River said, “He was well thought of at the MoD. Sat on some high-level commissions, including one on domestic terrorism which had Regent’s Park connections, and was on an advisory body to the UN in ’08. A newspaper profile of him that year called him the perfect modern soldier, part warrior, part diplomat.”
“I do like a man without faults,” Lamb said, scrumpling greaseproof paper into a ball and tossing it over his shoulder. “Reminds me of me.”
“Only he had a reputation for being a drinker.”
“There you go,” said Lamb. “A real prince.”
“What,” said Marcus, “he’s in the closet? In the arms trade? Or likes dressing up as a Nazi?”
Lamb glared. “What’s your problem? You look like you’ve lost a fiver and found a button.”
“. . . A button?”
“Forgive my folksiness. Woodstock generation.”
River trundled on. “Donovan’s career went to hell overnight. Not long after his UN stint he visited an army base in Somerset to give a lecture to an audience of cadets. Apparently there was a party afterwards, a knees-up in the mess, following which Donovan left the base in a car. He lost control, wrote the vehicle off, and his passenger, a Captain Alison Dunn, was killed. He was tried before a military court, and served five years, dishonourably discharged upon release. That was a year or so ago.”
“Okay,” Lamb conceded. “Maybe not entirely without faults.” He held up one fat finger: “So. He has a Regent’s Park connection.” And a second: “And he’s a drinker. Well?”
Nobody offered a comment.
“Jesus, do I have to do everything? He didn’t pick Standish at random. He already knew her.” He pointed at River. “How’d Sergeant Rock end up with Black Arrow?”
“Remember the Spider-Man incident?”
“Some idiot dressed as a cartoon fell off a building,” Lamb said.
This had happened back in the winter, not far from Slough House. It had made headlines for a few days, and had figured in a few comedy routines too, because the guy hadn’t actually died and, well, had been dressed as Spider-Man.
“Was thrown off a building,” River said. “It was a demo, fathers for justice sort of thing. He was divorced, and had been denied his visiting rights.”
“Was he complaining or celebrating?”
River ignored that. “Name of Paul Lowell, one-time DI with the Middlesex Constabulary, and more recently Sylvester Monteith’s second-in-command at Black Arrow. He never knew who threw him onto London Wall. They’d made contact through the Fair Deal for Fathers website, and whoever it was came dressed as Batman. He was never caught.”
“Well well well,” said Lamb. “Wonder who that could have been?”
“Donovan,” said Shirley.
“Yeah, that was rhetorical. Jesus, if I didn’t know the answer to something, you think I’d ask you lot?”
When he was sure Lamb had finished, River said, “Monteith hired Sean Donovan the same week.”
“Nothing like creating a job vacancy. Hope none of you think that’s the way to the top.”
“We’d never fit you through the window,” Louisa muttered.
Lamb rubbed the palm of his hand on his whiskery chin. Which he was scratching was open to question. “Okay, that’s who he is. What’s he want with the Grey Books? You.” He pointed at Louisa. “Go.”
Louisa said, “There’s a number of message boards where conspiracy theorists gather to swap stories. We’re not talking Dark Web here, this is all out in the open—well, they’re passworded, obviously.”
“But we have the passwords.”
“We have the passwords.”
She listed some of the sites, to blank indifference from her audience, except Shirley, who nodded vigorously throughout.
“About a year ago, around when Donovan would have been released from prison, a poster calling himself BigSeanD crops up.”
“Is that what gave you the clue?” Lamb asked.
“Thanks, yes. That and hints at a military background. It’s not unusual for online warriors to big themselves up, but he makes comments that chime with Donovan’s experience. About the Balkans, and the UN.”
She talked them through it. To all appearances, “BigSeanD” fitted snugly into the online community, where the prevailing attitude resembled what you’d get if you spliced the DNA of an only child, a
“So what’s his bag?”
“It’s the weather.”
“The what?”
Louisa said, “He’s got a thing about the weather. He thinks it’s being controlled by . . . someone. The government.
This was met with a moment’s silence.
Then Lamb said, “Christ, and they let him carry weapons.”
“He posts a lot about Project Cumulus, a government operation in the fifties, which had military backing. It was all about cloud-seeding, artificial rainmaking.”
Lamb squinted towards the window, where the blind was doing a half-arsed job of keeping the sunlight out. “Yeah, that’s working nicely.”
