Where his heart was was another question. Clearly, relations with Taverner were beyond breaking point, which left the nuclear option: He could atomise her career by revealing she’d financed an assassination on foreign soil using money from Chinese sources. Where that would leave him was more problematic. Judd was no blackmailer—he had a keen eye for a business opportunity, that was all—but he was facing the blackmailer’s dilemma: If he destroyed Taverner, he’d be left holding nothing. As First Desk, she’d been his ace in the hole. As a disgraced former spook, she was just a remaindered memoir awaiting its ghost.
The upside to this was cold comfort. Taverner had recruited an off-the-books pensioner for her dirty work, meaning she was in no position to use Service resources. That levelled the playing field. But the last thing Judd wanted was a level playing field. If everyone played fair, it put him at a disadvantage.
Out in the garden, on a branch at his window level, a squirrel was studying the rain with mild disgust. Its nose twitched, its tail came up, and Judd imagined aiming a shotgun at it and blowing its tiny life into fragments. Make a mess of the garden though. That was the trouble with even the smaller pleasures; they came with consequences attached. Still, he mimed the process, making a gun out of his arm and sighting down it. The squirrel affected not to notice. Bang, he thought. Bang bang, you’re dead. It wasn’t the squirrel he was thinking about. So when his landline rang at that precise moment his heart skipped, and he had the absurd notion he’d been spotted plotting murder.
He answered anyway.
If the squirrel had turned tables and sighted on Judd during the following several minutes, studying his reactions through the upstairs window, it would have enjoyed a brief catalogue of varying human emotions: fear, suspicion, disbelief, a slight flickering of hope. It’s more likely, though, that the squirrel was fixated on its own concerns, these involving its usual daily round of eating, mating, swinging from trees and perhaps the occasional act of slaughter. Either way, by the time Judd had finished his call and crossed to the window again, it was nowhere to be seen.
But. All stories end, just not always where expected, and light can creep out of the darkness through a slit life makes in the curtain, through which noise crawls too, a soft murmuring which is sometimes people and sometimes machines—the machines you see in hospitals, with screens and read-outs and declining numbers—replacing what had previously been a void, and before that chaos, a welter of people and sound and movement which had abruptly halted when something slammed into her, something blunt and sharp at the same time, the bluntness a hammer blow robbing her of breath, and the sharpness tearing a hole through her, and it’s that hole that’s causing trouble now, she knows; it’s that hole into which everyone is looking when they gather round her bed, and what they’re wondering is whether her life is still leaking out of that hole, or whether it’s slowing down now, whether she can hold on to what’s left, and keep it inside her, and let it grow until she’s herself again . . .
By the time River pulled up outside Peter Judd’s house light was leeching from the sky, and the grey canopy that had hung over the capital most of the day was darkening at the rim. Streetlights were coming on, though still looked undernourished; within the hour, they would have swollen in strength, and seem like they anchored London to the ground. Here in leafy Barnes, they did so with the help of trees; so many trees, it was as bad as living in the country. River had the feeling that his arrival here, satnav led, had not gone unnoticed; that he was an entry in half a dozen notebooks already, resting on the laps of the self-appointed guardians of the borough. There was nothing Lamb could do about this, unless of course there was, and River had to suppress the image that arrived uninvited of Shirley being sent from house to house, terrifying the residents into surrendering their Neighbourhood Watch records.
“Don’t get seen,” had been Lamb’s order, unless it was just a suggestion. Magical thinking either way. There were times River thought Lamb, for all his street smarts, out of depth in the here and now; more at home in his Berlin alleys or a Marseilles dive, provided both those places were securely located forty years ago.
“I’m to drive him through Central London without being seen? The world’s most monitored city?”
“Yeah, I’ve got Ho taking care of the busy bit.”
That was another worry: Roddy being in charge of closing down a section of the city’s CCTV. It wasn’t so much that Roddy might not be capable of it. It was more that he might like it too much, and take it up as a hobby.
“And Judd’s just going to get into my car and let me drive him away?”
