Nobody Walks (7 page)

“Seriously? We thought we’d already been serious. But apparently we weren’t serious enough. Were we?”

“Not enough,” Tweedledumber agreed.

“But what we find is, a little lovetap on the kneecaps, everything gets clearer. Says more than words ever can.”

There was a rasping sound as Tweedledumber struck a match against the alley wall. When he applied it to the cigarette in his mouth, his face became an October pumpkin.

He dropped the match in the gutter.

Tweedledum hoisted the bat, slapped its thick end into his left hand.

“I’ve made a mistake,” said Bettany.

“That you have, sunshine. That you have.”

They stepped forward, and the punishment began.

PART TWO

In the morning London
exhaled, and its breath was foul. It swam upwards from drains and gutters. It formed pockets of gas in corners, and burst in noxious clouds from cars’ rear ends.

By eight the first swell of workers had flooded the city and the second was gathering force. The underground, arteries hardening, was a wheezing queue of trains in which passengers, squeezed into awkward shapes, counted down the stations of the cross. Bad things could happen on the tube, though few entertained the possibility that disaster would happen to them. They feared, instead, small acts of rudeness and aggression, their own as well as others’, because in the daily anonymous crush it was easy for a grip on the ordinary decencies to loosen. The underground birthed a creature that might turn on itself. There was little need of outside agency.

Among their number this morning, as usual, was a woman whom even the kinder passengers would have difficulty not finding ugly. She was five foot tall and bottle-shaped, not classic Coke but pale ale, straight up-and-down to the neck, with, today, iron-grey hair whose colour matched the aspirin-sized growth that
bloomed on one side of her nose. But her eyes were piercingly bright, and she was expensively dressed—Caroline Charles, the discerning might have recognised, before wondering why someone wearing Caroline Charles chose to ride the tube at rush-hour. On closer inspection, they might have decided she resembled the more benevolent kind of witch, the type to dish out helpful potions when love let you down.

But few would spare the time to frame the thoughts. All were focused on being first off the train when it stopped. The woman seemed less anxious than most, allowing those around her to disembark before she did. On the stairs she kept an unhurried pace, not minding when less-controlled individuals rushed past, their disorganised limbs brushing against her. Once outside the commuters rediscovered their individual selves, and the temporary monster they’d assembled broke into parts and scattered. Her own course took her across the junction where traffic had argued itself to a standstill and onto a quieter road by the park, where a gracious terrace faced a row of full-grown sycamores, their branches leafless but no less soothing for that—
bare ruined choirs
her first thought on seeing them.
Where late the sweet birds sang.

She ascended the steps to one of the grand buildings, and its door opened before she reached it.

“Good morning, Graham. All well?”

She slipped her gloves off as she spoke.

“Everything fine up topside, ma’am.”

“All we can ask.” Removing her scarf, she folded it over one arm as she crossed the hall with its wide staircase and the monumental Landseer on the wall. “You take care of things up here, and I’ll do my best with everything else.”

“Then we’re all in safe hands,” Graham said, as he did most mornings.

Dame Ingrid Tearney smiled, and stepped through the door to the left of the staircase.

Since 7/7
she’d used the underground at least once a day, always during rush hour, and made no secret of it. Every profile written about her, every interview she gave, the fact was tripped out. And she always gave the same reason, which, first time she delivered it, appeared in a round-up of that year’s soundbites.

“My job is to keep our citizens safe. There’s no risk they face that I won’t gladly meet myself.”

Do you think it’s wise, she’d been asked, describing your average Londoner’s journey to work as a risk?

I think it’s wise that no one takes safety for granted, she’d said.

Despite the publicity she was never recognised, of this she was certain. She’d never been an agent—her route to head of the Intelligence Service had been largely via committee—but she had her smarts, and few illusions about herself. She sometimes drew a second glance, and knew full well why. But if she ever drew a third it would be someone realising who she was, and that never happened.

It helped, of course, that her hair alternated between the iron grey, a much curlier black and a really quite buttery blonde. Her wigs were expensive, age-appropriate, and functional. From the age of fifteen, Ingrid Tearney had been completely bald.

And now she was heading down again, the lift carrying her three floors below the street to the bi-monthly inter-departmental catch-up labelled W&N on everyone’s calendar for Wants & Needs, but called by her Whines & Niggles. Not usually a meeting she’d chair, for the good reason that it made her want to murder her staff, but every other blue moon she’d turn up to demonstrate how hands-on she was, and spend two hours listening to
departmental rivalries disguised as strategic planning. Why Comms needed extra space Intel should be made to surrender. Why Surveillance required a budget hike that could come out of Ops’ surplus. Et cetera. They could type it all up in January and circulate it at intervals, the effect would be the same.

Which was what she found herself saying out loud to the assembled company—twelve department reps, a minute-taker and one extra—ninety minutes later.

“We have increasing demands placed on capped resources, yes. Explain why this always comes as a surprise? If you wanted free rein and unlimited funds, you should have gone into the City. Next time let’s have less squabbling and more constructive thinking, shall we?” She removed her glasses, a sign that the meeting was over. “And let’s not forget, when we drop the ball, lives are lost. There’s no excuse for losing focus. Mr. Coe, would you stay behind?”

JK Coe was the extra.

After the others, seven men, six women, had trooped out of the meeting room, Dame Ingrid reached under the desk and disengaged the recording device. She then regarded Coe, a slight man in his early thirties, hairline receding already, wearing what she’d have to call a reserved expression.

“For all the backbiting, that was actually more muted than usual,” she said. “Care to guess why?”

“Because I was here, Dame Ingrid?”

She waved away the title. “Every last one of them was watching what they said, for fear of hearing it quoted back at them in their annual appraisal.”

