“Fairly indiscriminately, too.”
“Harsh. I’ve often thought she’s the best of your lot.”
“It’s comparative, isn’t it? Like, you’re the best First Desk since Charles Partner. And he was working for the fucking Russians.”
“I nearly had her brought back last year.”
“To the Park?”
“It felt like she’d done her time.”
“No one ever goes back to the Park.”
“I know. Imagine how much it would have pissed the rest of your crew off.”
“You do realise, if I tell her that now, it’ll fuck with her head.”
“Of course.”
“All this and Talisker too,” said Lamb. “Must be my birthday.”
And he shambled off in the opposite direction to that from which he’d arrived, which might have been spook instinct kicking in—the one that tells you never to take the same route twice—or might have been because this was the Barbican, and remembering how you got anywhere was an upstairs struggle at the best of times.
Diana, meanwhile, headed for street level and the nearest cab, replaying the encounter as she did so. Lamb distrusted most stratagems: Throw him a bone, he’d have been asking where it came from before it hit the ground. Throw three bones, though, and even he might just accept you’d been to the butcher’s and leave it at that. No guarantees, but you did what you could. Having done that much, she headed back to the Park.
The college was on the Woodstock Road, one of the two main thoroughfares leading northwards out of the city. Finding it was simple, thanks to Google Maps—which gave River pause; a spooks’ nursery should surely be, what, cloaked?—but parking was a challenge. Welcome to Oxford. After circling his target a while, he wound up on a side street five minutes’ walk away, then, as long as he had the app open, he checked on Slough House, and Jesus: That was there too! He looked forward to mentioning this to Lamb. He’d have to explain what Google Maps was, and possibly also the existence of social media, but some punchlines take longer to drop than others. He was whistling as he headed for the college, crossed the main road and called at the porters’ lodge. There, waiting for Erin Grey to be summoned, he gazed at buildings old and new, and reflected that this route he’d never taken had its charms, even if those who emerged at the other end frequently lacked them. Or maybe he was exaggerating. Sid, after all, was an Oxford graduate, and look at her. Not that she’d attended the Spooks’ College.
“Mr. Cartwright.”
Erin Grey had arrived while he’d been gathering wool.
Until now, their conversations had taken place on the phone, and this was his first chance to see what she looked like, or would have been, if Sid hadn’t cyberstalked her. “I’m not sending you on a blind date without knowing what the enemy looks like,” she’d said.
“This is not a blind date. And not with an enemy.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
To be fair, she had a point.
Grey was a redhead, somewhere around thirty, somewhere around five eight, and there were doubtless other numbers he could have called upon had he been inclined. The hair, evidently abundant when unleashed, was held in check by a cream-coloured Tilley hat, a brand River’s grandmother, Rose, had favoured for protection from the sun. Erin also had pale blue eyes and wore jeans and a white blouse, which as far as it went was pretty much a match for what he was wearing himself. In other circumstances this might have been a starting pistol for entry-level flirtation, but River still had that conversation with Sid replaying in his mind.
“Not my type,” he’d said, carefully not looking at the picture she’d unearthed. Did you “unearth” things online? Probably not the moment to set that hare running.
“You don’t have a type,” she told him. “Up till now, you’ve barely had a look-in.”
“Well, all I’m going to look at in Oxford is the old man’s book collection. And find out about this non-existent volume Ms. Grey has identified.”
“Ms. Grey!” This delighted Sid, for some reason.
It could still be, after all these months, utterly discombobulating how quickly a conversation could metastasize. It was like trying to catch soap in a jacuzzi while drunk, and also maybe handcuffed to something.
“Sid? I don’t care what she looks like, which incidentally isn’t as hot as you seem to think. I have no interest in her other than as the, what, the curator of Grandad’s library. Okay?”
“Said the spy.”
“Well what’s that got to do with—?”
“Spies lie. They betray. It’s what they do.”
He knew that. He just wouldn’t have set it out quite so uncompromisingly, in this particular context.
Meanwhile, Erin was waiting for him to respond, so he said, “River, please.”
They shook hands and she spoke some more, introductory stuff about the college, and had he been here before, and the library was this way. He had already told her this would be his first visit, but sometimes you had to say things twice—it was normal human interaction. They walked round a corner into a small courtyard, if that wasn’t too grand a word, bustling with summer foliage.
