Maybe two minutes; maybe three. He didn’t count. Again, he studied the clouds whipping elsewhere, and the looming roofs opposite threatening to come crashing down.
Next time the door opened, no words were spoken. Mr Sleek simply stepped to one side, his demeanour suggesting he’d drawn the word grudging in a post-dinner game of Charades.
Hobden was shown downstairs, past the drawing room, from behind whose closed door came the soft murmur of happiness. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d attended a dinner party, though he’d probably been discussed at a few since.
Downstairs was the kitchen, which was about the size of Hobden’s flat, and more carefully outfitted: wood and gleaming enamel, with a marble block forming a coffinsized island in its centre. Pitiless overhead lighting would have shown up streaks of grease or splashes of sauce, but there were none, even now: the dishwasher hummed, and glasses were assembled along one surface, but it all looked like a tidy representation of a party’s aftermath in a catalogue dedicated to polite living. From stainless steel hooks on a rail hung shiny pans, each with their sole purpose; one for boiling eggs, another for scrambling them, and so on. A row of olive oil bottles, ordered by region, occupied a shelf. He still had a journalist’s eye, Robert Hobden. Depending on who he was profiling, he’d take these things as evidence of middle-class certainty, or mail-ordered props intended to buffer up just such an image. On the other hand, he wasn’t writing profiles any more. And if he was, no one would print them.
Sleek stood by the door, pointedly not leaving Hobden alone.
Hobden drifted to the far side of the room; leant against the sink.
He wasn’t writing profiles any more, but if he were, and if his current host were his target, he’d be bound to start with the name. Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations—Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!!—Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the GBP, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the tax-man blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle. And here he was now, bursting through the kitchen door with an alacrity that had Mr Sleek making a sharp sideways step to avoid being flattened.
‘Robert Hobden!’ he cried.
‘PJ.’
‘Robert. Rob—Rob! How are you?’
‘I’m not so bad, PJ. Yourself?’
‘Oh, of course. Seb, take Robert’s coat, would you?’
‘I won’t stay long—’
‘But long enough to remove your coat! That’s just dandy, that’s just fine.’ This to Seb, if that was Sleek’s name. ‘You can leave us now.’ The kitchen door swung closed. PJ’s tone didn’t alter. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, you stupid fucking cunt?’ It reminded him of darker days; of missions you might not come back from. He’d always come back from them, obviously, but there were others who hadn’t. Whether the difference lay in the mission or the men, there was no way of knowing.
Tonight, he expected to come back. But he already had one body on the floor and another in a hospital bed, a pretty high casualty rate when he wasn’t even running an op.
The meet was by the canal, near where the towpath came to an end and the water disappeared inside a long tunnel. Lamb had chosen it because it cut down on directions of approach, and he didn’t trust Diana Taverner. For the same reason, he got there first. It was approaching two. A quarter moon was blotted now and then by passing clouds. A house across the water was lit, all three storeys, and he could hear chatter and occasional laughter from smokers in the garden. Some people threw parties midweek. Jackson Lamb kept tabs on his department’s body count.
She came from the Angel end, her approach signalled by the tapping of her heels on the path.
‘Are you alone?’ she asked.
He spread his arms as if to measure the stupidity of her question. As he did so his shirt came untucked, and night air scratched his belly.
She looked beyond him, at the treed slope leading up to the road. Then back at him. ‘What do you think you’re playing at?’
‘I lent you an agent,’ he said. ‘She’s in hospital.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘Lloyd Webber-grade, you said. One step up from sharpening pencils. But now she’s got a bullet in her head.’
‘Lamb,’ she said. ‘The job was the other day. Whatever’s happened to her since, that’s hardly—’
‘Don’t even bother. She was shot outside Hobden’s place. By Jed Moody, intentionally or otherwise. When you’re not co-opting my team, you’re subverting them. You gave Moody a mobile phone. What else did you give him? An earful of promises? A ticket to his future?’
Taverner said, ‘Check the rulebook, Lamb. You run Slough House, and God knows, nobody’s looking to take that away. But I’m head of ops, which means directing personnel. All personnel. Yours or anyone else’s.’
Jackson Lamb farted.
‘God, you’re a vile specimen.’
‘So I’m told,’ he said. ‘Okay, say you’re right, and this is none of my business. What do I do about the body on my staircase? Call in the Dogs?’
If he hadn’t had it before, he had her attention now.
‘Moody?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘The proverbial dodo.’
Across the water, the smokers fell upon a joke of unusual hilarity. The canal’s surface was ruffled by the wind.
Lamb said, ‘You wanted to subcontract, you could have chosen more carefully. Jesus, I mean, Jed Moody? Even when he was any good he wasn’t any good. And it’s a long time since he was any good.’
‘Who killed him?’
‘You want to hear something funny? He tripped over his own feet.’
‘That’ll sound good before Limitations. Though you might want to leave out the bit about it being funny.’
Lamb threw back his head and laughed a silent laugh, while leaves’ shadows flickered across his wobbling face. He looked like someone Goya might have painted. ‘Good. Very good. Limitations, yes. So we call in the Dogs? Hell, it’s a death. Why don’t I call the plod? As it happens, I’ve a mobile with me.’ He grinned at her. His teeth, mostly different shapes, shone wet.
‘Okay.’
‘The coroner. His turf, right?’
‘You’ve made your point, Lamb.’
He went fumbling in his pockets, and for a horrified moment she thought he was unzipping himself, but he produced a packet of Marlboro instead. He drew one with his teeth, and as an afterthought waved the pack in her direction.
Taverner took one. Always accept hospitality. It forms a bond. Makes you allies.
Of course, whoever had taught her that hadn’t been thinking of Jackson Lamb.
He said, ‘Talk.’
‘It’s good to see you too, PJ.’
‘Have you lost your cocking mind?’
‘You’ve not been taking my calls.’
‘Of course I haven’t, you’re fucking toxic. Did anyone see you arrive?’
‘I don’t know.’