“That would be good, yes.”
“Only this time, instead of running around, you just sit there. While I do all the work again.” He turned to Catherine. “And then Lamb finds out and kills me.”
River said, “Okay, how about this. You don’t tell us anything, but we find out anyway, and tell him you told us. Then he kills you.”
Catherine said, “River—”
“No, seriously. Lamb never locks his computer, and we all know what his password is.”
Lamb’s password was “Password.”
Ho said, “If you were gunna do that, you’d have done it. You wouldn’t be bothering me.”
“No, well, it hadn’t occurred to me till now.” He looked at Catherine. “What’s the opposite of teamwork?”
She said, “It’s not going to happen, Roddy. He’s kidding.”
“It doesn’t sound like he’s kidding.”
“Well he is.” She looked at River. “Isn’t that right?”
He surrendered. “Whatever.”
She said to Ho, “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to.”
As an interrogation technique, thought River, this lacked bite.
Ho chewed his lip and looked at his monitor. This was angled so River couldn’t see it, but reflected in Ho’s glasses he could make out a thin tracery of lines cobwebbing the screen, and green lights blinking on a black background. Ho could be navigating his way through an MoD firewall, or playing Battleship with himself, but either way, he seemed to be contemplating something else altogether at the moment.
“All right,” he said at last.
“There,” River said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“I wasn’t talking to you. I’ll tell her.”
“For fuck’s sake, Ho, she’ll tell me herself soon as—”
“And who’s ‘she’?” Catherine asked. “The cat’s mother?”
The two men shared an unlikely moment of mystified brotherhood.
“Never mind,” she said. She pointed at River. “Out. No arguments.”
There were arguments, and he made a few of them, but only in his head.
Back upstairs, he looked in on Harper and Guy’s office, but they weren’t back. “Meeting,” Harper had said when River asked, which might have meant a meeting, or might have meant they were taking advantage of Lamb’s absence to do whatever they did these days: a walk in the park, a movie, sex in Louisa’s car. Park, though … They couldn’t have gone to Regent’s Park, could they? The thought stilled him, but only for a moment. It didn’t sound likely.
In his own room, he spent five minutes reacquainting himself with the database of the dead and another ten staring out from behind the window’s worn gilt lettering: WW Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. There were three people at the bus stop opposite, and as River watched a bus arrived and took them all away. Immediately someone else arrived, and began waiting for the next bus. River wondered how she’d react if she knew she was being watched by a member of the Intelligence Service. Wondered, too, what she’d make of the notion that she almost certainly had a more exciting job than his.
He wandered back to his computer, where he entered a fictitious name and dates on the database, thought for a bit, then deleted them.
Catherine knocked and entered. “You busy?” she said. “This can wait.”
“Ha bloody ha.”
She sat. “Lamb wanted a Service personnel file.”
“Ho doesn’t have access to those.”
“Very funny. File was on an occasional from the eighties. A man called Dickie Bow.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Real name Bough, but his parents were stupid enough to call him Richard. I take it you’ve never heard of him.”
River said, “Give me a moment.”
He leaned back, mentally refocusing on an image of the O.B.—Old Bastard, an epithet bestowed by River’s mother. He’d been largely raised by the O.B., whose long life had been dedicated to the Intelligence Service, and much of whose long retirement was spent doling out its highlights to his only grandson. River Cartwright was a spook because that’s what his grandfather was. Not had been: was. Some professions you never gave up, long after they were over. David Cartwright was a Service legend, but the way he told it, the same held true for the lowliest bagman: you could change sides, sell your secrets, offer your memoirs to the highest bidder, but once a spook you were always a spook, and everything else was just cover. So the friendly old man trowelling his flowerbeds with a silly hat on remained the strategist who’d helped plot the Service’s course through the Cold War, and River had grown up learning the details.
Which mattered. This, the O.B. had drummed into him before he was ten. Details mattered. River blinked once, then again, but came back with nothing: Dickie Bow? A ridiculous name, but not one River had heard before.
“Sorry,” he said. “It means nothing.”
“He was found dead last week,” she said.
“In suspicious circumstances?”
“On a bus.”
He clasped his hands behind his head. “The floor’s yours.”
“Bow was on a train to Worcester, but it was cancelled at Reading because of signalling problems. The bus was taking passengers from there to Oxford, where the trains were okay. At Oxford everyone got off, except Bow. This was because he’d died en route.”
“Natural causes?”
