Authors: Mick Herron
After he’d gleaned as much as he was likely to without dropping the friendly pretence, he let Flea lead him upstairs, where the windows were untinted, and the view was of rooftops across the canal. What had once been factories were now flats, though retained the outward appearance of industry. But an industry tamed, its corners waxed and polished.
She said, “I think they were starting to wonder. You know, where grieving parenthood ends and interrogation begins.”
“Trust me. When I cross that line, they’ll know about it.”
She led him into her office, which adjoined Vincent Driscoll’s. A lot of one wall was window. Down below, Driscoll was emerging from a car. When it left he stood looking up, as if he sensed that Bettany, or someone like him, was watching.
For a moment, Bettany thought he was going to turn and walk away. Instead he’d pushed through the door and entered the building.
More impressions.
Mostly of someone very clean, very neat, who probably spent ninety minutes getting dressed. But that might be as much to put off stepping into the real world as to impress anyone he met there.
His fair hair bordered on translucent. His skin too was papery,
thin, as though Bettany could poke a finger right through him if the urge demanded.
Which it might.
“Can you spare a few minutes?” Bettany said.
This was clearly disconcerting.
“I don’t usually see anyone without an appointment.”
Bettany waited.
Flea Pointer said, “Mr. Driscoll’s got quite a busy morning …”
There was a simple trick, one Bettany learned in his stint as a Dog. It was a matter of looking like you not only weren’t going anywhere but were incapable of forming the intention. Like forests might rise and mountains fall before you’d move a foot.
Flea, about to speak again, changed her mind.
Driscoll made the mistake of glancing towards his office. Nearest place of safety. Bettany latched onto it as if it came inscribed RSVP.
“In there’s fine.”
Driscoll said to Flea, “When Boo—when Mr. Berryman arrives, could you send him up?”
“Of course.”
Driscoll’s office, if Bettany had been asked to guess, would be devoid of anything personal—just the usual chair, desk, desk hardware—and he was largely right, though hadn’t banked on the big and vibrantly coloured poster boosting a movie called
Shades.
That aside, it was a room that looked easy to leave in a hurry.
Without waiting to be asked, he planted himself in the visitor’s chair.
“Smart building.”
“Thank you.”
“All this from writing games?”
“It turns out you only need to write one,” Driscoll said.
“The basketball hoop,” said Bettany.
Driscoll waited.
“You get that from a film? Or read about it in some effective management handbook? How to encourage ‘creative thinking’?”
Driscoll said, “I think it was Ms. Pointer suggested the basketball hoop.”
“Everyone being free and easy. Let the ideas come swimming out.”
“Something like that.”
“Does it help?”
“If it helps my employees, that’s fine. Personally, I don’t … Why all these questions, Mr. Bettany?”
“I’m trying to get a handle on my son’s life. Exactly how free and easy does it get round here?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The kids smoke dope on the premises?”
“Of course not. That would be a sackable offence. And nobody wants to lose their job, not one where they’re paid for doing what they’d do for fun. What do you do, Mr. Bettany? I don’t think you said.”
“Lately, I’ve worked with meat.”
“… I’ve no idea what that means.”
“How well did you know my son?”
“How well …?”
“Not a complicated question.”
“No. It’s just that, well, I didn’t. Not really.”
“But he worked for you.”
“Obviously.”
“Because he was the one first cracked your game.”
Bettany gestured at the poster on the wall.
“That not give him special status?”
“It made him … a good hire.”
“A good hire.”
“There was interest. Publicity. Chatter on the web. Things you need in this business.”
Which sounded to Bettany like something he’d learned by rote.
“So Liam himself was, what? Neither here nor there?”
“He was a good hire.”
“Which anyone in his position would have been.”
A slight nod allowed the truth of that.
“Did you ever visit his flat?”
“Mr. Bettany. He worked for me, that’s all.”
He made a fluttery gesture with his hands.
“My team are all good people. I’m sure they are. But …”
“But you’re not a people person. Are you gay?”
“You think your son was my boyfriend?”
“I don’t know. Was he?”
