The Marylebone Drop

by Mick Herron

  “Thanks. But why do they even stock these books, if they’re so dangerous?”

  “It’s political correctness gone mad,” agreed Lamb sadly. “I’m rabidly anticensorship, as you know. But some books just need burning.”

  So did some bosses. She’d been working on this list, which involved cross-checking Public Lending Right statistics against individual county library databases, for three months. It now stretched not quite halfway down a single sheet of A4, and she’d reached Buckinghamshire in her alphabetical list of counties. Thank Christ she didn’t have to cover the whole of the UK, because that would have taken even an actual librarian years.

  Not the whole of it, no. Just England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

  “Fuck Scotland,” Lamb had explained. “They want to go it alone, they can go it alone.”

  Her only ally in her never-ending task was the Government, which was doing its bit by closing down as many libraries as possible.

  In the War Against Terror, you take all the help you can get.

  Louisa giggled to herself, because sometimes you had to, or else you’d go mad. Unless the giggling was proof you’d already gone mad. J.K. Coe might know, not so much because of his so-called expertise in Psychological Evaluation, but because he was a borderline nutter himself. All fun and games in Slough House.

  She pushed away from her desk and stood to stretch. Lately she’d been spending more time at the gym, and the result was increasing restlessness when tethered to her computer. Through the window, Aldersgate Street was its usual unpromising medley of pissed-off traffic and people in a hurry. Nobody ever wandered through this bit of London; it was just a staging post on the way somewhere else. Unless you were a stalled spook, of course, in which case it was journey’s end.

  God, she was bored.

  And then, as if to console her, the world threw a minor distraction her way: from not far off came a screech and a bump; the sound of a car making contact.

  She wondered what that was about.

  Hi Tina

  Just a quick note to let you know how things are going here in Devon—not great, to be honest. I’ve been told I’m being laid off at the end of the month because the boss’s sister’s son needs a job, so someone has to make way for the little bastard. Thanks a bunch, right?

  But it’s not all bad because the gaffer knows he owes me one, and has set me up with one of his contacts for a six-month gig in—get this—Albania! But it’s a cushy number, doing the wiring on three new hotel builds, and it’ll be cheap living so I’ll

  Coe stopped midsentence and stared through the window at the Barbican opposite. It was an Orwellian nightmare of a complex, a concrete monstrosity, but credit where it was due: like Ronnie and Reggie Kray before it, the Barbican had overcome the drawback of being a brutal piece of shit to achieve iconic status. But that was London Rules for you: force others to take you on your own terms. And if they didn’t like it, stay in their face until they did.

  Jackson Lamb, for instance. Except, on second thoughts, no: Lamb didn’t give a toss whose terms you took him on. He carried on regardless. He just was.

  Tina, though, wasn’t, or wouldn’t be much longer. Tina wasn’t her real name anyway. J.K. Coe just found it easier to compose these letters if they had an actual name attached; for the same reason, he always signed them Dan. Dan—whoever he was—was a deep cover spook, who’d moled into whichever group of activists was currently deemed too extreme for comfort (animal rights, eco-troublemakers, The Archers’ fanbase); while Tina—whoever she was—was someone he’d befriended in the course of doing so. There was always a Tina. Back when Coe had been in Psych Eval, he’d made a study of Tinas of both genders; joes in the field were warned not to develop emotional attachments in the group under investigation, but they always did. You couldn’t betray someone efficiently if you didn’t love them first. So when the op was over, and Dan was coming back to the surface, there had to be letters; a long goodbye played out over months. First Dan moved out of the area, a fair distance off but not unvisitable. He’d keep in touch sporadically, then get a better offer and move abroad. The letters or emails would falter, then stop. And soon Dan would be forgotten, by everyone but Tina, who’d keep his letters in a shoebox under her bed, and Google-Earth Albania after her third glass of Chardonnay. Rather than, for example, dragging him into court for screwing her under false pretences. Nobody wanted to go through that again.

