Slow Horses

by Mick Herron

  But still, he was the O.B.’s grandson. ‘If Hassan Ahmed dies,’ he said, ‘there’s no hiding place. It all comes out. Not just here in the Park, but out there in the real world. If your idiot plan gets that kid killed, I will crucify you. Publicly.’

  Taverner made a noise halfway between a snort and a laugh. She said to Lamb, ‘Are you going to tell him the facts of life, or shall I?’

  ‘You already screwed him,’ Lamb told her. ‘Bit late for a theory lesson, I’d have thought. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do.’

  She waited.

  He said, ‘If Hassan Ahmed dies, I’ll watch Cartwright’s back while he does whatever he thinks necessary.’

  And River learned something else about suits and joes; that when a joe wants to be noticed, he is.

  After a while, Taverner said, ‘What if the boy’s rescued?’

  Lamb gave her his shark’s grin. ‘That happens, maybe we’ll keep it between ourselves. There’s bound to be favours we can do each other.’

  The grin made it clear in which direction the favours would flow.

  ‘We don’t know even where he is,’ she said.

  ‘Well, my crew’s on it, so I’d call it sixty-forty he’s toast.’ He looked at River. ‘What do you reckon?’

  River said, ‘I don’t think it’s a joking matter.’

  But he was thinking: fifty-fifty. Absolute tops, he’d give Hassan fifty-fifty of seeing lunchtime.

  Curly was moaning, a long low keening sound, and his foot was twisted at a peculiar angle. Perhaps, Hassan thought, it was broken. One broken ankle versus two bound hands—that made for a level playing field. Or would have done, except that Hassan now had an axe.

  On the whole, that gave him the edge.

  Placing one foot heavily on the fallen Curly’s hand, Hassan rested the blade on the fallen Curly’s head.

  ‘Give me a reason not to kill you,’ he said.

  Whatever Curly answered was lost in a mouthful of earth and a whimper of pain.

  ‘Give me a reason,’ Hassan repeated, lifting the axe an inch.

  Curly turned his head aside and spat grit and leaf. ‘Foo’s ur.’

  ‘I’m supposed to understand that?’

  He spat again. ‘My foot’s hurt.’

  Hassan lowered the axe once more, so the blade touched Curly’s temple. He pressed down, and watched Curly’s eyes close and his features tighten. He wondered if the fear Curly felt was the same fear he’d felt himself. Since it seemed to have departed him now, he suspected it probably was. And how’s that for a joke, he wondered? How would that work with an audience? That the same fear Curly had set loose in Hassan’s gut was now burying its snout in his own bowels? But maybe not everyone would get it. Maybe you had to be there.

  Another push on the axe loosed a trickle of blood down Curly’s face.

  ‘Did you say something?’

  Curly had made a noise.

  ‘Did you?’

  He made another one.

  Wrapping his bound hands tightly round the axe handle, Hassan dropped into a crouch. The blade pressed heavily on the side of Curly’s head. He said, ‘Did you have something to say?’, and gave equal weight to each syllable.

  Curly said, ‘D—do it.’

  Or he might have said, ‘Don’t do it.’

  Hassan waited, his eyes six inches from Curly’s. He wished there were some way he could see inside Curly’s head; some way he could allow light into Curly’s brain in a way that didn’t involve brute surgery. But there wasn’t. He was sure there wasn’t. So he leant a little closer.

  ‘You know what?’ Hassan said. ‘You make me ashamed I’m British.’

  Then he stood and walked away.

  * * *

  He walked back to the car and then along the track that led to the distant road. He had no idea how far away it was. He didn’t care. He was thirsty, hungry and tired, which were all bad things; he was cold and filthy, and that was bad too. But his hands were no longer bound, because he had severed the cord with the blade of the axe; and fear was no longer chewing at his innards, because he’d left it behind in the woods. He was alive, and nobody had rescued him. He was alive because of who he was.

  And maybe because Joanna Lumley had come through, too.