“He was my employee. I didn’t know he was gay.”
“I didn’t say he was.”
“You’re obviously trying to trick me into some kind of admission, I have no idea what. I’m sorry about Liam, really I am. But I’d like you to leave now.”
A slight disturbance told Bettany someone was in the doorway. It would be Driscoll’s driver. Flea had called him some stupid name. Boo?
“How come your new game won’t make you richer?”
“That’s … I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
But he was. Bettany could see it in his eyes.
Behind him, Boo Berryman coughed.
“I’ll see you out,” he told Bettany.
Berryman walked Bettany downstairs,
where the kids were at their desks, glued to screens, calling to each other in what might have been code.
The woman who’d touched his elbow half-waved as they headed for the door, a movement she turned into a rearrangement of her hair when Bettany ignored her.
Outside Berryman said, “Finished now?”
“Finished?”
“Coming into Mr. Driscoll’s workplace, upsetting his staff. Asking stupid questions.”
Bettany guessed he’d been overheard asking Driscoll if he was gay.
“Making a nuisance of yourself.”
He said, “Nobody seemed upset.”
“They were being polite. On account of the situation.”
“But you’re not.”
“I’m sorry about your boy. But I have my own responsibilities.”
“Sure.”
“Chief among them making sure nobody disturbs Mr. Driscoll.”
Berryman spoke with assurance. He was usefully built, and the way he stood suggested he knew how to handle himself. Slightly favoured his right leg, though.
He was probably making his own assessment of Bettany.
Who said, “My boy wasn’t alone when he fell.”
“I didn’t hear that.”
“No, it didn’t get much coverage. On account of whoever it was made themselves scarce.”
Berryman didn’t answer. But he tilted his head to an angle, as if he’d moved on from gauging Bettany’s weight and was now wondering what kind of bullshit he was peddling.
Bettany said, “Until I find out who that was, I’ll be carrying on doing what you just said. Making a nuisance of myself?”
“That was it.”
“Good. A nuisance, then. Count on it.”
“Mr. Driscoll had nothing to do with your son’s death.”
“Then Mr. Driscoll has nothing to worry about.”
Unlikely to find a better line to leave on, he left.
Back at
Liam’s he opened a tin at random, heated its contents and ate them with a spoon. Afterwards he sat by the window. A cat was prowling its territory, coolly observed by a pigeon on the opposite roof. Ordinary small happenings. Liam must have witnessed a hundred such scenes, non-scenes, at this window, events which weren’t eventful but just the inevitable consequence of time passing. Bettany withdrew but left the window open. Fresh air gratefully occupied the flat.
He was starting to feel he knew this room. The sofa looked less like someone else’s furniture, more a personal invitation. He
lay on it, feet hanging over the arm. This, too. How many times had Liam lain like this?
Bettany breathed in the odour of his son.
When he opened his eyes again, time had passed.
He’d spent some of it thinking about Vincent Driscoll. An uptight individual, uncomfortable with strangers, but lots of people were. That whole business of hiring Liam for being the first to crack
Shades
might be on the level, and Flea’s comment about the new game not making Driscoll richer, that might mean a tax fiddle, a charity wheeze, anything. Not Bettany’s concern.
Having a minder might be because that’s what rich people did.
But he was an odd duck.
As for the kids, whose jobs involved playing games, or talking about playing games, or working out new ways of playing games, they’d not been holding back anything important. In the Service, as a Dog, Bettany had interviewed professionals, people who’d been trained to lie and had a flair for it. He’d learned how to excavate falsehoods, scrape away the truths to find the treacheries beneath.
All of which had been long ago, and a mild conversation in the workplace didn’t build up the pressure those interrogations had generated. But if there’d been anything to find, he’d have sensed it. Enough to know there was someone he’d need another crack at, somewhere less public. And there’d been nothing. Only Driscoll tripped his wires, and that might just have been personality.
Tripped his wires … A phrase from days gone by.
