Spook Street

Bad Sam Chapman put no trust in itchy feelings.

Bad Sam, though, didn’t have a lot of time for nicknames either, and his own had followed him like a hopeful puppy for years, its origins obscured by the passage of time, but probably something to do with an occasional irritability. He didn’t himself think he was that bad. Everyone had their moments.

Itchy feelings, though, were superstitious nonsense, conjured into being by an overly greased diet, or too much cheese. Nothing to do with a sixth sense—geese didn’t walk on your grave. You could step on all the cracks you wanted, and your mother’s back remained her own concern.

Which was why he had an irritable moment coming on, because he had a bucketload of itchy feelings, every last one of them screaming at him to avoid the cracks, to watch his back.

This wasn’t the first time he’d had them lately. He’d spent the previous morning trawling amusement arcades in Brixton, alert for one Chelsea Barker, the latest of the hundreds of teenage runaways he’d searched for these past years, except that Chelsea, God help us all, wasn’t a teenager; Chelsea was twelve years old. It was like looking for a goldfish in a piranha tank—you had to be quick. So when the itchy feelings overtook him, he’d thought they were on her account. Twelve years old, and she could be anywhere. She could be right behind him. So more than once he’d turned to check, as if that were the way things worked, and runaway kids came looking for him instead of the other way round, but there was never anyone there, except that there always was—there was always someone there, in London. And in the course of checking, he’d seen the same face twice.

Only twice, and just for an instant. A random stranger, one of the thousands on the streets every day.

But once upon a time Bad Sam had been a spook, which meant he could never rule out the possibility that one of those random strangers might be looking to tick his name off a list. So superstitious nonsense or not, he paid attention when the itchy feelings started.

Yesterday, this had involved a complicated ride to a tube station three lines away, and a twenty-minute loiter on an unfamiliar platform, while he satisfied himself his tail was clean. The random stranger had been a young man with dark, serious eyebrows and two days’ stubble, wearing a black leather jacket over a light-blue polo neck, jeans and trainers. Something European about him. Stone cold awake at three in the morning, Sam had run the face through his mental files, and hadn’t found a match. There was a niggle, though—a loose thread at the hem of his memory. The stranger had been young, and Bad Sam had been out of the game for years. Maybe it was a family resemblance, but that made no sense. He’d been Secret Service, not mafia. Grudges weren’t handed down father to son. At four he’d fallen asleep, but had dreamed of foreign travel, and its attendant irritations: the documents that were never in the right pocket; the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car.

This afternoon the itchy feelings were back, but the random stranger was nowhere to be seen.

It was another day of grey drizzle, London a cold wet misery, and Bad Sam was heading back to the office after his third morning of looking for, not finding, Chelsea Barker. His plan was to hit the phones again, and squeeze what leads he could from untapped contacts. London the cold wet misery was also a wolfpack world, and twelve-year-olds who were the hardest articles their schools had ever seen snapped like peppermint sticks on its streets. Finding the child was the most important thing in Bad Sam’s life right now, but still—those itchy feelings. Older, sterner creatures were snappable too. And who would go looking for Chelsea Barker then?

This junction here, tube station, church and building site: you had to be careful crossing. You had to look all ways. Lurking in the shelter of the station, bracing himself to face the waiting weather, Bad Sam Chapman turned his collar up against grey London’s worst.

Oh yes, grey London.

London was a class-A city, of course, constantly topping those lists which explained the world in bullet points. It had the best clubs, the best restaurants, the best hotels; it threw the best parties, and cobbled together the best Olympics ever. It had the best royal family, the best annual dog show and the best police force, and was basically brilliant except for the parts that weren’t, which were like someone had taken all the worst bits of everywhere else and shored them up against each other. And the traffic was a fucking nightmare.

None of which was news to Patrice.

Who wasn’t Patrice today, but that was hardly news either. His passport proclaimed him Paul Wayne, and this required no mental adjustment: Patrice had been Paul Wayne for as long as he could remember. And Paul Wayne was as much at home in London, even the bad parts, as anywhere in France; could order a drink either side of the river, and nobody would bat an eye. Because Paul Wayne didn’t just speak English, he spoke English English, the same way he spoke French French. He’d have tied Henry Higgins in knots, and if that wasn’t enough to piss Higgins off, Paul Wayne could have gone on to kill him with his bare hands in about fourteen different ways, because that, too, had been part of the training that had been taking place every moment of Patrice’s life. Patrice’s life was about being Paul Wayne. And today Paul Wayne was taking one Sam Chapman off the board.

Yesterday Chapman had spotted him and taken evasive action: ducking into the underground and adopting a sentry post at the end of a platform. Patrice hadn’t enjoyed the two-second report he’d had to make—Nobody at home. Will attempt redelivery—but at least it had given him a clue as to the target. Sam Chapman looked like most other people tramping the streets in lousy weather: pissed off, down-at-heel, in need of a better raincoat. But Chapman was also a pro, or had been, and that stayed in your blood. Responses slowed, but they didn’t disappear. When someone dropped a tray in a crowded restaurant, you looked every which way except towards the noise, hunting down the action it was meant to distract you from. And when you thought someone was tailing you you took evasive action, even if the thought was a secondhand murmur, a butterfly wing. If you felt a fool afterwards, at least you were alive to feel foolish. So Sam Chapman was that kind of target, which meant Patrice knew to prepare the ground this time; to check for escape routes and probable hideaways. A pro never went home with tingles running down his spine. A pro spooked on home territory took wing, and didn’t look back.

So this was today’s plan: spook him deliberately. Spook him, and watch him take flight.

Then bring him down.

Marcus had parked where he’d almost certainly get a ticket.

“Put a note in the window,” Louisa suggested. “Secret agent on call.”

He muttered something, a grumble about being designated driver. His fault for driving an urban tank, though; the only one with a car big enough to carry an unhappy passenger.

They were south of the river, half a mile from the Thames, near one of those busy junctions which rely on the self-preservation instincts of the drivers using it; either a shining example of new-age civic theory, or an old-fashioned failure of town planning. On one of its corners sat a church; on another, earth-moving monsters re-enacted the Battle of the Bulge behind hoardings which shivered with each impact. A tube station squatted on a third, its familiar brick-and-tile façade more than usually grubby in the drizzle. There was a lot of construction work nearby, buildings wrapped in plastic sheeting, some of it gaudily muralled with visions of a bright new future: the gleaming glass, the pristine paving, the straight white lines of premises yet-to-be. Meanwhile, the surviving shops were the usual array of bookmakers, convenience stores and coffee bars, many of them crouching behind scaffolding, and some of them book-ending alleyways which would be either dead-ends where wheelie-bins congregated, or short-cuts to the labyrinth of darker streets beyond. Once upon a time Charles Dickens wandered this area, doubtless taking notes. Nowadays the local citizenry’s stories were recorded by closed-circuit TV, which had less time for sentimental endings.

Up one of those alleys was Elite Enquiries; the private detective agency whose staff of three included Bad Sam Chapman, once of Regent’s Park.

Chapman had been Head Dog, long before Louisa’s time, and he’d left under a cloud whose rain had washed him up here: a third-rate agency specialising in evicting troublesome tenants, serving unwanted papers, and—Bad Sam’s own forte—finding runaways. The image on the web was of a shabby office resembling a minicab operation, but she supposed its low-rent appearance might play in its favour: if someone was lost among the rackety arcades, threadbare hostels and thrift-shop doorways of the city, this was the right sort of place to start looking. But anyway, they weren’t here to evaluate Elite Enquiries’ market position. They were here for Bad Sam.

“Okay,” Lamb had said. “Let’s bring him in.”

“On whose authority?” Louisa asked.

“I wasn’t suggesting you stuff him in the back of a van,” Lamb said. “Just ask him nicely.”

“And if he refuses?”

“Stuff him in the back of a van,” said Lamb.

“We haven’t got a van,” Shirley pointed out.

Lamb looked at Marcus.

“What? It’s not a van.”

But mere statement of fact wilted in the face of Lamb’s indifference.

So here they were, round the side of the church in Marcus’s suburban-warrior vehicle, the pair of them rendered featureless by its smoked glass windscreen. Marcus wore an earpiece, waiting for word from Slough House while they monitored the tube station entrance, its irregular heartbeat skew-whiffed by the drizzle: dribs and drabs of passengers scurrying in; larger groups reluctantly leaving every three minutes or so.

The pattering on the car roof sounded like mice changing places.

“I hope Ho doesn’t fuck up,” Marcus said at last.

“It’s computer stuff. He knows what he’s doing,” Louisa said.

“Maybe so, but he’s a little prick. And I hate relying on a little prick to get the job done.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” said Louisa.

They didn’t know Chapman would be coming from the tube. They knew he was out because they’d called his office, but that was the extent of their knowledge: that he wasn’t in his office. It was, as neither had yet said out loud, a pretty half-arsed basis on which to start a surveillance, but it was all they had to go on until Ho came up with the goods. Meanwhile, Chapman might appear from the tube station; he might swoosh past in a taxi; he might be wandering up the road from the other direction. But there were only two of them, and neither of them wanted to get wet, so here they were.

Marcus said, “You’re pissed off with him, aren’t you?”

“With who?” Louisa said, though she knew who he meant.

“With Cartwright.”

“Why would I be?”

“’Cause he didn’t tell you he’s alive.”

“I’m not his keeper. He wants to go haring off on a wild goose chase, that’s his look-out.”

“You’d have had his back, though. If he’d asked.”

“We have a drink once in a while. We’re not Batman and Robin. We’re not even you and Shirley. You’re more of a team than me and Cartwright.”

Marcus shrugged. “Shirley’s my bro. But she can be hard work.”

“I didn’t want to be the one to say it,” Louisa said.

“River, though, he could have picked up a phone.”

“He’s in joe country,” she said. “Not on a city break.”

Marcus was about to reply, but his earpiece squawked in time to stop him.

Back in Slough House, Roderick Ho was sandwiched between monitors, a pair angled inwards so his face was washed in their glow. Some people—cowards—thought it was dangerous, getting too close to your screens. But they were the kind getting left behind by history, unless they were being abandoned by the future: Ho didn’t care which, those fools were fucked either way.

On one of his screens was a satellite map of South London, on a scale that made it look like a circuitry diagram. On the other was a magnified portion of the same map, its focus an unremarkable alleyway half a mile south of the Thames. If Ho hovered his cursor over it, the legend Elite Enquiries would appear, along with its post code and a link to “further information.” The amount of data broadband delivered, half a spook’s job was done for him, right there.

Course, if you wanted the rest sorted out, you looked to your Bonds, your Solos, your Hos.

Earlier, he’d jacked into the Park’s tracking system and put the finger on Sam Chapman’s mobile, “putting the finger” being, he had decided, a cool way of describing tagging. Kim—his girlfriend—liked hearing about this stuff, how Roddy slipped in and out of systems like a cyber-ghost. The only problem was, Chapman’s mobile wasn’t showing up, which might mean he’d deliberately gone dark, and removed his phone’s battery, or just that he was out of reach: in one of the capital’s grey areas, where the signal fizzled to a damp wick.

“Tag him, find him, bring him in,” had been Lamb’s instructions.

Sometimes, Ho wished he was like the rest of the Slough House crew. Dumb muscle got the easy jobs.

And if he said as much to Kim, she’d laugh, pointing out that the Rodster was a lot of things, but dumb wasn’t ever going to be one of them. Except he couldn’t say that to Kim, because he hadn’t actually told her he was a spook—that was one of the first things they taught you, that it was the secret service. So he’d made it sound like he was private sector, working out of Canary Wharf, those huge glass canyons reeking of money and power: plenty of scope for a dude like the Rod-man, and really, was it such a bad idea? The crew here got called the slow horses, and Roddy Ho felt tainted by association. It’d break Lamb’s heart if he upped sticks, obviously, but sometimes a man had to—

A red dot pulsed into life.

Behind him, Shirley said, “What’s that? Is that Bad Sam?”

Patrice spotted the target the moment he emerged onto the pavement. The key to tailing someone was knowing where they’d end up: for two hours, he’d been sitting by a window in the public library, nursing an Americano from the coffee concession, and blending with the computer users, the students, the people with nowhere to go. It was a handy spot, shielded by scaffolding, passing traffic and a general air of gloom, but all he had to do was step outside for Chapman to see him and take flight. To bring a pigeon down, first you set it on the wing. He’d learned to shoot in the fields round Les Arbres, and appreciated a moving target.

Thinking these thoughts he was already on his feet, skirting the coffee booth, trotting down the risers to the exit ramp—

“Watch where you’re going!”

He tried to step past, but the newcomer, a burly man in a mobile fug of stale beer, caught his jacket.

“I said watch where you’re going—”

Patrice put him on the floor relatively gently, and it only took half a second, but he was in full view of the issue desk behind him.

“Hey! Hey! You can’t do that!”

He could, and had, but he didn’t want to hang around to discuss his abilities. Stepping over one nuisance, ignoring the other, he moved towards the doors, which obligingly parted, but not before someone had appeared between them, coming in from the street. He was wide and black and uniformed, and his face clouded suspiciously when he saw the man on the floor, and heard the growing commotion.

There was, thought Patrice, always something.

Shirley said, “Is that Bad Sam?”

“It’s his mobile,” Ho said.

“So it’s Bad Sam.”

“Unless someone else has his mobile.”

“So it’s Bad Sam.”

Ho snorted, but yeah, it was Bad Sam. Who let somebody else have their mobile?

Shirley said into her own phone, “He’s heading down the High Street. If he’s going to his office, he’ll take the one, two, third on his left. It’s an alleyway.”

“One, two, third?” Marcus said.

“I was counting. Can you see him?”

“Wait a sec.”

A muffled voice was Louisa, talking to Marcus.

Marcus said, “Yeah, we have him. Over the road.”

“There, that was easy, wasn’t it?” Shirley said. “Pick him up and bring him in.”

“You’re the boss all of a sudden?”

“You’re gunna let him go just ’cause I said to pick him up?”

Marcus had a brilliant answer for that, but before he could deliver it Louisa was tapping his arm.

“He’s turning off,” she told him, at the exact moment Roderick Ho said the same to Shirley.

Crossing the junction Bad Sam heard a crash, something heavy going through glass, and changed plans on the instant: there were always noises somewhere, and not all of them had to do with him, but he’d be an idiot to ignore the possibility, with those itchy feelings still scratching at his spine. So he slipped off the High Street before his turning, and headed down a narrow alley, where the ground was mushy with fag ends and the air smokily visible. Some of this was pumping from a vent set in the wall next to an open door, against which an olive-skinned man in a kitchen-worker’s smock was smoking a joint.

“Yo, Sam,” he said. “Sammity Sam.”

He always said that, and it always wasn’t funny. But Bad Sam always laughed, because you never knew when you might need a favour.

“Hey, Miguel,” he said. “You didn’t see me, and I wasn’t here, right?”

“Never here,” Miguel agreed as Bad Sam slipped past him, and through the kitchen, and out of the café’s front door onto another street entirely.

Here’s a thing about men in uniform: they go through a window as easily as any other kind.

Turned out it was only a traffic warden, but that wasn’t Patrice’s fault. And it made no difference to the way the glass rained down around him, the fingernail-sized nuggets of it used in bus-stops and windscreens. Libraries, too, were prepared for sudden impact. Probably wise, given the cuts.

But there was no time to dwell on that, because people would have phones out soon, and then there’d be more uniforms coming, the serious kind. In the two-second grace that follows unexpected violence, Patrice turned his collar up and strode through the obliging doors to see, on the other side of the road, the target turning down an alleyway not his own.

Louisa was gone in a flash, sprinting for the road, hoping to get into that alleyway before Sam Chapman disappeared out the other end. Marcus was slower, pausing to click the car locked: it was his vehicle, damn it, and they were south of the river, and the family was already one set of wheels down. Dying at his desk would look the softer option if anything happened to this one. So by the time he reached the road Louisa was just barely leaping to safety on the other side, a bus-horn blaring her home. The surface was slick with rain, and hurling yourself out into traffic, assuming it would stop, worked fine in the movies, but Marcus had seen people hit by cars, and didn’t fancy pissing sitting down for the rest of his life. Louisa was weaving in and out of people wielding umbrellas, and Marcus, running parallel with her, nearly crashed into a crowd gathered in a passage to his right: it was clustered round a large man lying in a puddle of glass and books. Noting the uniform, Marcus thought, Well you won’t be handing out tickets, but his follow-up was more to the point: Who put you through a window, mate? Someone more aggravated than a ticketed driver; he must weigh eighteen stone. And nobody tossed eighteen stone through a window without practice, or a trebuchet.

He looked across the road. Louisa was gone. He grabbed the nearest onlooker. “Who did this?”

“Are you police?”

“Who?”

The onlooker, scrawny, dandruffed, damp, said, “He was just a bloke, know what I mean? Didn’t look like he could throw a dart, let alone—”

A pro, thought Marcus. “Where’d he go?”

“Didn’t see, know what I mean?”

Marcus could just about work it out.

He scanned the area, but raining like this, most people hurrying, nobody stood out.

There was a gap in the traffic, though, so he took the chance and ran across the road.

When you flushed a bird, all you needed to know was which direction the sky was. Men were trickier, more devious.

But Patrice had studied maps, and knew that the alleyway the target had gone down led nowhere.

Which might mean the target was unlucky, and that was like finding money in the street. Hunting someone unlucky, you could just pick your spot and wait. But the target was a former spook, and while spooks made mistakes like everybody else, they didn’t run down blind alleys two hundred yards from home. Patrice moved past the entrance without pausing; just another Londoner caught in the rain. A little further on he took the next left, and looked back to see a woman following the target’s route.

There was hardly anyone on this street. The pavement was narrow, the kerbs flooded; parked cars lined the opposite side. To his left, a chain-link fence sealed off a space where a house had stood. From behind him came the growing wail of a siren, but this didn’t worry him. Add ten minutes for witness statements, and Patrice could be on the other side of London. Meanwhile, the target appeared from a doorway ahead and hurried up the road without looking round. Good tradecraft, thought Patrice, but in this case a mistake. He quickened his pace, and consulted the map in his head. Chapman would weave his way in and out of this tapestry of backstreets, trying to zigzag himself invisible, a common ambition when you knew you were prey. And in the attempt he’d pass through somewhere dark and lonely, maybe underneath one of the railway bridges which spanned the roads in this area. All Patrice would need was a second or two. He ran a hand through his hair. The rain was getting harder.

Ho watched the screen, lips moving. Behind him, Shirley said, “What happened there? Is he going through a building? He’s going through a building!”

She said into her phone, “He’s going through a building,” though Marcus had already gathered as much, twice.

Louisa emerged from the alleyway as he reached it. “Dead end.”

“He’s gone through a—”

“Building, yeah, I worked that out.”

“You got that map?” Marcus said, not to Louisa.

Into his earpiece, Shirley said, “Left, then left again.”

Bad Sam knew he’d been flushed by the breaking glass; that he’d fallen for the automatic escape principle, the one that said Fly. Now. But knew, too, that he’d bought himself a tiny advantage, one he could keep hold of provided he didn’t look behind.

He doesn’t know you know he’s there.

That in his mind, Bad Sam headed further into the maze of streets that looped round Corporation housing, dog-legged past schools, and threaded under bridges. In the rain he heard no following footsteps; just a steady patter on the pavements and, distantly, a police car’s plaintive wail. Don’t look round.

Louisa would have been off already, but Marcus caught her by the arm. Anyone else and she’d have broken his elbow—she was in the mood. But Marcus didn’t break easily, and had a message to impart.

“There’s someone else. After Chapman.”

“Who?”

“A pro.”

He released her.

And now she was away, faster than Marcus, who was getting a little heavy, frankly. A police car was coming; as she turned the corner it pulled up by the library, its blue light throwing ghosts onto wet surfaces. This new street was narrower, and right-angled a few hundred yards on; a figure was disappearing round the corner. Could be Chapman. Back at Slough House Ho was tracking his movements, relaying them to Marcus, but Louisa was offline.

She glanced behind. Marcus was following, his features set in a grimace.

At the corner, she turned left. The road ahead forked, one tine winding under a railway bridge where a pair of youngsters were sheltering, hand in hand. A woman was approaching, dragging a basket on wheels; beyond her, heading away, a figure in a raincoat was hustling along. On the opposite pavement a younger man, leather jacket, shoulders hunched, was moving fast.

Marcus caught her, one finger holding his earpiece in place. “He’s ahead of us. Two hundred yards?”

“Wearing a raincoat,” she said. “And there’s the pro. Leather jacket.”

“He see you?”

She wasn’t sure. She didn’t think so.

Marcus said, “Loop round at this next junction. If you’re fast enough, you’ll overtake him before he hits the main road.”

Making it sound like a challenge, which was probably deliberate.

She nodded and took off, breaking into a run once she’d rounded the corner.

Two of them, thought Patrice. The target was ahead, walking briskly, and there were two behind him: a suspicion confirmed by a reflection in a ground-floor window, cracked open to release a veil of blue smoke. If they knew what they were doing they would separate soon, though if they knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t have let him spot them so easily.

They might come to regret that.

His hands were bunched inside his pockets. Rain slid down his neck. But the rain was his friend, keeping the backstreets clear, and people’s attention elsewhere. The target had turned another corner, but that was fine. There were only so many corners left.

Have to lose some weight.

That wasn’t so much Marcus’s own mind forming thoughts as a small version of Cassie, his wife, making a guest appearance in his head.

Then Shirley’s voice was in his ear, completing the duet: “He’s ahead of you. Why aren’t you running?”

“. . . Sort of am,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Why aren’t you running faster?”

He was tempted to toss the earpiece, but going dark was frowned upon, midway through an op.

The man in the leather jacket had turned the corner after Chapman, and any doubt he was following had dispersed now. True, there were only so many routes, and everyone looked furtive in the rain, but still: there was something about the way the man moved. He didn’t break stride to avoid puddles, but didn’t splash through them either. Handy gift to have. Marcus bet his feet were grateful.

Shirley said, “Chapman’s stopping.”

“Where?”

“Next left, then right. Taking shelter?”

“Taking guard, more like,” Marcus said, and felt something tighten in his chest; the same feeling he got playing blackjack, watching the dealer deal. Knowing, always, that he couldn’t lose, whatever experience might suggest to the contrary.

The extra pound or two didn’t fall away, but still: Marcus felt lighter as he picked up his pace, following the spook on Chapman’s tail.

Another bridge over the road, this one with a train crossing. Its thunder filled the world for a moment, and then it was gone, and the rain was heavier, pounding the pavements ahead.

It seemed to Bad Sam Chapman that everything had grown darker.

His breathing was rough, and his thigh muscles aching: this without breaking into a trot. What age did to you, and late-night drinking. But age was inevitable, up to a point; as for late-night drinking, this was not easily avoided either. All political lives end in failure, someone once said. Spooks’ lives, too, held more to regret than to cherish, a conclusion it was hard to ignore once the light drained from the day. You could stay up late brooding, or you could stay up late brooding drunk. There weren’t many other options.

Bad Sam hoped like hell he’d find Chelsea Barker. He hated to leave things unfinished.

He crossed the road into a sidestreet and passed a pair of wooden gates, chained closed, but loosely enough to allow for a gap. For the first time, he looked behind. His follower wasn’t in sight; was leaving enough space between them to give Chapman the illusion of safety. Here it was, then. He took hold of one gate, pushed at the other, and ducked under the chain. He was in a garage forecourt: two black cabs parked against one wall; a workshop with its doors concertinaed open, a naked bulb glowing, but nobody in evidence. There’d be a hammer, a monkey wrench, something. Just give me a minute, Sam thought. Give me two. Time to catch my breath. He didn’t even know why this was happening, but that hardly mattered: this, or something like it, had always been on the cards. He wasn’t the only one who hated unfinished business. It went with the territory.

Patrice almost walked straight past, but there was that odd hint of movement; the suggestion that the gates were trembling in the rain. Chapman must be past the point of pretence—when you found yourself hiding in back yards, you were beyond caution and into the fear. Now was as good a time as any. His own pursuers had yet to show themselves; if he moved quickly, he and Chapman might finish their mission without interruption. Because it was a joint mission. Chapman had a significant role to play in its fulfillment. A murder is nothing without a victim.

Overhead, an airliner on the Heathrow approach was briefly visible below cloud, and then was gone.

Patrice slipped under the chain, one hand on the gate to prevent it wobbling. The yard seemed empty, though a light glimmered in the workshop. From his pocket he took a pair of thin leather gloves. When he snapped the poppers to tighten them at the wrist, the sound was the loudest thing on the planet.

When Louisa reached the junction the street was empty except for a fat woman, barrelling along like a boat in turbulent water. Louisa swore under her breath and did a quick 360-degree scan: there was nowhere for them to have gone. There hadn’t been time. Which meant they’d left the street altogether: entered a building, a shop, something . . .

There were no shops. A wall this side of the railway bridge was so plastered in graffiti it looked camouflaged, ready to be dropped unnoticed into someone’s acid trip; on the other side was a former gym, forfeiture notices pasted to its whitewashed windows. She glanced up at the bridge, but they’d have to be Spider-Man to have got up there. Spider-Men. And it wasn’t like they’d be working in concert.

A pro, Marcus had said. The way Chapman had ducked for cover, he’d known there was someone on his tail. So he’d have gone to ground first chance he got . . .

Beyond the bridge, set back from the road, was a pair of wooden gates: a garage perhaps, closed at the moment, a loose chain dangling from slack brackets.

Through there.

She should wait for Marcus who wouldn’t be more than a minute—make that a minute and a half. But a minute and a half was a long time for a pro; long enough to do anything he wanted.

A sudden squall of wind chased a curtain of rain down the road. It had a bracing effect. She had a task in hand: take Bad Sam Chapman to Slough House. A taxi was approaching, slowing down for her, but Louisa was nobody’s fare today. She trotted towards the gates, pushed them as wide as the chain would allow, and slipped into the yard in time to see a crowbar come hurtling at her head.

He moved like he could walk between raindrops. That was Bad Sam’s uninvited thought, watching from behind one of the taxis while Patrice crossed the forecourt, heading for the workshop. In Sam’s hand was a crowbar, plucked from a toolboard nailed to the wall, and its heft in his hand triggered a slow-motion flashback: some things you don’t forget. Like: don’t swing a weapon that’s more than a foot long. The motion leaves you open as a wardrobe. No: jab, hard, at the back of the skull. Then take as long as you like to line up your second shot; your man’s not going anywhere. He’s lying on the ground, his childhood memories leaking from a punctured head.

Which was the plan, and it didn’t go wrong for some seconds. The man stood staring into the workshop as if waiting for Bad Sam to emerge with his hands up; Sam, meanwhile, rose and drifted across the forecourt behind him, the crowbar in a two-handed grip like a broom handle. And then it was gone, wrenched away so slickly, he could have sworn the man still had his back to him, but for half a moment he was staring straight into his face—yesterday’s European stranger; no doubting that now—which wore no trace of emotion, and registered little effort, even as he jabbed with an elbow, hooked with a foot, and put Bad Sam into a puddle. On his back, he saw the crowbar raised high, ready to come slamming into his skull: night night. Instead, it whipped away through the air, and Chapman’s eyes followed its flight to see it pound the wood inches from the head of a woman who’d just slipped between the gates.

