright had missed acutely for years, without admitting it to anyone, even Rose.

. . . All these thoughts and he was still here in the hallway. What was it he’d been going to do? A blank moment came and went so smoothly it left barely a ripple. He was going to walk to the village. He needed to stock up on bread and bacon and whatever. His grandson might call round later, and he wanted to have some food in.

His grandson was called River.

Before he left, though, he needed to check his tie was straight.

In the same way a tongue keeps probing a sore tooth, the conversation in Marcus and Shirley’s office kept returning to Roderick Ho—specifically, the wholly improbable, end-of-days-indicating, suggestion that he no longer flew solo.

“You think he’s really found a woman?”

“He might have. It’s surprising what some people leave lying around.”

“Because it could easily turn out to be a chick with a dick or whatever. And he’d be the last to know.”

“Even Ho—”

Shirley said, “Seriously, trust me. Last to know.”

“Yeah, okay,” Marcus said. “But he seems convinced.” He directed a sour look towards the doorway, and Ho’s office beyond. “Says he’s a one-woman man now.”

“He probably meant cumulatively.”

Marcus, who hadn’t been laid since his wife’s car was repo’ed, grunted.

Louisa had peered round the door three minutes back to give them a heads-up on a possible Lamb appearance: as a result, the pair were staring at their screens; a reasonable facsimile of work, except that Shirley was still wet. Marcus’s monitor throbbed in front of him. Even after all this time in Slough House he found it hard to adjust to its routines; switch mind and body off, become an automaton, processing random information sets. Burnt-out vehicles, that was his spreadsheet: burnt-out cars and vans—hardly an unusual sight in British cities. He’d seen one himself last week, in a supermarket car-park; a black husk squatting in a pool of sooty residue. It would have been joy-ridden there then set alight, as the simplest way of eradicating evidence—the kids who’d taken it convinced that the forces of law and order were itching to go CSI on their gangsta asses; ready to swab DNA from seats, prints from the steering wheel. Safer just to torch that baby, and watch it crack and buckle in the heat.

But what if it wasn’t as simple as that, Lamb wanted to know? (Important corollary: Lamb didn’t want to know—Lamb couldn’t care less. Lamb had just hit on another way of wasting a slow horse’s time.) What if these torch-happy kids weren’t just lighting up their stolen rides; what if they were experimenting with ways of blowing cars up—calculating blast radiuses; measuring the potential damage varying payloads could deliver? So here was Marcus, whose role in life had been kicking down doors, retooling himself as an analyst; staring at a screen which broke down five years’ worth of vehicular arson by make, location, accelerant used, and a dozen other variables . . . There was always the possibility Lamb had a point—anyone who found the notion too high-concept just had to turn the TV on, and watch footage of the onesie-clad forensics crew picking through Westacres’ ashes. But either way, this wasn’t the part of the process Marcus should have been involved in. He should be the one they called when they had a suspect holed up in a towerblock with hostages. The one they decked out in Kevlar and dropped down a chimney: Merry Christmas, assholes.

Control, alt, delete.

The radiator gurgled noisily, interrupting his chain of thought, but at least it meant heat was moving around the building, which meant someone was paying bills. Marcus wasn’t. Marcus was accumulating a drawerful of red letters: final demands for electricity and gas. Cassie was talking about taking the kids, going to her mother’s “for a bit,” and that was even without knowing about the unpaid bills—her repossessed car had been the final straw.

“You said you’d got it under control.”

His gambling, she meant.

“You said you’d drawn a line, walked away. No more money down the drain. You promised, Marcus.”

And he’d meant it, too, but how did you stop money disappearing once it had decided to go? It was even less responsive to persuasion than Cassie.

He thought: I’ve turned into one of those men worth more dead than alive. More of us than you’d think. It’s not just the Jihadi Johns out there in the scrublands, living off camel meat and sleeping in holes but with a million-dollar price tag on their heads: it’s the rest of us too. Us poor working saps in debt to our eyeballs, a never-ending mortgage, and bills papering the walls; barely enough spare cash for a cup of coffee, but shouldering game-changing amounts of life insurance. I could keel over right here right now, and the death-in-service payout would solve all my problems. The house would be free and clear; money left over to see the kids through university. Best thing all round, except for being dead. But that’s going to happen sooner or later, so why not here at my desk? . . . He should raise that as a joke with Cassie, except she might not laugh. And no amount of Kevlar offered protection from a woman’s disappointment.

The slamming of a keyboard roused him from his reverie. Shirley was having hardware issues, and resolving them in her traditional manner.

“. . . You got an AFM later?” he asked.

“Who needs to know?” she snarled.

“Nobody at all,” said Marcus, and tapped at his own keyboard randomly for a moment, as if by altering the rows of figures on his screen, he might also change the facts he was confronted with: not simply the half-a-decade’s worth of destroyed cars, but his own dwindling net worth; the sums snapping at his heels growing ever larger, ever more vicious, and his ability to outpace them weakening by the day.

If he was going to walk to the village he’d need his wellingtons. Yesterday, he’d had to return home before he’d got fifty yards—a soft-shoe shuffle back down the drive; slippers jettisoned into the bin, soaked and useless. Well, a moment of absent-mindedness, and there’d been no witnesses. This was one of the advantages of living in semi-isolation, though you could never be certain there were no stoats watching.

“Know what I mean by stoats?”

River rarely forgot anything. David Cartwright had taught him well.

“You see a stoat, you pretend you haven’t,” River said.

“Except you never see a stoat.”

“You never see them,” River agreed. “But you know they’re there.”

Because the signs they left were legion. The bent grasses where they’d knelt; the lopped-off branch that had obscured their view. Cigarette ends in a tidy heap. Don’t have the boy picking up old fag ends, Rose had scolded. But it was best the boy was taught to be on his guard, because once the stoats had you in their sights it was the devil’s own job shaking them off.

A good morning for training, then. Besides, all boys like splashing in puddles so—one welly on; the other angled for entry—he bellowed for River to come join him for a walk. But even as his words went crashing through the empty house, he noticed their falsity: that was not the voice he’d had when River had been a boy. And River’s boyhood was over; the days of teaching him about stoats and bogeymen, the myths and legends of Spook Street, had been gone longer than Rose . . .

David Cartwright shook his head. An old man’s fancy—a memory rising to the surface, like a bubble from a frog. He lowered his foot into the second welly, chuckling. The boy ever learned he had these moments of inattention, he’d never hear the end of it. Besides, stoats weren’t what they used to be. These days they used drones and satellite imagery; they planted tiny cameras in your house. Your every movement charted.

Wellington on, he stood up straight. Little bit of exercise, that was the ticket. It was true, there’d been times lately when he’d worried he’d come adrift. He’d doze off of an afternoon, forgivable lapse in an old codger, and come to in a panic: the fire seething in the grate, lamplight softly glowing; everything as it ought to be, but still that knocking in his chest: what had happened while he’d slept? Walls had been known to fall. Things had emerged from under bridges. It was a relief when the world he woke to was the same as the one he’d left.

But that wasn’t always the case, was it? Sometimes the world did shift on its axis. Just two days ago, there’d been a suicide bomber in a British shopping centre—what did they call it? A flash mob . . . The blackest of black jokes; a flash mob ignited, and all those young lives destroyed. For a moment, standing by his own front door, David Cartwright felt it as a personal loss, something he could have prevented. And then that loss shifted shape, and Rose was telling him to be sure to wear his Barbour, not that dreadful old raincoat. And to carry his umbrella, just in case.

Keys in pocket. Wellingtons on feet. What was it he’d been thinking about, some dreadful thing or other? It slid past him like smoke, nothing he could get a grip on. Tucking himself into his raincoat—the Barbour made him feel he was pretending to be country folk—and leaving his umbrella hanging like a bat on its hook, he let himself out the door.

In the office above Marcus and Shirley’s heads, other fingers tapped away: their movements fluid, the keyboard imaginary, the notes they followed apparently random but always searching for the melody beneath; a tune that would echo, build and repeat itself for thirty minutes or so, its themes at first withheld, sometimes stumbling, but ultimately laid bare. And while this happened, nothing else did. That was its lure for Jason Kevin Coe; the clean white page it opened in his mind, temporarily erasing the nightmares scribbled there.

We feel that you’re not . . . happy in your work.

He could not remember how he had answered this question, which, anyway, was not a question. He had the feeling he’d simply sat, fingers twitching in his lap. Reaching for a tune that swirled around his head.

Coe wasn’t sure when this had begun. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, to mime his way through a series of improvised piano recitals; it was simply something he’d discovered himself doing, or rather, had discovered somebody else discovering him doing—he’d been on a bus, moving in fits and starts along a crowded Regent Street, when he noticed that the young woman next to him was edging away, casting worried glances at him, at his fingers, which were thrumming a non-existent keyboard. He hadn’t until that moment connected the music in his head with the movement of his hands. At the time, he hadn’t even been wearing his iPod. The music was simply inside him, something he relied on in moments of anxiety, which now included, he was barely surprised to learn, travelling in fits and starts in a crowded bus on Regent Street.

We were wondering if a transfer might not be in your best interests.

Always that we, underlining the plurality of the forces lined against him. Not that it was the Service’s HR department that gave him sleepless nights.

Today, beneath his grey hoodie, JK Coe wore a T-shirt and jeans ripped at the knee. It had been a while since he’d worn anything else. He was three-days unshaven, and while unarguably clean—he showered twice daily; more often when time allowed—there always followed him a whiff of something that seemed to float at the outer edge of his ability to smell it. Sometimes, he worried it was the smell of shit. But really he knew it was fear; the odour of his own worst memory, when he’d been tied naked to a chair while another man, also naked, threatened him with an electric carving knife. In his dreams, in his insomniac nightmares, he relived what might have happened; the ripping of steel through his flesh; the wet slap of his innards as they hit the plastic sheets spread on the floor. When his fingers weren’t searching for music they crept to his stomach, interlocked across his belly, struggled to hold inside what might have been carved out.

All of this had taken place at home, in his fifth-floor flat. He’d bought when he’d been earning well in banking, before he’d sickened of that career, shortly before everybody else had sickened of it too, and people began to look on bankers like there ought to be bags to collect them in. A narrow escape, he’d thought at the time, having fallen back on his degree subject and taken a post with the Service’s Psych Eval section, where he hoped to prove useful. A modest ambition, and no longer a career target.

Slough House might be a better fit, we think. Fewer . . . alarms.

In the weeks and months following his ordeal, Coe had tired of most things. Food lost flavour, and alcohol served to make him throw up long before he’d achieved any kind of anaesthetised state. If he’d had ready access to weed or stronger he’d have given it a shot, but acquiring illegal substances demanded social interaction; interaction with people he could imagine providing . . . “alarms.” He couldn’t read for long without becoming furious. Music was all that was left. Coe had never played the piano in his life, and it was a toss-up as to whether his fingers were going in the right direction when the notes in his head climbed the scale; nevertheless, here he was, exiled to Slough House with the other catastrophes of the Intelligence world; sentenced to plough away at a series of unpromising projects with no end in sight, instead of which he was making unheard music on an unplayable instrument, and finding in the process, if not peace, then at least a certain amount of white space.

From across the room, River Cartwright watched him dispassionately. If he’d learned anything as a slow horse, it was that there was no helping some people—sometimes, you had to let them drown. Which was what it looked like JK Coe was doing: not waving but drowning, scrabbling for purchase on a desk that was never going to keep him afloat. Whichever shore he was poling for, he’d either make it or he wouldn’t. Until that happened, River planned on leaving him be.

Besides, he had troubles of his own.

At the junction where the driveway met the lane lay the Great Lake, an annual event caused by poor drainage. David Cartwright skirted it unsteadily, one careful footstep after another along what remained of the kerb: little more than a series of narrow stepping stones. The hedgerow shivered at his passage, and tipped a pint of water straight into his boot, blast it! But now he was over, and back on firm ground. He waved a greeting at his neighbours’ house, though its windows were dark, and squelched past the bus-shelter, where a newspaper lay plastered to the floor. Torn images of parental grief screamed up. A streetlamp flickered uncertainly, unsure whether it should be on or off.

The lane led to the village in meandering fashion, literally going round the houses, but the footpath through the wood was direct. A wooden kissing-gate, semi-obscured by hedge, offered entrance. You watch your step now, Rose admonished. The way was carpeted with leaves, thickly sludged with them in places, but he’d always been mindful of treacherous ground, something he’d learned when plotting a course through history. You lived your life day by day, the O.B. thought, but days were mere splinters of time, no useful measure. The sudden events that blind us with their light had roots in the slowly-turning decades. Even now, he could make out shapes from the past behind the headlines, like predators glimpsed through murky waters. Twenty years retired, and he still knew when there were stoats on his trail. His neighbours’ house shouldn’t be empty at this hour: the cleaning woman should be there, unlikely to be vacuuming in the dark. And that flickering streetlamp: no doubt its innards had been tampered with, the better to insert some surveillance device.

He waited. Of all the sounds in the wood, all the damp rustlings and furtive scratchings, none paused, to allow him to focus on their absence. Everything continued as it had been. But then, he would expect no different. These were not amateurs.

“But if you know it’s a trap,” the boy said, “shouldn’t you avoid it?”

“No. You want them to think you’re oblivious to their presence. And then, first time they blink—pouf! You’re gone.”

He blinked—pouf!—and River was gone too.

The trees grumbled rustily. Someone whistled in imitation of a bird, and someone whistled back. The O.B. waited, but that was it for the time being. Carefully, eyes alert for snares among the leaves, he headed towards the village.

“Think he’s an issue or a fuck-up?”

“Who are we talking about now?”

“Mr. Air Piano.”

Marcus pretended to consider the matter. Sometimes it was easiest to go with Shirley’s flow. When Lamb wasn’t around she grew restless, as if his absence required celebration; and since Shirley’s definition of celebration was wide, anything that didn’t involve controlled substances was, on the whole, to be encouraged.

“You want to offer a little context?” he asked.

“Well, you and me, we’re issues. You’ve got your gambling addiction—”

“It’s not an addiction—”

“—and me, apparently I’m ‘irritable.’”

“You broke a dude’s nose, Shirl.”

“He was asking for it.

“He was asking for a couple of quid.”

“Same thing.”

“For Children in Need.”

“He was dressed as a fucking rabbit. I assumed he was dangerous.”

“That’s probably the only reason you’re not in prison,” Marcus conceded.

“Yeah, well. They wouldn’t have got me at all if it wasn’t for those pesky kids.”

Who had caught it on camera, and stuck it on YouTube. The whole dressed-as-a-rabbit thing was mitigation, of course, and the arresting officer had been charity-mugged herself three times that morning, and in the end the assault charges had been sidestepped on condition Shirley sign up for AFM.

Anger Fucking Management. Twice a week, in Shoreditch.

(“Don’t set off any new trends,” Marcus warned her when he found out. “I took an idiot round Shoreditch once. That’s how hipsters started.”)

“And I’m assuming River and Louisa are fuck-ups,” he said now.

“Well, duh.”

“Catherine was an issue. Min was a fuck-up.”

“And Ho’s a dickhead, but you always get outliers. So what’s Jasper Konrad, that’s what I want to know. And what is it with the air piano?” She mimicked his action, trilling up and down a non-existent instrument. “Who’s he think he is, Elton John?”

“You want to know what he’s hearing in his head, go ask him. But don’t blame me if the voices tell him to carve you up.”

“Yeah, ’cause he looks like he could be dangerous. Probably takes two of him to scramble an egg.” She stopped pretending to play the piano. “Tell you what, though,” she said. “If I was River, I’d be worried.”

“How so?”

“Youngish white guy, fucked up and seething. We’ve already got one of those. It’s like River’s being replaced.”

Marcus said, “You have a weird way of looking at things.”

“You wait and see. Then tell me I’m wrong.”

She started banging at her keyboard again, her actual one, and Marcus couldn’t tell if she was working out aggression, or writing an email.

Suppressing a sigh, he returned to work.

When he emerged from the footpath a car was heading down the lane, and it slowed at the sight of him, seemed about to halt, then sped up. He resolutely did not turn to watch it—they wanted him to react. Best keep his powder dry. And he was not quite defenceless, as they would discover to their cost.

No, he would make straight for the shop; in/out, back to camp. It might not be a simple exfiltration—the woman behind the counter was a chatty one; you could barely prise yourself loose with a crowbar—but lately, it occurred to him, she had been chatting less, listening more; coaxing out details it might have been wiser to preserve. He’d been explaining to her how history was never a closed book. Look at Russia: complete basket case. That hadn’t been the plan, but that was the thing about history: push it down in one place, it springs up in another, like ill-laid lino.

He’d said, “And there’s always a price to pay. You make decisions, and people die, and that’s what you live with, day and night, ever after. But I wouldn’t have done things any differently.”

She’d said, “David, you worked at the Ministry of Transport. I’m sure people were inconvenienced, but I don’t suppose many of them died.”

Of course he had. The Ministry of Transport was his cover story; the alibi that papered over forty-something years of working life. So in the village, that’s what he’d been: a pen-pusher with a brief for trains or roads or airports—you couldn’t expect him to remember. It was hard enough keeping track of what he’d actually done, without recalling everything he’d merely pretended to do.

So he’d laughed it off, “Figure of speech, dear lady,” but she’d have been on the phone as soon as he’d left, letting them know his cover was springing leaks. These were the lengths to which they were going. They were replacing members of his community, so that those he’d lived among for years were no longer to be trusted.

(“The best of us are thieves and scoundrels,” he’d told River more than once. “As for the worst . . . ”

“Slough House,” River would say. “Jackson Lamb. Remember?”)

And River was his most obvious asset, his most trusted fellow human. What if they replaced him too? He could open the door to his only grandson and find a viper slithering inside.

If that happened, measures would have to be taken. Because he was not quite defenceless, as they would discover to their cost.

He crossed the lane, glad of his wellingtons, and entered the shop, setting the bell above the door jangling. What was it he’d wanted? Basic supplies: bread and bacon, milk and teabags. But already there was the sense of entering enemy territory, of having wandered into the path of stoats, because the lady of the shop was staring at him in something like horror, something like pity; was coming round the counter with one hand washing the other, her mouth stretching ever wider.

“Oh, David,” she said. “David, your trousers . . . ”

And when the O.B. looked down it took him a moment to understand what she was getting at, because he was certainly wearing trousers, tucked into his wellingtons, and the lady of the shop had reached him and taken his hand before it dawned on him that what he was looking at was not the thick dark tweed of everyday use, but the dark-red paisley-patterned cotton of his pyjamas.

And morning gives way to afternoon, and evening falls, as it usually does. In Kent, daylight slinks away across the fields as streetlights wink on one by one, each casting a tight umbrella over its own little stage, while in the heart of London darkness loiters in corners, and peeps from behind curtains. In Slough House, the heating has died with as much effort as it took to come to life, the death rattle of its pipes sounding a knell over the afternoon’s activities, such as they were. In the end, Lamb has shown neither his face nor any other part of his anatomy, but the expectation of a dismal event can be as draining as its occurrence, and the atmosphere retains an edge of disquiet, despite the horses’ departure. First to go was Roderick Ho, followed closely by Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander. JK Coe may have been next—he was simply there one moment and then not, like the shine on an apple—but what’s certain is that Louisa Guy and River Cartwright left together, their destination the nearest pub in which they might expect to encounter no one they know. Moira Tregorian is last to leave, but before doing so yields to the temptation of entering Lamb’s office, which has overcome its top-floor location to assert a natural inclination towards cellardom. Dankness is its signature odour, with notes of stale flatulence and mouldy bread. A suspicious mind might even conjecture that smoking has taken place here. The blinds, as ever, are drawn, and the overhead bulbs have blown, so for illumination Moira is forced to rely on the lamp atop a pile of telephone directories to one side of the desk. The light this casts is yellow and sickly, and mostly serves to rearrange shadows. On Lamb’s desk, the piles of paper have an unread look and are curling at the edges; on his shelves, the clutter is a challenge to the tidy-minded intruder. Tidy-minded Moira Tregorian certainly is, but simple-minded she isn’t, quite, and she overcomes the urge to begin instilling order. Instead, she hovers a moment, wondering about this man into whose orbit she has been cast, whom she has yet to encounter, and who seems to collect empty bottles. It is clear that her predecessor has let things slide to the extent that bringing Mr. Lamb to heel might prove a wearisome business. Moira Tregorian sighs to punctuate this thought, then turns the lamp off and makes her way down the stairs and into the damp and gloomy air of Aldersgate Street.

Behind her Slough House creaks and bangs, and surrenders to the chill.

There was a pub near the church where they’d filmed Shakespeare in Love, and Louisa bagged a table under a diamond-patterned window while River fetched drinks. It still seemed odd, this—even a casual drink after work felt like two-timing Min’s memory. But nothing stayed still. It was like moving from one room to another: you’d been there, and now you were here. Sooner or later, you closed the door between.

Three months back, Louisa had shifted the fridge in her studio flat and chiselled a lump of plaster from the wall. Nestled there was the uncut diamond, a fingernail-sized chunk of light, she’d acquired when the heist at the Needle came unstuck, shortly after Min’s death. In a pub near Hatton Garden, she approached a man she’d been staking out for weeks: an appraiser at one of the smaller local jewellers, someone she knew would pay cash for an unprovenanced stone; not a fortune—daylight robbery, even—but that was an irony she could appreciate, and he could presumably guess at. Lumped together with her scraps of savings, it was enough for a deposit on an apartment some way out of town. “Apartment” was an estate agent’s word, making the property sound bigger than it was, but she was no longer sleeping in her kitchen, and her living-room window had a view of a park, and she was paying a mortgage, not rent. Sometimes at night she’d sit with the curtains open, a glass of wine in her hand, looking down on trees waving in the wind; not thinking about Min exactly, or about anything much, but being glad she was there and no longer in her poky studio with its constant cooking odours, and heavy bass noises thrumming from passing cars. Glad, too, she was no longer on bar stools every other evening, hooking up with strangers. She wasn’t drinking so much, and was sleeping better. She woke early, but was mostly untroubled by dreams.

And this, having a drink with River, this was okay too. When you’d been through a war together—even a small one—it lent you a connection you weren’t going to find in a hook-up. They’d both shot people. This didn’t get aired much, but it was always there on the table.

He returned with the drinks: a vodka-lime for her for old times’ sake, and a pint of bitter for him for £4.80. Prices in London were getting out of hand.

Because she wasn’t yet ready for conversation, she hit the burning question of the day before he was seated:

“Why’d you think Lamb’s invited the Moira to lunch?”

“The Moira” was what they’d taken to calling her; one of those unplanned habits that foster relationships.

River said, “He might have been pulling her leg.”

“Cruel, even for Lamb.”

“I dunno. Actually taking her to lunch would be crueller. Besides, taking her—paying for it? How likely is that?”

Lamb had a distinctly droit de seigneur approach to mealtimes.

Louisa sipped her vodka and felt it hit the right buttons: suddenly the bar’s edges were less harsh, and the noise from the other patrons subsided to a background murmur, waves collapsing on a beach. River looked better in this light too: the light of the evening’s first drink. He was fair-haired, pale skinned, grey eyed, and while these things were always true, they were usually run-of-the-mill details, swamped by the particularities of the moment: that he looked knackered, hungover, or pissed off, all of which were routine for a slow horse. His nose was a little sharp, true, and the mole on his upper lip grew larger when you noticed it, but basically he was fit enough, which was a good reason to go slow on the vodka-limes. Been there, done that. Her next phase of life involved domestic tranquillity, and avoiding unwise shagging choices.

So: conversation.

“Moira, anyway,” she said. “That’s an oldies’ name. Your aunt’s called Moira.”

“I don’t have any aunts.”

“You know what I mean, though.”

“Unless I do,” River continued. “I might have, come to think of it.”

“Yeah, ’cause who’s got time to go around remembering whether they’ve got aunts?”

He said, “Well, I never knew my father.”

“Oh.”

“Or if he had sisters. Or what they were called.”

“Oh, right, yeah, did I know that? I think I knew that. Sorry.”

“It’s what happened,” said River. “That’s all.”

“Your mother never told you who he was? No hints, no clues?”

“She’s a stubborn woman, my mother. She decided before I was born that he wasn’t part of her life any more. And that’s one path she’s never deviated from.”

This being an unusual circumstance, Louisa surmised.

Sundry details of their lives had been exchanged, but had frequently fallen into that abyss where facts of no relevance or interest were stored. This was because for most of that time, they’d been locked in separate miseries, exile to Slough House being a shared condition only in the way that long-term imprisonment was—you might knock about together in the yard, but when the cell doors slammed shut, you were alone. Sharing had been killing time, that was all. Later, with Min, her interest in other people had been dimmed for the inverse reason: the natural selfishness happiness carries with it. So Louisa might have absorbed any amount of information about River’s life, but basically, what she knew about him was he’d stood next to her once while bullets flew. She supposed most office relationships progressed along similar lines. Well, except for the bit about bullets.

So it was with the sense that she was covering territory she might have been expected to be familiar with that she said, “She’s not a big part of your life, then.”

“Not a big presence, anyway. My grandparents brought me up.”

“David Cartwright.”

“The one and only. Rose, my nan—she died a while ago.”

“And now you’re worried about him.”

“Yes,” River said. “I’m worried about him.”

“Getting forgetful?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is that so bad? I mean, yeah, okay, it’s bad, but . . . How old is he, anyway?”

“Eighties,” River said, “Eighty . . . four? Yeah, four.”

