Slow Horses: Slough House Thriller 1

2

LET US BE clear about this much at least: Slough House is not in Slough; nor is it a house. Its front door lurks in a dusty recess between commercial premises in the Borough of Finsbury, a stone’s throw from Barbican Underground Station. To its left is a former newsagent’s, now a newsagent’s/grocer’s/ off-licence, with DVD rental a blooming sideline; to its right, the New Empire Chinese restaurant, whose windows are constantly obscured by a thick red curtain. A typewritten menu propped against the glass has yellowed with age but is never replaced; is merely amended with marker pen. If diversification has been the key to the newsagent’s survival, retrenchment has been the long-term strategy of the New Empire, with dishes regularly struck from its menu like numbers off a bingo card. It is one of Jackson Lamb’s core beliefs that eventually all the New Empire will offer will be egg-fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork. All served behind thick red curtains, as if paucity of choice were a national secret.

The front door, as stated, lurks in a recess. Its ancient black paintwork is spattered with roadsplash, and the shallow pane of glass above betrays no light within. An empty milk bottle has stood in its shadow so long, city lichen has bonded it to the pavement. There is no doorbell, and the letterbox has healed like a childhood wound: any mail – and there’s never any mail – would push at its flap without achieving entry. It’s as if the door were a dummy, its only reason for existing being to provide a buffer zone between shop and restaurant. Indeed, you could sit at the bus stop opposite for days on end, and never see anyone use it. Except that, if you sat at the bus stop opposite for long, you’d find interest being taken in your presence. A thickset man, probably chewing gum, might sit next to you. His presence discourages. He wears an air of repressed violence, of a grudge carried long enough that it’s ceased to matter to him where he lays it down, and he’ll watch you until you’re out of sight.

Meanwhile, the stream in and out of the newsagent’s is more or less constant. And there’s always pavement business occurring; always people heading one way or the other. A kerbside sweeper trundles past, its revolving brushes shuffling cigarette ends and splinters of glass and bottle tops into its maw. Two men, heading in opposite directions, perform that little avoidance dance, each one’s manoeuvre mirrored by the other’s, but manage to pass without colliding. A woman, talking on a mobile phone, checks her reflection in the window as she walks. Way overhead a helicopter buzzes, reporting on roadworks for a radio station.

And throughout all this, which happens every day, the door remains closed. Above the New Empire and the newsagent’s, Slough House’s windows rise four storeys into Finsbury’s unwelcoming October skies, and are flaked and grimy, but not opaque. To the upstairs rider on a passing bus, delayed for any length of time – which can easily happen; a combination of traffic lights, near-constant roadworks, and the celebrated inertia of London buses – they offer views of first-floor rooms that are mostly yellow and grey. Old yellow, and old grey. The yellows are the walls, or what can be seen of the walls behind grey filing cabinets and grey, institutional bookcases, on which are ranged out-of-date reference volumes; some lying on their backs; others leaning against their companions for support; a few still upright, the lettering on their spines rendered ghostly by a daily wash of electric light. Elsewhere, lever-arch files have been higgledy-piggled into spaces too small; piles of them jammed vertically between shelves, leaving the uppermost squeezed outwards, threatening to fall. The ceilings are yellowed too, an unhealthy shade smeared here and there with cobweb. And the desks and chairs in these first-storey rooms are of the same functional metal as the bookshelves, and possibly commandeered from the same institutional source: a decommissioned barracks, or a prison administration block. These are not chairs to sit back in, gazing thoughtfully into space. Nor are they desks to treat as an extension of one’s personality, and decorate with photographs and mascots. Which facts in themselves convey a certain information: that those who labour here are not so well regarded that their comfort is deemed as being of account. They’re meant to sit and perform their tasks with the minimum of distraction. And then to leave by a back door, unobserved by kerbside sweepers, or women with mobile phones.

The bus’s upper deck offers less of a view of the next storey, though glimpses of the same nicotine-stained ceilings are available. But even a three-decker bus wouldn’t cast much light: the offices on the second floor are distressingly similar to those below. And besides, the information picked out in gold lettering on their windows says enough to dull interest. W. W. Henderson, it reads. Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. Occasionally, from behind the serifed flamboyance of this long-redundant logo, a figure will appear, and regard the street below as if he’s looking at something else altogether. But whatever that is, it won’t hold his attention long. In a moment or two, he’ll be gone.

No such entertainment is promised by the uppermost storey, whose windows have blinds drawn over them. Whoever inhabits this level is evidently disinclined to be reminded of a world outside, or to have accidental rays of sunshine pierce his gloom. But this too is a clue, since it indicates that whoever haunts this floor has the freedom to choose darkness, and freedom of choice is generally limited to those in charge. Slough House, then – a name which appears on no official documentation, nameplate or headed notepaper; no utility bill or deed of leasehold; no business card or phone book or estate agent’s listing; which is not this building’s name at all, in any but the most colloquial of senses – is evidently run from the top down, though judging by the uniformly miserable decor, the hierarchy is of a restricted character. You’re either at the top or you’re not. And only Jackson Lamb is at the top.

