Dead Lions by Mick Herron Read Free Book Online Page A

of the grail.
    A black hat. Left on a bus. The bus Dickie Bow had died on.
    Which didn’t in itself mean much, but Jackson Lamb wondered.
    It had been raining heavily when that bus reached Oxford, and first thing you’d do on stepping off a bus into the rain wasput your hat on, if you had one. And if you didn’t have one, first thing you’d do was go back for it. Unless you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself; wanted to remain part of the crowd heading onto the platform, boarding a train, being carried away from the scene as quickly as possible …
    He was being stared at, pointedly, by a woman who was far too attractive to be doing so out of amateur interest. Except, Lamb realised, it wasn’t him she was staring at but the cigarette he now noticed he held between two fingers of his left hand, the one he was tapping the fedora with. His right was already rummaging for a lighter, a motion not dissimilar from scratching his balls. He gave her his best crooked smile, which involved flaring one nostril, and she responded by flaring both her own, and looking away. But he tucked the fag behind his ear anyway.
    The rummaging hand gave up the search for a lighter, and found instead the mobile phone he’d collected from the bus.
    It was an ancient thing, a Nokia, black-and-grey, with about as many functions as a bottle opener. You could no more take a photo with it than send an e-mail with a stapler. But when he pressed the button, the screen squeaked into life, and let him scroll down a contact list. Five numbers: Shop, Digs, and Star, which sounded like Bow’s local, and two actual names; a Dave and a Lisa, both of which Lamb rang. Dave’s mobile went straight to voicemail. Lisa’s landline went nowhere; was a gateway to a humming void in which no telephone would ever be answered. He clicked onto Messages, and found only a note from Bow’s service provider informing him he had 82p in his pay-as-you-go account. Lamb wondered what fraction of Bow’s worldly goods 82p represented. Maybe he could send Lisa a cheque. He scrolled onto Sent Items. That was empty too.
    But Dickie Bow had fished his mobile out shortly before dying, and had jammed it between the cushions of his seat, as ifto make sure it would only be found by someone looking for it. By someone for whom he had a message.
    An unsent message, as it turned out.
    A train arrived, but Lamb remained on his bench. Not many people got off; not many got on. As it pulled away Lamb saw the attractive young woman glowering at him through a window and he farted quietly in response: a private victory, but satisfying. Then he examined the phone again. Drafts. There was a Drafts folder for text messages. He opened this, and the single-word entry of a single saved message stared back from the tiny screen.
    Near his feet a pigeon scratched the ground in imitation of a bird that might make an effort. Lamb didn’t notice. He was absorbed in that single word, keyed into the phone but never transmitted; locked forever in its black-and-grey box, alongside 82 pence-worth of unused communication. As if a dying word could be breathed into a bottle, and corked up, and released once the grim business of tidying away the corpse had been seen to: here on an Oxfordshire railway platform, with a late March sun struggling to make itself felt, and a fat pigeon tramping underfoot. One word.
    “Cicadas,” Jackson Lamb said out loud. Then said it again. “Cicadas.”
    And then he said, “Fuck me.”

 
    S hirley Dander and Marcus Longridge had settled back into their tasks; the atmosphere only slightly altered by their conversation. In Slough House, sound seeped easily. If he were interested Roderick Ho might have rested his head against the wall separating his office from theirs, the better to hear them, but all he registered was the familiar buzz of other people establishing relationships—he was, anyway, busy updating his online status: adding a paragraph to Facebook describing his