by Mick Herron
Then sank to the floor next to him. There were things you did, were supposed to do; recovery position, cardiac massage, oral resuscitation, any one of which might sign her own death warrant if she attempted them. Nerve agent. Toxic attack. Best advice: put on a rubber suit and stand somewhere in the next county. But instead she sank to the floor and held him, words circling her mind like wagons: don’t die don’t die don’t die; the useless instruction, prompted by love, that shatters on impact with reality. Everyone dies.
Sid Baker never knew how long it took the ambulance to arrive. But well before it did she could hear its ululation, as if an unleashed spirit were hurtling towards her, screaming through trees and howling through hedges, before finally coming to rest here, in the house that would do for its haunting: a house like many another, and only incidentally the one in which River had grown up—a house with ordinary windows, an intact roof, a garden that had once been loved, and ivy still growing around its poisoned door.
Afterwards the sound disappears, howling along the lanes, the roads, the motorway, all the way back to where it started, because endings swallow their beginnings eventually, so you can’t tell one from the other. Later the same day, or early the next—at any rate, long after dark has fallen—Louisa Guy is ruining a new pair of trainers, running in the rain which has descended on London like a punishment, and every slap of her feet on the unmetalled towpath finds an echoing thud in her heart. Don’t die. Meanwhile, in the grim kitchen of his current lodgings Lech Wicinski is making bread again, or at least thumping dough with his fists. In this light, which is harsh—an overhead tube which fizzes steadily, as if there were insects hatching within—his scars present as individual razor marks rather than the undifferentiated battleground they usually appear to be; here, now, he has a face like a first draft, all crossings-out and scribblings-over, which is nevertheless the finished text: as good as it’s going to get. What he thinks about this is impossible to determine, but what’s certain is that he continues to pound the dough long after it has reached the point where it should be allowed to rest; is as blindly intent on this activity as, some distance away, Roderick Ho is on his computer screen, the Rodster currently being ankle-deep in blood on a blasted landscape, doing combat with recognisably humanoid forms wielding recognisably inhumane weapons, a gallimaufry of swords and pikes and axes, between whose swings and roundhouses Roddy weaves, or Roddy’s avatar does, this being a slightly tweaked version of Roddy 1.0—taller, more chiselled of feature, more lustrous of hair, and significantly ripped: an Alpha male in an Omega world—he’s confident he’s got that the right way round. Don’t die, he instructs this other Roddy, knowing the instruction to be otiose, for the RodMan is an indestructible force, with moves as slick as Skywalker’s and dialogue to match, and a smile tickles his lips as he recalls his parting shot to Damien Cantor—We’re Slough House. Hasta la vista, baby—though it vanishes as he also remembers that Cartwright didn’t come home, and before he has quite finished processing that thought his avatar’s head is pirouetting across the cratered battlefield, skipping across mud and debris as slickly as if it were the dancefloor Shirley Dander occupies, for Shirley is dancing again, or dancing still, because there is a sense in which Shirley never stops dancing; the dance of being Shirley continuing even while she sleeps, which she has been known to do, when she runs out of alternatives. Nobody is watching as she achieves lift-off, her unaerodynamic shape unhampered by gravity for a moment, and for that short space of time she is at ease with herself, as if it is contact with the earth that causes her dissatisfaction, leaving her in constant need of a series of minor highs. This one ends, as all highs do, but the dance continues, and as always when she dances Shirley’s lips move to the lyrics, as if she were mumbling in prayer, the way Catherine Standish is doing—words addressed to no one in particular, because all that matters, Catherine feels, is that they be spoken, for words released into the air acquire power, and the possibility is that when she says don’t die the world will bend itself to fit, though it is equally likely that the world will refuse to listen. Certainly, words spoken aloud have had no noticeable effect on Damien Cantor’s situation, since he remains where the slow horses left him, shackled to an iron ring in an empty room. He is dozing now, his head resting between two half-full plastic bottles, and his dreams are not unlike the images summoned up by Roddy Ho’s wargame, full of noise and nuisance; disordered scraps of intelligence whose meaning remains as elusive as that of the tadpole