Slow Horses: Slough House Thriller 1

14

THIS DARKNESS WAS smaller than the last. Hassan was hooded again, with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth, his knees tucked up to his chest, and his hands bound. When he flexed them, the cord dug into his wrists. But even if it snapped, what would he do? He was in the boot of a moving car. His captors still had him. Two captors, because one was dead. His head had been left on the table in that house.

They’d brought him up from the cellar, into the kitchen, and there it had been, on the table. A human head. It sat in a pool of blood. What else could he say about it? It had been a head, and Hassan had seen films in which severed heads had been displayed, and had laughed at how ‘unrealistic’ they were, without it ever occurring to him that he had no frame of reference for the level of realism achieved. And now he did. And all he could think was that a real severed head was little different from a movie severed head, with one critical difference: it was real. The blood was real. The hair and teeth were real. The whole thing was real. Which meant that what he’d been told, We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web, was also real. Fucking Paki.

He had wet himself, and the jumpsuit clung to his legs. He wished he could remove it, and dry himself off. Wished he could have a shower, and change, and go to sleep, somewhere which wasn’t the boot of a moving car. If he were going to make wishes, perhaps that was the end he should start at. He should wish he were free and safe, and could worry about changing his trousers in his own sweet time.

The comedy voice in his head had fallen silent. There were issues that were not suitable for comedy. This argument had weekly been shot down in flames at the student stand-up society; try putting forward that point of view, and you’d be accused of fascism. Freedom of speech mattered more than notions of taste and propriety. Hassan Ahmed had agreed with that. How could he not? When the moment came, and he took his stand at the mic, it was all going to come out. Daring, edgy stuff. Nothing off-limits. That was the contract between stand-up and audience: they had to know you were baring your soul. Except now Hassan had encountered a severed head on a kitchen table, and had immediately understood that this was not something that could ever be the subject of a joke. And even if it could, it was not a joke that Hassan could make. Because it proved that the people holding him were capable of cutting off heads.

The thumps and jolts and crashings would not stop. The cord binding his wrists would not fray. Hassan would not find himself unleashed, but would lie suffering until the car reached its destination, and then he too would reach his destination. This was his last journey.

So even if he could. Even if he could make the best joke ever. Even if he could make the best joke ever, with its subject the decapitation of unwilling humans, this was not a joke Hassan could ever make, because Hassan was never going to make jokes again. Not that he had made that many to begin with. Because if he were to be uncompromisingly harsh on himself – if he were to tell the truth, observing the contract between stand-up and audience – Hassan would have to admit this too: that he had never been particularly funny. He could make jokes, yes. He could ride riffs. He could unreel a comedy thread and wrap it round the usual observation posts: quips about old people shopping, and teenagers texting, and how nobody smiles on buses. But only in his head. He had never been himself in public. And now never would be. Doing so would remain forever on the list of things Hassan had intended to do in his twenties; a list which would never grow longer and never grow shorter, for Hassan’s twenties were not going to happen.

Because these people were never going to let him go. Not without killing him first. We’re going to cut your head off and show it on the web. Fucking Paki.

The car bounced and bashed him, and Hassan Ahmed tried to make himself smaller. In his mind, he escaped in seventy different ways, but his body remained in the boot.

The common wisdom was that car-theft gave you a buzz, but that probably only held true if your evening hadn’t already involved blood, firearms and a severed head. The car was a beaten-up Austin, taken from a side street, and River guessed its owner’s reaction on finding it gone would be a sigh of relief. There were no spare keys in the glove compartment or behind the rear-view mirror, but there was a mobile phone in the former; a chunky grey thing that looked like River’s own phone’s distant ancestor. Hotwiring took him seven minutes, which was probably six minutes fifty over the record. He’d driven back the way they’d come, crossed the river at Blackfriars, then tried to use the phone to call the hospital again, only to find it was pre-pay, and out of credit.

This, at least, gave him a buzz, but not a welcome one. Throwing the phone through the window would have relieved his feelings, but he settled for swearing heavily. Swearing was good. Swearing helped. It kept his mind off the possibility that Sid was dead; kept it, too, from flashing back to the head on the kitchen table, raggedly sawn from its owner.

But why had it been familiar?

He didn’t want to dwell on it, but knew he had to … The answer was buried within his subconscious and ought to be within his grasp. He stopped swearing. Remembered he was on a mission, and came to a halt at a junction, re-establishing his bearings. He was on Commercial Road; heading for Tower Hamlets, where he’d collect Kay White. Stationary, he was hooted by a car behind, which swung out to pass him. He swore again. Sometimes it was good to have a visible enemy.

