Slow Horses

by Mick Herron

  Then one of the boots was on his shoulder, pressing him down on to the earth. It belonged to the one Hassan called Curly. Way up above his boot, Curly was showing him a thin, cruel smile.

  ‘End of the line,’ he said.

  Taverner said, ‘I’m glad you’ve seen sense.’

  Lamb ignored her, surveying her team instead, who were at their own or each other’s workstations, and engrossed in their current tasks, and studying every move he made. Soft light rained on them, and there was a slight buzzing in the air, white noise, which seemed to act as an aural curtain. Even without the glass wall, he doubted whether anyone could have heard their conversation.

  Nick Duffy was a different matter, of course. Nick Duffy was with them in Taverner’s office. Nick Duffy could hear every word.

  If there’d ever been any doubt that Diana Taverner could read minds, she put it to rest then and there. She said, ‘It’s okay, Nick. You can leave us.’

  He didn’t like it, but he went.

  ‘Three sugars, there’s a love,’ Lamb said to his departing back.

  Taverner said: ‘You want the bottom line?’

  ‘Oh, I’m gagging for it, darling.’

  ‘Black’s body’s been found. He used to be one of yours. It’s clear he was involved in the kidnapping of Hassan Ahmed. You were seen meeting with him in the early summer, long after he’d quit Slough House. Two of your crew have signed statements to that effect. You want me to continue?’

  ‘It’s the only thing keeping me going,’ Lamb assured her. ‘These statements. Loy and White, right?’

  ‘They make credible witnesses, and they put Black and you together. That, plus Moody’s homicidal outing last night, puts Slough House in a very messy frame. If you want it to go away, we can manage that. But you’re going to have to cooperate.’

  Lamb said, ‘Homicidal?’

  For the briefest of moments, a shadow crossed Taverner’s face. She said, ‘I’m sorry. You hadn’t heard.’

  He smiled, but it wasn’t a real smile; just a tightening of the flesh across the face. ‘Well. That’s another loose end clipped off, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s how you see your team? “Loose ends”?’

  ‘But Baker was never on my team, was she? You assigned her to Slough House, but not because she’d slept with the wrong boss. She was a plant. She was watching River Cartwright.’

  ‘Your evidence being?’

  ‘Her own words.’

  ‘Which she won’t be repeating any time soon.’ Taverner’s gaze was steady. She said, ‘I’ll make you an offer, Jackson. Something clean we can all walk away from. Co-sign Loy and White’s statements, and that’ll be the end of it.’

  ‘I don’t do subtle. You’re going to have to explain why I’d want to do that.’

  ‘You’re old school, Jackson, and not in a good way. You’re out of the loop. I go to Limitations with a sacrificial victim, and outcomes will matter more than proofs. That’s how things are done now. If there’s a quiet out available, Limitations will sign off on it. They’ll even call it a retirement. It’s not like you’ll lose your pension fund.’

  Jackson Lamb reached inside his coat, and had the satisfaction of seeing her flinch. Her expression turned to distaste as he scratched his armpit. ‘Think I might have been bitten at the canal.’

  She didn’t reply.

  He withdrew his hand and sniffed his fingers. Then put his hand in his pocket. ‘So your plan is, I cough to your sins? Or else what?’

  ‘It gets messy.’

  ‘It’s already messy.

  She said, ‘I’m trying to find a way out that causes the least damage for all of us. Like it or not, Slough House is in the firing line, Jackson. Appearances count. You’ll all come under scrutiny. All of you.’

  He said, ‘This about Standish again?’

  ‘Did you think I’d forgotten?’

  ‘You know me. Always hoping for the best.’

  ‘Charles Partner implicated her in everything. He left an itemized statement of his treachery in which he named her as an accomplice. She was lucky not to be arrested.’

  Lamb said, ‘She’s a drunk.’

  ‘That’s not an excuse for treason.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be. It’s what made Partner think he could get away with it. Why he kept her on after her breakdown. A dried-out drunk is still a drunk. She was loyal to him so he used her, tried to make out she helped him sell secrets. But no one who saw his, what did you call it?—itemized statement, believed it for a second. That was his last-ditch attempt to spread the blame, and it was pure fiction.’

