Slow Horses

by Mick Herron

  Catherine stepped aside to let him leave.

  She was always aware of Lamb’s physical presence. He took up more than his share of space. Sometimes she’d be in the kitchen at Slough House and he’d decide he needed to be there too: before she knew what was happening, she’d be pressed against the wall, trying to stay free of his orbit while he rooted in the fridge for somebody else’s food. She didn’t think he did this deliberately. He simply didn’t care. Or was so used to living in exile inside his own skin that he assumed others would give him room.

  Tonight, she was more aware than ever. Partly because Lamb was in her home, smelling of cigarettes, and yesterday’s alcohol, and last night’s takeaway; wearing clothes that looked like they were melting; taking her measure with his eyes. But there was more to it. Tonight, he gave the impression that someone was riding his coat-tails. He was always secretive, but she’d never seen him look worried before. As if his paranoia was paying off. As if it had found an enemy that wasn’t only his past, lurking in a shadow his own bulk threw.

  Scooping her keys from a bowl, unhooking her coat from its peg, she grabbed her bag, which was heavier than expected, double-locked the door behind her, and headed downstairs.

  He was in the lobby, unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  She said, ‘What sort of trouble? And how come I’m in it?’

  ‘Because you’re Slough House. And Slough House is officially in the shit, as of tonight.’

  Catherine cast her mind briefly through the last few days’ activity; found nothing in her memory but the usual list-assembly, the data-sift. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Cartwright’s blown a fuse, and we all get to burn down with him.’

  ‘Not a million miles off,’ Lamb admitted. He pushed open the door, and went through it first, scanning the parking area. ‘These the usual cars?’

  ‘Like I notice?’ she said. Then said, ‘Yes. They’re the usual cars.’

  This earned her a swift glance. He said, ‘Baker’s been hurt. Moody’s dead. There’s probably a C&C out on all of us, and I’d rather not spend the next couple of days answering stupid questions underneath Regent’s Park.’

  ‘Sid’s hurt?’

  ‘And Moody’s dead.’

  ‘How badly hurt?’

  ‘Not as badly hurt as he’s dead. Did you hear that bit?’

  ‘Jed Moody was always going to end badly. But I like Sid.’

  Lamb said, ‘You’re full of surprises, you know that?’ and led her out of the building forecourt, with its resident parking and low wall surround and tall green anonymous bushes, and saw the SUV parked on the pavement opposite.

  Nick Duffy, noting Lamb’s reaction, said, ‘I hope he’s not going to take this the hard way.’

  ‘How hard could that be?’ asked Webb. James ‘Spider’ Webb: and there was something as inevitable about his comment as there was about the nickname he’d been saddled with. Webb was under thirty, and married to the notion that anyone twenty years older was lucky to have made it through the flood.

  Duffy suppressed a sigh. He’d been scratching the bottom of the barrel all night; had been forced to send Dan Hobbs to collect the Slough House geek solo. That had ended well, with Hobbs lamping a citizen. So Ho was missing, and the other slow horses had either dumped their mobiles or were congregating in a sewer under Roupell Street. Meanwhile, Duffy was forced to commandeer non-Dogs like Spider Webb, to make up the numbers.

  On the upside, Lady Di had been right. Here was Lamb, come to collect Standish himself. So provided he didn’t do anything remarkable, Duffy would chalk at least one success on his side of the ledger.

  Answering Webb, he said, ‘You’d be surprised.’

  They got out of the SUV, and crossed the road.

  Lamb and the woman watched them come. Not a lot of options, Duffy knew: they could have gone back inside, which wouldn’t have helped, or they could have made a run for it. But if Lamb had skills underneath his slobbish exterior, speed wasn’t among them. Duffy doubted he’d be running anywhere.

  Two yards short of the waiting pair, Duffy said, ‘Busy night.’

  ‘Angling for overtime?’ Lamb said. ‘You’re talking to the wrong man.’

  Spider Webb said, ‘I need to know if either of you are carrying a weapon.’

  ‘No,’ Lamb said, without bothering to look at him.

  ‘I need to check that for myself.’

