Spook Street полностью

“So Jackson Lamb assured me. Speaking of whom . . . ”

“He mis-identified the stiff.”

“The body’s a mess,” Emma said. “No face to speak of. Still, though.”

“An ‘I don’t know’ would have done the job,” Welles finished.

“So maybe Lamb’s playing his own game. Christ, don’t you miss the Met sometimes? At least all the crap was honest crap.”

“Graft, drugs and hookers,” Welles agreed. “This lot, you just can’t trust.”

“So if Lamb wanted us to think young Cartwright’s dead, maybe there’s other stuff he’s keeping quiet. Like where Cartwright actually is. Both of them.”

“Lamb’s from that losers’ place, right?”

“Slough House.”

“You think the Cartwrights are there?”

“Too obvious. These are spooks, even if they’re Vauxhall Conference.” She paused. “Do they still have a Vauxhall Conference?”

“You’re asking a cricket fan,” Welles said. “So what do you reckon? Check out his colleagues?”

“Also too obvious.” She thought a moment. “But let’s look at Lamb’s contacts. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Call over, she started the car and pulled away with a squeal of rubber. Not the recommended practice when departing a safe house, but sometimes, chatting to a fellow ex-copper, the old instincts took over.

The rabbit looked unscathed, apart from being dead.

River’s heart started again.

“Good shot,” he said.

The man raised an eyebrow.

“ça, ç’etait formidable,” River improvised.

The man held his free hand flat and wiggled it side to side.

Comme çi, comme ça, thought River, and decided that if he were capable of reading French mime, his language skills weren’t as tragic as he’d been made to feel.

His new companion wore a waterproof jacket with capacious-looking pockets, from one of which he produced a length of string. Leaning his shotgun against a tree, he tied the rabbit’s back legs together, secured the string to his belt, then slung the corpse over his shoulder. Most dead things look smaller, but this remained an impressive piece of meat. With the thought, a hunger pang struck River. The sky growled too, a thundery echo.

“Anglais?” the man asked suddenly, his voice higher, lighter, than River might have expected. He was dark, with rook-black hair and angular features, all of which suggested something guttural. Not this soft cadence.

“Yes,” he said.

“You look for someone?”

“The people here.”

“Gone. All gone.” The man snapped his fingers, pouf, just like that. They were here and then were gone, in a puff of smoke, except the smoke had been a cloud: a thick black mass of it, pouring upwards through the trees.

And downwards through the trees now came the first fat spats of heavier rain.

The man tugged his collar up, and recovered his shotgun. Then looked at River’s inadequate jacket and shoes.

“You’re to be get wet,” he said.

“I am to be that, yes,” River agreed.

“Come.”

And the man led the way through the wood; not along the track River had followed, but set to an invisible course he seemed to know well, avoiding every root that River stumbled over, and every hole in the ground that sought out River’s feet.

Patrice pulled into a layby, and spread a map against the windscreen. He knew precisely where he was—wouldn’t dream of setting foot on hostile land without memorising routes—but it provided an excuse for remaining stationary while he gave thought to what he’d learned.

A police presence round the target’s house.

Which was to be expected. Bertrand would have made it look like an old-man accident, but even an old-man accident would require official scrutiny given the old man in question. Except that there had been no confirmation, parcel delivered, nor even its obverse, nobody at home. Will attempt redelivery.

So. Absence of message plus police presence meant Bertrand’s parcel hadn’t just not been delivered, it had likely blown up in his face.

This was not out of the question. Patrice loved Bertrand like a brother, but facts were facts: Bertrand had been known to falter at critical moments.

He refolded the map and took out his mobile at the precise moment that a passing bird, a seagull for Christ’s sake—he was miles from the sea—shat on his windscreen. There were omens, and then there were your basic illustrations. The phone was answered on its second ring, but he heard only silence. To fill it, he delivered three swift sentences, in French.

More silence.

Then: “And your parcel?”

“Still undelivered.”

“Try again.”

He ended the call.

Squirting cleanser onto the windscreen, he watched as the wipers smeared the seagull’s mess into a grey film. Another clean-up job that made things worse. Then he cried, very briefly, for Bertrand, who was probably dead; squirted more cleanser, and ran the wipers again. Then he drove back to London.