Real Tigers

by Mick Herron

  “Spoken to Louisa lately?” he asked.

  Marcus Longridge grunted.

  They were the newest of the slow horses, this pair, which accounted for their not saying much. Slough House had no rigid hierarchical structure, but it was pretty clear that once you’d ticked off Lamb at the top, you were looking at Roddy Ho—the place ran on brains, not muscle. So these two must regard him as their natural superior, hence their being overawed. Ho’d have felt the same in their shoes. He took a sip of his alcohol-free lager and tried again.

  “At all? In the kitchen or anywhere?”

  Again, Marcus grunted.

  Marcus was into his forties, Ho knew, but that didn’t mean you could rule him out entirely. He was tall, black, married, and had definitely killed at least one person, but none of that stopped Ho figuring Marcus probably looked on him, Ho, as a younger version of himself. There must be practical stuff he’d be happy to pass on, which was the reason he’d elected Marcus to join him for a guys’ night out. A few jars, a few laughs, and then some opening up. But reaching that stage was an uphill struggle with Shirley Dander sitting the other side of him, like a malevolent fire hydrant. He had no clue why she’d tagged along, but she was cramping both their styles.

  She had a packet of crisps in front of her, opened up like a picnic blanket, except when he’d reached to take one she’d slapped his hand. “Get your own.” She was levering about 15 percent of the total quantity into her mouth now, and once she’d done that she chewed briefly and said, “What about?”

  Ho gave her a look that meant men talking.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Lemonade go down the wrong way?”

  “It’s not lemonade.”

  “Yeah, right.” She used some of her own, definitely non-alcohol-free lager to sluice the crisps down her throat, then returned to topic. “Talk to Louisa about what?”

  “Just, you know. Anything.”

  Shirley said, “You’re kidding.”

  Marcus stared into his pint. He was drinking Guinness, and Ho had spent a few minutes working up something to say about this, about Marcus and his drink being the same colour—observational comedy—but had shelved it until the moment was right. Which might be soon if Shirley shut up.

  She didn’t.

  “You have got to be kidding.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Louisa. You think you’ve got a chance with Louisa?”

  “Who said anything about—”

  “Ha! That is fantastic. You seriously think you’ve got a chance with Louisa?”

  Marcus said, “Oh God. Shoot me now,” but didn’t seem to be addressing either of his companions.

  Not for the first time, Roderick Ho wondered if he’d made a tactical error in his social life.

  Sean Donovan said, “You’re not at the Park any more.”

  As this wasn’t a question Catherine didn’t answer it, instead saying, “I’m glad you’re out, Sean. I hope life’s treating you better.”

  “Water under the bridge.”

  But he said this with the air of one who spent a lot of time on bridges, waiting for the bodies of his enemies to float past.

  They were approaching the junction, where small queues of cars, mostly taxis, waited. Through the windows of the pub opposite she could see heads bobbing in conversation and laughter. It wasn’t a pub for serious drinkers; was strictly for casuals. She was very conscious of Sean Donovan at her side; of his thick soldier’s body. Still a physical presence, well into his fifties. Behind bars, he’d have haunted the gym. In his cell he’d have done push-ups, sit-ups, all those crunching exercises which kept the muscles strong.

  A row of buses trundled past. She waited until their noise abated before saying, “I have to be going, Sean.”

  “I can’t tempt you to a drink?”

  “I don’t do that any more.”

  He gave a low whistle. “Now we’re really talking hard time . . . ”

  “I get by.”

  But she did and she didn’t. Most days she did. But there were difficult passages, in the early summer evenings—or the late winter nights—when she felt drunk already, as if she’d slipped without noticing and woken enmeshed in her old ways, doing that some more. Drinking. Which would start an unravelling that might never end.

  Taking another drink was not about lapsing. It was about becoming someone she planned never to be again.

  “A cup of coffee then.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Jesus, Catherine. It’s been how long? And we were . . . close.”

  She didn’t want to think about that.

