Clown Town полностью

Or augment it, either. The uplit mood he’d been in earlier, the tunes waiting to be whistled, were all gone. They walked another circuit in silence, Stam evidently knowing he’d said enough, that River didn’t want to hear words of comfort. All spies’ lives end in failure: That was something else the O.B. had once said. And this was what failure looked like; the last of your secrets taken out of their box and exposed to the daylight. And what shabby, paltry things they were after all.

In the safe house, the trio were playing cards.

. . . There should be rain lashing windows, power cuts and candles; a bottle of vodka and a hunk of bread. Instead they were drinking tea, sharing a plate of special biscuits from a deli three minutes’ walk away, and—so far successfully—making a collective effort not to use the words Do you remember? But remembering, anyway, the days of cold passes and brush-bys, of synchronised watches and dead-letter drops—methods already antiquated when the three of them were operational, but in joe country you clung to the old ways, because the new ways gave themselves away: a phone you weren’t supposed to have, a bugging device that might as well have been Mickey Mouse ears. Things you weren’t supposed to have became the treasures you’d be buried with: When you were dug up, you’d still be clutching—or have been made to swallow—the emblems of your trade; the toys Regent’s Park had supplied you with, to keep you safe. That this had not happened to any of them did not require saying; that it had happened to others was unforgettable. Even here, in this throwback of a safe house, eating special biscuits, drinking tea.

“Two aces.”

“Cheat.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Because you can change your—”

“Cheat.”

Al displayed two aces. Avril sighed, and collected the pile.

Daisy said, “Is there anything to drink?”

“You want some more tea, love?”

“To drink.”

“Best not,” said Al. “Safe house rules.”

Daisy pursed her lips. Picked up her empty cup and studied its lack of contents: The tea had been made with bags. There was no future to be read. And the past was not to be discussed.

Avril watched her replace the cup in the exact spot she’d raised it from, thinking Daisy, Daisy. Of them all, Daisy was the one who had suffered most, the one who’d picked up the tab. And still paying it, all these years on.

Some debts you never settled. The interest crippled you; you never got close.

One of the things Avril had learned in the Park was that your joes were yours forever. This wasn’t in the handbook, but it was what your mentors taught you, what CC had told her, Love them or hate them, they’re yours for good. You’re bound to them by barbed wire, and no point trying to escape it. He’d said all this more than once. Their sins are yours, because you mould them. Give them their first communion. Confirm them in their saint’s name. Sometimes you bury them too. But you never let go of them, on the ground or in it. Best you know that from the start.

But CC was old-school, and the new school was being built before he’d vacated the premises.

Avril was old-school too, of course, recruited in this city, between Bodleian stack and lecture theatre. The fabled tap on the shoulder . . . And CC had been her mentor; his lamp had lit her way, and in his company she was always the acolyte. Come to Oxford. I’ve a plan. Which, from anyone else, might have meant a night serenading past triumphs. It’ll put you back on track. If there was one thing CC was sure of, it was that they’d all been thrown off track, but he didn’t know the half of it. They’d kept the worst hidden from him. And where was he, anyway?

Daisy picked up on her thoughts, or drew them from the air in the room. “When’ll CC get here?”

Which was the moment in the fairy tale when a name summons its owner, because here was his key in the door.