She had to assume he had a gun, and with that thought dropped to one knee, and groped around for rustic weaponry. No club-shaped sticks appeared. No handy brick-sized rocks. A few loose stones was all. She took them anyway, thinking David and Goliath. This jacket, white and puffy: would it stop a bullet? Wouldn’t even slow one down. But best not to think about that.
One stone, smooth and brilliant, she kept in her hand. The others she slipped into her pocket.
When she reached the track she fell to a crouch. The path stretched for a hundred yards before veering left; in the other direction, the way they’d come last night, the sightline was no more than twenty. The ground was rough and pitted, and there was an odd stretch, tramline straight, three inches wide, where snow lay. An oddity caused by the shape of the overhead trees, she assumed, not wanting to pay attention to quirks of nature; wanting to focus on that rustling sound which came again now, to her left. Her grip on the stones tightened. Whoever was approaching didn’t sound loud enough to be a person, which meant they were a person trying not to sound loud; a person who knew where to place their feet. She could all but see him, fading into sight like a professional, his gun in a two-fisted grip. Her jacket might as well have had gold and red circles imprinted upon it. And then the fox came trotting round the corner, its movement a bare rustle in the morning light; the scrappy bundle in its mouth a living thing until two minutes ago. It barely glanced at her as it passed. Some dangers were more noteworthy than others.
Louisa breathed out, shook her head, and went back to rejoin Emma.
The voices belonged to a man, a woman. The woman was leaning against a tree and the man was up in her face. It didn’t look pretty but that was okay: he wasn’t looking for pretty, or its opposite. Neither of these people mattered. They were, though, in his way.
He made to head past, but the man spoke.
“What you looking at?”
Lars raised his hands in polite surrender. “Just out for a walk.”
“Yeah, well walk somewhere else, all right?”
Lars looked at the woman. She didn’t seem surprised at her companion’s belligerence. Wearied by it, if anything.
He said, “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my friends? Two women? One wearing white, the other black? And a teenage boy?”
The man stepped away from the woman. “Am I here spying on women? Is that what you’re asking?”
“It wasn’t what I was asking, no.”
“Just as bloody well, right? Because I’m minding my own business, okay? Which is what you should be doing too.”
“Yes, fine. Okay.”
“You foreign? You sound foreign?”
“Well,” said Lars. “I’m not from round here. That’s true.”
“Maybe that’s why you don’t speak fucking English. Because I told you to piss off out of it, but you’re still here. So what you plan to do about that?”
“I plan to piss off now,” said Lars.
“Glad to hear it.”
“And I’m sorry about your nose.”
“What you mean, you’re sorry about my—”
Lars broke the man’s nose with as little movement as possible, though the man more than made up for Lars’s economy by going into a jig, accompanying himself with a high-pitched squeal. Throughout all this, the woman, to her credit, gave only a single yelp, which Lars decided to interpret as appreciative. He beckoned her closer. “Make sure he keeps his head up,” he said. “Here.” He guided the woman’s hand so it was tilting the man’s chin. “Like this, okay?”
She nodded, mutely.
“And tell him not to be such a dick, yes?”
Though it was possible the man had figured this out for himself in the last ten seconds.
He walked on down the path and then stopped and turned. The woman had let go of her boyfriend’s head and was holding her mobile in trembling hands. He sighed, went back, took it from her and hurled it into the woods. Then he set off back down the track at a steady jog, alert for the two women, the boy, and anywhere they might be hiding.
Someone had hung an air-freshener above the frosted window, which had been painted shut years ago. Catherine Standish, he expected. Hard to know whether to admire her persistence, or scorn the futility of her gestures. Presumably she was responsible, too, for the bottle of bleach next to the toilet, and the clean handtowel on a rail by the sink. But there’d been nothing she could do about the lime-scale scarring on the sink itself, and the mirror screwed into the wall was a battle-flecked mess. He was coming to recognise the process: you could resist all you liked its mildewed embrace, but Slough House would eat your best efforts in the end, its inch-by-inch victory as metronomic as the dripping of that tap.
Lech looked in the mirror. He’d barely use this to shave in, its surface was so pitted and green. But even here, his new wounds lit the room; the letters rearranging themselves in the absurd logic of reflection, but still legible, unmistakable; trumpeting their meaning the way sense jumps out of those wordsearch puzzles. PAEDO. He might as well be hoisting a flag.
He thought: How could he walk into a casualty ward, a doctor’s surgery, and ask for help with this? It’s not true. It isn’t true. He’d be begging for belief, in exactly the same way he’d be begging for belief if it were true. Didn’t doctors report stuff like this to the police? Jesus . . . His hands were fists. Even he wanted to batter his face into fragments. As if, by smashing his reflection, he could destroy what was written there; erase the lie destroying his life.
And it hurt. It hurt like hell.
From his pocket, he retrieved the razor Lamb had given him. Silver handle, with a fleur-de-lys design. Something from another age: like pocket watches and fountain pens. Lamb himself clearly didn’t use it: his jaw was a stubbly mess. But he kept a tool like this: what did that tell you? Having asked the question, Lech supplied the obvious answer. Who fucking cared? This wasn’t about Lamb.
The letters glowed scarlet in the mirror. They were radioactive. Toxic spill.
He opened the razor, and stared at the blade.
Maybe if he just never shaved again. His beard was thick and, left untamed, would cover his face like knotweed. It would drive people crazy, trying to read the letters through the undergrowth . . . But if he chose that path, he might as well pick out a bus shelter to bed down in. Stuff his possessions into carrier bags.
Already his throat was crawling with stubble. But it was such a puny defence, wasn’t it? A blade like this, you could slice your way through it, stubble and throat, adam’s apple, in seconds.
Give Lamb this: the fat bastard knew what he was talking about.
In case a third way occurs to you. Other than stitches or surgery.
He could not live with this word carved into his cheeks.
Lech lifted the razor and did what he had to do.
The thing about someone else’s car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.
That went double when it was Ho’s.
Shirley was glad to be alone after a day and a half in company. J.K. Coe was okay, because he could go hours without speaking, and was interesting on account of being on the freaky side. River Cartwright, though, was seven blends of vanilla. When she was bored at work, which was most of the time, she replayed Bourne or Bond scenes, with Cartwright bringing his own special talents to the role. Like the bit in The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bond skis over a cliff, and drops for what feels like forever before his Union-Jack parachute opens. Cartwright would drop forever too, before his lunch came flying out of a wrongly-packed bag. Bit cruel, but helclass="underline" it was the Secret Service, not Secret Santa. Lamb had explained that when making them work late Christmas Eve.