by Mick Herron
Her room had been about the size of the one she was in now. Through its window was a view of a smooth, very English lawn bordered by ash trees. Occasional twinned piercings in the turf indicated where croquet hoops had been fixed, but this game, being outwardly genteel but actually vicious, had been found too reminiscent of Service life to be a soothing pastime, and the hoops and mallets were disposed of. Those perfectly circular wounds in the lawn remained, a grassy stigmata just barely visible, and maybe they’d heal themselves, and maybe they wouldn’t . . . There was no end to the spirals of thought that could catch you; carry you away like Dorothy in her tornado, and drop you into a brighter land where logic eased its grip. The sober world, on the other hand, remained bleached of colour. Even the lawn, even those ash trees, were grim and grey and lifeless. Well, of course the ash trees. Why else were they called that?
But in the absence of colour, new sounds arrived. The voices turned up that first week. It was as if a small crowd of people, forever out of sight, had an awful secret to impart to Catherine all at once, so what reached her was an unbroken mutter of syllables, never approaching clarity. They were her secret sharers, and from the start she had known they existed only in her own delirium, and that the secret they were desperate to share was that she would fall and break at the next opportunity. There was no sadness or triumph in this. It was simply what was bound to happen: ultimately she’d be waved away from this hospital-like seclusion and rejoin the world of noise and lights and sharp edges, where the first thing she’d do would be to open a bottle and jump in.
She’d clung onto this as the first real hope, during those early days. She could stand all of it—the cure, the recovery; the effort demanded of her to regain her pride and her knowledge of who she could be—provided oblivion remained a constant possibility. Even now, most mornings, that thought woke with her. The voices had disappeared in time, and the effort to become herself once again had succeeded in the sense that it remained her daily struggle, but she’d never entirely forgotten them; rather, she’d bundled them in rags and stowed them in the lumber room of her mind. This was not an accepted recovery tactic, but it had worked for her, so far.
And so lost was she in this memory that she gave a small cry when the door rattled, as if her long-ago voices had assumed corporeal form, and were arriving now to take her away.
“You all right?”
This voice was Bailey’s.
Catherine composed herself, and stood. “I’m fine.”
He undid the padlock and let himself in, a manoeuvre complicated by the tray he was carrying. On it were a cardboard-packed sandwich, an apple, what looked like a flapjack tightly wrapped in cellophane, its price-sticker visible, a small bottle of water, a 25-mililetre bottle of Pinot Grigio, and a plastic beaker.
“Thought you’d be hungry,” he said.
He laid the tray on the bed.
Unable to take her eyes from it, Catherine gestured numbly towards the window. “There’s a bus out there.”
“I know.”
“Why is there a bus out there?”
Even to her own ears, she sounded like she was reciting phrases from a teach-yourself-English book.
“The people who own this place, that was their tour bus, I think.”
“They have a band?” Images of an ancient movie swam briefly into focus. Pinot wasn’t her favourite wine, but its sudden appearance had displaced previous pleasures. Summer Holiday. That was the film.
Bailey laughed. “They ran a tour company. Ferrying folk round local sights?”
“I don’t even know where we are.”
“No, well. Everywhere’s historical, isn’t it?”
Catherine said something else. She wasn’t sure what.
Bailey said, “Went bust, I suppose. This place used to be a farm. Now it’s a holiday let. Next stop, it’ll probably be a youth hostel.”
“How long are you going to keep me here?”
“Not long.”
“This isn’t going to end well,” she said. “You’re messing with serious people.”
“Ben and the colonel, they’re serious too.” He nodded at the tray before turning to go. “I brought you some wine. Little treat.”
“I noticed.”
“Better drink it before it gets warm.”
He opened the door, making the padlock key do a little dance between the index and second fingers of his left hand as he did so.
“Bailey?”
“What did you call me?”
“The others are soldiers, but you’re not. Are you?”
He didn’t answer.
Seconds later she’d have heard the clunk-click of the padlock being fastened if she’d been listening, but she wasn’t. All her attention was on the tray he’d placed on the bed, and the toy-sized bottle of wine it held.
The long-ago voices remained silent.
“You’re kidding,” Lamb said.
Nothing about Tearney’s demeanour suggested she was kidding. “It seems that Mr. Monteith’s scheme was hijacked by someone in pursuit of, ah, a particular world view.”
“He’s batshit crazy, you mean.”
“That would appear to be the case.”
The woman three rows ahead had apparently lost herself in prayer. Or perhaps she had simply given up hope of silencing the background murmur.
“The Grey Books,” mused Lamb. “That’s the creepy shit, right?”
“We’re an intelligence service, Mr. Lamb. We keep records on everything. Even, as you call it, the creepy shit.”
“And now this tiger, whoever he is, wants a peek.” Lamb fished the cigarette from behind his ear, glared at it, and put it back. “And all he has in his corner is Standish. Does he seriously think he can use her as a lever?”
