“Didn’t know I had a gun, did he? Think twice about playing that trick again.”
Chapman was about to continue, but Lamb cut across him. “We think he came from Les Arbres. That make sense to you?”
“. . . France,” the O.B. said.
“Yeah, France. Hence the funny name. Les Arbres’s where you used to visit your old friend Henry, remember? Way back in the nineties, when you had a working head. But Henry wasn’t really called Henry, was he? And—”
“You’re frightening him, Jackson,” Catherine said.
“And what he was doing was running Project Cuckoo. Remember? Cuckoo, like you’re becoming, or pretending to. Cuckoo, which was all about raising children to be something they’re not—back in the day, we’d have wanted to grow little Soviet Generals, so we’d have a clue what the real ones were thinking. Except we didn’t, in the end, because even by Cold War standards, it was a barking mad idea. But you—”
“Jackson . . . ”
“—didn’t let that stop you, did you? You went ahead and did it anyway.”
His voice had grown louder until it filled the whole room, and when he stopped the air shivered, as if settling back into place. The old man had a frozen expression now, halfway between fear and confusion. Catherine thought: she should bring this to an end. Escort the old man out. He’d be better off taking his chances in the rain, or at Regent’s Park, than sitting here listening to Lamb exorcise whatever demon had seized him.
And maybe that’s what she’d have done, she told herself later, except that Cartwright started to speak again.
Halfway to Pentonville Road, Louisa nearly missed her turn: not missed as in forgot to take it, but missed as in didn’t bother, and kept on in a straight line north; past the shops and churches, the mosques and synagogues, that were fast becoming familiar landmarks; the supermarket she used on her way home; the park that signalled the easing of urban tension. Wipers wiping fit to bust, she could be pulling into the residents’ parking area behind her block in twenty minutes, and running a bath not long later; a glass of wine poured, quiet music playing; the patter of the rain upon the windows promising sleep. But duty got the better of her and she made the turn, and headed towards the crime scene down Pentonville Road.
It was like a circus would be if circuses involved fewer clowns. Cop cars had arrived in droves, and cops were occupying every corner, some talking to huddled groups of civilians; others clustered round a car she knew from the YouTube film was the attack vehicle, itself looking like a mechanised assault victim: its front end folded in, and glasswork from its headlights scattered like frozen tears. The impact car, meanwhile, had been slammed sideways into a set of railings. Always, collision-scenes had an air of inevitability about them, as if the resulting damage had been written into the vehicles’ design specs. The police might have been there to confirm that everything had happened as required, and nothing been left undone.
She was feeling battered herself: torn jeans, hurt legs. But adrenalin was a powerful painkiller. “I think he’s the joker from this afternoon,” she’d heard Marcus saying as she’d hop-skipped down the stairs in Slough House. If she’d needed another trigger, that was it.
Having parked as near as she was able, Louisa showed her Service card to a reasonably experienced-looking cop, by which she meant one who’d found somewhere sheltered to stand. He seemed suitably impressed. One day, she thought, someone at Regent’s Park would notice that the slow horses’ official ID made them seem, to the uninitiated, like genuine Service personnel, and then they’d take them away and replace them with cardboard badges cut from a cereal packet. But until that happened, Louisa was able to get answers to a series of questions:
Yes, a gun had been fired.
No, nobody had been hurt.
There was nobody in custody.
The area was being searched.
Couple of your people in the car that was struck . . .
“My people?”
“Funny buggers,” said the policeman.
She looked up and down the road. Streetlights were on, and shop windows spilt yellow and gold squares onto the pavements, but visibility was poor, rain blurring pedestrians into fuzzy cartoon shapes. She’d been wondering how two men could have vanished so easily in the middle of the city, but the question answered itself. It was dark, and the rain washed away colour and difference, turning everyone into somebody else. There were witnesses, but most would contradict each other in that special way witnesses had, repainting the same event a dozen different shades of grey, and there’d be CCTV too, but she knew the work involved in tracking a quarry by camera, and it produced the kind of evidence useful in court, months after the event. For on-the-spot discovery, you’d be better off sticking notices to lamp posts.