Louisa said, “Not so very old. Not these days.”

“Kind of is, though,” River said.

She didn’t reply, because he was right. Eighty-four kind of was old.

Her glass was nearly empty, but because River was still working on his pint she didn’t make a move towards a fresh round. Besides, it wasn’t the moment to break off talking. River had the absorbed air of one getting something off his chest, but with a way to go before he’d mined down to the real stuff.

She said, “How forgetful are we talking? Days of the week or his own name?”

“Somewhere in between, I guess.”

“Is he on meds?”

“Statins. Nothing else I know of. And I would, because . . . ”

“Because you’ve been through his bathroom cabinet. Have you talked to him about it?”

He gave her a look.

“Okay, not easy. But is there anyone you can talk to? Neighbours, anyone?”

“His neighbours think he’s a retired civil servant.”

“Well, he sort of is.”

“But not the kind they think. And the last thing I want is to discover he’s been sharing his life’s story with the postman.”

“Is that likely?”

“I don’t know, Louisa. Every time I see him, a bit more of him has slipped away. It’s like the light gets dimmer. He’s always been the anchor in my life. Now, I sometimes catch a look in his eye like he doesn’t know where he is, and it frightens me. I don’t know what to do about it.”

She let her hand lie on his for a moment. He nodded at the contact, then broke it to pick up his beer glass, which he drained. Then he said, “Fancy another?”

“Yes. But it’s my round.”

At the bar, she briefly locked looks with a man down the far end. Six months ago, that would have been enough to trigger an evening’s descent into carnal oblivion; six months from now, who knew, it might be enough to kickstart conversation. For the moment, there were other priorities. She looked away, paid for her drinks, and carried them back to the table thinking about the O.B., a term she’d heard River use—Old Bastard: a term of affection in this case. There were all sorts of legends in the Service—she worked for one of them, for God’s sake—but David Cartwright’s was the kind that withstood scrutiny. Never actually First Desk, but the power behind several incumbents of that throne. Of all the secrets he’d been privy to, a good number could still be radioactive. If he began to leak, there’d be concerned faces at Regent’s Park and elsewhere.

Seated again, she said, “Would they—I mean, the Park. Do they get involved, situations like this?”

“No. I doubt it, anyway. Well, I wouldn’t have put much past Ingrid Tearney, and Diana Taverner probably has men killed just to keep in practice, but Tearney’s out the door, and from what I hear, Lady Di’s using both hands to keep a grip on her desk. She’s probably not authorising clandestine wet work on the old brigade, just to make sure they don’t talk out of turn.”

Louisa said, “Yeah, I wasn’t actually suggesting they’d have him murdered, though I can see you’ve put some thought into that. I was more wondering about a home or something. A home for distressed former spooks. Didn’t there used to be something like that?”

“Sorry. Must be getting paranoid.”

“Goes with the territory.”

He said, “There was a place, but it was closed down a few years ago. Austerity measure.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah. Anyway, it’s not a fate he’d take to lightly. You’d need a crash squad to prise him from his house if he thought you were trying that on.”

“So he’s aware of what’s happening?”

“No. I don’t know. I just meant generally . . . It’s not like he’s forgotten who he is. It’s more like he’s forgotten that that’s not who he is any more. Some days, I think he’s still fighting the Cold War.”

“A lot of old people live in the past.”

“But not many of them have his past to live in. He keeps a gun in the house, Louisa. He’s supposed to keep it in a gun safe—I mean, technically, he’s not supposed to have it at all, but given that he does, he’s supposed to keep it in a safe. But last week I found it on the kitchen table. He said something about keeping the stoats away.”

“Stoats?”

“What they used to call watchers. When you were under surveillance.” River paused to take a drink, then said, “God, I don’t know. After the last few days, the bomb at Westacres, maybe the fate of one old man isn’t something to get worked up about.”

“He’s your grandfather. Of course you’re upset.”

“Yeah.” He looked at his watch. “And I ought to make a move.”

“You’re going to see him now?”

“Yep. Thanks, Louisa. For, you know. Listening.”

“Well. We should stick together.” And then, in case he thought she meant the pair of them, added, “Slough House, I mean. Nobody else is looking out for us.” She paused. “I miss Catherine.”

“So do I.”

“Do you think Lamb does?”

“. . . Seriously?”

“He’s not been much in evidence since she quit.”

River said, “He misses having an alcoholic around. He got a lot of mileage out of that.” He finished his beer and stood. “I have to go. I’ll just make the next train.”

“I hope he’s okay.”

“Thanks. But I don’t think this is something he’s likely to get better from.”

“Maybe not. But, you know. He’s not necessarily going to start reciting his memoirs on the village green.”

“That’s not what really worries me.”

“What does?”

River said, “That someone’ll come to the door and he’ll shoot them.”

From the train window River looked out on London’s dark edges and thought about his mother.

He didn’t do this often. They spoke on the phone occasionally, usually while she was abroad—this gave her licence to broadcast how much she missed him, how he should “pop on a plane” to Antibes, Cap Ferrat, Santa Monica, Gstaad, where they could hunker down for some mother/son time. All safe in the knowledge it wasn’t going to happen. When she was in-country, on the other hand, River found out about it afterwards, or not at all. I was so busy, darling, not a minute to myself. You know I was desperate to see you. But this had long ceased to distress him. When they were together, it felt more like an audience, as if he were a cub reporter summoned to the presence of a fading movie star. The pictures had got small. He was simply there to bear witness to that fact.

And the Isobel Dunstable commanding such attention was a long cry from the young woman who’d dumped him on his grandparents’ doorstep when he was seven, and taken off for two years with a man whose name he couldn’t remember. He wasn’t confident she could, either. But her mercurial twenties were way behind her, and in her respectable widowhood, while she might admit to the occasional youthful indiscretion, she was hardly going to put her hand up to a period of anarchy. Which didn’t mean she’d re-established friendly terms with her father. In some ancient era—before River’s appearance in the world—they’d had what Rose had called “a falling out.” She was big on understatement, his grandmother, but not one for betraying confidences. The details weren’t hers to provide, she’d told him. And neither combatant was offering clues.

The last time he’d seen them together had been at Rose’s funeral, where they hadn’t exchanged a word that he’d observed—and he had observed. River Cartwright, junior spook. He had missed the original Cold War by some years. This one would do until the next came along.

He wondered if his mother should know what state the Old Bastard was in, and which of them he’d be betraying most by divulging it.

The carriage was heavy with wet overcoat smells, and every time a train passed in the opposite direction the windows slapped open. Meanwhile, the man opposite River was explaining to his mobile phone, at some volume, how quickly he had assimilated the implications of the recent changes to Stamp Duty. That everyone hadn’t yet banded together and hanged him by his braces was testament to the forbearance of the British commuter.

His grandfather thought about her often, he knew. He would ask River, carefully offhand, “whether he’d heard from his mother”—never using “Isobel,” as if this would presume a deeper acquaintance than they shared. And when River answered that she was fine, as far as he knew, “That’s good then,” David would say, or something like. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

But the Old Bastard himself was not fine. What River had told Louisa was only a small part of the truth, the worst of which was that on a recent visit, the old man hadn’t known him. So carefully had he carried this off that it wasn’t until he’d been there half an hour that River realised. His grandfather was covering his lapse like a pro: echoing statements River had made; offering bland follow-ups that concealed his ignorance. The O.B. had never been a joe. But he had lived his life among them, and knew how to adapt.

River often stayed over mid-week, but he’d headed back to London on that occasion. The thought of his grandfather lying awake all night, terrified of the stranger in the spare room, was more than he could bear.

The financial guru opposite was growing more pleased with himself by the minute. He was more or less River’s age but about a thousand times his net worth, going by shirt and shoes. Still, money wasn’t everything: River leaned across, tapped him on the knee, and said, “Would you mind finishing your call now?” His tone was polite, but his eyes weren’t.

The man blinked, then said, “What did you say?”

River repeated his request, but this time it wasn’t a request.

The man stared at him for four seconds, weighing alternatives. Then said, “Look, I’ll call you back,” and put his phone away.

“Thank you,” said River.

A sidewind buffeted the train, and two windows slammed open again.

Louisa had said: Yeah, I wasn’t actually suggesting they’d have him murdered, though I can see you’ve put some thought into that.

But how could he, his grandfather’s son, not have done?

And what really worries me, River had wanted to tell her, is that he’s always loved telling stories. Even now, visits meant sitting in the O.B.’s study, sharing a drink and hearing secrets. That these had grown confused, frequently petering out down lanes that led nowhere, didn’t mean they were no longer secret, and the thought of the O.B. on his daily pilgrimage round the village—butcher, baker, post office lady—weaving for all the same webs he’d spun River, had kept him awake two nights on the trot. The locals thought his grandfather had been a big wheel in the Ministry of Transport, one of the wheels which kept all the others turning, and they’d think his tales of a covert past the fantasies of a failing mind. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t attract attention. David Cartwright was not a forgotten man round Regent’s Park: he had seen the Service through choppy waters; never his own hand on the tiller, but a light grip on the elbow of whoever was steering. It was he who’d picked the stars by which the Service read its maps. And now he was old, and old spies grew forgetful, and among the things they forgot was remembering what not to say. More covers were blown by the need for a friendly ear than were ever dismantled by opposition hoods. So elderly spies had an eye kept on them, in case they came unbuttoned, and maybe there were times—how could he not have thought about this?—when the Service reached out a gloved hand and eased an old spook’s passage from this life.

Better that, the thinking would go, than have a legend like David Cartwright unspool his memories in public, for the world and his or her civil partner to hear, and sell to the Sunday papers.

They’d send stoats first, to check the lie of the land.

And the O.B. kept a gun in his house which he no longer stored in a gun safe.

The train trundled on towards his destination. Different scenarios played out in his head—there were only so many ways a story could end.

It could happen very quickly, and there needn’t be anyone else involved. Help the old man into a bath. A quick tug on his ankles and it would be over.

Jesus Christ, would you listen to yourself?

But: That ever happens to me, he’d instructed River more than once, shoot me like a horse. He’d meant getting older than nature intended; losing his mind, losing his marbles. And he hadn’t been making a jest. Nothing more frightening, to someone who’d lived by his wits, than to be slowly losing them.

And there was a dilemma for you, River thought drily. Could you do what he wanted, even though it would destroy you? Or will your scruples, your love for him, your cowardice, keep you from doing the only real favour he’s ever asked, and condemn him to a living hell?

Maybe he should seek his mother’s advice.

Through the window, he could see trees splashing about in the wind. He had a ten-minute walk from the station, and was going to get wet. But it suited his mood.

The man opposite caught his eye, and looked away hurriedly. River stared back for a while, at the man’s reflection in the glass, but his thoughts were elsewhere: out among those cold swaying trees, in the unforgiving weather, in the dark.

When the doorbell rang the jangly noise went on longer than necessary, exploring the house, checking upstairs and down for occupants. David Cartwright was in his study, his usual chair, books stacked next to him. Topmost was Bleak House, through which he had been leafing lately; skating over the surface, because he no longer had the patience to submerge himself in detail. The more he did so, the more the characters came apart; their cover stories exposed as threadbare fictions.

The bell rang again.

River had a key, but rarely used it, which was his way of acknowledging his grandfather’s sovereignty. The O.B. had a fear of becoming a charity case; someone the neighbours checked on; popping a head round the door “to make sure you’re all right,” meaning not dead yet. He wasn’t dead yet. He rose and went into the hallway. Through the front door’s pebbled glass he could make out a shape backlit by the nearby streetlight, which was no longer flickering. This seemed significant, though he couldn’t think why.

Without approaching further, he said, “Who’s there?”

“It’s me.”

He waited.

“. . . Grandad? It’s me, River.”

It didn’t sound like River. Then again, it had been a long day and he was tired; distraught, too, by the memory of his trip to the village in his pyjama trousers. The lady from the shop, she claimed her name was Alice, had driven him home, chattering all the while as if this were normal. She had waited while he’d changed, and when he came down she’d boiled the kettle: “nice cup of tea,” the universal panacea. They had sat at the kitchen table eating a slice of cake, and he had asked her several trick questions, and she had fielded them all nicely. Even now he couldn’t be absolutely certain she was an imposter any more than he could prove he’d been slipped some memory-twisting drug. They wanted him askew from reality, that was their plan; wanted him declared harmless and senile, the better to squeeze him dry when the time came. And to that end they would make use of those who loved him, because that was how things worked on Spook Street. Your friends and neighbours were not to be trusted, but it was your family you had to fear.

“Grandad? Are you all right in there?”

The shape shifted; became hooded and intense. Whoever it was had raised a flattened palm to their brow and was peering through the mottled glass.

“What was your grandmother’s name?”

“. . . What?”

“Simple question.”

River, if that’s who it was, fell silent.

“Because if you can’t even—”

“Her name was Rose, Grandad. Your wife’s name was Rose. And your daughter, my mother, she’s Isobel.”

Which proved nothing. Any fool could do research.

The man banged on the door again. “Grandad? Are you okay?”

Let the enemy in. Pretend your guard is down. He wasn’t defenceless, as this imposter might yet discover to his cost.

He turned the latch and opened the door to the stranger on his doorstep. It was a creditable likeness. They had done their job well. If he was as fuddled as they thought, this man would pass as River Cartwright.

And this man was pushing on the door now, making David step back. He closed it behind him. “Cold out.”

“Where’ve you come from?”

“You know where I’ve come from.” He glanced down. “You need to put some slippers on.”

The O.B. looked down at his feet: socks only, on the cold tiles.

“Where are your slippers?”

He had thrown his slippers away, but didn’t want to admit this, because it would lead to more questions—why had he thrown them away; how had they got wet; why was he wandering in the rain with only slippers on his feet? To admit to confusion was to play into their hands. So he simply glared at the young man in a way that made it plain he would be questioned no more on this topic.

In return, he received a quizzical look; a head tilted to one side in a way that River himself had. “Did something happen today?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You seem . . . confused.”

“I’m fine,” he snapped.

Once, he had sat in the Prime Minister’s office while First Desk briefed her on unexpected troop movements on the East German border, a brief later agreed to have had a calming effect on the PM in particular, on policy in general, during Westminster’s jumpiest week since October ’62. And which, very much to the point, had been written by Cartwright himself—he, David Cartwright, had taken a planing tool to history; had smoothed away a rough edge, and ensured that the lives of hundreds of thousands of people continued on their serene course instead of being capsized by the possibility of war. And that was just one day in his life. One day in a long life, crammed with incident: what made today so special? No lives had been ruptured, no navies sunk. He’d walked to the shops in his pyjama trousers, that was all. It could have happened to anyone.

“It’s cold in here.”

“I’m all right.”

“You should have the heating on.”

Heat dulls the senses, keeps you unwary.

The young man who was calling himself River walked into the kitchen, acting like he owned the place. He cast a professional eye over the surfaces, checking for signs of neglect—unwashed crockery, crops of mould. He’d be a long time looking. Rose Cartwright had run a tight ship, and her widowed husband did the same.

“Have you eaten, Grandfather?”

“Yes.”

He’d eaten cake. A cup of tea and a slice of cake, as prepared by the Alice woman. This man would know that already, of course. He’d have been fully briefed.

“Would you like me to run you a bath?”

“When have I ever needed you to do that?”

“Grandad, you look cold to the bone. And there’s no fire lit. How long have you been sitting without the heating on? I’ll run you a bath so you can warm yourself up, and then I’ll light a fire.”

“River never . . . ”

He lost his thread.

“I’m River.”

“Have you spoken to your mother lately?”

“She’s fine. She sends her love.”

She never does that, the O.B. thought.

“Why does your voice sound strange?”

“Slight cold, nothing to worry about. I’m not contagious. Now let’s get upstairs.”

And this was not his grandson. Not the River he had first met in the garden; a scruffy-haired boy, T-shirted and unhappy. Isobel was already motoring down the lane with her latest unsuitable beau: that was the last they’d see of her for two years.

He’d been on his knees, with a trowel. He could remember their conversation as if it had been yesterday:

We all make mistakes, River. Made a couple myself, and some have hurt other people. They’re the ones you shouldn’t get over. The ones you’re meant to learn from.

He had always treated River as an equal, never condescended to him.

Am I going to live here now?

Yes. Can’t think what else to do with you.

It turned out it was as easy as that to allow someone into your life.

River Cartwright had been bone of his bone, the warm glow of his heart, since the boy was seven. And would they dare send an imposter to his home if the real River was at liberty, or even alive?

“Grandfather?”

“. . . What?”

“Shall I run you a bath?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, why not do that.”

“Good. I think that would be best.”

“You go on up,” David Cartwright told this stranger. “I just need to fetch something from the study.”

Because he was not as defenceless as they seemed to think.

A mobile phone vibrating on a hard surface sounds like a fart. That this was not an unusual sound in Jackson Lamb’s bedroom, or indeed his vicinity, might have been why it failed to rouse him immediately: his surfacing was a slow, painful experience, like that of a whale being tugged to shore. When at last he emerged, tarred and feathered by sleep, the phone escaped his grasp like a sliver of soap, forcing him to lean over the side of the bed and fumble about on the floor.

Mission accomplished, he answered with a single word: “Fuck?”

Twenty seconds later he said, “Fuck,” and disconnected.

For a while after that he lay in the dark, which stank like a wrestling ring. The room’s torpor suggested he’d turned the heating on at some point, and forgotten to turn it off at another. He wore boxers, one sock and a tie, which was inexorably knotted at the point it became impossible to loop over his head, and well short of that at which he’d be able to wriggle the rest of his body through it. Still, at least he’d made some attempt to get undressed: life was on an upward curve. Or had been, until the phone call.

He said “Fuck” again, and hauled himself out of bed.

Breakfast was two pints of tapwater and four Nurofen. Shaving was out of the question, but he released himself from yesterday’s tie with the kitchen scissors and found a fresh suit, which meant one that had been in his actual wardrobe, if not on a hanger. Locating his shoes was another ten minutes’ work. In the end, the missing one turned up outside his front door, though when he tried to wedge his foot inside, it seemed to have shrunk overnight. Closer examination revealed a sock still in occupation. Scrunching this into a ball, he crammed it into a pocket; then, shod at last, though in unlaced shoes, clomped out to his car, wiped the mouse droppings from the driver’s seat, and set off for Kent.

The streets weren’t exactly deserted—it was a little after two—but were threadbare enough that he could drive on auto-pilot. On the fringes of the capital streetlights became more sporadic, then gave way to darkened roads whose rises and dips were sketched in by oncoming traffic. Lamb smoked as he drove, and each time he reached the filter he wound the window down and flicked the butt into the night, where it spat orange sparks into cold damp air.

Bright glittering beads at rabbit level observed his passage. Just once the car rucked, and wheels mashed fur and bone into ten yards of tarmac. The expression on Lamb’s face didn’t change, even as his cigarette shed a worm of ash into his lap.

He parked on a verge, where his tyres would leave treadmarks in the grass, and sat for a while without moving. The car’s heater had rendered the air thick and rubberised, but this had more established odours to compete with, like cigarette smoke, and the half-portion of chow mein which had slipped under the passenger seat an aeon ago, and would now require a high-powered vacuum cleaner or a certified zoologist to remove. Lamb himself wasn’t odour-free, come to that. He plugged another cigarette into his mouth without lighting it. Rubbing the corners of his eyes with his thumb and ring finger instead, he revived the images of other cars’ headlights, which looped briefly across the inside of his eyelids before spinning away into nothing.

It was a starless night, thick black cloud wrapping the sky, and the streetlamps were wreathed in mist, the hedgerows heavy with collected rain. The houses here were large and detached, each walled or fenced off from its neighbour; islanded by lawn and flowerbed, and anchored to the earth by the weight of a century or so. Their gateposts were chipped or crumbling, their driveways as rutted as farmyards’, and their hallways would be stuffed with Labradors and wellingtons, with overcoats handed down from father to son—a tightness masquerading as tradition, unless it was the other way round—because it was old money, in all its shabby glory, that owned villages like this. There’d be poorer elements, their function to mow lawns and repair boilers, but the foxes here would be red and bushy, the squirrels fat and cheeky, unlike their nicotine-addicted counterparts in London parks and alleys, while the human inhabitants would be bluff, smug, and brimming with the confidence born of inherited wealth. Lamb took care to slam the door when he hauled himself out into the cold. There was little point in discretion. He could already see upstairs curtains twitching in the nearest house.

A police car was parked by David Cartwright’s gate. Two other unmarked vehicles were nearby, one with a goon behind the wheel; the other empty, its hazards flashing. He felt its warmth as he passed. Cartwright’s front door was ajar, light puddling onto the driveway. A uniformed policeman stood there, observing Lamb’s approach with the wary contempt a street copper feels for the Funny Brigade. “Help you sir,” he said: three bare words, neither question nor statement. Lamb might as well have pulled a string on his back.

In place of an answer, Lamb produced the belch that had been brewing for the past five minutes.

“Very convincing, sir. But I’m going to need to see something laminated.”

Lamb sighed, and reached for his Service ID.

In the hallway a technician was dusting the banister for fingerprints, looking every inch an extra in a TV show. Star power was provided by the blonde in the black suit talking on her mobile. Her hair was bound in a severe back-knot, but if that was an attempt to dim her wattage, it failed; she could have painted a beard on and still sucked up all the local attention. When she saw Lamb she finished her conversation and slotted her phone into her jacket pocket. She was wearing a white blouse under the suit: her eyes were blue, her manner all business. But she didn’t offer her hand.

“You’re Lamb,” she told him.

“Thanks,” he said. “This time of night, I’m plagued by doubts.”

“We’ve not met. I’m Emma Flyte.”

“I guessed.”

Emma Flyte was the new Head Dog, in charge of the Service’s internal police squad. The Dogs sniffed out all manner of heresies, from the sale of secrets to injudicious sexual encounters: the honeytrap was older than chess, but stupidity was even older. So the Dogs were used to a long leash, roaming whatever corridors they chose, but were currently in the doghouse themselves: Dame Ingrid Tearney, erstwhile head of the Service, had used their offices to further her own interests, and while initiative was frequently applauded, getting caught exercising it was not. Emma Flyte, an ex-police officer, was the new administration’s clean-sheet appointment, though as more than one commentator had noted, if Regent’s Park was looking to the Met for an injection of integrity, it was in serious danger of an irony meltdown.

She said, “You know Mr. Cartwright?”

“Which one?”

“Either. Both.”

“The younger one works for me. His grandfather gave me a job once. You want to show me the damage?”

She handed him a pair of paper boots. “Treat it as a crime scene.”

Lamb left a lot of crime scenes in his wake. Arriving at one after the event was something of a novelty.

So was putting on a pair of paper boots, or so Flyte seemed to think. She watched with fascination as he attempted to slip the first one over his left shoe without bending over.

“It might help if you did your laces up.”

“I don’t suppose . . . ”

She didn’t grace that with so much as a smile.

Sighing, he got down to floor level and tied his laces. That done, the paper boots went on easily. When he regained his feet, his face was red and he was breathing heavily.

“I’d say you’re out of shape,” she told him. “But I’m not sure what shape you’re aiming for.”

He leered. “Offering to take me in hand?”

“Not even with these on.” She wore latex gloves. “It’s in the bathroom. That’s upstairs,” she added, as if his general knowledge wasn’t necessarily reliable in such matters.

Lamb led the way. The staircase was narrow for the size of the house, the pattern on its carpet a faded blurry mix of blue and gold. On the wall were a series of prints, pencil sketches of hands and faces, as if the artist was working up to something big but hadn’t got there yet. On the topmost one, an outstretched palm, the glass was smeared with blood. Lamb paused, then glanced down at the technician below. “Missed a bit.”

The landing was lined with books, shelved around a windowseat looking onto the front garden. The nearest open door was a bedroom, Lamb assumed the old man’s; lining a corridor were three other doors, one closed, with, at the far end, another set of stairs: attics and boxrooms, one-time servants’ quarters. On the wall opposite one of the open doors was another bloody handprint. You didn’t have to be a detective. He took the cigarette from his mouth, wedged it behind his ear, and jammed his hands into his pockets.

Behind him, she said, “Lamb?”

He paused.

“It’s bad in there.”

“I’ve seen bad before,” he told her, and entered the bathroom.

The body lay on the floor, which was where bodies usually ended up, in Lamb’s experience. He’d seen them hung in trees too, and washed up on shorelines, and a few snagged on barbed wire, dangling like broken puppets. But by and large, when you had a body, the floor was where it was going to finish. A little of this one had washed over the bathtub, too: its face was a pulped absence, a reminder that flesh and bone were temporary at best, and prone to rearrangement. He was probably imagining the smell of cordite in the air. Blood and shit were more prominent: besides, the trigger had been pulled on this scene easily a couple of hours ago.

“He was carrying this.” Flyte handed him a laminated card, much like the one he’d shown the policeman, but fresher, newer. When he held it at the right angle, its hologram configured into something like River Cartwright’s face.

“Uh-huh.”

He crouched down for a closer look, without any of the creaking or visible effort he’d made when tying his laces. The body wore jeans, black boots, a black V-neck over a white sweatshirt. It had had teeth once, and a nose, eyes, all the usual stuff, but none of that was currently available for identification purposes. The hair was carrying a lot of evidential weight, then: this was fairish, leaning towards brown, though substantially bloodied up at the moment. Cut short, but not excessively so, which fitted Lamb’s memory of his last sighting of River Cartwright. There were no rings on the fingers, no jewellery of any kind. That, too, was a match.

