Slow Horses: Slough House Thriller 1

4

WHEN LOVELY WOMAN stoops to folly, all bets are off. Was that how it went? Didn’t matter. When lovely woman stoops to folly, something’s got to give.

Such thoughts were pitilessly regular; as familiar as the sound of her footsteps clickety-clacking up the stairs of her apartment block. Lovely woman stoops to folly. This evening’s earworm, picked up from an ad on the Tube.

When lovely woman stoops to folly, the shit has hit the fan.

Catherine Standish, forty-eight a memory, knew all bets were off. Last thing she needed was her subconscious reminding her.

And she had been lovely once. Many had said so. One man in particular: You’re lovely, he’d told her. But you look like you’ve had some scary moments. Even now she thought he’d meant it as a compliment.

But there was nobody to tell her she was lovely any more, and it was doubtful they’d say so if there were. The scary moments had won. Which sounded like a definition of ageing, to Catherine. The scary moments had won.

At the door to her flat she put her shopping on the floor and hunted out her key. Found it. Entered. The hall light was on, because it was on a timer. Catherine didn’t like stepping into the dark, not even for the second it would take to flip a switch. In the kitchen, she unpacked the shopping; coffee in a cupboard, salad in the fridge. Then she took the toothpaste into the bathroom, where the light was on the same timer. There was a reason for that too.

Her worst scary moment had been the morning she’d turned up at her boss’s flat to find him dead in his bathroom. He’d used a gun. Sat in the tub to do it, as if he didn’t want to make a mess.

You had a key to his house? she’d been asked. You had a key? Since when?

That had been the Dogs, of course. Or one Dog in particular: Sam Chapman, who they called Bad Sam. He was a dark difficult man, and knew damn well she’d had a key to Charles Partner’s house, because everyone knew she’d had a key to Charles Partner’s house. And knew it hadn’t been because of an affair, but simply because Charles Partner had been hopeless about taking care of himself – ostensibly simple things like remembering to buy food, remembering to cook it, then remembering to throw it away when he’d forgotten to eat it. Charles had been twenty years older than Catherine, but it hadn’t been a father/daughter thing either. That was a convenient label, but the reality had been this: she had worked for Charles Partner, cared for him, shopped for him. And had found him dead in his bathroom once he’d shot himself. Bad Sam could growl all he liked, but he’d only been going through the motions, because Catherine had been the one to find the body.

Funny how swiftly that happened; how swiftly you went from being Charles Partner – not a man whose name was known to the public at large, true, but a man whose decisions dictated whether significant numbers of them would live or die, which had to count for something – to being ‘the body’. All it had taken was one calculated moment in a bathtub. He didn’t want to make a mess, but what mess he’d made was for others to clean up. Funny.

Less funny was how quickly the scary moments accumulated.

Because she was in the bathroom, and because the light was already on, it was hard for Catherine not to catch herself in the mirror. It held no surprises. Yes, the scary moments accumulated, but that was the least of it. Some damage was gifted by your genes. Some you discovered for yourself. Her nose grew red-tipped in the cold, as did her cheekbones. This made her look witchy and raw. Nothing she could do about that. But the rest of it – the spidery tracing of broken veins; the gaunt stretching of the skin across the skull – they told a different story, one she’d written herself.

My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.

By the time she’d got around to formulating that sentence, alcohol was a problem. Prior to that, it had seemed like a solution. No, that was too glib: rather, it hadn’t seemed like anything at all; it had simply been what one did. Perhaps a tad self-dramatic (a bottle for solace was such a time-worn trope, it felt like you weren’t doing heartbreak properly without a glass in your hand) but more often, just the normal backdrop. It was the obvious adjunct to an evening alone with the box, and absolutely de rigueur for an evening out with girlfriends. And then there were dates, which Catherine often had in those days, and you couldn’t have a date without a drink. A meal meant a drink; the cinema meant a drink afterwards. And if you were plucking up courage to ask him back for coffee, a drink was necessary; and ultimately … Ultimately, if you needed somebody there, because you didn’t want to wake in the middle of the night knowing you were alone, you were going to have to fuck somebody, and sooner or later you were going to have to fuck anybody, and that demanded a drink if anything did.

There was a phrase: the slippery slope. Slippery implied speed and blurriness, and the ever-present threat of losing your feet. You’d end up flat on your back, breathing splinters. But Catherine’s journey had been more moving staircase than slippery slope; a slow downwards progression; a bore rather than a shock. Looking across at the people heading upwards, and wondering if that was a better idea. But somehow knowing she’d have to reach the bottom before she could change direction.

