by Mick Herron
Shirley lobbed the wet flannel at him. Without taking his eyes from the screen he caught it one-handed, and scowled as water scattered everywhere: “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She towelled her head dry: a five-second pummel. “Gunna let me do you now?”
“In. Your. Dreams.”
She stuck her tongue out. Then said, “So. You’d be prepared to do that?”
“Just did, didn’t I?”
“For real, I mean. And keep doing it.”
Marcus looked up. “If it’d stop another Westacres, hell, yes. I’d keep doing it until the bastard told me everything. And drown him doing it, wouldn’t bother me none.”
“It would be murder.”
“Blowing up forty-two kids in a shopping centre is murder. Waterboarding a suspected terrorist to death, that’s housekeeping.”
“The philosophy of Marcus Longridge, volume one.”
“Pretty much sums it up. Someone’s got to do this shit. Or would you rather let the terrorist walk, for fear of violating his human rights?”
“He was only a suspect a moment ago.”
“And we both know what being a suspect means.”
“He’s still got rights.”
“Like those kids had? Tell their parents.”
He was getting loud now, which they’d both got into the habit of not worrying about, Lamb not having been around lately. This didn’t mean he couldn’t show up any moment, of course—his large frame creepily silent on the stairs, so the first you knew of his presence was his nicotine breath and sour outlook: Having fun, are we?—but until that happened, Shirley’s view was, they might as well keep on skiving.
She said, “Maybe. I just don’t think it’s that simple.”
“Yeah, things get simple real quick at the sharp end. I thought you’d have worked that out by now. Anyway,” and he indicated the chair she’d been sitting on, “better shift that into Ho’s office.”
“Why?”
“It broke.”
“Oh. Yeah. Think he’ll snitch?”
“Not if he values that bum-fluff he calls a beard,” said Marcus, briefly stroking his own. “He rats us out to Lamb, I’ll rip it from his chin.”
Probably a figure of speech, thought Shirley, but possibly a treat in store.
Marcus being Marcus, it could go either way.
Had he been aware that he was the subject of his colleagues’ violent fantasies, Roderick Ho would have put it down to jealousy.
Fact was, he looked fantastic.
Don’t just take his word for it, either.
He’d arrived, as usual, in a terrific mood: swanned in wearing a brand-new jacket (waist-length black leather—when you’ve got it, flaunt it!) and popped the tab on a Red Bull which he chug-a-lugged while his kit warmed up. Seriously, seriously, this was starting to harsh his mellow: his gear at the Rod-pad ran to higher specs than the Service provided, but what are you gunna do—explain to Jackson Lamb that some heavy duty cap-ex was required if Slough House was to come crawling out of the nineties? . . . He paused for a moment, allowing that scenario to take shape: “Jackson, Jackson, trust me—the suits, man, they’ve got to get this sorted. Asking me to work with that crap is like, well, put it this way. Would you ask Paul Pogba to kick a tin can around?” And Lamb chuckling, throwing his hands up in mock-surrender: “You win, you win. I’ll get the pointy-heads at the Park to loosen the purse-strings . . .”
That struck the right note, he decided.
If Lamb ever showed up, definitely the way to play it.
Meanwhile, he cracked his knuckles, clicked on Amazon, wrote a one-star review of a random book, then checked his beard in the mirror he’d fixed to the anglepoise. Devilishly stylish. The odd red strand among the black, but nothing a little tweezer-work couldn’t handle, and if it wasn’t entirely symmetrical, five minutes with the old kitchen scissors soon had things on track. Looking this good took effort. Not rocket science, but it managed to evade some of the lamebrains round here—naming no River Cartwrights, of course.
Heh heh heh.
