Dead Lions (7 page)

Spider Webb must have called in favours, or opened some classified folders, to secure the suite for his meeting, a few weeks hence. Any part of town, a space like this commanded respect. This high up, it demanded awe. Kitchen and bathrooms aside, it was a single room, designed for business; its centrepiece a beautiful mahogany oval table big enough for sixteen chairs, which, if it hadn’t been larger than Louisa’s entire flat, she’d have coveted. But like the view, the table belonged to the moneyed. This wasn’t supposed to factor into her motivation, but still. Here they were, the pair of them, and they’d be ensuring the safety of some hotshot whose pocket change equalled twice their joint salaries.

Forget it, she thought. Not relevant. But couldn’t help saying: “Kind of flash for a discreet meeting.”

“Yeah, well,” Min said. “Don’t suppose they’ll have anyone peeping through the windows.”

“How do they clean them, do you think?”

“Some kind of hoist? We’d better find out.”

That was just for starters. They’d need an itinerary; where the Russian was staying, and the route from there to here. Who was catering. Drivers. They’d need to study Webb’s notes and do extra digging, because Webb was trustworthy as a snake. And they’d
need sweepers to check for bugs, and maybe a techie to provide interference, though she doubted parabolic eavesdropping was possible. The nearest high building was a dwarf by comparison.

Min touched her shoulder. “We’ll be fine. Jumped-up Russkie oligarch is all. Coming over here. Buying our football teams. It’s babysitting, like Webb said.”

She knew. But Russkie oligarchs weren’t the most popular breed on the planet, and there was always the possibility something would go wrong. And underneath that, a very faint glimmer of possibility that everything would go right.

It swam into her mind again that this could be a test. And alongside it swam a creepier notion: What if a successful outcome resulted in a single ticket home; a desk at Regent’s Park for one of them but not the other? If it were hers, would she take it? If it were Min’s, would he? He might. She couldn’t blame him. She might too.

All the same, she shrugged his hand off her shoulder.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. We’re at work, that’s all.”

Min said, “Sure. Sorry,” but there was nothing snarky in his tone.

He wandered towards the doors, through which lay the lifts, the other suite, the stairwell. Louisa, in his wake, veered off into the kitchen. It was spotless, unused, gleaming, and fully equipped with a fridge that was restaurant-sized, but empty. Fixed to the wall was a friendly red fire extinguisher; next to it, behind a glass cover, a fire blanket and a small axe. She opened bare cupboards, closed them again. Returned to the big room and its windows, through which she could now see an air-ambulance, seemingly stationary over Central London, though possibly swinging like a randy divorcee from the point of view of those it carried. And she thought again of the black swans, and the huge and improbable events they’d lent their name to. It was only afterwards you knew
you’d encountered one. The helicopter was still hovering there when she went to find Min.

Ho didn’t
like having his space invaded. Especially not by River Cartwright, who was one of those who ignored the likes of Roderick Ho except when he needed something only the likes of Roderick Ho could provide. Technological competence, for instance. Competence was generally beyond Cartwright. For a while, Ho had used a CCTV still of the King’s Cross chaos as a screensaver, until Louisa Guy suggested River might break his elbows if he found out.

But Catherine Standish was with him, and while Ho didn’t precisely like Standish, he couldn’t put his finger on a reason for disliking her. Since this put her in a select category, he decided to see what they wanted before telling them he was busy.

River made a space on the spare desk, and perched on its corner. Catherine pulled out a chair and sat. “How are you today, Roddy?”

His eyes narrowed with suspicion. She’d called him that before. He said to River, “Don’t move my stuff.”

“I haven’t moved anything.”

“My stuff on the desk there, you just rearranged it. I’ve got everything sorted. You put it out of order, I won’t be able to find it.”

River opened his mouth to make a number of points, but Catherine caught his eye. He changed direction. “Sorry.”

Catherine said, “Roddy, we were wondering if you could do us a favour.”

“What sort of favour?”

“It involves your area of expertise.”

“If you want broadband,” Ho said, “maybe you should just think about paying for it.”