“Did he have any identifying marks?” Flyte asked.

“He used to have a face,” Lamb said. “That any help?”

“Tattoos? Scars? Piercings?”

“How the fuck should I know? I make them wear clothes round the office.”

“We’ll do blood work. But the faster we can do this, the better.”

“A mole,” Lamb said. “He had a mole on his upper lip.” He glanced at the bathtub. “You’re gunna need a pair of tweezers and a sieve.”

“So this is him.”

“What do you think?”

“I’d appreciate a response.”

Lamb passed a hand across his face, but when he took it away his expression hadn’t altered. “It’s him,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s River Cartwright,” Lamb said, and rose easily and left the room.

She caught up with him in the garden. He was smoking a cigarette, though the one behind his ear was still in place. Way overhead, a tear in the clouds allowed moonlight through: this cast a silvery tint on damp grass and wet hedges. A set of cast-iron furniture was arranged on the crazy-paved patio. One of its matching chairs had toppled over: it lay in a mad position, legs in the air, like a stranded tortoise.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Bit of a head,” said Lamb. “I’m not normally a drinker, but I had a sherry before dinner.”

“I’ll skip the pastoral stuff then. He was shot twice. Both times in the face.”

“Seems excessive. Though he could be annoying, I’ll give you that.”

“You don’t seem too concerned.”

The look Lamb gave her was blandly unexpressive. “I’ve lost joes before.”

“You were an Active.”

“While you were still in mittens. The neighbours hear anything?”

“Not until we turned up.”

“So who called it in?”

“He had a panic button.”

“Police?”

“No. Us.”

“So what was the response time?”

She said, “We don’t come out of this well. He pressed it at 21:03. First responder got here at 21:49.”

“Forty-six minutes,” said Lamb. “Good job it wasn’t an emergency.”

“It was his third call in three weeks. The two previous occasions, he’d forgotten what the button was for. He’d pressed it to find out.”

Lamb tapped his temple with a finger.

She rolled her eyes. “His last medical checked out okay. He’d admitted occasional memory lapses, but nothing significant. He could remember the date, his phone number. Who the PM was.”

“Impressive,” Lamb agreed. “Could he remember what he looks like?”

“All I’m saying, there was no reason to think he was anything other than a bit scatty. And certainly none to expect this.”

“And here’s me thinking the panic button was for the unexpected.” Lamb squashed his cigarette end on the table. “If we were first responders, why are there woodentops here?”

“SOP when there’s a body.”

He whistled. “I knew we’d gone corporate. I didn’t know we’d been spayed.”

“You’re maybe out of the loop. These days, we try to operate within the law. Which means drink-driving’s a definite no-no, by the way. Did you not get that memo?”

“Couldn’t read it. My decoder ring’s broken. So where is he, anyway?”

“Where’s who?”

“David Cartwright, who do you think?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” said Emma Flyte after a pause. “We have no idea.”

“I thought you said he had a button. Did nobody mention they’re traceable?”

“Thanks, I’ll make a note. But I’ve already traced his particular button to the kitchen table.”

“Did you look underneath it?”

“He’s not in the house, he’s not out here in the garden. Not with the nearest neighbours. We could do a canvass, but until we get word on how to play this, we don’t want to be flying too many flags.”

“What about the gun?”

She shook her head.

“So, to sum up,” said Lamb. “A former senior spook—I mean, seriously, this guy knows more secrets than the Queen’s had chicken dinners—blows his grandson’s face clean off then disappears into the night, armed. Oh yeah, and he’s lost his marbles.” He shook his head. “This is not gunna play well on Twitter.”

“At least we picked the right week to bury bad news.”

“What, Westacres? You’re joking. Any bomb that goes off in London is an Intelligence Service fuck-up, which ironically enough describes young Cartwright too. Trust me, there’ll be keyboard warriors joining the dots as soon as this hits the web.”

“We’ll wrap it up before it comes to that.”

“The next sound you hear will be me, expressing confidence.” He farted, and reached for the cigarette behind his ear.

Something rustled down the far end of the garden, but it was just the great outdoors, not a former senior spook. Lamb lit his cigarette, still staring in that direction. The clouds overhead healed themselves, and what little moonlight there’d been shimmered out of view.

“So you’re the boss of the famous Slough House,” Flyte said. “Isn’t that where they keep the rejects?”

“They don’t like to be called that.”

“So what do you call them?”

“Rejects,” said Lamb. He broke off his study of the darkness and turned to face her. “And you’re the new broom. For some reason, I was expecting someone less . . . female.”

“Do I detect a trace of sexism?”

“Christ, not you too. Sexism, sexism, blah blah blah. It’s like you’re all constantly on the rag.” He exhaled a blue cloud. “How long have you been a Dog?”

“Two months.”

“And before that?”

“I spent eleven years in the Met.”

“Uniform?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just painting a mental picture.”

“I spent some years in uniform, naturally.”

“Have you still got it?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Don’t be shy,” he said. “A figure like yours, and a uniform handy. That’s gunna make some man very happy.”

“Maybe I’m gay.”

“Well, picturing that’s gunna make a lot of men very happy.”

“This isn’t an appropriate conversation, Lamb. Apart from anything else, one of your team just died.”

“I’m working through my grief. I might need a little leeway.”

“I think what you need is to go. Thanks for your input. We’ll confirm your identification once the blood work’s through.”

“No hurry. I’d hate it to clash with my denial phase.” He dropped his cigarette and trod on it. “The last Top Dog had a run-in with an iron bar, did they tell you that? He’s upright again, but I heard they’ve pinned feeding instructions to his shirt.”

“The grapevine says it was young Cartwright wielding the bar.”

“Grapevines say a lot of things. But it’s mostly the wine talking. The guy before him, he was altogether classier.”

“Bad Sam Chapman.”

“That was just a name. He wasn’t that bad.”

“Except for the bit about losing a quarter of a billion pounds.”

“I said he wasn’t bad. I didn’t say he was perfect.” Lamb put his hands in his pockets. “Good luck with finding the old bastard. That’s what the boy used to call him.”

“Affectionately, I hope.”

“River thought so. But he was a bastard all right. I guarantee that.”

As he brushed past, she wrinkled her nose and said, “Have you showered lately?”

“Tempting offer,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s appropriate right now. Apart from anything else, one of my team just died.”

He walked through the open French windows and into the house.

“No, really,” Emma Flyte murmured to his back. “You had me at ‘fuck.’”

In London, dawn broke along the familiar fault-lines, grey light seeping through cracks, drawing round the edges of the tallest buildings. The forecast was for more dull weather, a promise kept by the rain rolling in to dampen the capital’s streets: taxis were already on the prowl as the first wave of commuters came crashing out of the tube stations, wondering where its umbrellas were. Where once there’d have been newspaper vendors on corners, now there were kagoule-clad youngsters, mostly Asian, handing out the free-sheets to passers-by, many of whom were using them as makeshift rain-protection. The warning lights at pedestrian crossings counted down to zero, buses came lumbering out of the gloom, and another day dragged itself from sleep, inviting miserable winter to do its worst, again.

A COBRA meeting had been called for 7:30, the early start a traditional method of indicating the serious intentions of all concerned. We may not be getting anywhere, the subtext read, but at least we’ve had very little sleep. Pre-meeting meetings were thus taking place from 6:00 onwards, as various Head Desks herded their ducks into a row, and some of the faces round the tables were new: over the past months, significant changes had been rung in the personnel called forth by crisis. Life in Whitehall’s corridors was sometimes compared to a game of musical chairs, an image conjuring genteel notions of women in bonnets, men in stiff collars, and a well-rehearsed string quartet pausing mid-note. No pushing, no shoving, no tears before bedtime: a gentle ruffle of applause awaiting the victor. But the reality was more like a mosh pit, with thrash metal accompaniment. Most of those playing were too deafened by reverb to notice when the music stopped, and losers wore the imprints of winners’ boots on their faces. Still and all, it sometimes happened that the most skilful players of the game found themselves outmanouvred. Peter Judd, for example, erstwhile Home Secretary and Prime Minister manqué, had retired into what passed for him as private life, his business interests—the official story going—having become incompatible with a political career. Dame Ingrid Tearney, former Head of the Intelligence Service, had likewise surrendered the reins of office, in her case to take up a role at one of the heritage charities dedicated to preserving Britain’s traditional verities: not so different in aim, perhaps, from her former life, but involving, it was to be hoped, less carnage. And there’d been other retirements too, from Westminster; none of them—it can’t be repeated often enough—remotely connected with ongoing police investigations into the sexual abuse of children: on the contrary, all were dictated by loftier concerns—to allow fresh blood into the body politic; to make way for younger guns; to give elbow room to the distaff side, as one outgoing notable put it, his vocabulary indicating how firmly his finger was held to the pulse of contemporary life. So the music had stopped, the music had started again, and bruised and bloodied players were licking wounds and picking sides.

And as a result of all this change, of course, most things remained the same.

In a room some storeys below the breaking dawn, the lately-appointed First Desk of Regent’s Park was speaking.

“First, the big picture. This is new. Something we’ve never seen before. Crowds as targets, yes, that’s always been the fear, whether it’s football stadiums or market squares, but this takes terrorism onto a whole new level. These kids were invited.”

Claude Whelan was a short man with a high forehead and a pinched way of speaking: words issued from him as if in perforated sheets; his full stops almost audible. But his manner was generally pleasant, and informality the key to his character. While suit-and-tie remained de rigueur among the Park’s male aristocracy, Whelan turned up on his first day wearing a polo shirt under his jacket, “and it was like,” one of the Queens of the Database breathlessly uttered, “a fresh breeze had blown through the whole building.”

“We’ve always known we’re defenceless against the individual extremist. Groups, yes, because groups have to communicate, but the lone wolf, who puts something together in his garage and sets it off in his local supermarket—when they’re completely under the radar, we can’t stop them. We all know that, deep down—everybody knows. But the advantage we’ve always had is that lone-wolf types tend to stick out. They tend to be odd, to arouse suspicion, and they tend—Hollywood notwithstanding—to be functionally moronic, so more of them plaster themselves over those same garages than ever make it as far as the shops.”

He was fifties, childless, but with a wife whose photograph adorned his desk, and whose image he was prone to introduce to visitors: “Claire,” he’d say. “Lost without her.” And sometimes with the words would come a furrowing of the brow, as if the phrase weren’t a simple mechanical tribute but a glimpse into an alternative state of being, where the landscape was a wasteland across which he’d wander mapless, his footprints circling nowhere.

“This one appears to have been different. This one planned his attack carefully, down to the hijacking of the Twitter feed on which the event was first mentioned. That feed belongs to one Richard Wyatt, twenty-one, a student at the LSE, who has a large number of followers owing to his role on the college’s entertainments committee. The tweet appeared at eight forty-seven a.m. on Monday the first, the day before the event. It read, ‘Mob needed for dance duty,’ followed by three exclamation marks and a hashtag, ‘flashthemall.’ We are satisfied that Mr. Wyatt was not responsible for its appearance.”

As for Whelan’s office: that was more fodder for the gossips. His predecessor, Dame Ingrid Tearney—a sweet old lady who drank fresh blood for breakfast—had occupied a room in the grand, and grandly visible, section of Regent’s Park whose windows overlooked the park itself, and whose walls were dappled in summer by the shadows of waving branches. But Whelan had decided that his place was among his staff, most of whom laboured away hidden from sunlight, if you didn’t count the spring-effect bulbs. And so he’d taken one of the smaller offices on the hub, an open-hearted gesture which immediately endeared him to the junior spooks, but put everyone else’s back up.

“By mid-afternoon, the flash-mob announcement had been retweeted over four hundred times and a page had appeared on Facebook. This was the work of one Craig Harrison, twenty-two, unemployed, of Bristol. We’re almost certain he’s innocent of anything more than an enthusiasm for public mischief, but the fact that he didn’t actually attend the gathering sounded alarm bells. His story is that he couldn’t afford the train fare to London, but nevertheless wanted to be part of what he describes as a ‘messin’ bang.’ Once the penny had dropped that a bang is precisely what ensued, Mr. Harrison was quick to add that this is a slang term for a party, and he was not admitting prior knowledge of the attack. Investigation has borne out his claim to poverty, but as we speak, Mr. Harrison’s interrogation has yet to be concluded.”

But a few ruffled feathers aside, things had gone smoothly so far. Claude Whelan’s breezy entrance may have made papers rustle, even blown one or two from unregarded shelves and cast them fluttering to the floor, but it hadn’t caused locks to fall apart, or twisted handles on doors best left shut. “That chap Whelan,” a voice Down the Corridor had remarked, “underneath it all, he’s One of Us.”

Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

“So what about the event itself? Our bomber can be reasonably assured of a crowd turning up, because his target audience will respond to the call of Twitter. That would have been enough for some of his ilk, but no, he wants an actual party to happen, because he knows that that will magnify the horror of the event a hundredfold. A thousand. Now, I’m not going to apologise for showing you the footage again, though God knows we’ve seen it often enough already, but the definition here’s higher than we’ve managed so far. Here’s what we have.” He raised a hand and clicked his fingers. “There. Now we’re looking at the CCTV film. The shopping mall, the kids arriving, the trio with the music machine.” He waved an imaginary baton at a point in the air behind him. “And stop.”

He paused, as if allowing his invisible audience to soak in the invisible scene he’d freeze-framed.

“These three boys. We know from the radio chatter that at least one of Westacres’ security guards, one Samit Chatterjee, guessed something was up when they appeared. Good for him, though sadly he was among the victims. The boys are Jacob Lee, Lucas Fairweather and Sanjay Singh. All sixteen, all at the same local school, inseparable friends according to reports. None with any known involvement with any extremist groups, none with any kind of police record . . . except for Fairweather.”

With a gesture, he aimed his imaginary baton at Fairweather, around whose non-existent image a black circle was no doubt appearing.

“Fairweather was cautioned last June after being arrested at a party that got out of hand. The party was in a house belonging to the parents of another schoolfriend. They were away, and their son’s planned party ended up being tweeted about—initially by Fairweather—so the expected hundred-or-so guests morphed into a mob about two thousand strong. It made the national press, and brought the unfortunate parents storming back from holiday eager to press charges on ringleaders. Fairweather, like I say, was one of them, and while charges weren’t actually brought, he enjoyed fifteen minutes’ notoriety. And that, we think, is what attracted the attention of our bomber.”

Another pause. Perhaps the film moved forward a few jerky frames. Perhaps it remained frozen on the image of three youths, one of them carrying a large black holdall; all of them—boys, bag, futures—now blasted into nothingness.

“On the same morning the first tweet went out, Lucas Fairweather received a text message from a pay-as-you-go mobile. It read, ‘Lucas, want some laughs?’ He replied ‘Who U?’ ‘Friend,’ the stranger replied. And so it went on. The full transcript is in your folders. By the thirty-eighth exchange, Lucas Fairweather and the stranger, who was calling himself Dwight Passenger, were the best of friends. And Passenger had persuaded Lucas to provide the music for the flash-mob. Excuse me.”

Claude Whelan took a sip of water from the glass on the table in front of him. Then said:

“Another little taste of notoriety for Lucas Fairweather. Presumably he enjoyed the attention. But it’s clear he had no idea what he and his friends were stepping into.”

A wave of the hand to indicate that the film should roll forward again.

“So. The music starts, and everyone strips off their coats and starts dancing. In the corner of the frame, you can see our security guard, Mr. Chatterjee, who, ah, stood down, as it were, once it seemed that nothing worse than an impromptu dance was in the offing. And for the next two and a half minutes, that’s all it was. A flash mob. They were briefly popular in the mid-noughties, bit of a nuisance if you were caught in one, but just youthful high spirits really. If only this one was—well. We all know it wasn’t. Because meanwhile, this man appears, at 3:04 pm, two and a half minutes after the music starts. And while everyone around him is dancing, he unbuttons his overcoat and—”

A phone rang.

“Christ. Sorry, Claude. Sorry sorry sorry. Really better take this.”

“That’s okay, Diana.”

“Really sorry. I’ll just be a mo.”

And Diana Taverner slipped out of the meeting room, mobile in hand, leaving Claude Whelan on his own, mentally rehearsing the remainder of the talk he’d be delivering to the PM’s COBRA session in just over an hour’s time.

It was a mostly one-sided conversation that took place in the corridor: Taverner—Lady Di, though not to her face—listening, nodding, asking questions. There were no windows here, but a set of glass doors offered a reflection, and she adjusted the fit of her jacket as she listened, brushed lint from her lapel. Her hair was chestnut brown, naturally curly, shorter than ever. The odd grey stranger had been making an appearance, and she found them easier to weed out of a neater crop. Just one of life’s many battles.

The grey hairs, she assumed, were not unconnected to the career-frightening developments of last year, when the internal power struggles common to any high-stakes operation had accidentally triggered a small war in one of the Service’s off-post facilities west of the city. A lot of the shooting had taken place underground, and the area itself was notable mainly for the number of residents who jumped under trains leaving Paddington, but still: you can only let so many bodies fall before someone notices the thumps. It was the excuse several of the big-chins on the Limitations Committee had been waiting for; revenge for having seen one of their own ground into mince, after being caught with his hand in the till. Criminal, yes; treasonous even, if you wanted to split hairs, but the chap was stripped of his knighthood for pity’s sake. Could hardly show his face in his club once he’d served his three months, less time off for having been at Harrow.

So the bloodbath out near Hayes was mirrored by a more serious one in Regent’s Park, and while Diana Taverner had survived the cull, it had been a close-run thing. Favours had been called in, and blackmail threats made good on. It was a rocky road to tread—she knew where a lot of bodies were buried, but, having put a number of them in the ground herself, it wasn’t wise to draw attention to the fact—and her long-held ambition of settling behind First Desk was one of the bargaining chips she’d had to surrender, or at least pretend to. So now she was back where it was starting to feel like she’d always been: Second-desking Ops, and offering ungrudging, whole-hearted support to the interloper who’d stolen her job. This time round, one Claude Whelan, from over the river, where the intelligence weasels lived.

She said, “Okay, Emma. It’s a mess we don’t need, but let’s not go to panic stations. If it’s not on Twitter, the press’ll never know it happened. So get the local Noddies on board. They can beat the bushes or the shrubbery or whatever they have down there until the old man turns up. Meanwhile, have one of our legals put the word to whoever’s in charge. Let them know it’s a security issue, and that Cartwright’s ours when they have him. Stress that it’s unrelated to the Westacres event. That’ll make them think it is related, and be more likely to cooperate. Update me in an hour. And try not to step on anyone’s toes.”

She ended the call.

The weasels from over the river dealt in data rather than human assets: feeding intelligence into gaming programs to assess real-world outcomes; running long-distance psychiatric evaluations of foreign notables; stress-testing domestic security systems for loopholes, all of which meant they spent more time with a mouse in their hands than they did interacting with humans, so it was no surprise they were all fucking weird. Whelan, though, seemed level-headed and socialised, which made him either an outlier or a born politician, and for the time being she was his go-to-guy; the only lifebelt he’d find in the notoriously treacherous waters of Regent’s Park.

She stepped back into the room. “Sorry about that.”

Whelan was gathering his papers into a pile, slipping them inside a cardboard folder. “Serious?”

“Not Westacres. A former agent—David Cartwright?”

“Of course. I never met him, but I know who you mean.”

“Yes, well, there’s been an incident at his home. It looks like the old boy shot an intruder and disappeared.”

“Good lord!”

“It gets worse. The ‘intruder’ was his grandson, who’s a current member of the Service. Bit of a mess all round. But Emma Flyte’s on the scene. She’ll lock it down.”

“The grandson. Is he—dead?”

“Very. Do you want to run through the rest of your debrief?”

Her switchblade turn took him aback. “. . . Not sure we have time. Any feedback so far?”

Taverner said, “You’re going to have to speed it up, especially at the beginning. Everybody knows it was a damn tragedy, and the PM gets his rhetoric from his scriptwriters. All he wants from you is fresh info he can dripfeed the media, plus something he can withhold for later dissemination when it all dries up. Which it will. This is going to be long, hard and cold. You want to get that across too, though nobody will listen. They’ll still expect answers tomorrow.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“They’ll want to know why nobody at Westacres was prepared for the flash-mob. It wasn’t the world’s best-kept secret.”

“No, but Westacres’ security staff aren’t GCHQ. They look for shoplifters, they’re not scanning the internet for potential threat. As for our own surveillance, if it crossed our radar, or Cheltenham’s, it wouldn’t have held their attention more than a minute. Why would it? It’s a student prank, not an IS plot.”

“Fine, but put that upfront. Make it part of the narrative, not an excuse we’ve come up with afterwards. And don’t worry about Cheltenham, either. If GCHQ fuck up, that’s their problem.”

“This is our united front?”

“This is zero-sum politics. If GCHQ gain influence, we lose it. That simple. You’ve got the fact-sheet on Robert Winters?”

Robert Winters was the 3:04 man. The man who’d turned up at the Westacres flash-mob and blown the children to Kingdom Come.

“Everything we know about him, yes.”

“Don’t stray beyond that for now. Speculation isn’t going to help.”

Whelan tucked the folder under his arm and said, “Thank you, Diana. I appreciate your input.”

“Your first week. Not what you’d call a gentle introduction.”

“No, well. I wasn’t expecting an easy ride.” He hesitated. “I know you had, ah, ambitions of your own.”

She was shaking her head before he’d finished. “Wasn’t going to happen, Claude. I was too closely associated with Dame Ingrid and, well, once it turned out she was toxic . . . ”

“The penalties of loyalty.”

“That’s a kind way of putting it.”

Five minutes’ prep would have taught him that she and Ingrid Tearney had been sworn enemies, and whatever else you might say about the weasels, they always did their prep.

As casually as he could manage, he said, “Anything else, Diana, before I go see the headmaster? Anything you’re not sharing?”

“Anything I find out, you’ll know one minute later.”

“A minute’s a long time in intelligence work.”

“Figure of speech, Claude. I won’t hold anything back.”

“Good. Because like you said, it’s a zero-sum game. Anyone not for me is against me. I hope we’re clear on that.”

“As glass, Claude,” she said. “Oh, one thing. Your autograph.” She’d left papers, neatly stapled, on the table, and she collected them now. “Times three, I’m afraid. Everything in triplicate.”

“Some things never change. Do I need to read all this?”

“I ought to insist. You’ll discover more about where we source our office supplies than you ever dreamed possible.”

“One of the things I love about this job. Its refreshingly traditional attitude towards red tape.” He skimmed the top set, signed all three on their final page, then left the room at a trot.

Lady Di watched him go, hugging the papers to her chest, then reached for her mobile and redialed Emma Flyte.

“Change of plan,” she said. “I need to see you.”

The COBRA meeting was well underway when Slough House came to life, if the heavy scraping of its back door counted as life: Roderick Ho, his red puffa jacket shiny new, its cuffs and pocket edgings trimmed with hi-viz silver. His earbuds were mainlining chainsaw guitars to his brain when his phone vibrated with an incoming text. That’ll be the ball and chain, he thought fondly. Checking I’ve not copped off with a City-bound babe on the Central line—women who worked in banking looked like they shopped at Victoria’s Secret. No wonder the girlfriends of alpha-types like Roddy Ho got nervous around rush hour. His head still pounding to a jackhammer beat he clicked to his messages, expecting to read “Kim,” but it was from Lamb. He read the text halfway up the first flight of stairs and said, “Jesus.” And then he said “Jesus,” again, and then he stomped the rest of the way up to his office.

When Moira Tregorian arrived, he was on his back in River’s room, fiddling around with cables. She tried to go past but the sight of a pair of legs protruding from beneath a desk defeated her, and she was back fifteen seconds later, coat still on.

“Is everything all right?”

He didn’t reply.

“Is the network down?”

Because if the Secret Service’s network was down, things were potentially serious. Maybe she ought to hide under a desk too.

But he still didn’t reply, and it only then occurred to her she was looking at Roderick Ho’s legs, not River Cartwright’s—Cartwright a lot less likely to be wearing jeans with purple embroidery on the thighs—so chances were their owner’s head was plugged into a Walkman, or whatever they were called. There was a strong argument that such devices should not be countenanced in the office, but it gave her the excuse to do what she did next, which was kick Ho on the soles of his feet.

Which didn’t hurt, but at least made him bang his head on the desk.

“Ow! Christ!”

“Yes, well, there’s no need for that.”

Ho pushed himself out and scowled up at her. “What you do that for?” he shouted.

She tugged at her earlobe.

Ho pulled his buds out and said, “What you do that for?” with equal petulance but less volume.

“Because you weren’t responding to me.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t hear you.”

“Precisely.”

Ho rubbed his head. Talking to women frequently left him bruised. It would be easy to start thinking they were all mad and violent.

“So—what are you doing?”

“Swapping PCs. This one’s better than the spare in my room.”

“But isn’t it Cartwright’s?”

“Oh, yeah, you haven’t heard. He’s dead.”

“He’s what?”

“Lamb texted me. I’m kind of his right-hand,” Ho said. “The others, well. Not exactly your high-fliers. Let’s face it, Shirley’s a nutjob, and—”

“He’s dead?”

Ho said, “Lamb just identified his body.”

“Dear dear me,” Moira said faintly.

There was movement behind her as Louisa arrived. “What’s going on?”

“I’m just swapping—”

“Young Cartwright’s dead,” Moira told her.

“No.”

