Everything came to an end, he knew that. Take those huge statues of Jedi Knights the Taliban bombed to dust. But he’d figured his own legend would remain intact for a while yet.
So he’d thought about putting himself back up there – easy enough when you had the Rodinator’s talent set: he could hoist a dick-pic as the Service’s screensaver if he had a mind to – but best not. Over at the Park, they had to know who they were messing with, and it stood to reason they’d have extra security in place for when Roddy-O came putting their wrongs to rights. Which meant ninja skills were called for, stealth and cunning, and that was basically Roddy’s user profile. He was near-invisible was the plain fact. Half the time, people didn’t notice he was in the room. So for now he trod pantherlike among the pixels, melding with the matrix. Gathering information was one thing; gathering the absence of information called for a whole different kind of cool. And Roddy Ho was cooler than a bowl of Frosties.
Pausing for a moment to wipe pizza topping from his keyboard, he summed up his progress so far.
What he’d mostly discovered was that whoever’d done the wiping had made an impressively thorough job of it.
In fact, it occurred to him, any newbies out there – any junior spooks just starting at the Park – would have no idea Slough House existed at all.
And the image came to his mind of an empty space on the street, an unfilled gap ignored by passers-by; and Roderick Ho found himself wondering, just for half a moment, what difference that would make to anyone.
Dance like no one’s watching, thought Shirley Dander.
What cockwomble came up with that?
Because the point of dancing is everyone’s watching, or they are if you’re doing it right. The wallflowers chugging flavoured gin and wishing they had the moves. The wannabe rocking the bow-tie-and-specs on the balcony. That cute pair of kids in the corner, sizing each other up: seriously, she thought. Get a wiggle on. Before I toss a coin to choose which of you to take home.
Which could happen, she promised herself. Could so easily happen, she ought to have a sign around her neck: Danger, Woman at Work. Let these sad sacks know what they were dealing with.
But meanwhile, check these moves. There was no high like a natural high, and she was pretty sure the coke had worn off. What was flowing through her veins was pure Shirley-power.
That afternoon, she’d been in Slough House. Every afternoon, face it, she was in Slough House, and even the afternoons when she wasn’t felt like she was. Slough House cast a portable shadow: you could hike halfway to Watford and still feel it on your back. Because Slough House sucked the juice from your veins, or tried to. The trick was showing you were juicier than it knew. So anyway: blah. That afternoon, she’d been in Slough House, working on one of Jackson Lamb’s pet projects: the hooligan hinterland, he called it. His notion being, you didn’t strap on a suicide vest and wander down your local high street without your antisocial tendencies having manifested in some way beforehand, like unpaid parking tickets, or using a mobile in the quiet carriage. Shirley wasn’t so sure, but that wasn’t the point: the point was, when you were in Slough House, you did what Jackson Lamb told you. The alternative was accepting that your career in the Secret Service was over, and like every slow horse before her, and every slow horse to come, Shirley Dander thought she’d be the exception to the rule that Regent’s Park didn’t take you back. She thought they were secretly waiting for her. She thought that somewhere in a stationery cupboard, they already had the banner they’d prepared for her homecoming.
On that day too, she’d dance.
Here and now, but doubtless also in that glorious future, a woman kept catching her eye and pretending it was accidental. Who knew, she might get lucky, but right at the moment she could simply gawp like everyone else, because this was Strictly Come Dander, and every other fucker better get their ass off the dance floor. At rest she might resemble, in the words of a former colleague, a concrete bollard with an attitude, but that was only half the story: Shirley was on the underwhelming side where height was concerned, and more cylindrical than traditionally associated with beauty, but the simple physics of it was, every body exerts gravitational pull, and when she was dancing Shirley’s pulling power was up there with Newton’s other laws. As for the former colleague, if he’d been asked to repeat his description a moment later, he’d have been too busy wondering what just happened to his lungs. Shirley could handle criticism as well as the next guy, but the next guy was a touchy bastard.
And still that woman was watching, and still pretending not to. You had to admire a trier, thought Shirley. You had to admire an admirer, and perhaps she should take pity on her, drag her from the crowd and jump-start her on the dance floor, but that might lead to awkwardness later, because a thing about Shirley’s partners – and she meant her professional partners, but there was such a thing as mission-creep – a thing about Shirley Dander’s partners was that they tended to die; their brains misted against an office wall, or their insides spilt on snowy Welsh hillsides … Shirley had never thought of herself as a jinx, but that hardly mattered, did it? What mattered was what everyone else thought, and – two partners down – it would be an uphill task dismantling gossip. Team up with Shirley and start counting the days. Not the kind of come-on you wanted to broadcast to those watching you from the sidelines, and pretending not to.
And the lights spun, and the dance floor pounded, and the weight of electric bass thrummed in her frame. All eyes were on Shirley Dander, and that was fine by her.
Just so long as nobody started dying again.
There was money now, a little, from his grandfather’s will – his grandfather’s care had gone through his savings like a landlord, but enough remained for River to have bought a car, his first for years. He’d done his due diligence, checked the wear-and-tear stats on second-hand vehicles, listened to Louisa’s tip that yellow cars lost only twenty-two per cent of their value in the first three years as opposed to thirty, like every other colour, then bought something he saw stickered for sale in the street. Well, it was a bargain. And so far so good, he thought, as mid-evening London fragmented into carpet showrooms and bed shops, into garages and self-storage warehouses; he’d broken away from a pedestrian existence. It might even be symbolic of a new beginning. He had a hand on the doorknob, ready to step into whatever came next. But first he had to deal with what was happening in Kent.
His childhood home was outside Tonbridge. Jennifer Knox was a neighbour, but that was by rural standards. Central London, you’d fit fifteen dwellings into the space between her house and the O.B.’s, and never meet half the occupants. But strangers were more visible outside the city, and lights in houses that should be dark were noticed. So he had no reason to doubt her word: there was – had been – someone in his grandfather’s house.
Which might be a simple case of opportunist intrusion. There’d been a death notice in the paper, and burglars were capable of research. But there were other possibilities. The O.B. had been a spook, a Service legend. His obituary had been tactful – his cover had placed him in the Ministry of Transport – but he’d lived a secret life, and the possibility that some of his secrets lived on could not be ruled out. His house was mostly empty now; the furniture mostly cleared. River’s mother had taken care of that: Let me take some of the burden off your hands. He’d thought at first – Christ, what did this say about him? – that she was hoping to skim the cash, and had put his foot down where the study was concerned. ‘The books,’ he’d said. ‘I’m keeping the books.’