Nobody Walks (17 page)

He wasn’t tall, Oskar Kask, but made up for it in energy. Even now, three minutes out of bed, it fizzed in him. He kept his hair short because it grew in tight little corkscrews, but Saar had always seen that as just another way Oskar’s inner electricity escaped. His beard came flecked with grey, like Saar’s own, but Oskar’s was heavier. It looked like he had three days’ worth, and he’d shaved yesterday.

“And these guys, they’re all business. You know that.”

He knew that, as much as anyone knew anything about the Cousins’ Circle, which was Russian-based, multiethnic, multinational, and enjoyed the double charm of having its existence doubted as much as its reach was feared.

“Besides. Join the Circle and we don’t have to worry about muskrat going out of fashion because we’ll have a lock on whatever the next big thing is too. This is good business, Marten. The Circle, they’re Google. They’re Apple. You don’t want to go head to head with them. You want to stand shoulder to shoulder.”

“And while we are standing shoulder to shoulder,” said Marten Saar, “who will be watching our backs?”

“That’s not how this’ll go. They don’t want us out of the game, they want us to be their team on the ground. Distribution. Goodwill. All that shit. You know?”

“You’re a good friend, Oskar.”

“I try to be.”

“And I know you think this is best.”

“It’s the way forward, Marten.”

“But if I decide they’re playing a double game, looking to ease us out of the picture …”

“We walk away.”

“We do.”

It was almost on his tongue to add drama—
And we burn them where they stand
, something like that, something else from TV. But it would have been worse than drama, would have been bravado. To utter threats would have been the little boy boasting that he wasn’t scared of wolves, because he wasn’t in a forest. But wolves had a way of bringing the forest with them. It didn’t matter where you were. It was where they were that counted.

You’re a good friend, Oskar.
It was true. And it was also true he’d never been an ideas man, more an enforcer—all that energy had to go somewhere. Reliably vicious, but never a thinker. Yet here he was, brokering their common future.

It was a good plan. A dangerous plan, because if trust needed daily renewal, trusting Russians was a minute-by-minute affair,
but still, it was a good plan because if it worked, their future was secure and their competition was dead.

If it worked.

Whether it was the danger or the hope he couldn’t tell, but one or the other lit a thrill inside Marten Saar. He remembered the girls in his bed, asleep but wakeable. Maybe he’d more than watch this time.

He said to Oskar, “I’m going back to bed,” and padded out of the L-shaped room, gown flapping at his knees.

Leaving Oskar Kask lighting a cigarette with a blue plastic lighter, and watching the sun attempt to make an impression on the streets below.

Morning rose to the
surface like trapped gas. At the tube station the crowd dispersed as if expecting random sniper fire. A little behind the first surge, Dame Ingrid Tearney crested the steps and joined the pavement procession.

Lights changed. Traffic snarled.

It was another damp day, vapour clouding every pane of glass, the sky an impenetrable grey bowl upended over the city. Overcoats and umbrellas shielded bodies. Hoods obscured faces.

Dame Ingrid, ash-blonde this morning, paused to adjust her gloves, holding them at the wrist and flexing her fingers one by one. Then continued on her way.

A figure stepped in front of her as a bus swept past.

She might have been expecting him.

“You look a mess.”

He felt one.

JK Coe had spent the night bundling reams of ripped-up black plastic bags into a giant ball he then disposed of via the stairs—the lift was too enclosed a space, too inviting of assault. In the basement by the bins he’d frozen, petrified by a noise he
couldn’t identify. Any other night he’d have shrugged it off. Londoners are used to rats. But he’d had his foundations rocked, and everything was a threat.

Once he’d dared move he’d found his clothes in a pile on his bedroom floor, wallet and watch on top, as if abandoned on a beach by a man faking his own death. So today there was a new, reborn JK Coe. This one wore a blue cagoule and jeans ripped at the knee. He’d showered twice but slime still oozed from his pores, coating his body in a paste that was two parts shame, one part fear.

“You’d better walk with me.”

Nobody paid attention because there was nothing to see. It might have been a son joining his mother, or a Samaritan offering a rough-sleeper breakfast.