At length, the traffic lights change. The bus coughs into movement, and trundles on its way to St Paul’s. And in her last few seconds of viewing, our upstairs passenger might wonder what it’s like, working in these offices; might even conjure a brief fantasy in which the building, instead of a faltering legal practice, becomes an overhead dungeon to which the failures of some larger service are consigned as punishment: for crimes of drugs and drunkenness and lechery; of politics and betrayal; of unhappiness and doubt; and of the unforgivable carelessness of allowing a man on a Tube platform to detonate himself, killing or maiming an estimated 120 people and causing £30 million worth of actual damage, along with a projected £2.5 billion in lost tourist revenue – becomes, in effect, an administrative oubliette where, alongside a pre-digital overflow of paperwork, a post-useful crew of misfits can be stored and left to gather dust.

Such a fancy won’t survive the time it takes the bus to pass beneath the nearby pedestrian bridge, of course. But one inkling might last a while longer: that the yellows and greys that dominate the colour scheme aren’t what they first appear – that the yellow isn’t yellow at all, but white exhausted by stale breath and tobacco, by pot-noodle fumes and overcoats left to dry on radiators; and that the grey isn’t grey but black with the stuffing knocked out of it. But this thought too will quickly fade, because few things associated with Slough House stick in the mind; its name alone having proved durable, born years ago, in a casual exchange between spooks:

Lamb’s been banished.

Where’ve they sent him? Somewhere awful?

Bad as it gets.

God, not Slough?

Might as well be.

Which, in a world of secrets and legends, was all it took to give a name to Jackson Lamb’s new kingdom: a place of yellows and greys, where once all was black and white.

Just after 7 a.m. a light went on at the second-storey window, and a figure appeared behind W. W. Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. On the street below, a milk float rattled past. The figure hovered a moment, as if expecting the float to turn dangerous, but withdrew once it passed from sight. Inside, he resumed the business at hand, upending a soaking black rubbish sack on to a newspaper spread across the worn and faded carpet.

The air was immediately polluted.

Rubber-gloved, wrinkle-nosed, he got to his knees and began picking through the mess.

Eggshells, vegetable ends, coffee grounds in melting paper filters, parchment-coloured teabags, a sliver of soap, labels from jars, a plastic squeezy bottle, florets of stained kitchen towels, torn brown envelopes, corks, bottle tops, the coiled spring and cardboard back of a spiral-notepad, some bits of broken crockery which didn’t fit together, tin trays from takeaway meals, scrunched-up Post-its, a pizza box, a wrung-out tube of toothpaste, two juice cartons, an empty tin of shoe polish, a plastic scoop, and seven carefully bundled parcels made from pages of Searchlight.

And much else that wasn’t immediately identifiable. All of it sopping wet and glistening, sluglike, in the light of the overhead bulb.

He sat back on his haunches. Picked up the first of the Searchlight parcels, and unwrapped it as carefully as he could.

The contents of an ashtray fell on to the carpet.

He shook his head, and dropped the rotting newspaper back on the pile.

A sound made its way up the back stairs, and he paused, but it didn’t repeat. All entrances and exits from Slough House came via a backyard with mildewed, slimy walls, and everyone who came in made a large, unfriendly noise doing so, because the door stuck and – like most of the people using it – needed a good kicking. But this sound had been nothing like that, so he shook his head and decided it had been the building waking up; flexing its lintels or whatever old buildings did in the morning, after a night of rain. Rain he’d been out in, collecting the journalist’s rubbish.

Eggshells, vegetable ends, coffee grounds in melting paper filters …

He picked another of the paper parcels, its scrunched-up headline a denunciation of a recent BNP demo, and sniffed it tentatively. Didn’t smell like an ashtray.

‘A sense of humour can be a real bastard,’ Jackson Lamb said.

River dropped the parcel.

Lamb was leaning in the doorway, his cheeks glistening slightly as they tended to after exertion. Climbing stairs counted, though he’d not made a squeak on them. River could barely manage such stealth himself, and he wasn’t carrying Lamb’s weight: most of it gathered round his middle, like a pregnancy. A shabby grey raincoat shrouded it now, while the umbrella hooked over his arm dripped onto the floor.

River, trying to hide the fact that his heart had just punched him in the ribs, said, ‘You think he’s calling us Nazis?’

‘Well, yes. Obviously he’s calling us Nazis. But I meant you doing this on Sid’s half of the room.’

River picked up the fallen bundle but it gave way as he did so, the paper too wet to contain its contents, spilling a stew of small bones and scraped-away skin – for a nasty moment, evidence of a brutal, baby-sized murder. And then the shape of a chicken asserted itself from the collection; a misshapen chicken – all legs and wings – but recognisably a former bird. Lamb snorted. River rubbed his gloved hands together, smearing sodden lumps of newspaper into balls, then shaking them into the pile. The black and red inks wouldn’t lose their grip so easily. The once-yellow gloves turned the colour of miners’ fingers.

Lamb said, ‘That wasn’t too clever.’

Thank you for that, River thought. Thanks for pointing that out.

The previous night he’d lurked outside the journo’s past midnight, wresting what shelter he could from the slight overhang of the building opposite while rain belted down like Noah’s nightmare. Most of the neighbours had done their civic duty, black sacks lined up like sitting pigs, or council-supplied wheelie bins standing sentry by doors. But nothing outside the journo’s. Cold rain tracked down River’s neck, mapping a course to the crack of his arse, and he knew it didn’t matter how long he stood there, he was going to have no joy.

‘Don’t get caught,’ Lamb had said.

Of course I won’t get bloody caught, he’d thought. ‘I’ll try not to.’

And: ‘Residents’ parking,’ Lamb had added, as if sharing some arcane password.

Residents’ parking. So what?