I don’t know who you are, he thought, but I hope you brought a gun.

Marcus arrived too late to see Louisa squeeze between the gates, but he heard her shriek; heard the clatter of heavy metal striking wood. In his ear Shirley was gabbling, and he pulled the earpiece out to focus on the here and now. A taxi had pulled up, engine running, and through its window the cabbie was asking where Stan was, he had a service booked, but Marcus was already running for the gates, which he hit shoulder first: some give, but no damage. Through the gap, he saw Louisa sprinting towards two figures in the middle of the yard: Sam Chapman prone, and leather-jacket man standing over him. His stillness, his readiness, put the fear on Marcus: not for himself, for Louisa. But there was no way he’d get through the gap in the gates: have to lose some weight, he thought again, this time with the hollow knowledge that even if he did so, it would be too late to help.

She wished she had a gun.

The crowbar carved its lunch from the gate just inches from her head, then clattered to the ground: not a gun, but it would do. She scooped it up. Chapman was down, and the pro was standing over him but watching her; measuring the distance between them, gauging her intent. She lobbed the bar from one hand to the other, and his stance adjusted minutely, but even as she changed hands again, because there was no way she was using her left, he was moving forward, stepping inside her swing so it was only her forearm struck him, and she dropped the crowbar as the yard turned upside down.

When she hit the ground she rolled, but not far enough to avoid his kick, which caught her left hip, and her leg went numb.

Two of them, and both down. It had taken seconds.

There was no pride in the thought. He was simply monitoring the situation.

Patrice bent to collect the crowbar, the nearest tool for finishing the job, and as he did so Chapman scrambled to his feet. The old spook had been right to go for the jab, not the swing, and if they were all sitting round a café table now it wouldn’t take either of them long to persuade the woman of her mistake either. But rules were made to be broken, provided you knew what you were doing; an excuse favoured by assassins as much as poets. Patrice dropped to a crouch, his back perfectly straight, and when he swung the tool into Chapman’s knee he heard the joint pop even above Chapman’s scream. Never outlive your ability to survive a fight, Patrice thought.

He turned to the woman, but she was gone and something was flying towards him, a metal can, its contents spraying wide as it rotated in the air. It would have caught his face had he not been wielding the crowbar; as it was, he deflected it effortlessly, like a first-class batsman despatching the short ball. While he was doing that the woman was making a dash for the workshop, where any number of weapons might be waiting. So he threw the bar again: not javelin-fashion, but more like skimming a stone: it struck her ankles, and if she hadn’t broken her fall with her hands, she’d have smeared her nose across her face. And this was as much comfort as the next twenty seconds had to offer her, he thought, because any chance he could leave her alive had disappeared when she came into the yard. Though she hadn’t been alone, he remembered, a memory that took solid form the moment it occurred, as a black London cab slammed through the gates, sending blades of wood shivering into the rain; it screamed at Patrice sideways as the driver hit a handbrake turn, then tossed him over its shoulder as casually as a bull discarding an apprentice toreador.

Somewhere in the background, an angry cabbie was shouting.

“And then he got away,” said Shirley.

“Yeah, well—”

“Like a ghost. Or a ninja.”

“Or a ninja ghost,” said Ho.

“Fuck off,” Marcus told him. And to Shirley: “Yeah, like a ninja. Or something.”

Because when you hit someone with a London cab, they generally stayed hit long enough for you to collect their ears, let alone their insurance details. But this guy was smoke: he must have gone over the cab’s roof and hit the ground feet first. Which were already moving, like in cartoons: if not a ninja, at the very least Daffy Duck.

Though when Daffy Duck whacked folk with heavy weapons, they assumed odd shapes for a second or two, then shook their heads and walked away intact.

“How you feeling?” he asked Louisa.

“Same as last time you asked,” she said. “That was ibuprofen, not horse tranquillisers.”

They were back at Slough House, in Marcus and Shirley’s room, and Louisa’s jeans, ripped in her fall, were rolled to the knee while her feet soaked in a plastic washing-up bowl nobody had known Slough House possessed—nobody except Catherine Standish, that is, who’d been there when they returned. It was a weird sort of reunion, with Louisa limping, and Bad Sam Chapman taking the stairs one at a time.

“You’re back,” Marcus had told her, unnecessarily.

She’d touched him, briefly, on the elbow. Then said: “Why’d you bring them here? They should be in A&E.”

“Slippery slope,” Lamb said. “Once you start giving this lot the professional attention they require, there won’t be enough of us left for a game of darts.”

“You can play darts on your own,” Roderick Ho said.

“Who was that guy?” Sam Chapman asked. “Why was he following me? Why were you following me, come to that?”

“God, I hate catch-up scenes,” Lamb said. “And a thank-you would be nice. I did just save your life.”

“Didn’t see you there.”

“Yeah, well, I let others do the spade work.” He glanced at Marcus. “Just a phrase. Let’s not involve the thought police.”

“We’d need a swat team,” Marcus muttered.

While this was going on, Catherine had found the plastic bowl for Louisa to soak her ankles, and produced some ibuprofen. Louisa claimed through gritted teeth she was fine, but her ankles looked like she’d done service on a chain gang.

“The skin’s not broken,” Catherine told her. “That’s something, anyway.”

It didn’t feel like much to Louisa, but having Catherine say so was reassuring somehow. “You back for good?” she asked.

“I hope not,” Catherine said, then followed Lamb and Chapman out of the room and up the stairs.

“She brought the O.B. with her,” Shirley told them.

“The O.B.’s here?”

“Upstairs with the Moira.”

Marcus shook his head. Chaos seemed the order of the day. That was certainly what Stan-the-garage-man had thought, when he’d returned to find his forecourt a war zone: a black cab steaming in the rain, his gates in splinters. Marcus had shown him his ID, pointing to the line about Her Majesty’s Service, and told him they were Duty Men, apprehending a VAT defaulter. Stan had cast an uneasy eye towards his workshop, which was doubtless where he kept his books, and piped down. Though he did ask who’d pay for the gates.

“Send the invoice to your local tax office,” Marcus said. “They’ll see you all right.”

And now Marcus felt good, or better than in recent memory. It wasn’t just smashing through the gates that had done the trick; nor sideswiping the bad guy in the process. It was more that he hadn’t had to use his own car. This felt like a turning of the wheel; his luck shifting back to its proper position.

Except for the part about the bad guy getting away.

He said, “I clipped him with the taxi, I know I did. Felt the impact.”

“And then he got away,” said Shirley.

“Shirl,” Marcus said. “If you’d been there, you’d have decked him. We get that. But you weren’t, and he’s smoke. Okay?”

“Just saying.”

“Any word from River?” Louisa asked.

“Not even a postcard. Don’t you hate it when colleagues go on holiday and—”

“When did Catherine get here?”

“I bet he won’t even bring chocolates back. About half an hour ago.”

“What kind of state’s the O.B. in?”

“He looked like a ghost. Confused and scared.”

“River was worried about him.”

“Yeah, well,” Shirley said. “Running off to the continent’s a good way of showing it. Cool jeans, by the way.”

“Ripped jeans.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“I pay good money for unripped jeans.”

“Kim wears ripped jeans,” Ho said. “She’s my girlfriend,” he explained.

“Really.”

“Ripped jackets too.”

“Are you still here?”

“Yes,” Ho said. They stared. “No,” he said, and left. Before he’d crossed the landing, they heard Lamb bellowing down the stairs for him.

“Ripped jackets?” Marcus said. “Is that a thing now?”

“No,” said Shirley. “And asking if something’s a thing now isn’t a thing any more either.”

“You think Chapman has any idea what’s going on?” Louisa asked.

“I hope somebody does,” said Marcus.

When Ho got to Lamb’s office Lamb threw a handful of takeaway cartons at him. “These things have been breeding. When you’ve chucked ’em out, go next door and fetch some new ones. Full.”

“. . . Full of what?”

“Chinese food, idiot,” Lamb said. “Or ‘food,’ as you people call it.”

Ho brushed a lump of congealed rice from his jacket, then tried to rub the stain away. “What kind, I meant?”

“Surprise me.”

Bad Sam eyed Ho with pity. “It’s Roderick, right?”

“. . . Yes.”

“Roderick, would you let me piss on you for a quid?” he asked.

“. . . No.”

“So why’d you let him do it for free?”

“Don’t mind him,” Lamb explained. “It’s the pain talking.”

“When you open your mouth, that’s a pain talking. What are you finding so funny?”

This to Catherine.

“You two,” she said. “It’s like watching dinosaurs having foreplay. Or Top Gear.”

“We’ve met, haven’t we?” Bad Sam asked.

“One of my happiest memories.”

“You’re very perky,” said Lamb. “Happy to be back?”

Catherine told Ho, “He doesn’t need food, he’s already eaten. But find me some ice, if you can.”

Ho slipped away, still rubbing at the mark on his new leather jacket.

She said, “I’ve told you why I’m here. The Park are looking for the old man. I thought it best to bring him somewhere safe.”

“Which old man are we talking about?” Chapman asked.

“Your ex-boss,” Lamb said. “David Cartwright.”

“Cartwright? He’s still alive?”

“Yeah, but we’re in injury time,” Lamb said. “The guy who tried to whack you? There’s a lot of that going round.”

“He tried to kill Cartwright?”

“Not personally. That particular gentleman ended up with a flip-top head. But I’m assuming the two events are not unconnected. Unless it’s just open season on clapped-out spooks.”

“I’m pretty sure if that happened, you’d be top of most people’s list,” Catherine said.

Chapman said, “Well if the Park are looking for him, why’s he here? He’d be safer with the professionals.”

“Well, that rather depends who signed off on the murder attempt.”

He stared. “You think someone at the Park wants to kill David Cartwright? And me?”

“It’s a theory.”

“They already gave me the sack,” Chapman said. “It’s a bit fucking cheeky having me murdered too. Besides, I’m old news. I don’t even know who’s running the place now. Tearney went, didn’t she?”

“A victim of political correctness,” Lamb said sadly.

“Didn’t she arrange several murders?”

“Well, that too. But the new boy, his name’s Whelan, hasn’t been there long enough to start throwing his weight around. No, if this things got its roots in the Park, it’s like you. Old news. From back when Cartwright was one of the movers and shakers. You used to watch his back, didn’t you?”

“Sometimes. It’s not like he needed full-time supervision.”

“But he went walkabout occasionally.”

“What are you getting at, Jackson?”

“You went with him to France.”

“Oh Christ,” said Sam Chapman. “This is about Les Arbres, is it?”

Moira Tregorian, too, was wondering at the turns the day had taken; from the secret thrill at the death of a colleague—well, it wasn’t as if she knew him well—to its baffling reversal; from the lunch she’d expected to be an induction into the rituals of Slough House to the interrogation it had turned into instead. How well did she know Claude Whelan? What was the point of contact between her—Regent’s Park’s erstwhile office manager; wielder of the power of overtime; desk allocator to the Queens of the Database; timekeeper extraordinaire; marshal of the service contracts; fielder of stationery-related enquiries; occasional duty-officer—and the brand-new, squeaky clean First Desk? Did they belong to the same book club? Frequent the same church? Had they, perhaps—even spooks have their carnal moments—indulged in an office indiscretion? And Lamb’s blandly neutral choice of word here, barely more loaded than a water pistol, was utterly belied by his expression, which was a popish leer. She’d suspected Mr. Lamb would be an awkward customer. She hadn’t realised how much work “awkward” could be made to do.

And then this: the arrival of her predecessor.

Whatever Moira Tregorian might have expected of Catherine Standish, this wasn’t it. She had seen drunks before: who hadn’t? They tended to vibrate slightly, as if tuned to a higher frequency than everyone else, and their skin was saggy and their hair poorly tended. They served, in other words, as a warning. But Catherine Standish seemed intact, a word Moira wasn’t sure she’d used of a person before. She was intact: nothing obvious missing. It was disappointing, somehow, though she had managed to keep this reaction to herself, she hoped.

Meanwhile, she was still sorting through a hundredweight of memos from the Park, and now had an observer in the corner.

“He needs somewhere quiet to sit,” Miss Standish had said, barely glancing round her old office. “He’s had a long day.”

“Well, I don’t know about—”

But already she was gone, and the old man—David Cartwright—was commandeering her chair, settling behind her desk as if this was his kingdom, and Moira the usurper.

So she had made him tea, and attempted conversation, until he slumped into a kind of vacancy, which Moira found mildly disturbing at first, then forgot about. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have work to do; a task which manifested itself, as her tasks tended to, in stacks of paper of varying heights, and which was soon accompanied by her usual repertoire of “tchah”s and “duh”s; of well I never dids, and what on earths; and, ultimately, a bloomin’ cuckoo is what this is.

At which the old man snapped out of the realm he’d wandered into and said, “Cuckoo?”

“Les Arbres was weird,” Bad Sam said. “Like a commune, but more regimented. And without many women, though there were kids.”

Ho had returned with a bag of ice, which he’d solemnly delivered to Catherine, then left. Chapman was applying it to his knee as he spoke. The room was damp, and the radiator supplied little heat; merely banged and wheezed at intervals, as if clearing its throat. Lamb was slumped in his chair, fiddling with an unlit cigarette, and Catherine had retired to a dark corner, like a child hoping its parents won’t notice she’s still there, attending to adult conversation which had turned unsuitable.

“I was there to watch David’s back, but it was a cushy gig. France was hardly hostile territory, the odd waiter aside. And you didn’t have to worry about anyone flying the coop. Defection wasn’t a big problem that year.”

“This was when?” Lamb’s voice was uncharacteristically muted.

“First time? Summer after the Wall came down.”

“Tell me about Les Arbres.”

Bad Sam described the house, the grounds, the location. He’d counted eight male adults. “I recognised one of them. Yevgeny, he was calling himself. First names only at Les Arbres. He was former KGB. He’d done a turn at the embassy in London, and back then we used to keep spotter’s cards on the visiting talent. Molly Doran made them up. Remember?”

Lamb grunted.

“She’d tape their pictures onto playing cards, making a big thing of whether they were hearts or clubs or diamonds. Lover boys or rogues, she’d say. She was pretty good at telling who was which.”

“What jolly japes we all had,” Lamb said. “Back when the world was teetering on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.”

“Oh, lighten up,” Bad Sam told him. “We’re all still here. Anyway, Yevgeny, he was a heart, I remember. Actual name, or embassy name, Ivor Fedchenko. But when I told Cartwright who he was, he brushed it off. Not important, he said.”

“And you let it go?”

“I hadn’t been in the job long, but I knew my pay grade. I was a junior Dog, Jackson. He was David Cartwright.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Debriefing an ex-agent. Code name Henry. That’s what the docket said, anyway.”

“And you stayed there?”

“Nope. Hotel in the nearby town. Angevin.”

“And you weren’t present at these debriefings.”

“Like I said, junior Dog. Jackson, I was his driver, his minder, his bottle washer. I wasn’t privy to classified discussions.”

“Debriefing a decommissioned spook doesn’t sound like he was juggling the nuclear codes. You lay eyes on this Henry at all?”

“How would I know? Nobody was wearing their codename on a badge.”

“Who was in charge?” Catherine asked softly.

He said, “There was an American, we weren’t introduced. But he seemed to be Boss Cat. I think his name was Frank.”

“You think,” Lamb repeated.

“His name was Frank. What’s this about, Jackson? It was years ago, it happened in peacetime, and nobody made a run at the old man. If you hadn’t mentioned France, I wouldn’t have remembered it.”

Lamb said, “Cartwright was far too senior to be making housecalls. I find that odd. How many visits did you make?”

“A couple. With me, anyway. The second was later that year.”

“And nothing unusual happened either time?”

Bad Sam said, “You’re sure this has something to do with what happened today?”

“I’m not even sure where Ho got that ice from. Right now, we’re all in the dark.” The snap of a lighter disproved his point, and for a moment Lamb’s face was visible. Catherine coughed. The lighter died, but Lamb’s cigarette tip glowed red. “There are bodies hitting the floor, though. That’s usually a sign something’s amiss.”

“The last night of our second trip, he was . . . distracted. Upset. Drank more than usual. And he was never too abstemious.”

“Warning to us all,” muttered Lamb, and was rewarded by a sigh in the darkness.

“There’d been a rumpus during the day. A woman turned up unexpectedly, Frank’s girlfriend, and they had a fight. She could scream and shout for England, I gather, which she was, by the way. English. I guess the old man must have taken some of the collateral, because he seemed cowed. But it was over by the time I got there. She’d just driven away.”

“Where’d you been?” Catherine asked.

Bad Sam looked sheepish. “Round back of the house, with a couple of the Russian guys. We were playing pétanque.”

“Sweet God in heaven,” said Lamb.

“So anyway, he started rambling on, telling war stories. I got the feeling he liked playing the old sage, you know? The grizzled warrior, telling fireside tales.” Chapman paused to adjust the bag of ice. “So there was a fair bit of that. But towards the end, he was pretty far gone on the brandy, and making less sense, except there was one thing he repeated, said it twice. ‘Wish I’d never heard of the damn thing,’ he said. I asked what damn thing he meant. First time, he didn’t reply. But the second time . . . ”

Bad Sam paused again, moulding the icepack over his knee.

“For Christ’s sake,” said Lamb. “Stop milking it.”

“Project Cuckoo,” Sam said. “He said he wished he’d never heard of Project Cuckoo.”

“Cuckoo?” the O.B. said. “That what this is about? Project Cuckoo?”

Moira Tregorian said, “I’m sorry, I don’t . . . ”

The old man shook his head. Last thing he’d been expecting. But there it was. Things came back to bite you. There was a saying, wasn’t there, as easy as closing a door, meaning nothing simpler. Door shut, job done. He was sure there was a saying something like that. But what it didn’t mention was making sure you were on the right side of the door when it closed.

He didn’t know where he was. It seemed to him he’d climbed some stairs, but this wasn’t like any part of the upstairs he was used to. There should be more light—all the best rooms in the Park had views—but this was one of the secretarial chambers, judging by its size. Bit of a cheek, stuffing him in this poky hole and expecting him to sing for his supper, but he supposed there was something to be said for it, telling stories in the dark. Hadn’t he done this, time without number; telling stories to . . . Young lad. Keen as mustard. Found him in the garden, his scabby knees showing. Name would come back.

Cloudy as the present was, though, some things you didn’t forget.

He said, “Project Cuckoo. Right you are, then. You taking this down?”

And his voice sounded stronger now, because he knew which side of the door he needed to be on.

All he had to do was step through it, and close it behind him.

Cuckoo.

JK Coe said, “There was a Soviet village, or there were rumours, anyway. It might have been a legend. There were a lot of them about.”

In the gloomy light of Lamb’s room Coe might have been Marley’s ghost, draped in invisible chains. There was nowhere to sit, so he leaned against the door. Hanging on a hook was a raincoat—it could only be Lamb’s—from which ancient odours crept, released by Coe’s pressure; a mummy’s tomb of long-dead fragrances: cigarettes and whisky, and bus station waiting rooms, and damp desperate mornings, and death. Coe wondered if it was just him, or whether the others could smell it too: Lamb himself, and Catherine Standish, and the man called Chapman.

“Any time you feel like drifting off into dreamland,” Lamb suggested, “feel free to use my arse as a pillow.”

“Give him a chance, Jackson,” said the woman in the dark.

“I say Soviet, but the point was, it was anything but. What they did was create an American town, picket fence, Main Street and all, way out in Georgia, or wherever. Just like there’s an Afghan village on the Northumberland moors, in the military zone, except that’s for strategic purposes. But this was for people to live in. Be born in and live in. Learning American English, and watching American TV. Spending American dollars. A sort of finishing school. That was Project Cuckoo, USSR-style. They’d have a different name for it. But it was a means of breeding a perfect simulacrum of the enemy, so you could learn the way he thought, the way he dreamed, the way . . . well, everything.”

Coe had been Psych Eval, in what felt like a different life. One of the modules had been in Black Ops. That was a favourite with everyone, because you got to hear about the spooky shit. As in, this was the kind of shit spooks got up to once. But also as in, there was some seriously spooky shit out there.

“The theory was, if you wanted to plant a sleeper, that was the right kind of nursery to grow them in.”

Lamb growled, but it wasn’t clear if this was an objection, an agreement, or a digestive necessity.

“And do you think it ever really happened?” Catherine asked.

“There was another story,” Coe said, “that somewhere near the Red Sea, back in the sixties, there was a perfect replica of the White House. And the Sovs had someone living there for years, with a full staff, all English-speaking, and the point of him was, they’d initiate crises, and monitor his responses, and this would give them an insight into how the actual President might react to a given situation.”

“And do you think,” and it was Chapman this time, “that that ever really happened?”

“No,” said Coe. “You’d have to be insane to base strategic policy on how a puppet reacted to a fake crisis.”

“Yeah, that was the thing about the Cold War,” said Lamb. “Everyone kept their heads.”

He seemed to lose his for a moment, but it turned out he was rustling about in a carrier bag under his desk. When he reappeared he was holding a bottle. There were two smeary glasses on his desk, the only items there which hadn’t lately been used as an ashtray. He poured two fingers into one glass, four into the other, and pushed the former in Chapman’s direction. To Catherine he said, “If you want to nip straight from the bottle, be my guest.” To Coe, “But you can buy your own.”

Coe didn’t respond. He had spoken more in the past ten minutes than in the last six months. His head was pounding. There was a line of verse stuck in his mind, a bright rain will wash your wounds, and it kept circling round without going anywhere. He wanted his music back. If he had to be in Slough House, and he might as well be here as anywhere else, he’d rather be at his desk, earbuds planted, listening to Jarrett carving music out of the air: November 12, 1976. Nagoya. That would wash his wounds, he thought.

“Was there anything else?” he said.

“Are we keeping you up?”

“I just—”

“Yeah, well just don’t.” Lamb half-emptied his glass into his mouth, and didn’t seem worried about savouring the taste. “So that was what the Reds got up to. Doubtless the Yanks had their own version. But what about us? Or wasn’t that on the syllabus?”

Coe said, “Not on the syllabus, no,” and Lamb’s ears twitched.

“His name was Frank. Frank Harkness. American chap, ex-Agency, though I didn’t find that out until later. That he was ex-, I mean. Assumed at the time he was on the books. Well, you do, don’t you? Assume the worst.”

Which was meant in jest but had a sour edge, spoken aloud. Never mind.

“Back then I was gunning for First Desk. Never admitted that before. But it’s true, I took it for granted it was mine for the asking. Simply a matter of waiting out the incumbent, and keeping my copybook clean. Didn’t seem too much to ask. Been doing it for years.”

Though there had been moments when his copybook hadn’t been all that clean. When his conscience hadn’t been spotless, come to that. But again: no time for nitpicking. The details. He had a daughter.

“Her name was Isobel.”

He wondered if he had skipped ahead here. But it didn’t matter; the tape would be running. Spill it all out, let them join the dots for themselves.

“Lovely child.”

She had been, too. It was later that it had all gone wrong. But then, it was later that he was supposed to be talking about, wasn’t it? Project Cuckoo.

“It wasn’t Frank’s idea, exactly,” he said. “The notion had been around for a while. The Agency had tested it, and the Sovs had their version, of course. The Chinese. But not us. Nothing to do with morality or ethics—sheer pragmatism. There’d be big investment required, and the time we’re talking about, well . . . Lines were being redrawn. Gorbachev was beating rugs in the Kremlin, throwing up dust clouds. Nobody knew what the world would look like once they cleared. So not much point in setting up a long-term project to confound our enemies when nobody knew who those enemies would be two Christmases down the line. We’d have ended up looking foolish. And the main objective of an Intelligence Service is not to look foolish if it can be avoided.”

The words were finding him now. He had always known they would, sooner or later. The Franks of this world were born damage-doers; in their one-eyed crusade to protect their innocent, they’d rain down fire on everyone in sight. And David Cartwright, God help him, had given this particular Frank a brand-new box of matches. So yes, he’d always known there’d be an accounting.

“But he had a different angle, did Frank. And you have to hand it to him, there were some things he saw more clearly than most. One thing had come to an end, so we had to be ready for the next. That’s what he said.”

The old man’s eyes crinkled with the effort of memory. When this was done, he thought, he’d head back home to Rose. Cup of tea, or something stronger. Tell her about his day. Though maybe not this part, no. This story wasn’t one he’d want her to judge him by.

His hands were trembling. Now there was a funny thing.

The woman said, “Are you all right? Would you like another cup of tea?”

This was clever, he conceded. The art of a good debriefing: always allow for the possibility that you can have a rest, that it would soon be over.

You could never have a rest.

It wouldn’t soon be over.

“Extremism, Frank said. That was what was taking hold in the Middle East. All very true, we told him, but it’s not like they’re exporting the stuff, is it? And if they want to chop the hands off thieves, well, it probably keeps shoplifting to manageable levels in downtown Baghdad. Because we’d just won a war, you see? We didn’t want to hear about the next one, not yet.”

“I’m not sure you should be getting yourself into this state.”

“Frank, though, he thought we should be preparing ourselves. Because this wasn’t going to be over in a hurry, he said. When you have an enemy with nuclear capability, it could all be over in seconds. When your enemy’s armed with rocks and knives, they’ll come at you slowly. Raise their children to hate you. They’ll stare down through the generations, preparing for a war that lasts centuries.”

“I really don’t think—”

“And he already had a network, you see. A network impossible to imagine even a year earlier. A couple of KGB agents, and others from the Soviet satellite states. Some Germans, a Frenchman. He called them his rainbow coalition. Ha.” The laugh was a bark. “Combined experience, he said, these people knew more about counter-terrorism than any official service in the world, because they’d played both sides of the fence, do you see? Black ops. Give them the wherewithal, Frank said, and they’d establish a version of Cuckoo equipped to face the future. Fight fire with fire, that was the name of his game. You want to fight extremists, you have to raise extremists.”

He looked at the woman. She wasn’t writing any of this down.

She said, “And that’s what you authorised him to do?”

“Well, no, of course we didn’t,” David Cartwright said. “He was a lunatic. We told him to sling his hook.”

Coe dry-swallowed; coughed. Ever Mr. Empathy, Lamb poured himself another drink.

From the darkness, Catherine said, “For God’s sake, let him get some water.”

Lamb said, “Oh, is he thirsty? Are you thirsty? You should have said.”

“Speaking out’s not his forte,” Catherine said. “That’s rather the point.”

To his own surprise as much as anyone’s, Coe said, “I’m fine.”

“There you go,” said Lamb. “He’s fine.” He slumped even further into his chair. He already resembled a Dali portrait. “And as long as we keep the carving knives out of sight, he’ll stay that way.”

