He said, “You busy?”
She was busy like a slow horse: plenty to do, none of it mattering, all of it skull-numbing dross. More specifically, she’d reached T on her library project. Library project—it sounded like something a primary school might inflict on its defenceless charges. The reality was worse. Way back when, round about the Middle Ages, Lamb had had one of his pet ideas; the kind of brainwave which doubtless struck somewhere between the fourth and fifth drink, the second and third vindaloo. Why not make Louisa’s life a screaming, maddening hell? Actually that was less an idea, more a mission statement; what the actual idea was was, why didn’t Louisa spend the rest of her life drowning in library-loan statistics? Because there were books out there which banged a certain kind of drum, and Lamb couldn’t help wondering who, if anyone, was marching. That was how he’d put it: I can’t help wondering. Help wondering? He could barely keep a straight fucking face. Once he’d realised every town in the UK had its own library, or used to, he’d have ordered a fifth or sixth drink, a third or fourth vindaloo. Islam: A call to arms. The blood-dimmed tide. He didn’t even have to make these titles up. All he had to do was get Louisa to check Public Lending Right statistics for the past few decades, and match the borrower names that came up against various red-flag lists the Service collated. Thereby devising a whole new list.
“And I hate lists,” he’d beamed.
“This might be a long one.”
“Maybe devise a points system,” he suggested. “You know. Bonus marks if they’re already on the hot map. Double that if they have a . . . dodgy name.”
“Dodgy name?”
“I’ve always thought ‘Gary’ a bit suspect.”
So far she’d taken special notice of those who’d borrowed a supposedly inflammatory text without ever, as far as records showed, returning it. Which meant she was flagging with budding-terrorist status those who’d committed the fearsome crime of losing a library book. But it was keeping the national security candle alight, or at least keeping herself in a job. She was aware that these weren’t the same thing exactly.
To Lech, she said, “Yeah, no. Same old usual. Why?”
“I heard something odd last night.”
“How odd?”
He glanced around. “We have a scale?”
“Just so long as it doesn’t involve library books.”
“You know John Bachelor?”
She knew the name. “He’s been staying with you, right?”
“He did. A while back.”
“An old family friend?”
“We confused ourselves into thinking so. I met him at a wedding, so somebody’s family was involved. Then we discovered we both worked for the Service.”
Lech still at the Park then, and Bachelor a milkman, whose round covered the old, the infirm, the clapped-out; those who’d once fought the Cold War and now were just fighting the cold. Bachelor made sure their heating bills were paid, that there was food in their fridges, all the while growing steadily worse at managing any such thing for himself, his misfortunes reading like instructions for a midlife crisis: divorce; his working hours cut; his savings lost to bad investments. So, Lech said, he’d been adrift for a couple of years, subletting rooms when he could, sleeping in his car when he had to, sofa-surfing until he ran out of friends; all the while hanging onto his job by cracked and bleeding fingernails. . . The point where this was going to be more boring than the job in front of her was approaching fast. “And what’s he done?” she said.
“He saw someone he recognised.”
Louisa said, “I really hope there’s more to this story than that. Because, you know, I could be reading lists of names.”
“Before Bachelor was a milkman,” Lech said, “long before, he worked on the London desk, and carried bags for David Cartwright. Once, he carried them all the way to Bonn.”
“Bit of a stretch from London.”
“Are you telling this or am I?”
“Sorry.”
What had happened was, someone at the British consulate in Leningrad had been caught shoplifting, or buying drugs, or something, anyway, which the KGB liked catching you doing when you were working at a British consulate, especially if you were really working for the Service. And what David Cartwright went to Bonn to do was sort out a deal which would allow the poor sod in question to come home without both countries having to resort to the usual tit-for-tat fandango, firing diplomats, rolling up local networks, and generally making a musical out of one tired old song. The sort of thing the David Cartwrights of the Service were born to do, though this particular David Cartwright, Louisa knew, had been River Cartwright’s grandfather. River probably hadn’t even been born then, but let’s not think about River right now.