It had been Charles Partner who’d been there when that happened. Not literally, thank God; not actually present when she’d woken in a stranger’s flat with a broken cheekbone, finger-shaped bruises on her thighs. But there to make sure the pieces were gathered together. Catherine had spent time in a facility that was beyond anything she’d have been able to afford had she been paying. Her treatment had been thorough. It had involved counselling. All this, she was told, was in line with Service protocol (Do you think you’re the first? she’d been asked. Do you think you’re the only one it gets to in the end?) but there’d been more to it than that, she was sure. Because after the retreat, after the drying-out, after the first six everlasting months of sober living, she’d turned up at Regent’s Park expecting to be assigned to the outer limits, but no: it was back to regular duties as Charles’s doorkeeper.

Most things, at that time in her life, had made her want to weep, but this seemed more warranted than most. It wasn’t as if they’d been close. Sometimes he’d called her Moneypenny, but that was it. And even afterwards they were hardly friends, though it did not escape her that he never called her Moneypenny again. Nor did they discuss what had happened, beyond his asking, that first morning, if she was ‘back to her old self’. She’d given him the answer he’d wanted, but knew that her old self was long gone. And from there, they’d continued as before.

But he had cared for her when it mattered, and so she cared for him in return. They were together another three years, and before the first was out she was playing a role in his non-working life. He was unmarried. She’d long registered his threadbare aura. It wasn’t that he was seedy, but seediness was a possibility, and poor diet an ongoing fact. He needed looking after. And she needed something. She didn’t need to wake up next to more strangers, but she needed something. Partner turned out to be it.

So she kept his freezer full, and arranged for a weekly cleaner; took his diary in hand and made sure he had the odd day off. She became a barrier against the worst of his underlings – the atrocious Diana Taverner, for a start. And did all this while remaining part of the wallpaper: there was never physical contact, and nor did he acknowledge that she was anything other than secretary. But she cared for him.

Though not enough to recognise that he needed more help than she could give him.

She tilted her head to one side now, allowing her hair to fall across her face. She wondered if she should tint it, bring the blonde out, but who for? And would anyone notice? Apart from the odious Jackson Lamb, who’d ridicule her.

She could accept, Charles Partner being dead, that there was no place for her at Regent’s Park. But Slough House felt like a deferred punishment for a crime she’d already atoned for. Sometimes she wondered if there were more to that crime than her own wine-dark past; if she were held responsible in some way for Charles’s suicide. For not knowing it was going to happen. But how could she have known that? Charles Partner had spent a lifetime dealing in other people’s secrets, and if there was one thing he’d learned, it was how to keep his own. You had a key to his house? she’d been asked. And: You were expecting this to happen? Of course she hadn’t. But she wondered now if anyone had ever believed her.

Ancient history. Charles Partner was bones, but she still thought about him most days.

Back to the mirror. Back to her own life. Lovely woman had stooped to folly, and this was where it had left her.

My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.

She hadn’t had a drink in ten years. But still.

My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.

She turned off the bathroom light, and went to make supper.

Min Harper spent a chunk of the evening on the phone to his boys: nine and eleven. A year ago, this would have left him knowing more than he needed to about computer games and TV shows, but it seemed both had crossed a line at the same time, and now it was like trying to have a conversation with a pair of refrigerators. How had that happened? Change should come with a warning, and besides, shouldn’t there have been a breathing space where his nine-year-old was concerned? More childhood to negotiate before adolescence crept in? But prising information from him was like scratching at a rock. By the time his ex-wife was on the line Min was ready to take it out on her, though she was having none of it:

‘It’s a phase. They’re the same with me. Except all the time they’re grunting and saying nothing, I’m cooking their meals and washing up. So don’t tell me you’re having problems with it, right?’

‘At least you get to see them.’

‘You know where we are. Would it kill you to get round more than once a week?’

He could have fought a rearguard action – the hours he worked; the distance involved – but marriage had taught him that once the battle lines were drawn, defeat was only a matter of time.

Afterwards, he couldn’t settle. It was hard, after such calls, not to end up thinking about the trajectory his life had taken; a free fall he could pin down to one specific moment. Prior to that brainless second, he’d had a marriage, a family and a career, along with all the accompanying paraphernalia – dentist’s appointments and mortgage worries and direct debit arrangements. Some of which still happened, of course, but its relevance, the evidence it supplied that he was building a life that worked, had been washed away by the Stupid Moment; the one in which he’d left a computer disk on a Tube train. And hadn’t known he’d done so until the following morning.

He supposed few people had had their careers dismantled via Radio 4. The memory hurt. Not the abject belly-panic as it sank in that the object under discussion was supposed to be in his keeping, but the moments before that, when he’d been enjoying a peaceful shave, thinking: I’m glad I’m not the pitiful bastard responsible for that. That was what hurt; the notion that all over the country other people were having exactly the same thought, and he was the only one who didn’t deserve to.

Other, more drawn-out painful moments had followed. Interviews with the Dogs. Comedy riffs on TV shows about secret service idiots. People on the street didn’t know Min was the butt of these sketches, but they were laughing at him all the same.

