Real Tigers

by Mick Herron

  “Where is she?”

  A mock-sad shake of the head. “Let’s move on to how you get her back, shall we?”

  He was enjoying this too much, River thought. As if whatever it was he wanted was secondary to the method of acquiring it.

  “What are you after?”

  “Information.”

  “About what?”

  “You don’t need to know about what. You simply have to steal it.”

  “Or?”

  “Do you really want me to go into details? Very well . . . ”

  He paused and River knew, without turning, that someone was behind him. It turned out to be the couple who’d pointed up at them a minute ago. They walked past, trying not to appear curious; maybe civic-minded types who wanted to be sure a violent assault wasn’t underway; maybe locals who were hoping one was. When they reached the Barbican side they looked back, but only once, and then were gone.

  “The men holding her have . . . poor impulse control.”

  “Impulse control,” River repeated.

  “Poor impulse control, yes. I’d say about eighty minutes short of going critical, in fact. If you wanted to put a figure on it.”

  River reached out and smoothed down the man’s lapels where his two-fisted grip had crumpled them. “You might want to remember this later,” he said. “That you once found all this funny.”

  “Can’t wait. Meanwhile, you have an errand to run. And,” and he looked at his watch, “seventy-nine minutes before those men I mentioned start loosening their belts. Do you want to waste any more of them threatening me?”

  “What do you want?” River said.

  The man told him.

  Two minutes after River left the bridge at a run, Marcus Longridge and Shirley Dander emerged from the alley onto Aldersgate Street. Marcus looked one way and Shirley the other. Pedestrians, freshly released from the underground, were trooping across the road at the lights, and more were clustered round the entrance to the gym on the corner. There were buses heading in both directions, and a cyclist who, judging by his disregard for other vehicles, had an organ donor card and was in a hurry to use it; there was a woman in Council livery pushing a dustcart their way, and a man in a grey suit observing all this from the pedestrian bridge into the Barbican. But there was no sign of River Cartwright.

  “See him?” Marcus asked.

  “Nope,” said Shirley. “You?”

  “Nope.” He paused, allowing River one last opportunity to reveal himself, then said, “Fancy an ice cream?”

  “Yeah, all right,” Shirley said.

  They headed off towards Smithfield, where they were less likely to be spotted.

  The man on the bridge had disappeared from sight.

  Catherine kept a spare set of doorkeys in a matchbox taped to the underside of her desk, where Louisa had stumbled upon them quite early in her Slough House career. She collected them now, and headed off to St. John’s Wood by cab. It was into the twenties already, bright sunlight blindly bouncing off glass and metal surfaces: enough to make you want to sit in a dark room, even if you didn’t want to do that anyway. She’d never been to Catherine’s flat before. For a while she wondered what that said about her, about the whole of the Slough House crew, and the paper-thin friendships their daily lives were scribbled on, but mostly she concentrated on not thinking; on simply moving in a bubble through London; not being at her desk, not filling the space left by Min.

  The flat was in an art deco block, shielded at the front by a well-maintained hedge. Louisa paid the taxi and pocketed the receipt. The block’s rounded edges and metal-framed windows lent it a science-fiction air: this had once been how the future would look. Its tiled and shiny lobby made her sandals clack, but that was the only obvious noise. The whole block seemed unnaturally quiet, as if Catherine weren’t the only occupant to have gone missing. It was a fate Louisa would cheerfully have wished on her own neighbours. Unnatural quiet wasn’t so much of a thing around her way.

