Regent’s Park was the light at the top of the ladder. It was where River would be now, if he hadn’t crashed King’s Cross.
He said, ‘So this Hobden thing, it’s Regent’s Park?’
‘Of course it bloody is. We don’t run ops from Slough House. Thought you’d worked out that much.’
‘So how come Sid got the real job? And I’m left collecting the rubbish?’
‘Tell you what,’ said Lamb. ‘You have a good long think about that, and see if you can come up with the answer all by yourself.’
‘And why would the Park want us anyway? They’ve no shortage of talent, surely.’
‘I hope that’s not a sexist remark, Cartwright.’
‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’
Lamb looked at him blankly, and River had the sense he was thinking deep thoughts, or else wanted River to think he was thinking deep thoughts. But when he answered, it was only to shrug.
‘And why do they want me to deliver it?’
‘They don’t,’ Lamb said. ‘They want Sid. But Sid’s not here. So I’m sending you.’
River picked up the flash-box, and its contents slid from one end to the other. ‘Who do I deliver it to?’
Lamb said, ‘Name’s Webb. Isn’t he an old mate of yours?’
And River’s stomach slid sideways too.
Flash-box under one arm, he cut through the estate to the row of shops beyond: supermarket, newsagent’s, stationer’s, barber’s, Italian restaurant. Fifteen minutes later, he was at Moorgate. From there he caught a tube part way, then walked across the park. The rain had stopped at last, but large puddles swamped the footpaths. The sky was still grey, and the air smelled of grass. Joggers loped past, trackies plastered to their legs.
He didn’t like it that Lamb had sent him on this errand. Liked even less knowing that Lamb knew that, and knew he knew it too.
In the weeks after King’s Cross, River grew accustomed to a scraped-out feeling, as if that desperate dash along the platform—his last-second, doomed attempt to put things right—had left permanent scars. Somewhere in his stomach it was always four in the morning, he’d drunk too much, and his lover had left. There’d been an inquiry—you didn’t crash King’s Cross without people noticing—the upshot of which was, River had made sixteen basic errors inside eight minutes. It was bullshit. It was Health and Safety. It was like when a fire breaks out in the office, and afterwards everyone’s ordered to unplug the kettle when it’s not in use, even though it wasn’t the kettle started the fire in the first place. You couldn’t count a plugged-in kettle as an error. Everyone did it. Almost no one ever died.
We’ve run the numbers, he’d been told.
Running the numbers happened a lot at Regent’s Park. Pixellating, too; River had heard that lately—
All of this was background static; his mind throwing up a curtain, because he didn’t want to hear the numbers.
But the numbers, it turned out, were inescapable. He heard them whispered in corridors his last morning. One hundred and twenty people killed or maimed; £30m worth of damage. A further £2.5 billion in lost tourist revenue.
It didn’t matter that none of these numbers were real, that they had simply been conjured up by those who took special pleasure in concocting worst-case scenarios. What mattered was that they’d been committed to paper and passed round committees. That they’d ended up on Taverner’s desk. Which was not a desk you wanted your mistakes to end up on if you had hopes of them being forgotten.
Much as River hated to admit it, that had been true. If not for the O.B., even Slough House would have been out of reach.
A career of shuffling paper. Of transcribing snatched mobile phone conversations. Of combing through page after page on long-ago operations, looking for parallels with the here and now …
Half of the future is buried in the past. That was the prevailing Service culture. Hence the obsessive sifting of twice-ploughed ground, attempting to understand history before it came round again. The modern realities of men, women, children, wandering into city centres with explosives strapped to their chests had shattered lives but not moulds. Or that was the operating wisdom, to the dismay of many.
