“No,” she said. “I just need some time to myself, that’s all.”
Catherine stared, as if she’d announced a desire for some agonising luxury or other. Then said, “I’ll have him sign it. When do you want to start?”
“Right away,” said Louisa.
“You’re supposed to give at least as much notice as the length of leave requested, you do realise that?”
Why’d you think I want you to hand him the form, Louisa thought, but didn’t say. “Thanks, Catherine. I owe you one.”
“You owe me more than one,” said Catherine softly as Louisa disappeared downstairs. She added another form to the stack requiring Lamb’s signature, a request for a replacement boiler, whose last service had provoked a teeth-sucking groan of disbelief from a plumber who was about nineteen. This, Catherine knew, would never make it beyond the post-room at Regent’s Park, there being a standing instruction that all mail from Slough House addressed to Finance be binned unopened. Besides, if you started replacing worn-out parts round here, where would it stop? Any overhaul would include herself, and she wasn’t sure she’d survive an upgrade.
She went back into Lamb’s office, the pile of forms in her arms. All over the world banks were becoming coinless, cars driverless, offices paper-free. Here in Slough House they were taking up the slack, as if in Newtonian response to refinements made elsewhere: an equal and opposite surfeit of unnecessary busywork.
Lamb was where they’d left him: arse in chair, feet on desk. Through holes in his socks, his toes tasted freedom. He was smoking, and though Catherine suspected him capable of doing this in his sleep, she’d yet to prove it. She slapped the papers onto his desk, or at least, onto the clutter that littered his desk. A self-defeating gesture, because once they slipped onto the floor they’d be archived as far as Lamb was concerned. He had a three-second rule about paperwork: that long on the carpet, it was good as filed.
Without opening his eyes, he said, “I sense your disapproval.”
“If you ever sense my anything else,” she said, “one of us has been replaced.”
“They spend their whole lives hoping for something to do,” he said. “And you want to spoil their fun?”
“We should leave Harkness to the Park.”
“Yeah, that happened last time. And they let him walk.”
“And what’s your plan, exactly? Always supposing you track him down, with all this genius expertise at your disposal?”
This time he opened his eyes. “I thought it was my job to remind you they’re a bunch of useless twats,” he said. “Not the other way round.”
“They’re not entirely useless,” she said, but even to her own ears, her protest sounded insincere.
Lamb took the cigarette from his mouth and examined it as if it were an alien artefact. Then he flicked it at his wastepaper basket, scoring a direct hit. “Last time Frank Harkness showed his face, he sent one of his sock puppets round with a gun.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
“He’s got the blood of my joes on his hands.”
“Funny how they’re joes once they’re dead.”
A thin spiral of smoke rose from the wastepaper basket.
Lamb said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s just got the blood of more useless twats on his hands. But they were my useless twats. And I hadn’t necessarily finished with them.”
“You’ll get River killed.”
“Standish, I could chain him to his desk and lock the door. You really think that’ll prevent him going after Harkness?”
She wasn’t in the mood to admit he might be right about anything. Nor inclined to warn him that he’d set his bin on fire: if nothing else, burning Slough House to the ground would see the paperwork off.
Speaking of which, the papers she’d set down for him began their inevitable slide floorwards. Catherine caught them before they became airborne; automatically tapped them into alignment before tucking them under her arm. It was as if the role she’d been cast into was an iron maiden, retaining its shape even as she was screaming for release. And her mind flipped forward a few hours: the journey home, the bottle of wine. Its glass body smooth to the touch. All those memories, waiting to be released.
He was watching her, his lip curled in its automatic sneer. What was it like being him? Pointless even to speculate. “You’ve been seething for a while,” he said. “You ever going to actually combust, or just keep us all in suspense?”
She didn’t know what he was talking about, or at least, that was the impression she tried to convey. “You need to sign these,” she said. “Now would be good. And with your actual name this time. Nobody was amused by the last lot.”
“I’m surprised they even read them.” Lamb reached out a fat palm, and she handed him the forms. While he signed them with a blue Biro—its plastic casing bitten through: he destroyed a dozen a week, not using more than one for actual writing—he continued scrutinising her. “Cartwright hasn’t done any work for longer than I can remember,” he said, “and the fact that you keep typing up whatever garbage he hands you doesn’t make them official reports. You know and I know and Cartwright knows that ninety-nine percent of what we do here is to provide practice for Regent’s Park’s document shredders, but that won’t help him if I call him upstairs now and can him on the spot.”
“Do you plan to do that?”
“Not today. Today he’ll actually be putting some effort in, which will make such an almighty change I’m half expecting spring to break out, with fucking butterflies and stuff. He’s probably tap dancing with cartoon rabbits as I speak.”
“You seriously think River’ll be able to trace him?”
“I seriously think if we dangle River from a piece of string, Harkness will show his face sooner or later, which is the only reason for keeping Cartwright in place I can think of offhand. That doesn’t involve using him as a toilet brush. What’s Guy want leave for?”
So much, thought Catherine, for his disregard for what he was signing.
She said, “I can only imagine she needs respite from the unrelenting comedy.”
“Yeah, I thought it was probably that. Does she know I can dock her a week’s pay for taking leave without proper notice?”
“You really can’t.”
“Yeah, but does she know that?”
Catherine shrugged. She’d fought enough of Louisa’s battles for one day. She held her hand out and Lamb surrendered the forms. All she needed do now was despatch them, wait a day, then begin the process again, with nothing achieved in the meantime. Well, Louisa would get her leave, she supposed. On her way to the door a thought struck her. “Wicinski. Lech. Should he even have access to the internet?”
“He’s already Kevin Spaceyed his career,” Lamb said. “If he wants to go for the full Rolf Harris, he’s a braver man than me.”
He magicked a cigarette from somewhere, plugged it between his lips, then bent and retrieved a smouldering twist of paper from the bin. He blew on it until it caught flame, and used it to light the cigarette. Then he wafted it to ash, dumped it back in the bin, and poured the dregs of a cup of tea on the budding bonfire. A thick plume of smoke filled the room.
“They’re not all joes,” he said.
“. . . Who aren’t?”
But Lamb had closed his eyes, and didn’t answer.
Before returning to her room Catherine went downstairs and wordlessly dropped the holiday request on Louisa’s desk. On her way back she passed Ho leaving the kitchen: a slice of pizza hung from his mouth, and he was carrying a plastic bottle in his left hand, his right still bandaged up. He said nothing. He was probably working out how best to trace Harkness’s car, she surmised, though he was in fact thinking about mousetraps, how there was a thing about if you invented a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to your door. Frankly, though, Roddy couldn’t see how mousetraps could be bettered, the one he’d found in Wicinski’s bin being an unimprovably effective way of silencing the bastards. Not to mention damaging fingers. How was he supposed to navigate the keyboard jungle with his hand taped up? It was like attaching bells to a ninja. You were robbing him of his greatest strength.