Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

A silence fell.

She was not one to fly the white flag, Diana Taverner, but she knew when to make a tactical retreat.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”

“Then let’s continue, shall we?” Dame Ingrid said, and the meeting progressed.

River hadread stats on how much of the average Londoner’s life was spent waiting for, travelling on or stuck in public transport: he had a pointlessly good memory for figures, but he’d deliberately suppressed these. Some days you could feel yourself growing older, going nowhere . . . Two minutes on the platform before a train had arrived, six minutes inside it since, leaving what, seventy minutes until deadline? The picture of Catherine seared into his eyeballs: sitting cuffed on a bed, a gag in her mouth. Seventy minutes before her captors loosened their belts . . . His fists were clamped between his knees. He wanted to hit something, ideally the bastard on the bridge. But that would have to wait. The train lurched and hauled itself forward a few yards, then stopped again. He swore to himself, or nearly to himself. It didn’t seem to help.

“This should test your ingenuity,” the man had said.

His tone had that same punchable quality you heard when government ministers dripping with inherited wealth lectured the nation on the culture of entitlement.

Another lurch, and this time the train began to move.

Reaching his destination was one thing; how to go about fulfilling his task once he got there was another. This was one place where his Service ID would be less than no help: he’d stand a better chance if he pulled a gun . . . It was a measure of his state of mind that he gave this more than a moment’s thought. But the nearest gun he knew of was in his grandfather’s safe, miles away.

He unbunched his fists, and stretched his fingers as far as they’d go. Words he’d spoken last night swam into mind, the description of his job he’d favoured James Webb with; that it was designed not just to bore him out of his mind, but to kill his soul one screaming pixel at a time.

Yeah, well, today was turning out a bit different.

And he couldn’t quite quell the little starburst of pleasure this thought gave him, even though that image of Catherine hadn’t left him yet, and even though he hadn’t a hope in hell of fulfilling the task he’d been assigned.

Which of your colleagues would you trust with your life?

None of them would have been the short answer, but Catherine didn’t think that would have sufficed.

But then, parental bonds aside, how many people could answer that without doubt in their hearts? Perhaps there were marriages that strong, though she suspected there weren’t many, and fewer than many married couples thought. Friendships, perhaps. But colleagues . . .

Early in her career, she’d had Charles Partner as her boss. Partner had been a rock of a kind; not the sort you’d want to dash yourself against, but one it was good to know would always be there. Except, of course, he wasn’t, because she’d arrived at his flat one day to find his corpse in the bathtub. This had been after her drying out. Where most anyone else would have shunned her on her return to Regent’s Park—how could First Desk have a recovering alcoholic as a PA?—he’d simply allowed her to slip back into place, and had never spoken of it again. Catherine supposed that that was the greatest act of trust she’d ever had bestowed upon her. Either that, or the way he’d arranged it so she’d be the one to discover his body. It was a difficult call.

And now, instead of Partner, she had Jackson Lamb. Lamb had been Partner’s joe once upon a time, and as fairytales went, that must have been grim indeed. Where Partner had been bank-manager straight—the old kind of bank manager, from the days when they’d been trusted—Lamb was as tightly wrapped as a fart in a colander. This, anyway, was the Lamb who’d come back from his wars, all those years he’d spent hopping this side and that of the Wall. He’s one of a kind , Partner had told her. And so he was, to everyone’s relief. But maybe the Lamb Charles Partner had known had been a different man, one who hadn’t buried himself inside a self-made monster.

In his way, she thought, Lamb had protected her the same way Partner had. When Charles died her career should have died too, but when Jackson Lamb was sent into exile in the reshuffle that followed, he’d taken her with him. And it was true, she knew, that Lamb would never leave a joe in the lurch—having been one himself; having been left there himself, more than likely. So maybe she should have nominated Lamb as the colleague she’d trust with her life, except that there wasn’t much else she’d trust him with. The collateral damage didn’t bear thinking about.

River, though. He’d keep it together. Whatever they asked of him, he’d do his best.

This might turn out to have to be quite good.

Off thetrain, River took the stairs three at a time, ignoring the “Watch it, mate!” thrown at his back. The sudden brightness of the street pulled him up short: loud traffic, a quantity of pedestrians, the glare and dazzle of a summer’s morning. The heat as thick out here as in the underground, and accompanied with smells of tar and rubber. A clock thumping in his head, reading forty-eight minutes . . .

He crossed the road against the lights, and was nearly clipped by a cyclist—and that too, like the stalling tube train, and the trembling in his knees, seemed familiar, as if racing the clock was an everyday experience, or an everynight one—yes, he thought, running now, leaving the main drag, heading for the leafier areas: that was it. This was the stuff of his dreams. Everyone knew what it felt like, struggling to reach somewhere that receded with every effort made, so your heart felt ready to burst from sheer frustration, though for River it was more of a memory than a suppressed fear; it was what he’d been through, years before, when King’s Cross crashed, and it was all his fault. A training exercise that went wrong, a mis-identified “terrorist”; twenty minutes of slapstick in the morning rush-hour . . .

That was how you got to be a slow horse.

Mind you, he’d had help.

Thank you, Spider Webb.

The pavement widened. There was parkland to his left, behind iron railings, and branches overhead mottling everything with patchy shadow. A couple sat in a parked car, having what looked like a row. River’s lungs were punishing him. Forty-four minutes. He stopped to calm his breathing: no point arriving like a damp rag. He had to look like he belonged, which was exactly what he might have done if not for King’s Cross and Spider bloody Webb . . .

Sometimes, a career went off like a volcano. Somewhere under the ashes of his own hid the glowing coals of what might have been, but only River himself, and possibly his grandfather, still believed they might yet spark back to life. And River only believed that sometimes, and not today.

Today was where he was, though. He ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair, and approached the front door of Regent’s Park.

The meetinghad drawn to a close and the Second Desks dispersed, all but Diana Taverner, whom Dame Ingrid addressed on her way out of the door.

“Diana? Could you spare a moment?”

Leaving Diana hovering while Tearney fussed: looking for her glasses, which remained on the chain round her neck; collecting her papers; pausing interminably for no obvious reason, as if struck by an idea whose genius demanded immediate inspection, in absolute stillness. All of it, Diana had no doubt, for the pleasure of making Diana hover.

It was grim. From almost any angle, she knew she held the advantage. Looks: no competition. Height: ditto. Ingrid Tearney was a hobbit of a woman, one Y-chromosome short of being a trainspotter. She did her best—she could afford to—but all the designer labels in the world couldn’t disguise a coypu on a catwalk. Squat body, short legs; and the trio of wigs she regularly rotated, grey, blonde and black, to cover the hair loss she’d suffered in her teens, though moulded by experts to look soft and buttery, still resembled something you might ask to borrow if you needed a bike helmet. Wealth, okay, Tearney had the edge there, but her education was so-so (LSE, as against Diana’s Caius, plus a year at Yale), and her upbringing was Staffordshire or somewhere, one of those counties that only existed because otherwise there’d be gaps in the map. In all those areas Diana Taverner had Tearney beat cold, and if there were any way of making a fair fight out of it, which Diana had been known to resort to when desperate, the result would hardly be in doubt.