Slow Horses: Slough House Thriller 1

8

A SHAG WAS MAKING its way up and down the Thames, carving out a stretch of river between Hungerford Bridge and Canary Wharf. She didn’t know much about the behaviour of birds – wasn’t one hundred per cent this was a shag – but she suspected that if another turned up there’d be trouble; feathers would fly, and the loser would end up downriver, looking for a quiet life. That was what happened when territory was at stake.

Take this space here: a bench where you could sit with your back to the Globe. Streams of tourists passed every hour, and in either direction fire-jugglers, buskers and itinerant poets jealously guarded their patches; fistfights, even stabbings, resulting from encroachment on another’s turf. Income was at stake. For the shag, food was the prize; for the hustler, tourist silver. But none of them knew the real value of the estate, which was that it was a blank spot. The bench on which Diana Taverner sat was in a twelve-yard corridor of CCTV limbo. It was a small safe cupboard in the open air, and had been reserved for her alone by a foul-looking splash of birdshit running most of its length; a revolting mess ensuring that even the weariest tourist would look elsewhere to rest his bones, though it was, in fact, a plastic transfer.

Unregarded, then, and off the leash, she lit a cigarette, and dragged a lungful of sweet poison into her system. Like most pleasures, this one diminished the more you indulged it. In normal circumstances Lady Di could let a pack last a month, but today, she suspected, she might be setting records.

A weak light fell upon the river. On both banks, the usual noises obtained: the rattle and honk of city traffic; the constant buzz of a million conversations. Way overhead, airliners were stacking up for Heathrow, while nearer to ground level a helicopter discovered a new shortcut between one side of London and the other.

Taverner breathed out smoke which hung in the air two seconds, then broke apart like a daydream. A passing jogger altered course to avoid the drift. Smoking was almost as good a guarantor of privacy as fake birdshit. Though give it another year or two, and it would probably be an arrestable offence.

Her current need for nicotine lay in the fact that she wasn’t long out of the day’s third meeting: this one with Limitations, formerly Steering & Oversight. It wasn’t clear whether a sense of humour lay beneath the rebranding. Limitations was a cross between an Oxbridge MCR and a railway platform: a collection of chinless wonders, with a sprinkling of field-hardened veterans. You had more chance of reaching a consensus with a vox pop on Marmite. The suits hated operations because operations cost money; the field guys loved them, because the best produced pure gold. To outward appearances Taverner was a suit, but her heart belonged with the field guys, the handlers. Besides, if you removed operations from the curriculum, security didn’t amount to more than putting on a peaked cap and a shiny badge. As far as the war on terror went, you might as well start digging trenches, and handing out tin hats.

The folders she’d brought to this particular meeting were all the same buff-colour; had all been time-stamped fifteen minutes previously; were all logoed Mozart, this year’s grade-A classification. They’d made their way round the table even faster than the pastries.

For a few moments there was near silence.

At length, a suit piped up. ‘You’re quite sure about this?’

‘Of course.’

‘Humint?’

A snort. The vets loved it when the footlights crowd slipped in a tradecraft term.

‘Human intelligence,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘And this Albion crew—’

Somebody else said, ‘Could we do this by the numbers, please?’

General clearing of throats, shuffling of papers.

Tradition decreed that Limitations gatherings were minuted, regardless of whether the session was designated open, and thus recorded, or closed, and thus officially not recorded. So by the numbers it was: date, time, those attending. In the chair, Leonard Bradley of Westminster Parish. In the hot seat, Lady Di. Not that anyone called her that.

‘For those who don’t know, Ms Tearney, Ingrid, is in Washington this week, or would of course be here. We’re grateful to Diana for stepping into her shoes, but then we all know how capable a Second she is. Diana.’

‘Thank you, Leonard. Good morning, everyone.’ Replies were murmured. She tapped her folder. ‘The first anyone knew of this, it popped up on a BBC blog at 4.22 a.m.’

‘I hate to interrupt,’ a suit said.

The almost audible rolling of multiple pairs of eyes suggested that this wasn’t entirely true.

‘Can’t such entries be traced via, ah, I believe they’re called—’

Diana Taverner said: ‘If we had a trace, we wouldn’t need this meeting. We’d have wrapped the whole thing up before Today aired.’

Bradley made a hand gesture that would have looked more complete if he’d been brandishing a pipe. ‘Perhaps we could let Diana finish. Or even start.’

