So when dawn reaches Slough House – a scruffy building whose ground floor is divided between an ailing Chinese restaurant and a desperate newsagent’s, and whose front door, made filthy by time and weather, never opens – it enters by the burglar’s route, via the rooftops opposite, and its first port of call is Jackson Lamb’s office, this being on the uppermost storey. Here it finds its only working rival a standard lamp atop a pile of telephone directories, which have so long served this purpose they have moulded together, their damp covers bonding in involuntary alliance. The room is cramped and furtive, like a kennel, and its overpowering theme is neglect. Psychopaths are said to decorate their walls with crazy writing, the loops and whorls of their infinite equations an attempt at cracking the code their life is hostage to. Lamb prefers his walls to do their own talking, and they have cooperated to the extent that the cracks in their plasterwork, their mildew stains, have here and there conspired to produce something that might amount to an actual script – a scrawled observation, perhaps – but all too quickly any sense these marks contain blurs and fades, as if they were something a moving finger had writ before deciding, contrary to the wisdom of ages, to rub out again.
Lamb’s is not a room to linger in, and dawn, anyway, never tarries long. In the office opposite, it finds less to disturb it. Here order has prevailed, and there is a quiet efficiency about the way in which folders have been stacked, their edges squared off in alignment with the desktop, and the ribbons binding them tied in bows of equal length; about the emptiness of the wastepaper basket, and the dust-free surfaces of the well-mannered shelves. There is a stillness here out of keeping with Slough House, and if one were to seesaw between these two rooms, the bossman’s lair and Catherine Standish’s bolthole, a balance might be found that could bring peace to the premises, though one would imagine it would be short-lived.
As is dawn’s presence in Catherine’s room, for time is hurrying on. On the next level down is a kitchen. Dawn’s favourite meal is breakfast, which is sometimes mostly gin, but either way it would find little to sustain it here, the cupboards falling very much on Scrooge’s end of the Dickensian curve, far removed from Pickwickian excess. The cupboards contain no tins of biscuits, no jars of preserves, no emergency chocolate, and no bowls of fruit or packets of crispbread mar the counter’s surface; just odds and ends of plastic cutlery, a few chipped mugs, and a surprisingly new-looking kettle. True, there is a fridge, but all it holds are two cans of energy drink, both stickered ‘Roddy Ho’, each of which rubric has had the words ‘is a twat’ added, in different hands, and an uncontested tub of hummus, which is either mint-flavoured or has some other reason for being green. About the appliance hangs an odour best described as delayed decay. Luckily, dawn has no sense of smell.
Having briefly swept through the two offices on this floor – nondescript rooms whose colour schemes can only be found in ancient swatches, their pages so faded, everything has subsided into shades of yellow and grey – and taken care to skirt the dark patch beneath the radiator, where some manner of rusty leakage has occurred, it finds itself back on the staircase, which is old and rackety, dawn the only thing capable of using it without making a sound – apart, that is, from Jackson Lamb, who when he feels like it can wander Slough House as silently as a newly conjured wraith, if rather more corpulent. At other times Lamb prefers the direct approach, and attacks the stairs with the noise that a bear pushing a wheelbarrow might make, if the wheelbarrow was full of tin cans, and the bear drunk.
More watchful ghost than drunken bear, dawn arrives in the final two offices and finds little to distinguish them from those on the floor above, apart, perhaps, from the slightly stuccoed texture of the paintwork behind one desk, as if a fresh coat has been applied before the wall has been properly cleaned, and some lumpy matter has been left clinging to the plasterwork: best not to dwell on what this might be. For the rest, this office has the same air of frustrated ambition as its companions, and to one as sensitive as light-fingered dawn it contains, too, a memory of violence, and perhaps the promise of more to come. But dawn understands that promises are easily broken – dawn knows all about breaking – and the possibility delays it not one jot. On it goes, down the final set of stairs, and somehow passes through the back door without recourse to the shove this usually requires, the door being famously resistant to casual use. In the dank little yard behind Slough House dawn pauses, aware that its time is nearly up, and enjoys these last cool moments. Once upon a time it might have heard a horse making its way up the street; more recently, the happy hum of a milk float would have whiled away its final minute. But today there is only the scream of an ambulance, late for an appointment, and by the time its banshee howl has ceased bouncing off walls and buildings dawn has disappeared, and here in its place is the day itself, which, once within Slough House’s grasp, turns out to be far from the embodiment of industry and occupation it threatened to be. Instead – like the day before it, and the one before that – it is just another slothful interlude to be clock-watched out of existence, and knowing full well that none of the inhabitants can do anything to hasten its departure, it takes its own sweet time about setting up shop. Casually, smugly, unbothered by doubt or duty, it divides itself between Slough House’s offices, and then, like a lazy cat, settles in the warmest corners to doze, while nothing much happens around it.
Roddy Ho, Roddy Ho, riding through the glen.
(Just another earworm.)
Roddy Ho, Roddy Ho, manliest of men.
There are those who regard Roderick Ho as a one-trick wonder; a king of the keyboard jungle, sure, but less adept in other areas of life, such as making friends, being reasonable, and ironing T-shirts. But they haven’t seen him in action. They haven’t seen him on the prowl.
Lunchtime, just off Aldersgate Street. The ugly concrete towers of the Barbican to the right; a hardly more beautiful housing estate to the left. But it’s a killing box, this uncelebrated patch of London; it’s a blink-and-you’re-eaten battlefield. You get one chance only to claim your scalp, and Roddy Ho’s prey could be anywhere.
He knew damn well it was close.
So he moved, pantherlike, between parked cars; he hovered by a placard celebrating some municipal triumph or other. In his ear, driven like a fencepost by the pounding of his iPod, an overexcited forty-something screeched tenderly of his plan to kill and eat his girlfriend. On Roddy’s chin, the beard he’d grown last winter; rather more expertly sculpted now, because he’d learned the hard way not to use kitchen scissors. On Roddy’s head – new development – a baseball cap. Image matters, Roddy knew that. Brand matters. You want Joe Public to recognise your avatar, your avatar had to make a statement. In his own personal opinion, he’d nailed that angle. Neat little goatee and a baseball cap: originality plus style. Roderick Ho was the complete package, the way Brad Pitt used to be, before the unpleasantness.
(Gap in the market there, come to think of it. He’d have to have a word with Kim, his girlfriend, about coining a nom de celeb.
Koddy.
Rim …?
Nah. Needs work.)
But he’d deal with that later, because right now it was time to activate the lure module; get this creature into the open and bring that sucker down. This required force, timing and use of weapons: his core skills in a nutshell … Whoever came up with Pokémon GO must have had Roderick Ho on their muse’s speed-dial. The name even rhymed, man – it was like he was born to poke. Gimme that stardust, he thought. Gimme that lovely stardust, and watch the Rodster shine.