by Mick Herron
“Same difference.” He slid past River and opened the fridge, where half a pizza sat, still in its box. He wormed it out, but left the box where it was. “Seven tweeters in that post code,” he said, closing the fridge door. “Two mentioned people knocking on the door the morning you said.”
“It was me said it,” River put in helpfully. “If that matters.”
It didn’t seem to. “One said they were from the Latter Day Church of Heaven, and the other from the Latter Day Church of Christ the Redeemer. There’s no such places. So the dudes weren’t righteous, doesn’t look like.”
“Is English your second language or your third?”
Ho scowled.
From upstairs came a familiar thump: Jackson Lamb wanting attention.
River said, “He wants your download on Lady Di. What’s that about?”
“It’s below your pay grade,” said Ho, cramming his pizza into his mouth before heading up the stairs.
“Oh, happy day,” said Louisa. “I want him to keep saying that forever.”
River said, “So they weren’t missionaries.”
“Wouldn’t appear so.”
“Which means Sid was right. They were looking for her.”
“Possibly.” The kitchen had filled with the smell of fresh coffee, and for a moment Slough House was transformed. “So it’s like I said before. You need to take this upstairs.”
“The same upstairs using us as practice dummies?”
“I meant Lamb.”
River said, “If we’ve been wiped, how come these guys know who to come looking for? If that’s what’s happening?”
She stared. “You’re not seriously suggesting Lamb has anything to do with it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Except Sid’s in danger.”
“And you plan to get all Jason Statham on it.”
“Tell Catherine I’ve been taken sick, would you? Must have been something I saw Ho eat.”
Before he could leave, she said, “River?”
“What?”
“I don’t want to lose anyone else.”
“When did the Stath ever get lost?”
“Well, he’s made some pretty iffy career choices,” Louisa said, but River was gone.
Afternoons dragged, but this one was reaching its apex now; tipping into evening. This happened differently than up north, where Sid had spent the last few years; differently, too, from the way it happened in cities, where you could measure sunlight’s decline against the buildings. Here there were trees that ought to perform the same function, but they were too variable to rely on, too prone to arbitrary movement, and seemed as if they might be capable of pushing the day on as their moods took them, ushering in the dusk with their gently waving limbs.
They were best watched from upstairs. Sid had told River she stayed in the study, but that wasn’t true. Obviously, she had to use the bathroom, and while these were brief furtive visits, tarried over no longer than necessary to get the job done, there were also times, like now, when she’d climb the stairs to the master bedroom, which had a view of the lane that wound through the trees. This was surprisingly well maintained, given its negligible importance. Eventually it joined forces with a larger road, which in turn fed into a motorway, which in turn became London. All these miles distant, that was a barely imaginable turbulence. Here, in rural stillness, there was a house next door, separated by a generous strip of garden and a bossy hedge; that aside, the next dwelling was a hundred yards down the lane. Before reaching it, you could cut off along a footpath, which took you to the village. She knew all this from a map she’d found in the study. There were other footpaths, dotted lines; you could tear along them, and rip the countryside to shreds. Scatter the pieces like leaves in a wind.
Tonight, anxiety had drawn her upstairs. Being alone all day skewed her emotional thermostat. The continual silence oppressed her, yet any unexpected noise—a passing lorry, passing voices—would have her crouching against a wall, waiting for it to subside. And then she’d find herself stroking the rift in her skull, wondering how much of her identity, of Sidonie Baker, had been carved away by that bullet’s passage. She had never been one to cower against walls. That was something the bullet had left her with; a whole new character trait, conjured out of pain and confusion.