She said: ‘Hassan Ahmed. Born Birmingham, 1990. His grandparents arrived from Islamabad in the early seventies. His grandfather ran a soft furnishings business which his father took over when the old man retired. Hassan is the youngest of four, in his second year at Leeds University. Business Studies. Shares a flat with three other students, but by all accounts, he’s a shy kid. No girlfriend known, or boyfriend either. His tutor couldn’t pick him out from a crowd. He belongs to a student society that calls itself the Last Laugh, for budding stand-up comedians, but nobody there has much to say about him. He’s clearly not lighting fires.’

She paused to take a sip of water.

‘He’s Muslim, but only nominally. Before university, he was a regular attender at his local mosque, which is not – and never has been – on a watch list. But his homelife is secular, and his father in particular seems to regard the mosque as a networking opportunity. They don’t use Urdu at home, and it’s not clear Hassan speaks it. There’s no record of his having contact with extreme influences, nor has he been clocked on demos or marches. His name popped up on a petition objecting to the 21/7 convictions, but it’s possible it was hijacked. And even if it wasn’t, it might just mean he happened to be there when the petition went round.’

When she replaced the glass on its coaster, she took care to position it dead centre.

‘It’s a brief profile, and we all know that moderate backgrounds can produce blazing extremists, but there’s absolutely nothing on Hassan to suggest that he’s anything other than what he seems to be. A British Asian studying for a degree. Either way, we do know he was taken late last night on his way home from the comedy club. He was snatched in a back lane not far from his flat, taking a shortcut from where he’d parked his car. The snatchers—’

‘He drives a car?’ somebody asked.

‘It was a present from his father,’ Taverner said.

She waited, but that seemed to satisfy him.

‘The snatchers call themselves the Voice of Albion.’

Now Leonard Bradley leant forward, his face creasing into that mask of perplexity he liked to wear when about to pick holes in somebody’s case. ‘You’ll forgive me—’

She waved him ahead, like a driver might a friendly bus.

‘I thought there’d been no actual contact with these snatchers. But you’ve identified them already? That’s smart work. Very smart.’

One or two murmurs of assent met this.

Diana Taverner said, ‘There’s been no contact, no. That’s to say, they’ve not made any demands or identified themselves in relation to this particular, ah, episode.’

‘But you’ve been keeping tabs on them.’

‘That’s well within our remit, I think you’d agree.’

‘Absolutely. Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.’

Down the table, Roger Barrowby made a clucking noise with his tongue.

Barrowby was usually called the Barrowboy, a nickname he detested and pretended to revel in. He had thinning sandy hair, a prominent chin, and a habit of pressing the tip of a finger to its central dimple, as if trying to encourage it back into his jaw. But he appeared to have done something about his dandruff.

‘Roger!’ Leonard Bradley’s tone couldn’t have sounded heartier at a barbecue. ‘You have an interjection? An objection?’ You could have cut the bonhomie with a knife. Taverner wondered why they hated each other.

‘An observation, Len. Merely an observation.’

‘Care to share?’

Barrowby said, ‘Bloody lucky, that’s all. We have a watching brief on a bunch of original thinkers, just as they’re attempting a coup? I mean, how often does that happen?’

Despite herself, Taverner smiled at ‘original thinkers’.

Bradley said, ‘We could argue about gift horses and dental plans. But perhaps Diana has a view?’

‘Watching brief is pitching it high,’ Diana said. ‘They’re one of seventeen groups on the radar right now, which is also a bit high, but there’ve been murmurs something like this was on the horizon. And—’

‘Excuse me?’

Barrowby again.

‘Murmurs?’

She’d have answered, but knew there was no way this was getting past the assembled ex-handlers, who provided a chorus:

‘Not our remit, Roger.’

‘Not even close.’

‘Intelligence gathering’s outside the sphere of this committee.’

‘Of course,’ Barrowby agreed. ‘But if we’re paying for supper, we get to glance at the menu, surely?’

‘We’ll check the books when the financial year closes,’ somebody else said. ‘But how Operations shells out the booty is their game.’

Bradley was nodding. ‘We get to taste the sausages, Roger,’ he said, ‘if you’ll allow me to pursue your metaphor. But we don’t get to watch them being made.’

