So. Absence of message plus police presence meant Bertrand’s parcel hadn’t just not been delivered, it had likely blown up in his face.
This was not out of the question. Patrice loved Bertrand like a brother, but facts were facts: Bertrand had been known to falter at critical moments.
He refolded the map and took out his mobile at the precise moment that a passing bird, a seagull for Christ’s sake—he was miles from the sea—shat on his windscreen. There were omens, and then there were your basic illustrations. The phone was answered on its second ring, but he heard only silence. To fill it, he delivered three swift sentences, in French.
More silence.
Then: “And your parcel?”
“Still undelivered.”
“Try again.”
He ended the call.
Squirting cleanser onto the windscreen, he watched as the wipers smeared the seagull’s mess into a grey film. Another clean-up job that made things worse. Then he cried, very briefly, for Bertrand, who was probably dead; squirted more cleanser, and ran the wipers again. Then he drove back to London.
The restaurant was near enough to be within Jackson Lamb’s compass, new enough for him not to have tried it yet, and canny enough to recognise an awkward customer. Or that was one possible reason for the waiter’s nervousness as he showed Lamb and Moira Tregorian to a table he first described as “nice” before instantly upgrading to “very good.”
“Do you treat all your new staff to lunch?” Moira asked.
“I treat all my staff the way they deserve,” Lamb said, as the waiter began rattling off that day’s specials: something something pulled pork, something medallions, something vinaigrette. Lamb politely let him finish before saying, “I’ll have the beef.”
“Sir, beef’s not actually—”
“Rare.”
Moira ordered the Caesar salad.
“And a bottle of the house red,” said Lamb.
“Oh, I don’t think I’d better drink anything.”
“Just the bottle of house red then,” said Lamb.
When the waiter had escaped, Lamb scooped up both bread rolls from the basket and split them open with a practised thumb. While he levered the contents of the butter dish into the cavities thus made, he said, his voice at its plummiest, “So, how are you settling in?”
“It’s been a mite discombobulating, I don’t mind telling you,” she said, tearing her eyes away from his evisceration of the bread. “What with everyone thinking Mr. Cartwright was dead for some reason.”
“It’s a herd mentality,” Lamb said sadly. “Someone gets hold of the wrong idea, and suddenly everyone believes it. I think that’s how the internet works.”
The waiter returned with the wine. He opened it grandly, as if performing a magic trick, poured a splash into Lamb’s glass and stood back, the way one might from a lit firework.
“If I cared what it tasted like, I’d have ordered from the bottom of the list,” Lamb said. “Just fill it up.”
The waiter did as instructed, then fled.
Lamb beamed at Moira suddenly, an expression which would have had the slow horses, with the possible exception of Catherine Standish, covering their heads. “Tell me,” he said. “Why do you think you were assigned to Slough House?”
“Well. It’s very clear that . . . does everyone call it Slough House?”
“They do.”
“It doesn’t have an official name?”
“Trust me, if it did, you wouldn’t want to know it.”
“I see,” said Moira, who didn’t. “Well, be that as it may, it’s very clear that Slough House needs me, or someone like me.”
“What an original thought.”
“Because everything’s such a mess. I don’t just mean the offices, though they’re bad enough, and as for the lavatories—well. I’ll say no more on that subject over lunch. But it’s the paperwork, it’s the lax standards when it comes to desk management, and as for general behaviour—well. There’ve been shenanigans. I’ll put it no higher than that.”
“Abuse of office equipment?” Lamb suggested.
“Abuse would be a mild term. Very mild.”
Lamb nodded, as if mildness were as much as he could usually bear, and then appeared to notice the glass of wine in front of him. It was a large glass, and currently held about a third of the bottle’s contents, so he drained it in two swallows and poured another. “Sometimes it’s self-evident,” he said.
“I . . . what is?”
“The reason why folk end up in Slough House,” Lamb said. He took a bite of the bread roll and chewed hugely for a moment or two. Then said, “Take young Cartwright. The not-so-dear departed. He arrived a couple of days after an incident at King’s Cross which quite literally made headlines all over the world. Not too difficult to work out what his misdemeanour was.”
“Rather more than a misdemeanour, I’d have thought.”
“There were mitigating circumstances,” Lamb allowed.
“What were they?”
“He was being dicked about,” Lamb said. “Apologies for the language. Your predecessor was a bad influence.”
“I gather she had . . . issues.”
“Some, yes. And also, she drank like a fish.”
“Oh dear.”
“All behind her now, she claims, but you know what they say.” Lamb reached for his glass. “Once a lush, always a lush.”
The waiter arrived with their food, and Lamb paused while plates were arranged in front of them, though he didn’t take his eyes off Moira Tregorian.
“Enjoy your meal,” the waiter said, with the air of one who wouldn’t mind much if Lamb choked to death instead.
Ignoring him, Lamb said to Moira, “But you know what’s interesting about your assignment?”
She paused, her fork hovering over her salad. For the first time, she seemed unsure of her role in this conversation: was she still the new confidante, replacing a sadly inadequate predecessor? Or was Jackson Lamb playing a game of his own, whose rules he hadn’t bothered to share?
He said, “Claude Whelan sent you here. One of his first acts on taking charge. Don’t you think that’s interesting? Because I do.”
And he smiled in a way that would have had the slow horses—Catherine Standish included—running for shelter, before pouring the rest of the wine into his glass, then waggling the bottle at the waiter.
The O.B. blinked in an owlish way, as if about to turn his head all the way round. “I used to live here, didn’t I?”
“No,” Catherine assured him. “You’ve never lived here.”
He’d woken an hour ago and clambered out of bed, and getting dressed had caused him no problems, because he hadn’t undressed in the first place. She’d felt bad about this—it had been an act of cruelty, allowing him to crawl under the covers fully clothed, only his shoes discarded—but in the end, not bad enough to attempt to undress him. And they were her covers. And it hadn’t been her idea to start with.
“I need somewhere he’ll be safe,” River had said. “With someone I trust.”
Which was a nice touch, but then he’d had an entire journey to rehearse his case; she had about three minutes to put up her defences.
“River—I’m happy you trust me. Really. But you can’t just leave him here!”
What does he eat? she wanted to ask. Do I need to walk him? Impossible to construct a coherent counter-argument with idiot questions forming in her mind.
“Someone tried to kill him, Catherine.”
“That’s supposed to motivate me? What if the killer comes here? River—”
“Don’t worry. That won’t be happening.”
Something in the way he said this precluded her asking the obvious.