‘It’s political correctness gone mad,’ agreed Lamb sadly. ‘I’m rabidly anti-censorship, as you know. But some books just need burning.’
So did some bosses. She’d been working on this list, which involved cross-checking Public Lending Right statistics against individual county library databases, for three months. It now stretched not quite halfway down a single sheet of A4, and she’d reached Buckinghamshire in her alphabetical list of counties. Thank Christ she didn’t have to cover the whole of the UK, because that would have taken even an actual librarian years.
Not the whole of it, no. Just England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
‘Fuck Scotland,’ Lamb had explained. ‘They want to go it alone, they can go it alone.’
Her only ally in her never-ending task was the government, which was doing its bit by closing down as many libraries as possible.
In the War Against Terror, you take all the help you can get.
Louisa giggled to herself, because sometimes you had to, or else you’d go mad. Unless the giggling was proof you’d already gone mad. J. K. Coe might know, not so much because of his so-called expertise in Psychological Evaluation, but because he was a borderline nutter himself. All fun and games in Slough House.
She pushed away from her desk and stood to stretch. Lately she’d been spending more time at the gym, and the result was increasing restlessness when tethered to her computer. Through the window, Aldersgate Street was its usual unpromising medley of pissed-off traffic and people in a hurry. Nobody ever wandered through this bit of London; it was simply a staging post on the way somewhere else. Unless you were a stalled spook, of course, in which case it was journey’s end.
God, she was bored.
And then, as if to console her, the world threw a minor distraction her way: from not far off came a screech and a bump; the sound of a car making contact.
She wondered what that was about.
Hi Tina
Just a quick note to let you know how things are going here in Devon – not great, to be honest. I’ve been told I’m being laid off at the end of the month because the boss’s sister’s son needs a job, so someone has to make way for the little bastard. Thanks a bunch, right?
But it’s not all bad because the gaffer knows he owes me one, and has set me up with one of his contacts for a six-month gig in – get this – Albania! But it’s a cushy number, doing the wiring on three new hotel builds, and it’ll be cheap living so I’ll
Coe stopped mid-sentence and stared through the window at the Barbican opposite. It was an Orwellian nightmare of a complex, a concrete monstrosity, but credit where it was due: like Ronnie and Reggie Kray before it, the Barbican had overcome the drawback of being a brutal piece of shit to achieve iconic status. But that was London Rules for you: force others to take you on your own terms. And if they didn’t like it, stay in their face until they did.
Jackson Lamb, for instance. Except, on second thoughts, no: Lamb didn’t give a toss whose terms you took him on. He carried on regardless. He just was.
Tina, though, wasn’t, or wouldn’t be much longer. Tina wasn’t her real name anyway. J. K. Coe just found it easier to compose these letters if they had an actual name attached; for the same reason, he always signed them Dan. Dan – whoever he was – was a deep-cover spook who’d moled into whichever group of activists was currently deemed too extreme for comfort (animal rights, eco-troublemakers, The Archers’ fanbase); while Tina – whoever she was – was someone he’d befriended in the course of doing so. There was always a Tina. Back when Coe had been in Psych Eval, he’d made a study of Tinas of both genders; joes in the field were warned not to develop emotional attachments in the group under investigation, but they always did. You couldn’t betray someone efficiently if you didn’t love them first. So when the op was over, and Dan was coming back to the surface, there had to be letters; a long goodbye played out over months. First Dan moved out of the area, a fair distance off but not unvisitable. He’d keep in touch sporadically, then get a better offer and move abroad. The letters or emails would falter, then stop. And soon Dan would be forgotten, by everyone but Tina, who’d keep his letters in a shoebox under her bed, and Google-earth Albania after her third glass of Chardonnay. Rather than, for example, dragging him into court for screwing her under false pretences. Nobody wanted to go through that again.
But, of course, joes don’t write the letters themselves. That was a job for spooks like J. K. Coe, whiling away the days in Slough House. And lucky to be doing so, to be honest. Most people who’d shot to death a handcuffed man might have expected retribution. Luckily, Coe had done so at the fag-end of a series of events so painfully compromising to the intelligence services as a whole that – as Lamb had observed – it had put the ‘us’ in ‘clusterfuck’, leaving Regent’s Park with little choice but to lay a huge carpet over everything and sweep Slough House under it. The slow horses were used to that, of course. In fact, if they weren’t already slow horses, they’d be dust bunnies instead.
Coe cracked his knuckles, and added the words be able to save a bit to his letter. Yeah, right; Dan would save a bit, then meet an Albanian girl, and – long story short – never come home. Meanwhile, the actual Dan would be undercover again, on a different op, and the ball would be rolling in a new direction. On Spook Street, things never stayed still. Unless you were in Slough House, that is. But there was a major difference between J. K. Coe and the other slow horses, and it was this: he had no desire to be where the action was. If he could sit here typing all day and never have to say a word to anyone, that would suit him fine. Because his life was approaching an even keel. The dreams were ebbing away at last, and the panic attacks had tapered off. He no longer found himself obsessively fingering an imaginary keyboard, echoing Keith Jarrett’s improvised piano solos. Things were bearable, and might just stay that way provided nothing happened.
He hoped like hell nothing would happen.
The car smeared Roderick Ho like ketchup across the concrete apron; broke him like a plastic doll across its bonnet, so all that was holding him together was his clothes. This happened so fast Shirley saw it before it took place. Which was as well for Ho, because she had time to prevent it.
She covered five yards with the speed of a greased pig, yelling Ho’s name, though he didn’t turn round – he had his back to the car and his iPod jammed into his ears; was squinting through his smartphone, and looked, basically, like a dumb tourist who’d been ripped off twice already: once by someone selling hats, and a second time by someone giving away beards. When Shirley hit him waist-high, he was apparently taking a photo of bugger-all. But he never got the chance. Shirley’s weight sent him crashing to the ground half a moment before the car ploughed past: went careering across the pedestrianised area, bounced off a low brick wall bordering a garden display, then screeched to a halt. Burnt rubber reached Shirley’s nose. Ho was squawking; his phone was in pieces. The car moved again, but instead of heading back for them it circled the brick enclosure, turned left onto the road, swerved round the barrier, and went east.
Shirley watched it disappear, too late to catch its plate, or even clock the number of occupants. Soon she’d feel the impact of her leap in most of her bones, but for the moment she just replayed it in her head from a third-party viewpoint: a graceful, gazelle-like swoop; life-saving moment and poetry in motion at once. Marcus would have been proud, she thought.