‘Really? I make it my business to be on first-name terms with all my staff,’ said Cantor. ‘Not that I’m trying to teach you how to run your Service.’
‘A wise decision.’
After she’d left, he reran the footage and approved it for that lunchtime’s bulletin. Ultimately this would be the editor’s decision, but ultimately he paid the editor’s salary. Then he stood near the window, looking down on London: its starts and stoppages, its daily chaos. He shouldn’t have mentioned Doyle really, but the worst that would happen was Doyle would lose his job and there was always room for him back here. Tommo was full of good stuff once you got him loosened up. A couple of drinks and he’d tell you stories would make your hair curl.
Treat those you despise with humanity, especially if the reason you despise them is that they have none. One of those lessons you pick up along the way, a little shard of wisdom – aspirational goodness – that becomes a moral anchor, if only by virtue of the fact that the words are there, in your head. So Lech Wicinski supposed that’s how he ought to regard his fellow beings – with humanity – seeing as how he seemed to be suffering the contempt of all around, but mostly what he felt was, fuck them. Especially Jackson Lamb.
‘You want the good news first or the bad news? And I should warn you up front, the bad news is, there’s no good news.’
Which was how Lamb had greeted them once they’d answered the summons to his room, delivered via Slough House’s version of jungle drums: Lamb’s foot, stamping repeatedly on Lamb’s office floor.
Catherine said, ‘Why don’t we cut the pantomime for once, and you could just let everyone know what’s up?’
Lamb, who was drinking what was probably tea from a mug the size of a bucket, raised his eyebrows. ‘Dissent in the ranks? Okay, I’m a reasonable man. Let’s put it to the vote. Hands up those who prefer Standish’s approach. Right. Now, hands up all those in charge. Oh, just me?’ He lowered his hand. ‘The mes have it.’
River Cartwright said, ‘Glad we’ve established that. What’s the bad news?’
‘You know how your self-esteem couldn’t get lower? Well, congratulations. We have a new depth. Tell ’em, Standish.’
‘Louisa was right,’ Catherine said. ‘She was being followed, by a Park junior. As are the rest of you, on and off.’
A certain amount of clamour followed this. Lamb, meanwhile, sipped tea daintily from his bucket, like a well-behaved silverback.
‘As a training exercise,’ Catherine said, once the noise had died down. ‘That’s why Slough House was wiped. To turn you all – us all – into anonymous targets.’
‘So we’re what now,’ asked Louisa. ‘Tin ducks at a fairground stall?’
‘Kind of,’ said Lamb. ‘Only without the individual personalities.’
‘And this is Taverner’s doing,’ said River.
‘You have to admit, it has a sly charm all her own.’
Shirley Dander said, ‘It’s a fucking liberty is what it is.’
Ho was looking from one slow horse to another, as if trying to work out when it would be his turn to speak.
Louisa said, ‘Have you suggested to Taverner that she curtail this?’
‘Hell no. Why would I do that?’
‘To stop your team being treated with disrespect? … Sorry. Forget I spoke.’
‘Already done.’ Lamb set his mug down carefully, then belched with all the restraint of a defrocked nun. ‘Anyway, I can’t see the harm, to be honest. Not like you present a challenge. And if you’re now serving two purposes instead of one, it’s like I’ve just halved all your salaries.’ He beamed. ‘Win win.’
‘What level surveillance are we under?’ asked Lech.
‘What level whattery are we what?’
‘Surveillance. Are they simply using us for pavement practice, or should we assume our airwaves have been tagged?’
‘Ah, yes, I can see why that’s an issue for you. What with all the porn out there, just waiting to be googled.’ He adopted a pious expression. ‘If that’s what one does with porn. You’re asking the wrong person, really. But as far as the surveillance question’s concerned, the answer is, I have no fucking clue. But thank you, Forrest Gimp. Good input.’
Catherine said, ‘So the plan is, we just put up with whatever nonsense the Park wishes upon us?’
Lamb rolled his eyes. ‘God, you’re a drag to have around. Moan moan moan. It’s like being shackled to the ghost of Bob Marley.’
‘I think you mean Jacob.’
‘Depends,’ said Lamb. ‘Which was the one surrounded by wailers?’
After that, the morning crawled past. Lech was deep into his register of social media absconders; #gonequiet, as he’d mentally dubbed it. There seemed no useful algorithm he could apply, so mostly he was making a random trawl of hot-button issues, particularly the aftermaths of terrorist events. In the midst of grief and anger, you could always discern hate. It occurred to him that, for all his pre-digital outlook, Lamb was a walking correlative of Twitter, inasmuch as his daily outpourings of bile didn’t look like drying up anytime soon. An insight he’d once have enjoyed relaying to Sara, his fiancée, when he got home, except they were no longer engaged and no longer lived together. There probably weren’t many relationships could survive accusations of paedophile leanings, he thought. He couldn’t blame Sara for pulling the plug, though he did.
Someone called @thetruthbomb had enjoyed the New Zealand murders. giving it some of there own innit, he’d opined. Almost certainly ‘he’. drink your medicin boys. He hadn’t tweeted since, unless he’d been banned, or changed his name.
Shirley Dander was standing in the doorway.
Lech assumed she’d come to see Roderick Ho, who was headphoned and might as well have been blinkered too, which was as much to say, he was being Roderick Ho. But Dander walked straight to Lech’s desk and stood waiting for a reaction, like a mute charity mugger.
‘… What?’
‘You doing anything?’
Lech looked at his computer, looked at Shirley, looked at the ceiling, looked back at Shirley. ‘Now?’
‘For lunch.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I was thinking, maybe fish?’
Lech said, ‘And why do you want me along?’
‘Bait,’ said Shirley.
The keeper of overlooked history, thought Diana. The curator of the dusty box file.
Or just an old bag in a wheelchair.
Two views of Molly Doran.
Elsewhere in Regent’s Park, the Queens of the Database managed information: stored it, catalogued it, rendered it readily obtainable for the boys and girls on the hub. They were the digital do-it-alls, and prided themselves on the meticulous nature of their record-keeping. They also fielded a formidable pub quiz team. Molly Doran, meanwhile, stalked the perimeter of her analogue estate like an old-world gamekeeper, if admittedly one on wheels; her archive, modelled on the stacks found in its real-world counterparts, was some floors below the surface, at the end of a blue-lit corridor. It occupied a long room lined with upright cabinets, set on tracks allowing them to be pushed together accordion-style when not in use, and in these cabinets languished acres of dusty information, the Park’s past lives and glories, and also its failures and dismal misadventures. All of which could be housed on a thumb drive, if the money was there for digitisation; a process which would be carried out over Molly Doran’s lifeless corpse, as the woman herself had asserted, in the apparent belief that this was a disincentive. When the Beast – Molly’s collective name for the array of databases and info-caches the Queens oversaw – when it broke down or, as daily seemed more likely, turned out to be also available in Mandarin, her shelves would be all that remained secret and untarnished. She’d have shielded the past from the present, which, as far as Diana Taverner was concerned, was the almost exact inverse of the task in hand.