by Mick Herron
Gimball stopped mid-sentence.
‘Do you need me to say more?’
‘… I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘We both know that’s not the case.’
Dodie Gimball’s face had sharpened to a point, all but her expensive nose, which retained its shape while the rest of her features contracted. Whelan’s reading was, the name was strange to her, but its implications weren’t. Which didn’t matter either way. She had never been the intended target of any necessary revelation.
He said to her, ‘I did warn you.’
‘Dennis and I have no secrets.’
‘Perhaps not from each other. But there are a lot of people out there who might find your husband’s … proclivities surprising.’
‘Dancing Bear doesn’t even exist any more,’ Gimball said. ‘It closed down years ago. And what of it, anyway? It was a perfectly legal establishment.’
‘So I understand.’
‘Just a little bit of dressing up.’
Whelan nodded. His face was blank of any obvious emotion: while he had no qualms about dropping a bomb in the Gimballs’ parlour, he didn’t want to give the impression he was enjoying it. That would lack class.
Dodie had gathered herself now. She said to her husband, ‘Darling, should I call Erica?’ Then, to Whelan, ‘Our lawyer.’
Before Whelan could answer, Gimball was shaking his head. ‘No. No. Let’s just wait and …’
See, probably. The word escaped him. Or suggested another implication:
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me there are photographs.’
‘Good God, no.’
‘… No?’
‘No, I’m not going to tell you that. It would be a little retro, wouldn’t it? A few polaroids in a Manila envelope? We’ve moved on since those days.’
‘Spit it out,’ said Dodie.
‘There’s video. Do you really think a club like Dancing Bear would pass up the chance to film its members having fun? That was its main revenue stream. If we hadn’t bought up its archive, you’d have heard from its proprietors by now. Given your rise to prominence since.’
Dennis was shaking his head, though more as an indication that he was still in his denial phase than in actual disbelief.
‘So here we are, then. Fair warning. If you go ahead with the speech you’re planning, your career will be over before the Shipping Forecast’s aired. I’m not suggesting the evening news, nor even tomorrow’s papers. All due respect, Mrs Gimball, but they’re no more of the moment than a polaroid would be. No, we all know that Twitter, YouTube, reach parts of the planet where they’re still puzzling out the wheelbarrow. And you’ll be tomorrow’s big star. I’d ask you both to consider that carefully.’
There was nothing more to say on either side, so he left them there and made his own way to the front door. But Gimball caught him as he was retrieving his raincoat, and barred his way, looking as if he hoped there were something that might be said or done to render the last few minutes impotent. But hope was all it was. So it was almost with pity that Whelan said, ‘I lied, by the way. I do that sometimes, for effect,’ and reached into the pocket of his coat and took out an envelope. It was creamy white, the kind birthday cards arrive in, and wasn’t sealed, and when he held it slantwise a single photograph slid out, face up. It showed Dennis Gimball in a happy mood. He was on a small stage, and appeared to be singing – karaoke, probably – dressed in what Claire, Whelan’s wife, would almost certainly identify as a flapper dress. It brought to mind The Great Gatsby, anyway.
As Gimball studied it, the way one might an alien artefact, Dodie appeared at his shoulder. She glanced at the photo in his hand, no more, and then at her husband with what Whelan identified as sympathy.
At Whelan himself, she directed a gaze of pure hate.
Gimball spoke. ‘There’s no crime in it.’
‘Nobody suggested there was.’
‘No one gets hurt by what I do.’
‘I doubt anybody will claim that. No, I think what most people are going to do is laugh, Dennis. I think they’re going to laugh their fucking hearts out.’
Afterwards, Whelan was ashamed of saying that – the whole sentence, not just the profanity – and knew that Claire would have been disappointed, but it came naturally in the moment. This probably had something to do with the way Gimball had attacked him in the House.
His raincoat over one arm, he walked through the mews to the road, where his car was waiting.
‘“Alternatively sane”?’
‘Top of my head.’
‘It showed.’
‘It was off the cuff, River. I didn’t know I was going to be marked on it.’
