by Mick Herron
. . . All these thoughts and he was still here in the hallway. What was it he’d been going to do? A blank moment came and went so smoothly it left barely a ripple. He was going to walk to the village. He needed to stock up on bread and bacon and whatever. His grandson might call round later, and he wanted to have some food in.
His grandson was called River.
Before he left, though, he needed to check his tie was straight.
In the same way a tongue keeps probing a sore tooth, the conversation in Marcus and Shirley’s office kept returning to Roderick Ho—specifically, the wholly improbable, end-of-days-indicating, suggestion that he no longer flew solo.
“You think he’s really found a woman?”
“He might have. It’s surprising what some people leave lying around.”
“Because it could easily turn out to be a chick with a dick or whatever. And he’d be the last to know.”
“Even Ho—”
Shirley said, “Seriously, trust me. Last to know.”
“Yeah, okay,” Marcus said. “But he seems convinced.” He directed a sour look towards the doorway, and Ho’s office beyond. “Says he’s a one-woman man now.”
“He probably meant cumulatively.”
Marcus, who hadn’t been laid since his wife’s car was repo’ed, grunted.
Louisa had peered round the door three minutes back to give them a heads-up on a possible Lamb appearance: as a result, the pair were staring at their screens; a reasonable facsimile of work, except that Shirley was still wet. Marcus’s monitor throbbed in front of him. Even after all this time in Slough House he found it hard to adjust to its routines; switch mind and body off, become an automaton, processing random information sets. Burnt-out vehicles, that was his spreadsheet: burnt-out cars and vans—hardly an unusual sight in British cities. He’d seen one himself last week, in a supermarket car-park; a black husk squatting in a pool of sooty residue. It would have been joy-ridden there then set alight, as the simplest way of eradicating evidence—the kids who’d taken it convinced that the forces of law and order were itching to go CSI on their gangsta asses; ready to swab DNA from seats, prints from the steering wheel. Safer just to torch that baby, and watch it crack and buckle in the heat.
But what if it wasn’t as simple as that, Lamb wanted to know? (Important corollary: Lamb didn’t want to know—Lamb couldn’t care less. Lamb had just hit on another way of wasting a slow horse’s time.) What if these torch-happy kids weren’t just lighting up their stolen rides; what if they were experimenting with ways of blowing cars up—calculating blast radiuses; measuring the potential damage varying payloads could deliver? So here was Marcus, whose role in life had been kicking down doors, retooling himself as an analyst; staring at a screen which broke down five years’ worth of vehicular arson by make, location, accelerant used, and a dozen other variables . . . There was always the possibility Lamb had a point—anyone who found the notion too high-concept just had to turn the TV on, and watch footage of the onesie-clad forensics crew picking through Westacres’ ashes. But either way, this wasn’t the part of the process Marcus should have been involved in. He should be the one they called when they had a suspect holed up in a towerblock with hostages. The one they decked out in Kevlar and dropped down a chimney: Merry Christmas, assholes.
Control, alt, delete.
The radiator gurgled noisily, interrupting his chain of thought, but at least it meant heat was moving around the building, which meant someone was paying bills. Marcus wasn’t. Marcus was accumulating a drawerful of red letters: final demands for electricity and gas. Cassie was talking about taking the kids, going to her mother’s “for a bit,” and that was even without knowing about the unpaid bills—her repossessed car had been the final straw.
“You said you’d got it under control.”
His gambling, she meant.
“You said you’d drawn a line, walked away. No more money down the drain. You promised, Marcus.”
And he’d meant it, too, but how did you stop money disappearing once it had decided to go? It was even less responsive to persuasion than Cassie.
He thought: I’ve turned into one of those men worth more dead than alive. More of us than you’d think. It’s not just the Jihadi Johns out there in the scrublands, living off camel meat and sleeping in holes but with a million-dollar price tag on their heads: it’s the rest of us too. Us poor working saps in debt to our eyeballs, a never-ending mortgage, and bills papering the walls; barely enough spare cash for a cup of coffee, but shouldering game-changing amounts of life insurance. I could keel over right here right now, and the death-in-service payout would solve all my problems. The house would be free and clear; money left over to see the kids through university. Best thing all round, except for being dead. But that’s going to happen sooner or later, so why not here at my desk? . . . He should raise that as a joke with Cassie, except she might not laugh. And no amount of Kevlar offered protection from a woman’s disappointment.
The slamming of a keyboard roused him from his reverie. Shirley was having hardware issues, and resolving them in her traditional manner.
“. . . You got an AFM later?” he asked.
“Who needs to know?” she snarled.
“Nobody at all,” said Marcus, and tapped at his own keyboard randomly for a moment, as if by altering the rows of figures on his screen, he might also change the facts he was confronted with: not simply the half-a-decade’s worth of destroyed cars, but his own dwindling net worth; the sums snapping at his heels growing ever larger, ever more vicious, and his ability to outpace them weakening by the day.