“That would be like asking a plastic surgeon to do ingrown toenails,” Catherine said.

“Yeah,” said River. “Or getting an architect to wash your windows.”

Ho regarded him suspiciously.

“Or a lion tamer to feed your cat,” River added.

The look Catherine flashed him indicated that he wasn’t helping.

“The other day, in Lamb’s office,” she began, but Ho wasn’t having it.

“No way.”

“I hadn’t finished.”

“You don’t need to. You want to know what Lamb wanted, right?”

“Just a clue.”

“He’d kill me. And he could do it, too. He’s killed people before.”

“That’s what he wants you to think,” River said.

“You’re saying he hasn’t?”

“I’m saying he’s not allowed to kill staff. Health and safety.”

“Yeah, right. But I’m not talking
killing
killing.” Ho turned back to Catherine. “He’d kill me on a daily basis. You know what he’s like.”

“He doesn’t need to find out,” she said.

“He always finds out.”

River said, “Roddy?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Whatever. A few months ago, we did a good thing. Yes?”

“Maybe,” Ho said, suspiciously. “So what?”

“That was teamwork.”

“It was kind of teamwork,” Ho admitted.

“So—”

“The kind where I had all the ideas. You did a lot of running around, I remember.”

River bit back his first response. “We all play to our strengths,”
he said. “My point is, for a while there, Slough House worked. Know what I mean? We played as a team, and it worked.”

“So now we do it again,” Ho said.

“That would be good, yes.”

“Only this time, instead of running around, you just sit there. While I do all the work again.” He turned to Catherine. “And then Lamb finds out and kills me.”

River said, “Okay, how about this. You don’t tell us anything, but we find out anyway, and tell him you told us. Then he kills you.”

Catherine said, “River—”

“No, seriously. Lamb never locks his computer, and we all know what his password is.”

Lamb’s password was “Password.”

Ho said, “If you were gunna do that, you’d have done it. You wouldn’t be bothering me.”

“No, well, it hadn’t occurred to me till now.” He looked at Catherine. “What’s the opposite of teamwork?”

She said, “It’s not going to happen, Roddy. He’s kidding.”

“It doesn’t sound like he’s kidding.”

“Well he is.” She looked at River. “Isn’t that right?”

He surrendered. “Whatever.”

She said to Ho, “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to.”

As an interrogation technique, thought River, this lacked bite.

Ho chewed his lip and looked at his monitor. This was angled so River couldn’t see it, but reflected in Ho’s glasses he could make out a thin tracery of lines cobwebbing the screen, and green lights blinking on a black background. Ho could be navigating his way through an MoD firewall, or playing Battleship with himself, but either way, he seemed to be contemplating something else altogether at the moment.

“All right,” he said at last.

“There,” River said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“I wasn’t talking to you. I’ll tell her.”

“For fuck’s sake, Ho, she’ll tell me herself soon as—”

“And who’s ‘she’?” Catherine asked. “The cat’s mother?”

The two men shared an unlikely moment of mystified brotherhood.

“Never mind,” she said. She pointed at River. “Out. No arguments.”

There were arguments, and he made a few of them, but only in his head.

Back upstairs, he looked in on Harper and Guy’s office, but they weren’t back. “Meeting,” Harper had said when River asked, which might have meant a meeting, or might have meant they were taking advantage of Lamb’s absence to do whatever they did these days: a walk in the park, a movie, sex in Louisa’s car. Park, though … They couldn’t have gone to Regent’s Park, could they? The thought stilled him, but only for a moment. It didn’t sound likely.

In his own room, he spent five minutes reacquainting himself with the database of the dead and another ten staring out from behind the window’s worn gilt lettering: WW Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. There were three people at the bus stop opposite, and as River watched a bus arrived and took them all away. Immediately someone else arrived, and began waiting for the next bus. River wondered how she’d react if she knew she was being watched by a member of the Intelligence Service. Wondered, too, what she’d make of the notion that she almost certainly had a more exciting job than his.

He wandered back to his computer, where he entered a fictitious name and dates on the database, thought for a bit, then deleted them.

