‘There. Ten minutes, and you’re fitting right in.’
Louisa said, ‘Information.’
‘That has to be it. Let’s face it, Ho’s a dick, but he knows his way around a password. If he didn’t, I’d have squashed him into a plastic bag and dropped him in a river long ago. So this female—’
‘Kim.’
‘His girlfriend.’
‘—whatever, she’s a honey trap. What do we know about her?’
‘She’s Chinese,’ Shirley said.
River said, ‘She
‘Yeah,’ said Lamb. ‘Let’s not jump to racist conclusions. She might be normal, but just look Chinese. One other thing, though—’
J. K. Coe gave a start, and sat upright.
‘Oh, did we wake him?’
Louisa, who was nearest, kicked Coe, and he reached up and pulled his earbuds loose.
Lamb said, ‘Excellent, I do like it when people at least pretend to pay attention. One other thing I forgot to mention. Whoever she’s in cahoots with was responsible for Abbotsfield.’
The silence that greeted this was marred only by the sound of Shirley masticating a Haribo.
Then J. K. Coe said, ‘I think we’ve got a problem.’
DURING THE WINTER THE day tires early, and is out of the door by five: coat on, heading west, see you tomorrow. The night then takes the long shift, and though it sleeps through most of it, and pays scant attention to what’s occurring in its quieter corners, one way or the other it muddles through until morning. But while summer’s here the day hangs around to enjoy the sunshine, and allowing for a post-lunch lull, and the odd faltering step when its five o’clock shadows appear, generally powers on as long as it’s able. And in those unexpectedly stretched-out hours, there’s more opportunity for things to come to light; or, failing that, for light to fall on things.
The light that fell on Regent’s Park that afternoon cast perfect shadows. As if designed by a professional, these were sliced laterally by venetian blinds to etch themselves onto desks and walls and floors, turning the upstairs offices into pages from a clothing catalogue, needing only model or mannequin to complete the effect. But as with swans, all the actual work at the Park went on out of sight; as picturesquely industrious as the upper storeys looked, it was down on the hub where the sweat and toil happened; where Lady Di Taverner and Claude Whelan gazed through glass walls at the boys and girls monitoring the world, and all the varied realities it had to offer. Here, the hunt for the Abbotsfield killers continued. It was slow progress. This surprised nobody. If you turn up out of nowhere and kill everything in sight, you don’t leave much to be tracked by. The origins of the killers’ odyssey were shrouded in static. Their jeep first appeared on CCTV eight miles north of Sheffield; backtracking took it to the outskirts of that city, where it disappeared in an electrical storm: the jerky whirr and buzz of too many cameras watching too much traffic, and skipping too quickly between too many points of view. Even a jeep could disappear in the stillness between digital breaths.
And when this happens, conspiracy theories blossom like mould. There must be a reason why the jeep had been able to evade surveillance so effectively; there must be an underlying cause. And there was a reason, and the reason was this: shit happens. When everything goes smoothly and the wind blows fair, the men in the jeep are arrested before they’ve finished oiling their weapons, and their victims continue their lives without ever knowing the fate that sidestepped them. But when shit happens the bad guys disappear, and their victims’ names grace headlines, and the boys and girls of the hub work on through the everlasting day, in a doomed attempt to atone for failures that others have laid at their door.