So he couldn’t sit in his car, he’d belatedly realised. Couldn’t cosy down, rain bouncing off a waterproof roof, and wait for the bags to appear. The chances of a parking revenue attendant – or whatever they were called today – doing the rounds after midnight were slim, but not non-existent.

It was all he’d need – a parking ticket. On-the-spot fine. His name in a book.

Don’t get caught.

So it was the slight overhang in the pouring rain. Worse than that, it was the flickering light behind the thin curtains of the journo’s street-level apartment; it was the way a shadow kept appearing behind them. As if the hack inside, dry as toast, was busting a gut at the thought of River in the rain, waiting for him to put his rubbish bag out so he could whip it away for covert study. As if the journo knew all this.

Not long after midnight, the thought occurred to River: maybe he did.

That was how it had been for the past eight months. Every so often, he’d take the bigger picture and give it a shake, like it was a loose jigsaw. Sometimes the pieces came together differently; sometimes they didn’t fit at all. Why did Jackson Lamb want this journo’s rubbish, enough to give River his first out-of-the-office job since he’d been assigned to Slough House? Maybe the point wasn’t getting the rubbish. Maybe the point was River standing in the rain for hours on end, while the hack laughed with Lamb about it over the phone.

This rain had been forecast. Hell, it had been raining when Lamb had given him the op.

Residents’ parking, he’d said.

Don’t get caught.

Ten more minutes, and River decided enough was enough. There was going to be no bag of rubbish, or if there was, it wasn’t going to mean anything, other than that he’d been sent on an idiot’s errand … He’d walked back the way he’d come, collecting a random rubbish sack on the way; had flung it into the boot of the car he’d parked by the nearest meter. Had driven home. Had gone to bed.

Where he’d lain for two hours, watching the jigsaw reassemble itself. Jackson Lamb’s Don’t get caught might have meant just that: that River had been given an important task, and mustn’t get caught. Not crucially important – if so, Lamb would have sent Sid, or possibly Moody – but important enough that it had to be done.

Or else it was a test. A test to discover whether River was capable of going out in the rain and bringing back a bag of rubbish.

He went out again not long after, abandoning the random sack of rubbish in the first litter bin he passed. Cruising slowly past the journo’s, he could hardly believe it was there, slumped against the wall below the window: a knotted black bag …

The same bag’s contents were now strewn across the floor in front of him.

Lamb said, ‘I’ll leave you to clear that, right?’

River said, ‘What am I looking for precisely?’

But Lamb was already gone; audible on the stairs, this time – every creak and complaint echoing – and River was alone in Sid’s half of the office; still surrounded by unsweet-smelling crap, and still weighed down by the faint but unmistakable sensation of being Jackson Lamb’s punchbag.

The tables were always packed too close in Max’s, in optimistic preparation for a rush of custom that wasn’t going to happen. Max’s wasn’t popular because it wasn’t very good; they re-used the coffee beans, and the croissants were stale. Repeat trade was the exception, not the rule. But there was one regular, and the moment he stepped through the door each morning, newspapers under his arm, the body on the counter would start pouring his cup. It didn’t matter how often the staff turned over: his details were passed down along with instructions about the cappuccino machine. Beige raincoat. Thinning, brownish hair. Permanently irritated. And, of course, those newspapers.

This morning, the windows were a fogged-over drizzle. His raincoat dripped on to the chessboard lino. If his newspapers hadn’t been in a plastic bag, they’d have been a papier-mâché sculpture waiting to happen.

‘Good morning.’

‘It’s a lousy morning.’

‘But it’s always good to see you, sir.’

This was the morning’s Max, a name they all shared as far as Robert Hobden was concerned. If they wanted him to tell them apart, they shouldn’t all work the same counter.

He settled in his usual corner. A redhead, one of only three other customers, was at the next table, facing the window: a black raincoat hung from the back of her chair. She wore a collarless white shirt and black leggings cut off at the ankle. He noticed this because her feet were hooked round her chair legs, the way a child might sit. A baby-sized laptop sat in front of her. She didn’t look up.

Max delivered his latte. Grunting acknowledgement, Hobden placed keys, mobile and wallet on the table in front of him, like always. He hated sitting with lumps in his pockets. His pen and notebook joined them. The pen was a thin-nibbed black felt-tip; the keyring a memory stick. And the newspapers were the quality dailies, plus the Mail. Piled up, they made a four-inch stack, of which he would read about an inch and a half; significantly less on Mondays, when there was more sports coverage. Today was Tuesday, shortly after seven. It was raining again. Had rained all night.

… Telegraph, Times, Mail, Independent, Guardian.

At one time or another, he’d written for all of these. That wasn’t so much a thought that occurred to him as an awareness that nudged him most mornings, round about now: cub reporter – ridiculous term – in Peterborough, then the inevitable shift to London, and the varied tempos of the major beats, crime and politics, before he ascended, aged forty-eight, to his due: the weekly column. Two, in fact. Sundays and Wednesdays. Regular appearances on Question Time. From firebrand to the acceptable face of dissent; an admittedly long trajectory in his case, but that made arrival all the sweeter. If he could have freeze-framed life back then, he’d have had little to complain about.

These days, he no longer wrote for newspapers. And when cab drivers recognised him, it was for the wrong reasons.

Beige raincoat discarded for the moment; the thinning, brownish hair a permanent accessory – as was the irritated look – Robert Hobden uncapped his pen, took a sip of his latte, and settled to work.

