The driver called something Dickie didn’t catch. The door hissed shut and the horn was tapped twice; a farewell note to the lingering buses. Dickie rubbed his thigh where the edge of a briefcase or umbrella-tip had nipped him, and thought about luck, and the strange places it dragged you. Such as, from a Soho street into the tube and out the other end; into Paddington, onto a train, then onto this bus. He still didn’t know whether that luck was good or bad.
When the lights went out the bus briefly became a travelling shadow. Then passengers switched overhead bulbs on, and blue screens gleamed upwards from laptops, and fists wrapped round iPhones grew spectrally white. Dickie fiddled his own phone from his pocket, but he had no messages. There were never any messages. Scrolling through his contact list, he was struck by how short it was. Two seats in front, the hood had rolled his newspaper into a baton, wedged it between his knees, and hung his hat upon it. He might be asleep.
The bus left Reading behind. Through the window, dark countryside unfurled. Some distance off, an ascending sequence of red lights indicated the mast at Didcot, but the cooling towers were invisible.
In Dickie’s hand, the mobile was a grenade. Rubbing his thumb on its numberpad, he registered the tiny nipple on the middle button that allowed you to orient your fingers in the dark. But nobody was hanging on Dickie’s words. Dickie was a relic. The world had moved on, and what would his message be anyway? That he’d seen a face from the past, and was following it home? Who would have cared? The world had moved on. It had left him behind.
Rejection came softer these days. Dickie heard occasional whispers on the Soho songlines, and these days even the useless were given a chance. The Service, like everyone else, was hamstrung by rules and regulations: sack the useless, and they took you to tribunal for discriminating against useless people. So the Service bunged the useless into some godforsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards. They called them the slow horses. The screw-ups. The losers. They called them the slow horses and they belonged to Jackson Lamb, whom Dickie had encountered, back in the Spooks’ Zoo.
His mobile gave a blip, but there was no message; only a warning that it was running out of power.
Dickie knew how it felt. He had nothing to say. Attention wavered and refocused elsewhere. Laptops hummed and mobiles whispered, but Dickie had no voice. Had no movement, bar a feeble flexing of his fingers. The tiny nipple on the keypad’s middle button scratched beneath his thumb: scratch scratch.
There was an important message to deliver, but Dickie did not know what it was, nor to whom it should be sent. For a few luminous moments he was aware of being part of a warm, humid community, breathing the same air, hearing the same tune. But the tune slipped out of earshot, and became beyond recall. Everything faded, save the scene through the window. The landscape continued unrolling one black fold after another, dotted with pinpricks of light, like sequins on a scarf. And then the lights blurred and dimmed and the darkness rolled over itself one final time, and then there was only the bus carrying its mortal cargo through the night, heading for Oxford, where it would deliver one soul fewer than it had gathered, back in the rain.
PART ONE
BLACK SWANS
Now that the roadworks have finally gone, Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, is calmer; nowhere you’d choose to have a picnic, but no longer the vehicle-related crime scene it once resembled. The area’s pulse has normalised, and while noise levels remain high, they’re less pneumatic, and include the occasional snatch of street music: cars sing, taxis whistle, and locals stare in bafflement at the freely flowing traffic. Once it was wise to pack a lunch if you were heading down the street on a bus. Now you could while away half an hour trying to cross it.
It’s a case, perhaps, of the urban jungle reclaiming its own, and any jungle boasts wildlife if you look hard enough. A fox was spotted one mid-morning, padding from White Lion Court into the Barbican Centre, and up among the complex’s flower beds and water features can be found both birds and rats. Where the greenery bends over standing water, frogs hide. After dark, there are bats. So it would be no surprise if a cat dropped in front of our eyes from one of the Barbican towers and froze as it hit the bricks; looking all directions at once without moving its head, as cats can. It’s a Siamese. Pale, short-haired, slant-eyed, slender and whispery; able, like all its kind, to slip through doors barely open and windows thought shut, and it’s only frozen for a moment. Then it’s off.
It moves like a rumour, this cat; over the pedestrian bridge, then down the stairs to the station and out onto the street. A lesser cat might have paused before crossing the tributary road, but not ours; trusting instincts, ears and speed, it’s on the pavement opposite before a van driver finishes braking. And then it vanishes, or seems to. The driver peers angrily, but all he can see is a black door in a dusty recess between a newsagent’s and a Chinese restaurant; its ancient black paintwork spattered with roadsplash, a single yellowing milk bottle on its step. And no sign of our cat.
Who has, of course, gone round the back. No one enters Slough House by the front door; instead, via a shabby alleyway, its inmates let themselves into a grubby yard with mildewed walls, and through a door that requires a sharp kick most mornings, when damp or cold or heat have warped it. But our cat’s feet are too subtle to require violence and it’s through that door in a blink, and up a doglegged flight of stairs to a pair of offices.
Here on the first floor—ground level being assigned to other properties; to the New Empire Chinese, and whatever the newsagent’s is called this year—is where Roderick Ho labours, in an office made jungly by electrical clutter: abandoned keyboards nest in corners, and brightly coloured wires billow like loops of intestine from backless monitors. Gunmetal bookshelves hold software manuals, lengths of cable, and shoeboxes almost certainly containing oddly shaped bits of metal, while next to Ho’s desk wobbles a cardboard tower fashioned from the geek’s traditional building block: the empty pizza box. A lot of stuff.
But when our cat pokes its head round the door, it’ll find only Ho. The office is his alone, and Ho prefers this, for he mostly dislikes other people, though the fact that other people dislike him back has never occurred to him. And while Louisa Guy has been known to speculate that Ho occupies a place somewhere on the right of the autism spectrum, Min Harper has habitually responded that he’s also way out there on the git index. It’s no surprise, then, that had Ho noticed our cat’s presence, his response would have been to toss a Coke can at it, and he’d have been disappointed to have missed. But another thing Roderick Ho hasn’t grasped about himself is that he’s a better shot when aiming at stationary targets. He rarely fails to drop a can into a wastebasket half the office away, but has been known to miss the point when it’s closer than that.
Unscathed, then, our cat withdraws, to check out the adjoining office. And here are two unfamiliar faces, recently dispatched to Slough House: one white, one black; one female, one male; so new they don’t have names yet, and both thrown by their visitor. Is the cat a regular—is the cat a fellow slow horse? Or is this a test? Troubled, they share a glance, and while they’re bonding in momentary confusion our cat slips out and nips up the stairs to the next landing, and two more offices.