The driver stared.
“Corpse aside.”
“Sorry, mate. It was just, you know. Pick ’em up at the station, drop ’em off at Oxford. Not like it was the first time.”
“And what happened when you got there? Oxford?”
“Most of them was off like the clappers. There was a train waiting to take ’em the rest of the way. They must’ve been an hour behind by then. And it was pissing down. So they wasn’t hanging around.”
“But someone found the body.” The driver gave him an odd look, and Lamb surmised the reason. “Richard,” he said. They’d been brothers, hadn’t they? “Dickie. Someone realised he was dead.”
“There was a huddle at the back of the bus, but he was already gone. One of them, a doctor, he stayed behind, but the rest left to catch their train.” He paused. “He looked quite calm, like. Your brother.”
“It’s how he would have wanted to go,” Lamb assured him. “He liked buses. So you what, called an ambulance?”
“He was past help, but yeah. I was stuck there rest of the evening. No offence. Had to give a statement, but you’d know that, right? Being his brother.”
“That’s right,” Lamb said. “Being his brother. Anything else happen?”
“Business as normal, mate. Once he’d been, you know, taken away, and I’d tidied the bus and everything, I came back here.”
“Tidied the bus?”
“Not cleaning it or anything. Just check the seats for anything left behind, you know? Wallets and that.”
“And did you find anything?”
“Not that evening, mate. Well, just a hat.”
“A hat?”
“On the overhead rack. Near where your brother was.”
“What sort of hat?”
“Black one.”
“Black one what? Bowler? Fedora? What?”
He shrugged. “Just a hat. With a brim, you know?”
“Where’s it now?”
“Lost property, ’less it’s been picked up. It was just a hat. People leave hats on buses all the time.”
Not when it’s pissing down they don’t, thought Lamb.
A moment’s reflection told him this wasn’t true. When it was raining, more people wore hats, so more people left them on buses. It stood to reason. A matter of statistics.
But the thing about statistics, Lamb reasoned, was statistics could take a flying hump at the moon.
“So where’s your lost property?” He waved in the vague direction of the depot office. “Over there?”
“Nah, mate. Back in Oxford, innit?”
Of bloody course it is, thought Lamb.
“So what about Ho?”
“Ho’s a dweeb.”
“Newsflash. All webheads are dweebs.”
“Ho’s dweebness goes deeper. You want to know the first thing he said to me?”
“What?”
“The very first thing, right? I mean, I haven’t even got my coat off,” Marcus said. “First morning here, thinking I’ve just been shipped to the spooks’ equivalent of Devil’s Island, and I’m wondering what happens next, and Ho picks up his coffee mug and shows it to me—it’s got a picture of Clint Eastwood on it—and he says, ‘This is my mug, okay? And I don’t like other people using my mug’.”
Shirley said, “Okay. That’s bad.”
“It’s way past anal. I bet his socks are tagged left and right.”
“What about Guy?”
“She’s doing Harper.”
“Harper?”
“He’s doing Guy.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that hardly amounts to a character portrait.”
He shrugged. “They’ve not been doing each other long, so right now, that’s the only significant thing about them.”
Shirley said, “That must have been them going out earlier. I wonder where they went?”
“We’re still persona non grata at the Park then.”
Which was an odd thing for Min Harper to say, given that they were in a park, but Louisa Guy knew what he meant.
“Do you know,” she said, “I’m not entirely sure that’s the reason.”
The park they were in was St James’s, and the park they weren’t in was Regent’s. They were heading for the palace end and a woman in a pink velvety tracksuit was approaching them along the footpath at about two miles an hour. At her ankles waddled a small hairy dog with a matching pink ribbon round its neck. They waited until she’d passed before continuing.
“Explain?”
So Louisa did. It was to do with Leonard Bradley. Until recently Bradley had been Chair of the Limitations Committee, which effectively controlled the Service purse strings. Every op planned by Ingrid Tearney, First Desk at Regent’s Park, had to be cleared by Limitations if she didn’t want budgeting issues, which was what running out of money was now called. Except Bradley—Sir Leonard, if the title hadn’t been repossessed yet—had lately been caught with his fingers in the till: a Shropshire “safe house,” fully staffed for the recuperation of officers suffering Service-related stress, had turned out to be a beachfront property on the Maldives, though to be fair, it was fully staffed. And the result of Bradley’s peccadilloes—
“How do you know all this?” Harper interrupted. “I thought he’d just retired.”
“Ah, that’s sweet. But you’ve got to keep an ear to the ground in this business.”
“Don’t tell me. Catherine.”
She nodded.
“Girls’ talk? Quick confab in the ladies’?”
He kept it light, but there was an edge. Something he was excluded from.
