The O.B. said: “That old saw about laws and sausages, about how you never want to see either being made? The same applies to intelligence work.” Dropping his invisible ball, he picked up his glass instead and swirled it thoughtfully, so the amber liquid washed round the tumbler’s edge. “And then he went AWOL. That was Dickie Bow’s claim to fame. Went for a walk on the wild side, and had switchboards lit up from Berlin to bloody … Battersea. Sorry. Alliteration. Bad habit. Berlin to Whitehall, because he might have been small fry but the last thing anyone wanted right then was a British agent turning up on Red TV, claiming god knew what.”
“This was when?” River asked.
“September eighty-nine.”
“Ah.”
“Too bloody right,
“When you say
“Well, I don’t mean nobody, obviously. I mean nobody on our side.” He examined his hand, as if he’d forgotten what it was for, then let it drop to his lap. “And it wouldn’t have taken much. Dickie Bow might have been just the grit of sand on the tracks to throw the locomotive. So we were keen on recovering him, as you might imagine.”
“And evidently you did.”
“Oh, we found him all right. Or he turned up, rather. Waltzed back into town just as we were ready to slap black ribbons on every operation he’d ever had a sniff at. Well, I say waltzed. He could barely walk was the truth.”
“He’d been tortured?”
The O.B. snorted. “He was blind drunk. Though the way he told it, not of his own volition. Held him down and poured the stuff down his throat, he said. Thought they meant to drown him, he said. Of course, why wouldn’t they? Drown a man like Dickie Bow in booze, you’re merely speeding things up.”
“And who were ‘they,’ in this scenario? The East Germans?”
“Oh, nothing so parochial. No, Dickie Bow’s story was, he’d been snatched by actual hoods. The Moscow variety. And not your everyday foot soldier, either.”
He paused, milking the moment. River sometimes wondered how the old man stood it, doing his daily rounds—butcher, baker, post office lady—without succumbing to the temptation to perform for the whole sorry bunch of them. Because if there was one thing the O.B. liked these days, it was an audience.
“No,” said the old man. “Dickie Bow claimed to have been kidnapped by Alexander Popov himself.”
A revelation which might have carried more impact if the name had meant anything to River.
Drive a saint to suicide, thought Catherine Standish.
Lord above!
I’m channelling my mother.
They were words she’d used earlier, about Jackson Lamb: that he’d drive a saint to suicide. Not a phrase she’d ever expected to hear herself say, but this was what happened: you turned into your mother, unless you turned into your father. That, anyway, was what happened if you let life smooth you down, plane away the edges that made you different.
Catherine had had edges once, but for years had lived a life whose borders were marked by furriness, and mornings when she wasn’t sure what had happened the night before. Traces of sex and vomit were clues; bruises on arms and thighs. The sense of having been spat out. Her relationship with alcohol had been the most enduring of her life, but like any abusive partner it had shown its true colours in the end. So now Catherine’s edges had been planed away, and alone in the kitchen of her North London flat she made a cup of peppermint tea, and thought about bald men.
There were no bald men in her life. There were no men in her life, or none that counted: there were male presences at work, and she’d grown fond of River Cartwright, but there were no actual
And she was also thinking, because she often did, how easy it would be to slip out for a bottle of wine, and have one small drink to prove she didn’t need one. One glass, and the rest down the sink. A Chablis. Nicely chilled. Or room temperature, if the off-licence didn’t keep it fridged; and if they didn’t have Chablis a Sauvignon Blanc would do, or a Chardonnay, or triple strength lager, or a two-litre bottle of cider.