  Catherine lived on the topmost floor. Louisa rang the bell and waited a full minute before letting herself in, calling Catherine’s name as she did so. No reply. She did a quick scoot through, making sure the place was empty. The bed was made, but that was no surprise—Catherine made a place look neater just by being in it. She was never likely to leave havoc in her wake. There was a landline in the sitting room, but no pad for taking messages; a calendar on the kitchen wall, but nothing marked for the month save a hairdresser’s appointment two weeks hence. A shopping list on the fridge door gave nothing away, and while a pile of books four deep on the bedside table suggested Catherine was a restless reader, none of the scraps used as bookmarks taught Louisa anything. It wasn’t a sterile environment—was a lived-in space—but it held no clues as to where its occupant might have gone. The wardrobe was full, resembling a dresser’s rack from a Merchant-Ivory production, and there was an empty suitcase in the hall closet. Nor was there any sign of those things Catherine might be expected to carry round with her: purse, phone, sunglasses, travel pass. At first glance, it looked like Catherine had had an ordinary morning: had got up and left for work as usual, and whatever had kept her from arriving there had happened en route. But when Louisa checked the dishwasher, she found it full of clean dry crockery long since cooled to normal, and there were no breakfast dishes stacked and ready for the next loading. A palm on the kettle came away stone cold. Either Catherine had left without breakfast, or she hadn’t been here last night.

  “Dirty stop-out,” Louisa muttered, but without conviction.

  She’d stopped out herself last night, of course. Had got home at seven, time enough to shower and change for work. More than once last year she and Min had spent an evening in a bar, passing comment on the hook-ups happening around them, encounters that increased in desperation the later they occurred, and had congratulated each other on being out of that game. Louisa had been careful never to add “for good” because fate was the kind of attack dog you didn’t want to taunt. But tempting fate or not, “for good” didn’t happen. “For bad” looked like it had come to stay instead.

  Enough of that. She checked the bathroom. The air was dry, and there were no damp towels. Catherine hadn’t been here for a day or more.

  Louisa returned to the sitting room, trying not to compare and contrast with her own studio flat, which was tiny and crooked and needed serious attention, like maybe arson. Everything here was, if not arranged in straight lines, at least in its proper place, and care had been taken in deciding what that place was. So far, so Catherine. None of this would surprise any of the slow horses, except probably Ho, to whom it wouldn’t have occurred to form an opinion. But it didn’t tell the whole story. This was where the surface Catherine lived, that was all. Which was why there was no wine cache in a cupboard; no spirits in the fridge, or emergency sherry on a dresser. Or even any glasses, or not proper ones. Louisa frequently ran out of glasses, but that was because glass broke easily, not because she was avoiding the issue. Here, it was deliberate, as if the occasional use of a suggestive receptacle, even for a virgin fruit juice, might nudge a scale that would tip the drinker into a puddle outside the nearest bar.

  So now came the obvious thought, that Catherine had fallen off the wagon. She knew Catherine was an alcoholic, not because the two women had ever discussed it but because Lamb made reference to it often enough. And one thing everyone knew about alcoholism was, it wasn’t like the flu. You didn’t shake it off and carry on; you tamped it down and hoped it wouldn’t reignite. Which meant anything could have happened; Catherine could have been on her way home and some tiny incident, invisible to everyone else, could have thrown a switch inside her, redirecting her to oblivion. Louisa wouldn’t put it past Lamb, even—who always kept booze in the office—to have tempted her with a taste. Leaving Catherine with an unkillable thirst, and the whole of London mapped with watering holes.

  But the
image wouldn’t stick. Catherine drunk; Catherine passed out under a hedge, or under a stranger—it was like a punchline to an unsuccessful joke. Because all of Catherine’s ramrod rectitude—the right-angled efficiency of her office; the primness of her dress; the fact that she so rarely swore—these things didn’t make it funny that she’d once been an habitual drinker; they were her defences against ever again becoming one. The same way her flat was, with its places for everything, and all of them filled. Even the private parts of her public life were a form of cover, because they were all joes in the end, all spooks were joes, even those who never set foot outside their secret offices; from the anoracked stoats monitoring phone calls in GCHQ to the intelligence weasels over the river; from the blue-eyed boys and girls on Regent’s Park’s hub to the slow horses themselves, gradually disappearing under reams of yellowing paper—they were all joes, every last spook of them, because they all knew what it was like to live nine-tenths of their lives undercover. It was why they’d joined the Service in the first place: this sneaking suspicion that the whole damn world was hostile. The only ones you could trust were those you worked alongside, and you couldn’t trust them either, because there was no friend falser than another spook. Always, they’d stab you in the back, cut you off at the knees, or just plain die.