If he was going to walk to the village he’d need his wellingtons. Yesterday, he’d had to return home before he’d got fifty yards—a soft-shoe shuffle back down the drive; slippers jettisoned into the bin, soaked and useless. Well, a moment of absent-mindedness, and there’d been no witnesses. This was one of the advantages of living in semi-isolation, though you could never be certain there were no stoats watching.
“Know what I mean by stoats?”
River rarely forgot anything. David Cartwright had taught him well.
“You see a stoat, you pretend you haven’t,” River said.
“Except you never see a stoat.”
“You never see them,” River agreed. “But you know they’re there.”
Because the signs they left were legion. The bent grasses where they’d knelt; the lopped-off branch that had obscured their view. Cigarette ends in a tidy heap. Don’t have the boy picking up old fag ends, Rose had scolded. But it was best the boy was taught to be on his guard, because once the stoats had you in their sights it was the devil’s own job shaking them off.
A good morning for training, then. Besides, all boys like splashing in puddles so—one welly on; the other angled for entry—he bellowed for River to come join him for a walk. But even as his words went crashing through the empty house, he noticed their falsity: that was not the voice he’d had when River had been a boy. And River’s boyhood was over; the days of teaching him about stoats and bogeymen, the myths and legends of Spook Street, had been gone longer than Rose . . .
David Cartwright shook his head. An old man’s fancy—a memory rising to the surface, like a bubble from a frog. He lowered his foot into the second welly, chuckling. The boy ever learned he had these moments of inattention, he’d never hear the end of it. Besides, stoats weren’t what they used to be. These days they used drones and satellite imagery; they planted tiny cameras in your house. Your every movement charted.
Wellington on, he stood up straight. Little bit of exercise, that was the ticket. It was true, there’d been times lately when he’d worried he’d come adrift. He’d doze off of an afternoon, forgivable lapse in an old codger, and come to in a panic: the fire seething in the grate, lamplight softly glowing; everything as it ought to be, but still that knocking in his chest: what had happ
ened while he’d slept? Walls had been known to fall. Things had emerged from under bridges. It was a relief when the world he woke to was the same as the one he’d left.
But that wasn’t always the case, was it? Sometimes the world did shift on its axis. Just two days ago, there’d been a suicide bomber in a British shopping centre—what did they call it? A flash mob . . . The blackest of black jokes; a flash mob ignited, and all those young lives destroyed. For a moment, standing by his own front door, David Cartwright felt it as a personal loss, something he could have prevented. And then that loss shifted shape, and Rose was telling him to be sure to wear his Barbour, not that dreadful old raincoat. And to carry his umbrella, just in case.
Keys in pocket. Wellingtons on feet. What was it he’d been thinking about, some dreadful thing or other? It slid past him like smoke, nothing he could get a grip on. Tucking himself into his raincoat—the Barbour made him feel he was pretending to be country folk—and leaving his umbrella hanging like a bat on its hook, he let himself out the door.
In the office above Marcus and Shirley’s heads, other fingers tapped away: their movements fluid, the keyboard imaginary, the notes they followed apparently random but always searching for the melody beneath; a tune that would echo, build and repeat itself for thirty minutes or so, its themes at first withheld, sometimes stumbling, but ultimately laid bare. And while this happened, nothing else did. That was its lure for Jason Kevin Coe; the clean white page it opened in his mind, temporarily erasing the nightmares scribbled there.
We feel that you’re not . . . happy in your work.
He could not remember how he had answered this question, which, anyway, was not a question. He had the feeling he’d simply sat, fingers twitching in his lap. Reaching for a tune that swirled around his head.
Coe wasn’t sure when this had begun. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, to mime his way through a series of improvised piano recitals; it was simply something he’d discovered himself doing, or rather, had discovered somebody else discovering him doing—he’d been on a bus, moving in fits and starts along a crowded Regent Street, when he noticed that the young woman next to him was edging away, casting worried glances at him, at his fingers, which were thrumming a non-existent keyboard. He hadn’t until that moment connected the music in his head with the movement of his hands. At the time, he hadn’t even been wearing his iPod. The music was simply inside him, something he relied on in moments of anxiety, which now included, he was barely surprised to learn, travelling in fits and starts in a crowded bus on Regent Street.
We were wondering if a transfer might not be in your best interests.
Always that we, underlining the plurality of the forces lined against him. Not that it was the Service’s HR department that gave him sleepless nights.
Today, beneath his grey hoodie, JK Coe wore a T-shirt and jeans ripped at the knee. It had been a while since he’d worn anything else. He was three-days unshaven, and while unarguably clean—he showered twice daily; more often when time allowed—there always followed him a whiff of something that seemed to float at the outer edge of his ability to smell it. Sometimes, he worried it was the smell of shit. But really he knew it was fear; the odour of his own worst memory, when he’d been tied naked to a chair while another man, also naked, threatened him with an electric carving knife. In his dreams, in his insomniac nightmares, he relived what might have happened; the ripping of steel through his flesh; the wet slap of his innards as they hit the plastic sheets spread on the floor. When his fingers weren’t searching for music they crept to his stomach, interlocked across his belly, struggled to hold inside what might have been carved out.