There’d been lights in the windows. Ho knew before opening the door that Slough House was occupied. But he’d have been able to tell anyway – damp footprints in the stairwell; the taste of rain in the air. Once in a harvest moon, Jackson Lamb would arrive before Ho; random predawn appearances that were purely territorial. You can haunt this place all you like, Lamb was telling him. But when they pull down the walls and count the bones, it’ll be mine they find on top. There were many good reasons for not liking Jackson Lamb, and that was one of Ho’s favourites.

But this wasn’t Lamb, or not Lamb alone. There was someone else up there.

Could be Jed Moody, but only if you were dreaming. Nine thirty was a good start for Moody, and it was generally eleven before he was ready for anything more complicated than a hot drink. Roderick Ho didn’t like Jed Moody, but that wasn’t a problem: Moody didn’t expect to be liked. Even before he’d been assigned to Slough House, he’d probably had fewer friends than fists. So Ho and Moody got on okay, sharing an office: neither liking the other, and neither caring the other knew. But there was no way Moody was here before him. It was barely seven.

Catherine Standish was more likely. Ho couldn’t remember Catherine Standish ever arriving first, which meant it had never happened, but she was usually next in. He’d hear the door’s agonised opening, and then her soft creak on the stairs, and then nothing. She was two floors above – in the small room next to Lamb’s – and out of sight, she was easy to forget. Actually, standing in front of you, she was easy to forget. The chances of sensing her presence weren’t good. So it wasn’t her.

That suited Ho. Ho didn’t like Standish.

He made his way up to the first floor. In his office he hung his raincoat on a hook, turned his computer on, then went into the kitchen. An odd smell was drifting down the stairs. Something rotten had replaced the taste of rain.

So here were the suspects: Min Harper, who was a nervous idiot, constantly patting his pockets to check he’d not lost anything; Louisa Guy, who Ho couldn’t look at without thinking of a pressure cooker, steam coming out of her ears; Struan Loy, the office joker – Ho didn’t like any of them, but he especially didn’t like Loy: office jokers were a crime in progress – and Kay White, who used to be on the top floor, sharing with Catherine, but had been banished downstairs for being ‘too damn noisy’: thanks, Lamb. Thanks for letting the rest of us suffer. If you can’t stand her chatter, why not pack her back to Regent’s Park? Except none of them were going back to Regent’s Park, because all of them had left a little bit of history over there; an ungainly smudge on the annals of the Service.

And Ho knew the shape and colour of each and every smudge: the crimes of drugs, drunkenness, lechery, politics and betrayal – Slough House was full of secrets, and Ho knew the size and depth of each and every one of them, excepting two.

Which brought him to Sid. It could be Sid up there.

And here was the thing about Sid Baker: Ho didn’t know what crime Sid was being punished for. It was one of two secrets that eluded him.

That was probably the reason he didn’t like Sid.

As the kettle boiled, Ho picked over some of Slough House’s secrets; thought about the nervous idiot Min Harper, who’d left a classified disk on a train. He might have got away with this if the disk’s pouch hadn’t been bright red and stamped Top Secret. And also if the woman who’d found it hadn’t handed it in to the BBC. Some things were too good to be true, unless you were the one they were happening to: for Min Harper, the episode had been too awful to believe, but had happened anyway. Which was why Min had spent the last two years of a once-promising career in charge of the first-floor shredder.

Steam billowed from the kettle’s lip. The kitchen was poorly ventilated, and plaster frequently flaked from the ceiling. Give it a while, the whole lot would come down. Ho poured water into a teabagged mug. The days were diced and sliced into segments like this; divided into moments spent pouring cups of tea or fetching sandwiches, and further mentally subdivided by rehearsing Slough House’s secrets, all but two … The rest of the time Ho would be at his monitor; ostensibly inputting data from long-closed incidents, but most of the time searching for the second secret, the one that ate away at him, and never slept.

With a spoon he fished the teabag out and dropped it into the sink, a thought striking him as he did so: I know who’s upstairs. It’s River Cartwright. Has to be.

There wasn’t a single reason he could think of why Cartwright might be here this time of the morning, but still: place your bets. Ho bet Cartwright. That’s who was upstairs right now.

That figured. Ho really didn’t like River Cartwright.

He carried his mug back to his desk, where his monitor had swum into life.

Hobden put the Telegraph aside, its front-page photo a gurning Peter Judd. He’d made a few notes on the upcoming by-election – the Shadow Culture Minister had handed his cards in, last January’s strokes wrapping up his career – but nothing more. When politicians voluntarily shrugged off the mantle it was worth a closer look, but Robert Hobden was a veteran at parsing a story. He still read copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when D-notices were an issue; when the Regent’s Park mob had left their fingerprints on the facts. This was most likely what it seemed to be: a politician heading back to the sticks after a health scare. And Robert Hobden trusted his instincts. You didn’t stop being a journalist just because you were no longer in print. Especially when you knew you had a story, and were waiting for its fin to show above the waves of the everyday news. It would break surface sooner or later. And when it did, he would recognise it for what it was.

Meanwhile, he’d continue his daily trawl through this sea of print. It wasn’t as if much else troubled his time. Hobden wasn’t as connected as he used to be.

Face it, Hobden was a pariah.

