He gave her a pitying look. “If I were to tell you everything I know,” he said, “you’d grow old and die before I was halfway done.” He shifted his feet suddenly, and a handleless mug that had sat on River’s desk, seeing service as a penholder, fell to the floor and completed its useful life. He looked at Ho. “You’re very quiet.”
“What about—”
“No, don’t spoil it.”
JK Coe spoke. “We have two fixed points.”
A short silence followed, then Lamb said, “Did someone fart? Only I heard a squeak, but I’m not smelling anything.”
“What’s that mean?” Shirley said. “Two fixed points?”
“Intended victim. Source of plot.” Coe was snapping his phrases off as soon as they were done, as if they were costing him pain.
Louisa said, “Triangulation requires three points.”
“Clue’s in the name,” Marcus pointed out.
Coe said, “The old man must have a French connection. He can’t tell us but someone will know.” The fingers on his right hand twitched. “There’ll be records.”
“I was wondering about returning him to the shop,” Lamb said. “But it seems he has a working brain.” He paused. “He’s gunna fit in round here like a monkey at a dog show, but we’ll worry about that later. You heard him—find the connection. What ties the old man to France? That’ll be our third reference point. Any questions? Good. Off you fuck.”
“Just one,” Shirley said, when safely back in her own office. “What’s all this triangulation shit?”
The bus spat him out mid-morning in what would have been called the village square in England, though it wasn’t square. More of a large junction, whose adjoining roads didn’t quite meet, leaving this haphazard space of which a low wall carved off one corner, and the stacked tables of a café claimed another. A pair of trees swayed one side of the wall, and there were cars parked underneath, cars the bus was even now missing by inches as it swung away from the bus stop, which was marked as such only by a dog-eared timetable stapled to one of the tree trunks. It was raining softly, else those tables might have been in use, and the air had an edge to it, the unmistakable tang of a recent fire: not leaves or barbecue, something larger. This falsely lent the idea of warmth to the morning, and River tugged his jacket’s zip higher before checking again the café receipt he’d taken from Adam Lockhead’s pocket. Le Ciel Bleu, Angevin. And there it was, as advertised, behind those stacked tables; lights on, windows misted. Dim shapes moving about inside. The rectangular piece of card on the front door’s frosted glass clearly said Open, or Ouvert, or would when he got close enough to read it.
But River stayed where he was for the moment, sheltering under the awning of the nearest shop, in whose window a gallimaufry of objects was on display: kitchen gadgets, children’s toys, radios, watches, toiletries, brushes, packets of seed, boxes of cat litter, as if the idea was to just chuck a lot of bait around and see what the net dragged in. It reminded him of the market-stalls on a street near Slough House, most of which had vanished when the foodies moved in. Random thoughts like this were the product of weariness. He surveyed the goods on offer while he accustomed himself to being here, middle of France, with only half a clue as to what he was doing.
It felt earlier than it was, or perhaps later—the light, anyway, seemed wrong, as if filtered through gauze—but then, his body clock was still set to yesterday. River hadn’t had much sleep last night, and didn’t have much money. Adam Lockhead’s euros had paid for a train ticket from Paris to Poitiers and the bus ticket here from there, but weren’t going to get him much further. They didn’t have to, though. By lunchtime at the outside, the body at his grandfather’s would have been, if not identified as Lockhead, at least unidentified as River Cartwright, which meant using his credit card wouldn’t be giving away anything that wasn’t already known, other than his location. They’d be looking at his known associates by then, trying to find the old man. With luck, by the time they got to Catherine, he’d have discovered what had brought an assassin from this quiet-seeming town on the river Anglin all the way to his grandfather’s house in Kent. Because the last thing he wanted was for the O.B. to be in anyone’s custody—not the Park’s; not the police’s—until he knew where the danger was coming from. Until then it was all joe country, and everyone a potential enemy.
Nobody had left or entered the café while he’d been standing here, and even if they had, what would he have done about it? It was time to take the next step. Collar up against the rain, he left the shelter of the awning, and made for Le Ciel Bleu.