“Mr. Lamb just texted—”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“No.”

Louisa left the room and entered her own office, closing the door behind her as softly as a breeze.

“Oh dear. I didn’t handle that very well.”

“Handle what?” said Ho.

JK Coe arrived, half-invisible in his hoodie. If he registered the presence of intruders, he didn’t say; just slumped at his desk and booted up. Already his fingers were tapping away, caressing invisible keys.

“Did you hear?” Moira Tregorian said.

She had as much luck with him as she’d had with Ho.

“Is everyone deaf?”

Something about her body language, the warning vibes, got through to Coe. He pulled his earbuds out and looked her way from the safety of his hood.

“It’s Cartwright. River. Lamb’s texted to say he’s . . . ”

It occurred to her she wasn’t making the best job of breaking the news, but on the other hand, there were only so many ways of finishing this particular sentence.

“. . . dead.”

Coe stared for a moment or two, then looked at Ho, who had temporarily abandoned his plan of cannibalising River’s kit.

“It was me Lamb texted,” he said, to underline who was whose right hand.

Coe stared a bit longer, then said, “Uh-huh.”

This was the longest speech either had heard him deliver.

More noise from downstairs: Shirley and Marcus, arriving together. And noise from the hallway too, as Louisa re-emerged from her office and came back into River’s room, her eyes the colour of burnt matches. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Ho said, “I was just swapping—”

“Not you, dickhead. Her.”

“Who’s a dickhead? Oh, him,” Shirley said from the doorway.

“Not a fucking word. Anyone.” This included everyone in Louisa’s orbit: Marcus too, on the landing with Shirley. “Except you.” This to Moira. “What. The fuck. Are you talking about?”

“I really don’t appreciate—”

“You have to understand this. You really have to understand this. I am this close to wringing your fucking—”

“Louisa.”

It was Marcus, his hand on her elbow.

“Louisa, you need to cool it. Just sit down, yeah?”

And she wanted to scream that she’d sit down when she was good and ready and what the hell did he know about it, anyway? Because he hadn’t been there when this bitch had said what she’d said, that River was dead—how could he be dead? But she didn’t say any of that because she was shaking too hard. It was as if she’d fallen from a tree into cold, cold water, and would never be warm again.

A chair was being scraped across a floor, and that was Shirley. Two arms were lowering her into it, and that was Marcus.

Who said, “And now I really need to know what the hell is going down.”

There are only so many ways of ringing a doorbell: the brief dash delivered by the confident; the short dot of those who don’t want to disturb you; and the gunna-lean-on-this-thing-till-it-opens approach favoured by bailiffs, ex-husbands, and anyone else unused to a friendly welcome.

“Jackson,” Catherine Standish said. “What a surprise.”

This without a flicker of emotion.

Catherine lived in an art-deco block in St. John’s Wood; a building with rounded corners and metal-framed windows, vaguely futuristic once, and charmingly retro thereafter. In the lobby the tiles were polished to an ice-rink sheen, and the lift had an actual dial over it, indicating which floor it was on. She sometimes imagined a Hollywood musical breaking out there: some business with a bellhop; a haughty matron with fur coat and lorgnette; and Fred twirling Ginger in and out of the lift while its doors slid open and shut: yes/no, yes/no . . . Not prone to whimsy, Catherine occasionally indulged herself when it came to where she lived. There’d been a time when a future in a series of shop doorways had not seemed implausible. A one-bedder in St. John’s Wood was a safe haven in anybody’s book.

Though not enough so to keep Jackson Lamb at bay.

“Nice welcome,” he said. “You might have put some feeling into it.”

“I did. Just not the kind you were hoping for.”

“Going to invite me in?”

“No.”

“Mind if I come in anyway?”

She stepped aside.

The last time Lamb had been here, it had been the middle of the night, and the slow horses were being rounded up. Today it was morning, and she was dressed . . . All things considered, his appearance wasn’t much of a shock. Some fates you escape. Others keep turning up regardless.

While most guests would hover in the hallway, awaiting further invitation, Lamb barrelled through to her sitting room. “How about a drink?”

“At this hour?”

“I meant tea,” he said, with an air of shocked innocence.

“Of course you did. Why are you here?”

“Can’t drop in on an old friend?”

“Possibly. But why are you here?”

“I’ve just come from identifying River Cartwright’s body,” he said. “And I wanted you to be the first to know.”

“River . . . ”

“His body.”

“How . . . ?”

“Two bullets to the head. Face, actually. Doesn’t leave much, you’ll not be surprised to learn.”

Catherine turned away, to look out of the window onto the street below. There was little happening there. A man walking a dog, a Cockapoo or Labradoodle or something, one of those breeds that didn’t exist one day and the next were everywhere: all bright eyes and floppy tongues. She watched him wait for it to do its business by the side of the road, then scoop its mess into a plastic bag. If he leaves it hanging off the hedge, she thought, I’ll open the window and throw something—the iron, the coffee table. But he didn’t. He walked on, bag swinging by his side. Sometimes people behaved like they were supposed to. Quite a lot of the time, probably. But it was easy to start believing otherwise, the line of work she’d been in.

She thought: River Cartwright, and tried to imagine how she must be feeling now, having just been told he’d been killed, two bullets to the face. But she couldn’t reach whatever feelings this information might be supposed to deliver. She could only watch the man and his dog continue up the quiet road, until they were lost to sight.

“You’re not going to respond?”

“This is me, responding,” she said. “Where did it happen?”

“In a bathroom. Just like old times, eh?”

Because she’d found her former boss, Charles Partner, dead in his bathroom, gun in his hand.

Bullet in his head.

Just the one. Few suicides took two.

“Have you told the others?”

“Sent Ho a text. I expect he’ll have spread it round by now.”

Despite herself, despite all she knew of him, this time she was actually shocked. “You sent a text?”

“You thought I’d tweet it? Jesus, Standish. A man died.”

“You know what that’ll do to Louisa?”

“That’s why I sent it to Ho. You think you invented tact?” He was holding a cigarette now. It had appeared in his hand just like that: no sign of a packet.

She shook her head; at the cigarette, at him, at the way he broke news, which was the way he broke everything else: with a certain grim joy at watching it shatter.

He said, “You didn’t ask whose bathroom.”

“Whose bathroom?”

He wagged a finger. “Sorry. Need to know.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“I’d enjoy it more with a cup of tea. I’ve been up since sparrowfart.”

“For God’s sake—”

“Are you alone? I should have asked.”

She said, “Do I look like I have company?”

“Had to ask. Hard to shake off a reputation, isn’t it?”

“You’d know. Everyone you’ve ever met has you pegged as an utter bastard. Now was there anything else? Because you’re free to leave any time.”

“His grandfather’s.”

“. . . What?”

“It was his grandfather’s bathroom. The O.B.?”

“That’s what River called him,” Catherine agreed. “I’m not sure you have the right.”

Lamb said, “Ah, don’t you hate it when people have private jokes? It’s like everyone’s a fucking spy.” He tucked the cigarette behind his ear. “You haven’t asked who yet.”

“Haven’t asked who what?”

“Who shot River,” Lamb said. “Are you just out of bed? You’re not exactly firing on all cylinders.”

“I’m still reeling from your presence,” she told him. “I’d feel a lot happier if you weren’t here.”

“Then I’ll go.”

“Thank you.”

“Just as soon as I’ve had that cup of tea,” he said, and bared yellow teeth.

A barge was puttering down the Thames, rubbish piled high in its middle, and there were seagulls all over it, a great boiling mass of them, arguing and scrapping for riches. Earth has not anything to show more fair. For Diana Taverner, it looked like politics as usual. She was waiting by a railing near the Globe, on a stretch of pavement which fell neatly into a CCTV blind spot, so highly prized by those aware of the fact. It was before ten, and while once pedestrian traffic would have been at a lull, all decent citizens at their jobs, now there were streams of people passing, a good proportion of them plugged into Smartphone and Tablet, working on the move. From a distance, there’d be little to choose between the upbeat rat-a-tat of their mobile conferencing and the screaming of the gulls, which was heading downriver now, and might make it as far as the sea. She checked her watch: two minutes to the hour. And then Emma Flyte was there, one gloved hand on the railing, an immaculate profile taking in the view: the City, draped in the beauty of the morning.

A garment unsuitable for the season, today being wet and cold.

“News?” asked Diana.

Flyte said, “He’s still missing.”

“Wonderful. How old is he, ninety?”

“Not quite.” She paused. “Someone’s reported a stolen car. About a mile away.”

“You think he could walk a mile?”

“I’m told he’s an old bastard,” said Flyte. “They tend to be tough.”

“Who said that?”

“Jackson Lamb.”

“Ah.” For some reason, whenever Lamb came up in conversation Diana felt a reflexive need to smoke. “The thing about Jackson is, he gives lessons to corkscrews. If he tells you the right time, it’s because he’s just stolen your watch.”

“I’ve heard similar said of you,” said Flyte in a level tone.

Taverner regarded her. Emma Flyte shouldn’t be in the Service, she should be on a catwalk—that was the kind of judgment the Park’s dinosaurs were prone to passing when a perfect ten hoved into view. But seriously: Christ. Watching her hail a taxi must be like seeing the flag drop on a chariot race. Which didn’t earn her any latitude with Lady Di, but it was interesting to note she had moxie to go with her looks. “Yes, but when it’s said of me it’s a compliment,” she said.

“I know.”

Okay, that was better.

She conquered the nicotine twitch, because it never did to show weakness early in the game, and while Diana Taverner had been playing for some while, the game always started anew when fresh blood joined. She had yet to work out whether Flyte was a team player, let alone whose team she was on. In part, that was what this meeting was for. And team player or not, Flyte had worked that much out for herself, because now she said, “You didn’t bring me here just for a heads-up on the Cartwright mess.”

“No.”

“So what is it you wanted?”

Which wasn’t quite the tone Diana had been hoping for, but was at least a start. A pawn shifted out there, front and centre. She’d never learned the notation, but she knew what the object was: to hang, draw and quarter the opposition’s king.

She said, “Giti Rahman.”

“She’s one of your girls.”

“On the hub, that’s right.”

One of the brightest and the best, in fact; an appraisal she had confirmed a little less than three hours previously. Currently she was taking some crash-time in one of the Park’s sleeping pods, or Diana hoped he was. Where she wanted Giti Rahman to be right now was dreamland, because the information she’d uncovered was such that the Park itself might come crashing round their ears if she was awake and broadcasting it.

Flyte said, “What about her?”

“I need her taken care of.”

The barge, some hundred yards downriver now, let out a whistle; a curiously jaunty note for what was basically a waterborne dustbin. The gulls ballooned away, scrambled for purchase in the air, then renewed their cackling onslaught.

“I’m going to have to ask you to be a little more specific.”

“Good grief, what on earth do you think I’m asking?”

“I’m not about to speculate, Ms. Taverner. I simply want to be sure that whatever it is, you have the authority to ask me to do it, and I’m going to be comfortable carrying it out.”

“How very extraordinary,” Diana said smoothly, though it was in fact useful to have the parameters clarified. “I wasn’t aware that I had to meet your standards when issuing instructions. I’d better check your terms and conditions. Better check my own, in fact. No, what I had in mind was a C&C.”

Collect-and-Comfort, in the jargon. Meaning scoop up and isolate, and cause no harm in doing so.

“If that doesn’t offend your code of ethics, obviously,” she added.

Flyte wouldn’t be drawn on that. “Where?”

“The Dogs have their own safe house, I believe.”

“Several,” said Flyte. “Where is she now?”

“In a sleeping pod. Wake her up, dust her down, and get her off the premises before you put the mufflers on. I don’t want anyone knowing she’s in your hands.”

“How long for?”

“Until I say otherwise.”

“I’ll need overtime authorised.”

“The budget will stretch. One of the advantages of being on red alert.”

“Is this to do with Westacres?”

“I’m pretty sure I can issue orders without needing to explain my reasons,” Diana said. “Unless you’re about to tell me that’s not so?”

“I’ll have to check my terms and conditions,” Flyte said, without the faintest suggestion of a smile. “But just out of curiosity, why are we here? And not in your office?”

“Not everything we do should be behind closed doors,” Diana said. “All part of the new openness.”

“And nothing to do with keeping this particular order secret?”

“If you have something to say, Emma, why not say it? We’ll both feel much better, I’m sure.”

“The Dogs aren’t a private army,” Flyte said. “Forgetting that brought Mr. Whelan’s predecessor grief.”

“Dame Ingrid retired with honours.”

“Only because the Tower’s just for tourists these days.”

“Yes, well. I’m not saying there weren’t those who felt she deserved a bullet in the head more than a whip-round when she left, but you can’t read too much into that. She didn’t have my gift for getting on with people.” This didn’t produce a smile either. Diana sighed. “All right, if it makes you feel more comfortable.” She produced the warrant she’d had Claude Whelan sign; the third sheet of a supposed triplicate. “Good enough?”

Emma Flyte read it before responding. “More than,” she said, and made to tuck it into her jacket pocket, but Diana extended a hand.

“This stays under wraps. You report only to me, and I report to Claude in confidence. That’s the chain of command. Are we clear?”

“We are.”

“I do hope we’re going to get along, Emma. You came to us with impeccable credentials.”

Flyte relinquished her grip on the warrant, and Diana made it disappear.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll get onto it now,” Flyte said.

Diana Taverner watched her walk away, noticing the number of men, women too, who glanced her way as she passed. Not the greatest asset for a member of the Service, but it cut both ways. Who was going to believe that’s what she was?

The seagulls’ cries were ever more distant. You moved the rubbish somewhere else, and the racket followed it. It all seemed so simple, put like that. Complications only set in once you moved away from the metaphorical.

Free from observation she awarded herself a cigarette, willing her mind into a blank: no plots, no plans, no corkscrew machinations. Around her, the world carried on: business as usual on a January morning, and London recovering from the seismic shock of violence. In front of her, only the river; grey, and endlessly travelling elsewhere.

When the kettle boiled its switch flipped up to turn itself off. When she was a child, electric kettles hadn’t been invented, or not in her house – kettles back then had sat on the stovetop, and when they boiled they whistled, so you’d come and turn the gas off. Nothing about the process had been automatic. Catherine was thinking these thoughts largely to stop herself thinking any others: it was dangerous having thoughts with Jackson Lamb standing behind you. He might not be able to read the contents of your head, but he could make you think he could. Sometimes, that was enough.

“If you want to grieve, go right ahead,” he told her. “I’m here for you.”

“I can’t begin to describe how that makes me feel.”

“You’re welcome.”

She threw a teabag into a mug, and poured boiling water on top of it.

“Not having one yourself?”

“I’ve things to do, Jackson. When you’ve drunk that, you might want to leave.”

She left it on the counter and leaned against the wall, arms folded. Lamb studied the mug as if he’d never encountered one in quite this state before, and sniffed suspiciously. “Got a spoon?”

Catherine slammed a drawer open and shut again, and all but threw one at him.

He said, “It was his grandfather shot him.”

“I’m sure it was an accident.”

“You should be a lawyer. I’m halfway convinced already.” He mushed the teabag against the side of the mug with the spoon, then fished it out and dumped it on the counter. “Milk in the fridge?”

“You don’t take milk.”

“Maybe I’ve changed.”

“Chance would be a fine thing.” She tore a sheet of kitchen roll from a holder on the wall, and used it to scoop up the teabag. “His grandfather wouldn’t have shot him on purpose.”

“Twice?”

“Whatever.”

“You just lost the jury, Standish. Once could be an accident, I’ll grant you. The second shot, right in the face? That takes carelessness to a whole new level.”

“He’s an old man.” She dumped her little parcel in the bin. “Confused, frightened. He probably thought River was an intruder.”

“That why he lured him up to the bathroom?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Just walking you through the stages. You seem to have put denial behind you quite swiftly.”

“Well, you have a way of hustling people straight on to anger. Are you going to drink that?”

“It’s still hot. Don’t want to scald myself. Any biscuits?”

“No.”

He said, “It’s almost like you don’t want me here. But what kind of boss would I be if I abandoned you when you’ve just had a shock? Anything might happen.”

“You’re no kind of boss. I quit, remember? Or tried to. I’ve sent the same letter to HR three times.”

“I know. They keep forwarding it to me. Something about ratifying the paperwork?”

“For God’s sake, Lamb, what’s your problem? You spent years goading me, and I finally did what you wanted. Just sign the damn papers and let me get on with my life.”

“Just making sure you know your own mind. Think how I’d feel if you wound up full of regret and had a relapse. Wouldn’t want that on my conscience, you getting all weepy and hitting the bottle.” He sipped his tea delicately. “They say drunks are just looking for an excuse. I’m not blaming you. It’s a disease.”

“Jackson—”

“Did you hear that?”

“What? No. Nothing.”

“Funny. Could’ve sworn I heard something.”

“There are people downstairs. It’s a flat, remember? Jackson, you shouldn’t be here, you should be at Slough House. You don’t leave your crew on their own when one of them just died. Didn’t you tell me that once?”

“It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d say.” He put the mug back on the counter, unfinished. “That is quite possibly the worst cup of tea I’ve had anywhere. And I’m including France in that.”

“I’ll be sure to pass your complaint to the management. Are you ready to go now?”

“Oh, I think my work here is done.” He looked round the kitchen for the first time, and in anyone else, that might have been the prelude to a compliment: it was a small, compact space radiating efficiency and homely comfort, everything where it ought to be. Even the calendar looked thoughtful: an Alma Tadema beauty, leaning on a block of marble. The little white squares underneath it, one for each day of the month, were all blank. “And I can see you’re busy.”

In the hallway, she opened her front door for him.

“No messages for the others?” Lamb said, pulling his gloves on. “Words of condolence?”

“Tell them I’ll be in touch.”

“Grand. And what about the Old Bastard?”

“. . . What about him?”

“You planning on keeping him in your bedroom forever, or do you want me to arrange for someone to come fetch him?”

After a moment or two Catherine closed the door, and Lamb peeled his gloves off again.

In Slough House all were still gathered in River Cartwright’s office, which was presumably now JK Coe’s office, though he’d made no attempt to stamp his authority upon it. Instead he was slumped in his habitual position, his hood obscuring his face. For once, though—perhaps as a mark of respect—his hands were at rest. His fingers twitched at intervals, but no improvised silences were being wrung from the woodwork.

Moira, somewhat hesitantly, had laid out what was known, which wasn’t much. And then they had grown quiet, while on the street outside traffic swished past on a wet road, and the day, which should have been growing lighter, seemed to have stalled at a glum grey question mark.

“I feel bad now,” Shirley said at last.

“It’s barely ten,” Marcus pointed out. “You always feel bad before ten.”

“About what I said the other day, I mean. About him being replaced.”

“Yeah, well,” he said philosophically. “Fuck it.”

“Was he married?” Moira asked.

Ho snorted.

“He had family,” said Louisa. “His grandfather. He was going to see him last night. How can anyone get killed going to see their grandfather?”

“You can die swallowing a peanut,” Ho said.

Louisa stared at him.

“Not an allergy, I mean. Just, when it goes down wrong.”

Marcus said, “Might be best if you don’t speak again today.”

“Where’s Lamb, anyway?” Louisa asked.

“Not here.”

“Well he fucking ought to be. One of his joes just got killed.”

“Are we sure he’s dead?”

“Lamb identified the body,” Ho said.

“That doesn’t fill me with confidence. Does it fill you with confidence?”

After a pause, Shirley said, “Well, I wouldn’t want him identifying mine.”

“Louisa,” Marcus began.

“No. This is not fucking happening. Not again.”

“Again?” Moira asked.

“This is not the time,” Marcus said.

“We are not sitting here remembering another dead colleague while that little bastard loots his computer.”

“Move away from the computer,” Marcus told Ho.

“It’s not actually Cartwright’s—”

“Like, now.”

Ho rolled his eyes—this was exactly the kind of thing he was always telling Kim, his girlfriend, about—but moved away from River’s PC.

JK Coe said, “What did Lamb write?”

The room fell silent.

“He speaks?” Shirley said. “Nobody told me he speaks.”

“What do you mean?” Louisa said. “Write what?”

“I think he means Lamb’s text,” said Marcus. “You mean Lamb’s text?”

Coe nodded.

“He means Lamb’s text,” Marcus confirmed.

“He sent it to me,” said Ho. “What makes it your business?”

“I swear to God,” said Marcus, “this is like being trapped in a special school. Ho? Read him the fucking text.”

Ho sighed theatrically and produced his Smartphone. He’d just finished tapping the code in when Shirley snatched it from his hands.

“Hey, you can’t—”

“Just did.”

Ho reached for her, but had a wise moment and refrained. She might be shorter than him but they both knew—everybody knew—she could rip him up like confetti if she wanted, and scatter him like rice.

She found his messages, and read the one from Lamb. “Will be late in. Up all night identifying Cartwright’s body.”

“Will be late?” Moira repeated. “Well. That’s a little . . . ”

“You haven’t met him yet, have you?”

Louisa said, “‘Cartwright’s’? He said ‘Cartwright’s’?”

“Louisa—”

“He doesn’t say the body’s River’s.”

“Who else could he mean?”

“River’s grandfather. Maybe he means the O.B.’s body.”

“Why would Lamb be identifying the O.B.’s—”

“Because this is not fucking happening!”

“Louisa,” Marcus said gently. “If he didn’t mean River, then where is River? He’d be here by now if . . . ”

“He was alive,” Moira blurted.

“Yeah, thanks,” Shirley muttered.

But JK Coe said, “I think he probably is.”

Leafless trees on the skyline resembled plumes of smoke, and the sky itself was a grey dome, holding the world in place. Every so often dark flecks scarred its surface, which he thought were probably geese: maybe swans, but probably geese. It was doubtful that it mattered, but he’d slipped his moorings now, and even the most Lilliputian detail might help anchor him to solid ground.

River Cartwright, unobserved—he hoped—took the passport from his jacket pocket, and examined it again by the light from the train window.

“I knew he wasn’t you,” his grandfather had said.

This would have seemed a small triumph, most days: that the O.B. knew who was and who wasn’t his grandson. But the photo in the passport would have fooled a casual acquaintance, and given pause to some who knew him well. It wasn’t just the physical similarity; it was the light in the eye, the tilt of the jaw. You look at a camera like you don’t trust it, a girlfriend had told him once. As if you’re not saying ‘Cheese’ but ‘Fancy your chances?’ This character had that same attitude.

Of course, the light in his eye was well and truly out now.

Adam Lockhead.

A name that meant nothing to River.

Who had gone through Adam Lockhead’s pockets, there in the bathroom. The passport; a wallet holding a hundred or so euros; the return half of a Eurostar ticket. Some loose change, a pocket-sized packet of tissues, a chocolate bar wrapper and a crumpled café receipt. Nothing to indicate what he’d been after; nothing to explain why he had planned to kill David Cartwright, if that’s what he’d intended.

To think otherwise was to allow the possibility that an innocent visitor had turned up to be shot in the head for his pains.

I’m worried someone’ll come to the door and he’ll shoot them.

In the city, when you heard something that sounded like a gunshot, you waited to hear it a second time, and when you didn’t, you put it down to a backfiring car. River wasn’t sure the same held true of the country. At any moment the quiet of the evening might be sawn in two by approaching sirens, and once that happened, they’d be sucked into the maw of Regent’s Park: a security blanket dropped over them like a cover on a parrot’s cage. No more talking, or not to each other.

“You’re sure you’ve not seen him before?” he asked.

“I knew he wasn’t you,” his grandfather repeated.

On the kitchen table lay the panic button the O.B. had been issued with, back when he could be trusted with such things. Lately, he’d activated it at least once that River was aware of; “False alarm, false alarm,” he’d asserted, though River suspected he’d simply forgotten what it was for. Pressing it was a way of finding out. And since pressing it in these circumstances was pretty much exactly what it was designed for, River, crouching over the body of Adam Lockhead, had wondered whether it wasn’t better to go with the flow . . . The Dogs would soon arrive. This kind of mess was what they were for: they cleaned, they disinfected, they made the bad stuff go away. But other words from earlier in the evening were haunting him: the possibility, the breath of an ancient rumour, that Regent’s Park might have a habit of lowering a curtain over its former glories.

“Yeah, I wasn’t actually suggesting they’d have him murdered,” Louisa had said. “Though I can see you’ve put some thought into that.”

He put some more into it now.

A stranger, upstairs in his grandfather’s house.

A stranger who looked enough like River to at least get through the door.

A stranger apparently running a bath.

A quick tug on an old man’s heels . . .

“We have to go.”

“River?”

“Grandfather, it’s not safe here.”

“Stoats?” his grandfather said, perking up.

“That’s right. Stoats.”

“I’ll need my wellingtons.”

He would, too, because they’d be leaving on foot. There was a car in the garage, a museum-quality Morris Minor, but River couldn’t remember when it had last been on the road, and besides, it was best not to make your escape in the first vehicle they’d look for. This was one of the stupid roundabout thoughts he allowed to occupy his mind, throwing dust in the way of what needed to be done, while his grandfather clumped downstairs and rooted about for his boots . . . Don’t think about it. Just do it.

He fired his grandfather’s gun into what was left of Adam Lockhead’s face.

Then he left his ID and phone in Lockhead’s pocket, taking the passport, the wallet, the tickets, the litter.