Barrowby raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘Diana. Forgive me. You heard murmurs. You allocated resources. Fair enough. It looks like you, or perhaps Ms Tearney, made a wise, operational, decision.’

Leaving unaddressed the degree to which Ingrid Tearney had been involved, Diana went on: ‘Like I say, not a watching brief. That is, we weren’t actually keeping them under surveillance, otherwise this caper wouldn’t have got off the ground. And that, I’d agree, would have been bloody lucky. As it is, I’m confident we can roll this up in short order.’

‘Before they chop young Hassan’s head off,’ Leonard Bradley said.

‘Precisely.’

‘Well, there’s no need to spell out the public relations aspect, is there? The half of the country that’s not watching this yet will be glued to it by suppertime.’ He glanced at the papers in front of him. ‘Voice of Albion, eh? I’d be more impressed if there was any chance these halfwits had actually read Blake.’

Silence greeted this.

He said, ‘Our friends in blue?’

‘We haven’t released the details, the Voice of Albion connection,’ Taverner said. ‘We will if necessary, but I’m confident that by this time tomorrow, we’ll be able to present them with the whole package.’

‘The boy was snatched in Leeds city centre?’ someone piped up.

‘Not quite the centre. Headingley.’

‘Don’t they have CCTV? I was rather under the impression one couldn’t cross the road without being a reality TV star.’

‘It appears that the traffic monitoring system was off air for six hours last night, from a little before midnight until a short while ago. Routine maintenance, we’re told.’

‘Bit of a coincidence.’

‘We’re looking into it. Or the police are. But I don’t think Albion have that sort of reach. You’ll find a printout of their homepage in the folder, if you want an idea of the clout they wield.’

There was a general rustling of pages.

Bradley glanced up. ‘“Natoinal purity”,’ he noted with distaste. It wasn’t clear whether it was the concept or the spelling which pained him.

‘We’re not dealing with the sharpest pencils in the box,’ Taverner agreed.

‘Can’t you trace them through the site?’ Barrowby asked.

She said, ‘Now, there they have shown nous. The proxy’s in Sweden, where they treat client privilege very seriously. Getting their details will take a while. More than the deadline allows. But let me repeat, I have every confidence that this crew will be under wraps before the deadline becomes an issue.’

Then Bradley did that thing with his hand again, and said, ‘Let me say on all our behalf – behalves? – that we’re grateful to Diana for a remarkably full picture drawn in a remarkably short time. And that we’ll be equally grateful for hourly updates, leading to a swift and happy conclusion.’

There was a knock on the door, and Tom entered, a folded sheet of paper in his hand. Without a word, he handed it to Diana Taverner, and left.

Taverner unfolded it, and read it in silence. Her expression betrayed not the slightest clue as to whether the information it contained was new to her, confirmation of something already suspected, or an out-of-date report on weather happening elsewhere. But when she looked up, the atmosphere shifted.

‘This is fresh. There’ll be copies in a moment.’

Bradley said, ‘Perhaps you might …’

She might. She did.

‘People, it would appear this isn’t the random snatch we’d thought.’

New information demanded at least as much action as discussion. It was Diana Taverner’s role to leave to see about the action, and everybody else’s to get the discussion under way. Or almost everybody’s. She was halfway to the lift when the Barrowboy caught her – almost literally: she turned to find him reaching for her arm. The look she bestowed upon him would have stuck six inches out the back of a more sensitive man.

‘Not a good time, Roger.’

‘When is it ever? Diana, this new information.’

‘You know as much as I do.’

‘I doubt that. But either way, it doesn’t change anything, does it?’

‘You think? Not even a little?’

‘What I meant was, you seemed confident enough before this apparent bombshell went off. Who he is doesn’t make your job harder.’

‘“Apparent”?’

Each vowel was its own icicle.

‘Poor choice of word. All I meant was, you’ve an asset in place, yes? You don’t get Mozart-grade info from random phone-grabs or lists of dodgy loan applications.’

‘It’s nice to hear from an expert, Roger. Remind me, where was your finest hour? Beirut? Baghdad? Or the bar at the Frontline Club?’

But it washed off him. ‘I only meant, that’s the stuff they do over at Slough House.’ He barked a self-appreciative laugh. ‘Hoping to bore the deadweights into jumping ship. This is higher grade. So. You have an asset.’

She jabbed the lift button with an index finger. ‘Yes, Roger. We have an asset. That’s how intelligence gathering works.’