  “Sean, I’m still with the Service. I can’t be seen with you. I can’t take that risk.”

  She regretted the phrase as soon as it escaped her.

  “Risk, is it? Touching pitch and all?”

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. But the truth is, I just can’t be with you. Spend time with you. Not because of . . . your troubles. Because of who I am. What I am.”

  “‘Your troubles.’” He laughed and shook his head. “You sound like my mother, rest her soul. ‘Your troubles.’ A phrase she’d trot out to a grieving widow or a fussing child. She was never one for making fine distinctions.”

  That phrase again. Making distinctions.

  “I’m glad to see you’re well, Sean.”

  “You’re looking grand yourself, Catherine.”

  It was perhaps indicative of their respective conditions that each left it to the other to affirm their essential roadworthiness.

  “Goodbye, then.”

  The lights were in her favour, so she was able to cross immediately. On the other side she didn’t look back, but knew that if she did she’d see him watching her, the colour of his eyes unknowable at this distance, but still that shade of stormy blue they became in his darker moments.

  “You look like you could use company.”

  Louisa didn’t reply.

  Undeterred, the man slid onto the stool next to her. A glance in the mirror told her he was passable—maybe mid-thirties and wearing it well; wearing, too, a made-to-measure charcoal suit, with an intricately patterned tie, blues and golds, loosened enough to indicate the free spirit blooming within. His spectacles had a thin black frame, and Louisa would have bet her next vodka and lime their lenses would be plain glass. Nerd-chic. But she didn’t bother turning to check this out.

  “Only you’ve been here thirty-seven minutes now, and you haven’t once checked the door.”

  He paused, the better for her to appreciate the cuteness of that specific amount of time, the sharpness of his observation. Sitting here thirty-seven minutes, and not expecting anyone. He’d doubtless counted her drinks, and knew she was on her third.

  And now a chuckle.

  “So you’re the quiet type. Don’t get many of them round here.”

  Round here being south of the river, though not far enough south to be free of made-to-measure suits and classy ties. It was a bus-ride from her studio flat, which, since the weather had turned and the streets become heavy with smells of tar and fried dust, felt smaller than ever, as if shrinking in the heat. Everything in it seemed to pulse. Arriving there was a constant reminder she’d rather be anywhere else.

  “But you know what? Beautiful woman, all mysterious and quiet, that’s an invitation to a guy like me. Gives me a chance to shine. So tell you what, any time you want to chip in, feel free. Or smile and nod, whatever. I’m happy just admiring the view.”

  So she’d showered and changed, and now wore a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and skinny black jeans over gold sandals. The blonde streaks in her hair were recent, as was the blood-red toenail polish. He wasn’t entirely wrong. She was sure she wasn’t a beautiful woman. But she was certain she looked like one.

 
Besides, a hot August evening, and chilled drinks on the bar. Anyone could look beautiful when the context allowed.

  She raised her glass and its ice whispered musical promises.

  “So I work in solutions? Clients mostly import-export, and a real bastard landed on my desk this morning, two-and-a-half mill of high-spec tablets chugging out of Manila and the paperwork’s only been bollocksed . . . ”

  He chuntered on. He hadn’t offered her a drink—he’d time it so he’d finish his own a beat ahead of her then raise a finger for the girl behind the bar, vodka lime, plenty of ice, then carry on with his story so as not to draw attention to the minor miracle he’d performed.

  This, or something like it, was how it always went.

  Louisa placed a finger on the rim of her glass and traced round it before tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. The man was still talking, and she knew, without looking round, that his companions were at a table by the door, alert for signs of success or failure, and prepared to have a laugh either way. Probably they worked in ‘solutions’ too. It seemed a job title that could stretch pretty far in any direction, provided you weren’t fussy about the range of problems it encompassed.

  Her own problems—the day she’d had, like every other working day of the past two months—involved comparing two sets of census figures, 2001 and 2011. Her target city was Leeds, her age-group 18–24, and what she was looking for were people who had dropped out of sight or appeared from nowhere.

