Chris looked at him narrowly. ‘You just happened to be carrying twenty grand in cash?’

‘Oh, that.’ Mike grinned again and crossed to where the bundle of currency still lay on the street. ‘Improvisation. Look.’

He tossed the money across, and Chris caught it awkwardly with his left hand. The notes were twenties. There was a thousand euros in the bundle at most.

‘Best I could do on the spur of the moment. You really walk in from the zones last night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Must have been some row.’

They stood amidst the carnage, the scattered weapons and spreading pools of blood, and very slowly Chris became aware that, amongst a small knot of people gathered at the end of India Street, Liz Linshaw was watching him.

He walked towards her.

‘Do you have any idea how bad this looks?’

Louise Hewitt stood stiff legged at the head of the conference table and gestured at the projection. Blown-up surveillance camera footage ran grainy and silent behind her, Mike Bryant giving the coup de grace to the two masked gunmen still breathing.

‘Do you have any idea what this kind of brawling does to our image as a serious financial institution?’

Chris shrugged. His side was numb where the Shorn medic had dosed him with contact anaesthetic prior to digging out the shotgun pellets. The rest of him was past feeling very much of anything too. ‘You should be talking to Makin. He started it.’

‘This is not a fucking playground, Faulkner!’

‘Louise, you’re being unreasonable.’ Mike Bryant met Philip Hamilton’s eyes across the table and the other man looked away, towards Hewitt. Beside him, Jack Notley stared into the middle distance, seemingly oblivious to the storm building around him. ‘Makin called this one, all the way down. If I hadn’t been there, Chris’d be dead now and the blame’d be farmed out to zone gangwits. We wouldn’t even know we had a loose cannon aboard.’

On the projection screen, Chris walked away from the bodies and out of shot. It was odd, watching himself disappear, back into the past of three hours ago and the confrontation with Liz Linshaw.

You set me up.

She took it like a slap. For the first time he could recall, he saw open hurt in her face. The sight of it licked the pit of his belly.

You fucking set me up, you bitch.

No. She was shaking her head. Chris, I don’t—

And then Mike was there, and they both slid their masks back on. Passion sheathed. There was control, there were words that meant something factual, there was the long, verbal comedown. Explanations, talk and shots of rough, blended whisky in Break Point to combat the shakes. Sanity leaking into the nightmare aftermath like blood across asphalt.

I just got a call. This guy said he worked Driver Control, he knew what really happened to Chris on the M11, did I want to know too? Meet him here. Five grand in cash.

She brandished the money out of her wallet. Like proof of innocence.

When Mike went to the bathroom, she reached out across the cheap plastic-topped table and took Chris’s hand in her own. No words, only a cabled look, eye to eye. Spinning sudden vertigo, and then the flush of the toilet through cardboard-thin walls, and their hands leapt apart like matched magnetic poles.

Louise Hewitt was talking to him, but he couldn’t make it matter. He levered himself to his feet, faced her disbelieving fury.

‘I’ve had enough of this shit, Louise. It’s pretty fucking clear what happened here.’

‘Sit down Faulkner, I haven’t—‘

‘Makin couldn’t hack the NAME account. I took it from him, and it hurt. He couldn’t take me on the road, so he hired a gangwit kid to do what he didn’t dare do himself. When that didn’t work—‘

‘I told you to sit dow—‘

He shouted her down. ‘When that didn’t fucking work, Louise, he hired some more sicarios and tried this. He couldn’t beat me playing by the Shorn rules, so he broke them. And now he’s dead. Everybody in fucking black.’

‘Chris.’ Notley’s voice didn’t seem to have raised much, but there was an edge on it that cut across the air like tyre screech. ‘You don’t talk to partnership like this. You’re overwrought, but that’s no excuse. Now get out.’

Chris met the senior partner’s eyes, and saw the man who had almost shot him dead in his own office a week ago. He nodded.

‘Fair enough.’

They watched him go in silence. Mike Bryant looked round the table again. He shook his head.

‘This isn’t right, Jack. I mean, it’s a fucking mess. But Makin called it. He’s been a fuck-up since he took over the NAME, he was way too impressed with himself from day one. I would have called him out myself, but what’s the point. Anyone could have seen he’d blink first.’

Hamilton blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You don’t have to drive against someone to know you’re better than they are, Phil. That’s crude. Sometimes you just know what the outcome’d be, and that’s enough. This kill-or-be-killed shit just gets in the way.’

The look ran between the partners like current. Up on the projector screen, the surveillance film had looped. The gun battle was starting again. Jack Notley cleared his throat.

‘Mike, perhaps you could give us some time to discuss this from a partner perspective. We’ll get back to you again on Monday morning.’

Bryant nodded. ‘Sure.’

When the door closed, Louise Hewitt spun on Notley.

‘Did you hear that? You know where that comes from, don’t you. That’s chess and bullshit neojap philosophy, courtesy of Chris bloody Faulkner. The man is a fucking toxin, Jack. He’s the real loose cannon around here.’

‘It doesn’t show up like that in the numbers, Louise.’

‘It’s not about the numbers.’

‘No?’ Notley raised an eyebrow. ‘Am I missing something here? Would you care to tell me what Shorn CI is about besides the numbers?’

‘Don’t be obtuse. It’s about an ethic. A corporate culture. A way of doing things. And if we let that go, this,’ she jabbed a finger at the surveillance film. Masked figures, collapsed like unstrung marionettes. Pools and snakes of blood. ‘Is what happens. Structural breakdown, anarchy in the streets. It’s axiomatic. Does anyone sitting round this table have any inkling why Nick Makin might have acted the way he did? Why he found it necessary, even believed perhaps that it would be acceptable, to breach Shorn etiquette like this? Think hard, Jack. Think about a certain major client, beaten to death in conference a week ago. Think about the way you rewarded Faulkner for that. Does anyone see a connection?’

For a fraction of a second, Jack Notley closed his eyes. When he spoke, there was a soft warning in his voice.

‘I don’t think we need to revisit that, Louise.’

‘I think we do, Jack. You gave Chris a green light for behaviour beyond any acceptable limits. And Makin learnt the lesson, resulting in this mess. And meanwhile we’ve got Bryant, our best driver, talking like a fucking ombudsman. Any way you look at it, Jack, you’ve destabilised what we’re about. And we can’t afford that.’

‘I wonder if Martin Page would see it that way?’

Hamilton and Hewitt traded a glance. Hewitt came to the table and seated herself carefully.

‘Is that some kind of accusation?’

Notley shrugged. ‘Let’s just say that your talk of loose cannons is selective, Louise. Page was a junior partner. What you did to him ran counter at least to an unspoken understanding of how partnership works here.’

‘I resent that, Jack. Page was a filed challenge.’

‘Yes, a challenge without a vacant post to justify it. Executive brawling at partnership level. An act of pure, equity share greed.’

‘Which you underwrote, as I recall.’

‘Retrospectively, yes. Because back then, Louise, you were the loose cannon, and I admired you for it.’

Hewitt smiled thinly. ‘Well, thank you. But I think there’s a limit—‘