And it had been years since she’d enjoyed this freedom allowed most everyone else. The apparently casual nature of the transaction thrilled her. You chose your bottle and swiped your card. People did it every day, a lot of them more than once. She’d done it herself times out of mind, in the olden golden days. She’d been at Regent’s Park then, a functioning alcoholic, following which, for a rather shorter period, she’d been a dysfunctional alcoholic, and then—after drying out in a Service sanatorium, courtesy of her boss, Charles Partner—a recovering alcoholic. And then that same boss, First Desk at Regent’s Park, had blown his brains out in his bathtub, or that had been the story at the time.
But like a wine stain the story wouldn’t go away, and every time she scrubbed it it re-emerged, its pattern different. Partner, it turned out, had been a traitor. The man who’d led the Service, and pulled Catherine back from her downward spiral, had spent a decade committing treason. This, it felt to her now, had been both a shock and a confirmation of something she’d always known: that all joes go to the well in the end. Charles’s well, it seemed, had been full of money . . . What had been slower to come to light was this: that Partner had kept her on because of what, not who, she was. She’d thought herself his dedicated helper; the ever-efficient PA whose own life might have been a mess, but who ensured that his ran along straight lines. But it turned out that her chief qualification, in his eyes, was that she was a drunk, and could be trusted not to see what was happening in front of her. Every secret he ever sold had passed across her desk, her fingerprints smeared on all his crimes. Had he faced trial, she’d have been standing next to him. Her fledgling sobriety would have taken wing at that.
But he had killed himself, and here she was in Slough House, and while the other inhabitants saw it as torture, for Catherine it was a penance. Being an alcoholic was part of her make-up, its seed inside her since her teens, but she hated having been a fool. Even mindless drudgery was better than running that risk again. Even Jackson Lamb was better—his endless crudity, his animal habits.
And then the stain changed shape once more.
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It had been Diana Taverner who had told her: There’s something you really ought to know. You had to hand it to Lady Di; when it came to breaking news, she could leave the jagged part sticking in your back. Did you really think he’d killed himself? Surely you’ve worked it out by now. . .
And of course she had; she’d known for years. Known, but never allowed the knowledge to harden and take root.
Jackson Lamb had killed Charles Partner. He’d been Partner’s joe, back in the day; Partner his handler, his mentor, the maypole around which he’d danced. But he’d killed him; had shot him in his bathtub, where Catherine had found him. So there was no trial, no trauma in the tabloids; just another Service suicide, a few mumbled words, and a trip to The Spooks’ Graveyard. As payment or punishment, she didn’t know which, Lamb had been given Slough House, and had been squatting here since, a grim overlord to the Service’s washouts; those whose careers might not have peaked with a bullet in a bathtub, but had reached a full stop nevertheless. And here she was too, every day; delivering reports to Lamb’s desk, making him cups of tea; sitting with him in the dark hours sometimes, for reasons she’d never understood. She did not like him, but was bonded to him: her bogeyman and occasional saviour; and now, it turned out, the man who’d murdered her former boss. How was she supposed to feel about that?
She was supposed to keep on keeping on. She was supposed to do that one day at a time.
Catherine began going through the reports, River’s and Louisa’s. She’d tidy them up, print them out, staple them neatly, slide them into a folder. Sooner or later they’d wind up in Regent’s Park, where for all she knew, they’d be shredded unread. Just one of the many things outside her control.
But later, on her way home, she’d buy a bottle.
If you like school you’ll love work, the old line went. And it was true, thought Shirley Dander, that the one was good training for the other. If you could handle the tantrums, the malice and the potty rage in the office, education would be a breeze.
Case in point. J.K. Coe.
Coe was three-quarters psycho, if you wanted Shirley’s opinion. And documented fact bore her out: he’d deliberately killed at least two people, not counting whatever he did in his free time; one of them (unarmed, manacled) here in the building; the other an admittedly harder target: a bad actor, spraying bullets from an automatic weapon. Coe had walked up and put a bullet in his head at point blank range. Even with a handgun, there’d have been a mess. With a police-issue rifle, it was modern art. Take those things, then factor in the time he’d held a blade to Shirley’s own throat, and she wasn’t sure why she was downgrading him to three-quarter status, unless it was professional courtesy. Most offices, a record like that, you’d be out on your arse by lunchtime. Most schools too, she hoped.
But this was Slough House, where Jackson Lamb made the rules, and provided you didn’t hide his lunch or steal his whisky, you could get away with murder. There’d been at least four corpses within these walls she knew of, and she didn’t work weekends. And this was the Service’s backwater, where they sent you when they wanted to bore you to death. God knew what went on in Regent’s Park.
So anyway, J.K. Coe and Shirley had history, which should have made it easier to have a conversation with him. As it was, it made it simple enough to find him—he was in his office—but after that it was uphill all the way.
“Quiet round here.”
If nothing else, his lack of response proved her point.
“Where’s River?”
He shrugged.
When he’d first turned up, Coe had had the irritating habit of playing an invisible keyboard. He’d be at his desk, or any flat surface, and his fingers would be tapping away, spelling out whatever he was hearing in his head, which was usually piped there by iPod, but she suspected might echo round his brain regardless. He didn’t do that so much anymore. But he was still pretty vacant; a charisma vacuum. Didn’t mean he didn’t pick up information, though.
“Spoken to the new guy?”
Coe shook his head.
“You heard what he’s in for?”
They always made it sound like a conviction, because that’s what it was. Something that got you hard time.
But Coe shook his head again.
Shirley shook hers too: waste of fucking breath. Coe made a shoehorn look chatty. It wasn’t like she wanted to be best buddies or anything. But they’d taken down bad guys together, and that should at least be worth idle conversation.
Pickings elsewhere were slim. River wasn’t around, they’d established that; Louisa had made it clear she didn’t want to talk; Ho was Ho; and Catherine had been strange lately, not given to chat. Sometimes, new people had that effect. They had you remembering a time when you still had hope. When you thought some mistake had been made, which might yet be rectified; that, given time, you could haul yourself out of the pit, to general applause.
After a while, you realised that all that would happen was you’d be thrown back in again.
Shirley said, “Good talk. Let’s do this again,” and left Coe to it.
Back in her own room, she had another look at her latest assignment. Lamb had had an idea not long ago; this particular gem being that your average bomb-chucking numpty (his words) was unlikely to observe the social niceties.
“This might just be me being harsh, but if your mission in life is to indiscriminately massacre your neighbours, you’re probably not that bothered about paying your TV licence. Right?”