“Yeah, and there’s a school of thought says we should just let the chips fall. Apart from anything else, if someone whacks Judd, we might all get a bank holiday.”
“I need details, Louisa.”
“Sure. Do you have a pen? I’ll spell this out. S-O-D-O-F-F.”
“Louisa—”
“You’re not the only one with skin in this game. You want details, I’ll meet you wherever Judd is.”
He said, “Is this what it’s going to be like? I give an instruction, and you do whatever the fuck you want?”
“Believe it.”
She reminded him of Emma. Not that he’d ever been in a position to give Emma instructions. Starting to move again, he said, “I’ll take it that you’re accepting the offer?” And then he told her about Nob-Nobs.
The royal family, apparently, never travel en masse in the same vehicle—this is to avoid the possibility of lineage-shattering accidents. That’s what they tell Andrew, anyway. The slow horses didn’t have the same protocol, and were madly crushed into River’s car. Should a sinkhole open in front of it, Slough House would need restocking from the ground up.
“Where are we going again?”
“Place called Nob-Nobs, it’s—”
“Did you get a postcode?”
“—in Shoreditch. No.”
“Would you shift your knee?”
River was driving mostly one-handed, his free hand seeking out Sid’s when it wasn’t required for more complex operations. Sid was squashed with Louisa in the shotgun seat, while, following negotiations that only Shirley and Ash had found satisfying, Roddy was on Lech’s knee in between them, in the back.
“Is that where he’ll be? Judd?”
“We don’t even know for sure—”
“That’s what Devon reckoned.”
“—he’s being targeted.”
“We discussed this.”
“Just saying.”
“You can always get out.”
“And it’s a nightclub?”
“Closed, apparently.”
Louisa looked out of the side window, at London’s streets and London’s pavements, wondering not so much whether this was sensible as to how much—curiously—she seemed to be enjoying herself. She was going to miss this.
“This CC guy—”
“Is this even safe?”
“You’re supposed to be a spook—”
“Because it feels like there’s
“—not a fucking chicken crybaby.”
“—in a car built for like three.”
“This is a spacious car,” River said. “It is roomy. Shut the fuck up.”
“—is he dangerous?”
Sid said, “He looks like someone you’d not look at twice. Someone who used to be in marketing, or real estate.”
Roddy said, “Sounds lame.”
“What, you think a tat of a baby squid makes you John Wick?”
Well, maybe not miss it. But she would think about it often, at least at first, when she was in her new job, enjoying her new salary, and sitting in an office she didn’t share with any of these people.
Sid said in her ear, “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“You’re smiling.”
“Yeah, well. Life’s an adventure.”
River made an illegal turn to avoid an upcoming set of lights, then another, faster one to avoid an oncoming vehicle. They weren’t far from Nob-Nobs now. No: In fact they were here.
They weren’t the only ones.
So. Louisa sometimes felt like she was forever getting out of cars at strange places, like this nightclub, which would be like all nightclubs everywhere, glittery with potential then drab and disappointing as an uncollected ashtray, not that she was here for the usual reasons—at the back of her throat was that catch familiar from previous occasions, ones in which danger was more immediately apparent, such as the time at the top of the Needle with a Russian shooting at her across a carpet of scattered diamonds, or facing that private militia beneath the streets of West London with River, or when she walked down a snow-covered road in Wales, hoping to find Min’s boy before men with guns did, but it was best to put such thoughts aside and concentrate on the task in hand, which was piling out of this vehicle with the other slow horses, so many of them it must have looked like a clown car, and each with different ideas about what to do next . . .
Judd had arrived fifteen minutes earlier, after killing time in a downscale coffee bar, enjoying the sordid nature of his surroundings. The grubby could be attractive, as a memorable tryst in a cupboard after an all-night session in the Commons once proved. With that fond memory tickling his ivories he stepped into early evening to find the city not yet soft but getting there, the honking and squalling of its traffic like a toddler’s last protest before bedtime. He had the keys to the night in his pocket, or the keys to the nightclub, which felt like the same thing.