The words put a buzz in the air. Coe could hear it, and knew that if he shut his eyes he’d feel it happen: the sharp edge slicing through his soft belly, then the slither and slap of all he contained falling wetly to the floor.

“You’re not having a panic attack, are you?” Lamb asked kindly.

“No.”

“Does the thought of having one frighten you?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jackson, leave him alone.”

Coe said, “There were rumours. About Cuckoo.”

There were always rumours. Spooks love their stories: it’s why they’re spooks.

But Catherine said, “Where did they come from? These rumours?”

“One of the course teachers,” Coe said, after a moment’s thought. It felt strange, rummaging for memories from that part of his life when he was still whole. It was like poking round somebody else’s attic. “It was a scenario one of the games teams was presented with, back when the Wall came down.”

“The pointy heads,” said Chapman.

Lamb said, “Yeah. The ones who have consoles instead of ops. Tell me about this scenario.”

“The Park was approached by an American agent, a Company man, who wanted to tailor the Cuckoo idea. Instead of aiming it at specific national types, he wanted to see if it was possible to . . . to build an extremist. To raise a prototype fanatic. He was prescient, you’d have to give him that. He was thinking in terms of suicide bombers long before the West woke up to them.”

“And how,” said Chapman, “did he plan to go about building a fanatic?”

“Indoctrination. You bring children up in the right environment, they’ll be anything you want them to be. Catholic. Communist. Ballet dancer. Fanatic.”

Chapman looked at Lamb. “An American. Frank?”

“Les Arbres was the middle of France, not a training camp in the desert,” said Lamb. “They’d be more likely to raise a bunch of cheese-eating hippies than a suicide squad.”

From her shadows, Catherine said, “But this was never done, right? He was never given the go-ahead. Isn’t that why it was all rumour and story? Never on the syllabus?”

“Like I said, it turned out he wasn’t Company, he was ex,” Coe said. “Former CIA. He’d been burned for unreliability. Once they found that out, he was shown the door. So no, his Project Cuckoo never happened. It just became one of those anecdotes that get swapped after lights-out.”

“So what was going on at Les Arbres?” Chapman said.

Lamb said, “If he didn’t get official backing from his own team, and didn’t get it from the Park either, it looks like he went through the back door. And guess who was holding it open?”

“Cartwright?” Chapman said. “Oh, come on—Cartwright?”

“And all these years later, they’re trying to close it again,” Lamb said. “So yes—Cartwright.”

“Oh lord,” said Catherine.

“What’s up with you?”

“Why now?” she said. “Why try to bury it now, after all this time?”

Lamb’s eyes narrowed, and he squashed his cigarette into a coffee mug already half-full of dead-ends.

“What?” said Bad Sam.

“Don’t you see?” said Catherine. “Project Cuckoo. Purpose-built fanatics . . . ”

“Oh shit,” said JK Coe.

“Westacres,” said Lamb.

Many a tear has to fall, thought Claude Whelan obscurely; a lyric from a forgotten song, a moment from his past. Long-stemmed glasses on a starched tablecloth. A dining room with a view of the sea; the windowpanes spattered with rain. If he asked, Claire would know the precise holiday, month and year, the name of the hotel. He was hopeless with such details, his ability to memorise facts being reserved for his working life. Outside of that, he simply had the long view, like the one offered by those hotel windows, and the generic details that might have come from anywhere: the long-stemmed glasses, the pristine tablecloth.

He was in a stairwell, taking a moment away from the Hub. A brief opportunity to ring Claire, let her know he’d be late. She understood: of course she did. He was First Desk. The country was shaking at the knees, the tremors from Westacres still rocking the capital. She had fierce notions of loyalty. She would have been shocked had he suggested he’d be leaving soon.

“As long as it takes,” she’d said.

“Thank you, darling.”

“I’ll make up the spare bed.”

And now he was watching raindrops coursing down the windows, miles away from that holiday hotel, and brooding on loyalty, and how it pulled you in different directions. His first COBRA session this morning, and his Second Desk had made a liar of him. Her reasons had been oddly persuasive, but treachery always had its convincing side. And there was a way out of this, of course: do his job, catch the bad people, and the problem would disappear. And this was what he intended to do anyway, so really, where was the difficulty?

But he knew that Claire, with her damn-the-torpedoes approach to ethics, would take a different view: she’d expect him to be on the phone to the PM by now, offering his resignation—the Service had dropped the ball; hell, the Service had polished the ball with an oily rag, pumped it up and handed it to the opposition. Here you go. Do your worst. All before his time, but no matter. You didn’t have to be there when the ball was dropped. You just had to be standing in the wrong place when somebody noticed.

And Whelan knew that this was not only the honourable course, it was probably the safest, but . . . but damn it, we’d be in lockdown, Claude. We’d have Special Branch going through every desk. It would make the Cambridge spies inquiry look like garden party chit-chat.

So, not only the shortest-lived First Desk ever, but one whose microscopic tenure had seen the Service hobbled and chained; an onlooker at its own court martial.

He removed his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of his jacket. At moments of weakness, he liked to recall the codename he’d gone by over the river: Galahad. All the weasels—yes, that’s what they were called—all the intelligence weasels were assigned codenames, largely so they’d reflect a little of the glamour of actual spooks. So: Galahad, and Claire had loved that. My knight in shining armour, she’d said. Had there really been such knights, or were they just a bunch of talented ruffians? It didn’t matter; remembering that he’d been Galahad buoyed him. He’d been made to change it on his elevation: he was RP1 now; functional, yes, but boring. And now he was no longer alone; one last polish of his glasses, and back on they went.

Diana Taverner had found him. “News,” she said.

He waited.

“Adam Lockhead. One of the . . . ”

“Properties,” he said.

Cold bodies.

“He’s turned up.”

A wave of relief flushed through Whelan. “Where?”

“On the Eurostar. His passport lit up coming through border control. His train arrives in five minutes.”

“You’ll have him arrested?”

“I’ve sent Flyte.” She paused. “It would be best if there were no . . . official chain of custody. Just in case.”

Whelan looked towards the windows again: at them, rather than through them. The raindrops were choosing zig-zaggy routes to the sill, as if this were the safest way of navigating glass.

Catch the bad people, he thought, and the problem goes away.

“Well,” he said at last. “Keep me in the picture.”

Coming through passport control before boarding the train, he’d had the sense of triggering a silent alarm. Have a good journey, sir, sure, thanks, but River read in the tightening of the chubbily pretty guard’s eyebrows as she handed him “his” passport that something had shown up on her screen. A red flag. But not so red they’d prevent him getting on the train.

Which might just mean they wanted him back in England with as little fuss as possible.

So on the train, while the grey winter landscape slipped into darkness, before the train itself disappeared beneath the sea, he’d wondered how big a hole he’d dug himself into. Travelling on someone else’s passport? Not great, though he could plausibly claim cover; he was a member of the security services, even if the claim would ring hollow to anyone who’d heard of Slough House. Travelling on someone else’s passport, though, who was recently dead, shot twice in the face? That might take more confidence than he’d faked for the guard.

In the end, he’d fallen asleep, and only woke when the train was pulling into London: it was early evening, and the weather still foul. With no luggage to fuss with River was first on the platform, joining the throng milling around St. Pancras in the uncoordinated way of crowds everywhere. The tube, he decided. He’d head for the tube. That would be the best way of shaking them off.

That there was someone to shake off, he had no doubt. He might not be in joe country any more, but he was definitely back on Spook Street.

Emma Flyte spotted him stepping off the train. Youngish, fairish, reasonably athletic-looking, no luggage: there’d be other candidates, but she felt confident this was the one. She had her phone to her ear, which was as good as a disguise, most places. She said to Devon Welles, “I think that’s him.”

“Gotcha,” Welles said. He’d just arrived back in the city when Emma had called, and was now on a stool outside a sushi joint. “Ready to play?”

“Soon as you like,” she suggested, slipping her phone into her pocket. Some jobs, you needed both hands free.

Sleep had left him spacey, off-kilter, and his unexpected trip to France felt distant already. More immediate were last night’s events—the weight of the gun as he’d obliterated dead Adam Lockhead’s face. The red smears on the wall and the top of the staircase; traces his grandfather had left on his way down to the kitchen, where River had found him on arrival.

I knew he wasn’t you.

But River was him now, or was using his passport. Adam Lockhead; also Bertrand, son of Frank. A French/American hybrid, using an English cover. He wondered what had happened at Les Arbres, and how much his grandfather knew about it; wondered, too, whether the blood on his grandfather’s hands went deeper than smears left on the furnishings. River had always known the O.B. was a spook, but some parts of the picture he’d purposefully left vague. His grandfather must have been responsible for many deaths: by omission, by sacrifice, by deliberate targeting. But he wondered how many times the O.B. had actually pulled a trigger. It would be ironic—though he wasn’t sure “ironic” was the word—if the only death David Cartwright had brought about with his own stained hands had been committed while no longer in his own right mind.

He was out of St. Pancras now, heading for the underground platforms it shared with King’s Cross. River could never be here without remembering the morning he’d crashed this place: a fucked-up training exercise during rush hour, a misidentified “terrorist”—blue shirt, white tee—and a projected hundred and twenty people killed or maimed; £2.5 billion in tourist revenue lost . . . He didn’t know how these figures had been reached, but it didn’t matter, because whichever way you added them up the bottom line came out the same: River was now a slow horse, King’s Cross the hurdle he’d fallen at. Being here was like having a toothpick jammed under a fingernail. If it was up to him he’d blow the damn place up, but that was what had got him into trouble in the first place.

Then there was someone too close behind him, and before he could turn, a rock-like hand had taken a grip on his upper arm.

“Adam Lockhead?”

It was a man who’d taken hold but a woman who was speaking; a strikingly attractive blonde.

“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” he said.

“Well, we’ll soon find out, won’t we?”

In her hand she somehow had his passport—there were posters on every surface warning you to watch out for pickpockets, but none of them suggested that professional dips would get quite so in-your-face about it.

“No, that’s you,” she said, opening it. “Adam Lockhead. Or did you mishear?”

River found himself being steered out to the street, the three of them walking abreast like colleagues heading to a meeting. “I’m a member of the security services,” he said as they stepped into the grey evening.

“Excellent,” she said. “Because that gives me so much jurisdiction you wouldn’t believe it.”

Few things gave an honest copper as much satisfaction as making an arrest: it was only afterwards, once you got solicitors, the CPS, the whole judicial machinery involved that things siphoned off into paperwork and loopholes. She wasn’t a copper any more, and this wasn’t precisely an arrest, but Emma Flyte wasn’t above feeling a quiet hum of pleasure as she climbed into the back seat alongside the prisoner. Devon, too, was feeling the moment: she could read this by the set of his shoulders, and the way he carelessly tossed the parking ticket they’d received into the footwell.

But this was police too: the tickle in her memory, looking at “Adam Lockhead.”

It was rush hour’s last grumble, and as Devon pulled away into the slow-moving traffic up Pentonville Road, Lockhead looked round. “This isn’t the way to the Park.”

This was true. They were heading for another safe house—if the Service ever diversified into private rentals, they wouldn’t have to worry about the cuts. On the other hand, they’d have nowhere to stow problems like Adam Lockhead while they worked out what to do with him.

“Keep him isolated. Don’t interrogate him. Restrain him if necessary.” Diana Taverner’s instructions: Emma was starting to feel like Lady Di’s personal gopher rather than head of internal security.

“Who is he?” she’d asked; a not unreasonable question, she felt. But Taverner’s response had nearly melted her mobile: a twenty-second blast of controlled fury, following which she’d repeated her instructions. Keep him isolated. Don’t interrogate him. Restrain him if necessary.

If not for that, Emma certainly wouldn’t have said what she said to Lockhead now, which was: “Have we met?”

He stared, his expression utterly serious. “I think I’d remember.”

It was the mole on his upper lip. Not that she recognised it, precisely, but it nudged something, a tantalising knowledge on the edge of recollection. She opened his passport again, glanced at the photograph. Not the same man. Similar, but there was no mole, and the words You’re gunna need a pair of tweezers and a sieve made their way to the surface. She’d almost landed the memory—was about to reel it in, drop it to the deck of her conscious mind—when something punched the car’s sidepanels, and her teeth crunched together as Lockhead slammed into her and the whole world blinked.

He hadn’t been able to achieve the speed he’d have liked—it was central London: walking pace the usual ceiling—but he hit the target hard in the circumstances: swerving out into the opposite lane when the oncoming traffic hit a lull, then a violent full-on smash to the driver’s side. He was out of his own recently-stolen vehicle inside seconds, limping slightly from the morning’s events, but otherwise unscathed. The target car’s driver was a hefty-looking black man whose reactions had been distinctly below par, and had mostly consisted of being swallowed by his airbag.

All around them, cars were screeching to a halt, and pedestrians pointing. It was still raining, of course; the ideal setting for an accident.

His second of the day.

After being sideswiped by the taxi in the garage forecourt, an impact he’d barely had time to brace for—instinct had taken over; his body ignoring his mind, leaping for the roof, pulling himself over the cab even before it had screamed to a standstill—Patrice had lost himself in the same sidestreets Sam Chapman had tried to vanish into, with more success, because nobody came looking. They were all too busy picking themselves up off the ground. The rain had continued to hammer down, and the skies growled occasionally, as if hating to give the impression they were already doing their worst. By the time he’d re-emerged onto a main road the pavements were largely empty, and the gutters were swirling with oil-flecked water, puddles swamping the intersections.

Nothing like the rain for clearing the streets.

He’d rung home, the part of him that hated to do this standing no chance against the part that insisted he follow protocol.

“Package still undelivered.”

This was greeted with a silence that whistled down the line all the way from Europe, he wasn’t sure exactly where. That, too, was protocol.

Eventually, Frank had spoken. “Are you compromised?”

Meaning injured or taken.

Patrice said, “I’m gold,” because any other metal would have meant the opposite. The injuries he’d collected rolling over the taxi weren’t worth enumerating. Injuries only mattered if they slowed you down: if they didn’t, you were gold. “I’m gold.”

“Bertrand lit up.”

So did Patrice, hearing that. It was unprofessional, but it couldn’t be helped; if Bertrand was alive, things might yet be all right. Yves was gone, of course, blasted to pieces in lunatic martyrdom, but that didn’t mean everything was over. They simply had to clean up the mess he’d left, by laying a thick cold blanket over anyone who knew who they were. That had been Yves’s real legacy. He had wanted to fulfill what he’d come to believe his destiny, but all he’d achieved had been to make it necessary to destroy all traces of his past.

Which existed only in fragments. Like Patrice, like Bertrand, like all of them, Yves had had his childhood removed even while it was happening, and replaced by qualities Frank favoured: obedience to him, and reliance on no other. Attachments were encouraged only because without them, there was nothing to purge. Patrice remembered how, for Yves’s seventh birthday, Frank had given the boy a photograph of his mother, the first Yves had ever seen. Frank allowed him to look at it for five full minutes before handing him a box of matches. Yves had not hesitated for a second. There had been glee in his eyes as he had trampled the resulting oily mess beneath his feet.

Always, he had gone further than any of them. Patrice had been frightened of Yves, a little. He sometimes wondered if Frank had been too.

Bertrand, though, had been the attachment Patrice had never purged himself of. If Bertrand was alive they could complete this mission together and get the fuck off this godforsaken island.

But “Where?” was all he said.

“St. Pancras. The Lockhead passport.”

You never asked where Frank got his information. You simply knew he had a network, the ghostly remnant of his CIA connections. Someone, somewhere, had picked up a phone when Bertrand’s passport was flagged at border control. But this in turn meant the Lockhead identity was blown . . .

These thoughts winking into place in the time it took him to say, “I’m there.”

He ended the call. No point waiting for instructions. Life at Les Arbres had taught him to grasp what needed doing, which here meant reaching St. Pancras before the action moved on. If Bertrand’s passport was flagged, there’d be security waiting. And of all the things that couldn’t be allowed to happen, Bertrand falling into the hands of MI5 ranked way up high.

What he’d been doing on the Eurostar—where he’d been and why—could stay on the burner for now. What Patrice needed was a car.

Luckily, there were a number of these in the immediate area.

River banged his head on the roof when the car struck, then again on the blonde’s head when she crashed into him. Their own car—not his, but he was identifying with it in the circumstances—had been shunted sideways into a set of railings, and the attacking vehicle had bounced back some yards and was stationary in the middle of the road, blocking traffic. He couldn’t smell smoke, but the air had turned thick with damaged-car smells: petrol and scraped metal.

The view in front of him was bendy and improbable. It took a moment to understand that the airbag had deployed.

He raised a hand in front of his eyes, and the gesture took forever. Not concussed, but inside a bubble of time that wouldn’t allow free movement. His hand looked like nothing he recognised. For a moment he was remembering a rabbit dead on a counter, but there was no clear reason for recalling this, and the next instant he wasn’t. His hand was just his hand. His head hurt, but he wasn’t concussed.

The driver gave a groan, muffled by the airbag. The woman, meanwhile, pulled herself upright and shook her head. Her perfect face was going to have one hell of a bruise, supposing they lived through the next few minutes.

Someone was getting out of the enemy car.

The blonde’s jacket had fallen open, and River could see her sidearm holster, her Heckler & Koch: he had a hand to its grip before her own locked round his wrist and she snarled, not words but angry sounds. River pulled back, and tried to open his door, but it was jammed shut by the railings. The blonde was easing her gun free in a clumsy, mechanical way. “Devon,” she said. Concussed. Or geographically challenged. And his door still wasn’t opening.

But the door on the blonde’s side was. A young man peered in, dark-featured, his leather jacket streaky with rain, and River knew him—had seen his photograph—and maybe the young man knew him too, because for a second his face creased into a series of shapes: recognition, puzzlement, disappointment. Then it became a cipher again, right at the moment the blonde woman released her gun at last and pointed it at him.

“Step back,” she said. “Then get on the ground.”

Her voice was impressively firm.

The young man wasn’t paying attention, though. He was staring at River.

The blonde released her seat belt and leaned towards the open door, her gun inches from the man’s face. “Now!”

He stepped back, hands raised, but no higher than his shoulders.

The woman climbed out of the car.

Guns didn’t worry Patrice much, or not ones he could see, anyway. Ones he could see were there for effect; they were for pointing while people shouted, and they always shouted the same thing: hands up, on the ground, assume the position. But there was no fallback. The people who wanted you to lie on the ground weren’t going to shoot you if you didn’t, because if they were the type to shoot you, they wouldn’t be telling you to lie on the ground. They’d be shooting you.

So the woman wasn’t a bother, but the man was. Because he wasn’t Bertrand, but in that first moment, Patrice thought he was: they had the same features, almost; the same hair. Eyes. Something was going on; crawling under the skin, like a worm inside an apple.

The sky growled, and rain kept raining.

From somewhere not far away, a siren wailed.

The woman was out of the car now; had her feet planted firmly the correct distance apart, arms outstretched, her left hand steadying her right wrist. Which might mean she’d used guns before, or just that she’d seen some movies.

“I told you to get on the ground.”

“What’s going on here?”

Patrice didn’t need to turn to know this was a civilian.

Without taking her eyes off Patrice, the woman said, “Sir, I need you to get back in your car. Everything’s under control.”

“Are you sure about that?” Patrice asked.

“Shut up. And get on the ground.” Then, to the interfering stranger, she repeated, “Sir, get back in your car!”

“I’m going to call the police.”

“Fine. Do that. From your car.”

Patrice said, “This is getting complicated. You’ve got civilians butting in. The rain makes things worse. And the police are going to have trouble getting through all this traffic.”

“I told you to get on the ground.”

“It’s wet. And I need to talk to your prisoner. He is your prisoner, right?”

Whether he was or not, he was emerging from the car too, one hand on the roof to steady himself: it was surprising, Patrice thought, how shook up the human body could be by something as trivial as a car wreck. But it all depended on whether you were expecting it or not.

“On. The. Ground.”

The woman again, trying for the air of someone who didn’t intend repeating herself, though, as Patrice could have pointed out, she’d already done so several times, and hadn’t shot him yet.

He took a step nearer, hands still at shoulder height. From behind him a voice, the same one as before, shouted something about the police, though most of his words were washed away by the noise of rain on car roofs. There was a pleasant hissing sound, too, from the engine of the car Patrice had stolen, which now required medical attention. On the pavements umbrellas huddled together in protective formation. It looked like a musical was about to break out.

The woman said, “I’m not going to—”

And at the same moment, the man said, “Patrice.”

“—tell you again.”

“Patrice.”

This from behind her, the man she knew as Adam Lockhead, and a puzzle-piece slotted into place: they knew each other; this was a rescue. She moved to one side so she could cover both. Devon was still in the car. Emma hoped he wasn’t hurt, because she could really use back-up.

That spark fizzed in her brain again, you’re gunna need a pair of tweezers and a sieve, and it was Jackson Lamb, the grubby spook who smelled like booze and fags and a million sins. And who’d misidentified a body as River Cartwright, because this was him here now, a mole on his lip.

And still the car-crash man wasn’t lying down; had in fact moved closer. If he thought she wouldn’t shoot, he was dead wrong, and might any moment just be dead, because this was three scant days since the Westacres bomb had killed all those kids, and if it wasn’t precisely open season on wrongdoers, the tabloids wouldn’t be making a fuss.

“Patrice? I’m just back from Les Arbres.”

“Shut up,” she said, her eyes on Patrice. “And get back in the car.”

“It burned down, Patrice. There’s nothing there any more.”

“I know,” said Patrice, and Emma opened her mouth to tell him one last time to get on the ground before she shot him, and never mind this was probably being uploaded to YouTube as she spoke—except she didn’t speak, because Patrice wasn’t a yard away, he was touching distance, and her outstretched arms were pointing skywards. The gun fired, and there was mayhem.

On the pavements, umbrellas scattered. On the roads, cars moved again, despite having nowhere to go.

The gun was no longer hers. Patrice had it, and was pointing it at her face.

If Patrice said anything, River thought—if he threw her words back at her, get on the ground—it would feel safer, somehow; as if control had shifted, but was still an issue.

As it was, he thought Patrice was about to shoot the woman dead.

Partly it was the gunshot, still echoing overhead. A loose bullet rips a hole in normality, through which more violence might slip.

He said, “Patrice?” again, making it a question. “Patrice? You don’t want to do anything foolish now.”

Given that Patrice’s most recent exploit had involved engineering a car-smash on a busy London road, this didn’t carry as much weight as River might have hoped. So he stepped forward and stretched an arm out in front of the woman. Speaking of foolish things: this would stop a bullet like the butter stops a knife.

He said, “It’s not what Yevgeny would want.”

“. . . Who are you?”

“Tell him to put the gun down. The nasty squad’ll be here any second.” This was the blonde, sounding preternaturally calm. Rain had plastered her hair to her skull: River knew women for whom that alone would cause hysterics, forget the car crash and the gun.

But her intervention wasn’t helping.

“Shut up,” he told her. Then, to Patrice, “She’s right, though. You’ve got less than a minute.”

“Twenty seconds,” she said. “Max.”

Which, thought River, wasn’t as comforting as she appeared to think—once the police arrived, the last place you wanted to be was next to anyone holding a gun. For a force that prided itself on being unarmed, the Met had racked up an impressive number of civilian casualties lately. True, you had to include all the unshot suspects to get a fair picture, but that was best done on the sidelines, not in open range.

And he really wanted to hear Patrice’s story before the pair of them were cut down in the street.

“Who are you?” Patrice repeated.

“Adam Lockhead,” River said.

The name cut a groove through Patrice’s expression. “No. Where’s Bertrand? And why . . . ”

Sirens nearly here. Though it was the ones you didn’t hear you had to worry about: they’d be flattening themselves behind car cover; sighting on the three of them from somewhere overhead.

The same thought must have struck Patrice. He lowered the gun. “Okay. We’re leaving.”

“We?” the blonde woman said, and at the same moment Patrice—his motion so fluid, he might have been an eel passing through water—jabbed her in the throat with his free hand. She dropped without making a sound. That would come later.

River swung a punch, which for some reason hit Patrice not on the side of the head, which was where he’d been aiming, but in his open palm, which closed round River’s fist and squeezed so hard he felt it in his toes.

Patrice spoke so calmly he might have been choosing fruit. “We. You and me. Or I’ll kill you here.”

Which sounded like he was reserving the option to do this elsewhere later, but River didn’t see he had a choice.

“There,” Patrice said, pointing through the blocked traffic towards a narrow street where a crowd still loitered—though they scattered when Patrice fired a shot over their heads.

Then he found himself running, Patrice on his heels, and behind them the noise grew muted: the keening of sirens, pulsing through the rain; the blaring of the traffic, still trying to work out what had happened; and the gasping of a blonde woman on her knees in the road, learning the hard way how to breathe again.

Some while ago, Shirley had constructed a wall chart based on those signs you see on entrances to building sites: We have gone __ days without an accident. Hers read: We have gone __ days without Ho being a dick, and she’d made a number-card to slot into the empty space. One side of it read “0.” So did the other. It amused her to swap it round occasionally. It was the little things made office life bearable.

She did this now before slumping into her chair. It was past home-time—and the slow horses didn’t so much keep office hours as nurture and cherish them—but today wasn’t ordinary, and no one was ready to leave. There was a reason she had joined the Service, and if much of the original impulse had been smothered under Jackson Lamb’s tutelage, it could yet be sparked into life by the feeling that something big was happening; something that promised action, and excluded her.

Like this, for instance—the Google alerts popping into her inbox.

“Are you seeing this?” she asked.

She was talking to Marcus. Louisa was still there—her feet in a washing-up bowl, like a character in a ’70s sit-com—but her eyes were closed and she didn’t respond. Nor did Marcus, immediately. He was intent on his monitor, and Shirley could tell by his scowl was either regretting a poor judgement call at an online casino or looking at his bank account. Lately, Marcus had been having money troubles—that was putting it mildly. Lately, Marcus and money had been undergoing a trial separation. And things didn’t look good for them. Before long, Shirley guessed, money was going to be heading out the door for good; was going to walk out on Marcus, and leave him all alone in the world, except for his wife and kids.

And he persisted in thinking she was the one with problems.

“Seeing what?” he said, without looking up.

Her alerts included “armed terrorist London.”

“YouTube,” she said. “Holy fuck! Is that River?”

She clicked and played it again. It was a grainy image, made grainier by rainfall: someone’s phone had captured it at a junction on Pentonville Road, and it showed the aftermath of a collision. One car had shunted another into a set of railings, and sat sideways, steam pumping from its bonnet. A man was leaning into the impact vehicle: checking they were okay, you’d have thought, except he suddenly raised his hands and backed up as a gun came into view.

“When did this appear?”

Louisa was behind her now, barefoot, watching her screen.

“Couple of minutes.”

The gun was attached to a blonde woman, who emerged from the car still pointing it, followed by—

“There, see? Is that River?”

—a man who didn’t appear to be armed. But it wasn’t clear whose side he was on, because the woman seemed keen to keep him within the ambit of her weapon.

“It might be,” said Marcus, who’d come to join them. “He’s obviously pissed her off.”

