And with this in mind, it would have found the first of the final pair of offices: a more welcoming area into which to strut, for this is where Catherine Standish works, and Catherine Standish knows what to do with a cat. Catherine Standish ignores cats. Cats are either adjuncts or substitutes, and Catherine Standish has no truck with either. Having a cat is one small step from having two cats, and to be a single woman within a syllable of fifty in possession of two cats is tantamount to declaring life over. Catherine Standish has had her share of scary moments but has survived each of them, and is not about to surrender now. So our cat can make itself as comfortable as it likes in here, but no matter how much affection it pretends to, how coyly it wraps its sleek length round Catherine’s calves, there will be no treats forthcoming; no strips of sardine patted dry on a Kleenex and laid at its feet; no pot of cream decanted into a saucer. And since no cat worth the name can tolerate lack of worship, ours takes its leave and saunters next door …
… to Jackson Lamb’s lair at last, where the ceiling slopes and a blind dims the window, and what light there is comes from a lamp placed on a pile of telephone directories. The air is heavy with a dog’s olfactory daydream: takeaway food, illicit cigarettes, day-old farts and stale beer, but there will be no time to catalogue this because Jackson Lamb can move surprisingly swiftly for a man of his bulk, or he can when he feels like it, and trust this: when a fucking cat enters his room, he feels like it. Within a blink he’d have seized our cat by the throat; pulled up the blind, opened the window, and dropped it to the road below, where it would doubtless land on its feet, as both science and rumour confirm, but equally doubtless in front of a moving vehicle, this, as noted, being the new dispensation on Aldersgate Street. A muffled bump and a liquid screech of brakes might have carried upwards, but Lamb would have closed the window by then and be back in his chair, eyes closed; his sausagy fingers interlinked on his paunch.
It’s a lucky escape for our cat, then—that it doesn’t exist, for that would have been a brutal ending. And a lucky escape twice over, as it happens, for on this particular morning the nigh-on unthinkable has happened, and Jackson Lamb is not dozing at his desk, or prowling the kitchen area outside his office, scavenging his underlings’ food; nor is he wafting up and down the staircase with that creepily silent tread he adopts at will. He’s not banging on his floor, which is River Cartwright’s ceiling, for the pleasure of timing how long it takes Cartwright to arrive, and he’s not ignoring Catherine Standish while she delivers another pointless report he’s forgotten commissioning. Simply put, he’s not here.
And no one in Slough House has the faintest idea where he is.
Where Jackson Lamb was was Oxford, and he had a brand new theory, one to float in front of the suits at Regent’s Park. Lamb’s new theory was this: that instead of sending tadpole spooks on expensive torture-resistance courses at hideaways on the Welsh borders, they should pack them off to Oxford railway station to observe the staff in action. Because whatever training these guys underwent, it left every last one of them highly skilled in the art of not releasing information.
“You work here, right?”
“Sir?”
“Were you on shift last Tuesday evening?”
“The helpline number’s on all the posters, sir. If you have a complaint—”
“I don’t have a complaint,” Lamb said. “I just want to know if you were on duty last Tuesday evening.”
“And why would you want to know that, sir?”
Lamb had been stonewalled three times so far. This fourth was a small man with sleeked-back hair and a grey moustache that twitched occasionally of its own accord. He looked like a weasel in a uniform. Lamb would have caught him by the back legs and cracked him like a whip, but there was a policeman within earshot.
“Let’s assume it’s important.”
He had ID, of course, under a workname, but didn’t have to be a fisherman to know that you don’t go lobbing rocks in the pool before you cast your line. If anyone rang the number on his card, bells and whistles would sound at Regent’s Park. And Lamb didn’t want the suits asking what he thought he was doing, because he wasn’t sure what he thought he was doing, and there was no chance in hell he was going to share that information.
“Very important,” he added. He tapped his lapel. A wallet poked visibly from his inside pocket, and a twenty pound note peeped visibly from inside that.
“Ah.”
“I take it that’s a yes.”
“You understand we have to be careful, sir. With people asking questions at major transport hubs.”
Good to know, thought Jackson Lamb, that if terrorists descended on this particular transport hub, they’d meet an impregnable line of defence. Unless they waved banknotes. “Last Tuesday,” he said. “There was some kind of meltdown.”
But his man was already shaking his head: “Not our problem, sir. Everything was fine here.”
“Everything was fine except the trains weren’t running.”
“The trains were running here, sir. There were problems elsewhere.”
“Right.” It had been a while since Lamb had endured a conversation this long without resorting to profanity. The slow horses would have been amazed, except the newbies, who’d have suspected a test. “But wherever the problem, there were people being bused here from Reading. Because the trains weren’t running.”
The weasel was knitting his eyebrows together, but had seen his way to the end of this line of questioning, and was picking up speed on the final stretch. “That’s right, sir. A replacement bus service.”
“Which came from where?”
“On that particular occasion, sir, I rather think they’d have come from Reading.”
Of course they bloody would. Jackson Lamb sighed, and reached for his cigarettes.
“You can’t smoke in here, sir.”
Lamb tucked one behind his ear. “When’s the next Reading train?”
“Five minutes, sir.”
Grunting his thanks, Lamb turned for the barriers.
“Sir?”
He looked back.
Gaze fixed on Lamb’s lapel, the weasel made a rustly sign with finger and thumb.
“What?”
“I thought you were going to …”
“Give you a tip?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Here’s a good one.” Lamb tapped his nose with a finger. “If you’ve got a complaint, there’s a helpline number on the posters.”
Then he wandered onto the platform, and waited for his train.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SOHO CRIME SERIES
Quentin Bates
(Iceland)
Frozen Assets
Cold Comfort
Chilled to the Bone
Cheryl Benard
(Pakistan)
Moghul Buffet
James R. Benn
(World War II Europe)
Billy Boyle
The First Wave
Blood Alone
Evil for Evil
Rag & Bone
A Mortal Terror
Death’s Door
A Blind Goddess
Cara Black
(Paris, France)
Murder in the Marais