And this, too, was down to Regent’s Park: at one time or another, he’d written for all these newspapers, but the spooks had put paid to that. So now he spent his mornings in Max’s, hunting down his scoop … This was what happened when you were close to a story: you worried everyone else was on it too. That your scoop was under threat. Which went double when spooks were involved. Hobden wasn’t an idiot. His notebook contained nothing that wasn’t public domain; when he typed his notes up, with added speculations, he saved them to his memory stick to keep his hard drive clean. And he kept a dummy, in case anyone tried to get clever. He wasn’t paranoid, but he wasn’t an idiot. Last night, prowling his flat, unsettled by the sense of something left undone, he’d run through unexpected encounters he’d had recently, strangers who had started conversations, but couldn’t come up with any. Then he’d run through other recent encounters, with his ex-wife, with his children, with former colleagues and friends, and couldn’t come up with any of them either. Outside of Max’s, no one wished him good morning … The thing left undone had been putting the rubbish out, but he’d remembered eventually.

‘Excuse me?’

It was the pretty redhead at the next table.

‘I said, excuse me?’

It turned out she was talking to him.

Fish bits. The last of the Searchlight parcels contained fish bits: not the bones and heads that would indicate that the journo fancied himself in the kitchen, but the hardened edges of batter and skin, and lumps of charcoaled chip that suggested his local takeaway wasn’t the best.

River had graded most of the crap, and none of it amounted to a clue. Even the Post-its, carefully uncrumpled, yielded nothing more than shopping lists: eggs, teabags, juice, toothpaste – the original ideas on which this mess was based. And the cardboard backing of the spiral-notepad was just that; no pages survived. He’d brushed a fingertip across the board, in case any scrawling was embedded there, but found nothing.

From the ceiling above came a thump. Lamb’s favourite summons.

They were no longer the only ones here. It was coming on for eight; the door had opened twice, and the stairs creaked their usual greeting. The noises that had ended on the floor below belonged to Roderick Ho. Ho was usually first in, often last out, and how he spent the hours between was a mystery to River. Though the cola cans and pizza boxes surrounding his desk suggested he was building a fort.

The other footsteps had passed River’s floor, so must have belonged to Catherine. He had to delve for her surname: Catherine Standish. Havisham would have suited her better. River didn’t know about wedding gowns, but she might as well have walked round draped in cobweb.

Another thump from the ceiling. If he’d had a broom handy, he’d have thumped back.

The mess had migrated. It had started off contained within the newspaper island he’d laid out; now it had spread, covering much of Sid’s half of the floor. The smell, more democratic, occupied the whole room.

A twist of orange peel, unreadable as a doctor’s signature, lay curled under the desk.

Another thump.

Without removing his rubber gloves, River stood and headed for the door.

He was fifty-six years old. Pretty young redheads didn’t speak to him. But when Robert Hobden sent an enquiring glance her way she was smiling, nodding; signalling all the openness one animal offers another when something is wanted or needed.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m supposed to be working? On this assignment?’

He hated that upward inflection. How did the young let each other know when an answer was required? But she had a light dusting of freckles, and her shirt was unbuttoned enough that he could see they reached as far as her breasts. A locket on a thin silver chain hung there. Her ring finger was bare. He continued to notice such details long after they’d ceased to have relevance.

‘Yes?’

‘Only I couldn’t help noticing the headline? On your paper? One of your papers …’

She reached across to tap his copy of the Guardian, offering a better view of those freckles, that locket. It wasn’t a headline she meant, though. It was a teaser above the masthead: an interview with Russell T. Davies in the supplement.

‘My dissertation is on media heroes?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Be my guest.’

He slid G2 from its mother-paper, and handed it to her.

She smiled prettily and thanked him, and he noticed her pretty blue-green eyes, and a slight swelling on her pretty lower lip.

But sitting back, she must have misjudged her pretty limbs, because next moment there was cappuccino everywhere, and her language had become unladylike –

‘Oh shit I’m so sorry—’

‘Max!’

‘I must have—’

‘Can we have a cloth over here?’

For Catherine Standish, Slough House was Pincher Martin’s rock: damp, unlovely, achingly familiar, and something to cling to when the waves began to crash. But opening the door was a struggle. This should have been an easy fix, but Slough House being what it was, you couldn’t have a carpenter drop round: you had to fill out a property maintenance form; make a revenue disbursement request; arrange a clearance pass for an approved handyman – outsourcing was ‘fiscally appropriate’, standing instructions explained, but the sums spent on background vetting put the lie to that. And once you’d filled out the forms, you had to dispatch them to Regent’s Park, where they’d be read, initialled, rubber-stamped and ignored. So every morning she had to go through this, pushing against the door, umbrella in one hand, key in the other, shoulder hunched to keep her bag from slipping to the ground. All the while hoping she’d maintain balance when the door deigned to open. Pincher Martin had it easy. No doors on his Atlantic rock. Though it rained there too.

The door gave at last with its usual groan. She paused to shake excess water from her umbrella. Glanced up at the sky. Still grey, still heavy. One last shake, then she tucked the umbrella under her arm. There was a rack in the hall, but that was a good way of never seeing an umbrella again. On the first landing, through a half-open door, she glimpsed Ho at his desk. He didn’t look up, though she knew he’d seen her. She in her turn pretended she hadn’t seen him, or that’s what it must have looked like. Actually, she was pretending he was a piece of furniture, which required less effort.

Next landing up, both office doors were closed, but there was a light under River and Sid’s. A rank smell tainted the air: old fish and rotting vegetation.

In her own office, on the top floor, she hung her raincoat on a hanger, opened her umbrella so it would dry properly, and asked Jackson Lamb’s shut door if it wanted tea. There was no answer. She rinsed the kettle, filled it with fresh water, and left it to boil. Back in her office she booted up, then fixed her lipstick and brushed her hair.