Louisa and River were fetching their cars, or in River’s case, Ho’s car. Well, Ho wasn’t using it, and Lamb had known where he hid his spare keys: in an envelope secured to the underside of his desk. ‘The second most obvious place,’ Lamb called it, the first being if Ho had just Sellotaped them to his forehead. River didn’t feel good about using Ho’s car without permission. He felt fantastic.
The rain had eased off, and the breeze that was kicking up felt fresh and ready for anything.
Ho used a resident’s parking permit he’d applied for in the name of a local shut-in, not far from where he’d nearly been run over the previous morning. Louisa was on a meter, which was nearly as expensive as, though without the obvious benefits of, a second home. They reached Ho’s car first. Before Louisa could walk on, River said, ‘You really think there’s something to this?’
‘What Coe said?’
‘That, yeah. Plus what happens next. Someone’s going to try to whack Zafar Jaffrey? Or Dennis Gimball? Tonight?’
‘Everything else has happened in a hurry. Abbotsfield. The penguins. The bomb on the train.’
‘Yeah, but.’
‘I know.’
‘We can’t even be sure it’s Jaffrey or Gimball. Let alone tonight.’
‘Well, we have to do something.’
‘On account of Lamb.’
‘On account of Lamb, yeah.’
More specifically, on account of Lamb pulling a gun on the Head Dog.
‘I didn’t think he was going to do that.’
‘It would worry me if you had. Emma’s already got you down as Lamb’s mini-me.’
‘… You agree with her?’
Louisa said, ‘Nah. You’ve a way to go yet.’
‘Thanks. I think.’
What Lamb had done: he’d aimed Marcus’s gun in Emma’s direction.
Emma Flyte said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘Well, you’d think so. But try seeing it from my point of view.’
She stood up. ‘Seriously, you are out of your mind.’
‘It’s been said before. But best sit down.’
Flyte looked around the room. Everyone was staring at Lamb, except Catherine Standish, who was looking at Emma.
‘I’d do as he says.’
‘He’s not going to shoot me.’
‘Probably not.’ Catherine let that ‘probably’ hang there a moment or two, then shrugged. ‘But it’s your call.’
Flyte said to Lamb, ‘You’ve lost your senses,’ but she sat down.
Lamb said, ‘Didn’t we used to have a pair of handcuffs somewhere?’
‘… Why is everyone looking at me?’ Shirley asked.
‘We’re not judging,’ said Catherine.
Grumbling under her breath, Shirley went to her room and came back with a pair of cuffs. River waited until she’d secured Emma Flyte to her chair before saying, ‘And this is a good idea because …?’
Lamb said, ‘Okay, for those of you who weren’t paying attention, or are just slow, or are called Cartwright, let me point out what you’ve missed. These last couple of days, the terrorist massacre, the dead penguins, the bomb on the train, yada yada yada, it can all be laid at our door.’
‘Ho’s door,’ Louisa said.
‘You think Di Taverner c
ares which door? Once she’s got an opening, she’ll use it. By which I mean, she’ll drive a bulldozer through Slough House, and the best you lot can hope for is, someone’ll pull you from the rubble before burying you again.’ He remembered his bottle of wine, and reached for it. ‘And before you ask, no, that’s not a metaphor either.’
Louisa said, ‘You’re not seriously saying the Park would black ribbon us?’
Black ribbons were what were wrapped round closed files.
‘I’m saying,’ Lamb said, ‘that if they don’t want you around to tell tales, then you won’t be around to tell tales.’
River said, ‘There was that protocol, a few years ago. Waterproof? But there was an inquiry. They don’t use that any more.’
‘Oh, believe me,’ J. K. Coe said. ‘They do.’
River stared, but Coe said nothing more.
‘Waterproof?’ asked Shirley.
‘Black prisons. Eastern Europe.’
‘Fuck.’
Emma Flyte said, ‘Will you lot listen to yourselves? The Park does not bury its mistakes any more. Or ship them off to foreign dungeons.’
‘They brought you in to run a clean department,’ said Lamb. ‘That doesn’t mean there aren’t still dirty bits you don’t get to hear about.’