Worst of all was the assumption that incompetence had caused the screw-up. Nobody had suggested treachery; that leaving a report outlining gaps in Terminal 5’s security procedures on the Piccadilly Line had been a bungled dead-letter drop. That would have been to accord Min Harper a measure of respect. He could have been in the grip of misguided idealism, or lured by wealth, or at the very least making a conscious decision, but no: even the Dogs had written him off as an idiot. Any other year, he’d have been out of the door, but a combination of hiring freeze and budget tightening meant that if Min had gone, his job would have left with him, and it proved politic to keep him on the books until his departure would allow for a replacement.

Regent’s Park, though, was in his past.

Min checked his pockets, reminded himself not to, then poured a drink and tuned the radio to the sports channel. As ball-by-ball commentary on an overseas Test match filled the room, a rewritten history swarmed through his head; a more amenable version of his life, in which he was halfway onto the platform at Gloucester Road when he turned and saw the disk on the seat and went back and collected it, feeling the hot chill of near-disaster tickle his nape – a sensation he’d feel again later that evening, as he helped put the boys to bed, and then forget about entirely as his career and life continued on their even tenor: marriage, family, career; dentist’s appointments, mortgage; direct debit arrangements.

As so frequently when he was trying not to have such thoughts Min startled himself by groaning aloud, but nobody heard. He was alone. There was only the radio. And as for the phone: once he’d spoken to his uncommunicative children and rowed with his ex, well: he didn’t have anyone else to talk to. So he turned it off.

Louisa Guy went home to her rented studio flat: examined its four walls – what she could see of them behind stuff in the way: piles of CDs, books, damp laundry on collapsible racks – and almost went straight out again, but couldn’t face the choices that would entail. She microwaved a lasagne and watched a property programme instead. House prices were in freefall, if you owned one. They remained laughably lunar to the rent-bound.

Her phone stayed silent. That wasn’t unusual, but still: you’d think somebody would have found time to dial a number. Ask how Louisa was. If she’d done anything interesting lately.

She left her plate to soak. Changed channel. Encountered someone telling her that pink placebos were more effective than blue ones. Could that be right? Was the brain that easily bamboozled?

Her own felt bamboozled constantly; not so much tricked as stifled into submission. When she closed her eyes at night, illegible data scrolled down her eyelids. Sleep was repeatedly yanked from her by a sensed error, the feeling that something was out of sequence for a reason she’d nearly grasped, and grasping would have rehabilitated her career. But it was always gone and she’d be stone awake once more, her unsleeping head on a pillow too thin and too warm, no matter how cold the rest of her bed was.

Jesus, she’d think, each time. Could she get a break? Could she get a decent night’s sleep? Please?

And in the morning, she’d do it all over again.

It was screen-watching. Which wasn’t what she’d joined the Service for, but what she’d ended up doing. And it felt like ending up, too; felt like she had no future other than the one that waited every morning behind the flaking back door of Slough House, and stretched out minute by endless minute until the door shut behind her when she left. And the time in between was spent fuming at the injustice of it all.

She should quit. That’s what she should do. She should just quit.

But if she quit, that would make her a quitter. She hadn’t joined the Service to be a quitter, either.

The screen-watching was virtual surveillance, trolling among the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere. Some of the websites she covered were Trojan horses, Service-designed to attract the disaffected; others might have belonged to other branches of the State – she sometimes wondered if she were lurking in chat rooms peopled entirely by spooks; the undercover equivalent of teen-sites populated entirely by middle-aged men. Genuine or not, the sites covered a range of mood, from the in-your-face (how to make your own bomb) to the apparently educational (‘the true meaning of Islam’) to the free-for-all forums where argument spat like a boiling chip pan, and rage brooked no grammar.

To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.

It felt pointless. Worse, it felt undoable … How could you know when something worse than words was meant, when all you had to go on were the words? And when the words were always the same: angry, vicious, murderous? Several times she’d decided that a particular voice rang darker than the rest, and had passed the information upstream. Where, presumably, it was acted upon: ISP addresses hunted down; angry young men tracked to their suburban bedrooms. But perhaps she was kidding herself. Maybe all the potential terrorists she ever identified were as ghostly as herself; other spooks in other offices, who were sending her own webname upstream even as she was sending theirs. It wouldn’t be the only aspect of the War on Terror that turned out to be a circle jerk. She should be out on the street, doing actual work. But she’d tried that already, and had screwed it up.

Every time she thought about this – which was a lot – her teeth clamped together. Sometimes she found herself thinking about it without realising that’s what she was doing, and the clue was the grinding of teeth, and an ache in her jaw.

Her first field op, a tracking job: the first time she’d done it for real. Following a boy. Not the first time she’d done that for real, but the first time she’d done it like this: at a distance, keeping him in sight at all times, but not so close he’d sense her presence.

Tracking jobs were done in threes, minimum. That day there’d been five: two ahead, three behind. The three behind kept changing places, as if engaged in a country dance. But it all took place on city streets.

