For the blast, when it came, left little intact. It shattered bone and pulverised mortality, and reduced all nearby life to charred stubble. Windows became shrapnel and the fountain hissed as flaming chunks of masonry, brick, plastic and flesh rained into it. An angry fireball swallowed the music and the dancers both, and sent a wave of heat and air pulsing down all four avenues, while the springtime dummies in their pristine clothing were blown away behind a memory of glass. It lasted seconds, but never stopped, and those it left behind—parents and families, lovers and friends—would ever after mark the date as one of unanswered phone calls and uncollected cars; a day when something like the sun bloomed in all the wrong places, searing its indelible image into the lives of those it found there.
Part One
Something like the Sun
Heat rises, as is commonly known, but not always without effort. In Slough House, its ascent is marked by a series of bangs and gurgles, an audible diary of a forced and painful passage through cranky piping, and if you could magic the plumbing out of the structure and view it as a free-standing exoskeleton, it would be all leaks and dribbles: an arthritic dinosaur, its joints angled awkwardly where fractures have messily healed; its limbs a mis-matched muddle; its extremities stained and rusting, and weakly pumping out warmth. And the boiler, the heart of this beast, wouldn’t so much beat as flutter in a trip-hop rhythm, its occasional bursts of enthusiasm producing explosions of heat in unlikely places; its irregular palpitations a result of pockets of air straining for escape. From doors away you can hear its knocking, this antiquated heating system, and it sounds like a monkey-wrench tapping on an iron railing; like a coded message transmitted from one locked cell to another.
It’s a wasteful, unworkable mess, but then this shabby set of offices—hard by Barbican underground station, on Aldersgate Street, in the borough of Finsbury—isn’t exactly noted for its efficiency, of equipment or personnel. Indeed, its inhabitants might as well be banging on pipes with spanners themselves for all their communication skills are worth, though on this cold January morning, two days after an appalling act at Westacres shopping centre claimed upwards of forty lives, other noises can be heard in Slough House. Not in Jackson Lamb’s room, for once: of all the building’s occupants, he may be the one most obviously in tune with its rackety plumbing, being no stranger to internal gurglings and sudden warm belches himself, but for the moment his office is empty, and his radiator its sole source of clamour. In the room opposite, though—until a few months back, Catherine Standish’s; now Moira Tregorian’s—there is at least some conversation taking place, though of a necessarily one-sided nature, Moira Tregorian currently being the room’s sole occupant: her monologue consists of single, emphatic syllables—a “tchah” here, a “duh” there—interspersed with the odd unfractured phrase, never thought I’d see the day and what on earth’s this when it’s at home? A younger listener might assume Moira to be delivering these fragments down a telephone, but in fact they are directed at the papers on her desk, papers which have accumulated in the absence of Catherine Standish, and have done so in a manner uncontaminated by organisational principle, whether chronological, alphabetical or commonsensical, since they were deposited there by Lamb, whose mania for order has some way to go before it might be classed as neurotic, or even observable. There are many sheets of paper, and each of them has to be somewhere, and discovering which of the many possible somewheres that might be is Moira’s job today, as it was yesterday, and will be tomorrow. Had he done so deliberately, Lamb could hardly have come up with a more apt introduction to life under his command, here in this administrative oubliette of the Intelligence Service, but the truth is, Lamb hasn’t so much consigned the documents to Moira’s care as banished them from his own, out of sight/out of mind being his solution to unwanted paperwork. Moira, whose second day in Slough House this is, and who has yet to meet Jackson Lamb, has already decided she’ll be having a few sharp words with him when that event comes to pass. And while she is nodding vigorously at this thought the radiator growls like a demented cat, startling her so she drops the papers she is holding, and has to scramble to retrieve them before they disarrange themselves again.
Meanwhile, from the landing below, other noise floats up: a murmur from the kitchen, where a kettle has lately boiled, and a recently opened fridge is humming. In the kitchen are River Cartwright and Louisa Guy, both with warm mugs in their hands, and Louisa is maintaining a nearly unbroken commentary on the trials and tribulations accompanying the purchase of her new flat. This is quite some distance away, as London flats tend to be if they’re affordable, but the picture she paints of its size, its comfort, its uncluttered surfaces, is evidence of a new contentment that River would be genuinely glad to witness, were he not brooding about something else. And all the while, behind him, the door to his office creaks on a squeaky hinge, not because anyone is currently using it, but in general protest at the draughts that haunt Slough House, and in a more particular complaint directed at the commotion arising from the next floor down.
But while his door remains unused, River’s office is not empty, for his new colleague—a slow horse for some two months now—sits within, slumped in his chair, the hood of his hoodie pulled over his head. Apart from his fingers he is still, but these move unceasingly, his keyboard pushed aside the better to accommodate this, and while an observer would see nothing more than an advanced case of the fidgets, what JK Coe is describing on the scuffed surface of his desk is a silent replica of what’s coursing through his head via his iPod: Keith Jarrett’s improvised piano recital from Osaka, November 8, 1976, one of the Sun Bear concerts; Coe’s fingers miming the melodies Jarrett discovered on the night, all those miles and all those years away. It’s a soundless echo of another man’s genius, and serves a dual purpose: of tamping down Coe’s thoughts, which are dismal, and of drowning out the noises his mind would otherwise entertain: the sound of wet meat dropping to the floor, for instance, or the buzz of an electric carving knife wielded by a naked intruder. But all this he keeps to himself, and as far as River and the other denizens of Slough House are concerned, JK Coe is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, the whole package then refashioned in the shape of a surly, uncommunicative twat.
Though even if he were yodelling, he’d not be heard over the commotion from the floor below. Not that this racket is emanating from Roderick Ho’s room, or no more of it than usual (the humming of computers; the tinnitus-rattle of Ho’s own iPod, loaded with more aggressive music than Coe’s; his nasal whistling, of which he is unaware; the rubbery squeak his swivel-chair emits when he shifts his buttocks); no, what’s surprising about the atmosphere in Ho’s room—or what would surprise anyone who chose to hang out there, which no one does, because it’s Ho’s room—is that it’s upbeat. Cheerful, even. As if something other than his own sense of superiority is warming Roddy Ho’s cockles these days, which would be handy, given the inability of his radiator to warm anything much, cockles or otherwise; it coughs now, and spits fizzily from its valve, spurting water onto the carpet. Ho doesn’t notice, and nor does he register the following gurgle from deep within the system’s pipes—a noise that would disturb any number of serious beasts: horses, lions, tigers—but this is not so much because Ho is a preternaturally cool character, whatever his own views on that subject, and more because he simply can’t hear it. And the reason for this is that the lapping and gurgling of the radiator’s innards, the banging and clicking of pipes, the splashy rattling of the system’s exoskeleton, are all drowned out by the noise from next door, where Marcus Longridge is waterboarding Shirley Dander.