Louisa could only imagine what that must have been like—tiny glass raindrops falling onto distant streets, while the
In the moment after Katinsky dialled the number to detonate the bombs, silence hung around the churchyard, around the whole village, like a plastic dome around a cake. Sunshine stopped, the wind paused, a blackbird choked off mid-note, and even River’s aches and pains were suspended as he waited for the series of cracks that would split the sky like lightning, and bring Upshott tumbling down. The weeks he’d spent here kaleidoscoped through his mind, and he thought of the pub and the village shop, of the graceful curve of eighteenth-century townhouses lining the green, of the one-time manor house, all turned into a series of craters to satisfy some dying spook’s vision of vengeance. It would be a rustic Ground Zero, memorial to a long-forgotten town that died in a long-forgotten fire; ZT/53235, an ancient casualty in the mirror-game played by spies.
It would be futile and useless, but would scorch the earth behind it.
And then the sun shone on, and the breeze stirred again, and the blackbird caught its breath and resumed its song.
Nikolai Katinsky was just an old man, staring at the phone in his hand as if its technology were beyond him.
River said, “See?” and his voice was close to normal.
Katinsky’s lips moved, but River couldn’t make out what he said.
He struggled to get up, and this time made it. Then he leant against the bench, his limbs still wobbly. “They’ve been here years,” he said. “They’re not yours any more. They don’t care what brought them here. This is their life. It’s where they live.”
There were cars arriving. He recognised the sound of jeeps’ engines, and felt a brief surge of hysteria as he wondered how this would play out; a village community revealed as a sleeper cell, one sleeping so hard, it had no desire to wake.
“Still,” he said. “Nice try,” and released his grip on the bench. There you go, River thought, you can stand; and thinking so, he set off along the path to the lychgate, through which military types would soon be swarming.
“Walker?”
He looked back. Katinsky was draped in sunlight, which this past minute had crested the bell tower.
“Not all of the bombs were theirs. One was mine.”
He hit another number on his phone.
The blast, which took out the west wall of St Johnno’s, killed Katinsky instantly, standing as he was right in its path. In later nightmares, River saw a chunk of ancient stonework cleave the old spook in two, but in reality he was bowled over by the shock wave, and by the time rocks were raining to earth was curled inside the lychgate itself, head between his knees. So he heard and felt, rather than saw, the slower death that followed Katinsky’s, as the belltower swayed and hovered and lost its grip on the vertical. When it dropped, it fell away from River’s shelter, or he’d have joined the old man in whatever afterlife was waiting. As it was, the tower’s descent onto the graveyard and the footpath beyond seemed to last for whole minutes, for acres of time, as befitted its brute removal from a skyline it had kissed for hundreds of years; and for hours afterwards it seemed to continue happening, as the shock reverberated through the suddenly emptier landscape, making new shapes out of silence and dust.
Marcus made sure Pashkin was dead, then helped Louisa to her feet.
He said, “I met Shirley on the stairs. He hadn’t passed her. So I figured maybe he’d come to the roof.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“Like I told you. They made me a slow horse ’cause I gamble. Not ’cause I’m a fuck up.”
The helicopter landed, and he went to meet it.
Throughout the day of the aborted rally, parts of London burned. Cars were torched, a bus was set alight, and a Jankel—one of the police armoured units—was baptised by a petrol bomb on Newgate Street. A photo of St Paul’s obscured by oily smoke duly graced front pages next morning. But before nightfall, the rally that had become a riot became a rout: mindful of criticisms of too softly-softly an approach to recent disturbances, the police went in hard, and broke heads, and made arrests. Free-ranging mobs were dispersed, ringleaders bundled into vans, and those who’d spent the day kettled up in backstreets were allowed to make their way home. It had been, the day’s Gold Commander announced at the inevitable press conference, an effective demonstration of firm, no-nonsense policing. Which did not alter the fact that the City had been well and truly stopped.