All of this had taken place at home, in his fifth-floor flat. He’d bought when he’d been earning well in banking, before he’d sickened of that career, shortly before everybody else had sickened of it too, and people began to look on bankers like there ought to be bags to collect them in. A narrow escape, he’d thought at the time, having fallen back on his degree subject and taken a post with the Service’s Psych Eval section, where he hoped to prove useful. A modest ambition, and no longer a career target.
Slough House might be a better fit, we think. Fewer . . . alarms.
In the weeks and months following his ordeal, Coe had tired of most things. Food lost flavour, and alcohol served to make him throw up long before he’d achieved any kind of anaesthetised state. If he’d had ready access to weed or stronger he’d have given it a shot, but acquiring illegal substances demanded social interaction; interaction with people he could imagine providing . . . “alarms.” He couldn’t read for long without becoming furious. Music was all that was left. Coe had never played the piano in his life, and it was a toss-up as to whether his fingers were going in the right direction when the notes in his head climbed the scale; nevertheless, here he was, exiled to Slough House with the other catastrophes of the Intelligence world; sentenced to plough away at a series of unpromising projects with no end in sight, instead of which he was making unheard music on an unplayable instrument, and finding in the process, if not peace, then at least a certain amount of white space.
From across the room, River Cartwright watched him dispassionately. If he’d learned anything as a slow horse, it was that there was no helping some people—sometimes, you had to let them drown. Which was what it looked like JK Coe was doing: not waving but drowning, scrabbling for purchase on a desk that was never going to keep him afloat. Whichever shore he was poling for, he’d either make it or he wouldn’t. Until that happened, River planned on leaving him be.
Besides, he had troubles of his own.
At the junction where the driveway met the lane lay the Great Lake, an annual event caused by poor drainage. David Cartwright skirted it unsteadily, one careful footstep after another along what remained of the kerb: little more than a series of narrow stepping stones. The hedgerow shivered at his passage, and tipped a pint of water straight into his boot, blast it! But now he was over, and back on firm ground. He waved a greeting at his neighbours’ house, though its windows were dark, and squelched past the bus-shelter, where a newspaper lay plastered to the floor. Torn images of parental grief screamed up. A streetlamp flickered uncertainly, unsure whether it should be on or off.
The lane led to the village in meandering fashion, literally going round the houses, but the footpath through the wood was direct. A wooden kissing-gate, semi-obscured by hedge, offered entrance. You watch your step now, Rose admonished. The way was carpeted with leaves, thickly sludged with them in places, but he’d always been mindful of treacherous ground, something he’d learned when plotting a course through history. You lived your life day by day, the O.B. thought, but days were mere splinters of time, no useful measure. The sudden events that blind us with their light had roots in the slowly-turning decades. Even now, he could make out shapes from the past behind the headlines, like predators glimpsed through murky waters. Twenty years retired, and he still knew when there were stoats on his trail. His neighbours’ house shouldn’t be empty at this hour: the cleaning woman should be there, unlikely to be vacuuming in the dark. And that flickering streetlamp: no doubt its innards had been tampered with, the better to insert some surveillance device.
He waited. Of all the sounds in the wood, all the damp rustlings and furtive scratchings, none paused, to allow him to focus on their absence. Everything continued as it had been. But then, he would expect no different. These were not amateurs.
“But if you know it’s a trap,” the boy said, “shouldn’t you avoid it?”
“No. You want them to think you’re oblivious to their presence. And then, first time they blink—pouf! You’re gone.”
He blinked—pouf!—and River was gone too.
The trees grumbled rustily. Someone whistled in imitation of a bird, and someone whistled back. The O.B. waited, but that was it for the time being. Carefully, eyes alert for snares among the leaves, he headed towards t
he village.
“Think he’s an issue or a fuck-up?”
“Who are we talking about now?”
“Mr. Air Piano.”
Marcus pretended to consider the matter. Sometimes it was easiest to go with Shirley’s flow. When Lamb wasn’t around she grew restless, as if his absence required celebration; and since Shirley’s definition of celebration was wide, anything that didn’t involve controlled substances was, on the whole, to be encouraged.
“You want to offer a little context?” he asked.
“Well, you and me, we’re issues. You’ve got your gambling addiction—”
“It’s not an addiction—”
“—and me, apparently I’m ‘irritable.’”
“You broke a dude’s nose, Shirl.”
“He was asking for it.
“He was asking for a couple of quid.”
“Same thing.”
“For Children in Need.”
“He was dressed as a fucking rabbit. I assumed he was dangerous.”
“That’s probably the only reason you’re not in prison,” Marcus conceded.
“Yeah, well. They wouldn’t have got me at all if it wasn’t for those pesky kids.”
Who had caught it on camera, and stuck it on YouTube. The whole dressed-as-a-rabbit thing was mitigation, of course, and the arresting officer had been charity-mugged herself three times that morning, and in the end the assault charges had been sidestepped on condition Shirley sign up for AFM.
