‘On account of Lamb, yeah.’
More specifically, on account of Lamb pulling a gun on the Head Dog.
‘I didn’t think he was going to do that.’
‘It would worry me if you had. Emma’s already got you down as Lamb’s mini-me.’
‘… You agree with her?’
Louisa said, ‘Nah. You’ve a way to go yet.’
‘Thanks. I think.’
What Lamb had done: he’d aimed Marcus’s gun in Emma’s direction.
Emma Flyte said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘Well, you’d think so. But try seeing it from my point of view.’
She stood up. ‘Seriously, you are out of your mind.’
‘It’s been said before. But best sit down.’
Flyte looked around the room. Everyone was staring at Lamb, except Catherine Standish, who was looking at Emma.
‘I’d do as he says.’
‘He’s not going to shoot me.’
‘Probably not.’ Catherine let that ‘probably’ hang there a moment or two, then shrugged. ‘But it’s your call.’
Flyte said to Lamb, ‘You’ve lost your senses,’ but she sat down.
Lamb said, ‘Didn’t we used to have a pair of handcuffs somewhere?’
‘… Why is everyone looking at me?’ Shirley asked.
‘We’re not judging,’ said Catherine.
Grumbling under her breath, Shirley went to her room and came back with a pair of cuffs. River waited until she’d secured Emma Flyte to her chair before saying, ‘And this is a good idea because …?’
Lamb said, ‘Okay, for those of you who weren’t paying attention, or are just slow, or are called Cartwright, let me point out what you’ve missed. These last couple of days, the terrorist massacre, the dead penguins, the bomb on the train, yada yada yada, it can all be laid at our door.’
‘Ho’s door,’ Louisa said.
‘You think Di Taverner cares which door? Once she’s got an opening, she’ll use it. By which I mean, she’ll drive a bulldozer through Slough House, and the best you lot can hope for is, someone’ll pull you from the rubble before burying you again.’ He remembered his bottle of wine, and reached for it. ‘And before you ask, no, that’s not a metaphor either.’
Louisa said, ‘You’re not seriously saying the Park would black ribbon us?’
Black ribbons were what were wrapped round closed files.
‘I’m saying,’ Lamb said, ‘that if they don’t want you around to tell tales, then you won’t be around to tell tales.’
River said, ‘There was that protocol, a few years ago. Waterproof? But there was an inquiry. They don’t use that any more.’
‘Oh, believe me,’ J. K. Coe said. ‘They do.’
River stared, but Coe said nothing more.
‘Waterproof?’ asked Shirley.
‘Black prisons. Eastern Europe.’
‘Fuck.’
Emma Flyte said, ‘Will you lot listen to yourselves? The Park does not bury its mistakes any more. Or ship them off to foreign dungeons.’
‘They brought you in to run a clean department,’ said Lamb. ‘That doesn’t mean there aren’t still dirty bits you don’t get to hear about.’
‘You’ve been rotting away in this slag heap for too long. You’ve all turned paranoid. If there’s even any remote truth in this scenario you’ve conjured up, this is not the way to deal with it.’
‘Nobody’s actually keeping minutes,’ Lamb said. ‘But if anyone had been, rest assured your objections would have been noted.’
‘I thought you had enough on Taverner to keep her onside,’ Louisa said. ‘Or at least to stop her going all medieval on us.’
‘If what happened at Abbotsfield turns out to be our fault,’ Catherine said softly, ‘that’ll trump anything Diana Taverner’s done.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lamb. ‘To be fair to her, her civilian casualties are probably still in single figures.’ He surveyed his assembled crew. ‘The good news is, if they’re holding off on questioning Ho, we’ve got a window.’
‘The last time you had a window,’ Flyte pointed out, ‘a body went through it. That doesn’t fill me with confidence.’
‘You’re not helping. Shut up. Zafar Jaffrey and Dennis Gimball, any advance on those two? For the role of most likely to be assassinated?’
‘You’re making decisions based on—’
‘You want to let me get this done, or do I need to put a bag over your head?’
River said, ‘She has a point. There are any number of politicians. Why would the target be one of the first two we put a name to?’
‘We’re talking about a bunch of mindless bottom feeders whose general ignorance of our way of life is tempered only by their indifference to human suffering, we’re all agreed on that?’
‘Is this the politicians or the killers?’
‘Good point, but I meant the killers.’
Shirley shrugged. ‘Then yeah. I guess.’
‘Good. So as one bunch of idiots second-guessing another, you make the perfect focus group. Besides, we don’t have the horsepower to cope with more than two potential targets.’ Lamb paused. ‘Horsepower. See what I did there?’
Now, out by Ho’s car, River said, ‘So Gimball’s doing a public meeting back in his constituency, and Jaffrey’s what? He’s not a public servant, or not yet. He doesn’t publish his itinerary. How do we work out where he is?’
‘I thought we could phone his office,’ said Louisa.
‘Oh.’
‘And ask what he’s doing tonight.’
‘Oh. Okay. Yeah, that might work.’
She said, ‘And, River, we can’t let that pair go together, you do realise that?’
‘Shirley and Coe? Why not?’
‘Because we’re trying to prevent a disaster, not cause one.’ Louisa was fumbling a coin from her jeans pocket as she spoke. ‘Call.’
‘Heads.’
She tossed. ‘It’s tails.’
‘… Loser gets Shirley, right?’
‘No, loser gets Coe.’
‘Maybe we should have established that before you tossed.’
‘Why, would that’ve made you win?’
Damn.
He said, ‘But I get to choose which target, right?’
‘So long as you choose Gimball, yeah.’
‘Why does it feel like I’m playing a stacked deck?’
‘Welcome to Slough House,’ Louisa said, and went to fetch her car.
Dennis Gimball felt like a victim.
There were lots of reasons for his feeling this way, and – as was his wont – he set them out as mental bullet points:
the prime minister hated him, so
he was being picked on by the Secret Service, which meant
he wasn’t going to be able to set his brilliant plan in action, because
they’d make him a laughing stock.
No wonder he needed a cigarette.
Dodie was tight-lipped, a bad sign. Tight-lipped meant she was thinking things through, and when that happened Dennis often found himself in deep shit, or that general postcode. Not for the first time, he wondered how things could go tits up so suddenly. A couple of hours ago, he was walking a shining path; now he was looking at, what? A public climbdown. Because as far as the political world was concerned, this was the perfect moment for him to bid for the leadership, and the thing about perfect moments was, they didn’t hang around. Announcing his return to the party fold was one thing, but without follow-through, without revealing that the PM’s go-to Muslim moderate was hand in glove with an illegal arms dealer, the evening could be spun through 180 degrees, and his announcement welcomed by Downing Street as a declaration of support. Like hammering the ball straight over the bowler’s head, only to be caught on the boundary. They didn’t give you two lives. It was back to the pavilion, bat tucked under your arm.
The car wasn’t due for an hour, so Dennis slipped into the handkerchief-sized garden, leaned against one of the huge pots Dodie was apparently growing a tree in, lit a cigarette, and brooded. If his planned triumph mutated into public capitulation, what could he expect? Twenty minutes in the spotlight as a prodigal son, a few weeks of speculation in the run up to the next reshuffle, and some chuckling paragraphs in the broadsheets when a Cabinet post failed to materialise. He’d join the ranks of those who’d confidently expected to swat this weak-kneed PM aside, and were now seeking opportunities elsewhere. A pub quiz question a decade from now: one for wonks only.