Roddy would have been the first to admit he had an excellent singing voice, though a long-established difficulty in finding the second meant he generally refrained from breaking into harmony when the slackers were about. Their loss. His gift for leaving even the roughest melody glazed in honey deserved its own labeclass="underline" a pity R&B was taken—Rodz Beatz—but there was still room for Roddy-pop. R-Pop. Hard not to see queues forming outside stadiums. Slough House, obviously, was never going to make it onto his touring schedule, but a combination of headphones, sheer joy in his own talent, and the fact that Wicinski was a sneaky bastard meant Roddy was in full song—had his Hojo working—when Lech returned from lunch.
“Losers and boozers,” he was crooning. “Something something fingernails.”
“Working on your theme song?”
Ho’s attempt to look like he was simultaneously upright, working and not singing resulted in his headphones and his mobile hitting the floor at not quite the same time, as if an experiment in gravity had just failed.
“Yeah, and you’ve found your . . . cheese grater.”
“Nice one.”
“Because that’s what you shave with.”
Lech rubbed his cheek: Funny, he could go for hours not being reminded about the mess his face had become—Londoners were unfazeable, by and large, when they weren’t online—but seconds into Ho’s company and he was contemplating bandaging himself up like the invisible man. “Did you ever think about a vow of silence? Or maybe having your vocal cords pruned?”
“Jealous. I went pro I’d have groupies. You’ve just got rubberneckers.”
“Ho, your voice sounds like you’re feeding an arthritic seal, very slowly, into a cider press. The only way you’ll draw groupies is if you sign up for assisted dying.”
“You need your ears plunged. My voice puts the Ho in ‘hot.’”
Lech, who would have quite liked to put the Ho in hospital, said, “You should leave your brain to science. They could do with one that’s not been used.”
“Yeah, and you should leave yours to . . . the Tiny Brain Museum.”
“Good comeback.”
“They could do with one that’s really small,” Ho called after him as he left the office and trudged up to Louisa’s, where he begged her to reconsider the No Squatters policy. Otherwise he might kill Ho.
“Sounds a plan. No, I meant killing Ho.” Too late: Lech was already booting up the PC on the spare desk, which Louisa hated anyone calling “the spare desk.” “It makes it sound like people can plonk themselves there whenever they feel like it,” she’d said more than once, usually to Lech, which proved her point. And just to underline how his presence was disturbing her, his phone rang.
“Yeah, what?”
“You working on the safe house register?”
“Is that what we’re calling it? A register?”
River, who’d spent the past two hours watching the house where Stamoran lived, said, “Shit, I don’t know, call it what you like. But are you at your desk? Can you look at the list?”
“Yes. Or no. But okay. Hang on a minute.” He pulled the spare chair from under the spare desk with his foot and crashed onto it while waiting for the spare screen to stop grinding grey and ask for his password. Meanwhile, Louisa had guessed it was River he was talking to: This probably had as much to do with the rarity of Lech’s receiving a call as it did with River being on her mind. “Ask him where he is,” she said.
“Where are you?” Lech asked. Then said, “Oxford.”
“What’s he doing in Oxford?”
“What are you doing in—you know what, hold tight.” He tossed the phone to Louisa, and used his newly free hand to slap the PC, a verified method of making it feel like you were speeding things up.
“What you doing in Oxford?” Louisa said.
“Not much. What you doing in Slough House?”
“Same. Why d’you need to know where the local safe house is?”
“Seen all the tourist stuff. Did you know they have an underground train here, taking books from one library to another?”
“Sounds like a lot of effort to avoid a bit of work. Who’s in the safe house?”
“Until I know where it is, hard to say.”
“What you up to, River?”
“Just tracking down someone who knew my grandfather.”
“Is this for Taverner?”
“No.” There was a moment’s interest when a passer-by paused at Stamoran’s door, but whoever it was was posting junk mail, and moved on swiftly. “I’m on medical leave, remember? From which, according to you, I’m not coming back. So I’m hardly doing anything for Taverner. Has Lech accessed that file yet?”
Lech had not done so.
“Have him call me back,” River said, and disconnected.
Rude bastard.
River, in his car, stiff from lack of movement, wouldn’t have disagreed. He knew he was blaming Louisa for delivering bad news earlier, even if it were bad news he hadn’t wasted a moment disbelieving—had he known all along he was kidding himself; that his nine-day time-out wasn’t something to be shaken off after a few months’ convalescence? It was hard now to see such wishful thinking as anything else. But that was what life could do: turn you upside down, shake your pockets empty, in the time it took to bite your tongue. One moment everything’s fine. The next, your mouth’s full of blood.
Stamoran’s door opened.
River turned his head lazily, careful to avoid sudden movement, but the young woman emerging from the house couldn’t have cared less, pulling the door shut behind her and setting off without a glance in his direction. There were three doorbells, and nothing about Stam suggested he might be playing house with a young woman, so this must be one of the other tenants. He turned back to his phone. Try Sid again? And say what? He didn’t want to tell her where he was; there was too much backstory involved. He hadn’t told her about the box-safe, about Stam’s saying it held porn, and would have to explain why he hadn’t mentioned that before going on to mention why he’d decided Stam was lying. Simpler to leave it until they were together again. There was a lot about being in a relationship that was easier to control when you weren’t actually having a conversation. It was possible that this attitude needed work, but he was busy. His phone chirruped but it was a text, spam. Did he want to change energy supplier? No, he wanted Lech to call back with the safe house address. Lech, though, was still having trouble with his PC, and had pretty clearly pissed on his picnic when it came to seeking help from Ho. He looked at Louisa, who pretended not to notice, but he didn’t dare call her on it because she was annoyed about something. Then Catherine came in, distributing worksheets, and noticed the atmosphere.
She said, “Please don’t say you need mother-henning too. It’s bad enough dealing with Ashley’s protracted adolescence and Shirley’s . . . being Shirley.”
“Relax,” Louisa said. “No one’s asking you to interfere.”
Catherine might have responded—should have done—but settled for giving Louisa a look which Louisa, on a roll now, also pretended not to notice. Lech thanked Catherine for the worksheet with his eyebrows, then thanked God or whoever when the PC accepted his password and blinked back into blankness, a possible precursor of emerging into life. Catherine, meanwhile, crossed into Ash’s room and laid the paperwork on her desk with a quiet, “Here’s your worksheet,” ignoring Ash’s muttered “What is a fucking worksheet, anyway?” but failing to quash a mental response as she carried on up the stairs: It’s a record of tasks completed in hourly time slots, as you very well know, these last five words rendered in italics. Frankly, she did not understand how she managed not to drink. Sometimes it beggared belief that she managed not to scream.