Nobody Walks (25 page)

This in response to Oskar opening his mouth, about to say something.

“—don’t insult me with a fairytale. If nothing else, we’ve been partners too long for that.”

Oskar didn’t know what he’d have said, if he’d had the chance to say it. But yes, it would have been a fairytale.

For half a minute they remained silent. Not far away there was music, the kind whose unrelenting beat is its entire point, and the irritation it causes to anyone over thirty a mere bonus. It came from a club, perhaps, or a pub jukebox, or a nearby flat.
It came from somewhere where people listened in the full expectation that this was just another night they were living through, which would give way in turn to another day, and so on. And so on.

The door at the bottom of the stairs opened.

Oskar said, “One favour?”

Marten tilted his head to one side like an interested bird.

“Do it here. Now. Quickly.”

Marten shook his head.

Behind Oskar, more of Marten’s crew arrived.

“Let’s go home,” said Marten.

It had rained hard
in the early hours, bringing small branches down from trees, and while it was calmer now, with a hint of brightness in corners of the sky, pavements were still wet, and minor floods pooled at kerbside corners where leaves blocked the drains. At the entrance to the tube station the tiled floors were filthy with tracked-in dirt, and plastic warning triangles emblazoned with exclamation marks provided extra trip hazards. Coming in from the streets, back in Central London, Bettany felt that this almostquaint station, sprouting like a redbrick mushroom in the middle of a constant traffic jam, was a time capsule, with its framed posters of bygone travelling experiences. But the thought didn’t stay. He passed through the barriers and took the stairs to the platform two at a time.

The LED display suggested an incoming tube. A newspaper on a bench fluttered its pages in confirmation.

The train piled into the station as if it had no intention of stopping.

It did, though. Bettany sat on the bench, apparently studying
the paper, while passengers disembarked. Ingrid Tearney wasn’t among them, but he hadn’t expected her. He was early.

Those waiting boarded the train and it creaked, then thundered, into the tunnel again.

He was alone on the platform.

Which was monitored, everyone knew this. But unless times had changed, people with nowhere to go haunted the underground, seeking warmth on its platforms, variety on its circuits, charity in its carriages. There was nothing unusual about a man passing time while the trains roared by. He wouldn’t raise alarms.

The paper was a free handout, its news two cycles old. It didn’t matter. He was scanning his surroundings, not the print.

If there was anyone else doing the same, they were too good to be spotted.

He folded the paper, tucked it under an arm, and leaned back into the bench’s alcove. The LED warned of another approaching train.

The same routine. No Ingrid Tearney.

“She’s the head of the Intelligence Service,” JK Coe had told him. “You can’t just sandbag her on the underground.”

“I suspect she’ll be expecting me,” Bettany had said.

But what difference that would make, he wasn’t sure. Legend suggested that she made her morning commute unaccompanied, but legend would suggest that, wouldn’t it?

Another train. This time he stood, pursed his lips, looked like a man about to make a decision. It slowed to a halt, then jerked forward another yard and halted again. The doors opened. Passengers spilt onto the platform. Behind them, Dame Ingrid patiently waited her turn.

He stepped on board before she could depart, earning scowls
and passive-aggressive mutterings, and caught her by the arm before the crush had dissipated.

“A message from Driscoll,” he said, bending to her ear. “He’s calling a shareholders’ meeting.”

Her arm felt rigid in his grip.

A young woman leant forward. “Is this man bothering you? Why are you holding her like that?”

“He’s an old friend,” Ingrid Tearney said as Bettany released her. “But thank you for asking, my dear. Too few people worry about others.”

The doors closed, and the train pulled away.

They did
not speak for five minutes, during which the train stopped twice more and the young woman—still glowering at Bettany—disembarked. Seats became briefly available, and they sat.

Sitting on a crowded tube was to become child-sized again, on a level with the hips and stomachs of adults.

In a conversational tone, Dame Ingrid Tearney said, “Following me?”

“Waiting for you.”

Her eyebrows narrowed.

“This is the carriage nearest your exit.”

Dame Ingrid Tearney gave the smallest of nods.

“It’s hard,” she said, “not to fall into habits.”

“You were never in the field.”

She patted his knee.

“But I’m full of admiration for those of you who were.”

A young man in a grey hoodie sitting opposite was gazing at them through the thicket of swaying bodies. But whatever he was earbudded to was consuming his attention.

Bettany said, “You recruited Oskar Kask last year, I’m guessing. After he was arrested for shooting a gangbanger.”

“We’d been awaiting some such opportunity. Not that we’d had to wait long. You’re aware of how it works. Violent men don’t
resort
to violence. It’s simply what they do.”

She spoke quietly, as did he. Here in the middle of the throng, most of whose bodies were willing themselves elsewhere with laptops and iPods and Kindles, their conversation murmured on unheard.

“But Kask was perfect because he was placed to give you something you wanted. A way into the Cousins’ Circle.”

“A commendable target, I’m sure you agree.”

“But too much trouble to actually infiltrate.”

“Deep undercover? Too expensive. You were one of a dying breed, Mr. Bettany. And no offence, but really. A years-long operation? To take a handful of hoods off the streets? These aren’t the returns we need these days.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “But this was unofficial, wasn’t it?”

The train began to slow.

“Are we staying on?” she asked.

“End of the line.”

The train stopped, and the doors opened.

Dame Ingrid said, “I have to tread a careful path. The good of the Service, versus the deniability of my lords and masters. Kask was too good an opportunity to miss. But he was also a murderer. Recruiting him was never going to be a popular move.”

