Dead Lions полностью

When he’d finished speaking to River, Lamb sat for a while wearing what Catherine Standish called his dangerous expression: the one where he was considering something other than what to eat or drink next. Then he checked his watch, sighed, and with a heavy grunt rose and picked up a shirt from the floor. Scrunching it in a fist, he crossed the landing to Catherine’s room.

“Got a carrier bag?”

Looking up from her desk, she blinked.

He waggled the shirt. “Anyone home?”

“In there,” she said, pointing at a canvas bag slung from her coatstand.

Thrusting a hand into it, Lamb withdrew half a dozen plastic carriers. He shovelled his shirt into one. The others fell to the floor. He turned to go.

“Leaving early?” she asked.

Lamb hoisted the bag above his head without turning round. “Laundry day,” he said, and disappeared down the stairs.

She stared for a while, then shook her head and returned to work.

In front of her were fragments of lives, fillets of biography, snatched from online sources and official records: HMRC, DMLV, the ONS; the usual crowd. It was like eating alphabet soup with a fork.

Raymond Hadley, 62, had been a BA pilot for eighteen years, and now busied himself with local politics and environmental issues, his commitment to which didn’t prevent him owning a small aeroplane.

Duncan Tropper, 63, was a solicitor; formerly with a high-powered West End interest, he currently put in a couple of days a week at a firm in Burford.

Anne Salmon, 60, was an economics don at the University of Warwick.

Stephen Butterfield, 67, had been sole owner of Lighthouse Publishing, a small concern specialising in left-leaning history, until one of the industry monoliths had gobbled it up, leaving a smoking pile of money in its place.

His wife Meg, 59, part-owned a clothes store.

Andrew Barnett, 66, was Civil Service (retired); something in the Ministry of Transport, which—a first in Catherine’s experience—actually meant he’d been something in the Ministry of Transport.

And the rest, and the rest, and the rest. Someone from the Financial Services Authority; two TV producers (one Beeb; one independent); a chemist who’d worked at Porton Down; graphic designers; teachers; doctors; a journalist; business refugees (construction, tobacco, advertising, soft drinks): it added up to a bunch of successful professionals who’d managed to combine busy careers with a quiet life in the Cotswold village of Upshott; the kind of quiet life, Catherine guessed, you’d need a busy career to fund. Many had taken early retirement. Most had children. All drove.

And, Catherine reminded herself, none of it was her business, let alone her job; and in her job, minding her business was paramount. But she was missing River Cartwright, sort of. And hoped he’d return safely, not dead.

The Cotswolds, Standish. Not bleeding Helmand Province.

Which was true, as was the fact that Lamb had staked River out like a sacrificial, well, lamb, to see what would happen next. And given that what had happened first was a murder, there were no guarantees River’s country exile would prove idyllic.

She looked at Stephen Butterfield’s brief profile again. A left-leaning publishing house. Too obvious? Or just the right amount?

Without more background it was impossible to say, and while Upshott had a small population, running a solo check on every villager was an uphill task. But of this, Catherine was convinced: that if every current inhabitant lined up in front of her, Mr. B would not be among them. Because if Lamb was right, and poor Dickie Bow had been killed in a drag hunt, then Mr. B’s role had come to an end once he’d finished laying his trail. The question was, why did that trail lead to Upshott?

The clue was that word, cicadas. Part of the Popov legend, intended to have the Service tying itself in knots, looking for a network that didn’t exist. But in the spooks’ hall of mirrors, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be real … The Cold War was history, but its shrapnel was everywhere. Maybe, all these years later, Upshott harboured a cicada, who was getting ready to sing.

Though the biggest damn mystery of all, Catherine thought, was why had their attention been brought to it in the first place?

In sudden irritation, she dropped her pen and stood. There were always displacement tasks; tiny mindless things to distract her from the larger, equally mindless tasks Lamb imposed. A smear on her window, for example. Attempting to wipe it clean, she found it was on the outside, but as she stood there Catherine saw a curl of smoke above distant rooftops. Fingers poked her heart, but before they could take a grip she remembered that a crematorium lay that way, and that the smoke funnelling from its chimney marked a private tragedy, not a public cataclysm. But still. You couldn’t see smoke on the city skyline without a shiver of fear that it, or something like it, was happening again. This was so much a reflex that it could remain undefined.