‘Give me a reason not to kill you,’ he said.
Whatever Curly answered was lost in a mouthful of earth and a whimper of pain.
‘Give me a reason,’ Hassan repeated, lifting the axe an inch.
Curly turned his head aside and spat grit and leaf. ‘Foo’s ur.’
‘I’m supposed to understand that?’
He spat again. ‘My foot’s hurt.’
Hassan lowered the axe once more, so the blade touched Curly’s temple. He pressed down, and watched Curly’s eyes close and his features tighten. He wondered if the fear Curly felt was the same fear he’d felt himself. Since it seemed to have departed him now, he suspected it probably was. And how’s that for a joke, he wondered? How would that work with an audience? That the same fear Curly had set loose in Hassan’s gut was now burying its snout in his own bowels? But maybe not everyone would get it. Maybe you had to be there.
Another push on the axe loosed a trickle of blood down Curly’s face.
‘Did you say something?’
Curly had made a noise.
‘Did you?’
He made another one.
Wrapping his bound hands tightly round the axe handle, Hassan dropped into a crouch. The blade pressed heavily on the side of Curly’s head. He said, ‘Did you have something to say?’, and gave equal weight to each syllable.
Curly said, ‘D—do it.’
Or he might have said, ‘Don’t do it.’
Hassan waited, his eyes six inches from Curly’s. He wished there were some way he could see inside Curly’s head; some way he could allow light into Curly’s brain in a way that didn’t involve brute surgery. But there wasn’t. He was sure there wasn’t. So he leant a little closer.
‘You know what?’ Hassan said. ‘You make me ashamed I’m British.’
Then he stood and walked away.
He walked back to the car and then along the track that led to the distant road. He had no idea how far away it was. He didn’t care. He was thirsty, hungry and tired, which were all bad things; he was cold and filthy, and that was bad too. But his hands were no longer bound, because he had severed the cord with the blade of the axe; and fear was no longer chewing at his innards, because he’d left it behind in the woods. He was alive, and nobody had rescued him. He was alive because of who he was.
And maybe because Joanna Lumley had come through, too.
He saw no sign of Larry, and that didn’t matter. He saw no rabbits, either, nor heard any birds, and his sense of time had long deserted him, but before Hassan reached the road lights bloomed way ahead of him: flashing ovals which painted the trees blue and then blue and then blue. And soon people were rushing towards him in a fever of noise and motion.
‘Hassan Ahmed?’
The axe was taken gently away, and arms were holding him up.
‘You’re Hassan Ahmed?’
It was a simple enough question, and it didn’t take him long to find an answer.
‘Yes,’ he told them. ‘Yes, I am.’
And then he added, ‘I’m alive.’
They were very glad to hear it, he learned, as they carried him back to the world.
Chapter 18
The roadworks have eased on Aldersgate. Traffic flows freely once more. If our inquisitive bus passenger of earlier acquaintance were to gaze at Slough House today on her way past, she might find its passage too swift for concentrated study, though on a London bus there always remains the possibility of inexplicable delay. But that aside, a glimpse is all that the new dispensation permits; one brief view of a young Chinese man with heavy-framed spectacles behind a monitor, and Slough House is in the past. Whatever used to happen there presumably continues to do so. Whatever haunts its fading paintwork doubtless still abides.
But fresh opportunities have arisen since our voyeur’s first journey. She can alight at the bus stop opposite, for instance, and take a seat, and gaze all day at the never-opening front door of Slough House, with no possibility that Jed Moody will emerge to encourage her departure. Such a vigil, though, would offer little in the way of entertainment, and besides, other views await: across the road, up the staircase at Barbican Station, over the pedestrian bridge, a brief sortie along a bricked-walkway, and—weather permitting—she’ll find a dry low wall on which to perch, and perhaps light a cigarette, and feast at her leisure on what she can see through the waiting windows.
Which is more than can be seen from bus-level, certainly. For instance, it is now clear that the wobbling ziggurat to one side of the young Chinese man’s desk is composed of pizza boxes, and the tin pyramid to the other of Coke cans; and clear, too, that he appears to have sole occupation of this office. There is another desk, but its surface is clear; almost antiseptically so. It’s as if a particularly conscientious cleaner has obliterated all traces of the desk’s erstwhile occupant; a sterilization which evidently leaves his former colleague undismayed, occupied as he is by whatever is unreeling on his screen.
This thorough decluttering is in marked contrast to the state of the adjoining office, which looks to have been abandoned at a moment’s notice. The desktops here are still littered with the usual detritus: diaries open to future events, uncapped pens, an alarm clock, a radio, a small gonk. Stuff which, upon a desk-worker’s abrupt departure, would usually find itself swept into the nearest cardboard box and carted home. But here it all remains, suggesting that whichever pair recently shared this office found good reason not to return; being guilty, perhaps, of the kind of offence which has rendered them not only persona non grata but in danger of incurring active hostility from above.
Onwards and upwards, though; onwards and upwards. From the Barbican perch, a view of the second floor is offered, and this is busier, or at any rate, more peopled. In one of the offices—for our watcher, the one to the left—a pair of workers sit at the same desk; or rather, one sits at the desk while her companion perches on its edge, both concentrating on a transistor radio. Meanwhile, in the next room—the one whose windows read W W Henderson, Solicitor and Commissioner For Oaths—a young man sits alone; a freshly barbered young man of average height; fair-haired, pale-skinned, grey-eyed; with a sharpish nose and a small mole on his upper lip. He sits unmoving, his gaze apparently focused on the desk in the other half of his room. This, like its counterpart in the occupied office downstairs, appears to have been swept clean of personal effects, leaving only the ubiquitous computer and keyboard, a telephone, and a battle-scarred blotter belonging to another era entirely. But closer inspection reveals something else on the desk’s surface; an object our watcher recognizes as a hair-slide, or barrette, though whether that word forms part of the young man’s vocabulary is open to question. And yet for the moment at least it demands his full attention: an abandoned barrette on a blotter on an unoccupied desk.
So far, so pleasing, from our watcher’s point of view, but even from her current vantage point the topmost floor remains inaccessible; the blind drawn over its windows ensuring that whoever haunts this floor does so unobserved. That should be an end of it, then. Our watcher should move along, there being nothing more to see. And yet still she remains, as if she were in possession of some sophisticated piece of surveillance kit that allows her not only to study the people through the windows but to unpeel their actual thoughts, and thus learn that Roderick Ho’s constant trawling through the Service’s classified databases is a quest for the secret that ever eludes him, this being the nature of the sin for which he’s been banished to Slough House—for he is certain that he has committed no crimes that anyone is aware of. And he might be right about this, but the fact remains that he’s looking in the wrong place, since the reason for his exile lies not in his doings but simply in his being. For Roderick Ho is disliked by everyone he encounters, a direct result of his own palpable dislike for everyone else, and his expulsion from Regent’s Park was the administrative equivalent of the swatting of a fly. And if this explanation ever does occur to Ho, enlightenment will probably have its roots in that moment in the café on Old Street, when Catherine Standish called him Roddy.