Decking a harasser at Regent’s Park; exile to Slough House; Marcus. Running up the stairs at the Needle—that had been a killer. The gunfight out west, at the underground complex, and Marcus again, this time dead. The penguin-assassins’ UK tour, and that moment in the church when she thought she’d be crushed to death (didn’t happen). Wales in the snow, and J. K. Coe lying under a tree like a discarded Christmas decoration. Hunting stalkers at Old Street roundabout; thumping a bus on Wimbledon Common. A week in the San, supposed to be a time of calm reflection, ending with a battle royale, a road trip with a former First Desk, and a showdown in a car wash with a helmeted hooligan. It would be fair to say there were both ups and downs in that lot. Though ups were getting harder to locate, and more expensive to maintain. And the downs—best not to dwell on the downs.
All of which left her here, in her office, having just been read, yeah, chapter again: chapter and verse by St. Catherine of Standish, patron saint of addicts. Who had herself graduated from the San with full honours, and obviously regarded Shirley’s truncated experience of its rehabilitative wonders as some kind of moral failure, so fuck that. What she really needed, leaving aside all the bollocks inherent in what others thought she needed, was to be left alone for a while; a little solitude (the odd pickup apart) and some clean living, with maybe the odd toot for variety’s sake—it was relaxation, not canonisation, she wanted. A few weeks of that and she’d be ready for anything Slough House could throw at her, even including her current task, which involved an online trawl for youths exhibiting antisocial tendencies in specific postcodes, these centring on mosques identified by Regent’s Park as being “of special interest” . . . Well, she could imagine Lamb saying. You have to start somewhere. He had the notion, or pretended to, that it ought to be possible to identify those undergoing radicalisation not so much by their youthful careers of hooliganism as by those same careers being abruptly curtailed. Redemption, in Lamb’s world, was less likely than the chances of being recruited by the forces of evil, forces which would prefer you kept your nose clean for the moment.
None of which had any relevance to her own situation, obviously.
She leaned forward and tapped at her keyboard to dispel the screensaver but her computer had switched itself off, its usual response to being ignored for more than five minutes. She could boot up again, but on the other hand it was less than two hours to lunchtime, so she might as well just sit it out. Coming up next on Shirley Dander: fuck all. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and wondered if she were the only one in the building who had no real plans at all. Maybe. Maybe not. Time would tell. It usually did.
Book restaurant.
The memo was fixed to her monitor’s upper corner, but she’d avoided acting on it yet.
Things Louisa had accomplished so far this morning included, pretty much exclusively, opening her window, through which now drifted the sounds of ordinary things, all of which had happened a million times before. Buses wheezed, traffic snorted, an airliner bulldozed its way through a temporarily cloudless sky. White noise, leaving no trace behind. On her windowsill lay two dead bluebottles, half a moth, and the scattered debris of city dirt, the kind that accumulates unseen, until it’s suddenly a landfill site. Underfoot was threadbare carpeting; on the walls a dull shade of paint that had long given up its proprietorial singularity—November Frost? Autumn Lawn?—in favour of a universal beige. The space between felt like it was held prisoner by the 1970s. The shelving on the walls remained there largely through inertia, and the mismatched desks—her own kept level thanks to a folded piece of cardboard; the other with a surface scarred by the penknife lacerations of a previous bored resident, and both with drawers that didn’t open easily, or wouldn’t shut—might have started life in a more salubrious corner of the civil service, but were now a decade or more past their useful working life. Not unlike—but she held off completing the thought.
That other desk, the scarred and battle-worn one, had been commandeered by Lech Wicinski lately, but had belonged to Min Harper once, what felt like fifteen years ago, and she still imagined him there occasionally, balanced on its edge or standing by the window, like an overgrown schoolboy gazing at the playing fields. Min Min Min. Oddly, he spoke to her now.
You going to make that reservation?
She hadn’t decided yet.
What’s to decide? An old friend seeking your company? Not even a date, as such. Just . . . friendship.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Min wasn’t there, of course, and even if he had been was unlikely to offer useful commentary on her options. He’d not been the most reliable source of advice while alive. It was unlikely he’d improved in that area since his death.
Still, he wasn’t shutting up.
And it’s not as if you’re doing anything else this evening.
Yeah, thanks for that.
She made a pistol of her fingers, shot Min’s ghost dead, and felt bad.
But he was right, she had nothing else on. And it shouldn’t be a big decision, an evening out with an old . . . friend? Barely. They’d had someone in common, no more, and she wasn’t sure there was a word for that. For him to reach out after all this time suggested he was after more than a nostalgic evening. Choose wherever. My treat. His words, so he’d obviously come up in the world. Whereas she remained on the same page.
Perhaps that was why she was havering. An evening spent basking in someone else’s progress: Did that sound like fun? Hearing about professional success, worldly advancement, while she looked forward to turning up here tomorrow, to an unswept windowsill? Except none of that sounded like Devon Welles, whom she’d known when he was one of the Park’s Dogs; a friend to Emma Flyte—a good character reference—who’d left the Park after she’d been fired, another indicator of decency. Not the type to spend an evening boasting to a former colleague. No: He was after something else. And it was possible this might turn out to her advantage.
He’s your ticket out of here.
Which wasn’t Min speaking, but might as well have been, being about as grounded in reality as he ever got. What did Welles have to offer her? And why was she overthinking this, anyway? Pick up the phone, book a restaurant. It wasn’t rocket science.
The Post-it note on which she’d scribbled the reminder fluttered for no obvious reason, and she thought goose on my grave. From overhead came a wheezing sound, which might be Slough House expressing its weariness, or Lamb expressing himself. Either way, it was not a reminder of how delightful these precincts were. The days were stacking up like dirty dishes, and each had been packed with moments like this, the kind where you look round and wonder how you got here, and why you haven’t left yet. For the longest time, she’d thought—like every slow horse before her—that this was a temporary glitch; that Regent’s Park would take her back once she’d proved herself. She no longer believed that. So why was she still here? It wasn’t the décor. It certainly wasn’t the company. And no, she wasn’t doing anything tonight. She plucked the Post-it from her monitor, screwed it up and tossed it into the waste basket, nearly.
Then took her phone out and began googling restaurants.
On the shelf, Ashley. On. The. Shelf. You want to spend your whole life there?
Yes, Mum.
Because you’re going about it the right way.