Ho reached for her, but had a wise moment and refrained. She might be shorter than him but they both knew—everybody knew—she could rip him up like confetti if she wanted, and scatter him like rice.
She found his messages, and read the one from Lamb. “Will be late in. Up all night identifying Cartwright’s body.”
“Will be late?” Moira repeated. “Well. That’s a little . . . ”
“You haven’t met him yet, have you?”
Louisa said, “‘Cartwright’s’? He said ‘Cartwright’s’?”
“Louisa—”
“He doesn’t say the body’s River’s.”
“Who else could he mean?”
“River’s grandfather. Maybe he means the O.B.’s body.”
“Why would Lamb be identifying the O.B.’s—”
“Because this is
“Louisa,” Marcus said gently. “If he didn’t mean River, then where is River? He’d be here by now if . . . ”
“He was alive,” Moira blurted.
“Yeah, thanks,” Shirley muttered.
But JK Coe said, “I think he probably is.”
Leafless trees on the skyline resembled plumes of smoke, and the sky itself was a grey dome, holding the world in place. Every so often dark flecks scarred its surface, which he thought were probably geese: maybe swans, but probably geese. It was doubtful that it mattered, but he’d slipped his moorings now, and even the most Lilliputian detail might help anchor him to solid ground.
River Cartwright, unobserved—he hoped—took the passport from his jacket pocket, and examined it again by the light from the train window.
“I knew he wasn’t you,” his grandfather had said.
This would have seemed a small triumph, most days: that the O.B. knew who was and who wasn’t his grandson. But the photo in the passport would have fooled a casual acquaintance, and given pause to some who knew him well. It wasn’t just the physical similarity; it was the light in the eye, the tilt of the jaw.
Of course, the light in his eye was well and truly out now.
Adam Lockhead.
A name that meant nothing to River.
Who had gone through Adam Lockhead’s pockets, there in the bathroom. The passport; a wallet holding a hundred or so euros; the return half of a Eurostar ticket. Some loose change, a pocket-sized packet of tissues, a chocolate bar wrapper and a crumpled café receipt. Nothing to indicate what he’d been after; nothing to explain why he had planned to kill David Cartwright, if that’s what he’d intended.
To think otherwise was to allow the possibility that an innocent visitor had turned up to be shot in the head for his pains.
In the city, when you heard something that sounded like a gunshot, you waited to hear it a second time, and when you didn’t, you put it down to a backfiring car. River wasn’t sure the same held true of the country. At any moment the quiet of the evening might be sawn in two by approaching sirens, and once that happened, they’d be sucked into the maw of Regent’s Park: a security blanket dropped over them like a cover on a parrot’s cage. No more talking, or not to each other.
“You’re sure you’ve not seen him before?” he asked.
“I knew he wasn’t you,” his grandfather repeated.
On the kitchen table lay the panic button the O.B. had been issued with, back when he could be trusted with such things. Lately, he’d activated it at least once that River was aware of; “False alarm, false alarm,” he’d asserted, though River suspected he’d simply forgotten what it was for. Pressing it was a way of finding out. And since pressing it in these circumstances was pretty much exactly what it was designed for, River, crouching over the body of Adam Lockhead, had wondered whether it wasn’t better to go with the flow . . . The Dogs would soon arrive. This kind of mess was what they were for: they cleaned, they disinfected, they made the bad stuff go away. But other words from earlier in the evening were haunting him: the possibility, the breath of an ancient rumour, that Regent’s Park might have a habit of lowering a curtain over its former glories.
“Yeah, I wasn’t actually suggesting they’d have him murdered,” Louisa had said. “Though I can see you’ve put some thought into that.”
He put some more into it now.
A stranger, upstairs in his grandfather’s house.
A stranger who looked enough like River to at least get through the door.
A stranger apparently running a bath.
A quick tug on an old man’s heels . . .
“We have to go.”
“River?”
“Grandfather, it’s not safe here.”
“Stoats?” his grandfather said, perking up.
“That’s right. Stoats.”
“I’ll need my wellingtons.”
