She still had damp tissue in her hand, and tucked it into her sleeve. It felt ugly there, as if her wrist suddenly sported a growth, but ugliness was what she needed.
Overhead, on the roof, rain still pattered. This was constancy, but not the good kind. More like a toothache than a heartbeat.
She said, “What happens now?”
“Well, Taverner’s still the ringmaster. Apparently. She reckons she can swivel the PM any direction she wants, and that Judd’s toxic enough that she’ll always smell sweet in comparison. And we’re a bunch of clowns, and a couple less of us won’t make any difference in the long run.”
“You think she’s right?”
“About you lot being clowns? Yeah. The rest of it?” He shrugged. “She’s spent so long turning showers of shit into career opportunities, she could give Thames Water lessons. On the other hand, she’s walking into the PM’s office to discuss a clusterfuck involving Service agents past and present, and a former Home Secretary who’s as popular with the current lot as a dose of clap in a convent. So if he fancies a change of the guard, that’ll give him all the excuses he needs.”
“You think she’ll go.”
Lamb turned to face her, the candle flame bending as it found a draught. “But that wasn’t a farewell speech she made. More like a trailer of forthcoming attractions. She’s got something up her sleeve.”
Which didn’t bode well, thought Catherine. “So there’s more to come,” she said. “More grief, pain and . . .” Her voice tailed away.
“Shit-the-bed clusterfucks.”
“What do you plan to do?”
He looked down at the candle, its flame still dancing in a draught, the shadows it cast warping and weaving across his face. His lips moved briefly, or perhaps he was just showing his teeth.
“Jackson?”
“I’m going to burn her fucking house down,” he said.
She had spent so long in hospitals that there was borderline comfort in being in one again. Between these walls, walls like these, life was the supreme priority, but subject to so many other forces that its clinginess was revealed: Life was needy, demanding constant attention, and it found this in a rackety combination of the high-tech and the out of date, the highly proficient and the undervalued. Here, geography was at the mercy of signage altered so often it resembled fridge-magnet poetry, with the names of departments squeezed into spaces not quite large enough. By such means an unintentional hierarchy was established, with longer names appearing in smaller typeface, in different colours. Alongside these were posters offering chaperones and help-lines and crayon portraits of nurses; there were ID parades of staff on duty; there were happy thank-you cards and sad thank-you cards arrayed on reception desks. There were the details left behind when emergencies were over: cardigans on the backs of chairs, spectacle cases on bedside cabinets, paperbacks bookmarked at midway points. Frightening smells lingered in the corridors. For what felt like years Sid had lain at the centre of all this, like a well-wrapped fly in a well-meant web. Or perhaps a chrysalis. If she hadn’t flown on being released, she had at least managed not to drop to earth.
Why she was here now was less obvious. Her interaction with Charles Stamoran had been brief and from an observer’s viewpoint unpromising: He had kidnapped her, dumped her in a motorway service station and then entangled her in an assassination attempt which had resulted in carnage. His own stroke had, at first instance, proved no more successful than his shot at murder, but it would prevail in the long run. Around his bed, the machinery was pessimistic. The numbers were dropping, a countdown in progress, and lift-off seemed an unlikely result.
Avril said, “Should you even be here?”
“Probably not. Would you rather I went?”
Avril paused, then said, “That might seem impolite. We can’t be sure he’s not aware.”
No, but they could really. CC was halfway through the door. If he were still among them, it was only to check his pockets: Did he have everything? He was going on a journey.
“Your friends—I’m sorry about your friends.”
Sid nodded. One of them she hadn’t known; the other she hadn’t known well. But they were part of River’s world, and River was hurting. She said, “I’m sorry too. I know this wasn’t your fault.”
“Or CC’s. Not really.” Avril paused again. “Well, no. That can’t be true, can it? But it wasn’t as much his fault as it was . . .”
She tailed off.
Sid said, “First Desk. Diana Taverner.”
“Yes.”
“But I’m the one who brought CC her message. So you could say I’m as much to blame.”
“That would be a long road if we started down it.” Avril’s gaze didn’t leave CC while she spoke. CC, a lump on the bed, held the attention. “There was something we did, me and the others. It put him in a difficult place. He was trying to shield us. So there’s that, too. While you’re parcelling blame.”
