“Guys maybe,” she said. “Sacking a girl for flattening a creep who’s harassing her, that’s embarrassing. Especially if the ‘girl’ in question wants to get legal about it.” The inverted commas round girl couldn’t have been more audible if she’d said quote/unquote. “Besides, I had an edge.”
“What sort of edge?”
She kicked back from her desk with both feet, and her chair-legs squealed on the floor. “What are you after?”
“Nothing.”
“Because you sound pretty curious for someone just making conversation.”
“Well,” he told her, “without curiosity, what kind of conversation have you got?”
She studied him. He wasn’t bad looking, for his age; had what appeared to be a lazy left eyelid, but this gave him a watchful air, as if he were constantly sizing the world up. His hair was longer than hers, but not by much; he wore a neatly trimmed beard and moustache, and was careful how he dressed. Today this meant well-pressed jeans and a white collarless shirt under a grey jacket; his black and purple Nicole Farhi scarf hung on the coatstand. She’d noticed all this not because she cared but because everything was information. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that meant nothing. Besides, everyone was divorced or unhappy.
“Okay,” she said. “But if you’re playing me, you’re likely to find out first-hand just how hard I hit.”
He raised his hands in not entirely mock-surrender. “Hey, I’m just trying to establish a working relationship. You know. Us being the newbies.”
“It’s not like the others put up a united front. ’Cept maybe Harper and Guy.”
“They don’t have to,” Marcus said. “They’ve got resident status.” His fingers played a quick trill across his keyboard, then he pushed it away and shunted his chair sideways. “What do you make of them?”
“As a group?”
“Or one by one. It doesn’t have to be a seminar.”
“Where do we start?”
Marcus Longridge said, “We start with Lamb.”
Perched on the back seat of a bus where a man had died, Jackson Lamb was looking out at a cracked concrete forecourt and a pair of wooden gates, beyond which lay Reading town centre. As a long-time Londoner, Lamb couldn’t contemplate this without a shudder.
For the moment, though, he concentrated on doing what he was pretending to do, which was sit in quiet recall of the man he’d said was his brother, but who in reality had been Dickie Bow: too daft to be a workname, but too cute to be real. Dickie and Lamb had been in Berlin at the same time, but from this distance, Lamb had trouble recalling the other man’s face. The image he kept coming up with was sleek and pointy, like a rat, but then that’s what Dickie Bow had been, a street rat; adept at crawling through holes too small for him. That had been his key survival skill. It didn’t appear to have helped him lately.
(A heart attack, the postmortem had said. Not especially surprising in a man who drank as much, and smoked as much, and ate as much fried food as Dickie Bow. Uncomfortable reading for Lamb, whose habits it might have been describing.)
Reaching out, he traced a finger over the back of the seat in front. Its surface was mostly smooth; the one burn mark obviously ancient; the faint tracery in a corner suggesting random scratching rather than an attempt to etch a dying message … It was years since Bow had been in the Service, and even then, he’d been one of that great army who’d never quite been inside the tent. You could always trust a street rat, the wisdom ran, because every time one of them took money from the other side, he’d be on your doorstep next morning, expecting you to match the offer.
There was no brotherhood code. If Dickie Bow had succumbed to a mattress fire, Lamb would have got through the five stages without batting an eye: denial, anger, bargaining, indifference, breakfast. But Bow had died on the back seat of a moving coach, without a ticket in his pocket. Booze, fags and fry-ups aside, the PM couldn’t explain Bow’s being in the sticks when he should have been working his shift at a Soho pornshop.
Standing, Lamb ran a hand along the overhead rack, and found nothing. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have been anything left by Dickie Bow, not after six days. Then he sat again, and studied the rubber lining along the base of the window, looking for scratch marks—ridiculous perhaps, but Moscow Rules meant assuming your mail was read. When you needed to leave a message, you left it by other means. Though in this instance, a thumbnail on a rubber lining wasn’t one of them.
A hesitant, polite cough from the front of the coach.
“I, ah—”
Lamb looked up mournfully.
“I don’t mean to rush you. But are you going to be much longer?”
“One minute,” Lamb said.