Cartwright was upstairs in the kitchen, chatting to Louisa. There’d been a time, not long back, when Roddy had had to play it cool with Louisa. It had been clear she’d taken a shine to him: embarrassing, but there it was—it wasn’t like she was a total dog; in the right light, she cast a nice shadow, but she was old, mid-thirties, and when women got to that age, a taint of desperation clung to them. Weaken for a moment, and they’d be picking out curtains and suggesting quiet nights in. Which was not how Roderick Ho played the game: so sayonara, babes. Being a tactful kind of guy, he’d managed to convey to her without having to put it into actual words that the Rod was off-limits—that Rod’s rod was not in her future—and give her her due, she’d managed to accept that without too much fuss, the odd wistful, what-might-have-been glance excepted. In other circumstances, he thought, there’d have been no harm in it—throwing a single woman the occasional boner was an act of charity—but a regular ram-Rodding was not on the agenda, and it would have been cruel to get her hopes up.
Besides, if the chick caught him providing consolation to another woman, he’d be in serious trouble.
Dig that singular.
Chick, not “chicks.”
Roddy Ho has got himself a girlfriend.
Still humming, still in a terrific mood, and still looking fantastic, Ho returned to his screen, metaphorically rolled his sleeves up, and splash-dived into the Dark Web, deaf to the continual gurgling of his radiator, and the sloshing in the pipes connecting his room to everyone else’s.
What was that blessed noise?
Only she didn’t need telling what it was, thank you very much, because it was the radiator again, sounding like a sick cat doing its business. Putting the most recently sorted stack of papers down—not that “sorted” was the right word, their category being “documents without a date”—Moira Tregorian paused in her efforts and surveyed her new domain.
Her office was on the top floor; it was the one vacated by her predecessor, and nearest Mr. Lamb’s. The personal possessions Catherine Standish had left behind (her departure had been abrupt) were in a cardboard box, sealed with packing tape: her non-official-issue pens, a glass paperweight; a full bottle of whisky, wrapped in tissue paper—the woman had had a drink problem, but then, that was Slough House. Everyone here had problems, or what you now had to call “issues.” Moira supposed that was why she’d been assigned here, to provide overdue backbone.
Dust everywhere, of course. The whole building felt neglected; seemed to revel in the condition, as if the appearance of a duster might cause structural conniptions. And condensation fogged the windows, and had pooled in puddles on the frame, where it was blossoming into mould, and much more of this and the whole place would be falling around your ears . . . Well. Someone needed to take a firm hand. This had clearly been beyond poor Catherine Standish, but once you let the bottle be your friend, you were letting yourself in for sorry times indeed.
It had not escaped her that among the forms awaiting attention were Standish’s discharge papers, needing only Jackson Lamb’s signature.
And it had long been Moira Tregorian’s credo that paperwork was what kept battleships afloat: you could have all your admirals out on deck in their fancy get-up, but without the right paperwork, you’d never get out of the harbour. She had always been a force for order, and didn’t care who knew it. In Regent’s Park, she’d kept the Queens of the Database in trim, ensuring that their timekeeping was precise and their equipment regularly serviced; that the plants they insisted on were disposed of once they died; that the stationery they got through at a rate of knots was replenished weekly, and a log kept of who was taking what, because Moira Tregorian wasn’t born blind and she wasn’t born stupid. Post-it notes might be made of paper, but they didn’t grow on trees. And every so often, jus
t to show there wasn’t much she couldn’t turn her hand to, she’d taken a shift as duty-officer: fielding emergency calls and what-not. None of it terribly complicated, if you asked her—but then, she was an office manager, and proud of it. Things needed managing. You only had to cast an eye around to get an inkling of what happened otherwise. And chaos was a breeding ground for evil.
Another thump from downstairs suggested that chaos was winning the battle for Slough House. In the absence of any other champion, Moira gave a long-suffering sigh, and headed down to investigate.
“How old would you say she was?”
“Fifties, mid,” Louisa said. “So . . . ”
“’Bout the same as Catherine,” River said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Almost like a replacement,” River said. “You know. One in, one out.”
“. . . You been talking to Shirley?”