But it was too fuzzy to be sure. The characters kept fading in and out of focus, in tune to the excitement of whoever’d been wielding the phone.

And then something happened so quickly, none of them could tell what it was: the first man made a move, and the gun went off. There was a communal scream from an invisible audience, and the image turned first skywards, and then became a collage of pavement and moving feet, while background voices swore, and asked each other what they’d just seen.

The clip ended.

“Play it again,” said Louisa. “Freeze it on River.”

They watched the first twenty seconds again, leaning closer when Shirley hit pause.

The frozen rain blurred the three figures to dark outlines.

Louisa said, “Yes. Yes, I think it is.”

Shirley clicked on play, and there was movement again, and a gunshot, streetlit rain, and pavements, and stampeding feet.

“When did this happen?” Louisa said.

“Not long ago,” Shirley said. “Fifteen minutes?”

“Any text?”

Shirley scrolled down to the helpful caption: “Holy fucking shit!” it read, followed by a screed of expert online thought:

fella with a gun innit

terrorists cant drive strait lol

OMG what is hapening to London!!!

“That was Pentonville Road?” Louisa asked, hobbling to her chair and stooping for her socks.

“You seriously heading out there?”

“I’m bruised, not crippled,” she snapped, but winced as she padded her feet dry with a tissue.

Marcus shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it’s still pouring.”

Shirley was watching the film again. “So he buggered off to France for the day, and soon as he’s back he’s in the middle of this shit? How come he gets all the fun?”

Marcus said, “Can you get this picture any clearer?”

“No. But I’m pretty sure it’s River.”

“It’s the other one I’m looking at.” Marcus tapped a finger against the screen. “I think he’s the joker from this afternoon.”

They both looked up, but Louisa had already left.

“Shall we go with?” Shirley said.

“She’ll be fine. Place’ll be crawling with cops.”

Shirley hadn’t been so much worried about Louisa’s welfare as anxious not to miss anything. But if there were cops, it meant the action was already elsewhere. General rule of thumb was, the police turned up afterwards.

She said, “Coe was just with Lamb, wasn’t he?”

“I think I heard him coming back down.”

“I’m gunna have a word,” she said. “I wanna know what they were talking about.”

Sam Chapman said, “So now what?”

“Another drink?”

“That’s your answer?”

“Do you have a better one?”

Bad Sam sighed, and pushed his glass across the desktop.

JK Coe had left the room at a nod from Lamb. Rain still beat on the windows, its percussive onslaught muffling thought. Elsewhere in the city, in the slowly filling pubs, the weather had become the main topic of conversation, the Westacres bombing fading into the background like a persistent hangover; something that had to be lived with, but didn’t need constant discussion. London always overcame attempts to cow its spirit. Not even 7/7 had brought the city to a standstill. Though, as Lamb liked to point out, the anniversary two-minute silences did slow it down a bit.

Watching him refill Chapman’s glass, Catherine said, “Very bonding, I’m sure, but not helpful. Do we really think a project David Cartwright set up more than twenty years ago was responsible for Westacres?”

“Put like that,” said Lamb, “it does sound like something only an alcoholic, a has-been and a post-traumatic headcase could come up with.”

“I’ve worked out which one I am,” she said. “I’m having trouble with you.”

“I left myself out. I’m just facilitating blue-sky thinking.”

“Either way,” Chapman said, “shouldn’t we be passing this on? Is Diana Taverner still Ops?”

“Oh yes,” said Lamb.

“I take it you’re not the best of friends.”

“We speak on the phone, we sometimes meet up. Every now and then she tries to have me killed.” He shifted a buttock. “I can’t remember if I’ve ever been married, but it sounds like that’s what it’s like.”

Chapman said to Catherine, “He’s not kidding, is he?”

“No.”

“What about the new guy, then. Whelan?”

Lamb tortured his chair further by leaning back: if a living thing had made the resulting noise, you’d have called a vet. Or the police. “I can just picture how that’ll go,” he said. “Hi, Claude. You know this bomb? Well, it turns out your Service built it, wound it up and let it go. Do you want to call a press conference, or should I?”

“Nobody’s saying they’ll be happy to hear it,” said Chapman. “But they’ve got to be told.”

“Maybe they already have been,” Lamb said. “Whoever came after the old man came from France, fine, but what about this afternoon’s joker? Was he from the same place? Or are the Park in on the act, and cleaning up the mess? Because that would be standard practice for the old guard, and all I know about the new guy is, he sent us Grendel’s mother through there. So he hasn’t made my Christmas list yet.”

“And this is how you make operational decisions?”

“When I don’t have a coin handy.”

“This place is as messed up as it looks, isn’t it?”

“You know me,” said Lamb. “I always demand the highest professional standards.”

He farted, though whether as illustration or punctuation wasn’t clear.

Bad Sam wafted a hand and said, “Jesus, Lamb, did something die inside of you?”

“I used to wonder that myself,” Catherine said quietly. “But I’m pretty sure he’s always been like this.”

“Thanks for your support,” Lamb said. “Now why not make yourself useful and go fetch the old bastard?”

From his lips, River’s term of affection soured into abuse.

Catherine said, “Seriously? You’re going to interrogate him?”

“You make it sound so brutal,” Lamb said. “I’m not going to hurt him.” He paused. “I’m probably not going to hurt him.”

“You’re not going to lay a finger on him.”

He said to Bad Sam, “She has this thing about older men. Her last boss blew his brains out, but that’s probably a coincidence.”

“You were Charles Partner’s Girl Friday,” Sam Chapman said. “I knew I recognised you.”

“‘Girl Friday’?”

“We had a chat after he died, didn’t we?”

“It’s nice that you think it was a chat,” Catherine said.

It had lasted for hours, was her memory. In the paranoia that had followed Partner’s death, everyone was suspected of knowing more than they should have. Catherine, who had known significantly less, had borne the brunt of the Dogs’ investigation, and, newly sober, had become instantly nostalgic for those alcoholic blackouts that had been a feature of her recent past.

There were those who would have assured her that they had only been doing their job. Chapman, wisely, wasn’t one of them.

Lamb said, “Either he knows more than he’s pretending or less than he should. Either way, let’s probe those gaps in his history, shall we?” He shifted his bulk, and the chair complained again. “If you don’t fetch him, I will.”

She shook her head, but only for her own benefit, and that was as far as her resistance went. Because it was true, they had to know what David Cartwright knew, so she rose and left the gloomy office to collect him.

River’s room—or River and Coe’s room, as Shirley supposed she ought to be calling it—was in semi-darkness, the only light Coe’s anglepoise, spilling a thick yellow cone over his desk. For once he wasn’t plugged into his iPod, and while his hands were splayed on the desktop, he didn’t seem to be indulging in his fake-piano bullshit either. For a moment, Shirley considered turning away; leaving him to his thoughts, which were probably dark enough that you wouldn’t want to spill them on anything delicate. All men were dickheads until proven otherwise, that was a given. But what Coe had said to Marcus, You gunna tie me to a chair and shave my toes off with a carving knife?, was way too specific to be voiced at random. So yeah, dark thoughts. But on the other hand, there was a time for quiet brooding, and that time wasn’t when Shirley was in need of information. So, “You were summoned,” she said.

He watched as she came into the room, halting by his desk.

“Hello? Your secret’s out, Mr. Piano Man. We all know you can talk.”

His eyes shone like wet dark stones from the recess of his hood.

“You were summoned by Lamb. Whatever you had to tell him, you need to tell Marcus and me. Because more shit is going down by the minute, which means that anything we can use as a shovel, we want to know about.”

She was quite proud of that remark, but it didn’t get her anywhere. Which was annoying, and would annoy anyone, right? His absence of reaction.

“Someone tried to whack Chapman,” she said. “And River’s just been caught on camera staging a gunfight for the tourists. And all of this, whatever it is, involves Slough House, which means it involves me. So start talking, buddy boy, or I’ll make you. Are you clear on what that’ll be like?”

He had to be—everyone knew Shirley had collected a bagful of scalps out near Hayes last year. But whatever Mr. Piano Man thought, he was keeping to himself. And just to underline the point, he reached into his hoodie’s pouch and retrieved his iPod.

You are not gunna do this, she thought.

He did, though. He set it on the desk in front of him, and slotted the earbuds into place.

So she did the only reasonable thing in the circumstances, which was rip them from his head.

What happened next was weird. Her plan, if you could call it that—her expectation—had been to give him a slap. Open palmed, nothing serious: even HR would agree he deserved that much. But before her hand had made contact, something sharp was under her chin, pushing upwards: he was on his feet, and the dark wet stones of his eyes were black with anger. Shirley found herself on tiptoe, clutching the desk for balance. He leaned close, the blade at her chin forcing her upwards.

“You don’t touch me,” he said.

She blinked.

“Ever,” he said.

There were ways and means, she thought. Push his hand aside, then a blow to the jaw or the stomach, or just reach out and detach his testicles with one rough twist: any or all of these were no more than a heartbeat away.

On the other hand, his knife would be inside her head before she’d completed any of them.

“Are you clear on that?”

From the doorway, Marcus said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Neither turned to look at him.

Marcus said, “You. Coe. Put the knife down, okay?”

Coe said nothing.

“If I have to come over there and take it off you, I’m gunna ram it where the sun don’t shine, I’m warning you.”

Coe said, “I’ll put it down.”

“. . . Good.”

“But she has to say it first.”

“Has to say what? Uncle?”

“She knows.”

Something trickled down Shirley’s jaw; might be sweat; might be blood. There was no way to confirm which. If she looked down, she’d impale herself on his blade.

“Shirley?” Marcus said. “You know what he’s on about?” He paused. “Probably best not to nod.”

She licked her lips.

Any normal person, she thought, would at least have glanced Marcus’s way. But Coe’s eyes had never left hers through this whole conversation.

All she’d wanted was to give him a little tap. Teach him some manners.

She swallowed.

Marcus said, “Shirl?”

She said—whispered—“I’m clear.”

Coe nodded, and just like that the knife was gone. He tucked it into the pouch of his hoodie and sat down.

Shirley put her hand to her chin, then looked at her fingers.

Sweat.

Marcus shook his head.

“They’ve been watching me for weeks,” the O.B. said. “Thought I hadn’t noticed. Streetlights blinking on and off. Woman at the post office asking questions. It was obvious what was happening. You’re not writing this down.”

“We have invisible pixies to do that,” Lamb assured him.

“You think that’s helping?” Catherine asked.

By way of answer, he poured himself another drink, or tried to. The bottle didn’t hold much more than a double.

The O.B. sat in the centre of the room. Catherine had placed a chair there, and rearranged Lamb’s lamps so much of the light fell around, rather than directly onto him. It wasn’t an interrogation. That’s what she told herself, though it could easily have been mistaken for one by the casual passer-by.

And what most alarmed her about all this, she thought now, was how she seemed to have slid back into her former role: Slough House’s chatelaine; Lamb’s doorkeeper. Was this what her future held? Another season orbiting Jackson Lamb’s dark star? She was going to see today through—make sure the old man was safe—and then kick the house’s dust from her heels, and launder Lamb’s smoke from her clothes.

For now, though, here she was, and the old man seemed happy to hold forth, and if it was true that his answers bore little direct relevance to the questions, they circled the subject at hand, as if closing in on a slippery truth.

“And you,” he said, addressing Chapman. “They let you indoors now, do they? I thought your job was to wait by the car.”

“Times change,” Bad Sam said softly. “Tell us about the other night.”

“What other night?”

“Somebody came knocking on your door,” Lamb said. “And for some reason, you shot him in the head.”

A cunning light switched on in the O.B.’s eyes. “How do you know about that?”

“Assume we were working the streetlights,” Lamb said. “He was pretending to be your grandson, wasn’t he?”

Cartwright said, “There he was, bold as brass, asking about the heating, wanting me to tell him about my day. All part of the act, you see? Yes, I was supposed to think he was . . . who you said. My grandson. The one with the name.”

Lamb opened his mouth, and Catherine said, “Don’t.”

“Said he’d run me a bath. As if I couldn’t run a bath for myself, if I wanted one.”

And he closed his mouth firmly, as if he’d said enough on that subject.

He hadn’t gathered himself together, Catherine thought; not really. Or if he had, he’d done so somewhere else, and was just poking his head round the door.

Chapman said, “He was an enemy.”

The O.B. stared.

“And you defended yourself.”

“Didn’t know I had a gun, did he? Think twice about playing that trick again.”

Chapman was about to continue, but Lamb cut across him. “We think he came from Les Arbres. That make sense to you?”

“. . . France,” the O.B. said.

“Yeah, France. Hence the funny name. Les Arbres’s where you used to visit your old friend Henry, remember? Way back in the nineties, when you had a working head. But Henry wasn’t really called Henry, was he? And—”

“You’re frightening him, Jackson,” Catherine said.

“And what he was doing was running Project Cuckoo. Remember? Cuckoo, like you’re becoming, or pretending to. Cuckoo, which was all about raising children to be something they’re not—back in the day, we’d have wanted to grow little Soviet Generals, so we’d have a clue what the real ones were thinking. Except we didn’t, in the end, because even by Cold War standards, it was a barking mad idea. But you—”

“Jackson . . . ”

“—didn’t let that stop you, did you? You went ahead and did it anyway.”

His voice had grown louder until it filled the whole room, and when he stopped the air shivered, as if settling back into place. The old man had a frozen expression now, halfway between fear and confusion. Catherine thought: she should bring this to an end. Escort the old man out. He’d be better off taking his chances in the rain, or at Regent’s Park, than sitting here listening to Lamb exorcise whatever demon had seized him.

And maybe that’s what she’d have done, she told herself later, except that Cartwright started to speak again.

Halfway to Pentonville Road, Louisa nearly missed her turn: not missed as in forgot to take it, but missed as in didn’t bother, and kept on in a straight line north; past the shops and churches, the mosques and synagogues, that were fast becoming familiar landmarks; the supermarket she used on her way home; the park that signalled the easing of urban tension. Wipers wiping fit to bust, she could be pulling into the residents’ parking area behind her block in twenty minutes, and running a bath not long later; a glass of wine poured, quiet music playing; the patter of the rain upon the windows promising sleep. But duty got the better of her and she made the turn, and headed towards the crime scene down Pentonville Road.

It was like a circus would be if circuses involved fewer clowns. Cop cars had arrived in droves, and cops were occupying every corner, some talking to huddled groups of civilians; others clustered round a car she knew from the YouTube film was the attack vehicle, itself looking like a mechanised assault victim: its front end folded in, and glasswork from its headlights scattered like frozen tears. The impact car, meanwhile, had been slammed sideways into a set of railings. Always, collision-scenes had an air of inevitability about them, as if the resulting damage had been written into the vehicles’ design specs. The police might have been there to confirm that everything had happened as required, and nothing been left undone.

She was feeling battered herself: torn jeans, hurt legs. But adrenalin was a powerful painkiller. “I think he’s the joker from this afternoon,” she’d heard Marcus saying as she’d hop-skipped down the stairs in Slough House. If she’d needed another trigger, that was it.

Having parked as near as she was able, Louisa showed her Service card to a reasonably experienced-looking cop, by which she meant one who’d found somewhere sheltered to stand. He seemed suitably impressed. One day, she thought, someone at Regent’s Park would notice that the slow horses’ official ID made them seem, to the uninitiated, like genuine Service personnel, and then they’d take them away and replace them with cardboard badges cut from a cereal packet. But until that happened, Louisa was able to get answers to a series of questions:

Yes, a gun had been fired.

No, nobody had been hurt.

There was nobody in custody.

The area was being searched.

Couple of your people in the car that was struck . . .

“My people?”

“Funny buggers,” said the policeman.

She looked up and down the road. Streetlights were on, and shop windows spilt yellow and gold squares onto the pavements, but visibility was poor, rain blurring pedestrians into fuzzy cartoon shapes. She’d been wondering how two men could have vanished so easily in the middle of the city, but the question answered itself. It was dark, and the rain washed away colour and difference, turning everyone into somebody else. There were witnesses, but most would contradict each other in that special way witnesses had, repainting the same event a dozen different shades of grey, and there’d be CCTV too, but she knew the work involved in tracking a quarry by camera, and it produced the kind of evidence useful in court, months after the event. For on-the-spot discovery, you’d be better off sticking notices to lamp posts.

Now she was here, it was clear she’d made the wrong call at that junction. She should have gone straight home. Damn River—all it would have taken was a swift phone call, and he’d have saved her untold grief . . . Untold grief was what had happened when Min died; untold because she’d had nobody to talk to. Thinking the same thing had happened to River had threatened to shatter the recovery she’d made: the new home, the new life, the evenings watching trees swaying in the darkness. So damn him for all that, but where was he, and what was happening?

One of the group clustered round the attack vehicle peeled away and approached. She was a wet blonde woman, her suit looking like it was halfway through a rinse-cycle; one side of her face turning over-ripe from a recent collision. She’d been in the impact car, thought Louisa; had been holding the gun. The gun the trickster had snatched with a movement so smooth it might have come from a dance routine.

Funny bugger, definitely.

A judgment confirmed by the first word out of her mouth:

“Service?”

Louisa showed her card again.

“You’re one of Lamb’s crew. The slow horses.”

“We get called that,” Louisa said.

“And Cartwright’s another.”

“It was him with you? In the car?”

“Do you all act dumb all the time? Or is it not an act?”

“We take it in turns,” said Louisa. “It was him in the car, wasn’t it?”

“Until his buddy came to rescue him.”

Louisa laughed.

“What?”

“River having buddies. Never mind. You don’t know who it was, then?”

“I know he’s called Patrice. Like I say, a buddy.”

“Yeah, well. Either way, he left you in the dust.” Louisa was remembering something she’d heard about the Dogs, about who was in charge now. She said, “You’re Emma Flyte, aren’t you? You’re new to this.”

“So I keep being told.”

“Your fifteen seconds of fame is up on YouTube, they tell you that? This Patrice, he’s quite . . . disarming.”

“Are we trying to be funny, Agent Guy?”

“A real charmer, is all I meant. He do that to your face?” Louisa indicated her own feet. “He took a crowbar to my ankles earlier. I’m betting River didn’t go with him voluntarily.”

“Exactly what,” Emma Flyte said slowly, “is going on here?”

“Wish I knew,” Louisa said. “But I’ll tell you this much. Patrice—you’re sure about that?”

“Patrice,” Flyte said.

“Patrice tried to kill a former spook today. So whatever you’re doing to find him, do it faster. Before he kills Cartwright too.”

Flyte turned away, looking back towards King’s Cross, where a lot of angry traffic was building up. “Uh-huh,” she said. “It didn’t look to me like that was his plan.”

“Where are we going?” River asked.

Patrice looked at him, his face expressionless.

“Okay. Just thought it was worth asking.”

It was thirty minutes since they’d left the scene on Pentonville Road, and they’d crossed half the city since: had doubled back to King’s Cross and caught a taxi to Great Portland Street.

“Been a bit of bother back there,” the driver informed them, pulling away. “Some lemon going mental with a shooter. Roads’ll be closed any minute.”

“I wondered what the police cars were doing,” Patrice had answered, texting as he spoke.

Another shot past; unmarked, its blue light looping through its back window as it bullied through a queue of traffic.

“The weather brings them out,” the cabbie said, with the air of one delivering a universal truth: that whenever it rained, there was gunfire in the city.

When the taxi dropped them, they walked to Baker Street. Patrice still had the gun, though where he’d secreted it, River couldn’t tell. If down the back of his waistband, as River suspected, he must have spent hours practising how to walk, sit, move, without looking like his haemorrhoids were flaring.

And if I make a break for it, he wondered, will he shoot me in the back?

It didn’t matter. Well, it mattered, but it wasn’t an issue. Last thing he was doing was leaving Patrice’s side; not until he’d had a chance to question him about Les Arbres, about the commune, and about why Patrice’s comrade-in-arms had come to kill the O.B. Though, ideally, he’d remove the gun from Patrice’s possession before the discussion turned to precisely what had happened to Bertrand.

Not quite a prisoner, then, though hardly an accomplice, he stayed by Patrice’s side as they headed into Baker Street station, and descended into the tube once again.

A manhunt would have kicked off by now. There’d be footage from Pentonville Road; someone would have been aiming a phone as Patrice waved the gun around. The tube was a good place to be, then. With no WiFi, at least no one was downloading their images while they bucketed from one station to the next. Patrice stayed close; one hand on River’s shoulder, as if for balance. So yes, River thought; they were in it together. Whatever “it” was. And however it turned out.

As they approached Embankment, Patrice’s hand squeezed. Okay, okay, I get it. River led the way off the train, up the escalator; turned towards the river entrance. Still raining, of course. He’d no sooner dried off from today’s French rain before being drenched in the English variety. Still, it was nice to be home.

They stood at the top of the steps, looking at wet traffic, a wet bridge; the wet South Bank across the wet Thames.

“Do you have a plan?” River asked.

“There is always a plan,” Patrice said.

“That’s good. Is that Sartre?” Not expecting a reply, he didn’t wait for one. “Who were you texting in the taxi?”

“You like to talk,” Patrice said. “Maybe you should talk about Bertrand. What happened to him. And why you have his passport.”

“That was Bertrand’s? Because it didn’t have his name on it. And, you know, a passport, you kind of expect—”

“You know I have a gun.” He turned and looked River in the eyes. “And the only reason you’re still alive is that I need answers from you.”

“Yeah, see, that’s not a great interrogative technique. Because it implies that once I’ve given you your answers—”

Patrice hit him so quickly that nobody saw: not the passers by, hurrying through the rain; not the fellow travellers still sheltering from the downpour. Certainly not River. First he knew about it was, Patrice was lowering him into a sitting position, murmuring calm words.

“He’s okay.” This for the benefit of those nearby. “He gets claustrophobic, that’s all.”

To River: “Maybe put your head between your knees?”

Somebody said, “Are you sure he’s all right? Should we get help?”

“He’ll be fine. I’m always telling him, we should take taxis. But no, he insists on the underground, and here we are again.”

“My boyfriend’s just the same.”

Any other time River might have protested the emphasis on My, but at the moment he was coping with a lot of frazzled nerve ends, as if Patrice had laid into him with a cattle prod rather than his little finger, or whatever it was he’d used to do whatever it was he’d done.

Someone else said, “Anyone got any water?” and everybody laughed.

Don’t mind me. You all enjoy yourselves.

Patrice maintained the fiction established for them by sitting next to River and putting his arm round his shoulders. He leaned close, as if whispering sweet consolation, and reminded River: “That required no effort on my part.”

River said, “Last time someone hurt me like that . . . ”

He paused for breath.

“Yes?”

“I knocked half his brains out with a length of lead pipe.”

Patrice made a show of looking here, there, in front, behind. “Don’t see any lead pipe.”

“You won’t.”

Patrice’s phone chirruped. “Do you mind? I really ought to take this.”

He stood and walked a few paces off. River looked around for a length of lead pipe, but his heart wasn’t in it.

The other travellers had moved on, braving the rain, because there seemed little alternative. He wondered if, later, they’d watch the news and say to each other Do they look like? and Nah, surely not.

Patrice finished his call. River watched him while he stared for a moment at the Thames, as if suddenly struck by its night-time beauty; the lights along the Embankment smeary in the rain. Then he looked at River.

“So,” he said. “What’s the dazzle ship, and where do we find it?”

“His name was Frank,” the O.B. said.

He stopped.

Catherine braced for another Lamb onslaught, but none came. Because he had done all he needed, she thought; he’d thrown the switch, and now all the old man’s memories would come tumbling forth.

She should have hustled him out while the thought was fresh in her mind.

“Came to the Park with his ridiculous plan. Cuckoo by name, cuckoo by nature. Even the Yanks hadn’t gone for it. Well, not a second time. Had tried it back in the sixties, of course, and came a cropper. Hushed up the details. Not that hushing things up ever worked. First law of Spook Street. Secrets don’t stay secret.”

He paused. Catherine could have sworn something shone in his eyes: unshed tears or bottled-up secrets. Something waiting to spill.

“So we told him to pack his wares and move his pitch.”

Again, the pause. This morning, Catherine remembered, he had seemed a man adrift; unmoored by encroaching dementia, and pushed further out to sea by last night’s events. And now he’d washed up somewhere, but it wasn’t quite here and wasn’t quite now, and if his sentences recaptured the brim and snap of his younger self, they were messages from a bottle launched long ago, and she doubted he knew who he was talking to. Memory was doing all the work, blowing through the old man like he was a seashell, and when it was done he would be smooth and empty.

Chapman said, “But you didn’t quite cast him away, did you?”

He spoke gently, to Catherine’s surprise. Her experience of his interrogation technique had been a little different.

David Cartwright blinked, then blinked again. He mumbled something, and she had to replay the sound in her head a few times before she thought she’d caught it: a repetition of what he’d said earlier, First law of Spook Street.

“He came to my house. Weeks later. Living in the city then. Bayswater. It was the fag end of summer, and he was . . . different. He suggested a drink. I suggested he disappear, if he didn’t want to find himself in pokey.”

She remembered River telling her of evenings spent like this, the young man listening to the old one, spinning spook yarns, brandy in hand, and wondered if that was where David Cartwright had retreated in his mind.

He needed River, she thought. But River was out slaying dragons, or looking for dragons to slay.

“Knew what he wanted, of course. Saw it in his eyes when he showed up at the Park. Because he was one of the believers. His Project Cuckoo, it wasn’t just a strategy he favoured. No, he thought it was our only possible direction, that we’d be doomed without it. That was his faith, you see? Why the Agency got shot of him. Nothing more dangerous than a believer.”

Because believers were always on a quest, for one Holy Grail or another. And quests were fuelled by the blood of anyone who happened to get in the way.

“So I thought he was there to make one last plea. If I got on board, he knew I’d carry the Park. More power behind the throne than there ever is sitting on it.” He grew cunning, like a man with a magic ring in his pocket, about to show what it can do. “You’ll have to turn the tape off now.”

Bad Sam said, “There’s no tape. You can speak freely.”

The old man tapped the side of his nose. “Do I look like this is my first time?”

Sighing theatrically, Lamb opened his desk drawer and reached inside it. Something made a clunky noise. It might have been a hole punch. “There,” he said. “Now, your American crusader. What did he want?” He was revolving his glass in his hand, and by the lamp’s yellow glow Catherine could see its sticky surface, its film of smudged fingerprints. “Well, we know what he wanted. But how did he get it? Why did you give it to him?”

“I never . . . ”

“The Park turned him down. We’ve established that. And the Yanks had kicked him out. But the following year there he is, middle of France, running his little colony, raising his children as prototype terrorists. And there you were, checking on his progress. But not officially. Because as far as the records go, you were paying welfare visits on an old spook. So whatever happened, you did it under the bridge. Why?”

