‘Catherine Standish,’ she said. ‘One-time PA to Charles Partner, late and unlamented. And now – what shall we call it? Amanuensis? Chatelaine? Dogsbody? – to the not-yet-late but lamentable Jackson Lamb.’
‘Who sends his regards.’
‘Does he?’
‘Not really.’
‘No, that didn’t sound like him. You’re not going to pretend this is a chance encounter, then?’
‘I’d been waiting ten minutes.’
‘Surprised you weren’t scooped up. Sensitive to hangers-around, this neighbourhood.’
This being Regent’s Park, the immediate catchment area of the Secret Service.
‘One of the advantages of being a middle-aged woman,’ Catherine said, ‘is the cloak of invisibility that comes with it.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
Which was a fair rejoinder. Molly Doran had many attributes, but invisibility wasn’t among them.
‘I normally take a cab,’ she continued. ‘You’re lucky you caught me.’ She halted abruptly. ‘I was sorry to hear about your colleague.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Jackson hates losing joes.’
‘I don’t suppose the joes are that thrilled either.’
‘Ah. She bites.’ The wheelchair resumed its progress. ‘The reason I’m not in a taxi heading home, Ms Standish, is that I have things to do in town. So you have two minutes to explain whatever it is you’re after, and then we can both get about our business.’
Catherine said, ‘We have concerns.’
‘How borderline tragic for you.’
‘And we were wondering if you could help.’
‘And how are we defining “we” in this context?’
‘Just me, really.’
‘I see.’ Molly wore mockery-defying make-up, her face lifelessly white, her cheeks absurdly red. She might have been auditioning for a role in a different manner of circus, as a clown or perhaps an acrobat, though she was more than usually challenged if the latter. Her legs, for instance, ended at the knee.
She said, ‘So Lamb has no idea you’re talking to me?’
Catherine was aware that it could be an error to categorically state what Lamb was and was not aware of at any given time, including when he was asleep. But it was simplest to stick to supposition. ‘No.’
‘That’s a pity. When Lamb wants a favour, I charge him through the nose.’
‘… Really?’
‘Information. Not money.’ She smiled, not in a pleasant way. ‘Spook currency. I’m something of a hoarder.’
‘Which is the reason I wanted to see you.’
‘It’s the only reason anyone wants to see me. That’s my USP. My raison d’être.’ Molly Doran came to a halt again, and Catherine sensed a speech coming. ‘I’m an archivist, Ms Standish. I deal in the paper world. My little kingdom’s full of folders stuffed with the secrets people kept back when they sat at typewriters to make their reports. I used to be told, ooh, fifteen years ago, that digitisation would put an end to my kind of gatekeeping. That was before everyone got the heebie-jeebies about how vulnerable the online world is.’ She mimed the flicking of a switch. ‘One smart cookie in Beijing, and everything’s on the Web for all to see. So I’m still around, and my records are very much hard copies. The future may not be in my keeping, but trust me, the past is my domain.’ She paused. ‘“Cookie” was wordplay, incidentally. It’s a thing they have on computers.’
‘Yes, I’d heard.’
‘So tell me about these concerns of yours. Has someone been shaking your foundations? Slough House tumbling around your ears?’
Before Catherine could reply there was a howling in the near distance, from the direction of the zoo.
‘Did you hear that?’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Molly. ‘The big bad wolf. Coming to blow your house down, is he?’
‘I think someone already has,’ said Catherine.
The back door opened into a porch where coats were hung and wellington boots abandoned, or that’s what used to happen. Now it was just a cold empty area between the outside world and the kitchen. River passed through it silently. That was the thing about familiar houses: you knew its squeaks and unoiled hinges; you knew where to put your weight. Here on the doorjamb was a single pencil mark, midriff height. Rose had marked it off for him. There. That’s how tall you are. And then David had explained the rules of life: you didn’t leave your details in the open for everyone to see; you didn’t mark your height and age for the weasels to find. It had been River’s first glimpse into his grandfather’s secret world, and he’d never again asked Rose to measure him.
There was no noise. The study was ground floor, at the back: exit the kitchen, turn left. He could have done it with his eyes closed. Its door was open a fraction. Was that how he’d left it? He waited while his eyes adjusted to the gloom, acutely conscious of the emptiness around him. Even the grandfather clock, a fixture in the hallway since long before his birth, was gone. Its absence of ticking felt like a tap on his shoulder.
But in the study the shelves would be stocked with books; the rugs in place; the desk, the armchairs. There’d be a basket of logs by the fire and a transistor radio on the coffee table. It would barely be a surprise to find the O.B. there, brandy glass in hand. But his grandfather had passed into joe country, and besides: in the air was a smell of fried dust.
He put a hand flat on the study door, and pushed. It swung open.
The soft glow came from the ancient one-bar electric fire, usually kept tucked behind the O.B.’s armchair. In its halo, the room assumed the air of a Dutch painting: pin-sharp details in the centre, fading to shadow around the edges. And there, more or less where it shone brightest, his grandfather’s chair, its familiar heft as much a presence in River’s life as the man who’d once occupied it. The figure that sat there now watched as River entered, and didn’t seem to move; didn’t appear to be breathing. Might have been a ghost.
‘Jesus,’ he said softly.
He took two steps into the room.
‘… Sid?’
‘Hello, River,’ she said.
At that precise moment, miles away, an ambulance in a hurry rounds Beech Street, its blue light strobing first Barbican Tube Station and then the buildings on the next block: the Chinese restaurant, the newsagent’s; the door between the two which never opens, never closes. And for the time this takes to happen, Slough House is illuminated, its windows throwing back light as if fully engaged in London life; as if the building breathes the same air as everybody else, and harbours the same hopes and aspirations. It doesn’t last. A moment later the ambulance is bombing down Aldersgate Street, its siren squealing round the rooftops, and in its wake Slough House’s windows become the same black pools they were before, so that if you approached and peered in, always supposing you could hover that high above the pavement, nothing would look back at you – not the everyday nothing of casual absence, but the long-drop nothing that comes once everything’s over.
But nobody ever approaches, and nobody ever looks in. Slough House might as well not be there, for all the attention paid to it, and while this is unsurprising – the spook trade not being renowned for kerb flash – it carries too a suggestion of redundancy. Because in London, a building best hurried past is a building without reason to be, and such a building might find its days numbered; might find itself viewed not as bricks and mortar but as an opportunity; as an empty pillar of air, waiting for steel and glass to give it shape. The history embedded in its bones counts for nothing. To those who buy and sell and own and build, the past is simply a shortcut to what’s yet to come, and what’s yet to come offers magpie riches to those prepared to embrace the changes demanded. Or so the promises run.