Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

“Either way, it’s a live operation and you play by the rules. Your first priority is ensuring that this man acquires what he wants without drawing undue attention.”

“Just so we’re clear on this,” Lamb said. “My first priority is bringing my joe home.”

He held her stare until she looked down and fiddled with the clasp on her bag, prior to departure.

“And put Cartwright in a taxi,” Lamb added.

“He can catch a bus,” were her final words.

He didn’t watch as she left St. Giles but remained facing the altar. The cigarette had reappeared in his hand, remarkably unbent given its travels, and he rolled it between his fingers as he sat. It was true what he’d told Tearney, he didn’t spend much time in churches, but he’d set fire to one once, way back when, behind the Curtain—he recalled the acrid taste of woodsmoke on his tongue, the way it had roiled upwards into the Soviet dark, melting the falling snow. How long do memories last? This one had been with him half his life, and carried on for what seemed like minutes. That noise, that bang, was the first of the rifle shots, as the soldiers realised what he’d done. And then it was merely a book slapping the floor, dropped by one of the elderly readers browsing the paperbacks.

His mobile rang, and the old woman looked round in fury.

“Sorry,” he mouthed. “Booty call.”

He slipped the cigarette between his lips as he left the church, phone trembling in his hand.

Back atSlough House, the natives were restless.

Standard CD-ROMs are 1.2 millimetres thick, 120 millimetres in diameter, made of polycarbonate plastic, and in digital-data-storage mode contain 2,352 bytes of user data per sector, divided into 98 24-byte frames. And when laid on the edge of a desk and struck suddenly with a downward motion, they can be made to flip gracefully into the air and drop into a wastepaper bin two yards distant.

“Three nil,” said Marcus.

“Cheater.”

“Yeah, right. Or just better than you.”

Shirley Dander lined her next CD up and chopped at it brutally—recent experience had taught her that time spent calibrating the trajectory required for it to drop into the bin rather than thud uselessly onto the carpet was time she was never going to get back.

It flipped into the air, turned over twice, and fell back onto the desk.

“Crap!”

“What you doing?”

They looked to the doorway, where Roderick Ho was standing, a folded-over slice of pizza in his hand.

Shirley said, “Bug off, square eyes.”

But Ho was looking at the CDs scattered round the bin. “Piece of piss,” he said.

It was clear, thought Marcus, that Ho hadn’t absorbed many life-lessons from the bruise Shirley had left on his cheek last night.

Shirley said, “You reckon? Seriously?”

“First time. No problem.”

“You got a fiver says the same?”

“Shirley,” Marcus began.

“What about you, old man?” she said. “You want a piece of that action?”

“I need to handicap him first.”

“Hasn’t life already done that?”

“Jesus, Shirley. He’s standing right there.”

Ho came into the room, squeezed another fold out of his pizza slice and ambitiously wedged it into his mouth. From Marcus’s desk he picked up a CD, held it to the light, squinted, shook his head, and put it down again.

“Grandstanding,” Marcus explained to Shirley. “You want to let him take a practice shot?”

“Nnng grrrrff,” Ho said, or something like. He picked up another CD, made a noise like a traumatised python, and the pizza was history. “I don’t need to practise.”

“He doesn’t need to practise,” Shirley told Marcus. “Fiver?”

“. . . Quid.”

“Chicken. Okay, a quid.” She looked at Ho, who was positioning a CD on the edge of Marcus’s desk. “Hit it, pizza boy.”

Ho hit it.

The disk shot vertically upwards into the lightbulb, scattering dandruffy fragments of glass everywhere, before cartwheeling into the window frame, from which it excised a wedge Shirley later discovered in her coffee cup.

Almost as an afterthought, it dropped into the bin.

“Yesssss!” screamed Ho, dropping to his knees.

Marcus laughed so hard, it was a full minute before he realised Louisa had entered the office.

“Sorry,” he said. “Are we making a noise?”

“A body’s been dumped in the street. Broad daylight.”

“Here?”

“Central London.”

“What does narrow daylight look like anyway?” Shirley muttered, brushing a light glittering of bulb-glass from her shoulder.

“More specifically,” Louisa said, “outside a fuck-off restaurant near the Mall.”

“That’ll be exciting the Met,” Marcus said. His eyes had narrowed: bodies in the street. There’d been a time he’d have been on standby.

“And guess who was dining in the fuck-off restaurant?”

“Well, probably not Her Madge,” grumbled Shirley. But she slumped back into her chair, and clicked on the BBC website. “Peter Judd. So what?”

“Did you notice what he had to say?”

A moment’s silence. Then Shirley said, “He’s not quoted here.”

“Precisely.” Louisa came further into the room. “When’s the last time Judd was in spitting distance of the media and slipped out the back door?”

“Is that what he did?” Ho asked.

“Figure of speech.”

Marcus said, “He’s Home Secretary. Law and order. It’s got to be kind of embarrassing to be on the scene of a body dump.”

“Embarrassing? This is Peter Judd we’re talking about.”

Roderick Ho said, “What’s your point, Louisa?”

Everybody looked at him.

“What? What did I say?”

Under her breath, Shirley hummed, “Ho and Louisa, sitting in a tree . . . ”

Louisa said, “Judd, our new lord and master, avoiding the press, the same day Catherine goes missing? And River’s at the Park, he’s under arrest. For stealing a file and God knows what else.”

“Beating his chest in a built-up area?” Shirley asked.

“Whatever, all this happening, the same day? I can’t be the only one thinks they must be connected.”

Marcus said, “We’re in the middle of a heatwave, did you notice? The temperature rises, crazy things happen. It’s a well-known phenomenon. It doesn’t mean there’s a pattern.”

“Yeah, right, sorry,” Louisa said. “I mean, Christ, you’re so busy. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Easy, tiger.”

“So let’s all get back to making lists. What you working on, Longridge? People with the same make of car the 7/7 bastards drove?”

He raised his hands in surrender.

Shirley asked, “Where’s Lamb?”

“Out.”

“Well, duh. Any clue where?”

Louisa shook her head. “He got a phone call, and he vanished.”

“He’s answering his phone? We’re through the looking glass, people.”

“This isn’t funny. Something’s going on. Make all the jokes you like, but I’m going to find out what.”

“I’m not busy,” said Ho.

“What?”

“They were playing some stupid game. I just wanted to know who was making all the noise.”

“Snitch,” said Shirley.

“You owe me a fiver.”

“Okay, then, do something for me,” Louisa told Ho. “Make your computer dance. Find out who the corpse is.”

“I can do that.”

He left for his own room, wiping his hands on his trousers.

“K-i-s-s-i-n-g,” murmured Shirley.

“Do you have a problem?” Louisa asked.

“God, no. Happy as Larry.”

“Because you’re uncannily twitchy and snarky as shit. Is it past time for your fix, or what?”

“ I’m twitchy? Who turned your lights on? You’ve spent the past year—”