  ‘And swiftly covered up.’

  ‘Of course it bloody was. Service had enough problems. Partner’s crimes were black-ribboned from the off, and half the chinless idiots on Limitations still don’t know about them. Drag all that up now, and things’ll get messy all right. You sure that’s a road you want to go down?’

  ‘Covering up treachery’s a crime in itself. This time round, they’ll do a full audit.’ Of the two Diana Taverner was in better shape, and knew it. But then, Jackson Lamb could climb out of a sauna, wrap himself in brand-new threads, and still come off second best to her on her worst day. ‘You found her a safe berth once, else she’d have drunk herself to death in a bedsit by now. But you can’t save her twice. I’m offering to do that for you.’ Her eyes shifted from Lamb to the hub behind him. Her team were making little pretence of not studying events in her glass-walled office. She deepened her voice slightly. It’s the tone she’d have used if she were trying, God help her, to seduce him. A tone that rarely failed. ‘Put your hands up to this. It was an honourable attempt to get a good result, and not your fault it went wrong. The public at large will never know. And between these walls, you’ll be a hero.’

  She stopped. She was good at reading people. Lamb was a tricky subject—had taught himself to be illegible—but still, Diana Taverner could see him weighing her words. His eyes suggested he was immersed in calculation; the consequences of a scorched-earth policy, as against the walk-away compromise on the table. And seeing this, she felt as a whaler must feel, watching the first harpoon strike flesh: a single wound, and far from mortal, but enough to guarantee the outcome. All that was left was the waiting. And she continued believing this until Jackson Lamb bent, scooped the metal waste-paper basket from beside her desk, and in a surprisingly graceful near-pirouette, hurled it at the glass wall behind him.

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ A flash of the familiar Roderick Ho; an expression of lofty contempt for the analog mind. ‘The car. Dermot Radcliffe’s Volvo.’

  Min Harper scraped his chair round the table, so he could see the laptop’s screen. For a moment he thought Ho was about to block his view; hook an arm around it like the class swot hiding his homework. But he restrained himself, even shifting the laptop slightly so Min could see it.

  If he’d been expecting a blinking red light on a stylized streetmap—which he partly was—Min was disappointed. Instead, he was looking at a slightly out-of-focus but recognizable photograph of the tops of a whole bunch of trees. ‘It’s under there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ho said. Then said, ‘Probably.’

  Catherine Standish said, ‘Care to elaborate on that?’

  ‘That’s where the sat nav system registered to the car Dermot Radcliffe hired from Triple-D Cars three weeks ago was, roughly fifty seconds ago.’ He looked across the table at Catherine. ‘There’s a slight time lag.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And they might have dumped the sat nav, of course. Might have tossed it out of the window hours ago.’

  Louisa said, ‘Assuming Black was the brains, they probably wouldn’t have thought of that.’

  ‘Let’s not underestimate them,’ Catherine said. ‘Black’s dead. They’re not. Where’s the sat nav now, Roddy?’

  Ho coloured slightly, and his finger stroked the keyboard’s touchpad. An OS map sprout
ed on to the screen. Two more taps, and it had magnified twice over.

  ‘Epping Forest,’ he said.

  Curly moved his boot away. Hassan pulled the handkerchief from his mouth, and tossed it as far as he was able. Then lay on the ground, sucking mouthfuls of cold damp air. He hadn’t realized how empty his lungs were. How foul it had been in that boot, with only his own stink to survive on.

  He sat up, every part of his body protesting. Behind Curly stood Larry: taller than Curly, broader too, but somehow less substantial. He was holding what looked like a bundle of sticks. Hassan blinked. The world turned swimmy, then washed back into line. It was a tripod. And that matchbox in his other hand: that would be a camera.

  Curly was holding something altogether different.

  Hassan drew his knees up, leant forward, and pressed his hands to the cold earth. It felt reassuringly solid, and at the same time coldly alien. What did he know about the outdoors? He knew about city streets and supermarkets. He pushed himself unsteadily on to his feet. I wobble, he thought. I wobble. Here among these trees, which are so very big, I am small, and I hurt, and I wobble. But I’m alive.