‘But he didn’t know this latest twist?’

‘If he knew everything he wouldn’t just be an asset, Roger. He’d be Wikipedia.’

‘So how close to the action is he?’

‘Pretty close.’

‘Handy.’

‘Some might say so. Others call it foresight.’

‘Well, there’s foresight and foresight, isn’t there? Not much credit in reading the runes if you laid them out in the first place.’

‘That’s right up there with apparent, Roger. Are you trying to tell me something?’

The lift arrived. Before its doors were fully open she was inside; pressing the button for floor level. Pressing it three times, in fact. Someday they’d invent a button which made things happen faster the more you pressed it.

‘Nothing really, Diana. Just that it might be an idea to be careful.’

The doors didn’t quite cut off his coda:

‘Swimming with sharks, that kind of thing.’

Swimming with sharks, she thought now, crushing her cigarette underheel. She checked her watch. It was fifteen seconds short of one o’clock.

He approached from the east, and even if she hadn’t pulled up his records earlier, before making the call, she’d have recognised him. At Regent’s Park they called them slow horses, and half the fun had been letting the slow horses know it. So it became self-fulfilling: when Slough House met Regent’s Park, it was always clear who was wearing the boots. And here he came, approaching her with a slow horse’s determination, as if reaching the finishing line meant the battle was won. When, as anyone with breeding knows, coming first is the only result that matters.

At the bench, he treated her to a look half aggressive, half defensive, like a wronged lover, and then curled his lip at the bench itself.

She said, ‘It’s not real and it’s quite dry.’

He seemed dubious.

‘For God’s sake. This is a useful bench. You think we’d let a gull crap on it?’

Jed Moody sat.

Out on the water the shag was halfway through another circuit, while near Bankside Pier a street-preacher had staked out an imaginary pulpit, and was haranguing passers-by. Everything normal, in other words.

Taverner said, ‘I’m told you reached out last night.’

‘Nick’s an old friend,’ Moody said.

‘Shut up. You told him Jackson Lamb was running an op, that he’d sent one of your junior colleagues on a datasnatch. That this wasn’t anything Slough House does, and that if it was, it should be you doing it.’

‘It’s true. I spent six years—’

‘Shut up. What I want to know is, how did you find out about it?’

‘About what, ma’am?’

She’d been focused on the buildings on the far bank, but now turned to face him. ‘Don’t for a moment imagine we’re having a conversation. When I ask for information, you give it. You don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, and you don’t dream about telling anything but the truth. Or you’ll find there are colder, deeper things than this river, and I’ll take pleasure in burying you in one of them. Clear?’

‘So far.’

‘Good. Now, I gave Lamb a specific instruction about a specific job. I don’t remember telling him to let you know about it. So, how did you find out?’

He said, ‘There’s a bug.’

‘There’s. A. Bug.’

It wasn’t exactly a question. So Moody didn’t exactly answer. He just swallowed, hard.

‘Are you seriously telling me you planted a bug in Jackson Lamb’s office?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sweet Jesus.’ She threw back her head and laughed. Then stopped. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ she said again.

‘It wasn’t …’

‘Wasn’t what? Wasn’t something that could get you, what, thirty years? Given the climate?’

‘Have you any idea what it’s like?’

But she was shaking her head: not interested in his prepared outburst. He might be frustrated, thwarted, feel he’d been made to carry the can for a Service balls-up. But the fact was, he’d never have made it out of his current pay grade. If you needed a walking definition of foot soldier, a glance at Jed Moody’s file would do it.

‘I don’t care. All I want to know is, how come the sweeps didn’t pick it up? Oh, no. Don’t tell me.’

So he didn’t.

‘You do the sweeping.’

He nodded.

‘Set a thief to catch a … Christ. What else do you lot get up to over there? No, don’t even start. I don’t want to know.’

True to her earlier forebodings, Diana Taverner fished her cigarettes out again. She offered the pack to Moody. He’d already produced a lighter, and with one big hand shielding the flame, lit them both. For a brief moment, membership of the twenty-first-century pariahs’ club united them.

He said, ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping. Well, I was. But not for anybody else. I used to be one of the Dogs. Lamb’s got me running background checks when they get a new waiter next door. Not because he thinks anyone’s about to post an asset there. He’s just taking the piss, and doesn’t care if I know it.’