  But of course, joes don’t write the letters themselves. That was a job for spooks like J.K. Coe, whiling away the days in Slough House. And lucky to be doing so, to be honest. Most people who’d shot to death a handcuffed man might have expected retribution. Luckily, Coe had done so at the fag-end of a series of events so painfully compromising to the intelligence services as a whole that—as Lamb had observed—it had put the “us” in “clusterfuck,” leaving Regent’s Park with little choice but to lay a huge carpet over everything and sweep Slough House under it. The slow horses were used to that, of course. In fact, if they weren’t already slow horses, they’d be dust bunnies instead.

  Coe cracked his knuckles, and added the words be able to save a bit to his letter. Yeah, right; Dan would save a bit, then meet an Albanian girl, and—long story short—never come home. Meanwhile, the actual Dan would be undercover again, on a different op, and the ball would be rolling in a new direction. On Spook Street, things never stayed still. Unless you were in Slough House, that is. But there was a major difference between J.K. Coe and the other slow horses, and it was this: he had no desire to be where the action was. If he could sit here typing all day and never have to say a word to anyone, that would suit him fine. Because his life was approaching an even keel. The dreams were ebbing away at last, and the panic attacks had tapered off. He no longer found himself obsessively fingering an imaginary keyboard, echoing Keith Jarrett’s improvised piano solos. Things were bearable, and might just stay that way provided nothing happened.

  He hoped like hell nothing would happen.

  The car smeared Roderick Ho like ketchup across the concrete apron; broke him like a plastic doll across its bonnet, so all that was holding him together was his clothes. This happened so fast Shirley saw it before it took place. Which was as well for Ho, because she had time to prevent it.

  She covered five yards with the speed of a greased pig, yelling Ho’s name, though he didn’t turn round—he had his back to the car and his iPod jammed into his ears; was squinting through his smartphone, and looked, basically, like a dumb tourist who’d been ripped off twice already: once by someone selling hats, and a second time by someone giving away beards. When Shirley hit him waist-high, he was apparently taking a photo of bugger-all. But he never got the chance. Shirley’s weight sent him crashing to the ground half a moment before the car ploughed past: went careering across the pedestrianised area, bounced off a low brick wall bordering a garden display then screeched to a halt. Burnt rubber reached Shirley’s nose. Ho was squawking; his phone was in pieces. The car moved again, but instead of heading back for them it circled the brick enclosure, turned left onto the road, swerved round the barrier and went east.

  Shirley watched it disappear, too late to catch its plate, or even clock the number of occupants. Soon she’d feel the impact of her leap in most of her bones, but for the moment she just replayed it in her head from a third-party viewpoint: a graceful, gazelle-like swoop; lifesaving moment and poetry in motion at once. Marcus would have been proud, she thought.

  Dead proud.

  Beneath her, Roddy yelled, “You stupid cow!”

  The internet was full of whispers.

  No, River Cartwright thought. Scratch that.

  The internet was screaming its head off, as usual.

  He was on a Marylebone-bound train, returning to London after having taken the morning off: care leave, he’d claimed it, though Lamb preferred “bloody liberty.”

  “We’
re not the social services.”

  “We’re not Sports Direct either,” Catherine Standish had pointed out. “If River needs the morning off, he needs it.”

  “And who’s gunna pick up his workload in the meantime?”

  River hadn’t done a stroke of work in three weeks, but didn’t think this a viable line of defence. “It’ll get done,” he promised.

  And Lamb had grunted, and that was that.

  So he’d taken off in the pre-breakfast rush, battling against the commuter tide; heading for Skylarks, the care home where the O.B. now resided; not precisely a Service-run facility—the Service had long since outsourced any such frivolities—but one which placed a higher priority on security than most places of its type.

