They felt okay. She walked up and down and they pinched a bit, more than when sitting, but it was hard to tell whether that was a new-shoe thing or a fitting issue. These places should have a treadmill. She flexed her leg to see if that helped, and noticed a guy noticing this – he was down the far end, examining a Nike – so did it again, and he kept on noticing, though studiously pretended not to. She crouched, and pressed the toe end of each trainer, checking for fit. He replaced the Nike on the wall and took a step back, his face a studied neutrality. Yeah, right, thought Louisa, awarding herself a mental high five.
Still got it.
She sat again, removed the trainers. They cost more than she wanted to spend, and while that had rarely stopped her in the past, it would be an idea to try on a few more pairs first. As if agreeing with this notion, her mobile trembled in her pocket, and at precisely the same moment she heard a nearby ping – someone else’s phone registering an incoming text. It was the guy who’d been watching her, or pretending not to, and he stepped out of sight behind a rack of socks and wristbands, reaching into his jacket as he did so. Could’ve been a meet-cute, she thought, self-mockingly. Hey, simultaneous texts – what are the odds? And she reached for her own mobile while having the thought, and checked her message.
… Fuck!
Louisa leaped up, shoeless, and raced to the far wall, slipping a little, steadying herself by grabbing the rack, but he was gone already – was that him on the escalator? Taking the stairs two at a time, as if alerted to a sudden emergency – yeah, she thought. You and me both. There was no point following, not with nothing on her feet. He was out of sight now anyway; would be on the street, picking the busiest direction to disappear in.
Bastard, she thought. You sly cunning bastard.
And then thought: So what the hell’s going on here then?, as she padded back to her shoes, the wet floor working through her socks with every step.
If you didn’t count the text that had pinged in five minutes ago, this was the first action River Cartwright’s phone had seen in days. He seriously needed to do something about his social life.
‘… Mr Cartwright?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It’s Jennifer Knox?’
River kept a mental list of the women he’d had contact with over the past few years, and it didn’t take long to scroll through. B to K was a blank.
‘From next door to your grandfather’s?’
And that explained the senior wobble in her voice, which was a relief. Not that desperate, whatever anyone thought.
So ‘Of course’ was what he now said. Jennifer Knox. A caller-in on the O.B.: supplier of casseroles and local gossip, though the visits had tailed off as the Old Bastard’s grasp on gossip and solids, and such fripperies as who this woman he’d known for years might be, had slackened to nothing. She had River’s number because River was who you called when the O.B. had an emergency, though the old man was beyond such contingencies now. Which Jennifer Knox knew very well, having been at the funeral.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Mrs Knox. How can I help you?’
‘There’s someone in the house.’
His grandfather’s house, she meant, which had been unoccupied for a while. It belonged to River now, technically, as his mother kept stressing – ‘technically’ apparently meaning in every possible sense, including the legal, barring his mother’s own feeling that the natural order had been disturbed – and was, equally technically, on the market, though at a price the agent had declared ‘way too optimistic. Way’, in these post-You-Know-What times. Its refusal to budge suited River, for the moment. He’d grown up in his grandparents’ house, having been abandoned there by a mother whose horizons hadn’t, at the time, included future property rights. He’d been seven. That was a lot of history to sell.
Jennifer Knox was still talking. ‘I thought about calling the police, but then I thought, well, what if they’re friends of yours? Or, you know, potential buyers?’
‘Thanks, Mrs Knox. I should have let you know. Yes, they’re old friends passing through, in need of somewhere to spend the night. And I know the furniture’s gone, but—’
‘It’s still a roof and four walls, isn’t it?’
‘Exactly, and cheaper than a hotel. They’re travelling at the moment, and—’
‘We all do what we can, don’t we? To keep the costs down.’
‘They’ll be gone in the morning. Thanks, Mrs Knox. I’m grateful you took the trouble.’
His flat was a rented one-bedder, ‘nicely off the tourist track’ as some smug git had once put it. He might have inherited a country pile, but his actual living conditions remained urban haemorrhoid. The flat was cold most times of year, and even in daylight felt dark. The nightclub over the way hosted live bands twice a week, and a nearby manhole cover had loosened; every time a car ran over it, the resulting ka-chunk ka-chunk made River’s jaw spasm. It happened now, as he tucked his phone in his pocket. Not so much a soundtrack; more an audible toothache.
River raised a middle finger in the world’s general direction. Then went to see who’d broken into his dead grandfather’s home.
Meanwhile, Roddy Ho was doing what Roddy Ho did best.
What Roddy Ho did best was everything.
Which did tend to make such moments busy, but hey: if being Roddy Ho was easy, everyone would do it – there’d be fat-thumbed Roddy Hos, bad-haired Roddy Hos; even chick-retardant Roddy Hos. Which you had to love the comic possibilities, but Roddy Ho didn’t have time to dwell on them because Roddy Ho had his skinny-thumbed, good-haired, chick-delighting hands full.
And the everything he was currently deployed on involved saving Slough House from whatever deep-impact shit was headed its way.
As usual.
That shit was incoming was a given: this was Slough House. But also and anyway, it had been the Rodster himself who’d alerted Jackson Lamb to the Weird Wiping, as he’d dubbed it. The Weird Wiping meant incoming shit, no question, and that the shit would be deep impact, welclass="underline" it didn’t take a genius. This was the spook trade, and when things went awry on Spook Street, they generally went the full Chris Grayling. So Roddy was checking the shit for depth and durability; trying to ascertain exactly which direction the shit was travelling in, and if, by now, he’d gone past the stage where the whole shit metaphor was proving useful, he’d at least made his point. Shit was coming, and everyone was looking to Roddy Ho to provide the double-ply bog roll.
Though actually, when you thought about it, that would involve Roddy doing the wiping.
Momentarily derailed, he reached for a slice of pizza. Roddy was in his office; it was way past sayonara time, but when the HotRod was on a mission, he didn’t watch the clock. Besides, some things you don’t want showing on your domestic hard drive, and tinkering around in Service records was one of them. Because the first problem he’d identified, the direction of travel of the incoming effluent, was a no-brainer: any time Slough House was under the hammer, you could bet your chocolate buttons it was Regent’s Park at the anvil. And in this particular instance, the Weird Wiping, what had been wiped was Slough House itself.
By ‘wiped’, Roddy meant erased from the Service database. Not just Slough House but the horses themselves, from the new guy Wicinski to Jackson Lamb; each and every one of them taken off the board. Oh, they were still around on the deep-level data sets; the ones involving salaries and bank accounts, all of which – after a nasty hack some years ago – were ascribed to employee numbers rather than names, so they were still getting paid, and still had jobs to do, but their personal files, their personnel jackets: they were gone, baby, gone. Anyone checking out Roddy Ho on the Service database would find zero, nada, zilch. Like the RodBod had ceased to exist.