by Mick Herron
And two minutes later it was over, and the killers left. The jeep, which had idled throughout the brief carnage, spat stones as it accelerated away, and for a short while there was stillness. The sound of the departing engine folded into the landscape and was lost. A buzzard mewed overhead. Closer to home a gurgle sounded in a ruined throat, as someone struggled with a new language, whose first words were their last. And behind that, and then above it, and soon all around it, grew the screams of the survivors, for whom all familiar life was over, just as it was for the dead.
Within hours trucks would come bearing more men with guns, this time trained outwards, on the surrounding hillsides. Helicopters would land, disgorging doctors and military personnel, and others would fly overhead, crisscrossing the sky in orchestrated rage, while TV cameras pointed and blamed. On the streets shrouds would cover the fallen, and newly loosed chickens would wander by the river, pecking in the dirt. A bell would ring, or at least, people would remember it ringing. It might have been in their minds. But what was certain was that there would still be, above the buzzing helicopters, a sky whose blue remained somehow unbroken, and a distant buzzard mewing, and long shadows cast by the stunned Derbyshire hills.
In some parts of the world dawn arrives with rosy fingers, to smoothe away the creases left by night. But on Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, it comes wearing safecracker’s gloves, so as not to leave prints on windowsills and doorknobs; it squints through keyholes, sizes up locks and generally cases the joint ahead of approaching day. Dawn specialises in unswept corners and undusted surfaces, in the nooks and chambers day rarely sees, because day is all business appointments and things being in the right place, while its younger sister’s role is to creep about in the breaking gloom, never sure of what it might find there. It’s one thing casting light on a subject. It’s another expecting it to shine.
So when dawn reaches Slough House—a scruffy building whose ground floor is divided between an ailing Chinese restaurant and a desperate newsagent’s, and whose front door, made filthy by time and weather, never opens—it enters by the burglar’s route, via the rooftops opposite, and its first port of call is Jackson Lamb’s office, this being on the uppermost storey. Here it finds its only working rival a standard lamp atop a pile of telephone directories, which have so long served this purpose they have moulded together, their damp covers bonding in involuntary alliance. The room is cramped and furtive, like a kennel, and its overpowering theme is neglect. Psychopaths are said to decorate their walls with crazy writing, the loops and whorls of their infinite equations an attempt at cracking the code their life is hostage to. Lamb prefers his walls to do their own talking, and they have cooperated to the extent that the cracks in their plasterwork, their mildew stains, have here and there conspired to produce something that might amount to an actual script—a scrawled observation, perhaps—but all too quickly any sense these marks contain blurs and fades, as if they were something a moving finger had writ before deciding, contrary to the wisdom of ages, to rub out again.
Lamb’s is not a room to linger in, and dawn, anyway, never tarries long. In the office opposite, it finds less to disturb it. Here order has prevailed, and there is a quiet efficiency about the way in which folders have been stacked, their edges squared off in alignment with the desktop, and the ribbons binding them tied in bows of equal length; about the emptiness of the wastepaper basket, and the dust-free surfaces of the well-mannered shelves. There is a stillness here out of keeping with Slough House, and if one were to seesaw between these two rooms, the bossman’s lair and Catherine Standish’s bolt-hole, a balance might be found that could bring peace to the premises, though one would imagine it would be short-lived.
As is dawn’s presence in Catherine’s room, for time is hurrying on. On the next level down is a kitchen. Dawn’s favourite meal is breakfast, which is sometimes mostly gin, but either way it would find little to sustain it here, the cupboards falling very much on Scrooge’s end of the Dickensian curve, far removed from Pickwickian excess. The cupboards contain no tins of biscuits, no jars of preserves, no emergency chocolate and no bowls of fruit or packets of crispbread mar the counter’s surface; just odds and ends of plastic cutlery, a few chipped mugs and a surprisingly new-looking kettle. True, there is a fridge, but all it holds are two cans of energy drink, both stickered “Roddy Ho,” each of which rubric has had the words “is a twat” added, in different hands, and an uncontested tub of hummus, which is either mint-flavoured or has some other reason for being green. About the appliance hangs an odour best described as delayed decay. Luckily, dawn has no sense of smell.
Having briefly swept through the two offices on this floor—nondescript rooms whose colour schemes can only be found in ancient swatches, their pages so faded, everything has subsided into shades of yellow and grey—and taken care to skirt the dark patch beneath the radiator, where some manner of rusty leakage has occurred, it finds itself back on the staircase, which is old and rackety, dawn the only thing capable of using it without making a sound—apart, that is, from Jackson Lamb, who when he feels like it can wander Slough House as silently as a newly conjured wraith, if rather more corpulent. At other times Lamb prefers the direct approach, and attacks the stairs with the noise that a bear pushing a wheelbarrow might make, if the wheelbarrow was full of tin cans, and the bear drunk.
