by Mick Herron
Except, like now, when you didn’t.
What he did have was the next best thing in the circumstances, which was knowing where they were headed, because Dame Ingrid Tearney had told him.
“They’re aiding and abetting an ex-convict in the commission of a crime involving a breach of national security.”
This with her usual, unflappable delivery. Duffy suspected that if Tearney were ever to break news of imminent nuclear catastrophe, it would be in the same style, though in those circumstances she would no doubt resort to calling him “dear boy,” her invariable way of sweetening a pill.
“And you want me to stop them?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
They were in Dame Ingrid’s office, with its view that had once been green, but was now mostly brown: since the hosepipe ban, the plant life in the park opposite had been dying. This had happened before, but this time it was hard to believe that things would revert to normal. It was as if a tipping point had been reached, and the city, maybe the planet, was sliding into irreversible decline.
But since there was nothing he or anyone else could do about this, Duffy shrugged it off, and listened to Dame Ingrid’s story of Sylvester Monteith’s tiger team, and how it had turned on him and bitten his head off.
Since speaking to Lamb, Dame Ingrid had conducted a little research of her own, following the exact same path River had taken. One Sean Patrick Donovan, she explained to Duffy, was the chief suspect.
“Dumping the body in Central London,” he said. “Sounds like he was trying to make a point.”
And it explained what River Cartwright thought he’d been doing this morning. But the fact that Cartwright had walked away unaided indicated that whatever was happening now, it wasn’t going to be written up on official notepaper.
That was fine by him. Duffy had been Head Dog long enough to know which end did the wagging. If Dame Ingrid needed something done under the bridge, then under the bridge he’d go.
“The files are of no consequence,” Tearney said. “Archived material of a rather lurid nature. I suspect that Mr. Donovan’s wide range of experience, either in the military or in its house of correction, has left him somewhat paranoid. It’s always a shame when a career goes so spectacularly awry.”
“But you’re happy to let him get away with it?”
“When you get to my age, dear boy, you’ll understand that nobody really gets away with anything. But in this very specific instance, yes, I’m happy for him to appear to have got away with this.”
The word appear swam between them for a moment or two, then vanished in its own slippery coils.
“I want you to track him to his lair, Mr. Duffy. To run him to earth. And ensure that his paranoia doesn’t lead him into more serious misadventures.”
“I see.”
“I very much hoped you would. You’re happy to undertake this without support?”
“Without back-up? Yes, Dame Ingrid. I’m happy to do that.”
Because acting without back-up broke every rule in the Service’s code of practice, which meant she’d be putting a very big tick on his side of the ledger. And given his earlier run-in with Lady Di, Nick Duffy was feeling the need for a friend in high places.
Besides, this was what he was born for. Leaning on agents who stepped out of line was one thing. Squashing potential enemies of the state was entirely another.
When Cartwright and Guy disappeared through a side door into the abandoned factory, Duffy lowered his binoculars and wiped the sweat from his eyebrows. It wasn’t dark yet, though shadows were lengthening on the wasteground below. Whatever played out here in the next short while, there was no danger he’d miss anything.
Nick Duffy, in fact, prided himself on missing very little.
“Where’s your car?” said Lamb.
“. . . Why?”
“Because I thought it might need a wax and polish. Jesus, answer the question.”
Ho pointed through the window, in the direction of the nearby estate. He had a local resident’s parking permit in the name of an actual local resident, though as the resident in question was ninety-three and homebound, she was never likely to discover this. Come to think of it, she might be dead by now. Either way, there was probably a law said your boss couldn’t make you lend him your car.
On the other hand, if such a law existed, it almost certainly didn’t apply to Lamb.
“Good. I’ll have a dump while I’m waiting.”
“. . . Waiting?”
“For you to fetch the car. Are you awake? Because sleeping on company time’s a sackable offence.”
A glint in his eye suggested Lamb had acquired a taste for firing his staff.
Ho’s reluctance to reach the obvious conclusion was being worn away by the inevitable. “You want to go to High Wycombe.”
“And to think your annual appraisal says you’re slow on the uptake.” Lamb’s melancholy headshake might have been more convincing if he wasn’t responsible for the said appraisal.
“. . . And you want me to drive you?”
“Christ, no. But there’s nobody else around.”
“Well, if you hadn’t sacked . . . ”
Ho’s voice tailed off in the face of Lamb’s benign expression. “You go right ahead, son. I’ve always prided myself on being able to take criticism.”
“I just don’t think I’ll be much help.”
“Neither do I. So you’ll have to prove us both wrong, won’t you?” Lamb plucked a can of Red Bull from Ho’s desk, and shook it to gauge its contents. There were none. He sighed, and dropped it. “Look. If you were kidnapped, would Standish help?”