Because God knows, River thought bitterly, he was weary of the invisible kind.

Pushing thoughts of severed heads aside, he resumed his journey. Another two minutes, and he found his turning: on the left-hand side was a three-storey brick-built block, its matching window frames and guttering marking it out as association housing. Maybe twenty yards ahead, double-parked outside what could easily be Kay’s address, was the car that had hooted him three minutes ago: lights on, engine running. A figure hulked behind the wheel. River reversed into a space, and disconnected the ignition wires. Got out and walked back to the main road. Turned the corner, dropped to one knee and peered back round, just as a man brought Kay White out of her home and loaded her into the waiting car.

She was neither cuffed nor roughly handled. The man was guiding her by the elbow, but it could have been taken as support if you didn’t know what you were watching. He settled her into the back seat, and got in after her. The car moved off. The moments during which River could have done anything to stop any of this had been over before he got here, and he wasn’t sure what use he’d have made of them anyway. The last time he’d tried an intervention, Sid had wound up lying in the street.

The car reached the next junction, turned, and was gone.

River returned to the Austin, and stole it all over again.

Struan Loy’s night had started promisingly. He’d had a date, his first in three years, and had planned it like an attempt at Everest, the base camps being wine bar, Italian restaurant and her place. Base one had proved a tremendous success, inasmuch as she had turned up; base two less impressive, as she’d left halfway through, and base three remained whereabouts unknown. Loy had returned home to an unmade bed and three hours’ sleep, interrupted by the arrival of Nick Duffy.

Now he sat blinking in harsh underground light. The room was padded, its walls covered with a black synthetic material which smelled of bleach. A table dead centre had a straight-backed chair on either side, one of them bolted to the floor. This was the one on which Loy had been told to sit.

‘So,’ he said to Diana Taverner. ‘What’s up?’

He was aiming for a carefree delivery, with about as much success as Gordon Brown.

‘Why should anything be up, Struan?’

‘Because I’ve been brought here in the middle of the night.’

And certainly looked like he’d dressed in the dark, thought Taverner.

‘Nick Duffy brought you here because I asked him to,’ she said. ‘We’re downstairs because I don’t want anyone to know you’re here. And we’re not having this chat because you’ve done anything wrong. We’re having it because I’m reasonably sure you haven’t.’

She leant just enough on reasonably for him to pick it up.

He said, ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

Taverner said nothing.

‘Because I’m pretty sure I haven’t done anything.’

‘Pretty sure?’

‘A turn of phrase.’

She said nothing.

‘I mean, I know I haven’t done anything.’

She said nothing.

‘Or not since, you know.’

‘Not since that e-mail suggesting that your boss and mine, Ingrid Tearney, was an al-Qaeda plant.’

He said, ‘It was the outfit she wore on Question Time, you know, that desert-gown thing …’

She said nothing.

‘It was a joke.’

‘And we have a sense of humour. Otherwise you’d not have seen the light of day since.’

Loy blinked.

She said, ‘Only kidding.’

He nodded uncertainly, as if receiving his first glimpse of how unfunny jokes could be.

Diana Taverner glanced at her watch, not caring he knew it. He only had one chance to climb on board. This wasn’t a decision he could mull over, and get back to her in the morning.

‘So now you’re in Slough House,’ she said. ‘How’s that working out?’

‘Well, you know …’

‘How’s that working out?’

‘Not so great.’

‘But you haven’t quit.’

‘No. Well …’

She waited.

‘Not sure what I’d do otherwise, to be honest.’

‘And you’re still wondering whether you’ll ever be let back upstairs.’

‘Upstairs?’

‘The Park. Do you want to hear something really funny, Struan? Do you want to hear how many people have made the journey back from Slough House to Regent’s Park?’

He blinked. He already knew the answer to that. Everyone knew the answer to that.

She told him anyway. ‘None. It’s never happened.’

He blinked again.

She said, ‘Of course, that doesn’t mean it never will. Nothing’s impossible.’

This time he didn’t blink. In his eyes, she saw wheels starting to turn; possibilities sliding into place like tabs into slots.

He didn’t speak, but he shifted in his chair. Leant forward, as if this was a conversation he was sharing, rather than an interrogation he was subject to.

She said, ‘Have you noticed anything unusual at Slough House lately?’

‘No,’ he said, with absolute certainty.

She said nothing.

‘I don’t think so,’ he added.

She checked her watch again.

‘What sort of unusual thing?’

‘Activity. Activity above and beyond the normal course of events.’

He thought about it. While he was doing so, Diana Taverner reached for her bag, which she’d hung on the back of her chair. From it she produced a black-and-white photograph, three inches by five, which she placed on the table between them. Turned it so it was facing Loy. ‘Recognise him?’

