She clicked and played it again. It was a grainy image, made grainier by rainfall: someone’s phone had captured it at a junction on Pentonville Road, and it showed the aftermath of a collision. One car had shunted another into a set of railings, and sat sideways, steam pumping from its bonnet. A man was leaning into the impact vehicle: checking they were okay, you’d have thought, except he suddenly raised his hands and backed up as a gun came into view.
“When did this appear?”
Louisa was behind her now, barefoot, watching her screen.
“Couple of minutes.”
The gun was attached to a blonde woman, who emerged from the car still pointing it, followed by—
“There, see? Is that River?”
—a man who didn’t appear to be armed. But it wasn’t clear whose side he was on, because the woman seemed keen to keep him within the ambit of her weapon.
“It might be,” said Marcus, who’d come to join them. “He’s obviously pissed her off.”
But it was too fuzzy to be sure. The characters kept fading in and out of focus, in tune to the excitement of whoever’d been wielding the phone.
And then something happened so quickly, none of them could tell what it was: the first man made a move, and the gun went off. There was a communal scream from an invisible audience, and the image turned first skywards, and then became a collage of pavement and moving feet, while background voices swore, and asked each other what they’d just seen.
The clip ended.
“Play it again,” said Louisa. “Freeze it on River.”
They watched the first twenty seconds again, leaning closer when Shirley hit pause.
The frozen rain blurred the three figures to dark outlines.
Louisa said, “Yes. Yes, I think it is.”
Shirley clicked on play, and there was movement again, and a gunshot, streetlit rain, and pavements, and stampeding feet.
“When did this happen?” Louisa said.
“Not long ago,” Shirley said. “Fifteen minutes?”
“Any text?”
Shirley scrolled down to the helpful caption: “Holy fucking shit!” it read, followed by a screed of expert online thought:
“That was Pentonville Road?” Louisa asked, hobbling to her chair and stooping for her socks.
“You seriously heading out there?”
“I’m bruised, not crippled,” she snapped, but winced as she padded her feet dry with a tissue.
Marcus shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it’s still pouring.”
Shirley was watching the film again. “So he buggered off to France for the day, and soon as he’s back he’s in the middle of this shit? How come he gets all the fun?”
Marcus said, “Can you get this picture any clearer?”
“No. But I’m pretty sure it’s River.”
“It’s the other one I’m looking at.” Marcus tapped a finger against the screen. “I think he’s the joker from this afternoon.”
They both looked up, but Louisa had already left.
“Shall we go with?” Shirley said.
“She’ll be fine. Place’ll be crawling with cops.”
Shirley hadn’t been so much worried about Louisa’s welfare as anxious not to miss anything. But if there were cops, it meant the action was already elsewhere. General rule of thumb was, the police turned up afterwards.
She said, “Coe was just with Lamb, wasn’t he?”
“I think I heard him coming back down.”
“I’m gunna have a word,” she said. “I wanna know what they were talking about.”
Sam Chapman said, “So now what?”
“Another drink?”
“That’s your answer?”
“Do you have a better one?”
Bad Sam sighed, and pushed his glass across the desktop.
JK Coe had left the room at a nod from Lamb. Rain still beat on the windows, its percussive onslaught muffling thought. Elsewhere in the city, in the slowly filling pubs, the weather had become the main topic of conversation, the Westacres bombing fading into the background like a persistent hangover; something that had to be lived with, but didn’t need constant discussion. London always overcame attempts to cow its spirit. Not even 7/7 had brought the city to a standstill. Though, as Lamb liked to point out, the anniversary two-minute silences did slow it down a bit.
Watching him refill Chapman’s glass, Catherine said, “Very bonding, I’m sure, but not helpful. Do we really think a project David Cartwright set up more than twenty years ago was responsible for Westacres?”
“Put like that,” said Lamb, “it does sound like something only an alcoholic, a has-been and a post-traumatic headcase could come up with.”
“I’ve worked out which one I am,” she said. “I’m having trouble with you.”
“I left myself out. I’m just facilitating blue-sky thinking.”
“Either way,” Chapman said, “shouldn’t we be passing this on? Is Diana Taverner still Ops?”
“Oh yes,” said Lamb.
“I take it you’re not the best of friends.”
“We speak on the phone, we sometimes meet up. Every now and then she tries to have me killed.” He shifted a buttock. “I can’t remember if I’ve ever been married, but it sounds like that’s what it’s like.”
Chapman said to Catherine, “He’s not kidding, is he?”
“No.”