The Catherine in her compact was always ten years older than the one she was expecting. But that was her fault and nobody else’s.

Her hair was still blonde, but only when you got close, and nobody got close. From a distance it was grey, though still full, still wavy; her eyes were the same colour, giving the impression that she was fading to monochrome. She moved quietly, and dressed like an illustration in a pre-war children’s novel; usually a hat; never jeans or trousers – nor even skirts, but always dresses, their sleeves lacy at the cuff. When she held the compact closer to her face, she could trace damage under the skin; see the lines through which her youth had leaked. A process accelerated by unwise choices, though it was striking how often, in retrospect, choices seemed not to have been choices at all, but simply a matter of taking one step after the other. She’d be fifty next year. That was quite a lot of steps, one after the other.

The kettle boiled. She poured a cup of tea. Back at her desk – in a space she shared with no one, thank God; not since Kay White had been banished downstairs on Lamb’s orders – she picked up where she’d left off yesterday, a report on real estate purchases for the past three years in the Leeds/Bradford area, cross-referenced against immigration records for the same period. Names appearing under both headings were checked against Regent’s Park’s watch-list. Catherine had yet to find a name to set alarms ringing, but ran searches on each anyway, then listed the results by country of origin, Pakistan at the top. Depending on how you viewed the results, they were either evidence of random population movement and property investment, or a graph from which a pattern would eventually arise, readable only by those higher up the intelligence-gathering chain than Catherine. Last month, she’d produced a similar report for Greater Manchester. Next would be Birmingham, or Nottingham. Her reports would be couriered over to Regent’s Park, where she hoped the Queens of the Database would pay it more attention than they paid her maintenance requests.

After half an hour she paused, and brushed her hair again.

Five minutes later River Cartwright came upstairs, and entered Lamb’s room without knocking.

The girl was on her feet, using the newspaper as a sort of funnel to direct cappuccino away from her laptop, and for a second Hobden felt a twinge of proprietorial annoyance – that was his paper she was rendering unreadable – but it didn’t last, and anyway, they needed a cloth.

‘Max!’

Hobden hated scenes. Why were people so clumsy?

He stood and headed for the counter, only to be met by Max, cloth in hand, saving his smile for the redhead, who was still ineffectually applying the Guardian. ‘It’s no problem, no problem,’ he told her.

Well, it was a bit of a problem actually, Robert Hobden thought. It was a bit of a problem that there was all this fuss going on, and coffee everywhere, when all he wanted was to be left in peace to trawl through the morning’s press.

‘I’m so sorry about this,’ the girl said.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he lied.

Max said, ‘There. All done.’

‘Thank you,’ the girl said.

‘I’ll bring you a refill.’

‘No, I can pay—’

But this too was no problem. The redhead settled back at the table, gesturing apologetically at the coffee-sodden newspaper. ‘Shall I fetch you another—’

‘No.’

‘But I—’

‘No. It’s of no importance.’

Hobden knew he didn’t handle such moments with grace or ease. Maybe he should take lessons from Max, who was back again, bearing fresh cups for both of them. He grunted a thanks. The redhead trilled sweetness, but that was an act. She was deadly embarrassed; would rather have packed up her laptop and hit the road.

He finished his first cup; put it to one side. Took a sip from the second.

Bent to The Times.

River said, ‘You thumped?’

Looking at Lamb, sprawled at his desk, it was hard to imagine him getting work done; hard to imagine him standing up even, or opening a window.

‘Nice Marigolds,’ Lamb replied.

The ceiling sloped with the camber of the roof. A dormer window was cut into this, over which a blind was permanently drawn. And Lamb didn’t like overhead lighting, so it was dim; a lamp on a pile of telephone directories was the main light-source. It looked less like an office than a lair. A heavy clock ticked smugly on a corner of the desk. A corkboard on the wall was smothered with what appeared to be money-off coupons; some so yellow and curling, they couldn’t possibly be valid.

He thought about peeling the rubber gloves off, but that would be a sticky business, involving pinching each finger end then tugging, so decided not. ‘Dirty work,’ he said instead.

Unexpectedly, Lamb blew a raspberry.

The desk hid Lamb’s paunch, though hiding it wasn’t enough. Lamb could be behind a closed door, and his paunch would remain evident. Because it was there in his voice, let alone his face or his eyes. It was there in the way he blew a raspberry. He resembled, someone had once remarked, Timothy Spall gone to seed (which left open the question of what Timothy Spall not gone to seed might look like), but painted an accurate picture nevertheless. Spall aside, that stomach, the unshaved jowls, the hair – a dirty blond slick combed back from a high forehead, which broke into a curl as it touched his collar – made him a ringer, River thought, for Jack Falstaff. A role Timothy Spall should consider.

‘Good point,’ he said. ‘Well made.’

‘Thought there might be a veiled criticism in there,’ Jackson Lamb said.

‘Wouldn’t have occurred to me.’

‘No. Well. Occurred to you to do this dirty work over Sid’s side of the office.’

River said, ‘It’s difficult to keep a bagful of rubbish all in one place. Experts call it garbage-creep.’

‘You’re not a big fan of Sid’s, are you?’

He didn’t reply.

‘Well, Sid’s not your biggest admirer either,’ said Lamb. ‘But then, competition for that role’s not fierce. Found anything interesting?’

‘Define interesting.’

‘Let’s pretend for the moment I’m your boss.’

‘It’s about as interesting as a bagful of household rubbish gets. Sir.’