JK Coe was from Psych Eval.

“Which means that if anyone wonders what you were doing here, that’s the answer they’ll come up with.”

He said, “So that’s not the actual reason you wanted me here.”

“No. And I’d apologise for making you sit through that, but time spent working up a cover is never wasted.”

Cover.

“This is an op?” he asked.

“Ops need approval from the Limelight Committee. I don’t know where they get these names.”

“They’re selected randomly from—”

“This doesn’t need approval because if it did it would be an op, and if it were an op it would require a budget ticket, and I’ve just spent an hour and a half repeating that this year’s budget’s stretched as far as it’ll go. Does that answer your question?”

It wasn’t an op.

Which was both a relief and a disappointment. JK Coe had never been involved in an operation. He was backroom, evaluating deskbound staff for their likely responses under extreme stress. Bio-attack stress. Terror event.

“No. Think of it more as a welfare assignment, one that nobody else need know about. Because if they did …”

“It would require a budget ticket.”

“I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

Ingrid Tearney laid her palm flat on the buff-coloured folder in front of her.

“You know, the Service used to take pride in the fact that we looked after our own. Something else that’s fallen prey to budget considerations. These days, once you’re out the door you’re history. But I’ve always had a soft spot for history.”

When she paused, he assumed he was being invited to speak.

“How ancient a history are we talking?”

“Oh, relatively recent. Before your time, but you’re one of our fresher talents, aren’t you?”

Somewhat mesmerised by her gaze, he nodded.

Eleven months. Coe had been with the Service eleven months. A degree in psychiatry had derailed into banking, which had proved both lucrative and unsatisfying. The switch had been a good move.

That’s what he thought so far.

Her eyes still on him, Tearney pushed the folder across the table.

“It doesn’t leave the building. But you’ll be more comfortable in the library. If anyone asks, you’re reviewing this morning’s minutes.”

Bending back the cover, he took a quick glance at the folder’s contents. It was stickered Priority John, the lowest of that year’s five-tier security codes, and had x-s stamped in black on the topsheet, meaning ex-service. A personnel file, one of thousands, relating to someone who was no longer part of the brotherhood, sisterhood, of agents. The photo showed a blond man with an army haircut and serious eyes.

THOMAS BETTANY
, the caption read.

Dame Ingrid Tearney was standing so Coe stood too, tucked the folder under his arm, and left the meeting room with enough purpose in his step that anyone watching might imagine he knew precisely where the library was.

Psych Eval was based
over the river. This was the first time Coe had entered the sacred precincts, as they called Regent’s Park that end of town, which was why he’d been the only one at the meeting with a lanyard round his neck,
VISITOR
in red caps on a laminate. Nothing to say which department he was from. As he stepped back into the lift, having been told at the security desk where the library was, he wondered what made Tearney sure the others would have known who he was, rendering them suitably nervous—apparently—then answered his own question in the same serious tone the voice in his head adopted for work issues. They’d have known because she’d have told them. Sometimes things were that simple.

Even if unexpected.

Coe had colleagues who’d been with the Service ten times as long as him, and never had a phone call like his last night.
Dame Ingrid Tearney for JK Coe
, spoken as if she were her own PA, though it was the Dame herself on the line.

“I have a task for you.”

A task. Like something Hercules might have been set.

“Be at the Park. Nine sharp.”

The call had come after twelve, and he’d spent the rest of the night wondering if it was a prank, like that time in Uni when he’d received an anonymous note from a secret admirer, begging him to meet her in a nearby pub. Keeping the date was an act of folly which the bastards who’d set him up never allowed him to forget.

This morning, sitting through an interminable meeting, he might have wondered if this weren’t some slightly more grown-up version of the same trick if not for the incontrovertible fact that at the head of the table, never so much as throwing a look his way, sat Dame Ingrid herself.

A Service legend, in her way. Not a bona fide legend like your Jackson Lambs—the plural uncalled for, because there was only one Jackson Lamb, thank God—but definitely a story in the making. Carving the Service into her own image, in spite of all those who queried the value of her initiatives, forever sucking up to Washington, spearheading charm offensives and doing wall-to-wall media. Taking the Intelligence Service “into the community.” And, most sinful of all, not letting the fact that she was nobody’s idea of photogenic—was, as one of those naysayers had put it, a crone in a designer cloak—ever hold her back.

Designer cloaks, he thought. JK Coe didn’t know much about women’s fashion, but Tearney had a reputation for dressing well. She could afford to, having private income, which she’d neither married nor been born into—was something of a whizz on the money markets. Maybe he should ask her for pointers, once he’d read the folder.

The library should have been all wooden shelves and high windows, in keeping with the Service’s Oxbridge image, but was underground, with plain tables more suited to a canteen. Coe identified himself, found a corner, and settled down to read.

Thomas Bettany.

Bettany had been Ops, which was to say he’d seen undercover service, Northern Ireland at first, then in the capital itself. Martin Boyd had been his workname, and as Boyd he’d been a key figure in a syndicate run by the Brothers McGarry, a pair of charmers who’d supplied arms to a wide variety of customers, from armed robbers to at least one budding terrorist group. It had been one of the longest ops the Service had run on home soil, and when it wrapped it claimed fifty-two scalps, including some MoD suits who’d been involved in diverting decommissioned materiel into the McGarrys’ hands. This brought an end to Bettany’s Ops career. After a stint with the Dogs, the Service’s internal police, he’d taken a pay-off and relocated to Lyme Regis with his wife and son, presumably to set about rebuilding a family life his work had left in tatters. This hadn’t lasted. Painfully soon afterwards his wife, Hannah, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour expensive care had done nothing to render otherwise. She’d died within the year.