“Why? What did she say?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Louisa said. She shook her head, not in self-contradiction but to remove her hair from her eyes; it was longer now, and she had to pin it back when actually doing anything: reading, working, driving. She’d let the highlights grow out and it had reverted to its natural brown, a little darker during these winter months. It would fade up once the spring arrived, if the spring brought sunshine; and if it didn’t, hell, she could always cheat, and squeeze a little sunlight from a bottle.
Right now, spring felt a long way distant.
River said, “Ought to get some work done, I suppose,” but sounded like he had things on his mind, tiptoeing around a different conversation entirely.
Louisa wondered if he was going to ask her for a date, and what she’d say if he did.
Almost certainly no. She’d got to know him this past half year, and his virtues stacked up well against the other locals: he wasn’t married like Marcus, a creep like Ho, or a possible psychopath like his new room-mate. On the other hand, he wasn’t Min Harper, either. Min had been dead now for longer than they’d been a couple, and there was no sense in which she was seeking a replacement for him, but still: date a colleague, and comparisons would be made. That could only get ugly. So the occasional drink after work was fine, but anything more serious was out of bounds.
That was almost certainly what she thought, she thought. But she also thought it might be best to head him off if it looked like he was going to say anything.
“Doing anything later?” he asked.
“Yeah, no, what? Later?”
“’Cause there’s something I want to talk to you about, only here’s maybe not the best place.”
Oh fuck, she thought. Here we go.
“I’m sorry, is this a private conversation?”
And here was Moira Tregorian, a name Louisa had spent much of yesterday trying to get her head round. Tregorian kept splitting into separate syllables, and rearranging itself: what was it, Cornish? She didn’t want to ask in case the answer bored her rigid. People could get funny about their ancestry.
“No, we were just talking,” River said.
“Hmmm,” said Moira Tregorian, and the younger pair exchanged a glance. Neither had spoken much to Moira yet, and Hmmm wasn’t a promising start.
She was in her fifties, sure, but that was where her resemblance to Catherine Standish ended. Catherine had had something of the spectral about her, and a resilience too, an inner strength that had allowed her to conquer her alcoholism, or at any rate, enabled her to continue the daily struggle. Neither River nor Louisa could remember her complaining about anything, which, given her daily exposure to Jackson Lamb, indicated Mandela-like patience. Moira Tregorian might turn out to be many things, but spectral wasn’t going to be one of them, and patient didn’t look promising. Her lips were pursed, and her jowls trembled slightly with pent-up something or other. All that aside, she was five-three or so, with dusty-coloured hair arranged like a mop, and wore a red cardigan Lamb would have something to say about, if he ever showed up. Lamb wasn’t a fan of bright colours, and claimed they made him nauseous, and also violent.
“Because it seems to me,” Moira said, “that two days after a major terrorist incident on British soil, there might be more useful things you could be doing. This is still an arm of the Intelligence Service, isn’t it?”
Well, it was and it wasn’t.
Slough House was a branch of the Service, certainly, but “arm” was pitching it strong. As was “finger,” come to that; fingers could be on the button or on the pulse. Fingernails, now: those, you clipped, discarded, and never wanted to see again. So Slough House was a fingernail of the Service: a fair step from Regent’s Park geographically, and on another planet in most other ways. Slough House was where you ended up when all the bright avenues were closed to you. It was where they sent you when they wanted you to go away, but didn’t want to sack you in case you got litigious about it.
And while it was true that national security had been stepped up to the highest notch, things hadn’t yet reached the pass where anyone was screaming down a telephone: “Get me the slow horses!”
Louisa said, “If there was something we could do, we’d be doing it. But we don’t have the resources or the information to do anything useful here in the office. And in case you haven’t noticed yet, they don’t put us out on the streets.”
“No, well. That’s as may be.”
“Which is why Marcus and Shirley are blowing off steam. I can’t speak for Coe, but my guess is he’s zoning out at his desk. And Ho’ll be grooming his beard. I think that’s all of us accounted for.”
“Is Mr. Lamb not expected?” Moira asked.
“Lamb?”
“Mr. Lamb, yes.”
River and Louisa exchanged a glance. “He’s not been around much lately,” Louisa said.
