But Dickie Bow had fished his mobile out shortly before dying, and had jammed it between the cushions of his seat, as if to make sure it would only be found by someone looking for it. By someone for whom he had a message.
An unsent message, as it turned out.
A train arrived, but Lamb remained on his bench. Not many people got off; not many got on. As it pulled away Lamb saw the attractive young woman glowering at him through a window and he farted quietly in response: a private victory, but satisfying. Then he examined the phone again. Drafts. There was a Drafts folder for text messages. He opened this, and the single-word entry of a single saved message stared back from the tiny screen.
Near his feet a pigeon scratched the ground in imitation of a bird that might make an effort. Lamb didn’t notice. He was absorbed in that single word, keyed into the phone but never transmitted; locked forever in its black-and-grey box, alongside 82 pence-worth of unused communication. As if a dying word could be breathed into a bottle, and corked up, and released once the grim business of tidying away the corpse had been seen to: here on an Oxfordshire railway platform, with a late March sun struggling to make itself felt, and a fat pigeon tramping underfoot. One word.
“Cicadas,” Jackson Lamb said out loud. Then said it again. “Cicadas.”
And then he said, “Fuck me.”
Shirley Dander and Marcus Longridge had settled back into their tasks; the atmosphere only slightly altered by their conversation. In Slough House, sound seeped easily. If he were interested Roderick Ho might have rested his head against the wall separating his office from theirs, the better to hear them, but all he registered was the familiar buzz of other people establishing relationships—he was, anyway, busy updating his online status: adding a paragraph to Facebook describing his weekend at Chamonix; tweeting a link to his latest dancemix … Ho’s name for these purposes was Roddy Hunt; his tunes were looted from obscure sites he subsequently torched; his photos were tweaked stills of a young Montgomery Clift. It still amazed Ho you could build a man from links and screenshots, launch him into the world like a paper boat, and he’d just keep sailing. All of the details that built up a person could be real. The only thing fake was the person … Constructing a mythical work-pattern for his user ID had been the most brilliant thing Ho had accomplished this year. Anyone monitoring his computertime would confirm his constant presence on the Service network, building an operations archive.
So Ho was uninterested in Shirley and Marcus’s chattering, and the office above theirs was empty, because Harper and Guy weren’t yet back. If they had been, it’s likely that one would have knelt with an ear to the floor, and relayed each word to the other. And if River Cartwright had been in there, instead of in the room above Ho’s, he might have done the same: it would have relieved the boredom. Which he should have been used to but it kept recurring, like a week-old insect bite that wouldn’t quit. Though if that analogy were to ring true, River now thought, he’d have to be wearing boxing gloves too: unable to scratch; just rubbing away without effect.
Until a few months ago he had shared this room. Now it was his alone, though a second desk remained, equipped with a PC that was newer, faster and less battered than River’s. He could have commandeered it, but Service PCs were user-specific, and he’d have had to log a request for IT to reassign it; a thirty-minute job that could take eight months. And while he could have short-circuited the process by asking Ho to do it, this would have involved asking Ho to do it, and he wasn’t that desperate.
He drummed an off-beat rhythm with his fingers, and studied the ceiling. Exactly the kind of pointless noise that could draw a returning thump from Jackson Lamb, meaning both shut up and come here. The fact that there wasn’t much to do didn’t stop Lamb dreaming up tasks. Last week he’d sent River out collecting takeaway cartons: River had plucked them from bins, gutters, car roofs; had found a trove in a Barbican flowerbed, chewed by rats or foxes. Then Lamb had made him compare them with his own collection, the fruit of six months’ afternoon snacking: he’d become convinced that Sam Yu, frontman of the New Empire next door, was giving him smaller cartons than everyone else, and was “working up the evidence.” Borderline Lamb: he might have meant it, might have been taking the piss. Either way, River was the one up to his elbows in bins.
For a while, a few months back, it had looked like things were changing. After years of squatting upstairs, happily dumping on the poor saps below, Lamb had appeared to be taking an interest; at the very least, had enjoyed putting the screws on Lady Di Taverner at Regent’s Park. But the mould was showing through again: Lamb had grown bored with excitement, preferring the comfortably unchanging days, so River was still here, and Slough House was still Slough House. And the work was the same grunt-work it had always been.
Today was a case in point. Today, he was a typist. Yesterday he’d been a scanner-operator; today the scanner wouldn’t work, so today he was a typist, entering pre-digital death records onto a database. The deceased had all been six months old or younger, and had died while rationing was still enforced: prime targets for identity theft. Back then, you worked this by taking names from gravestones; a less innocent form of brass-rubbing. Birth certificates were then claimed lost and copies sought; after that, you simply traced the life the infant might have led, with all its attendant paperwork: national insurance number, bank account, driving licence … All of the details that built up a person could be faked. The only thing real was the person. But anyone who’d actually done this would be collecting a pension by now. Any sleepers using the names River had found could have called themselves Rip van Winkle instead. So it was just makework for the slow horses, plugging gaps in a history book, nothing more. And where was Jackson Lamb?
Sitting here wouldn’t answer that. Having risen without consciously deciding to, River went with the flow: out of his office, up the stairs. The top floor was always dark. Even when Lamb’s door was open, his blinds were drawn, and Catherine’s office, at the back of the building, sat in the shadow of a nearby office block. Catherine preferred lamps to overhead lighting—the only trait she shared with Lamb—and these didn’t so much dispel the gloom as accentuate it, casting twin pools of yellow light between which murkiness swarmed. Her monitor gave a grey glow, and in its wash, as River entered her room, she seemed a figment from a fairy tale: a pale lady, hoarding wisdom.
River plonked himself on a chair next to a pile of vari-coloured folders. While the rest of the world pursued a digital agenda, Lamb insisted on hard copy. He’d once toyed with instigating an employee-of-the-month award, based solely on weight of output. If he’d had a pair of scales, and an attention span, River didn’t doubt he’d have done so.
“Let me guess,” Catherine said. “You’ve finished what you were doing, and want some more work.”