‘It’s Alan Black.’

‘Your former colleague.’

‘Yes.’

‘Seen him recently?’

‘No.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘You haven’t seen him lately in Jackson Lamb’s company?’

‘No.’

‘Well, that presents us with a problem.’

She sat back and waited.

‘A problem,’ he said at last.

‘Yes. A problem,’ she agreed. ‘Tell me, Struan. How would you like to be part of the solution?’

In Struan Loy’s eyes, wheels turned again.

‘Should we go round the back?’

‘Can we get round the back?’

‘There might be an alley.’

Min Harper and Louisa Guy were at Ho’s place; had pulled into the last available space moments before another car had arrived, slowed, then headed on down the street and parked. The pair watched without speaking while a man emerged.

They were in Balham, a stone’s throw from the railway line. Brixton, where they’d stopped for Struan Loy, had been a washout: he was either not at home or had died in his sleep. Like all the slow horses, Loy lived alone. That seemed a stark statistic, and it was odd that it hadn’t occurred to Min Harper before. He didn’t know whether Loy was single from choice or circumstance; divorced, separated or what. It seemed unsatisfactory, this ignorance about his colleagues, and he’d thought about raising the subject with Louisa, but she was driving. All the alcohol they’d put away earlier, it seemed a good idea to let her concentrate on that. Come to think of it, there was other stuff they should be discussing, but that too had better wait. From out of nowhere, they were on an op. How had that happened?

‘So …’

The man they’d been watching slipped out of sight.

‘Okay. Let’s try it.’

Crossing the road, Min felt his jacket bang against his hip. The paperweight. He was still carting the paperweight he’d used earlier, when confronting the masked intruder who turned out to be Jed Moody. He rubbed his thumb along its surface without taking it from his pocket. He hadn’t hit Moody with it. Hadn’t needed to. They’d taken a tumble, and only Min had got to his feet. He supposed that should go in the account book somewhere, in the opposite column to the one where he’d stepped off a tube train without a disk, and his career had gone whistling away down the dark tunnel.

He hadn’t liked Jed Moody, but didn’t enjoy knowing he’d been the instrument of his death. He suspected he hadn’t got to the bottom of that feeling yet. Everything had happened so swiftly since that he hadn’t yet taken it on board.

Leave it for now, he thought. You could coast for a while on that mantra. Leave it for now.

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Looks doable.’

They’d found a thin strip of unpaved passage between the backs of one row of houses and those on the next road. It was unlit, overgrown, and neither had a torch, but Ho lived only four houses along. Louisa led the way. The bushes were wet, and hung with cobweb. Underfoot was slick with mud, and they were walking close enough that if either went down, both would. Any other night, it would make for a comedy moment.

‘This one?’

‘That’s what I make it.’

Light showed from an upper storey. Ho seemed to have an upstairs conservatory. They climbed the fence, a flimsy wooden construction, and as Min dropped into the paved-over garden, a plank snapped cleanly behind him with a noise like a bullet. He froze, expecting alarms or sirens, but the noise simply disappeared into the dark. No curtains twitched; no voices were raised. Louisa Guy dropped next to him.

For another moment they waited. Min’s hand dropped to his pocket again, and his thumb stroked the paperweight’s smooth surface. Then the pair advanced on the back door.

As they got closer, Min thought he could hear music.

Audible music strained from an upstairs room, and light bled skywards from a skylight. It was what – after four? And Dan Hobbs could hear the music out here in the street.

He thought: I was a neighbour, I’d break the runt’s neck. Toss a wheelie bin through his window to grab his attention, and then take him by the neck and squeeze until his eyes pop like grapes.

Dan Hobbs wasn’t having the best night of his life.

He leant on the bell.

After his encounter with Jackson Lamb at the hospital, he’d come to on the floor; no obvious bruising, but he felt like he’d been trampled underfoot. The storeroom door hung open. River Cartwright was gone. Hobbs had got to his feet and made his way upstairs, where the first person he’d encountered was the newly arrived Nick Duffy.

And Hobbs learned the hard way that shit travels down-wards.

‘He was just this fat guy. How was I to know—’

‘Remember Sam Chapman? Bad Sam?’

Hobbs did.

‘Bad Sam once said he wasn’t frightened of anyone except overweight guys with bad breath and ill-fitting shirts. You know why?’

Hobbs didn’t.

‘Because once in a nun’s nightmare, one of them would turn out to be Jackson Lamb. And by the time you’d realised that, you’d lost your lunch, your boots and most of your teeth. Now fuck off back to the Park.’

