Spook Street полностью

As they approached Embankment, Patrice’s hand squeezed. Okay, okay, I get it. River led the way off the train, up the escalator; turned towards the river entrance. Still raining, of course. He’d no sooner dried off from today’s French rain before being drenched in the English variety. Still, it was nice to be home.

They stood at the top of the steps, looking at wet traffic, a wet bridge; the wet South Bank across the wet Thames.

“Do you have a plan?” River asked.

“There is always a plan,” Patrice said.

“That’s good. Is that Sartre?” Not expecting a reply, he didn’t wait for one. “Who were you texting in the taxi?”

“You like to talk,” Patrice said. “Maybe you should talk about Bertrand. What happened to him. And why you have his passport.”

“That was Bertrand’s? Because it didn’t have his name on it. And, you know, a passport, you kind of expect—”

“You know I have a gun.” He turned and looked River in the eyes. “And the only reason you’re still alive is that I need answers from you.”

“Yeah, see, that’s not a great interrogative technique. Because it implies that once I’ve given you your answers—”

Patrice hit him so quickly that nobody saw: not the passers by, hurrying through the rain; not the fellow travellers still sheltering from the downpour. Certainly not River. First he knew about it was, Patrice was lowering him into a sitting position, murmuring calm words.

“He’s okay.” This for the benefit of those nearby. “He gets claustrophobic, that’s all.”

To River: “Maybe put your head between your knees?”

Somebody said, “Are you sure he’s all right? Should we get help?”

“He’ll be fine. I’m always telling him, we should take taxis. But no, he insists on the underground, and here we are again.”

“My boyfriend’s just the same.”

Any other time River might have protested the emphasis on My, but at the moment he was coping with a lot of frazzled nerve ends, as if Patrice had laid into him with a cattle prod rather than his little finger, or whatever it was he’d used to do whatever it was he’d done.

Someone else said, “Anyone got any water?” and everybody laughed.

Don’t mind me. You all enjoy yourselves.

Patrice maintained the fiction established for them by sitting next to River and putting his arm round his shoulders. He leaned close, as if whispering sweet consolation, and reminded River: “That required no effort on my part.”

River said, “Last time someone hurt me like that . . . ”

He paused for breath.

“Yes?”

“I knocked half his brains out with a length of lead pipe.”

Patrice made a show of looking here, there, in front, behind. “Don’t see any lead pipe.”

“You won’t.”

Patrice’s phone chirruped. “Do you mind? I really ought to take this.”

He stood and walked a few paces off. River looked around for a length of lead pipe, but his heart wasn’t in it.

The other travellers had moved on, braving the rain, because there seemed little alternative. He wondered if, later, they’d watch the news and say to each other Do they look like? and Nah, surely not.

Patrice finished his call. River watched him while he stared for a moment at the Thames, as if suddenly struck by its night-time beauty; the lights along the Embankment smeary in the rain. Then he looked at River.

“So,” he said. “What’s the dazzle ship, and where do we find it?”

“His name was Frank,” the O.B. said.

He stopped.

Catherine braced for another Lamb onslaught, but none came. Because he had done all he needed, she thought; he’d thrown the switch, and now all the old man’s memories would come tumbling forth.

She should have hustled him out while the thought was fresh in her mind.

“Came to the Park with his ridiculous plan. Cuckoo by name, cuckoo by nature. Even the Yanks hadn’t gone for it. Well, not a second time. Had tried it back in the sixties, of course, and came a cropper. Hushed up the details. Not that hushing things up ever worked. First law of Spook Street. Secrets don’t stay secret.”

He paused. Catherine could have sworn something shone in his eyes: unshed tears or bottled-up secrets. Something waiting to spill.

“So we told him to pack his wares and move his pitch.”

Again, the pause. This morning, Catherine remembered, he had seemed a man adrift; unmoored by encroaching dementia, and pushed further out to sea by last night’s events. And now he’d washed up somewhere, but it wasn’t quite here and wasn’t quite now, and if his sentences recaptured the brim and snap of his younger self, they were messages from a bottle launched long ago, and she doubted he knew who he was talking to. Memory was doing all the work, blowing through the old man like he was a seashell, and when it was done he would be smooth and empty.

Chapman said, “But you didn’t quite cast him away, did you?”

He spoke gently, to Catherine’s surprise. Her experience of his interrogation technique had been a little different.