  “Any particular language group?” she remembered asking.

  “Ethnic profiling is morally obscene,” Lamb had admonished. “I thought everyone knew that. But yeah, it’s the sand-jockeys you want to focus on.”

  People who’d vanished and others who’d materialised. There were hundreds of them, of course, and rock-solid reasons for most, and potentially rock-solid reasons for most of the rest, though tracking those reasons down was a pain in the neck. She couldn’t approach the targets themselves, so had to come in at a tangent: social security, vehicle licensing, utilities, NHS records, internet use: anything that left a paper trail, or indicated a footprint. And blah blah blah—it wasn’t so much looking for a needle in a haystack as rearranging the haystack, stalk by stalk; grading each by length and width, and making them point the same way . . . She wished she worked in solutions. The current project seemed mostly a matter of contriving unnecessary problems.

  Which was the point. Nobody left Slough House at the end of a working day feeling like they’d contributed to the security of the nation. They left it feeling like their brains had been fed through a juicer. Louisa had dreams of being trapped in a telephone directory. The fuck-up that had put her with the slow horses had been bad—a messed-up surveillance job resulting in a large quantity of guns being dumped on the street—but she’d surely been punished enough. Except the point was, no amount of punishment was enough. She could set her own terms, serve her own sentence, and walk away whenever she felt like it. That was what she was supposed to do: give it up and walk away. So, like all the rest of them, it was the last thing she’d ever do. Something Min had said—no, don’t think about Min. Anyway, without discussing it, she knew they all felt the same way. Except for Roderick Ho, who was too much of an arsehole to realise he was being punished, which, given he was being punished for being an arsehole, seemed apt.

  And meanwhile, her brain felt like it had been fed through a juicer.

  The man was still talking, might even be reaching the climax of his anecdote, and Louisa was more certain than she was of anything else that whatever this turned out to be, she didn’t want to hear it. Without turning to face him, she placed a hand on his wrist. It was like using a remote: his story ended, mid-air.

  “I’m going to have two more of these,” she said. “If you’re still here when I’m done, I’ll go home with you. But in the meantime, shut the fuck up, okay? Not a word. That’s a deal-breaker.”

  He was smarter than he’d so far suggested. Without a sound, he waved for the bartender, pointed at Louisa’s glass, and raised two fingers.

  Louisa faded him out, and got to work on her drink.

  Shoot me now, thought Marcus again, this time not out loud.

  Shirley was having fun with the idea Ho fancied his chances with Louisa. “That is brilliant. Have we got a noticeboard? We are so going to need one.” She made a crosshatch sign with her fingers. “Hashtag deludedmale.”

  The bar was the far side of the Barbican Centre, and Ho thought he’d suggested it because it was a favourite dive of his, somewhere he hung with his friends, but the truth was Marcus had never set foot in it before, and had picked it for precisely that reason. It was exactly the kind of place he’d wager money no actual friend of his would ever set foot, so the chances of running into any of them while in company with Roderick Ho were minimal.

  On the other hand, wagering money was what had got him here in the first place, so placing further bets wasn’t his wisest course.

  A giant TV screen fixed to a wall was tuned to rolling news. The breaking-headline ribbon was unspooling too quickly to follow, but the picture would have been difficult not to identify: blue suit, yellow tie, artfully tousled haystack of hair and a plummy grin you’d have to be a moron or a voter not to notice concealed a degree of self-interest that would alienate a shark. The brand-new Home Secretary, meaning Marcus’s new boss, and Shirley’s, and Ho’s, not that the relationship would bother Peter Judd—to attract his attention, you had to have royal connections, a TV show or enhanced breasts (“allegedly”). Straddling the gap between media-whore and political beast, he’d long since made the leap from star-fucker to star-fucked, stealing the public affection with shows of buffoonery, and gaining political ascendancy by way of the Hollywood-sanctioned dictum that you keep your enemies close. It was one way of dealing with him, but old Westminster hands agreed that he couldn’t have been more of a threat to the PM if he’d been on the opposition benches. Which, if the opposition had looked likely to win an election soon, he doubtless would have been.