He checked Liam’s phone, found it fully charged, and scrolled through the contact list. Flea, of course. Kyle and Haydn. Eirlys and Luka. And others, forty or more, some first names only, some with reminders attached (“dentist,” “bank”). No way of knowing
whether first-name-only indicated a degree of intimacy rendering description otiose, or acquaintance so casual Liam didn’t know their surnames.
Well, there was one way of finding out. Reclining on the increasingly familiar sofa, he began the tedious process of calling them all.
Afterwards he
lay dry-mouthed, Liam’s phone on his chest. Most of those he’d spoken to had known of Liam’s death, and of those who hadn’t, one or two didn’t have a sure grasp of who he was. And of those who recognised Liam’s name but hadn’t known he was dead, none seemed sure how to respond. It was as if they were being polled on a news item not relevant to their situation.
All of which confirmed Bettany’s suspicion that his son had had no one truly close, Flea Pointer perhaps excepted. There were other avenues, of course, and might be a whole crew of buddies somewhere, boys he hung with, girls he slept with, but if so they’d made little impact on his surroundings. Work life aside, Liam seemed to have been a solitary.
He turned the phone off and went into the kitchen, where he poured, then drank, a glass of water. Wiping his mouth afterwards, he was struck by the strangeness of an only slightly stubbled chin. But that too would grow familiar. Everything did, in the end.
A hand on his chin … He experienced a sudden memory, as real as if he were thrown back in time, of his infant son, a few months old, reaching out and grasping him there. Then it ended.
There weren’t many such memories. Much of Liam’s childhood had taken place in Bettany’s absence, while Bettany himself had been Martin Boyd, acquiring the habits and thought processes of a made-up man. Family life had been a series of snapshots, interrupting the movie. Brief, furtive visits, more like a passing
criminal than a father. It wouldn’t be hard to draw a connecting line between that and the life Liam had been leading, apparently successful, but lacking solid relationships. A case of the apple and the tree. Undercover, after all, was what Bettany did when his own life failed him. Undercover meant dropping from sight, leading somebody else’s life in a succession of foreign cities. It meant leaving everything behind.
When Martin Boyd had been put to rest, and the Brothers McGarry were behind walls, Bettany had thought it possible to continue in the Service. He’d joined the Dogs, but it had been a failure. Something had boiled inside him, kept rising up the back of his throat. Short fuse, Psych Eval said. All those years of being someone else, he hardly knew how to be Tom Bettany any more. And London had become enemy territory, the chances of encountering someone who’d known him as Boyd a constant tremor in the background. Before long he’d taken a severance payment and moved the three of them to Dorset, a coastal town, a new life.
Bettany poured more water. He didn’t often think about his past, but that too was the undercover mentality. The person you used to be was sealed off, boxed tight, locked shut, and you walked away. But nobody really walked.
Oddly, it was his stint in the Dogs he’d had trouble shaking off, once they were settled by the sea. Bad things happened in the noughties, and in the wake of attacks in New York, London, Madrid, Mumbai, policing the Service acquired a broader remit, the investigation and interrogation of undesirables. It had been a bad time to be undesirable. While the public records defined the Service’s decade as one long cock-up, a lot of successes never made the papers because they left nothing in their wake. Men disappeared, women too, and those who’d known them were left under no illusions about their own fate if they kicked up fuss. Records
were sealed. Names erased. The subjects never saw daylight again. Packed into aeroplanes, shuttled into godforsaken skies, they’d never stand trial or hear a human voice. Next time they opened their eyes, they’d see everything their future held.
Operation Waterproof. That was the name of the protocol.
Bettany had never seen these prisons, most of them in former Soviet states, which had no shortage of facilities and accepted all major credit cards. But he’d heard stories. They had no windows, no exercise yards, no visiting rights, no phone privileges. You didn’t have to worry about being raped or knifed in the showers because there were no showers. There were cells, seven foot by five, with a door and a bucket. Once a week the bucket was removed, emptied, put back. The food never varied. For entertainment, you had the clothes you stood up in. After a while, even your memories would taste of stone.
On bad nights he dreamed of such places. It was every undercover agent’s hell. A place where there was no hiding from yourself.