“But you did it anyway.”

“As I say. Too good an opportunity to miss.”

“Which meant when it came to going really off the books,” Bettany said, “you had a ready-made tool to hand.”

During the
night, abandoned by sleep, he had etched patterns of vengeance on the hotel ceiling while his heartbeat became percussive. But now he was here, next to this calm woman who had ordered his son’s death simply to draw him into her machinations, he found that he, too, was calm, as if he’d come through the hurricane’s rage to find an unnatural stillness at its centre.

As for Dame Ingrid, nothing rattled her. The placidity of her ugliness—her iron-grey hairpiece, the putty-like growth on her nose’s left flank—was its own disguise, within which she could fume and scheme unnoticed. That would have been a lesson she learned long before the Secret Service beckoned her.

Directly opposite them, the young man nodded to his iPod’s beat.

Too obvious, thought Bettany. Too obvious.

He said, “Of course, it would have helped if I’d killed Marten Saar. Putting Oskar Kask in the driver’s seat.”

Dame Ingrid said, “It really doesn’t matter to me. It mattered to Oskar, of course. He’d much rather have been in charge.”

Mattered, thought Bettany.

He said, “But that was Plan B, wasn’t it? Plan A being that I kill Vincent Driscoll. Of the two targets you set up, that was the one you were really after. Because that was for your own benefit, not the Service’s.”

Dame Ingrid barked, which turned out to be her way of laughing.

“You think this is funny?”

“Of course not, Mr. Bettany. But something frightfully amusing did just occur to me. I had this sudden thought that maybe you were recording this conversation as a way of gathering evidence.”

The inverted commas she draped round “evidence” were heavy as curtains.

“And I was just counting the ways in which that would turn out to be a bad idea.”

Bettany said, “You think you’re fireproof. Are you bulletproof too, I wonder?”

“Really, Mr. Bettany. You should hear yourself. Threatening to shoot an old lady.”

“You’re the one who decided I was a violent man. What did you think was going to happen once I found out who really killed Liam?”

And there it was, out in the open.

She patted his knee again.

“I haven’t had a chance to tell you how sorry I am about that. Marten Saar has a lot to answer for. Drugs do so much harm to young people.”

He couldn’t speak. This took his breath away.

“Mr. Coe suggested that you might blame yourself, and I do hope he’s wrong about that. But psychology is such an unforgiving science.”

The train slowed.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said abruptly.

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Maybe we should get off.”

They were far from
the centre now, way out east, in streets that were memory-haunted for Tom Bettany, or for Martin Boyd. Round here the Brothers McGarry had once held sway. You could still drop their name in any pub and expect a nod of recognition.

He had not given this a thought when leaving the tube, but looked round now automatically.

She said, “You’re looking to see if we’ve been followed.”

For a moment Bettany thought she’d been sharing his memories. Then he realised she meant her own security detail.

He said, “The coat you’re wearing. It’s seen better days.”

“For a man whose tailor is a sweat-shop infant, you’re very free with your criticism.”

“I don’t care about clothes. You do. You’re broke, aren’t you? That’s why you want Driscoll dead.”

She said, “It’s been a difficult few years. I’ve always been shrewd in my investments, or so I thought. It turns out that perhaps I was merely lucky.”

“And the luck ran out.”

“And the luck ran out.”

“That must have been tough.”

She said, “He was planning on scuppering his own company. Giving away a product which was the main reason I’d invested in him in the first place.”

“Killing him is hardly a long-term strategy. From the company’s point of view.”

Words rang like a chipped bell in his head. He was talking to the woman who’d had his son murdered. Her motive, lurking several layers deep, was only money. Liam, who had no money, had been killed so she might stay rich.

She said, “It would have solved my immediate problems. Without Driscoll, the shareholders would have reversed his fatheaded decision. The first two versions of his game made millions. There’s no reason why the third shouldn’t either.”

“And you wanted me to do it for you.”

“That would have been helpful.”

“And that’s why you had Liam killed.”

His calmness as brittle now as a frosted leaf. Here in full view of the world, he might reach out and snap her neck.

But she’d come to a halt by a parked delivery van while a man brushed past her, manoeuvring a stack of plastic pallets from which new-baked smells were drifting.

“Good lord,” she said. “Of course not. What do you take me for?”

If he
was ambushing anyone else, thought Bishop, he’d have made himself comfortable in the boy’s flat. There was no knowing how long it would be before Bettany returned to claim his son’s ashes, and he didn’t want to spend the time huddled on a bench, stamping feet against the cold. He could commandeer the van, but passing officials tended to notice men sitting in vans, and the
world was full of officials these days, community-support noddies and revenue ambassadors, or whatever traffic wardens were called this week. He didn’t want to end up on some peaked-cap wearer’s mobile phone gallery, suspicious character #101. And he had low tolerance for jobsworths asking questions.

But the flat was no-go. Bettany was not an amateur. He’d moulded himself into the McGarrys’ crew and had kept up that pretence for years, which meant he must have developed a sixth sense for all manner of disturbance. If Bishop was in the flat when he entered, he’d know it before he’d closed the door. The smell of tobacco on Bishop’s jacket. The way the air hadn’t quite settled down.

There were other flats in the house, though. Bishop didn’t have to be out in the cold.

He checked that the crew weren’t drawing attention to themselves, and had a final word.

“When I call, you get the van to the door. You understand what immediately means? Don’t even answer. Just get the van to the door.”

The way he’d work it, he decided, was not to make an attempt in the flat itself. Wait till Bettany was in, then get him coming back out, on the landing, on the stairs.