Roderick Ho was lying on a makeshift bed of clothes and cushions and wondering why his ear was bleeding. Broken glass, it turned out. Maybe he should have swept that broken bottle up before settling down to sleep. But while reaching for a box of tissues, which for strategic reasons he kept handy at night, he felt the air shift, or a noise being stifled; something, anyway, to indicate a foreign presence on the stairs. Lamb. But why would Lamb be on the stairs when he was already in Ho’s bedroom?
Ho was trying to remember what else he had in his fridge worth stealing when a dark figure entered the room, heading towards him in a crouch, the way Roddy himself moved in his ninja dreams.
He felt like a Pokémon character, about to be bagged and boxed.
‘Kim?’ he said hopefully.
A light went on. The room went white. The figure turned and faced the nightmare in the doorway: Jackson Lamb, teeth bared, naked belly pendulous over a grubby pair of boxers.
And a plastic blue bottle in his hands.
‘Evening, sunshine,’ said Lamb, and squirted bleach in the stranger’s face.
The man dropped whatever he was holding, and screamed.
Lamb swung a hammer-like fist into his chest.
The man staggered backwards, tripped over Roddy’s still-recumbent form, and fell through the big glass window onto the street below.
When Shirley punched the glass a figure crashed to the pavement, as if she’d won a prize at a fairground attraction. She tried to turn, but her rolled-up jacket snagged on the broken window, and before she could tug free a car pulled up. Glass was falling like slivers of frozen rain, and through the large jagged hole it had left the bull-like figure of Lamb appeared, apparently naked, unless she was having a mental episode.
Lamb?
At Ho’s?
Naked?
… Whatever.
She wrenched loose, aware she was ruining her jacket, and turned in time to see a black shape being hauled into a silver car. At the same time someone leaned through the passenger window and pointed something at her. While she dropped behind the nearest car bits of wall flaked from Roddy Ho’s house, and chips flew from his door. Shirley could feel the pavement against her cheek, smell the filth in the gutter. A car door slammed, and the vehicle moved. When she risked a look she saw something bounce off its roof – a blue plastic bottle? – but it was gone a moment later, a diminishing wraith amid the fuzzy glows that hang around lamp posts at two in the morning. She shook her head and rubbed her cheek, feeling the latter beginning to swell. Another chunk of glass fell loose, and shattered on the ground.
When she looked up, Lamb was scowling down at her, his bare chest and shoulders carpeted with greying curls.
‘Ten out of ten for attendance,’ he said. ‘But nul fucking points for getting the job done.’
Then he withdrew, leaving shards of the night still falling from the sky.
6
IT BEGAN TO RAIN that morning, about the time London was coming to life; a series of showers that rolled across the city, reminding its inhabitants that summer wasn’t a promise, merely an occasional treat. The skies loomed grey and heavy, and buildings sulked beneath their weight. On the streets traffic played its wet-weather soundtrack, a symphony of hissing and slurring against a whispered backbeat of wipers, and in Slough House there was a muted atmosphere, because rain on office windows is a sad and lonely affair, and life in Slough House was hardly a barrel of laughs to begin with.
The car that pulled up on Aldersgate Street was black, as befitted the general mood, and sleekly rejoined the flow as soon as Diana Taverner alighted. She ignored its departure, as she had its driver throughout their shared journey; stared instead at Slough House’s front door, which was also black, or had been – was now faded, and almost green around the edges – and shook her head. Any lesser reason than planting a bomb under Jackson Lamb’s backside, she’d not come within a mile of the place. Up above, on a second-storey window, the words W. W. Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths were etched in gold paint; a long-forgotten cover story or simply the relic of a previous tenant: she had no idea which. Only now, as she stood before the door, did she remember that this was itself a cover; a barricade masquerading as an entrance. She imagined its key tucked away in a drawer of Lamb’s desk; imagined, too, that if the door were ever opened, the building would crumble like a betrayed network. Her collar was up, but she had no umbrella. How long was she supposed to stand here, waiting for Slough House to welcome her in? But that wouldn’t happen, and there was, she now recalled, an alleyway to her right, a door set into a wall, a backyard. These she found with no difficulty. The building’s back door, though, required effort, as if it preferred that she remain out in the rain. When it gave way at last, opening onto a staircase, it did so with a squeal like a distressed cat. The staircase smelled of mould and dashed hopes. One of its bulbs had died, and the other buzzed a bluebottle serenade.
Someone appeared on the next landing, a short broad figure that might have been of either sex. It seemed about to challenge her, but then, evidently realising who she was, retreated back into its room. Which displayed good sense, Lady Di conceded, but didn’t inspire confidence as to the security of the premises.
Onwards and upwards. The staircase grew no cleaner or brighter, and all the office doors were closed.
On the top floor she paused. She knew, though the available doors offered no clues, which would lead to Jackson Lamb: its lower panels were punctuated by toe-cap impressions, the pedal signature of one whose preferred method of entry is the abrupt. She should knock, but wouldn’t. But before her hand had reached the handle, a gravelly tone sounded from inside: ‘Well don’t just stand there.’
She opened the door, and went in.
It was a dark room, cramped, its only window veiled by a venetian blind. A lamp sat on a wobbly-looking pile of thick books, and the shadows it cast didn’t reach the far corners, as if whatever lay back there was best left undisturbed. A print in a smeary-glassed frame was of a bridge somewhere in Europe, while a cork noticeboard, hung lopsidedly, was mostly buried beneath a collage of brittle yellow clippings. And in the air, beneath the taint of stale tobacco smoke, a tang of something older, something furious and unreconciled. Though that was probably just her imagination.
With no great hopes of it working, she flicked the light switch next to the door. All this triggered was a grunt from Jackson Lamb.
So she removed her coat and shook it. Droplets scattered, little rain dances picked up briefly by lamplight. There was a hook on the door, and she hung the coat there, then ran both hands through her shoulder-length curls. She turned to face Lamb. ‘I’m wet,’ she said.
‘Nice to see you too,’ said Lamb. ‘But let’s not get carried away.’ He eyed her critically. ‘You look like all your birthdays came at once.’
‘I look happy to you?’
‘No, old. Am I the only one round here speaks English?’
She didn’t smile. ‘Old, how kind. And busy too, what with the country being on high alert. Yet here I am, slogging across London to discover precisely what manner of shit you’re pulling now. Roderick Ho? I thought you kept him in a cage, like a gerbil.’
Lamb gave it some thought. ‘That’s pitching it a little high. He’s more like a verruca. You’re never entirely sure how you ended up with one, but they’re a bugger to get rid of.’
‘But we both know he can make a line of computer code sit up and beg. So what the fuck’s he been up to, Jackson? There was a knife at the scene, bullet holes in his walls, and broken glass all over his neighbourhood. And the Met were less than impressed with your witness statement. A domestic?’