scribblings left behind by Andrey, on scraps of paper marking pages in his books, a jumble of which Reece is now attempting to assemble into some sort of order. But some of Andy’s scribblings are in Russian, and others so illegible that they might as well be, and before long Reece hurls the scraps into the air again, making another brief paper snowstorm. You shouldn’t have died, he thinks; an admonition hurled into the past, so less likely to be heeded than one levelled at the present, but it needed thinking. Other thoughts are best tamped down before they’ve sparked, and this might describe Diana Taverner’s preoccupations as she slips out of bed and pads downstairs, where she finds the outside security lights lit—a fox is vacating the lawn, and she hears the scrabble of its claws on the fence. Diana is in an insomniac limbo, unsure if it is the end of one day or the beginning of the next, but whichever it is, she knows that bad things lie both behind and ahead of her. These bad things coalesce around Peter Judd, who has managed to compromise her so absolutely that she is in no position to refuse him anything, but no problem is insuperable, even if some solutions seem unpalatable at first glance. What’s important is that she maintain her composure, a resolution which forms in her mind at precisely the moment the security lights switch off, which is also, by curious coincidence, precisely the moment at which Tommo Doyle regains consciousness. His evening had started in an East End pub, and has ended in a Dumpster, an itinerary from which a number of details are absent, though some are starting to emerge through a fog of pain. He recalls a fat man with swept back greasy hair and bristling jowls, who struck up conversation with Tommo on the evening’s first pub and was still matching him drink for drink in the last, after which—it’s coming back now—the fat man led him up a blind alley and broke his legs. Who’s the crip now? he’d asked, before dumping Tommo like unwanted furniture, the way debris from the O.B.’s house will be thrown into a skip in a few weeks’ time, shortly after its façade has been dismantled brick by brick, frame by strut, to eradicate any trace of the toxic substance smeared there. The building will be shrouded in canvas like an artwork, the artists in question favouring hazmat costumes rather than smocks, and the contents of its one furnished room—armchairs and tables, curtains and carpet—will be junked, and the O.B.’s carefully collated books hurled into random bags and boxes. If any messages were encoded in their shelving, which seems possible given the mind responsible, then those secrets are gone forever, while the house itself is left to be badgered by the elements. If houses die, this one probably will. Others persist, despite encouragement to the contrary. Back in the present, on Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, Slough House has weathered another day despite having been wiped from the map. It remains an estate agent’s nightmare, all leaky drainpipes and flaking woodwork, but even at this late hour exerts a pull upon its occupants, one of whom approaches now, from an unexpected direction, and vanishes into the alley that leads round back. If it were possible to see through walls, a shadow might be viewed soon afterwards, a bulky shape attached to the glowing tip of a cigarette, and rising floor by floor, its heat and light leaving tiny scars in the air behind it. When this shadow reaches the top floor the cigarette expires, but another is lit from its dying breath. And while the smoker speaks no words aloud, the dark and empty rooms below take up an echo regardless, and for a while it whispers round Slough House, don’t die, until all that is left is its tail, die, and this persists for a while, die, die, and then it stops.
Acknowledgments
Readers may notice in
Slough House echoes of events in Wiltshire, England, between March and July 2018, when four people were poisoned, one fatally, by the nerve agent Novichok. They should be aware, however, that this novel is pure fiction. Various details have been radically altered; none are intended to be accurate.
It might be worth adding that the novel was completed in March 2020, a week or so before the UK went into lockdown. Hence the absence from its pages of social distancing, face masks, workouts with Joe Wicks, and other aspects of actual life in the summer that followed.
My heartfelt gratitude, as ever, to all at John Murray and Soho Press for their unstinting efforts on my behalf; to Juliet Burton and Micheline Steinberg for their constant vigilance; to friends and fellow authors for companionship and support; to booksellers and librarians for lighting candles in the dark; and to readers, for making it all worthwhile. Special thanks to Mark Richards, for the huge difference he made to my career, and for leaving me in such good hands.
MH
Oxford
August 2020