Tearney said, “We value our operatives. It’s a moral imperative that we safeguard them from harm.”
“Yeah. Besides, if you give him what he wants, you’re putting Peter Judd’s balls in a vice.”
“You have a gift for the pithy phrase.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Tearney’s own gift was for serenity, it seemed. Talking low, indecipherable to anyone more than a whisper away, her expression had barely changed throughout their discussion. A witchy figure, it was often said, but that wasn’t a view Lamb subscribed to. Witches got under your skin. Dame Ingrid was more witches’ ground staff: she’d keep the broomsticks in order, though you couldn’t trust her not to sabotage them if she felt it was in her interests.
Now she said, “It’s not my policy to bow to hostile demands, but it seems the simplest course in the circumstances. The material this man’s after is worthless. Once he has his hands on it, and your agent has been released unharmed, he’ll be taken care of.”
But Lamb was following his own thread, and wasn’t about to let it get tangled with hers. “Of course,” he said, “it’ll have to be under the bridge, won’t it? Here’s Judd, sanctioning an attack on his own Service that ends with his old mucker dead and a tiger team off the leash. Assist in a cover-up, and you’re a co-conspirator. But let the tigers get away with it, that puts Judd deeper in the shit.”
“You have an agile mind, Mr. Lamb. I don’t think anyone ever denied that.”
“And it’ll be that special bespoke shit. The kind only you know where the shovel is.” He leaned heavily back against the bench. “Long story short,” he said, “that’s why I’m missing my takeaway. You want my crew to deliver the goods to this guy. Off the books. To make sure you’ve got the Home Secretary where you want him.”
“Well, it is one of your own you’ll be rescuing. Besides,” Tearney said, “there’s something appropriate about your, ah, remedial group assisting in a frankly demented exercise. What’s the phrase I’m looking for? Oh yes—horses for courses.”
“Yeah, I know they do,” said Lamb. He
scratched his thinning hair, then examined his fingernails suspiciously. When he’d finished, he said, “Judd’s man wasn’t the only one using Slough House as a drain rod.”
“Given the nature of the operation, I can hardly order you to undertake it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Though if you decide you’d rather not play ball, your department will be history by this time tomorrow.”
“Please. Don’t tempt me.”
He leaned forward, ran a finger round his neck, peered at it, and wiped it on his trousers. Then he looked at Dame Ingrid.
“I assume we’ll be collecting the material without the cooperation of those currently holding it?”
She nodded.
“Still. In the current climate, that’ll probably be workfare teenagers or rent-a-cop has-beens.”
“Either way, it’s a live operation and you play by the rules. Your first priority is ensuring that this man acquires what he wants without drawing undue attention.”
“Just so we’re clear on this,” Lamb said. “My first priority is bringing my joe home.”
He held her stare until she looked down and fiddled with the clasp on her bag, prior to departure.
“And put Cartwright in a taxi,” Lamb added.
“He can catch a bus,” were her final words.
He didn’t watch as she left St. Giles but remained facing the altar. The cigarette had reappeared in his hand, remarkably unbent given its travels, and he rolled it between his fingers as he sat. It was true what he’d told Tearney, he didn’t spend much time in churches, but he’d set fire to one once, way back when, behind the Curtain—he recalled the acrid taste of woodsmoke on his tongue, the way it had roiled upwards into the Soviet dark, melting the falling snow. How long do memories last? This one had been with him half his life, and carried on for what seemed like minutes. That noise, that bang, was the first of the rifle shots, as the soldiers realised what he’d done. And then it was merely a book slapping the floor, dropped by one of the elderly readers browsing the paperbacks.
His mobile rang, and the old woman looked round in fury.
“Sorry,” he mouthed. “Booty call.”
He slipped the cigarette between his lips as he left the church, phone trembling in his hand.
Back at Slough House, the natives were restless.
Standard CD-ROMs are 1.2 millimetres thick, 120 millimetres in diameter, made of polycarbonate plastic, and in digital-data-storage mode contain 2,352 bytes of user data per sector, divided into 98 24-byte frames. And when laid on the edge of a desk and struck suddenly with a downward motion, they can be made to flip gracefully into the air and drop into a wastepaper bin two yards distant.
“Three nil,” said Marcus.
“Cheater.”
“Yeah, right. Or just better than you.”
Shirley Dander lined her next CD up and chopped at it brutally—recent experience had taught her that time spent calibrating the trajectory required for it to drop into the bin rather than thud uselessly onto the carpet was time she was never going to get back.
It flipped into the air, turned over twice, and fell back onto the desk.
“Crap!”
“What you doing?”
They looked to the doorway, where Roderick Ho was standing, a folded-over slice of pizza in his hand.
Shirley said, “Bug off, square eyes.”
But Ho was looking at the CDs scattered round the bin. “Piece of piss,” he said.
It was clear, thought Marcus, that Ho hadn’t absorbed many life-lessons from the bruise Shirley had left on his cheek last night.