  He looked at Curly, and said, ‘This it, is it?’ His voice sounded strange, as if he were being played by an actor. Someone who’d never actually heard Hassan speak, but had worked out what he might sound like from a faded photograph.

  ‘Yeah,’ Curly told him. ‘This is it.’

  The axe he was holding looked to Hassan like something from the Middle Ages. But then, it was something from the Middle Ages—a smoothly curved length of wood with a dull-grey metal head, sharpened to a killing edge. Used down the centuries, because it rarely went wrong. Sometimes the handle wore thin, and was replaced. Sometimes the blade grew blunt.

  Joanna Lumley was long gone. Hassan’s inner comedian had not returned to the stage. But when he spoke again his own voice had returned to him, and for the first time in an age, he uttered the precise words he was feeling.

  ‘You fucking coward.’

  Did Curly flinch? Was he not expecting that?

  Curly said, ‘I’m a soldier.’

  ‘You? A soldier? You call this a battlefield? You’ve tied my hands, dragged me into a forest, and now you’re what? Gunna cut my head off? Some fucking soldier.’

  ‘It’s a holy war,’ Curly said. ‘And your lot started it.’

  ‘My lot? My lot sell soft furnishings.’ A wind stirred the woods, making a noise like an appreciative audience. Hassan felt blood run through his veins; felt fear build into a bubble in his chest. It might burst at any moment. Or might just float him away. He looked at Larry. ‘And you, right? You’re just gunna stand there and let him do what he wants? Another fucking soldier, right?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Or what? You’ll cut my head off? Fuck the pair of you. You want to film this? Film me now, saying this. You’re both cowards and the BN fucking P are a bunch of fucking losers.’

  ‘We’re not BNP,’ Curly said.

  Hassan threw his head back and laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  He said, ‘You think I care? You think I care who you are? BNP or English Defence League or any other kind of stupid fucking Nazi, you think I care? You’re nothing. You’re nobodies. You’ll spend the rest of your lives in prison, and you know what? You’ll still be nobodies.’

  Larry said, ‘Right. That’s it.’

  Duffy arrived full-tilt, of course. He’d never been far away. He found a waste-paper basket rolling harmlessly across the carpet, and a glass wall showing no sign that violence had been offered. But Taverner was white-faced, and judging by Jackson Lamb’s expression, that counted as a result.

  Lamb said, ‘A handler never burns his own joe. It’s the worst treachery of all. That’s what Partner was doing, using Standish as a shield. That’s what you’re doing now. Maybe I am old school. But I’m not watching that happen twice.’

  Nick Duffy said, ‘Partner?’

  ‘Enough,’ Taverner said. Then: ‘He’s been running Slough House like a private army. He’s been running ops, for Christ’s sake. Take him downstairs.’

  While she was speaking Lamb had found a loose cigarette in his overcoat pocket, and was now trying to straighten it. His expression suggested this was currently his major problem.

  Duffy wasn’t armed. Didn’t need to be. He said, ‘Okay, Lamb. Put that down, and drop your coat on the floor.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Duffy couldn’t help it: he glanced at Taverner. She was glancing right back.

  ‘Something you should know first, mind.’

  And now they both looked at Lamb.

  ‘The SUV your guy just drove under the building? There’s a bomb on the back seat. A big one.’

  A second passed.

  Duffy said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘Might not be.’ Lamb shrugged, then stared at Taverner. ‘I told you. I don’t do subtle.’

  The desk guys weren’t as fond of Spider Webb as he thought, but everyone likes having information. Somebody had parked a Service car on the forecourt, and received the inevitable response: the security drones and a couple of Duffy’s boys, not long back from various errands. They’d surrounded the car until Duffy himself appeared.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Jackson Lamb,’ the older desk guy said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’ve worked here twenty years. You get to know Jackson Lamb.’

  The word sonny was all the more eloquent for remaining unspoken.

  Lamb had come in under Duffy’s steam; was up on the hub. The desk guys’ monitors didn’t cover what happened there, but he hadn’t reappeared.