The boy they were following – a black youth as far from the tabloid image as you could get: he wore a pinstripe and plastic-rimmed corrective glasses – was point man in a gun drop. A cache of decommissioned handguns had been hijacked the previous week, en route to a furnace. ‘Decommissioned’ was like ‘single’ or ‘married’: a status liable to abrupt change. The handguns hadn’t been hijacked because they’d make nice paperweights. They’d been hijacked to be retooled, and released into the community.

‘Three? Take point.’

An instruction through an earpiece, propelling her to the front of the queue.

The agent who’d had the target’s heels peeled away: he’d hover by a newspaper stand for a while, then rejoin the procession. Meanwhile, she had the wheel. The target was maintaining an unbroken pace. This either meant he had no idea he was under surveillance, or was so used to it that it didn’t faze him.

But she remembered thinking: He has no idea.

He has no idea. He has no idea. Repeated enough, any phrase ceases to have meaning. He has no idea.

Less than a minute later, the target stepped into a clothes shop.

This wasn’t necessarily significant. He liked his threads: you could tell. But shops made good meeting places. There were queues, occasional crowds. There were changing rooms. There were opportunities. He stepped into the shop, and she followed.

And lost him immediately.

In the follow-up, which began later that day and went on for weeks, the unspoken accusation was of racism. That she could not tell one black youth from another. This was not true. She had had a firm mental picture of the target, and retained it even now: the slight dint in his jaw; his razor-sharp hairline. It was just that there were at least six other young men in the shop – same size, same colour, same suit, same hair – and they’d all been put in play.

Afterwards, it became clear he’d spent less than three minutes in the shop. Into a changing room, out of his suit. When he walked back on to the street, he was dressed like he belonged there: shades, a floppy grey top, baggy jeans. He’d walked straight past Two, who was heading inside to back Louisa up, and passed One, Four and Five unnoticed. Louisa – Three – was just starting to feel the panic. Not a good day at the office.

It got worse when the guns started turning up: in bank raids, in hold-ups, in street corner shootings …

Among the casualties was Louisa Guy’s career.

She thought about pouring another drink, then decided to turn the TV off and get to bed instead. It would bring the morning sooner, but at least there’d be oblivion between now and then.

It was a while coming, though. For at least an hour she lay in the dark, stray thoughts nipping and nagging at her.

She wondered what Min Harper was doing.

Jed Moody edged his way past the crowd by the door and bagged a pavement table where he smoked three cigarettes with his first pint. The shops opposite were a High Street palindrome – Korean grocery, courier service, letting agents, courier service, Korean grocery – and buses passed with noisy frequency. When he’d finished his pint he went back in for a second, but this time carried it upstairs, where tables lined along an internal balcony allowed a view of the stewing masses below. He was halfway through it when Nick Duffy joined him. ‘Jed.’

‘Nick.’

Duffy sat.

Nick Duffy, late forties, had been an exact contemporary of Moody’s: they’d finished training at the same time, both winding up in the Service’s internal security system – the Dogs – a dozen years later. The Dogs were kennelled at Regent’s Park, but had licence to roam. The furthest Moody had ranged was Marseilles – a junior operative had been knifed to death by a transsexual prostitute in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity – but Duffy had made it as far as DC. He had close-cropped grey hair these days and, like Moody, wore a jacket but no tie. They must have resembled a pair of off-duty whatever, Moody thought. Accountants, estate agents, bookies; perhaps, to the more astute observer, cops. Maybe one in a million would have guessed Five. And Moody would want a background check on that particular bastard.

‘Keeping busy?’ he asked.

‘You know.’

Meaning he didn’t. And wasn’t allowed to.

‘I’m not after classified, Nick. I’m asking how things are.’

Duffy tilted his head to the bar below. ‘Far end. Check it out.’

He’d been followed, was Moody’s first thought. His second was: Oh. Okay. At the far end of the bar sat two women whose skirts, combined, would have made a decent lens cloth.

One was wearing red underwear.

Duffy was waiting.

He said, ‘Jesus, you’re kidding, aren’t you?’

‘Feeling old?’

‘I didn’t ask you out on the pull.’

‘Why is that not a surprise?’

‘And if I had, I wouldn’t trawl this place. Not without penicillin.’

‘You’re a laugh a minute, Jed.’ As if testing this assertion, Duffy checked his watch, then took a long steady pull on his pint.

So Moody cut to the chase. ‘You have much to do with Taverner?’

Duffy realigned his beer mat, and set his glass upon it.

‘Is she approachable?’

Duffy said, ‘You want to talk approachable? That blonde’s sending out smoke signals.’

‘Nick.’

‘You really want to do this?’

And that was it, before they’d even started. Six words, and Duffy had told him he might as well shut up now.

‘I just need a chance, Nick. One small chance. I won’t screw up again.’

