One of those moments when the floor drops away. Louisa had once seen a photograph of a construction site in China; a huge development that razed a neighbourhood, though one homeowner had refused to sell up. So his house remained intact while all around was dug away, leaving it perched on a pillar of earth a hundred metres high. She remembered looking at the picture and recognizing it: no ground beneath your feet, save the space you occupied. Min had felt the same. It wasn’t so different now, she supposed, except that she’d got used to it.
She didn’t want more coffee; would be buzzing the rest of the morning. Gave her something to do with her hands, though.
“Clare—”
“I need your help.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Lucas. Our son. Min’s and mine.”
“Lucas? What’s he done?”
“He’s disappeared,” said Clare. “I’ve no idea where he is.”
A rusting green skip sat parallel to a length of wooden fencing, which looked twenty minutes’ effort away from being in the skip itself. This side of the fence was a row of garages, some with their doors rolled up, revealing workshop interiors, and overalled men tinkering with engines. From behind the thinly wooded area to Lech’s left came the sound of traffic, but here, in this low-key industrial estate, the cars were mostly sick or injured. This was where you’d come if you were rebuilding an American classic, or had recently flogged a car to death and were disposing of the body. A metal sign read powder coating fabrication shot blasting and it briefly amused him that, while he understood what each word meant, he had no clue what they signified.
Life was coding; was hidden messages. You knew what was going on or you didn’t.
Lech had parked on a grassy verge, and was walking through the estate called Northwick Park. A memory of mist hung in the air, and the ground was slick with leaves and the occasional fat black slug. Thrusting his hands into his pockets, he skidded briefly, then righted himself. A plane passed overhead, flying low; a two-seater, by the look. He didn’t know aeroplanes. His grandfathers, who’d both lived here, wouldn’t have recognised it either. But they’d have known what kept it in the air, and have held their breath at the memory of flight.
There were brick huts with corrugated roofs; some ivy-trailed, some barred up. Originally a hospital for American troops, the estate became a refuge for displaced Polish people in the war’s aftermath, and looking at it now in the bleak winter light, he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom.
But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind. Both his grandfathers had left Poland before the occupation; had served in the RAF, one a pilot, the other ground staff. They’d fought the war under foreign skies, but in time those skies had come to be their own. Maybe the skies hadn’t felt the same way. The war over, the men had chosen to stay and raise their families among fellow Poles, other ex-servicemen, until Northwick Park shut down in 1970. Both sets of grandparents, by this time in-laws, went to live on the south coast then, and family holidays for young Lech in the eighties had been seaside jaunts: ice cream and sandcastles. Poland was a name on the news, it was footage of unrest and cold-looking buildings, and he’d bridled against his ethnic heritage, hating the way it marked him as different, and had insisted on Alec, wouldn’t answer to Lech. His parents hadn’t fought him on the issue. Families from that end of Europe had learned to play the waiting game centuries ago. Give it time, give it time.
He had dark curly hair, and by five of an evening, looked like he’d gone two days without a shave. His genetic inheritance, he supposed. That, and a bone-bred pessimism: if you expected things to get worse, history would prove you right. And then, of course, there was the expectation of betrayal. Which was working out fine too.
A few short weeks back Lech had been an analyst on the Hub, Regent’s Park’s centre of activity, where the brightest and best were called to arms. He’d had all the usual training, but had never been out in the field. The nearest he’d come to an op was sitting in the back of the van while someone else kicked a door down. Afterwards, he’d be brought out to look at what had been found behind the door, or to offer a plausible reason as to why there was nothing behind the door after all, or occasionally to point at a different door and explain that that was the one he’d meant. This happened often enough that it had its own column in the budget. Analysis suited Lech; it gave him an excuse to brood. Not that he was sullen; he just liked to work things out, discover what was ticking. Plagued by insomnia, he’d pound the city streets, something he likened to taking London’s back off and exploring the workings. His fiancée, Sara, was used to waking in the dark to his absence, and would tell him, not entirely joking, that this would obviously cease once they were married. That was what life was: you worked, sometimes you couldn’t sleep, and your future was already being shaped. Until something crashed into it, and knocked everything out of true. A phrase that brought to mind Jackson Lamb.
Lamb was the head of Slough House, though you’d be forgiven for thinking him the belly. And yet, when Lech replayed their first encounter, he wondered how much to trust that initial judgement. Lamb was gross, sure—corpulent—though somehow not as obese as he appeared, as if the impression he gave of spilling out of his chair even while motionless was engineered. But when Lech had blinked and looked again, he hadn’t been able to tell where that thought had come from. Lamb was fat, that was all, and had a cruel look pasted across his damp-looking features. His hair, what was left of it, might have a blond tint if it were clean; his toenails might not be poking through his socks if he cut them. This last observation was impossible to avoid, Lamb’s shoeless feet being on his desk. He still wore his coat, however. The thought processes of a man who’d relax with his shoes off, his coat on, were foreign territory to Lech. Then again, the thought processes of Jackson Lamb, as revealed by their subsequent conversation, were probably terra incognita to the psychiatric profession as a whole.
“Oh, goodie fucking gumdrops,” he said, when Lech stepped into his room. “Fresh meat.”
“I was assigned here temporarily,” Lech said. “While some HR issues are sorted out.”
“HR issues,” Lamb repeated slowly. “Not heard it called that before.” He removed his feet from the desk with surprising agility, produced a cigarette out of nowhere, lit it, farted, reached into his desk drawer, removed a bottle of whisky he slammed onto his desk top, farted again, and said, “I don’t have any bad habits myself, so maybe I’m over-censorious. But seriously, kiddy porn?” He unscrewed the cap on the bottle. “You’re the six-foot Pole I wouldn’t touch that with.”
Lech Wicinski, who was five-eleven, felt his teeth clench. “I was told all details were sealed. You’re not supposed to know that.”
“Yeah, a list of things I’m not supposed to know but do would be nearly as long as the list of things I know but couldn’t give a toss about. Currently, you’re at the top of both. And a thing you should know about me is, I hate lists.” He blew out smoke Lech hadn’t noticed him inhaling. “The ones I don’t screw up and throw away, I feed into the shredder.”
Lech glanced around. The further reaches of the office were cloaked in shadow, but he couldn’t make out anything that might be a shredder.
“Yeah, okay, smartarse. I improvise.” There was a dirty glass among the rubbish on his desk, and Lamb poured whisky into it; what might have been a triple, if your idea of a single was a double. “Says on the paperwork you go by Alec. But your signature reads Lech. I’m guessing you reckoned a little ethnicity wouldn’t do any harm at this stage of your career, eh? This stage being the bit right before it runs off a cliff.”