by Mick Herron
“You pick weird places to set your boundaries. And you know what your problem is?” Marcus was warming up now, developing his theme. “You never do anything. You just sit in your office and surf your machines like, like, like a fucking elf. Day in, day out, churning through reams of pointless information, just to keep Jackson bloody Lamb happy.”
“So do you.”
“Yeah, but I hate it.”
“But you still do it.”
Shirley shook her head.
Marcus explained, “You’re a dweeb, Ho. All you are, all you’ll ever be. A woman like Louisa’s never gonna give you a second glance, and nor is any other woman without seeing your credit card up front. Me, I don’t have that problem. You know why? Because before I was stuck doing this shit, I was doing other shit. Proper shit. You, all you’ve ever done is this shit, and this is the shit you like doing.”
Ho said, “So what are you saying?”
“Give me strength . . . Do something, that’s what I’m saying. You want to make a mark, you want to impress people, do something. Doesn’t matter what, just so long as it’s not sitting at a screen crunching . . . data.”
If that last noun had involved bodily fluids rather than information, Marcus couldn’t have put a more disgusted spin on it.
Now he stood. “I’m going. Broken bones, remember? If you take nothing else away, take that. Broken bones.”
“Aren’t we having another round?”
Shirley did the thing with her fingers again. “Hashtag missingthepoint.”
“Stop doing that,” Marcus said. He looked down at his unfinished beer, shrugged, and headed for the door.
Shirley reached across, carefully removed Ho’s specs, folded them, and dropped them into Marcus’s Guinness. “There,” she said.
Ho opened his mouth to say something, but wisely changed his mind.
There was construction work on the other side of the road, as there seemed to be everywhere else: an office block had been taken down, a new one would one day go up, and meanwhile the empty space had been boarded off in case anyone noticed that not everywhere had to have a building on it. Catherine hurried past, buckled shoes tip-tapping on the pavement. An approaching man shot her a troubled look, but whether at her speed or her choice of clothing couldn’t be determined.
This area was only vaguely on her map, but she knew if she swung right she’d soon join the main road leading to King’s Cross; the other way, and she’d be into one of those enclaves London specialised in, whose small pockets of history had been left largely unmolested. This one was Georgian squares, many of them intact; one or two with a side removed due to war or development damage. Parked cars lined the kerbs. It struck her, and felt like an observation somebody else was making, how tranquil London could look, from the right angle, in the right light.
Out on the main thoroughfare loud cries would create confusion, and confusion was the enemy’s friend. Here, away from the rapid pulse of traffic, she could knock on a stranger’s door and plead sanctuary . . . She risked a look behind. There was no sign of the black van, which would have to travel some way down the road before effecting a turn, because of the median strip. But there was someone, a hundred yards back, or had been—in the moment of her turning he melted in the evening’s heat; was an imp of her unconscious, playing with her mind.
Or he was a man, and had dropped behind a parked car.
It might all be a heat dream. Paranoia, the sober drunk’s companion, blooming in the swelter of the evening. But it felt real. First Sean, then the other soldier; the van that had looped round, as if coming to collect her. Panic was welling inside Catherine, though it would have taken a pro to notice. She looked distracted, nothing more. At Slough House, this might have been cause to pull up the barricades; here on the streets, it didn’t register.
She believed she was being followed, and that he had dropped behind a car.
And she believed that any moment the black van would reappear, and that for some unknown reason it was coming for her—that Sean Donovan had tagged her for a cohort of watchers, who were gathering, and would soon pounce.
On the move, walking faster, she found her phone, re-called Lamb, and went straight to voicemail again. Disconnecting, she once more considered knocking on a stranger’s door: but then what? She was not unaware that Shirley Dander referred to her as the Mad Governess. Dangerous territory, snarking on others’ appearance when you were five-two high and favoured a buzz cut, but there it was—the mode of dress in which Catherine felt comfortable labelled her eccentric. Would you let this woman into your home? Besides, knocking on a door would mean coming to a halt, and movement felt safest. Lamb, she thought, would keep moving. Not the Lamb he was today, but the Lamb he’d been back whenever, living the life that had turned him into the Lamb he was today.