There wasn’t much pain, to be fair. There were occasional blinding headaches that came from nowhere and vanished just as suddenly, but they were happening less often. But her dreams had altered character, and made sleep bizarre and unrewarding. The bullet itself would appear to her, taking on the shape of a white-suited Belgian with an asymmetrical moustache. It had taken an unfeasibly long while for Sid to deduce that this was Hercule Poirot. Your little grey cells, non? he would twinkle. So many of them, how you say, smeared on the pavement. Tt Tt Tt. This vowel-less admonition would recur during her waking hours. It was her fault, was what he meant. You got in my way. Tt Tt Tt.
The bullet had been removed from her head in the hours that followed the shooting. But it remained there nevertheless; her deadly passenger, with her for the long haul.
The sky grew darker and the world through the window dimmed. Before coming upstairs she had cut a slice from the loaf River had brought, and wrapped it round a hunk of cheddar. Bread, cheese. She supposed River had other things to do than plan menus, but still. That could be something to tease him about when he turned up, teasing being something requiring forethought now. If she were to re-enter her old life she’d need more than a map of the neighbourhood, which was illuminated suddenly, the neighbourhood not the map, by a pair of headlights slicing crescent shapes out of the dusk, briefly rendering bright the room: its bare painted walls, its curtainless windowframe. She stopped chewing. The car wasn’t River’s, but it slowed anyway, and came to a halt on the verge. The engine died. Something inside Sid woke and fluttered. The car would move on soon. It would start up, drive away, and before long River would arrive, and she’d tease him about the bread and cheese.
Tt Tt Tt, said Hercule Poirot in her head. Tt Tt Tt.
But the car didn’t move. Instead its doors opened and two people got out, a man and a woman she recognised. They had knocked on her door in Cumbria, dressed as missionaries, and here they were, come to kill her again.
All down the lane the trees shifted as a gust of wind rifled through them. If she were out there she’d hear them sigh as they moved, but from inside the house, it was a silent blessing they bestowed. Their jobs were done, and night had fallen, and it seemed to Sid they were waving goodbye.
Part Two
Chasing Tails
They called it Silicon Roundabout, because of the tech firms clustered in its orbit, and from this end of Old Street, at the top of the sloped passage dropping into Subway 3, the landscape it commanded was a familiar London medley of the weathered and the new; the social housing estate and the Eye Hospital balancing the swollen glass bulb of what Lech thought was a hotel, and the complicated façade of an office block straight from an SF comic. Over the roundabout itself, part-shrouded in builders’ canopy, hung a four-sided video screen, scrolling through an endless cycle of ads for the Pixel 3a, but looking as if it wanted to be broadcasting something more in keeping with the times: cage-fighting, or Rollerball, or a party leadership hustings.
They’d waited out the worst of the evening crush in a nearby pub; one blessed with a good location, relieving it of the necessity of making an effort. Lech’s small red wine lasted forty minutes, during which Shirley had drained two pints of lager and explained, for reasons that escaped him, the various kinds of body-modelling on offer within a two-hundred yard radius: tongue-splitting, ear-pointing and tunnelling, this last involving opening holes in earlobes large enough to ease a pencil through. Lech wasn’t sure he hadn’t preferred being ignored. Through windows partly obscured by promises aimed at passersby—Good Food! Happy Hour 5–7!—
he watched office workers heading for bus stop or underground. There’d been a touch of rain in the air, a dampness on the pavements, and he wondered whether his raincoat was still on a hook in the flat he’d shared with Sara, and whether falling in with Shirley’s mischief was a wise idea, and whether doubling the length of an hour made it twice as happy, or only half.
“So anyway,” Shirley said, “I was thinking of getting my ears sharpened. What do you reckon?”
He reckoned Lamb would love that, possibly to the point where it triggered one of his seismic coughing fits. “Sounds cool. Go for it.”
She looked pleased. “Maybe I will.” Then checked her watch: “Okay. Time to go.”
Lech decided to give the last mouthful of wine a miss. He stood and, when she didn’t follow suit, gave her a questioning look.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be there.”