  Spider chewed his lip. Whatever Lamb was up to, it didn’t involve the madwoman with the gun; or River, either. He mumbled his thanks to the desk guys, and didn’t see the look they shared as he headed back upstairs. On the landing he stopped by the window. Nothing was happening on the street. He blinked. Something was happening on the street. A black van screeched to a halt, and almost before it had stopped moving the back was open, allowing three, four, five black-clad shadows to pour like smoke into the morning. Then they were gone, headed into the underground car park.

  The achievers, everyone called them. Spider Webb had always thought it a ridiculous name; a piece of jargon that shouldn’t have stuck, but had. They were the SWAT guys, who mostly did extractions and removals; he’d seen them in action, but only on drills. This hadn’t struck him as a drill.

  He wondered if the building were under attack. But if so, there’d be alarms, and a lot more activity.

  Through the window, the same nothing was happening again. Small disturbances only. A wind rearranged the trees over the road; a taxi passed. Nothing.

  Webb shook his head; an unnecessarily dramatic gesture, given there was nobody to witness it. Story of his life. The joke was, last time he’d been close to anyone, it had been River Cartwright. Some of the courses they’d been on, you couldn’t get through without forming alliances; what people called friendships. More than once, he’d assumed that their futures would run on parallel lines, but something had prevented that, which was Spider’s slow-dawning realization that River was better than him at most things; so much so, he didn’t have to make a big show of it. Which was the sort of moment on which alliances foundered.

  He carried on upstairs. Next flight up, he opened the door to his corridor, and one of the achievers stuck a gun to his temple.

  Larry said, ‘That’s it. I’m done. You want to do this, you’re on your own.’

  ‘You’re going?’

  ‘It’s all fucked up. You can’t see that? We were only meant to scare him. Film it. Show them we meant business.’

  ‘Scaring them’s not business.’

  ‘It’s enough for me. You killed a spook, man. I’m leaving. Get back to Leeds, maybe just …’

  Maybe hide under the bed. Maybe get home, and hope it would all go away. Close his eyes tight enough
, and none of this would have happened.

  ‘No way,’ Curly said. ‘No fucking way are you going anywhere.’

  Larry dropped the tripod and tossed him the digicam. It landed by Curly’s feet. ‘Still want to film it? Film it yourself.’

  ‘And how am I supposed to—’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Larry turned and started to pick his way along the track.

  ‘Get back here!’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘Larry! Get fucking back!’

  Hassan said, ‘Soldiers, right. You’re soldiers.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Soldiers get shot for deserting, don’t they?’

  ‘Shut your fucking hole!’

  ‘Or what?’ Hassan asked. Inside him, the bubble burst. He’d soiled himself, wet himself, sweated and wept through days of fear. But now he’d come out the other side. He’d done the worst of dying: the knowing it was going to happen, the absolute shame of knowing he’d do anything to avoid it. And now he was watching his murderer’s plans crumble. ‘Show this on the internet, you fucking Nazi. Oh, right, you can’t, can you? You’ve only got one pair of hands.’

  In pure blind rage, Curly hit him with the axe.

  The four sat around the table, their plates now cleared away. Since Catherine had got back from the phone, and the other three had confirmed, in the way of small groups of people everywhere, what they all knew already—that she had called the police, explained who she was, what she knew, and how she knew what she knew—no one had spoken. But Ho had folded his laptop away, and Louisa was leaning forward, her hands cradling her chin, her teeth grinding. Min’s lips were pursed in a way that suggested deep thought. And every sudden noise attracted Catherine’s attention, as if every rattle of every cup, every dropped spoon, threatened disaster.

  Out on Old Street, cars whistled past in bursts dictated by the nearby traffic lights.

  Min cleared his throat as if about to speak, but thought better of it.

  Ho said, ‘You know something?’

  They didn’t.

  ‘I’ve got my mobile in my pocket.’ He took it out and placed it on the table, so they could see it for themselves. ‘All this time, Catherine’s trotting off to the callphone in the corner. And I’ve got my mobile in my pocket.’