River opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. They paused at the lights near the old Post Office buildings, and he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Roddy was staring straight ahead, the smear of blood on his forehead still wet, so River opened the glove box, found a packet of tissues and passed it to him. Roddy took it without a word.
The lights changed, and they started moving again, heading towards the others.
. . . and becoming herself again is what’s starting to happen, a long slow process, like looking for a car in an enormous car park, no idea of its make or colour, but sure it must be somewhere, and what she needs is a key fob, something she can point and hear a responding
When the figure on the bed twitched, there was someone there to see it happen. A nurse, approaching her thirteenth hour on shift. She bent over the bed, close but not too close, and waited to see if the eyes would open. They did.
“And here you are. We’ve been expecting you back, and here you are.”
“Mum?” said the waking woman.
In the gathered dark Slough House is less visible than its neighbours, its façade a shade or two greyer, its windows twice as blank. Or that’s how it seems to Catherine, who had left the pub once it became good and loud. Roddy and River had arrived, Sid too, and nobody noticed when Catherine slipped off to the bar and kept walking: into the night, along the gummed and littered pavements, across the stressful road, and round the back and through Slough House’s door, which, as always, required heavy pushing. Already she can smell Lamb’s presence, the damp-dog-in-a-dumpster odour of his coat wafting down the stairs. He’s behind his desk, unshod, a drink in front of him, and instead of smoking is shredding an empty cigarette packet, his equivalent of a health kick. He doesn’t look at Catherine when she enters.
She says, “Do I want to know what you’ve done?”
“No.”
“But you’ve . . . burned Taverner’s house down.”
“I’ve done what she wanted doing in the first place. But that’s the first rule of fairy tales, right? Be careful what you wish for.”
“So much for diplomacy.”
“It’s not always a great idea to state your intentions beforehand. It can have the effect of undermining support.”
“So instead, whatever you’ve done, which I’m sure we’ll discover in due course, you’ve involved River and Roddy in it.”
“Their choice, Standish.”
“You told them it was just a meeting.”
“Yeah. Spies lie. It’s what we do.”
“And when whatever it is you’ve done bounces back on them?”
“Not going to happen.”
“Oh, it will. One way or the other.” She watches while he raises his glass to his lips and drains it, still without meeting her eye, while in the pub she left ten minutes ago, River and Sid have broken apart from the others, and are sharing words in the corner.
Sid says, “What did you do?”
“Do? Nothing. I was a driver.”
River mimes holding a steering wheel, aware as he does so that he’s evading; that the imaginary car he’s driving might be holding true to the road, but that this conversation has already burst a tyre.
He elaborates. “I collected Peter Judd. Took him to Di Taverner’s. Then rescued Roddy, by the way. He was in a state.”
They glance towards the others, and Roddy is clearly still in a state, inasmuch as he is not currently beating his chest or standing on a table. Every so often he rubs his arm, but that’s as grandiose as he’s getting.
Sid says, “And what happened at Taverner’s? What happened to Judd?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t enter the house.” River knows he sounds like he’s entering a defence, but it’s too late to do anything about that. He says, “Sid, whatever it is, it’s over. And Roddy wiped the local cameras. I might as well not have been there.”
“Sure,” she says, “if you take away accidental phone footage. Eyewitnesses. Passing drones. But the bigger point is, why was Lamb so keen on killing the cameras if all he was doing was having a chat? And the even bigger point . . .”
He waits.
“I asked you not to. I asked you not to fall in with whatever Lamb had going on.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But you did it anyway.”
“Yes, for Louisa. And Ash.”
“CC died, by the way.”
“Did he? Oh. I mean . . .”
“This whole thing, this world, Spook Street. I don’t want to be here any more. I don’t want you to be part of it either. It’ll kill us.”
“I was driving, it wasn’t dangerous—”
“It’ll kill
“I’m gone, anyway, aren’t I?” he says. “Not a slow horse any more, remember? Failed the medical.”
But Sid just shakes her head and seems to be looking into a different future. “When did anything like that stop Lamb getting what he wants?”