  The Old Bastard, River’s grandfather, had wandered off down the twilit corridors of his own mind, only occasionally emerging into the here and now, whereupon he’d sniff the air like an elderly badger and look pained, though whether this was due to a brief awareness that his grasp on reality had crumbled, or to that grasp’s momentary return, River couldn’t guess. After a lifetime hoarding secrets the old spook had lost himself among them, and no longer knew which truths he was concealing, which lies he was casting abroad. He and his late wife, Rose, had raised River, their only grandchild. Sitting with him in Skylarks’ garden, a blanket covering the old man’s knees, an iron curtain shrouding half his history, River felt adrift. He had followed the O.B.’s footsteps into the Secret Service, and if his own path had been forcibly rerouted, there’d been comfort in the knowledge that the old man had at least mapped the same territory. But now he was orphaned. The footsteps he’d followed were wandering in circles, and when they faltered at last, they’d be nowhere specific. Every spook’s dream was to throw off all pursuers, and know himself unwatched. The O.B. was fast approaching that space: somewhere unknowable, unvisited, untagged by hostile eyes.

  It had been a warm morning, bright sunshine casting shadows on the lawn. The house was at the end of a valley, and River could see hills rising in the distance, and tame clouds puffing across a paint box sky. A train was briefly visible between two stretches of woodland, but its engines were no more than a polite murmur, barely bothering the air. River could smell mown grass, and something else he couldn’t put a name to. If forced to guess, he’d say it was the absence of traffic.

  He sat on one of three white plastic chairs arranged around a white plastic table, from the centre of which a parasol jutted upwards. The third chair was vacant. There were two other similar sets of furniture, one unused, and the other occupied by an elderly couple. A younger woman was there, addressing them in what River imagined was an efficient tone. He couldn’t actually hear her. His grandfather was talking loudly, blocking out all other conversation.

  “That would have been August ’52,” he was saying. “The fifteenth, if I’m not mistaken. A Tuesday. Round about four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  The O.B.’s memory was self-sharpening these days. It prided itself on providing minute detail, even if that detail bore only coincidental resemblance to reality.

  “And when the call came in, it was Joe himself on the line.”

  “. . . Joe?”

  “Stalin, my boy. You’re not dropping off on me, are you?”

  River wasn’t dropping off on him.

  He thought: this is where life on Spook Street leads. Not long ago the old man’s past had come barking from the shadows and taken large bites out of the present. If this were common knowledge, there would be many howling for retribution. River should be among them, really. But if his own murky beginnings had turned out to be the result of the O.B.’s tampering with the lives of others, they remained his own beginnings. You couldn’t argue yourself out of existence. Besides, there was no way of taking his grandfather to task for past sins now those sins had melted into fictions. The previous week, River had heard a story the old man had never told before, involving more gunfire than usual, and an elaborate series of code names in notebooks. Ten minutes on Google later revealed that the O.B. had been relaying the plot of Where Eagles Dare.

  When the old man’s tale wound itself into silence, River said, “Do you have everything you need, grandad?”

  “Why should I need anything? Eh?”

  “No reason. I just thought you might like something from . . .”

  He tailed off. Something from home. But home was dangerous territory, a subject best avoided. The old man had never been a joe; always a desk man. It had been his job to send agents into the unknown, and run them from what others might think a safe distance. But here he was now, alone in joe country, his cover blown, his home untenable. There was no safe ground. Only this mansion house in a quiet landscape, where the nurses had enough discretion to know that some tales were best ignored.

  On the train heading back into London, River shifted in his seat and scrolled down the page of search results. Nice to know that a spook career granted him this privilege: if he wanted to know what was going on, he could surf the web, like any other bastard. And the internet was screaming. The hunt for the Abbotsfield killers continued with no concrete results, though the attack had been claimed by so-called Islamic State. At a late-night session in Parliament the previous evening, Dennis Gimball had lambasted the Security Services, proclaiming Claude Whelan, Regent’s Park’s First Desk, unfit for purpose; had sailed this close to suggesting that he was, in fact, an IS sympathiser. That this was barking mad was a side issue: recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy, and even the mainstream media had to pretend to take Gimball seriously, just in case. Meanwhile, there were twelve dead in Abbotsfield, and a tiny village had become a geopolitical byword. There’d be a lot more debate, a lot more hand-wringing, before this slipped away from the front pages. Unless something else happened soon, of course.