She hurried through the square and into a connecting terrace. Streetlights were coming on and the quality of the heat was changing, radiating up from the pavements instead of pulsing down from the sky. Night would bring no relief. Still, when it fell she hoped to be home, behind a locked door, wondering what momentary madness she’d fallen prey to, out on the sun-struck streets.
This terrace was thirty houses long, and ended in another square. At the next junction, she’d head back to the main road: hop on a bus, rejoin the transport network that held London together, when it wasn’t holding it up. Another look behind. Nobody. The shape that had dropped behind a car had been a falling shadow, nothing more. Two black vans was well within an ordinary margin. A car rolled by, looking for a parking space, and rounded the corner ahead. As it passed from sight the black van turned into the road. Catherine swung on her heels, and Sean Donovan scooped her into his arms like a fairytale hero; cradling her and stopping her mouth in a single embrace. The black van slowed, its back doors opened, and Donovan stepped inside carrying Catherine. The doors closed, and the van swept off.
Seven seconds, if that.
The streets quietly smouldered, as the violet hour grew purple.
It was still hot as hell when Jackson Lamb emerged from Slough House into the backyard and, fiddling in his pocket for his lighter, found his mobile phone instead, and noticed he had two missed calls—Standish. Missed calls. A stationery delivery gone astray, or a complaint about a printer not working. Standish persisted in laying such issues at his door, no matter how many times he outlined department policy, which was that he didn’t give a toss. Cigarette smouldering in hand he shambled into the lane, a coronet of smoke lingering in the air behind him, like an image of a wandering spirit . . .
Which lasted but briefly, though in the moments before its passing swelled outward, as though pregnant with impressions of the building’s inhabitants, weighed down as they were with grief and gambling debts, with drug habits and self-involvement; unburdening themselves to the comatose, squabbling in pubs, hunting oblivion in strangers’ beds, or else grown lazy, fat and complacent—sifting through all these as if somewhere among them lay the answer to a question posed recently, quite some distance away: Which of your colleagues would you trust with your life?
And then the air shifted, and the smoke was gone.
It must have been a nursery at one time, nestling quietly under the eaves, because beneath the plain white of the ceiling Catherine could make out faint shapes from a previous scheme, stars and crescent moons, decorations to enchant the tenant of a crib. But that was in the distant past, judging by the plaster dust lying in icing-sugar drifts by the skirting board. The floor, too, was bare—no protection for infant feet—though a thin rug had been laid next to the single bed, and the padlock on the outside of the door was heavy-duty, beyond what even the most mischief-prone child warranted. A nursery no more. Though not the securest of prisons.
They’d travelled for an hour at least; slowly at first, through the never-empty streets of London, then faster once free of the capital. Less than an hour,
she thought, but her watch had been taken from her, and she had lacked the presence of mind to perform a slow count . . . Besides, she’d blacked out on being dumped in the van. Partly the grip Sean Donovan had exerted, a clasping of—was it her carotid—plus the shock and the heat and, crazily enough, a momentary relaxation at knowing the worst had happened, and she need no longer dread its approach. She had grown dizzy, and life had grown dark. So there’d been no running tally of corners taken; no memorising of audible landmarks. If churchbells had rung, she’d missed them. If the van had passed a waterfall, she’d failed to notice.
There’d been two others. One driving, obviously. Sean himself, who had lifted her from the street like a sack left for recycling; and a third, the soldier she’d seen loitering by the tube. Being spotted, it occurred to her, had not been his error: she’d been meant to notice him, and turn away. What use would their van have been on the underground?
