Slough House #6 Joe Country Mick Herron
Books by Mick Herron
Down Cemetery Road
The Last Voice You Hear
Why We Die
Smoke & Whispers
Slow Horses
Dead Lions
The List (a novella)
Real Tigers
Spook Street
London Rules
The Marylebone Drop (a novella)
Reconstruction
Nobody Walks
This Is What Happened
Copyright © 2019 by Mick Herron
All rights reserved.
Published by Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herron, Mick, author.
Joe Country / Mick Herron.
I. Title
ISBN 978-1-64129-055-5
eISBN 978-1-64129-056-2
PR6108.E77 J64 2019 823’.92—dc23 2019003464
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Annabelle
Joe Country
The owl flew screaming from the barn, its wingtips bright with flame. For a moment, silhouetted against the blank sky, it was a dying angel, scorched by its own divinity, and then it was just a sooty husk, dropping like an anvil into the nearby trees. He wondered if it would set the wood ablaze. But the trees were thickly layered with snow, and any spark that survived the fall would be smothered on contact. He turned back to the barn in time to see the roof collapse, and a cloud of dust burst upwards. Kind of beautiful, if you liked that sort of thing. This must be what got arsonists stoked.
But he was no arsonist; just following instructions. They’d burned the barn to erase their recent presence, and it hadn’t occurred to either of them that this was an extermination; that there’d be an owl inside, plus any number of mice, rats, spiders, whatever. Not that it mattered. But he should have been aware of the possibility. That way, his heart wouldn’t have leaped up his throat when the burning bird emerged, desperately hunting the last few seconds of its life.
It had found them now. Up there in the great grey yonder, while its one-time home was transformed by the miracle of flame into a smoky mass.
Something gave with a crash and a heave of sparks, and that was as good a signal as any. Time to leave.
“We done?” he said.
“Not as done as that bird. What was it, a chicken or something?”
“. . . That’s right. A chicken.”
Jesus Christ.
He checked the straps on his backpack, tightened the cuffs of his quilted jacket, pulled his hood up, and led the way to the footpath. Behind them smoke curled upwards, while the falling snow grew lumpier, and the world flattened to a single tone. The barn hadn’t been in use, and was miles from anywhere. The pillar of smoke would rouse attention, but they’d be long gone, their tracks covered, before any professional response arrived, and there was a ready-made scapegoat here in the wilderness: kids. Country life wasn’t all driving tractors and shovelling shit with happy grins. They’d be doing meth, white cider and setting fire to barns. That’s what he’d have done, if forced to grow up round here.
Once the bodies were found there’d be a circus, of course, but that wouldn’t happen until the flames died down. And the blood on the snow would be a muddy mess by then, trampled by the first responders.
His right cuff was too tight, so he adjusted the Velcro fastener. Better. Good jacket: kept the weather out. The woman had been wearing one similar. New-looking, though she’d managed to rip it scrambling over a fence or something, leaving a triangular tear on the right breast; a flap of fabric hanging loose, showing the spongy material beneath. As for the man, he hadn’t been dressed for the cold, and would have caught his death even without intervention.
The footpath left the cover of the trees, and they were out in the open again. The weather was coming in from the coast and they were walking towards it: on the way he’d call the boss, arrange a meeting-point. With any luck, the boss would have found and killed the kid this morning, but they were boots up now anyway. Sometimes jobs went south, that was all. Sometimes colleagues got killed. When it happened you chalked it down to life-lessons, then went home and waited for the bruises to heal.
His companion spoke. “I could murder a drink.”
“Not until we’re back among the lights.”
By which he meant England, obviously. There might be lights in Wales, but he wasn’t convinced they weren’t powered by hamsters on wheels.
A black shape flitted overhead, a bird heading home, and he thought about the owl again; how the flames were already consuming it as it fled the barn. He had a memory about owls: that they were omens of something, probably death. Most omens had to do with death, if horror movies were anything to go by.
He reached a stile and clambered over it. Behind them lay a few complicated days, and a black curl of smoke etching an ideogram in the sky; ahead, a whitening landscape, and beyond that the sea. As he set off to meet it, he thought: that owl had been right on the money, even if late with its prediction. Death had visited the area, making a collection. It had had a tougher job than it might have expected, given that the opposition had been from some rejects’ department: Slade House? No, Slough House . . . Slough House, because the boss had called them “slow horses.” A harder job than expected, but it made no lasting difference.
The man was dead. The woman was dead.
Slough House was going to need some new slow horses.
Part One
Lame Ducks
Cities sleep with their lights on, as if they’re afraid of the dark. Up and down their roads, clustering at junctions, streetlights make daisy chains out of the night, illuminating pavements and hiding the stars. And if, from above—from the perspective of an astronaut, say, or a reader—these chains resemble neural pathways, forging connections between a city’s hemispheres, that seems an accurate picture. For a city is made of memories, stored recollections packed into boxes of stone and metal, brick and glass, and the brighter its pathways pulse with light, the stronger those memories are. On its wider, busier thoroughfares the traces of grand events linger—royal progressions, wartime rallies, victory celebrations—while the circuses where its big roads meet nurture shades of less seemly occasions: riots and lynchings and public executions. Along its riverbanks, quiet moments promenade—a hundred thousand engagements and cuckoldings—and in the explosive glow of its transport terminals, a billion arrivals and a billion departures are recalled one by one. Some of these have left scars on its memory, others a faint graze, but all contribute to the whole, for this is what makes a city: the slow accumulation of history, of a near-infinite number of happenings in a network of streets that light up at night.
But if the grandest of these memories warrant plaques and statuary, the more private are kept out of view; or at least, stored in such plain sight that they’re unseen. Take Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, upon which the gross bulk of the Barbican squats like a toad. Even on the main drag, the dull weight of mediocrity hangs heavy: of all London’s memories, this undistinguished array of shops and offices is least likely to ring bells; those bright connections, firing through the night, are at their weakest here. But briefly lit by their flare, not far from the entrance to the Underground, is a block four storeys tall, though it appears shorter. Its pavement-level frontage comprises a black door dusty with neglect, sandwiched between a newsagent’s and a Chinese restaurant; its façade is distempered, its guttering a mess, and the local pigeons have shown their contempt for it in the traditional manner. The one stab at respectability—the legend WW Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths tattooed in gilt on a second-storey window—has long since started to peel, and the unlettered windows above and below it are smeary and grey. The building is a bad tooth set in a failing mouth. Here is where nothing happens: nothing to see here. Move along.