by Mick Herron
She said, “Down the road. Not towards the village, I mean. Else their lights would have shone through my curtains.”
Which weren’t pulled shut, not entirely. There was a slight gap, in front of which a small table was positioned, a notepad and pen waiting. Seeing this, River had a view of Mrs. Knox’s life as clear as if it were spotlit; saw the heart of her empty days. Without asking, he crossed the room and picked the notebook up.
“What on earth are you—”
XTH???
“That’s private!”
“Was this the number plate? Part of it?”
“I’m not some kind of snoop!”
“I really don’t care. Was this the number plate?”
She said, “I live here alone, you know.”
XTH???, which he could easily remember, but didn’t need to. “Sorry,” he said, though he wasn’t. He ripped the page from its spiral spine.
“You can’t do that!”
But he could, and had. He thanked her, or apologised, or supposed afterwards he’d done at least one of the two. He didn’t close the door behind him, either, in his rush to reach his car; a memory etched into his mind as he pulled away showed Mrs. Knox framed in an oblong of light on her doorstep. She might have been wringing her hands.
•••
“So what happened to you?”
Shirley shrugged. “What did it look like? I was waiting for you to draw him into the net.”
“I didn’t see you anywhere.”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
And besides, he’d have needed super-vision, since Shirley had been half a mile away, having decided to lose her own tail before tackling Lech’s. Northern Line to King’s Cross seemed a good bet, and had almost certainly been successful, in that Shirley had grown confused changing platforms, resulting in a brief, unexpected excursion to Mornington Crescent. She hadn’t noticed anyone else making the same tortuous journey, so assumed her follower was currently heading wherever the Northern Line went. Unless nobody had been following her in the first place. That was the trouble with this bullshit training game the Park was playing: nobody told you when it started, and when or if it stopped.
Once back at Old Street, she’d hovered by the station barriers, then walked a circuit—underground, overground—without spotting Lech, let alone his tail. So she decided she needed a little sharpener, just to keep her edges shiny, and headed into the toilets to do a line, which was when she’d heard Lech’s voice coming from the Gents.
But all he needed to know was that she’d been there when the chips were down.
She made a sideways gesture with a flattened hand. “Moves like Wonder Woman.”
They were in a pub again, a different one, having left the colosseum by separate routes and regrouped on a side street off Shoreditch High. Black Mac—whom Shirley had rendered comatose with a small leather sap—was last seen propped on a toilet, outstretched legs keeping the cubicle door closed. He won’t die, had been Shirley’s considered opinion. And okay, she wasn’t a medic, but she had considerable pharmaceutical expertise.
Lech was twitchy, his eyes flicking doorwards every time it opened. You’d think he’d never beaten up a stranger in a toilet before. And when she’d showed him the sap, he’d actually groaned.
“Put that away. It’s a deadly weapon.”
“I’ll just say it’s a sex aid.”
“Still probably arrestable.”
She’d been interrupted in her earlier mission, so headed for the loo before she’d finished her first pint, and returned brighter-eyed, bushier-tailed, then dumped the contents of Black Mac’s pockets on the table.
“For fuck’s sake,” Lech hissed, scooping keys and phone up and transferring them to his pocket. “Why don’t you just hoist a banner? ‘Muggers R Us’?”
“Nobody’s watching.”
“You hope.” He thumbed through the wallet while Shirley took a few life-enhancing draughts of lager. She’d been in this pub before. Shoreditch was her stamping ground, though she might have to expand that definition. Stamping and bopping-on-the-head. She examined her fingers, which were a little tingly. Nothing gets the sap moving like swinging a sap . . . She thought about sharing this with Wicinski, but it was maybe too soon. He’d gone green when Black Mac hit the deck.
And now he said, “You know what I’m not finding?”
“What?”
“A Service card.”
“Yeah, check again.”
“I already did.”
“Well, maybe he had it in his trouser pocket. I might have missed it.”
“Or he didn’t have one.”
“Or he left it at home.”
“You ever do that?”
She didn’t. Her card was as good as sewn onto her body: there was always the chance she’d need to flash it at a copper making a drugs bust, or use it to impress someone. Which she hardly ever did, by the way. Maybe twice.
Lech said, “What if he wasn’t the tail?”
“He probably was.”
“But what if he wasn’t?”
“What’s his ID say?”
There were credit cards in the wallet, their user name D Walker. Nothing with a photo on it. And no Service card.
Lech said, “He was wearing a reversible mac. He changed it while I was doing a loop. So I wouldn’t notice he was hanging around.”
“There you go. Definitely a tail.”
“Unless I got that wrong. Maybe he had it black side out all along.”
“So what was he up to?”
“Waiting for someone?”
“So why’d he follow you into the toilet?”
“Because he needed a piss,” Lech said. Then: “Jesus, what have we done?”
“Worst case scenario,” Shirley said, “we’ve decked a civilian.”
“And stolen his wallet and phone.”
“Yeah, that too.”
“This is serious!”