  To borrow an assessment, Dreadful piece of work.

  To coin another, “Honky twerp,” muttered Marcus.

  “Hate speech,” warned Shirley.

  “Of course it’s hate speech. I fucking hate him.”

  Shirley glanced at the TV, shrugged, and said, “Thought you were one of the party faithful.”

  “I am. He’s not.”

  Ho was looking from one to the other, as if he’d entirely lost his place.

  Shirley returned her attention to him. “So when did it start, this insane notion you might be in with a chance with Louisa?”

  Ho said, “I can read the signs.”

  “You couldn’t read welcome on a doormat. You seriously think you can read a woman?”

  Ho shrugged. “Bitch is ripe,” he said. “Bitch is ready.”

  Shirley backhanded him. His spectacles went flying.

  Marcus said, “That’ll be my round, then.”

  •••

  Friend or foe?

  There was no getting round it, anyone from that time of her life was a foe.

  Catherine lived in St. John’s Wood, but had no intention of heading there yet. Laying a false trail came naturally—alcoholics learn to dissemble. So she walked north, heading vaguely for the Angel; a woman with a destination, but no great urgency about it. Everyone she passed was thirty years younger, and wearing about as much clothing as covered her own arms. Some shot her glances full of wonderment at one or other of these facts, but this didn’t concern her. Friend or foe didn’t cover all contingencies. These strangers were neither, and she had other things on her mind.

  Sean Donovan was a foe, because anyone from that time of her life was a foe, but he was a decent man, or so Catherine’s memory suggested. He was a soldier, and while this was in some ways an error of tense—Sean Donovan had been a soldier; Sean Donovan was
demonstrably, dishonourably, no longer such—it remained the most accurate description Catherine could summon: you only had to look at him. Mid-fifties now, by rights he should be taking salutes on parade grounds, and having his opinion sought by Whitehall mandarins. Not difficult to picture him before cameras justifying the latest military action. But the last time he’d been before the cameras had been as he was led from a military tribunal in cuffs: found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving, and sentenced to five years.

  For Catherine, this had been a newspaper item rather than a personal shock. She was sober by then, and part of the process of becoming so had been avoiding the company she’d kept when she’d been otherwise. This meant men, of whom Sean Donovan had been one; not a particularly important one, or no more important than any other man from that period, but then again, that was a long list.

  She crossed a road. This made her a little dizzy; not the action in itself, but emerging from her memory to concentrate on doing so. It took effort, peering back into her past. It wasn’t pleasant. For some reason an image of Jackson Lamb swam to mind, cloistered in his gloomy office, but it swam away again. Safely over the road, she risked a look back. Sean Donovan was not following. She hadn’t really expected him to be. At the very least, she had not expected to be able to spot him doing so.

  He was part of her past, but other than knowing that much, she had little to go on. Of their actual lovemaking, if it could be so described, she had no memory. In those days, two drinks in, her immediate future became a blank slate, with everything scrawled thereon erased within moments of its appearance. He could have written her sonnets, or transcribed arias, and it would all be the same to her. But she knew that was never the case; that it had been fuck-buddy sex like always, because in those days anyone would have done, just so long as she had someone to cling to as she slid into the dark. Poems and operas were not required. A bottle would do the trick.

  But while it was true that there were many she’d forgotten, of whom she’d barely been aware even while they were inside her, Sean Donovan had at least been there in the morning once or twice. Fond of the drink himself, he’d done her the false kindness of pretending they were bad as each other. Man, my head this morning. We pushed the boat out all right. But what for her had been blackout territory, for him had been a night on the tiles. She’d been a willing enough partner in this, because she was always willing back then. And if she’d been otherwise, Catherine wondered now, if she’d been sober, would they have stood a chance together? But there was no answering that.