“What about the new guy, then. Whelan?”
Lamb tortured his chair further by leaning back: if a living thing had made the resulting noise, you’d have called a vet. Or the police. “I can just picture how that’ll go,” he said. “Hi, Claude. You know this bomb? Well, it turns out your Service built it, wound it up and let it go. Do you want to call a press conference, or should I?”
“Nobody’s saying they’ll be happy to hear it,” said Chapman. “But they’ve got to be told.”
“Maybe they already have been,” Lamb said. “Whoever came after the old man came from France, fine, but what about this afternoon’s joker? Was he from the same place? Or are the Park in on the act, and cleaning up the mess? Because that would be standard practice for the old guard, and all I know about the new guy is, he sent us Grendel’s mother through there. So he hasn’t made my Christmas list yet.”
“And this is how you make operational decisions?”
“When I don’t have a coin handy.”
“This place is as messed up as it looks, isn’t it?”
“You know me,” said Lamb. “I always demand the highest professional standards.”
He farted, though whether as illustration or punctuation wasn’t clear.
Bad Sam wafted a hand and said, “Jesus, Lamb, did something die inside of you?”
“I used to wonder that myself,” Catherine said quietly. “But I’m pretty sure he’s always been like this.”
“Thanks for your support,” Lamb said. “Now why not make yourself useful and go fetch the old bastard?”
From his lips, River’s term of affection soured into abuse.
Catherine said, “Seriously? You’re going to interrogate him?”
“You make it sound so brutal,” Lamb said. “I’m not going to hurt him.” He paused. “I’m probably not going to hurt him.”
“You’re not going to lay a finger on him.”
He said to Bad Sam, “She has this thing about older men. Her last boss blew his brains out, but that’s probably a coincidence.”
“You were Charles Partner’s Girl Friday,” Sam Chapman said. “I knew I recognised you.”
“‘Girl Friday’?”
“We had a chat after he died, didn’t we?”
“It’s nice that you think it was a chat,” Catherine said.
It had lasted for hours, was her memory. In the paranoia that had followed Partner’s death, everyone was suspected of knowing more than they should have. Catherine, who had known significantly less, had borne the brunt of the Dogs’ investigation, and, newly sober, had become instantly nostalgic for those alcoholic blackouts that had been a feature of her recent past.
There were those who would have assured her that they had only been doing their job. Chapman, wisely, wasn’t one of them.
Lamb said, “Either he knows more than he’s pretending or less than he should. Either way, let’s probe those gaps in his history, shall we?” He shifted his bulk, and the chair complained again. “If you don’t fetch him, I will.”
She shook her head, but only for her own benefit, and that was as far as her resistance went. Because it was true, they had to know what David Cartwright knew, so she rose and left the gloomy office to collect him.
River’s room—or River and Coe’s room, as Shirley supposed she ought to be calling it—was in semi-darkness, the only light Coe’s anglepoise, spilling a thick yellow cone over his desk. For once he wasn’t plugged into his iPod, and while his hands were splayed on the desktop, he didn’t seem to be indulging in his fake-piano bullshit either. For a moment, Shirley considered turning away; leaving him to his thoughts, which were probably dark enough that you wouldn’t want to spill them on anything delicate. All men were dickheads until proven otherwise, that was a given. But what Coe had said to Marcus,
He watched as she came into the room, halting by his desk.
“Hello? Your secret’s out, Mr. Piano Man. We all know you can talk.”
His eyes shone like wet dark stones from the recess of his hood.
“You were summoned by Lamb. Whatever you had to tell him, you need to tell Marcus and me. Because more shit is going down by the minute, which means that anything we can use as a shovel, we want to know about.”
She was quite proud of that remark, but it didn’t get her anywhere. Which was annoying, and would annoy anyone, right? His absence of reaction.
“Someone tried to whack Chapman,” she said. “And River’s just been caught on camera staging a gunfight for the tourists. And all of this, whatever it is, involves Slough House, which means it involves me. So start talking, buddy boy, or I’ll make you. Are you clear on what that’ll be like?”
