Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

Lamb put it in the cup and jiggled it, so the coins splashed against each other. Then he opened the door. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, do something.”

“. . . Like what?”

“Well I don’t fucking know, do I? Google ‘cunning plan,’ see what the internet suggests.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I haven’t decided yet. But it’ll involve fetching Standish back. I’d forgotten what it was like not having a buffer between me and you lot, and I’m not enjoying it one bit.”

“Have you got a gun?”

“No.”

“What if they have?”

“Your concern is touching. I’ll be all right.”

“But what if . . . ?”

Lamb leaned through Ho’s open window. “What if they come after you? With guns?”

“. . . Yes.”

“You’ll be fine. Getting shot’s like falling off a log. It doesn’t take practice.”

He walked off down the road and melted into the twilight as if it owned him; as if country shadows were no more foreign to him than any other kind. And Lamb, Ho reflected, belonged in the shadows—not a thought he’d formed himself, but one he remembered Catherine Standish articulating. Lamb was a creature of the half-light. The notion made Ho shudder. He checked the clock so he’d know when his twenty minutes were up, and when he looked back at the road, Lamb was gone.

Do something .

Roderick Ho hadn’t the faintest clue what.

He hoped Lamb returned before it became an issue.

Douglas said,“You’re bastards, you know that?”

River partly agreed, but sometimes being a bastard was the best way of getting things done. Even slow horses know that. Douglas hadn’t wanted to cooperate, and neither of them had wanted to hurt him, but in the end it didn’t take more than a minute to work out how to open the hatchway, because the switches on Douglas’s console were neatly labelled, one reading hatch. Douglas had watched the monitors with a bitter expression as Donovan and Traynor dropped into the chamber beneath the factory floor; had snorted with disgust when they descended the ladder into the facility itself.

“This’ll all be reported,” he told them.

“Even the part where you groped my tits?” Louisa asked.

“I never—I wasn’t—”

River said, “Douglas. Keep your cool, don’t be an idiot, and you might come out of this with your job intact.”

Reaching the floor, Donovan and Traynor scanned the facility like they were used to such places.

“Is he all there is?” Traynor asked.

“Yes,” Louisa said.

“And is he going to be a good boy?”

“Yes.”

“Well make sure he sits somewhere quietly and touches nothing.”

“They want you to sit somewhere quietly,” Louisa began, but Douglas snorted again.

“I heard.”

River said, “The files are that way.” He indicated the doors Douglas had pointed to earlier: swing doors with glass portholes, through which only darkness could be made out.

Traynor said, “Thanks. Now go sit with Igor.”

Douglas said, “Igor?”

“I’m not sitting anywhere,” River said.

“Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” Louisa muttered.

River ignored her. “The deal is, we let you have the Grey Books, then everybody leaves. Nobody said anything about letting you wander round—”

“If he doesn’t shut up, can I pop him?” Traynor asked Donovan.

River, being River, took a step forward at this, a move Traynor seemed to be expecting. They were an inch off bumping chests when Louisa laughed. “Why don’t you just get them both out? I expect Douglas has a tape measure.”

Donovan said, “Okay, pack it in. That includes you.” This to Louisa. Then to Traynor: “Wait here. Don’t shoot anyone unless you have to.”

Traynor nodded, and dropped his hand to his belt, brushing his shirt tail aside. The movement revealed, as it was intended to, the handle of a gun.

River rolled his eyes, making sure Traynor noticed.

Donovan said, “I’m not going to say it again. Behave yourself or he’ll put a bullet in your knee.”

Then he strode to the swing doors, pushed through, and disappeared into the corridor beyond.

“Marcus.”

“Fucking moron copper. That light was amber. I had ample time.”

“Marcus.”

“He’s lucky I didn’t—”

“Marcus.”

“ What?”

Asking the question but not in a way that suggested he wanted an answer: it was one of those what s that mean I’m still talking . But as he asked it he registered the expression on her face, so he said it again, “What?” and this time meant it.

“There were two soldiers, right?” she said. “Donovan and Traynor.”

“Yeah, they joined Black Arrow at the same time.” He started the car, and glanced bitterly into the mirror, where he could see the policeman at the kerb, studying Marcus’s departure as if willing some further infraction to be made: a failed indicator, mirror-neglect, state treason.

“Benjamin Traynor served with Donovan,” Shirley said. “He was honourably discharged about the time Donovan came out of the clink.”

“So? They were mates. Soldier buddies, they’re not gonna let a thing like a little jail time come between them.”

“Yeah, right. Except. Alison Dunn? The woman who was killed in Donovan’s car that night?”

“What about her?”

“She was Traynor’s fiancée,” Shirley said.

Lights throughwindows leaked a pallid yellow into the evening sky; an hour from now they’d be beacons, but for the moment seemed an admission of weakness. The farmhouse was stone, with a brick addition on one wing, and the front door had a small porch arrangement, a wooden afterthought which one big storm or one bad wolf might easily render kindling. And there was a bus on the forecourt, a London familiar made strange by dislocation; an open-topped tour bus, its upper deck swaddled in canvas to keep the rain off, a gesture that embraced both caution and optimism, given the heatwave.

If it had been a working farm, Lamb noted, there’d have been dogs barking. The only sound he could make out was an insect-like chirping.

He studied the house again. It would have an attic and cellar, and any hostage would be in one or the other. Himself, he’d have opted for the cellar. But there was something off about this whole affair—it had been tainted with unreality since the Grey Books were thrown into the mix—so chances were Standish was in the kitchen, brewing up a cuppa for whomever Donovan had left in charge. Probably happier than she was in Slough House.

But she was one of his, and you messed with Lamb’s stuff at your peril. Besides, the joes you didn’t bring home were the ones who never let you go.

He rattled the polystyrene cup, and was rewarded with a silvery tinkle. If you were going to storm an enemy citadel, you might as well do it with flair—he kept a gun at Slough House, illegal, unofficial, and it might have been a useful piece of kit right now, but Lamb hadn’t survived this far by getting into firefights with soldiers. Well, maybe just the once—and memory tugged at him again: the burning church, and gunfire in the snow. He shrugged it away.

In the porch he found a doorbell but used the rapper instead, pounding it as loudly as he could—a steady, unforgiving thunder that rattled the door on its hinges and travelled every inch of the building, swarming along its boards and beams as fluidly as a family of mice. Bam bam bam bam bam , and if it wouldn’t raise the dead it might at least disturb the worms enjoying their corpses.

Without warning the door flew open, and the knocker was wrenched from his grip. “What do you want?” the answerer snarled. He was younger than Lamb might have expected: stocky, in an off-white short-sleeved shirt; his arms writhing with black-and-blue designs; his head hairless; his expression halfway between anger and alarm. Which was fine, thought Lamb, this was an audience he could work with, and without further warning he began to sing: