“She got the call late. Whoever it is used the code she responds to. Bring your car, underground garage round back of Edgware Road.” Duffy had slipped into telegraphese, to spare himself unnecessary words. “Two of them plus, her words, a drunk bloke they’re carrying.”
“She ever see them before?”
“Says not.”
He paused again. Then told Lamb what Rebecca Mitchell had told him, eventually: that one of the pair had smashed Min Harper’s head against the concrete floor of the garage, while the other had backed Rebecca Mitchell’s car up. The next part had been like a kids’ game: balance the man on the bicycle, smack the car into him. Once they’d made sure his neck was broken, they’d loaded bike and body into their own car, and moved the scene somewhere else.
When he’d finished, Duffy stood staring at the trees, as if he suspected their rustling was a secret conversation, and what they were talking about was him.
Lamb said, “It should have been picked up.”
“They took photos. Laid the body and bike out the way they fell in the garage.”
“Still should’ve been picked up.” Lamb threw his cigarette away, and sparks burst. “You did a half-arsed job.”
“No excuses.”
“Damn right.” He wiped his face with a hand smelling of tobacco. “Was she keen to talk?”
“Not so much.”
Lamb grunted.
After a while, Duffy said, “He must have seen something he wasn’t supposed to see.”
Or someone, thought Lamb. He grunted again, then went back through the big door.
This time, stepping out of the lift, he was met by an overgrown boy in a sweatshirt with Property of Alcatraz stamped on it, and glasses with heavy black frames. “You’re Jackson Lamb?” he asked.
“What gave it away?”
“The coat, mostly.” He shook the pill bottle Lamb had given Duffy earlier. “You wanted to know what this is.”
“And?”
“It’s called Xemoflavin.”
“Right. Wish I’d thought of reading the label.”
“Basic research tool,” the kid said. “Name aside, it’s a whole lot of not much. Aspirin, mostly, in a sugarshell coating. Orange, if it matters.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Lamb. “They sell it on the internet.”
“Bingo.”
“As a cure for?”
“Liver cancer,” said the kid. “Doesn’t work, though.”
“There’s a surprise.”
The kid dropped the bottle into Lamb’s waiting hand, pushed his glasses up his nose, and stepped into the lift Lamb had vacated.
Lips pursed, Lamb wandered back into Molly Doran’s space.
She’d made herself more tea, and sat nursing it in her alcove. Steam rose in thin spirals and disappeared in the upper dark.
Lamb said, “I checked his diary, did I tell you? He has no plans for the future.”
Molly took a sip of tea.
“And he’s broken things off with the woman he was seeing.”
Molly placed her cup on the table.
“And he’s taking some quack cancer remedy.”
Molly said, “Oh dear.”
“Yeah,” said Lamb. He dropped the pill bottle into the wastepaper bin. “Whatever he’s up to, at least we know why. He’s dying. And this is his last hurrah.”
Morning. Light. Surprisingly strong, breaking through the curtains, but then it had been sunny lately; unseasonably warm. Summer in April, full of unreliable promise. If you turned your back on it too long, the temperature would drop.
Louisa didn’t so much wake as realise she’d been awake for some time. Eyes open, brain humming. Nothing especially coherent; just little mental Post-its of the day’s tasks, beginning with get up, shower, drink coffee. Then bigger things: leave the flat, meet Marcus, collect Pashkin. Everything else—like last night—was just a black mass boiling in the background, to be ignored as long as possible, like clouds on an unreliably sunny day.
She rose, showered, dressed, drank coffee. Then went out to meet Marcus.
Catherine was back in Slough House so early it felt like she’d never left, but even so, she travelled there through a city whose fuse had been lit. The underground was full of people talking to each other. Some held placards—STOP THE CITY was a favourite. Another read BANKERS: NO. At Barbican station, someone lit a cigarette. Anarchy was in the air. There’d be glass broken today.
But early as she was, Roderick Ho had beaten her. This wasn’t unusual—Ho often seemed to live here: she suspected he preferred his online activities to emanate from a Service address—but what was different was, he’d been working. As she passed his open door, he looked up. “Found some stuff,” he said.
“That list I gave you?”
“The Upshott people.” He brandished a printout. “Three of them, anyway. I’ve tracked them back as far as they go. And there’s paperwork, sure, they’ve paperwork coming out their ears, but the early stuff is all shoe and no footprint.”
“Which would be one of those internet expressions, yes?”
Ho flashed a sudden smile. This was even weirder than people chatting on the tube. “It is now.”
“And it means …?”
“Well, take Andrew Barnett. His CV’s got him attending St Leonard’s Grammar School in Chester in the early sixties. It’s a comp now, with a good IT department, and one of its projects is putting the school records online.”