A couple of hours’ fuming, and he had new instructions; another slow horse to collect.

‘Name’s Roderick Ho.’ Duffy read out the address. ‘Slough House geek. Think you can handle him on your own?’

Hobbs took a breath. The Service was hierarchical, to put it mildly, but you didn’t get to be one of the Dogs by meekly observing the protocols. ‘In my fucking sleep,’ he told his boss. ‘You said yourself, even Sam Chapman couldn’t take Lamb, and I didn’t know it was him. So give me a break, all right?’

A twelve-second silence followed. Then Duffy said, ‘You’re as much use as an elastic anchor, you know that? But my four-year-old niece could take down Ho, so I’m going to trust you.’

Carefully keeping relief from his voice, Hobbs asked, ‘How hard do I bring him in?’

‘C&C.’

Dogs’ slang for collect-and-comfort. Which meant without worrying onlookers.

‘And Dan? Screw this up, and I’ll sack your whole family.’

He wouldn’t. This wouldn’t wipe the slate, but would show he was still in the game. And intended to remain there.

And the next time he encountered Jackson Lamb …

But he shook that thought free too. Nothing screwed you up faster than keeping score.

And now he was at Ho’s place. He’d have gone in through the back, but the music changed the rules. Ho was awake. Possibly had company. Geeks had social lives. Who knew?

Company or not, nobody was opening the door. He leant on the bell again, and stayed there.

Having been caught once this evening, he’d done his research, or had the Queens of the Database do it for him. Roderick Ho’s records had been on his BlackBerry long before he’d got here, and it was clear from the physicals that if Ho hadn’t been geek-supreme, he’d have been invalided out to spare everyone’s embarrassment. He looked the type to wear a smog-mask on the Tube. And if it turned out the records lied, and Ho was Bruce Lee’s forgotten cousin, that was fine too. Hobbs knew some moves himself.

Did the music stutter? Something had happened. Without taking his hand from the bell, Hobbs peered through the marbled window. A fuzzy shape was coming to the door.

Roderick Ho hadn’t been to bed. Roderick Ho didn’t sleep much anyway, but tonight he had business. Tonight, he was paying off a debt.

On his way home he’d picked up two economy-sized bags of tortilla chips, and had dropped both when a twat in a Lexus honked him on a zebra … His glasses had slipped off when he’d bent to retrieve them, and the twat in the Lexus honked again, and it was obvious he’d been enjoying this, was simply livening up those dead moments when he’d been forced to wait at a crossing for a pedestrian, for fuck’s sake. Because the road belonged to car-users. Belonged to SI 123, as his plate had it. Ho retrieved his glasses, gathered up his bags of chips. He’d barely cleared the Lexus’s wheelbase when it roared past, and he knew he wasn’t even a memory by this point. At best, he was a punchline. Should have seen the chinky jump.

That had been then. This was now:

SI 123 was Simon Dean of Colliers Wood, and Ho wasn’t up at four because it had taken him that long to discover this, he was up at four because he was taking Simon Dean’s life apart piece by piece. Simon Dean was a telesalesman for a life-assurance company, or that’s what he probably still thought he was, though one of his last acts before leaving work, according to the rigorously backed-up e-mail system his company maintained, had been to send a resignation note to his boss, accompanied by a detailed account of Simon’s intentions regarding the boss’s teenage daughter. Since then, Simon had maxed out his credit cards, cancelled his standing orders, transferred his mortgage to a new lender at a distressingly poor rate, changed his phone number, and sent everyone in his address book a wedding-sized bouquet of flowers accompanied by a coming-out note. He’d donated his savings to the Green Party and embraced Scientology; had sold his Lexus on eBay; and within forty-eight hours would become aware of his status as a registered sex offender, as would everyone else in his postcode. All in all, Simon Dean was not in for the happiest time of his life; but, looking on the bright side, Roderick Ho felt chirpier than he’d done in ages. And his tortilla chips, it turned out, hadn’t been much damaged by their fall.

It wasn’t surprising that he’d lost track of the time; allowing his CD changer to keep on pumping music. What was surprising was that his online reverie shimmered at all, and that he noticed something vying for his attention. There was someone at the door. They’d possibly been there for a while.

Jesus, thought Ho. Wasn’t a man allowed any peace? He hated it when others failed to show consideration. Shutting the music off, he went down to find out who was disturbing him.

Louisa Guy had a headache coming on, maybe caused by her proximity to the dead. Two deaths tonight. Both colleagues, even if Alan Black had lost that role long before he’d lost his head. She’d smelt the blood before stepping into the kitchen; had known she was about to see something disgusting. But she’d assumed it would be the hostage, Hassan. And instead there he was, there was his head, Alan Black. A man she’d not given a thought to since she’d last laid eyes on him. Hadn’t given him a thought before then, to be frank.

