by Mick Herron
River said, ‘My office is bigger than yours.’
‘Real estate’s cheaper that end of town.’
‘I thought the action took place upstairs. On the hub.’
‘I’m there a lot. Lady Di—’
‘She lets you call her that?’
‘You’re a laugh a minute, River. Lady Di—Taverner, she keeps me busy.’
River waggled an eyebrow.
‘I don’t know why I’m even bothering.’
River said, ‘You ever going to admit you made a mistake?’
Webb laughed. ‘You still on that?’
‘He was wearing a white tee under a blue shirt. That’s what you told me. Except he wasn’t, was he? He was wearing a blue tee under a—’
‘The guy was wearing what I said he was wearing, River. I mean, what, I get the colours the wrong way round and there just happens to be someone there, that exact moment, wearing what I said? Same general profile as the target? What are the odds?’
‘And the tape not working. Don’t forget the tape not working. What are the odds on that?’
‘EFU, River. Happens all the time.’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘Equipment fuck-up. You think they dish out state-of-the-art gear for assessment ops? We’re up against budgetary constraints, River. You don’t want to get Taverner started on that—oh, but hang on, you won’t, will you? On account of you’re in Slough House, and the closest you’ll get to the inner circle is reading someone’s memoirs.’
‘There isn’t an acronym for that? RSM?’
‘You know something, River? You need to grow up.’
‘And you need to admit that the mistake was yours.’
‘Mistake?’ Webb showed his teeth. ‘I prefer to call it a fiasco.’
‘If I was you, and smirked like that, I’d have someone watching my back.’
‘Oh, I play London rules. I don’t need anyone watching my back but me.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘Time to go.’
‘Should I shout for a guide? Or have you pressed a secret button?’
But Webb was shaking his head: not in response, but in reaction to River’s presence, which had tired him, because he had important things to get on with.
And nothing River said would get Webb to admit it was him who’d screwed up, not River. Besides, what difference would it make? It had been River on that platform, a star on CCTV. When you got to boardroom level, playing fair wasn’t even a bullet point. Who’d screwed up didn’t matter; who’d been visible during the screw-up did. Webb could put his hands up right now, and Diana Taverner wouldn’t care.
The only reason you’re still here is your connections, Cartwright. If not for grandad, you’d be a distant memory.
River stood, hoping an exit line would occur before he got to the door. Something to make him feel less like he’d been dismissed: by Spider bloody Webb.
Who said, ‘Didn’t Lamb have a flash-box?’
‘A what?’
‘A flash-box, River.’ He tapped the padded envelope. ‘The kind you can’t open without a key. Unless you want a magnesium flash.’
‘I’ve heard of those. But at Slough House, frankly, I’m amazed we’ve got jiffy bags.’
River’s need for an exit line evaporated. Scorched hand wrapped tightly round the memory stick in his pocket, he left.
Chapter 3
When lovely woman stoops to folly, all bets are off. Was that how it went? Didn’t matter. When lovely woman stoops to folly, something’s got to give.
Such thoughts were pitilessly regular; as familiar as the sound of her footsteps clickety-clacking up the stairs of her apartment block. Lovely woman stoops to folly. This evening’s earworm, picked up from an ad on the tube.
When lovely woman stoops to folly, the shit has hit the fan.
Catherine Standish, forty-eight a memory, knew all bets were off. Last thing she needed was her subconscious reminding her.
And she had been lovely once. Many had said so. One man in particular: You’re lovely, he’d told her. But you look like you’ve had some scary moments. Even now she thought he’d meant it as a compliment.
But there was nobody to tell her she was lovely any more, and it was doubtful they’d say so if there were. The scary moments had won. Which sounded like a definition of ageing, to Catherine. The scary moments had won.
