“Of him. Berlin hand.” Putting his drink down, the O.B. adopted his sage pose: elbows on the armrests, fingertips pressed together as if holding an invisible ball. “How’d he die?” And when River had given him the details said, “He was never what you’d call fast track,” as if the late Dickie Bow’s sluggishness preordained him for death on a bus. “Never first division.”
“Premier league,” River suggested.
His grandfather waved away such modern abominations. “One of life’s streetwalkers. And I think he had an interest in a nightclub. Or worked in one. Anyway, he used to come up with titbits. Which minor official was stepping out on his wife or his boyfriend. You know the kind of thing.”
“And all of it was fed into the files.”
The O.B. said: “That old saw about laws and sausages, about how you never want to see either being made? The same applies to intelligence work.” Dropping his invisible ball, he picked up his glass instead and swirled it thoughtfully, so the amber liquid washed round the tumbler’s edge. “And then he went AWOL. That was Dickie Bow’s claim to fame. Went for a walk on the wild side, and had switchboards lit up from Berlin to bloody … Battersea. Sorry. Alliteration. Bad habit. Berlin to Whitehall, because he might have been small fry but the last thing anyone wanted right then was a British agent turning up on Red TV, claiming god knew what.”
“This was when?” River asked.
“September eighty-nine.”
“Ah.”
“Too bloody right, ah. Everyone in the game, all the Berlin hands anyway, knew damn well something was about to happen, and while nobody said it aloud for fear of jinx, everyone looked at the Wall while they thought it. And nobody, nobody, wanted anything that might throw history off course.” His swirling became agitated, and whisky sprayed from his glass. Setting it on the table next to him, the old man raised his hand to his mouth and licked the drops away.
“When you say nobody …”
“Well, I don’t mean nobody, obviously. I mean nobody on our side.” He examined his hand, as if he’d forgotten what it was for, then let it drop to his lap. “And it wouldn’t have taken much. Dickie Bow might have been just the grit of sand on the tracks to throw the locomotive. So we were keen on recovering him, as you might imagine.”
“And evidently you did.”
“Oh, we found him all right. Or he turned up, rather. Waltzed back into town just as we were ready to slap black ribbons on every operation he’d ever had a sniff at. Well, I say waltzed. He could barely walk was the truth.”
“He’d been tortured?”
The O.B. snorted. “He was blind drunk. Though the way he told it, not of his own volition. Held him down and poured the stuff down his throat, he said. Thought they meant to drown him, he said. Of course, why wouldn’t they? Drown a man like Dickie Bow in booze, you’re merely speeding things up.”
“And who were ‘they,’ in this scenario? The East Germans?”
“Oh, nothing so parochial. No, Dickie Bow’s story was, he’d been snatched by actual hoods. The Moscow variety. And not your everyday foot soldier, either.”
He paused, milking the moment. River sometimes wondered how the old man stood it, doing his daily rounds—butcher, baker, post office lady—without succumbing to the temptation to perform for the whole sorry bunch of them. Because if there was one thing the O.B. liked these days, it was an audience.
“No,” said the old man. “Dickie Bow claimed to have been kidnapped by Alexander Popov himself.”
A revelation which might have carried more impact if the name had meant anything to River.
Drive a saint to suicide, thought Catherine Standish.
Lord above!
I’m channelling my mother.
They were words she’d used earlier, about Jackson Lamb: that he’d drive a saint to suicide. Not a phrase she’d ever expected to hear herself say, but this was what happened: you turned into your mother, unless you turned into your father. That, anyway, was what happened if you let life smooth you down, plane away the edges that made you different.
Catherine had had edges once, but for years had lived a life whose borders were marked by furriness, and mornings when she wasn’t sure what had happened the night before. Traces of sex and vomit were clues; bruises on arms and thighs. The sense of having been spat out. Her relationship with alcohol had been the most enduring of her life, but like any abusive partner it had shown its true colours in the end. So now Catherine’s edges had been planed away, and alone in the kitchen of her North London flat she made a cup of peppermint tea, and thought about bald men.
There were no bald men in her life. There were no men in her life, or none that counted: there were male presences at work, and she’d grown fond of River Cartwright, but there were no actual men in her life, and that went double for Jackson Lamb. Nevertheless, she was thinking about bald men; about one in particular, giving a swift glance up at the camera before pacing into the driving rain of a railway platform, instead of boarding under shelter. And about the hat he wasn’t wearing because he’d left it on a bus two minutes earlier.
And she was also thinking, because she often did, how easy it would be to slip out for a bottle of wine, and have one small drink to prove she didn’t need one. One glass, and the rest down the sink. A Chablis. Nicely chilled. Or room temperature, if the off-licence didn’t keep it fridged; and if they didn’t have Chablis a Sauvignon Blanc would do, or a Chardonnay, or triple strength lager, or a two-litre bottle of cider.
Deep breath. My name is Catherine, and I’m an alcoholic. A copy of the Blue Book stood between a dictionary and a collected Sylvia Plath in the sitting room, and there was nothing to stop her settling down with it, peppermint tea at her elbow, until the wobble passed. The wobble: that was another one of her mother’s. Code for a hot flush. A lot of code words, her mother had used. Which was almost funny, given what Catherine did for a living.
So what would her mother make of her now, if she were alive? If she could see Slough House, its flaky paintwork, its flakier denizens … Catherine didn’t need to ask, because the answer was blindingly clear: her mother would take one look at the worn-out furniture, the peeling walls, the dusty bulbs, the cobwebs that hung from the corners, and recognise it as somewhere her daughter belonged, somewhere safe from aspiration. It was better to build your life’s ceiling low. Better not to put on airs.
Better, in the long run, not to think about what lay behind you.
So picking up her peppermint tea Catherine carried it into her sitting room, and for the many hundredth time didn’t go out for a bottle. Nor did she browse the Blue Book—let alone Sylvia bloody Plath—but instead sat and thought about bald men, and their actions on rainy railway platforms. And she tried not to think about her mother, or about life’s edges being planed away until you could see clear past them into whatever came next.
Because whatever came next, it was best to assume the worst.
From the seventy-seventh floor to this, thought Louisa Guy.
Holy crap!
A broadsheet’s Beautiful Homes column had lately informed her that a little imagination and a small amount of cash could transform even the tiniest apartment into a compact, space-efficient dream-dwelling. Unfortunately, that “small amount” was large enough that if she’d laid her hands on it, she’d have moved somewhere bigger instead.
As ever, damp washing was tonight’s motif. A clothes horse, designed to be folded out of sight when not in use, was always in use, and anyway, there was nowhere to put it when it wasn’t. So it leaned against a bookshelf, draped with underwear, her collection of which had undergone significant upgrading since Min Harper had entered her life. Elsewhere, blouses hung on wire hangers from anywhere they could be hooked, and a still-damp sweater reshaped itself on the table, its arms dangling heavily over the sides. And Louisa perched on a kitchen chair, laptop on her knees.