Seeing him, the air had gone out of her. Everything became slow. But she’d kept her grip – kept her head – hadn’t thrown up like Cartwright. She almost wished she had. She wondered what it said about her, that she could see something like that and not throw up … Cartwright’s unexpected vulnerability made her readjust her opinion of him. Fact was, she’d avoided most of her colleagues, except, lately, Min Harper. Fact was, the same held true for all of them. They’d been thrown together by fate and poor judgement, and had never operated as a team before. It was somewhat ironic that they were just starting to do so now the team was significantly smaller.

And now she was in the dark again, this time in Ho’s back garden. She wondered how come Ho had a garden when everyone she knew lived in shoeboxes. But there was no point wondering why bastards prosper. Min at her side, she advanced towards Ho’s back door, forcing herself not to grind her teeth as she did so. There were lights on, and she could hear music. Funny how Ho could be careful in some ways and damn stupid in others. The lengths he’d gone to to keep his head below the parapet, and here he was winding the neighbours up with unnecessary noise after dark.

She and Min looked at each other, and shrugged at the same time.

Louisa reached out and banged on Ho’s door.

‘What?’

Surly guy, scrawnily built, early twenties, wearing a Che tee-shirt and a pair of Hawaiian shorts.

Any of the above was enough to earn him Dan Hobbs’s lasting enmity, but worst of all was the fact that he wasn’t Roderick Ho.

‘I’m looking for Ho,’ Hobbs said.

‘You’re looking for what?’

‘Roderick Ho.’

‘Your ho’s not here, man. It’s like four in the morning. You out your fucking mind, ringing people’s bells?’

The door swung shut, or would have done, if Hobbs’s foot hadn’t been in the way. Hobbs was mentally verifying information, and affirming what he knew: that he hadn’t screwed up; that this was the address Duffy had given him, confirmed by the Queens of the Database. The surly guy opened the door wide again, his expression suggesting that he was about to remonstrate. It was a cheque he never got to cash. Hobbs punched him once, a short jab in the throat. With a civilian you could phone first, tell them you were about to hit them, and it wouldn’t help them any. Hobbs closed the door, stepped over the man, and went looking for Ho.

What felt like a long time ago, back when he was first feeling his way round the Service systems, Roderick Ho had gone into his personnel records and changed his address. If he’d been asked why, he wouldn’t have understood the question. He did it for the same reason he never gave his real name when taking out a loyalty card: because you never gave a stranger the inside track. Look at Simon Dean. Bloody vanity plate. He might as well be handing out cards with the word Tosser printed above his bank details. To be fair, any number plate would have worked as well, but why make life easy for the other side? And as far as Roderick Ho was concerned, everybody was the other side until proved otherwise.

So how come Min Harper and Louisa Guy were in his back yard?

‘… What?’

‘Do you always play your music this time of night?’

‘Neighbours are students. Who cares?’ Ho scratched his head. He wore the same clothes he’d worn when he’d left Slough House ten hours previously, though his sweater was now dusted with tortilla crumbs. As for these two, he couldn’t remember what they’d been wearing then, but they didn’t look like they’d slept since. Ho didn’t do well with people, on account of not liking them, but even he could tell this pair were different tonight. For a start, they were a pair. He’d have asked what was up, but he had a more important question first.

‘How did you find me?’

‘Why? Were you hiding?’

He said it again. ‘How?’

‘Lamb told us.’

‘Fucking Lamb,’ said Ho. ‘I don’t like him.’

‘I’m not sure he likes you. But he sent us to get you.’

‘So here we are.’

Ho shook his head. He was wondering how Lamb had known he’d altered his records, let alone knew where he lived. And with that thought came another, even more disturbing. What Lamb knew about the digital world could be wrapped inside a pixel. There was no way he’d unpeeled Ho’s secrets the honourable way: using a computer. Which suggested the horrible possibility that there were other ways of dismantling a life, and that maybe being a digital warrior didn’t bestow invulnerability.

But Ho didn’t want to live in a world where that was possible. Didn’t want to believe it could happen. So he shook his head again, to dislodge the notion and send it fluttering into the night air, which was rapidly becoming the early morning air.

Then said, ‘I’ll get my laptop.’

Duffy said, ‘What?’

‘He’s not here.’

‘So where is he?’

Hobbs said, ‘I don’t know.’

There was a moment’s silence, during which Dan Hobbs could hear the remains of his career blowing like a tumbleweed down the corridors of Regent’s Park.

Then Duffy hung up on him.