Shirley said, “You reckon? Seriously?”
“First time. No problem.”
“You got a fiver says the same?”
“Shirley,” Marcus began.
“What about you, old man?” she said. “You want a piece of that action?”
“I need to handicap him first.”
“Hasn’t life already done that?”
“Jesus, Shirley. He’s standing right there.”
Ho came into the room, squeezed another fold out of his pizza slice and ambitiously wedged it into his mouth. From Marcus’s desk he picked up a CD, held it to the light, squinted, shook his head, and put it down again.
“Grandstanding,” Marcus explained to Shirley. “You want to let him take a practice shot?”
“Nnng grrrrff,” Ho said, or something like. He picked up another CD, made a noise like a traumatised python, and the pizza was history. “I don’t need to practise.”
“He doesn’t need to practise,” Shirley told Marcus. “Fiver?”
“. . . Quid.”
“Chicken. Okay, a quid.” She looked at Ho, who was positioning a CD on the edge of Marcus’s desk. “Hit it, pizza boy.”
Ho hit it.
The disk shot vertically upwards into the lightbulb, scattering dandruffy fragments of glass everywhere, before cartwheeling into the window frame, from which it excised a wedge Shirley later discovered in her coffee cup.
Almost as an afterthought, it dropped into the bin.
“Yesssss!” screamed Ho, dropping to his knees.
Marcus laughed so hard, it was a full minute before he realised Louisa had entered the office.
“Sorry,” he said. “Are we making a noise?”
“A body’s been dumped in the street. Broad daylight.”
“Here?”
“Central London.”
“What does narrow daylight look like anyway?” Shirley muttered, brushing a light glittering of bulb-glass from her shoulder.
“More specifically,” Louisa said, “outside a fuck-off restaurant near the Mall.”
“That’ll be exciting the Met,” Marcus said. His eyes had narrowed: bodies in the street. There’d been a time he’d have been on standby.
“And guess who was dining in the fuck-off restaurant?”
“Well, probably not Her Madge,” grumbled Shirley. But she slumped back into her chair, and clicked on the BBC website. “Peter Judd. So what?”
“Did you notice what he had to say?”
A moment’s silence. Then Shirley said, “He’s not quoted here.”
“Precisely.” Louisa came further into the room. “When’s the last time Judd was in spitting distance of the media and slipped out the back door?”
“Is that what he did?” Ho asked.
“Figure of speech.”
Marcus said, “He’s Home Secretary. Law and order. It’s got to be kind of embarrassing to be on the scene of a body dump.”
“Embarrassing? This is Peter Judd we’re talking about.”
Roderick Ho said, “What’s your point, Louisa?”
Everybody looked at him.
“What? What did I say?”
Under her breath, Shirley hummed, “Ho and Louisa, sitting in a tree . . . ”
Louisa said, “Judd, our new lord and master, avoiding the press, the same day Catherine goes missing? And River’s at the Park, he’s under arrest. For stealing a file and God knows what else.”
“Beating his chest in a built-up area?” Shirley asked.
“Whatever, all this happening, the same day? I can’t be the only one thinks they must be connected.”
Marcus said, “We’re in the middle of a heatwave, did you notice? The temperature rises, crazy things happen. It’s a well-known phenomenon. It doesn’t mean there’s a pattern.”
“Yeah, right, sorry,” Louisa said. “I mean, Christ, you’re so busy. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Easy, tiger.”
“So let’s all get back to making lists. What you working on, Longridge? People with the same make of car the 7/7 bastards drove?”
He raised his hands in surrender.
Shirley asked, “Where’s Lamb?�
�
“Out.”
“Well, duh. Any clue where?”
Louisa shook her head. “He got a phone call, and he vanished.”
“He’s answering his phone? We’re through the looking glass, people.”
“This isn’t funny. Something’s going on. Make all the jokes you like, but I’m going to find out what.”
“I’m not busy,” said Ho.
“What?”
“They were playing some stupid game. I just wanted to know who was making all the noise.”
“Snitch,” said Shirley.
“You owe me a fiver.”
“Okay, then, do something for me,” Louisa told Ho. “Make your computer dance. Find out who the corpse is.”
“I can do that.”
He left for his own room, wiping his hands on his trousers.
“K-i-s-s-i-n-g,” murmured Shirley.
“Do you have a problem?” Louisa asked.
“God, no. Happy as Larry.”
“Because you’re uncannily twitchy and snarky as shit. Is it past time for your fix, or what?”
“I’m twitchy? Who turned your lights on? You’ve spent the past year—”
“Shirley,” Marcus warned.
“—wafting round like a ghost on downers. All of a sudden you want to start giving orders?”
“Shirley,” Marcus repeated.
“Because I’m not taking them from you. And don’t you start, either.” This last to Marcus. “Partner.”
She left the room and stomped up the stairs. A moment later, they heard the lavatory door slam shut.