‘So why not quit?’

‘Because it’s what I do.’

‘But you’re not happy.’

‘Nobody’s happy at Slough House.’

Taverner concentrated on her cigarette, or pretended to, but had good peripheral vision, and was studying Jed Moody. He’d probably been handy once, but the drink and the smoking had put paid to that, and it was a safe bet that exile had sealed the downward spiral. These days, he probably guilt-splurged at the gym; seven-hour workouts making up for lost weekends. He’d keep kidding himself this was working. Whenever the truth looked like breaking in, he’d have another drink, and light another smoke.

‘Not even Lamb?’ she asked.

Rather to her surprise, he gave her a straight answer: ‘He’s a burn-out. A fat, lazy bastard.’

‘You ever wonder why he’s at Slough House?’

‘What good would he be anywhere else?’

That wasn’t quite so straight. The one self-evident fact about Lamb being allowed to run his own little kingdom – even from a crackpot palace like Slough House – was that he must know where bodies were buried. Moody didn’t want to raise that with Diana Taverner. Which meant, she surmised, that Moody was treading round her with caution. Which was exactly how she preferred it.

Moody’s cigarette had burned to the filter. He let it fall from his fingers, and it rolled into the crack between two paving stones.

When he looked up, she fixed him with a stare that left no doubt who was in charge. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘You’re going to do one or two favours for me. Off the books.’

‘Illegal.’

‘Yes. Which means that if for any reason things go even slightly wrong, and you end up in a small room being questioned by angry men, there’s no possibility I’ll pretend to have heard of you. Are we clear on that?’

Moody said, ‘Yes.’

‘And are we happy about it?’

Moody said ‘Yes’ again, and she could tell this was the truth. Like other slow horses before him, he wanted to be back in the game.

From her bag, she produced a mobile phone, and handed it to him. ‘Incoming only,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘And dump the bug. Slough House may be a dead end, but it’s a branch of the Service. If it gets out it’s been compromised, your former mates from Internal Investigations’ll take you apart, bone by bone.’

She stood, but instead of moving straight off, she hovered a moment.

‘Oh, and Moody? Word of warning. Lamb’s a burn-out for a reason.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning when he was in the field, he had more to worry about than his expenses. Things like being caught, tortured and shot. He survived. You might want to bear that in mind.’

She left him sitting there, an asset bought and paid for. Some were cheaper than others. And she already knew to what use she could put him.

From the window River gazed down on the traffic backed up along Aldersgate, victims of the roadworks that had plagued the street forever. Sid was at her desk, her monitor still unreeling the twelve-minute loop of the boy in the cellar; the actual twelve minutes long swallowed by the passing day, but each loop nevertheless chopping away at the time left to him.

‘A far-right group,’ River said, and though it was a while since either had spoken, Sid Baker picked up the tune without missing a beat:

‘There’s more than one of them.’

He turned. ‘I’m aware of that. You want me to run through some of the more obscure—’

‘River—’

‘—nutjob circuses, in case any have slipped your mind?’

‘Don’t assume it’s Hobden’s crew. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘Because it’s more likely to be coincidence that he pops on to Five’s radar the day before this happens?’

‘He popped on to yours the day before this happened. I expect he’s been on Five’s a lot longer.’

River’s grandfather would have recognised the stubborn look on his face. Sid Baker pressed on regardless.

‘The British Patriotic Party are the usual bunch of shallow-enders, blaming their lack of prospects on the nearest victim group. Get them lagered up, and they’ll break windows and beat up a shopkeeper, sure. But this is out of their league.’

‘You don’t think Hobden’s got the nous to put this together?’

‘Nous, yes. But why would he want to? Besides, if Five thought he was behind this, you think they’d be stealing his files? They’d have him answering questions in a basement.’

River said, ‘Maybe. Or maybe he’s got enough friends in high places that he can’t be tossed into a van without people getting upset.’

‘You think? He’s spent the last couple of years being strung up in print by the rags he used to write for.’

‘Because they can’t afford to look like they support him.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. They’ve strung him up because he deserves it. There’s no sympathy for views like his in the mainstream. Twenty years ago, perhaps. But times have changed.’

‘And keep changing. There’s a recession on, didn’t you notice? Attitudes have hardened. But we’re off the point, anyway. What this is, we’ve a far-right group performing a terrorist act the same day we pull a data-theft on the highest-profile right-wing nutcase in the country. No way is that just one of those things.’

