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After the hearings and inquiries, after the verdict, but before he was sentenced to Slough House, River Cartwright called up the man whose fault it all was.
It was something no one in their right mind would have done. But at the time, River wasn’t in his right mind. As far as he could piece together, afterwards, it happened something like this:
He was alone in his flat. It was a Thursday. It was the day after it had been unequivocally decided that he was responsible for Stansted; he’d misheard the witness, James Webb, or had heard correctly but then forgotten, and his brain had substituted ‘blue shirt, white tee’ for ‘white shirt, blue tee’. There wasn’t any audio evidence to back that up, because they hadn’t recorded anything, but there was Webb’s testimony, and Diana Taverner’s testimony, and the testimony of another dozen people who’d been in the control room that day.
It meant he was getting kicked out. Years of training that now equalled absolutely fuck all. Fuck. All.
He’d stayed with his grandfather for a few days, both pretending that what was happening wasn’t really happening. But he couldn’t stay there forever. He hadn’t spoken to his grandfather since they read the verdict. He didn’t want to. What was he meant to say? Just lament about how much of a monumental fuck-up he was? What was his grandfather meant to say? He’d never been one for commiserations. Which was why River had liked staying with him, but now—now that there was nothing else to hide behind, no defence beyond that he was really just that thick-headed that he mixed up blue and white—he didn’t think he could handle the silence anymore.
So, after he left the Park, he went back to his flat, stopping along the way to buy a litre of vodka from an off-licence. He felt like the people in there were staring at him. He tried to tell himself that they weren’t. Or, at least, if they were, it was because he was buying vodka at three o’clock on a weekday afternoon, not because he’d just been kicked out of MI5.
But he just avoided their eyes and took his bottle back to his flat.
He hadn’t left the Park with the intention of getting shitfaced, but he saw the lit-up open sign of the off-licence and the idea occurred to him. Couldn’t sit there feeling sorry for himself if he couldn’t feel anything. It wasn’t until he was nearly home that he realised he forgot to buy any mixers. And it wasn’t until he was home that he saw he didn’t have any food in, either.
But that didn’t matter. He could pour some into a whiskey glass and pretend he was drinking an 18-year-old Macallan instead of Smirnoff that he bought for just over a tenner. Hopefully until he stopped caring about that and started to drink it straight from the bottle.
He looked through the fridge and the cupboards for a few minutes, but there was literally nothing in them except some mouldy leftovers that he had forgotten to put in the bin before he went to his grandfather’s. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, before the verdict. His grandfather always put on a good spread, but that morning he’d only managed a few slices of toast and half a banana before he had to go and sit in the bathroom for a while and try very hard to not be sick. Mostly digested toast did not constitute lining his stomach; if he’d learned anything in university, it was that he would probably throw up before he got as drunk as he was aiming for.
So, to try and stop that from happening, he ordered a pizza (vodka and pizza in the afternoon; he hadn’t stooped that low even when he was a student) and ate half of it before he started crying.
MI5 agents did not eat pizza alone on their sofa on Thursday afternoons. Unless you were James Bond, and you were eating caviar, not pizza, and you were in bed with a beautiful woman, not lying alone on a threadbare sofa, feeling progressively sicker with every slice before you’d even started on your cheap vodka. He threw the last third of a slice back into the box.
Okay. His stomach was lined, which was good. His head was still clear, which was bad. Time to do something about it. He wiped his eyes and rolled off the sofa to get the alcohol.
Drinking neat vodka was not something that he had ever done before, except from shot glasses. Clearly, there was a reason for that: it was fucking disgusting. The first couple of sips nearly triggered his gag reflex.
After a while, his throat got used to it. He finished the first glass within the hour. Poured his second. Got over-confident, took too big a sip, held back a retch and managed to swallow it down. Took a smaller sip and had more success with that one. Took more smaller sips.
He finished the second glass before five p.m., half-propped up by some cushions. He didn’t feel drunk yet. His thoughts were a bit swirly, and he had to really focus on the clock in the corner of the room to be able to read the time, but that was all. He was still lucid enough to be thinking about his fuck-up and subsequent loss of his job. He shook his head. The way his brain sloshed about in his skull made him optimistic that he was getting there.
Fifteen minutes into the third glass, he had to get up to go to the bathroom, and that was when he happily realised that he was drunk. The way his vision seemed to lag half a second behind his movements. The way he had to stare at his feet as he moved, as if telepathically commanding them “okay, left go, good, keep steady, now right go”. The way he had to lean against the wall for balance as he pissed. The way he stared into the mirror and didn’t quite recognise his own face.
He got back to the sofa before noticing his phone wasn’t in his pocket. He was still wearing the suit from the inquiry, and the trouser pockets were too shallow to safely hold a phone. His shirt wasn’t tucked in from when he’d used the bathroom, and he’d lost his jacket. He remembered his earlier thought about James Bond. Bond definitely never looked like this. Wait, maybe in that newer one where he was sad his girlfriend died. Bond. Bond, James Bond. James. James Webb.
The name’s Webb, Spider Webb, he thought, and started laughing.
He turned around and headed back towards the bathroom, eyes fixed on the floor, mind fixed on Spider. That fucker. That utter prick. In his suit in the courtroom, saying: “No, your honour, I said ‘white shirt, blue tee’, that is, what our intelligence said the suspect was wearing.”. River had had to bite his lip to stop himself saying, “There wasn’t any ‘intelligence’, fuckwit, it was what was written down by the guys who made up the training scenario, you know, because it was a fucking TRAINING EXCERISE.”.
