by Mick Herron
Except in those days he’d have found a patch of wall and smoked a cigarette. Not possible here, which didn’t stop a nicotine pang twitching inside him, or a sudden wasp-sharp sting pricking his thigh, so real he gasped. He gripped the spot, his hand brushing first the corner of an oblivious briefcase, then an umbrella’s slick damp nastiness. Deadly weapons, he thought. Your nine-to-fivers carry deadly weapons.
He was crowded onwards, like it or not, and suddenly everything was okay, because he’d secured visible contact once more: the hood, a hat shielding his bald head, his case tucked under an arm, stood near the escalator to the passenger bridge. So, corralled by weary travellers, Dickie shuffled past and up the moving stairs, at the top of which he sidled into a corner. The main exit from the station was across this bridge. He assumed that was the route everyone would take, once instructions about buses were issued.
He closed his eyes. Today was not ordinary. Usually by this time, just after six thirty, all sharp edges would have been smoothed away: he’d have been up since twelve, after five hours’ stormy shut-eye. Black coffee and a fag in his room. A shower if needed. Then the Star, where a Guinness and whisky chaser would either set him right or serve him notice that solids were best avoided. His hardcore days were over. Back then, he’d had his unreliable moments: drunk, he’d mistaken nuns for whores and policemen for friends; sober, he’d made eye contact with ex-wives, no recognition on his side, and only relief on theirs. Bad times.
But even then, he’d never had a gold-standard Moscow hood shimmy past without clocking him for what he was.
Dickie became aware of action: an announcement about buses had been made, and everyone was trying to cross the bridge. He hung by the monitor long enough for the hood to pass, then allowed himself to be carried forward, three warm bodies behind. He shouldn’t be this close, but there was no accounting for the choreography of crowds.
And this crowd was not happy. Having squeezed through the ticket barriers on the other side, it hassled the station staff, who placated, argued, and pointed at the exits. Outside was wet and dark, and there were no buses. The crowd swelled across the forecourt. Crushed in its embrace, Dickie Bow kept both eyes on the hood, who stood placidly, waiting.
An interrupted journey, thought Dickie. You played the odds in this line of work—he had forgotten he was no longer in this line of work—and the hood would have finished processing them before getting off the train; he would go with the flow, make no fuss; continue on his way by whatever means presented. Where this might be, Dickie had no idea. The train had been Worcester-bound, but made plenty of stops before then. The hood could be getting off anywhere. All Dickie knew was, he’d be getting off there too.
And now there were buses, three of them, pulling round the corner. The crowd tensed, pressed forward, and the hood sailed through the mass like an icebreaker carving an Arctic field, while Dickie slipped through spaces in his wake. Someone was calling instructions, but didn’t have the voice for it. Long before he’d finished, he was drowned out by the muttering of people who couldn’t hear.
But the hood knew what was what. The hood was heading for the third bus, so Dickie sidled through chaos in his wake, and boarded it too. Nobody asked for a ticket. Dickie simply trotted on and headed for the rear, which boasted a view of the hood, two seats ahead. Settling back, Dickie allowed his eyes to close. In every operation came a lull. When it did, you shut your eyes and took inventory. He was miles from home, with about sixteen quid on him. He needed a drink, and wouldn’t get one in a hurry. But on the upside, he was here, it was now, and he hadn’t known how much he’d missed this: living life, instead of easing through it on the wet stuff.
Which was what he’d been doing when he’d spotted the hood. Right there in the Star. A civilian’s jaw would have hit the table: What the hell? A pro, even a long-defunct pro, checked the clock, drained his Guinness, folded the Post and left. Loitered by the bookies two doors down, remembering the last time he’d seen that face, and in whose company. The hood was a bit player. The hood had held the bottle, poured its contents directly into Dickie’s clamped-wide mouth; strictly a non-speaking role. It wasn’t the hood who sent electric shivers down Dickie’s spine … Ten minutes later he emerged, and Dickie fell into step behind him: Dickie, who could follow a ferret through a wood let alone a leftover ghost. A blast from the past. An echo from the Spooks’ Zoo.
