Outside, London sulks. If cities sleep with their lights on, afraid of the dark, they treat the sunlit hours with suspicion, and cast shadows where they can. Many of these fall on Slough House, where they’re welcomed as natural camouflage, and having made their way through the dirty windows form a kind of ground mist on the stairs, through which Roddy Ho wades now, fizzing and bubbling with the news he bears, all the way up to Jackson Lamb’s room. It’s late morning, and the day is one of smudged margins and ill-defined activities, one thing bleeding into another, the way memories spawn forebodings, but Lamb’s stillness is a constant at least, and he remains utterly motionless, barely breathing even, as Roddy explains that all of them, not just Wicinski, but all of them—Roddy Ho, Catherine Standish, River Cartwright, Shirley Dander, Louisa Guy, Jackson Lamb, and all their dead colleagues—all have been wiped from Regent’s Park’s memory, their histories erased, their pasts blanked out, their Service records expunged. By the time Ho stops talking Catherine is a mute angel at his shoulder, and the others are crowding the landing. They have all heard enough to grasp the gist: their pasts, good and bad, have been cancelled, it seems. What this portends for their future is unclear, and they wait to hear Jackson Lamb’s verdict.
But Lamb, in his monstrous calm, says nothing.
Acknowledgments
My thanks, as ever, to the teams at John Murray in London—especially Mark Richards, Yassine Belkacemi, Jess Kim, and Becky Walsh—and at Soho Press in New York—especially Bronwen Hruska, Juliet Grames, Paul Oliver and Rachel Kowal—for all the hard work and effort they put into making me look good.
And to Juliet Burton and Micheline Steinberg for taking care of business.
And to my mother, my siblings, their attachments and their offspring for being there.
One of the great perks of this job is the opportunity it affords to spend time in the company of writers. Allowing one to stand for many, I’m grateful to Lucy Atkins for support, advice, friendship and innumerable cups of coffee here in Oxford. Happily, I met with similar warmth and friendship far from home while working on this book, from those involved in translating, publishing and selling the slow horses abroad, or whose paths simply crossed mine along the way. So many thanks to, among others, Anik Lapointe, Anna von Planta, Charles Cumming, Claudia Cucchiarato, Daniela Seyfarth, Darrel Bristow-Bovey, Eugene Ashton, Jonathan Ball, Kate Turkington, Peter Cunningham, Philipp Keel, Ruth Geiger, Stefanie Schäfer, Stephanie Uhlig, and especially Nkanyezi Tshabalala, for making travel a pleasure, when I so often fear it will be an ordeal.
Mostly, though, my debts fall closer to home. Joe country would be nowhere without joes; Joe Country would not have been written without Jo. Thanks are not enough.
—MH
Oxford, February 2019