Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

“That’s a stupid combination. Strawberry and pistachio don’t go.”

“Go well enough for me.”

“Then your taste buds are wrong. Strawberry needs chocolate or else vanilla. Pistachio’s not even a real flavour. They only invented it in like 1997.”

“You’ve been dumped, haven’t you?”

“What do you mean, dumped? What kind of question’s that? We’re talking about ice cream.”

“Right.”

“And no, I haven’t.”

“Right.”

“And even if I had been, it wouldn’t be any of your business.”

“Right.”

“And anyway, how can you tell?”

“Christ, I don’t know,” Marcus said. “Maybe it’s the way you’re such a bundle of fun.”

“Piss off.”

“What happened, she meet someone else?”

“Piss off. Why do you assume I’m gay?”

“You’re saying you’re not?”

“I’m saying how would you know? Do I bring my private life into work?”

“Shirley, sharing an office with you lately’s like having my own personal thundercloud, so yes, on balance, you bring your private life into work. Which gives me the right to hear the dirt. Did she meet someone else?”

“And again with the ‘she’ . . . ”

Marcus laid his spoon on a napkin and licked away the hint of a strawberry moustache. “It’s like in books,” he said. “Thrillers, whodunnits, you know? You read much?”

“You got a point to make?”

“In thrillers, when the writer says the killer this, the killer that, and never says if it’s a he or a she, it’s always because it’s a she. And you’re like that with your girlfriend. You never say if it’s a he or a she. Which means it’s a she.”

Shirley sneered. “Maybe I’m just messing with your head.”

“You might be, except you’re not. So what happened? She meet someone else?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fair enough. But that means you have to drop the angry victim act. Deal?”

“You really are a hardass, you know that?”

“Yeah, that used to be my job description.”

“Well not any more it’s not,” Shirley said. “Now you’re a desk jockey, like the rest of us. Get used to it.”

“That’s what I was told months back,” Marcus said, picking up his spoon again. “Still got to shoot someone, didn’t I?”

“I doubt you’ll get that lucky twice.”

“Well just in case I do,” Marcus said, “you know what I don’t need? I don’t need a partner pissing and moaning behind me. That shit throws your aim off.”

Shirley picked up her spoon too, but her bowl was empty. Watching her tap the one against the other, causing a high-pitched note to ring around the room, Marcus was struck, not for the first time, by how intense her concentration could be. With her near–buzz cut and her broad shoulders, an idiot might think her mannish, but there was nothing remotely masculine about her skin tone or her deep brown eyes. Still. Crouched over the ruins of her ice cream, she might almost disappear into androgyny. But either way, she had a right hook could knock you off your feet.

She looked up at him. “Is that what we are? Partners?”

“In the absence of a better offer,” he said.

“In that case, I’ll have another one of these, partner . Butterscotch and mint.”

“Seriously?”

She stared at him, unblinking.

Marcus went to fetch more ice cream.

“Cartwright.”

Taverner, as promised, was on the staircase, a feature which fell on the kerb-flash side of the line, being wide enough to dance down, and boasting, on this particular landing, a narrow window which must have been eight foot tall. Dusty sunlight slanted through it, catching Lady Diana’s hair and roasting a chestnut tinge onto its curls, momentarily distracting River. His mind had blanked. What was he supposed to call her? “Ma’am,” his mouth supplied. A glimpse of her wristwatch, as she glanced at it, reminded him: thirty-six minutes.

She said, “You’re not supposed to be here, you do remember that?”

“Yes, but—”

“And you look a mess.”

“It’s hot out,” he said. “Ma’am.”

It was cooler in here, though; air-con and marbled floors.

“. . . Well?”

They had history, River and Diana Taverner. Not the kind of history people usually meant when they said history, but not far off: treachery, double-dealing and stabbing in the back—more like a marriage than a love affair. And most of it at a remove, so their actual face-to-face encounters hadn’t been frequent. Here and now, on this landing, his shirt clinging to his back, River was remembering how distracting her presence could be. It wasn’t just her physical attractions; it was the way she visibly weighed up every situation she was in, calibrating the moment to maximise her own advantage.

He said, “It’s about James. James Webb.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve been . . . visiting him.”

Spider had been Taverner’s protégé once, though he’d split what he’d have no doubt called his loyalties fairly evenly between her and Dame Ingrid. At the precise moment he’d been shot by a Russian hood it was hard to tell whose side he was on, though as he’d been mostly on his own back ever since, it probably didn’t matter in the long run.

She said, “You were still friendly? I didn’t realise.”

“We trained together.”

“Not what I asked.”

River said, “We weren’t that friendly in the end, no, but we were close at one time. And he’s got nobody else. No family, I mean.”

He had no idea whether Spider had family or not, but he was busking here. And banking on Taverner not knowing Spider’s family situation either.

“I didn’t realise,” she said. “So . . . what’s his current condition? Any change?”

“Not really.”

Just for an instant, he saw something in her eyes that might have been unfeigned concern. And then he mentally kicked himself—why wouldn’t there have been? She’d worked with him. And here was River, using his former friend’s condition to bluff his way back into the very place Spider had had him exiled from . . . It occurred to him that Spider might have seen the funny side of this. That this small act of treachery was more tribute than revenge.

Thoughts for later.

Thirty-five minutes.

He said, “None at all, in fact. And no real chance of any occurring.”

Taverner glanced away. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the reports,” she said vaguely.

“Then you’ll know. It’s a vegetative state, his brain activity’s almost entirely dormant. A flicker here and there, but . . . And his organs, they’re not functioning on their own. Take him off the machines, and he’ll die in the time it takes a heart to stop beating.”

“You obviously have a point to make.”

“We talked about it once, the two of us. On one of those endurance courses, up on the Black Mountains?”

She gave a brief nod.

“Long story short—” River said.

“Good idea.”

“—if he ever wound up plugged into a wall-socket, if that was all that was keeping him alive, he’d want to be switched off. That’s what he told me.”

“Then that information will be on his personal file.”

“I doubt he ever got round to making an official declaration. He was, what, twenty-four at the time? It wasn’t something he was planning for. But it was something he’d given thought to.”

“If he’d given it a little more thought, he might have noticed planning doesn’t come into it.” Thirty-four minutes. “What exactly are you asking me to do?”

“I just wanted to speak to someone about it. How long is he going to be lying there before a decision is made?”