At the door to her flat she put her shopping on the floor and hunted out her key. Found it. Entered. The hall light was on, because it was on a timer. Catherine didn’t like stepping into the dark, not even for the second it would take to flip a switch. In the kitchen, she unpacked the shopping; coffee in a cupboard, salad in the fridge. Then she took the toothpaste into the bathroom, where the light was on the same timer. There was a reason for that too.
Her worst scary moment had been the morning she’d turned up at her boss’s flat to find him dead in his bathroom. He’d used a gun. Sat in the tub to do it, as if he didn’t want to make a mess.
You had a key to his house? she’d been asked. You had a key? Since when?
That had been the Dogs, of course. Or one Dog in particular: Sam Chapman, who they called Bad Sam. He was a dark difficult man, and knew damn well she’d had a key to Charles Partner’s house, because everyone knew she’d had a key to Charles Partner’s house. And knew it hadn’t been because of an affair, but simply because Charles Partner had been hopeless about taking care of himself—ostensibly simple things like remembering to buy food, remembering to cook it, then remembering to throw it away when he’d forgotten to eat it. Charles had been twenty years older than Catherine, but it hadn’t been a father/daughter thing either. That was a convenient label, but the reality had been this: she had worked for Charles Partner, cared for him, shopped for him. and had found him dead in his bathroom once he’d shot himself. Bad Sam could growl all he liked, but he’d only been going through the motions, because Catherine had been the one to find the body.
Funny how swiftly that happened; how swiftly you went from being Charles Partner—not a man whose name was known to the public at large, true, but a man whose decisions dictated whether significant numbers of them would live or die, which had to count for something—to being ‘the body’. All it had taken was one calculated moment in a bathtub. He didn’t want to make a mess, but what mess he’d made was for others to clean up. Funny.
Less funny was how quickly the scary moments accumulated.
Because she was in the bathroom, and because the light was already on, it was hard for Catherine not to catch herself in the mirror. It held no surprises. Yes, the scary moments accumulated, but that was the least of it. Some damage was gifted by your genes. Some you discovered for yourself. Her nose grew red-tipped in the cold, as did her cheekbones. This made her look witchy and raw. Nothing she could do about that. But the rest of it—the spidery tracing of broken veins; the gaunt stretching of the skin across the skull—they told a different story, one she’d written herself.
My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.
By the time she’d got around to formulating that sentence, alcohol was a problem. Prior to that, it had seemed like a solution. No, that was too glib: rather, it hadn’t seemed like anything at all; it had simply been what one did. Perhaps a tad self-dramatic (a bottle for solace was such a time-worn trope, it felt like you weren’t doing heart-break properly without a glass in your hand) but more often, just the normal backdrop. It was the obvious adjunct to an evening alone with the box, and absolutely de rigueur for an evening out with girlfriends. And then there were dates, which Catherine often had in those days, and you couldn’t have a date without a drink. A meal meant a drink; the cinema meant a drink afterwards. And if you were plucking up courage to ask him back for coffee, a drink was necessary; and ultimately … Ultimately, if you needed somebody there, because you didn’t want to wake in the middle of the night knowing you were alone, you were going to have to fuck somebody, and sooner or later you were
going to have to fuck anybody, and that demanded a drink if anything did.
There was a phrase: the slippery slope. Slippery implied speed and blurriness, and the ever-present threat of losing your feet. You’d end up flat on your back, breathing splinters. But Catherine’s journey had been more moving staircase than slippery slope; a slow downwards progression; a bore rather than a shock. Looking across at the people heading upwards, and wondering if that was a better idea. But somehow knowing she’d have to reach the bottom before she could change direction.
It had been Charles Partner who’d been there when that happened. Not literally, thank God; not actually present when she’d woken in a stranger’s flat with a broken cheekbone, finger-shaped bruises on her thighs. But there to make sure the pieces were gathered together. Catherine had spent time in a facility that was beyond anything she’d have been able to afford had she been paying. Her treatment had been thorough. It had involved counselling. All this, she was told, was in line with Service protocol (Do you think you’re the first? she’d been asked. Do you think you’re the only one it gets to in the end?) but there’d been more to it than that, she was sure. Because after the retreat, after the drying-out, after the first six everlasting months of sober living, she’d turned up at Regent’s Park expecting to be assigned to the outer limits, but no: it was back to regular duties as Charles’s doorkeeper.
