It was plain she didn’t.
‘The fuck,’ she asked, ‘are you talking about?’
He scrambled to his feet.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s pretend you just wanted to sabotage my hunt. That’s all Kim needs to know, anyway.’
‘… Huh?’
‘My girlfriend,’ he explained, so she’d know where she stood.
‘Did you get a plate for that car?’
‘What car?’
‘The one that just tried to run you over.’
‘That’s a good story too,’ Roddy said. ‘But let’s stick with mine. It’s less complicated. Fewer follow-up questions.’
And having delivered this lesson in tradecraft, he collected the pieces of his phone and headed back to Slough House.
Where the day is well established now, and dawn a forgotten intruder. When River returns to take up post at his desk – his current task being so mind-crushingly dull, so balls-achingly unlikely to result in useful data, that he can barely remember what it is even while doing it – all the slow horses are back in the stable, and the hum of collective ennui is almost audible. Up in his attic room, Jackson Lamb scrapes the last sporkful of chicken fried rice from a foil dish, then tosses the container into a corner dark enough that it need never trouble his conscience again, should such a creature come calling, while two floors below Shirley Dander’s face is scrunched into a thoughtful scowl as she replays in her mind the sequence of events that led to her flattening Roderick Ho: always a happy outcome, of course, but had she really prevented a car doing the same? Or had it just been another of London’s penis-propelled drivers, whose every excursion onto the capital’s roads morphs into a demolition derby? Maybe she should share the question with someone. Catherine Standish, she decides. Louisa Guy too, perhaps. Louisa might be an iron-clad bitch at times, but at least she doesn’t think with a dick. Some days, you take what you can.
Later, Lamb will host one of his occasional departmental meetings, its main purpose to ensure the ongoing discontent of all involved, but for now Slough House is what passes for peaceful, the grousing and grumbling of its denizens remaining mainly internal. The clocks that each of the crew separately watches dawdle through their paces on Slough House time, this being slower by some fifty per cent than in most other places, while, like the O.B. in distant Berkshire, the day catnaps the afternoon away.
Elsewhere, mind, it’s scurrying around like a demented gremlin.
3
THERE WAS A STORY doing the rounds that the list of questions traditionally asked of head injury victims, to check for concussion – what’s the date, where do you live, who’s the Prime Minister? – had had to be amended in light of the current incumbent’s tenure, as the widespread disbelief that he was still in office was producing a rash of false positives. Which might explain, thought Claude Whelan, why he insisted on being addressed as PM.
But like all his ilk the man was dangerous when cornered, and one thing politics was never short of was corners.
‘You know the biggest threat Parliament faces?’ he asked Whelan now.
‘A cyber—’
‘No, that’s the biggest threat the country faces. The biggest threat Parliament faces is democracy. It’s been a necessary evil for centuries, and for the most part we’ve been able to use it to our advantage. But one fucking referendum later and it’s like someone gave a loaded gun to a drunk toddler.’ He was holding a newspaper, folded open to Dodie Gimball’s column. ‘Read this yet?’
Whelan had.
The PM quoted from it anyway: ‘“Who are we to turn to for protection? Yes, we have our security services, but they are ‘services’ only in the sense that a bull ‘services’ a cow. In other words, dear readers, a cock-up of the first magnitude.”’
Whelan said, ‘I’m not entirely sure that works. She goes from plural to—’
‘Yes yes yes, we’ll get the grammar police onto her first thing. Do they have actual powers of arrest, do you think? Or will they just hang her from the nearest participle?’
Whelan nodded his appreciation. He was a short man with a high forehead and a pleasant manner, the latter a surprise given his years among the intelligence service’s back-room boys, a fraternity not known for its social skills. His ascent to the top rank had been unexpected, and largely due to his not having been involved in the crimes and misdemeanours which had resulted in the desk being vacant in the first place. Having clean hands was an unusual criterion for the role, but his predecessor’s shenanigans had ensured that, on this occasion at least, it was politic.
It did mean, though, that his experience of actual politics was on the thin side. His required learning curve, as Second Desk Diana Taverner had pointed out, was steeper than a West End bar bill.
Now he said, ‘Twelve people died. However indelicately she phrases it, it comes under the heading fair comment.’
‘Fair comment would be laying the blame with the homicidal cretins who committed the murders. No, Gimball has her own agenda. You’re aware of who she is?’
‘I know who her husband is.’
‘Well then,’ said the PM. ‘Well then,’ and slapped the newspaper against his thigh, or tried to. There wasn’t really room for the manoeuvre.
They were in what was best described as a cubbyhole, though was informally known as an incubator. Number 10 was a warren, as if an architect had been collecting corridors and decided to use them all up at once. Offices of state aside, every room in the building seemed an excuse to include a bit of extra space between itself and the next one along, in most of which, at any given time, a plot was being hatched. Hence ‘incubator’. They were ideal for the purpose, as they were only really big enough for two people at a time and thus reduced the amount of political fear that could be generated, political fear being the fear that the blame for something bad might fall on someone present.
The meeting they’d just come from, discussing the events in Derbyshire, had triggered an awful lot of this.
‘And the bastard wants my job,’ the PM continued.
‘He certainly gives every indication that he’d enjoy running the country,’ Whelan agreed. ‘But, Prime Minister, with all due respect, he’s his party’s sole MP. What possible threat could he represent?’
‘He’s indicated that he might be willing to rejoin the party.’
‘… Ah.’
‘Yes, bloody ah. And not indicated to me, you understand. To various … sympathetic ears. Which includes half of those in my own damn Cabinet.’
It didn’t much matter whether this meant the entire Cabinet had offered one sympathetic ear apiece, or half the Cabinet both. Either way, the PM was beleaguered: the referendum voting the UK out of the European Union meant he had to steer a course he’d openly campaigned against, whatever his private views on the subject, and only the lack of a strong contender within the party – the most obvious candidates having been brought low by a frenzy of backstabbing, treachery and double-dealing on a scale not seen since the Spice Girls’ reunion – had allowed him to hang on to power this long. But if Dennis Gimball had indicated that he might be tempted back into a fold he’d left ‘with supreme reluctance’ some years previously, in order to join a one-issue party spearheading the Brexit campaign, a whole new ball game was in the offing. And few believed the PM’s balls would see him through the current game, let alone a new one. Apart from anything else, he had a terrorist atrocity to deal with.