Which it was, but you had to see the funny side was Shirley’s take. And you could trace the culpability right back to Regent’s Park, if you wanted to get technical.
On the other hand, if you wanted to get evidential, you could trace it back to Shirley’s leather sap.
Lech said, “I’m not exactly unrecognisable.”
“Neither am I,” offered Shirley.
“Yes, but he didn’t see you.”
Shirley thought about that. “You might be in some shit.”
“Thanks.”
She looked at the booty on the table. “Probably we should get rid of this.”
“We can post it back to him,” Lech said.
“Or he could pay for the next round,” she said.
It didn’t seem much to ask. Not after Black Mac had wasted their time. But Lech was having none of it, and Shirley watched grumpily as the wallet joined the rest of the treasure trove in his pocket.
“Another drink?” she suggested.
“I’m going home,” said Lech.
“Might be best to avoid Old Street.”
He didn’t appear any more grateful for that than he had for Shirley saving his neck in the toilet. But she was used to going unappreciated, and stayed for another drink anyway.
At the meetings she attended less often than she should—My name is Catherine, and I’m an alcoholic—they suggested that you let go; not fret over things you couldn’t control. This was for the avoidance of guilt. One of the side-effects of addiction, or recovering therefrom, was that you felt you had let the world down, as if you’d nodded off at a critical moment and allowed things to slide. And given the parlous state of that world, and the moral bankrupts governing it, it would be hard not to let the guilt become overwhelming. She knew all this. It was a series of small steps heading in the wrong direction: best to stick to the twel
ve recommended at those meetings. Make amends to those we have harmed, for instance.
Kay White was on her mind.
It was a peculiarity of Slough House that its occupants tended to know where everyone was. If some organisations had Chinese walls, to prevent confidential information spreading, Slough House’s walls were Swiss, inasmuch as they were full of holes; both literally—occupants had been known to punch the plaster—and in the sense that there was always leakage. The anguish of the floorboards and the creaking of the stairs told you who was where: it was an aural panopticon, wired for sound. And yet, it was easy to forget about each other. The separate miseries that slow horses came wrapped in, and the ongoing drudgery that was their daily grind, meant that much of the time they were on their own. Some more so than others. Kay White, for example. Nobody had liked her. She never shut up, for a start. So it felt no huge surprise when she’d betrayed them, and no huge loss when she’d been sacked. And what it felt like now she was dead, thought Catherine, was just more of the same: the woman had left no mark here, nothing to grieve over, and where there was no grief there was often guilt.
To assuage which, Catherine Standish was making mental amends. The working day was done but she remained at her desk, hands clasped on her lap, eyes closed. It might have looked like prayer, but was simply the summoning of memory: she was trying to find a moment she’d shared with Kay White, something that stood out against the background noise. But there was nothing of substance. Most moments spent with Kay had been an attempt to block her out. When she’d departed, along with—the name escaped her—it had been a relief. And that wasn’t a matter of blame, Catherine told herself. It was just life, which was full of passing strangers, even if some of them hung around for years.
. . . Struan Loy. That was the name. Loy had been here at the same time as Kay, and Lamb had kicked the pair of them out together.
And Struan Loy too had joined that chorus invisible; those who’d drifted from the margins of memory. In Catherine’s life, most such had been fellow drunks, who’d done their best to blur her recollection by being little more than blurs themselves, smeary with alcohol. But there were slow horses among them, which was why that prick of guilt was needling her. That prick of shame. She should go home, really. But before that—before running the gauntlet of London’s bars and pubs, its off-licences and supermarkets, its corner shops with their furtive shelves of booze, all calling her name as she passed—before any of that, she’d have a quick trawl through the usual search engines, and see if she could find out what Struan Loy was up to these days.
Maybe that would soothe her conscience, for a while.
Peter Judd said, “We live in new times, with new conditions, and new alignments are coming into being. This is a natural, and indeed ah ah ah a necessary, progression. For progression it is. And those who fail to appreciate that will suffer the usual fate of those unable to adapt to new circumstances.”
“You mean political defeat.”
“I mean political extinction.”
“Give me a break,” said Diana.
It would have been a nice moment if Channel Go had indeed gone to a break then, but it chundered on regardless.
“And you believe,” the interviewer went on, “that Desmond Flint is one of those ushering in these new conditions we’re disc—”
Diana killed transmission.
Judd’s TV appearances hadn’t diminished in number since he’d left office, a career-turn some commenters had described as his fall from grace. But grace wasn’t something he’d ever aspired to, and its absence hadn’t hindered him. Besides, the notion that he was a spent force only held weight if you heeded the current wisdom, and wisdom was no longer an asset when making political predictions. The paths to power of current world leaders—paths including conspiracy to assault, knee-jerk racism, indeterminate fecundity and cheating at golf—were so askew from the traditional routes that only an idiot would have dared forecast future developments. It wasn’t unfitting, then, that Judd’s popularity as a political pundit continued. Judd might not have been an idiot himself, but his core supporters were a different story.