She shouldn’t be party to this, she thought again, but it was too late; everything was too late. Jackson Lamb would ebb and flow, and the old man would crumble. Whether there’d be anything left of him once it was over was anybody’s guess. And she had promised River she’d look after his grandfather, but God help her, she wanted to know too. Whatever had happened back then, it had sown the seeds of the Westacres bombing, and she wanted to know what it had been. Because she’d been kidding herself if she’d thought she’d escaped Slough House. It didn’t matter where she was, she was as much a spook as Lamb, and every bit as hungry to learn these secrets.

“He had something on you,” Lamb said. “He turned the screw. What did he know?”

“He’s had enough,” Bad Sam said. “Let’s leave it for now, shall we?”

“He’s had enough when I say he’s had enough. What did Frank have on you, Cartwright? What did he know that you wanted kept hidden?”

“Jackson—”

“You said it yourself. Secrets don’t stay secret, not on Spook Street.”

“Stop now, or I’ll make you stop,” Bad Sam said. “I mean it.”

“Frank had something. What was it?”

“Leave him, Jackson,” Catherine said.

And the old man said, “Isobel,” and started to cry.

“Well,” Louisa said. “I wasn’t expecting this.”

Her companion said, “I’ve been up for eighteen hours. I’ve spent most of them in my car, and the rest looking at bodies, being lied to, locking up innocent people, and letting a French whackjob steal my gun. Oh, and having what feels like my cheekbone broken by the very hard head of that colleague of yours. Who, when my day started, was dead. I deserve a drink or seven after that.”

“No argument,” Louisa said, who hadn’t been fazed by being in a bar; just by Flyte’s invitation. She was drinking fizzy water: her car was down the road. But Emma Flyte was putting away tequila shots, one either side of a Mexican beer, and nothing about the way she was doing this suggested amateur status.

“Met your boss this morning,” Emma said.

Ah, Louisa thought. It was rare you got the chance to hear first impressions of Lamb. “And how did you get along?”

“He gave me about a dozen good reasons for bringing disciplinary charges against him.”

Louisa nodded seriously. “If you decide to do that, I very much want to be there when it happens.”

“I’m not going to,” Emma said. Her beer bottle had a piece of fruit lodged on its rim for some reason, and she pushed it inside with her thumb. It fizzed. “I mean, he’s a pig. And he lied about whose body he was looking at, which might come back and bite him yet. But I’d sooner have him telling me lies than Diana Taverner. When that lady plays hide-the-soap, she does it for keeps.”

Louisa let that image sparkle and die before saying, “Maybe you and Lamb have more in common than you think.”

Emma’s phone buzzed, and she glanced at it. “The Park.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They probably want to know what happened out there,” Emma said, nodding towards the door, the outside world, Pentonville Road. “And how come Adam Lockhead has, ah, evaded custody.”

“I thought you said his name was Patrice.”

“It’s Cartwright I’m talking about.” Despite the booze, her voice was steady. “That’s the passport he was using. Adam Lockhead. News to you?”

“I’m about three laps behind everyone at the moment,” Louisa said. “All I know is, this Patrice? He’s a pro. And as we’ve established, armed. In fact, his becoming armed is doubtless clocking up views on YouTube as we chat. So all in all, it might be an idea to be out there looking for him instead of in here self-medicating.”

“When we find him, it won’t be because I’m outside getting wet,” Emma said. “It’ll be phoned in by some beat-cop who listened to his radio chatter.”

“D’you think that’ll be before or after he kills Cartwright?” Louisa said. “I realise you’re not that bothered either way.”

“He didn’t look to me like he wanted to kill Cartwright. He looked—startled, I thought. Startled to see him.”

“River can be a pain in the neck,” Louisa agreed. “But he’s not actually alarming. Not at first glance.”

“Where’d he been?”

“I gather he’s spent the day in France.”

“Why?”

“When I see him, I’ll ask. You used to be with the Met, right?”

“Yes.”

Louisa grinned. “Missing it yet?”

The phone buzzed again, angrier this time, the way phones get. Emma sighed, and moved a few steps away. “Flyte.”

“Tell me that’s not you I’m watching. Along with half the population of the western world.”

“I doubt it’s that many,” Emma said. “Most of them’ll be viewing it twice. You have to factor that in.”

Diana Taverner said, “Are you drunk?”

“Not yet.”

“How did this happen? How did any of it happen?”

“It happened because I wasn’t given enough information,” Emma said. “So when we were sideswiped by a professional hitman, we weren’t expecting it. In the circumstances, we got off lightly. Unwelcome publicity notwithstanding.”

“You call that lightly? What would heavy look like?”

“It would involve my body lying in the street. Who was Adam Lockhead supposed to be?”

“That’s way outside your need to know.”

“Fine. So do you want me to forget who he really is? Because another couple of tequilas might do the trick.”

Taverner said, “What are you talking about?”

“The man you sent me to collect, the one whose passport said Adam Lockhead, he’s River Cartwright. Who for a while last night we thought was dead. Stop me if I start making sense. It would be a good note to end my day on.”

In the pause that followed, the usual bar clatter seemed to increase, as if anxious to fill any void in its jurisdiction. Emma wondered if Taverner was running the video again, to check what she’d just said.

Maybe so, because when she next spoke she said, “It does look like Cartwright. Did he say anything?”

“He knew the hitman.”

“Why do you keep calling him that?”

“He hit us with a car. It’s the shortest version of that I can think of.” Emma was missing her drink, so she wandered back to the table. The way things had come undone, it didn’t seem to matter who heard what. “Cartwright called him by name. Patrice.”

“Where are they now?”

“Do you know, that’s a really good question,” Emma said, reaching for her shot. “Not sure. London?”

“Are you anxious to lose your job?”

“I figure that’s out of my hands.” There was a short interval, during which she saw off her tequila. “The Met’s on the case now anyway. Can’t keep this one quiet. He was firing a gun in the street.”

“Your gun.”

“I hadn’t forgotten. You haven’t asked about Devon yet.”

“. . . What the hell has Devon got to do with anything?”

“Devon Welles. He was driving the car.”

“Oh. Right. He’s not dead or anything?”

“Couple of cracked ribs. I packed him off to A&E. You want me to have Giti Rahman released?”

“Why would I want that?”

“Because there doesn’t seem much point hanging onto her. Whatever it is you’re so desperate to keep under wraps is leaking worse than a broken sieve. I’m not sure which’ll happen first, a Freedom of Information request or an offer for the film rights.”

“Ms. Flyte, all that’s been broadcast to an easily amused world so far is your own inability to carry out a straightforward arrest. And if you want your career to survive that hiccup, I suggest you keep a low profile from now on.” She paused. “You’re a disappointment. Go back to the safe house. Sit with Ms. Rahman. And if I ever relieve you from that not particularly onerous duty, you’ll know hell just installed air conditioning.”

Emma put her glass down. She thought: another round exactly like that, and the varying degrees of pain, humiliation, embarrassment and anger she was feeling would subside into a molten mass from which she needn’t emerge until morning. It might even have stopped raining by then.

She said, “Lady Di? I wish I could say the same about you. About being a disappointment, I mean. But no, you more than live up to everything everyone says.”

She disconnected.

Louisa said, “Wow. Was that your career I just saw leaving?”

“Tell me you don’t know what that feels like.”

“You want another drink?”

“What I want is a cup of coffee. Can you organise that? Because I need the bathroom.”

Louisa, watching Emma retreat to the back of the bar, decided to hang on a while; join her in that coffee. Her flat with all its quiet comforts would still be there later. And sticking with Flyte might give her the inside track when River and Patrice broke surface.

Pissed off as she was with him, she had to admit that all the exciting stuff happened round River.

Somewhere not far away—or not as the pigeon flies, though few cared to do so in the cold wet dark: even London’s pigeons have their limit—River was adding this to his list of unexpected beauties: a dazzle ship in the rain, its perspective-bewildering doodles becoming extra smeary, its black-and-white pipe-and-funnel finish ballooning into ever more cartoony shapes. It seemed to shimmer in the downpour, as if the lights trained on it were all that anchored it in place.

Patrice said, “That’s something.”

River, as if explaining an object of national pride to a tourist, said, “They were painted like that to confuse submarines. It made it harder to sink them, to pinpoint them as targets.”

“And that worked?”

“Well, this one’s still here.”

Though its patterning was not the World War I design, but a recent hommage, jauntier than the original.

HMS President was moored on the Embankment, on the approach to Blackfriars Bridge. In the background, cars and buses crossed the Thames, their tyres a swooshing soundtrack. This riverside road was quieter; one lane closed to traffic. Someone was always trying to improve the capital’s roads, and if they ever finished the job, they might turn out to have succeeded. Meanwhile, canvas-shrouded fencing was pitched along a stretch of kerb, reaching from the ship’s purpose-built jetty up to the bridge itself, lanterns fixed to it at regular intervals. These too wobbled in the wind, bouncing dizzy halos off the sturdy buildings on the other side of the road: banks and publishers and other dubious institutions.

River and Patrice had walked, because they were already so wet it made no difference, and it didn’t seem like something a pair of fugitives would do: stroll along in the pouring rain, pointing at the sights along the way.

Though their apparent camaraderie didn’t stop River wondering whether Patrice would kill him before the night was done.

He could run for it, of course. But running from trouble had never been a core skill of his; running towards it was more his thing. And running wouldn’t give him the answers he was after.

A figure waited near the dazzle ship, on its walkway’s sheltered platform. Before they reached him, River said, “There’s something I should tell you.”

Patrice showed little curiosity, but so far, apart from that moment he’d first laid eyes on River, he hadn’t shown much of anything. Had simply transmitted a dull grey pulse, performing each action as it was required; as if he were a wind-up construct, its movements oiled to perfection.

“I met your mother today,” he said. “Natasha.”

Patrice said nothing.

“She misses you.”

Patrice shook his head, but still said nothing.

“She wants to know you’re all right. It worried her, when Les Arbres burned down. Any mother would worry.”

“I have no mother.”

“She didn’t abandon you, you know. Or at least—she came back. She wanted to see you, to be with you. They wouldn’t let her.”

“I have no mother,” Patrice repeated.

“She was there for years. Never far away. In case you needed her.”

Patrice looked at him and said, “Those things never happened. Stop talking.”

“I will if you want. But I don’t think you do.”

As casually as if he were swatting a fly, Patrice reached out to slap River’s cheek, but River had been expecting this, or something like it, and blocked the blow. But not the second, which was aimed at his throat. Patrice pulled it at the last second, or River would have been laid out on the pavement.

Patrice said, “Stop now. Or I’ll make you.”

Maybe he had a point.

The figure under the shelter watched them approach. He wore a raincoat, its collar up, but there was something familiar about him, about the way he stood—because this was Frank, of course. His hair thinning; his cheekbones more pronounced; but still tall, fairish, broad-shouldered. Strong and capable. His way of growing older had been to grow more like himself.

As they reached him, he opened his arms. Patrice stepped dutifully into them, and Frank kissed him on one cheek, then on the other. There seemed little affection in the gesture. It was more, River thought, like a general greeting a soldier back from the front.

“I didn’t know you were in England,” Patrice said.

“You didn’t need to know I was in England,” Frank said. He turned to River. “You’re River Cartwright.”

“And you’re Frank. I didn’t get your surname.”

“Harkness. Frank Harkness.”

The accent was American, but with its corners sanded away by European exile.

River said, “Great to have this opportunity to chat. You sent someone to kill my grandfather.”

There were noises from the boat, whose features included a bar; overlapping voices and the tinselly ringing of glasses, mostly muffled by the rain. There was nobody in sight. River could have shouted without risk of being overheard.

To his surprise, Frank laughed.

River said, “You do know what happened, right? To your boy, Bertrand.”

Patrice took a step nearer, like a dog reacting to danger.

“You want to call him off?” River said.

Frank said, “It’s okay, Patrice. He’s got things he needs to say.”

“Why did he have Bertrand’s passport? And he said he was at Les Arbres.”

“There’s nothing to see there,” Frank said. “Not any more.”

“But why—”

“Excuse us,” Frank told River. “This won’t take long.”

It took River a moment to realise he was being asked to give them some privacy.

Well, he couldn’t get wetter.

From the laughably inadequate shelter of a nearby tree, he watched Frank put an arm round Patrice’s shoulder, and lean close. Whatever instruction or advice he was offering demanded intimacy . . . Water snaked down River’s back, throwing an uncontrollable shiver into him; a full-body spasm. How long had today gone on for? It had already been old when he’d arrived at his grandfather’s to find the body in the bathroom. How much longer, and what would happen yet?

Then Frank kissed Patrice again, and stepped back.

When Patrice approached River, he tensed, wondering if he’d just witnessed a Godfather moment; the older man explaining to the younger why he, River, had to die. But instead Patrice paused, then leaned forward, hands in pockets, and kissed River on the cheek. One cheek only.

He said, “We will speak again soon.”

Then he walked back the way they’d come; just a man hurrying through the rain, eager for the next place of shelter.

“Sorry about that,” Frank said. “Patrice, he’s a little confused right now.” He produced a pack of cigarettes, and offered them to River, who shook his head. Frank used a lighter, and the space filled with blue French smoke. “On account of your grandfather killing his best friend.”

“And your son.”

“Uh-huh.” He might have been acknowledging a vaguer relationship. Someone he shared a lift with once, perhaps. “I can’t believe he let that old bastard get the better of him. It’s like, lesson one. Don’t let your guard down just because the target appears harmless.”

River said, “The target was my grandfather.”

“I hadn’t forgotten.”

River wanted to punch the cigarette clean out of his mouth. Break his nose, black his eyes, watch him crumple in the rain. But instead of using his fists he said, “I shot your son’s corpse in the face. To mess up the forensics. I thought it might buy us twenty minutes.”

“His name was Bertrand.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should,” said Frank. “He was your brother. It’s good to see you, son. How’ve you been?”

Taverner disconnected and said: “I swear to God, I sometimes think I’m the only thing standing between this place and total chaos.”

Claude Whelan looked up from his laptop. Four viewings of the YouTube video now, and any further information it held wasn’t going to reveal itself on a fifth. The young man who’d brought it to Diana’s office had assured them it was being assessed by experts, its every pixel weighed and measured. Whether any knowledge thus acquired would help save Claude’s bacon, or ensure it was served extra crispy, would no doubt become clear in its own sweet time.

Diana said, “The other man in the car—the one who was using the Lockhead property—Flyte says it was River Cartwright.”

For a moment, Whelan’s mind didn’t bother taking this in. Then he said, “River Cartwright? He was supposed to be dead. What’s he doing with a cold body passport?”

“Let me think.”

He was happy to. As long as she was doing that, she wasn’t binding him more tightly inside this mad conspiracy which had just looped back on itself. The Cartwright mess—that’s what she’d called it this morning, back when he’d thought he was in charge round here—the Cartwright mess had nothing to do with Westacres. Cartwright was a Service legend who’d subsided into dementia, shot his grandson, and gone walkabout in Kent. Though apparently it hadn’t been his grandson after all . . .

The fact that it was Taverner doing the thinking didn’t prevent Claude from having ideas too.

He said, “David Cartwright.”

“Yes,” she said, already working the same seam.

“He was around at the right time. Twenty years ago.”

“He could have taken the properties. Nobody would have questioned anything he did. He was Charles Partner’s right hand.”

“But why?”

“Why anything? Money, power, sex—it doesn’t matter. If one of the cold bodies came to his door and ended up dead, you know what that means?”

“They’re cleaning house,” said Whelan.

Once, late at night in New York City, he’d sat with Claire in the back of a yellow cab as it tore down Broadway, and watched each set of traffic lights turn green at their approach. Sometimes, problems solved themselves: each question finding its own answer before you’d arrived at it.

He said, “Cartwright supplied the cold bodies to someone long ago. And now they’ve gone operational, they’re covering their tracks. With Cartwright dead, they’re secure.”

“Except,” Diana said. “You know what’s wrong with this picture? It’s hung backwards. If you’re a terror group planning a Westacres, you tie up your loose ends first. They should have come for Cartwright before the bombing.”

“But they didn’t. So maybe—”

“They didn’t know the bombing was going to happen,” Diana said.

Out on the hub, the work of the Service continued. There was a muted flatscreen on the wall whose rolling news channel remained fixated on Westacres. Relatives of the dead were fair game now, the three-day interval deemed long enough for mourning, and the transforming power of involvement in world-event had rendered several of them experts in counter-terrorism. One such was performing now, his head bobbing angrily as he explained the failings of the intelligence services, their laxity, their incompetence. Whelan could see him through the office’s glass wall. It must be of comfort, he thought, to pretend you had an understanding of how the world operated. Especially when it went wrong, and the result was carnage: broken bodies, torn flesh, and lives forever damaged.

He said, “I’m not sure which is worse. That someone planned this, or that it’s all some colossal fuck-up.”

“Welcome to Regent’s Park.”

“Let’s back up. Young Cartwright had Adam Lockhead’s passport. There was a body at Cartwright’s house. Ergo—”

“It was Adam Lockhead’s body,” Diana said.

“So young Cartwright turned up in time to foil the assassin, then went haring off across the channel on the killer’s passport. He was walking back the cat. Trying to find out who wanted to kill his grandfather.”

“Well, if nothing else, it shows the old man really does have dementia,” Diana Taverner said. “Otherwise he could have just asked him. Saved himself a journey.” Briefly she raised her fingers to her lips, and he understood that she was a smoker, unconsciously miming a nicotine hit. “So the question is, what did young Cartwright find out? How much does he know?”

“And who came after him?” Whelan said. He reached out and tapped the pad on his sleeping laptop, making the Pentonville Road video come to jerky life once more.

Taverner said, “The only thing that makes sense is, he’s the other cold body. Paul Wayne.”

“And he’s not rescuing Cartwright, he’s abducting him,” said Whelan. “So he can find out where the old man is now.”

His eyes flicked from the small screen in front of him to the larger one out on the hub. As if it were part of an installation, the recurrence of violent action in urban iconography, the YouTube film was playing on that one too now: more fodder for the debate on how the effort to keep the streets safe had fallen short. First Westacres, now this. Already, there’d be those straining to join the dots between the two. If anyone managed it, you’d hear the howls of outrage even while the screen remained mute.

Diana Taverner said, “You realise, the more complicated the situation gets, the simpler the solution becomes.”

“I’m not going to want to hear this.”

“I don’t care. As long as you’re First Desk, there are decisions you’ll have to make. Not for your own good, not for mine, not even for your wife’s—”

“Leave Claire out of this.”

“Of course. But I’m simply stating facts. Your choices are no longer about your own moral comfort. They’re about the greater good.”

“And the greater good, as you see it—”

“Is the survival of this Service.” She pointed out towards the hub. “Westacres happened. There’s nothing we can do about that. But we’ve stopped similar things happening in the past, and we’ll do so again in the future. Provided we’re allowed to. Provided we maintain what trust is still out there.”

“There’s not an awful lot of that about,” Whelan said, indicating the TV.

“There’ll always be those pointing fingers. But the vast majority? They trust us to keep them safe. Because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be doing what they do—getting on trains, walking down streets, visiting shops. They’d be holed up in their bedrooms, living off canned food and bottled water. That’s the measure of our success, Claude. That the country still leads a normal life, even while we bury the dead.”

“I’m not sure Marketing’ll approve that as a slogan.” He closed the laptop. It was good to have these visible punctuation marks: without them, conversations might go on forever. “What are you suggesting we do?”

“The obvious. We have an armed terrorist on the streets, accompanied by a rogue agent. They present a clear and present danger to the populace.”

“You want me to issue a shoot-to-kill order.”

“Well there’s no point shooting to wound. People would only get hurt.”

“Diana—”

“It’s what I’d be suggesting even if it weren’t for the . . . additional aspects of the situation.”

“But it would certainly suit our interests if this pair were dead, and unavailable for interrogation,” he said. “Except young Cartwright’s not exactly rogue, is he? I mean—”

“His actions have been unwarranted, unauthorised, and he’s been involved in a violent death. We can argue semantics if you like, but nothing he’s done today has improved his CV. Which was already less than exemplary.”

“Still—”

“And we have reason to believe his grandfather made possible one of the worst ever terrorist outrages on British soil.”

“Hardly the grandson’s fault.”

“So why has he been hiding him?”

“We’re not likely to find out if we have him gunned down in the street.”

“And if he’s allowed to talk, then the media coverage we’ve seen so far is going to look like a PR script. This is a turning point, Claude. It’s not just your career that’ll be over. And mine. It’s the Service as we know it. Which is imperfect, sure, and sometimes slow to respond, but we can make those things better—you and I. But not if this fiasco becomes public. If that happens, we’ll have nothing to build on. Because there’ll be no trust and no public belief. It’ll all be buried under the Westacres rubble.”

If Taverner hadn’t been here, he’d have reached for his wife’s photo. Would have found strength in that contact, even though she would never agree to what was being offered him: a swift way out of a situation not of his making. But then, he had been here before, hadn’t he? He had found his way out of corners in ways that Claire wouldn’t have approved of. Corners she hadn’t known he’d been in.

“What about David Cartwright?” he said at last.

“He’ll turn up eventually. But it’s not like he’s going to be making any sense. No, this is our chance to make everything go away. And it’s not even a push, Claude. It’s a nudge. The Met will be going in heavy-mannered whatever recommendations you make.”

“I can’t give instructions to the police force.”

“But you can make a call to the PM.”

He could feel it sliding out of his reach, any sense that he had a choice in what was about to happen.

“Young Cartwright is not an enemy of the state.”

“If he’s discovered what his grandfather did, then he very likely is. Because that would mean he has information that can do serious—irreparable—damage to the Service. And if that doesn’t make him an enemy of the state, I don’t know what would.”

It had been hours, he thought, since she had referred to the sword she’d left dangling over his head; the false information he’d fed COBRA. Instead, she wanted him to find his own way to the decision she’d placed in front of him.

If he did what she wanted, he’d be bound forever in her coils.

If he didn’t, she’d throw him to the wolves.

With a wash of nostalgia, he remembered life across the river, where the worst he had to contend with was the passive-aggressive needling of his fellow weasels.

He said, “This isn’t right.”

“Maybe not the right thing to do. But it’s the right decision to make.”

Nothing in her demeanour, he thought, indicated that she’d ever had a moment’s self-doubt in her life.

Keeping his face as expressionless as possible, Claude Whelan reached for the phone.

A police car flashed past, or didn’t; the sky growled dramatically, or held its breath. Mermaids might have risen from the Thames, and the dazzle ship taken to the air. Probably all that happened, though, was the rain. If asked to reconstruct the moment later, that’s all River would have been able to swear to.

“. . . What did you say?”

“You heard me, River. I’m your father.”

“My father?”

“You want to hear it in a Darth Vader voice?”

River didn’t want to hear it at all.

He blinked several times, but nothing altered. They were under a shelter on the bank of the Thames, whose night-time reflections were rendered impressionist by steady rain. From the dazzle ship’s bar drifted a murmur of voices, and an unidentifiable tune. And here was Frank Harkness, who’d run some mysterious commune in the heart of France; who’d raised boys like Patrice, like Bertrand, and sent them out to be killers.

He had an English woman, I remember. I saw her once, or more than once. Perhaps these occasions have melted into one.

Natasha’s words, floating back to him the way those reflections floated on the water.

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. And when we come back, she is gone.

His mother had never stayed with anyone long. Even her eventual marriage, which had elevated her into comfortable respectability, hadn’t gone the distance, her husband having succumbed to a dicky heart within three years of their union.

The distance she’d come, the respectability she’d assumed: all of that was summed up in her use of the phrase dicky heart.

“How can you possibly . . . ?”

He could almost see his words, so effortfully did they struggle into the air. And then crash to the ground, unable to reach the end of their sentence.

“We should go inside,” Frank said. With a tilt of the head, he indicated the bar behind them; the comfort room on the dazzle ship. “You look like you could use a drink.”

“. . . How can you possibly be my father?”

“Seriously? We need to have this conversation?” Frank shook his head. “I gathered you were a late starter, but—”

River grabbed him by the lapels and shook him, but it was clear that Frank was allowing himself to be shook. To be shaken. There was a solidity to his frame, something like a tree trunk—you could push on it all day and night, but there was no way you were toppling it without serious tools.

“That’s better,” Frank said. “For a moment there, I thought you were going to pass out. But this is better. You’re strong. You’ll do.”

“You’re lying.”

“You know I’m not. If you thought I was, it’s the first thing you’d have said.”

River let him go. “That’s just mind games. That’s bullshit. You can’t possibly—”

But already it felt like knowledge he’d been deliberately resisting till now. Already it felt like he was the last to know.

“We met, we fell in love, she became pregnant. Your grandfather didn’t approve, do I need to tell you that?”

The O.B. and his mother, and the rift that had driven them apart. For years he’d watched on the sidelines, with neither party giving anything away. He had missed the original Cold War by years. This one would do until the next came along.

“He drove a wedge between us. What did she tell you about me?”

“Nothing. She told me nothing. She never speaks of you.”

“Well, you have to hand it to the old man. When he drives a wedge, it stays driven.”

This time a police car did flash past, though flash was not the word. It slowed, rather, while its occupants gave them the once-over, before negotiating the chicane the roadworks had assembled. There was other traffic too, none of it important.

“Why did he do that?”

“Drive us apart?”

“Yes. Why would he do that, especially if—if me. If she was pregnant. Why would he do that?”

“Maybe he didn’t like the thought of having a Yank for a son-in-law. Or he was worried I’d take his precious daughter way over the big blue sea.”

“No.”

“No he didn’t find her precious, or—”

“No, you’re lying. None of that’s anywhere near the truth.”

He was thinking of all those years, all those conversations. All the times his grandfather had asked “whether he’d heard from his mother”: never using “Isobel,” as if this would presume on a deeper acquaintance . . . He had missed her terribly for all of River’s life, without ever admitting it out loud. And the reasons he was being offered here were nowhere near enough to account for that.

Frank said, “Okay, there was a little more to it. Your grandfather—he was a great one for making deals.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“There were certain things I needed. A project I had to get off the ground. If I kept away from Isobel, your grandfather would . . . smooth the way. Allow certain things to become possible.”

“Les Arbres,” River said.

“How much do you know about that?”

It might have been an enquiry at a dinner party.

“You ran some kind of commune there,” River said. “And burned it to the ground the same day you sent your boy out to kill my grandfather.” He ran a hand through his hair, and it came away sopping wet. “Which smells like cover-up to me. This project of yours went badly wrong, didn’t it?”

“There’ve been mistakes,” Frank said. “I’d be the first to admit that. But nothing we can’t get right next time.”

“And you tried to bury it by killing my grandfather!”

“And I’m sorry. That was the wrong approach. I get that now.”

“The wrong approach? What the hell are you, a fucking self-help guru? You sent your own son—who died, by the way. Your son died.”

Frank said, “He knew the risks.”

“And that’s all you’ve got to say? That he knew the risks?”

“You think I’m not screaming inside? I’m hurting, River. Believe me, I am. But Bertrand was . . . there was a mission, and it’s still going on, and when you’re out in the field you lock the hurt inside. There’ll be time for that later.” He paused. “For both of us.”