  Lamb, still not looking at Webb, said, ‘Nick, I’m not holding. Not a gun, not a knife, not even an exploding toothbrush. But if your lapdog fancies frisking me, he’d better frisk my colleague first. Because he’s not gunna be able to do her with two broken wrists.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Duffy said. ‘Nobody’s frisking anyone. Webb, get in the car. Ms Standish, you’re in the front. Jackson, we’re in the back.’

  ‘And supposing we object?’

  ‘If you were going to object, you’d not have asked the question. Come on. We’ve all been doing this far too long. Let’s get to the Park, shall we?’

  It occurred to him later that Lamb had been playing him. Calling him Nick? They’d met, sure, but were hardly buddies. And Duffy was Head Dog, and not easily flattered. But Lamb, unlike Duffy, had seen undercover service, and it was impossible to ignore that. Kids like Webb might see only a burn-out; an older generation remembered what it was that caused the burn-out … Jesus Christ, Duffy thought. He must have found it as tricky as winding his watch. But those thoughts came later, back in Regent’s Park, by which time Lamb and Standish were long gone.

  The four of them got in, and Webb started the car.

  Lamb sneezed twice, then sniffed, and—Catherine didn’t see; she was looking straight ahead—made a noise like he was wiping his nose on his sleeve. She was glad she wasn’t sitting next to him.

  Approaching her was a sporadic trickle of traffic; nothing like the stream, then the flood, these streets would see in an hour or two. The city was still dark, but dawn’s first whispers could be heard, and the streetlights were losing their grip on the air. She’d spent many mornings, this sort of time, waiting for light to creep into her room. The first few hundred, she’d been trying not to think about drinking. She didn’t do that so much any more, and sometimes even slept through till the alarm, but still: the early morning was not unfamiliar to her. It’s just that she wasn’t usually in a car; not usually under arrest. However it had been phrased, that’s what was happening here. She and Lamb were under arrest. Though really, it ought to have been just her, and Lamb should have been somewhere else. Why had he come for her?

  Behind her, he said, ‘Loy, was it?’

  Duffy didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m guessing Loy. He’d be easiest to turn. It would take Taverner about three minutes.’

  From the front, next to Webb, Catherine said, ‘Three minutes to what?’

  ‘To get him to agree to whatever she said. She’s rewriting the timeline. She’s putting Slough House in the frame.’

  Duffy said, ‘This journey’s going to pass a lot quicker if we postpone the conversation till we get there.’

  Catherine said, ‘Frame for what?’

  ‘For the execution of Hassan Ahmed.’ Lamb sneezed again. Then said: ‘Taverner’s scorching the earth, but it won’t work. It’s the cover-up that gets you in the end, Nick. She knows that, but she thinks she’s the exception. That’s what everybody thinks. And everybody’s always wrong.’

  ‘Last time I was at the Park, Diana Taverner was in charge. Until that changes, I do what she says.’

  ‘That’ll sound good before Limitations. Christ, I thought you were Boss Dog. Isn’t it your job to make sure nobody goes off reservation?’

  Catherine glanced sideways. Webb, Duffy had called the driver. He looked the same age, same type, as River Cartwright, but quicker to ask how high when told to jump. He caught her looking: just a flicker from his eyes, which were mostly on the road ahead. A faint smile curled his lip.

  She had barely a glimmer of what was happening
here, but there was a certain comfort in knowing whose side she was on.

  ‘Look,’ Duffy said at last. ‘All I know is, you’re wanted at the Park. That’s it. So you’re wasting your time trying to find out what’s going on.’

  ‘I already know what’s going on. Taverner’s covering her arse. Thing is, she’s too busy doing that to worry about Hassan Ahmed. Remember Hassan, Nick?’ Duffy didn’t reply. ‘Taverner would sooner he had his head cut off than admit it was her fault. Which is why she wanted Loy, who’s no doubt signed off on her version of events by now. And Moody being dead, well, she can paint him any colour she likes. Not as if he’s about to contradict her.’

  Up front, Catherine decided that the streets were starting to look themselves again; places where business was done and people moved freely, instead of skipping from shadow to shadow. Moved as if they belonged here.

  Lamb said, ‘But it’s all going to unravel, Nick. The sensible thing to do would be forget about Lady Di’s London rules and concentrate on finding the kid before he gets whacked too. If that’s not already happened.’ He sneezed again. ‘Jesus, you keep a cat in here or what? Standish, you got tissues in that bag?’