He found his phone on the bathroom floor. It was still off from when he’d been in the inquiry. He tapped at the black screen for thirty seconds before he realised it was off. He turned it on.
One voicemail from his grandfather. He didn’t want to listen to that now.
And. That. Was. It.
River scowled. He noticed that his thighs hurt. Realised he was crouching down and had been for about a minute, so he stood up, clutching at the door handle so he wouldn’t fall over. If he still had the wherewithal to do a seek-locate of his phone then he wasn’t drunk enough. More vodka. Shaken, not stirred. He laughed again. Whoever heard of stirring a cocktail?
He went back to the sofa. He crashed into the coffee table on the way and knocked over the rest of the glass of vodka. Ugh, he was going to have sticky furniture in the morning, like he’d had a house party or a half-hearted orgy. He reached out for the glass and missed. He tried again and successfully righted it. Using both hands and every ounce of his concentration, he poured another measure of vodka into the glass. Then another measure and a half, by accident.
He was quite a way into that glass when he remembered about his phone. Where the fuck had he put it? He searched around the floor and found it underneath the coffee table. The screen was on, and it was open on his contacts page. He didn’t remember doing that. The one at the top, was, simply,
🕷️🕸️
Followed by a phone number.
River picked up the glass of vodka and nearly spilled it all down himself taking a drink of it. His thumb made several attempts before it hit the call icon.
And that was the last thing he could remember for a while.
He didn’t remember the phone call that led Spider to come over. He didn’t remember letting Spider into his flat. The first thing he remembered was seeing Spider sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, holding a glass of his own.
“I don’t remember saying you could have any,” said River.
Spider looked quizzically at him. “It’s water. I drove here. Remember?”
River shook his head, which hurt quite a lot.
“Christ, you’re fucking gone, aren’t you?”
“I don’t—I didn’t—did I invite you?”
“Not in so many words, no. But I thought if you carried on like you were, you might need someone to drive you to A&E.”
“I’m fine,” said River. The three syllables he gave to the word ‘fine’ gave away that he was not, in fact, fine. He realised that, and tried again. “Fuck you, Spider.”
“Like I haven’t heard that a million times already.”
“If you’re here to gloat then you can fuck off,” said River. Each word was spat out like it was too big for his mouth.
“I’ll save my gloating for when you can remember it,” said Spider. He pointed to the pizza box. “Mind if I heat that up? I haven’t had dinner yet.”
River squinted at the coffee table, then at the clock. It was half past eight. He was missing three hours of time. Had Spider been there that long? He tried to judge if there was any more vodka gone from the bottle, but he couldn’t tell. He’d come back to himself, which probably meant he hadn’t had any more in those three hours.
He said, “We’re not friends.”
Spider looked at him again. “Okay. Can I have your pizza anyway?”
After a minute’s consideration, River nodded.
Spider said, “Thank you,” and took the box to the kitchen.
River tried to take stock of the situation. He’d crossed the hazy line into blackout drunk, but found his way back. Maybe three hours of unthinking bliss were all he was getting tonight. He could drink some more, he supposed, but frankly the vodka looked even more unappetising than it had when he’d first started. Plus, he felt distinctly unwell. He wondered if he’d been sick yet. If he had, it would explain why he’d sobered up a bit. He hoped it had been while Spider was there. Spider hated puke.
All in all, it wasn’t great. His hips were aching from the way he’d been lying; his mouth tasted like he hadn’t brushed his teeth in five years; his stomach was hurting, both inside and outside, where his trouser button dug into his alcohol-bloated belly; his vision was fuzzy; none of his earlier problems had been remotely solved.
He rolled onto his side. At least he wasn’t hungover yet.
In the kitchen, the microwave pinged. A minute later, Spider emerged, with the remaining four slices of pizza stacked on a plate, which he put down on the coffee table. “I put the box with the recycling,” he said, as if River cared even slightly about that. “I won’t eat all of that. You can have some if you want.”
River might have taken a slice, if the smell didn’t make him gag. Maybe he was hungover and his body was just realising it before he was. Maybe this was just what day-drinking felt like. He wouldn’t know. Getting hungover in real time instead of waking up to it.
Spider had settled back into his chair and was starting on his own slice. “Jesus, did this cost you literally three pounds? It’s fucking shit.”
River tried to think of a more cutting response than ‘fuck off’. “I wasn’t thinking about quality, at the time.” Much better. Christ alive.
To his surprise, Spider looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Yeah. Well. Sorry.”
“Sorry,” repeated River. He rolled the word around in his mouth some more. “Sor-ry.”
“Shut up.”
River nodded. Shutting up sounded like a good idea, if it meant he could keep his mouth closed. He wasn’t sure if he was going to be sick soon, because he didn’t feel nauseated as such. But, Christ, he couldn’t remember drinking ever giving him such a stomach ache. Probably the cheap vodka. Or Spider’s presence.
As he pressed the side of his face into the cushion, he noticed that the bin that normally lived in the kitchen had been placed next to the sofa. Huh.
Had he missed something? Why was Spider being nice to him? Well, nice in a relative sense. It couldn’t just be because he’d been sacked, could it?
He realised he’d spent the last ten minutes thinking about Spider and not the loss of his job. He huffed out a wry laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” River murmured.
River Cartwright woke up on the sofa six hours later with a feeling like his brain was trying to escape his skull. By the dim light of the lamp in the corner, he saw that the coffee table was now home to a glass of water and two tablets of paracetamol. The bottle of vodka was conspicuous by its absence.
Also absent was Spider Webb.
River pressed an arm to his eyes and tried to remember what the fuck had just happened.