“Hence,” said River, and waved a vague hand. Hence people talking in kitchens and torturing each other in offices. When the cat was away, Lamb had been known to remark, the mice started farting about with notions of democratic freedom. Then the cat returned in a tank.
(“Remind me,” River had once asked him, “back in the Cold War—whose side were you on?”)
“Only he’s invited me to lunch.”
In the silence that followed, the radiator on the landing belched in an oddly familiar way, as if it were working up an impression.
“I think I may have just had a small stroke,” Louisa said at last. “You can’t possibly have said what I thought I just heard.”
River said, “Have you met Jackson?”
“He sent me an email.”
“Is that a no?”
“We haven’t met in person.”
“Have you heard about him?”
Moira Tregorian said, “I’m told he’s a bit of a character.”
“Did nobody tell you which bit?”
“There’s no need for—”
Louisa said, “Seriously, you haven’t met him, but he sent you an email asking you to lunch? When?”
“He just said ‘soon.’”
“Which might mean today.”
“Well . . . Yes, I thought it might.”
“Action stations,” murmured River.
They escaped, but before they disappeared into their separate rooms River said, “So, you okay for later?”
“Yeah, no, what? Later?”
“Quick drink,” said River. “Thing is—”
Here it comes, thought Louisa.
“—I’m worried about my grandfather.”
Though the rain had stopped, it still shook from the trees when the wind blew, spattering the windows, and still dripped from the guttering over the porch, which was thick with leaves. A lagoon had appeared in the lane, drowning the grassy verge, and in the village a burst main had closed the road for a day and a half, water pumping through the tarmac in its familiar, implacable way. Fire you co
uld fight, and even half-way tame; water went where it chose, taking a hundred years to wear away a rock, or a minute and a half to pick the same rock up and carry it two miles distant. It altered the landscape too, so that when he looked from his window at first light he might have been transported elsewhere in his sleep; the whole house shipped off to a realm where trees groped upwards from the depths, and a tracery of hedgework scraped the surfaces of lakes. Bewildered by difference, you could lose your bearings. Which was the last thing you wanted to happen to you, because one day it would be the last thing that did.
It was important to keep track of where you were.
Knowing when you were was equally critical.
A good job, thought David Cartwright—River’s grandfather; the O.B.—that he had a head for dates.
January 4th. The year, as ever, the current one.
His house was in Kent; old house, big garden, not that he did as much of that since Rose had died. Winter provided an alibi: Can’t wait to be back out there, my boy. Life’s better with a trowel in your hand. Gardening, come to that, was what he’d been doing first time he’d laid eyes on River. Funny way to meet your grandson, already seven years old. River’s mother’s fault, he’d thought then, but such straightforward judgments seemed less clear now. He was tying his tie, as he had these thoughts; watching his hands in the mirror as they made complicated movements beyond the reach of his conscious brain. Some things were best done without thinking. Raising a daughter, it had turned out, not one of them.
Tie seemed straight enough, though. Important to maintain standards. You read about these old chaps in their pee-stained corduroys, with their vests on backwards, and dribble on their chins.
“That ever happens to me,” he’d instructed River more than once, “shoot me like a horse.”
“Exactly like a horse,” River would reply drily.
Dammit, that was the name they gave them, there at Slough House. The slow horses. Treading on a young man’s toes, that was; reminding him of the balls-up he’d made of things.
Not that his own copybook was free of blot. If they’d had a Slough House in his day, who knew? He might have whiled his own career away in terminal frustration; forced to sit it out on the bench, watching others carried shoulder-high round the boundary. Laps of honour and whatnot. That was what the boy thought, of course; that it was all about guts and glory—truth was, it was all about flesh and blood. Medals weren’t won in the sunshine. Backs were stabbed in the dark. It was a messy business, and maybe the boy was better off out of it, though there was no telling him that, of course. Wouldn’t be a Cartwright otherwise. Just like his mother, whom David Cartwright had missed acutely for years, without admitting it to anyone, even Rose.