  Louisa didn’t yet know which of those Catherine had done, but she was certain she hadn’t gone off on a bender. She guessed Lamb thought that too, but she opened her phone to let him know anyway. There was no such thing as too much information.

  Seventy-nine minutes . . .

  It had not taken the man long to explain what he wanted. He gave the impression of being used to imparting instructions: a class thing, River thought—the country still riddled with this, and especially London: walking talking suits, inflated by their own self-importance, each and every one of them asking for a good hard kick in the slats—

  This the beat in the background as he ran.

  Bond would have leaped from the bridge onto a passing bus, or drop-kicked a motorcyclist and hijacked his wheels. Bourne would have surfed the streets on car roofs, or slipped into parkour mode, bouncing off walls and wheelie bins, always knowing which alley to cut through . . .

  River threw a quick glance at the nearby row of Boris bikes, shook his head, and ran down into the tube station.

  Not far from Regent’s Park, below a recently renovated local authority swimming baths, lurk several subterranean levels unknown to the public. Here, Service members—joes and handlers alike; desk staff too, when their annual appraisals demand—undergo various forms of hand-to-hand combat training, partly to improve their chances of surviving assault by an armed opponent, should such circumstances arise, but largely to ensure they can maim an unsuspecting victim should the opportunity present itself. Pens, coffee cups, spectacles, pocket change: all and any can be used to inflict permanent damage on a potential enemy.

  How to do the same to a subordinate is a skill you pick up on the job.

  There were six of them at the meeting in the Park, five Second Desks and Dame Ingrid Tearney, but to all intents and purposes, four of them might have been the articles of furniture their informal designation suggested. Because, like most other meetings with this cast list, this was all about Tearney and Taverner: Dame Ingrid, who’d helmed the Service for the best part of a decade, and intended to carry on doing so until they gave her a state funeral or made her queen, and Diana Taverner—“Lady Di”—who was Second Desk (Ops), and ruled the hub at Regent’s Park, which gave her life-and-death control over joes in the field, but meant she had to hold doors open for the Dame.

  It was no secret that she coveted the top job. But, twelve years younger than Tearney, her window of opportunity was closing with every passing day.

  The meeting was about resources. Every meeting was about resources these days, whatever their agenda—the bumpy road of austerity having rattled the Service’s axles as much as anyone else’s—but this one was literally about resources, and how there were going to be fewer of them for the foreseeable future, even though there had already been fewer of them for the recent past. Cuts were in the interests of efficiency, according to a Treasury Department nobody was ever going to mistake for an embodiment of that virtue, and cuts were, more to the point, going to happen, so the Service might as well learn to live with them. Especially since, with the recent reshuffle, the Service had no defender Down the Corridor.

  Because their new boss—the new Home Secretary—was Regent’s Park’s loudest critic. The fact that, decades previously, Peter Judd’s application to join the Service had been given the thumbs down was widely held to have played no small part in fostering this antipathy, but his psychological assessment had been so damning—had basically been written in block capitals, using red ink—that even now, old hands agreed, it cut both ways. On the downside, they were paying the price for having pissed off a narcissistic sociopath with family money, a power complex and a talent for bearing a grudge; but on the up, had Judd actually been allowed into the Service, he’d almost certainly have escalated the Cold War into a hot one, if his intervening years in diplomatic roles were anything to go by. But failures in diplomacy often score highly with the public, and Judd’s star remained obstinately in the ascendant. For the moment at least, the Service would have to live with him.

  Besides, while it cut both ways, every two-edged sword has a handle. Which was what Tearney was grasping now, preparing to wield the blade where it would do her most good.

