His mother had adopted her default mode of assuming he’d gone mad. ‘You don’t read, River.’
‘I read.’
‘You don’t read that much.’
Who did? The old man’s study was a booklined cave, as if he’d grown part-hobbit in age. But his last year he’d not read at all, the words having slipped from the pages in front of him. One of the last coherent conversations he’d had with his grandson: I’m losing anchor. The look in his eyes bottomless.
So the study remained like a showroom in a vacant property – books, chairs, curtains; the shelf with its odd collection of trophies: a glass globe, a hunk of concrete, a lump of metal that had been a Luger; the desk with its sheet of blotting paper, like something out of Dickens, and the letter opener which was an actual stiletto, and had once belonged to Beria – and if David Cartwright had left secrets in his wake they’d be somewhere in that room, on those shelves, hidden among a billion other words. River didn’t know if he really believed that, but knew for sure that he didn’t know he didn’t, and if River thought that way others might too, and act upon the possibility. Spook secrets were dangerous to friends and foes alike, and the old man had made many of both down the years. He could see one of either breed breaking a lock, finessing a window; could see them working round the study, looking for clues. If that was happening, River needed to stop it. Any trail his dead grandfather had left, no one was going to follow but him.
Traffic grew lighter as the skies grew dark, and he made good time, parking up the lane from the O.B.’s house and approaching on foot. The house seemed empty from outside, its windows lightless. There was always the chance that the old lady had made a mistake. But there was equally a chance that she hadn’t, and River skirted the front of the building, keeping in tree-shadow, and let himself in through the back door as quietly as he could.
Lech Wicinski was making dough, the instructions a list in his head.
First weigh out the flour, or make a reasonable guess.
Now add yeast and a pinch of salt. Stir it in.
Now add your warm water, your tablespoons of olive oil.
Now punch the bastard to within an inch of its life.
He faded out for a moment while this part was going on.
The day had been a bad one, which was to say, no different from most others. Jackson Lamb had taken to asking him when he planned to clean the office windows, as if this were a genetic trait, and while the other slow horses had, if not exactly warmed to him, at least defrosted slightly, the air around Slough House remained that of a half-hearted funeral. The task he’d been given, after months of staring at the walls, was slightly less energising than staring at the walls: Lamb had seen on TV, or read in a newspaper, or invented out of his own head, something about radicalised teenagers withdrawing from social media, and decided Lech might usefully pursue this topic.
‘… You want a list of kids who’ve withdrawn from social media?’
‘From Facepalm and Twatter and the rest, yeah.’
‘Any clues as to how I might go about doing that?’
Lamb had pretended to ponder. ‘I could do your job myself, if that’s what you mean,’ he’d said at last. ‘But then there’d be even less fucking point to you than there is now.’
Which was about average for an encounter with Lamb.
So anyway, that was the shape of Lech’s days: lost in a blizzard of hashtags, much like the face that looked back from every reflecting surface. Because this was a frightening mess. From a distance, he might have barely survived an acne attack; close up, you could see the razor marks obliterating what had lain beneath. As if he’d run a cheese grater over his cheeks. Bad enough, but it could have been worse: the word scored out was PAEDO, carved into Lech’s face by the man who’d infected his laptop with illegal pornography.
Thinking this, he punched the bastard dough some more.
That man was out of reach now – thanks to Lamb, as it happened – but so was Lech’s career, so was his earlier life. No way would Regent’s Park admit he’d been framed. His exoneration would mean their mistake, and the Park didn’t do mistakes. So there was no way back to the bright lights, and no obvious future if he stepped away from Spook Street: leave now, he’d be doing so without a clean reference, looking like an extra from a horror flick. Employers wouldn’t fall over themselves. While they couldn’t get you for being old, gay, ethnic, disabled, male, female or stupid, when you looked like you’d crawled from wreckage of your own devising, they could throw you a pitying look: Thank you, next. So Slough House it was, for the foreseeable future.
It was enough to induce paranoia. That evening, on the bus heading home, he’d had the feeling of being watched; a feeling so unnervingly real he’d stepped off the bus early, and waited until it was down the road before walking the rest of the way. Unlikely, he knew; if there was any advantage to being a slow horse, it was that no one was interested. But you couldn’t switch off your instincts.
He draped a cloth over the bowl. Once the dough rose he’d bash it down again, flatten it onto a tray, pour olive oil over it, along with a paste of garlic and shredded basil leaves, and leave it an hour before putting it in the oven. Then, lo, focaccia.
And tell me this, he thought. Tell me this: how could any life be broken if it included baking fucking focaccia?
It took all the willpower he possessed not to throw the bowl at the wall, but Lech managed it.
Look at me now.
Not long back, Catherine Standish had taken to buying bottles again; a self-conscious recreation of her drinking days, with this important distinction: she did not drink. It had been a deliberate flirtation with danger, acting out the alcoholic desire of oblivion, but in the end she had done what she had to do, and emptied her bottles down the sink, dismantling the Aladdin’s cave she had wrought. It had felt, afterwards, the way she remembered the post-Christmas lulls of her childhood, when decorations were packed away and ordinary dullness re-established. But at the same time she knew a danger had been avoided, and that her regret at not having confronted it head-on was her addiction speaking. Addiction loves challenge because challenge provides an excuse to fail. Though in Slough House, opportunities to fail were never far from hand.
And if you were ever in danger of forgetting this, Jackson Lamb was usually there to see you right.
But Lamb had left the office on some mission of his own before Catherine, and she herself had left early. The evening was chill, the start of British Summer Time having been marked by hailstorms and grey skies, and she wore her winter coat as she waited at a bus stop: not her own, nor anywhere near her route. Several buses passed, and she hailed none, but when a wheelchair rounded the nearest corner and trundled past the stop, she fell into step behind it. The wheelchair’s occupant gave no indication of having noticed, but continued as far as the next junction, where the chair’s electric humming ceased for a moment at the pedestrian crossing. Catherine remained out of its occupant’s range of vision, but the woman in the chair spoke anyway.
‘Do I know you?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Give me a minute.’
This was as long as the traffic lights required. But once they’d done their job, the wheelchair was on the move again. As they crossed the road, to the impotent fury of London’s traffic, its occupant spoke again.