A street-sweeping lorry bustled past tight to the kerb, rearranging gutter grime with its brushes’ circular motion. They waited until it, and the frustrated queue of cars behind it, was past and half-scuttled across the road, Dame Ingrid somehow making the scuttle dignified, or at least plausible.

Smaller streets awaited, passages between towers of glass and concrete. The traffic noise abated but other sounds took its place, rumblings and groanings, snatches of music, the wasplike buzz of a helicopter. Rounding a corner, they passed the entrance to a car park. A woman with a dog was scooping shit into a small blue bag.

These details tumbled round Coe’s mind. It was like recovering from illness, or slowly becoming less drunk. Everything strange and familiar at once.

“So Bettany came for you?”

Something about the question, the way it dropped from her fully formed, threw a switch in his head.

“… You knew he would.”

“It seemed likely.”

This stated as a matter of fact, as if it were absurd of him to have considered otherwise.

“You should have warned me!”

She halted abruptly, and gave him a look so sharp it ought to have had a handle on one end.

“You’ve had an upsetting experience. But address me in that tone again, Mr. Coe, and there will be repercussions. Do I make myself clear?”

“… Yes.”

“An apology would not go amiss.”

“… I’m sorry.”

She blinked regally. Which evidently qualified as acceptance, for having done so, she resumed their stately progress.

“There seemed no need to warn you,” she said. “You’re Psych Eval. Junior, granted, but nevertheless. Psych Eval. One would have thought you’d have spared a moment to consider the possible ramifications of your meeting with Bettany.”

“All I was doing was delivering a message!”

The exclamation mark earned him another sharp look.

“And all he was doing was verifying its content.”

And then she sighed, a faint wisp of noise. Wearing Anna Valentine today, not that JK Coe would have recognised it. If he had, he might also have registered that it was neither last year’s collection nor the previous year’s, but the one before that.

“Our Mr. Bettany,” she said, “has played both sides of the field. He’s been undercover, and he’s been a Dog. Which means he has a tendency to treat all unknowns as hostiles and all information as a lie. It was never likely he’d take delivery of a message at face value. You can’t have failed to be aware of that.”

“It didn’t occur to me he’d …”

“Yes?”

He said nothing.

An ambulance rumbled past, in no great hurry.

Dame Ingrid said, “What did you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Mr. Coe, of one thing I am absolutely certain, and that is that you’d have answered any question he put to you. So, again. What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I mean, nothing I hadn’t already told him. Because I don’t know anything, do I? All I was doing was repeating what you told me. And that was all true, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was, dear boy.”

He’d come to confront her because he’d been through hell, and no way could he vent that on the one responsible—in his imagination he could take Bettany apart with a chainsaw, but reality wasn’t going to cooperate. So he’d come seeking Dame Ingrid instead, but was no longer sure what he’d expected. An apology? An admission that the message he’d given Bettany had a coded element beyond his understanding? But instead she was calling him
dear boy
again.

Even that ambulance had made him flinch, and it hadn’t been keening. Was just another vehicle negotiating the streets.

He wondered how long he’d be jumping at shadows.

“I thought he was going to kill me.”

Words he hadn’t known he’d been about to say.

“But he didn’t.”

“And what would you have done if he had?”

“My dear boy, I’d have been most seriously distressed.”

Nothing in her tone suggested otherwise.

“And what would have happened to Bettany?”

Which provoked another sigh.

“Mr. Coe, you do understand the concept of the greater good?”

“You said this wasn’t an op.”

“And it isn’t. But Thomas Bettany remains an ex-member of our Service. Now,” and here she leaned closer to him in the manner of a teacher about to unveil a basic rule, one to stand him in good stead ever after, “we’ve had quite enough bad publicity in recent years as a result of Service boys embroiling themselves in squalid little scrapes. It doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good at all.”

It didn’t. JK Coe wasn’t about to dispute that.

“So if he’d killed you we’d have had to sweep it under the carpet. You’d have been a random victim of city crime, Mr. Coe. But you’d have caused no embarrassment to us, and I’d have been proud of you for that.”

Well, at least that was an honest response.