  He saw no sign of Larry, and that didn’t matter. He saw no rabbits, either, nor heard any birds, and his sense of time had long deserted him, but before Hassan reached the road lights bloomed way ahead of him: flashing ovals which painted the trees blue and then blue and then blue. And soon people were rushing towards him in a fever of noise and motion.

  ‘Hassan Ahmed?’

  The axe was taken gently away, and arms were holding him up.

  ‘You’re Hassan Ahmed?’

  It was a simple enough question, and it didn’t take him long to find an answer.

  ‘Yes,’ he told them. ‘Yes, I am.’

  And then he added, ‘I’m alive.’

  They were very glad to hear it, he learned, as they carried him back to the world.

  Chapter 18

  The roadworks have eased on Aldersgate. Traffic flows freely once more. If our inquisitive bus passenger of earlier acquaintance were to gaze at Slough House today on her way past, she might find its passage too swift for concentrated study, though on a London bus there always remains the possibility of inexplicable delay. But that aside, a glimpse is all that the new dispensation permits; one brief view of a young Chinese man with heavy-framed spectacles behind a monitor, and Slough House is in the past. Whatever used to happen there presumably continues to do so. Whatever haunts its fading paintwork doubtless still abides.

  But fresh opportunities have arisen since our voyeur’s first journey. She can alight at the bus stop opposite, for instance, and take a seat, and gaze all day at the never-opening front door of Slough House, with no possibility that Jed Moody will emerge to encourage her departure. Such a vigil, though, would offer little in the way of entertainment, and besides, other views await: across the road, up the staircase at Barbican Station, over the pedestrian bridge, a brief sortie along a bricked-walkway, and—weather permitting—she’ll find a dry low wall on which to perch, and perhaps light a cigarette, and feast at her leisure on what she can see through the waiting windows.

  Which is more than can be seen from bus-level, certainly. For instance, it is now clear that the wobbling ziggurat to one side of the young Chinese man’s desk is composed of pizza boxes, and the tin pyramid to the other of Coke cans; and clear, too, that he appears to have sole occupation of this office. There is another desk, but its surface is clear; almost antiseptically so. It’s as if a particularly conscientious cleaner has obliterated all traces of the desk’s erstwhile occupant; a sterilization which evidently leaves his former colleague undismayed, occupied as he is by whatever is unreeling on his screen.

  This thorough decluttering is in marked contrast to the state of the adjoining office, which looks to have been abandoned at a moment’s notice. The desktops here are still littered with the usual detritus: diaries open to future events, uncapped pens, an alarm clock, a radio, a small gonk. Stuff which, upon a desk-worker’s abrupt departure, would usually find itself swept into the nearest cardboard box and carted home. But here it all remains, suggesting that whichever pair recently shared this office found good reason not to return; being guilty, perhaps, of the kind of offence which has rendered them not only persona non grata but in danger of incurring active hostility from above.

  Onwards and upwards, though; onwards and upwards. From the Barbican perch, a view of the second floor is offered, and this is busier, or at any rate, more peopled. In one of the offices—for our watcher, the one to the left—a pair of workers sit at the same desk; or rather, one sits at the desk while her companion perches on its edge, both concentrating on a transistor radio. Meanwhile, in the next room—the one whose windows read W W Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner For Oaths—a young man sits alone; a freshly barbered young man of average height; fa
ir-haired, pale-skinned, grey-eyed; with a sharpish nose and a small mole on his upper lip. He sits unmoving, his gaze apparently focused on the desk in the other half of his room. This, like its counterpart in the occupied office downstairs, appears to have been swept clean of personal effects, leaving only the ubiquitous computer and keyboard, a telephone, and a battle-scarred blotter belonging to another era entirely. But closer inspection reveals something else on the desk’s surface; an object our watcher recognizes as a hair-slide, or barrette, though whether that word forms part of the young man’s vocabulary is open to question. And yet for the moment at least it demands his full attention: an abandoned barrette on a blotter on an unoccupied desk.