‘You’ve been rotting away in this slag heap for too long. You’ve all turned paranoid. If there’s even any remote truth in this scenario you’ve conjured up, this is not the way to deal with it.’
‘Nobody’s actually keeping minutes,’ Lamb said. ‘But if anyone had been, rest assured your objections would have been noted.’
‘I thought you had enough on Taverner to keep her onside,’ Louisa said. ‘Or at least to stop her going all medieval on us.’
‘If what happened at Abbotsfield turns out to be our fault,’ Catherine said softly, ‘that’ll trump anything Diana Taverner’s done.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lamb. ‘To be fair to her, her civilian casualties are probably still in single figures.’ He surveyed his assembled crew. ‘The good news is, if they’re holding off on questioning Ho, we’ve got a window.’
‘The last time you had a window,’ Flyte pointed out, ‘a body went through it. That doesn’t fill me with confidence.’
‘You’re not helping. Shut up. Zafar Jaffrey and Dennis Gimball, any advance on those two? For the role of most likely to be assassinated?’
‘You’re making decisions based on—’
‘You want to let me get this done, or do I need to put a bag over your head?’
River said, ‘She has a point. There are any number of politicians. Why would the target be one of the first two we put a name to?’
‘We’re talking about a bunch of mindless bottom feeders whose general ignorance of our way of life is tempered only by their indifference to human suffering, we’re all agreed on that?’
‘Is this the politicians or the killers?’
‘Good point, but I meant the killers.’
Shirley shrugged. ‘Then yeah. I guess.’
‘Good. So as one bunch of idiots second-guessing another, you make the perfect focus group. Besides, we don’t have the horsepower to cope with more than two potential targets.’ Lamb paused. ‘Horsepower. See what I did there?’
Now, out by Ho’s car, River said, ‘So Gimball’s doing a public meeting back in his constituency, and Jaffrey’s what? He’s not a public servant, or not yet. He doesn’t publish his itinerary. How do we work out where he is?’
‘I thought we could phone his office,’ said Louisa.
‘Oh.’
‘And ask what he’s doing tonight.’
‘Oh. Okay. Yeah, that might work.’
She said, ‘And, River, we can’t let that pair go together, you do realise that?’
‘Shirley and Coe? Why not?’
‘Because we’re trying to prevent a disaster, not cause one.’ Louisa was fumbling a coin from her jeans pocket as she spoke. ‘Call.’
‘Heads.’
She tossed. ‘It’s tails.’
‘… Loser gets Shirley, right?’
‘No, loser gets Coe.’
‘Maybe we should have established that before you tossed.’
‘Why, would that’ve made you win?’
Damn.
He said, ‘But I get to choose which target, right?’
‘So long as you choose Gimball, yeah.’
‘Why does it feel like I’m playing a stacked deck?’
‘Welcome to Slough House,’ Louisa said, and went to fetch her car.
Dennis Gimball felt like a victim.
There were lots of reasons for his feeling this way, and – as was his wont – he set them out as mental bullet points:
the prime minister hated him, so
he was being picked on by the Secret Service, which meant
he wasn’t going to be able to set his brilliant plan in action, because
they’d make him a laughing stock.
No wonder he needed a cigarette.
Dodie was tight-lipped, a bad sign. Tight-lipped meant she was thinking things through, and when that happened Dennis often found himself in deep shit, or that general postcode. Not for the first time, he wondered how things could go tits up so suddenly. A couple of hours ago, he was walking a shining path; now he was looking at, what? A public climbdown. Because as far as the political world was concerned, this was the perfect moment for him to bid for the leadership, and the thing about perfect moments was, they didn’t hang around. Announcing his return to the party fold was one thing, but without follow-through, without revealing that the PM’s go-to Muslim moderate was hand in glove with an illegal arms dealer, the evening could be spun through 180 degrees, and his announcement welcomed by Downing Street as a declaration of support. Like hammering the ball straight over the bowler’s head, only to be caught on the boundary. They didn’t give you two lives. It was back to the pavilion, bat tucked under your arm.