She was in her office, its glass wall frosted for privacy. On the hub, the night crew was settling into business, prepared to respond to the routine emergencies of national security. One of these, she considered, was even now unfolding: Judd had gone ahead with what he’d hinted at, and was throwing his weight behind the Yellow Vest movement. There were those who’d regard this as tantamount to pitching in with the Nazi Party. But then, Nazis had a lot of support these days. That old saw about learning from the past didn’t always mean studying monstrous historical movements to ensure they never happened again. It could indicate an intention to perfect their trajectories, in the hope that they’d triumph next time.
Along with Judd’s hint had come veiled threats.
When you disappoint rich and powerful men, they let their displeasure be known.
And when you’d painted yourself into a corner, it was best to let the paint dry before leaving the room.
Earlier that afternoon, she’d had a meeting with the Ops team, one of whose ongoing low-level engagements was infiltration of the Yellow Vest movement: nothing too significant; a couple of youngsters distributing leaflets, stacking chairs and generally making themselves useful. An eyes-on approach, with the potential to upgrade to dicks-out if the situation demanded. But Diana had announced that she was pulling the plug.
Others around the table had exchanged puzzled looks.
“Is that wise? All signs suggest that the movement’s gaining ground, not withering away.”
“And we have a tightrope to walk,” Diana said. “Our remit is security, and that doesn’t include an over-zealous policing of dissenting voices.”
“But—”
“I wasn’t inviting discussion. I was stating strategy.”
“If you say so.”
“I’m pretty certain I do. I’m pretty certain this is me, doing just that.”
The mood had brightened when she’d gone on to outline the new funding, but the instruction had left her feeling treacherous, and she’d been glad when the meeting was over. A necessary move, though. It would give her a little breathing space while she decided what to do about Judd, about Cantor too. That a decision would be reached, a solution found, was a given. She’d wandered into the briar patch, true, but she hadn’t lasted this long at the Park without learning to trust her abilities. Even unelected, Judd remained a big beast in the political jungle. But Diana had done her growing up on Spook Street, where big beasts numbered among the daily kill.
He moved fast, though, she’d give him that. She hadn’t expected him to be putting down a public marker so swiftly. On the other hand, if it turned out he’d made a catastrophic error of judgement in backing Desmond Flint, he’d deal with it in his usual fashion: by pretending it hadn’t happened. It was astonishing how obediently the public trotted along after him when he did this.
Josie had interrupted her contemplation just before the shift change.
“You were asking about Thomas Doyle. Recent hire with the Dogs.”
“Yes.”
“He’s left us already.”
“That was quick.”
“He came to the end of his probationary period. There were question marks, like that episode with Molly Doran, but he’d probably have passed if he’d made the right noises. But he evidently didn’t want to. Handed his notice in.”
“I see.”
“Do you want me to follow up?”
Diana said, “Send me his file. Such as it is.”
“Of course. And there’s an update on that death by fire outside Leicester. The former Park agent. I’ll send that too.”
“Please do.”
When Josie left, she’d switched the news on, surfing her way to Channel Go from the more serious bulletins. And now
she’d switched it off, having caught Judd’s contribution.
Emails from Josie were in her box: Tommo Doyle’s file, and a news report on the death of one Struan Loy.
She remembered Loy. Something of a joker, and so an irritation in any office space. The space he’d come to occupy outside Leicester, though, had been a shipping container, inside which he’d burned to death. Investigation remained ongoing, but it was clearly a murder. He’d been a slow horse, yes, but this was a coincidence. People got murdered. Slow horses were people. There was a Venn diagram waiting to happen, and somewhere near Leicester, it just had.
It was unlikely that Jackson Lamb would see it that way—he had a tendency to become aroused at any sign of threat—but Diana had other things to worry about. Besides, Lamb wasn’t privy to the daily updates, and the story hadn’t made headlines here in the capital. Chances were, it wouldn’t come to his attention.
“Fuck me sideways,” said Jackson Lamb.
Then he put his head back and stared at the ceiling.
Catherine said, “The local paper said suspicious circumstances.”
“Burning to death in a shipping container? Yeah, it doesn’t take Shylock Holmes.”
She decided to let that one go.
To the amateur observer, Lamb might be preparing for a nap. His feet were on his desk, his toes mostly visible through the tatters of his socks, and one arm lay across his paunch like a jovial illustration from Dickens. But Catherine, a seasoned watcher, recognised the tension enfolding him, and knew, too, that Lamb thought the way a bear hibernates. Best not interrupt him, unless you wanted a limb torn off.
She settled herself on the visitor’s chair, to one side of which lay the pile of takeaway hotboxes, and waited.
Empty noises drifted up from the lower storeys. Slough House was a medley of knocks and rattles after hours, its ghosts scratching windows and walls once its occupants had left. Or perhaps, she thought, this was normal, and it was simply a building relaxing into the dark.
She thought about Kay White, tumbling off a stepladder in the comfort of her own home.
About Struan Loy, screaming his lungs out in a tin trap.