More watchful ghost than drunken bear, dawn arrives in the final two offices and finds little to distinguish them from those on the floor above, apart, perhaps, from the slightly stuccoed texture of the paintwork behind one desk, as if a fresh coat has been applied before the wall has been properly cleaned, and some lumpy matter has been left clinging to the plasterwork: best not to dwell on what this might be. For the rest, this office has the same air of frustrated ambition as its companions, and to one as sensitive as light-fingered dawn it contains, too, a memory of violence, and perhaps the promise of more to come. But dawn understands that promises are easily broken—dawn knows all about breaking—and the possibility delays it not one jot. On it goes, down the final set of stairs, and somehow passes through the back door without recourse to the shove this usually requires, the door being famously resistant to casual use. In the dank little yard behind Slough House dawn pauses, aware that its time is nearly up, and enjoys these last cool moments. Once upon a time it might have heard a horse making its way up the street; more recently, the happy hum of a milk float would have whiled away its final minute. But today there is only the scream of an ambulance, late for an appointment, and by the time its banshee howl has ceased bouncing off walls and buildings dawn has disappeared, and here in its place is the day itself, which, once within Slough House’s grasp, turns out to be far from the embodiment of industry and occupation it threatened to be. Instead—like the day before it, and the one before that—it is just another slothful interlude to be clock watched out of existence, and knowing full well that none of the inhabitants can do anything to hasten its departure, it takes its own sweet time about setting up shop. Casually, smugly, unbothered by doubt or duty, it divides itself between Slough House’s offices, and then, like a lazy cat, settles in the warmest corners to doze, while nothing much happens around it.
Roddy Ho, Roddy Ho, riding through the glen.
(Just another earworm.)
Roddy Ho, Roddy Ho, manliest of men.
There are those who regard Roderick Ho as a one-trick wonder; a king of the keyboard jungle, sure, but less adept in other areas of life, such as making friends, being reasonable, and ironing T-shirts. But they haven’t seen him in action. They haven’t seen him on the prowl.
Lunchtime, just off Aldersgate Street. The ugly concrete towers of the Barbican to the right; a hardly more beautiful housing estate to the left. But it’s a killing box, this uncelebrated patch of London; it’s a blink-and-you’re-eaten battlefield. You get one chance only to claim your scalp, and Roddy Ho’s prey could be anywhere.
He knew
damn well it was close.
So he moved, pantherlike, between parked cars; he hovered by a placard celebrating some municipal triumph or other. In his ear, driven like a fence post by the pounding of his iPod, an overexcited forty-something screeched tenderly of his plan to kill and eat his girlfriend. On Roddy’s chin, the beard he’d grown last winter; rather more expertly sculpted now, because he’d learned the hard way not to use kitchen scissors. On Roddy’s head—new development—a baseball cap. Image matters, Roddy knew that. Brand matters. You want Joe Public to recognise your avatar, your avatar had to make a statement. In his own personal opinion, he’d nailed that angle. Neat little goatee and a baseball cap: originality plus style. Roderick Ho was the complete package, the way Brad Pitt used to be, before the unpleasantness.
(Gap in the market there, come to think of it. He’d have to have a word with Kim, his girlfriend, about coining a nom de celeb.
Koddy.
Rim . . . ?
Nah. Needs work.)
But he’d deal with that later, because right now it was time to activate the lure module; get this creature into the open and bring that sucker down. This required force, timing and use of weapons: his core skills in a nutshell . . . Whoever came up with Pokémon GO must have had Roderick Ho on their muse’s speed dial. The name even rhymed, man—it was like he was born to poke. Gimme that stardust, he thought. Gimme that lovely stardust, and watch the Rodster shine.
All reflex, sinew and concentration, Ho shimmered through the lunchtime air like the coolest of cats, the baddest of asses, the daddy of all dudes; hot on the trail of an enemy that didn’t exist.
A little way down the road, an enemy that did turned the ignition, and pulled away from the kerb.
That morning, on her way to the Tube, Catherine Standish had dropped in at the newsagent’s for a Guardian. Behind the counter a steel blind had been drawn to hide the array of cigarette packets, lest a stray glimpse prove a gateway to early death, while to her left, on the topmost row of the rack, the few pornographic magazines to survive into the digital age were sealed inside plastic covers, to nullify their impact on concupiscent minds. All this careful protection, she thought, shielding us from impulses deemed harmful, but right there by the door was a shelf of wine on special offer, any two bottles for £9, and up by the counter was a range of spirits all cheerfully marked two quid down, none of them a brand to delight the palate, but any of them enough to render the most uptight connoisseur pig-drunk and open to offers.
She bought her newspaper, nodded her thanks and returned to the street.
One journey later, she remembered it was her turn to pick up milk for the office—no huge feat of memory; it was always her turn to pick up milk—and dropped into the shop next to Slough House, where the milk was in the fridge alongside cans of beer and lager, and ready-mixed tins of G&T. That’s twice without trying, she thought, that she could have bought a ticket to the underworld before her day was off the ground. Most occasions of sin required a little effort. But the recovering alcoholic could coast along in neutral, and the temptations would come to her.