‘Elaborate, why don’t you?’

‘He empties his ashtray into a sheet of newspaper. Wraps it up like a present.’

‘Sounds like a loony.’

‘Stops his bin from smelling.’

‘Bins are supposed to smell. That’s how you know they’re bins.’

‘What was the point of this?’

‘Thought you wanted to get out the office. Didn’t I hear you say you wanted to get out the office? Like, three times a day every day for months?’

‘Sure. On Her Majesty’s, etc. etc. So now I’m going through bins like a refuse diver. What am I even looking for?’

‘Who says you’re looking for anything?’

River thought about it. ‘You mean, we just want him to know he’s being looked at?’

‘What do you mean we, paleface? You don’t want anything. You only want what I tell you to want. No old notebooks? Torn-up letters?’

‘Part of a notebook. Spiral-bound. But no pages. Just the cardboard backing.’

‘Evidence of drug use?’

‘Empty box of paracetamol.’

‘Condoms?’

‘I imagine he flushes them,’ River said. ‘Should the occasion arise.’

‘They come in little foil packets.’

‘So I recall. No. None of those.’

‘Empty booze bottles?’

‘In his recycling bin, I expect.’

‘Beer cans?’

‘Ditto.’

‘God,’ said Jackson Lamb. ‘Is it me, or did all the fun go out of everything round about 1979?’

River wasn’t going to pretend he cared about that. ‘I thought our job involved preserving democracy,’ he said. ‘How does harassing a journalist help?’

‘Are you serious? It ought to be one of our key performance indicators.’

Lamb pronounced this phrase as if it had been on a form he’d lately binned.

‘This particular example, then.’

‘Try not to think of him as a journalist. And more as a potential danger to the integrity of the body politic.’

‘Is that what he is?’

‘I don’t know. Anything in his rubbish suggest he might be?’

‘Well, he smokes. But that’s not actually been upgraded to security threat.’

‘Yet,’ said Lamb, who’d been known to light up in his office. He thought for a moment. Then said, ‘Okay. Write it up.’

‘Write it up,’ River repeated. Not quite making it a question.

‘You have a problem, Cartwright?’

‘I feel like I’m working for a tabloid.’

‘You should be so lucky. Know what those bastards earn?’

‘Do you want me to put him under surveillance?’

Lamb laughed.

River waited. It took a while. Lamb’s laugh wasn’t a genuine surrender to amusement; more of a temporary derangement. Not a laugh you’d want to hear from anyone holding a stick.

When he stopped, it was as abrupt as if he’d never started. ‘If that’s what I wanted, you think I’d pick you?’

‘I could do it.’

‘Really?’

‘I could do it,’ he repeated.

‘Let me rephrase,’ said Jackson Lamb. ‘Supposing I wanted it done without dozens of innocent bystanders getting killed. Think you could manage that?’

River didn’t reply.

‘Cartwright?’

Screw you, he wanted to say. He settled for ‘I could do it’ again; though repetition made it sound an admission of defeat. He could do it. Could he really? ‘No one would get hurt,’ he said.

‘Nice to have your input,’ Lamb told him. ‘But that’s not what happened last time.’

Min Harper was next to arrive, with Louisa Guy on his heels. They chatted in the kitchen, both trying too hard. They’d shared a moment a week ago, in the pub across the road, which was a hellhole: an unwindowed nightmare, strictly for the lager and tequila crowd. But they’d gone anyway, both suffering the need for a drink within sixty seconds of leaving Slough House, a margin too thin to allow for reaching anywhere nicer.

Their conversation had been focused at first (Jackson Lamb is a bastard), then becoming speculative (what makes Jackson Lamb such a bastard?) before drifting into the sentimental (wouldn’t it be sweet if Jackson Lamb fell under a threshing machine?). Crossing back to the Tube afterwards, there’d been an awkward parting – what had that been about? Just a drink after work, except no one in Slough House went for a drink after work – but they’d muddled through by pretending they’d not actually been together, and found their separate platforms without words. But since then they’d not positively avoided each other, which was unusual. In Slough House, there was almost never more than one person in the kitchen at a time.

Mugs were rinsed. The kettle switched on.

‘Is it me, or is there a strange smell somewhere?’

Upstairs, a door slammed. Downstairs, one opened.

‘If I said it was you, how upset would you be?’

And they exchanged glances and smiles both turned off at exactly the same moment.

It took no effort for River to remember the most significant conversation he’d had with Jackson Lamb. It had happened eight months ago, and had started with River asking when he was going to get something proper to do.

‘When the dust settles.’

‘Which will be when?’

Lamb had sighed, grieving his role as answerer of stupid questions. ‘The only reason there’s dust is your connections, Cartwright. If not for grandad, we wouldn’t be discussing dust. We’d be talking glaciers. We’d be talking about when glaciers melt. Except we wouldn’t be talking at all, because you’d be a distant memory. Someone to reminisce about occasionally, to take Moody’s mind off his fuck-ups, or Standish’s off the bottle.’

River had measured the distance between Lamb’s chair and the window. That blind wasn’t going to offer resistance. If River got the leverage right, Lamb would be a pizza-shaped stain on the pavement instead of drawing another breath; saying:

‘But no, you’ve got a grandfather. Congratufuckinglations. You’ve still got a job. But the downside is, it’s not one you’re going to enjoy. Now or ever.’ He beat out a tattoo on his desk with two fingers. ‘Orders from above, Cartwright. Sorry, they’re not my rules.’

