London Rules полностью

Besides: Jackson Lamb. The temptation to hand him whatever rope he was looking for was not one to shrug off easily. Sooner or later he’d wind up swinging from it – nobody could be Jackson Lamb forever without paying the price – but the certain knowledge that aiding him would give Lady Di the screaming abdabs was good enough for Molly Doran. She had a sudden image of Lamb’s carcass dangling from a gibbet. The reek of it would empty buildings. But he wouldn’t have it any other way, she knew. After half a lifetime battling the forces of oppression, he’d spent the second half revenging himself on a world that had fucked up anyway. If things had gone otherwise, he might have been something to behold. As it was, he was a spectacle; just not the kind to draw admiring glances.

Easy to spiral away into such thoughts. Her days and weeks, her years, down here; so many of them had been lost to flights of fancy, her earthbound wheels notwithstanding. It was as if the files were slowly leaking; gracing the air with secret histories, with private visions.

‘It’s Regent’s Park,’ she reminded herself now. ‘Not bloody Hogwarts.’

So saying, she reached out and plucked from the shelf the first of the night’s treasures.

She was alone in the car, and this was what grief meant. Grief meant being alone in the car.

Would she remember that, or should she make a note for future reference?

Technically, Dodie Gimball supposed, she wasn’t alone, because of the driver, but such were the details art skimmed over. Her husband was dead, and she was alone in the car, and evermore would be. Her lifemate had been destroyed – here one moment, gone the next. What was she to do now?

There were lights behind her, lights ahead; the police escort was running without sirens, but both cars were flashing their blues, and the BMW’s interior pancaked in and out of colour. Every so often, too, it blurred, as tears filled Dodie’s eyes, but the outpour never came. It was as if a valve had stuck, refusing to allow the free passage of water.

Dennis was gone. They had killed him. They would pay.

Nobody had been able to tell her what had happened. It was ‘under investigation’. It was ‘too soon to tell’. The area had been cordoned off, and there’d been a roadblock in place when her motorcade exited Slough, but all of that was not for her ears, not for her eyes. Under any other circumstances she’d have blown a dozen different holes through the careers of everyone in earshot, but tonight she felt powerless. This was grief; grief was being alone in the car. But it was something else too, something she hadn’t got to the bottom of yet.

Her last words to Dennis had been If you get caught, you’re never borrowing my Manolos again. And that was that.

This, too, would benefit from a rewrite. As I embraced him, I had a strange presentiment, of a kind I’ve only ever once had before, when my beloved grandmother – no, grandfather – grandmother – sod it, the interns can handle the details. ‘I love you, my darling.’ I’ll always be glad those were the last words I …

The blue light in front slowed, drew to a halt.

Her own car followed suit.

They were on Western Avenue. Up ahead, lights picked out the Hoover Building, under reconstruction. On the road, red fireflies streamed into central London; here, blue lights looped slowly fore and aft of her, and she was stationary in a layby, and the driver was saying something: it included the word ma’am.

‘… What?’

‘I’ve been asked to pull over.’

‘… What?’

‘You have a visitor.’

And then the driver was leaving, and she truly was alone in the car.

‘How did you know where to find us?’

Lamb sighed. ‘Give me credit. You were clearly going to be looking for the girl, and where else would she be hiding?’

‘Also, I told him,’ said Catherine.

‘Well, if you want to get technical.’

Kim – Roddy Ho’s girlfriend – was flat on her back on the office floor with everyone gathered round her, the spectrum of concern to indifference running from Catherine Standish at one end to Jackson Lamb so far off the other, he was barely visible. ‘Timing,’ he’d said more than once. ‘Now that was timing.’

‘There might have been gentler ways of accosting her.’

‘Yeah, right.’ He surveyed the assembled: J. K. Coe with a slashed chin; Shirley Dander with a torn earlobe; Louisa and River both moving gingerly. ‘Because you lot handled her with such fucking panache.’

The conversation with Catherine had taken place over the phone in Welles’s car, after they’d left the Park; Flyte and Welles up front, Lamb sprawled in the back.

‘We need to find the girl,’ Flyte had said.

‘I know.’

‘If they haven’t killed her yet.’