He would, too, because they’d be leaving on foot. There was a car in the garage, a museum-quality Morris Minor, but River couldn’t remember when it had last been on the road, and besides, it was best not to make your escape in the first vehicle they’d look for. This was one of the stupid roundabout thoughts he allowed to occupy his mind, throwing dust in the way of what needed to be done, while his grandfather clumped downstairs and rooted about for his boots . . . Don’t think about it. Just do it.
He fired his grandfather’s gun into what was left of Adam Lockhead’s face.
Then he left his ID and phone in Lockhead’s pocket, taking the passport, the wallet, the tickets, the litter.
Sitting on the train now, his heartbeat echoing the clatter of its wheels, he knew that that had been the moment when it happened—not sneaking away from the house; not leaving his grandfather in the empty bus shelter while he scouted the road for a stealable car; not the journey into London along dark roads, with every approaching headlight a threat, and one stomach-flipping episode when a police car had screamed up behind him, lights ablaze, only to go pelting past; not abandoning the car behind a West End supermarket and hopping on a night bus; not turning up at Catherine’s door, because it was the only safe place he could think of—all of these had been stages on the journey, but putting the bullet into Adam Lockhead’s corpse was when he had crossed the threshold. The point at which he’d stepped outside.
Spook Street was the phrase his grandfather used. When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret. But there were other territories. Beyond Spook Street it was all joe country—even here, with the friendly French landscape pelting past at a hundred miles an hour, he was in joe country, and there was no telling what came next.
He had only the vaguest idea of where he was going; simply that he was walking back the cat, retracing a dead man’s journey. But he knew this much: he wasn’t sitting in Slough House, his energies being sucked away with every tick of the clock. He was alive, and alert to the game . . . The leafless trees on the skyline were plumes of smoke, and the sky itself a grey dome, holding the world in place. This was what joe country looked like. He tucked the passport out of sight and closed his eyes, but didn’t sleep.
The old man was asleep, or looked it, only his head visible. His body might have been a fold in the duvet. Lamb regarded him from the doorway, his face expressionless. The fluttery noise was David Cartwright’s breathing: regular, but not deep. The curtains were drawn but thin grey January light seeped in, painting everything it touched in the same lonely colour: the fitted wardrobes each side of the bed, in which Catherine’s many similar outfits doubtless hung, all those long-sleeved, high-necked, mid-calf dresses she favoured, like a governess’s Sunday best; the dressing table on which a few tubs were arranged, moisturising creams and the like, and from a corner of whose mirror a pair of necklaces hung, one of black beads Lamb had never seen before, and the other a slim gold chain she often wore, and probably had sentimental associations; even the pair of scarves draped over a chair, both in dark colours, but one threaded with gold: they were all grey-toned in this light, washed of vitality, though nothing more so than the O.B.’s face, which might have been a death-mask, were it not for that fluttery breathing.
“Happy now?”
Lamb said, “You know me. When am I not full of joie de fucking vivre?”
“So maybe you could leave my bedroom now?”
“Hey!” he shouted suddenly.
“Jackson—!”
The old man’s eyes opened, and any doubt that he’d been genuinely asleep vanished with the frightened yelp he made.
“Out! Now!” Her voice was taut with fury.
Lamb watched a moment longer as David Cartwright tried to raise his head from the pillow, his eyes soaking up the frightening unfamiliarity of his surroundings. Fingers crept out from the covers and took what grip they could. He looked like an illustration from a hundred-year-old ghost story.
And then Catherine Standish was pushing him out of the room, closing the door behind him; remaining inside with the old man. He could hear soothing noises, interrupted by an odd sort of squawking, as if she had a chicken with hiccups in there, rather than a former Service legend.
Lamb went into her sitting room. When she joined him, he was picking through the postcards on her mantelpiece, checking each for messages, though most were museum-bought.
“Was that necessary?”
“I do apologise,” said Lamb. “I was forgetting he was a vulnerable old man.”
“Yes, well—”
“I was thinking more of him being a nasty old spook with more blood on his hands than you’ve had gin for breakfast. When did they get here?”
“‘They’?”
“This is me you’re talking to. River brought him, right?”
“I thought you’d identified River’s body.”