The car wasn’t due for an hour, so Dennis slipped into the handkerchief-sized garden, leaned against one of the huge pots Dodie was apparently growing a tree in, lit a cigarette, and brooded. If his planned triumph mutated into public capitulation, what could he expect? Twenty minutes in the spotlight as a prodigal son, a few weeks of speculation in the run up to the next reshuffle, and some chuckling paragraphs in the broadsheets when a Cabinet post failed to materialise. He’d join the ranks of those who’d confidently expected to swat this weak-kneed PM aside, and were now seeking opportunities elsewhere. A pub quiz question a decade from now: one for wonks only.
Okay, he thought, feeling nicotine course through his veins. That’s the downside. But let’s adjust this picture, shall we? It was always possible that, instead of a victim, he was in fact a hero, who had single-handedly forced everyone else into a corner:
the prime minister was scared of him, so
he was being picked on by the Secret Service, which meant
they thought his brilliant plan would work, so
… they’d make him a laughing stock.
Fuck.
He reached into his breast pocket, where something with sharp corners was digging into him: the photograph from Dancing Bear. Ancient history, but he’d had happy times there – and was that a crime? Nobody could look at this photo, surely, and not see past the ill-applied blusher (okay, that had been unwise) to the joy behind. Yes, he was wearing a dress; yes, elbow-length gloves – but so what? Was he hurting anyone? The only damage being done was to his own future, and since he couldn’t have known that at the time, even that was an innocent injury. He had known Dodie then, but they weren’t married, and it wasn’t until years later that he had confessed to her this aspect of his personality. So: all this photo showed was a single man, happy in the company of like-minded fellows. A little bit of dressing up – have we not come far enough, as a society, to accept that? He could feel himself slipping into speech mode. This, this: this was normal English manhood, letting off steam. Hadn’t Mick Jagger onc
e declared that no Englishman needed encouragement to dress up as a woman? And look at Eddie Izzard – he was popular; beloved, even. So why shouldn’t Dennis Gimball receive the same treatment?
It’s not like he was gay, for God’s sake.
So he could be a pioneer. Could break the mould.
And – once it was known he was being persecuted for who he was – he could be the poster-boy for a whole new politics. The sanctity of personal choices, that would be his banner. Identity, selfhood, fiscal responsibility, strong borders, and a ground-up rethink of the benefits system. What’s not to vote for?
A scorching sensation at his fingertips warned him he’d finished his cigarette. He ground it out on the terracotta pot and buried the stub in its soil. His speech would need a new shape: how the Secret Service had tried to prevent him telling the truth about Zafar Jaffrey with blackmail threats. How they had tried to destroy Dennis Gimball with their bully-boy tactics. And how he was not a man to allow any citizen, himself included, to be ground beneath the Establishment’s boot …
He would be carried from the hall shoulder high, he decided. His people’s cheers would echo through the nation; his name would ring between the very stars.
Taking one last look at the photograph, he tucked it carefully away in his pocket.
And wished he could see the look on Claude Whelan’s face when the spook realised he’d been outmanoeuvred.
Most of the crew had departed Slough House: Cartwright with a reluctant Coe; Louisa Guy with an oddly subdued Shirley Dander. Catherine worried about Shirley; would have worried less if she’d spent the months since Marcus’s death kicking holes in walls and throwing desks through windows. It was when a bomb stopped ticking that you should be nervous.
J. K. Coe, too: Catherine couldn’t read him at all. It wasn’t that he was a bad person; more that bad things had happened to him, and there were bound to be consequences. Plus, of course, he might be a bad person. No point pretending otherwise.
Probably, though, who she ought to be worrying about was herself.
Lamb had disappeared into the toilet, having loudly announced that this time was for real, and he’d be taking no prisoners. ‘No offence,’ he’d added to Emma Flyte, still handcuffed to a chair. And this was the main reason Catherine should be worried: Lamb had kidnapped the Head Dog and sent the horses on a madcap errand which, if it turned out not madcap after all, demanded seventeen times the number of agents and a hell of a lot more resources if they weren’t to make a bad situation worse. Which, as someone had once pointed out, was their specialist area. So why did it all have a just-another-day-at-the-office feel? She must have been here too long.