‘I hardly ever see her, Jed.’

‘You get ten times as close as I do.’

‘Whatever you want from her—’

‘I don’t want from her—’

‘—it’s not going to happen.’

Moody stopped flat.

Duffy went on: ‘After that mess last year, they needed someone to throw to the wolves. Sam Chapman handed his hat in, and that was a start, but they wanted an unwilling victim. That would be you.’

‘But they didn’t kick me out.’

‘You reckon you’re in?’

Moody didn’t reply.

Duffy, because it was his job, put the boot in. ‘Slough House is not in, Jed. Regent’s Park, that’s the centre of the world. The Dogs – well, you know. We roam the passageways. Sniff whoever we like. We make sure everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and nobody’s doing what they’re not. And if they’re not, we bite them. That’s why they call us the Dogs.’

Throughout this, he kept his voice light and breezy. Anyone watching would think he was telling a joke.

‘Whereas over at Slough House, you get to – what is it you get to do again, Jed? You get to frighten people if they lurk at the bus stop too long. You make sure nobody steals any paper clips. You hang around the coffee machine listening to the other screw-ups. And that. Is. It.’

Moody said nothing.

Duffy said, ‘Nobody followed me. I know that, because I’m the one says who follows who. And nobody followed you, because nobody cares. Trust me. Nobody’s keeping an eye on you, Jed. The boss made a mark on a piece of paper, and forgot you ever lived. End of story.’

Moody said nothing.

‘And if that’s still bothering you, try another line of work. When cops get the boot, they pick up security jobs. Given that any thought, Jed? You’d get a uniform and everything. Nice view of a car park. Move on with your life.’

‘I wasn’t given the boot.’

‘No, but they figured you’d quit. Have you not worked that out yet?’

Moody scowled and reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, before contemporary reality kicked in. When was the last time he’d enjoyed a smoke in a pub? Then again, when was the last time he’d had a drink with a colleague, and joked about the job? Or the last time he’d felt okay about being Jed Moody? Inside his pocket, his hand curled into a fist. He loosened it, stretched his fingers, laid both hands on the table in front of him.

‘He’s up to something,’ he said.

‘Who is?’

‘Jackson Lamb.’

Duffy said, ‘Last time Jackson Lamb stirred himself to do anything more strenuous than break wind, Geoffrey Boycott was opening for England.’

‘He sent Sid Baker on an op.’

‘Right.’

‘A real one.’

‘Jed, we know, okay? We know. You think Lamb farts without permission?’ He raised his glass to his lips again, but it was empty. He put it down. ‘I’ve got to go. Early meeting in the morning. You know how it is.’

‘Something to do with a journo.’ Moody tried to keep desperation out of his voice. To keep it on a level Duffy would understand: that if an op was being run from Slough House, Moody should be part of it. Christ knows, he had more experience than the rest of them put together. Sid Baker was barely out of a training bra, Cartwright had melted King’s Cross, Ho was a webhead, and the others were fucking fridge magnets. Moody alone had kicked down doors in earnest. And don’t tell him it wasn’t about kicking down doors. He knew it wasn’t about kicking down doors. But when you were running an op you wanted someone who could kick down doors, because sooner or later that’s what it would be about, after all.

Duffy said, ‘Jed, a word of advice. Jackson Lamb’s got the authority of a lollipop lady. You’re three rungs below that. We know what Baker was doing, and only a rank amateur would call it an op. It was an errand. Get the difference? An errand. You think we’d trust him with anything bigger?’

Before he’d finished speaking he was getting to his feet.

‘I’ll put one behind the bar. No hard feelings, okay? If anything comes up, I’ll let you know. But nothing’s going to come up.’

Moody watched as Duffy vanished down the stairs then reappeared in the bar below, gave money to the barman, pointed a thumb in Moody’s direction. The barman glanced up, nodded, and fed the till.

On his way out Duffy paused by the short-skirted blonde. Whatever he said caused her to open her eyes wide and give a little scream of laughter. Before Duffy left she was huddling up, passing his words on to her friend. A little ripple of friendly filth; just another hit-and-run on a weekday evening.

Jed Moody drained his pint and leant back in his seat. Okay, you son of a bitch, he thought. You know everything, I know nothing. And I’m stuck in the wilderness while you’re having early meetings and deciding who follows who. I got the shitty stick. You got the whole of the moon.

But if you’re so clever, how come you think Sid Baker’s a man?

He didn’t bother collecting the pint Duffy had paid for. It was a small victory, but they added up.

Years ago – and he wouldn’t thank you for reminding him – Roderick Ho had worked out what his Service nickname would be. More than that, he’d settled on his possible responses first time it was used. Yeah, make my day, he’d say. Or Feeling lucky, punk? That’s what you said when people called you Clint.

Roderick Ho = Westward Ho = Eastward Ho = Clint.