Sid turned back to her monitor. ‘You’re always saying we do nothing important here at Slough House. How does that fit in with us suddenly being on point for the whole damn Service? If Hobden’s behind this, and Five were checking him out, we wouldn’t know about it, would we?’

He had no answer for that.

‘He’ll be found. It’s not going to happen, River. This boy is not going to get his head chopped off on camera. Not tomorrow, not any other day.’

‘I hope you’re right. But—’

He bit the rest of his sentence off.

‘But what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You were about to say something. Don’t pretend you weren’t.’

But I saw what you took from Hobden’s laptop, and it was gibberish. Whatever you were trying to steal, you didn’t get. Which means if he is involved in this, he’s at least one step ahead of Five, which means it’s not looking good for that kid right now …

‘Is this about what you were looking at in the pub?’

‘No.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Okay, I’m lying. Thanks.’

‘Give me a break. I’d lie too if I’d come into possession of knowledge I shouldn’t have. I mean, given we’re spies and all.’

She was trying to get him to laugh, he realised. That was an odd feeling. He couldn’t recall the last time a woman had tried to get him to even smile.

Wasn’t going to work though. ‘It was nothing,’ he repeated. ‘Just some corrupted files.’

‘Weird form of corruption, translating everything into pi.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘Sounds more like some kind of security scrambling.’

‘Look, Sid, it was nothing important. And even if it was, it’s none of your business.’

Judging by the look on her face, it would be a while before she attempted to put a smile on his again.

‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘Fine. Excuse me for breathing.’ She stood abruptly, and her chair toppled backwards. ‘And speaking of breathing, this room still stinks. Open a bloody window, can’t you?’

She left.

Instead of opening the window, River looked out of it again. The traffic hadn’t noticeably shifted. He could stand here the rest of the day, and that sentence wouldn’t need changing.

It’s not going to happen, River. This boy is not going to get his head chopped off on camera. Not tomorrow, not any other day.

He hoped she was right. But he wasn’t banking on it.

But the police found Hassan safe and sound.

It turned out there’d been a partial witness to the abduction; from her bedroom window, a woman had seen some lads ‘rough-housing’ – her word – at the end of the lane opposite, then they’d all bundled into the back of a white van, a Ford, and headed east. She’d thought nothing of it at the time, but the news reports stirred her memory, so she took her snippet of information to the local cops. There were traffic lights in the direction the van had gone; overhanging cameras monitored the junction. A partial number plate had been captured. This fragment was swiftly disseminated the length and breadth of the country; every force in the land matched it against recorded sightings of white Ford vans on motorways, in city centres, on garage forecourts. After that, it was only a matter of time. But it was a peculiar stroke of luck that broke the case wide open and brought an armed-response unit bursting into Hassan’s cellar; it seemed that a local homeless man had …

Hassan opened his eyes. Darkness stared back. He closed them again. Armed-response cops burst in. He opened them. No they didn’t.

He hadn’t known time could crawl so slowly.

And hadn’t known this, either: that fear could take you away from yourself. Not simply out of time, but out of your body. Sitting in a hood and jumpsuit, like a patient in a surrealist’s waiting room, his grasp on the here-and-now slipped away, and that shrill voice at the back of his mind popped up, the one that delivered all his best riffs. Shaky, but recognisably his own, and trying to pretend none of this was happening; or that it had happened, but was now safely over; was now, moreover, material for the most scrotum-tightening stand-up routine ever. All those other hostages – the ones who’d spent years chained to radiators – they wrote their books, they made their documentaries, they hosted radio shows. But how many of them took it open-mic?

‘Let me tell you about my hood.’

Pause.

‘No, really. My hood.’

And then they’d get it, his audience; they’d get that he meant hood, the thing they’d put on his head. Not his ’hood, where you couldn’t leave your car out overnight.

But that was as far as the shrill voice got. Because it wasn’t over. The stink was too foul for it to be over: the vomit, the shit, the piss; everything that fear had shifted out of its way when making space inside him. He was here. He didn’t have an audience. He’d never had an audience; every open-mic night at the Student U he’d been there, head full of material, stomach full of knots, but he’d never dared take the stage.

