He thought about peeling the rubber gloves off, but that would be a sticky business, involving pinching each finger end then tugging, so decided not. ‘Dirty work,’ he said instead.
Unexpectedly, Lamb blew a raspberry.
The desk hid Lamb’s paunch, though hiding it wasn’t enough. Lamb could be behind a closed door, and his paunch would remain evident. Because it was there in his voice, let alone his face or his eyes. It was there in the way he blew a raspberry. He resembled, someone had once remarked, Timothy Spall gone to seed, which left open the question of what Timothy Spall not gone to seed might look like, but painted an accurate picture nevertheless. Spall aside, that stomach, the unshaved jowls, the hair—a dirty blond slick combed back from a high forehead, which broke into a curl as it touched his collar—made him a ringer, River thought, for Jack Falstaff. A role Timothy Spall should consider.
‘Good point,’ he said. ‘Well made.’
‘Thought there might be a veiled criticism in there,’ Jackson Lamb said.
‘Wouldn’t have occurred to me.’
‘No. Well. Occurred to you to do this dirty work over Sid’s side of the office.’
River said, ‘It’s difficult to keep a bagful of rubbish all in one place. Experts call it garbage-creep.’
‘You’re not a big fan of Sid’s, are you?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Well, Sid’s not your biggest admirer either,’ said Lamb. ‘But then, competition for that role’s not fierce. Found anything interesting?’
‘Define interesting.’
‘Let’s pretend for the moment I’m your boss.’
‘It’s about as interesting as a bagful of household rubbish gets. Sir.’
‘Elaborate, why don’t you?’
‘He empties his ashtray into a sheet of newspaper. Wraps it up like a present.’
‘Sounds like a loony.’
‘Stops his bin from smelling.’
‘Bins are supposed to smell. That’s how you know they’re bins.’
‘What was the point of this?’
‘Thought you wanted to get out the office. Didn’t I hear you say you wanted to get out the office? Like, three times a day every day for months?’
‘Sure. On Her Majesty’s, etc etc. So now I’m going through bins like a dumpster diver. What am I even looking for?’
‘Who says you’re looking for anything?’
River thought about it. ‘You mean, we just want him to know he’s being looked at?’
‘What do you mean we, paleface? You don’t want anything. You only want what I tell you to want. No old notebooks? Torn-up letters?’
‘Part of a notebook. Spiral-bound. But no pages. Just the cardboard backing.’
‘Evidence of drug use?’
‘Empty box of paracetamol.’
‘Condoms?’
‘I imagine he flushes them,’ River said. ‘Should the occasion arise.’
‘They come in little foil packets.’
‘So I recall. No. None of those.’
‘Empty booze bottles?’
‘In his recycling bin, I expect.’
‘Beer cans?’
‘Ditto.’
‘God,’ said Jackson Lamb. ‘Is it me, or did all the fun go out of everything round about 1979?’
River wasn’t going to pretend he cared about that. ‘I thought our job involved preserving democracy,’ he said. ‘How does harassing a journalist help?’
‘Are you serious? It ought to be one of our key performance indicators.’
Lamb pronounced this phrase as if it had been on a form he’d lately binned.
‘This particular example, then.’
‘Try not to think of him as a journalist. And more as a potential danger to the integrity of the body politic.’
‘Is that what he is?’
‘I don’t know. Anything in his rubbish suggest he might be?’
‘Well, he smokes. But that’s not actually been upgraded to security threat.’
‘Yet,’ said Lamb, who’d been known to light up in his office. He thought for a moment. Then said, ‘Okay. Write it up.’
‘Write it up,’ River repeated. Not quite making it a question.
‘You have a problem, Cartwright?’
‘I feel like I’m working for a tabloid.’
‘You should be so lucky. Know what those bastards earn?’
‘Do you want me to put him under surveillance?’
Lamb laughed.
River waited. It took a while. Lamb’s laugh wasn’t a genuine surrender to amusement; more of a temporary derangement. Not a laugh you’d want to hear from anyone holding a stick.
When he stopped, it was as abrupt as if he’d never started. ‘If that’s what I wanted, you think I’d pick you?’
‘I could do it.’
‘Really?’
‘I could do it,’ he repeated.
‘Let me rephrase,’ said Jackson Lamb. ‘Supposing I wanted it done without dozens of innocent bystanders getting killed. Think you could manage that?’
River didn’t reply.
‘Cartwright?’
Screw you, he wanted to say. He settled for ‘I could do it,’ again; though repetition made it sound an admission of defeat. He could do it. Could he really? ‘No one would get hurt,’ he said.
‘Nice to have your input,’ Lamb told him. ‘But that’s not what happened last time.’
Min Harper was next to arrive, with Louisa Guy on his heels. They chatted in the kitchen, both trying too hard. They’d shared a moment a week ago, in the pub across the road, which was a hellhole: an unwindowed nightmare, strictly for the lager and tequila crowd. But they’d gone anyway, both suffering the need for a drink within sixty seconds of leaving Slough House, a margin too thin to allow for reaching anywhere nicer.
Their conversation had been focused at first (Jackson Lamb is a bastard), then becoming speculative (what makes Jackson Lamb such a bastard?) before drifting into the sentimental (wouldn’t it be sweet if Jackson Lamb fell under a threshing machine?). Crossing back to the tube afterwards, there’d been an awkward parting—what had that been about? Just a drink after work, except no one in Slough House went for a drink after work—but they’d muddled through by pretending they’d not actually been together, and found their separate platforms without words. But since then they’d not positively avoided each other, which was unusual. In Slough House, there was almost never more than one person in the kitchen at a time.
Mugs were rinsed. The kettle switched on.
‘Is it me, or is there a strange smell somewhere?’
Upstairs, a door slammed. Downstairs, one opened.
‘If I said it was you, how upset would you be?’
And they exchanged glances and smiles both turned off at exactly the same moment.
It took no effort for River to remember the most significant conversation he’d had with Jackson Lamb. It had happened eight months ago, and had started with River asking when he was going to get something proper to do.
‘When the dust settles.’
‘Which will be when?’
Lamb had sighed, grieving his role as answerer of stupid questions. ‘The only reason there’s dust is your connections, Cartwright. If not for grandad, we wouldn’t be discussing dust. We’d be talking glaciers. We’d be talking about when glaciers melt. Except we wouldn’t be talking at all, because you’d be a distant memory. Someone to reminisce about occasionally, to take Moody’s mind off his fuck-ups, or Standish’s off the bottle.’
River had measured the distance between Lamb’s chair and the window. That blind wasn’t going to offer resistance. If River got the leverage right, Lamb would be a pizza-shaped stain on the pavement instead of drawing another breath; saying: