He was happy to. As long as she was doing that, she wasn’t binding him more tightly inside this mad conspiracy which had just looped back on itself. The Cartwright mess—that’s what she’d called it this morning, back when he’d thought he was in charge round here—the Cartwright mess had nothing to do with Westacres. Cartwright was a Service legend who’d subsided into dementia, shot his grandson, and gone walkabout in Kent. Though apparently it hadn’t been his grandson after all . . .
The fact that it was Taverner doing the thinking didn’t prevent Claude from having ideas too.
He said, “David Cartwright.”
“Yes,” she said, already working the same seam.
“He was around at the right time. Twenty years ago.”
“He could have taken the properties. Nobody would have questioned anything he did. He was Charles Partner’s right hand.”
“But why?”
“Why anything? Money, power, sex—it doesn’t matter. If one of the cold bodies came to his door and ended up dead, you know what that means?”
“They’re cleaning house,” said Whelan.
Once, late at night in New York City, he’d sat with Claire in the back of a yellow cab as it tore down Broadway, and watched each set of traffic lights turn green at their approach. Sometimes, problems solved themselves: each question finding its own answer before you’d arrived at it.
He said, “Cartwright supplied the cold bodies to someone long ago. And now they’ve gone operational, they’re covering their tracks. With Cartwright dead, they’re secure.”
“Except,” Diana said. “You know what’s wrong with this picture? It’s hung backwards. If you’re a terror group planning a Westacres, you tie up your loose ends first. They should have come for Cartwright before the bombing.”
“But they didn’t. So maybe—”
“They didn’t know the bombing was going to happen,” Diana said.
Out on the hub, the work of the Service continued. There was a muted flatscreen on the wall whose rolling news channel remained fixated on Westacres. Relatives of the dead were fair game now, the three-day interval deemed long enough for mourning, and the transforming power of involvement in world-event had rendered several of them experts in counter-terrorism. One such was performing now, his head bobbing angrily as he explained the failings of the intelligence services, their laxity, their incompetence. Whelan could see him through the office’s glass wall. It must be of comfort, he thought, to pretend you had an understanding of how the world operated. Especially when it went wrong, and the result was carnage: broken bodies, torn flesh, and lives forever damaged.
He said, “I’m not sure which is worse. That someone planned this, or that it’s all some colossal fuck-up.”
“Welcome to Regent’s Park.”
“Let’s back up. Young Cartwright had Adam Lockhead’s passport. There was a body at Cartwright’s house. Ergo—”
“It was Adam Lockhead’s body,” Diana said.
“So young Cartwright turned up in time to foil the assassin, then went haring off across the channel on the killer’s passport. He was walking back the cat. Trying to find out who wanted to kill his grandfather.”
“Well, if nothing else, it shows the old man really does have dementia,” Diana Taverner said. “Otherwise he could have just asked him. Saved himself a journey.” Briefly she raised her fingers to her lips, and he understood that she was a smoker, unconsciously miming a nicotine hit. “So the question is, what did young Cartwright find out? How much does he know?”
“And who came after him?” Whelan said. He reached out and tapped the pad on his sleeping laptop, making the Pentonville Road video come to jerky life once more.
Taverner said, “The only thing that makes sense is, he’s the other cold body. Paul Wayne.”
“And he’s not rescuing Cartwright, he’s abducting him,” said Whelan. “So he can find out where the old man is now.”
His eyes flicked from the small screen in front of him to the larger one out on the hub. As if it were part of an installation, the recurrence of violent action in urban iconography, the YouTube film was playing on that one too now: more fodder for the debate on how the effort to keep the streets safe had fallen short. First Westacres, now this. Already, there’d be those straining to join the dots between the two. If anyone managed it, you’d hear the howls of outrage even while the screen remained mute.
Diana Taverner said, “You realise, the more complicated the situation gets, the simpler the solution becomes.”
“I’m not going to want to hear this.”
“I don’t care. As long as you’re First Desk, there are decisions you’ll have to make. Not for your own good, not for mine, not even for your wife’s—”
“Leave Claire out of this.”
“Of course. But I’m simply stating facts. Your choices are no longer about your own moral comfort. They’re about the greater good.”
“And the greater good, as you see it—”