Not going there, thought River. Not going there. But part of him went there anyway, joining dots and filling in corners. His half-brother . . . More than a passing resemblance. No wonder he thought he’d get away with turning up at the O.B.’s house, pretending to be River. No wonder River had been able to use his passport.

And River had obliterated that face, in the name of operational expediency.

But not going there.

“What’s the mission?” he said.

Frank smiled a crooked smile. “Right now?” he said. “Right now, River, the mission is you.”

The gunplay on Pentonville Road had sent further tremors through the city, making the old and the vulnerable nervous, but adding a sweet edge to the nightlife of the young. This wild-west frisson had its upside. Just like in frontier towns, the risk of sudden death was greater, but your chances of getting laid were similarly enhanced.

Patrice recognised this in scenes glimpsed through windows as he made his way though the heart of London. Social interaction had been tightened a notch. People were smiling more brightly, their laughter strung a note higher, everything more brittle. Which was useful. A group was emerging from a bar, armed with umbrellas and busy with laughter. He fell in among them, his expression breaking easily into companionship. “I couldn’t hitch shelter as far as the next tube, could I? I have got so wet today!”

“’Course you can, darlin’.”

“Hey, a little less of the darlin’s, you!”

“Take no notice of him.”

An umbrella shifted on its axis, and he was offered its protection.

“That’s great,” said Patrice. “Thanks.”

“It’s not just the rain you’ve gotta watch out for,” somebody slurred. “Mad people out there waving guns about.”

They moved in tortoise formation, past the pair of policemen on the corner who were peeled and alert for suspicious pairings.

“Evening, officers.”

“Keep the streets safe!”

Patrice smiled and nodded with the rest of them, and slipped free at the next corner. Two of the girls invited him to stay with the party—there was always a party—but he had a gun in his pocket, and a destination. And an instruction from Frank, who had been giving him instructions since he was a toddler, and who had ensured, way back then, that there was no question of Patrice not carrying them out.

“An address,” Frank had said, out of earshot of the young spook who’d been pretending to be Adam Lockhead. He’d recited it slowly. Aldersgate Street.

Patrice knew not to ask why. Frank let him know anyway.

“It’s where he’s stationed,” he’d said, indicating the young spook. “And that department doesn’t run to safe houses.”

“So Chapman might be there,” Patrice guessed.

“And the old man too. You know what to do.”

Patrice did, but Frank told him anyway.

“Kill them all. Call me when you’re done.”

Patrice nodded.

He was heading past Smithfield Market now, all shuttered up against the evening.

Aldersgate Street was minutes away.

Back in Slough House, Shirley was reliving her near-death experience.

“He’s a fucking psycho,” she said happily.

“And this is fun because . . . ?”

“Keeps life interesting. Hey, what if we get him annoyed at Ho? Roddy’d shit himself if the Mad Monk pulled that knife trick on him.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t so much a knife trick,” Marcus pointed out, “as just a knife.”

They were in their office, the overhead bulbs growing starker as the darkness outside solidified, and the more Shirley replayed the YouTube videos—and there were two now, another Citizen Journalist having uploaded footage—the surer she became that it was River caught on camera. Which was cool. The last time the slow horses had found themselves on a war footing had been the most fun she’d had since being kicked out of yoga class for starting a fight. If this turned out to be Slough House business, she might get to punch some heads. At the very least, this would give her something to talk about at her next Anger Management session.

Besides, there was nobody waiting at home. Not that she wanted to run through that sorry scenario again, even in the privacy of her own head.

She said, “I’m going to make a cup of tea. Want one?”

But Marcus only grunted.

Ho was in his diving bell, gazing at the world at the bottom of the sea.

That’s what it felt like, anyway.

After fetching the ice for Chapman’s knee—and Jeez, it was painful the way old folks crumbled: Ho was broad-minded, it was one of the things Kim, his girlfriend, most admired about him, but seriously, old people made him feel ill—he’d returned to his machines. He planned to stay late; there was stuff he preferred to do from a Service computer. It was kind of a dare—a task he’d been set. A quest, even. A quest, and the prize was his lady’s hand. Though after four dates, and the amount of money he’d shelled out, her hand was the least he was owed.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t into him. Roddy Ho didn’t fool easy, and Mama Internet had taught him well. When a chick was really into you, there were ways you could tell, and one of the ways you could tell was when she said “I’m really into you,” saying it low and breathy into his ear, friendly as a kitten, her leg brushing across the front of his trousers.

So yeah, she was into him. It was just that so far, at evening’s end, she’d had an important reason for getting home alone, a sick flatmate or a need to be up very very early next day, “but soon, Roddy, soon,” which was a phrase he’d hugged to himself like a hot-water bottle once he’d got home alone himself. Soon. He liked the sound of that. And if completing a quest made soon come sooner, then he was up for it. That was definitely the right phrase.

So anyway: his task. What had happened, the evening before, Kim, his girlfriend, had been asking him how he did what he did; how he hacked in and out of other people’s networks, big and small. He’d had to laugh. “Hacking,” he’d explained, implied slicing and chopping, like using a machete to move through a jungle. But when he did it—“When Roddy Ho does it, babes”—ghosting was the word you were after, because he left no tracks, and nobody knew he’d been there.

“So you can’t, like, change anything? You leave everything the way it was?”

Again: ha! She was so cute and so sexy, but she really didn’t get the things the Rodster could do with a keyboard.

“Kim,” he’d said. “Babes.” She loved it when he called her that. “I can change anything I want. I just make it look like it’s always been that way, you dig?”

And she dug, of course she did, because she laughed too in that sexy way she had, and gazed at him with liquid eyes.

“That’s great, you’re so wonderful, because . . . ”

Because it turned out she had a friend with a problem.

Long story short, the friend had been ripped off by the company she worked for, well, used to work for, only they’d fired her for some made-up shit when the real reason was she was too good at her job, and they couldn’t afford to pay the commission they owed her—“Thousands of pounds, Roddy”—and now she couldn’t afford a lawyer to sue them, so if there was any way he could “ghost” into this company’s system and adjust their accounts so the money they owed her ended up on her credit card or something, that would be beyond wonderful. Because she was such a sweet friend, and pretty too, and she’d be so grateful to Roddy, and Kim would be grateful too, and wouldn’t that be nice, Roddy having two pretty girls feeling grateful and friendly towards him at the same time?

And Roddy had gulped and adjusted himself, and said, “Sure, babes,” but it had come out squeaky.

So anyway. As luck would have it, Kim had had the company’s details jotted down on a piece of card, which was in front of Roddy now. So it was just a matter of getting into submarine mode, diving into the deep web, and it didn’t matter that the others were still floating round Slough House, because not one of them would realise what he was up to if they were watching over his shoulder.

Because he worked better at low temperatures he opened the nearest window, let cold damp air refresh him, then settled to his quest.

At the junction where the road from Smithfield ran under the Barbican complex, Patrice took shelter outside a gym which was disgorging toned, sweaty City workers, bags in one hand, smartphones in the other, already catching up on what they’d missed while on the treadmill. The massive structure overhead kept the rain off, but the air was damp, and the pavements lumpy with some kind of deposit from the concrete overhangs. It felt like the entrance to an underground garage.

For one brief moment, he remembered the cellar.

Each of the boys, on their twelfth birthday, had been locked in a cellar at Les Arbres, with no natural light and just one candle. Every morning, a single bread roll and a beaker of water was delivered. And every morning, they were told they would be released as soon as they asked for their freedom. Bertrand, Patrice remembered, had lasted just seventeen days before asking to be released. Patrice remembered Frank’s look of disdain at his son’s reappearance, as if it were an act of cowardice, or betrayal. Patrice himself had lasted a full month: at the time, a new record.

Yves had lasted two.

Frank should have known, he thought now. Frank should have known that there would come a time when Yves’s desire to prove he could go further than any of them would see him step over each and every line there was. He had grown too used to the darkness. It was a wonder he had survived so long in the light.

But this thought, that Frank should have known, demanded punishment, and Patrice submitted to the moment, lashing out at the pebble-dashed wall, then licking the resulting blood from his knuckles. He had deserved that. Nobody could have known where Yves’s demons would take him. It was this place that was breeding such ideas: rainy London, its blues and greys seeping into his soul. Well, Patrice wouldn’t be here much longer. This last task done, he and Frank could vanish back to the mainland: Les Arbres was smoke and ashes, but they’d find somewhere. And the others would return—except for Bertrand, of course; except for Yves—and life would start again.

But before that could happen, the old man David Cartwright, who had been there at the birth of Les Arbres, had to go. So did Sam Chapman, his driver, his muscle. That they had survived the first attempts to remove them could be assigned to their own blind luck, or to his and Bertrand’s incompetence; or perhaps, he thought now, it had been because of the weather; this never-ending blanket of rain: slowing the joints, dulling reactions. Well, that was about to come to an end. The young spook had worked in that building over the road, the one Frank had called Slough House, and there was a reasonable chance, a working possibility, that that was where the two targets currently were. It was also possible that by now they had shared their knowledge of Les Arbres with the young spook’s colleagues, which rendered the target pool larger. It was important, then, that this time there be no mistakes.

Pulling his collar up, he crossed the road.

Lamb paused in the yard to light a cigarette, sucking in smoke and holding it so long there was barely anything to exhale. Rain on his hat filled his head with the beating of drums.

The door behind him opened, and Catherine was there. She stood in the hallway, framed by light, and said, “He’s in some distress.”

“Boo hoo.”

“I’ve left him with Moira. She’ll make him a cup of tea.”

“Why stop there? Tell her to tuck him in. Read him a story.”

“He’s an old man, Jackson.”

“He’s an old man with blood on his hands. Let’s not pretend he’s a victim here.”

“He couldn’t know what would happen. He thought he was protecting his family.”

“Protecting himself, more like.” He turned to her. “Last thing he wanted was his daughter shacking up with an ex-Agency oddball. Because that might scupper his chances of getting to be First Desk, right? These days they appear on Newsnight, reviewing Bond films. But back then, the whole secrecy thing was more of an issue, and nobody wanted Service gossip headlining in the tabloids.”

“He never wanted to be First Desk.”

“Uh-huh. And Buzz Lightyear never wanted to be first man on the moon.”

“I don’t think you mean Lightyear. And besides, getting Frank what he wanted didn’t work out, did it? He still never got to be First Desk.”

Lamb said, “By the time he’d finished kitting Frank out, running the money through whatever back-channel he dug, the old man probably thought he’d better keep his head down. Putting your hand in the till, that’s one thing. Shovelling the proceeds the way of a paramilitary organisation, that’s borderline treason. He might have rescued his daughter from the clutches of a lunatic American, but he screwed his own career in the process. I suppose that’s a kind of justice.”

“She never forgave him.”

“For rescuing her?”

“I don’t suppose she saw it as a rescue,” Catherine said. “Besides, it wasn’t just her he was rescuing, was it?”

“You’re going to tug my heartstrings now? Remind me there was a foetus involved?”

“If he hadn’t bought Frank off, he’d have been delivering his unborn grandson into Frank’s hands. And Frank would have got what he wanted eventually, because Franks always do. Which means he’d have found some other way to fund his Cuckoo project, and—”

“And River would have been part of it. Yes, I get that.”

“So why are you so sure his hands are dirty?”

Lamb didn’t reply.

“I’ll bet you’ve done things—”

“Some of them on his orders.” Lamb tossed his cigarette against the wall, and a brief firework bloomed in the dark. Then he reached into his raincoat pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a sock. After gazing at it for a moment, he put it back.

Catherine said, “Where are you going, anyway?”

“I’m out of drink.”

“And you’re fetching your own these days?”

“Yeah, well. Sometimes I get my hands dirty too.”

He slunk out into the alleyway that led to Aldersgate Street.

Catherine watched him go, then shut the door, and headed back upstairs.

Moira Tregorian had her hands full again: when was it ever any different? Make him a cup of tea, if you please. This was Her Ladyship, of course; Ms. Catherine Standish, dishing out orders as if neither of them knew her discharge papers were sitting on the desk in broad daylight, not that there was much of that to be seen. Daylight.

“Here you go, then.”

She put it in front of him, and if she did so a little abruptly, causing it to slop over the rim, well, it wasn’t as if he was about to complain, was he?

“It’s already sugared,” she added.

And then, because he stared at it uncomprehending, she felt ashamed, and said, more gently, “You want to drink it before it gets cold. You need a warm drink inside you.”

Whether he did or didn’t seemed beside the point, somehow. There was precious little else she could do for him.

There was work to do, because there always was. Nobody had ever accused Moira Tregorian of not pulling her weight, not that her weight was anything anyone ought to be making comments about. There were still files and folders here from last September, and she had a good mind to call Ms. Standish in, ask if she wouldn’t mind lending a hand as a good part of this confusion had happened on her watch? But she could imagine the frosty answer she’d get from that one. Queening it over the whole department as if she were the Lady of Shallots or someone. No, that wasn’t who she meant. The other one.

“Lady Guinevere,” she said out loud.

That was who she meant.

There was an unseemly slurping from the old man as he revived himself with a healthy gulp of tea. When he set the cup down, he said, “King Arthur.”

Oh Lord help us, she thought. He thinks we’re playing Snap.

But she was still feeling guilty about her rough treatment of him. And it was nice to have someone to talk to, even if it was childish nonsense.

She said, “Sir Lancelot.”

“Sir Percival.”

She wasn’t even sure Sir Percival was a real one, to be honest, but she didn’t want to spoil the old man’s game. “Sir Gawain,” she said, conscious that if this went on much longer, she was going to run out of names.

“Sir Galahad.”

Galahad, she thought. Now that was funny—that rang a bell.

Where had she come across Galahad recently?

But the answer wouldn’t come.

It was clear that nobody used the front entrance—you only had to look at the door, its peeling black paint, to know it hadn’t been opened in years—which meant there must be another round the back. So he passed the Chinese restaurant, on whose grubby windowpane was fixed a yellowing menu, and reached an alleyway lit only by window-leakage from the neighbouring office block. It was one of those lost areas every city knows; an unconsidered gap between postcodes. To his left was a wall with wooden doors set into it at intervals, and when he tried the second one, it opened. Now he was in a small, mildewed yard, looking up at a dismal building which must be Slough House. For a department of the Security Service, it didn’t seem too secure. That said much about the value placed on its inhabitants.

Patrice took the gun from his pocket. The woman who’d owned it had been Service too, and it struck him briefly how difficult it would be for her, knowing her own weapon had been used to erase her colleagues. But this was no more than a blur on his mental horizon; an awareness of the weather elsewhere.

He tried the door, which jammed a little. He had to lean on it, pushing upwards on the handle to ease it open without making a noise. But that took only a moment. And then he was inside, and on the stairs, the gun dangling by his side, as if it were of no more weight or importance than a pint of milk.

Marcus could hear Catherine talking to Shirley in the kitchen. There was a kind of comfort in having her back in Slough House—they were two of a kind, after all—A gambler and a drinker; funny they’d never discussed their respective addictions. Except it was anything but funny, of course; this situation they were in. His family life was more than fraying at the edges; it was perforated right down the middle, and one quick tug would leave him floating wide and loose. As for Catherine—well, she seemed serene. But what kind of life was she living, really; what demons had smuggled themselves into her private corners? So no, of course they’d never spoken of such things. Besides, he’d never admitted it out loud before, had he? Had rarely said as much to himself.

“I have a gambling problem,” he said, very quietly. The words barely bothered the air. His lips moved, but that was about it.

He shook his head. If Shirley had been around for that, he’d never hear the end of it—

And because she wasn’t, he pulled open his desk drawer and stared down into it again. The one thing he could sell, get serious money for—a couple of ton at least—without Carrie knowing. He’d brought it in that morning, carried it through the rush-hour crush in his raincoat pocket; had half-expected Lamb to have found it by now—creepy, the way that man knew what was going on around him without appearing to open his eyes. And this evening, when he left, he’d take it with him, though he wouldn’t be heading straight home. There was a place round by St. Paul’s, a stationer’s shop, except it wasn’t. It had a back office where a man who looked like a hobbit kept court: Dancer, his name was, and Dancer bought guns, and sold them on again to people whose motives it was best not to inquire into.

Putting a gun on the street—can I really do that, Marcus wondered?

But I need the money.

He needed the money and he’d always need the money, the same way Catherine would always need a drink. Except Catherine needed a drink without taking one. Marcus looked down at the gun in his drawer and thought of all the uses it could be put to once it was out of his possession. Uses he’d never know about, though he’d never stop wondering. But meanwhile, he’d have a couple of hundred and could pay some bills; pay more than a few if he did the clever thing, and used the money to stake himself a bigger win . . .

Or I could go upstairs right now and talk to Catherine. She’d listen. Help.

Yeah, he thought. I should do that . . . Except no, not really. Because he didn’t have a problem. What he had was a run of bad luck, and the thing about runs was, they came to an end.

A couple of hundred in hand. All he’d need was one glimmer of light and he could turn his whole situation round. Then buy the gun back off Dancer before any harm was done. He smiled to himself at the thought of this happening, soon.

Then he wondered who that was, out on the staircase.

Bad Sam’s knee still hurt, for all the anaesthetising effects of Lamb’s bottle, but he had to stand anyway, and leave the office. Volkswagon had nothing on Lamb when it came to unfiltered emissions . . . Letting the ice pack slump to the floor, he tried a little weight on his leg and found it more or less bearable.

Half-hopping down to the next level, where the kitchen was, he found Catherine Standish and another woman—Shirley? Shirley—the former busying herself with the kettle while the latter watched. Shirley was short with suede-cut dark hair; broad at the shoulders, but not without a certain appeal, provided you were a lot younger than Bad Sam, and didn’t mind things getting edgy. That was a lot to read into a brief acquaintance, but she had a legible face. She said nothing when Bad Sam arrived, but watched him closely.

Well, he thought. It was a good thing someone round here was reasonably alert.

He said to Catherine, “I’m sorry.”

A lesser woman would have raised an eyebrow. She simply looked at him.

“For after Partner died. The interrogation.”

She nodded.

“But it had to be done.”

She nodded again.

Shirley was looking from one to the other, like a cat at a tennis match.

Catherine said, “He’s gone for some more alcohol. But I’m making tea.”

“That would be great.”

Sam felt released from something; he wasn’t sure what. Like he’d said, the interrogation had to be done; if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. And he hadn’t given it a moment’s thought in years. But still, in this woman’s company, he couldn’t help feeling he’d done her a wrong, and was glad to be forgiven. If that’s what this was. And he—

A gunshot cut the thought off.

Two gunshots, rather; one following the other so swiftly, they might have been two halves of a single sound.

Sam said, “Is there a—”

“Lamb’s desk.”

“Get it.”

She vanished up the stairs while Shirley rattled open a drawer, finding only a corkscrew she gripped in her right fist, its twirly point becoming a wicked extra finger.

“Upstairs,” he told her.

“And then what?”

JK Coe appeared in his doorway, his hood puddled around his shoulders, his blade in hand. He looked at Shirley. “What was that?”

The light on the lower landing went out.

Bad Sam said, “Get behind that door. Barricade it.” He was reaching for the kettle as he spoke; it was still grumbling to itself, steam gusting ceilingwards. “Now.”

He pushed past them, bad knee forgotten, and leant over the banister. As a dark figure appeared on the next flight down, Sam dropped the kettle onto its head.

Catherine knelt by Lamb’s desk, tugged at the bottom drawer, found it locked. There’d be a key somewhere, but she didn’t have time: there was a metal ruler on the desktop, acquired to break him of the habit of shattering plastic ones, and she slid this into the gap and pulled upwards until the drawer gave. From it, she pulled a shoe box and—because the mind won’t stay in its kennel—found herself thinking When did Jackson last buy a pair of shoes?, a thought that burst like a bubble. The lid of the shoe box was taped in place, which cost her another second. And then Lamb’s gun was in her hand, surprisingly small, though heavy enough. There was nothing else in the box—no bullets—so she hoped it was loaded: time would tell. As she left the room, the door to her old office opened, and an irritated Moira Tregorian appeared.

“What in the blessed name of—”

“Stay in there.” The gun in her hand would have done the trick anyway. Moira changed colour, and faded back inside, closing the door behind her.

Catherine was on the stairs when she heard the third shot, and almost felt it on her cheek—the displaced air the bullet pushed aside on its upward journey.

The kettle missed Patrice’s head by half an inch, though it struck him on the shoulder, spouting scalding water onto his face. He leaned back against the wall to rub his eyes. The kettle bounced down the staircase, its contents arcing across the walls, and overhead a door slammed. Vision still blurry he raised his gun, and when he heard someone on the stairs, fired blind. The bullet whistled up the stairwell and buried itself in the roof.

Deliberately, he banged his head against the wall, twice. Clarity of a kind returned.

Ignoring his scalded cheek, Patrice took the stairs two at a time, swivelling on the half-flight to aim at the figure on the landing above.

Coe grabbed Shirley and pulled her into his room, where she swiped at him with her corkscrewed fist, and tried to get back onto the landing. He tripped her, and when she hit the floor he threw his knife aside to grab her by the collar and the seat of her jeans, and haul her back.

“Fuck you—”

“Yeah, you too.”

He was reaching for the door when Catherine appeared from upstairs, looking wild—her hair had come loose and floated wide behind her, and in her eyes was something savage; in her hand was Lamb’s gun.

“Move!” Sam Chapman screamed—he was emerging from Louisa’s office, where he’d flung himself after hurling the kettle downstairs. Now he was brandishing a chair, and moving like someone who’d forgotten his knee didn’t work.

Coe grabbed Catherine, pulled her through the open door, and slammed it shut.

Bad Sam Chapman hurled the chair at Patrice just as Patrice raised the gun and fired again.

Frank had been right, or half-right at least: it was Sam Chapman on the landing; Chapman, whom he’d hunted yesterday, and earlier today. Package undelivered. Not any more, thought Patrice, and fired just as a chair came hurtling towards him; one of its slats splintering in flight as the bullet ricocheted off it; the chair itself, a wooden thing, caught him mid-chest. He barely blinked. This was what they fought with, kettles and furniture? A door slammed, then another; they were hiding in their rooms. There was a fairy tale about the houses little pigs built. They were about to find out how it ended.

Patrice kicked the chair aside, and arrived at the kitchen landing.

There was a lock, a bolt like you’d find on a toilet door; something to let outsiders know it was occupied, but not hefty enough to deter assault. Coe used it anyway, then got behind River’s desk and pushed it towards the doorway.

Shirley stepped round him and drew the bolt back.

“What the hell are you—”

“Marcus,” she said.

“He’s either okay or not, but you can’t—”

“Don’t tell me what I—”

There was a crash from the landing. A splintering noise.

“Shirley?” Catherine said. “Lock the door. Or I’ll shoot you.”

“Or,” said Shirley, “you could give me the gun, and I’ll go shoot him.”

Bad Sam didn’t know how this had happened so suddenly, so completely, but it had, and when things went to the wire, you did what you could. This wouldn’t be much. Sonny Jim out there had a gun, and Sam had none; and Sonny Jim, judging by the afternoon’s events, barely needed a weapon. He could take Sam apart with his bare hands if he wanted. And then he’d do the same to the others, including—especially—the old man upstairs, who had been under Sam’s protection once, and was again now, not that this would help him. Sam ought to push something against the door, to slow events down, but there didn’t seem any point, and when he put his hand to his side, he understood why he felt this way. That last shot, as Sam had thrown the chair—well, bullets had to go somewhere. That was a law of physics, or nature; a law, anyway, that Bad Sam Chapman had just found himself on the wrong side of.

He wished he’d had a chance to find Chelsea Barker. He hoped someone else would go looking.

And then the door burst off its hinges, and Sam’s hopes shut down.

The old man said, “Sir Bedivere.”

Moira Tregorian closed her eyes.

“Sir Kay.”

There was more gunfire from downstairs.

When Patrice kicked the door it almost came apart, the wood was so rotten. He stepped over its broken parts, shot Sam Chapman in the head, then checked the room, but it was otherwise unoccupied. The kitchen, too—a galley-space no bigger than a barge’s—was empty, though the other office door was closed. There would be targets behind it. He braced and kicked, the flat of his right foot hitting the door squarely.

This one held against his first assault, but wouldn’t withstand a second.

The door tried to pound its way into the room, and only just changed its mind. He’d kick once more, they knew, and be inside.

“Bullets?” Shirley said.

Catherine shook her head miserably.

JK Coe had blade in hand again, but it looked small and brittle; the wrong weapon for the occasion. He said, “Spread out. He might not get all of us.”

Catherine grabbed the first thing to hand, the keyboard from River’s desk, and yanked it from its cable. She wielded it two-handed, unsure whether she was preparing to hurl it or use it as a racquet, swat back the bullet he’d fire her way—

She thought: I could really do with a drink right now.

The door splintered open.

“Sir Tristan,” the O.B. said. “Sir Bors, Sir Gareth.”

“Shut up!” Moira screamed. “Shut up shut up shut up!”

“They all died, you know,” the old man told her, unperturbed. “They started with such promise, but they all went the same way in the end.”

There was another crash from downstairs as another door bit the dust, and then there was more gunfire—two shots? Three? Enough of them, anyway, to silence the old man.

He looked her way, visions of long-ago knights put to rest.

A short while later, they heard someone climbing the last flight of stairs.

When the door fell Patrice planted himself in the doorway and levelled the gun. There were three targets: a man, two women. Choosing the order in which to drop them took no time—the shorter woman, who held a gun, was the threat; the man, who had a knife, would be next; the older woman, who appeared to be wielding a piece of office equipment, last. David Cartwright was not among their number, but Patrice knew from the earlier commotion that there were more people upstairs. He sensed that the woman’s gun was empty, because there was fear in her eyes, and she did not look like someone who would be scared holding a loaded gun. Microseconds, these thoughts took. Less. It was part of what he’d learned at Les Arbres, in its woods and in its cellars; that you measured a situation in the moment you became part of it, and that what you did next was less action than response—you became part of the inevitable: that was what he had been taught. What would happen next was fixed from the moment he’d kicked the door down. All that remained was for the bodies to hit the floor. He aimed at the young woman and pulled the trigger, and in his mind was already turning to fire at the man, was already aware that the other woman had thrown a keyboard at him, and that he would turn and shoot her too before it reached him; and all of this was inevitable up to the moment that the whisky bottle flung by Jackson Lamb from the stairwell smashed into his temple, throwing his aim off—he fired three times, but his bullets bit air, bit glass, bit plaster. He landed on top of the broken door, and for a moment, all was quiet.

She took each set of stairs in a single leap; would have broken an ankle, a leg, a neck, if she’d noticed what she was doing. But there was no plan driving her, simply an imperative; an impulse that carried her to the doorway of her office, where it failed her. She had to reach out to its frame for support, and take several breaths before taking her next step.

The room was much as Shirley had left it. Her PC, never the quietest of beasts, was humming to itself, awaiting instructions. The steamed-up windows were weeping; the carpet was rucked. Marcus, though. Marcus was different. Marcus sat behind his desk, but had been thrown back against the wall, his chair balanced on two legs like an animal performing a party trick. His eyes were open. There was a hole in his forehead. There was a mess on the wall behind him.

