His raincoat over one arm, he walked through the mews to the road, where his car was waiting.
‘“Alternatively sane”?’
‘Top of my head.’
‘It showed.’
‘It was off the cuff, River. I didn’t know I was going to be marked on it.’
Louisa and River were fetching their cars, or in River’s case, Ho’s car. Well, Ho wasn’t using it, and Lamb had known where he hid his spare keys: in an envelope secured to the underside of his desk. ‘The second most obvious place,’ Lamb called it, the first being if Ho had just Sellotaped them to his forehead. River didn’t feel good about using Ho’s car without permission. He felt fantastic.
The rain had eased off, and the breeze that was kicking up felt fresh and ready for anything.
Ho used a resident’s parking permit he’d applied for in the name of a local shut-in, not far from where he’d nearly been run over the previous morning. Louisa was on a meter, which was nearly as expensive as, though without the obvious benefits of, a second home. They reached Ho’s car first. Before Louisa could walk on, River said, ‘You really think there’s something to this?’
‘What Coe said?’
‘That, yeah. Plus what happens next. Someone’s going to try to whack Zafar Jaffrey? Or Dennis Gimball? Tonight?’
‘Everything else has happened in a hurry. Abbotsfield. The penguins. The bomb on the train.’
‘Yeah, but.’
‘I know.’
‘We can’t even be sure it’s Jaffrey or Gimball. Let alone tonight.’
‘Well, we have to do something.’
‘On account of Lamb.’
‘On account of Lamb, yeah.’
More specifically, on account of Lamb pulling a gun on the Head Dog.
‘I didn’t think he was going to do that.’
‘It would worry me if you had. Emma’s already got you down as Lamb’s mini-me.’
‘… You agree with her?’
Louisa said, ‘Nah. You’ve a way to go yet.’
‘Thanks. I think.’
What Lamb had done: he’d aimed Marcus’s gun in Emma’s direction.
Emma Flyte said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘Well, you’d think so. But try seeing it from my point of view.’
She stood up. ‘Seriously, you are out of your mind.’
‘It’s been said before. But best sit down.’
Flyte looked around the room. Everyone was staring at Lamb, except Catherine Standish, who was looking at Emma.
‘I’d do as he says.’
‘He’s not going to shoot me.’
‘Probably not.’ Catherine let that ‘probably’ hang there a moment or two, then shrugged. ‘But it’s your call.’
Flyte said to Lamb, ‘You’ve lost your senses,’ but she sat down.
Lamb said, ‘Didn’t we used to have a pair of handcuffs somewhere?’
‘… Why is everyone looking at me?’ Shirley asked.
‘We’re not judging,’ said Catherine.
Grumbling under her breath, Shirley went to her room and came back with a pair of cuffs. River waited until she’d secured Emma Flyte to her chair before saying, ‘And this is a good idea because …?’
Lamb said, ‘Okay, for those of you who weren’t paying attention, or are just slow, or are called Cartwright, let me point out what you’ve missed. These last couple of days, the terrorist massacre, the dead penguins, the bomb on the train, yada yada yada, it can all be laid at our door.’
‘Ho’s door,’ Louisa said.
‘You think Di Taverner cares which door? Once she’s got an opening, she’ll use it. By which I mean, she’ll drive a bulldozer through Slough House, and the best you lot can hope for is, someone’ll pull you from the rubble before burying you again.’ He remembered his bottle of wine, and reached for it. ‘And before you ask, no, that’s not a metaphor either.’
Louisa said, ‘You’re not seriously saying the Park would black ribbon us?’
Black ribbons were what were wrapped round closed files.
‘I’m saying,’ Lamb said, ‘that if they don’t want you around to tell tales, then you won’t be around to tell tales.’
River said, ‘There was that protocol, a few years ago. Waterproof? But there was an inquiry. They don’t use that any more.’
‘Oh, believe me,’ J. K. Coe said. ‘They do.’
River stared, but Coe said nothing more.
‘Waterproof?’ asked Shirley.
‘Black prisons. Eastern Europe.’
‘Fuck.’
Emma Flyte said, ‘Will you lot listen to yourselves? The Park does not bury its mistakes any more. Or ship them off to foreign dungeons.’
‘They brought you in to run a clean department,’ said Lamb. ‘That doesn’t mean there aren’t still dirty bits you don’t get to hear about.’
‘You’ve been rotting away in this slag heap for too long. You’ve all turned paranoid. If there’s even any remote truth in this scenario you’ve conjured up, this is not the way to deal with it.’
‘Nobody’s actually keeping minutes,’ Lamb said. ‘But if anyone had been, rest assured your objections would have been noted.’
‘I thought you had enough on Taverner to keep her onside,’ Louisa said. ‘Or at least to stop her going all medieval on us.’
‘If what happened at Abbotsfield turns out to be our fault,’ Catherine said softly, ‘that’ll trump anything Diana Taverner’s done.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lamb. ‘To be fair to her, her civilian casualties are probably still in single figures.’ He surveyed his assembled crew. ‘The good news is, if they’re holding off on questioning Ho, we’ve got a window.’