But nobody had ever called him Clint. Perhaps political correctness wouldn’t allow them to make the oriental elision from Westward to Eastwood.

Or perhaps he was giving them too much credit. Perhaps they’d never heard of Westward Ho!

Actually, bunch of morons. He worked with a bunch of morons. Couldn’t make a pun with a dictionary and a Scrabble board.

Like Louisa Guy, like Min Harper, Ho was at home this evening, though his home was his own, and a house not a flat. It was an odd house, though that was none of his doing: it had been odd when he’d bought it. Its oddness lay in its upstairs conservatory; a glass-roofed, tiled-floor mezzanine. The estate agent had made much of this feature, pointing out the array of plants that created a microclimate there; natural and green and eco-whatever peppering her spiel. Ho had nodded like he cared, calculating how many electronics he could fit into here once this eco-shit was off the premises. Quite a lot had been his estimate. This turned out to be the precise exact amount.

So now he sat surrounded by quite a lot of electronics, some quietly awaiting his touch; others humming pleasantly in response to pre-set commands; and one blasting out death metal at a volume that threatened to make the genre literal.

He was too old for this music, and he knew it. He was too old for this volume, and knew that too. But it was his music, his house, and the neighbours were students. If he didn’t make his own noise, he’d have to listen to theirs.

Currently, he was virtually crawling through Home Office personnel files. Not looking for anything in particular. Just looking because he could.

Ho’s parents had left Hong Kong ten years before handover, and Ho – who obsessed about what-ifs; who’d devoured you-make-the-decisions books as a teenager, when not playing Dungeons and Dragons relentlessly, unsleepingly – often wondered how he’d have turned out if they’d stayed. Odds on he’d have been a webhead in a more commercial area, software design or SFX, or lackeying for some vast faceless corporation whose tendrils touched every corner of the known world. Odds on he’d be pulling down more money than he was now. But he wouldn’t have these opportunities.

The previous evening he’d been on a date with a woman he’d met on the Tube that morning. They hadn’t spoken. First dates were like that.

She’d been mousy blonde, and wore a regulation City outfit – charcoal jacket and skirt, white blouse – but what attracted Ho was her building pass, which dangled on a chain round her neck. Strap-hanging eight inches away, he had no trouble reading her name; ten minutes after reaching Slough House, he’d established her address and marital status (single); her credit history (pretty good); her medical records (usual female stuff); and was wandering through her e-mails. Work. Spam. A bit of flirting with a colleague, which was going nowhere. Plus, she was looking to buy a second-hand car, and had responded to an ad in her local free press. The owner hadn’t replied.

So Ho gave him a call, and established that he’d already sold the car but hadn’t bothered informing the unlucky enquirers. That was fine, Ho assured him, before calling the woman himself, to see if she was still interested in a six-year-old Saab. She was, so they arranged to meet that evening in a wine bar. Ho, established in a corner before she turned up, had watched her grow visibly more frustrated over the following hour; had even thought of approaching her; sitting her down and explaining that you couldn’t be too careful – that you could not. Be. Too. Careful. A security pass on a chain round her neck? Why not sport a badge reading Rape My Life? Financial details, favourite websites, numbers dialled, calls received. All it took was a name, and one other bite: place of work did fine. Tax codes, criminal records, loyalty cards, travel passes. It wasn’t simply that these things could be found, along with everything else. It was that they could be changed. So you leave home one morning, security pass like a cowbell round your neck, and by the time you reach work your life’s not your own any more.

Roderick Ho was here to tell this woman that.

But hadn’t, of course. He’d watched until she’d given up and left in a storm of silent fury, and then finished his alcohol-free lager, and walked home satisfied that he’d had her in the palm of his hand.

His secret.

One among many.

So now he sat in front of his screen, not hearing the music blasting through his room; not even blinking. A Home Office flunkey might as well be standing by his monitor, ushering him in; leading him to the filing cabinets. Offering him a key. Would sir like an alcohol-free lager while he prowled? Why, yes. Sir would.

Ho plucked the can from the holder screwed to his desk.

Thank you, flunkey.

He contemplated swapping the birth dates of some of the higher-ranking apparatchiks, which would mess up a pension plan or two, but was distracted by a link to an external site, which led him to another, and then another. It was surprising how quickly time passed: next time he looked up it was midnight, and he was miles from the Home Office; was navigating his way round a small-time plastics factory with deep-cover links to the MoD. More secrets. This was the playground he’d been born to run around in: didn’t matter where his parents ended up. This was his element, and he’d dig in it until time healed over; like a miser sifting heaps of dust, in search of the nugget of gold.

And all of it was practice, nothing more. None of his trawling had brought him anywhere near uncovering the mystery that really tormented him.

