That didn’t sound right. Catherine Standish was wound pretty tight, and with her curiously old-fashioned way of dressing resembled Alice in Wonderland grown middle-aged and disappointed. But Marcus seemed sure:
“She’s dry now. Years, probably. But if I know drunks, and I’ve known a few, she could have put me under the table in her day. You too. Sequentially.”
“You make her sound like a boxer.”
“Your really serious drunk approaches booze like it was a barfight. You know, only one of you’s going to be left standing. And the drunk always thinks that’ll be him. Her, in this case.”
“But now she’s hung up her drinking shoes.”
“They all think they’ve done that too.”
“Cartwright? He crashed King’s Cross.”
“I know. I saw the movie.”
Video footage of River Cartwright’s disastrous assessment exercise, which had caused a rush-hour panic in one of London’s major railway stations, was occasionally used for training purposes, to Cartwright’s less-than-delight.
“His grandfather’s some kind of legend. David Cartwright?”
“Before my time.”
“He’s Cartwright’s grandfather,” Marcus said. “He’s before all our times. But he was a spook back in the dark ages. Still alive, mind.”
“Just as well,” Shirley said. “He’d be turning in his grave otherwise. Cartwright being a slow horse and all.”
Marcus Longridge pushed further back from his desk and stretched his arms wide. He could block doorways, Shirley thought. Probably had, back in Ops: he’d been on raids; had closed down an active terrorist cell a year or so back. That was the story, anyway, but there must have been another story too, or he wouldn’t be here now.
He was staring at her. His eyes were blacker than his skin: a thought that reached her unprompted. “What?”
“What was your edge?”
“My edge, huh?”
“That meant they couldn’t sack you.”
“I know what you meant.” Somewhere overhead, a chair scraped on a floor; footsteps crossed to a window. “I told them I was gay,” she said at last.
“Uh-huh?”
“And no way were they gunna fire a dyke for punching out some arsehole who felt her up in the canteen.”
“Is that why you cut your hair?”
“No,” she said. “I cut my hair because I felt like it.”
“Are we on the same side?”
“I’m on nobody’s side but my own.”
He nodded. “Suit yourself.”
“I intend to.”
She turned back to her monitor, which had fallen asleep. When she shifted her mouse it grumpily revealed a screen frozen on a split-image of two faces so obviously not a match that the program must have been taking the piss.
“So are you actually gay? Or did you just tell them that?”
Shirley didn’t reply.
On a bench at Oxford station sat Jackson Lamb; overcoat swamping him either side, undone shirt button allowing a hairy glimpse of stomach. He scratched this absently, then fumbled with the button before giving up and covering the mound instead with a black fedora, on which he then concentrated his gaze, as if it held the secret of the grail.
A black hat. Left on a bus. The bus Dickie Bow had died on.
Which didn’t in itself mean much, but Jackson Lamb wondered.
It had been raining heavily when that bus reached Oxford, and first thing you’d do on stepping off a bus into the rain was put your hat on, if you had one. And if you didn’t have one, first thing you’d do was go back for it. Unless you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself; wanted to remain part of the crowd heading onto the platform, boarding a train, being carried away from the scene as quickly as possible …
He was being stared at, pointedly, by a woman who was far too attractive to be doing so out of amateur interest. Except, Lamb realised, it wasn’t him she was staring at but the cigarette he now noticed he held between two fingers of his left hand, the one he was tapping the fedora with. His right was already rummaging for a lighter, a motion not dissimilar from scratching his balls. He gave her his best crooked smile, which involved flaring one nostril, and she responded by flaring both her own, and looking away. But he tucked the fag behind his ear anyway.
The rummaging hand gave up the search for a lighter, and found instead the mobile phone he’d collected from the bus.
It was an ancient thing, a Nokia, black-and-grey, with about as many functions as a bottle opener. You could no more take a photo with it than send an e-mail with a stapler. But when he pressed the button, the screen squeaked into life, and let him scroll down a contact list. Five numbers: Shop, Digs, and Star, which sounded like Bow’s local, and two actual names; a Dave and a Lisa, both of which Lamb rang. Dave’s mobile went straight to voicemail. Lisa’s landline went nowhere; was a gateway to a humming void in which no telephone would ever be answered. He clicked onto Messages, and found only a note from Bow’s service provider informing him he had 82p in his pay-as-you-go account. Lamb wondered what fraction of Bow’s worldly goods 82p represented. Maybe he could send Lisa a cheque. He scrolled onto Sent Items. That was empty too.