(Berlin, if you insisted. The Spooks’ Zoo was Berlin, back when the cages had just been unlocked, and frightened thugs were pouring from the woodwork like beetles from an upturned log. At least twice a day, some sweating, would-be asset was at the door claiming to have the crown jewels in a cardboard suitcase: defence details, missile capability, toxic secrets … And yet, for all the flurry of activity, the writing was on the newly dismantled Wall: everyone’s past had been blown away, but so had Dickie Bow’s future. Thanks, old chap. Afraid there’s not much call for your, ah, skills any more … What pension? So naturally, he’d drifted back to London.)
The driver called something Dickie didn’t catch. The door hissed shut and the horn was tapped twice; a farewell note to the lingering buses. Dickie rubbed his thigh where the edge of a briefcase or umbrella-tip had nipped him, and thought about luck, and the strange places it dragged you. Such as, from a Soho street into the tube and out the other end; into Paddington, onto a train, then onto this bus. He still didn’t know whether that luck was good or bad.
When the lights went out the bus briefly became a travelling shadow. Then passengers switched overhead bulbs on, and blue screens gleamed upwards from laptops, and fists wrapped round iPhones grew spectrally white. Dickie fiddled his own phone from his pocket, but he had no messages. There were never any messages. Scrolling through his contact list, he was struck by how short it was. Two seats in front, the hood had rolled his newspaper into a baton, wedged it between his knees, and hung his hat upon it. He might be asleep.
The bus left Reading behind. Through the window, dark countryside unfurled. Some distance off, an ascending sequence of red lights indicated the mast at Didcot, but the cooling towers were invisible.
In Dickie’s hand, the mobile was a grenade. Rubbing his thumb on its numberpad, he registered the tiny nipple on the middle button that allowed you to orient your fingers in the dark. But nobody was hanging on Dickie’s words. Dickie was a relic. The world had moved on, and what would his message be anyway? That he’d seen a face from the past, and was following it home? Who would have cared? The world had moved on. It had left him behind.
Rejection came softer these days. Dickie heard occasional whispers on the Soho songlines, and these days even the useless were given a chance. The Service, like everyone else, was hamstrung by rules and regulations: sack the useless, and they took you to tribunal for discriminating against useless people. So the Service bunged the useless into some godforsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards. They called them the slow horses. The screw-ups. The losers. They called them the slow horses and they belonged to Jackson Lamb, whom Dickie had encountered, back in the Spooks’ Zoo.
His mobile gave a blip, but there was no message; only a warning that it was running out of power.
Dickie knew how it felt. He had nothing to say. Attention wavered and refocused elsewhere. Laptops hummed and mobiles whispered, but Dickie had no voice. Had no movement, bar a feeble flexing of his fingers. The tiny nipple on the keypad’s middle button scratched beneath his thumb: scratch scratch.
There was an important message to deliver, but Dickie did not know what it was, nor to whom it should be sent. For a few luminous moments he was aware of being part of a warm, humid community, breathing the same air, hearing the same tune. But the tune slipped out of earshot, and became beyond recall. Everything faded, save the scene through the window. The landscape continued unrolling one black fold after another, dotted with pinpricks of light, like sequins on a scarf. And then the lights blurred and dimmed and
the darkness rolled over itself one final time, and then there was only the bus carrying its mortal cargo through the night, heading for Oxford, where it would deliver one soul fewer than it had gathered, back in the rain.
PART ONE
BLACK SWANS
Now that the roadworks have finally gone, Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, is calmer; nowhere you’d choose to have a picnic, but no longer the vehicle-related crime scene it once resembled. The area’s pulse has normalised, and while noise levels remain high, they’re less pneumatic, and include the occasional snatch of street music: cars sing, taxis whistle, and locals stare in bafflement at the freely flowing traffic. Once it was wise to pack a lunch if you were heading down the street on a bus. Now you could while away half an hour trying to cross it.
