He was here, in the kitchen of the flat he shared with Sid Baker. They were eating breakfast, or that was the theory. An unfinished slice of toast sat on his plate. Some mornings, he had no appetite.
“. . . Sorry.”
“Interesting email?”
His phone was in his hands, true, and that was what had started his spiralling descent. But it took a moment to gather himself. “From that researcher. The one in Oxford?”
“Who’s sorting out your grandfather’s library.” Sid knew all about the O.B.’s library; she’d spent weeks living there, hiding from her own close encounter with death, nesting on cushions like a child in a storybook.
“She’s been looking at that video I made—”
“The one of me sleeping.”
“The one of my grandfather’s study, yeah—”
“Which was mostly me sleeping.”
“Which makes it sound way creepier than it was, which was just me filming my grandfather’s bookshelves, and happening to include a moment of you sleeping. And she’s been using it as a . . . catalogue, to make sure none of the books got lost in transit. And so she can shelve them in the same order he did.”
“That matters?”
“Does to her. Or that’s what she’s doing anyway, in case it mattered to him.”
Which it might have done. True, it was a fantastical notion, straight out of Dan Brown or Scooby-Doo, but on the other hand, the O.B.—who, with his late wife, Rose, had raised River—had been Regent’s Park’s strategist par excellence, and had spent his adult life steering the ship of state security through historically choppy waters. He’d never been First Desk, but he’d stood at the elbow of several who had been, pointing out changes in the weather. Something of a teddy bear, those who didn’t know him had liked to think; a reliable sounding board, but lacking the edge that might have taken him to the highest office. Others, more mathematically inclined, counted instead the years he’d spent as trusted adviser, coming up with a figure far higher than most First Desks managed, First Desks being notoriously vulnerable to the workings of events, not to mention the machinations of their subordinates. Besides, teddy bears weren’t the companionable pushovers they were taken to be. It wasn’t fun and games they planned at their picnics; it was long-term strategies for consolidating positions of influence. Nor were their objectives achieved wearing furry mittens. In recent years River had come to understand that his grandfather’s hands, which he’d first seen tending his flowerbeds, had been soiled by more than garden waste.
Meanwhile, River was still looking at the email from Oxford. “Anyway, apparently there’s a book missing.”
“Stop the bloody clocks! A missing book? Shall I call the Park?”
“You can laugh—”
“Am doing.”
“And I’d join in, if that’s all it was, a missing book. Could have been lost when the study was packed up, or been put in the wrong box and sent into storage with the furniture, or, I dunno, a hundred other things. It was a bit chaotic, I imagine.”
Imagination being all he had to go on, having been comatose at the time.
“So it’s not just missing,” said Sid. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Yeah,” said River. “Apparently this book, which is there on the film I took?”
“It’s a rare and valuable volume?”
“No,” said River. “It doesn’t exist.”
A chapter of accidents, that was the phrase. A series of unfortunate events.
If Shirley were a TV show—which obviously she was not—but if she were, now would be a good moment for a “Previously on
Decking a harasser at Regent’s Park; exile to Slough House; Marcus. Running up the stairs at the Needle—that had been a killer. The gunfight out west, at the underground complex, and Marcus again, this time dead. The penguin-assassins’ UK tour, and that moment in the church when she thought she’d be crushed to death (didn’t happen). Wales in the snow, and J. K. Coe lying under a tree like a discarded Christmas decoration. Hunting stalkers at Old Street roundabout; thumping a bus on Wimbledon Common. A week in the San, supposed to be a time of calm reflection, ending with a battle royale, a road trip with a former First Desk, and a showdown in a car wash with a helmeted hooligan. It would be fair to say there were both ups and downs in that lot. Though ups were getting harder to locate, and more expensive to maintain. And the downs—best not to dwell on the downs.
