“Ms. Flyte, all that’s been broadcast to an easily amused world so far is your own inability to carry out a straightforward arrest. And if you want your career to survive that hiccup, I suggest you keep a low profile from now on.” She paused. “You’re a disappointment. Go back to the safe house. Sit with Ms. Rahman. And if I ever relieve you from that not particularly onerous duty, you’ll know hell just installed air conditioning.”
Emma put her glass down. She thought: another round exactly like that, and the varying degrees of pain, humiliation, embarrassment and anger she was feeling would subside into a molten mass from which she needn’t emerge until morning. It might even have stopped raining by then.
She said, “Lady Di? I wish I could say the same about you. About being a disappointment, I mean. But no, you more than live up to everything everyone says.”
She disconnected.
Louisa said, “Wow. Was that your career I just saw leaving?”
“Tell me you don’t know what that feels like.”
“You want another drink?”
“What I want is a cup of coffee. Can you organise that? Because I need the bathroom.”
Louisa, watching Emma retreat to the back of the bar, decided to hang on a while; join her in that coffee. Her flat with all its quiet comforts would still be there later. And sticking with Flyte might give her the inside track when River and Patrice broke surface.
Pissed off as she was with him, she had to admit that all the exciting stuff happened round River.
Somewhere not far away—or not as the pigeon flies, though few cared to do so in the cold wet dark: even London’s pigeons have their limit—River was adding this to his list of unexpected beauties: a dazzle ship in the rain, its perspective-bewildering doodles becoming extra smeary, its black-and-white pipe-and-funnel finish ballooning into ever more cartoony shapes. It seemed to shimmer in the downpour, as if the lights trained on it were all that anchored it in place.
Patrice said, “That’s something.”
River, as if explaining an object of national pride to a tourist, said, “They were painted like that to confuse submarines. It made it harder to sink them, to pinpoint them as targets.”
“And that worked?”
“Well, this one’s still here.”
Though its patterning was not the World War I design, but a recent hommage, jauntier than the original.
HMS President was moored on the Embankment, on the approach to Blackfriars Bridge. In the background, cars and buses crossed the Thames, their tyres a swooshing soundtrack. This riverside road was quieter; one lane closed to traffic. Someone was always trying to improve the capital’s roads, and if they ever finished the job, they might turn out to have succeeded. Meanwhile, canvas-shrouded fencing was pitched along a stretch of kerb, reaching from the ship’s purpose-built jetty up to the bridge itself, lanterns fixed to it at regular intervals. These too wobbled in the wind, bouncing dizzy halos off the sturdy buildings on the other side of the road: banks and publishers and other dubious institutions.
River and Patrice had walked, because they were already so wet it made no difference, and it didn’t seem like something a pair of fugitives would do: stroll along in the pouring rain, pointing at the sights along the way.
Though their apparent camaraderie didn’t stop River wondering whether Patrice would kill him before the night was done.
He could run for it, of course. But running from trouble had never been a core skill of his; running towards it was more his thing. And running wouldn’t give him the answers he was after.
A figure waited near the dazzle ship, on its walkway’s sheltered platform. Before they reached him, River said, “There’s something I should tell you.”
Patrice showed little curiosity, but so far, apart from that moment he’d first laid eyes on River, he hadn’t shown much of anything. Had simply transmitted a dull grey pulse, performing each action as it was required; as if he were a wind-up construct, its movements oiled to perfection.
“I met your mother today,” he said. “Natasha.”
Patrice said nothing.
“She misses you.”
Patrice shook his head, but still said nothing.
“She wants to know you’re all right. It worried her, when Les Arbres burned down. Any mother would worry.”
“I have no mother.”
“She didn’t abandon you, you know. Or at least—she came back. She wanted to see you, to be with you. They wouldn’t let her.”
“I have no mother,” Patrice repeated.
“She was there for years. Never far away. In case you needed her.”
Patrice looked at him and said, “Those things never happened. Stop talking.”
“I will if you want. But I don’t think you do.”
As casually as if he were swatting a fly, Patrice reached out to slap River’s cheek, but River had been expecting this, or something like it, and blocked the blow. But not the second, which was aimed at his throat. Patrice pulled it at the last second, or River would have been laid out on the pavement.
Patrice said, “Stop now. Or I’ll make you.”
Maybe he had a point.
