Shirley mumbled something. Louisa assumed it was assent.
‘You want to be inside or out?’
‘I want the monkey wrench,’ Shirley said.
‘It’s in the boot,’ Louisa told her, and left to join the crowd in the library.
‘I need a cigarette,’ Gimball told his wife.
‘No you don’t.’
‘I’m not going to get through this without one.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘You gave up. Publicly. Very publicly. If I’m seen with a cigarette between my lips again, don’t vote for me. Your words.’
‘Well, yes, but I didn’t mean them. It wasn’t an electoral promise.’
Actually, he reflected, he’d have been better off saying it had been an electoral promise. Only infants and idiots expected you to keep those.
‘You’ve done this a thousand times. What are you so worried about?’
He could tell her, he thought. Explain that he was about to get up on stage and ask for acceptance for who he really was. That done, he could probably let slip he was still smoking too, and get away with it. It wasn’t going to be what his audience focused on.
But if he came clean now, and she expressed doubt – which she would – he’d crumble like a cupcake in the rain. He needed her support, and to get that he’d have to present her with a fait accompli. Following which there’d be some bad moments to get through in private, but in public she’d back him to the hilt, having little choice. Unless – but no. He couldn’t believe she’d abandon him. There’d be mileage in that – the deceived wife – but standing by her man would guarantee acres of coverage, with material for a year’s worth of columns. And also she loved him. So this was the way to go.
‘It’s a crunch moment,’ he said. ‘For both of us.’
No word of a lie.
‘We’re keeping our powder dry,’ she told him. ‘That’s all. Doing as Whelan said isn’t the end of anything, Dennis. It’s an interruption.’
He still needed a cigarette.
‘If you get caught,’ she said, ‘you’re never borrowing my Manolos again.’
Which was her way of giving assent. He’d never fit into her Manolos in a million years.
He checked, with a tap of a finger, that fags and lighter were in his breast pocket, then retreated from their commandeered room to find one of the volunteers staggering past under a ziggurat of plastic chairs.
‘Is there a back door? Need to gather my thoughts.’
There was.
River walked the block, and the neighbouring one, to get his bearings. At one point he saw J. K. Coe crossing a junction up ahead, a mobile slouch, and shook his head. Even now, when he could halfway kid himself he was doing something that mattered – was on an op – the reality of life among the slow horses kept asserting itself. His colleagues were mostly useless, so bowed down by issues they might have been in art school rather than the Secret Service. Louisa excepted, maybe. And himself, of course. Always important to remember that: there was nothing wrong with River himself.
There was an outside broadcasting truck at the hall, and this would be a good disguise for a bunch of armed maniacs, but the more River looked the more like a real TV truck it seemed. Most disguises would have maxed out with a logo on the sides and a few peaked caps and clipboards; here, two men were unreeling a marathon’s length of cabling through a propped-open fire door, and there was still enough equipment left over to shoot a Harry Potter movie. Of course, if you were going to carry out a successful assault on a political gathering, this might be the way to do it – rig out transport, stack it with authentic-looking kit, then park near the target and take your time. But River didn’t think so. Unleashing gunfire on a village street, or leaving a home-made bomb on a train; lobbing a pipe bomb into a penguin enclosure – it all smacked of a bunch of fanatics slipping through the cracks. Any move they made, he thought, would be more a headlong dash for victory than a minutely planned assault. Passing themselves off as media professionals, with all the fake credentials required, was surely out of their league.
He watched a while longer, waiting for some sign that all was not as it appeared, then left them to it.
Not far off was a building wrapped in scaffolding: its upper half freshly painted, the lower grimy and road-splashed, years of urban living etched into its facade. Alongside it ran a narrow alley along which the scaffolding continued, making passage difficult, and which dead-ended in an area occupied by wheelie bins. The building was in use – lights shone in the upper storeys – but a sheet of tarpaulin flapping overhead gave it a forlorn, abandoned air. River walked to the end of the alley, found no human presence, and returned to the main road.
When he looked back, the building reminded him of Slough House. No special reason. Just that it was a little dismal, a little so-what?; the kind of place, if you worked there, you’d find yourself reaching for a drink the moment you got home. Difference was, somebody was going to the trouble and expense of having it repainted: if not a bright new future, at least a fresh coat to cover the past. And he felt a familiar internal slump. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep this pretence up, where he was nominally one of the nation’s protectors but actually an irrelevant drone. He could count on his fingers the number of times he’d been dispatched from Slough House on a mission. Not including fetching takeaways for Lamb. It wasn’t what he’d wanted from life. Not what his grandfather had wanted for him, either.
So if something didn’t happen soon, he’d quit. Anything was better than this. Standing by scaffolding as the evening descended, this was the decision River came to, but if he’d expected his heart to lighten with the moment, he was disappointed. It felt as if something had deflated instead.
Ach, he thought. And then: shit. And then he made his way round the metal poles obstructing the pavement and walked back to the hall, outside whose doors a queue had formed.
He wondered where Coe had got to.
Shirley waited until Louisa had been in the library for ten minutes before going to fetch some chips, and then waited another ten, because if she’d been Louisa, hoping to catch Shirley in the act, that was the time frame she’d have adopted. If she’d been Louisa, she’d definitely have caught Shirley in the act. As it was, being Shirley, she’d be back with her chips before the gathering dispersed.
She was halfway to the takeaway before she remembered the wrap of coke in her pocket.
Sixty-three days she was on, and the sky was gloomy; the evening gathering pace. Not long now, and she’d have sixty-four. What then? Sitting back and watching the numbers grow held no pleasure for her, but stilclass="underline" there was a nagging concern at the back of her mind that there’d be a tint of … failure in setting the calendar to zero. As if she’d set out to do something, and given up before getting there. As if she were unable to carry it further.
But there was no reason why anyone would think that; no reason anyone would know. She was on her own. She could get off her tits on a nightly basis, and provided she rocked up to Slough House every morning, life would crawl on as usual. Because she wasn’t an addict. A user, sure, but for recreation only. And it was nobody’s business how recreational she got.
If she had a problem, how come she had sixty-three days straight?
A fresh batch of cod had just been put into the deep fryer, so Shirley ordered a hot dog while waiting, and ate it watching fat spit and sizzle. She remembered once sitting in an all-night laundrette, studying the tumblers as their loads rose and fell, rose and fell, like dolphins. It might have been hours she sat there, lost in fascination. That was the sort of thing that happened then, but didn’t now. Now life was set to normal, was a long string of grey moments, as if the mood in Slough House were leaking through its walls, and infecting everything, everywhere.