‘Another round?’
‘Yeah. Maybe. Or …’
‘Or?’
‘Or maybe back to the office?’
‘It’s late. There’ll be nobody there.’
‘My point exactly.’
‘You think we should …’
‘Check Ho’s info?’
‘If Lamb knows anything, it’ll be on his e-mail.’
Both considered this for flaws, and found plenty. Both decided not to raise them.
‘If we get caught looking at Lamb’s e-mail …’
‘We won’t.’
If there was anyone there, there’d be lights in the windows, visible from the road. It wasn’t like Slough House was high security.
‘You sure there’s a point to this?’
‘More point than sitting here getting pissed. That’s not helping anyone.’
‘True.’
Each waited for the other to make the first move.
In the end, though, they had another drink first.
There had been hospitals before, but not since childhood. One bad year had seen River incarcerated twice; first for a tonsillectomy, then for a broken arm, sustained in a fall from a large oak two fields from his grandparents’ house. It hadn’t been the first time he’d scaled it, though he’d had trouble getting down on the previous occasions. This time there’d been no trouble. Only gravity. Back home he’d tried not to mention the injury, on account of having promised not to damage himself climbing trees, but at length had been forced to admit that yes, he was struggling to hold his fork. The O.B. told him later that it was only after having made the admission that River had turned white, then whiter, then dropped to the floor.
Lying in the dark now, what he remembered that occasion for was that his mother had come as he lay in hospital. It had been the first time he’d seen her in two years, and she claimed to have arrived back on English soil only that afternoon. ‘Perhaps at the same moment you had your fall, darling. Don’t you think that’s what happened? That you sensed my arrival, all those miles away?’ Even at nine River had difficulty with this scenario, and hadn’t been especially surprised when he later learned that Isobel had been in the country for several months. Be that as it may, she was with him now, unaccompanied by his ‘new father’, and unfazed by River’s having told his nurse he was an orphan. In fact, the only thing that galvanized her was her parents’ negligence.
‘Climbing trees? How could they let you do such a thing?’
But evasion of blame was so ingrained to her character, even those around her colluded. River himself wasn’t immune. Of the injuries she’d bestowed upon him few had caused as much grief as his name, but even at nine he knew a narrow escape when he saw one. Isobel Cartwright’s hippy phase had been superseded by an equally short-lived Teutonic one, and had River been a year younger, he might have been a Wolfgang. He suspected that his grandfather would have balked at that. The O.B. was as adept at destroying true identities as he was at creating false ones.
But long time ago. Water under a bridge. River was a name for water that passed under a bridge. Lying in another hospital, River wondered who he’d have been if born to a different mother; one who hadn’t rebelled so thoroughly, if ineffectively, against her middle-class upbringing. He wouldn’t have been brought up by his grandparents. Wouldn’t have fallen out of a tree, or not that tree. And wouldn’t have fallen under the spell of an idea of service; of a life lived outside the humdrum … But his mother had drifted in and out of his life like a song. During her longer absences, he forgot the words; when she was around, there was always a new one to add to the list. She was beautiful, vague, solipsistic, childish. Lately, he’d recognized how brittle she’d become. She often imagined she’d raised him herself, and would bristle convincingly when reminded otherwise. Her hell-raising years were not only behind her, they belonged to someone else. Isobel Dunstable—her late marriage had been a satisfactory one, bestowing respectability, wealth and widowhood in quick succession—might never have looked at a hash pipe in anything other than puzzlement. It wasn’t only her father who was adept at destroying true identities.
Thinking these familiar thoughts was better than the alternative, which was thinking about other things altogether.
There came a scraping from beyond the locked door; as if somebody was balancing on a chair, steadying themselves with their feet against the opposite wall.
As a boy with a broken arm, River had recognized his surroundings for what they were: hospitals were where light gathered in corners, and curtains performed the functions of walls. Where privacy was rarely granted, and unwanted visitors far more common than the other kind.
He heard footsteps heading down the corridor, towards him.
Slough House too was in darkness. At Regent’s Park, even when nothing was happening, there’d be enough people about for a midnight football match: eleven a side, plus linesmen. Here there was only emptiness, and the reek of disappointment. Min Harper, climbing the forlorn staircase, decided that the place resembled nothing more than a front for a mail-order porn empire, and with the thought came the dispiriting sense of being part of an enterprise nobody cared about, where tasks that didn’t matter were performed by people who didn’t care. For the last two months, Min had been examining congestion charge anomalies: cars clocked entering the zone whose owners had never paid; whose owners, in fact, denied being in the zone on the day in question. And time after time, it broke down to the same boring facts: that those who’d been caught were guilty of everyday life. They were playing away from home, or shifting bootlegged DVDs, or delivering their daughters to abortion clinics well out of their husbands’ sight … There were prison camps whose inmates spent their days carrying rocks from one end of the yard to the other, and then back. That might be a more fulfilling occupation.
Something shifted further up the stairwell.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. A noise.’
They halted on the landing. Whatever had made the sound didn’t make it again.
Louisa leant closer to Min, and he became aware of the smell of her hair.
‘A mouse?’
‘Do we have mice?’
‘We’ve probably got rats.’
Alcohol thickened the syllables, and slurred the sibilants.
Whatever they’d thought they’d heard didn’t happen again. The smell of Louisa’s hair, though, continued. Min cleared his throat.
‘Shall we?’
‘Um …?’
‘Go up, I mean?’
‘Sure. Going down’s not an option. I mean—’
Good job it was dark.
But as they set off up the next flight of stairs their hands brushed in the darkness, and their drunk fingers entangled themselves, and then they were kissing, and more than kissing; were clutching at each other in the darkness; each pushing at the other as if anxious to occupy the same space, which turned out to be against the wall in Loy’s room, the first they’d come to.
Three minutes passed.
Coming up for breath, their first words were:
‘Jesus, I never—’
‘Shut up.’
They shut up.
Two floors above them, a black-clad figure paused inside Lamb’s office.
Outside the door, one of Nick Duffy’s crew occupied a plastic chair, tilting it so its back was resting against the wall. Dan Hobbs had been two minutes short of going off-roster when he was dispatched here instead. When an agent got shot, there was no such thing as downtime. Even when it was a slow horse. Even when it was their own stupid fault.
Though short on detail, Hobbs was prepared to accept that it had been their own stupid fault.