Here and now, like any prisoner, she checked the window first. Set in an alcove formed by the slant of the roof and mullioned into a diamond pattern, it was closed by a simple latch, and easily large enough to fit through, but there were iron bars set into the external sill which a brief tug told her weren’t going anywhere. Not that she was built for scrambling down the side of a house. It wasn’t the securest of prisons, but didn’t have to be—she was a middle-aged woman who’d never been a joe; a recovering drunk who was PA to a drunk still working on it. Why did they want her in the first place? And who, Sean Donovan included, were they?
Unsuited for squeezing through them, Catherine settled for leaving the windows open instead, causing a slight adjustment in the air. Nothing you could call a breeze. There was a hum of distant traffic, but she couldn’t see the road from here. It had felt like a motorway, though that didn’t narrow things down much. An hour or so from Central London, somewhere off a motorway . . . A house set on its own in what must be countryside, because it was too dark to be anything else.
In the van, she’d been blindfolded and gagged, her hands bound, but none of it roughly—it might have been a sex game, a party promise. And that had been it for the rest of the journey. She’d contemplated thrashing about, but to what end? Best to preserve her strength for whatever came next.
When they’d left the motorway, the terrain had swiftly deteriorated: slip road, B-road—she’d heard bushes swishing the van’s panels. Then the crunching of gravel, and the sudden dips and bounces of rough ground. The van had lurched to a stop; no negotiating its way into a space. They’d untied her but left the blindfold on as they helped her out, one strong arm—not Donovan’s—at her waist until she’d found her feet. Then out of the country air, which was softer, greener, richer than the city’s, and into a house whose floors were wooden, on which her buckled feet sang, and produced a faint echo.
“There’s stairs.”
Again, not Donovan.
There were stairs, yes, and then more stairs; three floors’ worth. And then she was in here, this one-time nursery, and the blindfold was removed.
“Your quarters.”
It was the second soldier, the one from the tube: chipped from the same block as Donovan. Before she had time for a more detailed analysis, he was gone. She heard him fitting the padlock in place, then heading downstairs.
Here she was, then. They’d taken her bag: her money, tissues, lipstick, Kindle, travel pass, other stuff; her phone too, of course. Her watch. They hadn’t searched her, though, which could easily have proved their undoing, if she’d been in the habit of carrying a concealed weapon or the means of improvising one. And still she had no clue what they wanted . . . The slightest of draughts now, through the opened window. There were hills in the distance, a starless expanse blocking the heavens. A few faraway lights, which must be other dwellings; a more focused blaze of electricity which was probably a garage, servicing the nearby motorway. All plainly visible. Almost an amateur operation, except for Sean Donovan’s involvement. No one would call him amateur.
Looking down on the immediate surroundings, she could make out other structures, half-revealed by the pools of light splashing through downstairs windows. They looked like outhouses—barns?—further suggesting that this was a farmhouse. Something else, too, in the darkness; a vehicle the size and shape of a London bus; one of the old Routemasters that were either out of service or about to be reintroduced, depending what the transport policy was on any given morning. Just another touch of the bizarre to throw into the mix. What was going on?
She doubted it was personal. Donovan would hardly put a crew together to kidnap a former girlfriend. Or not even girlfriend; one of his former lays. Some other reason, then . . . He knew she was no longer at the Park, because he’d said as much, on Aldersgate Street. What did he know about Slough House? Did he think it was important? He had a serious disappointment coming if so.
There was a second door on the far side of the room and Catherine tried it now, expecting to find it locked, but it opened without complaint. An en-suite bathroom: loo, sink, bath. There was no cabinet on the wall, though screw marks, and a less-discoloured rectangle of magnolia paint, indicated that there had been once: yes, well, she thought. Give a girl a mirror, she can make herself a knife. Presumably similar thoughts about the weaponising potential of shampoo, tubes of toothpaste, cans of hairspray, etc. had also occurred to her captors, because the only toiletry, a single loo roll aside, was a complimentary-sized bar of soap, still in its wrapper. Stick a hairpin in it, you’ve got a one-use-only shiv, she thought, but she didn’t have a hairpin, and didn’t imagine it would take anyone bigger than a boy scout to take it away from her if she did.