It’s a case, perhaps, of the urban jungle reclaiming its own, and any jungle boasts wildlife if you look hard enough. A fox was spotted one mid-morning, padding from White Lion Court into the Barbican Centre, and up among the complex’s flower beds and water features can be found both birds and rats. Where the greenery bends over standing water, frogs hide. After dark, there are bats. So it would be no surprise if a cat dropped in front of our eyes from one of the Barbican towers and froze as it hit the bricks; looking all directions at once without moving its head, as cats can. It’s a Siamese. Pale, short-haired, slant-eyed, slender and whispery; able, like all its kind, to slip through doors barely open and windows thought shut, and it’s only frozen for a moment. Then it’s off.
It moves like a rumour, this cat; over the pedestrian bridge, then down the stairs to the station and out onto the street. A lesser cat might have paused before crossing the tributary road, but not ours; trusting instincts, ears and speed, it’s on the pavement opposite before a van driver finishes braking. And then it vanishes, or seems to. The driver peers angrily, but all he can see is a black door in a dusty recess between a newsagent’s and a Chinese restaurant; its ancient black paintwork spattered with roadsplash, a single yellowing milk bottle on its step. And no sign of our cat.
Who has, of course, gone round the back. No one enters Slough House by the front door; instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it. But our cat’s feet are too subtle to require violence and it’s through that door in a blink, and up a doglegged flight of stairs to a pair of offices.
Here on the first floor—ground level being assigned to other properties; to the New Empire Chinese, and whatever the newsagent’s is called this year—is where Roderick Ho labours, in an office made jungly by electrical clutter: abandoned keyboards nest in corners, and brightly coloured wires billow like loops of intestine from backless monitors. Gunmetal bookshelves hold software manuals, lengths of cable, and shoeboxes almost certainly containing oddly shaped bits of metal, while next to Ho’s desk wobbles a cardboard tower fashioned from the geek’s traditional building block: the empty pizza box. A lot of stuff.
But when our cat pokes its head round the door, it’ll find only Ho. The office is his alone, and Ho prefers this, for he mostly dislikes other people, though the fact that other people dislike him back has never occurred to him. And while Louisa Guy has been known to speculate that Ho occupies a place somewhere on the right of the autism spectrum, Min Harper has habitually responded that he’s also way out there on the git index. It’s no surprise, then, that had Ho noticed our cat’s presence, his response would have been to toss a Coke can at it, and he’d have been disappointed to have missed. But another thing Roderick Ho hasn’t grasped about himself is that he’s a better shot when aiming at stationary targets. He rarely fails to drop a can into a wastebasket half the office away, but has been known to miss the point when it’s closer than that.
Unscathed, then, our cat withdraws, to check out the adjoining office. And here are two unfamiliar faces, recently dispatched to Slough House: one white, one black; one female, one male; so new they don’t have names yet, and both thrown by their visitor. Is the cat a regular—is the cat a fellow slow horse? Or is this a test? Troubled, they share a glance, and while they’re bonding in momentary confusion our cat slips out and nips up the stairs to the next landing, and two more offices.
The first of which is occupied by Min Harper and Louisa Guy, and if Min Harper and Louisa Guy had been paying attention and noticed the cat, they’d have embarrassed seven bells out of it. Louisa would have gone onto her knees, gathered the cat in her arms and held it to her quite impressive breasts—and here we’re wandering into Min’s area of opinion: breasts that couldn’t be called too small or too large, but breasts that are just right; while Min himself, if he could get his mind off Louisa’s tits long enough, would have taken a rough manly grasp of the cat’s scruff; would have tilted its head so they could share a glance, and each understand the other’s feline qualities—not the furry, soft ones, but the night time grace and the walking-in-darkness; the predatory undercurrent that hums beneath a cat’s daytime activities.
Both Min and Louisa would have talked about finding milk, but neither would actually have done so, the point being to indicate that kindness and milk-delivery were within both their scopes. And our cat, quite rightly, would have relieved itself on the mat before leaving their office.