On the floor, next to him, a gun. He’d got one shot off, but had only killed his desk.

Shirley waited for this scene to change, but it didn’t. When there was a noise at her back she knew it was Ho, emerging from a hiding place.

“You’re alive,” she said, without turning round.

“Uh-huh.”

His voice didn’t sound familiar, but then neither did hers.

He said, “I hung out the window. I nearly fell.”

She didn’t reply.

After a while he said, “What about Marcus?”

“Marcus didn’t make it,” she said, and turned and went back upstairs.

The rain was never going to stop. It had found a loophole in the weather-laws, and henceforth would fall without interruption, soaking the guilty and innocent alike, though mostly the former, a statistical inevitability. From the dazzle ship’s sheltered platform, River could see the neon blur it was making of the South Bank, drawing a grey curtain across the monolithic pile that was Sea Containers House, and dampening the Coca-Cola colouring of the Eye to a dotted outline.

He said to Frank, “Mission? Me? What are you talking about?”

“You’re wasted where you are.”

“What would you know about it?”

“I’ve made it my business to know. You went into the family business. You know how proud that makes me? I was CIA, back in the day. And still fighting the good fight.”

“No,” said River. “Whatever fight you’re fighting, it’s dirty.”

“You don’t know the full story. What we were trying to do at Les Arbres, it benefits everyone. Everyone.” He waved a hand, taking in the Thames, which meant the whole of London. “Look around. When you went into the Service, it was to protect all this, wasn’t it? You wanted to serve, to defend. And what have you ended up doing? Slough House is a cul de sac. A joke. Everything you might have been, all the promise you showed, and you’re spending your days finding different ways of stapling bits of paper together.”

“Are you about to offer me a job? Because sending someone to kill my grandfather’s a hell of a recruitment strategy. Or did you get your definitions of headhunting confused?”

“Okay, that was an error. I’ve admitted that. But it’s brought us here. You, me. And you now have the opportunity to decide what you want the rest of your life to be. Because if you stay in the Service, River, you’ll be in Slough House forever. And if you leave, what will you do? Get an ordinary job in an ordinary office?”

“I haven’t much thought beyond seeing you charged with conspiracy to murder.”

“Seriously, son, that’s not going to happen.”

Son. River shook his head. He was foggy with disbelief still: his father? His father? It was like the punchline to a failed joke he could already see himself repeating in bars. And then guess what he said? No, go on, guess!

“I get that you’re mad,” he told Frank. “And for all I know, you drag that I’m-your-daddy line out every time you meet someone new. But what I want to hear is what triggered this whole thing. What made you burn your house down, and send your son to kill my grandad? You’ll be coughing all this up at the Park soon. Might as well give me the preview. Think of it as making up for all those missed birthdays.”

“Son—”

“And stop calling me that.”

“Why? It’s who you are.”

River became aware, though they’d been there all the time, of high red lights glowing way up in the dark, marking the tips and joints of the ubiquitous cranes.

Frank had a red tip too: the end of his Gauloise. From behind its brief curtain, he said, “I know it sounds insane, after this past couple of days. But think about it, River. You can carry on at Slough House, which you just know is designed to kill your spirit. Or you can come join me and do some serious good. I promise you. What we’re doing, what we started at Les Arbres—it’s about protecting all those things you hold dear. About making a difference.”

River said, “What do you mean, this past couple of days? For me, this all started last night. What happened before then?”

And as the tip of Frank’s cigarette glowed bright again, he realised he already knew.

“I turn my back for five minutes,” said Lamb.

Catherine had found some plastic ties in a drawer, the kind that tightened onto themselves, and had to be cut loose. With them, Coe had secured Patrice to the radiator, which—if she hadn’t prevailed on Shirley to turn it off—would have scorched his flesh by now, adding burnt meat to the other smells crowding Slough House: the gunpowdery whiff of a discharged firearm, and the leakage from two fatal head wounds. Only Lamb’s voice was a normal sound. Everything else was stunned and reduced, like a recording of its own echo. Even the heating, running down to zero, failed to summon its usual clamour: the bangs and ticks from the ancient pipework were a half-hearted symphony, a weary requiem.

“I said—”

“We heard. Now is not the time.”

Lamb gave her a savage smile. “When’s good for you? If I hadn’t come back, there’d be seven corpses, not two. You’re supposed to be secret service, not sitting ducks.”

He was holding the bottle he’d brought Patrice down with, his fingers curled around its neck. The way he was caressing it, you might think it was his favourite survivor.

But Catherine shook her head. No. We’re all his joes, and he’s just lost two.

She said, “We need to call the Park.”

“We’ll call the Park when I say so.”

“We’ve got two fatalities, Jackson, and we can’t just—”

“Like I said. When I say so.” He kicked Patrice’s foot. “Show me this video.”

Ho fiddled with his phone, then passed it over. Lamb watched the YouTube moment, sneered, then tossed the phone back. Ho caught it, nearly, then went scrabbling about on the floor.

Lamb kicked Patrice again. “You kill Cartwright too?”

Patrice was conscious, but hadn’t spoken yet. Maybe he couldn’t. Once he’d gone down Lamb had stamped on his face, just to be sure, and he currently had fewer teeth than he’d started the day with. His jaw was a purple mess, his jacket and shirt blood-soaked. Lamb’s shoe hadn’t got off scot-free, come to that, but he wasn’t avidly image-conscious, so didn’t mind.

“You listening?”

“I can make him talk,” Shirley said quietly.

“I don’t doubt it.”

She’d do it the way Marcus had shown her: with a cloth over the face, and a jugful of water.

“Seriously, I can—”

“No.” But Lamb too spoke quietly.

Shirley had Patrice’s gun. It still reeked; something that didn’t get mentioned much in the movies, in the books. Her hands would be stained with its residue. Anyone would think she’d pulled a trigger.

The room seemed curiously empty, given there were five of them. Six if you counted Patrice. But no Marcus. Nobody was going to be counting Marcus again.

Lamb looked at Catherine. “The old man okay?”

She nodded. It was the first thing she’d checked. Moira Tregorian had fainted when Catherine opened the door. She was still upstairs, descent being beyond her yet. Catherine had rescued the bottle of whisky from her drawer—its long-term purpose being to lure Jackson back from a clifftop, or encourage him over one; whichever situation cropped up first—and had poured both David and Moira a hefty slug. As for herself, she’d wavered. For half a second, maybe less, she’d spent a small eternity balanced on the rim of a glass.

Ho had recovered his phone, and was leaning against River’s desk. He looked smaller—diminished—they all did. They really needed to call the Park. The police, even. This was Lamb’s kingdom, but kingship had its limits.

Lamb said, “If he killed River, I doubt he bothered to bury him after. Someone check the news, see if there are bodies on the streets.”

Nobody moved.

“Did I die too, and not notice? Because if I’m a ghost, I’ll tell you this. I go whoo, you fucking jump.”

“I’ll do it,” said Ho.

Catherine thought he sounded about twelve.

On River’s desk were the contents of Patrice’s pockets: a passport in the name of Paul Wayne, a mobile phone, a wallet containing euros and sterling. A ticket for the chunnel train. Did it still get called the chunnel? She hadn’t heard that in years. On his way past the desk, she noticed, Ho lifted the mobile. She didn’t doubt Lamb saw this too, but he said nothing.

JK Coe was against the wall. His head was uncovered, and his hands jammed into his hoodie’s pouch. Catherine could read nothing in his eyes, which were fixed on Patrice, who despite the damage Lamb had wrought was not only conscious but alert, as if the blood and associated liquids pooling from his jaw were a mask, beneath which he was planning his escape.

She shuddered. When he’d kicked through the door, gun in hand, she was sure she was on her last breath.

I could really use a drink, she thought; unsure whether it was a memory from that moment, or the same need reaching the surface again.

Lamb dropped to his haunches suddenly; did so without a sound, though there were times he’d audibly creak and groan if he had to do anything strenuous, like reach into a pocket. His face inches from Patrice’s he said, “Are you the last of them? Or is your bossman, Frank, is he around too?”

Patrice’s eyes betrayed no emotion. His lips didn’t move. Catherine didn’t think his lips moved. It was hard to tell, though, messed up as his face was.

She said, “It’s not going to work, Jackson. He’s not going to talk.”

Lamb looked up at her, and for a moment there was something in his eyes she’d never seen before, and then it was gone. She wasn’t sure what it had been.

Roderick Ho appeared. He was holding Patrice’s phone.

“There’s only one number been called from this,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And if I piggyback on the Service program—”

“You can trace it,” said Lamb. “So what are you hanging about for?”

Louisa had finished her coffee and was having a pee when her phone rang, of course. She’d have ignored it, except it was Lamb.

Knowing him, he’d register the acoustic, and that was all she’d hear about for weeks.

“Yeah,” she said, trying to keep her voice low, so it wouldn’t bounce off the porcelain.

“Where are you?”

“A bar off Pentonville. What’s up?”

Because he didn’t sound normal.

“How soon can you get to the Embankment?”

“What’s happened, Lamb? Who got hurt?”

She didn’t want to say “killed,” but that’s what she meant. Last time she’d heard Lamb sound like this—

“I ask how fast you can get somewhere, I don’t expect you to waste time asking questions. Call me on the way.”

He disconnected.

She finished up, washed her hands, collected Emma on her way out the door.

“Where are we going?”

“Embankment.” Her car was boxed in, but with a little nudge to the vehicle in front, she got loose.

Best to think about stuff like that, and about how it was still raining, and the best route to the Embankment, rather than anything more serious.

Like: who just got hurt, or worse.

Given Lamb’s failure to make any loo-based jokes, it was probably worse.

River said, “Westacres. Oh, you crazy fucker. Westacres is what happened. That’s what started this off.”

“Son—”

River punched him. It felt so good, for so many reasons, that he did it again: on the nose, then on the right cheek. Frank fell back against the railings and rainwater poured onto him. He shook his head, spraying water, then touched his nose, which was bleeding. He found a handkerchief, dabbed at the blood, and said, “Seriously, two free shots, and that’s the best you can do? Maybe Slough House is what you deserve.”

He put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

Three cars went past in succession, heading west, towards where the earlier action had been.

Frank said, “It wasn’t meant to happen. It was an exercise, an exercise in what’s possible. What can happen when the state doesn’t protect its people, when—”

“You fucking madman, you sent one of your boys—”

“No. Not sent. Not to do what he did. He was—he went over the edge. Maybe I should have seen it coming. Maybe nobody could have. I don’t know. But it happened, and it’s a damn tragedy, but you know what? Some good might yet come of it. And wouldn’t you want to be part of that?”

River couldn’t reply. Didn’t have the language.

Frank’s nose was still bleeding, and he pinched it with his fingers. Then shook his head. “We’re running out of time, son. I need to know what you plan to do.”

“You seriously think I might join you?”

“I hoped so. Or maybe I knew you wouldn’t. Maybe I just wanted to see you, talk to you. We could have been something, you know that? It gives me a kick, you going into the Service. A chip off the old block, and you didn’t even know it.”

“My grandfather raised me,” River said. “Everything I am’s because of him. You’re just a fucking lunatic. If you are my father, that’s an accident of birth. But you were the accident, not me.” He did something he didn’t remember ever doing before, and spat at Frank’s feet. “And you’re right, you’re running out of time. You’ve seen me, talked to me. Now I’m taking you in.”

“Oh hell,” said Frank. “I really didn’t want to hear that. Because I don’t want to hurt you, son, but I really don’t need the security services on my heels just yet.”

“Too bad,” said River.

“And I’m guessing you don’t have a phone with you, or you’d have used it by now. So tell you what. Give me ten minutes, okay? All I’ll need. Ten minutes. Then raise all the alarms you want.” He reached out suddenly, grabbed River by the elbow, and pulled him into an embrace. Into his ear he said, “Your place is with me, son. Not with that pack of losers. Think about it. We’ll talk again.”

River tried to pull away, but the older man’s grip was iron. “I’m not giving you ten minutes,” he said. “I’m not giving you one.”

“That’s my boy. But you don’t have a choice.” He kissed River hard, on the lips; a brief and violent contact.

And then lifted him off the ground and threw him over the low wall into the Thames.

The gun in Shirley’s hand grew heavier.

It was odd, but all she wanted to do was sleep. Earlier that day, she’d been pissed off at missing the action—even seeing Louisa’s chain-gang bruises hadn’t mollified her: she’d have liked to have been there in that Southwark garage, see if she’d have fared better. But now Patrice was tied to a radiator, wearing half a pint of blood on his jaw, and Marcus—Marcus was still downstairs. And she felt so damn tired, so very very tired. She wanted to put the gun down, crawl under the nearest duvet and sleep for a week. Wouldn’t need medication. Just let her head hit a pillow, and please don’t let her dream.

Especially not about Marcus, and the mess on the wall behind his head.

JK Coe was looking at her with his usual absence of expression.

“What?” she snarled.

Funny how she could still do that, go from nought to sixty on the pissed-off-ometer in the time it took Coe to blink.

And then it returned, crashed in like a wave: a weary tsunami threatening to lift her up and toss her away like a broken puppet.

Lamb was talking to Louisa again. “No, I don’t know what he looks like. He’s an American, that any help? And maybe he’s got Cartwright with him.”

There was that tinny sussuration you get when the other part of the conversation’s happening somewhere else.

“Why? What possible use is talking to her gunna be?”

There was another squawk of static from his mobile, following which he handed it to Catherine.

“For some reason she wants to talk to you.”

Catherine took the phone and left the room. Shirley could hear her talking to Louisa, quietly, as she made her way up the stairs. And then a door closed, and her soothing murmur was cut off.

Lamb looked around at what was left of the company: Shirley Dander, Coe and Roderick Ho. “So she’s telling Guy we’ve lost two. You think that’s a good idea? Think that’ll put her at her operational best?”

Nobody had an answer. Nobody knew anything.

For once, Lamb didn’t press the point. Instead, he made a cigarette appear out of nowhere, and lit it. He looked grey. He always looked grey, more or less, but was now a shade greyer. He dragged in smoke, blew a cloud at the ceiling, and said to Shirley, “Made your mind up yet?”

Shirley stared.

He said, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but your partner’s head looks like someone took a shovel to a watermelon. If you’re happy to let the wheels of justice take their course, that’s up to you. But if you want to discuss matters with the Terminator here, you go ahead. I’m going for a smoke.” He flapped the hand holding his cigarette. “You’re not allowed to do that indoors any more.”

Ho watched as Lamb left the room, then looked at Shirley nervously.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Then fuck off.”

So he did; following Lamb part way down the stairs, then peeling off into his own office, closing the door behind him.

JK Coe stayed where he was.

Shirley said, “You too.”

“Me too what?”

“Fuck off.”

He shook his head.

“I’m not going to ask twice.”

“You didn’t ask once yet. You just told me to fuck off.”

“So why haven’t you?”

“Because it’s my office. Where’m I supposed to fuck off to?”

“That’s more words than I’ve heard you say before,” she said. “Put together.”

“Yeah, well. Big day.”

Patrice coughed; a thick, phlegmy noise.

It startled Shirley. She’d more or less forgotten he was there; as if he’d ceased to have human significance, and been reduced to one factor in an equation, the others being Shirley herself, the gun in her hand, and the half-second it would take to act.

The gun, which still felt so very very heavy.

JK Coe said to her, “You don’t want to do this, do you?”

But she really did.

“Fuck it!” said Louisa. “Fuck it fuck it fuck it!”

“What?” Emma said. “What happened? That was Lamb?”

Louisa shook her head. The lights of London blurred. She was driving through heavy rain, and had just been told Marcus was dead, Bad Sam Chapman too . . .

Marcus, dead.

Marcus had saved her life once, on London’s tallest rooftop. He’d shot a man who’d been about to kill her, and Louisa’s only regret was that she hadn’t been able to kill the bastard herself. And this afternoon too, bursting through those wooden gates in a commandeered taxi: if he hadn’t done that—shit, she’d be dead all over again. Dead twice over if not for Marcus.

She’d never met his family, never been to his home—Christ, they were a dysfunctional bunch, the slow horses; in each other’s pockets half their lives, but never taking the time to share the other moments.

And now they’d be diminished, smaller, less of a unit. Marcus, apart from anything else, had probably been the only thing keeping Shirley Dander from going postal on a daily basis.

“You okay?” Emma asked.

Louisa nodded, and blinked her vision clear.

“This is Patrice we’re hunting?”

“One of his team.”

“Good enough.” Emma unbuttoned her coat, and checked her weapon.

“I thought you’d lost that.”

“I took Devon’s. He’s not going to need it in A&E.” She thought about that. “He’s probably not going to need it in A&E. How much further?”

“Blackfriars Bridge,” Louisa said. “Next one.”

Emma squinted through the windshield. “There’s some kind of commotion up ahead. That’ll be our stop, right?”

There were roadworks, metal fencing dividing the road in two. On the river side, there was no road surface, and plastic bollards blocked the way. Temporary traffic lights herded traffic into single file, shepherding them left. Louisa pulled right instead, ploughed through a row of bollards, and hit the brakes so hard the back of the vehicle was briefly airborne.

“Jesus!” Emma shouted.

A cluster of people at the end of the dazzle ship’s jetty were examining the water below in a manner suggesting emergency. Despite being winded, Emma was out of the car first. Something about her—the bruise on her face?—must have conveyed authority, because the crowd parted for her, offering overlapping commentary:

“We can’t see him!”

“He’s gone under!”

“There were two of them—”

“The other one legged it.”

“What happened?” she said, and was echoed immediately by Louisa:

“Who’s in the water?”

A man in a blue coat said, “There were two of them out here, acting odd. An older bloke and a young man, fairish hair—”

“Who’s in the water?” Louisa repeated.

“The old one tipped the young guy over the side. I saw him from the bar window.”

The water below was black and rained-on and furious.

“Oh, fucking hell,” said Louisa.

An orange lifebelt bobbed lonely on the surface. There was no sign of anyone reaching for it.

Louisa pulled her coat off.

“What?” said Emma.

“Go after him—the old guy. Find him. Stop him. Now.” Then she said “Fucking hell” again, and peeled her shoes off.

Emma said, “Which direction did he go?”

The man in the blue coat pointed, and Emma ran.

Louisa climbed onto the wall and scanned the water. There was no sign of River. The rain was pummelling down, and she was already as wet as she’d ever been—she waited one second for someone to tell her not to be stupid, but the group had fallen unaccountably silent. There was a police car approaching, and police cars were famously loaded with heroes, and would soon deliver someone more professional, more trained, and more prepared to jump into the Thames. But the longer she hung here, the longer River spent underwater. Fucking hell, she thought again. But before the second syllable had formed, she was airborne, and then she wasn’t.

When he’d hit the water, his lights had gone out. Not far to fall, perhaps, but a little too far to be thrown: any surface was going to welcome him the way gravity welcomes the apple—it rattled him to the core; stole his breath, then swallowed his body, wrapping him in a bone-numbing cold that somehow held the promise of warmth later. And he didn’t know which way was up. He kicked, and seemed to move, but his lungs were bursting—he tried to turn, but everything felt heavy, his shoes, his coat, his limbs. Every action pushed him further into darkness. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open. Soon his lungs would give up, and he would be forced to inhale. After that, the darkness would be complete.

His hand brushed something, he didn’t know what. He reached for it, but it was gone. And then he felt his body slowing down. Why fight it? He was in the river. It had been bound to end this way. He was drifting face down, and there was a light somewhere but it couldn’t reach him. He’d gone too deep. Slowly, slowly, River gave up. He breathed deep, and filled himself with water. After that, there were only two possible directions he could go. It was with some relief that he noticed he seemed to be heading upwards.

Most times of day the Thameside Path was kerb-to-wall joggers, only slightly less cavalier than cyclists in regard to legitimate pavement-users, but Emma was on her own as she hared under Blackfriars Bridge, its ice-cream colouring lost to the night and the weather. Everything was shades of grey, barring the odd blur in her peripheral vision—she was regretting those tequilas, regretting the beer they sandwiched, but was propelled onwards by the thought of having someone in her sights; a way to reclaim the day. Success would mean the sack of woe she’d laid out to Louisa in the bar could be knotted and dumped in the river.

Thoughts of Diana Taverner being dumped in that same sack, maybe with a couple of angry weasels for company, were a comfort . . .

Her breath was heavy, blood hammering in her ears, but there was a figure ahead of her so she ratched it up a notch, her footsteps echoing against the underside of the bridge. He must have heard her, but didn’t turn; he stepped, instead, into a halo of streetlight which transformed the rain into a torrent of gemstones, then disappeared up the flight of steps leading roadward.

Emma slipped, crashed into the wall, just managed to keep her balance—Christ, she could have ended up in the water too. She shouted after the vanishing man, and didn’t realise until she’d heard herself that the word she shouted was Police. She was so winded it sounded more like a bark. Reaching the stairs she took them three at a time, her legs rubbery. Round the dog-leg corner, more steps, and she was on the bridge itself, where everything was louder, noisier—a bus passed; a big red box of curious shapes behind steamed-up windows, but the pavement was bare as a singleton’s cupboard: no vanishing man. She turned, checked the other direction: the same. He’d come up the stairs, but hadn’t reached the top.

Think.

A blue light was spinning on the other side of the road, a police car turning onto the bridge from the Embankment. A black van, too. The nasty squad. They’d be alert for mischief after Pentonville Road, and she had a gun in her pocket. Entirely legitimate, but accidents happened. She turned and went back down the steps. Level with the landing, upright in the Thames, sat a temporary structure bearing a winch or crane of some sort, alongside a workman’s hut and assorted junk impossible to make out in the dark. Whatever it was for, bridge maintenance or riverbed dredging, it was the only place the vanishing man could be. He must have jumped, and given how close behind him she was, must have done so without hesitation. Reached the landing, saw the platform, climbed onto the wall and jumped. Some nerve.

She peered across. There was one light, set into the deck, illuminating the bridge. Everything else was in shadow, and there was no movement that couldn’t be explained by the rain and the rocking of the river. Here, leaning out over the water, the rain sounded different. It hit the river with a constant hiss, as if large machinery were operating nearby.

The gap between the thigh-high wall enclosing the staircase and the edge of the platform was a couple of yards at most.

Which wasn’t much. A distance she’d not think twice about jumping most days of the week; but most days of the week it wasn’t raining, she wasn’t pissed, there wasn’t a cold deep river down below. But he couldn’t have gone anywhere else. He had to be on that platform, behind that hut, crouched in the shadow of that crane or winch—stop overthinking it; make the bloody jump. She stepped up onto the wall, made the beginner’s error of looking down, and it might have all been over in that same second if some survival instinct hadn’t kicked in, the kind that decided she might as well jump as step back onto the nice safe stairs. Maybe not a survival instinct, then. Maybe her internal idiot. Either way, she jumped, and for half a moment was a statistic waiting to happen, and then landed on the platform, its wooden decking solid as a road, but twice as slippery. She went down on her hands and knees, and had to grab one of the crane’s metal joists to haul herself up. Some of the shapes took solid form: crates and buckets and a toolbox, some metal poles and an industrial-sized bobbin wrapped with cable. And then there was movement from behind the toilet-sized cabin; it might have been a shadow flung from the far bank of the river, except shadows didn’t assemble themselves into solid human shapes. The vanishing man stepped out of the dark and unvanished.

“You’re under arrest,” she told him.

He punched her in the face.

Or would have done; she leaned sideways and his fist missed her by a whisker, but she slipped and went down again anyway. Her coat, she thought—her coat was going to be such a mess. Partly because she’d just landed on her back in an oily puddle. But mostly because her hand had just found her Service weapon—Devon’s Service weapon—and as she pulled it from her shoulder holster it snagged on her coat’s lining, so the shot she fired tore a nasty hole parallel to its middle button. She didn’t hit him—hadn’t intended to—but she stopped him in his tracks.

“I should have fucking mentioned,” she said. “Stop or I shoot.”

And suddenly there were bees everywhere, a swarm of bright red bees dancing around her; around the vanishing man too, who looked down at her with quite a charming grin. He raised his hands above his head, though kept his eyes on Emma rather than raise them to the bridge where the nasty squad had gathered, their laser-sighted guns trained on the pair of them. A metallic voice was suggesting she drop her weapon now. She dropped her weapon. And still they danced, the flight of red bees, humming over her upper body as if awaiting the order to dive and sting. It could easily happen. She’d be the last to know. But even that couldn’t stop Emma doing what she did next, which was roll sideways and vomit two tequila shots, a beer and two black coffees.

Some of which went on her coat.

Shirley said, “Like fuck I don’t. Right now, it’s all I want to do.”

She was still holding the gun; Patrice was still chained to the radiator. JK Coe was leaning against the wall, which seemed to be his preferred location. Because, it occurred to her, standing like that, nobody could come up behind him.

But someone could come up behind her, and did.

Catherine said, “Shirley, Marcus is dead. Nothing can change that. And if you kill this man now, it will haunt you forever.”

“I’ve killed men before.”

“While they were chained to a radiator?”

She didn’t reply.

“This is different,” Catherine explained.

Shirley thought: I can handle different. What she couldn’t handle was the thought of this man walking around a world he’d ejected Marcus from.

She raised the gun and levelled it at Patrice, who watched her without changing expression.

But the gun felt heavy in her hand.

Catherine said, “Shirley. Please. If you kill him like this, you might never sleep again.”

“Sleep’s overrated.”

“Take it from me, it’s really not. Sometimes it’s the only thing that can get you out of bed in the morning. The knowledge that you can get back into it come night.”

“He was my friend.”

“He was mine too. He was a good man. And he wouldn’t want you to do this.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

JK Coe said, “She’s right.”

“What?”

“Marcus wouldn’t want you to kill him.”

“How would you know?”

“Psych Eval. Remember?”

The gun felt so very very heavy.

“Marcus thought you were a prick,” she told him.

“He was your friend, not mine.”

Catherine said, “Shirley. This isn’t an op. It would be an execution.”

“I don’t care.”

“You will.”

It felt like the heaviest thing she’d ever held in her hand.

“I don’t want him to be alive when Marcus isn’t,” she said.

“I know.”

“He should die.”

“But you shouldn’t kill him.”

Silently, Coe offered his hand. She looked at it, then at the gun in her own. Then at Patrice, who was still on his back, cuffed to the radiator. A short time ago, he’d been indestructible; storming Slough House, killing Marcus, killing Sam.

Shirley really wanted him dead.

But she didn’t want to kill him. Not like this.

And she felt so very very tired.

She heard Catherine sigh softly as she lowered the gun into Coe’s waiting hand.

Anger Fucking Management. Marcus would be proud.

Then Coe shot Patrice three times in the chest.

“There you go,” he said, and handed the gun back to Shirley.

River rolled and threw up Thames water, then opened his eyes. He was staring at wet pavement. He rolled again and a blurry face, inches from his own, took shape, slipped out of focus, then slipped back in again.