There was nothing unusual about this. It was just the surface tension; the everyday gauntlet the dry drunk runs. Come lunchtime, the lure of the dark side behind her, Catherine was absorbed in the day’s work: writing up the department’s biannual accounts, which included justification for “irregular expenses.” Slough House had had a lot of these this year: broken doors, carpet cleaning; all the making-good an armed incursion demands. Most of the repairs had been sloppily done, which neither surprised nor bothered Catherine much: she had long ago grown used to the second-class status the slow horses enjoyed. What worried her more was the long-term damage to the horses themselves. Shirley Dander was unnervingly calm; the kind of calm Catherine imagined icebergs were, just before they ploughed into ocean liners. River Cartwright was bottling things up too, more than usual. And as for J.K. Coe, Catherine recognised a hand grenade when she saw one. And she didn’t think his pin was fitted too tight.
Roddy Ho was the same as ever, of course, but that was more of a burden than a comfort.
It was a good job Louisa Guy was relatively sane.
Stacks of paper in front of her, their edges neatly though not quite neurotically aligned, Catherine waded through the day’s work, adjusting figures where Lamb’s entries overshot the inaccurate to become manifestly corrupt, and replacing his justifications (“because I fucking say so”) with her own more diplomatic phrasing. When the time came to leave for home, all those temptations would parade in front of her again. But if daily exposure to Jackson Lamb had taught her anything, it was not to fret about life’s peripheral challenges.
He had a way of providing more than enough to worry about, up front and centre.
Shirley Dander had sixty-two days.
Sixty-two drug-free days.
Count ’em . . .
Somebody might: Shirley didn’t. Sixty-two was just a number, same as sixty-one had been, and if she happened to be keeping track that was only because the days had all happened in the obvious order, very, very slowly. Mornings she ticked off the minutes, and afternoons counted down seconds, and at least once a day found herself staring at the walls, particularly the one behind what had been Marcus’s desk. Last time she’d seen Marcus, he’d been leaning against that wall, his chair tilted at a ridiculous angle. It had been painted over since. A bad job had been made of it.
And here was Shirley’s solution to that: think about something else.
It was lunchtime; bright and warm. Shirley was heading back to Slough House for an afternoon of enforced inertia, after which she’d schlep on over to Shoreditch for the last of her AFMs . . . Eight months of anger fucking management sessions, and this evening she’d officially be declared anger free. It had been hinted she might even get a badge. That could be a problem—if anyone stuck a badge on her, they’d be carrying their teeth home in a hankie—but luckily, what she had in her pocket gave her something to focus on; to carry her through any dodgy moments which might result in the court-ordered programme being extended.
A neat little wrap of the best cocaine the postcode had to offer; her treat to herself for finishing the course.
Sixty-two might just be a number, but it was as high as Shirley had any intention of going.
Being straight had had the effect of turning her settings down a notch, and the world had been flatter lately, greyer, easier to get along with. Which helped with the whole AFM thing, but was starting to piss her off. Last week she’d had a cold-caller, some crap about mis-sold insurance, and Shirley hadn’t even told him to fuck himself. This didn’t feel like attitude adjustment so much as it did surrender. So here was the plan: get through this one last day, suffer being patted on the head by the counsellor—whom Shirley intended to follow home one night and kill—then hit the clubs, get properly wasted and learn to live again. Sixty-two days was long enough, and proved for a fact what she’d always maintained as a theory: that she could give it up any time she wanted.
Besides, Marcus was long gone. It wasn’t like he’d be getting in her face about it.
But don’t think about Marcus.
So there she was, heading past the estate towards Aldersgate Street, coke in her pocket, mind on the evening to come, when she saw two things five yards in front of her, both behaving strangely.
One was Roderick Ho, who was performing some kind of ballet, with a mobile phone for a partner.
The other was an approaching silver Honda, turning left where there was no left to turn.
Then mounting the pavement and heading straight for Ho.
So here’s the thing, thought Louisa Guy. If I’d wanted to be a librarian, I’d have been a librarian. I’d have gone to library school, taken library exams and saved up enough library stamps to buy a library uniform. Whatever they do, I’d have done it: by the book. And of all the librarians in the near
vicinity, I’d have been far and away the librarianest; the kind of librarian other librarians sing songs about, gathered around their library fires.
But what I wouldn’t have done was join the intelligence service. Because that would have been fucking ridiculous.
Yet here I am.
Here she was.
Here being Slough House, where what she was doing was scrolling through library loan statistics, determining who had borrowed certain titles in the course of the last few years. Books like Islam Expects and The Meaning of Jihad. And if anyone had actually written How to Wage War on a Civilian Population, that would have made the list too.
“Is it really likely,” she’d said, on being handed the project, “that compiling a list of people who’ve borrowed particular library books is going to help us find fledgling terrorists?”
“Put like that,” Lamb had said, “the odds are probably a million to one.” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you this for nothing. I’m bloody glad I’m not you.”