To enter River Cartwright’s room. And while our cat would have crossed this threshold as unobtrusively as it had all the others, that wouldn’t have been unobtrusive enough. River Cartwright, who is young, fair-haired, pale-skinned, with a small mole on his upper lip, would immediately have ceased what he was doing—paperwork or screenwork; something involving thought rather than action, which perhaps accounts for the air of frustration that taints the air in here—and held our cat’s gaze until it broke contact, made uncomfortable by such frank assessment. Cartwright wouldn’t have thought about providing milk; he’d be too busy mapping the cat’s actions, working out how many doors it must have slipped through to make it this far; wondering what drew it into Slough House in the first place; what motives hid behind its eyes. Though even while he was thinking this our cat would have withdrawn and made its way up the last set of stairs, in search of a less stringent reckoning.
And with this in mind, it would have found the first of the final pair of offices: a more welcoming area into which to strut, for this is where Catherine Standish works, and Catherine Standish knows what to do with a cat. Catherine Standish ignores cats. Cats are either adjuncts or substitutes, and Catherine Standish has no truck with either. Having a cat is one small step from having two cats, and to be a single woman within a syllable of fifty in possession of two cats is tantamount to declaring life over. Catherine Standish has had her share of scary moments but has survived each of them, and is not about to surrender now. So our cat can make itself as comfortable as it likes in here, but no matter how much affection it pretends to, how coyly it wraps its sleek length round Catherine’s calves, there will be no treats forthcoming; no strips of sardine patted dry on a Kleenex and laid at its feet; no pot of cream decanted into a saucer. And since no cat worth the name can tolerate lack of worship, ours takes its leave and saunters next door …
… to Jackson Lamb’s lair at last, where the ceiling slopes and a blind dims the window, and what light there is comes from a lamp placed on a pile of telephone directories. The air is heavy with a dog’s olfactory daydream: takeaway food, illicit cigarettes, day-old farts and stale beer, but there will be no time to catalogue this because Jackson Lamb can move surprisingly swiftly for a man of his bulk, or he can when he feels like it, and trust this: when a fucking cat enters his room, he feels like it. Within a blink he’d have seized our cat by the throat; pulled up the blind, opened the window, and dropped it to the road below, where it would doubtless land on its feet, as both science and rumour confirm, but equally doubtless in front of a moving vehicle, this, as noted, being the new dispensation on Aldersgate Street. A muffled bump an
d a liquid screech of brakes might have carried upwards, but Lamb would have closed the window by then and be back in his chair, eyes closed; his sausagy fingers interlinked on his paunch.
It’s a lucky escape for our cat, then—that it doesn’t exist, for that would have been a brutal ending. And a lucky escape twice over, as it happens, for on this particular morning the nigh-on unthinkable has happened, and Jackson Lamb is not dozing at his desk, or prowling the kitchen area outside his office, scavenging his underlings’ food; nor is he wafting up and down the staircase with that creepily silent tread he adopts at will. He’s not banging on his floor, which is River Cartwright’s ceiling, for the pleasure of timing how long it takes Cartwright to arrive, and he’s not ignoring Catherine Standish while she delivers another pointless report he’s forgotten commissioning. Simply put, he’s not here.
And no one in Slough House has the faintest idea where he is.
Where Jackson Lamb was was Oxford, and he had a brand new theory, one to float in front of the suits at Regent’s Park. Lamb’s new theory was this: that instead of sending tadpole spooks on expensive torture-resistance courses at hideaways on the Welsh borders, they should pack them off to Oxford railway station to observe the staff in action. Because whatever training these guys underwent, it left every last one of them highly skilled in the art of not releasing information.
“You work here, right?”
“Sir?”
“Were you on shift last Tuesday evening?”
“The helpline number’s on all the posters, sir. If you have a complaint—”
“I don’t have a complaint,” Lamb said. “I just want to know if you were on duty last Tuesday evening.”
“And why would you want to know that, sir?”