For obvious reasons. For obvious fucking reasons, Sara. Because it’s child porn, Jesus Christ—even the words rip a hole in your guts.
And besides, he thought. And besides. You know me. You love me. How can you possibly believe that I’d—
Richard Pynne, he thought. As soon as he’d left the pub, Pynne must have been on the phone. Let’s both save our breath and you get back on home to, remind me. Sara?
Which was what he’d done, got back on home, after a long walk through the late-night, ghost-blown streets. A day in Slough House, with its damp dissatisfactions, needed flushing out of the system.
And then he was back at the flat, to find Sara in furious tears.
Most of their conversation was thankfully a blur, a mishmash of italicised outrage and grief. He hadn’t packed a bag; hadn’t been offered the chance. But he’d walked out at last, through a door that had been standing open half an hour, its cold warning blowing right through him. And then the streets again, and the weight of his angry thoughts, and nowhere to go except here. Slough House.
This time of night, it ached like a rheumatic joint. Lech could hear its floorboards wheeze, its pipework bang. It was a warehouse of memories, all of them bad, and now it was having dreams. And he was caught up in them; every time sleep came near, one limb or other thrashed out in alarm. It was as if he were standing on a flight of stairs, his balance fragile as an egg. He mustn’t fall. But staying where he was filled him with terror.
Weak light, lamppost light, swam through the window. On the street something clattered to the ground. On the staircase, a shadow broke loose and entered the room.
Lamb.
He moved without a sound, though that was hard to fathom given his bulk, and for a while hovered in front of the desk, his gaze unblinking, unreadable, until at last he shook his head and reached for the landline. He lifted the receiver, punched some numbers, waited a while, then spoke. “Yeah, customer for you.” He held the receiver out to Lech. “Samaritans,” he said. “Quid a minute in the kitty when you’re done.”
Lech stared.
Lamb shrugged. “Or just leave it in your will. Up to you.”
He dropped the receiver, left the room and headed upstairs.
Lech looked at the phone, still live, still softly crooning.
Then he ripped it from its socket and hurled it at the wall.
It was snowing by the time Louisa crossed into Wales.
She had set out early; had virtuously breakfasted on muesli and apricots, and packed a bag with nut-based energy bars, carrots, and a pack of what claimed to be yoghurt-covered raisins, though could easily be mouse-shit past its best. All of which was more than enough to counterbalance the pair of breakfast McMuffins she picked up later. Roddy Ho had traced Lucas Harper’s Fitbit to Pegsea; the map coordinates Emma had pinged her would match, she guessed, Bryn-y-Wharg, or that was how she’d heard it over the phone—the cottage Clare and her boys used twice a year. That being established, she might have easily spent the rest of her sudden holiday hunkered in her flat, working her way through The Good Wife. But a fuse had been lit. On the motorway, racing into a cold front, she’d been keenly aware of not being at her desk, compiling a list of suspect library users; of not attending one of Lamb’s morale-shafting meetings. Slough House cast a long shadow, but not that long. Here, the sky was a blank page. Traffic was steady, the radio crackly with weather warnings.
If Lucas wasn’t at the cottage, she’d get an update on the Fitbit’s whereabouts via Emma—might cost her another spa day, but now that Emma had established comms with Roddy Ho, she might as well keep ploughing that furrow. Last thing Louisa wanted was to owe Roddy a favour herself, especially one involving the name Harper. All pennies dropped eventually, even down wells like Roddy Ho, and she didn’t want Min’s ghost raised among the slow horses. Questions asked. Memories stirred.
Not that there was a shortage of ghosts round Slough House.
A little while back, River had thought he’d received a call from Sidonie Baker. This was fine, as far as it went; Sid had been a slow horse, and what was wrong with a former colleague getting in touch? Except that Sid Baker was dead: shot in the head, carted away in an ambulance, and that was the last anyone saw of her. She’d been a slow horse, yes—except, somehow, not quite; there was a rumour she’d been planted in Slough House; a rumour which, if true, made her Park, and if she were Park, she might not be dead after all. Because Park couldn’t bring you back to life, but it could cover up the fact that you’d never actually died, and what it really really liked to bury was the notion that a mistake had been made, ever. Having an agent go down on a London street with a bullet in her head definitely fell under “mistake.” So when no record of Sid Baker ever having been admitted to that hospital, in that ambulance, came to light: well, that could mean she’d been whisked away, couldn’t it, River wanted to know. Could mean she was still among the living.
Or it could just mean that the Park had found something better to do with the body: for instance, not have it appear in a headline, anywhere, ever.
And what Louisa thought about it was, she didn’t know. Probably Sid was dead, and it was best to work on that assumption, because otherwise you’d jump every time the phone rang, or spend your life looking through windows. She hadn’t said as much to River, though perhaps should have done. Get your mourning over. Couldn’t say it now. River had been in a turmoil even before his grandfather died, and he was unlikely to have calmed down now Frank had shown his face again.
But that was in a different country. Because here she was, in Wales.
The snow worsened, and the last twenty minutes of her journey took almost an hour. SatNav was a stranger here, and led her up a few false roads, but in the end there it was, Bryn-y-Wharg, a whitewashed cottage at the top end of a steep lane perpendicular to the main road through the village. Similar properties lined the lane, down one side of which a row of cars was parked, iced with snow an inch thick. It was early afternoon but streetlamps were already lit, flakes swirling round them like a plague of moths. The cottage itself was dark, its windows blank. Louisa parked opposite, where the lane widened before angling around a church wall, and sat reconsidering the day’s decisions. She’d kitted up welclass="underline" she had walking boots, and the ski jacket she’d bought before Christmas, when a previous snowfall had blanketed the capital. Even so, she was in new territory, looking for someone she wouldn’t recognise, and had nowhere to stay. But this was the choice she’d made. Getting out from under Jackson Lamb’s meaty presence; breathing clean cold air, and enjoying being a stranger. Being somewhere new gave you licence. You could reinvent yourself, adjust to a different reality.
And it wasn’t like she’d made a life-or-death choice or anything.
Snow drifted across her windscreen. The temperature in the car was rapidly falling.
Louisa grabbed her jacket from the passenger seat, struggled into it, and stepped out into the world.
Secrecy was the Service’s watchword, but leaking like a sieve was what it did best. When the leaked material was classified the leaker was tracked down and strung up, or so the Handbook required, but gossip was and always had been fair game—who’d lunched who, and where, and how often—and Di Taverner knew better than to attempt to fix that. So when she had a meeting off the books she tagged it Personal Time in her calendar, happy for her staff to weave erotic legends around her absence, just so long as that kept them from any darker truth.