But she wasn’t, or not that Lech could see. Collar upturned, he strode down the passage towards Subway 3 and turned into the underground complex that always felt to him like a colosseum, though whether that made its commuters gladiators or lion-fodder was open to question. Down here, a few timid retail premises huddled; the kind that looked like they’d not survive ten minutes in the open air. On the other hand, stranger weeds flourished in London’s cracks and crevices. He walked past book shop, card shop, coffee shop, key-cutters; skirted a post-box-sized screen reeling through the same ads as its monster parent overhead, and noted without pausing a sign announcing Subway 2’s refurbishment. What had been its entryway was boarded over, and he could hear drilling. There were still people around, mostly heading into the Tube station, but he carried on by, veering right towards Subway 1—the Hoxton/Shoreditch exit—past sandwich shop and flower shop, whose brief fragrance was a shower of light in the dark. At the far end he took the stairs up to ground level, where he doubled back past the gated entrance to the housing estate then, without looking behind, made a 180º turn onto the slope heading back to the subway. Overground, underground. Nobody paid attention that he could tell, but he was careful not to check. He didn’t see Shirley anywhere, either.
And what were the odds, he wondered, back in the underground colosseum, that this was some bastard prank; that the others had already joined her in the pub, where they were busting a gut over his gullible goose chase?
. . . Fuck them, he thought.
But not quite yet. Fuck them in ten minutes; maybe fuck them in twenty. Because he didn’t have anything else to occupy him, and he’d always been a walker after dark, Lech Wicinski; a long-time stroller of the empty streets.
And if these streets weren’t exactly empty, or entirely streets, they’d do for now.
I suppose you’re wondering why you’re gathered in the library.
That was Hercule Poirot speaking: the memory of her bullet, deep inside her brain.
And she was indeed gathered in the library, if that was what hiding in the study amounted to. But other suspects were nowhere. It was just Sid alone, and whoever was outside.
She’d come downstairs while they were on the garden path, and now sat with her back against the closed study door, the doorbell dying away. Nothing sounds louder than a bell in an empty house. Her heart was fluttering, her insides clammy. The study was in darkness. Nobody here. The bell rang again, then once more. And then the flap on the letterbox jangled, and she imagined the pair taking it in turns to drop to one knee and peer into the hallway.
Life went quiet again, the only disturbance the faint rattling of a doorknob.
In a perfect world, they’d have gone away. But in a perfect world, Sid wouldn’t have been shot in the head.
There was a shelf in the study devoted to objects rather than books. This had struck Sid as strange. She hadn’t known the O.B.—which was what River had called him, so it was hard for her not to—she hadn’t known the O.B., but had known who he was, and it was difficult to imagine the Service legend, the man who’d steered the ship during the captaincy of various First Desks, as collecting knick-knacks. A glass globe; a hunk of concrete; a lump of misshaped metal. But that was how lives worked, as a slow accretion of private detail, and what mattered more was whether these objects would make useful weapons. She supposed they might, if the wielder was in decent shape. Which she wasn’t, but this didn’t stop her taking one in her hand, a pleasingly heavy glass globe, with just the thinnest slice removed to allow it to stand. It contained nothing. She might have expected a butterfly wing, or a whispered fragment of autumn—a leaf, a pebble—but it was only glass and weight. Crouched against the door, she cradled it in both hands, allowing herself to believe that it anchored her to the world.
Which worked up to a point, but that point was reached when she heard the tapping on the back door.
There’d been a tourist, a year or two back, who’d been separated from his party in the underground, and it was three and a half days before they found him. It was so nearly a classical myth, it wasn’t even funny. Lech was starting to recognise the feeling. He turned into Subway 4—St. Luke’s/Clerkenwell—passed the public toilets and turned left, up the slope, beneath its pedestrian bridge, and arrived for the fifth time at the plaza, with its trees and benches and flowerbeds, its ranks of e-bikes. The rain was holding off still, and there were fewer people. It was that lull between the end of the working day and the start of a weeknight’s drinking; less frantic than the weekend version, but not without its panicky framework. Sometimes you clung onto the edges of a day because what went on in the middle ate away at your soul. Sometimes it was the other way round. Lech shook his head, dispelling the notion that his days held no safe places, and kept walking: past the appalling mural, stags and druids, and back down the stairs into the half-light.