“Louisa,” he said, or tried to. It came out “Larghay.”

“In future,” she told him, “pick up a fucking phone, yeah?”

Then she pulled away and all he could see was the rain, still steadily falling.

In the glow from the streetlights, the drops looked like diamonds.

The rain had stopped, which was such a longed-for, such an unexpected outcome, that all around the city people were saying it twice: the rain has stopped. The rain has stopped. Slough House was all but empty that night, twenty-four hours after the attack. There was still a stain on the wall behind what had been Marcus’s desk; another on the carpet in Louisa’s room, where Bad Sam had fallen; and a third in Coe and Cartwright’s office, beneath the radiator. But the bodies had been removed, and someone, probably Catherine, had cleared away the smashed chair and assorted debris. The broken doors were propped against walls, waiting for the paperwork to go through enough channels that somebody, somewhere, would give up and sign a chitty allowing them to be replaced. Until then, Slough House would be largely open-plan.

Jackson Lamb’s door was undamaged, but stood ajar, allowing a little grey light to spill onto the landing. The room opposite, once Catherine Standish’s, was in darkness, though its door too was open. And on the stairs was a noise, a series of noises, made by someone on their way up; someone unused to the creaking staircase, the damp walls, the various odours of neglect in the stairwell, which it would take industrial solvents or environmental catastrophe to shift.

When Claude Whelan reached the uppermost landing he paused, as if unsure the ascent had been worth it.

“In here,” something growled.

Suppressing a shudder, he went in.

Lamb was behind his desk. His shoeless feet rested on top of it, his right heel showing through a hole in one sock, and most of his toes through a hole in the other. There was a bottle in front of him, and a glass in his hand, whose emptiness was presumably a temporary anomaly. The room’s only light source was to his right, a lamp set on a thigh-level ziggurat of dusty books: telephone directories, Whelan thought. An analogue man in a digital world. Whether that was obsolescence or survival trait, time would tell.

He said, “Legend doesn’t do this place justice.”

Lamb seemed to consider several responses before settling for a fart.

“Or you,” Whelan added.

“Maybe leave the door as it is,” Lamb suggested.

There was a visitor’s chair, so Whelan took it.

Not much of Lamb’s office could be seen in the gloom. A blind was drawn over the only window; a cork noticeboard hung on one wall. And there was a clock somewhere, which Whelan couldn’t see; instead of ticking it made a steady tap-tap noise, a dull repetition which seemed to underline how appalling the passage of time could be.

Lamb refilled his glass, then reluctantly waved the bottle in Whelan’s direction. When Whelan shook his head, he set it down again, unstoppered. “Can’t remember the last time we had First Desk here,” he said. “No, hang on, yes I can. Never.”

“We don’t usually make housecalls,” said Whelan. “But in the circumstances . . . ”

“What, dead agents? Yeah, that’s always a photo op.” Lamb rested his glass on his chest, his meaty fingers embracing it. “Did you tie a teddy to a lamp post?”

Whelan said, “You wanted a meeting. We could have done this at the Park.”

“Yeah. But that would have involved me making the effort instead of you. Frank coughing his guts up?”

If the sudden switch fazed Whelan, he hid it well. “He’s been . . . cooperative.”

“I’ll bet.”

“We’ve not had to adopt unorthodox measures to make him talk, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Lamb said, “I was thinking you’d have to get seriously innovative to shut him up. I mean, he told Cartwright his life story. It’s not like he’s shy.” He raised the glass to his mouth without taking his eyes off Whelan. He resembled a hippo enjoying a wallow. “But what surprises me is you took him alive. I’d have thought Lady Di would have had the trigger pulled as soon as he broke cover.”

“That was her stated preference, yes.”

Lamb looked interested. “You overruled her?”

“We’d reached a point where I either agreed to do her bidding evermore, or drew a line in the sand. And there’d been quite enough blood shed in London’s streets for one week.”

“Not only its streets,” said Lamb. “So what’s he had to say for himself?”

Whelan shifted in his chair. He was finding it difficult not to stare at Lamb’s feet. It was like catching sight of a joint of meat hanging in a butcher’s window and wondering what the hell that had been when it was still attached to its body. He said, “Lamb, your team’s been at the sharp end, I appreciate that. And you’ve suffered a loss. But that doesn’t make you privy to classified intelligence. What Frank’s had to say is being analysed as we speak. And in due course there’ll be a report. But it’ll be eyes-only, and your eyes won’t be on the list, I’m afraid.”

Or anywhere near it.

Lamb nodded thoughtfully. “Good point. I mean, a lot of this has gotta be pretty sensitive, right?”

“Precisely.”

“Like how Frank’s whole operation was originally funded and resourced by the Service. I presume that’ll be bullet point one when the report’s finished.”

The tap-tap-tapping, Whelan belatedly realised, wasn’t time hammering away but water dripping, off a loose section of guttering perhaps. Leaks can happen anywhere.

He said, “I’m not entirely sure it would be in everyone’s interests for that . . . supposition to be made official.”

“So Lady Di’s influence hasn’t left you entirely unsoiled.”

“I wasn’t wholly naïve to start with, you know.”

“We’ll get to that later,” Lamb said. “You sure you don’t want a drink?”

“I don’t want to deprive you. Your bottle’s nearly half empty.”

“I know where I can lay my hands on a fresh one.” He indicated a second glass, hiding behind the phone on his desk. To Whelan’s surprise, it looked more or less clean.

He’d never acquired a taste for whisky. More of a brandy man. But he was developing the sense that he wasn’t going to get through this conversation unaided, so this time accepted the offer.

While Lamb poured, he said, “There, that makes this just a nice friendly chat, doesn’t it? Colleagues winding down after a hard week. Nothing official about it.”

“If you’d come to the Park,” Whelan said, “there’d be a recording.”

“Now you’re getting it.” Lamb leaned back. “Bad Sam Chapman put in some hard years for the Park, and he was a good soldier. Leastways apart from losing all that money he was. And Longridge had his moments when he wasn’t pissing his salary away on the slot machines. And if nothing else, I reckon I’m owed something for the mess they’ve made of my carpets. So let’s hear the edited highlights of Frank’s post-Agency career, shall we? All unofficial, like.”

A good operative, Whelan had heard, knew how to make a threat sound like a digression.

He took a sip of whisky. He had spent all day at the Park; had arrived there before dawn, leaving Claire asleep—he’d looked in, but hadn’t wakened her—and for most of the hours since had been watching, rewatching, footage of Frank Harkness. Lamb was right: getting him to talk hadn’t been a problem. It rarely was, with unhinged narcissists.

“You know about Les Arbres,” he said.

“A nursery for terrorists,” Lamb said. “Yeah, I’d grasped that much. What was he doing, training them in black ops before they’d done their ABCs?”

“Pretty much. And there was a KGB hood too, who specialised in what Harkness called mental calibration.” Whelan sighed, and let his head rest on the back of his chair. What he could see of the ceiling was a scarred, cobwebby expanse of distempered plaster. “You know what Harkness identified as the biggest threat to our way of life? Here in the west?”

“Radio One?”

“That we encourage our kids to think for themselves. While those who’d bring our towers down teach their children to sacrifice their lives without a moment’s thought. No, more than that. Teach them that death, their own and ours, is their victory, their apotheosis. And we’re trying to fight them with kids who’ve grown up thinking their Smartphones are a human right.”

“And Frank thought this paranoid bullshit made him a visionary?” said Lamb. “He should have written a blog. Saved us all a lot of grief.”

“He’s not entirely without a point.”

“And the west isn’t entirely without weapons of mass destruction. Let’s not pretend we’re babes in the wood.”

“Either way,” Whelan said, “what Harkness wanted was that same dedication, the same energies, only—as he put it—on our side.”

“Jesus wept,” said Lamb. “And that’s what he got.”

“And that’s what he got. Eventually. A troupe of young men trained in all the black arts at Frank’s disposal. Which, seeing as his crew was made up of a bunch of former Cold War warriors, was pretty much all of them.”

Lamb was empty again. He remedied this situation, making sure that it wouldn’t reoccur in the foreseeable future by filling his glass to the brim. “Then what?” he said.

Whelan said, “There have been several . . . events, over recent years.”

“‘Events.’ There’s an administrator’s word.”

“Frank’s team ran terror operations in cities throughout Europe. Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, Barcelona, others. Some quite small towns too. Pisa. That struck me as odd, I don’t know why. But lots of tourists, I suppose.”

“I assume these were fairly quiet terror jobs,” Lamb said. “On account of I don’t remember hearing about them.”

“They were dry runs. Unarmed, though fully functional, bombs left in strategic places. Water sources ‘poisoned’ with harmless but visible pollutants. Food distribution outlets, travel networks, energy suppliers, hotels—all compromised in specific, targeted operations.”

“He was playing games.”

“He claims that after each operation, security was tightened not only at the target site but throughout the city, and even nationally. Loopholes were plugged. Weak links dispensed with.”

“Did it not occur to him to write the odd letter?”

Whelan said, “We both know that wouldn’t have had the slightest effect.”

“You sound like you approve of what he’s been up to.”

“Each operation he undertook, he attempted to duplicate within the year. In all but one case, he was unable to do so.”

“Well, rah-de-fucking rah for him.”

“His point, he says, is we’re sleepwalking into catastrophe. If IS, or whoever comes next, gets serious—his words—they could level whole towns with little more effort and coordination than it’s taken them so far to become the global bogeyman. Paris is attacked and the whole world trembles, but how many people died? One hundred and thirty? Harkness estimates the theoretical bodycount his team have racked up to be into the thousands, and he counts those as lives saved. Because they couldn’t happen again.”

“Until Westacres put a dent in his average.”

Whelan looked up at the ceiling again. “As you say.”

Lamb put his glass down for the first time since Whelan had entered his office. From his pocket he produced a grey rag which turned out to be a handkerchief. He blew his nose, examined the results, raised his eyebrows, and tucked the handkerchief back out of sight. Then reached for his glass again. “Let me guess. One of his mentally recalibrated robots blew its wiring.”

“That’s the risk he was always running,” said Whelan. “But it didn’t seem to have occurred to him. He thought he’d raised a troupe of perfect soldiers. They had firearm skills, explosives skills, they knew how to live under the radar. But the whole point of the Cuckoo program was, the subjects have to believe they’re who they’ve been trained to be. He wanted terrorists, and that’s what he got. At least in one instance. He was called Yves, by the way. If it matters.”

“And not Robert Winters,” said Lamb.

“No. Well. False IDs were part of the process.”

“Pretty professional ones too, I imagine.” Lamb produced a cigarette from somewhere and plugged it into the side of his mouth. “That would have been part of the set-up package, wouldn’t it? Along with the explosives he used for his suicide overcoat. I mean, I can’t imagine him waltzing through the tunnel with that little lot in his hand luggage. That would really be putting the lax into relaxed.”

“No,” said Whelan after a pause. “They were already here. Frank had a cache from a raid on an armoury back in the early nineties. It was thought at the time to be an IRA operation, but . . . ”

“But it was Frank acting on information received. And we all know where the information came from.” Lamb lit his cigarette, and was momentarily wreathed in blue fumes. When it cleared, his eyes seemed yellow. “The same place as the funds used to set up Les Arbres in the first place.”

“You’ll understand we’re not particularly anxious to have that feature in the report,” Whelan said.

“Oh, I can see it might not play well down the corridor,” Lamb said. “I mean, we’re supposed to be protecting the citizenry. Not providing the wherewithal for lunatics to massacre it.” He breathed smoke. “So one of his mini-mes blows a gasket and performs a wet run instead of a dry one. Which is why Frank has to scorch the earth. David Cartwright being top of his list.”

“We’re still not clear on Sam Chapman’s role,” Whelan said.

“He carried Cartwright’s bags back in the day. Including to Les Arbres.”

“Ah.” He waved a hand to dispel Lamb’s smoke. “That’s one of the areas Harkness wasn’t so forthcoming about.”

“Alongside how he got Cartwright on board by putting his daughter up the duff? There’s an angle they don’t teach you at spook school. But shall I tell you what’s more interesting right now?” Lamb inhaled deeply, and when he spoke his voice was pinched. “Your use of the past tense. Wasn’t so forthcoming. Had an accident, has he?”

“Not . . . exactly.”

Lamb stared, and it seemed to Whelan his yellow eyes became tinged with red. “You’re not fucking telling me you’ve let him go.”

“As we’ve established,” said Whelan, “the full story is not one we want becoming public knowledge. And he still has comrades out there, don’t forget. If we . . . wrap a black ribbon round his file—”

“Or put a bullet in his head.”

“—we can be sure it’ll come back to haunt us.”

“And having him alive means it won’t?”

“We do what we can,” Whelan said. “But we’re at the mercy of events. This is one huge mess we’re dealing with. It’s not possible to clean it up. The best we can hope for is to . . . minimise the repercussions.”

“So he creates fucking havoc trying to keep his story secret, and we end up doing his job for him? He’ll be wanting a sponsorship deal next time. Where is he now?”

“He slipped the leash about ten minutes after hitting the street.”

“There’s absolutely no part of this in which we come out looking good, is there?”

“Not really, no.”

“Plus ça bloody change. I swear to God I’d defect, if there was anywhere worth defecting to these days.” He emptied his glass.

Whelan took another sip from his own, then set it down, still mostly full, on Lamb’s desk. “Other business,” he said. “I’ve set the wheels in motion for Longridge’s death-in-service payment. Five years of salary, tax free. It should come through by the end of the week. Beginning of next at the latest. You might want to let his wife know.”

“Five years,” said Lamb.

“Standard terms.”

“Except Longridge was operational.”

“He was what?”

“What I just said. Operational. As in, on an op.”

Whelan said, “As I understand it, Slough House is deskbound.”

“But I have managerial discretion. Says so somewhere, I can’t be arsed to find the paperwork. Anyway, I sent Longridge and Guy out on the streets yesterday afternoon, and until such time as I sign off on his field report, his status remains operational. Doesn’t look like he’s going to be doing any typing anytime soon. Therefore . . . ”

“Seriously?”

“He qualifies for the active agent increment. Ten years, not five. Or his family does. Money won’t work where he’s gone.”

Whelan shook his head. “That’ll never get through Legal. I barely accept it as English myself.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not going through Legal. Sign off on it in the morning, and pass it on to Finance. Lady Di’s still letting you sign things, right?”

“Lamb, I have every sympathy. You lost an agent. But the active increment only applies to joes in the field, and with the best will in the world—”

“See, the thing is, shut the fuck up. Let me explain why. Moira Tregorian—remember her? She’s the superannuated dinnerlady you sent over here, day one of your reign—she spent a lot of time with old man Cartwright yesterday, and gave me what I assure you was a very thorough debriefing. I’ve got pissed in less time than it takes her to finish a sentence. Anyway, one of the details she shared was his recitation of the names of the knights of the round table, which he launched himself upon on account of having lost his marbles, and this got her worrying about where she’d heard the name Galahad lately.” Lamb leaned back. “Ever heard Moira Tregorian trying to remember where she first heard something? It’s like, you can fuck off and read Lord of the Rings, and when you come back she’s still talking. Anyway. Long and short of it is, she still can’t remember. But I’ve got a fair idea. Want me to go on?”

Whelan found that he was holding his whisky tumbler once more; had frozen in the act of delivering it to his mouth. He said something which didn’t work, so cleared his throat and said it again. “There’s no need.”

“Ah, what the hell. We’re both men of the world. You were Galahad when you were over the river, right? She didn’t know that, but it took me thirty seconds to find out. And took my boy Ho not much longer to trawl through the duty-books for the nights Tregorian was duty officer. And guess what? There you are. Galahad, calling in a Collect request.”

“I’ve heard enough, Lamb.”

“Word is, you’re a happily married man. Making a Hollywood musical of the fact, let alone a song and dance. So how come you needed rescuing from the clutches of the Met, Claude? After they’d picked you up for kerb-crawling way out in London Fields? Quite the regular, apparently, trawling for tarts every night. Watching but not buying—always worries the working girls, that. Thought they might have a headcase on their hands.” Lamb leered. “So. Things not so rosy in the bedroom? Lovely wife a little icy where it matters?”

Whelan said, “Claire—she—it’s been some years since—look, none of this is your business, none of it. We have a very special marriage.”

“Just not a particularly active one.”

“Shut up! How dare you! What could you possibly know about . . . Just, just shut up. That’s all.”

Lamb said, “None of my business. That’s right. Or wasn’t, up until the moment you learned of your elevation to First Desk, and started worrying Tregorian might do some nasty maths—you know, putting two and two together. Not hard to square whichever Dog came round to prise you from the Met’s grasp—nothing like a promotion to ensure loyalty—but you can’t bribe a gossip, can you? Or you can, but it does no fucking good. Best thing is, get her out the way before any pennies start to drop. Bit unfair, some might call it, but that’s life in the big leagues, eh, Claude?”

“You’ve made your point.”

“Good. So anyway, Tregorian’s retiring—medical grounds. Post-traumatic bed-wetting, or whatever the PC term is. Seems all those bodies round the place have put her off coming back. So you can add sorting her pension out to your to-do list.” Lamb smiled a crocodile smile, every bit as fake as its tears. “Then she’s off both our backs.”

Whelan stared at him for what felt like a long time, though it didn’t discomfit Lamb. At last he said, “And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“What will it take to get you off my back?” He glanced around the office. “A desk at the Park?”

Lamb said, “Well, I’m glad we’ve had this little chat.” He dropped his cigarette into a mug of ancient tea, where it briefly disappeared, then bobbed to the surface, alongside several others. “I’ll expect to hear from Finance in the morning. Leave the door open, would you? I like a through draught.”

Whelan didn’t move.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Lamb. “That last bit meant fuck off. Didn’t they teach you subtle over the river?”

“They taught me lots of things,” Claude Whelan said at last. “I’m sure we’ll meet again soon.”

He drained what was left in his tumbler and placed it on Lamb’s desk. Then he left. This time, he took the stairs swiftly.

When the door downstairs slammed shut Catherine Standish appeared from the room opposite Lamb’s, and crossed the landing in her usual quiet manner.

“Do you reckon that last bit was a threat?” Lamb said.

“He certainly hoped you’d think so.”

“Huh.” He leaned across to pour the last of the whisky into the glass Whelan had been using, then pushed it nearer Catherine.

She sat.

He said, “If he survives another month of Diana Taverner, I’ll maybe start to take him seriously. Until then, he’s just a mouth in a suit. I’ve had bowel movements that worry me more.” He reflected a moment. “Quite recently, come to think of it.”

“A topic for another day,” said Catherine. “That was a good thing you did. For Cassie, I mean.”

“Who’s Cassie?”

“Marcus’s wife.”

Lamb said, “I just like fucking with Finance, you know that.”

“He didn’t say anything about Patrice.”

“No, well, they’re probably still cutting him up. Wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions about cause of death just because he’s got a few holes in him.”

Catherine picked up the tumbler and held it in front of her, using both hands, as if it were a chalice. Lamb’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything.

She said, “You stopped Shirley from making him talk.”

“Uh-huh. Missing fingernails or water-filled lungs might have made ‘self-defence’ tricky to pull off.”

“You’re aware there’ll be abrasions where we cuffed him?”

“That would account for him being so cross and dangerous when he got loose. Necessitating extreme measures.”

“Lamb—”

“For fuck’s sake. He killed an agent, not to mention an ex. You think anyone’s going to care he got his ticket punched? When they’ve finished with his body they’ll burn it and dump the ashes. Nobody’s going to be issuing warrants.”

“And what about Coe?”

Lamb said, “Yeah, Coe, you know, I think he might work out.”

“He shot an unarmed man, Jackson! Who was tied to a radiator!”

“Okay, so whoever coloured him in went over the lines. But he was doing a job. You think I was going to watch that French punk taken away in a Black Maria? When I’ve got a joe plastered over a wall downstairs?”

“So you were letting him do your dirty work? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“A good boss provides opportunities for personal growth and development. I think we were all winners, on the day.”

“Lamb, this isn’t a laughing matter. Coe needs arresting or he needs help. One or the other.”

“I don’t care. I’m losing staff at a rate of knots here.”

She said, “You once told me it didn’t matter about staff leaving. That there’d always be other fuck-ups to take their place.”

“I like it when you talk dirty. Are you going to drink that?”

“Isn’t that why you gave it to me?”

“Force of habit.”

Catherine said, “Yes, I’m aware of how habits work, thank you.”

To prove she wasn’t the only one who knew that, Lamb lit another cigarette. He inhaled, removed it from his mouth, and addressed his next question to it, rather than to Catherine. “So. Are you coming back?”

“Are you asking?”

“I just did.”

“No, you asked whether I was or not. That’s different from asking if I will.”

Lamb said, “It’s a good job you’re on the wagon. I hate to think what crap you’d come up with drunk.”

Catherine raised the glass to her lips and breathed in. She smiled a little, though to herself rather than at Lamb. Then she put it back on the desk.

Lamb retrieved it, and poured its contents into his own.

She said, “Shirley’s a mess. So is Roddy. God knows what state River’s in. And Coe . . . Well, we’ve covered Coe. He’s either PTSD or a psychopath. It would serve you right if I left you to it.”

“I’d lock ’em in a room and let ’em fight for the gun.”

“There’s always Louisa, of course. She’s pretty reliable.”

“Well, it’s a sliding scale, isn’t it?” said Lamb. “Least fucked-up employee of the week. We should have a plaque.”

“I’ll make a note,” said Catherine. Then she rose and crossed the landing to her own office, from which she emerged a moment later wearing her coat.

She made little noise on the staircase, well used to its repertoire of squeaks and groans. Even the back door behaved for once, and she exited Slough House with little effort and less noise.

A few moments later, the heating went off.

And a chill descends on Slough House, as chills are wont to do; a chill accompanied by a series of gurgles and bangs as the ancient boiler begins its nightly ordeal of sucking warmth from the air. From the top floor, this process sounds like the rattling of old tin bones, and nowhere are bones rattled more fussily than in Jackson Lamb’s office. He listens to his radiator die its death, and smokes a last cigarette, and drains a final glass. And then he rises, leaving his lamp to cast its weary glow on an empty room; he wrestles himself into his raincoat, and trudges down to the next landing, his heavy tread coaxing maximum complaint from each stair.

Outside the kitchen, he pauses. The offices here are doorless now, and he can see into Louisa Guy’s room, with its recently scrubbed and disinfected patch of carpet the approximate size and shape of Dead Sam Chapman. He does not know, but would not be surprised to learn, that Louisa is asleep already, early as it is; he suspects she has achieved some semblance of peace these past few months, and in those circumstances, sleep would be his own drug of choice. To the other side lies River Cartwright’s room; now JK Coe’s room too. Sleep is probably not on Cartwright’s immediate agenda, but then, thinks Lamb, Cartwright has some fairly radical new information to absorb; that, for instance, he owes his birth, his very existence, to the messianic schemes of one mad spook, just as he owes his lifetime since to the handed-down dreams of another. For Lamb has no doubt that David Cartwright has slipped past the point of no return; has embarked on an irrevocable descent into mental twilight, haunted by the realisation that what he helped sow across the Channel years ago has bloomed in carnage-colours on his own doorstep. How the younger Cartwright will come to terms with this—if he ever does—is, as Catherine Standish recently observed, a topic for another day; whether the older Cartwright will be brought to book for his ancient sins, Lamb wastes little time contemplating. He has been a joe most of his working life; is still a joe whenever the lights go out. And one thing joes learn quickly is that those who write the rules rarely suffer their weight.

As for Coe, Lamb meant what he said earlier to Standish: that JK Coe might work out—though, for Lamb, “working out” might not indicate as positive an outcome as that phrase usually conveys. Might be useful to Lamb would be another way of putting it, not always an unmitigated delight to those so designated. But whatever his future holds, at this precise moment JK Coe, too, is casting his eyes around an empty room; in his case, the sitting room he has spent little time in this past year or more, ever since the evening he spent here naked and petrified, at the mercy of a dangerous man. There hasn’t been a night between that one and this that Coe hasn’t stared wide-eyed at the dark, wondering what torment it holds, but for some reason he feels he might sleep dreamlessly tonight. And gazing round, he decides that come the weekend he will rearrange the furniture, or perhaps heave it down to the pavement for locals to pillage, and replace it all. And he spreads his hands in front of him, splays them wide, and sees very little trembling. The music in his head is not quite silent, but his fingers at least are resting.

Another flight of stairs. There are stains on these walls which are highly mysterious even to Lamb; stains that seem to arrive of their own accord, and yet own the appearance of having been there always. He is aware that his slow horses occasionally harbour similar thoughts about himself.

On the next landing, he pauses again. One of the rooms here is Roderick Ho’s, and Ho’s whereabouts, activities, hopes, dreams and desires have only ever concerned Lamb when Lamb is busy thwarting one or other of them. So it doesn’t matter to him that Ho is currently explaining to Kim—his girlfriend—that he was unable to carry out the favour she wanted because of something that came up at work; or that, when she petulantly suggests that he has misrepresented his talents to her—that he is, in short, little more than an unreliable fantasist—Ho’s response, babes, is to close his eyes and replay in his mind what never happened: his sudden emergence from his hiding place, his overpowering of the lone gunman, his bringing Marcus back to life . . . Little light finds its way through his closed lids, though some small part of a tear squeezes out. But no matter.

The other room is Marcus and Shirley’s, now Shirley’s alone. It smells fresh, because a painter has been, but the painter has plied his trade very much in the ethos of Slough House, which is to say, with little enthusiasm and less care. It is true that the wall behind what was Marcus’s desk is now whiter than it has been in years, but only the middle section has been repainted, leaving even the most casual onlooker to wonder what has been painted over, and even to imagine that this freshness hides an undercoat of dubious quality. Something not quite eradicable, of a morbidly stuccoed texture, and lingering effect.

But Lamb won’t spend his days staring at this wall. That will fall to Shirley Dander, who is out clubbing now; has hit the dance floor unfashionably early, and to everyone watching appears to be celebrating something marvelous; flailing her limbs in an uncoordinated mess of ecstasy, just violent enough to prevent anyone getting close, and piercing her fraudulent joy. She is a dervish tonight, a priestess in her own brand-new religion, and the object of her adoration is fury. For Shirley is not managing her anger; she is allowing it to take root, and will nurture it within, and when the time is ripe, will cut it loose.

Lamb knows none of this, of course. But he can guess. He can guess.

A final dog-legged set of stairs. Now he is at the back door, which sticks—it always sticks—as if reluctant to see him leave, but leave he does, with a grunt and a roll of the shoulder. Locking it behind him, he stands in the mildewed yard, looking up for the few brave stars London has to offer. But none are shining on Slough House. Instead, a feeble light stains the window of his own office, some storeys above; a light kept mostly in check by the ever-drawn blinds, but managing still to press itself against the grimy glass. For a moment, Lamb is transfixed by what his room—his lair—his life—looks like from the outside, but this passes. Then, with his collar turned up, he leaves the yard, and no one sees him go.