Sitting on the train now, his heartbeat echoing the clatter of its wheels, he knew that that had been the moment when it happened—not sneaking away from the house; not leaving his grandfather in the empty bus shelter while he scouted the road for a stealable car; not the journey into London along dark roads, with every approaching headlight a threat, and one stomach-flipping episode when a police car had screamed up behind him, lights ablaze, only to go pelting past; not abandoning the car behind a West End supermarket and hopping on a night bus; not turning up at Catherine’s door, because it was the only safe place he could think of—all of these had been stages on the journey, but putting the bullet into Adam Lockhead’s corpse was when he had crossed the threshold. The point at which he’d stepped outside.

Spook Street was the phrase his grandfather used. When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret. But there were other territories. Beyond Spook Street it was all joe country—even here, with the friendly French landscape pelting past at a hundred miles an hour, he was in joe country, and there was no telling what came next.

He had only the vaguest idea of where he was going; simply that he was walking back the cat, retracing a dead man’s journey. But he knew this much: he wasn’t sitting in Slough House, his energies being sucked away with every tick of the clock. He was alive, and alert to the game . . . The leafless trees on the skyline were plumes of smoke, and the sky itself a grey dome, holding the world in place. This was what joe country looked like. He tucked the passport out of sight and closed his eyes, but didn’t sleep.

The old man was asleep, or looked it, only his head visible. His body might have been a fold in the duvet. Lamb regarded him from the doorway, his face expressionless. The fluttery noise was David Cartwright’s breathing: regular, but not deep. The curtains were drawn but thin grey January light seeped in, painting everything it touched in the same lonely colour: the fitted wardrobes each side of the bed, in which Catherine’s many similar outfits doubtless hung, all those long-sleeved, high-necked, mid-calf dresses she favoured, like a governess’s Sunday best; the dressing table on which a few tubs were arranged, moisturising creams and the like, and from a corner of whose mirror a pair of necklaces hung, one of black beads Lamb had never seen before, and the other a slim gold chain she often wore, and probably had sentimental associations; even the pair of scarves draped over a chair, both in dark colours, but one threaded with gold: they were all grey-toned in this light, washed of vitality, though nothing more so than the O.B.’s face, which might have been a death-mask, were it not for that fluttery breathing.

“Happy now?”

Lamb said, “You know me. When am I not full of joie de fucking vivre?”

“So maybe you could leave my bedroom now?”

“Hey!” he shouted suddenly.

“Jackson—!”

The old man’s eyes opened, and any doubt that he’d been genuinely asleep vanished with the frightened yelp he made.

“Out! Now!” Her voice was taut with fury.

Lamb watched a moment longer as David Cartwright tried to raise his head from the pillow, his eyes soaking up the frightening unfamiliarity of his surroundings. Fingers crept out from the covers and took what grip they could. He looked like an illustration from a hundred-year-old ghost story.

And then Catherine Standish was pushing him out of the room, closing the door behind him; remaining inside with the old man. He could hear soothing noises, interrupted by an odd sort of squawking, as if she had a chicken with hiccups in there, rather than a former Service legend.

Lamb went into her sitting room. When she joined him, he was picking through the postcards on her mantelpiece, checking each for messages, though most were museum-bought.

“Was that necessary?”

“I do apologise,” said Lamb. “I was forgetting he was a vulnerable old man.”

“Yes, well—”

“I was thinking more of him being a nasty old spook with more blood on his hands than you’ve had gin for breakfast. When did they get here?”

“‘They’?”

“This is me you’re talking to. River brought him, right?”

“I thought you’d identified River’s body.”

“Wishful thinking,” said Lamb. “Though to be fair, he looked like River might, if you put two bullets in his head. Which could yet happen, the aggravation he’s causing.”

“They got here about four.”

“He’s had more sleep than I’ve had, then.” Without warning, Lamb collapsed onto the two-seater sofa, which was stronger than it looked and didn’t buckle. “What was their story?”

“They didn’t really have one.”

“And you took them in?”

“River wouldn’t have come if he’d had anywhere else to go.”

“The last refuge of the desperate,” said Lamb. “Yeah, I can see how you fill that role.” He was holding a cigarette, of course: it had appeared in his hand by magic. He slotted it into his mouth and sucked it thoughtfully. “And now he’s off on a marvelous adventure.”

“What’s going on, Jackson?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He arrived in the middle of the night, asked me to look after his grandfather, and left.”

“Always mistaking drama for style, that boy. You gunna keep hovering like that? Sit down. Make yourself at home.”

She simmered, but sat anyway: not on the sofa. She said, “He was in a state. Still is. Confused, not sure what’s happening. He called me Rose. Did he really shoot someone in his bathroom? Or was that just you playing games?”

“You have a nasty mind, Standish. It’s wasted on this.” He indicated their surroundings: a calm and quiet room, with books on the shelves. “And yes, he did.”

“Twice?”

“Good question. Know what? I don’t think so. Old, confused man, like you said, I think once he’s shot someone, first thing he’s gunna do is drop the gun. I hate ageism, as you know, but old people are pretty useless.”

“I can’t tell you how much I haven’t missed your observations.”

“That’s good, because I have more.”

He paused, and his eyes shifted focus; he was looking at something that wasn’t there. Catherine recognised the signs—as familiar to her as the way he deliberately misheard her comment—and knew he was about to spin a story from whatever fragments he’d so far collected.

“I think someone came to kill the old man,” he said, “and didn’t realise he’s a dangerous old fuck. So whoever it is ends up dead in the bathroom, and that’s when young Cartwright arrives for one of his cosy at-home evenings with grandpa. Anyone else, anyone sane, you know what they’d have done at this point? They’d have called it in. Not like the old man’s gunna get done for murder, no, what’d happen next is the Dogs arrive, followed by the cleaners, and twenty minutes later, it’s like it never happened. But that’s not what young Cartwright does. Why’s that?”

“You’re about to tell me.”

“Well, he’s a dick, obviously. We have to factor that in. But assuming he’s got an actual motive, beyond his tireless desire to play Double-Oh Seven, it’s probably that he thinks calling the Dogs will make things worse.”

“. . . Seriously?” She was putting it together even as he spoke. “He thinks it was a Service hit?”

“Well, it was a fuck-up. That’s circumstantial evidence right there. And if the old bastard’s actually gone loopy, the kid might have a point.”

“What, he was worried the Park has a, what have I heard it called, an enhanced retirement package?” she said. “That never really happened.”

“Are you asking or telling?”

“I’m saying I don’t believe it ever did.”

“And I’m the one gets called a wide-eyed idealist. But what you believe’s neither here nor there, because it’s what River thinks that matters in the circs. And he thinks if he calls the Dogs, they might just finish the job. So he puts another bullet into Mystery Man’s face—”

“He what?”

“See? I knew you were interested.” Lamb removed the cigarette from his mouth and tucked it behind his ear. Then he fished another from his pocket and plugged it into his mouth. It was possible that he wasn’t aware of either of these actions. “He does that because while Mystery Man might pass for River, he’s hardly an identical twin.” He pressed a finger to his upper lip. “That mole of his, looks like he’s been eating crap and missed a bit? Mystery Man doesn’t have one, and that’s going to be noticed.”

“So he’s just muddying the waters.”

“It’s what a joe would do,” Lamb said grudgingly.

“It wouldn’t buy him more than twenty minutes.”

“He got this far, didn’t he? And then further. Where’d he head off to, by the way?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.”

Lamb said, “See, I get told by HR all the time that I never give you lot training, and you know what I always say?”

“You tell them to fuck off.”

“Well, yeah, I tell them to fuck off, but you know what I say after that? I tell them I lead by example. Case in point. If I don’t like a question, I answer a different one. Like you did just there.” He gave a complacent smile, and the cigarette dropped from his mouth. He caught it between two fingers. “I didn’t ask whether River told you where he was going, I just asked where he was going.”

“What makes you think I know?”

“Because you’re not a great liar. You’re good, but you’re not great.”

“Excuse me? When did I lie?”

“When you pretended to believe me when I told you he was dead.”

“. . . So?”

“So you know he’s somewhere far enough away that I couldn’t have got there and back in the time it took me to turn up at your door. Jesus, Standish. It’s not rocket science.”

“Not for someone with your twisted thought processes,” she conceded.

They sat in silence and stared at each other, as if this were just another phase of a game they’d both been playing for a long long time.

At last she said, “He hung his jacket over a chair. I went through his pockets while he was getting his grandfather settled.”

“That must have brought back memories. Didn’t you use to roll sailors, back in the day?”

She said, “He had a passport. British. Alex Lockhead, no, Adam. Adam Lockhead. And a Eurostar ticket, and some euros.”

Lamb groaned. “Oh, great. The idiot’s gone to France.”

“On someone else’s passport.” Catherine shook her head. “I didn’t think he’d get past border control.”

“Inside Europe? If the passport’s not on a watch-list, he could waltz through wearing falsies and a tutu. Though mind you, having a photo that actually resembles him might raise suspicion.” He sniffed. “Mine makes me look fat.”

“Imagine.”

“So he’s over the channel. But France is a big place. What’s he plan to do, stomp up and down the Champs Élysées, waving his arms in the air?”

“There was a café receipt.”

“Of course there was,” said Lamb.

There was a hold-up somewhere: a faulty traffic light, an accident, or—probably—a stretch of road being dug up, with a knock-on effect spreading ever outward. He’d seen a sign near some roadworks not long ago: two hundred yards of plastic mesh and bollards, not a workman in sight, and a notice reading: “We are currently examining the waterpipes in this area. At times, it will look like no work is being done.” Nothing like getting your alibi in first.

Claude Whelan chuckled, then abruptly stopped. Three days after the Westacres bomb, last thing he needed was a tabloid headline, Intelligence Chief enjoying a private joke. And you never knew when a lens was trained on you, even in the back seat of your smoke-screened official limousine.

He was being driven back from Downing Street. The COBRA session had been long, and last night sleepless; he had ended up in the spare bed, to avoid disturbing Claire. His first COBRA: no wonder he’d been nervous. Nobody had to tell Whelan his elevation had been unexpected. Dame Ingrid Tearney had cast a long shadow, and there were nooks and crannies of the Service still in darkness; after her—as he’d heard it called—over-managed tenure, there’d been an expectation that the mantle would pass back to Ops. After all, Charles Partner, the last head of the Service to have hailed from Operations, had overseen a successful, invigorating era that was looked on as a golden age. Had it been more widely known that he’d spent much of his career in the pay of the Soviets, this afterglow might have been tarnished somewhat; as it was, only his apparent suicide cast a retrospective taint of unreliability over his administration, and since this was ascribed by those not in the know to hidden trauma from his days as an Active, it had subsequently been decided that hands-on experience was a drawback, and Partner’s successors to date had achieved office mostly by dint of managerial cunning. But following Tearney there’d been rumours of impending “reform,” and while the word had long lost any association with notions of improvement, attaching itself instead to cost-cutting, it had nevertheless been mooted that a new direction might be in the offing, and Ops in the ascendancy once more. Diana Taverner would have been the obvious choice. But Tearney, when she went, had gone with the grace of a scuttled supertanker: it had taken ages, it had been very messy, and it left few onlookers with clean feathers. Reform had thus subsided into the usual face-saving reshuffle, and Whelan, recently gonged after twenty years’ service, and very much not associated with the Dame’s doings, had been helicoptered in from across the river: a safe pair of hands.

And any secret doubts he harboured about this he’d kept in check this morning. Having laid out the facts rehearsed with Diana Taverner, he’d forged on into the territory that was Robert Winters—the man caught on camera detonating himself in a crowded shopping centre; a made-in-Britain version of all those headlines, which had shrunk over the years to a page-seven sidebar, about events in distant marketplaces. Nothing brought the meaning of “suicide bomber” home quite so hard as familiar logos glimpsed through the rubble. So there he was—now you see him, now you don’t—and they owed his name to the brilliant work of the boys and girls of Regent’s Park, who had traced his passage backwards through the streets of London, courtesy of all that CCTV coverage the liberal tendency decried; as if putting a smashed clock together, they had reconstructed the minutes that had ticked down to zero, each stage of the journey rooting Robert Winters more fixedly into the life he had emerged from, and loosening him from the explosive manner in which he had ended it. Here he was in the underground, among crowds of the ignorantly blissful; here he was changing lines at Edgware Road, his blurry features by now more familiar to his watchers than those of their own children. And so it went, step after step, fragments of footage spliced together in reverse order, and if he was still a cipher at this point, assigned a random codename nobody paid attention to, because he was always he—him—they had known long before they pinned him down that this was the inevitable end of their quest. Nobody so hunted could remain uncaught. We will have him was the common refrain, and it became almost irrelevant that he was unhavable, that what was left of him could be weighed on a set of kitchen scales; no, they would have him—they would bring him back to life through digital magic, interrogate his spirit, undo his evil. And in the end they achieved this much: one final flicker of footage showing him emerging from a backpackers’ hotel in Earls Court, eighty-one minutes before the detonation in Westacres—stepping from a cheap and nasty dive into a grey damp January London; the skies barely distinguishable from the pavements; the pavements wet and littered; the litter pulped and mushy.

Two minutes later a net had dropped over it so thinly meshed an anorexic flea couldn’t have slipped through.

The Earls Court hostel was their crime scene, and it was here, in one of its grubby rooms, that he acquired an identity at last, for not only had Robert Winters registered under that name, he had left his passport under his pillow for them to find, alongside the pay-as-you-go he had used to text Lucas Fairweather; and—naturally—as much DNA as the boys and girls could wish for. An amateur error? Pointless to ask: when it comes to suicide bombers, everyone’s a first-timer. No, this was a cock being snooked from the other side of death; Robert Winters nailing down his place in history before setting off to create his own sunset. It would be a far far better thing if they buried the passport with his victims and claimed never to have found it. Cheat the bastard of posthumous fame, and in doing so reveal his true nature: that whatever blaze of infamy he’d sought to depart the planet in, he had been at heart a nobody, a nothing; not worth the moment it took to learn his name.

Which, philosophically, might have been appealing, but wasn’t an acceptable approach to take in a COBRA briefing.

“Robert Winters.”

“Yes, PM.”

(He liked to be addressed as “PM.” Presumably because he still couldn’t believe it himself.)

“A British citizen.”

“That’s right, PM.”

“Not a convert . . . ?”

Because that would have helped: if the Westacres bomber had been radicalised by conversion. But—

“There’s nothing among his possessions to suggest that, no.”

“Pity.”

Claude Whelan couldn’t, in good conscience, respond to this.

The PM, though, hadn’t finished: “And no evidence yet of any other extremist affiliation—animals, veggies, climate change?”

“Nothing. But it’s early days. We’ll have a full working dossier by noon, see what happens when we shake the tree.”

But the PM, for all his faults—and there was an actual list of these in circulation, courtesy of a cadre of his own backbenchers—wasn’t always slow on the uptake. “But if you have to look for it, it’s not much of a cause, is it? Terrorists hang their flags out. No point perpetrating a massacre anonymously.”

This had troubled Whelan, too. Leaving a passport in open view was one thing, but he’d have expected a terrorist’s bible, a video message, a wonderwall. Look on my works and tremble sort of thing. But for the moment, he wanted to emphasise progress.

“The hostel’s a staging post. When we have his . . . lair, we’ll find motive.”

He regretted lair as soon as it was out of his mouth.

Somebody asked, “What about the bomb? Progress?”

“The HE element, the high explosive, we already knew was Semtex,” Whelan said. “We’ve since determined it came from a batch stolen during a raid on a police armoury in Wakefield.”

“The police have Semtex now? When did that start?”

There was a slight ripple of laughter: not as much as if it had been the PM’s quip.

Whelan said, “It was part of a haul seized by HMRC, along with a quantity of firearms, off the Cumbrian coast in ’92. Believed at the time to be intended for an IRA splinter group. But there was no proof of that, and no arrests made.”

“Ninety-two?” This was the Defence minister. “That’s ancient history.”

Whelan suspected he was trying to remember who’d been in government then; whether this was something that could be passed off on the other party. He said, “The raid on the armoury took place three years later.”

“But it’s so old.” This from the MoD again. “It must have been highly unstable –”

And then lapsed into silence as it struck everyone present that worries about the explosive’s efficacy were misplaced, to say the least.

The meeting had carried on for a further two hours, and had dissolved into rhetoric long before it came to a close. It was as if all those present felt the need to go on the record, even a sealed record, as to their personal disgust at the Westacres event, as if worried that it would otherwise be assumed that they approved. Well, in the internet age, that was probably true. On the other hand, the lengthy discussion of property damage, insurance hikes and likely impact on tourist spending wouldn’t have endeared the assembled company to grieving parents, so it was, Whelan supposed, swings and roundabouts.

Meanwhile, he had work to do. By nightfall there’d be a dossier on Robert Winters this thick; they’d have every contact he’d ever made under a microscope, squirming like cancer cells. Walking back the cat, it was called: they’d walk this cat back to Robert Winters’s cradle, and scorch the earth it trod on. By nightfall—and his phone rang, interrupting his reverie.

Taverner, the screen read.

The car gave a tumbril-like shudder.

“Diana.”

“Claude,” she said. “Meeting go well?”

“Fine, yes, I—”

“Good. But we need to talk.”

And something in her tone made Whelan understand that by nightfall, he’d have more problems than he had now.

Louisa had made coffee an hour previously, and still it sat, a film developing on its surface. Soon she would pour it away, and maybe refill the cup, and either drink it or not. Life was full of choices.

I think he probably is, JK Coe had said; meaning River; meaning alive.

Predictably, Marcus had become cross.

“Just so we’re clear. If you’ve chosen now to speak just so you can mess with our heads, there’ll be repercussions. Emphasis on the percussion.”

And Shirley had added: “And take your bloody hood off. Or I’ll do it for you.”

A short acquaintance informed the intelligent that Shirley’s threats never stayed empty for long. Slowly, Coe had pulled his hood back, wincing at the light. His face was washed out, his stubble messy; his eyes pale and watery, as if he were staring from the bottom of a pool.

“Jesus. Do you eat? Or exercise? Or anything?”

“Can we stick to the point?” Louisa snapped. “What did you mean, you don’t think River’s dead?”

Coe started to speak, but his voice was too thick. He cleared his throat and began again. “Same as you. Lamb didn’t say he is.”

“I just read Lamb’s text, fool,” Shirley said. “Identified his body? Duh?”

“I’ve met Lamb.”

“So?”

“So he doesn’t mince words.”

Louisa said, “He’s right.”

“You want him to be right,” Marcus said. “There’s a difference.”

And maybe that’s all it was, she thought now: she wanted Coe to be right because otherwise River was dead, same as Min, and she wasn’t sure what she would do in that case—oddly, she found herself thinking of Catherine, wishing Catherine were here. There wouldn’t be anything Catherine could do either, but it would make a difference all the same. Right this moment, Louisa was the only woman in Slough House, if you didn’t count Shirley and Moira. Company would have been nice.

But Lamb hadn’t said River was dead. He’d said he’d identified his body.

And this was exactly the kind of thing Lamb would do, Louisa reflected, just to fuck with them. Let them all think River was dead. Exactly the stupid bastard kind of thing he’d do, though it did leave other questions open, like where River was now, and whose body Lamb had identified.

She stood abruptly, took her cold coffee to the kitchen, poured it down the sink, then went into River’s room. JK Coe was at his desk, apparently focused on his monitor, though she couldn’t see his eyes for his hood. He was stroking the desk in front of him. He didn’t look up at her entrance, or when she spoke.

“You were Psych Eval, weren’t you?”

He didn’t reply.

“Before whatever fuck-up brought you here.”

His fingers continued their caressing motion, and she realised he was plugged into an iPod. Perhaps he genuinely hadn’t noticed she was here, she thought, which possibly made what she did next unfair: scooping a stapler from River’s desk she lobbed it so it landed on Coe’s keyboard. The actual one, not the imaginary one he was playing. The effect startled her as much as the stapler did him: he shot to his feet with a shout of rage, and stuff went flying: his iPod, the chair he’d been sitting on, a mug, its contents.

“Fuck!”

“Jesus! I didn’t—”

“Fuck!”

His hood had fallen back, and he still looked washed-out, messy and pale, but dangerous too, like a cornered rat. Something glinted in his fist. It disappeared almost immediately into the pocket of his hoodie.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Louisa said.

He seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. Collecting his iPod instead, he righted his chair and slumped back down. The mug remained on the floor, its contents joining the several years’ worth of blood, sweat and tears soaked into the carpet. Mostly tears.

“I’m sorry.”

But what was that in your hand, she thought—was that a knife?

“What happened?”

This was Marcus, with—inevitably—Shirley in tow, chanting “Fight! Fight!” under her breath.

“I dropped something,” Louisa said.

“Yeah, right.”

Shirley said, “Did he talk again? Make him talk again.”

“Shut up, Shirl.” Marcus moved across the room, stooping to collect the fallen mug on his way. This he set in front of Coe before crouching until they were on the same level. “Are we going to have a problem with you?”

Louisa said, “It was my fault, Marcus.”

“I’m talking to Little Grey Riding Hood here,” Marcus said, without shifting his gaze. “I’m wondering if he’s planning on starting to act up. You know, loud squawks and flying cups. Shit like that.”

When Coe replied, it was in a near whisper. “You gunna tie me to a chair and shave my toes off with a carving knife?”

“. . . Don’t plan to.”

“Then I’m not scared of you.”

Marcus looked over his shoulder at the women. “I think I found his boundaries.”

“Leave him alone, Marcus,” Louisa said wearily.

“Yeah, leave him alone, Marcus,” said Lamb.

Christ on a bike, Louisa thought. How did he do that? All he needed was a puff of smoke—and then a more urgent line of enquiry took shape, and she said, “What happened to River? Is he dead?”

“Fine, thanks. Yourself?”

“Lamb—”

“I realise I may have extended my Christmas break a smidgin, but really, people, has any work gone on here at all?”

His Christmas break had started last September. Louisa could count on her fingers how many times she’d seen him since.

She said, “Answer the question. River . . . ”

“He’s not dead.”

Instead of the relief she might have expected, a wave of tiredness came crashing upon her, as if she’d developed an adrenalin leak.

“As far as I know.”

“Then why,” she began, and gave up. The why would emerge in its own good time, or not at all. Pointless to expect better from Jackson Lamb.

Who was surveying his slow horses now, the way a battery farmer might inspect his chickens.

“You.” He pointed at Shirley. “You look different. Why?”

She patted the top of her head, where her buzz-cut was a softer, downy peach-fuzz. “I’m letting it grow out.”

“Huh.”

“It makes me look like a young Mia Farrow,” she said. “If she’d been dark instead of blonde.”

“Yeah,” said Lamb. “And if she’d eaten Frank Sinatra instead of marrying him.”

Ho, who’d trotted into the room on Lamb’s heels, said, “And I’ve grown a beard.”

“Really? Where?”

“On my . . . ” Ho’s voice trailed away.

“This is almost too easy,” Lamb said. Then tilted his head to one side. “You’re different too, though. Not just the chin pubes. How come you look all shiny?”

“He’s been showering,” Marcus said.

“Seriously?” Lamb looked at Ho, stunned. “You’ve found a girlfriend?”

“That’s not what he—”

“Jesus. And this is an actual relationship? Not an abduction? Well well well.” Lamb dropped the appalled expression, and beamed round at the company. “See what you can achieve with a little application?” He patted Ho on the shoulder. “It does me good to see you rise above your disability.”

“I don’t have a disability,” Ho said.

“That’s the spirit. You should bring her into the office, introduce her.”

“Really?”

“Christ no, not really. It’s not a fucking coffee bar. And speaking of the fairer sex, our new lady friend settling in? Where is she, anyway?”

Marcus said, “Did you just call her a lady?”

“Of course. Always be polite when referring to a woman of a certain age,” Lamb said. “In case the mad old cow turns vicious.”

Louisa said, “She’s upstairs, I think. In Catherine’s office.”

“Now, now. It’s not Standish’s office any more. Remember?”

“That why you’ve been sulking?”

He ignored that; focused instead on JK Coe, who had clasped his hands on his desktop, as if to make sure they wouldn’t betray him. Lamb studied him for a moment or two, then said, “Does he speak?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“Do you speak?”

Coe shrugged.

“What was he, raised by hamsters?”

“He was talking earlier,” Shirley said. “You must’ve scared him.”

“Are you going to tell us what’s going on?” Louisa said.

Now Lamb turned to her. “What’s your problem? You look like Santa shat on your sofa.”

“You let us think River was dead.”

“No, River let you think River was dead. I just didn’t spoil the joke.”

“So what’s he playing at? Whose body was it? And where?”

“Who am I, Google? I don’t know whose body it was, and what Cartwright’s playing at, my guess is Secret Agents. Why change the habit of a lifetime? As for where, it was out in the sticks, at his grandpa’s. Why do old people live in the country, do you think? Do they start in the city and just get lost?”

“So somebody’s dead, but not River?”

“How many more times?” Lamb rolled his eyes at Ho. “Women, eh?”

“Yeah, I know what you—”

“Shut up,” Louisa told him.

“So where’s River now?” asked Marcus.

“France.”

“Why?”

“That’s where the killer came from.”

“We have a killer now?”

“The body in the bathroom,” Lamb said. “I’m assuming he wasn’t a plumber.”

“And he came to kill River?”

“Let’s think that through carefully,” said Lamb. “Using our brain.”

Louisa said, “He means, whose house was it?”

“But River’s often at his grandad’s,” Marcus objected. “If I was gunna hit River, I might follow him and do it there. Out of the city, empty roads, easy getaway.”