Funny thing was, he’d thought that had been fear. His dread of making a tit of himself in front of beered-up fellow students – he’d thought that had been fear. Like stubbing your toe on a railway sleeper, and hopping on the spot with the pain. Not seeing the train bearing down on you.

One minute, walking home. Next, bunged in a cellar, holding a newspaper for the camera.

Now that was fear.

And this, too was fear: We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web.

He liked the internet. He liked the way it brought people closer. His generation had thrown its arms around the globe, tweeting and blogging to its heart’s content, and when you were chatting online with a user called PartyDog, you didn’t know if they were a boy or a girl let alone black or white, Muslim or atheist, young or old, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it? …

Except that Hassan had once read about some toerag who’d seen a woman collapse in the street, and instead of trying to help, like a normal person – or hurrying past, like a normal person – he’d pissed on her, actually pissed on her, and filmed himself on his phone doing it, then posted it on the web for other toerags to laugh at. It was as if the internet validated certain actions … For a tiny moment it felt good to have something to blame for all this, even if what he was blaming was the internet, which could never be made to care.

And then that tiny moment too became another chip knocked off a block that was rapidly growing smaller; and the awareness that the moment had passed occupied the moment that followed it, and also the moment after that, and in neither of those moments, nor in any of those that came after it, did armed-response cops burst into the cellar, and find Hassan safe and sound.

The kitchen wasn’t anywhere you’d want to cook a meal. On the other hand, it wasn’t anywhere a meal had been cooked; its surfaces piled with takeaway containers and plastic cutlery, with greasy brown paper bags and pizza boxes, with empty soft drink bottles and discarded cigarette packets. Ashtrays had been made of anything that didn’t move. The lino curled at the corners, and a blackened patch by the back door suggested a small fire in the past.

In the centre of the room sat a Formica-topped kitchen table, its red surface scarred with circular burns and razor-straight slashes. A laptop computer occupied the centre of this table, its lid currently closed. An assortment of cables snaked on top of it like electrical spaghetti, and next to these lay a folded tripod and a digicam about the size of a wallet. Once upon a time, you’d needed a building’s worth of hardware to reach the world, but ‘once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days. Arranged around the table were four mismatched chairs, three of them occupied. The fourth was tilting at a crazy angle, held upright only by the pair of booted feet that were alternately pushing it away then hauling it back. Every other second it seemed the chair would topple, but it never did.

The feet’s owner was saying, ‘We should webcam it.’

‘… Why?’

‘Stick it on the intranet. ’Stead of those clips. Let the whole world watch him crap himself start to finish.’

The other two shared a glance.

They were bulldog males, the three of them; different shapes and sizes, but with this much in common: they were bulldog males. You wouldn’t put your hand out to any of them and feel sure you’d get it back. Below them, in the cellar, Hassan Ahmed was calling them Larry, Curly and Moe, and if they’d formed a line-up for him, this was how it would have shaken down:

Larry was tallest, and had the most hair, though this wasn’t a fierce contest: where the other two were shaved to the bone, a mild fuzz covered Larry’s skull, somehow conferring on him an air of authority, as if he were wearing a hat in a room full of bareheaded men. He was thinfaced with restless eyes, which kept checking door and window, as if either might burst open at any moment. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up; he wore black jeans and brand-new trainers. Moe, meanwhile, was the middleman in every sense: shorter than one, taller than the other, and with a belly a black tee-shirt did nothing to minimise. Unwisely he sported a goatee he stroked constantly, as if checking it remained attached.

As for Curly – the owner of the feet – he seemed to be the stupid one.

Larry told him, ‘We don’t want a webcam.’

‘Why not?’

‘We just don’t.’

‘He’s stinking that room out like a rat inna trap. We should let the world see what they’re like. When they’re not clambering on to buses with rucksacks loaded with Semtex.’

Moe, his tone of voice suggesting this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, said, ‘We set up a webcam, we double the chances of getting caught.’

‘We’re already putting the video clips out there.’

You could spend all day trying to drum simple stuff into Curly’s head, Larry thought, but sooner or later you were going to have to give up. If you wanted him to understand anything more complicated than a two-horse race, you’d either have to draw him a picture or just give him a cigarette and hope he’d forget about it.

But Moe persevered. ‘This stuff on the web, people are going to be trying to find where it’s coming from. There’s ways of hiding our tracks, and we’ve done all that. But we go live – we put a webcam down there, and it’ll be easier for them to trace us.’