Most things, at that time in her life, had made her want to weep, but this seemed more warranted than most. It wasn’t as if they’d been close. Sometimes he’d called her Moneypenny, but that was it. And even afterwards they were hardly friends, though it did not escape her that he never called her Moneypenny again. Nor did they discuss what had happened, beyond his asking, that first morning, if she was ‘back to her old self’. She’d given him the answer he’d wanted, but knew that her old self was long gone. And from there, they’d continued as before.
But he had cared for her when it mattered, and so she cared for him in return. They were together another three years, and before the first was out she was playing a role in his non-working life. He was unmarried. She’d long registered his threadbare aura. It wasn’t that he was seedy, but seediness was a possibility, and poor diet an ongoing fact. He needed looking after. And she needed something. She didn’t need to wake up next to more strangers, but she needed something. Partner turned out to be it.
So she kept his freezer full, and arranged for a weekly cleaner; took his diary in hand and made sure he had the odd day off. She became a barrier against the worst of his underlings—the atrocious Diana Taverner, for a start. And did all this while remaining part of the wallpaper: there was never physical contact, and nor did he acknowledge that she was anything other than secretary. But she cared for him.
Though not enough to recognize that he needed more help than she could give him.
She tilted her head to one side now, allowing her hair to fall across her face. She wondered if she should tint it, bring the blonde out, but who for? And would anyone notice? Apart from the odious Jackson Lamb, who’d ridicule her.
She could accept, Charles Partner being dead, that there was no place for her at Regent’s Park. But Slough House felt like a deferred punishment for a crime she’d already atoned for. Sometimes she wondered if there were more to that crime than her own wine-dark past; if she were held responsible in some way for Charles’s suicide. For not knowing it was going to happen. But how could she have known that? Charles Partner had spent a lifetime dealing in other people’s secrets, and if there was one thing he’d learned, it was how to keep his own. You had a key to his house? she’d been asked. And: You were expecting this to happen? Of course she hadn’t. But she wondered now if anyone had ever believed her.
Ancient history. Charles Partner was bones, but she still thought about him most days.
Back to the mirror. Back to her own life. Lovely woman had stooped to folly, and this was where it had left her.
My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.
She hadn’t had a drink in ten years. But still.
My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.
She turned off the bathroom light, and went to make supper.
Min Harper spent a chunk of the evening on the phone to his boys: nine and eleven. A year ago, this would have left him knowing more than he needed to about computer games and TV shows, but it seemed both had crossed a line at the same time, and now it was like trying to have a conversation with a pair of refrigerators. How had that happened? Change should come with a warning, and besides, shouldn’t there have been a breathing space where his nine-year-old was concerned? More childhood to negotiate before adolescence crept in? But prising information from him was like scratching at a rock. By the time his ex-wife was on the line Min was ready to take it out on her, though she was having none of it:
‘It’s a phase. They’re the same with me. Except all the time they’re grunting and saying nothing, I’m cooking their meals and washing up. So don’t tell me you’re having problems with it, right?’
‘At least you get to see them.’
‘You know where we are. Would it kill you to get round more than once a week?’
He could have fought a rearguard action—the hours he worked; the distance involved—but marriage had taught him that once the battle lines were drawn, defeat was only a matter of time.
Afterwards, he couldn’t settle. It was hard, after such calls, not to end up thinking about the trajectory his life had taken; a free fall he could pin down to one specific moment. Prior to that brainless second, he’d had a marriage, a family and a career, along with all the accompanying paraphernalia—dentist’s appointments and mortgage worries and direct debit arrangements. Some of which still happened, of course, but its relevance, the evidence it supplied that he was building a life that worked, had been washed away by the Stupid Moment; the one in which he’d left a computer disk on a tube train. And hadn’t known he’d done so until the following morning.