“I’m sure we’ve all spent hours planning the best way of killing River,” Lamb said. “But our assassin came all the way from France, which sounds more like a job than a hobby. So let’s assume he was after Grandpa. Business before pleasure and all that.”

“So who killed the killer?”

“One Cartwright or other. Does it matter?” Lamb slumped heavily into the nearest chair, which was the absent River’s. “What we actually need to know is what the hell’s going on. And since young Cartwright’s not here to tell us, and old Cartwright’s lost the plot, we’re going to have to work it out ourselves.”

Louisa said, “Has he really lost it? The old man?”

“I’ve had more illuminating conversations with ducks,” Lamb assured her.

“River said he was worried about him.”

“Been confiding in you, has he, young Double-Oh Three-and-a-Half?”

“Well, he—”

“But not enough to pick up a phone and let you know he’s alive.” He shook his head sadly. “Kids today, eh? Who’d have ’em?”

Shirley said, “France is pretty big.”

“Excellent. We have a geographer. Any further insights?”

“All I meant was, River must have had more to go on than just that.”

“Yeah, well, you have a point, oddly enough. River found a train ticket in the dead man’s pocket. Plus a café receipt . . . Christ. An actual fucking clue. He must think he’s died and gone to heaven.” He looked at Louisa. “Not literally. Keep your hair on.”

“Where was the café?” she said.

“God knows. Well, him and River.” Lamb pushed his chair back, and with surprising dexterity swung first one then the other foot onto River’s desktop. Some unimportant, to Lamb, devastation ensued. “So. We have what I believe our American chums call a sit-u-a-tion. An assassin with a UK passport, but apparently based across the channel, arrives to take a pop at David Cartwright, but trips over his dick in the process. River’s gone haring off like the half-cocked idiot he is, taking the only clue with him, and the old bastard himself doesn’t know what time of day it is, let alone why anyone might want to punch his ticket. Leaving us here, now. Any bright ideas? Don’t be shy.”

“What do the Dogs say?” Marcus asked.

“The dogs say bow wow,” said Lamb. “Ask me a harder one.”

“You know what I meant.”

“They’re currently scouring Kent for a bewildered pensioner, so I imagine they’ll have their hands full. But any moment now, if they haven’t done already, they’re going to work out that it’s not River who’s dead, and alter the course of their investigation. Actually,” he said, “that might involve asking why I identified the body as River’s. So don’t be alarmed if we have unexpected company.”

“Why did you identify the body as River’s?” Louisa said.

“Because, bizarre as it sounds, he’s now a joe in the field. And you don’t blow a joe’s cover.” For a moment, it looked as if Lamb were about to say more, but he clamped his mouth shut instead. And then opened it again to repeat, more softly. “You don’t blow a joe’s cover.”

“You could have told us.”

“Well, I could. But that would have involved trusting you not to do something dickheaded, like blog about it, or hire a skywriter.” He smiled kindly. “I know you think of me as a father figure, and want to do well to impress me. But if you weren’t all useless fuck-ups, you’d not be here in the first place.”

“You’re telling us now,” Shirley pointed out.

“And that’s because, like I just said, by now they’ll have established that the body isn’t River’s. So it’s become a little moot, see?” He paused. “I said ‘a little moot,’ not a little toot. Don’t go getting ideas.”

“Where’s David Cartwright now?” Louisa asked.

Lamb hesitated, then said, “He’s safe.”

“There’s something you’re not telling us.”

He gave her a pitying look. “If I were to tell you everything I know,” he said, “you’d grow old and die before I was halfway done.” He shifted his feet suddenly, and a handleless mug that had sat on River’s desk, seeing service as a penholder, fell to the floor and completed its useful life. He looked at Ho. “You’re very quiet.”

“What about—”

“No, don’t spoil it.”

JK Coe spoke. “We have two fixed points.”

A short silence followed, then Lamb said, “Did someone fart? Only I heard a squeak, but I’m not smelling anything.”

“What’s that mean?” Shirley said. “Two fixed points?”

“Intended victim. Source of plot.” Coe was snapping his phrases off as soon as they were done, as if they were costing him pain.

Louisa said, “Triangulation requires three points.”

“Clue’s in the name,” Marcus pointed out.

Coe said, “The old man must have a French connection. He can’t tell us but someone will know.” The fingers on his right hand twitched. “There’ll be records.”

“I was wondering about returning him to the shop,” Lamb said. “But it seems he has a working brain.” He paused. “He’s gunna fit in round here like a monkey at a dog show, but we’ll worry about that later. You heard him—find the connection. What ties the old man to France? That’ll be our third reference point. Any questions? Good. Off you fuck.”

“Just one,” Shirley said, when safely back in her own office. “What’s all this triangulation shit?”

The bus spat him out mid-morning in what would have been called the village square in England, though it wasn’t square. More of a large junction, whose adjoining roads didn’t quite meet, leaving this haphazard space of which a low wall carved off one corner, and the stacked tables of a café claimed another. A pair of trees swayed one side of the wall, and there were cars parked underneath, cars the bus was even now missing by inches as it swung away from the bus stop, which was marked as such only by a dog-eared timetable stapled to one of the tree trunks. It was raining softly, else those tables might have been in use, and the air had an edge to it, the unmistakable tang of a recent fire: not leaves or barbecue, something larger. This falsely lent the idea of warmth to the morning, and River tugged his jacket’s zip higher before checking again the café receipt he’d taken from Adam Lockhead’s pocket. Le Ciel Bleu, Angevin. And there it was, as advertised, behind those stacked tables; lights on, windows misted. Dim shapes moving about inside. The rectangular piece of card on the front door’s frosted glass clearly said Open, or Ouvert, or would when he got close enough to read it.

But River stayed where he was for the moment, sheltering under the awning of the nearest shop, in whose window a gallimaufry of objects was on display: kitchen gadgets, children’s toys, radios, watches, toiletries, brushes, packets of seed, boxes of cat litter, as if the idea was to just chuck a lot of bait around and see what the net dragged in. It reminded him of the market-stalls on a street near Slough House, most of which had vanished when the foodies moved in. Random thoughts like this were the product of weariness. He surveyed the goods on offer while he accustomed himself to being here, middle of France, with only half a clue as to what he was doing.

It felt earlier than it was, or perhaps later—the light, anyway, seemed wrong, as if filtered through gauze—but then, his body clock was still set to yesterday. River hadn’t had much sleep last night, and didn’t have much money. Adam Lockhead’s euros had paid for a train ticket from Paris to Poitiers and the bus ticket here from there, but weren’t going to get him much further. They didn’t have to, though. By lunchtime at the outside, the body at his grandfather’s would have been, if not identified as Lockhead, at least unidentified as River Cartwright, which meant using his credit card wouldn’t be giving away anything that wasn’t already known, other than his location. They’d be looking at his known associates by then, trying to find the old man. With luck, by the time they got to Catherine, he’d have discovered what had brought an assassin from this quiet-seeming town on the river Anglin all the way to his grandfather’s house in Kent. Because the last thing he wanted was for the O.B. to be in anyone’s custody—not the Park’s; not the police’s—until he knew where the danger was coming from. Until then it was all joe country, and everyone a potential enemy.

Nobody had left or entered the café while he’d been standing here, and even if they had, what would he have done about it? It was time to take the next step. Collar up against the rain, he left the shelter of the awning, and made for Le Ciel Bleu.

She favoured park benches for off-the-books meetings—park benches or shady riverside stretches she was confident were unmonitored, but it was good to mix it up. So she’d told Claude to get out of the car and walk, to wait on the north-east corner of Oxford Circus. There were always crowds there, a good spot to check him for back-up. Maybe she didn’t have field savvy—running Ops was a desk job—but you didn’t have to know how to strip an engine to drive a car, and Claude Whelan had no clue how near she was until she put a hand on his elbow—almost.

He turned at the last moment. “Diana.”

“Sorry about the cloak and dagger.”

“No you’re not.”

“But some conversations are best kept out of the headlines.”

He was alone. His driver was still in a traffic jam, and tensions had to be running high before First Desk warranted an armed escort.

“What are you up to, Diana?”

“I want to catch a bus. This one will do.”

A bus ride up Oxford Street was a lengthy business at the best of times, and late morning wasn’t one of them. She paid cash, so there’d be no Oyster-card record, and they sat upstairs at the back like teenagers, except they weren’t texting. Whelan wore an amused expression, to cover whatever forebodings Taverner’s phone call had summoned, and she allowed him a minute to get used to where they were, assuming correctly that he hadn’t been on a bus in some time.

He’d noticed the flickering monitor on the lower deck. “You do realise there’s CCTV.”

“Which will be wiped tomorrow morning, provided no intervening event requires otherwise.”

“Well, let’s try to make sure that doesn’t happen. What’s going on, Diana?”

“We have a problem, Claude.”

“We do?”

“Well, technically you do. It seems you’ve supplied misinformation to a COBRA meeting. I don’t think that counts as actual treason, but—”

“Misinformation?”

“—it almost certainly amounts to dereliction of duty, and not in a small way, either. How long have you been in office now?”

“How long have I—Diana, what’s going on?”

“I’m just wondering if it’s a record, that’s all. Shortest serving First Desk.”

He said, “One of two things is going to happen. Either you start making sense, or I’m getting off this bus. And if it’s the latter, then the moment I’m back at the Park, I’ll be issuing a suspension notice. Have I made myself clear?”

“Crystal. What did you tell them about Winters?”

“You know what I told them about Winters. That we have his passport, for God’s sake. And that we’re ninety-nine per cent certain it’s the genuine article, which means it’s the key to unlocking everything else about him.”

“Yes, you see, that’s rather the problem.”

“What is?”

“Robert Winters’s passport.”

A bus going in the opposite direction jerked to a halt, and for a moment Whelan was looking past Taverner at another pair, another man and woman, sitting on a different top deck, heading somewhere else. Whoever they were—clandestine lovers, bored professionals—for a second he wished he were part of their conspiracy instead of this one. “What are you saying?” He hissed the words, his vehemence causing the nearest other passenger, a man four seats in front, to turn.

“Oh darling, don’t be like that,” Diana cooed, and the man smirked as he looked away. Lovers’ spat. Well, sometimes they did.

It occurred to Whelan that one reason she wanted this conversation to take place on a bus was to lessen the possibility he might strangle her.

She said, “Robert Winters—he’s one of ours.”

“He was an agent?”

“Not exactly.”

“An asset? Jesus—”

“Not an asset either. He’s what they call a cold body. You’re familiar with the term?”

“Stop spinning this out. Tell me what you know.”

So she did.

This triangulation shit, the way Marcus explained it, was pretty basic, and had Shirley never attended a standard training session? She probably had a head cold that day, she explained. Since “head cold” was accepted code for “cocaine hangover,” Marcus acknowledged the likelihood of this. So anyway, this triangulation shit:

“You’ve got two pieces of information, you can draw a straight line between them, no more. You’ve got three—”

“Okay, yeah, I get it.”

“—you can pinpoint—”

“I said I get it, okay?”

“Now you get it. A minute ago you knew nothing.”

“Yeah, well, I remembered.”

Marcus felt like saying more, but there was no sense poking a stick at Shirley when you didn’t need to. Any given day, the odds on her going postal were marginally in favour, and if she’d calmed down lately, that wasn’t—Marcus figured—on account of anything in particular getting better, but just things not getting appreciably worse. Everyone drew a line somewhere. And maybe the AFMs were helping. In fact, now he thought about it, it had been a while since she’d—

“Christ on a fucking pedalo!”

Okay. Maybe not that long.

He said, “What now?”

“Password’s expired.”

The Service network required a new password every month, for security reasons, though since you could only register a new password by first entering your old one, there were those who questioned the value of this procedure. Shirley was among their number.

“What you looking for?” Marcus asked, as Shirley went through the process of acquiring a new login, which took up some nineteen seconds of her precious bloody time, as she dubbed it under her breath.

“Phone number.”

“Bit early for Chicken Shack.”

“It’s never too early for Chicken Shack,” said Shirley. “Besides, fuck off. This is work.”

Logged in, she accessed the internal phone directory: everyone you might need to contact, at the Park and all other Service outposts—except Slough House. Nobody needed to contact Slough House.

Marcus was curious now, but didn’t want to ask. Shirley took pity. “Molly Doran,” she said.

“The wheelchair wonder?”

“Well, I think of her as the legless legend, but basically, yeah, we’re thinking of the same person.”

“Impression I got, she was pretty sick of Slough House. Didn’t River try to nick one of her files?”

“News flash. I’m not River.”

“You’re a slow horse, though.”

Shirley shrugged. “She’s a walking history book. She’ll either know something or not. And tell me or not. Only one way to find out.”

She dialled the number.

The café smelt of coffee and grilled cheese, and the faded pictures on the walls were of girls in rural costumes, with mill-and-cornfield backgrounds. A flyer for a circus had been taped to the door, alongside a coatstand, heavy with damp clothing. To River’s right was a glass-topped counter whose interior displayed pastries and sandwiches; most of the rest of the floorspace was occupied by chairs and tables, except for immediately in front of the counter, where a child’s buggy was parked. Its usual occupant sat in a high chair, slapping the tray with one hand, tugging an ear with the other, and gurgling as his/her—its—mother spooned into it a confection which was luridly green enough to look radioactive, though presumably wasn’t. The woman glanced River’s way, registered that the buggy was blocking his passage, and turned back to her child. River, offering a Gallic shrug, shifted the buggy enough to get past, then sat at a table against the far wall.

It wasn’t quite full. Mother and infant aside, there were only four others; a man in his fifties, with neat beard and pencil-thin eyebrows, reading a paper, and three young men sprawling round an array of cups and crumb-riddled plates and mobile phones. One watched River with open curiosity. The man with the newspaper didn’t look his way at all. An amiable woman, a little plump, appeared through a bead-curtained door behind the counter, and plucked a notepad from a shelf as she made her way towards River, pausing en route to cluck over the infant.

“Monsieur?” she said.

River ordered coffee.

He sat with it for half an hour. The three young men left in a noisy dazzle of endearments for the waitress; two girls came in and chattered ceaselessly over toasted sandwiches. River’s stomach growled, but he had barely enough cash for the coffee. The newspaper reader was brought another plate: an omelette, with mushrooms folded into it, judging by the smell. The coffee was good, but nowhere near filling. He examined the receipt once more: it was from five days previously, on the old side of the New Year, and Adam Lockhead had enjoyed two bottled beers and a steak-frites. The slip of paper had been crumpled into a ball, a forgotten piece of pocket detritus rather than deliberately retained for expenses; the distinction, in River’s mind, meaning that trips to Le Ciel Bleu had been regular, ordinary experiences for Adam Lockhead. Meaning that people here would recognise him; would know where he was staying, who his associates were . . . That, anyway, was what River had been telling himself for twelve hours or more. But it was starting to feel tenuous, here at this end of the argument, and not for the first time in his life, he wondered whether his initial instincts might have borne more rigorous inspection.

And would he have got this far, if not for that physical similarity, that coincidence of height and colouring? But then, he told himself, how many different colours did pairs of eyes come in? How many shades of fair did hair possess? Besides, the coincidence wasn’t that he looked like Lockhead; it was that Lockhead looked like him. That was the only reason Lockhead had managed to talk himself through the O.B.’s door; was maybe—probably—the reason he’d been chosen for the job in the first place.

The glances the waitress was giving him were gathering force. He’d possibly outstayed a single cup of coffee.

River nodded at her, and she was on him like a flash.

“Madame,” he began, then noticed she wore no wedding ring, but it was too late to back down now. “Je cherche un ami, un gens Anglais?”

She waited.

“Il . . . ” His French dried up. Looks like me? Resembles me? He found he was waving an open palm in front of his own face, illustrating a sentence he couldn’t create. Bond never had this trouble. Bond, though, would have been talking to a waitress twenty years younger, with inviting cleavage.

She was speaking now, words that included “man” and “breakfast,” and might have been a response to his half-arsed enquiries, or just a pithy French saw about the most important meal of the day.

When she paused, he said, “Il habite pres d’ici, je pense.”

His tense was all wrong, but that didn’t matter. Even if his French were perfect, he’d not be getting into Lockhead’s extinct status. But either way, the look on the woman’s face was one of total incomprehension.

A sudden rattle of syllables to his right interrupted the moment.

It was the bearded man, who had laid his paper down and was speaking to the waitress. There are few things more galling than to have one’s efforts at a foreign language require translation into the same, but it seemed to have the desired effect, for the woman simply left a saucer in front of River, on which lay the bill for his coffee, and retreated behind the counter.

“You are looking for a friend, I think,” the man said, in English.

“Yes,” River said, before the possible ambiguity of this approach had sunk in. “He—”

“He looks like you, yes?”

“You know him?”

“An Englishman?”

“Yes.”

The man shook his head. “Not English.”

“You’re sure?”

“He is a local. Bertrand, I think. Bertrand something.”

“And he comes in here?”

“I have seen him in here.” The man pointed to his eyes, then at River’s. “You share . . . You have the same expression. Am I saying that correctly?”

“Uh-huh. I mean yes. Oui. Do you know where he lives?”

“He is a friend? Or a relative?”

“A cousin,” River said.

“But you do not know his name. Or his nationality. Or where he lives.”

“We’re not a close family,” River said.

“Évidemment. I think he was from Les Arbres.”

“Is that another village?”

“A house. A big one. Not so far away.”

“Is it easy to find?”

“Well,” his new friend said. “Yes and no.”

“I remember you, yes,” Molly Doran told Shirley Dander over the phone.

“That’s good.”

“How very confident of you to think so.”

“. . . Sorry?”

“Don’t mention it. What is it you’re after this time, Ms. Dander? Or rather, what is it Jackson’s after? I assume you’re calling on his behalf.”

“I’m more what you’d call using my initiative.”

“What a nice way of putting it. So exploiting my expertise becomes your achievement, is that how it works?”

Shirley suppressed a sigh. Suppressing sighs was actually quite high on the list of personal goals drawn up at her AFM sessions, so it was like she was ticking a box at the same time. “How are things with you?” she asked, remembering another target: be aware of other people’s issues.

This attempt at heightened awareness met with stupefied silence.

Molly Doran wasn’t quite a Service legend, but she was heading that way. Molly ran personnel records at the Park: she trundled round in a bright red wheelchair on account of having lost her legs way back at the dawn of time, and knew everything, which made her a useful source of information. Every year, she gave a lecture on the Service’s research resources to baby spooks: a one-off class which had been known to reduce the intake’s hardest customer to a bubbling jelly. Even Lamb was rumoured to be impressed. Shirley, in fact, had heard a myth that Lamb and Molly shared history, which was kind of mind-numbing.

And now, Shirley’s polite enquiry comprehensively ignored, it was Molly’s turn to speak. “I gather Mr. Coe is now among your number.”

It took Shirley a moment to put the name Coe together with the hooded menace upstairs. “You know him?”

“I seem to recall sending him Jackson’s way once.” She paused. “If I’d known he was to end up there permanently, I might not have done that.”

A semblance of regret, there, or a passable pretence of the same. Shirley decided to treat this as an opening. “You know old David Cartwright?” she asked.

The brief silence that greeted this was precisely the amount of time it took to roll a pair of eyes. “I may have come across the name.”

“Yeah, well, someone tried to whack him last night.”

This next silence was rather more profound.

“Someone . . . ”

“Whack him, yeah. Apparently.” She gave Marcus a thumbs-up. This was going well now.

“And that’s the reason you’re calling.”

“Kind of. See—”

“And might I ask why you insist on conducting your investigation over the phone instead of affording me the basic courtesy of calling round in person?”

“Seriously?”

“I’m accustomed to being taken seriously, yes.”

“Because I don’t have clearance to enter the Park,” Shirley said.

“I know.”

She what?

Shirley said: “Well, if you already know, why—”

“Because I’m trying to make a point, Ms. Dander. And my point is, whatever investigation you’re conducting, I’m far from convinced you’re the one who ought to be conducting it. If you follow my meaning.”

It took Shirley a moment, but yeah, she grasped it.

“Which rather means I’m unlikely to cooperate when you finally get round to drafting your request for information.”

Which was all well and good, it occurred to Shirley, but then why was the cow still hanging on the line, when she could have saved herself several breaths and hung up half a minute ago?

And then came a sudden noise, the like of which she’d never heard before. Terrified, she looked at Marcus, and saw that he, too, had heard it—if he hadn’t, she thought afterwards, she’d have happily sworn off narcotics for good; uncomplainingly attended her Anger Management sessions; might even have gone back to the Church, so forever after, she was grateful that Marcus had heard it too, proving that it was really happening, not a hallucinatory nightmare.

Out on the landing, heading down the staircase, was Jackson Lamb. With him was Moira Tregorian.

And the pair of them were laughing happily.

The sound hovered mockingly once they’d gone; it lingered in the stairwell, fluttered about like a moth in search of a bulb. Marcus looked like someone had just swatted him with a shovel. Shirley’s own expression was equally graceless. But even as she closed her mouth an idea was forming, and the fact that Molly Doran was still on the line made it glimmer all the brighter.

“Are you still there?” she asked.

A faint sigh supplied the answer.

“Guess what I just heard,” she said.

“I’m certainly not going to do that.”

“You should. You should try. I’ll give you three guesses and a major clue.”

“A major clue?”

“Uh-huh.”

Molly Doran said, “And I imagine the forfeit—”

“I know what that means,” Shirley said.

“Very good. And I imagine the forfeit in the event of my failing to guess correctly is that I have to help you with your enquiries.”

“Yep.”

“Forgive me, but I fail to see what I have to gain from this.”

“Well, if you guess right, I hang up and never bother you again.”

“That does sound tempting,” Molly admitted.

Shirley said, “The clue is, it was Jackson Lamb made the noise.”

“Well,” Molly said after another pause. “Given Jackson’s limited repertoire, that sounds like the odds are in my favour, doesn’t it?”

The bus had arrived at a scheduled stop ten minutes previously and had remained there since, engine off, though traffic flowed freely past. None of the passengers made any audible complaint. Either they were regulars and had expected the hiatus, or were new to buses and had lost the will to live. On the top deck, at the back, Diana Taverner was in session with Claude Whelan:

“A cold body,” she said, “is a ready-made identity. Birth certificate, passport, National Security number, bank account, credit rating, the works. Constructed over the course of years, through official channels. This isn’t master forgers at work, this is the wheels of the Civil Service doing what the Civil Service does best. Which is paperwork, Claude. Cradle-to-grave paperwork. That’s what a cold body is. All you do is add flesh and blood, and you’ve got a fully documented life.”

“I thought that was standard practice. Creating false IDs.”

“These aren’t false. That’s the point. They’re real identities awaiting an owner. Don’t get me wrong, we can create fakes. And they’re good. If we fake a driver’s licence, it’ll look real to the last detail, but that last detail is the expiry date. Once we reach that, we’ll need to make a new one. With a cold body ID, that’s not an issue. You simply apply for a renewal. Because the expired one’s real, issued by the DVLA.”

Whelan said, “That must have required full-time maintenance.”

“Of course. Back in the day we had the resources we deserve. But the wardrobe department was closed once the Cold War was declared won, which for all intents and purposes was the day the Wall came down. It was deemed surplus to requirements, but don’t get me started on Treasury myopia. No, these days field identities are strictly off the cuff. Even long-term relocation covers are done on the cheap.”

“So what happened to these . . . cold bodies? When wardrobe was discontinued?”

“Mothballed. Or so it was thought.”

“But Robert Winters . . .”

“Was one of them. Yes.”

“How? How in the hell could he be? According to the passport, he’s twenty-eight. And you’ve just told me the project was closed way back—”

“Claude. You’re not listening. A cold body was a cradle-to-grave service. Identities created from scratch, in real time. The department had been running since the war, so the IDs it rolled out in the sixties were for twenty-year-olds. And so on. Get the picture?”

“A long-term undertaking,” he said faintly.

“You might say. Which means that when the department ceased to exist, they would have had any number of IDs in different states of preparation. Including one for a two-year-old Robert Winters.”

“If all we’re going on is the name—”

“And date and birthplace. Trust me, the Robert Winters who blew himself up in Westacres was a Service creation. There’s no other way he could have had that passport.”

“Jesus Christ.”

The bus lumbered into life, shuddering nose to tail.

“How long have you known?” he asked. “Who brought this to you?”

“One of my kids. A few hours ago.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me then?”

“And if I had? What would you have done?”

He struggled to contain his anger. “What do you think? I’d have included it in my presentation to the PM—”

“And what would have happened then? No, don’t bother. I’ll tell you. We’d be in lockdown, Claude. The Park, over the river, even bloody Slough House—every department, every agent. We’d have Special Branch, or worse still Six, going through every desk. It would make the Cambridge spies inquiry look like garden party chit-chat.” She paused. “Which, to be fair, it more or less was.”

“Where’s your . . . kid now?”

“With the Dogs.”

“You’ve used internal security on this? They’re supposed to be upholding the law, damn it, not acting as your praetorian guard!”

Taverner shook her head. “You still don’t get it, do you? If even a hint gets out about this, any credibility the security services have in this country will be over. Every crackpot conspiracy nut in the world will be calling Westacres a black flag op, and even normal people will believe it.”