Ho broke with his usual habit, and gave this question some thought. Standish called him Roddy, which nobody else did; she would occasionally praise him for his computer skills without immediately following this up with a request that he perform some digital task; and one lunchtime had presented him with a homemade salad in a Tupperware box because he “ate too much pizza,” whatever that meant. When his resentment had worn off, Ho found he was quite touched; so much so that he had disposed of it where she might not find it. And he thought, too, how of all the slow horses, she was the one most likely to be pleased when she found out about him and Louisa. Of course, there were fewer slow horses than there used to be, but that altered the percentages, not the facts.
Having thought all this, he muttered, “. . . I guess.”
“You’d better hope so. Because no other bugger round here will, I promise you that. Now go get your car. Chop chop.”
Ho was halfway down the stairs when Lamb called out, “Oh, and when I say ‘chop chop’? I hope you don’t think I’m being racially insensitive.”
“. . . No.”
“Only you Chinkies can be pretty thin-skinned.”
It was going to be a long drive to High Wycombe.
The details of the off-Park storage site were on the Service intranet, if you knew where to look; passwords were available to agents in good standing, which didn’t include the slow horses, but applied to Jackson Lamb. Neither Louisa nor River had seen fit to pass comment on this back at Slough House while Ho had retrieved the relevant code. From the summary this accessed, they had learned that the facility was below the semi-derelict industrial estate; an underground complex that had started life as a bomb shelter in the thirties, and been refitted two decades later. At this time, it was hugely expanded to allow living room for a hundred and twenty local government officials, these being deemed, for reasons perhaps not unconnected with their having been involved in the planning, necessary to the survival of civilisation in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. The subterranean network now stretched for more than a mile westwards from its originating point, its connecting corridors carved into abrupt dips and bends to avoid the underground line—the work had been passed off as maintenance. Here in
this system of caves and caverns, the important work of means-testing and rates-assessment would carry on even as the world outside shivered through nuclear winter.
That had been the plan, anyway, but in the late seventies the site was repurposed and moved into Service hands. Given that armageddon was still on the cards then, council officials had evidently been downgraded to expendable, but little fuss was made. Natural wastage, generous early-retirement packages and the notoriously abbreviated attention span of local government officers had combined to allow the facility’s existence to pass into the status of myth; and it was deep enough, and its walls thick enough, to pass undetected while the work of the industrial estate lumbered on overhead. And when that fell victim to the economic miracle that had transformed Britain into a service industry, the facility continued on its quiet course, upgraded by now to cope with more contemporary threats than a nuclear exchange: viral outbreaks, extreme weather events, and the righteous indignation of a pissed-off electorate.
It was hard not to think in terms of James Bond–type shit.
“You think there’ll be crews wearing silver tracksuits?” River said as they made their way into the abandoned factory.
“You mean blondes,” Louisa said.
“Well, obviously blondes. But, you know. Redheads too.”
“And a secret railway?”
“And a control panel with a countdown window and a big red button.”
Louisa’s mouth twitched and she seemed about to say more, and then, exactly as if some big red button or other had actually been pressed, the moment was erased and her lips flatlined. “You realise the place is now basically a warehouse.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
“Minimally staffed.”
“Yeah, I read that bit too.” It was on the tip of River’s tongue to tell her to lighten up, and then he wondered if James Bond–type shit was the kind of thing she’d used to laugh about with Min, so didn’t. “The south-west corner. Which one’s that?”
Louisa was already pointing, phone in hand, compass-app working.
“I’m hoping for a nicely oiled trapdoor.”
What they got was a drain cover, its handle packed tight with dirt.
“Oh great,” said River, looking round for a stick or something to scrape it clean.
“Maybe we should try the main entrance.”
This was at the southernmost point of the complex, and doubled as an access tunnel to the city’s Victorian sewage system. As such, it was something of a tourist attraction. It had closed for the day by this hour, but remained more likely to be populated than the old factory; besides, it was a long hike from there to the complex’s nerve centre, directly below them. Unless there really was a secret railway.
“We’re here now,” River said. He’d found a foot-long length of metal siding, and used it to prise up the drain cover, releasing various stinks into the already fetid air. “Jesus.”
Louisa said, “You thought it would be all shiny metal? It’s a secret entrance.”
He pushed the cover aside, feeling at the base of his spine the noise it made scraping the floor. “Want to go first?”
“I think I’ll let you do that.”
She produced a torch and aimed it down the hole. With this to guide him, River dropped into darkness.
Dame Ingrid was signing off the minutes of that afternoon’s Limitations Committee meeting, each set of initials at the foot of each column a work of art; her pen never leaving the paper as she bestowed approval upon a series of opinions that the act of transcription had somehow rendered gnomic . . . Each member invariably left a session convinced that his or her criticisms had been taken on board, and a window opened on a grubby corner of the covert world that would henceforth gleam untarnished. Only with the passage of time would it become apparent that the window remained closed, its curtain securely drawn. And were this state of affairs ever drawn to Dame Ingrid’s attention, she would express surprise that anyone might think otherwise, and produce the minutes to prove that it had never been intended so.