‘And it’s the internet,’ Larry said. ‘By the way.’

‘What?’

‘Internet. Intranet’s something’s else.’

‘Same difference.’

Larry looked at Moe again, and an unspoken thought passed between them.

‘Anyway,’ Curly said. ‘Think he’s scared now? He’ll be a steaming pile of chickenshit this time tomorrow.’

This with an air of finality, as if it were the final step in a careful argument.

‘I’m going for a crap,’ he added.

Both chairs hit the floor when he stood.

When he’d gone, Larry lit a cigarette, then tossed the pack to Moe. ‘Do you think he’s up to this?’

‘He’s not as stupid as he pretends to be.’

‘No, well. Cunt can walk and breathe at the same time, he’s obviously not as stupid as he looks.’

‘I said pretends.’

‘I heard.’

On the other side of the kitchen door Curly listened without moving a muscle, until satisfied they’d finished. And then he moved like smoke down the hallway and up the stairs, where he locked himself in the bathroom, and made a quiet call with a phone he shouldn’t have had.

Lamb was at his desk with a folder in front of him – an analysis of congestion charge anomalies, or Twitter feeds, or cash-in-hand real estate purchases in Beeston – but his attention seemed focused on the corkboard on his wall, on which an array of money-off tokens were pinned: the local takeaway pizza place; Costcutter’s price promise on Ginsters’ sausage rolls. Catherine watched from the doorway. She’d intended to walk in, add her own report to his pile and leave, but something had snagged her. Lamb didn’t look like the Lamb they all knew and hated. There was something there that hadn’t been there before.

The funny thing was, Catherine Standish had once been keen on meeting Jackson Lamb. It had been Charles Partner’s fault. Lamb had been one of Partner’s joes, back in the Middle Ages. He’d turned up one day in the modern world; was Partner’s 10 a.m. He’s one of a kind, Jackson Lamb, Partner had said. You’ll like him. And given the source, she’d thought she would.

At the time, Lamb had been in transition; making the jump from foreign holidays – as the joes all called them – to tending the home fires. This was in that blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the Cold War and about ten minutes later. And she’d known he’d spent time behind the Curtain. You couldn’t know a detail like that without it colouring your expectations. You didn’t expect glamour, but you understood the bravery involved.

So he was unexpected, this overweight, dishevelled man who’d stumbled into her office an hour and twenty minutes late, hungover, or still drunk. Partner was in another meeting by then, and if he’d been surprised by Lamb’s no-show he hid it well. When he turns up, give him coffee. So she’d given Lamb coffee and put him in the visitor’s chair, which he’d occupied the way a sloth occupies a branch. He’d fallen asleep, or pretended to. Every time she looked his eyes were closed and a bubble was forming at his lips, but still: she felt watched all the time he was there.

A couple of years later, the world was upside down. Partner was dead; Slough House was up and running; and Jackson Lamb was king.

And for some reason, Catherine Standish was beside him. Lamb had asked for her specifically, she discovered, but he never gave her one hint why. And she’d never asked him. If he’d had designs on her, he was years too late; there’d been a time when she’d have slept with him without giving it much thought, or remembering it afterwards, but since drying out she’d been more particular, and had slept with precisely no one. And if that ever changed, it wasn’t going to be for Jackson Lamb.

But now here he was, and there was something about him that hadn’t been there before. Anger, perhaps, but anger with the brakes on; held in check by the same impotence that curbed everyone else in Slough House. Lamb had spent the best part of his working life behind enemy lines, and now here the enemy was, and there was bugger all Lamb could do but sit and watch. Weirdly, this had the effect of making Catherine want to say something comforting. Something like: ‘We’ll get them.’

We’ll get them. People were saying this in offices up and down the country; in pubs, in classrooms, on street corners. Can’t happen here. We’ll get them; and by we they all meant the same thing: those in jobs like her own and Jackson Lamb’s; those who worked, one way or the other, for the security services. Those who didn’t allow things like this to happen, even if they generally didn’t succeed in stopping it until the fifty-eighth minute. And it occurred to Catherine that if anyone thinking these thoughts ever got a look around Slough House, they might re-evaluate their position sharpish. That kid in the cellar? Doesn’t have a prayer.

So she backed away from the door and returned to her room, her report still tucked under her arm.