Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(24)

‘Fuck yeah, I thought you did it for that,’ I said. ‘I’d have done it for that.’

‘Liar,’ said Lesley – this time with real heat, and the bell sang loud enough for her to notice. ‘Fucking liar.’

‘Then why?’

I made sure I kept my left hand nice and still where it rested on the walkie-talkie. We didn’t want to get premature – not now. Not now.

Lesley’s lips twisted.

‘You think this is a game, Peter,’ she said. ‘You find out there’s a whole world full of weird shit, and you want to make a form for it. A form? Like you can control gods by ticking off boxes. Like you can make a procedure for dealing with monsters. You’re so blind.’

‘I’m just trying to do the job—’

‘You don’t even fucking know what the job is!’ shouted Lesley, and the bell rang in sympathy. ‘You used to make me sad listening to you talk about fucking engagement and fucking whatnot while the whole city turned to shit around us. Do you remember the baby, Peter? Do you even remember his fucking name?’

His name had been Harry Coopertown, and not saying it out loud hurt more than I expected – but I was so close.

‘So what are you saying?’ I said. ‘If you can’t beat them, join them?’

‘Yeah. Or maybe I’ve got something better. You ever think of that? Did that ever even occur to you, that I might have found something not just for me – you pillock – but for everybody. Including you and, you know, your mum, and maybe even Beverley.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said but, actually, I didn’t. Or at least I didn’t doubt that she believed it. I couldn’t trust the face, but her eyes were bright and confident.

‘Why are you stalling me?’ said Lesley. ‘Everyone is busy with Mrs Obama. SCO19 and Diplomatic Protection are fully deployed elsewhere. It’s just you and me, isn’t it?’

Her eyes flicked left and right, and then up and to the left to the gantry which would serve as the best vantage point for a sniper on overwatch.

She didn’t know – but she suspected.

‘We could slope off for a pint,’ I said. ‘You and me. Have a chat. Sort things out.’

‘It’s really simple, Peter. If you hand over the bell now he won’t have to make another one. Nobody else has to get hurt.’

‘How many people got hurt making the first one?’

‘None,’ said Lesley. ‘But that’s because nobody got in the way.’

‘I tell you what. You tell me what it’s for and I’ll think about it.’

I could actually feel my finger trembling as it hovered over the call tone button on the walkie-talkie.

‘Okay, I’m backing off now,’ said Lesley. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

‘You can always call me,’ I said as she backed away. ‘You know that, right?’

She gave me a strange half smile and stepped out the gate.

I ripped the walkie-talkie off the table and thumbed the push to talk button.

‘Anybody got eyes on?’ I asked.

One of the spotters had her, and reported that she’d been picked up by a moped, had crossed the main road and disappeared up Greatorex Street. I told everyone to maintain position just in case Martin Chorley tried to catch us off guard with an immediate follow-up.

Frank Caffrey climbed down from his position in the overhead gantry and joined me. His SA80 assault rifle was cradled in the ‘ready’ position. I didn’t like using Caffrey’s merry band of reserve Paras for operations, but Lesley had been right about the overstretch on SCO19.

And Nightingale had insisted.

‘I’m not sure I approve of making a lure of yourself and casting yourself out into the water,’ he’d said, when I sketched out the plan. ‘I’m not sure the catch will be worth the cost.’

We’d let today’s Falcon deployment ‘leak’ onto the police intranet over the weekend. We knew that somewhere some bent bastard was leaking operational details to Martin Chorley. DPS were monitoring the intranet in the hope they might catch him, and then we were going to turn the fucker and use him or her to feed disinformation back to Chorley.

‘You should have let me take the shot,’ said Caffrey, who had a very straightforward approach to these things.

‘There’ll be a truck somewhere nearby,’ I said. ‘A flatbed with its own crane.’

And it would have been stolen first thing this morning from somewhere which wouldn’t notice it was gone until at least this afternoon. Martin Chorley was that methodical. But still, even he couldn’t account for the human factor.

My phone rang as soon as I turned it on.

‘Well?’ said Nightingale. I could hear excited cheering in the background.

I remembered the way the bell had resonated when Lesley spoke, and how she’d felt it worth trying to justify herself. If not a new face and all the sociopathy she could eat, then what was Martin Chorley offering her?

Something she believed in?

Something she might want me to believe in, too?

‘I think we’re in with a chance,’ I said.





11

Against the Dark

In the end we broke up the bell.

Dr Conyard’s lads did it with sledgehammers under his grim supervision while Nightingale watched for any supernatural funny business. It hadn’t been an easy decision to destroy something so special, whatever its true purpose. We considered bringing it into the Folly for safekeeping, but even the non-classically educated among us were thinking Trojan horse.