An ability to think round corners was often cited as a prerequisite for Service work. Perhaps more critical was the ability to bend other people’s thoughts through 180-degree angles. Come to think of it, that was why Peter Judd represented such a threat: he knew how to play a meeting as well as she did. Luckily for Ingrid Tearney, his attempt to short-circuit the process had left him vulnerable.
Though even as she framed the thought, it struck her that luck was not an element she usually relied on.
Capping her pen, she reached for her glass of water and sipped from it, considering. As things stood, the upper hand was hers. Judd’s tiger team, intended to demonstrate the shaky grasp Dame Ingrid had on the Service, was now an object lesson in how ministerial arrogance could leave blood on the streets: a career-ending fiasco, even for the so-far impermeable PJ. Mopping up was under way, with Nick Duffy primed to trace Donovan to his lair once the Grey Books were in his possession. It was one thing to allow the ex-soldier to waltz off with his fool’s treasure—that was another nail in Judd’s coffin: look what your hare-brained scheme let happen—but to allow things to go further was to licence anarchy. So Duffy was the stopgap: Donovan would die a soldier’s death; the files would be returned to their subterranean cabinet; the slow horses, ridiculous name, could go back to their humdrum existence; and Dame Ingrid herself would resume the even tenor of her way, comfortable in the knowledge that the ministerial hand apparently on her tiller was in fact responding to her instructions. And as for the future, Judd’s ambitions need not necessarily be thwarted; if having a whipped Home Secretary rendered her position bulletproof, having a PM in her pocket guaranteed beatification. So all in all, a good day.
But still, there was that idiot whisper loose in the room now, the one that kept reminding her that luck was the grease in the wheel. If Donovan hadn’t proved a wild card, everything would have gone Judd’s way.
Ingrid Tearney realised that she was uncapping, recapping, uncapping her pen in a way that in a lesser mortal might reveal uncertainty. She placed it firmly on her desk. Time for a walkabout.
By dint of a brief, illegal shortcut up a one-way alley, Marcus had changed direction and was heading west, manoeuvring his black tank through the city streets like he was piloting an image on a PC, and the worst that could happen was game over. Twice, as he strayed into oncoming traffic, Shirley stopped breathing, and her grip on the door handle was tight enough it would take a monkey wrench to loosen.
Her voice squeakier than she’d have liked, she said, “We going fast enough yet?”
“Sooner we get there, sooner I’ll slow down.”
Shirley was hoping this would come to pass without any pedestrians smeared across the tarmac; or, worse, her own sweet self propelled through the windscreen.
She looked across at her partner. Was that still the word, now they’d been sacked? Or was he just another semi-stranger; one of the increasing number in her life who buggered off when things got tricky? Except he hadn’t, had he? Things officially turned tricky about an hour ago, and here he still was, skyrocketing her through the city streets; heading full-tilt for what might turn out to be just another windmill.
Maybe he could read her mind.
“Back in the crash squad, we had a joke,” he said. “When is a door not a door?”
“. . . When it’s ajar?”
“When it’s a pile of fucking matchsticks,” Marcus said. “We weren’t especially subtle.”
“No, I get that.”
“If there’s a chance something bad is happening, we want to be there before it starts. Otherwise we’re already on the defensive, and that’s not anywhere you want to be when the bad shit’s going down.”
He was slipping into the macho rhythms of his Service career, Shirley realised, and in a rare moment of tact decided not to call him on it.
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An amber light turned red maybe two seconds before they cruised past, leaving an angry squall of honking in their tracks.
“Hence the need for speed.”
“So we can arrive before the bad thing starts,” Shirley said.
“Yep.”
“And maybe get our jobs back.”
“Maybe.”
“And keep Cartwright and Guy from getting toasted.”
“. . . Yeah. That too.”
“I still think you should slow down,” Shirley said.
“Why?”
“Because that’s a cop car you just passed,” she told him; information immediately rendered old news as the car in question flashed its bar-lights, and the familiar two-tone lament began its upward spiral, demanding everyone’s attention, but specifically theirs.
Roderick Ho was proud of his car. Some other horses he could mention (he was thinking of Cartwright) didn’t even own a set of wheels, let alone a Ford Kia, electric blue with cream flashing, and seriously punishing sound system—Ho favoured music that came with health warnings, in Gothic lettering. The seats were cream too, with reciprocal electric-blue seaming, and the windscreen ever so slightly tinted, to keep onlookers guessing. Online, where Ho mutated into Roddy Hunt, DJ superstar, he referred to it as the chick-magnet, and in real life kept it immaculate, regularly treating it to squishes from a spraycan of new-car smell. In return for which it had obstinately refused to live up to its nickname, but then that was the problem with pre-owned wheels: the previous owner had used up its luck.
Still a great ride, though. Probably every bit as good as the other kind, he thought, coming to a halt at the kerb where Jackson Lamb stood waiting.