She said, “As it is, advising Bettany to lay off Vincent Driscoll could only ever have had two possible outcomes. One, that he would lay off Vincent Driscoll. An unlikely outcome, but not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility. Or two, that he would take this as an indication that Vincent Driscoll was in fact responsible for what happened to his son, and act accordingly. Very much not what we wanted. But having paid you his little visit—”

(His little visit. As if dropping in for a cup of tea.)

“—he now knows there was no stratagem involved, which makes it far more likely that he’ll do what we want him to do. And lay off Vincent Driscoll.”

Coe said, “So torturing me was a necessary part of the process. As you’d planned it.”

A sigh.

“Mr. Coe, why did you join the Service?”

Wrongfooted, he stammered nonsense. Sense of duty, desire to serve.

“In which case, you can be satisfied with last night’s work. You do understand the essential nature of what has happened, don’t you?”

“I—”

“All the same, I’ll spell it out. The essential nature of what has happened is that it remains classified. You do not speak of it. To anyone. And if you ever again accost me in this fashion, you will learn the meaning of power. Is that clear?”

He allowed that it was.

“Good. Now go home, Mr. Coe. You don’t look yourself. We all need a sick day now and then.”

And just like that, dismissed, he was adrift in Central London.

Dame Ingrid carried on alone. Within the minute she’d produced a mobile, and came to a halt near the cobbled entrance to a mews. Whoever she called answered on the first ring.

She said, “I think we can expect Bettany to make a move soon. Keep an eye on him.”

Out of nowhere a sparrow appeared, and began a minute examination of a space between two stones.

“Some kind of low-level torture, apparently. Nothing too serious. The young man was reluctant to go into detail, which I expect means he disgraced himself.”

Finding a crumb, the sparrow speared it with its beak.

“I assume he’ll go home and try to put it behind him. But either way, we can tidy up later.”

She ended the call.

The sparrow flew away.

From the top deck
of the bus, Flea Pointer looked out on the usual chaos.

Once in a while, you find yourself engaged in that pavement dance in which both partners step aside in the same direction, then correct themselves, then do it again … It generally ends with amused apology on both sides. Viewed from above, what was amazing was that you rarely got head-on collisions, that fist-fights weren’t breaking out. Instead, what Flea was watching resembled a physics experiment in which particles rushed around at great speed and in great proximity, only their innate tendency to repel their like ensuring they never touched.

Something about which thought inevitably led to Vincent.

Not touching was a thing with Vincent Driscoll, of course, and that wasn’t just about physics, wasn’t just about the physical. She sometimes wondered if he even remembered who she was from day to day. Oh, he had a grasp of her name, and her function—to keep the human elements of the business ticking over without his having to get involved—but all he needed for that was a Post-it on his fridge.
The woman you see at work is Flea
Pointer. She deals with the people.
One quick glance at breakfast, and he’d be up to speed. And while at first she had regarded this with an amusement not untinged with contempt, over the past year it had come to seem less funny, and that slight contempt had turned inward. What did it say about her, that he had so little interest? Zero interest.

Nothing. She found she was mouthing the word aloud, and disguised this by mouthing another word or two, as if humming a lyric or rehearsing a shopping list, then glanced around to see who was staring at the mad lady. But nobody was staring at the mad lady. Everyone had their own bubble they were trying not to burst.

But nothing. That was what it said about her. Vincent was Vincent, and Flea Pointer could be … Kylie Minogue, it wouldn’t make a difference. Talk about being inside your own bubble. Vincent, famously, had written
Shades
in his teenage bedroom, and to all purposes he was in there still, building it anew each morning. Boo Berryman aside, he didn’t have close relationships, and he was only close to Boo so Boo could keep everyone else away. Throwing around words like Asperger’s was a cliché—the slightest indication of indifference, and onlookers started clucking about where you fell on the spectrum. And that went tenfold if you worked in IT. So it would be easy to write Vincent off as someone for whom intimate relationships were like trying to breathe on the moon, but Flea thought, had always thought, that the truth lay elsewhere. That all that was really needed was for someone to find the key to his bedroom door, and let him out.