There was another window in here, a skylight, but it too was barred over, and anyway out of reach.
She returned to the bedroom. It occurred to her that maybe she should try to get some sleep, there being few other activities available which didn’t involve pacing and growing scared, but decided against it. To sleep was to become vulnerable. For the time being, she was in charge of herself, if nothing else. She’d sit and wait. Sooner or later, information would start to flow. Meanwhile, she’d carry on being herself: not drunk, unbowed, and as organised as the situation allowed her to be.
•••
It was perhaps half an hour before anyone came. Catherine had turned the light off, the better to familiarise herself with the view through the window, but no great insights arrived in the dark. Sean Donovan, she remembered, had been in a liaison role when she first met him; had attended a meeting with Charles Partner, her former boss and then head of the Security Service, and various other bigwigs, some from Down the Corridor, as Westminster was locally known; others from Over the River, where Intelligence was supposedly housed. Alone of those gathered, he had looked her in the eye as she handed out the morning’s dossiers. One thing had led to another. In those days, it usually did.
And now, hearing someone rattling the padlock, she assumed it would be him, but the man who entered was a stranger; neither Donovan, nor the other soldier, but a third man: younger, stocky. He wore a once-white short-sleeved shirt, and up his arms crawled inky designs, which also peeped out from the collar, and crept onto the back of his hairless head. He held something in his hand: two somethings. One was the pair of handcuffs she’d been made to wear in the van. The other was a mobile—it looked like Catherine’s own.
“Put these on.” He dangled the cuffs.
“Why am I here?”
“Lady, just put the cuffs on. And this.”
He produced the gag from his back pocket.
“Is that my phone?”
“Yes.”
His vowels were flat, she noted: northern. She was no expert on regional accents, but thought North-West rather than East. She noted, too, that her own pronunciation had sharpened in response, becoming more BBC. Maybe Lamb was rubbing off on her. That was the kind of trick he’d play.
“What’s your name?” s
he asked.
“Seriously?”
“It was worth a try.”
He said, “Let’s just get the cuffs on, okay?”
Catherine said, “Well, since it’s traditional.”
She offered her wrists, then he leaned across her to tie the gag round her mouth. She could smell him when he did this—sweat, inadequately masked by his deodorant, which was marginally less pleasant. When he’d finished, he stepped back and aimed her iPhone at her. She remained still while he took her picture, and stayed that way while he examined the result, nodding to himself. Good lord, who did he think he was?
Perhaps he caught something of this in the blank gaze she levelled at him, because while he ungagged her, he said, “Just checking.”
“Thank you, David Bailey.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter.” But he was Bailey now, which pleased her. Information, even the kind you make up yourself, gives you a handle on what’s going on.
He uncuffed her and left, padlocking the door behind him. She wondered what time it was, decided after midnight, and wondered if they planned on feeding her. She wasn’t hungry, but to feed her someone would have to come back and maybe talk some more . . . Thinking about not being hungry made her thirsty instead, so she returned to the bathroom, where she cupped her hands and drank from the tap. Where would she normally be now? At home; most likely asleep. She didn’t always sleep well. Some nights she played music quite late, but softly. Alcohol used to blur the edges of even the roughest days. Now she had to rely on other comforts, and the days never quite became smooth.
She must have dozed, or hovered on the border, because the noise of the door opening startled her; brought her back with a wildly beating heart. She sat up so quickly her head buzzed.
This time, it was Donovan.
He didn’t speak at first but surveyed the room, as if she’d paid a security deposit, and he was looking for reasons not to return it. While he did that, she studied him for signs of guilt. It was there, she thought. Whatever was going on, he felt bad about this part, at least.