Anyway: her part was done. Cartwright could haul up the paperwork and say whether it was daddy. And then—if she’d read the signs aright—Lamb might just let them off the leash, which would make for a late Christmas present. Harkness had killed Marcus, or primed the hand that did so. Thinking that thought had Shirley clenching her own hand: making a fist, letting it go. Making a fist. She’d shared this office with Marcus once. They’d had their moments, but never come to blows. And in the end, they’d been partners.
She had to avert her eyes from the wall, remembering this. The wall against which Marcus’s life had ended; his final thoughts sprayed upon it like illegible graffiti.
Making a fist, letting it go. Making a fist again. Letting it go.
Shirley had attended court-mandated anger management sessions not long back, and the sessions had been successful in the sense that she didn’t have to go to them anymore, but unsuccessful in the sense that she’d punched someone in a nightclub earlier in the week, and while this had, as it happened, been the manager, that probably didn’t count. The whole thing had been a misunderstanding—he had thought she was accusing his staff of selling drugs; in fact she’d been complaining that they weren’t—but she had to be honest with herself: not resorting to violence during misunderstandings had been a key feature of the anger management course. And if, in her defence, it had been a hell of a punch—straight uppercut, no tell—that wasn’t really, when you got down to it, an actual defence. Punching someone who didn’t see it coming lost you points for self-control. Whether or not they were a dick didn’t enter into it, apparently.
Then again, the course hadn’t been an entire waste of time. At least she knew what bullshit she was expected to spout next time someone got to ask her:
Buoyed by this positive thinking, she checked her email: yep, Cartwright had requested a copy of the relevant paperwork from the car hire firm, a ‘request’ phrased as delicately as a grip on the company’s lapels. There weren’t many advantages to Slough House, but the fact that nobody knew its status as Service pariah was one, making it possible to play the national security card with civilians. Just don’t get tweeted about while doing it. Cartwright had been promised a response within thirty minutes, which in most offices translated as an hour and a half; time to grab some food, Shirley thought, a Pavlovian reaction to a glimpse of J.K. Coe passing her door, carrying something wrapped in greaseproof paper. He took it up to the office he shared with River Cartwright, who as usual offered no greeting. They’d reached this kind of détente, Coe supposed you could call it; a working arrangement whereby either might as well have been alone for all the rapport in evidence. Which suited Coe.
He sat, took a bite from his sandwich, and set the face recognition program running again. He’d have left it on while fetching lunch—that was what computers were for; to do stuff for you while you did other stuff—but experience had taught him that the program froze every twenty minutes, unless you paused it. The footage it was currently trawling through was of yesterday’s ferry arrivals at Southampton: the foot passengers. Until confirmation came that the man who’d hired the car there was the same man driving it in Hampstead—Frank Harkness—this could be a waste of time, but if you were after a working definition of life as a slow horse, that would do. Which, again, suited Coe. His was a precarious balance. His own trauma lay far in the past, or so the calendar said; it didn’t feel like ancient history though, not when memory woke him in the small hours. And the glimpses he’d had since of what he was capable of himself didn’t make for comfortable contemplation either: he was, it seemed, the sort of person who would shoot an unarmed, manacled man, an action you only had to perform once for it to become a defining characteristic. Not the person he’d assumed he was. Another, more recent outing had suggested him capable of heroism too, at least in the eyes of others, though Coe knew that when he’d shot an armed terrorist dead in Derbyshire, he’d been in the grip of something—call it a manic curiosity—over which he’d had little control; the overwhelming urge to see what a dead terrorist looked like, close up. Given all that, wasting time was as good a way of getting through it as any.