  Nearly there. River closed his laptop. The O.B. would be dozing again by now; enjoying a cat’s afternoon in the sun. Time had rolled round on him, that was all. River was his grandfather’s handler now.

  Sooner or later, all the sins of the past fell into the keeping of the present.

  “You stupid cow!”

  He’d been thrown sideways and the noise in his head had exploded: manic guitars cut off midwail; locomotive drums killed midbeat. The sudden silence was deafening. It was like he’d been unplugged.

  And his prey was nowhere to be seen, obviously. His smartphone was in pieces, its casing a hop-skip-jump away.

  It was Shirley Dander who’d leaped on him, evidently unable to control her passion.

  She crawled off and pretended to be watching a car disappear along the road. Roddy sat up and brushed at the sleeves of his still-new leather jacket. He’d had to deal with workplace harassment before: first Louisa Guy, now this. But at least Louisa remained the right side of her last shaggable day, while Shirley Dander, far as the Rodster was concerned, hadn’t seen her first yet.

  “What the hell was that for?”

  “That was me saving your arse,” she said, without looking round.

  His arse. One-track mind.

  “I nearly had it, you know!” Pointless explaining the intricacies of a quest to her: the nearest she’d come to appreciating the complexities of gaming was being mistaken for a troll. Still, though, she ought to be made to realise just what a prize she’d cost him, all for the sake of a quick grope. “A bulbasaur! You know how rare that is?”

  It was plain she didn’t.

  “The fuck,” she asked, “are you talking about?”

  He scrambled to his feet.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s pretend you just wanted to sabotage my hunt. That’s all Kim needs to know, anyway.”

  “. . . Huh?”

  “My girlfriend,” he explained, so she’d know where she stood.

  “Did you get a plate for that car?”

  “What car?”

  “T
he one that just tried to run you over.”

  “That’s a good story too,” Roddy said. “But let’s stick with mine. It’s less complicated. Fewer follow-up questions.”

  And having delivered this lesson in tradecraft, he collected the pieces of his phone and headed back to Slough House.

  Where the day is well established now, and dawn a forgotten intruder. When River returns to take up post at his desk—his current task being so mind-crushingly dull, so balls-achingly unlikely to result in useful data, that he can barely remember what it is even while doing it—all the slow horses are back in the stable, and the hum of collective ennui is almost audible. Up in his attic room, Jackson Lamb scrapes the last sporkful of chicken fried rice from a foil dish, then tosses the container into a corner dark enough that it need never trouble his conscience again, should such a creature come calling, while two floors below Shirley Dander’s face is scrunched into a thoughtful scowl as she replays in her mind the sequence of events that led to her flattening Roderick Ho: always a happy outcome, of course, but had she really prevented a car doing the same? Or had it just been another of London’s penis-propelled drivers, whose every excursion onto the capital’s roads morphs into a demolition derby? Maybe she should share the question with someone. Catherine Standish, she decides. Louisa Guy too, perhaps. Louisa might be an ironclad bitch at times, but at least she doesn’t think with a dick. Some days, you take what you can.

  Later, Lamb will host one of his occasional departmental meetings, its main purpose to ensure the ongoing discontent of all involved, but for now Slough House is what passes for peaceful, the grousing and grumbling of its denizens remaining mainly internal. The clocks that each of the crew separately watches dawdle through their paces on Slough House time, this being slower by some fifty percent than in most other places, while, like the O.B. in distant Berkshire, the day catnaps the afternoon away.

  Elsewhere, mind, it’s scurrying around like a demented gremlin.