“That’s hardly—”

She rolled right over him. “Do you know how long it took, after the bomb, before rumours of cover-ups were plastered across the internet? Less than two hours. That’s the level of trust we’re looking at. We are losing this war, Claude, and believe me, it is a war. They said it couldn’t be waged on an abstract, and I’ll leave that to the philosophers and the pedants, because when you’ve got broken kids being carried out of a wrecked shopping centre, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a war. And we need to be on the front line. We do. You and me. Because without our guidance, the Service will be flapping around like a damp sock instead of doing what it was built to do, which is catch these bastards. So let’s make sure we’re on the same page, here and now, before we get off this bus. And in case you’re having difficulty making up your mind, remember this. You signed the C&C.”

“I signed the what?”

“The warrant authorising the Dogs to pick up Giti Rahman—the kid who found this—and hold her.”

“I didn’t—ah.”

Your signature, please, in triplicate, he recalled.

And: Do I need to read all this?

“Which I did,” he said slowly, “before briefing COBRA.”

Thus proving prior knowledge.

It really was surprising, he thought, how slowly buses moved.

“No need to look like that,” she said after a while. “I’m on your side.”

“Good to know. But was it really necessary to make sure my balls were in your pocket before declaring your support?”

“It’s just politics, Claude. You’ll get used to it. And believe me, when the Service is hanging by a thread, the politics get nasty.”

It struck him that Diana Taverner was enjoying this. Or at least looked intensely alert, alive . . . attractive. This was not an observation he wanted to dwell on. Casting it from his mind, he said, “So what do we do now?”

“We find out how our cold body wound up strapping on a Semtex vest. Which means finding out who had access to these IDs, and plugging them into a light socket until they talk.”

“We don’t torture suspects in the UK,” he said automatically.

“Grow up, Claude.”

“And when you say these IDs . . . ?”

“Yes. Plural. As far as I can tell, there are three cold bodies unaccounted for. Which means there are two more out there still upright. And God only knows what they plan to do next.”

The smell was stronger here, more acrid, and stung River’s throat as he walked the narrow road. This was bordered on one side by eight feet of brick with a broken-glass topping, and on the other by a hedgerow beyond which lay fields and then roads, a distant smattering of houses, France. The drizzle persisted, and he was starting to notice that his shoes weren’t as waterproof as they might be; that his left foot was chafing against a damp sock. But he’d spent days on the Black Mountains while training; spent nights in ditches evading capture by squaddies. He could survive wet feet. Just so long as he wasn’t expected to speak convincing French while doing so.

Thin branches bent over the road, lending shade to what was already grey and toneless. He ran a finger along one, and it came away grey with soot.

Les Arbres: the house. Not so easy to find on account of its not being there any more; on account of it having succumbed to a fire three nights previously.

Where the main road met a twin-rutted track, the wall bordering Les Arbres’ grounds turned right, and became a waist-high, moss-covered mound. Heading down the track, River peered over it into a wooded area: largely leafless but on an upward gradient, so visibility remained limited. There was no sound. He was only a quarter mile or so from Angevin, but could have been transported into the heart of a lonelier region. He would barely have been surprised to meet a horse-drawn cart coming up the track to meet him. But he encountered no one, and only once or twice heard a car on the road, heading to or from the village.

“When was the fire?” he had asked his new friend back in the café.

It had been three nights previously.

“Was anyone hurt?”

The house had apparently been empty. At least, no bodies had been found among the wreckage.

“How many people had lived there?”

Nobody had been entirely sure. It had not been a family situation. A commune, rather. If River was familiar with that term.

River was.

“The fire. Was it arson?”

“Deliberate? Yes, it would seem so. There were no vehicles there, yes? Everybody left before the fire started. And the blaze . . . ha. Big black clouds, blacker even than the night.”

Meaning petrol had been used, River surmised. Petrol or something; something to burn fast and hard enough that no evidence would remain.

But evidence of what?

He reached a pair of gates; large iron ones with a circular sign attached, propriete privee defense d’entrer, in red. They were chained together, but this was as good a place as any to make entrance. River scrambled over the wall, smearing his hands green in the process, and followed a track the width of a car through the melancholy trees. The smell grew stronger. He was reminded of clearing the grate at his grandfather’s house the morning after a late-night session, one in which they’d sat by a dying fire while the O.B. poured out stories, his clarity growing dimmer with the light. But River had always wanted to listen, had always wanted to hear. Never wanted his grandfather’s voice silenced. It was unlikely they’d share another such evening, he thought, as he made his way closer to the heart of the now-dead fire.

His first sight of the house was unexpected, as he crested a rise he hadn’t noticed he was approaching, but in that same first moment it was there, it was gone again too. For the house was no more. What must once have been an impressive structure, three or four storeys high, seven or eight rooms to a floor, was now a ragged outline of walls, with charred lumps of timber piled between. Anything the house had once held had melted to barely recognisable pyramids of scorched and blackened sculpture: window frames and furniture, snakes of cable, lengths of staircase. An enamel sink hovered three feet above the ground, or did at first sight: it was suspended there, in fact, by upright piping. Around it sat the squat lumpy shapes of its former colleagues: a stove, a washing machine, a dishwasher, a fridge. White goods rendered black, half-melted. There was a bath, too, embedded in a mess of rubble, the tap-end reaching out of the ruins like the prow of a dying ship.

And though all of this was still wet, it seemed to retain the memory of heat, as if the recent inferno had been too intense an experience to dissipate entirely. The house was gone, but the ghost of what destroyed it lingered, and all around its ruin the ground was churned up, with heavy tyre tracks moulded in mud, and oily pools in the deeper craters. It must have been deeply violent; not only the fire, but the mission to quell it. The damage done to prevent further harm from spreading—his grandfather would have had a story to illustrate that. But it would have grown confused in the telling, and wound round itself without reaching a conclusion, and River wondered for the first time if he were here investigating the attempt on his grandfather’s life, or simply putting distance between himself and the old man, so as not to have to witness his deterioration.

He crouched and laid a palm flat to the ground, but felt no stored warmth: wet flattened grass was all. He wiped his hand on his jeans. This was where Adam Lockhead’s journey had started, the one that ended on the O.B.’s bathroom floor. It couldn’t be chance that the house had burned so soon before that. But what was the chain that bound the events together?

Something rustled in the woods, but when he scanned the area, nothing caught his eye. The wind, or a small animal. Gossiping trees.

River gazed at the ruined house. If he closed his eyes, he could see it happening: the flames massively orange against the black sky, and sirens ripping the night apart. It must have been visible for miles; a beacon thrilling the countryside. He didn’t know what colour French fire engines were: were they red? They might be yellow. It didn’t matter. They had arrived too late, but had doused what was left of the house to prevent the fire spreading. That much had worked. A pair of outhouses two hundred metres or so from the ruins were still standing, and something like a dovecote too, further away, but visible through the trees. And the trees themselves had survived, of course, though looked thin and bony in the grey afternoon, like a memorial to a holocaust.

And anything that might have been a clue had been reduced to ashes, blown about the fields, and smeared on damp surfaces.

The grey was giving way to something bleaker, something darker. Overhead, the clouds grew heavy, preparing to release more rain, and River’s feet had grown no drier, plodding around in mud and filth. He would take shelter back in Angevin, he decided. There would be a local paper, or a local centre of gossip—a church, a bar—where he might discover a name; a piece of thread to tug on. Bertrand Something. That was the name Adam Lockhead had gone under. Or perhaps Adam Lockhead was the name Bertrand Something went under: either way, this ruin shed no light. Another noise emerged from the wood, the cracking of a branch, but again he saw nothing.

A drive led down to the main road. There was another gate there, set between a handsome pair of stone posts, and looking at it was like gazing down a tunnel, the way the trees composed an arch, and he thought that during the summer it must make an impressive sight, the trees in leaf, the drive washed clean of mud. But it wouldn’t any longer look like much from the opposite end: the big gates, the trees, the drive, and all of it ending in wrack and ruin. He wondered how long the house had been here, and whether its loss would cut a hole in the village’s life the way the bomb in Westacres had in London. And then he turned to make his way back through the wood, and a man stepped out of the trees holding a long single-barrelled gun which he brought to his shoulder in one smooth movement, and then fired, and River’s heart stopped.

Emma Flyte said, “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s a routine precaution.”

“But I haven’t done anything—”

“No one’s suggesting that you have.”

They were in what appeared to be an ordinary sitting room: a sofa, chairs, shelving, a TV. But any room you’re taken to, rather than enter of your own free will, carries the whiff of the cell. They were not far from Brixton market, a fifteen-minute journey, but that quarter of an hour had rattled Giti Rahman’s world.

“In that case, what am I doing here?”

“Awaiting instructions,” Emma said flatly. “If you need anything, there’s an intercom. I’d advise you not to overuse it. Mr. Dempsey’s patience is not infinite.”

Anyone who knew Mr. Dempsey, the Dog assigned to this particular chore, would have agreed that patience was not his forte.

“And the windows are reinforced. I wouldn’t recommend you attempt an exit.”

“I’m hardly James Bond.”

“No. If you were, we’d shoot you.” Her reaction made Emma regret that a little. “A joke, Ms. Rahman.”

“It probably sounded funnier in your head.”

Couldn’t argue with that.

She locked the door behind her. In the kitchen Dempsey was going through cupboards; had found teabags and a vintage packet of biscuits.

“Call me if she gives trouble.”

Dempsey said, “Trouble? I’m more worried she’ll wet herself.”

Out in the car, Emma sat thinking. Diana Taverner was a slippery lady, and anything with her fingerprints on was likely to be wiped clean before official examination. That the warrant for Giti Rahman’s collection had been signed by Claude Whelan could be discounted. Acquiring other people’s signatures was no doubt among Lady Di’s talents.

Then again, these people were safeguarding national security, and her role was to ease their passage. So Giti Rahman—innocent, guilty, or just in the way—was no longer her concern. David Cartwright, on the other hand, was a task in hand.

She called Devon Welles, whom she’d left in charge at the Cartwright house.

“Anything?”

“. . . Not really.”

“Tell.”

“It was nothing. A car went past, slowed down, as if someone was trying to get a look through the window.”

“Nosy neighbour?”

“Could be. And there’s a woodentop on the door, which is always exciting.”

“But you got a plate anyway,” she said.

She liked Welles. He was another ex-copper, with all the right reactions.

“A partial.”

“Run it. Any ID on the body yet?”

“No. Except who it’s not.”

“Except—?”

“The blood’s not a match for Cartwright’s grandson.”

“Ah.” She thought a bit. “Well, that narrows it down by one, I suppose. And means we have two missing persons. Better start with the grandson’s associates.”

“He’s really called River?”

“So Jackson Lamb assured me. Speaking of whom . . . ”

“He mis-identified the stiff.”

“The body’s a mess,” Emma said. “No face to speak of. Still, though.”

“An ‘I don’t know’ would have done the job,” Welles finished.

“So maybe Lamb’s playing his own game. Christ, don’t you miss the Met sometimes? At least all the crap was honest crap.”

“Graft, drugs and hookers,” Welles agreed. “This lot, you just can’t trust.”

“So if Lamb wanted us to think young Cartwright’s dead, maybe there’s other stuff he’s keeping quiet. Like where Cartwright actually is. Both of them.”

“Lamb’s from that losers’ place, right?”

“Slough House.”

“You think the Cartwrights are there?”

“Too obvious. These are spooks, even if they’re Vauxhall Conference.” She paused. “Do they still have a Vauxhall Conference?”

“You’re asking a cricket fan,” Welles said. “So what do you reckon? Check out his colleagues?”

“Also too obvious.” She thought a moment. “But let’s look at Lamb’s contacts. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Call over, she started the car and pulled away with a squeal of rubber. Not the recommended practice when departing a safe house, but sometimes, chatting to a fellow ex-copper, the old instincts took over.

The rabbit looked unscathed, apart from being dead.

River’s heart started again.

“Good shot,” he said.

The man raised an eyebrow.

“ça, ç’etait formidable,” River improvised.

The man held his free hand flat and wiggled it side to side.

Comme çi, comme ça, thought River, and decided that if he were capable of reading French mime, his language skills weren’t as tragic as he’d been made to feel.

His new companion wore a waterproof jacket with capacious-looking pockets, from one of which he produced a length of string. Leaning his shotgun against a tree, he tied the rabbit’s back legs together, secured the string to his belt, then slung the corpse over his shoulder. Most dead things look smaller, but this remained an impressive piece of meat. With the thought, a hunger pang struck River. The sky growled too, a thundery echo.

“Anglais?” the man asked suddenly, his voice higher, lighter, than River might have expected. He was dark, with rook-black hair and angular features, all of which suggested something guttural. Not this soft cadence.

“Yes,” he said.

“You look for someone?”

“The people here.”

“Gone. All gone.” The man snapped his fingers, pouf, just like that. They were here and then were gone, in a puff of smoke, except the smoke had been a cloud: a thick black mass of it, pouring upwards through the trees.

And downwards through the trees now came the first fat spats of heavier rain.

The man tugged his collar up, and recovered his shotgun. Then looked at River’s inadequate jacket and shoes.

“You’re to be get wet,” he said.

“I am to be that, yes,” River agreed.

“Come.”

And the man led the way through the wood; not along the track River had followed, but set to an invisible course he seemed to know well, avoiding every root that River stumbled over, and every hole in the ground that sought out River’s feet.

Patrice pulled into a layby, and spread a map against the windscreen. He knew precisely where he was—wouldn’t dream of setting foot on hostile land without memorising routes—but it provided an excuse for remaining stationary while he gave thought to what he’d learned.

A police presence round the target’s house.

Which was to be expected. Bertrand would have made it look like an old-man accident, but even an old-man accident would require official scrutiny given the old man in question. Except that there had been no confirmation, parcel delivered, nor even its obverse, nobody at home. Will attempt redelivery.

So. Absence of message plus police presence meant Bertrand’s parcel hadn’t just not been delivered, it had likely blown up in his face.

This was not out of the question. Patrice loved Bertrand like a brother, but facts were facts: Bertrand had been known to falter at critical moments.

He refolded the map and took out his mobile at the precise moment that a passing bird, a seagull for Christ’s sake—he was miles from the sea—shat on his windscreen. There were omens, and then there were your basic illustrations. The phone was answered on its second ring, but he heard only silence. To fill it, he delivered three swift sentences, in French.

More silence.

Then: “And your parcel?”

“Still undelivered.”

“Try again.”

He ended the call.

Squirting cleanser onto the windscreen, he watched as the wipers smeared the seagull’s mess into a grey film. Another clean-up job that made things worse. Then he cried, very briefly, for Bertrand, who was probably dead; squirted more cleanser, and ran the wipers again. Then he drove back to London.

The restaurant was near enough to be within Jackson Lamb’s compass, new enough for him not to have tried it yet, and canny enough to recognise an awkward customer. Or that was one possible reason for the waiter’s nervousness as he showed Lamb and Moira Tregorian to a table he first described as “nice” before instantly upgrading to “very good.”

“Do you treat all your new staff to lunch?” Moira asked.

“I treat all my staff the way they deserve,” Lamb said, as the waiter began rattling off that day’s specials: something something pulled pork, something medallions, something vinaigrette. Lamb politely let him finish before saying, “I’ll have the beef.”

“Sir, beef’s not actually—”

“Rare.”

Moira ordered the Caesar salad.

“And a bottle of the house red,” said Lamb.

“Oh, I don’t think I’d better drink anything.”

“Just the bottle of house red then,” said Lamb.

When the waiter had escaped, Lamb scooped up both bread rolls from the basket and split them open with a practised thumb. While he levered the contents of the butter dish into the cavities thus made, he said, his voice at its plummiest, “So, how are you settling in?”

“It’s been a mite discombobulating, I don’t mind telling you,” she said, tearing her eyes away from his evisceration of the bread. “What with everyone thinking Mr. Cartwright was dead for some reason.”

“It’s a herd mentality,” Lamb said sadly. “Someone gets hold of the wrong idea, and suddenly everyone believes it. I think that’s how the internet works.”

The waiter returned with the wine. He opened it grandly, as if performing a magic trick, poured a splash into Lamb’s glass and stood back, the way one might from a lit firework.

“If I cared what it tasted like, I’d have ordered from the bottom of the list,” Lamb said. “Just fill it up.”

The waiter did as instructed, then fled.

Lamb beamed at Moira suddenly, an expression which would have had the slow horses, with the possible exception of Catherine Standish, covering their heads. “Tell me,” he said. “Why do you think you were assigned to Slough House?”

“Well. It’s very clear that . . . does everyone call it Slough House?”

“They do.”

“It doesn’t have an official name?”

“Trust me, if it did, you wouldn’t want to know it.”

“I see,” said Moira, who didn’t. “Well, be that as it may, it’s very clear that Slough House needs me, or someone like me.”

“What an original thought.”

“Because everything’s such a mess. I don’t just mean the offices, though they’re bad enough, and as for the lavatories—well. I’ll say no more on that subject over lunch. But it’s the paperwork, it’s the lax standards when it comes to desk management, and as for general behaviour—well. There’ve been shenanigans. I’ll put it no higher than that.”

“Abuse of office equipment?” Lamb suggested.

“Abuse would be a mild term. Very mild.”

Lamb nodded, as if mildness were as much as he could usually bear, and then appeared to notice the glass of wine in front of him. It was a large glass, and currently held about a third of the bottle’s contents, so he drained it in two swallows and poured another. “Sometimes it’s self-evident,” he said.

“I . . . what is?”

“The reason why folk end up in Slough House,” Lamb said. He took a bite of the bread roll and chewed hugely for a moment or two. Then said, “Take young Cartwright. The not-so-dear departed. He arrived a couple of days after an incident at King’s Cross which quite literally made headlines all over the world. Not too difficult to work out what his misdemeanour was.”

“Rather more than a misdemeanour, I’d have thought.”

“There were mitigating circumstances,” Lamb allowed.

“What were they?”

“He was being dicked about,” Lamb said. “Apologies for the language. Your predecessor was a bad influence.”

“I gather she had . . . issues.”

“Some, yes. And also, she drank like a fish.”

“Oh dear.”

“All behind her now, she claims, but you know what they say.” Lamb reached for his glass. “Once a lush, always a lush.”

The waiter arrived with their food, and Lamb paused while plates were arranged in front of them, though he didn’t take his eyes off Moira Tregorian.

“Enjoy your meal,” the waiter said, with the air of one who wouldn’t mind much if Lamb choked to death instead.

Ignoring him, Lamb said to Moira, “But you know what’s interesting about your assignment?”

She paused, her fork hovering over her salad. For the first time, she seemed unsure of her role in this conversation: was she still the new confidante, replacing a sadly inadequate predecessor? Or was Jackson Lamb playing a game of his own, whose rules he hadn’t bothered to share?

He said, “Claude Whelan sent you here. One of his first acts on taking charge. Don’t you think that’s interesting? Because I do.”

And he smiled in a way that would have had the slow horses—Catherine Standish included—running for shelter, before pouring the rest of the wine into his glass, then waggling the bottle at the waiter.

The O.B. blinked in an owlish way, as if about to turn his head all the way round. “I used to live here, didn’t I?”

“No,” Catherine assured him. “You’ve never lived here.”

He’d woken an hour ago and clambered out of bed, and getting dressed had caused him no problems, because he hadn’t undressed in the first place. She’d felt bad about this—it had been an act of cruelty, allowing him to crawl under the covers fully clothed, only his shoes discarded—but in the end, not bad enough to attempt to undress him. And they were her covers. And it hadn’t been her idea to start with.

“I need somewhere he’ll be safe,” River had said. “With someone I trust.”

Which was a nice touch, but then he’d had an entire journey to rehearse his case; she had about three minutes to put up her defences.

“River—I’m happy you trust me. Really. But you can’t just leave him here!”

What does he eat? she wanted to ask. Do I need to walk him? Impossible to construct a coherent counter-argument with idiot questions forming in her mind.

“Someone tried to kill him, Catherine.”

“That’s supposed to motivate me? What if the killer comes here? River—”

“Don’t worry. That won’t be happening.”

Something in the way he said this precluded her asking the obvious.

But what was worst about this conversation, what had been really horrible, was the way it was conducted: in furious whispers with the old man in the room, confused fear on his face. She didn’t need this. Not today. Not on a bleak January morning with the whole city mired in shocked grief; a beautiful excuse for drowning her own and everyone else’s sorrows.

“Please, Catherine.”

“Who wanted him dead?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Why don’t you take him to the Park?”

River didn’t answer.

“Oh God,” she said, joining his dots.

So now here she was, and here was the O.B. too, and already the integrity of the safe house was compromised because it had taken Lamb all of five minutes to work out where to find him, and while Lamb was smarter than most people, his wasn’t the only brain on Spook Street.

Though not all spook brains worked the way they used to.

“Where’s he gone?”

“Where’s who gone, David?”

Because she couldn’t call him Mr. Cartwright: not in these circumstances.

“That boy, that young man.”

“. . . River?”

“What sort of a name is that?”

She’d often wondered . . . “He’s not here. But he’ll be back. I promise.” I hope.

“I think he might be up to something,” David Cartwright said.

She had poached him two eggs, and arranged them on toast, and he had eaten hungrily and then drunk three cups of tea, though he’d spilt the third. Now he was in her sitting room, straight-backed on a comfy chair, as if allowing himself to sink into it would compromise his principles. He was still struggling with his grandson: both his name, and the fact of his existence.

“He’s not up to anything, David. He’s just had to run an errand.”

“Used to know someone called River. About so high.”

The old man placed a palm level with his chest, though as he remained sitting, it was difficult to judge precisely what height he was remembering River to be.

Either way, it was a while ago. “That’s the same River,” Catherine said gently. “He grew up.”

“Used to know his mother.”

These weren’t waters Catherine wanted to swim in. “Do you have everything you need? Would you like more to eat?”

Listen to yourself, she admonished. She sounded like her own mother: deflecting the threat of emotion with offers of sustenance.

She said, “His mother, River’s mother—that was your daughter. She was called Isobel.” Too late, she realised she’d slipped into the wrong tense. “That’s what she’s called, I mean. She’s called Isobel.”

A tear was rolling down the old man’s cheek. “I don’t have a daughter.”

“You do, you know.”

“No. She told me so. I’m no longer your daughter. She told me that.”

And this was why you offered food, she thought. This was why you deflected emotion: because there was no helping this level of hurt. There was nowhere either of them could go in this conversation.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked again. “Or are you quite happy?”

A ridiculous question in the circumstances, but it lit something in his eyes. “Happy,” he said.

“. . . Yes?”

“Grumpy. Sneezy. Doc.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake, she thought.

“Dopey. Bashful. Grumpy. And that’s all seven.” He tapped his temple. “Nothing wrong with the old memory banks.”

She didn’t point out his error. She didn’t do anything. It was like taking a glimpse down a set of cellar stairs, she thought, and becoming suddenly aware of the steep darkness awaiting you. It didn’t really matter how careful you were in your descent.

“Where’s River?” he asked again.

“He went to France,” she said, invention momentarily beyond her. She was sure that’s where he’d gone: she’d found the rail ticket in his pocket.

“France? He can’t have gone to France!”

“It’s not far. He’ll be back soon.”

“No no no.” He’d grown agitated. “France. Out of the question.”

“It’s not dangerous, David. It’s only over the channel.”

But he wasn’t convinced. He began to mutter to himself, nothing she could make sense of, and to distance herself from it, she went to the window. Still the same bleak January, under the same grey canopy of sky. A car was pulling up, slipping into the residents’ parking area, though it wasn’t a familiar vehicle. The woman who emerged was a glacially beautiful blonde in a black suit. It might have been Catherine’s Service instincts; might have been her drunk’s paranoia. Either way, bells rang loud and clear.

She said, “Perhaps we should get you out of the way, David.”

River had half-expected a hut constructed from fallen branches and moss, but after ten minutes Victor, as his name turned out to be, led him out of the woods and onto a road, and soon after that they were turning down a lane towards a row of modern cottages, with breezeblock walls and aluminium window frames. Rain was pelting down now. While he waited for Victor to unlock the door, River looked down the valley towards Angevin, and its bridge, its church tower, the houses climbing its small collection of streets, all seemed to have huddled closer for shelter. From this perspective it was clear that Les Arbres hadn’t been part of the village at all. Not even an outpost, but a walled-off enclave. Whatever had gone on there would have been gossiped about in the bars, but the reality would have been as solid and graspable as the smoke Les Arbres had become.

Victor had had trouble with River’s name. “This is what you are called?”

“I’m afraid so. I mean yes. Yes, River.”

Victor didn’t actually say Bof, but it was clearly implied.

The house was small, but untidy. A portable TV occupied a low table in the centre of the sitting room, and magazines, mostly TV schedules, were scattered about. An overflowing ashtray sat next to an overflowing ashtray, and most other surfaces displayed bruised-looking ornaments: plaster figurines of what were probably saints, though might have been sinners; a number of glass animals. One corner was given over to outdoor equipment: rubber boots, fishing poles, a variety of nets and snares. Victor carefully laid his waterproof over these, sneaking a sly glance River’s way as he did so. River thought he could smell a cat, but it was hard to tell. Perhaps Victor had been smoking one. He took his own jacket off, more for politeness than anything else. It didn’t feel much less damp in here than outside.

Victor deposited the morning’s spoils on the kitchen counter, next to a handy array of knives and cleavers.

“I make tea.”

“Do you have coffee?” said River.

“Tea. You are English.”

“Thank you,” River said. He wasn’t much of a tea drinker, but that didn’t sound like it would lend itself to straightforward translation.