  Hoisting the bag in question on to her knees, Catherine unzipped it and took out Lamb’s gun, which he’d placed there while she was dressing. The safety catch was clearly marked, and she snicked it off before pointing the gun at her chosen target.

  ‘We all know I’m not going to shoot you dead,’ she told Webb. ‘But I’ll put a bullet through your foot if I need to. And that’ll wipe the smirk off your face, won’t it?’

  ‘You two can walk home from here,’ said Lamb. ‘If that’s all right.’

  Chapter 15

  Blake’s grave lies half a mile or so from Slough House, in Bunhill Fields cemetery. It’s marked by a small headstone, also dedicated to his wife Catherine, and is out in the open, at one end of a paved area lined with benches and sheltered by low trees. The stone doesn’t mark the couple’s exact resting place, but indicates that their remains are not far off. Next to it is a memorial to Defoe; Bunyan’s tomb is yards away. Nonconformists all. Whether that was why Lamb chose it as a meeting place, nobody was prepared to guess, but that was where they gathered all the same.

  Having failed to collect Kay White, River arrived alone. He climbed the gates, which were padlocked, and sat on a bench under a tree. Traffic was building up in the background. The city never really slept; it endured white nights and fitful slumbers. Its breakfast was cigarettes, black coffee and aspirin, and it would feel like death warmed up for hours.

  A rattling at the gates meant that others were arriving.

  Min, Louisa and Roderick Ho strode into view, Ho clutching a laptop. Min and Louisa looked as pale as River felt, but were walking tall. Things were happening. They weren’t on the sidelines any more.

  Ho said, ‘Moody really dead?’

  River nodded.

  Ho said, ‘Right,’ and sat on the bench opposite. He opened his machine, booted up and attached a dongle. Nobody asked what he was doing. If he’d sat and listened, or tried to kickstart a conversation, they’d have asked, but Ho diving into the web was business as usual.

  ‘White?’

  River shook his head. ‘Too late.’

  ‘Not—’

  ‘No. Christ, no. She was just being driven away. What about Loy?’

  ‘No sign.’

  Louisa sat next to River. Min stood. He stretched suddenly; went on to tiptoe, and extended his arms as if crucified.

  ‘It’s the Dogs, isn’t it?’

  ‘Guess so.’

  ‘They think we killed Jed?’

  River said, ‘I think they think we killed Alan Black. How well did you two know him?’

  Both shrugged.

  ‘He was around. But not much of a talker.’

  ‘Let’s face it, there are no big talkers at Slough House.’

  ‘He ever say why he quit?’

  ‘Not in my hearing. You never knew him?’

  ‘He was before my time,’ River said.

  ‘Why would they think we killed him?’

  ‘Because we’re being set up,’ River said. ‘Is that a car?’

  It was. It slowed, parked and the engine died; all of this out of sight, behind the trees lining the cemetery’s western edge. River and Louisa got to their feet. Ho, absorbed in his screen, paid no attention. At the far end of the path, there came a clinking sound, and the noise of a bolt being shot.

  ‘It’s Lamb,’ said River.

  ‘He has a key?’

  ‘Well, that would explain why he wanted to meet here.’

  A moment later Lamb and Catherine Standish appeared.

  This was what it had come to: Curly was in a foreign country, undercover, in time of war. His own country, and he was the stranger.

  They were driving past a mosque—a fucking mosque. Here in the capital of England. You couldn’t make it up.

  For years, there’d been warning voices raised, but what good had it done? Sweet FA. Anyone who wants can wander in and take the country: we’ve given them the jobs, the houses, the money, and if they don’t want jobs, we give them money anyway. Welfare state? Don’t make us laugh. Whole country’s a charity case.

  Plus, they were lost. Had no idea where they were. Follow the signs: North. How hard could it be?

  But Larry was flaking. Coward was what it was. We were only supposed to give him a scare. Yeah, because that’s how you fight a war, right? The 7/7 killers didn’t open their rucksacks and show their bombs, say See what we could’ve done if we felt like it? They just did it. Because give them this much: they knew they were fighting a war. And you couldn’t fight a war without both sides taking part.