And there he was again.
First time Lech noticed him he’d been wearing a grey mac. He was now wearing a black one, but its lapels were open enough that Lech could see the grey lining: a reversible, a swift and handy costume change. He’d been wearing specs earlier too, and wasn’t now. Didn’t matter. Lech had his number. Kept it to himself, though; didn’t let it show in change of pace or curl of lip as he reached the central area and looped back towards Subway 3: Moorgate and Old Street West (South Side). He was starting to feel as if he could draw the colosseum freehand, and people the result with sasquatch-figures, lumpen and drooling.
He climbed the stairs, waited a full two minutes, then headed for the slope and walked back down. Give his tail time to start wondering if he’d got lost in the surrounding streets.
The crowd was thinner. Still no sign of Shirley, and he was now about eighty per cent sure she’d been playing him, and would spend the rest of the week, or maybe her life, laughing herself sick whenever she passed him on the stairs: sucker spent an evening circling Silicon Roundabout. He supposed that meant he’d have to retaliate, which would no doubt lead to massive escalation. Well, everybody had to die sometime. When he passed the central pillar he spotted his tail again, his mac black side out, and without pausing to study him, Lech registered relief in his body language. Good good. He thought he’d messed up, and allowed Lech to get away. For now—for the next minute or so—he’d overcompensate by keeping him in sight, or that was the theory.
Lech remembered that feeling, those moments during training when you knew you’d screwed up, and wondered if this was the one that would tip the balance; lead to the brief interview where you were thanked for your time, and assured that there were plenty of avenues that someone with your talents might usefully explore. Landscape gardening or life insurance. Maybe something in IT. But Regent’s Park wasn’t in your future, or a subject you’d ever talk about again. Sign here, please.
To this kid here, that probably felt like the worst of all possible outcomes. But trust me, thought Lech, as he walked back along Subway 4—trust me—that’s not the worst that can happen.
Instead of reaching the end and heading streetw
ards, he turned into the public toilet.
The tapping paused, as if a reply were expected. When none came, it started again.
And perhaps, if she stayed very still, this would stop happening. But that was frightened-animal thinking; the instinct that freezes a rabbit in a road. This rarely causes cars to disappear.
The study curtains were open. She’d tried the windows the day before, hoping to let the room breathe, but they were locked, and she hadn’t found a key. An image of throwing herself through them came and went, a scene from a film, which in real life would leave her in bloody rags on the lawn.
And she couldn’t call River. Her phone was in the cottage in Cumbria, or that was where she’d last seen it. When you went dark, your phone was the first thing you ditched.
Can’t call for help; can’t dash for safety.
This was what got rabbits killed.
She’d been padding about in socks, but her trainers were under the O.B.’s chair. Relinquishing the globe she crawled across to reach them, pulling them on and lacing them up in a supine position. Wearing them gave her a small measure of comfort; an extra protective layer. Tt Tt Tt said the bullet. As well as being the voice of Poirot it was the voice of reason, it seemed. Eager to remind her that any notion of safety was balls.
The tapping paused.
Sid risked a look at the window from behind the bulk of the chair. She saw nobody; just the waving shadow of a tree: goodbye. It might have been her heart playing tricks.
But it happened again.
Only it wasn’t a tapping now; more a squeaking, like someone rubbing a finger against glass. The back door had a glass pane, she remembered. A glass pane in a wooden frame. And she had locked the door after River’s departure last night because that was what you did when you were hiding; you locked doors. Even doors with glass inserts, which you didn’t have to be an expert to find your way through; merely someone with a disregard for damage.