Roderick Ho knew exactly what sins had brought his colleagues to Slough House; the precise nature of the gaffes and blunders that had condemned them to the twilight of the second-rate. He had calibrated their wrongdoings to the minutest detail, knew the dates and places where they’d fallen, and understood the consequences of their screw-ups better than they did themselves, because he’d read the arse-covering e-mails their superiors had subsequently penned. He knew exactly whose hand had given the thumbs-down in every instance. He could quote chapter and verse, chapter and verse.

For every sin but two.

One was Sid Baker’s, and he was starting to have his suspicions about that.

As for the other, it remained as elusive as that hidden nugget.

Ho raised the can once more, but it was empty. Without looking behind, he tossed it over his shoulder; had forgotten about it by the time it hit the wall.

Kept his eyes glued to his screen.

Every sin but two.

The days when he’d been a creature of instinct were in Jackson Lamb’s past. They belonged to a slimmer, smoother version of himself. But previous lives never really disappear. The skins we slough, we hang in wardrobes: emergency wear, just in case.

Approaching his house, he became aware of a figure lurking in the shadow of the adjoining lane.

A shortlist of suspects wouldn’t have been hard to draw up. Lamb had made enemies over the years. Lamb, to be frank, had made enemies over the days – it never took him long. So he rolled his Standard into a baton as he neared the junction; rotated it hand to hand, as if conducting music in his head. He must have looked oblivious to the world. He must have looked an easy target.

He must have looked a lot less friendly two seconds later.

His arms knew the movement. Like falling off a bike.

‘Jesus mister—’

And then the voice was cut off by the Standard: a brief taste of the thrills you could expect if you poked a sleeping beast with too short a stick.

A light went on nearby. It wasn’t a neighbourhood where anyone was likely to step outside to question events, but it wasn’t unusual for residents to want a closer look.

In the brief yellow glow before a curtain was drawn, Lamb saw he’d netted a kid; just another teenage hustler. His face so dappled with acne, someone might have carved him with a knife.

Slowly, he removed the newspaper from the boy’s mouth. The boy promptly threw up.

Lamb could walk away. It wasn’t like the boy would follow, seeking vengeance. But on the other hand, he didn’t have far to walk. The kid would see which house he went into. Lamb’s life was built up of moments in which he decided who should know what. In this particular instance, he decided he didn’t want this kid learning anything new. So he waited, right hand clutching the kid’s collar. The left had discarded the Standard, which had reached its use-by date even more swiftly than usual.

At length, the kid said: ‘Jesus Christ …’

Lamb let him go.

‘I was mindin me own business.’

Lamb was interested to find that he was only mildly out of breath.

‘You some kind of fuckin lunatic?’

Except that, now he thought about it, his heart was racing, and he could feel a strangely unpleasant heat pulsing at his forehead, and through his cheeks.

The kid was still speaking. ‘Not doin any harm.’

There was a self-pitying twang to this assertion, as if it were a temporary victory.

Lamb rode over his body’s complaints. He said, ‘So what are you doing?’

‘Hangin.’

‘Why here?’

A sniff. ‘Everybody’s gotta be somewhere.’

‘Not you,’ Lamb said. ‘You go be nowhere, somewhere else.’ He found a coin in his pocket: two quid, two pee; he didn’t know and didn’t care. He tossed it over the kid’s shoulder. ‘Okay?’

When the kid had disappeared from view, he waited a few minutes more.

His heart slowed to its normal rate. The sweat on his forehead cooled.

Then Jackson Lamb went home.

Not everyone was so lucky that night.

He was nineteen years old. He was very frightened. His name didn’t matter.

You think we give a toss who you are?

He’d parked the car two streets away, because that was as close as you could get. This area of Leeds was slowly overcrowding – too many immigrants, his father had laughed; too many Poles and East Europeans, coming over here, ‘taking our jobs’: ha ha, dad – and as he’d walked back he’d been working on a riff about how it was a funny thing with cars: there wasn’t anything else you owned which you’d leave overnight two streets away and expect to find in the morning. There was something there, he knew. Throw in a two-beat pause …

‘Mind you, round our way, that’s gunna happen.’

The thing about punchlines, they had to slide into the socket. No room for ambiguity. And never use two words when one will do, but that one word had to do its job. That’s gunna happen. By which he meant: of course, round our way, if you leave your car out overnight, it’ll get stolen. Would an audience pick that up straight off? It was all in the delivery.

‘Mind you, round our way, that’s gunna happen.’

Pause.

‘Round our way, you leave your house on the street overnight—’

And then the first shape appeared, and he’d known he was in trouble.

He was in the back lane. He shouldn’t have taken the shortcut, but that was what happened when he was riffing: his feet took over while his brain went AWOL. Creativity was like being drunk, when you got down to it. He should make a note of that, but there was no time now because the first shape had stepped out of a garage doorway where he could have been taking a leak, or lighting up, or doing anything essentially innocent except for this one detail: he wore a stocking over his head.

Fight or flight? Never in question.