Catherine knocked and entered. “You busy?” she said. “This can wait.”

“Ha bloody ha.”

She sat. “Lamb wanted a Service personnel file.”

“Ho doesn’t have access to those.”

“Very funny. File was on an occasional from the eighties. A man called Dickie Bow.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Real name Bough, but his parents were stupid enough to call him Richard. I take it you’ve never heard of him.”

River said, “Give me a moment.”

He leaned back, mentally refocusing on an image of the O.B.—Old Bastard, an epithet bestowed by River’s mother. He’d been largely raised by the O.B., whose long life had been dedicated to the Intelligence Service, and much of whose long retirement was spent doling out its highlights to his only grandson. River Cartwright was a spook because that’s what his grandfather was. Not had been: was. Some professions you never gave up, long after they were over. David Cartwright was a Service legend, but the way he told it, the same held true for the lowliest bagman: you could change sides, sell your secrets, offer your memoirs to the highest bidder, but once a spook you were always a spook, and everything else was just cover. So the friendly old man trowelling his flowerbeds with a silly hat on remained the strategist who’d helped plot the Service’s course through the Cold War, and River had grown up learning the details.

Which mattered. This, the O.B. had drummed into him before he was ten. Details mattered. River blinked once, then again, but came back with nothing: Dickie Bow? A ridiculous name, but not one River had heard before.

“Sorry,” he said. “It means nothing.”

“He was found dead last week,” she said.

“In suspicious circumstances?”

“On a bus.”

He clasped his hands behind his head. “The floor’s yours.”

“Bow was on a train to Worcester, but it was cancelled at Reading because of signalling problems. The bus was taking passengers from there to Oxford, where the trains were okay. At Oxford everyone got off, except Bow. This was because he’d died en route.”

“Natural causes?”

“So the report says. And Bow’s not been on the books for a while. So not what you’d call an obvious candidate for assassination, even if he’d ever done anything important.”

“Which you’re sure he hadn’t.”

“You know what personnel records are like. Secure stuff’s redacted, and anything more sensitive than a routine drop-and-poke is secure. But Bow’s file’s an open book barring some drink-related incident near the end. He did a lot of toad work. Cash for info, mostly gossip. He worked in a nightclub, so he picked up a lot.”

“Which would have been used for blackmail purposes.”

“Of course.”

“So revenge isn’t out of the question.”

“But it was all a long time ago. And like I say, natural causes.”

“So why’s Lamb interested?” River mused.

“No idea. Maybe they worked together.” She paused. “A note says he was a talented streetwalker. That doesn’t mean what it sounds like, does it?”

“Happily, no. It means he was good at shadowing people. Following them.”

“Well, then. Maybe Lamb just heard he’d died, and got sentimental.”

“Yes, but seriously.”

Catherine said, “Bow didn’t have a ticket for his journey. And he was supposed to be at work. I wonder where was he going?”

“I’d never heard of him until two minutes ago. I doubt my speculations are worth much.”

“Mine either. But it’s got Lamb off his arse, so there must be something to it.” She fell silent. To River, her gaze seemed to turn inward, as if she were looking for something she’d left at the back of her mind. And he noticed for the first time that her hair wasn’t entirely grey; that in the right light, might even look blonde. But her nose was long and pinched, and she wore hats, and it all added up to a kind of greyness, so that was how you saw her when she wasn’t there, and after a while became the way you saw her even when she was. A sort of witchiness that might even be sexy in the right circumstances.

To break the spell, he spoke. “Wonder what kind of something.”

“Assume the worst,” Catherine said.

“Maybe we should ask him.”

Catherine said, “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

It wasn’t
such a good idea.

A few hours later, River heard Lamb whomping up the stairs like an out-of-breath bear. He waited a while, staring at his monitor without seeing it. “Maybe we should ask him.” Simple enough while Lamb was elsewhere; a different proposition with him on the premises. But the alternative was to sit looking at reams of indigestible information, and besides, if River backed down, Catherine would think him chicken.

She was waiting on the landing, eyebrow raised.
Sure about this?

Well, no.