He supposed few people had had their careers dismantled via Radio 4. The memory hurt. Not the abject belly-panic as it sank in that the object under discussion was supposed to be in his keeping, but the moments before that, when he’d been enjoying a peaceful shave, thinking: I’m glad I’m not the pitiful bastard responsible for that. That was what hurt; the notion that all over the country other people were having exactly the same thought, and he was the only one who didn’t deserve to.
Other, more drawn-out painful moments had followed. Interviews with the Dogs. Comedy riffs on TV shows about secret service idiots. People on the street didn’t know Min was the butt of these sketches, but they were laughing at him all the same.
Worst of all was the assumption that incompetence had caused the screw-up. Nobody had suggested treachery; that leaving a report outlining gaps in Terminal 5’s security procedures on the Piccadilly Line had been a bungled dead-letter drop. That would have been to accord Min Harper a measure of respect. He could have been in the grip of misguided idealism, or lured by wealth, or at the very least making a conscious decision, but no: even the Dogs had written him off as an idiot. Any other year, he’d have been out of the door, but a combination of hiring freeze and budget tightening meant that if Min had gone, his job would have left with him, and it proved politic to keep him on the books until his departure would allow for a replacement.
Regent’s Park, though, was in his past.
Min checked his pockets, reminded himself not to, then poured a drink and tuned the radio to the sports channel. As ball-by-ball commentary on an overseas Test Match filled the room, a rewritten history swarmed through his head; a more amenable version of his life, in which he was halfway on to the platform at Gloucester Road when he turned and saw the disk on the seat and went back and collected it, feeling the hot chill of near-disaster tickle his nape—a sensation he’d feel again later that evening, as he helped put the boys to bed, and then forget about entirely as his career and life continued on their even tenor: marriage, f
amily, career; dentist’s appointments, mortgage; direct debit arrangements.
As so frequently when he was trying not to have such thoughts Min startled himself by groaning aloud, but nobody heard. He was alone. There was only the radio. And as for the phone: once he’d spoken to his uncommunicative children and rowed with his ex, well: he didn’t have anyone else to talk to. So he turned it off.
Louisa Guy went home to her rented studio flat: examined its four walls—what she could see of them behind stuff in the way: piles of CDs, books, damp laundry on collapsible racks—and almost went straight out again, but couldn’t face the choices that would entail. She microwaved a lasagne and watched a property programme instead. House prices were in freefall, if you owned one. They remained laughably lunar to the rent-bound.
Her phone stayed silent. That wasn’t unusual, but still: you’d think somebody would have found time to dial a number. Ask how Louisa was. If she’d done anything interesting lately.
She left her plate to soak. Changed channel. Encountered someone telling her that pink placebos were more effective than blue ones. Could that be right? Was the brain that easily bamboozled?
Her own felt bamboozled constantly; not so much tricked as stifled into submission. When she closed her eyes at night, illegible data scrolled down her eyelids. Sleep was repeatedly yanked from her by a sensed error, the feeling that something was out of sequence for a reason she’d nearly grasped, and grasping would have rehabilitated her career. But it was always gone and she’d be stone awake once more, her unsleeping head on a pillow too thin and too warm, no matter how cold the rest of her bed was.
Jesus, she’d think, each time. Could she get a break? Could she get a decent night’s sleep? Please?
And in the morning, she’d do it all over again.
It was screen-watching. Which wasn’t what she’d joined the Service for, but what she’d ended up doing. And it felt like ending up, too; felt like she had no future other than the one that waited every morning behind the flaking back door of Slough House, and stretched out minute by endless minute until the door shut behind her when she left. And the time in between was spent fuming at the injustice of it all.