  He hadn’t realized it was a mosque until they were right next to it, but now he could see it properly, it couldn’t ever have been anything else. It bulbed into foreign shapes. As if they’d driven off the map, and wound up the last place they wanted to be. Panic clutched him: the thought that the kid would know where they were—would pick up on the smells and sounds—and start kicking at the boot. Curly had a vision of a crowd surrounding the car; rocking it side to side. Pulling the kid free, and then what? Setting fire to them. Dragging them on to the street and stoning them. Fucking medieval, the lot of them. The reason he was doing this in the first place: give them a taste of their own medicine.

  He swallowed the panic. The Paki was in the boot. No way could he know where they were.

  None of them knew where they were.

  ‘You got any clue where you’re trying to get to?’

  ‘You said to get some distance, right? I’ve been—’

  ‘I didn’t mean bring us into bloody India.’

  The mosque was behind them. The buildings everywhere were concrete, with barred windows. The only hint of green was a Poundshop’s metal shutter.

  ‘We need to get out of the city.’

  Lamb perched on the rail around Bunyan’s tomb, eating a bacon sandwich. In his other hand he held a second sandwich, wrapped in greaseproof paper. The slow horses were gathered round him.

  He said, ‘Black was recruited by Taverner. The kidnapping was a set-up. Only now it’s real, so Taverner’s looking for scapegoats.’ He paused to swallow. ‘That would be us.’

  ‘Why?’ Min asked.

  Catherine said, ‘Well, it’s not like anyone’ll miss us.’

  ‘And she already had Black signed up,’ Louisa put in. ‘That’s one slow horse in the frame already.’

  ‘And he won’t be contradicting anyone soon,’ Lamb agreed. ‘For all we know, Taverner has a papertrail in place. Saying Black was working for Slough House, not her. Not the Park.’

  ‘She’s going to a hell of a lot of trouble,’ River said. ‘Okay, so there’s two dead, and it doesn’t look rosy for the kid, but ops have gone haywire before. Why’s she running scared?’

  Lamb said, ‘The name Mahmud Gul mean anything?’

  ‘He’s a General,’ Riv
er said automatically. ‘In the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. The Pakistani secret service.’

  That earned him a look. ‘I bet you used to play Top Trumps with grandad. With spooks instead of racing cars.’

  Ho’s laptop was cradled in front of him like an ice-cream seller’s tray. ‘Gul’s Joint Intelligence Department,’ he read. ‘Equivalent to our Second Desk.’

  River was racking his memory for more details. Nothing came to mind that wasn’t painted with a broad brush. ‘He’s a bit of a hardliner.’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’

  Ho said, ‘Back at the turn of the war, it was thought there were elements inside Inter-Services who were alerting Taliban militants to missile strikes. Gul was one of the likely suspects. Nobody was ever charged, but a Park analyst wrote him up as likely to go either way.’

  ‘On the other hand, he’s always supported the government in public,’ River said. ‘And he’s usually mentioned when the next Director’s being discussed.’ Which used up all he knew about Gul. ‘What’s he got to do with this?’ But before Lamb could answer, he said, ‘No. Wait. Don’t tell me.’

  ‘Oh great,’ Catherine said. ‘Twenty questions.’

  Louisa gave her a glance. That comment didn’t sound like Catherine. But then, she didn’t much look like Catherine. Her nose was red-tipped in the chill, sure, and her cheekbones were tinted the same, but the spark in her eyes was out of the ordinary. Perhaps she was enjoying this adventure. Then Catherine’s eyes met hers, and Louisa quickly looked away.

  Lamb finished his sandwich, and belched appreciatively. ‘That was bloody excellent,’ he said. ‘Five stars.’

  ‘Where’s open this time of morning?’ Louisa asked.

  He waved vaguely in the direction of Old Street. ‘Twenty-four-hour place. It wasn’t far out of the way. Didn’t think you’d mind waiting.’

  ‘I hate to interrupt,’ River said. ‘Hassan Ahmed. He’s one of Gul’s?’

  ‘He’s not an agent.’

  ‘Sure?’

  Lamb let his breath out slowly.

  ‘Okay, so—oh, Christ.’ The truth hit River with a thrill. ‘He’s family?’