They drank tea in the small kitchen while rain battered the windows, and the dead rabbit stared reproachfully at River, and Victor smoked a succession of hand-rolled cigarettes, each no fatter than the matches he used to light them.

“You know Les Arbres?” he asked.

“I was looking for someone. Bertrand?”

“A young man, he look like you. I think that was his name, yes.”

“Can you tell me anything about him?”

“Tell you about your friend?”

“I didn’t really know him,” River said.

“You are cousins, maybe?”

“We might have been,” River said, thinking this would make things simpler: a man seeking his long-lost cousin.

“Les Arbres, there were people there. Eighteen, twenty? A number like that. All of them men.”

“How long had they been there?”

“Many many years. Vingt-trois, vingt-quatre.”

“So . . . ” River thought of the dead man on the bathroom floor, whose passport claimed him twenty-eight. “Were there children?”

“At one time, I think. Then not.” Victor placed a level palm two feet from the floor, then slowly moved it upwards. “You know?”

Children grew.

The man in the café had spoken of a commune, but Victor thought there had been no women there. Didn’t sound like much of a commune to River, who was pretty sure the concept involved sex. An all-male community didn’t rule that out, of course, but the presence of children cast a disturbing light. But what would that have to do with a murder attempt on his grandfather? He said, “Were they French?”

Victor shrugged. “French, yes. But Russian too, I think, or Czech. An American. Maybe some English. They did not mix in the village.”

“But went to the café sometimes? Le Ciel Blue?”

“Sometimes, bien sur. There is the marché, the market. People stop at the café afterwards. It is natural.”

“Who was their leader, do you know?”

“Leader?”

“Somebody must have been in charge.”

“I do not know about leaders. Probably they were communiste. All equal, you know?”

“And what about the fire? Does anyone know how that started?”

“The fire, it was deliberate. They are all gone, and then it burns.”

“At the same time?”

“On the same day, yes. In the afternoon, their cars, they leave towards Poitiers. And soon after, the fire starts. There is much activity, many fire trucks, lots of noise.”

River half-wanted to know what colour the fire engines were.

“Maybe the police look for them now,” Victor went on. “I expect this is so. But your cousin, he did not die in the fire.”

No, he died of a bullet in the face, River didn’t reply. He said, “It’s strange, that they lived for so long so near the village, and nobody seems to know anything about them.”

“Maybe we were curious, years ago. But time passes, yes? And you forget to be curious. It is just Les Arbres.”

He rose suddenly, and examined his rabbit. The rain was still beating down, but River thought it was time he made a move. He stood too. “You’ve been very kind, Victor,” he said. “Tres gentil. Merci.”

“De rien.” He chose a knife, and gestured with it at the rabbit, then at River. “You can stay, no? He will taste good.”

“Thank you, but no.”

“It is not all tea. There is wine.”

“It sounds excellent, really. But I’d better head back to Poitiers.”

“As you wish.” With a flash of his wrist Victor buried the blade in the rabbit’s corpse, and a moment later seemed to turn the animal inside out, peeling its skin off as if it were a glove. A flake of ash dropped from his roll-up onto the naked meat, and he scraped it away with the knife. “Maybe there is someone else. Who knows Les Arbres.”

“Really?”

“She is not living at Angevin. Is from next village. I write you address.”

“Who is she?” River asked.

“She is nice lady. Was prostitute, yes? Whore. But nice lady.”

Leaving the knife in the rabbit, Victor found a ballpoint pen and laboriously wrote out, in the margin of an ancient magazine, instructions for River to follow: another road, another few miles, some turnings, a house, Natasha.

“Nice flat.”

“Thank you.”

“Quiet area, too. And you’re a reader.” Emma Flyte nodded at Catherine’s bookshelves. “Nothing spoils a good book faster than a lot of background noise.”

“Unless it’s unwelcome visitors,” Catherine said.

Emma nodded, as if they’d found common ground. Checking up on Jackson Lamb’s known associates had been illuminating only inasmuch as it had revealed how carefully he avoided having any. She’d had to fall back on colleagues, and Catherine Standish had struck her as interesting. For reasons that would no doubt come up soon.

Her scrutiny of the living room over, she said, “Do you see much of your former colleagues?”

“I don’t see much of anyone.”

“And why’s that?”

“When you’re having sex,” Catherine asked, “do you prefer to be on top?”

Emma raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, sorry. I assumed it was my turn to ask an impertinent question.”

“There’s a reason I’m here.”

“You’re not about to produce a religious tract, are you? Because my neighbour Deirdre’s a much better bet.”

“If I had a suspicious mind,” Emma said, “—which I do, by the way—I’d be asking myself why you’re avoiding answering questions.”

“Oooh, I’m not sure,” said Catherine. “Something to do with resenting the unwarranted intrusion, perhaps?”

“‘Unwarranted,’” repeated Emma, nodding. “I see what you did there.”

“I could tell you were sharp.”

“Only you haven’t thought that one through. You’re still a member of the Service, Ms. Standish, which means you’re subject to my jurisdiction. Which means I don’t need a warrant.”

“Except I resigned some while ago.”

“Mmm, yes, not exactly. You handed in your resignation. The paperwork seems to have stalled, though. Remind me, are you still receiving a salary?”

Which was the point of interest, of course. Ms. Standish’s peculiarly free-floating status as regarded Slough House.

Catherine said, “Receiving. Not spending.”

“Yes, I think we’ll save that one for the inquiry. Meanwhile, you’re on the books, you’ll answer my questions. All clear so far?”

“It sounds like it will have to be.”

“Good. River Cartwright. When was the last time you had contact?”

“Just before Christmas. He sent me a text.”

“What did it say?”

“‘Merry. Christmas,’” Catherine said slowly.

“And nothing since?”

“I was impressed by that much, if you want the honest truth.”

“Are you aware that Jackson Lamb identified his body last night?”

“I am now.”

“You don’t seem shocked.”

“Little that Jackson Lamb does shocks me any more.”

“I’ve just told you that River Cartwright’s dead. You don’t seem remotely bothered by that.”

“And I’ve just told you that in four months, I’ve had a two-word text from him. It’s not like he’ll leave a huge hole in my life.”

“Or maybe you already know it’s not true.”

“You’re starting to lose me. Which bit’s not true? That he’s dead? Or that he sent me a text?”

“Are we going to play games all morning?”

“I wish I could spare the time,” Catherine said. “But that neighbour I mentioned? I promised I’d drop in on her.”

“Yesterday evening, one of the Cartwrights committed murder,” Emma Flyte said. “Either River or his grandfather. So you’ll understand I’m keen on interviewing both. Have they been here?”

“No.”

“I think you’re lying.”

“Why’s that?” Catherine asked, sounding genuinely interested.

“Because nothing I’ve said has come as a remote surprise to you.”

“Perhaps I’m just unflappable.”

“Or well informed. And if it wasn’t the Cartwrights, it can only be one man.”

“Lamb,” said Catherine.

“Uh-huh. Mr. Lamb. When was he here?”

“First thing.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“Exact words?”

“Please.”

“He said he’d spent the early hours winding up the dyke who’s currently boss of the kennel. And that if she turned up here, I was to waste as much of her time as possible.”

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?”

Louisa said, “But whoever came to kill David Cartwright, it wasn’t this mysterious Henry. Not unless he was about three when Cartwright was paying him visits.”

“Why was he doing that?”

As on the previous occasions when JK Coe had opened his mouth, this caused a brief silence: not so much people wondering about what he’d said as registering that he’d actually said something.

Ho said, “I think you missed the bit about the status updates,” and glanced at Lamb for approval.

Who said, “Listen and learn, grasshopper.”

Coe said, “He was First Desk in all but name. Why would he be trotting off to the continent to check up on a retired spook?”

“Maybe it was the other way round,” said Lamb. “Maybe checking up on a retired spook was the excuse he needed to go trotting off to the continent.”

“So this Henry, who we first heard of fifteen seconds ago, might just be a smokescreen?” said Marcus. “He didn’t last long.”

“Are you suggesting Cartwright invented an agent just so he’d get his travel expenses paid?” Louisa said.

“Those ferries weren’t cheap,” said Lamb. “But no. If Henry’s an invention, it was to give Cartwright the freedom to go to France in the first place. Like the mad monk said, he was First Desk in all but name. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t make trips abroad. It just meant he had to have a better reason for making them than ‘felt like it.’”

“So he had some kind of secret mission going on in France in the nineties,” said Louisa. “And whatever it was, it’s come back to bite him.”

“Have I triangulated yet?” said Shirley. “Because there’s more.”

“Did someone start an employee of the month competition?” Lamb asked. “Because I’ve got to tell you, I wish I’d thought of that myself. And I can’t believe Dander’s ahead of the pack.”

“Is there a prize?”

“Yeah, Ho will explain how he got a girlfriend. You can take notes.”

“I assume it involved cash,” Shirley said. “Anyway, when Cartwright travelled, he didn’t travel alone. On account of—”

“Being First Desk in all but name,” said Marcus.

“And thus requiring a body-watcher,” said Louisa.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” said Shirley. “So you want to hear who it was, or not?”

Lamb said, “It was Bad Sam, wasn’t it?”

“Bad Sam Chapman,” Shirley said. “That’s exactly who it was.”

“So my name is Natasha, Natasha Reverde, and I grew up here, in this village. I moved away for a long time, but now I am back. This is something I have found, that as we get older, we need to return to our beginnings. This is not original, I think. But it is true.”

The house, like Victor’s, was small, but there the resemblance ended. This was not only neat and clean; it was a loved space, and simply by being there, River was invited into Natasha’s confidence. It felt a sudden promotion, from stranger to confidante, but he knew his resemblance to Bertrand was the trigger. It was as if he had become part of a family whose existence he hadn’t been aware of. The fact of Bertrand’s death he held to himself like a long-sworn promise or an imminent betrayal.

“So one evening, long ago, I met a man in a bar, and his name is Yevgeny, and one thing moves on to another. Yevgeny lives with his friends in a big house called Les Arbres, and when he takes me there I see that it is a very different way of life. They do not have jobs, but they are always very busy, very serious. Yevgeny is Russian of course, but others are English and some German and Czech and a Frenchman too, he is called Jean. All Frenchmen are called Jean, but he really is.”

Her eyes grew darker.

“Yevgeny said they are all friends, all equal, but I think this is not so. One of them is not so equal, and he is the one they listen to. He gived, gave, not orders, but he makes suggestions, yes? And the suggestions he makes are the things that happen.”

“Were they all men?”

“Yes. Some of the men had girlfriends, local girls like me, but none of them are living there. And there is an older woman, a nursemaid, who calls in daily.”

“There were children?”

“Two small boys. Later, there were more.”

River waited, and again her eyes seemed to take on a deeper colour, as if the memories she was sinking into were staining her from the inside.

He said, “Who was the man in charge?”

“His name was Frank. An American. Frank.”

“Did he have a surname?”

“I never hear it.” Natasha paused, listening to rain drumming on the windows. She had turned on two small lamps, whose glow didn’t reach the corners, and the surrounding colours—the deep red of the throw upon the sofa; the cream and gold of the hanging on the wall—had grown richer in the half-light. River was reminded of Lamb, who also disliked overhead lighting, not for the unsubtle mood it threw upon a room’s fixtures, but because he preferred the shadows.

“But he was American.”

“Yes. And he had an English woman, I remember. I saw her once, or more than once. Perhaps these occasions have melted into one.”

“Time plays tricks,” River said.

“She was very beautiful, and very cross, the time I saw her, and they have big argument, big row, and Frank tells everyone to leave. Yevgeny, he laughs, but we go for drive anyway. And when we come back, she is gone.”

“How long did you . . . know Yevgeny?”

“This was one summer only. 1990.”

Which seemed a long time ago, to River.

“What happened?”

“Well, I fall pregnant. My parents are very angry with me, and with Yevgeny too. He was much older than me. In his thirties.”

“And how did he react?”

Her eyes became faraway again. “He is happy. He say he will be good father, and we will live happily ever after. It is every young girl’s dream, no?”

“Maybe not everyone’s,” River said.

“No, this is true. Because if that happens, if I live happily ever after, it will mean being here for the rest of my life, in the next village along the river, and that is how far I will travel. And that is not what I want, you see? I want to go to Paris, to other cities, other countries. I want to see more of the world than the space between these two bridges.” She held her hands a few inches apart. “For Yevgeny to take me away. Not keep me here.”

“Did you have the baby?”

“Yes. A boy, Patrice. And he does what babies do, which is cry a lot, and I was just eighteen.”

“I’m sorry, Natasha,” he said, without knowing why.

“So one night,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken, “I leave the house with some money I have saved and I catch a train to Paris, which is how I get to see parts of the world which are not between these two bridges. And it is big and exciting and glamorous, and what happens to me there is what happens to lots of young girls who run away to the big city. I think you know what I mean.”

River, with Victor’s words in mind, nodded briefly.

Natasha said, “You are a young man, and you are English, and these things are great obstacles, but I will tell you this, that yes, I became a prostitute, and that is not something I feel shame for. There are things you do in life to be able to eat, yes?”

River said, “We all do things to eat.”

“And this is one of them. I have worked in shops, also, and now I have a house-cleaning business, with three girls working for me, but once upon a time, a long way from here, I was a whore, and to some people that is always what I am. To Victor, for instance. Who is nice enough person, but does not understand that people are not always the same.”

He decided he didn’t want to know how Victor had discovered her previous profession. “When did you come back here?”

“After some years. Ten, eleven? Things become bad in the city, and I decide it is better to return with what you call it, a tail between the legs, than stay there. But it is only because my father is dead that I am able to come back.”

River nodded. “And Patrice?”

“All that time Yevgeny has him, at Les Arbres. My parents never see him, my father because he does not want to, and my mother because my father. But Yevgeny sends her photographs. I have these pictures still. I will show them to you.”

But she made no move to rise. Instead, she said:

“I went there, of course. To Les Arbres. But they do not let me in. Yevgeny, he comes out. He tells me I am not welcome, that I am no longer Patrice’s mother. That he has a family, and does not need me.”

“I’m sorry,” River said.

“I too. Because I know he is right, I am not Patrice’s mother. I give him birth, that is all. But still, I want to see him, I demand to see him, and then Frank comes, and Frank, he is very clear, very direct. He tells me that unless I leave, he will have police arrest me. He will tell them that not only am I a prostitute but a drug addict also, and other things like that. Threats.”

River knew better than to ask if she had been a drug addict.

For a while, Natasha sat gazing into her past, and then she rose and crossed the room, opened a drawer, retrieved something and returned. It was an envelope, unsealed. When she tilted it, several photographs slithered out; more than several. They seemed to be in order already, the topmost one the earliest. It showed a man with dark Russian looks, holding an infant.

“Yevgeny,” Natasha said. “With Patrice.”

More followed. The child grew older, learned to stand on his own feet; sometimes in the company of other children.

“Who are these?”

“The eldest two, they were at Les Arbres from the beginning. I do not remember their names. And here,” and she plucked a photo from the pile of her son at five or so, with another boy, slightly younger, “this is Patrice with Bertrand. Bertrand is Frank’s son.”

“Where did he come from?”

“I think the usual place,” Natasha said.

“I meant—”

“I am teasing. There are six or seven children in the end. All boys. The first two, and then Patrice and Bertrand and two or three more. All I know is what I hear, and what I see from photographs.”

“Yevgeny kept sending them, then.”

“While my mother lived. When she died, he stops. The last picture I have of my son is ten years old.”

This was said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“And the mothers, they were living there too?”

“Never for long. There were some Russian women, and a French girl, I think. An Englishwoman too, a different one. But they never stay long. Only the children stay.”

“Why do you think they left?”

“Once there was a rumour that bad things had happened, that the women were . . . killed or murdered or something, but the police, they make enquiries, and afterwards the rumours stop. The women, they move away because they are not happy there. They return to Moscow or London or wherever, and they leave their children behind, because this is how they like things to be. But I think it is how Frank likes things to be. Like with my own father, he says how he feels about things, and that is how the things become. They are the law. I think, at Les Arbres, Frank makes the law.”

River looked through the remaining photographs. Patrice grew older, Bertrand did the same, and in one shot the latter stood under a tree, the expression on his face familiar to River, though he couldn’t think why. And again the thought struck him that this boy was dead now, and whatever future he might have had when this was taken was now an irretrievable mess on a bathroom floor. And even that presumably cleaned away by now; nothing more than a stain, an afterthought.

Another photo showed Patrice and another boy with two adult males.

“Who are they?” he asked, certain he already knew half the answer.

“That is Frank. The other, that is Jean. The Frenchman.”

Frank was tall, fairish, though not enough to be called blond; broad-shouldered and—here, at least—unshaven. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, and his arms looked strong and capable. He wasn’t smiling. Rather, he seemed to be questioning the value of having his picture taken at all; as if he felt little need to have his presence confirmed by outside agency.

“Who’s the other child here?”

Natasha said, “That is Yves. He is called Yves.”

He looked younger than Patrice, and to River’s eyes an ordinary boy; his features a little blank; a canvas waiting to be scribbled on. Was he five years old? He might have been about that: River couldn’t tell. But Natasha’s tone had shifted, mentioning Yves’s name. There was the same note of distaste as when she’d spoken of Frank. Distaste, unless it was fear.

But who would be frightened of a five-year-old, wondered River? And then remembered: five-year-olds grow up.

“You don’t like this one,” he said.

“I do not know him.”

“But you know him enough not to like him.”

She was quiet for a while, then said, “Sometimes you see him at the market, in the café. He looks at people like they are a different species.”

“In what way?”

“Like they are insects, or worse. Lower than insects.”

Growing up at Les Arbres, surrounded by men. River wondered what the boys had been taught.

He said, “What did they live on, do you know?”

“Money?”

“Yes.”

“I do not know. Some of the villagers call them hippies at first, but even then it was late for hippies. And besides, they do not have guitars or take drugs, and there are not enough girls. So I think they have made their money somewhere and decide this is where they want to live, that is all. Somewhere remote, but not impossible. Somewhere . . . their own.”

“Did the children go to school?”

“No. Jean, he is a teacher, or he has qualifications. It is enough. They are educated at Les Arbres.”

“Which has now burned down.”

“Yes.” Natasha leaned forward. “And that is why you are here, yes?”

“No. I didn’t know that had happened. I didn’t know about Les Arbres at all before today.”

And I don’t know much more now, he thought. Or understand, anyway. But still, he had a grinding feeling in his stomach, as if he had ingested more knowledge than he was yet aware of, and it was trying to claw its way out.

Either that, or his hunger was becoming violent.

“Thank you,” he said at last. “Thank you for speaking to me.”

“You don’t know where they are,” she said.

“No.”

“But you are going to find out.”

“I’m going to try,” he said.

“If you find my son,” she said, “you will tell me, yes? You will tell me where he is?”

River lied to her, as sincerely as he knew how.

Limping through the rain again, he made his way to the centre of the village and found a bank, with a cash-machine embedded in its wall. As he fed his credit card into its slot, he had the sensation of reappearing on the map; an awareness that he could now be tracked. His brief holiday among the dead was over. When emerging from the underworld, he vaguely recalled, it was best not to look over your shoulder; you could lose everything you thought you’d recovered. Even so, he took a moment to glance at the photograph he’d stolen from sad Natasha: her son, Patrice, and the other boy, Yves, their teacher, Jean, and the man Frank, who stared out from the celluloid as if already regretting the moment of contact it would produce, years later, here in the rain; the house that was the photo’s backdrop a sodden ruin, and his own son a corpse in another country.

He had time to buy a bread roll, packed with cheese, before the bus arrived. And then he was on his way to Poitiers, thence to Paris, and from there London: a journey he mostly slept through, though his dreams were of constant movement, and always with something swelling behind him; ready to pounce, ready to smother, ready to wash him away.

Back in the Park, on the hub, unfamiliarity had reimposed itself. Claude Whelan had been starting to feel he was settling in, but the conversation on the bus had thrust him back into the cold. He was the stranger again, the interloper, and no title he bore—First Desk, Chief Exec, God Albloodymighty—could bring him within the embrace of this chamber. And the glass wall of his office mocked the moment more.

Though it was always possible he was just feeling sorry for himself.

Diana had had coffee and sandwiches brought: a peace offering, Whelan thought, though again he might be overdramatising. It was, after all, lunchtime. She had been running him through the logistics of the cold body protocol. How it had been mothballed once the wardrobe department was wound up, and how—like everything else to do with the Civil Service—this had not meant that the stalled product was consigned to the furnace; simply that it had been packaged, sealed, labelled, stored.

“We’ve had problems with storage space,” she said.

“So I heard.”

The problems in question had culminated in a shooting war in one of the Service’s off-site facilities out beyond Paddington: “putting the wild into the west” as a wit on the Limitations Committee had phrased it. Like many local unpleasantnesses—the deployment of Service resources to personal ends; the unseemly wrangling over parking-spaces; the decades-long cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by Members of Parliament—this had been quietly swept under the carpet, with the usual result: not so much a tidy floor as an unsightly bulge, which sooner or later someone was going to trip over, and break their career.

“But ID product has always been kept on-site, in one of the secure rooms.”

Diana broke off to unwrap a crayfish sandwich, bending its packaging into a nest so that wayward flecks of mayonnaise wouldn’t soil her outfit. Then she removed the plastic lid from her coffee container and scraped the excess froth from it with a wooden paddle. Whelan watched, fascinated. The longer this went on, the less there’d be of the rest of his life, in which he had to cope with the dangerous stuff Diana was revealing.

But this wouldn’t do. He was in charge—First Desk, Chief Exec, God Albloodymighty.

“So, then. How, precisely, do we determine who was responsible for stealing these—”

“Product,” she said.

“Product?”

“We can’t keep calling them cold bodies, Claude. Apart from anything else, it might alert people to what we’re talking about.” She raised her cup to her lips and breathed in coffee fumes rather than sipped. “We are spies, remember?”

“Product, then. Do we have a list of suspects?”

“Well, there can’t have been many people in a position to walk out of a secure room with several box-files’ worth of high-clearance . . . product, but it was a long time ago. Whoever it was might have retired, moved on or dropped off the perch. Investigation would be a time-consuming business, and we don’t have time, and it would inevitably attract attention, and we don’t want any.”

“But apart from that,” he said.

“Apart from that,” she agreed, “we would like to know who was responsible.”

“To what end?”

She said, “I’m not sure I take your meaning, Claude.”

“I’m trying to determine what you regard as the best outcome,” he said. “That we apprehend whoever’s responsible in order to bring them to public justice. Or to make sure that nobody ever discovers the Service’s involvement in the Westacres bombing.”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“I—what?”

“You haven’t eaten your sandwich.”

He was still clutching it, in its wedge-shaped container. Something with chorizo. He didn’t remember having been asked for a preference, or what he’d replied if he had been, but was pretty sure it wouldn’t have been chorizo, if only because chorizo was one of those foodstuffs whose existence he only recalled when it was actually in his presence. Like yellow peppers. He was hungry, though, so tore the strip off the container, and carefully eased one sandwich out, though not carefully enough to prevent a globule of mustard dripping onto his lapel.

“Can I fetch you a—”

“I’m fine,” he snapped.

“The Service had no involvement in the Westacres bombing,” she said, as if the intervening pantomime had not occurred. “Service product was misappropriated, and that’s regrettable. But the Service itself had no involvement. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page on that one, Claude.”

Nothing in her tone suggested that this was a subordinate offering counsel to her boss. He glanced at Claire’s photo, and it occurred to him that one of his first acts on taking up Dame Ingrid Tearney’s mantle had been to neutralise—or at least, marginalise—a potential source of danger. He’d thought himself a pretty fine player of the game at the time. But it had been like trapping a mouse and releasing it miles away, then returning home to find a dragon in the kitchen.

A mouse can cause untold irritation, but there’s nothing like the rain of fire a dragon can bring down.

Regaining an equable tone, he said, “I think you can trust me to have the Service’s best interests at heart, Diana.”

“Good.”

“Alongside those of the nation at large.”

“God, yes. The nation.”

He bit into his sandwich. The chorizo was spicy, and bit back. “The missing product, though. You have the details?”

She was nodding before he’d finished; had the look, Whelan decided, of a satisfied teacher. He didn’t care. Right this moment, he’d take anything he could get.

“If they’re currently in use, we find them,” he said. “We find them, and with their help, voluntary or otherwise, we discover who provided them with their identities in the first place. And then we draw a curtain over the whole dreadful episode.”

“Voluntary or otherwise,” she repeated. “Perhaps you have the makings of a First Desk after all, Claude.”

“What are the names?”

“Robert Winters we already know. He’s the only one to make a mark on the world so far.”

“And the others?”

“Paul Wayne,” she said. “And Adam Lockhead.”

“Wayne and Lockhead,” he murmured. The names meant nothing to him, and he hoped they never would. Not in the way their brother-in-fiction Robert Winters did.

“I’ve fed them into the system,” Diana said. “On a low priority.”

Whelan raised an eyebrow.

“Because the only high priority right now is Westacres,” she said. “And we can’t have anyone drawing a connection between those names and that event. Not until we’ve had a chance to . . . ensure the correct outcome.”

A safe pair of hands, he thought, nostalgically. That was supposed to be him. And almost without pause, his feet barely under First Desk, here he was: involved in what some—even Claire, he supposed—might consider a conspiracy. Almost unconsciously he reached out and adjusted his wife’s photo. Little moments of contact, that was all he asked.

“Well then,” he said. “Let’s make sure that the correct outcome is what we achieve.”