  “I know this isn’t what any of you want to hear,” she said. “But the figures are in on projected spending levels for the next two quarters. There’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that the bad news isn’t as bad as it might be.” She paused, allowing a rueful grin to sweep round the table like a Mexican wave, breaking only on the stony reef of Diana Taverner. That was fine. Dame Ingrid knew how to play a room, and isolating the troublemaker was always a good move.

  She removed her glasses, which were looped round her neck by a chain, and allowed them to drop onto her bosom. Her wig, today, was the blonde halo—a sure indication, for Dame Ingrid–watchers, of serious intent; its downy appearance meant to soften the blows that were coming.

  “There’ll be no recruitment at Desk-support level for the remainder of the financial year. In fact, come the Autumn Statement, we might well find ourselves having to shed those appointed within the last two years—I know, I know, and I’m sorry.” She looked it, too. But this was one of Ingrid Tearney’s natural strengths; what she lacked in comeliness, she made up for in apparent empathy. “But these are the realities we’re dealing with, and it will do none of us any good to kick against them.”

  Taverner, of course, was first to ignore that.

  “I need admin support.”

  “But you’re doing so well without it, Diana.”

  “Ingrid, I’m spending half my time chasing up office supplies.”

  “I’m sure that’s an exaggeration.”

  She was sure it wasn’t. Taverner’s junior had transferred across the river a while back, and for ten months she’d been holding down two roles: acting as her own assistant, as she’d put it in a memo. Given the tendency of Taverner’s assistants to burn out within eighteen months tops, there were those who were anticipating a schizophrenic meltdown soon, but Dame Ingrid wasn’t holding her breath. If Diana Taverner ever self-destructed, she’d find a way of doing so to her own advantage.

  She said, “Diana. We all know you’ve been hamstrung by the lack of assistance this past year, but Finance feels it’s better to make sacrifices at office level than to risk having to make them on the streets. I’m sure you understand that.”

  Because not to do so would have been tantamount to declaring she’d sooner put the public in danger than make her own coffee.

  “And besides, and this is something I was going to bring up anyway, it’s not gone unnoticed what a
splendid job you’ve been doing flying solo. Finance was most complimentary about your solution to the, ah, logistical difficulties we’ve been facing with Confidential Storage. Most impressive.”

  Dame Ingrid’s use of capitals was a trait all were familiar with. It meant footnotes were following.

  She said, “For those of you who don’t know, Diana’s solution to our Information Overload was actioned as of the end of Q1, and I believe I’m right in saying that your own sector’s process has now been completed—Diana?”

  Taverner gave the slightest of nods; acknowledging not so much the implied praise as Dame Ingrid’s skill in placing it so neatly. Well played. She could already sense the killer thrust which was surely on its way.

  But which was temporarily diverted by one of her fellow D2s.

  “This would be the rehousing of operational records?”

  “That’s right, George,” Ingrid Tearney said sweetly. “So good of you to pay attention. And as we all know, where Ops goes, the rest of us follow, like children trotting after the Pied Piper. There’ll be a memo circulated, but, in brief, we can expect our on-site paperwork mountains to become, well, molehills in the near future. If it works for Ops, it’ll work for everyone. Operations was always going to be the biggest problem. When Ops go wrong it creates so much paperwork.”

  “But not as much as our successes do,” Taverner said through not-quite-gritted teeth.

  “Of course, my dear. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

  “Of course not.”

  Confidential Storage, to use Dame Ingrid’s capitals, had long been an issue. Confidentiality was key, obviously, but the rather more prosaic problem of where to keep everything had grown exponentially. Digitalisation was no cure-all: encryption was one thing, and Ingrid Tearney had enormous faith in Regent’s Park’s ability to render all and any information in its possession incomprehensible—it was, after all, a branch of the Civil Service. But fear of records being, to employ the modish word, disambiguated was a lesser concern: a more alarming threat was the cyber-equivalent of a dirty bomb, a virtual attack that would render departmental records so much spam.