  So far, so pleasing, from our watcher’s point of view, but even from her current vantage point the topmost floor remains inaccessible; the blind drawn over its windows ensuring that whoever haunts this floor does so unobserved. That should be an end of it, then. Our watcher should move along, there being nothing more to see. And yet still she remains, as if she were in possession of some sophisticated piece of surveillance kit that allows her not only to study the people through the windows but to unpeel their actual thoughts, and thus learn that Roderick Ho’s constant trawling through the Service’s classified databases is a quest for the secret that ever eludes him, this being the nature of the sin for which he’s been banished to Slough House—for he is certain that he has committed no crimes that anyone is aware of. And he might be right about this, but the fact remains that he’s looking in the wrong place, since the reason for his exile lies not in his doings but simply in his being. For Roderick Ho is disliked by everyone he encounters, a direct result of his own palpable dislike for everyone else, and his expulsion from Regent’s Park was the administrative equivalent of the swatting of a fly. And if this explanation ever does occur to Ho, enlightenment will probably have its roots in that moment in the café on Old Street, when Catherine Standish called him Roddy.

  Meanwhile, on the next floor up, Min Harper and Louisa Guy share a desk. If Min retains a tendency to pat his pockets, to make sure he hasn’t lost anything, it’s a habit held in check for the time being; and if Louisa still grinds her teeth at moments of tension, either she is learning to control this, or is currently feeling no stress. And while there remains unfinished business between this pair, what commands their attention right now is the radio, which is informing them of the death of one Robert Hobden in a hit-and-run accident. Hobden, of course, was a fallen star, but that his passing is not un-newsworthy is evidenced by the contribution of Peter Judd, a politician as assuredly in the ascendant as Hobden was in decline. And what Judd has to say is this: that while Hobden’s attitudes and beliefs were, of course, utter hogwash, his career had not been without its highlights, and his tragic—yes, that was the word—Hobden’s tragic arc should serve as a warning of the inherent dangers of extremism, in whatever flag it draped itself. And as for his own ambitions, yes, since the question had been asked, Peter Judd would, actually, be prepared to, ah, leave his plough if so required and take up greater office for the common weal—an underused term, but one with historical and cultural resonance, if he might be pardoned the digression.

  Leaving unexamined the question of whether Guy and Harper are in a forgiving mood, our watcher’s attention shifts now to River Cartwright, alone in the office next door. And what River Cartwright is thinking is that rewriting history is the Service’s favourite game; a topic he might illustrate from a hundred of the O.B.’s late-night stories, but which is most immediately realized for him in the fact of Sidonie Baker’s absence—not merely from the office, but from the records of the hospital in which she supposedly died, which have been so thoroughly sanitized as to offer reassurance as to the hygiene standards of the NHS. Just as she is not here now, so she was never there then. Indeed, River’s own memories and those of his colleagues aside, his only absolute proof of her having existed resides in the barrette he found in his car, and which he has placed on her desk. As for proof of her having ceased to exist, he has none. Which allows him to speculate—or perhaps a better word might be pretend—that what he imagined happened to her did not. And he is also thinking that tonight he will catch a train to Tonbridge, and spend time with his grandfather; and perhaps even call his mother. And that tomorrow he will return to Slough House, where daily boredom is perhaps not so absolutely guaranteed as it once was, now that the Second Desk at Regent’s Park is effectively in Jackson Lamb’s pocket.

  And as for Lamb himself—as for Lamb, he remains the shape he ever was, and of much the same temper, and his current position is what it is most mornings: he is reclining in his chair to a degree that threatens its stability and studying his noticeboard, to the back of which is once more pinned the flight fund so briefly in the possession of Jed Moody. The flight fund’s existence, of course, is now known to River Cartwright, but Lamb has other secrets, and major among them is this: that all joes go to the well. River would balk at the information, but Lamb knows it to be true: all joes go to the well in the end, slyly whoring themselves for the coin of their choice. Among the late slow horses, for example, Sid Baker wanted to do her duty, Struan Loy and Kay White sought favour, and Jed Moody needed to be back among the action. Lamb has known greater treacheries. After all, Charles Partner—one-time head of Five—sold himself for money.

