The man on the bridge had disappeared from sight.
Catherine kept a spare set of doorkeys in a matchbox taped to the underside of her desk, where Louisa had stumbled upon them quite early in her Slough House career. She collected them now, and headed off to St. John’s Wood by cab. It was into the twenties already, bright sunlight blindly bouncing off glass and metal surfaces: enough to make you want to sit in a dark room, even if you didn’t want to do that anyway. She’d never been to Catherine’s flat before. For a while she wondered what that said about her, about the whole of the Slough House crew, and the paper-thin friendships their daily lives were scribbled on, but mostly she concentrated on not thinking; on simply moving in a bubble through London; not being at her desk, not filling the space left by Min.
The flat was in an art deco block, shielded at the front by a well-maintained hedge. Louisa paid the taxi and pocketed the receipt. The block’s rounded edges and metal-framed windows lent it a science-fiction air: this had once been how the future would look. Its tiled and shiny lobby made her sandals clack, but that was the only obvious noise. The whole block seemed unnaturally quiet, as if Catherine weren’t the only occupant to have gone missing. It was a fate Louisa would cheerfully have wished on her own neighbours. Unnatural quiet wasn’t so much of a thing around her way.
Catherine lived on the topmost floor. Louisa rang the bell and waited a full minute before letting herself in, calling Catherine’s name as she did so. No reply. She did a quick scoot through, making sure the place was empty. The bed was made, but that was no surprise—Catherine made a place look neater just by being in it. She was never likely to leave havoc in her wake. There was a landline in the sitting room, but no pad for taking messages; a calendar on the kitchen wall, but nothing marked for the month save a hairdresser’s appointment two weeks hence. A shopping list on the fridge door gave nothing away, and while a pile of books four deep on the bedside table suggested Catherine was a restless reader, none of the scraps used as bookmarks taught Louisa anything. It wasn’t a sterile environment—was a lived-in space—but it held no clues as to where its occupant might have gone. The wardrobe was full, resembling a dresser’s rack from a Merchant-Ivory production, and there was an empty suitcase in the hall closet. Nor was there any sign of those things Catherine might be expected to carry round with her: purse, phone, sunglasses, travel pass. At first glance, it looked like Catherine had had an ordinary morning: had got up and left for work as usual, and whatever had kept her from arriving there had happened en route. But when Louisa checked the dishwasher, she found it full of clean dry crockery long since cooled to normal, and there were no breakfast dishes stacked and ready for the next loading. A palm on the kettle came away stone cold. Either Catherine had left without breakfast, or she hadn’t been here last night.
“Dirty stop-out,” Louisa muttered, but without conviction.
She’d stopped out herself last night, of course. Had got home at seven, time enough to shower and change for work. More than once last year she and Min had spent an evening in a bar, passing comment on the hook-ups happening around them, encounters that increased in desperation the later they occurred, and had congratulated each other on being out of that game. Louisa had been careful never to add “for good” because fate was the kind of attack dog you didn’t want to taunt. But tempting fate or not, “for good” didn’t happen. “For bad” looked like it had come to stay instead.
Enough of that. She checked the bathroom. The air was dry, and there were no damp towels. Catherine hadn’t been here for a day or more.
Louisa returned to the sitting room, trying not to compare and contrast with her own studio flat, which was tiny and crooked and needed serious attention, like maybe arson. Everything here was, if not arranged in straight lines, at least in its proper place, and care had been taken in deciding what that place was. So far, so Catherine. None of this would surprise any of the slow horses, except probably Ho, to whom it wouldn’t have occurred to form an opinion. But it didn’t tell the whole story. This was where the surface Catherine lived, that was all. Which was why there was no wine cache in a cupboard; no spirits in the fridge, or emergency sherry on a dresser. Or even any glasses, or not proper ones. Louisa frequently ran out of glasses, but that was because glass broke easily, not because she was avoiding the issue. Here, it was deliberate, as if the occasional use of a suggestive receptacle, even for a virgin fruit juice, might nudge a scale that would tip the drinker into a puddle outside the nearest bar.
So now came the obvious thought, that Catherine had fallen off the wagon. She knew Catherine was an alcoholic, not because the two women had ever discussed it but because Lamb made reference to it often enough. And one thing everyone knew about alcoholism was, it wasn’t like the flu. You didn’t shake it off and carry on; you tamped it down and hoped it wouldn’t reignite. Which meant anything could have happened; Catherine could have been on her way home and some tiny incident, invisible to everyone else, could have thrown a switch inside her, redirecting her to oblivion. Louisa wouldn’t put it past Lamb, even—who always kept booze in the office—to have tempted her with a taste. Leaving Catherine with an unkillable thirst, and the whole of London mapped with watering holes.
But the image wouldn’t stick. Catherine drunk; Catherine passed out under a hedge, or under a stranger—it was like a punchline to an unsuccessful joke. Because all of Catherine’s ramrod rectitude—the right-angled efficiency of her office; the primness of her dress; the fact that she so rarely swore—these things didn’t make it funny that she’d once been an habitual drinker; they were her defences against ever again becoming one. The same way her flat was, with its places for everything, and all of them filled. Even the private parts of her public life were a form of cover, because they were all joes in the end, all spooks were joes, even those who never set foot outside their secret offices; from the anoracked stoats monitoring phone calls in GCHQ to the intelligence weasels over the river; from the blue-eyed boys and girls on Regent’s Park’s hub to the slow horses themselves, gradually disappearing under reams of yellowing paper—they were all joes, every last spook of them, because they all knew what it was like to live nine-tenths of their lives undercover. It was why they’d joined the Service in the first place: this sneaking suspicion that the whole damn world was hostile. The only ones you could trust were those you worked alongside, and you couldn’t trust them either, because there was no friend falser than another spook. Always, they’d stab you in the back, cut you off at the knees, or just plain die.
Louisa didn’t yet know which of those Catherine had done, but she was certain she hadn’t gone off on a bender. She guessed Lamb thought that too, but she opened her phone to let him know anyway. There was no such thing as too much information.
Seventy-nine minutes . . .
It had not taken the man long to explain what he wanted. He gave the impression of being used to imparting instructions: a class thing, River thought—the country still riddled with this, and especially London: walking talking suits, inflated by their own self-importance, each and every one of them asking for a good hard kick in the slats—
This the beat in the background as he ran.
Bond would have leaped from the bridge onto a passing bus, or drop-kicked a motorcyclist and hijacked his wheels. Bourne would have surfed the streets on car roofs, or slipped into parkour mode, bouncing off walls and wheelie bins, always knowing which alley to cut through . . .