Which it finds in the shape of River Cartwright. River is also quiet, having just ended a call to St Mary’s Hospital, which is where Spider Webb was taken, a little longer after being shot than Accident and Emergency Rooms recommend. The news of his former friend’s current status might be what he contemplates now, and our mouse cannot tell whether it brings pain or pleasure; though River might equally be occupied by other emotions; by the suspicion, for example, that the reason the name ZT/53235 came tripping so lightly from his grandfather’s memory was that it had long resided there, the O.B. himself having been responsible for convincing the Soviet authorities that the closed town nurtured a traitor. It was in 1951 that ZT/53235 burned, with the loss of thousands of lives, and David Cartwright would then have been much the age his grandson is now, prompting River to wonder whether he has it in him to play the mirror game as if the stakes were spent matches instead of human lives. And to wonder, too, if such thoughts will intrude the next time he visits the old man, or whether he will bury them like any spy’s secrets, and greet his grandfather as fondly as ever.
As this is not a problem our mouse can help with, it retreats, to find in Louisa Guy’s room a different kind of silence, the kind used to smother a soft noise. This finds no echo, as there is nobody to offer one, the spare desk here being just that: spare, untenanted, redundant. Given time, a fresh body will turn up to commandeer it—as Lamb has pointed out, Slough House is staffed by screw-ups, of which there’s never any shortage—and perhaps it’s that future occupation that causes Louisa to gently sob now, or perhaps it’s the current emptiness awaiting her at her flat, which once seemed too small for two, and is now too large for one; a situation unassuaged by her recent acquisition, currently nestled among her newer, less practical, now uncalled-for underwear, of a fingernail-sized diamond; its weight less than that of a doughnut, and its value a mystery to her. Ascertaining this would be another step over a line she never intended to cross in the first place, so for now it remains wrapped and hidden; its only promise that of an escape from one empty place into another, which is all the future seems to offer to Louisa; one empty space after another, like an infinity of mirrors reaching all the way to nowhere.
Small wonder she sobs; even less that our mouse tiptoes discreetly away from a grief it can’t comfort. Further up, on the final floor, it pays a brief visit to Catherine Standish, for whom a mouse holds no horrors, provided it’s real. Catherine has seen her share of phantom mice, small shapes that scurried from sight when she turned to look, but those days are long past, and the only day that matters is the one that lies ahead. Which she will deal with in the same calm manner she has come to deal with most things; a talent honed by daily exposure to the irritating Jackson Lamb, who is currently in his own room, door firmly closed, which presents as much an obstacle to our murine explorer as the inelegantly heaped pile of telephone directories, atop which it pauses at last, whiskers quivering, snout a-tremble. Jackson Lamb has his feet on his desk, and his eyes closed. On his lap is a newspaper, folded at a bizarre little story about a localised earth tremor in the Cotswolds, for heaven’s sake; a seismic shrug which caused a much-loved church to collapse, thankfully with only a single fatality. And so, thinks Lamb, the ghost of one Alexander Popov, as embodied by one Nikolai Katinsky, fades into nothingness in the heart of a village which in no way resembled the town he’d emerged from, except in the manner of the destruction he’d hoped to wreak upon it. As for the cicadas—that collection of long-buried sleepers, who’d slept so deeply their false existences had displaced the real—for them there’d be no awakening, cruel or otherwise, the school of thought from Them Down the Corridor being to let sleeping spooks lie. Lying, after all, is what spooks do best.
Thinking such thoughts Jackson Lamb reaches blindly out for something, probably his cigarettes, and when his questing hands come up empty, resorts to opening his eyes. And there in front of him—snout quivering, whiskers a-tremble—sits a mouse. For a moment Lamb has the uncomfortable sensation that this mouse is staring into a past he has tried to bury, or peering into a future he’d sooner forget. And then he blinks, and the mouse is nowhere, if it was ever there at all.
“What this place needs is a cat,” grumbles Lamb, but there’s no one there to hear him.