‘If you ever find yourself in trouble … street hassle?’ Something his father had once said to him.

‘Dad, don’t even try.’

‘Aggro?’

‘Dad—’

‘A rumble?’

‘I know what you’re trying to say, dad. Use your own words to say it, okay?’

‘Run like hell,’ his father had said simply.

Words to live by.

But there was nowhere to run, because the first shape was just that: the first. When he turned there was a second. Also a third. They too wore stocking masks. The rest of their wardrobes faded into insignificance.

Run like hell.

Trust this: he tried.

He got three yards before they put him on the ground.

Next time he opened his eyes, he was in the back of a van. A foul taste in his mouth, and the memory of cotton wool. They’d drugged him? The van’s bouncing went on forever. His limbs were heavy. His head hurt. He slept again.

Next time he opened his eyes, there was a bag on his head and his hands were tied. He was naked, except for his boxers. The air was damp and chill. A cellar. He didn’t have to see it to know. Or hear the voice to know he wasn’t alone.

‘You’re gunna be good, now.’

It wasn’t a question.

‘You’re not gunna make any problems, and you’re not gunna try to escape.’ A pause. ‘No fuckin chance of that anyway.’

He tried to speak, but all that came out was a whimper.

‘You need to piss, there’s a bucket.’

And this time he managed to find a voice. ‘Wh—where?’

His reply was a tinny kick over to his left. ‘Hear that?’

He nodded.

‘That’s where you piss. Shit. Whatever.’

Then something was dragged across the floor; something he couldn’t see but which sounded monstrous and punitive; a device they’d strap him to before applying sharp tools to his softer parts …

‘And here’s a chair.’

A chair?

‘And that’s your lot.’

And then he was alone again. Footsteps receding. A door shutting. A lock being thrown: that was the verb, thrown, as if any chance of opening that door had been heaved out of reach.

His hands, tightly bound, were at least in front of him. He raised them to his head and pulled the sack off, nearly throttling himself in the process, but managing it. That was one small victory at least. He threw it to the floor, as if it were responsible for all that had happened these last – what? Hours?

How long since they took him in the lane?

Where was he now?

And why? What was this about? Who were they, and why was he here?

He kicked at the rag on the floor. Tears were running down his cheeks: how long had he been crying? Had he started before the voice left the room? Had the voice heard him crying?

He was nineteen years old, and very frightened, and more than an audience – more than a roomful of people laughing at his routines – what he wanted was his mother.

There was a chair in front of him, an ordinary dining-room chair, and with one swift kick he laid it flat on the floor.

And there was a bucket in the corner, exactly as promised. He might have kicked that too, if the phrase didn’t have disturbing connotations.

Wh—where?

He hated himself that he’d said that. ‘Where’s the bucket?’ As if he’d been asking about the amenities in a guest-house. As if he’d been grateful.

Who were these people? And what did they want? And why him?

That’s where you piss. Shit. Whatever.

They were going to keep him here long enough he’d need to take a crap?

The thought buckled him at the knees. Crying took it out of you. He sank to the cold stone floor.

If he hadn’t kicked the chair over, he’d have sat on it. But the task of putting it back on its legs was beyond him.

What do they want from me?

He’d not spoken aloud. But the words crawled back to him anyway, from the edges of the room.

What do they want?

There were no answers handy.

A single lightbulb lit the cellar. It dangled, shadeless, three feet or so above him, and he became aware of it now mostly because it went out. For a few seconds, its glow hung in the air, and then it too went wherever ghosts go in the dark.

He thought he’d felt panic before, but that was nothing to what he felt now.

For the next moments he was entirely inside his own head, and it was the scariest place he’d been. Unspeakable horrors hid there, feeding on childhood nightmares. A clock struck, but not a real one. It was a clock he’d woken to once aged three or four, that had kept him awake the rest of the night, terrified that its tick-tick-ticking was the approach of a spindly-legged beast. That if he slept, it would have him.

But he’d never be three or four again. Calling for his parents would have no effect. It was dark, but he’d been in the dark before. He was frightened but—

He was frightened but alive, and angry, and this might be a trick; a rag week-type stunt pulled by the cooler kids on campus.

Angry. That was the thing to hold on to. He was angry.

‘Okay, guys,’ he said out loud. ‘You’ve had your fun. But I’m tired of pretending to be scared.’

There was a tremor in his voice, but not much of one. Considering.

‘Guys? I said I’m tired of pretending.’

It was a prank. A Big Brother-influenced routine he’d been made the butt of.

‘Guys? You’re pretty cool, okay. You think. But you know what?’

He couldn’t see his own tied hands as he raised them to the level of his face, and extended both middle fingers.

‘Sit and spin, guys. Sit. And. Spin.’

And then he set the chair on its feet once more, and sat, hoping that his shoulders didn’t betray how ragged his breathing was.

It was important that he get himself under control.

The thing to do was not lose his head.