“I want in.”
“There’s nothing to be in.”
“I’ll tell Lamb.”
“Where are we, nursery school?” The kettle boiled and he poured water onto a teabag. “Look, remember Old Street Station? Remember we decided to take out one of the newbies sent to follow us?”
“. . . Yeah. So?”
“So you put a civilian in hospital. Louisa and I aren’t up to anything, and if we were, you’re the last person I’d want along, unless for some reason I hoped it would go tits up in the first five minutes. Clear?”
She kicked the wall hard enough to cave plaster in, and that was Shirley with trainers on. Give her a pair of boots, she’d bring down the house.
She stomped back to her office, and Lech carried his tea to his room, where Roddy Ho was still hunkered behind his screens. “Sorry, man,” he said. “Mr. Lightning came in twenty seconds quicker.”
“Don’t believe you.”
“Well, I’ll do my crying in the rain.” He sat, drank his tea and looked over the work product on his monitor, a list he barely remembered amassing. Was this really worth chasing down? It was made up of the names, the noms de web, of barely hinged individuals who’d dropped from social media after a flurry of hate-filled rants: Had they become radicalised and vanished undercover, the better to fulfil some real-world outrage? Or had they just got laid and calmed down? It was Slough House in a nutshelclass="underline" a blizzard of random incidentals it might take years to sift through, leaving you with a handful of nothing, or possibly, just possibly, one solid nugget in your palm . . . Lech thought again of John Bachelor in the pub, his hangdog air dispelled as he outlined what he’d glimpsed on a news broadcast. A face from yesterday. What if it meant something? It certainly felt solider now, the photographs adding weight to the story, but all Lech was sure of was, this wasn’t something to take to the Park. Not because it might turn out a waste of time, but in case it didn’t. He allowed himself a moment’s imagining: of presenting the hub, not with a loose thread but a tightly wound bobbin, and the reaction that would get. They’d thrown him onto the waste ground, and he’d struck gold there, and carried it back. Imagine that . . .
Oh Jesus, he thought. Just listen to me.
Wiping thoughts of glory from his mind, he opened a new browser, logged onto a Service database, traced an address for Sophie de Greer, then turned his computer off without bothering to close the other programs first. Tell me about it in the morning, he thought. Or, you know. Just burn and die.
Ho glared at him as he pulled his jacket on. “You rigged the timing so it looked like I lost.”
“No, I didn’t,” Lech said, with absolute honesty.
“I bet Louisa knows it too.”
“Louisa’s got the hots for Mr. Lightning.”
“Got them for me, more like.”
“She should learn to hide that.”
He left the office before Ho could think of a rejoinder—which gave him a ten-minute window—and took the stairs two at a time. He didn’t plan to wait for Louisa in Slough House’s yard, whose walls were held together with moss, so followed the alley round to Aldersgate Street, and crossed the road, and sat at the bus stop. Looking across at the glum takeaway, the suicidal newsagents, and the three storeys of dead-eyed windows stacked on top of them, he thought, not for the first time, How did I end up here? And felt his face, beneath its veil of scars, harden into a scowl.
An expression that wasn’t clear to Louisa, looking down from her room, but even if it had been she might have failed to recognise it; might have simply noticed that she could look at Lech’s scars now without thinking about what they hid: the word PAEDO, which he’d scrubbed away with a razor. Well, she was thinking about it now. But she hadn’t been a moment ago. Maybe there’d come a time when she could look at Lech and simply see him, rather than the mess he’d made of his face, but she wasn’t there yet. Nor was he. Everyone carries wounds, she thought. But they don’t always stare back at you from every reflecting surface.
She shook her head. Maybe it would be a wasted evening, no more; maybe she’d have to terminate a pass, in which case it might as well happen tonight as any other time. And maybe—just maybe—Lech wasn’t wrong, which in turn might mean they wound up in serious trouble, because whoever Sophie de Greer turned out to be, she moved in the world of chimp politics, where it was always the nastiest monkey ran the show. Anthony Sparrow, appearances notwithstanding, was currently King Kong, which made de Greer Fay Wray. If she had Kremlin connections, Sparrow either didn’t know about it or did, and either way wouldn’t look kindly on anyone digging into the matter. Would be likely, in fact, to bang his chest and start throwing faeces around. But that was a thing about life in Slough House: you grabbed any opportunity for excitement with both hands, and even knowing you were doing that didn’t stop you doing it. Hadn’t done in the past. Wouldn’t now.
Louisa powered her computer down and checked she had keys and wallet. Turned the light off. The office across the landing was where Ashley Khan had been put, and Louisa looked in before heading downstairs. Ashley had been allotted the desk furthest from the door, though she’d shifted to River’s desk instead. This might have been because it was better lit, or less susceptible to scrutiny from the doorway, or simply because it wasn’t the desk she’d been assigned, and this was her two-fingered response. Fair enough. Louisa remembered her own early days, wrapped in a fog of misery, and she didn’t have Ashley’s excuse of having had her arm broken by Lamb before she’d even started. Talk about a tough interview.
Truth was, Louisa hadn’t made an effort with Ashley, because you didn’t. That was the rule. There was no knowing how long a slow horse would survive, even leaving aside the grim mathematics of the bigger picture. You didn’t have to expect a colleague would take a bullet in the head—or a knife in the gut—or put their hand to a toxin-smeared doorknob—to know they weren’t necessarily going to be around forever. Lamb’s usual method of inducting a newby was to not give them anything to do for the first few months, which, if they took as an invitation to turn up late or knock off at lunchtime, would also be their last few months. So far Ashley had stood the course, but “so far” was still in single figures, if you were counting weeks. That wasn’t bad going—Louisa recalled counting days; hell, hours—but it was still all uphill, and wouldn’t get easier.
“Hey,” she said to Ashley, who was slumped across the desk, her dark hair pooled around her.
The young woman started. “I wasn’t asleep.”
“Didn’t think you were,” Louisa lied.
“Is he still around?”
No need to ask who “he” was.
“Yes. But dormant,” Louisa said, stepping inside and keeping her voice low. Sound followed peculiar waves in Slough House; syllables that couldn’t be heard a social distance away might yet reach Jackson Lamb’s ear. “Are you on anything yet?”
“Like her downstairs, you mean? No, not so far.”
“I meant work.” Not pharmaceuticals. “Has he given you an . . . assignment?”
There must be a better word than that for a slow-horse task. ‘Assignment’ sounded like it might have meaning somewhere down the line.
Ashley Khan said, “I’m to adjust myself to the realities of performing within attenuated parameters,” and Louisa couldn’t tell whether she was quoting, or had retreated behind irony.
“Yeah, that sounds about right. But, you know. It gets . . .”
“Better?”
“Not really.”
“That’s what I thought.”
There was a plastic box on her desk containing a mixture of nuts and dried berries. Ashley reached into it without looking and collected a palmful, then sat back and regarded Louisa with unnerving frankness. “How long have you been here?”