“Blurgh—bleurgh—off—coff—blargh!”
“Yeah, I didn’t follow any of that.”
“Blearrrgh!”
“Sorry, does that mean—”
“BLARGH!”
“—uncle?”
The chair to which Shirley was tied with belts and scarves was angled against her desk, and nearly crashed to the floor when she arched her back. A loud crack suggested structural damage, at the same moment as the flannel that had covered her face slapped the carpet like a dead sea creature hitting a rock. Shirley herself made similar noises for a while; if you were asked to guess, you might hazard that someone was trying to turn themselves inside out, without using tools.
Marcus, whistling softly, replaced the jug on a filing cabinet. Some water had splashed his sweater, a pale blue Merino V-neck, and he tried to brush it away, with as much success as that usually has. Then he sat and stared at his monitor, which had long defaulted to its screensaver: a black background around which an orange ball careened, bumping against its borders, never getting anywhere. Yeah: Marcus knew how that felt.
After a few minutes Shirley stopped coughing.
After a few minutes more, she said, “It wasn’t as bad as you said.”
“You lasted less than seven seconds.”
“Bollocks. That was about half an hour, and—”
“Seven seconds, first drops to whatever it was you said. Blurgh? Blargh?” He banged his hand on his keyboard, and the screensaver vanished. “Not our agreed safety word, by the way.”
“But you stopped anyway.”
“What can I tell you? Getting soft.”
A spreadsheet opened into view. Marcus couldn’t immediately recall what it represented. Not a lot of work had happened in this office lately.
Shirley freed herself from scarves and belts. “You didn’t time it properly.”
“I timed it immaculately,” he said, drawing the word out: im-mac-u-late-ly. “It’s like I said, no one can cope with that shit. That’s why it’s so popular with the vampires.”
The vampires being those whose job it was to draw blood from stones.
Shirley lobbed the wet flannel at him. Without taking his eyes from the screen he caught it one-handed, and scowled as water scattered everywhere: “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She towelled her head dry: a five-second pummel. “Gunna let me do you now?”
“In. Your. Dreams.”
She stuck her tongue out. Then said, “So. You’d be prepared to do that?”
“Just did, didn’t I?”
“For real, I mean. And keep doing it.”
Marcus looked up. “If it’d stop another Westacres, hell, yes. I’d keep doing it until the bastard told me everything. And drown him doing it, wouldn’t bother me none.”
“It would be murder.”
“Blowing up forty-two kids in a shopping centre is murder. Waterboarding a suspected terrorist to death, that’s housekeeping.”
“The philosophy of Marcus Longridge, volume one.”
“Pretty much sums it up. Someone’s got to do this shit. Or would you rather let the terrorist walk, for fear of violating his human rights?”
“He was only a suspect a moment ago.”
“And we both know what being a suspect means.”
“He’s still got rights.”
“Like those kids had? Tell their parents.”
He was getting loud now, which they’d both got into the habit of not worrying about, Lamb not having been around lately. This didn’t mean he couldn’t show up any moment, of course—his large frame creepily silent on the stairs, so the first you knew of his presence was his nicotine breath and sour outlook: Having fun, are we?—but until that happened, Shirley’s view was, they might as well keep on skiving.
She said, “Maybe. I just don’t think it’s that simple.”
“Yeah, things get simple real quick at the sharp end. I thought you’d have worked that out by now. Anyway,” and he indicated the chair she’d been sitting on, “better shift that into Ho’s office.”
“Why?”
“It broke.”
“Oh. Yeah. Think he’ll snitch?”
“Not if he values that bum-fluff he calls a beard,” said Marcus, briefly stroking his own. “He rats us out to Lamb, I’ll rip it from his chin.”
Probably a figure of speech, thought Shirley, but possibly a treat in store.
Marcus being Marcus, it could go either way.
Had he been aware that he was the subject of his colleagues’ violent fantasies, Roderick Ho would have put it down to jealousy.
Fact was, he looked fantastic.
Don’t just take his word for it, either.
He’d arrived, as usual, in a terrific mood: swanned in wearing a brand-new jacket (waist-length black leather—when you’ve got it, flaunt it!) and popped the tab on a Red Bull which he chug-a-lugged while his kit warmed up. Seriously, seriously, this was starting to harsh his mellow: his gear at the Rod-pad ran to higher specs than the Service provided, but what are you gunna do—explain to Jackson Lamb that some heavy duty cap-ex was required if Slough House was to come crawling out of the nineties? . . . He paused for a moment, allowing that scenario to take shape: “Jackson, Jackson, trust me—the suits, man, they’ve got to get this sorted. Asking me to work with that crap is like, well, put it this way. Would you ask Paul Pogba to kick a tin can around?” And Lamb chuckling, throwing his hands up in mock-surrender: “You win, you win. I’ll get the pointy-heads at the Park to loosen the purse-strings . . .”
That struck the right note, he decided.
If Lamb ever showed up, definitely the way to play it.
Meanwhile, he cracked his knuckles, clicked on Amazon, wrote a one-star review of a random book, then checked his beard in the mirror he’d fixed to the anglepoise. Devilishly stylish. The odd red strand among the black, but nothing a little tweezer-work couldn’t handle, and if it wasn’t entirely symmetrical, five minutes with the old kitchen scissors soon had things on track. Looking this good took effort. Not rocket science, but it managed to evade some of the lamebrains round here—naming no River Cartwrights, of course.
Heh heh heh.
Cartwright was upstairs in the kitchen, chatting to Louisa. There’d been a time, not long back, when Roddy had had to play it cool with Louisa. It had been clear she’d taken a shine to him: embarrassing, but there it was—it wasn’t like she was a total dog; in the right light, she cast a nice shadow, but she was old, mid-thirties, and when women got to that age, a taint of desperation clung to them. Weaken for a moment, and they’d be picking out curtains and suggesting quiet nights in. Which was not how Roderick Ho played the game: so sayonara, babes. Being a tactful kind of guy, he’d managed to convey to her without having to put it into actual words that the Rod was off-limits—that Rod’s rod was not in her future—and give her her due, she’d managed to accept that without too much fuss, the odd wistful, what-might-have-been glance excepted. In other circumstances, he thought, there’d have been no harm in it—throwing a single woman the occasional boner was an act of charity—but a regular ram-Rodding was not on the agenda, and it would have been cruel to get her hopes up.