The yellow-toothed smile accompanying this held nothing of sorrow at all.

River said, ‘This is bullshit.’

‘No, I’ll tell you what’s bullshit. One hundred and twenty people dead or maimed. Thirty million pounds’ worth of actual damage. Two point five billion quid in tourist revenue down the drain. And all of it your fault. Now that – that’s bullshit.’

River Cartwright said, ‘It didn’t happen.’

‘You think? There’s CC footage of the kid pulling the cord. They’re still playing it over at Regent’s Park. You know, to remind themselves how messy things get if they don’t do their jobs properly.’

‘It was a training exercise.’

‘Which you turned into a circus. You crashed King’s Cross.’

‘Twenty minutes. It was up and running again in twenty minutes.’

‘You crashed King’s Cross, Cartwright. In rush hour. You turned your upgrade assessment into a circus.’

River had the distinct impression Lamb found this amusing.

‘No one was killed,’ he said.

‘One stroke. One broken leg. Three—’

‘He’d have stroked anyway. He was an old man.’

‘He was sixty-two.’

‘I’m glad we agree.’

‘The mayor wanted your head on a plate.’

‘The mayor was delighted. He gets to talk about oversight committees and the need for airtight security processes. Makes him look like a serious politician.’

‘And that’s a good idea?’

‘Can’t hurt. Given he’s an idiot.’

Lamb said, ‘Let’s try for a little focus. You think it’s a good idea you turned the Service into a political football by being, what would you call it? Colour-deaf?’

Blue shirt, white tee.

White shirt, blue tee …

River said, ‘I heard what I heard.’

‘I don’t give a ferret’s arse what you heard. You screwed up. So now you’re here instead of Regent’s Park, and what might have been a glittering career is – guess what? A miserable clerk’s job, specifically tailored to make you save everyone a lot of grief and jack it in. And you only got that much courtesy of grandpa.’ Another flash of yellow teeth. ‘You know why they call this Slough House?’ Lamb went on.

‘Yes.’

‘Because it might as well be in—’

‘In Slough. Yes. And I know what they call us, too.’

‘They call us slow horses,’ Lamb said, exactly as if River had kept his mouth shut. ‘Slough House. Slow horse. Clever?’

‘I suppose it depends on your definition of—’

‘You asked when you were going to get something proper to do.’

River shut up.

‘Well, that would be when everyone’s forgotten you crashed King’s Cross.’

River didn’t reply.

‘It would be when everyone’s forgotten you’ve joined the slow horses.’

River didn’t reply.

‘Which is going to be a very fucking long time from now,’ Lamb said, as if this might somehow have gone misunderstood.

River turned to leave. But there was something he had to know first. ‘Three what?’ he asked.

‘Three what what?’

‘There were three somethings, you said. At King’s Cross. You didn’t say what they were.’

‘Panic attacks,’ said Lamb. ‘There were three panic attacks.’

River nodded.

‘Not including yours,’ Lamb said.

And that had been the most significant conversation River had had with Jackson Lamb.

Until today.

Jed Moody would turn up eventually. A couple of hours after everyone else, but nobody made an issue out of this because nobody cared, and anyway, nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of Moody, and most sides of Moody were the wrong one. A good day for Moody was when some character took up residence at the bus stop over the road, or sat too long in one of the garden patches in the Barbican complex opposite. When this happened, out Moody would go, even though it was never serious – was always kids from the stage school down the road, or someone homeless, looking for a sit-down. But whoever it was, out Moody would slope, chewing gum, and sit next to them: never engaging in conversation – he just sat chewing gum. Which was all it took. And when he came back in he was a little lighter of step for five minutes: not enough to make him good company, but enough that you could pass him on the stairs without worrying he’d hook a foot round your ankle.

He made no secret: he hated being among the slow horses. Once he’d been one of the Dogs, but everyone knew Jed Moody’s screw-up: he’d let a desk-jockey clean his clock before making tracks with about a squillion quid. Not a great career move for a Dog – the Service’s internal security division – even without the subsequent messy ending. So now Moody turned up late and dared anyone to give him bullshit. Which nobody did. Because nobody cared.

But meanwhile Moody wasn’t here yet, and River Cartwright was still upstairs with Jackson Lamb.

Who leant back in his chair, folding his arms. There’d been nothing audible, but it became apparent he’d farted. He shook his head sadly, as if attributing this to River, and said, ‘You don’t even know who he is, do you?’

River, half his mind still at King’s Cross, said, ‘Hobden?’

‘You were probably still at school when he was successful.’

‘I dimly remember him. Didn’t he use to be a Communist?’

‘That generation were all Communists. Learn some history.’

‘You’re about the same age, aren’t you?’

Lamb ignored that. ‘The Cold War had its upside, you know. There’s something to be said for getting teenage disaffection out your system by carrying a card instead of a knife. Attending interminable meetings in the back rooms of pubs. Marching for causes nobody else would get out of bed for.’

‘Sorry I missed that. Is it available on DVD?’

Instead of replying, Lamb looked away, beyond River, indicating they weren’t alone. River turned. A woman stood in the doorway. She had red hair, and a light dusting of freckles across her face, and her black raincoat – still glistening from the morning rain – hung open, showing the collarless white shirt beneath. A locket on a silver chain hung at her breast. A faint smile hovered on her lips.

Under one arm she held a laptop, the size of an exercise book.

Lamb said, ‘Success?’

She nodded.

‘Nice one, Sid,’ he told her.