  There is movement behind him, and Catherine Standish enters, bearing a cup of tea. This she deposits on Lamb’s desk before departing again, no word having been spoken during the transaction. But Standish, though she doesn’t know it, occupies a place in what Lamb, when he’s forced to acknowledge it, thinks of as his conscience, for another lesson he has long absorbed, and one hardly limited to the Intelligence sphere, is that actions have consequences which harm and ensnare others. Once, in exchange for a service, Lamb revealed to Roderick Ho the sin that had left him in Slough House, and his story—that he had been responsible for an agent’s death—was, like all the best lies, true, though rendered harmless by the omission of details; that, for instance, it was Charles Partner’s death for which he had been responsible, an execution sanctioned by, among others, River Cartwright’s grandfather. For this act, Lamb’s reward was Slough House. Lamb, then, went to the well for peace and quiet, for a sanctuary in which to indulge his ironic self-disgust, and the killing of his former friend and mentor does not disturb his sleep. But the fact that it was, inevitably, Catherine Standish who found her boss’s body has been known to give him pause. Having found bodies in his time, Lamb is aware that such moments leave a scar. He has no intention of attempting to make amends for this, but if it lies within his power to do so, he will prevent further injury to her.

  For the time being, though, he is contemplating immediate options. The status quo is the most obvious of these: Slough House is Lamb’s kingdom, and recent events have done nothing to change that. And should the unexpected arise, he always has his flight fund. But a third way seems to be suggesting itself; and this is that perhaps he is not as weary as he thought of the world of Regent’s Park and its ever-diminishing loyalties. Perhaps he washed his hands of it too soon. Certainly he’s had few moments of late to match that in which he watched Diana Taverner realize that he’d outplayed her, and if he can outplay her, he can surely find more worthy enemies. So far, this is idle fancy; something to fill the space between this cup of tea and the next. But who knows? Who knows.

  Enough. Our watcher extinguishes, if she was smoking, her cigarette, and checks her watch, if she’s wearing one. Then stands and retraces her steps: along the bricked-walkway, over the pedestrian bridge, down the staircase at Barbican Station, and on to Aldersgate. It is threatening rain again, which it always seems to do on this corner. And she has no umbrella. Never mind. If she walks fast enough, she can reach her destination without getting wet.

  If another one ever turns up, she might even step on to a bus.

  Continue reading for a sneak preview from the next Slough House Novel

  Dead Lions />
  A fuse had blown in Swindon, so the south-west network ground to a halt. In Paddington the monitors wiped departure times, flagging everything ‘Delayed,’ and stalled trains clogged the platforms; on the concourse luckless travellers clustered round suitcases, while seasoned commuters repaired to the pub, or rang home with cast-iron alibis before hooking up with their lovers back in the city. And thirty-six minutes outside London, a Worcester-bound HST crawled to a halt on a bare stretch of track with a view of the Thames. Lights from houseboats pooled on the river’s surface, illuminating a pair of canoes which whipped out of sight even as Dickie Bow registered them: two frail crafts built for speed, furrowing the water on a chilly March evening.

  All about, passengers were muttering, checking watches, making calls. Pulling himself into character, Dickie Bow made an exasperated tch! But he wore no watch, and had no calls to make. He didn’t know where he was headed, and didn’t have a ticket.

  Three seats away the hood fiddled with his briefcase.

  The intercom fizzed.

  “This is your train manager speaking. I’m sorry to have to inform you we can’t go any further due to trackside equipment failure outside Swindon. We’re currently—”

  A crackle of static and the voice died, though could faintly be heard continuing to broadcast in neighbouring carriages. Then it returned:

  “—reverse into Reading, where replacement buses will—”

  This was met with a communal groan of disgust, and not a little swearing, but most impressively to Dickie Bow, immediate readiness. The message hadn’t ended before coats were being pulled on and laptops folded; bags snapped shut and seats vacated. The train shunted, and then the river was flowing in the wrong direction, and Reading station was appearing once more.

  There was chaos as passengers disgorged onto crowded platforms, then realised they didn’t know where to go. Nor did Dickie Bow, but all he cared about was the hood, who had immediately disappeared in a sea of bodies. Dickie, though, was too old a hand to panic. It was all coming back to him. He might never have left the Spooks’ Zoo.