Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

“But there’s a U in ‘cunt,’” Shirley muttered.

Ho rubbed his bruised cheek with one finger.

Marcus opened a window, and for a brief moment enjoyed the fantasy that a cool breeze would rush in, dispersing the general funk of sweat and stale energy that hung around Ho’s office. Then a blast of air and hot noise put him right. He closed it again, and made a mental note to badger Catherine about getting fans that worked. Except Catherine wasn’t here . . . A figure peeled out of the bookies a few doors down the road, paused by a bin, and dropped something into it, or nearly did. The bundle of paper slips bounced off the rim and fell into the gutter. Someone having a bad day, thought Marcus. He’d had a few himself, but one lucky afternoon was all he needed. And then he’d walk away from it all: the cards, the horses, the damn roulette machines.

“Did you say something?”

“We need some working fans,” Marcus said.

Ho recited what he could find on Black Arrow. Founded twenty years previously, it wasn’t what you’d call a blinding success, except that anything that hadn’t actually gone tits up in the last five years was a hymn of praise to the free market. Currently employing just over two hundred ‘officers,’ it held a few smallish government contracts, and provided security to a second-tier supermarket chain. This probably involved ferrying takings and salaries around more than keeping an eye on stock, though it might mean that too.

“Employee records?” Louisa asked.

“Why?” said Shirley.

“Intelligence gathering. I haven’t time to explain the concept, but—”

“Oh, any time you want start explaining concepts —”

Marcus said, “That was the door. Lamb’s back.”

So all four of them set about looking idle, because looking busy, they’d learned to their cost, meant that as far as Lamb was concerned, they were up to no good.

But it wasn’t Lamb who appeared a minute later, it was River.

T he Thames looked low.Years gone by, there were stories of the river freezing; of ice fairs thrown in the shadows of the bridges, and skaters weaving past long-lived landmarks, but Sean Donovan didn’t remember hearing it had ever dried up. When that day came, the stink would surely drive the capital out of its mind.

If that hadn’t already happened. The fury of the pace, the anger of the traffic, had a sociopathic buzz.

And think of the secrets that would come to light, when the cracked, flaking ooze of the riverbed lay exposed to view. Everything the Establishment tried to flush away, to drown in the dark; it would all lie choking in the sunshine. There’d be nowhere to hide anything.

He was standing under a tree on the Embankment. The tree was sad and brown, and offered little in the way of shade; the Embankment was cloaked with CCTV coverage, and offered nothing in the way of privacy. But Donovan had faith in organisational chaos, and knew that while a match would eventually be made between the figure loitering here, early for an appointment, and the hooded man abandoning a van from which a body had been dumped a mile or so distant, this wouldn’t happen for some time yet. He checked his watch as if to verify this, then looked up at the sky. The sun was working on plan B; the one where it cut the crap, and just frazzled everything in reach.

Momentarily dazzled, he didn’t see Ben Traynor until the soldier was upon him.

“Sean.”

Though they’d parted only hours ago, they shook hands.

“All okay?”

“I’m fine,” Donovan said. “The woman?”

“Stop worrying. It’s a rest cure.” Traynor glanced round, a 360-degree sweep. He saw nothing to alarm him. “And Monteith? Not a happy bunny, I presume.”

Not a happy bunny at all, Donovan thought.

He said, “Ben, it went wrong. My fault.”

“How wrong?”

“The worst.”

Traynor nodded. He glanced away again, towards the South Bank, and his eyes clouded over as he mentally adjusted to the new situation. Then he looked back at Donovan.

“Okay,” he said. “So he’s not trussed up in the van, cooking like a chicken. Tell you the truth, Sean, he’s not the biggest loss to humanity.”

“Walk away now,” Donovan said. “Call the kid. Tell him it’s over. He knows the drill.”

“Aye, and what then? We’ve come this far.”

“Kidnapping was bad enough. Murder’s over the line.”

“What did you do, snap his worthless neck?”

“He made a break for it, for Christ’s sake. Have to hand it to the little bugger. I thought he’d fold and whimper.”

“We’d all expect that.”

“I caught him. Hit him. One punch, you know?”

“You don’t know your own strength.”

Donovan probably did, near as damn it. What he hadn’t taken into account was his anger, the constant companion of the last few years, always glowering below the surface. Anger had been at his elbow in the car park, making sure he didn’t pull his punch. He’d hit Monteith as hard as he’d ever hit anything. Even as he’d made contact, he’d known things had tipped over an edge.

A passing siren caught their attention, but it was an ambulance. Some poor sod collapsed in the heat. He waited until its clangour was wrapped inside the city’s other noise, then said, “You’re still here.”

“We can still make it work.”

“Maybe. Maybe. But we won’t walk away from it.”

“Sean,” Traynor said. “We were never going to be able to walk away from it.”

River Cartwrightfelt as if he’d had his insides scooped out, tossed like a salad, then reinserted any which way. Trying to move naturally, but keep himself from jostling, he looked like he was balancing an invisible egg on his head.

Nick Duffy had known what he was doing.

“Your grandfather won’t be around forever,” he’d told River as he’d escorted him out of the Park.

River was still dazed by the sudden turnaround in his fortunes. “What’s that mean?” He was clutching his phone in one hand; his self-respect in the other. Any unexpected movement, and he’d lose his grip on one or both.

“Someone pulled your nuts out of the fire. And it’s not like you’ve any friends round here.”

“And everyone speaks so highly of you.”

“Take some advice.” Duffy dropped an arm round River’s shoulders in a gesture that might have looked like friendship, from a distance. He squeezed, knowing where to apply pressure. “Don’t bother going back to Slough House. All those forms and pointless reports, they must be doing your head in. So just fucking give up, why don’t you? Try something else, like maybe McDonald’s. Pretend you don’t speak English, they’ll take you like a shot. Because your spook career? It’s deader than your mate Spider.”

“He’s not dead.”

“No, but they hold a mirror to his lips every morning, to check.”

They were out of the door by this time, over the road from the park, in which mothers wheeled prams, and some mad joggers ran, but mostly people slumped in groups in whatever shade they could find. Whether it was torpor or tranquillity, it felt strange to be looking on it while hearing thinly veiled threats.

River said, “My grandfather’s into his eighties. Some days he has difficulty on the stairs, you know? When his joints are troubling him.”

“You’re not gonna be taking them two at a time yourself any time soon.”

“But on his worst day, he’d scrape you from his shoe without a second thought,” said River, and he’d walked off down the road arms swinging freely by his sides, hardly at all like someone who’d recently had a professional going-over. He was round the corner before he’d dropped between parked cars and vomited into the gutter.